Posts by 100113.1537

Hmmmmm,

Given the fact that it took almost a week to come up with this response, I am somewhat sceptical of their explanation. Given the history of Apple - I simply don't believe it!

Common theme going on here...

I think there have been similar attacks on other international agencies - the webmail access at the World Bank was also taken down for a while after a cyber-attack (reportedly).

They use Lotus Notes, but for external consultants the webmail interface was the only option. When webmail access was discontinued, they sent out notifications - via the same system so no-one who actually needed to know could find out......

Education - or training?

As a UK graduate (BSc and PhD) who has not lived or worked in the UK for 20-odd years, my impressions may be somewhat off-base, but the issue I have is the changing role of higher education - into a training system as opposed to education. As a number of previous commenters have noted, real training (as in learning the job) comes when you are on the job - the degree requirement was to identify those people who could learn and had the necessary background.

It now seems more and more that people (employers? employees?) expect to be able to "do the job" as soon as you start not "learn on the job" and so the focus of the qualification becomes more vocational than educational. In this case, we end up reducing the usefulness of the qualification for anything other than the specific job it is intended for and ability of the employee to bring anything more to the job than just an adequate ability to perform it. Now this is a chicken and egg situation - do employers demand this or teachers expect this to be the case - but as I compare my A-levels and degree studies with what I read now, there is no doubt that there has been a large change in focus.

As I have been exposed to higher education in four other countries since my UK PhD, what I have noted is the value in the highly focussed A-level system in the UK: For those people who have the desire and ability to get into research it is (or was?) the best system of any that I have experience of. Whether this was a problem for other students was an important question, but wrecking one (only?) good thing about the UK education system hardly seems the right way to go about addressing a different problem.

One caveat

Everything Tim has written is quite correct (as befits someone who knows economics), however, part (most?) of the reason for the rise in rice prices in 2008 was because producing countries closed their borders to exports, exacerbating the fear of shortages in importing countries and fueling local price inflation in those countries.

This is an issue relatively specific to rice because, although the vast majority of the crop is consumed locally, export trade is critical to provide the shortfall in a few importing countries and the traded price ends up being translated into the local price. if you go back and look at where there was unrest in 2008, it was only in a few countries which were importers of rice and this followed the closing of export markets from countries such as India and Thailand.

At the same time, Tim points out that the traded price is not the same as the futures prices and should not have affected them. It is only when politicians start reacting to futures prices that trouble happens!

Junket for particle physicists

I knew one of the NSF grant reviewers in the US who had to go and visit the site when they were asking for extra funds. A 3-4 week round trip just to look at some snow... I was jealous 'cos I never got that kind of trip!

Lord Triesman was right...

Anyone notice how this outcome was predicted by Lord Triesman in his recorded comments (admittedly while trying to get his leg over) in May this year.

"Spain and Russia in a deal to bribe referees so that Spain would win the World Cup and Russia would win the bid for 2018."

Looks a bit prescient now doesn't it?

National security?

Wind farms have already been noted as causing radar blackout areas - I wonder what the Pentagon thinks of having most of the eastern seaboard blacked out for incoming cruise missiles?

[Black helicopters - because they wouldn't be needed anymore for sneaking up on the US]

More on people doing their own investigating

On a similar theme, there has been a story in the Norwegian media recently who sent the police details from the anti-theft software on his (stolen) mac which not only sends emails, but pictures of who is using it! The latest I heard was that one of his mates even saw the woman pictured using it on a bus ans still the police did nothing.

At what stage can you take the "law" into your own hands to retrieve stolen property?

[Hand grenade - one way of taking the law into your own hands]

I'm confused

(not an uncommon occurrence) - only last week I saw (smooth) nipple covers designed to hide nipples when going bra-less.

Can someone tell a poor male of the species what is going on here?

Hit the nail on the head

This is not a replacement for a note/netbook or a 'phone or a TV or or or - it is something else which may or may not be useful to people.

Now can we all calm down?

If BMI was discredited years ago - why are people still using it?

To all of those posters criticizing the article for pointing out what the original paper said...

