Posts by h4rm0ny

Re: @Douglas Lowe It's true!

>>"So, as I said, it's a clever trick to ask for something that you know can't be done and make it sound reasonable. Not bad for someone living under a bridge."

Actually, it can be done. You just watch over time and see if the predictions of the model bare out. Until that is done, you can say that the model is unproven. And that's what they're stating. You say that people compare previous models with how it turned out and adjust them so they fit - but there's no logical way to distinguish between whether you're making your model better, or introducing other wrong things that make it fit the known conclusion:

Suppose my model said the temperature rise was going to be 0.4C but it was 0.6C. I shall say that latent heat in the oceans contributed 0.2C. Now my model is right. That's the process you're talking about, but is it right? Maybe it wasn't latent heat in the oceans but something else. Maybe it was but it contributed 0.3C and the other parts of your model were wrong for some reason. You don't know. And there is no way to know if you've improved your model or just made it wrong in a different way. Creating a model to fit a known conclusion cannot prove the model. Only prediction can. So you're wrong to dispute with the OP about asking for proof that a model is right. Yes, you are indeed unable to give that proof to them. But the implication of that is that you can't verify the model, not that they are wrong to ask for proof before they'll believe.

Re: It's true!

>>"What has happened with the last purge"

Has there been some sort of official action that I missed? I've seen a couple of references to this and I notice Lewis and Worstall don't seem to be writing (though thankfully Orlowski is presumably still around?).

Did El Reg. fall under new management or something?

Re: So it's not

Hipotatoes?

Re: So what are we supposed to think?

>>"In 2005, the United Nations Environment Programme predicted that climate change would create 50 million climate refugees by 2010. Question: Where are they hiding and why?"

A lot of the unrest in Syria that has resulted in many people fleeing the country was in part precipitated by drought in that country.

Re: It's true!

The thing I dislike most from your quote is the characterizations of AGW skeptics as "anti-greens" (closely followed by the pejorative 'deniers', what am I, a pair of tights?). I, and I'm confident in speaking for others as well, care a great deal about the environment and I have long been an active campaigner on environmental issues as well as considerable financial support to conservation of species, local environments as well as general animal welfare as a related area.

The fact that I am unconvinced of AGW currently does not make me "anti-green". Yet I repeatedly see my voice and support co-opted by AGW-proponents for their own gain - whether that be egotistical or simply financial. Money that could be going to forest conservation or protection of endangered species of bird or mammal, gets squandered on subsidies for wind farms when a single nuclear power station would do the job of hundreds. Airtime that could be used to highlight the fact that over-fishing has brought our marine ecology to the brink of catastrophic collapse is endlessly swallowed up by people attempting to say how this weeks weather is the result of AGW. Realistic methods of dealing with changes in the climate and adaptation are side-lined by near religious obsession with CO2 and ill-founded ideas for eliminating it with little real idea about whether or not they'll work. Research grants are vacuumed up by academics who know that if you want to get published, what you have to do is put "Climate Change" in your abstract somewhere.

And people shout down debate with pre-decided positions like the person you quote who looks at two debating groups on the forum she runs and deplores the fact that 'those who are wrong have the better arguments'; with no indication she is aware this indicates bias on her part.

Being AGW-skeptical does not mean you are an anti-green. If we turn out to be correct, we'll have been some of the most green people on the planet.

Re: Good Riddance to Lewis Page

I liked his articles. They provided very interesting analysis and a dissenting voice to the party line.

Re: Back in the 70's...

>>How is relying on nuclear power NOT "a reliance on stuff pulled from the earth and burnt"?

Because inside a nuclear powerstation you wont find a big bonfire of uranium producing heat.

Nuclear Fission =/= Combustion.

Re: Back in the 70's...

>>"The vast majority of climate papers in the 1970s predicted warming".

Whilst I wasn't in the habit of reading academic papers as a child, I do recall the general idea being that we were heading for another Ice Age and this being the popular theory. Skeptical Science may offer a handy Go To list of counter-arguments for when you encounter a (ironically) skeptic of AGW, but what they claim is at odds with my recollection.

