Posts by Deetal

Hefty physicist: Global warming is 'pseudoscientific fraud'

The best you can do?

Just who is this guy anyway, and why is El Reg giving him a platform? What are the criteria for dubbing someone "hefty" and "heavyweight?"? All I can find on him apart from his academic position (which has nothing to do with climateology) is page after page of stuff about his letter of "resignation" - I can't even find what position he actually had, if any, in the society he resigned from. It doesn't sound to me like this bloke is more of an expert on climate change than anyone else. Merely being a "boffin" doesn't count for anything, and if you ask me calling him "A heavyweight American boffin" is a tad generous, if not outright disingenuous. Amittedly I chose not to waste more than 5 minutes searching, so if anyone else wants to dig deeper, I'm sure we'd all be interested.

Ya know, If there were really a massive global academic conspiracy, I'd expect resignations of rather a higher calibre than some random dude quitting the APS.

Bromsgrove lass slapped with Boozbo

headline accuracy par for Sun

"Laura, 20, banned from boozing anywhere in UK"

and the subheading

"LOUT Laura Hall is the first person to be banned from buying or drinking booze ANYWHERE in the country"

Er, no. She's allowed to drink in private as long as someone else buys it for her.

Also, when did Scotland and Northern Ireland secede?

Microsoft under threat from Linux - it's official

Microsoft not with it still

"The Linux operating system, which is also derived from Unix..."

No. This is factually incorrect. Linux is no more "derived from Unix" than ReactOS is derived from Windows - it just aims for compatibility. The BSDs, on the other hand (of which Mac OSX is one), do in fact share code with Unix proper. Slipups like that don't send a particularly good message to astute investors - call me pedantic, but one would expect a company whose primary business is operating systems to know their stuff.

I also liked the "available without payment" bit - while you could cut them some slack as it is the only relevant part of the GPL to a financial filing, it would arguably seem to imply that Microsoft still doesn't really "get" open source. They still think of it in terms of cost vs no cost, when viral open source code is a rather bigger threat than just being free-as-in-beer.