Posts by Loyal Commenter

Essex cops slaps cuffs on social media riot crusaders

Really?

In any dealings I have ever had with the police, they have been very well mannered, and those that I have had have mostly been with Avon and Somerset Constabulary, a force who reputedly are one of the less well behaved. Maybe it is your antagonistic attitude towards the police that causes the friction, rather than their attiude towards you?

Having said that; of course, ther are bad apples, it only stands to reason, but they are a tiny tiny minority. The ones at the top, however, could probably benefit from spending more time doing actual police work rather than political activities. ACPO should also be properly regulated, so that the orders that come down from the top come from accoutnable sources.

Watchdog washes hands of Lush hack

Eco-friendly products?

If I walk into one of their stores, I can only last a few minutes before my eyes start streaming from all the massively concentrated artificial fragrances. If this is eco-firendly, I'd hate to see their idea of pollution.

Dunkin' Donuts waitress offers additional dunkin'

@Not illegal

Indeed. I believe soliciting is, so she might get done for that. She'd more likely just get the sack. No pun intended. Oh alright, yes it was...

RunPee

So presumably...

For anything by Michael Bay, the interval where you can go to the loo without missing any of the plot starts just after the trailers, and ends at the credits?

Sony distribution centre engulfed by fire

So...

...at what point does a bunch of thugs breaking into a warehouse, stealing stuff and torching it become a riot, or civil unrest?

When there's two of them? Five? Ten? When there's something else on fire nearby? When Someone else is doing the same somewhere else in the city/country? When the police turn up to try and stop them?

Gordon Ramsay sues father-in-law over alleged spyware plot

Reminds me of the Armstron and Miller sketch

Where the kitchen staff kill and cook the 'sweary chef'

Couldn't happen to a nicer man

Not sure who is more deserving of contempt, the crooked father in law, or the arsehole who makes his own children call him 'Chef' to plump up his ego.

School caned for losing 20K details

Ummm, unauthorised access to a protected machine?

Yes, I believe this is _technically_ against the law, in the same way as dropping litter is. I wouldn't expect the cops to give much of a crap about it, but I think there are laws concerning it...

If I ran a school's website and one of the students hacked it, I'd expect them to be disciplined, just as if they'd broken into school grounds at night and sprayed graffitti on the wall.

Maybe...

Staff, ex pupils, enquirers, parents, carers, etc. etc.

I hope the student was disciplined for this.

Hacking the school's website in the first place is arguably a criminal offence (depending on what the student did to 'hack' it).

And one has to wonder how or why a student was able to gain access to the database in question in the first place, regardless of whether they could guess the password. I seriously hope such a database wasn't accessible from the internet. If it was, then the School's IT management should probably also be the target of disciplinary action.

10-year old hacker finds flaw in mobile games

Previously unknown?

Previously unpublished perhaps, along with a lot of other trivial things. It's a bad programmer who trusts the user's system to tell the truth about such things as the system time.

Having said that, I have a number of instant messages sat on Skype which appear to be from the future because I reset my PC's BIOS and failed to notice that the clock setting was in 'merkin format (mmddyyyy) until I'd been using it for a few hours. I mean seriously, who came up with that? It's like telling the time with the seconds between the hours and minutes. And honestly, why does Skype not timestamp messages with a server time?

Antimatter close to home

Well, yes and no...

...If it was up there in bloody great big chunks, rather than as a rarefied ion plasma, then this might happen. As it is, things going through the Van Allen Belts get hit by the odd antiproton, causing the annihilation of a proton in the outer layer of atoms, the release of a high-energy photon (probably in the gamma ray range), and possibly making the atom that was hit mildly radioactive, depending on whether it can bear to lose a proton or not. This is kind of why they are known as the Van Allen Radiation Belts, the clue there being in the word radiation really.

Given the rarefied nature of the belts, something would have to stay up there for a serious amount of time to be annihilated by the antimatter; the orbit would decay a long long time before this ever happened.

Still, I'm not sure I'd want to spend my holidays there...

Murdoch accused of operating illegal US air force

Not Strictly Accurate...

