Posts by SysKoll

Why go back to Nixon?

AD,

Did you already forget the famous "if you like your plan, you can keep it" uttered about 30 times by Obama, right as he was working to dismantle existing health insurance plans? I think a robot would have remembered...

Appendix not useless

Just for the record: the appendix function has been found. Its use is to harbor intestinal flora and to reseed the colon with beneficial bacteria after a diarrhoea. As such, it's either a nice piece of evolutionary work, or another proof of intelligent design, depending upon your axioms.

Given the prevalence of diarrhoea-giving diseases, the appendix probably improves mankind's survival rate. From which you can deduct that death from the aftermath of a cholera-type disease was historically a bigger risk than appendicitis.

Nice article

I find disturbing similarities between IPCC and Family Radio, the religious organization that "predicted" the end of the world for May 21. At least, in FR's case, the end-of-world antics are only originating from the founder, and many staff members pretend that they don't hear him. The IPCC, on another hand, revels in catastrophism.

Bad reference on Killdozer

'Killdozer' (an excellent SFstory by T. Sturgeon, BTW) was featuring a D7, not a D9. The D7 fell under control of a malevolent entity which quickly turned all the crunchy humans around it into muddy dog breakfasts.

Toe the party line, you maggot!

It gets better. The unnamed teacher then called Ken, the blog's author, complaining that she had been "thrown to the wolves" (and genuinely upset). This, in spite of her name not being released.

Yes, that teacher's behavior was unflatterinly discussed in many online forums, but it's not like her name and address were on the web page. She was and remains an anonymous figure of ignorance.

We should thank Karen for being such a wonderful stereotype. She's a product of a bureaucracy without any clue about software, yet she displays unbelievable condescension and spouts threats about a matter of which she doesn't know anything. "I don't know what you're proposing, but I think you should be jailed for disrupting the establishment. Toe the party line, you maggot!"

And that, fellows, is the "progressive" system that's supposed to teach our kid how to think.

Let's hope that at least, she learned something about Linux -- that is, apart from "don't ever piss off a bunch of nutso geeks with too much free time on their hands".

A victory for the Thought Police

So some members of the BNP are going to lose their job because of their opinion, and everybody finds this normal. Hmmm. Who's next? Communist? Free-Masons? Scientologists?

It is ironic, though, that people claiming to act out of virtuous anti-facism are giving a punishment of Berufsverbot -- the prohibition of engaging in certain professions that Nazi Germany used to inflict on Jews.

Love your articles

Once again, a thoughful article that a high level strategy magazine would be proud of. The El Reg team is decidedly a remarkable bunch. Thank you.

Learn the right jargon when you write a story, darn you!

It's not PAN PAN -- It's Panne Panne. You sound like these hollywood actors that mispronounce mayday (The ay should be flat, not a diphtongue)

The reason is that all these words come from the early French aviation! While the Wright brothers were busy sueing wannabe aircraft manufacturers in the early 1900, effectively paralyzing the nascent US aircraft industry, the French were putting early crates in the air.

The pre-WWII international aeronautical institutions were therefore very influenced by the Gallic terminology craftyness. And what emergency messages did they standardize on? Well, they chose "M'aider" (Help me, imperative form), and "Panne Panne Panne" (Breakdown, repeating three times). To avoid hearing mispronounced abominations, they gave Yanks a cheat sheet with the phonetic spelling of these terms. Little did they know that the French empire -- and its language -- would soon be a distant memory.

So please do not write the grotesque "pan pan", which sounds like a disturbing mating call for frying implements. Write "Panne panne", which is the manly, blood-chilling distress call that echoed through early wireless transmissions, back when Aeropostale was crossing oceans with engines that had an MTBF measured in single-digit hours.

You'll be back, I tell you.

Oh, so you're leaving, eh? Think you can get rid of us, eh? Well, think again! At the rate the NYT is going down, you'll be back begging for the old El Reg job in a few years!

Gray Lady my *ss. Gray brontosaurus is more like it.

Beware of hellhole makers

Some people here seem nostalgic of the insane FDR policies. In essence, FDR tightened credit at a time where a liquidity crisis struck the country. That liquidity crisis, by the way, was generated by the policy of the Federal Reserve, who blindly supported a "Real Bill" ideological control of credit. See numerous books on the subject.

Mr Worstall has written his article as a cynical piece taking potshots at blumbering fools pontificating about a subject they ignore. Unfortunately, he is right.

