Posts by h4rm0ny

Re: Galloway Rocks....

>>"The real issue as that I find Galloway to be odious, oily, smug and self-centred. A massive contrast to another leftwing politician, Tony Benn, who also stuck to his principles no matter what

So basically you think that he should leave the country because you don't like his manner whereas another politician you did so they can stay.

Got it.

Re: Galloway Rocks....

>>"Well I guess he must have something to inspire such an impassioned defence"

More that I just dislike cheap attacks and pretending to speak for the country.

Anyway, given I posted facts and your posts go "are you his mum", I think this is pretty much done. As another poster said, if sponsors of mass surveillance just try to tar opponents of it by association, your sort of mindset is exactly the one that tactic works on. What matters is that they're trying to get away with dragnet style surveillance, not that you get upset about George Galloway.

He has a very good track record of highlighting government wrongs. You should watch that link of him laying into the US case for war with Iraq. That got a lot of press and his arguing style is to back everything up with references as he goes, which is a lot better than most people's style of word play and veiled ad hominems, imho.

Re: Dear Mr. Galloway.

No. Are you his ex?

Re: Galloway Rocks....

>>"I don't believe he gives a toss about this subject, he just wants the publicity"

Any particular reason you would know the inner mind if George Galloway? He's been pretty badly beaten up twice by people for his criticisms of various powerful factions. He could have had a cushy and successful career in the Labour party but clashed with the whips repeatedly over points of principle and was eventually expelled from the Labour party for advocating that people refuse to go to war. This may come as a shock to you but you don't generally achieve political success by annoying the most powerful people in government. It actually tends to lead to political marginalization, severe curtailment if your political career and advancement. Oh, and character assassination. There has been a truly exceptional amount of that over the years in Galloway's case. Usually followed by people having to settle for libel, incidentally.

So given how often he has set back his political career by sticking to his principles or pursuing human rights (he was an early supporter if same-sex marriage and I seem to recall him getting flack for voting to normalize the age of consent for homosexuality with heterosexuality), or been hospitalized for criticism of Israeli policy or put up with some pretty vicious attempts to end his career with various libels, I'm going to return to my original question. How is it you know that despite all the cost sticking to his principles has brought him, that you know that what he's really motivated by is the pursuit of fame?

Re: Dear Mr. Galloway.

I rather enjoyed seeing him rip into the US Senate over Iraq. They basically tried to character assassinate this vocal critic by summoning him to answer charges of taking bribes from Iraq and it turned into one of the all the great political backfires of the decade. He pretty much tore down their case for the invasion of Iraq in meticulous detail and the lovely thing is, he backs everything up with references. Got a LOT of coverage of the flaws in the case for war. And possibly the only person I have ever seen successfully shoot down Fox News's Bill O'Reilly in his own show, no less.

He also stands up for his principles. He's been badly beaten up twice by people with your attitude in the past couple of years. Once by a Zionist fanatic because of his criticisms of the Israeli government and I don't recall the other's reasons. But it seems to me he has a lot more courage and clear beliefs than a lot of MPs. He fought tooth and nail against the invasion of Iraq whilst most of the Labour and Tory politicians kowtowed to their political masters and only came out against the war much later when there was no political cost in doing so. Whilst Galloway is endlessly politically marginalized for positions that are actually pretty justifiable.

So no, you don't get to speak for "basically everyone in the country", in fact, as the pretty much equal downvotes to your post show.

Re: For £1,099 you can have...

The difference between Macs and PCs, in hardware terms, is that Apple only sells premium laptops. With PCs there are Premium and Standard and Budget variations. Compare like for like. If Apple can successfully sell laptops in the premium range, there's clearly a market. And besides, Lenovo and Dell have been charging these sorts of prices for their high-end for years so presumably are doing fine.

Just because there are cheaper laptops out there, doesn't mean this is above market prices.

Re: Nomen est omen

>>"The thing is, when it comes to science, precision matters. Science MUST be pedantic or mistakes linger."

Sure. But planet has next to no scientific meaning. When you're calculating the path of your spaceprobe, you factor in 1x10^6Kg mass to your slingshot calculations, not "1 planet".

Planet is a cultural term used by laypeople.

Re: American

I upvoted you just for "Team Planet". Beats the Hell out of "Team Downgrade Classification".

Re: American

British support of Pluto's Planethood right here. Don't be so xenophobic. At best, I think you're just suffering confirmation bias from the fact that this is more of a controversy in the USA. In most of Europe and Asia, most people still just think of it as a planet so of course you'll see less argument.

I don't care if an American discovered it. I don't discount Venus because a bunch of Sumarians or Mayans first documented it.

Re: Wishing and Hoping

And honestly, why shouldn't it be a planet. Planet isn't a term that has any precise scientific meaning? No space probes will crash because they expected 2 Planets worth of gravitational force to affect them and there was only 0.5 Planets of gravitational force. It's not a scientific term, it's a cultural one. You want to correct someone who calls a hyena a canine because it's not? Fine - there are precise meanings behind the term. But there's nothing that says "planet = Xkg in mass".

It's been a planet for most of its existence and it's really just a cadre of people who like correcting others that took it up as a crusade. Call it a planet, no-one will get confused. In fact, confusion and arguments will drop. And I say all this as someone who back in the day argued fiercely against metric KB and KiB inventions - they affected me as an engineer. But what the Hell is the scientific definition of "planet". It's just a layperson's term so let 'em have it.

Re: The key question is ..

I shall probably regret this, but what is it you think is broken in current Windows that would be fixed by more money?

