Best of the Rest: Swire, AMD, Gush, Bore

Claire Swire email claims nine more victims

Haven't you considered, perhaps, that maybe everyone is just being a bit too uptight?

A society that punishes people for disclosing their open-mindedness will produce depressed people. A society that produces depressed people is worth less than a nickle. One would be better off moving to a distant island somewhere in the Pacific than to live in an oppressive society. Sadly, an oppressive society is what the anglo-american world is turning into.

Yes - some things that are perceived by some to be fun may be perceived by others as rude or even offensive. But as long as everyone involved has reasonable opportunity to avoid things that they find offensive, the encouraged way to handle these issues should be to make it clear to the offended ones that they should simply ignore what they don't like. In most cases, it is the offended people who are the maladjusted ones; not the people who help produce or distribute "offending" content.

Unfortunately, the anglo-american society keeps on stomping on the rights of people to produce and distribute potentially offensive content in order to accommodate the loud minority of easily-offended people. This applies to pornography regulations; film ratings; swear words; "sexual harassment" laws; and so on and so on. What makes the word "fuck" so dangerous, so outright destructive, that we should take measures to prevent people from seeing it?

The mistake we are making is that we think that society has to make sure that people are not offended. This is simply not true; there are so many ways for someone to be offended that the society can't possibly take care of them all without completely restraining other normal and healthy human beings. We follow this path too long, and sooner or later it won't be any better here than it is in China.

Think about it. Someone in this situation is being a healthy human being, and someone is being a spoiled neurotic. What type of personality should the society encourage people to have?

Regards,
Denis

---

The stock values of AMD and Intel should be reversed since AMD clearly produces superior processors, has had nothing but good things happen this year and is making a KILLING in the flash memory industry. Intel has had the 820 chipset blunders, lost the gigahertz race, the RAMBUS scandals and a new class of "next-generation" processor that hardly competes with the last generation they churned out. This is SO disappointing to AMD shareholders.

Long live AMD - as long as they exist, they'll keep the dumb lummox called Intel on its toes enough to realize they need to start making chips that aren't dumbed-down, excessively buggy, and running out of their original spec. ...And they (AMD) will always be in my PCs.

Todd D. Perkins

---

BT launches US hyperlinks legal action

Granting this patent was a demonstration of pure insanity in full force. The scary part about the moron granting this patent is that the patent application is quite readable and not obfuscated like they do them today.

Looking at the patent, mainly describing terminals and modems as were common in those days, you can see it's really nothing special about it even back in 1976, except for the part where the terminal had a memory in where to store things - that was new but it never took off since you where using only the mainframes memory until the days when computers became "personal".

One part describes simple menus. Menus was considered marginally new at that time and using menus with choices where the user could press a single button on his keyboard and the terminal would display new data. Choices in menus often being prefixed by a digit starting with 1 followed by 2, 3, 4 etc.

Another part describing how a terminal stored additional values sent (now a.k.a. Hyperlink information) so that the mainframe didn't need to keep track of the user although it states that the mainframe so does (for charging purposes).

Quote from the patent application: "The displayed information consists of 960 bytes, each of eight bits, and may, for example, represent 24 lines each of 40 characters forming an alphanumeric display. The hidden information consists of 64 bytes, each of eight bits."

That's it! HTML-pages being 960 bytes with hyperlinks being in total 64 bytes long is patented by the BT. Time to check your webpages boys and girls, but wait a minute...

"Although the invention has been described with reference to a specific embodiment it will be appreciated that modifications can be made to the system described without departing from the invention. In particular, the numbers of digits making up each part of a block of information may differ from those described. ..."

A we're doomed... But no! The patent application states the information is divided in two blocks. One for presented data and one for the hyperlinks.

HTML code consists of all data in one block and the browser is responsible for obfuscating those links (underline them, give an alternate value as presented in the code etc.). It's all about browser technology and that is not a part of the patent. The world is saved. :-)

Epilogue:
Quote from patent application: "The invention is particularly useful in reducing the complexity of the operating protocol of the computer."

Yeah! Computer has been simpler ever since. Instead of pressing one button to restart my computer I now have to press three every once in a while. Thanks to Hyperlinks and browsers...

Best regards,
Markus Berg

PS. All I want is my 15 minutes of fame... ;-)

---

ShittyGift.com points to online crap merchants

That story on shitty gifts (or whatever) is allegedly the reason for some Norwegian fella sending shitpackets by mail.

I usually never answer readers mail if they are posted.
1) because they are answered
2) because they are rubbish (well at least the once you post)

The person writing this must know very little of Norway. Take these facts into consideration and you will see how the Reg could not possibly have anything to do with it.

1) Postal services. Ever tried to send a mail to Norway?

Our company is still missing the harddrive they sent from Netherlands in June...1999. So unless you had that story way back in the nineties there is no way the terrorist could have been inspired, mailed the bomb and made it arrive at the Parliament "in time for Christmas".

2) Read the news again, the case was cleared by local police (or more correctly the poor sod turned him self in). It turned out to be "beer"... beer accidently mistaken for shit. Seems like some art student were trying to invite a few "celebs" to his show. Using his "homebrewed" "beer" (he commented "I have never made beer before, it seems I did a poor job)

jeez, I have tasted something very close to cat's p!ss before from a Scottish pub while on holiday. But beer that can be mistaken for shit....*sigh*

Christopher

(oh one more thing, if you post this mail it proves that you only post the readers letter that are truly rubbish....hmm now is that a good or bad thing? And did I win?)