The sad truth is that very few people on Earth, if any, undestand the complexity of the economy. To try to understand its intricacy, you have to understand the motivation of human action, a rather hard undertaking.

Once you understance that, you will realize that you're up against things you cannot reliably influence, let alone control, and you'll leave them alone. But if you are a foolish tinkerer like the New Economics Foundation, your hubris and arrogance will lead you to impose a dictatorship and create yet another centralized economy hellhole.

That's the point of the article. And Mr Worstall is right. Case in point: A lot of recent immigrants from Poland would be delighted to tell you more about the delights of such hellholes, since they grew up in one. They'll also be happy to beat you into a pulp if you insist on creating one in the place where they are trying to rebuild a life.

Finance inmates running the asylum

I fail to see what qualifies the banking business to give lessons to successful industries.

In case they didn't notice, they almost destroyed themselves by handling subprime mortgage packages like valuable securities, and now they are crying that the taxpayers -- us -- should bail them out. I don't see these execs refunding the record-breaking bonuses they got during the real estate bubble, though.

And now, these fools want to tell the semiconductor industry how it should run its business. The financial sector's credibility is at its lowest, and this guy comes out of the blue to tell the SC people they don't know what they're doing. Moreover, he simply recommends to slash R&D in an industry where most profits are generated by products less than 3 years old.

Un-freakin-believable.

Why isn't the Reg flaming down this moron? Why do they retranscribe his drivel as if it was worth reading? C'mon guys, you know better.

It's just PR.

Look, guys, it's just PR. It's BS meant to impress the gullible greens and the media.

California has successfully fought any effort to build more power generation capacity. Billions were wasted in dubious feel-good efforts to develop "renewable energy", at a horrific cost per watt. This might be a good way to subsidize some companies but it did little to add more capacity to the grid.

And now SF wants to add a massive number of power-draining rechargeable cars? Exactly how, pray tell, does Gavin hope to find this power?

Take a piss-poor electric car with a 50-HP electric engine and a one-hour autonomy. That's 50*736/1000 = 36 kWh of power storage requirements. With very optimistic losses, call it 40 kWh.

Now let's see. I want to rechage this car in 5 hours at night. That's 40/5 = 8 kW of load on the grid, neglecting all losses. Put 100,000 of these suckers in the streets, and hello, you need an extra 800 megawatts of power every night. That's 4 gas generators or half a small nuclear power plant, which isn't going to fly since there are already rolling black-outs in some parts of California.

I'll believe in this electric car plan the day SF announces it's building power plants. Otherwise it's just PR.

The deal will go through. And thus...

From Ballmer's office, in a few months:

"So the deal is done, these EU regulators finally agreed on a price?"

"Yes Mr. Ballmer. The videotape from that Las Vegas hotel room helped."

"Bwahaha... Yahoo is ours! And after we take over the advertizing income, we move all their ugly BDS machines to our nice, shiny Windows Server..."

"That's BSD. Yes, Mr. Ballmer."

"And then we start changing all them Yahoo, Flickr and whatnot sites to work only with IE."

"Sure, Mr. Ballmer."

"Oh, and that ZImbra thing. We kill it of course. We want everyone to use our shiny Exchange."

"The whole ZImbra development team already quit, Mr. Ballmer."

"Excellent! I won't have to deal with that bunch of hippies. No more Zimbra. Send our sales rep to moon the current Zimbra customers. Have them tell these traitors they are going to bleed."

"Err... Actually, Mr. Ballmer, all the Zimbra developers were hired by other companies that took over the development of the..."

"What?!! But... It's our intellectual property! Ours! OURS! We bought it! Sue them. Sue all the developers!"

"Well, see, the code is open-source. The license says it's legal for the developers to..."

"Aaaaugh... Developers! Developers! Developers!"

(Sound of chair crashing)

"That brand is our last hope" - "No. There is another."

If the rumor is true, MS will probably kill the Squeezebox that Logitech acquired from Slim Devices. They'll probably replace it with some monstrosity that rapes your dog and explodes if you attempt to use it to play an AAC file or use a Linux server.

Fortunately, there is a replacement in the same market. Roku Labs has a gadget called the Soundbridge M1001 that looks very similar to the Squeezebox. (Disclaimer: I own neither devices, I am just investigating before I buy one).

So were the Redmond Beast to devour Logitech, the coolest gadget of this brand would at least be replaceable.

Now if someone could make keyboards half as good as my model M, I'd happily stockpile them.