Not really. Firstly, it's massive, massive overkill as such people are likely to have a very small user base and a single location for files. It's not much good trying to detect anomalous patterns of behaviour amongst your users and network if that's basically two people and a couple of laptops.

Secondly, even though this flags up data for review, you still need to be competent to make use of that. The average family are not going to know what to do with if some software flags up an alert that user account X suddenly has a new pattern of scanning and copying files from Y. A competent sysadmin would, but not your typical home users.

Though really the first one makes the second academic, anyway.

Re: Of course they'll break up

Some of AMD's debt isn't due until 2017 and the rest isn't due until 2020. So no, receivers aren't going to come bursting in the door tomorrow. AMD have time for Carrizo to be selling before then and they will have a very new architecture (Zen) released and in distribution as well. We should also see HBM bedded down as a standard by then in which AMD have the lead.

So whilst the plane has been nose-diving, the ground is still legally five years away and they have measures that could turn things around in that time.

Re: Low end parts

A lot of the time the customer doesn't even bet as far as buying it in the first place. Vendors always pair the AMD chips with shoddy hardware. So whilst the processor might be adequate to their needs the poor screen and shoddy plastic wont. So AMD get disqualified by association.

A high-end laptop or workstation isn't going to use AMD because the high-end Intel chips are more powerful and more efficient than AMD's best chips. But there's certainly room for AMD's offerings in better products than they get.

Re: This good be good news or bad news..... @CodeJunky

>>"However, is it still the case that there have been no deaths due to Fukushima? I can't clearly recall where, but I do remember reading about 1300 deaths, though did not at the time ascertain the source."

There have been no deaths attributable to radiation or other direct effects of Fukushima. There have, however, been a number of deaths due to the hysterical ways of responding to it. That's hysteria in the clinical sense, not the humorous one. For example, many aged people have become ill or passed away from stresses and emotional trauma brought on by being moved away from their homes, from loved ones, kept in evacuation centres, loss of livelihood and financial devastation from losing homes. There have been many cases of severe depression and trauma amongst people who have basically seen their entire community and life taken away from them as villages are emptied and the inhabitants scattered to the wind. I'm not sure about your figure, but statistically many people have suffered adverse health effects and mortality has increased amongst affected demographics. The great tragedy being that it's avoidable. Nearly all of the evacuated areas are fine to live in and even the areas really close are essentially just a "you have a very slightly increased risk of cancer, statistically speaking".

However, the Japanese government was and is terrified of being accused of not doing enough. You're familiar with the way someone will always show up to tear down a government with claims of how they could have done X and why didn't they do Y. They even upgraded the rating of the nuclear disaster to its highest level (despite not meeting the criteria at all) because someone accused them of not taking the disaster seriously enough by putting it lower than the maximum. Disastrous evacuations and traumatic break up of communities and families followed.

I'm not exactly sure of your numbers, but that is likely what you have seen referred to as "deaths due to Fukushima". The media loves its disaster porn.

Re: This good be good news or bad news.....

>>"Genius. It's not even compromise. Superb"

It's not some clever method of tricking AGW-skeptics into supporting anti-climate change measures. I AM a skeptic. And for example, I get very unhappy when I see extras tacked onto my electricity bill and am forced to subsidise wind farms which are hugely inefficient. (Solar and nuclear I'm in favour of, wind power is downright destructive).

I just happen to be an AGW-skeptic who would like to head off staggering rises in energy costs (which increasingly expensive to extract fossil fuels inevitably lead to), who detests regimes that stone women and would like to see London's vehicles emit water vapour rather than black filth.

Re: This good be good news or bad news.....

>>"Have you seen where a lot of the uranium comes from?"

Kazakhstan may mine Uranium, but there are also plenty of other sources globally where it can be mined very economically. For example, whilst Australians are frequent complainers about their government, I doubt even they would refer to their government as a despotic regime (mostly). And that's just Uranium. When you get onto Thorium reactors, fuel is so globally plentiful it's absurd.

You can get oil from places other than Qatar, Saudi, et al. But with oil, Western support of despotic regimes seems to have been intractable. Nuclear power, the fuel is so easily sourced that if we decide we don't like Kazakhstan's human rights, shifting to another provider is perfectly doable with only a modest financial impact. Maybe even none.

Re: This good be good news or bad news.....

AGW-skeptic right here, and you might be surprised to find that many of us are actually in favour of moving away from fossil fuels. Just not out of some (imo) terror of AGW. They are polluting and cause adverse health effects. They are finite, meaning we must start changing away from them. They are heavily produced in regions ruled by despotic regimes we should not be supporting.

All of these are good reasons to be moving away from fossil fuels. Though not to wind power which is a dreadful ideal, but to nuclear which is cleaner, has plentiful fuel and doesn't result in us protecting the Saudi royal family from those they oppress.

AGW doesn't come into it, as far as I'm concerned

Re: It's like the sixth form common room

>>"they are most probably still living with mum and dad"

That would be because house prices today are beyond most people's reach and consequently any available properties are snapped up by well-off people who buy them to let out. Frequently borrowing to fund their buy-to-let which further exacerbates the problem. Thus you get buying a house unattainable for most under the age of thirty-five and if rent it takes up half or more of what you actually earn each month.

So there are lots of people "still living with mum and dad" through little choice, even when they work.

Re: If you're an IT Contractor

Can you explain, please? I missed this one.

Re: I am more concerned...

They can end up being used in the national press when you are investigated / wanted for a crime.

Re: One MEEELION lines…

No. A major version increase would be based on new functionality / interface changes. Simple improvements to the codebase (or complex ones!) don't merit that.