Posts by Anteaus

90% of visitors declined ICO website's opt-out cookie

Get us OUT!

It would be great if the year deadline were academic because we were no longer in the EU by that time.

Then, the Whitehall shredders will need to do some serious overtime on all those thousands of unwanted laws.

MS advises drastic measures to fight hellish Trojan

Not sure what Trading Standards thinks...

"Microsoft makes the operating system. The company who built your computer has chosen not to include a install DVD. "

Except, the buyer is not told that they are getting a functionality-limited copy of Windows with their new computer. Everything on the computer suggests thay are being supplied with the full product. If that isn't misrepresentation, then I dunno what is.

Maybe there should be a requirement for such versions to include the legend "OEM" on the splash screen, along with the wording, "One-time preinstall" or suchlike. Then, at least the nontech buyer would not be misled into thinking they have a full, reinstallable copy.

IMHO it is also steering very close to misrepresentation to describe an install as "Microsoft Windows" when it has a million items of trialware embedded into the OEM image, and no way is provided of actually installing Windows alone, minus junk.

Parallel example, can I mix Grouse, water and lemonade with Talisker, and sell that as Talisker (with bundled add-ons) -and also fail to provide a stopper for the bottle? I think that would soon get me in trouble, would it not?

Fundamental question; at what extent of adulteration does a brandname cease to legitimately apply to a product?

McAfee to wipe mess off .xxx pr0n sites

But..

Site advisor only tells you that McAfee think the site isn't a malicious one in itself. It doesn't tell you if a legit site has been compromised by malware.

Also, the site advisor ratings are generated by volunteers, and by the looks of things the process is vulnerable to robot spamming, judging by the numerous sites flagged with identical, nonspecific malware alerts.

Therefore, IMHO not a reliable source.

Blow to the head makes people feel good about religion

Religion=malfunction, then?

The obvious place to check this theory would be a survey of boxers to see how many are religious. It it's right, then boxers who've lost a lot of fights would tend to be more religious than those who generally win.

Though, this maybe explains the thriving happy-clappy contingent in the USA compared to the wane of religion here in the UK. Here, parents and teachers generally aren't allowed to whack kids, especially not aroud the ears. I gather that some of the more religious States still allow corporal punishment.

Arkeia bigs up sliding windows dedupe

How long is a piece of...

Common-or-garden PKZIP can reduce a typical .xls by 50% or more. 7-zip might do even better.

For .vmdk files, compressibility will depend on whether all space is allocated at creation, or not. If yes, then there will be acres of blank space which can be very easily compressed. Now, if they'd taken already-compressed .jpg, .mp3 or .avi files into account, the results might look less promising.

For years, backup software and hardware vendors have made unrealistic claims as to media capacity, through quoting hypothetical compressed values instead of actual figures. This leads buyers who are unaware of this hype into specifying backup solutions which are inadequate for the task in hand, for example a "500GB" tape drive typically will NOT backup a full 500GB disk. Sometimes, not even a half-full disk. Consequences are eventual failure of automated backups to run properly, and the need to replace costly but under-spec'd backup equipment ahead of life-expectancy.

This claim might be genuine, and I'm prepared to give it the benefit of the doubt. But, I'm wise to the backup industry's reputation for hype.

'Robots can save America', says Obama

Same problem as today...

In the Industrial Revolution, people weren't forced to work in the towns/mills, they went there of their own free will because the mills, despite their dangerous working conditions, offered them a better quality of life than scratching a subsistence-farming existence in the country under a greedy landlord.

Which suggests that the mills themselves weren't the real problem, which was -as always- abuse of power by those with obscene amounts of money and land.

Beancounters beware...

Almost all of the couner-robot arguments are based on the 'beancounter society' paradigm in which the GDP - the accumulation of money, not goods or services, is the measure of progress.

The fact is that widespread use of robots will eventually make the 'beancounter model' of society untenable. But at the same time, robots will vastly increase our REAL wealth and quality of life.

Roll-out the robots, I say.

Hackers pierce network with jerry-rigged mouse

A software restriction policy is useful protection.

