denyerec.co.uk

I have an EVGA 8800GTS OC 320mb. I purchased it from Overclockers.co.uk and I urge anyone reading that they do not make the same mistake.

Overclockers firstly lied to me about the product, falsley advertising that it was elegible for the EVGA “Step Up” program, which it is not. The 90-day bullshit was even printed all over the box, something I was later informed was the result of EVGA shipping products in whatever boxes they had available. Way to go you theiving fraudsters. I don’t like being lied to, especially when the trained monkey retard on the end of the phone “umms” and “errs” blankley on the end of the phone when confronted with the facts. Maybe I just don’t get shitty enough with people on the phone to ‘get things done’, but I don’t see why one should have to resort to crude behaviour and legal threats. Maybe that’s how one has to take these pillocks on, I should make a note to try this in future…

Anyhow, the card is defunct. It causes glitching and crashing symptomatic of overeheating yet the temp sensors report everything to be normal. RMA time. Overclockers basically deny all knowledge of ever dealing with me, saying if it’s an EVGA product to RMA it direct to EVGA. EVGA initially say to try dealing with your supplier. Fat chance. So the arrogant arses at OCUK just say “Deal with EVGA” and provide me with a mobile number (!) for the only person in the UK working for EVGA. Great start. I call the guy who listens to me, seemingly ignores everything I say and gives me the email addresses of some people in Germany to contact.

I contact them.

Twice.

I get no responses. I don’t even get a response from the guy on the mobile phone. If i could rememeber the sodding number I’d put it up here for people to prank call and flagrantly abuse, because frankly they deserve it. I discover I can raise an RMA request by email, I try this but am once again ignored. I raise an RMA request using their RMA ticket system thingy, I am once again ignored. I receive NO feedback from EVGA about anything, at all. Basically they’re operating under the umbrella of “You were stupid enough to buy our product from a bunch of crooks, so hahahaha sucks to be you.” and are not uphlding any part of their warranty claim which, as far as I am aware, is illegal. It’s worth noting that EVGA Europe is based in Germany and all RMA requests need to be shipped back there, with ALL shipping costs (To and from) payable by the consumer. Not even EBuyer is this bad and it’s fairly plain how pissed off I am with their level of “Service”.

Do me a favour and boycott the punks at EVGA and the crooks over at Overclockers.co.uk. There are other more respectable and worthwhile computer suppliers like CCL who don’t lie, cheat and all out swindle you out of your hard-earned with dubious returns policies and inaccurate falsified advertising.

Even if EVGA ever do issue an RMA I just know I’m going to feel like Neville Chamberlain coming home from his pow-wow with Hitler, waving that pretty little appeasement paper.

Hitler was (an honourary…) German too. I wonder if EVGA inherited his customer service principles. Certainly bloody feels like it.

Once again the window into our beloved Big BrotherState, the BBC, brings us a harrowing peice about two desperate and dangerous criminals, determined to endanger the lives of our beloved parliamentary doo-gooders. Obadiah Marius was arrested under the “Serious and Organised Crime Act”, another one of those policies dashed through to provide blanket powers to the police under the guise of doing something useful to protect us from, well, Serious and Organised crime. He had in fact just gotten himself a little lost which, I’d always though, was allowable. It seems now however that “Inability to Navigate” has been added to the list of henoius and sinful crimes alongside “Speaking your mind near Whitehall”. Interestingly enough his girlfriend was released, though her name wasn’t. I wonder if Obadiah was “White British”, or perhaps his girlfriend? She was released, afterall, even though it’s well known that women can be at times both very serious and organised.