Yes, BMI is crap, but it is still used by health authorities the world over. Consider the latest NICE recommendations about using BMI to determine treatment options - a simple way to ration health-care, but which does nothing except entrench the pressure on people to conform to an ideal body image.

If having a BMI greater than 25 did actually cause any health impacts, why does the 25-30 group have the highest life expectancy in the US? Followed by 30-35, which is statistically the same as the "normal" 20-25 group. These are US-CDC figures from actual data, not extrapolations from extreme cases (which is where all of the obesity-related health predictions come from).

BMI was even re-classified in 1999 to make "normal" 20-25 instead of 22-27 and so on up the scale. At a stroke, this increased the percentage of overweight and obese people in the population and I have yet to find any discussion of re-calculating obesity rates in the historical data - itis simply give an evidence the "obesity epidemic". Furthermore, average heights are still increasing, even in western populations, and the BMI calculation cannot hold up for the extra bone mass needed to support taller people.

Papers like the one referred to here deserve a wide reading - and if a great headline such as provided by El Reg helps, good on yer!

What about documents?

And how is this case different from the recent cases of secret documents left on trains/buses and subsequently sold to journalists?

I don't remember anyone here claiming that the person who found the documents should have made returned them to the police. We were all very happy to heap sh*t on the poor sod who left the docs, but no mention was made of the actions of the person who found them - who could have been doing a lot more damage than simply costing Apple a few quid.

Yes, if I found a 'phone (or wallet or whatever) I'd start by trying to return it to its owner and then probably go to the police. But if I found something labelled Secret I would take it straight to the cops, not to the media.

Let's have a little consistency here people!

Airport Security....

Speaking of fun in airport security...

Returning from a trip last week, I was going through Dubai for the second time in a week and had to leave the "secure" area to to go to the transfer desk. On coming back though security again (about 10 minutes after going through the first time) my notebook security cable was confiscated as being not allowed on an aircraft!

The sheer ridiculousness of the situation stunned me. I think I have taken - conservatively - 150 flights over the past 4-5 years with the cable in my carry-on (I forget it is there to be honest because it sits in a pocket on the front) and on this trip alone went through 5 security checks before it was confiscated - two of them in Dubai.

As a fairly frequent flyer, I am quite happy with security procedures - sure they are a bit of a pain, but mostly because of the queuing first, but I havne't been hijacked or blown up yet so they must be working - right?. It would just be nice to have a bit of consistency to make me think they are actually doing some good...

I have had a good time with Christmas cakes and Christmas puddings before now, but my all-time favourite was coming back from Kenya with a piece of lead-crystal glass as an anniversary present for my in-laws. The security person's double-take on seeing a big square lump of something X-ray opaque was priceless! In retrospect, I should be glad I didn't get hauled off, being merely asked to open the bag and show the nice piece of artwork, but it is one I will remember for a while.

The most delicious irony!

Apart from the fact that there is nothing sinister in this guy's contact list including Google employees (they may well be his friends as well as legitimate contacts), this has to be the loveliest demonstration of a "feature" that would be called a bug by anyone else!

I can't imagine what Buzz would do to my email contact list - I am just glad that I don't use G-mail (or similar) that can be mined by a social networking bot (apparently without express orders to do so (although this isn't clear from the article). At the very least, this should not be public by default - surely we all know by now that default is to turn this kind of thing OFF and require the user to specifically activate it.

Ho Hum, said Pooh.

I am not sure I should be more or less worried that Google is so heavily entrenched in the Obama administration. I can't say as I feel too good about the wishy-washy touchy-feely Google-bots in the White House, but I am sure that is what most of Obama's team are anyway. Maybe the Google people at least have some executive experience - not conspicuously visible otherwise.

Musings

Hmmm, depending on the country (copyright laws are national) there is a requirement to actively pursue copyright infringement to show that you are maintaining your rights. Depending on when this suit was filed, there could also be a case for limiting the damages to the royalties since that time (I'm sure MaW made most money from this in the first couple of years).

There is still hope that at the damages hearing common sense will prevail and the percentage of the song that is actually used will be taken into account.

What am I saying - common sense and lawyers?

Compaq Concerto anyone?

Why do we think Apple is doing anything new here?

