Posts by Dodgy Geezer 1773 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Jul 2007
I bet the majority of households all over the developed world have a little drawer with up to a dozen old and no-longer-usable chargers.
Er... I don't think I'm terribly unusual, and I have nearer 100 than 10.
If you don't throw them all away when the consumer item dies, and if you have kids, a dozen is a very small number...
...Against such a threat, no holds are barred. Thing is, that raises a "hard" question. Is it worth protecting freedom when that same freedom can also destroy you utterly?...
Actually, it raises an earlier question. "Are they lying in order to keep their well-paid jobs?"
And that's not a hard question to answer at all....
...Beam these fuckers up. They've dressed us all as red shirts and we're screwed as long as they're on the planet with us....
The MOST IMPORTANT thing you need to realise about the Intelligence Services of the US and the UK is that you have ABSOLUTELY NO method of influencing them, auditing them or controlling them in ANY WAY.
They are not subject to democratic accountability in the way politicians are. They are not subject to market forces in the way commerce is. The only 'control' (if you can call it that) comes from carefully selected 'friendly' politicians who are allowed to sit on a committee where they are fed explanations of why NSA, GCHQ, SIS and the rest all need bigger budgets.
These committee members are carefully cleared, but are certainly NOT allowed to see all the workings of the intelligence community. They see only what they are told to see. When the press complains about a balls-up they are given a stupid excuse like the one above and told to parrot it. Meanwhile, the services get on with doing whatever they like.
Any organisation which operates with no control and no auditing will eventually end up like that. The intelligence services were constrained by the equivalent of market forces during WW2 - if they made a mistake it was obvious - but they now have no such control at all, and no real reason for existing. They do a job which would be better done by the Police ...
....it's just an attempt to "monitor, record and understand every single online communication, on the off-chance that we might find something of interest"
But more importantly, it provides a justification for multi-billion dollar budgets. And that means several armies of staff, and middle and senior managers, and high-ranking consultants and advisers, and a very nice living to be made by all - with no danger of competition, or being sacked for inefficiency, and a huge pension after retiring in early middle age.....
Just so long as everyone buys the story that the war on 'Terrerism' (TM) is going to be a LONG war, and one where we have to keep MANY secrets, and no one is ever to audit us, and you can rest assured that we are only doing this because we have your interests at heart, and it really IS worthwhile you continuing to pay those ever-increasing taxes...
...Remember that up until not too long ago there was no proof smoking cigarettes was unduly harmful....
Interestingly, there still isn't. Proof, that is. There's lots of statistical correlation, and most people believe it, but no one has found an unambiguous mechanism for cancer or heart damage yet, which are the two most commonly claimed harms....
..."They are using the kind of techniques that federal prosecutors send people to jail for decades for using," she said. "These are tools that are criminal, and I'm still wondering what's the authority? What kind of authority are they claiming that they can do this?"...
If you ask this you are not a patriotic American.
In fact, you are probably a Commie sympathiser. Or whatever the bogie-man is at the moment...oh, yes, a Muslim Terrorist.
So you are not allowed to ask any questions by law, and if you do, we'll ship you to the Gitmo that Obama was going to close down...
Caspar Bowden, ex-senior Microsoft executive, is in jail tonight after being found in bed with three under-aged girls, a Baptist minister and a goat.
Police say that they have also been provided with overwhelming evidence that he was financing a plot to detonate a terrorist bomb in an American city, sell nuclear material to the Iranians and rocket technology to North Korea.
...In the library world a surprising number of XML formatted documents rely on LOC for the Schema needed for validation. Those are all gone now, so work just grind to a halt for now....
So this is a very good trial run to find out what we would have to do to take the net away from the US permanently, then...?
The best word to describe IPCC AR5 is 'strange'.
With regard to the Sun, one chapter says it has no effect on global climate at all, while another says that it is responsible for the recent lack of warming.
Of particular interest is the apparent failure of the model projections to match reality, since they show continually increasing temperatures MUST happen if CO2 rises. Oddly, the last draft of AR5 shows this issue illustrated in graphical form with the model predictions running way higher than observations - the just released Final Draft shows a graph with the same data, but this time the model projections DO fit reality.