And there I was thinking the opening paragraph of George Orwell's Ninteen Eighty-Four was:

"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him. "

Your Quote, I believe, comes from the middle of the fourth paragraph. Nice to see someone who (presumably) has actually read the book though, before likening things to it's themes or characters...

Spamford Wallace charged for hacking 500,000 Facebookers

My spidey sense is tingling!

Do I sense a certain degree of over-zealous moderation on legal grounds? A number of seemingly innocuous non-rabid comments seem to have suddenly vanished...

Death haunts government petitions site

@Nuke

If a guilty verdict is overturned after someone has been imprisoned, they can be rleased and compensated.

if a guilty verdict is overturned after someone has been executed... Oh dear, my bad!

Indeed

Bring back the death penalty for Charles I*!

*and VI of Scotland, if such matters are important to you...

May I suggest...

The re-introduction of the death penalty, and the introduction of a law criminalising support for the death penalty, for which the penalty is death. Anyone who supports the death penalty is then executed. This way, everyone is happy.

I, of course, am only suggesting this. I don't *support* it....

‘Pitstops’ can inhibit viruses

All good in principle

But I have to wonder how toxic compounds that bind to / prevent other things from binding to clathrins would be. How, for instance, do these tell the differences between nutrients and viral particles?

Acoustic trauma: How wind farms make you sick

@ChilliKwok

I'll be glad to take your money.

From Wikipedia*:

"Collective projections generally predict that global peak coal production may occur sometime around 2025 at 30 percent above current production in the best case scenario, depending on future coal production rates."

This is around fifteen years from now. At this point, the price of coal will increase due to scarcity, and people will stop using it as a result if they have a reliable alternative.

*Yes I know, it's Wikipedia, but it is from a cited source within the Wiki article.

Wow, downvote on a technical post

Someone really must not like facts today.

Just to provide a little evidence for my assertion that rare earths aren't actually rare (and Neodymium in particular); the natural abundance of Nd in the Earth's crust is 38 ppm (parts per million), a little less than copper (50ppm), twice that of lithium (20ppm) which is what pretty much all modern rechargable batteries are made from, and 17 times as abundant as tin, one of the main constituents of bronze, for which we named a period in human history.

So my point is this; China produces most of the world's neodymium at present for a number of reasons:

Firstly, they have decent sized deposits of Neodymium bearing minerals, but so do several other countries.

Secondly, they can produce the metal cheaply because labour costs in China are low (but rising).

Thirdly, they aren't too bothered about the environmental consequences of mining, whereas other coutries may not be so gung-ho any more.

Finally, there historically hasn't been a large demand for Neodymium so it didn't make sense for lots of people to be mining it. As the market for high-power ceramic magnets grows (as it has been for several years due to the demand for these things in hard disks), so will the supply as it becomes economical for more people to dig it out of the ground. The stuff won't run out any time soon, and if anything, the price will fall as economies of scale take off.

The arguments about the cost, mass and availability of neodymium for the permanent magnets in wind turbines are fallacious. Yes, I agree that the things are expensive but expect the price to fall as, perhaps by a significant amount. My doubts remain as to whether wind power will ever supply a significant amount of our electricity, but in fifty years time, I'm willing to bet they'll still be around (assuming we are), and coal won't.

So, your source says:

"Jack Lifton suggests 1 ton NdFeB/MW however I have not seen a source for that. This source suggests 567kg/MW."

Note that this is the weight of the magnet, not the rare earths in it, the type of magnet in question has a chemical structure of Nd2Fe14B, Neodymium has an atomic mass of 144.242, Iron 55.845 and Boron 10.811, a little maths tells me that the portion of the mass of the magnet that comes from 'Chinese rare earths' is 26.68%, so the mass of neodymiujm required is actually 151Kg per MW.

Okay, this is still a biggish number, but it is an order of magnitude less than the one you plucked from the air.

Also, the thing about rare earth metals isn't that they are rare, but that they aren't commonly mined. The name is a bit of a misnomer really. If the demand goes up, so does the supply, as it becomes economical to find and extract them. China by no means controls the world's supply, if fear of the Chinese is what is driving your dislike of wind turbines.

Sealed Mineshaft?

If you lived in a sealed mineshaft, you may well find yourself prone to more low level low frequency noise than you'd get from wind turbines, due to the resonant properties of tunnels.

