Posts by Peter Murphy 283 publicly visible posts • joined 17 May 2009
http://stopwar.org.uk/index.php/united-kingdom/635-rupert-murdoch-has-blood-on-his-hands
Bush and Blair deserve most of the blame, but it was Murdoch who told his papers to promote the war. It would have been far harder to have the conflict without him.
My sympathies and condolences to the fine, fine people of the United States who have to put up with this shit. I wish them luck. But at the end of the day, I still have the ability and the choice to escape from this, because I live in another first world country with more actual freedom. My government is not yet infected by the TSA virus, not are they in the pocket of Hollywood. Hopefully they never will be. I also hope that in the interim, some freak meteor/tsunami/accident takes out the lobbyists, pollies and corrupt business people while leaving the other 300 million intact.
Once upon a time, being American (well, a white American) meant winning first prize in the lottery of life. These day, it's more like obtaining a simulacrum of a winning ticket, and the FBI has arrested the winner for forgery.
Jeff Bridges would be a good choice. Apart from being a marvelous actor, he's got the physical attributes for the task. He played a baldy in Iron Man, and he really put on the pounds for True Grit. Put those elements together (and remove the beard and some charisma), and you've got Ballmer.
People are asking for an alternative to capital punishment. How about good old "life without parole"? It keeps actual criminals away from the general public without executing anybody wrongfully convicted (which happens a lot), while the occasional exonerated prisoner gets the chance to go home.
And for those that think "life's too good for them"... is it? Staying 50 years behind bars is a lot slower that a quick gassing or organ harvesting. Even at its best, being in prison is boredom squared or cubed, with screws telling you what to do and when to do it. At its worst, it's pretty violent. A lifetime of that would be horrible.
I'm instructing the CSS as I go along, rather than as a separate subject to HTML. I'm trying to teach students the "W3C" way - you have your hypertext files for the content, and the style sheets for the presentation; keep them orthogonal to each other, and no "font" tags, thank you very much. It is a little heavy going at times, but I am giving them lots of revision exercises, and they are getting the hang of the material.
I should add that my students are trainee librarians; they're not expected to be technical, nor put together a three column layout with header and footer from first principles. They are expected to be able to put together a website at the end of the course using a tool (like Dreamweaver), and I think I am training them to do that. I'd rather teach them the way of angle brackets than just tell them the Dreamweaver menu commands to make an unordered list. That's boring and they don't learn.
My course does not cover dynamic programming, so I do not have to deal with SQL and server side scripting.
I read the press release. It appears that the plants are not seeking colder temperatures, just higher altitudes but with the same temperature. It's an important distinction. Unfortunately, the plants on the top of mountains have nowhere else to go, so they're being hammered hard. To quote the article:
Harald Pauli added, "The observed species losses were most pronounced on the lower summits, where plants are expected to suffer earlier from water deficiency than on the snowier high peaks. Climate warming and decreasing precipitation in the Mediterranean during the past decades fit well to the pattern of shrinking species occurrences. Additionally, much of the Mediterranean region is projected to become even dryer during the upcoming decades".
It's happening in my state of Queensland as well. There are two mountains in northern Queensland - Bartle Frere and Bellenden Ker - that tower 1.5 km above the surrounding area. The bottom is tropical rainforest; the top is sub-tropical/temperate rainforest. The areas at the summit are going to be changed within the next few decades.
If you have to get rid of someone, do it face to face. It might be because the employee is incompetent, the company is short of funds, or some other reason. But sit down, close the doors and ex
I've been let go once. At the time, I was expecting it (lack of company funds, finding myself with nothing to do), so when I got the phone call to come up to the boss's office, I knew what to expect. I didn't like him (nor he I). Never the less, he was never the man that would send an email to let someone go, or let someone else do the job. I respected him for that.
Anyone who is too gutless to sack someone in person - anyone who is afraid or lazy to actually explain his or her reasons to the retrenchee to their face - has no place in management.
So what you're saying is: Microsoft is acting like a dealer that doesn't mind giving out free samples... as long as the customer gets hooked on the product?
