* Posts by Scott Holland

10 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Jun 2008

Snowden speaks: NSA spies create 'databases of ruin' on innocent folks

Scott Holland

@terra

"You Americans give far too much weight to the "founding fathers". They are just people who probably would have done exactly the same thing today if they could have had that power. They are just symbols, and i'll bet each and every one of them had their own Monica Lewinsky tugging at their parts."

I'll be the first to admit that none of them were perfect. But as for the "They would do it too" argument I have to say no, they would not. These men knew what it was like to live under the thumb of a oppressive ruler. Something no native born American can presently say. Now, would King George have taken advantage of such a program had it existed? No doubt he would.

I can't speak about all of the founders, but Washington certainly wouldn't even entertain the idea that such a program was legal. As you may know, he was a war hero, and the first president. He didn't really want the job of president, he wanted to retire after the war, but the people pretty much demanded that it be him. So, he answered the call.

He reluctantly accepted a second term, and flat out refused a third. The official restriction that presidents may only serve 2 terms was passed after WW2, to prevent another FDR. Until that time, all presidents willingly stepped down after 2 terms because of the precedent set by Washington.

After the war, they didn't just want to make him president. They were ready to make him an actual king. A position he absolutely refused with the reasoning (paraphrasing): "I just fought a very bloody war to throw off one king. I didn't do it so we could just replace him with another."

On the ceiling of the capitol building is a large mural titled "The Apotheosis of George Washington". For decades, the man was practically revered as a god.

But, in no small measure, because of his humility, belief in freedom, and dedication to the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, Americans still enjoy more freedom and more protection FROM the government than most in the world. But those protections have been steadily eroded over the decades. Snowden helped to reveal just how much.

The Colosseum, Hagia Sophia, Tower of London... and, er, Steve Jobs' GARAGE

Scott Holland
FAIL

She better appeal this while she can

If she lets it go, she'll discover that if she wants to so much as give the place a new paint job she'll need to get permission from the city first. And they're likely to say no.

I don't know if she's living there or not. But, if she is, she should force them to pay her full market price for the place, plus a premium for the hassle. Given real estate prices in California, I doubt they could justify the expense. If they're not willing to buy it from her, they've got no business assuming some level of control over it by declaring it "historical".

Confirmed: Bezos' salvaged Saturn rocket belonged to Apollo 11

Scott Holland

Who really owns these?

Does anyone know how far out to sea they found these? If it's in international waters, then does Bezos not have the right of salvage? I'm no maritime law scholar, but it would seem that if something's been sitting on the sea floor for decades in international waters, then it belongs to whomever wants to haul it up.

If that's the case, I'd tell NASA to sod off if they get pushy about what can/cannot be done with these.

NASA's new 'Bullet' airship to fly from Moffett Field

Scott Holland

Why not recover the helium?

I've always been puzzled by the need to vent the helium. Perhaps someone more knowledgeable can enlighten me.

The helium creates lift by displacing heavier air. If you need to reduce lift, you decrease the amount of air being displaced. So, why not just compress the extra helium into storage cylinders? The weight would remain the same, but lift would be reduced due to less air being displaced. You wouldn't be wasting any by venting, and should you suddenly need more lift for any reason, you just re-inflate the bladder.

What am I missing here? This seems like a pretty simple (too simple?) solution to the need to maintain neutral buoyancy.

PayPal restores Cryptome for real

Scott Holland

Nope.

PayPal is NOT a bank, at least not in the US. They walk like a bank, talk like a bank, and act like a bank in many ways. But, they have gone to great lengths to make sure that, legally, they are NOT a bank. That's how they can pull crap like this. They aren't subject to the same regulations and supervision that banks are.

They want you to think they're a bank, and to use them to store your money like a bank. But, PayPal puts your money into their (real) bank account and they get the interest from it. They charge you a fee every time money moves to your account from someone else's.

This would be the equivalent of your bank charging you a variable (depending on the amount) fee for each check you deposit. Such a bank would not stay in business very long. The only reason PayPal can pull this off is becuase they have become the de-facto standard for online payments.

YouTube and Hulu dabble in for-pay vids

Scott Holland

I'll only pay for performance

If these guys want to start charging for "premium" content, then the performance when delivering such content had better go WAY up. I can live with lower video resolutions, and not-theater-quality audio. But, I will refuse to pay for something that freezes every 2 minutes because they don't want to pay for the servers and bandwidth.

Unlike YouTube (at least currently), you can't just pause a Hulu vid and let it buffer the whole thing. Hulu's licensing deal with the studios forbids them from buffering more than 5 minutes of video. So, these guys will need to either cook up custom apps that will encrypt everything and allow you to buffer the whole thing to your HD. Or, they will need serious upgrades to their infrastructure.

The only way I ever found Hulu tolerable, was to use one of those Hulu downloader apps that saves the vid to your drive. But that's a running battle between Hulu blocking them and the downloaders countering. I grew tired of this battle, and stopped using Hulu.

El Reg to launch space paper plane

Scott Holland
Coat

Why make it a vulture in name only?