I have to say I am getting more than a little worried about what appears to be very selective reporting by El Reg on certain environmental issues. Any time a crank puts out a paper that 'disproves' AGW, suggests that renewable energy is all bunk, or claims that fly ash from coal fired power stations solves global economic recession, we get a massive upselling of this, but the balanced viewpoint from the serious hard-working and credible scientists is sadly missing. For shame!

Some balance...

"To equal the output of a single 1GW gas fired power station requires:"

- I don't think anyone is seriously suggesting all new power generation capacity should come from wind. Personally, I'm pro-nuclear, but some other renweable power sources are geothermal, tidal, solar, etc.

"Each turbine requires a spacing of 8 x 100m rotor diameters in all directions for turbulence = 0.64Km2 per turbine = 1280 km2 land area rendered uninhabitable to humans due to noise and flicker."

- Which is why they are normally placed in lines, so 800m in one direction per turbine. Also, fields in the middle of nowhere generally aren't considered habitable for any but the least developed humans. They're good for sheep though.

"Each turbine requires about 200 tonnes of steal for the tower, 1 tonne of Chinese rare earth metals for the magnets, 100T of concrete for the foundations, plus 10s of miles of pylons to carry the leccy from windy areas to the cities."

- steal [sic] is cheap. As for the magnets, where did you get 1 tonne of neodymium per magnet from? That sounds unlikely to say the least. Pylons are also required to move electrons from other power sources, unless you're an afficionado of the theories of Nikolai Tesla...

Some of your other points are fair, particularly those about providing backup. However, fossil fuelled power stations are only going to get more expensive over time as the fuel runs out, whereas renewables will get cheaper as they scale up and the technology matures.

Interstingly, though

The human brain is very good at filtering out constant sensory noise, to the extent that if you stare at an object without moving your eyes at all (actually quite difficult), you will cease to see it, and you often won't notice that high-pitched CRT squeal until it is pointed out to you. Tinnitus is what you get when this filter stops working. This is also why you are not acutely aware of things like the pressure of the clothes you are wearing on your skin (assuming you are wearing any), or your own body odour.

Sat in the office at the moment, if I listen, I can hear the fans in my PC, the air conditioner across the room and various other buzzes and hums from the machines around me. I am only aware of this if I make a conscious effort to be.

The issue at stake here is whether the noise from wind farms is loud enough, or varies enough, to be noticeable without having to listen for it. I remain to be convinced one way or the other.

Anonymous unsheathes new, potent attack weapon

Hmmmm

"Are people really stupid enough to use all their internet bandwidth to attack Sony because Microsoft told them to do so for removing OtherOS that nobody cared about?"

Microsoft did what now?

I won't get into that argument now, but some people did want the ability to both use OtherOs and play games on their PS3s, and were, quite rightly in my opinion, pissed off with Sony when they took it away.

And no, poeple weren't stupid enough to do this, because it isn't what happened. Sony got cracked, not DDoSed IIRC.

"Are people stupid enough to think the internet is anonymous?"

Yes, some are. I think naïve is probably a better word though. The people who assume that they are anonymous on the internet by default are probably the same people who believe without question the things they read in the papers or hear on Sky News. There are plenty of these people, unfortunately.

"Are people stupid enough to download malicious stuff like this and risk going to jail and/or getting really big fines?"

There have already been arrests, so I think you may have answered your own question.

I think the sheer fact that LOIC has been used for DDoS attacks, without proxy anonymisation, and that quite a lot of people have joined in to do so, demonstrates that there are number of people who are both stupid enough and either pissed off enough, or are trying to fit in with a 'cool' crowd, to do so.

HTC sues Apple in the UK

EMACS

EMACS Makes A Computer Slow

Good news: A meltdown would kill fewer than we thought

In the event of a massive Earthquake,

any sensible operator of a nuclear plant will immediately shut down the reactors to prevent damage and escape of radioactive material.

At this point, older designs of reactor, such as those at Fukushima, which require active cooling systems, need an alternative power source.

Normally, this is not a problem, as Fukushima was both conencted to the grid, and had backup diesel generators to keep the cooling running for as long as needed. Unfortunately, there was a pesky little 13 metre tsunami that came along and wiped these out.

