Posts by Steve Crook 633 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Jan 2008
>> Do you *really* think that we should do everythig they do?
No, you nitwit, I don't. Argumentum ad absurdum. But do YOU really appreciate the scale of the problem? Do you think 'fixing' the US spying on us is going to make us safer? If you do, you're mistaken and you risk neglecting the wider problem...
And the recently resurrected snoopers charter? Turns out they've already been doing it, just not quite legally. Take my point? They were asking for an inch when they'd already got the mile. And many of our spineless MPs were prepared to meekly line up and legitimise this sort of spying.
In the last decade there have been more people killed by falling trees than terrorism. But we need to surrender more of our liberty to protect ourselves from something that we're already pretty well protected from. Stuff it.
There are UK citizens who hate the US. You think we don't take every bit of intelligence we can (I'm a Brit btw) on the Yanks? Just because we're friends now, doesn't mean we will be in 10 years time.
I'm *NOT* justifying or agreeing with what they've done, or their reasoning that's made them do it, but I don't think it's exceptional globally. It's just that we know what the US is doing. Do you *really* think that China or Russia are trying to do any less?
The UK has it's own problems with institutional government secrecy. Illegal covert operations staged by the Police, GCHQ that operates its surveillance operations by rules that are themselves classified, the Care Quality Comission, Health Trusts trying to bury bad news with gagging orders, and the BBC spending millions on legal advice to evade answering legitimate FOIA requests.
I merely point out that people are complaining about this as if it's exceptional and not already a globally endemic problem. Why do you think Orwell wrote 1984?, think about *when* he wrote it? What was life like in Romania or Eastern Germany and what would their governments have done with the tech the Americans have? Give governments an inch and you'll find they've *already* taken a mile.
Nations have spied on other nations for as long as there have been nations, and I'm sure it was villages, tribes and caves before that.
No amount of hand wringing is going to change it. Personally, I'd be more concerned about what the Russians, Chinese, Norks and sundry Islamic states are up to. At least with the US there's always the chance that someone is going to leg it and live long enough to start talking. For the others, there are are absolutely no controls except those imposed by available talent and the finances. If you do try to get out, there's always a lethal umbrella or something waiting for you...
Ultimately, the US needs to protect itself, and, given that almost everyone outside the US has a gripe with the US, it means it's not paranoia, it's justified self interest. You could argue (I wouldn't) that, as a nation of immigrants, there's even a justification for spying on a select (but large) minority of your own citizens.
30% of the UK have no access to off street parking. Unless there's mass installation of public charging posts, there's always going to be a substantial minority of people for whom electric motoring isn't going to be a reality.
Ironically, many of them are people living in large towns and cities, for whom an EV would be ideal...
I wouldn't dispute that we're changing the climate. Land use, irrigation, soot, aerosols all have an effect as well as CO2. You *cannot* attribute all of the warming to CO2. There's natural variation, the slow rebound from the last ice age *and* anthropogenic effects.
However, Sir Paul and the BBC were quite categoric in that programme. Not only did we understand the *causes* of climate change, but we were also in a position to predict the consequences with enough accuracy for government policy to be based on those predictions, and that to argue otherwise was wrong headed and "anti science".
If expected warming is around the 2c for a doubling, then it's probably in the range where adaptation is going to be better than mitigation. Further increases after that will have less effect as the relationship is logarithmic.
As technology improves both in efficiency of appliances and wide deployment of solar on buildings we'll see CO2 output rate slow, stall and then decline. There's a lot of development work to be done to improve tech we already have. I think recent papers indicating an ECS of around 2c show that there's no need to rush in with immature tech, but have time for a slower less disruptive deployment than we thought 10 years ago.
Good news.
The quickest way to deal with overpopulation is development. As wealth increases population growth declines, stalls, and then reverses. Even in countries that notionally have an objection to contraception.
I'm not the greatest fan of models and projections, but those that the UN are working with are predicting a peak in global population (10bn by 2100) and then a gentle decline as global living standard improve. Still, there's some solid data available from the developed and developing world that indicate that these forecasts may be reliable.
So it may be that we won't have to bash out (is eating optional?) each others brains to solve the world population problems. However, there are plenty of other things going on that may yet lead to a sudden and unexpected correction to the worlds population.
See http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=38253 small changes in overall fertility can lead to dramatically different outcomes with that population varying from 7bn to 15bn by 2100.
Climate models aren't doing a good job of prediction at the moment. I wonder if those programming them are waiting, hoping that the climate sees sense and goes back to fitting their models, or frantically fiddling with their parameters trying to hind-cast the current hiatus...
