Posts by JP19

SpaceShipOne man, Nobel boffins: Don't panic on global warming

16 Scientists were really dumb enough to sign this?

"The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't."

This Climategate scandal lack of warming referred to lack of warming in recent tree ring derived temperature records which didn't match the warming in recent instrumented records. One or the other has to be wrong. If it is the tree rings it casts doubt on historical tree ring derived records required for all the 'unprecedented warming' claims, if it is the instruments it casts doubt on man's ability to measure global temperature at all and the claimed recent warming.

They chose to pretend the problem didn't exist and ignored recent tree ring derived records which was a scandal but not an indication they thought there had been no recent warming.

UK sight-loss charity sues BMI

Upvote from me

The world doesn't owe the disabled.

There is nothing wrong with being nice and taking reasonable steps to accommodate the disabled because of it. I don't take kindly to being forced to be nice under threat of prosecution. Such legislation is destroying our society and I have no respect for people and organisations using it to their advantage.

Shaming people and organisations who are not nice is fine, prosecuting them isn't.

Google finally admits it wants to OWN YOU

FF plugin to extract the real URL

A plugin called optimized google or something like that is supposed to do it, didn't work when I tried it.

The link re-writing tracking shit seems to be a moving target. I tried and failed to reliably remove the link re-writing with proxomitron filters (but I barely know what I am doing).

So now I mostly use google through scroogle (when google hasn't blocked them) and Bing FFS.

Paramount opens Cloud-based movie shop

persuade freetards

Maybe freetards would be more persuaded by not having a slow shit website which doesn't show anything being available (did offer me a "Server Error" once).

Not charging 4 quid more for a DRM infested download than Play wants to deliver a Blu-ray to my door might help too.

Rumoured 'GarageBand for e-books' to bulldoze textbook biz

not into physically putting ink on paper

If it costs so little to manufacture and distribute printed books why isn't the world already flooded with them authored by the people who this new apple software is targeted at?

Flog secondhand MP3s at your peril - law guru

Why shouldn't the copyright holder get paid for the work they have put into the creation!

Good question, and I'll ask why should they?

The answer is because if they didn't get paid something far fewer of them would do the work and we the 'consumers' wouldn't have much to listen to, watch or read.

And so we have copyright, not for the benefit of artists and producers but for the benefit of rest of us who want to have something to consume. The problem is copyright has been so distorted by vested interests and thick or bought politicians it is barely recognizable as something serving its original purpose.

'Mobiles bake men's balls' bog ad is cobblers - new ruling

When it comes to smoking, obesity, salt, speed, that 5 a day drivel etc lying is fine.

Tell lies which piss off Telcos and the ASA will be on your case in a flash.

Solar installations skyrocket in Oz

Solar is shit

Yet again we can compare with a knackered 40 year old nuke Hinkley B which produced 6.4TWh last year.

Installation on 8% of Australian roof tops produced 680GWh so it would need solar PV on 75% of Australian roof tops to replace one small old knackered nuke, except of course it wouldn't replace one because solar only produces power during the day when it is sunny.

Skyrim update makes dragons FLY BACKWARDS

par for the course

Buggy game released before it was ready gets buggy patch released before it was ready.

Sadly nothing new here - move along.

'Leccy car plug map keeps greenies juiced up

ultra low carbon cars

FFS they are not low carbon now and won't be for decades (if ever).

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Skyrim is definitely one reason to own a PC

Lol. Now the game has been out a few days most people have spent longer playing it than they spent designing the PC user interface. This is a game you could play for hundreds of hours, the thought of enduring the user interface for hundreds of hours is so depressing.

The game and its predecessors always felt to me like they were designed by lots of people doing their own thing creating bits of the world. Sadly the PC user interface seems to have been designed the same way.

World of Warcraft subscriptions slip

Free to Play

There are no (non-trivial) free to play games, someone pays or they go bust. The mechanisms used to induce some to pay generally make the games suck.

Monthly subscription only works for the biggest and best. If you are going to pay 15 bucks a month for one game you are going to pick the biggest and best game going and probably play the hell out of it because you already paid for it. That is why WoW dominates and all the also-rans are folding or moving to (not really)free to play models.

