Posts by Sean Timarco Baggaley

Activist supplied illegally obtained docs to DeSmogBlog

Re: Re: Warmist

This alarmism isn't new. I've been hearing the same tune from different groups for well over 30 years at least, and it's been going on since long before then.

The problem is the constant cries of "Wolf!" The endless Chicken Littles screaming in a blind panic that the sky is falling, despite all evidence to the contrary. For the wolf never comes! The sky does not fall! Not for the "Population Bomb" criers who were ringing the media's alarm bells in the 1960s and '70s—we were all supposed to be wearing gas masks and living in permanent smog by the 1980s!

Nor have we seen thousands of people killed by those evil nuclear reactors. And then there was "acid rain", deforestation of rainforests, impending asteroids of doom, Bird Flu, and so on.

Not a single cry of "Wolf!" has proved correct. And that is the biggest problem of all: the population of this planet is getting tired of these tricks and, before long, we'll just ignore these cries.

To all the alarmists and Chicken Littles out there, know this: when the Big Bad Wolf finally does make an appearance, it'll be entirely your fault that nobody believes you any more.

Call them Chicken Littles. Call them "Boys who cry 'Wolf!'" (though that doesn't exactly trip off the tongue). But don't get sidetracked by their alleged allegiances: it's not about the "warmists" or "denialists", but about the alarmism. The incessant fear-mongering. The deliberate attempts to spread of terror in the population in order to further their "cause".

We already have names for such people: extremists, fanatics... terrorists*.

* (Contrary to popular belief, an aptitude for throwing bombs or hijacking planes is not a requirement. All that is required is that you use fear and terror to achieve your aims. Look it up in a dictionary if you don't believe me.)

Apple goes to European Commission with complaint about Motorola

Re: So how come

FRAND = "Fair, Reasonable And Non Discriminatory". Which part of that bit in bold do you not understand?

Motorola Mobility, Sagem, Samsung, etc. have been making mobile phones for years. Suddenly, here comes this boutique computer manufacturer out of nowhere and spanks the whole fucking lot of them, showing them up for the overly conservative, risk-averse bullshitters they are and proving that it is possible to make a "smart-phone" that's genuinely easy to use.

The old guard don't like disruptive innovations like "good design". Hence the ridiculous number of lawsuits from the likes of Samsung and their ilk, trying to slap Apple down and teach them a lesson.

As others have pointed out ad infinitum: Apple shouldn't have to pay a damned "license", because Apple are buying the same chips everyone else uses for the GSM and CDMA functionality. If I buy a chip from Qualcomm, I bloody well expect Qualcomm to have paid for the patents already. Why the hell should I have to pay Samsung and Moto again for the same patents when I'm merely a customer of one of their existing licensees?

iPad 3 chip leak squeaks dual-core tweaks

Re: mehPad

Why would I need 4 cores if my GPU can do all the grunt work anyway? I've yet to see an iPad (or any rival tablet) app that needs four core CPUs more than it needs multi-core GPUs.

Also, I rather value battery life. All the CPU cores in the world are useless if they drink so much power that your tablet is dead by lunchtime.

OTOH, it's possible that the iPad 3 won't have the retina display. There may be some truth to the rumours of an iPad 4 (or "iPad 3 HD") later in the year, when the CPU and GPU technology is more likely to be ready to do such a high-res display justice.

Or, of course, these could be photos of an early prototype.

That's the problem with rumours: they're just... rumours!

'Exploitative' Proview slammed by trademark judge ... in 2010

Re: Re: "driven by greed"

"DOUBLE STANDARDS."

Yes. From you and your idiot ilk. Clearly you didn't bother RTFA.

Node.js Native breakthrough: cloudy C++ on steroids

OS X uses C++?

News to me. All Apple's documentation—which I'm inclined to trust as I'm learning to develop for their platform—makes it crystal clear that OS X is built on... Objective-C.

