Posts by mhenriday 1222 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Dec 2009
to his own satisfaction at least - what is safe and what is not, and that he has deemed the region within a radius of 20 km from the Fukushima Daiichi plant to be quite safe, I suggest that he be issued a white coverall and put to work in the teams attempting to deal with the disaster in situ. And do please put a stamp in his passport preventing him from visiting Chennai !...
Henri
«Your [Graham Bartlett's] argument relies on Assange's edited version of the video to try and prove your point. Yet in context,the chopper crew were acting in accordance of their RoE.» Just what is the «context» of which Mr Gumby, with his characteristic objectivity and freedom from bias, speaks ? He attempts to convince us that the version seen by Mr Bartlett and upon which the latter bases his comment was «edited» by Mr Assange, as if «editing» here should be taken to mean that the video had been manipulated to give a false picture of the events it portrays. My understanding, however, was that the 17'47" version of the video which Wikileaks released (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0) was indeed the raw footage taken by the Apache crew. Has Mr Gumby seen another version which demonstrates that this is not the case ? If so, perhaps he would be so kind as to provide us with a link ? While awaiting Mr Gumby's response, those interested can take a look at the AlJazeeraEnglish video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zok8yMxXEwk), on which both Julian Assange and a «military analyst», Ivan Eland, comment on what we see....
Henri
viewing it, I almost felt sorry for poor Mr Toner : defending the indefensible has ever been a delicate task and probably one far above Mr Toner's pay grade. Still, as a much younger man than P J Crowley, Mr Toner probably doesn't yet have his pile made, and given the current labour market in the US, he's probably grateful to have any job at all. So I suspect he will just keep soldiering on....
Henri
regarding speeds, costs, etc) cannot be allowed to pass without the appropriate quote from Henry David Thoreau :
«We are in great haste to build a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.»
Henri
I suggest that before coming to join us here, you prepare a contract of about the length and complexity of a typical EULA, which makes clear that responsibility for any misunderstanding concerning sexual activities or ruptured condoms, etc, etc, rests entirely with any hot leggy blond who takes an interest in you or invites you to overnight in her apartment and that your own interpretation of these and related events has legal priority. In the event such a blond person starts to talk to you, you would be advised to make signing the contract in triplicate a prerequisite for your own participation in the conversation and whatever events ensue. These precautions may, it is true, seem a bit excessive, but let me assure you, they can be necessary, in particular if your relation to the US government is not the best....
With regard to what is likely to happen to our present technical pre-eminence, foreigners can be forgiven for not being aware of the fact that ever since a Social Democratic government decided to communalise our schools in 1989, and a so-called «bourgeois» government went them one better three years later and introduced tax-financed charter schools, our ranking in, e g, the international PISA assessments has steadily declined. But there's no reason to despair - now that we have a former Army major as minister of education, things are bound to look up !...
Henri
that the firm access the BOINC site ; Google, however, does seem to have been aware of the latter even previously - note the following passage under the subheading Technical Specifications and Requirements on the web page which explains the Google Exacycle for Visiting Faculty Grant Program (http://research.google.com/university/exacycle_program.html) :
«Proposals that are ideal for Google Exacycle include, but are not limited to, research projects like Folding@Home, Rosetta@Home, various BOINC projects, and grid parameter sweeps. Other examples include large-scale genomic search and alignment, protein family modeling and sky survey image analysis.»
Always wise to do one's research before firing off a comment....
Henri
about the Reg or a Reg blogger celebrating a crime - as long as it is performed by one of the official «good guys». Compare the manner in which Reg blogs deal with Wikileaks and Julian Assange on the one hand, and with the current version of «War is Peace» while the US and lackeys like the UK and France bomb Libya under the guise of «protecting» the civilian population (which, of course, «our» kindly bombs, don't kill or maim) on the other. Crowley, for example, who hotly desires to see you mugged and beaten while he stands idly by, gloating, might want to consider a situation in which he himself was «protected» by being bombed. But then again, the Bell curve of empathy, like that of other qualities, tends to be skewed according to our political preferences and what we read/see/hear in the media. So can it go !...
Henri
of the whole speech, Ian, but this article from Time Magazine from 17 November 1941 (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,795595,00.html)seems to contain the gist. The words paraphrased in square brackets in the citation in question seem to have been «that man's»....