A software restriction policy might not prevent all malicious actions possible with this kind of exploit, but it would prevent malware being launched on the PC from the mouse's USB memory. Which I assume is the main component of the exploit, the mouse's controller being preprogrammed to simulate the clicks needed to do this.

If the user is limited, the the mouse controller would also find it hard to circumvent the policy by copying the malware to the computer's HD, since locations which are writable to a limited user will typically not permit software launch.

Policy-application tool:

http://sf.net/projects/softwarepolicy

Woman dies of heart attack at own funeral

IT angle..

Well, they say computers get more human-like as they progress, and with Windows 7 you likewise have the situation where the computer you ostensibly switched-off is actually playing possum, and springs to life while you're changing RAM or whatever.

Must add a sharpened stake to my toolkit.

As for the OP, seemingly it's possible for the human body to remain alive but with reduced temperature and a very low heartbeat. This may not be noticed if the examination is hurried.

US plan to hold EU passenger data for 15 yrs 'unlawful'

EU worse...

If you study what the EU directive includes, they even intend to give your credit card details to other countries. I would have thought it was illegal to pass anyone's credit card details to a third party without consent. That could expose you to all sorts of scams.

Not to mention that providing bulk email addresses to slightly-dodgy destinations is just perfect for a spammer to bribe an official to allow them to be harvested as they arrive.

Help! My Exchange server just rebooted

Only yesterday...

Had to reboot an SBS because several less-important services had ceased functioning. The reboot took about twenty minutes. Most of which was, I suspect, Exchange shutdown.

One of the site staff lost her rag and began screaming abuse at me, saying that she had a panic schedule to meet, and couldn't understand why I had to cancel her file-share access just to get the other services back working.

Meanwhile the satellite offices wehre phoning-in to ask why they couldn't access their email.

Anyone specifying SBS needs to think carefully about the SPOF they're creating. It's a bit like having an electrical installation with only one fuse/breaker. Bulb blows, pop, out goes the lot. Need to change a socket? Sorry, everything goes off, including lights. In some ways this is even worse than relying on dodgy cloud servers.

Differing experiences.. ?

Interesting that some guys report high Exchange reliability, others very poor. I wonder how many are running the full version, how many SBS. My own experiences are that the SBS version of Exchange is far more troublesome. A contributing factor here is the oft-found (and arguably reasonable!) assumption by purchasers that a 'small' business OS will run on a small server. Hence it's often found to be running on grossly under-spec'd hardware.

As regards the databases, corporate workers are used-to being restricted to tiny amounts of personal data, but small business users see nothing wrong with accumulating several gigabytes worth of old emails. The issue here is that with Exchange's everything-in-one-file approach it takes only a handful of hoarders to saturate the mailstore, or to create database files so huge that backup is a major problem. Yet, what is the point of a system which is incapable of storing a full email history for each user, over at least several years? Not having last year's emails makes it hard for sales staff to follow-up repeat orders, and so on.

For my own office I don't use Exchange. I have a full history of my email communications with clients running back several years on an open source email platform, and if I get a repeat enquiry I have no problems following it up. Plus, no AD domain, no special DNS, no SIDs, no SBS wizards, no licensing woes. Would I switch? Er... no thanks.

Bloke pissing in reservoir prompts 8m gallon flush

Recycling...

Was just thinking that if pubs installed NASA fluid recycling technology, that would save an awful lot of carbon emissions transporting beer. They could even reclaim the alcohol, saving the need to brew more.

Besides, what goes in already looks pretty-much the same as what goes out, so no cosmetic issues.

Refusal to unveil scuppers French refusal-to-unveil trial

@Maninthemoon

Good point, and one that hasn't been raised before.

Although I think in the Fundamentalist world it's also a question of the woman not being trusted to stick with an arranged marriage, and maybe finding a partner she prefers instead. Putting them in a black sack certainly reduces that possibility.

Hard to tell who has the right of it.

The French authorities evidently to take the view that opinions stated by burqua-wearers can't be relied upon, as coercion to make those statements might be involved. Thus, as they see it they are enforcing the human rights of those individuals by ingoring their protests and instead enforcing upon them what they think they actually want. Or, something.

