Posts by Adam Nealis

ProtonMail deletes 'we don't log your IP' boast from website after French climate activist reportedly arrested

I've posted a couple of questions on the protonmail subreddit about what happens if they get a court order.

There is never an official reply. Of course, I am just a non-entity, not worth replying to.

Brits unveil 'revolutionary' hydrogen-powered car

Sinclair C6?

Looks like a cheap and nasty version of the cars in the Gerry Anderson "UFO" TV series.

ISPs 'blindsided' by UK.gov's 'emergency' data retention and investigation powers law

Re: Nick Clegg = Idiot

Nick Clegg = Someone who does not give a shit.

DON'T PANIC: Facebook returns after 30-minute outage terror

"PLUMMETS"?

0.8% is a plummet?

Got that in football fields or swimming pools?

Microsoft challenges US gov over attempts to search overseas data

"Amazing what you can do when your revenue stream is threatened"

Indeed. M$ finally grow a a pair.

Be interesting to see who really has the best lawyers.

Piketty thinks the 1% should cough up 80%. Discuss

Re: That assumes continuation of state education and the NHS

I disagree.

The article claims that one should include the effects of welfare spending on the wealth of an individual.

It's just a few more terms to add to the equation.

Should any of state pension, NHS, state education, etc. be reduced or fall to zero, then the contributions due to state pension, NHS, state education, etc. also fall. The effect is to simply reduce the total wealth.

Tech that we want (but they never seem to give us)

Re: The females in the house have this request:

Boys should sit to pee just like girls.

My wife trained me to do it when she had a hyper-sensitive nose while pregnant. It's much less messy.

Better FAX machines.

Why not a FAX machine that knows how to connect to the outside world, instead of trying to guess whether you have to dial a leading zero (or whatever) first?

GM reveals how much you'll pay to turn your car into a rolling 4G LTE Wi-Fi hotspot

Bandwidth or quantity?

"...will be able to add 200MB of data per month for $5, 1GB for $15, 3GB for $30, and 5GB for $50. Non-subscribers will pay $10, $20, $30, and $50 for the same bandwidth amounts.

GM cites AT&T's Data Calculator when saying that 200MB of bandwidth is "enough to stream more than 6.5 hours of music, surf the internet for 13 hours or send more than 10,000 emails without attachments."

Those numbers are not bandwidth.

Indestructible Death Stars blow up planets with glowing KILL RAY

Superduperlative

Megistronian

Bad luck, n00bs: Mozilla to splurge ADS inside empty Firefox tiles

Palemoon Portable is also an option

For those with no admin rights.

MtGox takes heat as reasons for Bitcoin FAIL surface

Re: Not MtGox's fault

Wrong.

MtGox fail to properly verify a given transaction.

MtGox fail.

Bill Gates to pull a Steve Jobs and SAVE MICROSOFT – report

"Gates is known as one of the pioneers of the PC era."

Yep.

I can't shake off the idea that Gates is overrated. He seems to get max respect from other suits, not tech. types.

Re: I don't understand

I saw the same thing. THis is how I put it:

"But the idea that Gates would use his newfound free time to meddle with Microsoft's products might not sit well with those who argue that the software giant has remained mired in the past since Gates resigned as CEO in 2000."

Doesn't make sense. If MS was worse since he left, then wouldn't they think it would be better if he did meddle?

Microsoft: You've got it all WRONG. It's Apple's iPad playing catch-up with our Surface

And some sour grapes too.

"The post was titled "Apples and oranges", but he should probably have squeezed a bit of lemon in there too."

And some sour grapes too.

Re: I like him,

Just what I was thining, and there was your comment already there...

Microsoft's $7.1bn Nokia gobble: Why you should expect the unexpected

$ 7,100,000,000 at $ 40 per phone is

only 177,500,000 phones to sell to get their money back.

How long will that take?

Obama cancels meeting Putin in Russia, says Snowden 'a factor'

Cut 'em off, I say.

Too late. NAFTA won't let Canada do it. Or rather, if Canada tried the government would be sued.

Elon Musk's Grasshopper tops 300m, lands safely

Can we please have that in units of football fields?

"The 325-metre flight is higher than Manhattan's Chrysler building, London's Shard, or the Sydney Tower."

Higgs data shows alternate reality will SWALLOW UNIVERSE

The laws of physics will be different in the encroaching bubble.

I think.

Apple refreshes MacBook Pro range

Re: Please stop moaning about transat differences

+1

The price disparity topic has been done to death many times over.

Ice island snaps off Greenland: Just a fifth the size of 1962 whopper

Re: pictures

Nice link.

From the article (my emphasis)

"Ted Scambos, lead scientist at the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center, noted that this calving event marks a retreat of the Petermann Glacier “farther back than historical calving fronts.” A comparison of this event to the 2010 event shows that this iceberg broke off the glacier tongue farther upstream. The crack along the southern margin of this new iceberg, however, has been visible in satellite imagery for several years. That rift was first identified in 2001."