Sorry state of affairs really. I would like to see pay-as-you-play models, it works for mobiles. Giving away plenty of free 'minutes' removes any barrier to entry and makes it free to play a little and cheap to play a lot because more players are paying and you don't need sucky mechanisms to induce payment.

Cheap gas is a 'crisis' for Greens, but not for us

that's up to them

No it isn't. It is our ground and our gas underneath it so what happens to it is up to us.

All dead dino fuels are a limited resource and we should make the best use of them. Gas is the only fuel that fits in the huge existing network of pipes feeding our homes and buildings. It can also be liquefied for use in vehicles.

The last thing we should do (or have done) with this relatively clean portable and easily stored energy is piss it away in fixed power stations inefficiently turning it into a different form of clean portable and very expensive to store energy.

Greens threaten to sue over solar power cash slash

15 years rather than 25

Wow, you would be happy if we were forced to buy your electricity when we don't want it at more than 4 times the price of anyone else's electricity for only 15 years so you don't have to pay for your folly.

How generous of you.

Smart meters: Nothing can possibly go wrong, says gov

why the government...

Because to technically illiterate eco tossers which most politicians are the idea of forcing us to install personal real-time energy guilt meters at our own expense is irresistible.

Solar power boom 'unsustainable', says Gov

as a decent power station

No that's how much power they produce when they are new and clean and for a few hours a day during the summer.

A typical 3kW panel installation on a roof in the UK might produce 2700 kWh annually. Hinkley B is a knackered 40 year old nuke currently running at 70% of design output and produced 6.4TWh last year.

So you would need 2400000 not 92000 domestic PV installations to replace one knackered old nuke and they wouldn't replace it anyway because they only generate power sometimes, during the day and mostly in summer.

Father-of-three attacked teen after Call of Duty jibes

And they wonder why they rioted and looted

Gobby kid deserves slap, Gobby kid gets slap, slapper gets 16 weeks (suspended) in pokey.

Gobby kid learns he can do whatever he likes, behaves like a shit till one day he is old enough for the state to put him in pokey for his actions which comes as a big surprise.

Massive study concludes: 'Global warming is real'

The findings so far provide validation for Phil Jones says the BBC

The report confirms that Phil Jones's tree ring derived temperature records do not match recent temperature records from other sources. A mismatch he can't explain and best he ignored, at worst tried to conceal.

It confirms his historical tree ring derived temperature records are unreliable and the BBC calls it validation - you couldn't make it up.

Viacom appeals dismissal of $1bn YouTube lawsuit

this kind of money?

What kind of money?

Huge bandwidth and high storage costs and not much advertising, has youtube made any money yet?

Energy minister gives grudging nuke endorsement

more gas than we know what to do with

What we should do with gas is not piss it away producing electricity.

We should save it for the pipes already feeding most of our homes and use more of it to power vehicles instead of idiotic batteries.

Future wars will be over water not fuel, warns Intel sage

We are supposed to put bricks in our loo cisterns because.....

In the UK only around 2300 gallons of water fall from the sky per person per day.

There is no shortage of water around here, just a shortage of will to build infrastructure to collect, store, and deliver it.

Win 8 haters are just scared of change, say MS bosses

Classic Shell

I find Classic Shell (http://classicshell.sourceforge.net/) to be rock solid and function exactly as I would expect.

Installing it was the best thing I did to Win 7.

Facebook wannabe rioters cop large helpings of porridge

Don't do that again

Trouble is increasingly over the last two decades no one has been telling kids not to do that (or anything else) in the first place.

I can forgive kids for growing up thinking they can do anything they like and if anything bad happens it will be someone else's fault for allowing it.

The state nurtured false self esteem and sense of entitlement in them and now is almost bragging about how much they are going to punish them for crossing some line they never told them about.

I would rather see 300 Labour politicians in jail than the rioters and the Tories are barely better.

HMRC online tax systems slammed by Private Forum for Biz

actually tried to help the tax-paying

It is going to take a long time to undo NuLabs expansion of the state and attitude adjustment. They and their servant still think we are here to serve them not the other way round.