Objective-C had a similar birth to C++ and, like the latter, evolved from the original C programming language. Nevertheless, Objective-C took a different path to C++ and remains at heart a "C with Objects" language with a very clean design considering its age. By contrast, C++ has become a nasty, brutish camel of a committee-designed language that has more ways to blow your own foot off than a minefield.

Netherlands plans to make 'copyrighted material easier to use'

So, the Dutch government is getting its copyright law advice from Google now?

They're not going to be even remotely biased, are they?

The only "freedom" Google are interested in is the freedom to make a massive profit from the work of others, who received precisely zilch.

Even Foxconn workers get paid for what they do, even if it's not very much.

So, which one is the company building its profits off slave labour again..?

Feds to carmakers: 'Rein in high-tech dashboards'

@Chris Miller:

"Sometimes, I have to drive somewhere I've never been before. Sometimes, I have to drive alone."

Oh no! The horror! The horror!

Why didn't you prepare for your journey first by reading a bloody map and looking at the location on, say, Google Maps or Bing Maps BEFORE you leave? Make a couple of notes if you need to—perhaps jot down the names of any local towns or villages on a Post-IT note and stick it to the back of your sun visor. That way, you'll know what to look for on the signposts. It's not that hard.

Worst case scenario: you just stop by the side of the road and bloody ask someone.

Is it now standard practice in hospitals to rip out your common sense at birth? How do you think people navigated in the bad old days before GPS? Jesus! This is basic navigation, not rocket science!

New Mac OS X: Mountain Lion roars at unauthorised apps

Er, you nay-sayers do realise that...

... the "Slippery Slope" argument is a logical fallacy, right?

This is (c) jake.

It means nothing.

The copyright assertion is essentially a US invention as copyright was not automatic until the US joined the Berne Convention in 1989. However, you're more likely to win a bigger fine against a copyright infringer if you do include a copyright statement.

The accepted forms are:

Copyright [YEAR] [AUTHOR NAME]

© [YEAR] [AUTHOR NAME]

Copr. [YEAR] [AUTHOR NAME]

E.g.

© 2012 Sean Baggaley

Note that the use of a "c" in parentheses is not considered a valid abbreviation. It has to be one of the options listed above. Also, it is not necessary to write "Copyright © [YEAR] [AUTHOR NAME]" as the "Copyright" makes the "©" glyph redundant. It is also no longer necessary to add "All Rights Reserved."

There is one exception to all this: recorded music. A recording of a song involves two copyrights. The first is the song itself, while the second is the performance or recording. (Not every performer writes their own music, and not every songwriter is a performer.)

The recording copyright uses a "P-in-a-circle" symbol (the "P" stands for "phonogram") and looks like this:

℗ [YEAR OF FIRST PUBLICATION OF RECORDING] [AUTHOR NAME]

(The author's name is optional as it can be usually inferred from the packaging of the recording.)

And now, here is some music...

Apple's secret outsource: 'Even more software to be made in India'

What's "patriotism" got to do with it?

The day our governments started referring to countries in corporate terms (e.g. "UK Plc.") is the day I stopped giving a toss about my "country".

Tribalism isn't a good idea in any case, and patriotism is just tribalism in a different sweater.

The jobs are in India. Why should Indian workers pay income taxes to the US Treasury instead of their own government?

It wasn't that long ago that the US (and the UK in its turn) was the sweatshop of the world. Now it's some other country's turn and you're complaining?

If the US wants more tax revenues, they could try taxing those high earners who pay less tax than their cleaners. Even Warren Buffet has suggested this and he's one of the wealthiest people on the planet, so it's not as if there's a complete lack of will.

Indian programmers are only trying to compete by pushing a major asset: their low wages. (It's not as bad as it seems either: a low-wage nation usually has a low cost of living too. I live in Italy for similar reasons.)

Actions have consequences. Voting is an action. Globalisation is a consequence of past elections. Outsourcing is a consequence of globalisation. You voted for all this. If you don't like it, perhaps you might want to (cough!) "Vote Different" next time.

Your "joke" might have been funny...