I wonder how far back "historical calving fronts" data go?

Why not football pitches and Olympic swimmimg pools?

The latter for volume of course.

More Steve Jobs iPad mini attacks from beyond the grave

Re: If a 7" device is not an iPhone and not an iPad - what is it?

"But I'm guessing the 7" device is an iPod."

It might just be the remote control for the iTV

Nexus 7 and Surface: A bonanza for landfill miners

Re: An extremely pessimistic article this

"So what you're saying is that Google and Microsoft will never be able to catch up with the iPad and therefore should just let Apple have free reign in the tablet market?"

I don't think AO is saying that Apple should have free reign. He is just saying that surface and nexus 7 don't pose a threat.

"You say that the reason the Kindle and iPad are successful is because of their content market - a point I agree with. But content does not grow on trees - device first, then the content grows. Expecting a device to launch an iPad-equivalent amount of content available is foolishness."

What content exclusively requires a Kindle or an iPad?

Menage á tablet: Apple vs Amazon vs Google

What have Apple to do with it?

All the author has to go on viz apple is that they only denied once that they don't do 7".

So all the author has to go on in terms of facts is that Apple are competing in the 7" space by not having a product in that form factor.

iPhones, iPads to be FULL OF FACEBOOK and NOT GOOGLE

NFC = "No F@cking Chance"?

WTF does NFC stand for?

LinkedIn admits site hack, adds pinch of salt to passwords

Re: Why only 6.5M entries?

Maybe change it again unless you're sure the change now has added salt.

Touchscreens to get finger friendly

Re: I know it's a bit gimmicky but...

I don't think it's gimmicky at all.

If it works as I expect, when applied to tablets it should reduce the need for a separate keyboard and therefore a track pad.

Oracle gobbles upstart Facebook, Instagram biz tout

Re: Oracle Gobbles Upstart Facebook

I think you got it the wrong way round.

It sounds like Larry, not Zucks is doing the sucking.

Which would make Larry the bitch.

Core Wars: Inside Intel's power struggle with NVIDIA

Not much will change.

In the grand scheme of things.

The first parallel programming language I can remember is/ was OCCAM, introduced in 1983. That's nearly 40 years for parallel programming to take over and it hasn't.

I am not aware of any cross compiler that is generic enough to optimise for an arbitrary architecture. So to optimise, people are needed. People are the most expensive part of the bangs to the buck equation. There's a fine line between parallelise and paralyse.

Most software is "optimised" by upgrading the hardware it runs on.

Intel will win market share with MIC because it is a big company, because of the ease of porting code to the class of performance problems that can be addressed in this way without expensive rewrites but deliver nice performance multiples.

It will be interesting to see how Nvidia penetrate the various scales of the supercomputing market. But how big is that market in terms of shipped units? But to the investor in relatively small Nvidia, it might be higher earnings per share than MIC for Intel.

Microsoft scrapes Windows Azure name off cloudy kit

Errr... they bought Visio

And to my mind promptly gutted it of a lot of useful add-ons.

Microsoft's dumpster-diver partner strategy is rubbish

Droves.

"All of which leaves Microsoft in a quandary: consumers are leaving Windows Phone in droves"

Er, was there ever as much as a whole drove of MoPho consumers in the first place?

Greenland glaciers not set to cause disastrous sea level rises - study

no clear indication... that the glaciers will stop gaining speed

That sentence stood out to me too, and did not seem to accord with the thrust of LP's latest uninformed rant.

Nympho hauled to loon-cooler after serial bonkathon brutality

Jones Crusher

Deadly jaws

Better get the gauze

...

She can push, she can shove

'til it's just a nub

Windows 8: Thrown into a multi-tasking mosh pit

Re: So many words...

"Just because you don't understand the words, doesn't mean it's "wankword bingo"."

But is isn't a paradigm shift either based on the original Kuhnian meaning of the term.

OTOH it may just be "innovation". But as an innovation is supposed to be a significant improvement, the "improvement" part is so far subjective.

New iPad: Crack open your wallets, fanbois, here's what it'll cost

Watching the Fanboi queues form.

If only google maps were in real time.

http://g.co/maps/87hap

We need a BOFH to hack into the nearest police surveillance cameras and make it a webcam.

Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet

Re: Typo

While you're there, can you arrange to move that sodding "report abuse" button to the right of the optional picture? It takes up far too much space.

Melting Arctic leads to snowy winters

Re: that is scientific theory

Ah, the Andrew Orlowski approach.

RIP: Peak Oil - we won't be running out any time soon

Re: I always seem to find the "don't panic about peak oil" arguments circular...

Any serious discussion of "Peak Oil" should talk about depletion rates, and how long the stuff is likely to last at such rates. Peak Oil is not even defined in the Citigroup paper.

Most cornucopians will, when pressed, admit oil is a finite resource. Then cognitive dissonance kicks in and they will wave their hands and say "but we don't have to worry for N decades" and revert to behaving as if oil was infinite.