On a similar note there could also be some comparison betweeen headscarves ahd hoodies. If wearing a hood in a mall or bank is prohibited on security grounds, should that not apply to any hood, it making no odds whether the hood is tied around the head or attached to a coat? My feelings are that people should be allowed to wear a hood if they wish, BUT I don't see why one form of hood should be granted exemption, the other not.

Earth may be headed into a mini Ice Age within a decade

Common ground..

There is one thing that both Warmists and Deniers agree on, and that is that hydrocarbon fuel reserves are limited. We need to conserve coal, oil etc until a replacement is found.

Yet, carbon capture technology threatens to significantly reduce the efficiency of hydrocarbon-based power generation. This might or might not prevent 'global warming' but it will have one certain result, namely that we run out of fuel sooner than otherwise.

So, if we squander our fuel reserves on 'carbon capture' and THEN suffer a mini ice-age, oh boy will we look daft. Not only will we have made temperatures even lower, but we won't have any heating either.

The world wants cloud coders. Where are the cloud coders?

But then..

You also find very few anti-gravity boot makers, or mind-transfer stone specialists.

That's because sensible developers concentrate on ideas which are feasible with present technology. I don't doubt that in a decade or two, cloud computing may be the norm. But presenty, Internet connectivity is neither reliable nor fast enough to properly support cloud working. That, and the cloud systems themselves have shown a singular lack of reliability.

Facebooking juror gets 8 months

Theatre.

Court is a kind of theatre which tries to demonstrate that one party has a better, more convincing argument than the other. As such, the verdict depends more on thespian skills than on facts.

That said, the only real winners are the lawyers, who make an indecent amount of money out of the whole show.

As for ignorance of the law not being a defence, little argument in this instance but in the more general sense it's a bit like telling a guy with one leg that he should have known where all the mines are.

A sysadmin's top ten tales of woe

Beware the 'smart wizard' ....

One of the worst snafus I've seen was with database software which had one of those 'wizards' which kicks-in every time a new user logs-on. The wizard asks the user where to store the data, and defaults to a location on the C: drive.

So, one morning the cleaner snags the LAN cable and rips the RJ45 off. User, a data-entry clerk, logs-on locally and is greeted by this wizard because the network data isn't accessible.User answers, 'Yes, Yes, Yes, blah-de-blah' and continues entering data (company registrations) as usual.

Later that day an IT guy calls and fixes the LAN cable. Pings server..OK. Asks user if anything else needs looking-at. Told no. Goes on his way, job done.

User continues entering data for several months.

Alarm is finally raised when one of the accounts team notices that certain companies' data hasn't been updated for recent corporation-tax changes. They contact the data-entry clerk, who dutifully re-enters the data. Only to be told by Accounts that she hasn't entered anything, the data they're seeing is unchanged.

At this point I get called-in to investigate, and discover a cache of data in the user's local "Application Data" folder going back several months. Merging this data with the proper, network database involves special code being written by the software authors, with four-figure costs.

Meanwhile at the company's behest I set-up a test platform to find out exactly how this snafu arose, and discover that any LAN interrruption, however brief, will trigger this 'wizard' into instructing the user to permanently reset the data location to C: This will happen even if the user has limited rights.

I notify the design fault in this 'wizard' to the software authors as a critical bug.

Several versions later, that damn wizard is still there, still as stupid.

Moral: Where data security is concerned, 'smart' software is your worst enemy.

The New C++: Lay down your guns, knives, and clubs

C syntax here to stay?

Years back I did a fair amount of coding in xBASE, an English-like language, and found that I could write substantial routines and often have them work first time, with ZERO bugs. I'd defy any coder to claim that to be possible In C-based languages.

It's interesting to compare the entrenched nature of C syntax with user-interface development, where the opposite paradigm prevails. No qualms about willy-nilly change, change for change's sake, or even ill-advised change there. Yet, in coding, we're told that we MUST stick with a donkeys-years old way of entering code, and woe betide anyone who even suggests that an alternative might be better.

It occurs to me that soon we will be communicating reliably with computers in spoken language. If we haven't modernized our coding syntax by that time, coders will effectively bar themselves from making use of such developments. Which would be one singularly ludicrous situation, would it not?

