Posts by J 1044 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Apr 2007
"recent trend of rich popstars giving away their recorded material - while keeping more of the bounty for themselves"
And rightly so, methinks. The only problem is: how to become a rich popstar in the first place without the pesky, greedy record companies doing all the marketing in the beginning -- because of course people need to be told what to like and where to get it...
"a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions"
Talking about dark ages...
"Just because some nutter blows up a building and says it is for God, doesn’t mean that God wants this to happen"
Apparently you've never read the "holy" books very attentively, eh? It's amazing the amount of people I've met who say something like "I stopped believing when I really did read the Bible"...
Yeah... Whomever complains about this should first consider:
"Doctors sympathetic to voodoo medicine denied hospital jobs"
"Aerospace engineers sympathetic to flat earth doctrine denied NASA jobs"
"Researchers sympathetic to the humoralism denied jobs at big pharma"
"Holocaust deniers denied jobs at the Jewish History Research Center"
Re: the Dawkins thing... I'm a big RD fan, but I'm not above having a laugh at his expense every once in a while... :-) And no matter how immoral the fundies were when they did this film business, RD (and others) should just shut up and deny them the free marketing. I can see the fundy headline: "see the movie that upset atheist Richard Dawkins... because he sees it must be all true then".
Been done, in the "Lord of the Rings". Although they used to call them "Oliphaunts" or something like that -- clearly a misnomer if I've ever seen one.
OK, they got the mitochondrial (0.0005% of the cell's genetic material). But someone has gotten -- and sequenced -- quite a bit of the nuclear one a while ago (it's in Nature or Science somewhere, but I'm lazy to search now) from permafrost preserved specimens. Why bother with hair if you've got the beast in the freezer? :-)
You embarrass us atheists by not getting the freaking joke, Eric... Or just ignoring it anyway.
"I don't imagine there'll be many citizens of Hiroshima or Nagasaki laughing along with you."
Well, unfortunately that is the nature of humour, I'm afraid. The best of it is always at the expense of someone...
Yeah, I also think the new nano is a bit of a disappointment. I just want to listen to music, I sure do not want to see videos in any portable crap (I mean, the ones smaller than the portable DVD players, which are OK). I was expecting they would release a 16Gb nano -- then, video or not, I would get this one to replace my 4 Gig generation 1 nano (which is only used for music, never used the games, calendar, etc. crap). Now I'm sorry I didn't get the 8 Gig generation 2 nano before this... Oh well, I guess my nano will have to survive another year.
Good that they are doing this website thing. Sure, it's nothing new and they are just drawing attention (I agree the "everyone's to blame" angle is stupid) to the problem. Which is great, I think. The more upset and revolted people are, the more noise they make.
I personally believe only licensed breeders should be able to breed and sell animals, instead of the stupid situation we have now. Every non-licensed owner should have ALL their animals castrated. Sounds extreme, but I think it's necessary to save the millions of killed animals and the mountains of money wasted to cope with the situation as it is now. And before such kind of measure has time to have an effect (if it happened to come to fruition), stupid people should NOT go buy dogs or cats, thus discouraging people from breeding them in the first place. Go get one from the pound/ rescue society, or from the street (my cat chose me in the parking lot like that, and fooled me into letting him inside, the bastard). They are as good (or frequently better, health-wise) than "breed" animals.
"urging them to leave out in town squares items such as fans or refrigerators"
Even if the refrigerator has been lurking menacingly in the corner, unopened for who knows how long? That can obviously have unforeseen consequences of cosmic proportions.
"should legalize cocaine or at least cocoa production"
Cocoa production? Gee, and I thought my chocolate was all legal and fine. Gotta be careful nowadays.
"Seems more like commen[sic] sence[sic]. Like alot[sic] of things he dose[sic]. there may well be things he has done wrong, but as far as I can tell Chavez is accualy[sic] quight[sic!!!] a good leader."
Hmmm, have any of you guys considered the remote possibility that Lester was, as usual, making fun with the "anti-US" part? And man, please, get a spell/grammar checker...
"Sod it, in a new and complex and recently released product this is essentially a teething problem and is pretty much to be expected."
Er, I hope you are the only one thinking so, really. I mean, it's a bloody software whose only purpose in life is basically making calculations, no matter what other uses people put it to (even writing stupid games, or so I've heard)... And it makes a mistake my free calculator does not? What has to be "sodded" here is whomever wrote/tested Excel, really.