Don’t get me wrong, I think with the jokes the UK government is pulling off on a global scale they really do need that security, but do they genuinely believe that Obadiah Marius was either serious, or organised? Just make sure you don’t stop to ask a copper for directions in The Smoke any time soon, else you might find yourself sharing a cell with genuinely serious and organised criminals…

Much as I hate criminals, chavs, thugs, louts, hooligans and doley scum who do nothing but destroy this precious isle and the best intentions of its noble and proud inhabitants, I’m also not a big fan of the state. Having privacy slowly stripped away and our right to do whatever we want on our own time is not on, by any measure. A lot of people get agitated by the notion that if you’ve got nothing to hide then what’s wrong with other people having a look. I say that’s nonsense, as anyone who’s ever read a Philip K Dick novel will tell you. Once you give an authority the power to collect and catalog and monitor everything, you’ve essentially surrendered your entire life to them. Now, so long as you play nice and don’t rock the boat you can live out your 80 years (approx) in blissful oblivion under the impression that all is good with the world BUT, if you’re unfortunate enough to slip through the cracks you’re going to find yourself in a world of hurt when “The computer says no.”

What if the kid you bullied at school gets a job at the “Ministry of Information” and decides to get back at you? What if all of a sudden the government makes drinking milk illegal and can trace every purchase of milk everyone has ever made, ever? Sounds ridiculous, but then the Nazi’s rounded up people with long noses. In the USA they want to make mobile phones the centre of your retail experience so you make purchases based off centralised phone credit. Cashless societies are flawed for many reasons, but a cashless society which can track your movements as you make your purchases…? The mind spins at the utter wrongness of it. Sure all that information in the hands of a noble and un-corruptable force would be of no danger to anyone, but sadly we don’t have Lensmen and western governments have already proven that they don’t give a crap about human rights. (Apogies to Opera users, Amnesty Internation evidently need to hire a proper web developer!)

Anyway, back to the title of this mini-rant. You all should remember Robocop and the infamous ED-209 (If you don’t then shame on you, it’s a film history icon). You should also know what happens, then, what happens when the system malfunctions or, more critically, the system creators want to subvert the otherwise noble intentions of an automated law enforcement system. Just a good job that Murphey remembered he was human afterall…

You might be wondering if someone slipped me something in my tea but no, this was all kicked off by another BBC article about Flying Police Death Drones. Ok,so I might be leaning a little heavy on the drama here, but you can see where I’m going with it. How long before they have automated drones that “Automatically detect suspicious behaviour”, how long before they’ve got tazers or tear gas?

I’m all for rounding up the undesirables, the thugs and retarded goons who stab children and have anger mangement problems that would make Adolf Hitler look like a nice guy, but I can’t help feeling that it’s going to go down in a way that’s good for Government and very, very bad for the public.

The bastion of reliable, unbiased and journalistically adept reporting the BBC brings home a little gem today about how woefully optimistic UK educational establishments have become. You can read it by clicking the following sarcastic and search engine optimised link text: High Standards for UK Universities.

One could argue that as I made it through the whole system without dropping a grade that this was already painfully obvious, however I’m sure you’ll agree that the comparison in entry test questions really slams it home. The Chinese one has so many lines! Now at first glance you might think that this is OK, as the Chinese language has lots more lines in it than English so naturally, they’re used to dealing with such problems. However on inspection you see that the problem reaches further than simply counting the number of lines, though in fairness the UK questions isn’t really a lot more developed. Some people could quite honestly sort that one out without the aid of a logbook or calculator in no time flat.

There is more, though, even beyond considering that the Chinese question is set for people not even into University yet and the British one is set for first year students. At Loughborough University (UK) I’m told that maths was causing such a problem for entry students to Engineering that to remedy the problem they simply dropped A-Level maths as a requirement! Maybe they realised that A-Level maths was a joke beyond help and that it really didn’t matter anyway, or perhaps they’re suffering from the same disease as the rest of the system, slackening standards to boost pass rates and make everyone feel jolly good about themselves. Looking back, our A-Level maths was a damn sight easier than that of 5 years before and the current offering, in A or AS form, is down at the O-Level standard of years gone by. Should we just get over it and outsource our education too?

I went to university at Loughborough. Many a night spent out with friends in town or at the union and no real trouble witnessed or heard of. In the last 6 months there have been rapes, assaults, brutal knife attacks and now someone’s been shot in the university union, on the campus itself. The BBC reports (vaguely) about the university shooting.