I don't know. I could be wrong, but I don't think 365 is that addictive. It's like trying to make Steve Ballmer out as a shady character out of a Blaxploitation flick: it doesn't quite work as a mental image.
Jacket please: the one with the theme to Superfly in the pocket.
http://physics0054.anu.edu.au/
For most people, this would resolve to the same site as http://150.203.48.55/index.php
I provide this for the unfortunate few who work for firms so anal that they automatically censor web addresses that are expressed in IP form.
Like mine.
(Can't say who they are, but they work in the "educational" sector.)
Unlike New Orleans, Tasmania is a hilly place, and it's hard to pump out the ground water under 1500 m of mountain. In addition, it is low in population, and has fairly high rainfall; some places are over 2000 of mm per year. I think they can get their water from dams sustainably enough, and I don't see them sinking under the seas like Numenor.
Mind you, Tasmania doesn't have a good music scene like New Orleans.
My uni also has a Live@Edu mail service, but all the staff I've spoken to about it dislike the thing. The whole "Microsoft Outlook" interface feels like going back 10 years, especially when it often hung accessing it through Firefox.
The advice I got was to access Live@Edu through a third party interface. The librarians even helped me set up Gmail to log on and download my email without touching the Outlook interface ever again. Now that's what I call service.
I thought it was a shout out to Cheech Marin, the Mexican-American half of stoner duo Cheech and Chong. I admit it sounds like a long shot, but read the message:
Us be shoked porque their shiiit was packed with goodiez cummin from a USA Military brigadezz in Afghanistan,
I think our author likes packing his pipe with some goodiez of his own. I just hope it's good shiiit.
Dave's coat, please, because Dave's not here, man. He's always leaving things behind.
Seems all the Windows, Macintosh and Linux fans have settled their differences. They're joined forces to give a roasting to their common enemy - Wired - because of their braindead way of publishing issues as 250 megabyte of straight images.
It's ironic. I remember that Wired were one of the most technophillic magazines when I first encountered them. You'd expect them to jump in boots first into HTML5. Instead, they're perpetrating canonical "DO NOT DO THIS" behaviour of the WWW: representing text as images.
Seriously. I hate them. I expect better from The Register and all its commenters.
Look at this way: Ravi's going to have a couple of long miserable years to reflect on what he did - and that's before he gets expatriated back to his home country in shame. It's may break him. It may lead to contrition. I don't know. But that's what the justice system is for. He did wrong, and so he gets prison. Adding rape on top of that is cruel and unusual and unnecessary.
As for "Bubba" himself: if he likes raping fellow prisoners, he should be doing time in solitary. And any prison guards and administrators who allow such things to come to pass should be doing time themselves.
One in six (or one in seven) Australians are (in) LinkedIn? I find that a bit hard to believe myself. It's more boring than Facebook (if you're into that sort of thing), and I find it doesn't even succeed in its stated aims of making work connections.
The only guy who tried to do business with me on the site was some SEO huckster from India, who was never the less signed up to the Brisbane IT group. So we may be dealing with inflated figures from elsewhere anyway. But after an unpleasant experience of him trying to send me LinkedIn messages, and me saying "no, thank you" in increasing measures of anger and insult, I thought: "LinkedIn is not for me".
So I remain signed up to the site (as does my wife), but we don't do anything with it. We certainly don't go out of our way to sign up new people. And we roll our eyes when we receive one of their newsletters, because they cut and paste the titles from the most banal business articles out there.
This is from the latest: "Five Reasons You Need to Meet in Person", "The 5 Qualities of Remarkable Bosses" and "Five Leadership Lessons From James T. Kirk".
That's LinkedIn in a nutshell: like a Cosmo mag for the suits.
Sentences that contain sentiments unacceptable to the Pakistani government. Sentences like "India is okay" or "ISI is a waste of funding". Or worst of all, "Bangladesh is better off without us." [1]
And you thought censorship would be about sex, drugs and rock-and-roll. More fool you.