{[Time] (to) {ditch {C syntax}}} ? ;

C, C++, C#, Java, Javascript, PERL, php etc. are all fundamentally similar in using a punctuation-heavy syntax as opposed to an English-like syntax. Worse, the punctuation symbols most often used are those which most typists find hard to touch-type owing to their placement on the keyboard. (and let's face it they were placed where they are because they are rarely used in standard typing)

Apart from leading to slow, finger-twisting typing this heavy reliance on punctuation makes it hard to spot errors. A missing } can lead-to all kinds of weird error messages, most of which bear no relation to line with the actual error.

While English-like syntaxes involve more characters per statement, this is easily offset by the fact that they can be typed much faster, and debugged more reliably.

The choice of C syntax came about in the early days of the PC, through the need for a language which would deliver satisfactory perfromance on the puny 8086 processors of the day, but which would offer easier coding than pure assembly language. The fact that we're still using this syntax in the days of phones with GHz processors and PCs with more power than an early mainframe is historical, and somewhat farcical. It's akin to insisting on using CGA graphics on a 24" LCD.

If as the article says there's a need for a rethink of programming languages to properly handle concurrent processing, then this may also be the point to stop using the archaic C syntax.

Sophos says sorry over Google Analytics false alarm

Could be worse...

NIS automatically deletes any download its database hasn't encountered before, whether malware or not. In doing so it claims that the file was 'suspect by reputation' -Which would seem to be dangerously close to grounds for a libel action. Or, possibly a USA class action by affeced coders. Now, that could be majorly expensive. I'm surprised Symantec haven't considered that risk.

McAfee Site Advisor allows members of the public to rate websites as benign or malicious, and is robot-friendly, judging by the many thousands of identical troll postings. Again, allowing trolls to use your system to defame websites in-bulk could be very costly, in a legislative sense.

Eset recently gave a false positive on one of our downloads. This caused it to automatically delete a security utility, leaving the computer in a state where no new software could be installed. Uncertain how many users were affected but it certainly damaged our reputation as coders, and though no fault of ours.

Basically the whole anti-malware business is in chaos. Key problem is the desire to cover all eventualities, while at the same time to present a 'dumbed-down' interface which makes all decisions without asking the user's OK. Now, the software is bound to get it wrong sometimes, but it's when the human is taken out of the loop that the daft decisions really cause damage.

As for Google Analytics, if the site loads third party content or stores a third-party cookie there are at least grounds for suspicion of unethical actions.

World IPv6 Day fails to kill the internet

Anyone for a spot of brigandry?

How's about we set up an 'alternative' registry offering IPV4++ numbers instead? Preferably on a Swedish host as they seem to get away with just about anything. These addresses will be of the form 123.123.123.123.123.123 with the last four octets identical to IPv4, and NO changes being required for existing IP-address owners.

Existing routers may need a firmware upgrade to access IPs in the range above 0.0.255.255.255.255, but in most cases that will be all that's needed.

Cue roaring pirate laughter...

Sony hack reveals password security is even worse than feared

Assumes no bruteforce protection

All of this assumes sites have no bruteforce protection. If a site does have some form of bruteforce protection, then even short passwords are very secure, provided they're not directly guessable.

Notably, Microsoft's server products lack bruteforce protection, and they are one of the main proponents of complex passwords.

Of Windows patch management

BS indeed...

Yesterday NOD32, normally one of the more reliable AV products, started eating the main .exe from a sourceforge project we use extensively. Irony is that the executable in question is part of an anti-malware utility.

It is literally getting to the stage where if you run AV, then you can only install mainstream, big-box software. Anything else is liable to be treated as potential malware, and deleted without warning.

NIS even takes this to the stage of being literal - If a download hasn't been seen before, it pops a malware warning and deletes it, no questions asked. I start to wonder if Symantec could find themselves in legal trouble for accusing coders of writing malware without having anything at all to substantiate that claim, not even a positive detection.

Meanwhile, McAfee operate a vetting system for unknown websites which relies on information submitted by the public. While this is nowhere near as bad as Symantec's 'if we don't know you, you catch a bullet' approach, it is still wide-open to trolls. One such troll had evidently been using a 'bot script to flag tens of thousands of websites as malware-infected. Again, this raises questions over legal liability for maintaining a system which allows trolls to block public access to legit sites.