Since it will, in all likelihood, be called the Vulture (or some variation thereof), why not make it look like one too? I don't just mean a paint job. I mean something, which seen gliding majestically through the British skies, would be mistaken for an actual vulture by the casual observer.

Mine's the one with the "Birds of Britain" book in the pocket.

US teen cuffed for disorderly classroom texting

Scott Holland
Stop

@Arun - On the right track

Arun is defintely on the right track here. In American schools these days, teachers and administrators have been effectively neutered with regards to their options for handling unruly students. If verbal threats don't work their only real option is to call the cops.

If the teachers tried to physically force the girl to leave class or take the phone, they and the school district would most likely have been sued into oblivion by the little snot's parents because they dared lay a hand on their little angel.

Children are very adept at detecting ways to manipulate adults to get what they want. They're like wild animals, they can smell fear. With teachers, the fears are usually assault charges or sexual abuse charges. Kids know that the mere accusation is enough to effectively end a teacher's career. Sadly, authorities usually take the child's word as gospel even in the absence of any other evidence. Because we all know that children are pure. They are never vindictive, spiteful, vengeful, or willing to lie to get what they want.

Usually these children will have their parents wrapped around their little finger. The parents are so scared that their child might "hate" them, all the kid has to do is scream "You don't love me!! I hate you!!" and the parents roll over.

YouTube 'poisoned baby food' hoaxer pleads guilty

Scott Holland
Thumb Down

@So....

I assume that you are saying that what this guy did should be considered free speech, and there should be no consequence for him.

If so, then, yes. This is exactly where the free speech line is drawn. This is an almost perfect example of the "shouting fire in a crowded theatre" scenario. It's like calling in a bomb threat, and using "But there was no bomb" as your defense. The fact that he used the net as his medium is irrelevant.

Veteran climate scientist says 'lock up the oil men'

Scott Holland
Dead Vulture

Food for (rational) thought.

I have just a few points to make here.

Those who were around 30 or so years ago, may remember the "inevitable climate catastrophe" that awaited us then. It was the impending ICE AGE. Why did they think an ice age was coming? Mainly, because from 1940-1970, global temperatures dropped steadily, and the fear was runaway global cooling. Who was one big backer of the "coming ice age" theory? None other than James Hansen. Last time I checked, Ontario had not been erased by a glacier.

I personally find it odd that the global temperature dropped during this period. This was WW2 and a post-industrial West. CO2 levels were skyrocketing during this time, yet the temperature continued to fall. This would seem to fly in the face of the (high CO2) => (global warming) equation.

Anyone ever wonder what happened to the "hockey stick" graph that Al Gore, Hansen, and others flapped around so wildly claiming it was "definitive proof"? Well, it got thoroughly smacked about, and was proven to show the exact opposite of what it had been claimed to show. Yes, the chart did indeed show a link between high CO2 levels and global temps. But, the relationship showed that the temperature change came FIRST, then the CO2 levels would rise. Hansen and Co. would have us believe that the effect preceded the cause. This is the caliber of scientist you have in James Hansen.

People seem to often confuse two separate issues. There is climate change, and then there is human-induced climate change. There isn't much we can do about the first. So, there are no careers or fortunes to be made pursuing it. Few would argue that climate change is not happening. It is happening, and has always happened. The climate is not a steady state machine. The climate has always swung back and forth between extremes, ice ages to global jungles. The human race has just been damned lucky that we popped up when we did, in the middle of a relatively temperate period. One which has lasted long enough for us to develop technologies that would allow us to survive much of what the planet could throw at us.

Computer models are often cited as good evidence for human-induced climate change. One way (really, the only way) to test if a model is accurate, is to have it predict the weather for a period of time that we already have reliable records for. Say, 1970-1980. If the model's predictions match up with the recorded data, the model can be claimed to be sound. However, no one has yet produced a model that can reliably pass this test. As any programmer could tell you, garbage in = garbage out.

The doomsayers often make a point of the fact that 1998 was the hottest year on record. Which it was. But, if we are in a warming period, should that record not have been consecutively broken in 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, etc? Well, it wasn't. Indeed, global temps have done nothing but go down since then. So, where's the warming?

Back in the 70's, similarly drastic, economy killing "solutions" were proposed. Careers and fortunes were made, and then the whole furor died down. I see the cycle of history repeating itself here (at much greater expense). The Greens tell us the opposition can't be trusted because they have a vested financial interest in the status quo. Well, the Greens have just as much of a vested financial interest in this game. No one is going to pay Hansen to give a speech on global warming if there's no apocalypse around the corner.

Is climate change happening? Yes. Are humans responsible for it, even in part? To me at least, and to quite a few meteorologists (a title Hansen can not claim btw), the evidence to date would seem to say no. One last thing, some might say "Of course it's us, what else could it possibly be?". These people seem to forget about this big bright thing that occupies the daytime sky. This thing which is a runaway nuclear fusion reactor 800,000 miles across, and is anything but stable and unchanging. The Sun drives ALL of our weather. If the Sun changes, the weather changes.

The dead vulture, because its bloated, rotting corpse will release methane and CO2, bringing us all that much closer to the end.