Now, it could be argued that the plant was not sited in the most sensible place possible, being, as it was, facing one of the worlds largest and most active subduction faults, and that they should maybe have expected the odd tsunami. The one that happened, however, was a bit of a biggie.

Given the huge number of deaths, and the trillions of $currency worth of damage to the infrastructure of Japan directly caused by the tsunami, I think zero deaths from the radioactive leakage/fallout and a little extra evacuation around a damaged power station were actually a bloody good result.

Pripyat

The town where the Chernobyl reactor was sited...

...is now a nature reserve and tourist destination.

The reason that people didn't move back there after they were evacuated is that they were re-housed, mostly in more modern and better housing.

Yes, Chernobyl was a bad nuclear accident. Anything involving a reactor exploding and catching fire and ending up with no containment has to be classed as such, but in reality, the vast majority of those killed or badly injured were those in the control room at the time, and the cleanup crews. Bearing in mind that the cleanup crews were dosed with several orders of magnitude over the lifetime safe dose of radiation, it is quite impressive to note that of those that suffered leukaemia, the 5-year survival was 43%.

Also worth noting

That coal fired power stations release radioactive material into the atmosphere during normal use, and the ash produced is also mildly radioactive, whereas nuclear powered ones don't unless something has gone wrong. This is because coal contains trace amounts of uranium and thorium, which are concentrated by the combustion of the main constituents of coal (mostly carbon, hydrocarbons, and sulphur compounds), which produces gaseous oxides. The phosphorus and metal oxides left in the ash are solids.

You think 1 in 4000 is bad?

On December 2nd 1984, the Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India suffered a leak from a containment tank, and a large amount of methyl isocyanate was released into the atmosphere. This resulted in 2,259 immediate deaths, and a further 1,528 deaths shortly afterwards. 558,125 people were injured, 3,900 of whom suffered permanent disabling injuries.

The population of Bhopal is currently given as a little shy of 3 million people, in 1984 it would probably have been around half of this. Most of those people would not be living within ten miles, so I think it is fair to say that the risk of death to those living within ten miles would be far greater than 1 in 4000 (by at least two orders of magnitude). Note also that the background rate of death by isocyanate poisoning is zero, as oppsoed to the background rate of cancer, which is about 1 in 2 (death from cancer is approximately 1 in 4).

What this 1 in 4000 rate actually means then, is that a person's risk of developing cancer over their lifetime is increased by approximately 0.05% if a nuclear power plant within ten miles melts down and they aren't evacuated in time.

Now, it is important to note that the Bhopal plant was a chemical plant, not a nuclear one, but my point is to illustrate that the worst-case scenario for a nuclear plant is orders of magnitude less bad than the worst case scenario from a simple old chemical plant, albeit one handling large amounts of very poisonous reagents.

I'm not suggesting that a meltdown is not a bad thing, but at the same time, it's not a 'scorched earth' disaster either. If you read the Wikipedia article about the Bhopal tragedy, you'll see that this very much was.

'Missing heat': Is global warmth vanishing into space?

@Chris007

You refer to the 'mini ice age' that affected Northern Europe, but not the rest of the planet? I think you'll find that this is what is known as a localised effect, and there is little evidence that this affected the global heat balance in any way.

So, here's an explanation for you: The climate DOES have short , medium, and long-term cyclical effects (ranging from el-nino, to ice ages), these can be explained variously by cyclical changes in ocean currents (without which most of Europe would be frozen solid for most of the year), and things like predicatable periodic changes in the orbital eccentricity of the Earth.

The existence of these effects does nothing to disprove the existence of the greenhouse effect, which is based upon sound scientific knowledge of the spectral properties of atmospheric components such as carbon dioxide, methane, water vapour, sulphur dioxide, etc. etc.

Now, having given you an explanation of why AGW is, in my opinion, a real effect, please explain to me, based upon the scientific evidence that you clearly possess but I do not, why you believe it doesn't. Fair's fair.

@DaWolf

It is also worth noting that the cooling effects of sulphur aerosols operate on a different timescale to the warming effect of greenhouse gases. IIRC, sulphate aerosols in the troposphere (which is where they usually will end up as a result of power station emissions) typically have a lifetime of around a week. Carbon dioxide's lifetime is measured in years, and methane's in decades.