NHS, local councils. HMRC all the same.

The other day I needed to identify which of several trees are protected by preservation orders. The orders are public documents and the public have a right to see them. After waiting 30 minutes on the phone I get to talk to a bloke who is looking at the order on his screen but can't describe it well enough. I ask can you email or fax just the map to me? No. I have to call 'customer' services to give them 24 hours notice of my wish to view the document and they will make it available for viewing at their offices and apparently I can pay a quid a page to make a photocopy, or hearing a tip from someone else they won't stop me photographing it if I take a camera with me.

So I'll waste a couple of hours and a gallon of petrol because they won't email a couple of pages of an already comupterised document. Imagine a company providing that kind of service - they would be out of business in weeks. .

'There's too much climate change denial on the BBC'

theories which match the data

But the only data we have is historical and a bit rubbish because we are left with what little remains and that data is the product of many 'theories' and there is no way to attribute it between them. We can't conduct useful experiments to obtain more or more relevant data because they need to be the size of the planet and would take decades if not centuries to complete.

So there is sod all data to match theories for them to become accepted and we are not going to get more data in a hurry and still won't be able to attribute it to particular theories.

The quality (the level of confidence with which it can be used to predict the future) of a theory does not depend on the absence of data which disproves it, it depends of the quantity and nature of data which has failed to disprove it.

If you understood scientific method you would not accuse someone who observes the quantity and nature of data failing to disprove AGW theory is lacking of taking an anti-science position.

Gratz on the slimy creationist quip, that's a new one.

Sunday Times accused of blagging Gordon Brown's records

@Graham Marsden - their readers to "vote with their pockets" is nonsense becuase...

You know best and the opinion of those scummy people who read the 'tabloids' is worthless.

Tell them that to their face and you would be told to eff off or worse. How sweet it must be to be able to break their toys from a safe distance hiding behind a smoke screen of offence taken on behalf of a handful of politicians, celebs, and poor poor Millie's family.

Of all things about this story that make me want to puke what the NotW hacks did is far from the top of the list.

How many extensions do you need

on your ladder to mount that high horse?

I read NotW was the biggest selling British newspaper so obviously plenty of public were interested in their stories however they got hold of them.

I personally don't give a rats arse about what is wrong with the prime minister's kid, I equally don't give a rats arse about anyone else knowing it.

We absolutely need a free press and investigative journalism. The press deserve a slap on the wrist for what they did the beheading we got and petit-bourgeois lynch mob screaming for the rest of them.

Shame the NotW folded like a wet tissue, I would have like to see them ask their readers to vote with their pockets, then we might have seen what real public rather than politician/media opinion is.

Coulson arrested

I'd be a lot more excited about this story if...

the government didn't all ready want to keep records of all my communications and couldn't already 'hack' them on a whim.

If you had to choose would you rather have NotW rummaging in your inbox or the government?

Google: Go public on Profiles or we'll delete you

no compunction about giving out their info

Nope your average person does care about giving out their info. Your average facebook using moron doesn't, or does but doesn't understand what they are doing, or does and is giving out false information anyway.

Opting out of a network full or morons is no great loss to me.

Strangely I did provide some personal information to a network the other day in exchange for the chance of a large financial gain (gain divided by chance about 50 quid). Win or loose I will be deleting the account and creating a new false one.

Chinese coal blamed for global warming er... cooling

level of scientific understanding was low

Theories are incredibly useful for predicting what will happen in the future. A theory can not be proven, a theory can only be tested and fail to be dis-proven. The more a theory is tested and fails to be dis-proved the more reliably (and so useful) we consider it to be for predicting the future.

That is what science is, formulating theories and trying to test and dis-prove them.

The trouble with global climate is there are hundreds (if not thousands) or theories required to predict it and we can't properly test any of them. We can't test them because they require planet sized experiments and results of a test may not be available for generations. All we can do is make observations of the past which is really low quality testing because little data remains and there is no accurate way of attributing that data to one theory or another.

So yes the level of scientific understanding is very low and so the reliability of future climate predictions is also very low. It doesn't matter how much money you throw at it (and plenty is being thrown) that level isn't going to increase much any time soon because the only improvement we have is better observation of the present which will eventually give us better quality data from the past.