Conventional economists may refuse to answer yes or no, but insist that somehow price will force oil to be created.

Go to here

http://dieoff.org/page185.htm#_ednref18

Search for "#5. Economists are trained to believe" and read that section.

Economists as a class have very unphysical models of the world. In some areas these models are useful approximations. In others, not. If economics was a science, there would be be a lot of soul-searching going on in the profession as they struggled to understand why the major market crashes of this century occurred, and why they missed them, and why they don't know what to do about their aftermath. So in my eyes they are a profession with no more integrity or moral standing than estate agents, politicians or investment bankers.

The point is, the authors of the report cited by AO was produced by Economists working for an Investment Bank.

"Resurging North American Oil Production and the Death of the Peak Oil Hypothesis", I'm not sure if the Citigroup paper takes into account the recent significant downward revisions by the US GS of the amount of shale gas/ unconventional oil estimated to be under the ground in the mainland USA.

In these articles, we hear how a separate group of analysts at a bank (Barclays Capital) reach the opposite conclusion:

http://oilandglory.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/02/17/the_weekly_wrap_feb_17_2012?page=full

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/has-the-united-states-beaten-peak-oil-not-so-fast/2012/02/17/gIQAhFbAKR_blog.html

Re: Interesting Arguments

The simplistic economics argument as put forward os largely unphysical.

It assumes infinite supply (as if the cost can magically make oil appear).

It assumes infinite substitutability (e.g. synthetic oil for "real" oil).

It ignores the energy cost of mining a unit of energy.

Some economists are actually intelligent, yet they don't realise their ideas don't always apply properly. So one can forgive AO for not thinking too hard about it either - especially as to do so would hurt his cornucopian proclivities.

Since the stuff is finite, it will run out.

Peak Oil will be a supply problem first, irrespective the amount stil in the ground, known or unknown.

Re: EIEO

In terms of EROI, you are saying EROI = 1 = EIOI ?

We're not quite at 1:1 yet. It would become uneconomic to use oil as an energy source before we got to 1:1. Unconventional oil is reckoned to give you a 5:1. Conventional oil is a bit less than 20:1 these days.

AO is a cornucopianist. His reasoning is often clear. But he doesn't really understand, or chooses to ignore, all the salient data. As a journalist he is not very objective.

Re: Do The Math

I would have mentioned it, but you got there first.

There's also "Without Hot Air" http://www.withouthotair.com/ by David McKay.

Court rejects Tesla’s latest libel spat with Top Gear

Re: Re: Re: Re: can you say class action ?

"Well done to Tesla for now building in a system to tell them when the car is neglected and the silly irresponsible customer needs a slap to remind them to plug it in."

Yeah. Very 'Merikin. Akin to McDonald's having to put "this is hot" warnings on their pop tarts.

Apple TV stock shortage sparks new gadget rumour fever

There's clearly two seperate markets...

Logical.

Sort of an iPod nano, but the TV version.

Met thumbed through Oyster card data up to 22,000 times in 4 years

TSA

Not that I agree with it, but I would rather my Oyster data be scanned than be subjected to the occasional "special investigation" by your Constitution-upholding TSA brutes.

New sat data shows Himalayan glaciers hardly melting at all

And economics is an exact science, is it?

Economics is given far more credence in political circles than, say, climatology.

Mozilla releases Firefox 10, adds developer tools

I thought they promised no more restarts after add-on updates.

Maybe I got it wrong, or confused that feature with another browser.

Annoyances that still remain:

1. Go to the Add-Ons screen. There is "Get Add-ons", but once you get an Add-On, it becomes an "Extension". Why two name sfor the same thing? And WTF are "Plugins" for anyway?

2. This dialogue box has always been broken. Else I carry round some Add-On/ Extension/ Plugins that are messing it up:

http://www.learningally.org/SiteData/images/screen_tro/a66a2ee8104c488d/screen_trouble_03.gif

So suppose one checks "Do this automatically" and downloads, the next time, "Do this automatically" is checked, but I still get the damned dailogue box and I still have to click OK. Is this PICNIC or is this "Windows Automation" at work?

WD's MyBook takes a Thunderbolt to the chest

*MPAA suffers collective heart failure*

*MPAA suffers collective heart failure*

I live in hope.

Try a 'shroom before ruling on chill pills, boffin tells gov

Make tea. Hold your nose while drinking. Apparently.

The psilocybin is not active until hydrolysed. Stomach acids do this. Hence the 30 - 60 minute delay before onset of "symptoms" and the feeling of having been ripped off if you didn't pick them yourself but bought them. Allegedly.

Apparently if you boil them in water, this will hydrolyse the stuff for you, so when it is imbibed it gets to work right away.

My friend tells me someone he knows would pinch his nose and drink the lot in one go. That way you only taste the last mouthful after you let go of your nose. Even Vimto doesn't render it palatable. Supposedly.