Posts by Matt Bryant 9690 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2007
".....Primitives who based their beliefs not on science but, rather, on what made them feel good....." A perfect description of your average AGW bleater. Indeed, it's so good I would suggest you please also do a description of those scientists that deliberately "sex-up" their AGW data.
"By that logic 100% consensus wouldn't be credible to you because you....." I would refer you back to the previous and since discredited scientific theorems mentioned - that the atom was the smallest possible building block of matter; that the Sun orbited the Earth; which replaced the discredited notion the Earth was flat - all of which had 100% consensus amongst the scientists of their respective days.
".....You're obviously not understanding how this science actually works...." I think it is more of a case that you have found a belief that lines up neatly with your sociopolitical views, and you therefore do not want to understand how science actually works (or doesn't).
"...... There's nothing quasi-religious about increased flooding....." Please don't be so stupid. Flooding predates man's existence, the worst cases including the creation of the Mediterranean Sea, long before man got beyond the campfire stage. If you are referring in particular to flooding in the UK, that to a large extent is due to building on floodplains and not dredging waterways as we should. I would suggest you try reading more than the Al Gore Fanclub magazine.
Indeed. This is more Hockeystick "science" - using a flawed method to deliberately "prove" the desired result. Nothing exposes this more then the statement about the first step of the method, where they took biased members of his own team to do the first pass and found only ".....32.6 per cent endorsed AGW...."! They then made a second pass consisting of approaching the scientists that they believed had a preference for AGW and asked them "do you believe in AGW?" - that's like asking the Catholic Church to only talk to Bible printers and ask them if they believe in God. Result - massively skewed, predetermined result, seized on by the gullible to justify their position and browbeat anyone that dares to disagree.
".....after all if wiki leaks had taught us anything it is that authority can be trusted. .." What Dickileaks has taught most is that egocentric convicted e-criminals like A$$nut will happily dupe the paranoid into giving them their cash. There are however still some Faithful that still seem to believe in their Holy St Jules.
What a bunch of hypocrites! I thought it was a case of A$$nut's ego leading Wikileaks but now it seems they're all equally moronic. ".....The stock footage used has been heavily edited, in some places distorting what was said...." Oh, like Dickileaks has never edited video to distort a message? And as for them getting uppity over the implication A$$nut could be culpable of encouraging or actually directing Manning, if they're that upset tell them to bring a case for libel and see how that goes.
And as for their version of the "truth" - from Red Ken Loach, a council member and representative of the truly awful Respect Party? What a joke!
Tipping was not often used as most fighters could not stay in formation with a V1 long enough to place their wingtip under the very small wing of the V1. Apart from the Tempest the majority of Allied interceptors needed good fortune and a height advantage to dive into a firing position. The V1 was a very small target which meant the pilots had to close to very short range to guarantee a hit, and there was a considerable risk of the hit V1 exploding and damaging the attacking fighter, but this was still much preferred to the risk of colliding with a V1 whilst attempting tipping.
"I seem to remember that Hamburg and Dresden suffered a bit of "marshmallow roasting" from firestorms....." Whilst the Allies did do area bombing of German cities, they did have a strategic plan (daylight attacks on aircraft factories by the Yanks, RAF attacks on the German petrol and oil manufacturing and distribution system by night). After a rather inept attempt at attacking the British aircraft industries in 1940, the Germans made little attempt at strategic bombing as the Luftwaffe simply wasn't equipped for the task. Goring had ignored developing proper strategic bombers by concentrating on building a tactical airforce as quickly as possible. Instead, from late 1940 onwards, the Luftwaffe bombing effort did virtually nothing but "revenge" attacks aimed at civilians when not doing tactical support of the German land and naval forces. The V2 and V1 programs were simply extensions of that - too inaccurate to hit specific factories but good enough for shooting at cities. Which is why the Allies did not pursue similar programs - they realised the limits of the guidance technology and instead concentrated on better strategic bombing technologies (such as the Tallboy and the Bouncing bombs, HS2 radar, and Pathfinder Mosquitos). But of course, it's become popular amongst revisionists to simply bleat about the "horrors" of Dresden (or Tokyo) and ignore the campaign to reduce Germany's capability by destroying their transport infrastructure and POL system.