Also, is it worth pointing out that the article has a disconnect in it? It gives evidence that the Earth is warming (this is generally accepted) and then adds an assertion "this is down to greenhouse gasses". It is the latter that AGW skeptics are generally questioning. Arguing as if it's the former is a common error. If it is an error.

Re: Why don't they make an actual step forward...

Because the majority of Outlook users would scream blue murder the first time they went to a new PC / laptop / phone and found that all their emails were lost to them.

Don't get me wrong - I'm very in favour of encrypted emails being the default if we can figure out how to make it error-proof. But Outlook already supports encrypted emails out of the box. You can also get a GPG plug-in for it. Talking about turning it on by default though, is a whole other can of worms. It's fine if you're Enterprise and you have an IT team taking care of certificate management for you. But in this case, they can already configure it to on. If you're suddenly throwing it at home users - there are difficult issues to solve with that.

Re: Not invisible

It depends on the criteria they use for killing access. From the article they suggest using it if they detect an infection or a crime. I don't mind about the infection part as almost by definition that will be doing something I don't want. But a crime might be something I choose to do in which case I don't want my computer colluding against me with the authorities.

And there's also the question of the degree of infection. MS include Defender with all their OS's now and it's adequate. But what happens when something does get past it? Would you be helplessly booted off the Internet? Do they kick you off at the slightest sign of infection or only if you're wreaking absolute havoc? Who makes that decision? There's a lot to unpack in the details here.

Re: Sounds interesting

Agreed. Whether or not this is a good solution (am still thinking it over), they at least understand the problem. It's not Ads that bother me (unless they're they start autoplaying video and sound in which case it's an instant page close), it's the tracking.

I'm happy for the staff of El Reg. to get paid! What I'm not happy with is Google having a detailed profile of me which is easily linked to who I am.

Re: Summer school?

Ah yes, you'll be earning less than any of your mates, or alternately not having fun going away with your friends over the Summer... But you forget - GCHQ can "compete on the value of our Mission".

Which, if you want to spy on your fellow Brits, genuflect before a painting of Teresa May in the lobby every morning and read Jeremy Corbyn and Caroline Lucas' emails to each other, is going to be your dream job.

(N.b. They don't actually have a painting of Theresa May in the lobby. I think.)

Re: @h4rm0ny - What is the sky?

>>"Hang on, what? Are you saying that blowing something out of the sky with a shotgun isn't violent? And turning up to a house occupied by someone who has just done this, unarmed, is somehow the more violent action?"

I am saying that blowing something out of the sky with a shotgun isn't inherently violent, yes. It could be - i.e. it's a plane with people on it. But equally it could be a small remote control toy in which case there is no violence directed towards people which is my relevant criteria. Similarly, gathering your mates and going round the house of someone you have a beef with, is confrontational (which was my actual wording) and more likely to lead to a violent situation.

So certainly, barring some loose wording on your part, you have indeed got what I said correct.

>>"To me, being told "if you enter my property I'm going to shoot you" is the most violent action of this whole sordid tale, but that seems to pass as normal behaviour in the US."

I wasn't there. I can't comment with certainty. My point is that one certainly can't support an abstract statement that Meredith shot down the drone and then went on to threaten it's owner with a gun as not pretty misleading when the actual circumstances were four people advancing on his property and him saying that he'd defend himself if they came onto it.

>>"In short your assignation of guilt to the one party isn't backed up by the facts quoted in this story or your comments on it."

I haven't assigned absolute guilt either way. I've just pointed out the facts favour Meredith and there's been some demonstrably loaded reporting on the subject mainly, it seems, based on people's a priori politics and feelings about people with guns.

Re: Missed it?

>>"Yes, quite how Worstall's services were no longer required while presumably still forking out for the wrong-headed bilge Potty trots out every month is beyond me."

Yeah, Worstall wrote stuff I'd disagree with very strongly sometimes, but he can at least support his arguments and has an interesting take on things. Potts has previously tried to find out the real identity of posters who's posts he didn't like and has expressed more than clearly how if he met me in real life the only thing stopping him from assaulting me would be if there was a risk of legal consequence. And he took the time to emphasize this wasn't just Internet trash talk but that he'd genuinely like to give me a kicking. Worse, I find his articles tiresome.