The technology is old (my first notebook was a Compaq Concerto way back in 386/486 days) and they have had closed apps forever without it destroying the world.

I've not actually looked at the specs, but from the article (and the comments) it seems like it isn't even a replacement for a netbook, let alone a notebook. What is the point of that?

The stylus of the Concerto was a clever way to replace a mouse for portable computing and, although it had its problems, was a real boon to actual mobile computing (standing up and doing something else that needed interaction) - they were widely used in the medical sector for example. The stylus-driven Palms and other PDAs took up the challenge and have become heavily used in embedded applications, but for some reason after Apple's failure with the Newton they developed a paranoia about any form of stylus and their current focus on entertainment has lead them further away from being a computer maker.

That's fine for them because they can make a tidy profit by delivering dumbed-down interfaces for specific jobs (yep, I have an iPod and am debating a Touch because Palm have stopped making PDAs for me to play games on while I am waiting for my flight) - but don't think this will change computing and certainly not the "world as we know it".

Academic incentive

"adding global warming to your grant application" is one thing - getting in the region of 16 million in grants over a 10 year period (as revealed in one of the leaked/hacked files) is something else altogether!

For UEA the CRU was a gold mine - bringing in that kind of research funds means they shoot up the ranks of UK research universities and get lots of other funds (block grants pro-rated to research grants). While the staff researchers don't necessarily get a higher salary, they get a lot of extra support and kudos within the organization.

So, what starts out as a good idea, gets big grant money, then gets hard to replicate ('cos the original code was cobbled together by non-programmers, PhD students etc.) - suddenly you have an incentive to "lean on the scales" a little. Then someone starts asking hard questions and you start to get defensive....

In the end, it is the cover-up which always gets caught out - leak or hack, sooner or later this information was always going to come out and now we can claim all sorts of conspiracies. The sad fact is that these scientists are themselves really being used by groups who stand to make real money out of global warming - the politicians, bankers and major companies that are busily pushing for taxes on energy regardless of whether there will be any impact on the weather.

In the immortal words of "deepthroat" - follow the money!

Methanol - liquid fuel of the future?

Although some of these comments are funny, I think methanol to power fuel cells has a future. Methanol is flammable and difficult to get onto a plane (although 50ml would fit into the little plastic bags and not be checked), but it isn't explosive per se (same as petrol) and used in a fuel cell has a good energy to weight ratio.

In answer to the comments above, it isn't a chemical reaction and so it doesn't 'carry-on' when not plugged in to anything and you can't substitute ethanol (which has much better uses anyway - hic). A few companies have trialled fuel cells for laptops and if you replace the battery with them, they run quite cool (no explosion issues). Used as suggested above, they don't get close to the (hot) batteries so the safety thing isn't too bad.

Right now, this is a gimmick with the only real application lightweight generation of low currents when separated from main electricity (the US Army is interested to replace batteries in field kit). On a larger scale, it beats the home Hydrogen generators that Honda are selling with their fuel cell cars. In addition Hydrogen is much more dangerous and heavier to transport.

The big question is the grade of methanol - someone pointed out how cheap the standard grade is to buy and if you can use that then we are not too far (just one order of magnitued) from a viable option. I thought the actual fuel cell used quite a dilute solution to generate Hydrogen for the actual reaction so perhaps the grade is only important from the point of view of reducing weight.

Sad news

As you can tell from my handle, I was an early user of CompuServe. In fact, without it I probably wouldn't have married my wife as the purchase of two 2400 modems (with which the CompyuServe subscription came free for the first year) when I left Norway for Australia was what kept me in touch with my - then - girlfriend. Internatrional 'phone calls were horrendously expensive at the time (early 90's) so without the daily emails we would have been lost.

The forums were very useful back in the days of Word Perfect (pre-Windoze really) 'cos there was always someone who wanted a printer driver and CS was way better than the early WWW for finding specific items like that. It was also very useful for international access in some strange out of the way places.

But, as has been said before, this is progress. They dies with the death of dial-up really as people went to local ISPs for broad-band access I guess global WiFi access accounts are the modern version, but the Telecoms companies own these as well.

I for one am sad, even if we did give up the account about 4 years I can still roll-off the account name and password ************** (sniff)