Statisticians are currently wondering how this apparent miracle was achieved - it looks as if some undocumented changes have been made at the last minute to the papers which were accepted by the IPCC. But not by the original authors....??
...Deforestation without chainsaws is rather slower....
Not exactly. It's done in Indonesia by the simple process of throwing a match into the forest.
Works rather rapidly, and is very labour-saving. Possibly one of the most efficient industrial processes ever... :)
...we can always find uses for excess power...
Umm... not exactly.
If you simply had a free source of excess power sitting and waiting for a use, I would agree with you. But the problem we have hear is running a GRID. And on a grid, excess power is a major problem of the same order as insufficient power. The excess power has to be 'dispatchable'...
What is needed on a grid is basic, reliable, cheap baseline power, then an additional flexible rapid-to-get-online source of variable power to do the 'topping-up'. An ideal system would be nuclear and hydro. And we will probably always need some cheap gas turbine systems hanging around.
The problem for Solar is that it is not flexible. You may be able to rely on it in the Sahara, but in the UK you can't suddenly call for it to produce an extra 100 MW at 10:06:35 GMT. That is actually the problem with ALL of the modern green 'renewables'. And trying to combine them with 'energy storage' makes them much less efficient and more expensive....
...Seriously, if Thorium reactors are the cure, what's the snag? Why aren't we using this cheap wonder fuel?
Because if you propose that a Thorium reactor be built, you will find your house and place of work overrun by protesters who would make the Balcombe incident look like a small picnic.
I'm not actually complaining about that. It is, after all, what democracy is about. People are allowed to express their opinions. But that is the reason for the lack of Thorium development. It's just not a technical one.
...to understand the fundamental requirement.
1 - We need energy. We either get this by generating locally as we need it (a car, for instance), or using a GRID.
2 - The GRID works by matching energy inputs to energy outputs over an energy transport system. To do this it needs:
a) efficient baseline generation capability
b) flexible top-up generation capability
3 - Nuclear is fine for baseline. But Solar is completely useless for flexible top-up. The only thing it could do would be to save a bit of nuclear fuel at the expense of making the nuclear systems less thermodynamically efficient. But nuclear fuel is incredibly cheap, and effectively limitless - so there's no point in saving it as there might be with, for instance, oil.
4 - Tim Worstall's proposals for running the Grid are therefore fundamentally flawed.
..and boats. Don't forget boats. Some of them float in the North Sea.
Not only that, but they are designed by Marine Engineers. Indeed, there are special Marine Corrosion Engineers. Some of them live in special places like this:
Center for Corrosion Science & Engineering
I'm not saying that they have all corrosion problems completely sussed, but I'll bet you could find marine engineers in there who are 'seriously thinking' about maintenance of metallic structures in all sorts of seas...
...I am making the assumption that we'd all like to have some method of generating electricity that doesn't involve pumping more CO2 into the atmosphere.
Not necessarily true.
It has been pretty obvious for the last 15-20 years that increased CO2 in the atmosphere does not result in runaway heating, and is a net benefit to plant life.
You will also find if you delve into the detail of the various papers on the subject, that the human input to the increased CO2 concentrations we have noted over the last 60 years is not well understood at all, and likely to be FAR lower than the IPCC claims which are politically-based 'science'. It seems likely that CO2 fluctuations are overwhelmingly natural, and human contributions have a small impact, well below the levels which the natural processes can cope with.
As a general principle, if all other issues are precisely equal, it seems sensible to pick an option which has the least external impact. But if CO2 output has a very small impact, is probably beneficial, and the large-scale manufacture and operation of solar arrays has an unquantified impact, I would be inclined to stick with the fossil-fuel system which was working so well for us until we tried to shut it down on dubious political grounds.
I agree that the future is nuclear. I see no reason why solar power needs to be added to the mix. You should note that powering nuclear baseline systems up and down again every day will lower the thermodynamic efficiency to something chronic!
Thanks, Palf. Your comment puts things in a nutshell. Let's look at a few points...
"The Earth seems to be habitable for perhaps 6.29 billion years (Gyr), but this is excluding the influence of humans and our pesky habit of pumping extra CO2 into the atmosphere,"
Nonsense. Current science (though not the biased IPCC) clearly shows that extra CO2 changes little, and that little is likely to be beneficial.