[1: if you don't have any idea what I'm talking about: here's a link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_Liberation_War ]
Because the Queensland government (like all governments everywhere) choose technologies based on the "Ooh, Shiny!" principle.
If I were in charge of things, I would make the app "HTML5" for two things. It makes it cross platform, which is what you want. But "HTML5" also has a nice buzzword quality to bamboozle - er, I mean persuade - otherwise technologically illiterate public servants and politicians that they're coming on in for the big win.
Not all blogs have visible counters. Mine doesn't. Nor does the Australian government have the power to force my ISP to divulge hard figures. While I live in Australia, my website is hosted in the US.
It is possible for the government to hit my website once and then refresh it 40 times more. But I reckon that's cheating.
Fortunately, these are proposed recommendations, and I have the freedom to submit to the government that they pulled the number "41" out of their ass. Moreover, silly proposals often get withdrawn when problems are pointed out. Or die due to neglect. After all, Conroy's feared net filter has been lurking around for 5 years, but seems to have been shelved indefinitely...
1. Apple builds a time machine.
2. They use it to go back in time to 2002.
3. They kill all the fuckwits and reprobates that caused all the jobs being lost in the ten years leading up to this year of the lord 2012.
You know who I'm talking about: political enablers like Bush and Greenspan in the States and Blair and Brown in the UK; and all the financial "wizards" from Goldman Sachs and Bank of America and Royal Bank of Scotland etc. pushing CDOs and sub-prime mortgages and tranches and all of the financial scams we saw in the last decade. [1]
I don't care how Apple does it: cyanide, bullets, TNT. Just cap the fuckers. Do that, and you haven't just created an extra 500,000 jobs - you've stopped millions of jobs being lost in the first place around_the_world. [2]
Maybe I'm being facetious with my solution. There are problems with it. For example, one major flaw is that time machines don't exist. But you must agree that my solution is "Innovative" with a capital I in bold 72 px Times New Roman font. It's certainly more innovative than rounded corners or hiring more patent lawyers.
The problem is not that these things are or are not innovative. They aren't. The problem is that Apple needs to pretend that these things are innovative to such a degree that they are advertising themselves to an _unseemly_ level. I don't understand why. It shows a level of insecurity in the company.
Apple should not be that insecure. Apple does not need to be that insecure. They make products that are appreciated by millions. They do stuff. They should be proud of that, and stop spending millions on campaigns wanking on about their "Innovation".
Am I right or am I right?
[1] While they're there, Apple could point out to a younger, more living Steve Jobs that there are no "alternative therapies" for Pancreatic cancer. No successful ones anyway.
[2] This shows the percentage jobs lost in the States for all the post WWII recessions. Notice which one is not like the others.
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-EQhAKiXaEJQ/TyvqgkFWwSI/AAAAAAAAMDM/G_ErFTiSxkM/s1600/PercentJobLossesJan2012.jpg
... named after Mark Shuttleworth. Desiring to get Ubuntu into the mobile market (as widely reckoned), he not only introduced a new UI, but forced it onto users, many of whom seem to be indifferent or hate it. Similarly, Microsoft has its own UI for mobiles, Metro, and for some reason thinks that mandating it for its new OS is a goer. It doesn't look like it, going by the screenshots.
Forrtunately for consumers, upgrades aren't compulsory. I still use Ubuntu 10.04, because GNOME 2 works for me; while my wife uses Windows 7. Hopefully the firms will come to their senses in the interim.
I had my own WTF moment with this sentence:
"Bear in mind that Microsoft specifies a minimum screen width of 1366 pixels for Windows 8."
Isn't 1024 x 768 good enough for them?
After all, Wikileaks does the same thing that Stratfor does: it produces "intelligence". The difference is that Wikileaks is far more competent at what it does. As Bernard Keane put it in "Crikey":
http://www.crikey.com.au/2012/02/29/the-filth-and-the-fury-and-the-catfood-stratfor-talks-wikileaks/
"The insight into Stratfor gained from the emails shows that a flimsy intelligence-gathering model can be the basis for generating significant revenue, as long as clients don’t suspect just how poor the information they are getting is. As revealed in its emails, like many consulting firms, Stratfor — bizarrely described by some journalists as a “shadow CIA” — relies heavily on the government contacts of former bureaucrats and pulling together publicly available information and putting a gloss on it."
