Posts by Chris Fox

CO2, acidification and acoustics

There is reliable evidence that increasing acidification of the oceans due to rising atmospheric CO2 levels is increasing the distance that underwater sounds are travelling by very significant amounts. It has been predicted that this will lead to a change in the behaviour of marine animals that use sound, including whales. Perhaps this is relevant?

This acoustic effect is described in the recent, and widely distributed report on the potentially catastrophic impact of acidification of the oceans. No doubt The Register is reluctant to mention this report as it would be at odds with their anti-science editorial stance on issues relating to CO2 emissions, and jeopardise their income from advertisers who have an interest in the continued consumption of fossil fuels.

Scam

So, Microsoft is "generously" offering a discount on what in many cases will be the *third* OS licence covering a machine? What a bargain!

Many institutions have corporate MS licences that allow students to install any version of Windows, and other software, at no additional cost. So students may be mislead into paying something for which Microsoft has already been paid, in additional to any licence that came with the machine. Or do you suppose that Microsoft will check the students' email address and tell them when they are already covered by an educational licence?

I think it is already bad enough that MS collects two licences for many machines under in corporate use: one that came with the machine, and an institutional licence to permit the use of a common OS image, without which it would not be feasible to manage the hairball of an OS .

@AC 08:40 GMT: it has always been Microsoft's "education" policy to get them while their young, so that using Microsoft becomes a life-long habit which they will keep feeding once they are earning money and making spending decisions. It's a classic dealers' (fake) "introductory offer".

In many cases this will be the first Microsoft licence that the students in question will have bought with their own money. Microsoft UK once had a head of "education" strategy who made no secret of the fact that her remit had absolutely nothing to do with education as such, but was concerned exclusively with the generation of future sales to future wage earners. This is why they go to such great lengths to stop schools around the world from moving away from Microsoft. The current offer is an integral part of this strategy: it weans future customers off the "free" stuff (previously paid for by schools and parents) while making additional MS profit.

@AC 07:24 GMT: I see that the article has been quietly edited since it was posted, correcting the UK addresses to .ac.uk from .edu. This has the unfortunate side-effect of making your comment look like a FAIL, when it really was the article.

The real conspiracy (yet again)

From Greg: "I'm taking all this both with an open mind and a grain of salt, suppose I had a block of ice 100m thick, and it melted at 1m per year, at end of year one we all agree it will have decreased by 1%"

Anyone with a normal understanding of reality might agree, but if one were to follow the oh-so-well-informed climate change denial analysis in the article, it won't have melted at all, even if it is down to 0.1m thick.

Some people suspect there is a self-serving narrow-minded agenda to push a particular selective interpretation of the data for financial reward; they are right, the journalism of The Register is a first-class example.

As has been said before, if The Register cannot get the science right, perhaps it could at least attempt to get the journalism right, and ask others to explain their interpretation of the data.

I expect the reason that it does not is that The Register would find this too embarrassing. Its climate-change-denial agenda would collapse like the house of cards that it is. It would also undermine its attempts to push up its visitor numbers with these troll pseudo-science articles that do little more than preach to a depressingly large gallery of fellow deniers who don't apperar to understand uncontested basic science about the behaviour of C02 and the notions of steady state conditions, or the nature of peer-reviewed science.

These articles are undermining the credibility of this outfit. All we need now is a steady drip of articles preaching intelligent design and arguing that evolution is a conspiracy made up by a bunch of cynical self-serving scientists. No doubt just as many readers would agree and cheer you on.

I dare you. Go on, you know you want to.

The real conspiracy here

The adjustments in satellite temperature date are well document. They were made to correct for shifts and decays in satellite orbits. Previously the raw sat data had been used by climate change deniers as it suggested stable or declining temperatures. A major source of systematic error was then detected and removed.

Now climate change deniers have lost a major plank in their argument, they appear to have decided that the only rational explanation is that there must be a conspiracy.

In truth, the only real conspiracy is The Register's editorial agenda for arguing against climate change by peddling half-baked pseudo-science in the face of overwhelming evidence.

This story misses a critical detail: the border moves

As was pointed out at the time, the agreed border was defined in a way that means it is not fixed, it moves as the main channel shifts. It is not defined by a line on a map. This was so as to give both countries equal access to the channel, wherever it might be. The actual line on the "ground" that is to be used for enforcement purposes is supposed to be subject to periodic ratification.

As I recall, the navy overlooked this small but important detail, and was using a line on a map as defining the legal border, when in reality it was just showing where the border was at the time the treaty was agreed. The Iranians appeared to be locating the border by following its specfication in the treaty document. As a key reference point, the channel, has moved since the original indicative line was plotted, this may well have placed the navy inside Iranian waters, as defined by the treaty.

Given that the ratification of the actual position of the border on the ground has expired and never been renewed, in breach of the treaty, this could mean that legally there is no formally agreed location for the border line, and that both sides were both right and wrong, but for different reasons.

Evidence for reliability?

"The database does not contain details such as the name of a person because it relies only on biometric comparison, the safest and most accurate available identification method..."

Does anybody know of a single piece of peer-reviewed research on the safety and reliability of fingerprinting as an identification method that is not critically flawed? The only research I know of contains numerous methodology flaws, including a prescreening step that was justified by appealing to the "fact" that there could be no false positives or distinct multiple scans of the same prints...

If policy makers equate "identity" with "matching a fingerprint", there can be no appeal against wrongful (mis)identification by way of fingerprinting. I fear there will be all kinds of miscarriages of justice if biometric identification becomes the norm. Of course bringing in these procedures under the smoke-screen of anti-immigration policy (and anti-terrorism), and applying them to individuals with limited access to justice and little popular support will help ensure that opposition is somewhat muted ... until it is all too late.

@Brown

"you'll need to come out with more compelling evidence that what you've presented."

The comment from System about which you are complaining mentioned the IRA. Perhaps you have heard of them? A bunch of Catholic terrorists funded by donations from US citizens, who tried to blow up various UK prime minister on several occasions, who made many dozens of attacks against mainland targets and thousands of attacks in Ireland (1,300 explosions in one year alone). The total fatalities attributed to the IRA are estimated to be over 1,700. Of course, countless terrorist atrocities were also committed by their opponents, also with depressingly high numbers of fatalities, but strangely, they weren't Muslims either. Until quite recently, having an Irish accent in Great Britain was sufficient for you to be treated with suspicion.

If you are talking about suicide bombers, it might be worth noting that the group usually attributed with committing the most suicide bomb attacks over the past few years is a bunch of Maoists (the Tamil Tigers), and surprise surprise, they are atheists (and hence not Muslims), but of course the country in which their attacks are mounted is usually counted as being in the "third-world", and does not have any oil, so you might not have heard of them either, unless you are a rational, intelligent human, who has even remotely paid attention over the course of the last 25 years...

There are many other examples from around the world, even excluding state sponsored terrorism, but perhaps just these two examples are enough to convince many rational people that something more than 1% of terrorist acts in recent years have been committed by people who are not of the Muslim persuasion. Interestingly, there are some figures that suggest the number of terrorist attacks around the world has been in decline pretty much continuously since around 1967, but for some reason you don't often hear government officials referring to that kind of information very often, can't think why.

"i dont think you really thought out your statement before you made it, because, any rational, intelligent human, who has even remotely paid attention over the course of the last 25 years realizes that 99% of all terrorist acts around the world are committed by islamic extremists."

I love the self-referential humour!