Re: @h4rm0ny - What is the sky?

>>"I think what's really clear is that *both* of them are playing PR games."

Actually, I don't see the same sort of tactics from Meredith. True, he could just be amazingly convincing in playing the role of an average Kentucky townsfolk and him having his face plastered across our media in a prison photograph is just some clever double-bluff game, but he seems fairly blunt and sincere to me.

>>"but you (and your upvoters) didn't seem to have done any looking to see if there *was* an "on the other hand" version which may contradict it, hence the downvote."

You don't know what I'm familiar with. You'll find comments on me about this on El Reg's coverage going back to their first stories on it. It's something I've been following in depth for sometime. I don't suppose there's any reason to suppose upvoters of my post are ignorant either. Assuming that you know more than other people and downvoting them on the assumption that they simply don't know as much as you or their opinions would be different, is flawed, imo.

>>"As for the gun stuff, personally I don't live in a country where there are people who think that "go for your gun" is the apparent default method of resolving an issue"

Nor do I. I live in the UK and am as English as they come.

>>"(If Meredith was so concerned about the drone, why didn't *he* call the Police...?)"

That's a counter to my proposing that a better response to property destruction would be to call the police rather than gather your mates and go round there as you suggested. It doesn't take away in any manner from my point. Should he have called the police? Maybe. It likely would have been gone by the time they got their and proving ownership would be very difficult. But sure, calling the police is what I would have done. However, my point was to add some context to what was presented in this article which was Meredith following up shooting down the drone by going and threatening the drone owner. You want to argue that calling the police on the drone would be a better response than shooting it down, be my guest. But don't try and counter my point by saying 'yeah, well why didn't he call the police, then?' There's a large difference between an obviously confrontational situation of gathering your mates and going round someone's house and the immediate response of whether or not to damage a mechanical device that is on your property and you consider to be actively infringing on your life. One is potentially violent and by definition pre-meditated. The other is neither.

Re: Interesting....

>>"He had increased height to 278 feet when it was shot down"

Correction. He claims he had increased height to 278 feet. Whether or not he did is another matter, but it contradicts statements by neighbours and family. And whilst I'm not an expert, shooting down a drone with shot (police records show the ammo is #6 shot) at 92 yards straight upwards, seems something of a feet to me.

He did produce a map on his iPad he says is the path, but I shouldn't have to explain on a tech news site the ease of editing a text file (which is typically how drone telemetry is stored) and showing it to people a few months later.

Re: @h4rm0ny - What is the sky?

>>"Downvoted, not for the gun stuff (see later), but because here's the drone owner's version"

Okay, so you downvoted me because the drone owner has now produced a contradictory account. Understood. I've now watched and read your link including the Fox News interview. One thing I note, though it's an aside, is how Meredith is having photos of himself plastered everywhere and footage of him in an argument when he's being arrested. The argument seems to revolve around the fact that someone is filming him being arrested which plausibly seems to be the drone owner or friend showing up to film Meredith being arrested after he called the police on him. Meredith isn't violent in any way, but is swearing. If someone called the police on me and then filmed my arrest, I would not be happy either. I also don't like the PR angle that Boggs keeps trying to play with things like "the world famous drone-slayer" and such. Everything I've read with Boggs seems to give me the feeling he's playing some PR battle against the guy. One example is the photograph of a drone shown several times in your link of a distant blur in the sky and an enlarged inset showing it's a drone. Is there any claim that this photograph actually was taken at the time? No. It's almost certain it wasn't. But it's presented as if it was. The site you link to has multiple hallmarks of this sort of "truth-y" presentation.

Now specifically as to him coming forward with his own version, I would be stunned if the map he showed on his iPad was remotely admissible as evidence. Drones record basic telemetry which you export as a text file as I understand it. I haven't used this software but I would lay good money that I could produce you whatever flight path you wanted. Unless the iPad was seized at the time by the police (which it wasn't), there's no evidence of Boggs' is story. Whilst on the other side we have multiple eye-witness statements, the range of the shotgun itself, where the shotgun presumably fell and the sudden appearance of flight path data.