"Fred Burton, for example, as a former Diplomatic Security Service chief in the State Department, is plainly plugged into information networks within his old department, or at least routinely boasts as much. But much of Stratfor’s operation is amateur-hour stuff, as Pratap Chatterjee showed in The Guardian — Stratfor analysts used Google Translate to read Arabic news articles and recycled blog posts for sale to clients..."
"What’s never said is that WikiLeaks is in fact a competitor to Stratfor, but one that refuses to play by the industry’s rules. Stratfor, like so many firms offering consulting and “strategic advisory” services, and not just in the intelligence or cyber security or foreign policy sectors, has a business model based not so much on offering real intelligence and high-quality analysis, as collating publicly available material, dressing it up with “strategic analysis” and preserving a mystique of secrecy around “intelligence” that impresses clients."
Check the Toews Twitter leak. Looks like he's been preaching about the sacrament of heterosexual marriage one day, cheating on his wife the next, and then fathering a baby with his mistress some time later. Even Rick Santorum hasn't gone that far as far as I know.
This is the first time I've heard of the guy. First look at him and I thought it was the evil twin of Jack Layton, separated at birth. Also reminds me of Paul Newman out of "Road to Perdition".
"Why would anyone spy on *Canadians*?"
Canada is currently the 10tth largest economy in the world, on both IMF and World Bank figures. 1.7 trillion dollars GDP/year is nothing to be sneered at.. They're large enough to be a worthy target of industrial espionage themselves.
If you think $1.7 trillion is pissweak, you could consider the "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" scenario: spy on a major ally of the USA, and then manipulate things so that intelligence sharing exists. Now you've got your hands on the crown jewels.
I'm appalled, but I'm puzzled as well. I want to know: why is child safety a _council_ responsibility in the UK?
In Australia, child safety is a _State_ level responsibility, because they're big enough to support the bureaucracy that goes along with it. (Including training, which was lacking along with common sense.) I know you don't have States, but devolving the responsibility onto the councils sounds like madness. If they don't even have the _budget_ for elementary data protection training, perhaps they shouldn't be handling sensitive matters like child abuse.
I live in Brisbane - Australia's largest council - 1.1 million people as opposed to Croydon Borough's 345 thousand. Brisbane's pretty well run as councils go, handling local roads, sewerage, garbage collection and a hundred other "local" duties pretty well. But trust Brisbane to run "child safety" - oh god, no. States or even the Federal government, but not your local council. It just doesn't feel right.
[I should add that councils in Australia are often smaller than their British equivalent, so it wouldn't make sense here to have the UK model. For example, the Shire of Croydon, _Queensland_ has a population of 273. Not much room for a child abuse prevention bureaucracy there.]
Here's one idea: have a feature that allows you to send a message to all (i.e, 100%) of your friends. Rather than adding friend by friend, give an option that makes it "All" with a single click. Facebook does not provide it, because they probably think it could be used for spam. That many be possibly true, but as none of my actual friends are Canadian Pharmacy scammers, it's a risk that I'm willing to take. On the other hand, announcing to your friends that you've just had a baby is one good use of this feature.
Possibly this feature exists already. I couldn't find it, even after trawling through old BB posts on the subject. So here's one another bright idea for Zuckenberg and co: provide a UI for Facebook that users can find things, and document the UI clearly. Seriously, I've dealt with aberrant UIs. I've seen MS Office changing its interface for shit and giggles over nearly 20 years, including the abomination known as the Ribbon. I've even worked out how to turn off the bloody PaperClip as soon as it came out. But I will be able to find things. Alas, Facebook is such a layer of "improvement" now eroding "improvement" before ad nauseum that not only can I not find things, I don't even know if features are there at all.