Henri
but perhaps you should have added that both Britain nor France were happy to acquiesce in allowing the Nazi machine to dismember Czechoslovakia (Agreement in München, 30 September 1938) or gobble up the rest in March a year later (it should be noted that the very same day that the München Dictate (as it was called in Czechoslovakia), Poland's Józef Beck demanded that the Czechs withdraw from the Zaolší region, which was occupied by Polish troops the very next day - a month later the Hugarian dictatorship also got into the act and annexed Czech territory). Why, then,did Britain and France decide to go to war when Poland was attacked on 1 September 1939, when they had been more than willing to sacrifice Czechoslovakia - a far more democratic state than junta-led (Sanacja) Poland ? The whole thrust of these two countries' foreign policy during the period was not to stop Germany, but rather to encourage that country to attack eastward and make war on what was regarded as the real enemy, the Soviet Union. The difference between 15 March 1939, when the remainder of Czechoslovakia was invaded by the German army, and 1 September 1939 was, of course, that in the meantime, a non-aggression pact between Germany and the Soviet Union had been signed on 23 August 1939, which made evident that the old policy had failed and that Germany would attack westward before it turned its attention to the East. If, during the period from 1933 - 1938, the governments of Britain and France had accepted the proposals on collective security for which the Soviet foreign minister Maxim Litvinov laboured so tirelessly, Germany could have been contained and the horrors of WW II avoided - but that was not the road that men like Arthur Neville Chamberlain or Édouard Daladier chose to take....
Henri
I've been considering starting a chain of schools designed to teach students to manufacture nuclear weapons in their spare time, in the hope that this useful knowledge will, as you say, be «passed around». However, I keep running into people of little faith, who point to such discouraging factors as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and other deal breakers. But given that these things are routinely ignored by both the governments that signed the treaty and those that didn't, I persist in my plans. Thanks so much for your encouragement !...
Henri
certain things are simply not done - e g, anything that might benefit consumers to the detriment of their corporate masters. Toyota committed a faux pas - but fortunately for the way the world works, had the good sense to cave when the error was brought to their attention....
Henri
espionage is called «counter-espionage», cyber espionage is called «counter-cyberespionage», terrorism is called «counter-terrorism», cyber terrorism is called «counter-cyberterrorism», etc, etc. Eric Arthur Blair, to whom we owe the insight that War is Peace - demonstrated daily in our «responsibility to protect» interventions throughout the world - would be proud !...
Henri
- and I find it difficult to believe that it originated with Microsoft, for in that case Ballmer & Co would surely have asked their pals at the USPO for a patent - it's a good one ; many of us who have a tendency to add add-on after add-on to our Firefox repertoire could indeed use a reminder that some of them may well be negatively affecting start-up times. But as several posters have noted above, the real issue is how long the browser, as compared to its competitors, takes to load pages. And I, too, would like to see a little gentle pressure from Mozilla on add-on developers to make their offerings compatible with FF 4.0 ; the only thing preventing me from making the latest Minefield (FF) 4.0 nightly build my default browser and sending FF 3.6.17pre out to pasture is the fact that I can't get my Delicious Bookmarks to work with the former....
Henri
as Mr Page will undoubtedly inform you, electrical power, batteries, etc, like GE nuclear power plants installed in Japan always work flawlessly - except when they don't. Even in that unfortunate event, however, the consequences of their failure are always far less severe than reported in the alarmist, fear-mongering press. By contributing to these fears, you risk imperilling the Jetsons future that our descendants might otherwise enjoy....
Henri
if people can't learn to cope mentally with actual powerful modern technologies more capable than fire and windmills and social networking – then we face a bleak, troublesome, mundane future indeed, one which will probably mean an end to human civilisation down the road rather than its long-term survival.»
Wow ! Talk about fearmongering ! If we don't believe Lewis Page's ignorant comments about how the Fukushima disaster - not perhaps for Mr Page himself, but, at a minimum, for those residing near the nuclear power station - was/is not a disaster at all, but rather a blessing in disguise, than its out with humanity ! Perhaps Mr Page could be enticed to re-enlist in the Royal Navy, there his capacity to make a fool of himself would not be noticed....