".....But if we had an educated people......" There is this liberal Western failing that seems to think all Islamists are poorly educated and have been "deceived", and that all we have to do is talk nicely to Islamists and they can all be convinced to be good little citizens. This flies in the face of evidence that not only are they deadset against any form of reasoning, but that many of them are not only well-educated but also lived comfortable lives before they decided they wanted to be jihadis (bin Laden, Civil Engineer and multi-millionaire from billionaire Saudi family; Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, Master Surgeon for the Egyptian Army, came from a well-off background; Abu Zubaydah, Computer Science grad, left Saudi by choice to "work" in the West Bank; Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, studied Mechanical Engineering in the States (!), came from a rich Kuwaiti background; Mohamed Atta, Engineer and Architect, was from a well-off family and his father was a lawyer, and was studying in Germany when he went off the rails; Anjem Choudry, former solictor, born in the UK and educated here). Whilst I'm sure the imams are not giving them a balanced view in their sermons, the jihadis CHOOSE to be jihadis despite their education and knowledge of the West, and that once they become so very, very few can overcome their Islamisation.
"....one sky fairy is no better than another sky fairy....." All for that, but with the added proivso that those that refuse to keep their skyfairy superiority views to themselves get locked up, and those that use their skyfairy beliefs to excuse violence be locked up for life in a loony bin. Works for Christian nutters as well as the Islamic variety. If people need religion as a crutch to get them through life then that's their business, just as long as they keep it their own business and don't start making demands on others.
"Why are you bringing number of reactors into discussion about number of centrifuges used in the cascades?....." They have one civilian reactor that uses 5% enriched fuel but is already fuelled, they have one tiny medical reactor that already has 50 years of fuel, yet they are running 9000 centrifuges in just one of their facilities and producing 20% enriched "fuel" - if the connection is stumping you then you really are wilfully and obstinately blind, and stupidly so. If the whole of Europe can make all their medical isotopes off one small reactor using low-enriched fuel then you tell me why Iran needs so many centrifuges unless it is for mass production of highly-enriched material for weapons? Oh, hold on a sec, that might actually require you to get a clue - unlikely!
".....1,000 IR-1 centrifuges, out of 9,000 deployed at Natanz....." Yeah, all for "medical isotopes"! Anyone still believing Iran is not racing for nuke weapons is simply too stupid for words. Europe produces all the medical isotopes it needs (and about a third of the World's annual supply) from a single reactor in Holland.
".....A bit like locking yourself in your room because someone threatened to lock you in your room." Wow, the denial is strong with this one! They closed down the PUBLIC wifi, nothing to do with the actual operation of the base. That's more like closing the office window and getting on with work whilst some idiot is throwing stinkbombs into your carpark - total non-event. Please go ask someone to lend you a clue.
Anonymous: "We're gonna hack you off teh internets!"
GITMO: "OH NOES!! Shut down all internet access, Keep the hackers out!"
Anonymous: ".... Well... that was easy... Who wants pizza?"
GITMO: "Have they gone back to watching kids' TV? Right, back to work!"
Another Anon failure which changed absolutely nothing, but you carry on bleating if it makes you feel better.
".....they should do is make it a proper POW camp....." Prisoner of war camps are for proper soldiers, not un-uniformed terrorists/freedom-fighters (delete as you see fit). Oh, didn't anyone tell them there were downsides to aymetric warfare?
It seems that nowadays winners have tanks, jetfighters AND legal blackholes.
"What they are doing to that kid is a fucking nightmare...." Yeah, they must have fed him some really nasty chemical cocktail to make him rap so badly! Oh, wait - he meant to sound like that!?!?!? Maybe they mean to charge him under some environmental statute for noise pollution.
".....Blair and crew were every bit as right wing...." Perfectly true, it is very obvious that Blair was not a die-hard Leftie for the simple fact he was electable, some of the Party having realised they needed to hide behind a veneer of Centralism if they ever wanted to get enough public appeal to get back into No. 10. But they've fixed that and let control of Labour fall back into the hands of the unions, and their puppet Ed will ensure they remain unelectable for a good many years. Enjoy!
In the meantime, anyone thinking about using an off-the-shelf encryption tool might want to consider a simple fact - The Man (as you no doubt refer to the authorities in your paranoid fantasies) has had the capability to monitor website traffic for years. They can sit there and watch Abdul Wannabe Jihadi logging in from Birmingham to killthekaffir.com and log his every click - do you seriously think they haven't been watching the encryption vendors too? Ever wonder why AQ stopped using PGP and started writing their own encryption tools? DUH!