"if the stupid man didn;t want that OS he should have gone elsewhere"
How thick these comment(er)s are, by Odin... That is EXACTLY the point! There is not much where to go now, is there it? How easy is it to find a laptop without OS, in a store, *right now*? You might find some small company on line selling generic stuff (that will arrive in a bunch of days). Trust them at your own risk. And they will be selling a small selection of things anyway -- which probably means you won't find the hardware you want. Or maybe you will, lucky. And I wouldn't be building my own laptop if I were you...
And someone mentioned that forcing the bundle is illegal, so there...
"Jesus is coming back soon."
The only Jesus coming back soon is the illegal Mexican working at the farm next door here. He's out to buy diesel for the tractors but should be back later in the afternoon.
"But the Bible and Torah are legal even in those countries (like Canada) that hold hate literature as illegal."
Even if it is fiction!? ;-)
"Such dexterity is all the more impressive - not to say eye-watering - when you consider that thus far they have been working with the testicles of mice rather than men."
I don't understand why you think so. Corresponding cells in mice and men (or whatever) are all about the same size, so under a microscope it's all pretty much the same.
"free to chat while cruising down the freeway, eating ice cream out of a bucket and reading Sports Illustrated"
You forgot "throw their unwanted junk mail out of the window" -- I've seen it happen here in Virginia more than once. People driving, reading the mail, and getting rid of the pieces they didn't want. A beauty.
I don't know how is the driving in the UK, but compared to Brazilian (São Paulo) standards, US (VA) driving is pretty scarily bad.
@Useless metric Chris
Yeah, but the article didn't say it was a RATE, did it? :O)
Technically speaking, I believe "four times as many" could refer to absolute numbers too, eh? (although it's hard to believe that would be the case here, but don't spoil my fun!)
FINALLY somebody commenting here who gets his F1 news from more than just El Reg! Sheesh... Thanks, Anthony.
Bunch of pathetic nationalists you are... Just because McLaren is British... Oh, wait. Actually, it's Mercedes who owns most of the team now, and they are German. My bad. No coincidence they are Silver, eh? 1950's anybody? Now just need to buy the remaining 40% of the joint and get rid of the historical reminiscence in the name...
Now go and read some of the emails between De La Rosa, Alonso and Coughlan and see if you think it didn't make a difference. They bloody knew which lap Raikkonen would pit in Australia, FFS. If you know anything about F1, you know how much that info can mean.
And since you think the FIA is all pro Ferrari, etc., it sounds like most of you guys started following F1 in the Hamilton era, so let's remember a few things. Where was the FIA helping Ferrari during the 20+ years when they didn't win anything except an odd race here and there, but never the driver's champ (which is the only thing people care about really)?
Why did the FIA tweak the rules so fiercely during most of the Schumacher years, when nobody but Ferrari was winning? Trying to break their beloved red team, were they? Well, they finally got it right when the came up with the stupid rule of no tyre changes during races. (which was repealed pretty quickly after it had served its purpose) That did it pretty nicely, didn't it? Yeah, they love Ferrari alright... but they love money much more, I'd say. I wonder what you said about the FIA when they (justly) disqualified Schumacher from the WHOLE championship after his trying to knock Villeneuve out that year... Or what you said when they put him in the back of the grid in Monaco last year, after the stupid parking in the middle of the track trick... He was racing for Ferrari, wasn't he? Maybe the FIA was distracted those times.
In the end, McLaren got away with it with a smile, didn't it? Ron Dennis is even joking about it, wondering if Haug will want to split the $30+ million bill with him (pocket change for these guys, budget dent my arse), etc. Almost nobody cares about the constructor's champ, only the driver's, and McLaren will get the driver's without trouble, if things keep going like they are. But no, I don't think Mercedes will carry the number 1 next season. Alonso wants to vacate his seat quite badly for some reason... ;-)
"If they object to them, they should avoid ALL US products. Somehow."
Sure, but it does not really solve the problem. Some other cases that were related in the Brazilian press show that even if the US has nothing to do with the transaction, they can still screw people up.
One example was some microwave equipment that was shipped from Portugal, by Portuguese scientists, to Brazilian collaborators in Brazil. Somehow, the equipment ended up passing through the US... well, it didn't pass. The US held it and wouldn't allow it to go away. Another case involves the denial of the US in approving the shipment of some equipment from Switzerland to Brazil for testing or the like.