Henri
I performed a search (via Google) for «Brad Smith» (Wikipedia was no help, as its disambiguation list only provided two persons - a political scientist and a «Holocaust denier» - in addition to a plethora of sports figures) and finally found the following : https://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/bradsmith/ . Now I know....
it's hardly surprising that that country is being blamed for eavesdropping on Aussie parliamentarians. But given that the (dis?)information comes from the US, it does seem strange that nobody has mentioned Echelon (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Echelon_%28signals_intelligence%29), which listens to us all. But then again, the Aussie government is an active participant in this particular case of eavesdropping....
Henri
that we who post here live in places like the US or the UK or - as I do - in Sweden - where no laws that permit government spying on citizens are on the books ; or if they are, they are only employed to protect us peaceful citizens from terrorists, spies, people who without permission share copyrighted material, and other such dangers to the health of the state....
Henri
to test FF 4.0, Chromium 12.0.700, and Opera 11.01 on an older 64-bit Ubuntu 10.10 machine, and to my surprise, FF 4.0 was by far the fastest - 444,6ms +/- 2,5 %, as compared to 569,6ms +/- 2,5 % and 584,2ms +/- 7,0 %, respectively, for the other two browsers. (For some reason, Microsoft doesn't permit me to use IE9 on Ubuntu, which is hardly surprising, as I'm not allowed to use it on Windows XP, either.) Only one benchmark, but it does indicate that FF is now up there with the leaders as regards speed. Now if only some kind soul would update the Delicious-bookmarks add-on to make it compatible with FF 4.0 - otherwise I'm going to have to stick with 3.6.16pre as my default browser....
Henri
when collaborating on documents, far easier than sending new draughts backwards and forwards. The greatest problem I've had with Google Docs is that in converts all footnotes to endnotes, which means that the final version has to be reformatted in a word processor like OpenOffice/LibreOffice. Haven't yet had occasion to try the new discussion system, but from what Cade writes, it seems like a step forward. Telephone conversations can indeed be helpful in straightening out problems, but are not always practicable with multiple collaborators working in widely different time zones....
Henri
with information about Australian citizens ? Mr Assange seems to have forgotten just who is running the Empire of which Australia constitutes a part (that, of course, is why, despite geography, Australia is said to be a part of the «West»)....
Henri
But alas, to more adequately describe reality, the equation would have to read :
Codecs = mathematics (mathematical algorithms) and therefore should not be patentable....
At present, just about everything seems patentable that a sufficiently well-paid team of patent lawyers deems patentable. Splendid way to keep control of innovation in the hands of those to whom it belongs by natural right, i e, those with bags of money....
Henri
And besides, while a machine can easily be programmed to solve the problem itself, it (presumably) can't resolve the captcha, as it can't process the image - which, after all, is the point of a catcha. But I do agree with Mike 140, why is the problem expressed as a partial derivative ? Or is that part of the joke ?...
Henri
who spent a great deal of his professional life treating forensic patients, I can only agree with Anonymous Coward's description above of the treatment of Mr Manning as «torture», designed to ensure a mental breakdown before he is brought to trial within what is called «the military justice system». «Requesting» an investigation (I hope I may be pardoned for suspecting that an investigation has been going on long before one was «requested») into an alleged documentation campaign against two employees of the US «Defense» (read «War») Department is a transparent attempt to turn (two of) the perpetrators of this ongoing and most deliberate violation of human rights into «victims» of that great Pentagon bugaboo - «asymmetric warfare». Would that the warfare between Anonymous and the Pentagon were a bit more symmetric and that the former possessed a fraction of the resources vouchsafed the latter !...
Henri
in using Japanese on an Ubuntu machine ? I have occasion to use both Chinese and Japanese on my 64-bit Ubuntu 10.10 box, and find that SCIM provides me with the features I need (others have recommended IBus, but I have no personal experience with that input system)....
Henri
into the market. Whether they come from China or Norway or Brazil is a secondary matter ; what's important is that they can produce good products at reasonable costs, thereby putting pressure on the prices that our present batch of chip manufacturers see fit to vouchsafe us. As to the Chinese capacity for innovation, it might be wise to remember that willy-nilly, one pays homage to that capacity every time one uses a paper product rather than one's thumb to wipe oneself after defecation....