So, it's not just the weather that's unsettled, it's the science too. Really? Who knew?
Everything announced from this meeting so far seems to be heavily qualified with statements about uncertainty. Which is what I thought science was always supposed to be about. It's a refreshing change from Sir Paul Nurse and the BBC telling that it was all settled, no argument, no doubt. Whatever happened to Sir Paul? Where is he when we need him?
The trouble is, if it's all that uncertain how do we base policy decisions on this sort of scientific advice?
I went to the Orion gateway and from there to check a couple of the books to see how much I'd be paying for them. Basically £4.99 across all the retailers for the books I looked at. Regardless of the quality of the work, it's a lot to pay when the bulk of the books were first published at least 30 years ago.
Can't help feeling that I'll be passing on bulking up my collection of Vance's work if that's what they're going to charge. It reinforces my resolve to build a book scanner and set to work converting my library to EPub. At those prices I'd be saving myself several thousand pounds for the sacrifice of some time...
I did some reading up on this a couple of years ago, so my knowledge may be a little out of date, but...
There's a big difference between asbestos cement and asbestos used in insulation and brake linings etc.
Generally, the asbestos cement contains a low percentage of asbestos, typically < 10% (I believe as low as 3% usually), and it's mostly white asbestos, not the really nasty blue stuff. The asbestos is therefore mostly well bound by the cement, and the advice is (was?) to leave it in place if it is in good condition *and* can be isolated from people *and* won't get abraded or drilled into. That said, most companies operate a zero tolerance for any asbestos.
Some UK household waste recycling centres will accept the old corrugated asbestos roofing commonly used in garages, sheds etc because it is considered to be low grade, low risk. Look around, you may be surprised just how much of that old corrugated stuff there is...
Remember, there was a time when no-one knew that asbestos was harmful, and it was a very handy for binding and insulating. Anyone remember the original rawlplug compound? That had asbestos in it. As did the filters in the gas masks issued to the military and UK population during WW2...
Doesn't sound like it. Sounds like this is standard operating procedure for any multinational. Therefore, strictly, it's not extraordinary.
All Millband and any other politician that doesn't like it needs to do is CHANGE THE LAW. Standing there and berating a multinational for trying to make the most money it legally can seems a bit Canute like. It would also be more impressive if Milliband hadn't been so cosy with Gordon Brown and Ed Balls for 10+ years when they *could* have started to make the tax system simpler and more effective But they didn't, they didn't even talk about sorting it out, because it wasn't a problem was it, because multinationals only started doing this in 2008, and only really seriously since 2010. So what could they have done.
/rant
I think you'll find that the people who owned this service don't actually own the rights to anything, except the ability to download it in some form at the convenience of the rights holder in whatever way and form the rights holder decrees,
Welcome to the new world, where you don't own anything, and you have to pay for it whenever someone feels like milking you.
Don't think they can't do this with physical media either. With players that are connected to the WEB, it won't be long before you'll need an on-line validation before you can play that disc....
Of course I could be unduly cynical but lets face it, they've got form.
What has been missing until recently have been the scientists who had access to accurate data that would let them challenge some of the more uninformed guesses that were common during the 90s. This paper is one of several published recently that chips away at the idea of catastrophic climate change.
Each time a paper shows that it's not as bad as we thought at first, it reinforces the opinions held by many economists that the measures being taken to mitigate climate change are almost certainly more costly than adapting to whatever change we will see.
What will be most interesting will be to watch the reaction of the 'climate establishment' as they try and spin these results into "nothing to see here, move along".
1. It's not an appropriate course for you to go on now as it's not really related to your current work.
2. It's an appropriate course, but at the moment you're fully committed to your current project and we cannot afford to lose you for training.
3. It would have been appropriate for your last project, but we feel you've gained all the relevant experience on the job and this course is not required.
So much for training....
That 10% (when I looked at my last electricity bill, it was 12%) is the direct cost to consumers 'at the pump'. Companies are also being charged extra, and they're not going to just absorb all that additional cost are they? No, they pass it on the *us* as increased prices *and* we pay VAT at 20% on that price increase.
So the true figure is probably closer to 20% than 10%. But honestly, who knows? I'm sure that it's possible to squeeze the figures to extract whatever truth one requires :-|
@nomnomnomnomnomnomnom
I think that the relationship between CO2 and its direct heating effect is logarithmic, so the base rise expected from the second doubling of CO2 will be much much less than the second. What feedback will add to it, who knows?