On a more "personal" note: as far as I understood a majority of the new buses in Cuba were sold to them by my father. Brazilian VW buses, that is, completely made in Brazil, and pretty good ones by the way. No doubledeckers though. :-) They were intended to replace many of the 1950's buses still running in the island. Well, the US took a while to approve the sale... At least they did approve it, but that's not the point. Why should we be forced by the stupid bully in the playground to do something like that? If we want to have commercial ties with whomever, specially selling something like *buses* we should have it and fuckl the USA, as that old song says. If there was any justice in the world, the US wouldn't be able to interfere and would get punished if it did. But since justice is not really available...
"files can be changed without the user's knowledge"
Sounds like a fair definition of malware to me... Now if what Mike said about the law in the state of Washington does really apply here (and I don't see why it wouldn't), can't somebody please start the proceedings? Sorry, I can't. They don't own my computers. :-)
It's always hard to find anybody who can tell you how things are without having some vested interest. But for what's worth...
I recently learned about the "fast neutron reactors", or fast breeder reactors, etc. (Dec. 2005 Sci. Am.). Supposedly, France plans to have about 50% of their reactors being of that type by 2050 or the like. By the little I understood and remember of that (which might have some inaccuracies), these reactors are 60 times more efficient than the current thermal reactors. They are safer, in that they do not use pressurized water as cooling, but room temp liquid metals. Depending on how they are set up, they can burn the remains of old decommissioned weapons, as well as not produce any more of these nasties. The final waste is much less "toxic", with much shorter half lives, etc. So why didn't these stay? Filthy money talks louder, always. These reactors, even being around for decades, are more expensive to build and maintain (they need their fuel to be reprocessed every once in a while). And uranium is cheap comparatively, so... Instead of depending on the Eastern guys you will depend on the Aussies, oi!
Anyway, I've also recently read that coal plants spread much more radiation than nuclear ones. Huh? Here it goes:
"Coal also contains low levels of uranium, thorium, and other naturally-occurring radioactive isotopes whose release into the environment leads to radioactive contamination. While these substances are present as very small trace impurities, enough coal is burned that significant amounts of these substances are released. A 1,000 MW coal-burning power plant could release as much as 5.2 tons/year of uranium (containing 74 pounds of uranium-235) and 12.8 tons/year of thorium. The radioactive emission from this coal power plant is 100 times greater than a comparable nuclear power plant with the same electrical output; including processing output, the coal power plant's radiation output is over 3 times greater."
This is from the Oak Ridge, after redigestion by Wikipedia. The original statement with numbers and all:
"For comparison, according to NCRP Reports No. 92 and No. 95, population exposure from operation of 1000-MWe nuclear and coal-fired power plants amounts to 490 person-rem/year for coal plants and 4.8 person-rem/year for nuclear plants. Thus, the population effective dose equivalent from coal plants is 100 times that from nuclear plants. For the complete nuclear fuel cycle, from mining to reactor operation to waste disposal, the radiation dose is cited as 136 person-rem/year; the equivalent dose for coal use, from mining to power plant operation to waste disposal, is not listed in this report and is probably unknown."
(http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/colmain.html)
Gee... If that idiot is really an admin for schools, I fear for the kids (windows invented by... Windows!?). I hope "he" doesn't come anywhere near them, at least. Bloody semi-literate troll. Yeah, "everyone nose" my nose... and I suspect OSX has nothing to do with LINEX (wtf?). Brand new notebook, PCs, right... I suspect all you have is some nasty venereal disease messing with what's left of your brain.
"Does anybody here know one single person not employed in the IT industry who runs Linux as an everyday machine? I bet you don't!"
You lost your bet, what do I get?
I'm not working in IT at all, but a biologist using Linux only since 2001 -- in the beginning, with a few dual booting cases because of hardware (scanner, mainly, but also music production), but it's been years ago. I know other biological scientists and mathematicians who also use Linux. And let me tell you, having a PhD does NOT necessarily make you computer literate...
"But you can't get your work done on Linux"
Stupid statement. Maybe YOUR work can't be done on Linux. I for one can ONLY get my work done on Linux, or at least some Unix derivative. Toy systems for drooling gamers like Windows are next to worthless for me, and even if you do bother with the available workarounds, it's clumsy and slow anyway.