I’m sick of this crap. I’m sick of mindless thugs ruining the place, destroying property and lives because their tiny minds know no better. I’m sick of chav doley bastards breaking into our homes, wrecking our cars and fouling the streets with vomit, needles and piss.

The police are clearly ineffective, the education system has failled and public awareness can only reach those who can read and, more importantly, give a damn. What’s next? Martial law? Vigilante groups who will dispense justice in the only way these brutish fools understand? I have no idea, but it’s plain to see for anyone who cares to look that right now, in this age of Big Brother and heightened security, nothing is working. Perhaps the police are too busy chasing imaginary terrorists that they’ve no time for the real problems.

Ironically, my GF and I are in the process of applying for her permanent leave to remain here. As soon as it’s approved, maybe we’ll be applying for permanent leave to remain somewhere else.

(And yes, I’m aware that everywhere has crime, but when a dead-end sleepy town like Loughborough ends up with gunshot victims, it’s time to ask questions. Also, no-one in Australia, Sweden, Switzerland or pretty much anywhere East of here knows what a Chav is, and that can only be a good thing.)

A brief stutter out of inactivity to bring two lovely links to you. The word for today (And most likely a long time to come and for a long time past…) is Hypocrisy.

First off we have : America weaponising space in an attempt to “Deny adverdaries access to orbit”. I didn’t think anyone owned that, but there you go, obviously the USA thinks it does and has the budget to make that a reality.

Anyhow, skirting around the implications of that article (Which would probably make for a good post in isolation) we get to the second post that highlights the word of the Era… Chinese Anti-Satellite Test.

If you’re a little slow I’m just trying to point out that the media and government would like you to believe that only white men should have spaceships and/or the right to poke their nose, in glorious high res detail, into the lives of people in other countries and/or guide their expensive missiles into hospitals and daycare centres with pinpoint accuracy.

What they’re missing here is that there has been and arms race running all along, it’s just that because “Their Team was winning (Think white, wealthy and wealthy) it didn’t occur to them. The hare has been out in the lead for so long he’s forgotten why that tortoise is following him, or why the tortoise is riding a Segway. A hopped up, supercharged, submersible Segway with offroad wheels, nuclear arms and anti-satellite missiles.

I have no doubt every nation on earth wants to feel safe, and it’s down (unfortunately) to the people in power to ensure that this safety is reached together and in co-operation, rather than in animosity. M.A.D. only keeps you safe so long as no-one pushes the button.

A little peice on (Woe betide me, I hope I am forgiven…) Fox News (See?) was brought to my attention today, regarding the segregation of men and children on aeroplanes.

So, I have an X and a Y chromosome and I’m immediately a kiddie-fiddling paeodophile “Risk Candidate” ? Holy smokes, that makes me want to feed certain board members of certain airlines into the turbine intakes of their precious jets. If I walk up to someone in the street and shout “RAPIST!” they can have me for defamation of character. If I make suggestions about an illigitimate heritage to someone of prominence I’ll be whisked away and no doubt locked up for several years on trumped up and utterly despicable “terror charges”

However, if I’m an airline then it’s perfectly ok to suggest that I’d roger the Cabin Boy or delight in giving Jane a hand down the well whilst Jack lays unconscious at the foot of the hill. Come on, what’s this all about and why, in today’s litigious society, isn’t someone sueing someone else about it? You could get yourself sued for calling a member of cabinet a wanker (Which is an almost certainly not fallacious…) but you can get away scot free supposing that any adult male is a closet paedophile (Which is almost certainly wrong, and exponentially a more serious, demeaning and damaging claim).

Oh boy, angry Den.

On the upside, I’ve acquired a new lens and a new chair, which means my arse no longer hurts and I can finally take photographs of large things without having to move out of the county to do so.

You can see more of the devastation in this post. Bumblebee is some kind of crappy American muscle car, not a beetle, and none of the robots appear to bear any relation to their other forms, not like the old days when you could see the parts of the Porsche sticking out of Jazz, or the nose cone down the front of Starscream.

It’s taken 20 years for this movie to come to the fore, is it going to be another 20 before we see it done right? Sigh. One more chance to relive the childhood dream, dashed.