While other people...

relish something big, scary, complex, and possibly calamitous because it gives them a new windmill to tilt at and they will grasp every straw, every gap, every scientific disagreement, every counter argument no matter how specious as a reason to claim their windmill and so their crusade against it is bigger and more important.

Look at me I'm campaigning to save the entire planet, look at you trying to destroy the entire planet, Gosh I feel good about myself and so much superior to you.

Sadly the world has far too many of these Don Quixote fuckwits.

New anti-corruption offences come into force today

How much will this cost

How much will this political 'look how much holier than thou we are' willy waving cost us in lost business and trade?

If you can't do business in some countries without back handers unless that country is ours it is not our problem.

90% of visitors declined ICO website's opt-out cookie

Don't need no stinkeen cookies

And in other news Tescos new online banking service uses browser fingerprinting tech from arcot without telling you never mind asking for permission.

Solar panel selling scam shown up by sting

I am simply a householder

Installing PV and taking advantage of the ridiculous feed in tariffs makes you a jerk. The same way that finding a wallet in the street and pocketing it would make you a jerk.

Laws made by idiot politicians which force people to have holes in their pockets so wallets fall out for jerks to pick up is no excuse.

tackle the non-financial barriers

You know when they say 'tackle' they are talking shit.

The non-financial barriers to microgeneration are that is mostly crap and doesn't work. How are they going to 'tackle' that?

I am reminded of an article by some Scottish bint politician moaning about how difficult it was to get real facts and figures about costs, performance and savings of microgeneration schemes and how that problem needed to be 'tackled'. Well given true costs, performance and savings figures for the majority of microgeneration schemes no one in their right mind would install one, not without huge subsidies anyway (mental note - Cameron has/had a windmill on his house).

It takes about 1.9 million 'micro' PV installations costing 10-15k each to replace one small old knackered nuke and they won't replace it anyway because they only produce power during the day and mostly the summer.

"the Coalition’s intention to become the greenest Government ever"

We are paying through the nose for a political willy waving competition. The tossers should wear their own hair vests instead of forcing us to.

UK taxpayer 'fleeced' in spectrum selloff windfall

given away?

Who owns the air above your head containing the spectrum?

What a jolly clever revenue generating wheeze it was taking the (3G) spectrum that belonged to us and selling it at outrageous prices to companies who recover their costs by charging us to use what was already ours.

Spectrum use needs to be managed and it should be for the benefit of the owners (us). Selling to the highest bidder ensured the highest level of stealth taxation.

All spectrum should have been given away with sufficient controls to ensure it is put to good use and that we get a good deal from the companies providing services in it.

WTF are... connected appliances?

room for internet connected appliances

If I am going to pay money for extra hardware in an appliance I would rather it be spent on making the appliance more reliable and durable than on a facility to phone home when it is broken.

Four jailed for million-pound abuse images ring

Am I reading The Register or the Sun?

Since when is usenet a ring?

At first sight they ran a small subscription usenet service.

When you can get 6 months for possession of a dozen kiddy porn images 33 month sentences don't indicate they were any kind of peedyfile child abusing ringleaders. 2.2 million turnover in 7 years is less than an average banker's bonus FFS.

Apart from not carrying a set of newsgroups rather arbitrarily selected by name does any usenet provider monitor and censor what they carry?

If they carried any non-peered newsgroups containing kiddy porn then they might have a bit more to answer for.

Maybe the Reg could do some investigative journalism instead of regurgitating crap about rings and light dimming servers.

Renault readies sub-£7000 e-car for Blighty

The problem with EVs

I have said all along the problem with electric vehicles is batteries are crap and expensive.

Here we have a demonstration, 32p a mile for a battery crap enough to take an overgrown roller skate 60 miles.

Give the Met Office £10m, says Transport Committee

Save £9999999.99

Giving them a penny to toss would produce the same accuracy improvement in long-term forecasting.

Official: Microsoft buys Skype for $8.5bn

correction

provide any ->valid<- personal information.

madness

We use Skype to video chat with a few friends.