"I wouldn't be surprised if the man-hours involved in installing Red Hat or Ubuntu on a handful of customised machines far outweighs the time taken to dump XP or Vista images onto hard disks."
Well, it seems like you've got no clue what you're talking about, so I think I'll "surprise" you. First of all, a disk image is a disk image. Why would it take longer to dump an Ubuntu image compared to an image of XP or Vista or random bits or whatever to a hard drive? Second, even if you do install from the CD, it's at least faster than Windows 2000 (the last Windows I have had the displeasure of installing), and I've heard it beats the modern Windozes too.
@Jonathan Walls
Hmmm, I wonder if you got redirected, it sounds exactly like the US site... I tried it myself in the UK site (redirects to www1.euro.dell.com, but states I'm in UK) and got mixed results. If you click, on the right, Solutions for: Home, then you get NO link to Open Source PCs in the next page. If you, as I suppose you did, hover the mouse on the laptop or desktop pictures and then choose Home from the pop up menu, then you do get the nice Open Source PCs link on the left of the next page.
"Has anyone taken the time to think that maybe, just maybe, that portion of the DNA simply isn't needed?"
Chris, the point you miss here is that these elements are ultraconserved. Historically, every time we see something being so conserved, it has a function. The more conserved the feature, the more important it usually is. So yes, DNA changes over time, but it changes slower the more important its function is. So the obvious expectation for ultraconserved elements (which, by the way, can also be found unchanged in fish, which parted ways with our lineage MUCH longer ago than mice did) is that they must have at least some function, and probably an important one. Or they would "decay" in time.
"prestigious boffinry journal"
Boffinry? Oh, my, does that one sound weird... I hope it's not a real English word. Or maybe I hope it is. Anyway, I suppose that the journal is prestigious, not the boffinry, right? Does it make me a prestigious boffin for having published my boffinry there too? Hmm, better no answer I guess.
True, but no, people don't make as much noise unless it's Apple. It would be fair if people where out to crucify *everyone* who does the same thing Apple did. But they don't, do they? It does not sound like it to me.
(disclaimer before the flamer: I don't like OSX as I didn't like previous Mac interfaces, for example, and the only Apple thing I've ever owned is my two-year old 1st gen nano)
Now, all this whining about iPhone prices proves this is a geek infested site, if there was any doubt left... I mean, with few exceptions there's very little display of any knowledge of human psychology. Did you know some people buy $100,000 cars when a $30,000 would do basically the same job? Or some people buy $30,000 cars when the $20,000 would be more than good enough? Or that some stupid chaps go to the movies in a Hummer that will never see mud (I've seen it more times than my stomach can take it) when a Beetle costing a fraction of the price would be much better suited? Some other people pay thousands for a Rolex watch, or a Louis Vuitton bag (now also available for you little dog for another grand or more). When the $10 Wal-Mart equivalents would do the same job, no? Oh, they're buying something else than their cars/watches/bags then, what a surprise...
Where's the iPhone angle! :-)
El Reg is late, must be the time zone sending you guys to the pub on a Wednesday afternoon... I just read in my favorite Brazilian news site that:
Nesse momento, donos de iPhones em todo os EUA devem estar xingando a Apple.
(Right now, iPhone owners all over the USA must be swearing at Apple.)
I'm gonna go find a tech site in my own time zone now. :O)
Reminds me of another one of these "super-speed on a bike" YouTube videos from a while ago. The speedometer showed 120 and there was an old VW Golf easily keeping up with the guy, in front of him, until he accelerated and passed... At the time it seemed obvious to me it was km/h that the speedo was showing. That's probably the case here too, and the numbwits just did that to look like they are flying down the road and post it on the web. To impress other, less cunning chavs, I guess...
"the site which hosted his blog went and lost most of the stuff from those early years"
The Internet archive thing wasn't running at the time yet then, I suppose? Anyway...
<partial sarcasm>
Of course the Americans invented the Web! And blogs. And pizza, and automobiles, etc...
</partial sarcasm>
J
I think "Horny Hyena" would have been a much better choice...
Anyway, the semi-computer-literate blond bird (sorry if she sounds like a stereotype, but what can I do!? That's how she really is!) sitting behind me here in the lab had Feisty Fawn installed in her old laptop, and she is so happy with it. She still has it double boot just in case, but she almost does not use the Win XP partition anymore because she says it is "so slow".
Lucky me, the resident Linux "expert"... :-)
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
