Posts by Matt Davey

Booming scareware biz raking in $34m a month

@Hairy Scary

Ah no, that's amanfrommars1 you're talking about. A more coherent entity entirely.

Exotic star's 'violent ejections' during companion's visits

@Chris

Wasn't the subtitle to the article good enough for you? Perfect pitch, Lewis.

Mine's the one with the interstellar dust stain on the front.

NY Stock Exchange cures jitters with Juniper

@Stupid Fatal Error

Sure, you go ahead and have some dampening latency, and I'll arbitrage you out of business.

Nikon D90 digital SLR with HD video recording

HD video example (from Canon 5D II)

I'm the happy owner of a D90, and agree that the video feels like a 1.0 feature. Fun, though, and nice to have.

Boffins: global warming kills lemmings, not suicide

@Truth Seeker: what planet are you on?

1. Sea ice extent reached second lowest level ever recorded this year. It's not surprising that the surface area has had a correspondingly large recovery, but it is the thickness that will not recover. The climate scientists are the first to point out the 2007 minimum was exacerbated by the 'weather' of ocean currents, but the shrinking trend is now so huge and so prolonged that you would have to be a particularly special class of ostrich to deny it.

2. "Copious empirical data combined with mathematics and the employment of the scientific method has proven that CO2 cannot catastrophically warm the planet, nor has CO2 caused any significant warming". Citation? Please? Where on earth (pardon the puns, I really can't help it) do you get this notion from? Even global-warming sceptics seem to have finally given up contesting that the globe is warming, and that CO2 is a cause. You're supposed to be arguing that global warming doesn't matter. Get on message.

3. "no net warming since 1998". For crying out loud - 1998 was the warmest year ever recorded. Ever - since records began. It was a strong El nino year. Look at a moving average of even a few years and that 'no net warming' starts to look pretty shaky.

4. The state of the antarctic is pretty well understood and captured by the models. As I understand it, the main reason it behaves differently is that the presence of clear ocean all round the earth allows continuous encircling currents that do a great job insulating the continent from the rest of the warming planet. This is in obvious contrast to the Arctic. (apologies to any climate scientist if I've got this garbled...)

Why do I believe the IPCC consensus? If you look at their record, they have been spectacularly good at predicting the recent changes in climate. Check out how the global cooling of Mt. Pinatubo was predicted by Hansen in 1992 using the existing climate models: http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/1992/91GL02788.shtml

Buffalo touts 'first' external SSD

@Trademarks (AC 11:06 GMT)

IANAL, but I do remember that 'Pilot' pens managed to force Palm to drop its use of 'Palm Pilot' as a product name. Now, maybe Palm needed a better legal team, but I guess the courts have a fair degree of latitude in deciding how easily consumers are misled!

Showdown over encryption password in child porn case

@Tim (truecrypt)

Truecrypt looks interesting, but given that it is open source it would, I suspect, be pretty trivial to break 'plausible deniability' by demonstrating the supplied password was for the 'outer volume' and not for the 'hidden volume'.

Is VMware too close to Linux?

Is this about kernel binary modules?

It seems to me that this supposed violation by VMware is in the same class as those by, say, nvidia distribution proprietary binary modules that link against the kernel. The controversy centres on the GPL/copyright notion of a 'derived work', and whether binary modules are 'derived' from the kernel because of their close symbiosis.

AFAIK, this interpretation of the GPL for kernel modules has yet to be tested in court. Opinions differ, but I can't see the linux world wanting to chuck out all the crucial existing proprietary binary modules in use. Apart from fedora, perhaps.

Beeb's iPlayer service gets greenlight

UK only?

Does anyone know if the iPlayer service will be restricted to UK addresses? I couldn't tell from the article or the BBC statement.