>>Now, regarding the guns, if someone starts shooting at and destroying my property, I think I'd be a little miffed, and if I wanted to have a word with them, I doubt I'd just go up to their house, knock on the door and say "excuse me, old chap, would you mind not doing that?" I'd want a few friends with me

You wouldn't call the police or something? You'd get your mates together and go round there? How is what you're saying different to what I said. I simply pointed out that a lone line saying "and then threatened the owner with a gun" is quite different to four angry people showing up and you warning them to stay off your property.

>>"When we see the guy I want to speak to is packing a side arm and threatening 'If you cross my sidewalk, there's gonna be another shooting" I think we're going to back off. "

Crossing the sidewalk means the pavement. It's a street-facing house - crossing it means you're now walking into his garden. Just to be clear.

>>"(NB nowhere can I find anything that says the drone owner or his friends are carrying firearms...)"

And nowhere in my post will you find it stated that they were. I simply observed that four angry unknown men pulling up outside your house and heading into your property is a very different mental image to "and then he threatened them with a gun". And your facts are supporting that, so I stand by it. Four men don't need a gun to make me feel threatened.

Re: More Drone Hysteria

>>"A crook would do a midnight check of your mail or a random knock on your door"

You're allowing your preconceptions to get the better of you. Drones are affordable and easy to use. Plenty of "criminals" have them. And yes, it's just as effective to be able to fly a drone past a house's upper windows peering in than it is to walk up to a door, knock and risk being spotted by neighbours or people who were at home after all; or to take the chance that maybe they just weren't bothering to answer the door. Possibly even more effective.

Re: the problem with drones...

>>""secretly or surreptitiously uses" - but drones flying close enough to viably peer in windows are (currently) loud enough to be definitively not-surreptitious, making the Peeping Tom law inapplicable"

Well when that law was written there was no way to do such things without being there in person. So you would be secret and surreptitious. Now you can be secret and surreptitious even with a noisy drone because nobody knows who owns it or who is watching through its eyes.

Surreptitious (adj): 1.kept secret, especially because it would not be approved of:

The person is still being surreptitious even if the drone can be seen. And it's the person who gets charged with a crime, not the tool they use to do it.

Re: Would you like another dimension with that, sir!

>>"Don't we already have that tho? We have no idea where these particle pairs come from in the first place - they just seem to spontaneously spring into existence. We don't know why radioactive substances decay when they do either."

Well some of that is above my degree-grade so I don't know whether we know that or not (as a species, I mean). However, these are both examples of us not knowing something. That is different to a theory requiring something to happen without a cause. Or rather for mathematics to only make sense in one direction.

I've thought of another way to put it. Suppose we say a+b = 4. Now we don't know the values of a or b. That's like your example. Now suppose we say that a + 2 = 4, but then go on to say that 4 - a might not equal 2. How can that be? We have lost information about a. It was there and now it's not. This is more like the examples we're talking about. If you can run mathematics forwards, but not backwards, then you're violating determinism. For reasons that E2 is putting better than I am elsewhere... :)

Re: "The escaping particle steals a tiny bit of the black hole's mass with it"

>>"And in fact given that anti-matter responds to gravity the normal way, wouldn't the number of particles and anti-particles falling into the BH be equal and therefore its net energy increases?"

A sensible question but the answer is 'no' because Hawking Radiation only occurs at the event horizon itself. Particles further away annihilate each other immediately afterwards - no big deal. Particles closer to the event horizon... well there's no such thing. But at the exact edge, you get one particle getting sucked in and the other having enough momentum to get away. That's why the Black Hole bleeds energy - it's an infinitely thin line drawn down the middle of all these particle/anti-particle events that prevents them reaching their usual conclusion.

Well, I say infinitely thin. Planck might disagree. We need a proper Physicist at this point.

Re: Would you like another dimension with that, sir!

>>You've said it twice, but you haven't explained why.

Well, that's not a fair comment. I did try and explain it in the post you replied to. However, I think E2's explanation is best below: link. But I'll take another stab at it as you replied to me.