... if the article didn't explicitly state that the outsourced development work is for back-end software for use by Apple's internal corporate systems, such as retail.

If you're going to crack jokes in an article's comments thread, it's considered good form to actually read the fucking article you're commenting on first.

I know. I'm such an ass.

So?

This is a website, not a printed book. It takes barely any time at all to scroll past a long post if you don't want to read it.

I'd prefer an unlimited* post length with a "Read more..." link after the first paragraph or so to reveal the rest.

But this isn't my website, so I'm not going to complain too loudly.

* (Fair Usage Policy applies: maximum post length: 65535 characters. Or something like that.)

Megastar personalities are intellectual property in draft law

RTFA

The law explicitly includes exemptions for satirical usage.

Mornington Crescent

Tricky...

Hmmm... give me a second to smoke this pipe...

Aha! I do believe S. W. Geke's Alliterative Childhood Ravishment Fulmination applies here, so...

Jar-Jar Junction.

Your move, gentlemen!

Easy...

... the Effra!

UK's digital policy seized by fanatical bureaucrats, say MPs

I'll tell you what'll 'appen, mate...

... we'll all be fired off to another planet in a spaceship named "Ark (B)". We'll have become a nation of parasitic middle-men who contribute nothing of value to the universe.

We're already haemorrhaging creatives to other countries because the UK simply isn't interested in having more than one viable industry. We must suck at multitasking or something.

Rather good piece I thought.

The second page was particularly good at pointing out the rather large elephant looming over the horizon over there { WAVES HAND IN THE GENERAL DIRECTION OF CHINA }.

It's amazing how many people out there seriously believe every problem is digital: either X is BAD or X is GOOD. There is never, apparently, any middle state.

I blame Mr. Boole, myself.

TV?

Apparently...

... lots of people still have one and use it.

How else do you explain "reality TV shows"?

RIM's apps revolution swings on Blackberry 10

The issue with the v1.0 PlayBook OS is that it lacks a NATIVE email client.

For a company with RIM's track record, this was beyond stupid. RIM products are (or were) very popular in corporate environments because the BlackBerry phone email client could be easily integrated into the corporation's IT infrastructure.

Webmail doesn't cut it. Not even close.

Space: 1999 returning to TV?

'Twasn't me...

... but I've never thought Joss Whedon was that good, to be honest.

Firefly was okay, but the whole "space cowboy" thing was beaten to death in literary SF decades ago. It's just lazy writing. (Then again, I had no time for "Buffy" and its spinoff either. The joke was already thinly spread over the original movie.)

It's odd how many people praise Whedon, but don't realise that Russell T. Davies very blatantly ripped off Whedon's shows when rebooting Doctor Who. Why do you think it became 25% tiresome soap opera, 25% fan service and 25% tedious fantasy masturbation of the "Ninjas vs. Pirates vs. Aliens!" variety? (The other 25%, the endless Deus ex Machina endings as RTD realised he'd written himself into a corner and had to pull a rabbit out of a previously unseen hat, are entirely Davies' contribution.)

We don't need "More of X". Rebooting old franchises is stupid. Blake's 7—I refuse to let the BBC's graphics department dictate punctuation rules to me—is the only series of that era that could conceivably have legs.

As for Space:1999... it's already been rebooted, no less than four times! Two of the reboots were called "Battlestar Galactica", another was Star Trek: Voyager, while the most recent (and unsuccessful) attempt was "Stargate: Universe".

That particular SF sub-genre has been done to death. Let it die.

"Did you watch a version with Barbara Bain edited out?"

No, but I wish I had. Bain and Landau had all the chemistry of a hard vacuum.

Barbara Bain's acting was unforgivably wooden; in most episodes, she's part of the scenery, not the plot.

The 2nd season's minor "reboot" by the much-maligned Fred Freiburger introduced a new set of younger, more photogenic, leads who acted rings around Bain and were less likely to phone in their performances.