"......Then you wheel out your own expert...." DUH! Apart from the fact you don't get the chance to with a Section 49 notice until AFTER it hits court, you are forgetting that they are not going to come at you with nothing, they will have a REASON for turning you over, such as your dim-witted association with types like the Anons, Lulzsec, ALF, or other dross, or your habit of visiting certain websites. They do not randomly turn up and accuse anyone of having an encrypted drive, it is usually a case of "during our investigation of a serious crime we came upon information leading us to suspect that Mr X was involved, the nature of his involvement including safekeeping information in an encrypted partition on his PC". By the time they get round to requesting a notice they will have enough info to get the notice in the first place, which means they already have dirt or the inference of dirtiness on you. It will not be a case of "dear Mr Clean, please give us your keys", it will be "the accused, suspected of crime X (paedophilia/terrorism, delete as required)". If you have a history of visiting AQ-sympathetic or ALF-linked or padeophilic websites then your pretence of a genital wart pictoral diary will be a very obvious attempt at deception. Please try and understand that the coppers are not as stupid as you may want to believe.
"So they can look at the randomn data generated by Truecrypt to fill the empty space when the volume was created and tell the difference between that and the random-looking data generated by encrypting a file and writing it amongst that random data?...." Nope, all they need is an expert prepared to SAY it looks like an encrypted volume, which then makes it your word versus that of the coppers, and guess which way the average judge and jury will lean after the prosecutor has done a good job of slinging mud at your rep? The coppers don't even have to PROVE there is an encrypted drive anywhere, just that they REASONABLY SUSPECT (the actuall RIPA Part 3 Section 49 uses the phrase "believes, on reasonable grounds") there is one. They serve a Section 49 notice and the onus effectively shifts to the accused to prove there is not an encrypted partition or give up the key(s). Any info they can find to make it look like you have played with encryption (such as showing that someone from your IP address visited www.truecrypt.org, for example) just adds to their case. Having an encrypted volume inside an encrypted volume is just asking for trouble as it shows you are actively trying to hide information, giving the prosecution a stick to beat you with in court.
You may wish to consider the case of the animal rights activist convicted under RIPA, who insisted she did not even have any encrypted info on her PC (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/14/ripa_encryption_key_notice/).
Whilst I'm generally in agreement with the idea a lot gets passed simply because it has "counter-terror" tones, I have to point out your accusation that " the swivel eyed right wing nutjobs" are the source is simply too silly for words. For a start, in the UK, the years of Tony Blair's and then Gordon Brown's Nu(t)Labour showed the Left is much more determined to trample on rights than the Tories (remeber the ID cards fiasco?). In the US the Dummicrats have proven just as adept at using their powers as any of the Bush administartions (for example, Obambi has upped the number of drone strikes, and where do you think they get the targetting info from?). And let's not get started on the good ol' USSR and friends and their histories of "the end justifies the means, Comrade".
"I'm no legal expert, but I don't think that would pass constitutional muster....." Please feel free to put it to the test. You could get someone in Pakistan or some other NSA/FBA hotspot to start sending encrypted messages to you and see what happens, and I'm sure helpful types like the ACLU would be racing to your defence. But don't be surprised if that comes after the police have raided your home, your office, interviewed all your friends, colleagues and family, and whilst you're in an orange jumpsuit and sharing a cell with someone probably not too wonderful whilst your family scrabbles to seel stuff to make your bail.
"they can't *prove* it....." Yes they can. All they need is a surface level scan of the drive and a professional to stand up in court and say "Yes, M'Lud, that pattern does not look randomly generated, therefore I believe the accused has a hidden partition they did not admit to and that they tried to hide, in contravention of the court order issued by yourself to oblige him to do so." Game over, do not pass go, do not collect your £200 in Bitcoins, just go straight to jail.
"In the name of the big and bad terrorism threat, where each and every foreign state is perceived as potential (future) threat, all is permitted....." So, are you denying that there is any terrorist threat or that you don't think they use encrypted coms? Try taking off the trendy ideological blinkers and learning a few home truths - they're not just using OTS products like PGP, they're writing their own (http://www.pcworld.com/article/142149/article.html, http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-05/03/how-al-qaeda-hid-secret-docs-in-a-porn-video, http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/02/new_al_qaeda_en.html).
As to those that think importing foreign opensource software is a good idea, I'm sure the FBI would agree - it would be the equivalent of one person in a crowd wearing a shirt saying "Look at me, I'm doing evil!" All the FBI/NSA have to do is record the encrypted stream (they can claim reasonable grounds), arrest you and then get a court order for you to decrypt it or go to jail for contempt. After the first dozen or so anarcho-liberal twits have gone down "to prove a point" I would suspect the popularity of said opensource software to dip sharply.
".....And we would like to point out that the protection of the emergency services for their offices, the schools that educated many of their UK employees, the roads, the civil structures within which they operate are what we call a civilized society....." I think you'll find that Google's UK employees paid taxes on their wages which went towards the emergency services, schools roads, civil structures, etc.