I actually found out how to "message" everybody (in this case, wishing all of my friends[*] a Happy Chinese/Vietnamese New Year earlier this week): set up an Event and then "invite" people to it. But I think this is a little FUBAR that I need to do this.
[* In this case, friends were actually real-blood-and-flesh people I had met off the Internet
Kim Dotcom is German-Finnish, both Mathias Ortmann and Finn Batato are German, and Bram van der Kolk is Dutch. So the Kiwis have every right to expel them in a USA-bound direction. Roughly speaking, all countries should have the right to get rid of undesirable foreigners. None of these guys are Gary McKinnon, or that poor dude who got told last week that he could be extradited to the US.
However, I do not know about the other three. If any of them is a NZ citizen, then they should not be extradited. At worst, they can be charged and serve the crime in their own country. People know it's wrong to extradite people in such circumstances.
There's a word for people who betray one's own countrypeople for financial or political gain. It's called "treason". It's why people get angry about Gary McKinnon. But the New Zealand government is not doing anything treasonous with the Megaupload Four.
Yet.
Imagine the European Space Agency had a snafu of its own, and Angela Merkel mused openly:
"I am not suggesting hanging them using piano wire like under Heinrich Himmler..."
Imagine the outcry. Even Nicolas Sarkozy would distance himself in the situation. Might even become David Cameron's BFF, hard as it may seem.
But I guess in post-Soviet Russia it's ok to get nostalgic for Stalin, as long as you're being ironic about it. Look on the bright side: no one's doing the same for Beria.
"Plucky women uses her genius to rescue her family from adversity"
But perhaps the real headline should be:
"Millions living in poverty"
Good luck to Samantha Garvey. May she and her family return to a level of stability. I'm even quite confident. Look at her abstract. That's MEATY.
"Elevational differences in a salt marsh have created very different habitats in terms of the physical environment. These differences translate into differences in biotic interactions for organisms, including the risk of predation. Four salt marsh habitats were studied for this experiment: creek region, low marsh, middle marsh and high marsh; within these four habitats, the differences in the risk of predation. It has been previously documented that crab predation is greatest in lower elevational areas where bivalve recruitment is higher (Low marsh and Creek Region). To understand juvenile recruitment of the ribbed mussel, Geukensia demissa, in these different habitats in the salt marsh, laboratory and field experiments were performed. Laboratory experiments were used to assess whether the ribbed mussel have different morphological defenses against predators. Juvenile ribbed mussel were exposed to cues from the crab predator, Hemigrapsus sanguineus, to assess whether chemical cues from crabs could induce defensive morphologies, or phenotypic plasticity. The shells of mussels exposed to chemical cues from predators and control animals were digitally analyzed (using ImagePro), to assess if there were any changes in shell morphology due to exposure to crabs. Field experiments were performed to assess mussel morphology from different regions in the marsh where mussels were exposed to different levels of predation. Data were collected from 40 individuals from four different habitats included: shell mass, shell length, shell width, shell thickness, and soft tissue mass. "
But damnation to the financial charlatans that got her and millions like her into the economic scrapheap in the first place.
There's more detail here.
http://blogs.laweekly.com/informer/2012/01/khadijah_baseer_burbank_homele.php
'A homeless woman that Burbank police say often hangs around the local McDonalds allegedly took the begging game to new lows last Wednesday...
'"She was offering BJs" for Chicken McNuggets, says Lieutenant John Dilibert, who immediately knew why we were calling. He was baffled by the insane amount of press and attention that the week-old citation has garnered in the last 24 hours.
'Khadijah Baseer, 31, was reportedly going car to car, asking drive-thru customers if they'd buy her some McNuggets in exchange for a blowjob. "She used to go out there in the past asking for money, but this time..."'
I have no idea of her backstory at all, but it is sad; it sounds like she's starving.
I have a soft spot for Bernie Sanders. He ain't no corporate whore. But any politician who is honest enough to be a "Socialist" AND get elected Senator in the US of A deserves some respect. Matt Taibbi on the man:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/bernie-sanders-puts-barack-obama-to-shame-20101215
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