Posts by Adam-the-Kiwi

WIN a RockBLOCK Iridium satellite comms module

Re: EVACUATE

You're missing an 'A' there. How about:

Emergency

Vehicle

Abort

Command

Under

Adverse

Telemetry

Event

?

Peter Capaldi named as 12th Doctor Who

@William Donelson

Still, you felt it was worth (at the least) going to the article, navigating past it to the comments and leaving your opinion. Which, ironically, is:

> 1. Silly

> 2. Boringggggggggggggg

'First' 3D-printed rifle's barrel splits after single shot

Re: One up the spout!

> Err .. so "Adam's mistake" actually mean that Adam is a mistake ..?

Did you RTFA?

"igniting a bullet's not the hard part" is a shortening of "igniting the bullet is not the hard part" (ignoring the obvious problem that igniting a bullet is actually an extremely difficult undertaking).

2 grammar nazi fails in one comments section!

Re: One up the spout!

Pendantic grammar nazi fail:

"igniting a bullet's" is a shortening of "igniting a bullet is".

HP sacks English employees to bag Scots gov jobs cash

Re Re: English Taxpayers (12:26)

Interestingly, from that report:

"The figures will be relevent to the ongoing discussion of independence for Scotland. Scotland receives no net subsidy." (sic)

US lawmaker blames bicycle breath for global warming gas

Re: UK: Cyclists already pay for the upkeep of roads, as do pedestrians

> Oh I see - so a second car should be tax free.

No. There's a clue here - I'll point it out for you as you're obviously short of them: that's why it's a *vehicle* tax (that's the "V" in "VED") and not a *road* tax.

Climate shocker: Carry on as we are until 2050, planet will be fine

Re: Modelling??

>> @Mr Page - just to confirm, does this mean that you DO acknowledge that human activity is causing the planet to warm, even if you're not that concerned about it because you believe that it will cost us less to deal with it than to try and stop it?

Also, @Mr Page: does this mean models are OK now? Coz I thought doing science by models was rubbish and proved you were a commie...?

Swedish boffins: An Ice Age is coming, only CO2 can save us

Re: An alternative conclusion can be had by *reading the paper*

Lewis Page in climate-science-cherry-picking shocker! In other news, Papal Catholicism revelation...

How did you get 2 down-votes for your post? Do people not like being presented with the *actual* science - oh, sorry, silly me - this is the Register. As you were, then...

Steve Jobs' Apple-powered yacht makes belated first trip

Re: sail there on its own?

1) Probably cheaper to ship it than to pay a crew and the voyage costs;

2) I doubt *very* much that the Venus is capable of an Atlantic crossing in anything other than the most clement weather.

Foxconn: Worker who lost half his brain in accident must leave hospital

Re: Sounds like @ Anonymous coward 18:08

As a hard-working small-business boss with an employee, I can categorically say that your twisted opinions do not represent those of "people with jobs", arsehole.

40,000 sign petition to oust Rep. Paul 'pit of hell' Broun

Re: The big bang is solid science?

The point, though, is that Big Bang theory makes no statements whatsoever about creators or religion and is not incompatible with any religion (that doesn't make a non-allegorical description of the start of the universe as a fundamental tenet). It is simply the best-supported description of the start of our universe based solely on what we can determine by observation. It makes no statements about the "reasons" that everything came into being.

The same kind of principle applies to your last (unbracketed) sentence, too. The maths don't "only [hold] up when 95% of the universerse is undetectable" - they just suggest that this is the case. This mathematical model wasn't dreamt up by a desert tribal leader a couple of thousand years ago and recorded on papyrus - it was developed from (and is being constantly refined by) the observations that are being made about our universe.

There is no science vs religion debate. Science has little to say about religion, other than when religion uses descriptions of the physical world that do not match with observations of reality. There is a science vs stupid debate, though, and Rep. Broun has made it clear he's not on the side of science...

Paris because, well, she's not on the side of science either.

Salt marshes will suck CO2 from air faster and faster as seas rise

Re: Oh, the bit Lewis didn't feel like mentioning.

Lewis Page in "selectively reports scientific paper to suit his own worldwiew" shocker! Tell me it ain't so...

On a more serious note, this is great news and should be a driver to exert much more effort on preserving salt marshes, sea grasses and mangroves - something we're not very good at right now.

Apple pounces on Samsung doc as proof of 'slavish copy' claims

Re: Well yes

Lawyer. n: Someone who tries to prevent anyone else getting hold of your money.

Greenland melt surprises NASA Earth-watchers

Re: Not a surprise then

The Greenland ice sheet is a bit older than 200 years - try 110000 years*. Still a blink of an eye in geological time scales, adminttedly...

And if this level of melting, which is currently unprecedented in the last 30ish years of satellite observations, and 150ish years of surface station observations, happens again next year *or* continues for 5 consecutive years it will *definitely* be surprising.