To be fair to Freiburger, he was more unlucky than terrible; there were some good episodes in _both_ seasons. Unfortunately, there were a lot of duds in both too, and the pacing in the first season was often glacial. Space:1999 looked great, but that's about all it had going for it.

Incidentally, it wasn't unusual to show series episodes out of production order back in the '60s and '70s, so each episode was usually treated as a standalone, sharing only the basic premise and the main cast. Series continuity wasn't considered important and writers didn't often bother with it. Recollections of strange character progressions are likely to be a result of this.

UFO was a _much_better series, with a more plausible premise, but I think Blake's 7 is more deserving of a revisiting by modern production standards: a very simple premise with some very strong parallels in today's world.

IT guy answers daughter's Facebook rant by shooting her laptop

Were you watching the same video?

"I've possessed and safely used firearms"—bully for you; I haven't—"and he isn't safe." Says a random stranger on the internet.

"He has no idea how many rounds he has left,"—And...? He's not claiming to be a professional soldier, is he?

"is firing at something that could ricochet and hit him,"—no, he's very clearly firing at a static target made of plastic, resting on soft ground, using hollow point rounds which are designed to fragment upon impact, not bounce around like a cheap special effect in a Star Wars movie!

"the house or the traffic within sight"—the road is a long way away and you are assuming the father didn't make sure there was nobody else in the vicinity! The guy works in IT, for f*ck's sake! A basic grasp of logic is pretty much a given.

", is clearly acting on impulse and majorly over-reacting."

Planning a video shoot, grabbing the video camera from wherever it's stored, setting it up and positioning it carefully so that he's perfectly framed in the shot, then reading out the offending Facebook post, pointing out the lies in it one by one, and then proceeding to show the consequences of the girl's actions by shooting at a laptop that has not been simply dropped casually on the doorstep or, indeed, any other part of his home, nor in any other potentially dangerous location—all this is entirely "impulsive"?!

I don't think that word means what you appear to think it means.

Yes, it was a bit extreme, but by all accounts, his daughter had already been warned about this kind of behaviour in the past.

If you speak as well as you type...

... I agree with you.

Dear The Late Dr. S. Freud,

Try designing a working handgun in the shape of a vagina. Harder than it looks isn't it?

There's a good reason for this: often, things look the way they do because they have to, otherwise they could not function at all. The gun is a classic example of form following function. Ditto for skyscrapers, which look like that because it's a very efficient use of valuable land.

At the other end of the spectrum, you have people who look, talk and act almost exactly like dicks. [Source: the Internet.]

Yrs.,

Me.

He'll soon change his tune...

... when he starts being charged for rent and his share of the bills.

(Although with the cost of housing in much of the UK, that might still work out cheaper than moving out.)

Apple Stores getting petitions on ethical conduct for breakfast

The "Apple are overpriced" myth? Again?

"On the other hand, Apple do charge a much higher price for their products than their competitors."

No. They don't. They really don't. They haven't done so for years now—ever since the switch to Intel, in fact.

There's a review of the Asus ux21 Zenbook on this very website that shows exactly what I mean:

That Asus costs £850. The equivalent MacBook Air costs... £999. That's a whopping, er, £149 more than the Asus. For which you get a much better screen, a BSD Unix-derived OS with a nice GUI, some decent media apps, a Thunderbolt port, no misleading "You've plugged a USB 2 device into a USB 3 socket" bollocks, and video documentation that actually f*cking plays.

Oh, and some of that attention to detail—like being able to open the damned thing up easily—that some of us actually appreciate.

Clearly, Apple do not charge a "much higher price for their products". Slightly higher, maybe, but you're clearly getting more for your money.

If you want to criticise Apple, please try not to use arguments that haven't been true for over seven bloody years already.

Ethics, schmethics!

Go into any supermarket in the UK and you'll see plenty of products with labels like "Fairtrade" and its ilk. Alongside these products are other, cheaper, products produced using more, er, "conventional" ethics.

You will be shocked—shocked, I say!—to learn that the cheaper, "differently ethical", products vastly outsell their kinder, more expensive, rivals.