Agree

The only time we've had a 'patch' knock-out a LAN is when antivirus ate the login scripts.

That said, nowadays most of the serious vulns seem to affect third-party software like Java, Flash, Quicktime. Keeping this crud off desktops that don't need them is a better precaution than patching. As is a company policy that IE shall not be used on untrusted sites.

Space shuttle Endeavour's long journey is over

Sorry to see them go

As the human race, we've effectively regressed from the spaceplane era, back to the thowing-guys-up-in-the-air-in-a-tin-can era.

Admittedly the Shuttles were no NCC-1701, but at least they had the makings of a proper spacecraft.

End of an era, definitely.

The bright area is probably the APU exhaust, BTW. Although the Shuttle glides in it still needs hydraulic power for the control surfaces.

BT cheerfully admits snooping on customer LANs

Surprisingly...

Quite a few of these BT routers won't work with some Intel WiFi cards. Now, Intel is of course an obscure hardware manufacturer whose products few OEMs use, so that doesn't matter. Does it?

As for IPv6, I just have the feeling that the major security issues have yet to be uncovered. Have already heard of an issue where Windows servers with fixed IPv6 addresses pull a second unauthorized address from any router they can see.

A key concern is that with IPv6, ISPs could in principle go as far as to restrict the number of devices which can be connected to a BB router, or even to require that all devices are registered with them before they are granted Internet access. I don't say that will happen, but giving ISPs this capability perhaps isn't wise.

IPv6, anyone?

Potentially much more of an issue when all internal devices have discrete public IP addresses. In that case it will be possible to track which IP address is putting-out a particular class of packet. And, a lot more besides. It may even lead to a scenario where certain ISPs limit the number or type of devices you are allowed to use on your internal LAN.

Because of the automatic router discovery, I imagine it will also be much more difficult to prevent devices which have no right or business in connecting to the Internet from doing so.

UK.gov 'falls short' of legal obligation to enforce EC cookies Directive

True but...

Little crooks have bigger crooks to bite e'm...

And so on up... until the Council of Minsters.

Though, at least our own Arthur Daleys are accountable, whereas the Al Capones of Brussels are not.

In a word...

Well, a URL actually

http://ukip.org

Cloud in 2011: A bright new dawn...

Been in IT long enough..

.. to recognize another 'bubble' forming when I see one. Sooner or later they always go 'pop' leaving a lot of people crying into their hankies. Main issue is that broadband lines are nowhere near reliable enough to place so high a dependence on them.

MIght add that if a site needs Messagelabs filtering then they need to look-at WHY they're getting all that spam. Spam doesn't arise out of nowhere, it comes from the firm's addressbook being harvested through one of several very common security failures. Fixing the underlying security problem will be cheaper than filtering, and will lose less valid mail.

Naked cyclist streaks through Suffolk village

Justice system no longer serves public.

Justice has ceased to be a question of stopping crime, and has shifted its focus to furthering a series of political agendas. The protection of 'vulnerable individuals' -which farcically includes anyone under 18, as well as violent mental-health sufferers- is one such moral panic. Most of ths stuff comes from the EU, and is another good reason for our getting out.

Round here we've had problems with youth gangs, and in one case these hoodlums were in the roadway, swearing their heads off, and baring their asses to passing traffic.Their parents were sent warning letters. No £500 costs, not even an arrest. It's almost like the caste system in India, if you are one of a favoured group you can get away with anything. But, if you're just Joe Public, woe betide that you put a foot out of line.

Honda security breach exposes 283,000 customers

Not another....

Methinks the EU and other bureaucratic institutions have completely the wrong focus in controlling trivia like cookies. There needs to be an investigatory process for sites which leak bulk quantities of contact details. This is far more important. Needless to say, where negligence is proven to have been the key factor, there should be 'subtle' discouragements to repeat occurrences.

Meanwhile, it shows the advisability of using a throwaway email address for these kinds of signups.

Utilities turn in blacklisted carbon emission credits

But but but but

Unfortunately by the time the carbon-con bubble bursts the damage to the economy may be irreversible.