Henri
«We'll fight the government if we need to fight the government. I think we've proven ourselves over time. Look at the China incident.» Shouldn't that quotation from M Girouard have been amended to read «We'll fight the Chinese government - with the help of Ms Clinton and the US State Department - if we need to fight the Chinese government. I think we've proven ourselves over time. Look at the China incident.» ? Myself I haven't noticed too many incidents lately in which Google demonstrated its independence from the US government. As M Girouard himself admits «That's not to say that a National Security Letter could be issued and we could be forced to turnover data without notifying you». That being said, any company located in the US is bound to obey US law, just as any company with activity in China is bound to obey Chinese law. But it would be seemly if representatives for Google could refrain from ostentatiously displaying anti-government credentials which, when examined closely, are found to be mostly vapourware....
Henri
mathematical algorithms was brought to an end ? Would requiring all users of mathematical analysis to pay for a licence to Brook Taylor Limited have encouraged or discouraged discovery in both that area of human endeavour or, say, physics ? I may be naive, but I submit that the latter is obviously the case. However, for some strange reason, I very much doubt that the US Patent Office will become the agent of necessary change in its own practices....
Henri
of the European Economic and Social Committee, let us hope that its statement helps to prevent what would no doubt prove the extremely profitable (for those making the devices and those charged with those«security operations» which always seem to leave us progressively less secure) introduction of body scanners in the EU. But I'm not sanguine ; here in Europe as well as in the United States, lobbyists and their money nearly always trump the public interest....
Henri
For some strange reason, I find it difficult to touch upon any significant reserves of sympathy for organisations like HBGary - or, for that matter, the CIA, MI6, SÄPO, et cetera ad nauseam - and those who employ them, whether companies or governments. Up the kiddies !...
Henri
but given that Den Norske Nobelkomite is safely in the hands of people like Thorbjørn Jagland, whose primary concern is Norway's relation to the USA, the chances that WikiLeaks or Bradley Manning will be awarded the prize are minimal. And given that people like Heinz Alfred Kissinger, Barack Hussein Obama, Shimon Peres, Yitzhak Rabin, Joseph Austen Chamberlain, Theodore Roosevelt, who have not always been known for their contributions to peace (unless, of course, the definition placed in the mouth of Calgacus by Gaius Cornelius Tacitus - «ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant» - is generally accepted) have been awarded the prize, perhaps WikiLeaks and Manning would prefer other company. Still, there have been worthy laureates, like Linus Carl Pauling, Martin Luther King Jr, Willy Brandt, Rigoberta Menchú Tum, Kim Dae Jung, et al, so our prospective laureates could stand on that side of the room (to the degree that they haven't been placed in solitary confinement). But as I said, with Thorbjørn running the show, it will never happen....
Hope I'm proved wrong !...
Henri
to report on Julian Assange without insisting on inserting his personal feelings with regard to Mr Assange into the article ? Mr Metz's view of Mr Assange is, by this time, well known to Reg readers, and allegations of «shameless self-promotion and empty hype» are entirely irrelevant to the Sydney Peace Foundation's decision to award Mr Assange its gold medal for peace with Justice. Perhaps Mr Metz's continual carping is motivated by a feeling that he himself is lagging in the «shameless self-promotion and empty hype» race ?...
Henri
on what it is you dislike about Gmail, apart from your contention that «it appears most useful to those of our employees who don't actually do any real work». In what way is Google responsible for this «problem» - if it exists at all - rather than the leadership of the organisation - if it exists - for which these «employees» - if, indeed there are any - work ? Perhaps it is more than «the entire Google Docs / Gmail mess» which «needs a lot more than an 'update'» ?...
Henri
I read «Simon 11»'s posting as a criticism of WikiLeaks - and Julian Assange - for not contributing more (15000USD hardly constitutes «lack of action» in my book, but perhaps you have made better career choices than I) to the Bradley Manning defence fund. From this, I drew the conclusion that «Simon 11» - and other's posting similar criticisms - believe that generously contributing to the defence fund is a virtuous thing to do - a notion, by the way, that «Simon 11» could easily have dispelled by himself (?) posting a reply, instead of allowing a (still more) anonymous coward to do so - and therefore asked what his (?) own actions in that respect had been. Supporting - or not supporting, as the case may be - Bradley Manning in the situation in which he finds himself is one thing, and entirely up to the person concerned, but hypocrisy is quite another....
Henri
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