Posts by Charles Manning 3509 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Jun 2007
"increasing overpopulation in "third world" nations [BAD]"
By any of your measures, third worlders are far less of a problem than first worlders.
First worlders consume more, pollute more, fight more than third worlders.
If anyone should be denied healthcare and fertility treatment it should be the first worlders.
Have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs
Pre industrialisation, most people lived in the bottom bit - even struggling to get into the bottom bit. Until 50 years ago, famine was rife. Now it is fairly close to nonexistant, except for disturbances caused by local conflicts.
The same for disease. Sure Ebola is making a lot of news, but that's not even 0.1% of what the 1918 flu pandemic was.
Booming industry has brought us this wealth, and that is largely driven by low-cost energy.
As people get more wealthy, and use more energy, their aspirations improve. One of the things they want is a cleaner environment. Wealthy societies can spend more on clean ups.
USA and UK uses more energy (including oil) than ever before, yet the rivers and air are cleaner now than 50 years ago.
London air is now far cleaner than it was in the 1960s and the streets cleaner than they were in 1900.
The clean up is happening without the UN telling people what to do.
What horseshit.
A team of US engineers designed the craft and are responsible for the ongoing servicing of the program.
Part of the design process is qualification and testing of the components that went into the product and making sure they were fit for purpose.
If they designed in a defective component, then failed to respond when the component was found to be defective, then that was their fault.
Likewise, NASA is, as the name says, an Administration. They are filled with Administrators. Part of the administrators' reponsibilities is to ensure that the projects are audited and run well so that public money is not wasted.
All we're seeing here is a bunch of defective administrators and engineers looking for a scapegoat.
" The NSA and other acronyms were "allowed" to mature if you will, "
Perhaps. But the NSA of the Bush era was limited by the technology of the day. That has always been the case.
In the Obama years surveillance tech has got to be many times more powerful and plentiful. It is not Obama's fault that tech improved, but it is his responsibility to understand the implications. You can't blame GWB for stuff that increased by a factor of 10 since the end of his watch.
The Utah Data Centre, and indeed the whole Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative were developed under Obama. Sure, bush approved the later, but when Obama took over this was still young enough to have been redirected or reduced.
"LED source is simply too long a wavelength to have the decent mix of phosphors."
Did you steal a physicists scrabble board?
LEDs can produce a wider range of wavelengths than the human eye can see. All the way from UV to IR.
"mix of phosphors"??? WTF does that mean.
You're right, but not the way you think. The cost of LED lights are killing it for Sammy.
They were predicting a lucrative LED lightbulb business. The prices have dropped so low, so fast, that it has become a race to the bottom. Even the dirty cheap units work pretty well.
Samsung has become a premium brand and are wasting their brand and energy chasing the LED lightbulb market.
Things have changed.
There was a time (60s, 70s, maybe even the 80s) when being up to date and trendy with music was fashionable and the yoofs would spend all their money on records and looking cool. Every street had at least one garage where some wannabe boy-band was making crap sound they call music. The music industry made a lot of money.
Music is no longer fashionable.
Fashions come and fashions go. Music has gone, just like bell bottoms and stovepipe jeans and various haircuts. We don't blame the hair industry fro the demise of the duck tail, so why blame the music industry for the demise of music.
Saturation is certainly an effect: once everyone has a few hundred songs of the genre they prefer, the buying will slow down.
The other thing is crapness. How much good new stuff has come out recently? Stuff worth clicking on and buying.
Top twenties etc was part of the 70s and 80s. Nobody does that any more.
Funification detatches people from the reality of just about everything from science to arts.
Chemistry is more than just fizz, bang and stink.
Consider what would be a typical classroom interaction today:
Kid: Miss, I've finished my macaroni collage. Do you think 'll be an artist?
Miss: Well done Johnny, you'll be a fine artist.
...
A more thruthful session would go something like:
Kid: Miss, Ive finished my macaroni collage. Do you think 'll be an artist?
Miss: Ok Johnny, compare it to what Pete and Suzy have done. If you're going to be a real artist you will have to learn to accept critisism and competition. The hard part of being an artist is selling enough to keep you solvent. You will need to find other ways to earn a living. Go join Betty who's over in the corner practicing flipping plasticine burgers.
Real affirmative action would not look at school ties, geneder, race etc.
It would look at the individual and would correct for personal circumstances.
If you're a white male, raised by alcoholic trailer trash parents then surely you're more deserving of affirmative action than a black female raised by professional parents who nurtured you academically?
Dear AC, you seem to have hit the "I'll blame my lack of progress and gumption on toffs" ceiling.
We all have some obstacles. Some of us just give up at the first chance we get, then blame everyone else. "The little man just can't get ahead", blaah, blaah, blaah.
Or perhaps...
Your volume might go up according to the cube of your height, but your surface area goes up according to the square of your height.
If we say a fattie (or which I am one) has an average of F cm of fat under the skin, then the fat will be approx constant x F x height squared.
