Posts by Mark S 1

Massive global cooling process discovered as Paris climate deal looms

More straw-clutching spin from climate truther Lewis Page.

Vanished global warming may not return – UK Met Office

Re: Rubbish

"drop by the Reg to read IT articles and BOFH stories" doesn't exclude reading other articles once there, codejunky. Do try to think outside of your very narrow box, if you can.

Rubbish

Speaking as a professional geoscientist with (non-research & non-work) interests in climate change, I drop by the Reg to read IT articles and BOFH stories, not for crap spin from a global warming fake skeptic.

The Glorious Resolution: Feast your eyes on 5 HiDPI laptops

Re: No mention of the Lenovo Y50

Wish I had waited. I purchased a Dell Precision M4700 last year and while it's OK the Y50 as equipped above blows it away in almost every measure (apart from 32 GB of RAM in the M4700, used rarely for very specific applications), and does so for than half the price I paid while looking much better to boot.

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

Good way to put stereotypes to rest, Cletus...

So rather than publicly scolding the spoiled and bratty adolescent and, say, doing a clean install of Windows and grounding her, he destroys a laptop? Bright lad. Wonder how the family dynamics are working out.

My own thought is that shooting the laptop and posting the video is on one end of a scale that (as one proceeds along the controlling insanity scale) progresses to shooting a family pet and culminates with shooting the disrespectful child.

And I have teenage daughters and own firearms myself, by the way.

Bug in Flash Player allowed Mac webcam spying

Umm...

The Flash player settings manager keeps website and global privacy setting data for individual computers on Adobe servers?

Well, that's a little disconcerting, to say the least.

Italian toads predicted L'Aquila earthquake

Better to stick to what you know...

I realize biologists may not <always> be held to the same quantitative standards as physicists and geophysicists, but really, extreme caution is warranted when extrapolating outside one's area of expertise.

For decades now, geophysicists have carefully examined radon gas emissions, geomagnetic and geoelectric fields, strain rates, stress measurements, and microseismic records before and after many significant earthquakes. The consensus at this point is that there are NO statistically significant recognizable precursors in the short term (days to months) before large earthquakes.

The non-deterministic nature of earthquake triggering mechanisms makes this a reasonable conclusion. Stress builds up over many years and <will> be released. However the precise location and timing of the main stress release is subject to many complex factors, and is likely to remain unpredictable.

So odd behaviour of a single toad colony 74 km away from the L'Aquila epicentre? Nice try, but no.

NZ internet filter goes live - gov forgets to tell public

It's the basic concept that's wrong...

Yes, sure, some internet content is loathsome, potentially harmful, illegal, etc. No argument, but I must have missed the part where the government of a representative democracy has shown this to have actually caused serious harm to its citizenry.

To let a government, any government, acquire the ability to look over our shoulders to see what we're reading, and pro-actively and secretly block off sites of its choice, is not what happens in countries whose rulers hold a basic respect for its citizens, their intelligence, rights and freedoms. Does anyone imagine that the list of blacklisted sites and topics will become shorter with time? Give anyone unchecked power and it WILL be abused.

Dirty, dirty PCs: The X-rated picture guide

Solution?

Fanless.

VelociRaptor users bitten by false error bug

untitled

First Seagate, now WD. Is it really that hard to 1) admit that there is a firmware problem as reports from customers come in and 2) get a usable fix out to those customers in a timely and clear manner?

Not asking for miracles here, but I'd rather have reliable storage than 1 GB 2.5" and 2 GB 3.5" drives that I can't trust.

Audi's R8 goes all-electric

re: lovely lithium

Lithium is a light metal, and makes up only 3.7 wt% of the new lithium iron phosphate compound that may displace Li-ion (lithium cobalt oxide) batteries due to cost and safety considerations.

Assuming that LFP makes up 75% of a battery pack by weight, a 500 kg battery (which seems a bit on the heavy side) would require 14 kg of lithium. Presumably such battery packs will be designed from the start with recycling in mind.

So not quite so critical as the 100 kg per car, but good times for anyone owning a lithium deposit I suppose.

Brain-jacking fungus turns living victims into 'zombies'

@Gross

First carpenter ants, next human carpenters, then the rest of us. Maybe a high level of alcohol in the bloodstream confers immunity.