[*: Meese, DA, AJ Gow, RB Alley, GA Zielinski, PM Grootes, M Ram, KC Taylor, PA Mayewski, JF Bolzan (1997) The Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2 depth-age scale: Methods and results. Journal of Geophysical Research. C. Oceans. 102(C12):26,411-26,423.]

Himalayan glaciers actually gaining ice, space scans show

Re: Then lets take the financial incentive away

"If I had a few spare billion, could you explain exactly how I would go about perverting a scientific consensus?"

If you had a few spare billion - like, say, off the top of my head, the fossil fuel industry - you could "pervert" the scientific consensus - or even just change it - by the simple method of providing funding to groups of scientists to produce hard, undeniable science, independent of the current political elite. In no time at all, your true climate science - which would be completely independent, remember, of the horribly biased, political-gravy-train-funded nonsense produced by the so-called "scientists" of the "consensus" - would fill the journals. People would soon see that the "scientific consensus" was clearly completely fabricated by those fat-cat "scientists" and their left-wing paymasters.

Come to think of it - why haven't those saintly oil executives already done this?

Ice age end was accelerated by CO₂

Re: How ironic

While there is clearly a lot of earnest, enthusiastic and ill-informed comment on both sides of the climate change "debate", Lord Zedd must surely take some kind of award. How many things can one commentard get wrong in a three-line (three-paragraph) posting? I particularly like the 'case an "ice age" with CO2' RTFA fail!

Special mention must go to the two morons who upvoted that post.

'The new iPad' revealed: Full specs, rumor scorecard

Re: How is any Android Tablet maker gonna compete...

Why assume that Marvin O'Gravel Balloon Face's 'Meh' was driven by a love of Android? Are fanbois getting so paranoid that they see Android tablets lurking in every comment that's not a sycophantic love-in of Apple?

Perhaps 'Meh' refers to the amount of press coverage devoted to what is only an evolution of a device that is the preserve of rich people (relatively-speaking, of course) who mostly want to browse the interwebs on their sofa or in a coffee shop. It is not, really, in the grand scheme of things, going to change the trajectory of human civilisation...

Banks toss $8bn into Facebook's lap ahead of IPO

Re: Next big banking bail out?

Of course they've learnt something: if they gamble big-time with our money and fall flat on their @rses, the governments of the world will commit our money to bailing them out. Trebles all round!

Cloud altitude changing with climate: NZ study

Re: Surely the key point here is that it is an admission that climate change models are flawed...

All models are flawed. The climate models that use massive computing resources to process all the variables that we understand using the physics that we're confident of, though, are more reliable than the climate models that exist inside people's heads and are based on their political outlook.

Labour targets Tories' Google problem

Re: Yay

Good to see that the Tories are sticking to their tried and tested "cronyism for big business" method, allowing a large corporation to cosy up to government and influence our democracy through personal relationships.

So, no change all round then. That doesn't make it any easier for me to decide who to vote for...

OPERA grabs spanner, fixes kit, and slows down neutrinos

Only half the story

More one-sided science reporting from El Reg?

"The OPERA collaboration has [...] identified two possible effects that could have an influence on its neutrino timing measurement. [...]. If confirmed, one would increase the size of the measured effect, the other would diminish it.

The first possible effect concerns an oscillator used to provide the time stamps for GPS synchronizations. It could have led to an overestimate of the neutrino's time of flight. The second concerns the optical fibre connector that brings the external GPS signal to the OPERA master clock, which may not have been functioning correctly when the measurements were taken. If this is the case, it could have led to an underestimate of the time of flight of the neutrinos."

Also, to all those conflating the OPERA experiment with the LHC: CERN does more than one thing...

Oz skeptic offers prize if Rossi’s E-cat works

re: /also/ acting exactly like a man who is fraudulently hyping...

Yes, possibly, although I'd tend more towards deluded crank than conscious fraud - as I said, if he knows he's being fraudulent, then he's doing a pretty bad job of keeping his head sufficiently below the parapet to get away with it when it does all prove to be less than he claims.

re: No explanation is necessary for patents.

From physorg:

Rossi and Focardi have applied for a patent that has been partially rejected in a preliminary report. According to the report, “As the invention seems, at least at first, to offend against the generally accepted laws of physics and established theories, the disclosure should be detailed enough to prove to a skilled person conversant with mainstream science and technology that the invention is indeed feasible. … In the present case, the invention does not provide experimental evidence (nor any firm theoretical basis) which would enable the skilled person to assess the viability of the invention. The description is essentially based on general statement and speculations which are not apt to provide a clear and exhaustive technical teaching.”

re: peer-review

To be fair, peer-review isn't possible until Rossi releases some information on how it works. He's not going to do that until he can get it protected by patents (he claims). Patents aren't going to be granted (except in Italy) because the "invention" breaches the currently-understood laws of physics.