So maybe square is a fair measure?
The Alkaselzer tab would have filled the bottle with almost pure CO2.
If he had done it prooperly he'd have put 400ppm CO2 in the bottle.
If you want to, repeat the experiment by blowing into the bottle. That would put approx 1% CO2 in the bottle.
That would have put the two lines so close together that other variables (eg. direction of the light) would have far bigger impact.
I wrote some of the software that MS claimed was infringing. It was not, and MS finally backed down after a fight.
By my calculations, MS would have made somewhere between $50M and $100M out of my efforts.
When one of the phone vendors wanted me to investigate something, they offered no payment. I was feeling a bit grumpy that day and suggested they'd paid MS for the use of the software so perhaps they should ask MS for tech support too.
You can't get too twisted up about this because you'd just end up a bag of ulcers.
According to one of the lawyers I dealt with, MS has a huge patent portfolio that is well orgaised and indexed. They have people going through the patents and trying to see how these might be applied. Anything that looks like it might be close to infringing is thrown on the pile. This is a huge revenue stream for MS, so it pays to spend a few million per year organising it into a profitable money spinner.
The whole "article" is just cut&paste out of variouse press releases. The Quark stuff directly from Intel, the 8051 directly from Silicon Labs.
Only ARM covers all the bases from Coretex M0 (with devices starting at 28c that run for a year or more on a coin cell) to multicore application running Linux/whatever.
"Will this force usage of IPv6 soon?"
No.
When people speak of the IoT theny don't really mean that these devices are connected directly to the internet via IP.
What they mean is that these would be accessible via the internet. ie. you might have a "home controller" on the actual internet, but that uses Bluetooth etc to comunicate with the hundred or thousands of devices in your house (if you believe the hype).
If you're running Ubuntu etc then the bash problem is already fixed.
The biggest problem with heartbleed is that there are a lot of embedded infrastructure devices (routers etc) that were vulnerable to heartbleed, but are very difficult - if not practically impossible - to fix.
Now in theory the same could apply here: the routers etc could, in theory, be running bash. However almost one of the embedded systems use bash for scripting. They almost all use busybox etc. That means they do not have this problem.
bahs is on servers, and some desktops. Those should all be on good patch streams, either due to being auto updated or through BOFHery.
So all this "Bigger than Heartbleed" crap is just a media beat-up.
" The I.M. campaign certainly got a lot of younger potential voters engaged "
Nonsense.
KDC's Internet party joined forces with the Mana party. They only got a 0.1% more votes than the Mana party did in 2011 even though they went from, essentialy, a Maori oriented party to a full spectrum party. They lost their existing MP.
While the NZ media, like any media, have biasses, it is KDC's own party that has throw him under the bus fastest.
http://tvnz.co.nz/vote-2014-news/internet-mana-made-mistake-kim-dotcom-laila-harre-6087161 Intenet party leader having a go at him
http://www.radiolive.co.nz/Where-to-now-for-Georgina-Beyer/tabid/506/articleID/55196/Default.aspx an internet/mana candidate
Did the youth turn out and vote? No. This election had the second lowest turn out ever.
KDC has an enormous ego and believes himself more than anyone else does.
He paid around NZD4.5M, getting a small number of votes - around NZ$700 per vote.
He ran a website trying to get people to pledge to vote - he got 422 pledges.
His "party" blames him for their humiliating loss.
His "moment of truth" email "proving" a conspiracy against him looks like the sort of fake a 10 year old might try. Even his party members think it is a fake.
Everyone in NZ is royally tired of him and most can't wait for his next extradition hearing to roll around in Feb next year.
is a speculative art rather than a science. There's far too much assumtption and fanciful thinking to call this a real science.
From one tiny tooth fragment they'll claim a new dino species and make preposterous claims as to its size. Sure, some bones etc scale well, but some do not.
Imagine if you took girraffe bones and assumed the animal was more or less deer shaped. You'd end up with completely the wrong idea.
"Maybe we're long overdue a cull?"
Volunteering, are you?
The problem with this horseshit reasoning is people want sacrafices to be made... but won't make them themselves.
Al Gore wants us all to go back to the stone age, except he needs his executive jet and power gobbling mansion because he has important work to do.
Contents 1k
Box 100 quid
Shipping the rest
It would have been a lot cheaper to take a leaf from our WW2 forefathers and build with a sandwich composite construction (ala Mosquito). The box would have cost a bit more, but would have weighed a lot less and cost a fraction in shipping.... while also giving you the smugness of UK genetics giving you an advantage.
I grew up in South Africa during the sanctions. There were many things we could not get - in theory. Of course it was available at inflated prices so the richest and most powerful could still get everything they wanted. It was the others that lost out - regardless of race or political persuasion.
Of course it makes everyone that imposes the sanctions feel very righteous.
Many governments were still doing lots of business with South Africa behind closed doors because that still allowed you to get stuff done in Africa.