Fundamentally, it boils down to this: If the Chinese want their society to change, they'd better stop hoping another country will come riding to their aid and make it happen for them, because that's not how revolutions with full buy-in of the populace work.

Been there, done that, took the (cheap, Chiinese-made) T-shirt back for a refund. Imposing regime change from without does more harm than good. It's certainly not very ethical.

Vodafone squirrels cash into Blighty nightly as Europe falters

"Spain, Italy disappointing."

No shit. Their coverage in Italy outside of urban or suburban areas is as close to fuck all as they can get without violating the terms of their bandwidth licensing agreements.

The town I live in right now still hasn't even got 3G yet. From any of the network operators.

Sinofsky shows off Windows 8 on ARM and Office15

Office apps should run pretty well, I think.

They spend most of their time just sitting there, waiting for user input, so that's not an issue. And if Apple's iPad 2 can run intensive apps like iMovie, there's really no excuse for a modern ARM (most likely a quad-core design, with NVidia graphics judging by Sinofsky's own words) device not to be able to cope with a bloody word processor, a spreadsheet, a note-taking app and the other apps that come in that software bundle.

However, the proof will be in the execution and marketing. Microsoft haven't had a lot of success with the marketing side of things, so I hope the recent head-rolling operation in that department has paid off.

Competition is good, though I suspect ARM devices running Windows 8 will be mainly fighting the likes of Android if the licensees make their usual mistake of starting a race to the bottom.

New sat data shows Himalayan glaciers hardly melting at all

All glaciers melt.

The point of the article is that the melting has been shown to be nowhere near as much as was previously thought. Most likely because the melting ice is being replaced quite quickly by fresh ice at t'other end of the glacier.

(You do know what a glacier is, right?)

I do not "deny" climate change exists.

Nor do I receive any funding from the fossil fuel industry. (Quite the opposite in fact.)

I do, however, have little time for the endless Chicken Littles trotted out by the media constantly telling us that the skies are falling.

Yes, the Earth's climate is changing. This is NOT news, and never was. It's been changing pretty much since the Earth formed. It has even been through long periods where the atmosphere was utterly poisonous to today's life-forms. It has seen major glaciations. It has seen major interglacial periods. As this article—among many others—has pointed out, "the science" is most certainly not fully understood. It's getting there, but it is not there yet. That three-letter word right there appears to be something you people don't seem to understand.

The media have been repeating this cheap psychological trick of terrorising its customers for longer than I've been alive—from the "Population Bomb" theories of the 1960s (weren't we all supposed to be wearing gas masks by the early '80s?); the Cold War fear mongers from the '50s through to the '90s; the Energy Crisis of the 1970s; the anti-nuclear brigades who have neatly snookered us today with their ignorance; the incessant demands for our "fookin' money!" from overpaid, under-talented celebrities who appear to believe it's not even remotely hypocritical for the filthy rich to demand money from one set of poor people on behalf of other poor people or they'll DIE, and it'll be ALL OUR FAULT!

The point is, it's always "our" fault. Never THEIR fault. It's NEVER the idiotic short-termist policies of (wealthy) politicians who pull all the social engineering strings, but OUR fault. Even Robert fucking Mugabe is "our" fault, though Christ alone knows how.

Enough! I'm suffering from chronic Fear Fatigue. If you have a problem with that, I'll show you the note from my mum.

How Zuck wields power over Facebook for a few hundred bucks

No. That's their parents' job.

Eolas claims royalties for browser apps and plug-ins

The concept of "plugins" has been around since (at least) 1991.

Photoshop introduced them in its v2.0 release. It is very clearly an "obvious" feature for other software, including web browsers. Plugins were all the rage at the time.

The term "hypermedia document" could easily include any multimedia application of the day, including those early interactive CD-ROMs. Projects like the BBC's own "Domesday Book" (using Laserdisc technology) in the mid-80s may also include enough examples to prove prior art.

