Posts by firefoxx

Or possibly

... it might be the case that Lockheed \ Leidos did *pretty well* and stood up a working system ready for MoJ to take over. Otherwise why would they spend £££ and take 9 months TUPE-ing staff over?

:-)

A poor anaysis from Reg readers (sorry).

I work in an organisation issuing government grants for science.

*Please* everyone - always remember that the government has taken your tax to put into research, and the political right wing do *not* want to do that unless it is spent efficiently and they have some control over how it is used. They have to account for it to the voters. They can't just take the lefty approach saying "Here you go scientists, here's tons of other people's cash. You decide how best to spend it".

The military are actually pretty good at this, because they are a long way ahead of commercial products in terms of basic science knowledge (materials, optics, computing, physics and what is called "human effectiveness"). They're very careful to direct the research toward the results they want, and avoid recovering the same ground.

And *please* do not think that the highest level of political players are all idiots. They clearly are not. No one wants to have to justify to the press why your staff spending half a million quid on a study of how shiny their pens are. It has to be part of a top-level strategy, not a free for all.

But what is it all for?

Let's not forget that we are (mostly) techies here and see value in fast Internet speeds. Many people and families simply *do not*. Many of my friends have lived perfectly happily with 2MB braodband for ages, and will continue to do so. They simply don't do anything which requires massive bandwidth. If you offered them a lower data service for less money, they'd probably take it.

Just a thought.

Numerical perspective

Ok...

1) The comments about becoming less basic rather than more acidic are very important - if you say 'more acidic' this implies that it can *actually become acidic* at some concentration of CO+ ion absorption. As far as I know this is total boll***cks, since this would require more carbon to enter the seas than exists on the planet. The oceans are unimaginably vast. The current ocean pH is well above 7 so it would need 100s of billions of tons of carbon to materially change from alkalinity. Any absorption changes are tiny.

2) The ocean pH varies quite a bit from place to place anyway and from depth to depth. I've heard up to 0.8 which is higher than any difference that could be made from surface absorption of CO2. My opinion is that these measured changes are simply part of the noise and cannot rise above the level of experimental error to be significant.

3) Less sure about this, but I've read that the dissolved carbon content of oceans is used by coral and others to make calcium carbonate shells. More carbon in solution can be *positive* to some species because there is more raw material for building their organic structures. Pros and cons all round.

That'll do for now :-)

Tiny correction

"[..] the Arctic ice cap floats on the sea and so cannot contribute directly to sea level rise by melting"

Basically true but with a caveat. The standard experiment is melting ice cubes in a glass of water - after the cubes have melted, the water level remains the same. BUT there is a difference in density between salt water and fresh water, so the melting of freshwater floating ice casues a *tiny* increase in sea level. Or so I'm told. And that's if it all melts, which of course it probably won't :-)

Thank god for ClimateGate and Mr. FOIA. We are much better informed about the internal goings-on now. Encrypted emails and files still to be released so it's not over yet.

PlanetSide

I'm really not a gamer but had a look at this MMO 1st person shooter when it ws recommended to me. The *entire point* of the game is to collaborate - and it's great. You get virtually no points and progression without others to help you in a team / platoon / whatever. The first time I ever played, I was invited into a Galaxy-like transporter plane and went to attack an enemy base with a bunch of other players, who I realised could be from anywhere in the world. There are planes to fly which are all basically helicopters so it's really easy to get stuck in. Several of the large vehicles need two people to drive / gun so the collaboration is always encouraged.

A wonderful game, and it looked amazing too with beautiful sky backdrops and landscapes.