Rushby suggests that future exoplanetary investigations – "or SETI campaigns" – might do well to focus on such planets, since the evolution of intelligent life is likely not a simple, few-billion-year affair.
An odd statement. We know that life started on our planet incredibly early. The earliest evidence for life found so far is in a 3.8 billion-year-old rock, the Isua sediments, found in western Greenland. So it appears life was underway at least within 700 million years of the formation of the Earth (4.5 billions years ago). Maybe life had an even earlier foothold on the planet but the traces have long since been wiped out.
...if we want to search for extraterrestrial intelligence, it would be wise to rigorously analyze planets that have been around for awhile for evidence of, for example, organisms that have altered their planet's biosignatures to such an extent that they could be detected across interstellar space, since those life forms would "undoubtedly require some level of complexity beyond that of simple replicating molecules."
Completely incorrect! For example, man has hardly altered the biosphere at all. In contrast, the early atmosphere had huge amounts of CO2 and NO oxygen. This was completely reversed by the activity of microbes, typically photosynthetic blue-green algae. Even today their impact on CO2 swamps human activity. And they have no intelligence.
If you want to detect intelligence, look for non-natural phenomena. Light from dark places, perhaps, or modulated radio waves.
So this paper seems to have got every aspect of the argument wrong...
It seems that developers are informally sounded out about the possibility of placing secret access to spooks in their technology before the discussion goes any further on the technical details and requirements. Once a programmer snubs the feds, the g-men back off, it's believed....
And then, when your company is involved in any government-associated work, either prime or sub-contracted, or is involved with any client who is involved with any such work, the developer's careers seem to undergo a sudden reversal...
The pressure on Biddle came primarily from FBI agents who said they needed a skeleton key, of sorts, to easily break the crypto on suspects' computers in child-abuse investigations, allowing the locked-up data to be examined....
I assume that Mr Biddle will shortly be appearing in front of a court to answer charges of aiding and abetting paedophiles. Or terrorists....
Here we have a story that stresses the fact that castoreum from beaver's glands is defined as 'safe for human consumption', probably grandfathered in based on its use many years ago, followed by scare stories about how it might be in all sorts of products under the heading 'natural ingredient'.
The story says "is used to make vanilla flavouring for cakes", but the only thing that was confirmed by the Swedish Food Authority was that it would be legal.
Given the shortage of commercial beaver breeding facilities of the size that would be needed to supply the human food-making industry, I suspect that all our cakes are actually vanilla-pod flavoured. But it's a good yucky scare...
"...The union is vague on exactly why biometric fingerprinting is a bad idea. When The Register contacted the RMT, a spokesperson told us staff felt "brutalised" by the system, which made them feel like "slabs of meat"....
Yup.
Modern life, with CCTV surveillance, speed cameras spewing out automatic fines, menu help-lines and other examples of the ROTM brutalises us all. A union member can strike. All the average citizen can do is refuse to vote.
Which, increasingly, is what we're doing. In droves...
...$ANYBODYWITHACLUE doesn't include TalkTalk, as your rightly point out, and most readers will hopefully have read it that way....
Hmm.
Presenting your advice like that makes it incredibly easy to offer even more precise directions. How about only buying your internet services from $THEBESTCOMPANY?
...There is a serious point to this research, because tingling is something often associated with pain. If we can figure out why Szechuan pepper produces the same response from our nerves as mechanical vibration, we may get a step or two closer to figuring out what makes us hurt. ...
Or, indeed, what makes us enjoy it.
Closely followed by an extensive study of the German S&M scene. Interestingly, current legislation defining legal sex habits says something to the effect that you are not allowed to appear to be causing any actual harm to anyone.
"...I suspect so. And I'd guess that the main cost problem will be the low productivity of the asset, caused by its slow speed. In the time this takes to get any reasonable distance, a conventional jet could have flow there and back twice including the turnarounds. Not only does that mean that the asset is less productive..."
Um.. productivity isn't just a matter of comparing ANY item with the fastest of it's type. The question is whether the craft can find a market.