What this generally means is that thigns are actually worse than they appear to be, because pretty much as soon as the power stations stop pumping out sulphates, the effect drops off, and Chinese coal is notorious sulphur rich. They also burn a lot of it.

As for being downvoted; you just have to accept that despite giving an accurate and correct explanation of the chemistry and physics involved, many people involved in the 'debate' surrounding global warming do not have a scientific education, so don't see the bigger picture. It is sadly human nature to be swayed more by soundbites than by facts.

For the record, I have degrees in Chemistry but work in the IT industry. I have no vested interests in green technologies or climate research, other than the desire not to see the human race severely fuck up the planet for ourselves. Pumping crap into the atmosphere whilst putting our fingers in our ears and shouting 'la la la' is just one way we are doing this.

@deegee

"the theory of evolution is a religion"

"Is it not the belief's of a set of people, who also may practice within the confines of those beliefs?"

No. It is a constructed hypothesis based upon observable and reproducible evidence, rather than a work of fantasy written by several authors several centuries after the supposed events took place.

I'm afraid I didn't read the rest of your post, as your first line is observable and reproducible evidence of it being drivel.

Sci/tech MPs want peer review, not pal review

Sorry LPF

But I have to agree with the AC here. This country used to be a world leader in science and technology. Think of the vast number of things that were invented here. However, investment in science and technology is a long term investment, and the political class rarely see beyond the four year re-election horizon. They aren't interested in the potential benefits if they fall beyond that timeline. The solution really is for funding to be properly decoupled from the influence of MPs, and handled, as it should be, by the research councils without interference from meddling politicians who are only after thier next vote.

As for peer review; yes, it is generally acknowledged that this isn't a perfect system, in much the same way that our voting system isn't perfect. I would ask you to suggest a better alternative to either that is generally acceptable. I remember reading somewhere an article about why a perfectly representative voting system isn't possible, the peer review system is good enough, has stood teh test of time, and is one of several checks and balances that keeps scientific research honest. Other checks include the need for reproducibility, ethics committees, and the unwillingness of funding bodies to give money to researchers who can't show that their work is serious and novel.

Having said that, the researches in the so-called 'climategate scandal' may have been guilty of being somewhat circumspect about releasing their data. You have to remember, however, that being human, they are not perfect, just like you and I, and most people wouldn't want to spend a significant portion of their working time pandering to nutjobs, adn lobbyists who are trying to undermine your work by grabbing your research data and selectively quoting the outliers.

The problem really isn't that science is dishonest; on the whole it is very much the opposite, but that human beings are dishonest, particulalrly those with vested interests. In this case, I'd put money on the MORE dishonest parties being the AGW deniers funded by large oil producers and their lobbyists.

HP's fondle-slab dilemma: What to do when you're No 2

@Stick and Stones

"rabid Apple hater"

"petty name calling"

Pot, meet kettle...

UK data watchdog 'looking into' Google+ mission creep

Depending ont eh country, the WHOIS information may be anonymous

For the domain in question (I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader), the registrar is French, and the whois record lists what appears to be a name and private address of an individual. It just goes to show; you are often less anonymous than you think you are. You have to assume that if you have let slip your identity to anyone then potentially your details are available to all and sundry. This applies in real life as well as on the interweb, it depends on how paranoid you are as to how much this worries you...

Given that you now know this,

You might want to get onto your domain registrar and get the details changed on the WHOIS register, and/or change your user name on the Register to not identify your postings here with your domain name...

IF you want anonymity, using your own domain is probbaly not a great idea

Unless, of course, you registered the domain under a pseudonym.

A simple WHOIS search will give the world and his monkey the registration details.

'Up to' broadband claims out of control, says Ofcom

Except your simile breaks down...

It's more like the car dealer sellign you a rocket car and telling you it's speed is 'up to 350 mph', but neglecting to mention that the speed limit is 70 mph (akin to the real top speed you'll get) and that the roads are oversubscribed at busy times, so you'll more likley be doing 15mph (akin to contention).