My landlord (mid 1980s) was a multi-millionaire with a trucking business. He made a lot of money brokering food aid deals for various government releif organisaions (eg. Canadian govt). He openly told them he was from South Africa and how his operation worked: he would take products (eg. maize) in unmarked sacks to Botswana. From there his other fleet would take them to Zimbabwe and have Product of Zimbabwe labels applied, then send them off to whereever.
At the end of the day, he got the most aid through to help the most people with a documented paper trail showing stuff actually got there. Dates, times, photgraphs of recipients. Sure he took a hefty cut, but it was way better outcome than if they had run through the normal channels of corruption, bribery etc.
And being quiet, the Canadian public could still hold their heads high that they were not dealing with those terrible South Africans.
No doubt this all plays out pretty much the same in Russia. The bootleggers will just profit while western citizens get to feel smug.
It's not just to protect yourself from stupid citizens either. The law enforcement types would likely shut them down for being money laundering operation. Not exactly the way to run a money transfer service.
After all, after 9/11 they had some semi-legitimate reason to attack targets in Afgahnistan, but instead attacked Iraq.... a whole 3000 km away.
Imagine bombing Moscow if you didn't like London's fish and chips! (London to Moscow is approx 3000km)
... or bombing Mexico because the Canadaina make maple syrup.
... or NZ becuae you hate kangaroos.
Nope. With this lot best not to take chances.
Just hope like hell some large unfriendly orgaisation does not spring up with Soft in its name :-).
Make tons of money out of... well... somebody.
The trillon sensor summit coming soon thinks that a year-on-year exponential increase in sensors can continue unchecked forever. http://www.tsensorssummit.org/Resources/Why%20TSensors%20Roadmap.pdf
This document is a nausiating mashup of "multi-physics" and "multi-biochemistry", electronic and nanomaterials. It promises Smart Cities, Smart Environment and Smart Water. It has all the buzzwords there to lure in the greedy investor.
Anongst other things it gravely warns: "Without focused commercialization efforts and availability of standardised development and manufacturing infrastructure, the developmen and scalability of sensors will be delayed, undoubtedly delaying Abundance."
Or in other words, buy up IVV6 routers or starving chindren will die of waterborn diseases in Africa.
As I have commented elsewhere, the vast majority of the people in the world live on $10/year or less and don't exactly have budget for anything beyond food and shelter. That means that less around 1 billion people will "need" to spend $15000 on 1000 sensors each in the next 8 years or so.
That's more than the annual household income of wealthy countries like USA.
Whenever something bad happens, or is percieved to have happened, politicians need to be seen to be doing something.... anything...
What they do need not actually have any positive effect. It just has to push the right buttons with the citizens to placate them.
That's why government is incremental.We very rarely see them saying a rule does not work, or is pointless, so they strike it. Generally the best they do is tweak it. That is all governments - the world over.
That's how we end up with daft laws that permit the use of headsets when driving when they are as distracting as hand held phones which are banned.
Does having gun licensing reduce gun crime? Maybe, ut unlikely by much. Criminals don't bother themselves with licenses etc. Toff paying 10 quid per year seldom rob banks. But what it does do is placate a whole swath of anti-gun people who tut-tut that at least it is better than in USA where any maniac can get gun.
Of course they don't realise that USA has a vast amount of gun laws - restricting all sorts of things - many seemingly very stupid. You can buy a whole rifle at Wallmart, but you need a federal firearms license to buy some parts (triggers, bolts,...).
In USA you need a special $200 permit to buy a supressor. In Australia they are illegal. In UK you can get it one with a regular license. In NZ they are unrestricted - anyone can buy one through the post or in a shop.
As a license holding NZ gun owner, I don't mind the idea of a gun license at all - even though it costs be about $10NZ per year. It does perhaps weed out some nutters, but mainly it makes the naysayers happy so they get out of my hair.
"If they've been collecting money on your behalf, you should claw it back... :)"
Unfotunately they have been collecting it on behalf of themselves.
I got an email once from someone at HTC expecting some free technical support. It happened to be on a day when I was feeling rather pissy. I suggested they contact Microsoft for support since they were paying Microsoft.
I wrote an open source file system that has been used in many tens of millions of devices. I have not received one cent of royalties or donations from the people building devices or the flash vendors who have sold billions of dollars of flash that use the file system.
About the only people who have made money out of this are Microsoft through gouging "Android tax" and alleging that my code infringes copyright (a claim from which they subsequently backed down). By my back of the envelope calculations they probably made $50M or so out of open source use of my work.
But, hey, that's open source. If you get all worked up about it you'll just get ulcers.
"The phone channel has become the weakest link in protecting individuals and businesses from scams and fraud,"
Nonsense. Human greed is the weakest link.
You can't cheat an honest man and all that...
While there are people who think they can get something for nothing or can make a deal with a lawyer wanting to hide ONE HUNDRED MILION DOLARS: $100,000,000.00 there will be a people scammed... through the interwebs, phones or people knocking on doors.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