Apple's own "HyperCard" (and variants) also predates the WWW by some years and allowed execution of other applications through "Externals" (a synonym for "plugin"). Hypercard was released in 1987, so there's definitely prior art there.

Revealed: Apple's plea for fairness in mobile patent war

@Paul Crawford...

You were doing so well until you got to this: "... difficult to accept given the frivolous details they used to get the Galexy banned."

See my earlier post above for why.

Other than that, I agree.

When your own company lawyer...

... cannot tell the difference between the leading brand product and your own, the problem is rather deeper than rectangles.

I don't see Apple suing Sony or Toshiba, despite their fondleslabs also being broadly rectangular in shape.

Indonesian train roof fare-dodgers given the brush off

"Health & Safety? We've heard of it!"

More of this sort of thing!

People who are too thick to realise how dangerous it is to ride up there clearly need to be taught the meaning of the word "consequences" the hard way.

Found myself humming

EXCellent! My evil plot is working!

{Mieo-SCRUNCH! CRUNCH CRUNCH MUNCH...}

Mmm, lovely! I think I'll have another...

{ PEELS LIVE KITTEN }

Your subconscious has excellent taste.

Although mine tells me it would have gone for the theme to "U.F.O."

Chinese company demands $38m, 'apology' from Apple

"(some question if they are employees or slaves)"

They're employees.

Slaves don't get paid above-average wages for working.

Slaves don't get paid, full stop.

Google's whack-a-mole Marketplace cleans house again

Indeed not.

Either that, or someone seriously felt that "Rovio Mobile" really would apply for a new developer account with a misspelled name.

Seriously, the real WTF isn't that this malware took 3 hours to be pulled down, but that such an obviously fake developer account was allowed in the first f*cking place!

2020: A Press Odyssey – reporter licensing explained

"...who watches the corrupt journalists?"

Other journalists. They get jealous when others of their ilk seem to be getting too big for their boots, so the greater your fame, the harder your fall.

Private Eye may be edited by a smug little gnome with a face his own mother would never tire of punching, but that magazine serves a very useful purpose. And Hislop, for all his faults, does at least have a moral compass.

Apple tells authors: All your books iBook files are belong to us

You do know that the .iBook format is proprietary, right?

The only device that can even read an iBook file is the iPad, using iBooks v2.

Apple are just arse-covering here: they're giving away an application that lets you create content for their device. If someone writes an iBook-compatible reader for, say, Android, then, suddenly, Apple's free app can also be used to produce content for a rival platform.

This makes Apple lawyers angry, and you wouldn't like them when they're angry.

Apple kicks China's most popular browser out of iTunes

Apple's T's&C's explicitly include the option of banning...

... because they want to.

They don't _have_ to give you a reason.

(To be fair, similar clauses exist in other app stores too. It's a generic get-out clause for handling edge cases.)

iOS 5 'crashes more apps' than Android

I see your statistically insignificant anecdote...

... and raise it with an "IOS5 works just fine on MY gear."

Maybe you're running too many crap apps?

Study links dimwits to conservative ideology

I'm not sure I entirely agree with the interpretation of the results.

Ignorance isn't related to intelligence: if you lacked the opportunities to remedy your ignorance of a subject, you'd be ignorant on it. Just as many people today are ignorant of how their phone or computer actually works, yet are more than happy to use them, so there are people who have either been misinformed or simply never had the opportunity to discover the truth about many other topics.

"Intelligence" is a woolly, vague, hand-wavy term for a concept that has yet to be satisfactorily defined. IQ tests—which were popular back in the 1950s and 1970s—are no longer considered accurate measurements of someone's intellectual skills. A mechanical genius might also be a mathematical imbecile.

Kids of "below average" intelligence often get left behind in schools, which have always tended to assume that a "one size fits all" system will work for everyone equally well. We now know this isn't true and that different people prefer learning in different ways.

Bigotry is, in my experience at least, generally born of ignorance, not stupidity. It is only those who deliberately choose to remain ignorant —avoiding any possibility of changing their very thought processes—who represent the ultimate form of conservatism.