What Google is doing is not illegal, as Deadhead Silliband knows full well when he uses the issue to score political points with the clueless. Even if we were to sign up to the full European disaster of one financial system, with uniform taxes, it would make zero difference as they would just relocate their tax avoidance mechanism to countries outside the EU. The chances of getting every country in the World to agree uniform tax rates and rules is tantamount to that of a snowball in Hell.
As expected, your reply is of note for its extensive and complete appraisal of the historical and political situation, and provides a new and enlightening viewpoint. Oh, no it doesn't, it's just the typical gormless insults shrieked by the sheeple when they can't handle an argument containing facts. This is my surprised face, honest. I'm not even going to accuse you of being an anti-semitic bigot (or homophobe, going by your post) as I suspect your unquestioning following of the herd is more due to an overwhelming desire to belong to the "in crowd" rather than any ability to actually formulate a reason to hate. If anything I just pity you.
Save your pitiful tales for Oprah, she might feign interest.
I'm more interested in Hawking's support of anti-semitism, given his acceptance of Iran, and where he might have got it from. Maybe it goes back to when Israeli physics student Jacob Bekenstein successfully expanded on Hawking's second law of black hole dynamics before Hawking could, showing that Hawking was actually wrong and that black holes do decay. An ego like Hawking's probably found that hard to handle.
Agreed, running applications on the array is not a good diea. And putting more storage in servers (such as flash) takes us back to the bad old days of DAS and its many problems - lack of redundancy; poor utilisation of disk; individual backups or swamping the network with a centralised backup; lack of centralised storage management; the DR risk of what happens when your one server (even if it is a grid across multiple servers) suffers as part of a site-wide outage; and bottlenecks in client access as they're all hitting one server. Whilst big monolithic arrays may seem dated, they still offer advantages in centralised data management, efficiencies in disk useage, ease of backup and (usually) redundancy and replication to DR sites. With the move to grid-like arrays with multiple controllers (and multiple protocols mixes such as FC, FCoE and iSCSI) the front-end bandwidth is improving, so rather than moving the engine or the petroltank, why not just increase the number and size of the pipes between them?
Just because the target is Pakistan does not make India the obligatory guilty party. Russia has no love for Pakistani-linked Islamists in Chechnya and neighbouring countries. Shia Iran has more than an interest in destabilising Sunni Pakistan, especially if it makes trouble for the US. And even the US itself has plenty of groups, both official and private, that would target Pakistan. Need a bit more proof.
"None, other than the comic lack of reality. No East West tensions, just free love and free trade?....." I would suggest you go read up on the Sixties and East-West relations, then you might realise that China has moved a lot closer to the rest of the World. I didn't say China had become the perfect World citizen (which country is?), but a China with overseas investments and trade is less likely to back even the crazy Norks should they decide to invade South Korea.
"....you're usually shilling for Israel......" Aw, still crying from another thread you couldn't handle a few facts in? Grow up.
China increasing it's reliance on Western markets by copying Western technology, whilst structuring their economy around our companies over here outsourcing everything to them (actually more to India). All of which suggests a more co-operative World without nasty East-vs-West tensions. Anyone see a problem with that?
"....it would have been 11Km closer 3 million years ago." Thumbs up for thinking outside the box, though I'm not really sure 11km would make so much difference.
But at least you thought of it, so kudos to you. It seems the AGW crowd are so desperate to believe that they regularly "overlook" factors that have a negative impact on their faith. First it was clouds they overlooked in their climate models, now we have plate teutonics, all inconvenient truths (LOL!).
On the Moon front, I'm reminded of Edgar Rice Burroughs' "Pirates of Venus", where the hero's attempt at rocket flight to Mars is thrown off track by the mistake of forgetting to include the Moon in the calculations. It seems we have far too many scientists happily screaming about AGW without considering very basic and fundamental factors, and if we listen to them we're going to end up somewhere very different from where we intended, and I somehow don't think our "Venus" will have a beautiful princess as a consolation prize.
"Yeah, those hot air balloonists really pull some amazing high speed stunts don't they?...." Dear moron, you may want to consider that hillsides and mountains don't pull "amazing high speed stunts" but aircraft regularly collide with them. Balloons are completely dependent on the prevailing wind, so if there is high wind at the level they are at they can reach a good enough speed, but even hovering they can be a hazard to aircraft if they are in the wrong place at the wrong time. In our case, we were jointing the circuit to land at an airfield as bad weather was coming in and the cloudbase was already down to 1000ft, and trying to keep out of the way of some trainees doing circuits, when a lost balloon blew across the airfield. We missed him by feet - if we had hit him we would all of been killed. He should never have been up in that weather.