Interestingly, speed across the Atlantic is not a simple process of cutting minutes off to be better. You have to consider the entire experience. For instance, the big liners could have gone considerably faster if designed to do so, but that would have meant leaving the UK at an inconvenient time, or arriving in the States at an inconvenient time. They took 4 days, leaving and arriving in the daytime. To really clean up they would have had to do it in 3 days, because nobody wanted to take 3 1/2 and arrive at 2AM.
It looks to me as if an airship could cross in 24 hours. That's a good marketable time. At the moment you take a day to travel anyway, with what getting to and from the airports. Having a day of luxury at the beginning and end of a trip is a saleable commodity...and no jet lag...
It is odd that, after many years of assuring us that cigarettes unquestionably cause cancer, NOONE has yet shown a proven mechanism for this. The arguments remain stubbornly statistical.
There are also some statistics indicating that, when you just consider the older age cohorts (that is, people who didn't die of cancer in their 60s/70s), smokers actually live LONGER than non-smokers. This is termed the 'smokers paradox', and is thought to be associated with the better prognosis applying to advanced heart conditions that older patients also suffer from. Smoking is posited to help relaxation. Here is an example ref:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3559533/
The problem with any work in this field is that it is heavily - indeed overwhelmingly politically charged. It is impossible to publish any work which raises any doubt that smoking is the most unhealthy activity that a person can undertake without running into a barrage of criticism, usually anecdotal. Smoking may indeed be very bad for one's health, but the social attitude that the science is completely settled, and that questioning any aspect of this assertion marks the questioner as a tobacco industry propagandist is equally bad for the proper operation of scientific study...
...Nearly every action taken to 'win' the War On Terror has only succeeded in increasing the level of fear in those who are supposed to be being protected. No right minded person could possibly believe that increasing fear is the desired outcome of these massive expenditures and use of resources in a campaign that is supposed to eliminate the terror part of terrorism....
I believe myself to be of sound mind, though the body is getting on a bit.
In the 1960s and 1970s it was well understood that responding to terrorism in the way we are doing was playing into the terrorist's hands. Both Che and Mao wrote manuals on terrorism/guerrilla warfare explaining this, and these were well known, even to the Secret and Security Services.
Since then, the one thing that has changed is that the 'Eastern Bloc Menace' (which justified the jobs of the UK Security Service, and the world-wide reach of the CIA, NSA, GCHQ and SIS) has disappeared. Most of the military structures in society left over from WW1 and WW2 disappeared in the 1950s - they are the only part left in existence. They are now frantic to maintain the justification for their jobs.
I'm not saying that they would start wars and destabilise countries on their own nowadays, as they used to in the 1960s. For one thing, I don't think they're competent enough to start something from scratch. But they certainly aren't unhappy about a CONTINUOUS 'war on terror', and maintaining a civil war. Do you remember how the speeches on this subject in the 2000s emphasised the belief that this would be a 'long haul'? Who do you think drafted those sentiments?
...Then again, "Can't we just get along with each other", it'll be cheaper in the long run....
Much cheaper. That's the problem.
You see, the guys making the decisions about what weaponry we will need are MILITARY guys. They get paid for preparing for and fighting wars. You are asking them to throw their jobs away. And there isn't much call for instant obedience, the ability to strip a rifle in the dark and a willingness to kill other people in Civvy Street...
...Have you ever tried the following experiment? Take manufacturers and generic inks. Print the same picture, one with each set of carts....
Who TH cares? I'm talking about breaking physical copy protection, not ink capability.
(and, if you're interested, I use a CIS with OCP inks. If I did your experiment I would see no difference...
...ThinFilm's solution isn't as elegant as a hologram: one needs a special reader which pushes pins against the exposed contacts on the label....
Now where have I seen this attempt to stop counterfeiting before? .... Ah, yes, on printer cartridges.
I use a continuous ink supply, so I've looked into the copy protect on these things. The printer manufacturers have tried every permutation of physical and software methods to force people to buy their overpriced propriety brands. And you know what? Cheap replacements come out within a day of any new launch....
...Unless of course you happen to have say a 10m thick wall already in orbit. Getting it moving is tough, but not impossible by a variety of methods....
I'd be surprised if you weren't carrying a water container on the ship which was 10m in size or greater.
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