You ask sceptics to accept that co2 is the main driver of warming. I'm not prepared to do that until there's more research that provides a better quantification of anthropogenic effects such as land use change, aerosols and soot pollution as well as some other non anthropogenic causes like cloud formation. Once we have more reliable data for these, then I'd be happy to accept that we know exactly what's going on with the climate system.
It is becoming apparent that we were misled during the late 90s and the early part of this century. A lot of people made predictions that have been shown to be false. We were *assured* that the science was settled and government policy changed as a result. Well, now we that that the science isn't settled.
When someone produces a verifiable explanation for the divergence of measured surface and tropospheric temperatures from model predictions I will be more impressed. Then, someone will also have to explain to me why, when the science was settled, we need this new explanation at all...
"by growing interesting new crops on land that cannot be effectively used for other food production"
I think that was what the green groups had in mind in the first place. Trouble is, land that's not fit for growing food crops is generally not fit for growing crops of any sort at a commercial yield.
The reason that they're using palm oil, maize and rape etc for bio stuff is that it's relatively easy to get from plant to fuel. The farming process is already industrialised and once harvested, the route to ethanol or whatever is relatively uncomplicated and again, has few technical hurdles to overcome.
If you want to reprocess waste, generally someone has to sort it and do more work to get it into fuel, and usually at lower conversion efficiencies. This means that the processes would require even more subsidies to get anyone interested in investing it.
But it's up there, floating with some others I can think of.
It's particularly interesting to see the volte face performed by green groups as this train crash has occurred. I'm sure they'd argue that the policy implementation was not what they wanted and outside their control. Well, welcome to the world of unintended consequences.
What's most irritating is that it's not stopped them from proposing other equally doubtful policy ideas, all with the best possible intentions of course, but flawed none the less. Still, it's easy to propose policy, when you have no responsibility for delivering it and can pretend it was never your idea when the hit hits the fan.
Rude but honest?
Punch the opposition in the face? This *must* be 'the plan' in most boardrooms. They just make sure no-one is off message outside the boardroom when the appearance of 'doing no evil' has to be maintained.
+1 for being honest. But I still hope HyperCompuGlobalMegaCorp have to cough up a substantial sum.
On Today BBC R4 this morning he was asked about the cold wet weather we've had and how the forecasts were for warmer and drier. He couldn't bring himself to deal with it and only wanted to talk about extreme events, so he ignored the question.
Which is exactly what I'd expected. I don't have a problem with forecasts being wrong, but these were handed to us with the full authority of the scientific establishment and were given the weight of being near incontravertible fact. Poicy was based on them, why else did we run out of salt when we had the first cold winter à couple of years ago.
It's the monomania with CO2 and feedback effects that's the problem.
Land use change also has a significant impact on on climate. You can't just build thousands of 100sq mile conurbations and cut down trees to grow crops that require irrigation without seeing changes in climate. The focus on CO2 has distracted effort in trying to gauge the significance of these effects. Consider the increased rain run-off from cities and towns, it goes to the sea when much might have been absorbed into the ground. How much contribution to sea level rise does that make? Recent papers have shown irrigation run-off as a significant player in sea level rise.
Ever wonder why we don't hear much about Kilimanjaro's shrinking glaciers any more? It's because all the evidence points to man made deforestation being the cause, not temperature rise.
The real debate is over the scale of these effects compare to that projected for CO2 from models. Remember, on it's own, doubling CO2 will give around a 1c rise in temps and everything else is feedback from that rise. Recent papers have pointed at a significantly reduced climate sensitivity.
The science isn't settled.
It would be odd if the changes in Arctic ice didn't have an effect on climate. The interesting thing is why the ice is disappearing. There are three factors, AGW, natural variation, and soot pollution. There's good body of peer reviewed evidence showing man made effects are the dominant cause, but recent work indicates that soot may be playing a much larger role in summer melt than had been previously assumed.
If soot is a significant factor it's a problem that is a piece of piss to fix compared with trying to prevent more CO2 getting into the atmosphere.
@NomNomNom Those satellites and buoys you refer to show that sea level rise has remained at a low constant rate for many decades and will have to increase rapidly over the next 5 decades if IPCC forecasts are to be met. Recent papers have also attributed a significant portion of seal level rise of the last 100+ years to irrigation run-off, and, while that cause is still anthropogenic, it has little to do with CO2.