"...... You never know where they're gonna be in ten seconds time." In theory, balloonists are only supposed to launch into clear skies when favourable winds are forecast. In practice, given the changeable nature of UK weather and the low number of really good days, it is common to see balloonists up in questionable weather and even amongst clouds, very stupid given their low radar signature. In the crowded UK airspace that's simply too stupid for words. But collisions even occur in clear weather, between slow paragliders and balloons(http://www.examiner.com/article/paraglider-and-hot-air-balloon-collide-over-arizona-air-show).
Seeing as the typical Anonyputz attack is nothing more sophisticated than SQL injections and DDoS, I would suggest the OS is irrelevant. The real question is we're these numpties actually local organisers for the Anons or just Low IQ Cannonfodder?
"Why not just establish sharia law...." Don't be silly, Sharia law is rediculously outdated, being over 900 years old and completely out-of-place in modern society, and doesn't even suggest which bit of a hackers body should be lopped off as punishment.
Yeah, most of the items he was caught with can be understood and also be quickly dumped or excused if stopped, apart from the cash and the written instructions. The foil could be to wrap his phone in to stop it being tracked (if he had a device without a removal battery it would have to be foil-wrapped, and if his phone did have a removable battery it would still be quicker to whip the foil off to use the phone than put the battery back and wait for it to boot). The knife can be excused away as "I was scared of muggers" and not as incriminating as a pistol. And, IIRC, carriage of folding knifes is not illegal in Russia, so it might even have escaped a police stop and search without comment if it was a gravity blade or the like.
But the cash? Surely it would have been simpler just to stick the funds in bank account under a fake ID, then take the potential recruit an ATM card that accessed the account. One ATM card in the wallet amongst many would probably go unnoticed, but carrying wads of cash? Hmmmmmm. And I'm a bit sceptical of the written instructions, I would have thought it much more likely that he would have memorised any such rather than carry around such an incriminating bit of evidence. That and the cash may be the FSB padding out the evidence to make it more spectacular.
".....where they don't even ask for a signature a lot of the time." One of my colleagues over from the States a few years back was shocked by the higher levels of credit-card security over here. It rendered his wife's non-C&P card unusable for the duration of their visit as the signature strip on the back was marked "CID", which apparently means "check ID to confirm the user is the card owner". Apparently, that also meant it was the cheapest holiday they'd had for years, so maybe not all bad.
"to justify as a peripheral, not good enough to replace a PC or one of the coming consoles as a gaming platform, and has insufficient launch titles for it to make sense as a player's only game machine. It looks nice, though." What about as a MOBILE gaming platform? I used to have power adapters and cables for the kids to run two laptops in the back of the car for long journeys, but when I suggested tablets the kids said "no thanks, they don't have any good games" - if this can offer some good games, and play movies and music, it will be a better long distance journey option than the iPad, Surface Pro and comparable to the other portable games devices from Sony and co.
All I can say you just carry on bleating whatever childish justifications and delusions help you make it through the day. There are very tight legal definitions of child porn in the UK courts, and any attempt to pass off anything milder would have been seized on by their legal team and trumpeted as "evidence" of a setup. I would suggest you go buy a clue as you seem incapable of developing one yourself, but I suspect even the haul of Bitcoins AVunit has run off with wouldn't be enough for the extensive neurosurgery your case requires. Enjoy!
"With the kiddie porn, was a he a pedophile or are we talking about some 4chan pictures?...." COUGH* apologist * COUGH! Yeah, like everyone that visits 4chan keeps copies of the pics. Oh, wait - no I didn't, and not because I didn't find them "shocking" enought but because I'm not a paedophile.
".....Sounds like they threw a net out and trawled to try and beef up their case as much as they could....." Sounds like "they" didn't have to do much at all seeing as these prime-grade numpties got caught not only with a shed load of evidence of the crimes they committed, but also got thoroughly grassed up by their equally vacuous online buddy (who it turned out valued his real-life freedom more than protecting his e-chums). Maybe they should have invested more time in finding real friends offline.
".....These boys need helping to become more responsible citizens....Lulzsec, if nothing else, helped to harden the internet.....". Oh yes, 'cos they're just such sharp in-duh-viduals, right? Wrong! They did nothing new or inventive, they just used simple social engineering, known vulnerabilities and downloaded tools, just like the majority of the skiddies out there. They committed crimes and need to be punished, and then they need to be put on probation to make sure they have learned their lesson. And if they have not learned how to become responsible, productive citizens, and decide to return to their criminal ways, then I'm pretty sure they'll be caught and sent back to prison again, no matter how smart they, or you, think they are.
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