Apart from an IP address none of us have provided any personal information or paid Skype a penny. If that is forced to change it will be ditched instantly.

So what is the best replacement?

H2O water-powered shower radio

just lol

Cost 35 quid, generates at best 280mW while showering.

How long will it take to generate 35 quids worth of mains electricity? About 140 years of continuous operation.

During a 10 minute shower it would save you in the order of 0.0005 pence worth of mains electricity.

Wind power: Even worse than you thought

The problem today is...

The world is fully of technically illiterate morons who don't know they are technically illiterate morons, probably because nowadays no one is allowed to tell you you are thick for fear of damaging your self esteem.

Micro generations schemes are mostly so incredibly crap that anyone with a clue would not give them a second thought. The batteries required to make solar electrical power a viable 24 (never mind the /7 to cover overcast spells and the winter) source cost more than the electricity they can charge and discharge in their lifetime. Just the batteries required to replace one nuke with solar micro generation bollocks will cost 7 or 8 times more than the nuke.

Microgeneration windmills are crap, it takes around 15 million of them to replace one nuke, and tjhey don't produce power when you want it, and nukes last 40 years while you will be lucky to get a 2 year guarantee on your new micro windmill, and far more people will be killed erecting them and when they start falling to bits and falling down than a nuke will ever kill.

Time-shifting sunlight for street lighting - just lol. An attractive idea only when you are utterly clueless about the economics of what is required to achieve it.

GIVING UP BOOZE CAUSES CANCER - shock study

Been here before

Cancer Research UK came up with similar drivel a year or two ago which the media regurgitated without question as usual.

Women who (claimed) to drink less than one unit of alcohol a week were more likely to get cancer than women who drank up to 7 units a week and above 7 the risk increased again (or something along those lines). The reality is the study didn't find anything statistically significant and they chose to claim the noise they published was worth more than the paper it was printed on. Anyone with a clue would know that the contradictory dose relationship indicates what little correlation there was was not causal.

e-Borders snares 2,800 possible crims, 5 tons of baccy

help keep our country safe

I think the country would be safer if they let the criminals, rapists, etc leave. Wonder what proportion were arrested coming rather than going? They didn't manage to nab one terrorist either - oh dear.

And why are they claiming to have helped seize drugs and baccy 4 years before the scheme existed?

Journalistic screw up or are they that desperate to make the scheme look useful?

Microsoft wraps Windows 8 in Ribbon UI?

Typical

Looks like Win 8 is going to be another ME/Vista.

I only just stumbled across ClassicShell to replace the f**k awful Win 7 start menu and fix some of Explorer's horridness.

Australians can’t read or count

Just another example...

... as we've seen recently in the reports coming from Japan - the media is only too happy latch on to vague or irrelevant statistics - meanwhile the real news is sidelined ( remember those hundreds of thousands of tsunami victims? whatever happened to them? )

Why US antitrust regulators should probe Google search

Duh

If they need to do this, then they Definitely need to do the ATT/T-mobile acquisition!

Fukushima's toxic legacy: Ignorance and fear

On "Natural" radiation......

I'll put Radiation Damage in the words of one of the "fathers of the Atomic Bomb" ( and Professor Emeritus ) who I've interviewed....... "When the level's of Radiation exceed those of Natural Background sources, then it starts to become a problem".

How dangerous depends on ( 4 ) things......MASS ( size of radiation source ), TIME ( How long were you exposed to that mass ), DISTANCE ( How far away were you from that mass ), SHIELDING ( What type of shielding was there between you and the mass - example, Clothing, Lead, Wood, etc. ). Even a small source of radiation inhaled or ingested for say, 15-20 years WILL cause DNA damage, it's this DNA damage that will lead to cancers down the road in time. Here in the U.S. we use R.E.M.'s ( Radation dose Equivilent to Man ) to take into account all those factors. We hate to use the Seivert scales over here because they don't go low enough to measure radiation. Our background radiation in the U.S. is around 10-15 microREM due to the fallout from the Nevada tests during the 1950-80's.

So the bottom line.......radiation exposures above natural background sources WILL cause cancers, it's just not certain how long, unless you know the ( 4 ) items mentioned above, then you can calculate it.