I'm assuming there will need to be a full scale demonstration plant built, tested and certified. So it's years if not a decade or more away from commercial deployment. It's not going to be the thing that gets our government out of the hole it and its predecessors have dug, because long before its available we'll probably be having scheduled power cuts and a government telling us that it's good for us and that we're helping save the planet.
@AC You weren't listening. OFCOM are interested in intensity, but the rain gauges were also measuring QUANTITY.
To quote "and shows rainfall increasing across almost all of the UK with only a few bits of Cornwall getting drier"
And, as another commenter pointed out, the meme has changed as often as the weather. First it was hotter and drier in the UK (particularly in the south) with snow being a distant memory for all except those in the far north of Scotland. Then, when it snowed we were told that, yes or course melting Arctic ice was always going to cause colder winters because of jet stream effects. Then when we had a very wet year we were told that, overall, rainfall wasn't going to change, but it would be delivered in more extreme events.
Normally, I don't object to people getting things wrong, but when I'm beaten around the head with today's truth and am called a 'denier' because I say "show me", I deeply resent being expected to blithely accept another truth that conflicts with the earlier one and still be called a 'denier' when I quite rightly say WHAT THE FUCK.
We've had a decade or more of being told in no uncertain terms that climate change meant that, on average, the UK would be getting drier. Plant drought tolerant gardens, gravel not grass we were told. At the same time we were told this, the data from these rain gauges was accumulating (sorry) and giving a completely different story.
I wonder if this data has surfaced because it fits comfortably with the last year of heavy rain and the changed stance of the met office.
As far as I was aware, the Hindenburg was undone by the aluminium paint that was applied to its fabric covering. Static discharge from the tethering pylon caused the coat to burn (turns out it burns really easily). AFAIK there's no such thing as a hydrogen fire, it's generally a bang rather than flames...
I worked at a local authority, programming on an ICL2900 (in COBOL too). We had plenty of outages, but the guy responsible for keeping the 2900 up and running was always quoting up times of well over 90%. Then we found out that as far as he and his stats were concerned 'up' basically meant the power switch was in the 'on' position.
Ahhh, how we laughed...
It goes to show that it's not just the fruity firm that have a hunger for this sort of conflict. I wonder if there's a virus that's going round infecting corporate types and causing their egos to swell even further to the point where they really believe this sort of shit. I assume they'll eventually drop it and say that it was all a big mistake and that amazon over-reacted. Perhaps Games Workshop will respond and explain their behaviour? No? I thought not...
It always seemed to me that the risks were acceptable. The 'nauts knew what they were getting into and were brave enough to decide it was worth it anyway. I was sorry for them and their families when they died, but I thought there was far too much fuss made. I'm aware that there were faults in the way NASA operated and they directly caused the deaths of the 'nauts, but NASA needed to fix the problems and we needed to move on.
Regardless of the rights and wrongs of colonisation, how many lives were lost in building the US through failed expeditions, sunk ships, disease and the rest? Many thousands undoubtedly, but people still went because the rewards were high enough. If we're going to go out into the solar system and do stuff, lives will be lost, probably hundred or thousands if we get serious about it. But there will always be volunteers because for some people the rewards will always outweigh the risks.
If they were looking for old farts to go on a Mars mission today and there was only a 1 in 10 chance of a safe return, I'd accept an offer of a place. Obviously I'd be expecting at least get to Mars, but I'd take the chance of not even making it into orbit and I wouldn't expect a memorial...
If I ever reach the exalted state of Benneton and have enough cash to spare to be able to fund an F1 team I probably shouldn't be worrying too much about a guy on the street selling shirts. In fact, if he's got that much cheek and enterprise, I might do well employing him somewhere...
Develop a sense of proportion.
We used to send a gunboat and shell the offending <insert your offensive adjective here> when they upset the Empire. This is no different. It should be a reminder to the US and others that the Chinese are flexing their muscles on the global stage and would be quite happy (and capable) of continuing this sort of low level attack if it silences criticism and inhibits competition in areas close to their hearts.
While I don't entirely agree with the current US, Indian and Japanese paranoia about Chinese manufactured hardware, this isn't exactly going to calm fears.
I thought the Abrams Star Trek was brilliant. It managed to simultaneously keep all the original characters and their traits, and at the same time give us a completely different universe for future films. If Abrams can work similar magic on the Star Wars franchise I'll be surprised, will Lucas really be able to let go?
Still, anything that gives us a decent story and dialogue will be a good start. I thought that generally star wars films were at best mediocre and at worst, something close to Plan 9 with top of the line special effects.
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