35m Google Profiles dumped into private database

Go... as in go read.

http://spamwise.org

Microsoft BPOS cloud outage burns Exchange converts

Wrong end of..

I didn't mention Exchange. In fact the unsuitable product was Dynamics.

Though, I've lost count of the number of small sites I've encountered using SBS Exchange to supply three or five desktops with email. And, you often find they don't use the calendar etc, just email. This is just plain silly. It's even more ludicrous when the three accounts' email is fetched from three POP boxes into Exchange, and then delivered to Outlook via Active Directory auth.

But, it's not planned like that by IT guys, managers ask for Exchange because it's a 'buzzword.' These days I've learned that if people want to throw money away on stuff whose name sounds good but which they don't need, I'm as well to play along. There is after all an argument that the more costly the software, the more you can get-away with charging to install it. <g>

Tell me about it...

"Nobody has ever been fired for buying Microsoft" still holds water.

We lost a couple of support contracts recently because I slated certain Microsoft products the client was intent-on buying as being unsuitable for their purpose. I hadn't appreciated that IT is a religion not a science, and that I had committed blasphemy in doing this.

Both of these sites then called-in a competing IT contractor who transferred them from an inhouse SMTP/IMAP mailserver onto hosted Exchange.

A member of staff confided that even before these latest events, one site has already had a five-day email outage which caused massive disruption. They (naturally) don't know how much business was lost as a result, but the money would probably have paid for traditional inhouse mailservers and support for a very long while.

Think carefully before you chuck out your desktops

Don't agree.

People who say that kind of thing have usually worked in large cubicle farms. The small or medium business has a much wider diversity of software requirements, and furthermore cannot afford to buy fifty identical PCs at once, so the usefulness of cloning methods is far more limited.

Plus, the enormous complexity of software push-delivery systems simply makes it uneconomic to deploy these on small sites. Two hours to install software on each of five computers equals ten hours.. or, two hundred hours at a wild guess to configure and debug a scripted install-system, to set-up each computer in half an hour. I'd love to charge for the latter as it'd be far more fun to deploy... but I somehow don't think I'd get paid!

Trying to keep personalization off smallbusiness desktops as far as possible really makes things simpler. Most smallbusiness computers have an identified role, and different roles require different software. In most cases the role of the computer remains the same regardless of who is using it. The only thing which needs to be personalized is email, and here it would be preferable if the data and settings could roam freely with logon. Unfortunately Outlook, the usual preference, is very bad at this. This is an area where Thunderbird does better, and Web-based clients excel.

As well using the desktop PC

Seeing as you still need something with a glowy panel and a set of those pushbutton-key-things on your desk anyway, may as well retain the PC to perform that duty.

The main cost of supporting a PC is that of AD domain setup, user profiles, email accounts, troublesome apps, licensing, malware, etc. A PC used as a thin client needs none of these, in principle making it no more costly to maintain than a specialist terminal. Also, making all desktops userization-free means computers can be swapped-out as required.

Also a good opening for Linux. If the cloud software will work with a Mozilla browser then no need to pay for a licensed desktop OS. Although if you've already got XP COA's just use them, a limited XP user with software policies enforced is reasonably secure against malware.

Not that I'm advocating cloud working, the people I've seen switch to it have had their fingers burned. Inhouse virtualization yes where suitable, relying on some datacenter in another country... NO.

Mozilla to shift 12m surfers off 2-year-old Firefox 3.5

Reinvent wheel yet again

Was just taking a look at FF4 with a view to deploying it. Didn't expect any major issues.. but immediately noticed that the greprefs folder no longer exists. Since we use a modified all.js to stop unwanted plugins loading, that meant I had to waste a load of time googling to see why this change had been made, and where the file is now. Apparently the file is now inside a jar, making any kind of scripted update very difficult. Ugh. So, any resolution is likely to be complex and time-consuming.

Think this highlights a problem all IT guys suffer from these days -that of spending 95% of our time reinventing the wheel over and over, instead of doing productive work. We make near-zero progress in providing new services to our users, because we're too busy trying to keep-up with the willy-nilly changes that developers make to how things work, and finding workarounds for all the incompatibilities these create.

Worst example ever was of course the switch from XP to Vista, which was reinventing the wheel triangular. Though, opensource projects seem to developed the wheel-reinvention craze of late.