You have to understand what Information is in this context. It is distinct from "things we know". Nobody is saying that some real person can no longer find something out. That's true, but it's not an accurate description because there are lots of other reasons why we might not know something - for example, not having the tools to measure something. What it means in this context is that the Information actually is lost - entirely. Determinism follows from being able to model interactions. Particle X with mass blah at velocity yada collides with particle Y which has... Etc. Imagine a blackboard with lots of such equations written on it. Then you wipe away parts of it. Now you have particle Y flying off in a random direction with no reason. The information about Particle X was lost. Now to get this, I have to re-emphasize the key point. I'm NOT talking about us the humans not knowing something. I'm talking about the information being lost. Until one understands that these are different things, one cannot understand the problem with a theory in which information is lost. A theory in which information is lost is a theory in which things happen without a definable cause.

And I'm afraid that's probably my best effort at this as I'm not a theoretical physicist. If it doesn't explain it (which it may well not), then I'm out. Personally, I'd stick with E2's explanation below which is better than mine.

Re: "The escaping particle steals a tiny bit of the black hole's mass with it"

>>"Anti particle's have opposite charge, but not negative mass:"

That's correct but I'm not sure it's the answer to the question. Because one would expect there to be an equal distribution of positive and negative matter falling into the Black Hole. I think the actual reason is that via this process, the Black Hole actually loses energy, but because Energy converts to matter, the Black Hole effectively loses mass.

Re: Evaporating black holes

>>"In the limit, a tiny black hole would evaporate in a small fraction of a second, in a ridiculously large explosion."

I heard a proposal to try and make these at CERN, yes?

Re: Would you like another dimension with that, sir!

>>"Isn't it enough to just hold your hands up and say, "we haven't got a clue", but we have some ideas on what to do about it."

And isn't it the case that papers like this are exactly us having some ideas on what to do about it? And who says "we haven't got a clue"? You? Ever since Newton we've been making great strides in studying the universe and building models that we hope will simulate it and then finding ways to test those models. We're trying to observe Hawking Radiation right now and might even be able to measure it at CERN some day. So just because YOU think "we haven't got a clue" and will one day look back and laugh at scientists like Stephen Hawking, doesn't mean we will. Right or wrong, their theories are steps towards understanding the workings of our universe.

>>"So, information is "lost" in a black hole, like water is lost when it goes down the sink. It's all relative to the onlooker, the water still exists, even though I can't see it."

This is a misunderstanding. The point is that information shouldn't be lost from the Universe. If Information is lost then you can throw out determinism. You'd have effect without cause because the cause (information) no longer existed. We're not talking about something not being known to a specific observer - that happens all the time. We're talking about something not being known to the universe. Which is a rather more alarming prospect because then you have a universe that is operating based on things that didn't happen. Do you see what is meant by information in this context? The spin of a particle, the momentum it has. These are the things that determine what happens when it bumps into another particle. If information is lost then there's no determinism. It's not "water down a sink" where we simply can't see it anymore. We (people) are not the "we" in that sentence.

>>"After the business with David Slater, they'll never get a penny off me. There's no need to feel guilty about it - just do your best to avoid using Wikipedia if at all possible."

Yes. I used to give Wikipedia fairly generous donations during their fund-raising drives. I stopped with the David Slater / Monkie Selfie debacle. I once unwisely read their faux-neutral self-congratulatory page on the case where they affect objectivity. You can practically see the dewy beads of self-righteousness squeezing through your monitor by osmosis.

I felt better about stopping contributing when I learned that they meet their hosting costs with just a small fraction of the donations and that most of it is going on salaries and pet projects.

>>"and they intend replacing the one that's going with another community-elected member."

I read it more as "and they intend replacing the one that caused trouble."

Also, I'm a little confused as to the set up here as it reads as though the appointees who voted him off, were actually just members of the same board he was elected to. If this is so, then they're really set up so that the majority can vote out the members that they object to, then something is seriously wrong. It would be like the Tories getting a majority and deciding to vote Labour and the Lib Dems out of Parliament.

And it seems a majority of the board are appointees who get in there by selection rather than voting. If this is the case, then the community elected representatives don't actually have any possibility of pushing through any decisions regardless of the mandate given them by the community, because the community representatives are a minority on the board? Essentially, the community is allowed to pick representatives to be sent (although this one has been sent back as unacceptable), but they don't actually have real power. Can someone confirm my reading of this is correct, please?