Yes, I am that West Saharan grandmother

Letters No over-riding theme in this postbag, just emails that took our fancy.

Yes, I'm that West Saharan grandmother

Dear Sir,

following a couple of reg advisories on how to preserve privacy on the net, I've filled out your survey. Yes, I'm that West Saharan grandmother that controls the IT assets of a very large company with a microsoftish annual overturn and employing half the country's population, that makes heavy use of any mobile or wireless gadget, has bought/will buy large amounts of hardware of any kind...

This is kind of audience represents, I guess, the wet dream of any marketing drone. Again following the example of the register (i.e. the reg whoring price list), I've got an idea how to reduce the element of luck in my obtaining the reg t-shirt: for a T-shirt (XL, please), I'll fill out the survey up to 50 times with impressive data of your liking, if necessary with a different IP and e-mail address for each survey form. I'm looking forward to your response and goods deliveries.

Cheers
Horror Vacui

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Reg black minilogo t-shirt hits the stores

Make public the names of people requesting XXXL shirts. It'd be good for them. Nothing makes you more motivated to change your habits than public humiliation. And if they get really_REALLY_ unhappy about it, well, depression often leads to decreased eating. Or increased, but what the hell.

//Carl - quite serious. Or not at all.

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Upcoming Not Becoming

Sir,

I appreciate that many (perhaps most of) of your readers are broad-minded -indeed that is almost an essential attribute- and most can accept stupidity as a factor in our lives. However, this bothers me:

"The upcoming changes to UK Copyright law are necessary in order to bring UK law into line with changes at an international level – the
World Intellectual Property Organisation Treaties of 1996 and the EU Copyright Directive of 1998."

It is impossible to believe in, support, or otherwise agree with an ass-hole who thinks "to upcome" is a verb.

Sorry, this is obviously just another pension-guaranteed, no-brainer civil (hey, man who you calling civil?) -servant (hey, man, I ain't no man's servant) writing what he/she fondly believes to be English.

Perhaps, when society collapses, those who have encouraged its demise will be allowed to suffer from an equal inability to ask for food- "Income diet are to incoming dietary fooding most nicing", and starve to death."

Yours, perhaps sincerely,

Terence

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Intel gives leg up to UK pro gaming scene

Hello,

As I am on a drunken e-mail writing spree, here is an e-mail:

1. OK, I probably am a geek.
2. I've won ~£5000 playing games - more than my phone bills (when there was such a thing) & net connection charges at least.
3. I've been on TV a couple of times, but I try not to think about that. Sujoy manages to appear everywhere though.
4. Who wants to be famous, it's a pain in the arse when it's restricted to the immediate peer group, I wouldn't want to imagine what it'd be like if it were bigger.

I'm also fairly sure that Intel are just making up the £25k being the biggest prize fund ever.

The GDOC (which I ran) in September also had a £25k prize pool. The recent UK WCG qualifiers (which Sujoy ran) had £25k in prizes. The UKPCGC in 1999 had ~£35k prizes (which my team won), although that included £15k for the 6 qualifiers. Also, the UK WCGC qualifier in 1999 had approx. £1m budget with ~£25k prize pool (I won the Starcraft qualifier), which unsurprisingly bankrupted the somewhat moronic company that ran it, Battletop.

On a related 'I rock' note, my team is second favourites to win the RTCW competition at the Intel tournament too.

Aha!

I'm quite impressed that the organisers have managed to get so much press though, it's much more than the so-called PR firm we hired for the GDOC got around to doing.

Cheers,
Andrew West
Daishi

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HP, Compaq user groups merge

Actually, HP and Compaq took from September 2001 to May 2002 to merge, nine months rather than the six months we took. And HP and Compaq had slightly more resources than largely volunteer-led, frequently penniless user groups. Despite all that, we in Europe have managed to create a federation that genuinely respects the traditions of both sets of user groups, looks set to mount a successful European Conference (May 2003, Amsterdam) and use the profits therefrom to create more services for user groups in Europe. Meanwhile, over the pond, the HP User Groups are separate and have no immediate plans to merge...

Love and peace,

Peter Bradley ®