Update popups themselves are the biggest threat

Far more malware relies on spoofed update-prompts than relies on complex exploits. If users are accustomed to seeing repeated prompts to update software -especially on unrelated sites- then they will be conditioned to respond 'yes' without thinking to any such prompt which appears. The next 'update' they encounter will of course be a keylogger, spambot or fake antivirus.

Therefore, a bad idea. It may even lead to numerous reports that Google has been compromised by a update-spoofing exploit.

Would putting all the climate scientists in a room solve global warming...

Good article..

..and highlights the lack of reliable, dependable science behind all of these climate-change issues.

I think one of the key issues is that the proponents of global warming are trying to draw conclusions from statistically-insufficient data sets. Because of random 'noise' on short-term measurements, climate trends can only be properly assessed over data spanning periods of hundreds of years. Attempting to make predictions of trends for the next century based of 30 years of data (since global warming allegedly took-off) leaves a gigantic margin for error.

The fact of the matter is that if we want proof (or refutation) of global warming, we need to wait for more data, to see if the trend continues or not. Meanwhile the politicians are already in panic-mode, and don't want to wait. Result: unwise decisions, knee-jerk reactions, wasted capital and resources, unwise energy policies, scaremongering and hysteria, racketeering, environmental damage.

Climate change or no, we need a replacement for fossil fuels, and will need that whatever happens, sometime within the next hundred years. Therefore we should be concentrating on that area of science. Once we have a safe energy source that doesn't liberate carbon dioxide, the global warming debate will become irrelevant.

NASA restores Pluto to league of planets

Rocks

Fundamentally, they're all lumps of rock. Some smaller, some bigger, some rounder, some knobblier. Some with an atmosphere, some without.

'Planet' is a purely human notion. Nature knows of no such distinction.

What Carthage tells us about Amazon, Fukushima and the cloud

Throwing salt away - unlikely

'Salary' originally meant being part-paid in salt, which was a scarce commodity in Roman times.

Nude gardener's arse hauled into court

Unequal justice

"And nudity in a film garners a 15 cert where as someone getting gunned down manages to scrape by on a PG."

True. Not to mention that you can describe nailing a man to a plank of wood and leaving him out in the sun to die -or the rape of an entire tribe's womenfolk- to a five-year old, so long as it's out of a 'holy' book, but not out of 'Doom.'

Excuse me, as I can feel a smiting urge coming-on. Oh, I am soooo holy.

UK.gov would pay to have benefit claimants' tattoos erased

Aversion therapy

Anyone thinking of getting a tattoo should try servicing the PCs in the local laser clinic.

-Still fancy a tat? No?... What changed your mind?

Every PC from that place exudes an aroma of well-roasted human flesh.

Freeman Dyson: Shale gas is 'cheap and effective'

Carbon con => environment damage

Fracking carries risks of polluting water supplies. If we engage in this questionable activity for the sake of 'carbon reduction' then we may cause infinitely more harm than if we did not. I think this illustrates just how the carbon con can lead to real damage to the environment, whilst chasing after some mythical bogey man of 'climate change.'

Scotland is a net energy exporter, but only a small faction is hydro. The decision was made not to build any more hydro plants because, while they are relatively cheap to run once built, they take-up vast amounts of ground and produce relatively small amounts of power.

It's spelled nucular, btw.

Fujifilm Finepix X100 APS-C camera

I miss my manual SLR

One of the advantages of manual cams that the full-auto brigade seem to have overlooked is that a manual cam can be prepped for a series of shots before the action starts. When the time comes you can then raise the camera and shoot in one motion, the only delay being your own reflexes.

What's more, you can lower the camera and then raise it again without losing your settings.

Meanwhile the full-auto cam user is frantically trying to get the focus, zoom and exposure back to exactly where they were a few seconds ago ....and misses the shot.

Red Hat: Cloud will anoint next Microsoft

Artificial horizon, anyone?

As an aviator I can tell you one definite fact about clouds: When you're inside one, you can't see where you're going.

Furthermore, unless you are skilled at that kind of flying, encounters with unexpected hard bits of cloud are distinctly possible.