In my opinion, they should be limited to putting the 'up to' speed in the small print of their adverts, and using the average speed obtainable, and be forced to also mention the slowest speed you'll get (this figure should be the mean of the bottom quartile of obtainable speeds, sampled evenly at all times of day, or similar, or it would be zero and meaningless). In other words, I'd like to be told that my 'up to 10Mb' service actually averages 6.3 Mb download speed, and a quarter of the time, averages 1.5Mb. They should also be made to advertise both download and upload rates, e.g. that the mean upload speed is only 256Kb.

Dear OFCOM,

My dinner is cold.

Kit steals Mac login passwords through FireWire port

Right up until the point

Where you take the BIOS battery out, reboot, power down and put it back in again.

Sorry, time travelers, you’re still just fiction

Ummmm...

You do know photons are massless, yes? It's not the mass of a photon that means it can't go faster than c, it's the momentum, which photons do have, hence the possibility of things like solar sails.

There may be other theoretical particles which have no momentum, which could travel faster than light, but then (if I remember this rightly), they'd have no energy, meaning that they could just pop in and out of existence, and couldn't interact with any other particles in any way which essentially means they wouldn't exist...

Rogue kangaroo floors broom-wielding 94-year-old

What to do with the captured 'roo?

Chilli kangaroo burgers sound tasty

Microsoft previews 'Juneau' SQL Server tools

Why so hard on Management Studio?

Sure, it takes an age to load, and has its quirks, but the newer version does have some quite useful features, such as the ability to view recent expensive queries on a server, a godsend if trying to optimise performance.

A number of valid points.

However, you mention, 'transactions not necessarily being quite as atomic as you think they might be'. Unless you are talking about things like (NOLOCK) and (READPAST) keywords, which are used to deliberately read (or skip over without locking) uncommitted data, I'd really like a concrete example of what you man by this, if you have one to hand. This is the sort of thing that I, as a developer writing SQL-heavy applications, should know about!

Amateur claims crack of final Zodiac Killer cipher

However,

As pointed out above, he doesn't use a fixed shift for the Caesar cipher, each symbol in his 'solution' is abitrarily assigned a letter, then shifted an arbitrary number of characters. He provides a rationalisation for the first THREE characters, which is flimsy to say the least. He also misses out symbols, and the shifts he DOES provide are in places not those which would give the solution he gives.

In other words, he came up with an arbitrary solution to the cipher, then filled in a randomly shifting Caesar cipher to shift it to arbitrary letters which he then arbitrarily assigned to the symbols in the original cipher. Note also that this has been done to match the symbols to letters that look like the symbols. In the previously solved ciphers, the substitutions were not related in this way.

By 'solving' the cipher in this manner, you could in fact assign to the solution any text of approximately the same length as the cipher.

Oh Dear

If the code was a substitution/Caesar cipher, then it would have been cracked years ago by frequency analysis techniques. It's not like it isn't one of the world's best known undecoded messages.

I also find it extremely unlikely that the encoded message would contain the 'stream of consciousness' type drivel as proposed, complete with spelling and grammatical errors, omissions of letters etc., given that the killer would then have had to sit down and painstakingly encode the message and write out the elaborate and neatly ordered symbols involved.

Chinese lecturer demands his students acquire iPads

What now?

"We should be worried about China...within 20 years it *will* be better than us at *everything*."

Really? Does this mean that we are doing everyhing so abysmally badly that our Eastern cousins can beat us at it with us having a head start, or are they somehow better endowed than us in every way? Or maybe you are talking bollocks, and as they become more industrialised and westernised, they will be bound by the same limitations as the rest of the planet, and rather than living in some sort of la-la-wonderland where unlimited growth with no consequences is possible, they will have to cope with the same economic and practical issues as everyone else?

Marketer taps browser flaw to see if you're pregnant

@Don't be Insane

No. Disabling Javascript by default and requiring the user to explicitly allow it for the site would be more akin to requiring car users to have driving licences, if your metaphor wasn't a complete nonsequitur in the first place.

I use NoScript precisely for this reason and AdBlock because advertisers have no right to be putting anything on my computer without my consent in the first place, and because they have a bad track record of security, what with poisoned ads, behavioural tracking et al.

Higgs Boson hiding place narrows

I might have done so...

...but how can you know?