This is not a comment on whether Rossi's claims are true or not - BUT: he is acting exactly like a man who (believes he) is telling the truth, (believes he) has a world-changing invention and wants to protect it. I suspect a knowling fraud would not be making his "invention" so public, where it falls under the scrutiny of people who know what they're talking about.

Footie club sacks striker for homophobic tweet

@Chris W, Aaron Em,

> "...forced upon us by a namby pamby state..."

> "...the progressive movement..."

Actually, I think you'll find it was only Oxford Football Club.

Antarctic ice formed at CO2 levels much higher than today's

@ Anonymous Coward 11:51GMT

Perhaps TomR was referring to this line in the abstract: "Our results show that CO2 declined before and during Antarctic glaciation and support a substantial CO2 decrease as the primary agent forcing Antarctic glaciation, consistent with model-derived CO2 thresholds."?

UK Met Office: World temperature back down to 1997 level

Yes, it was a record El Niño (1997-1998) - that is, an increased-temperature Pacific oscillation . This year (well, 2010-2011) is a strong La Niña - that is, a decreased-temperature Pacific oscillation.

Slightly inconvenient to El Reg's particular bias to point that out, though...

MPs: This plan for proper navy carriers and jets is crazy!

Aye, I realise it would be politically difficult and make the French impossibly smug...

Not newer than the Rafale, even in Super Hornet guise, but definitely a bit cheaper. Less capable in almost every way, though. Since we're talking about sharing carrier air groups with the French, the spares and training commonality would probably help with the overall price.

Plus, on top of that, the UK would have a fighter that looks as good as, and flies/dogfights as well as the Eurofighter, but can actually engage ground targets too! And land on carriers, of course.

Dassault Rafale?

Why not consider the Rafale? Comparable in cost to the F-18A but more capable, stealthier, newer airframe and avionics, also available in a carrier version.

Global warming much less serious than thought - new science

Re: The Australian.

So you're accusing Lewis of just lifting his articles from a publication that agrees with his views rather than doing some simple research?

re: thought it was all settled

The science is pretty settled - that doesn't mean that new models won't apply that science and be published with new results (often not much different from the old results) on a regular basis. Ultimately, that is what this paper is - a new model run with the model extended at little more than past ones have been.

I note, though, that Lewis' long-held hatred of models as used in climate science seems to have been suspended for this particular paper. The scientific scepticism, which should be applied to all new results and is a very healthy thing, seems to be a bit selective here at El Reg.

Ultimately, if this model does further refine the science (and I've not yet read the paper in full nor seen any responses from the authors' peers), it provides excellent news. The caveat, as with all these papers, though, is that this is only one modelling paper among many on this topic.

Eurozone crisis: We're all dooomed! Here's why

> So enlighten us, what ARE the benefits of the single currency then???

> And the single currency benefits are? You appear to have failed to list them...

The fairly obvious one, I'd have thought, is ease of trade.

Ancillary benefits include ease of travel, price transparency, wage transparency...

@James Micallef

It's not entirely true that Italy has borrowed loads of money since joining the Euro. In fact, when Italy fixed the Lira against the Euro on 31st December 1998, its debt level was 114.9% of GDP - it had been falling steadily since 1995, when it was 121.5% GDP. It fell prettly steadily from that point to a low in 2007 of 103.1%, from whence it has risen steadily to 118.4%.

The problem with Italy is that its government services a larger than average debt/GDP based on its productivity. That, like the rest of the Europe and, indeed, much of the world, has taken a tumble since the US mortgage lenders poisoned the world financial system by finding a way to package up bad debts in a way that no-one would understand the risks they were taking by buying them.

Greece's debt/GDP was also pretty steady until 2007, when it also started climbing quite sharply, from 107.4% to 144.9%. Not as sharply, it should be pointed out, as the UK - which has gone, in the same period from 44.4% to 79.9%.

The main problem is that running such large deficits works to give the government bond markets an utterly undemcratic hold over the politics of your country. Since Germany does not want to allow the ECB to be lender of last resort, there is no way to combat that in the Eurozone.

Re: Count me as a crackpot too...

So, you're saying you're in favour of Scottish independence, then?

Google feeds patents to HTC for assault on Apple

Re: What did I miss?!?!

Big company buys patents from another big company (who, in turn, bought them from a big company), uses them to counter-sue yet another big company who were suing them for infringement of patents they bought from a big company. Not the same big company, clearly.

Lawyers seen leaving with truckloads of hard cash. Consumers pay a little more than they need to.

All caught up now?

To be honest, I'm thinking of recording this one and watching it when I'm really bored. It seems a bit slow and derivative...

Room-temperature brown dwarf spied just 9 light-years off

Re: Can anyone enlighten me?

I think there's some debate over whether or not there is a continuum with stars at one end and gas giants at the other. The key definition of a star, though, is presumably that it has sustained fusion in its core at some stage. Deuterium fusion (D +p -> 3He + gamma) requires objects of around 15 Jovian masses, IIRC.

No Gingerbread snack for Desire owners, says HTC

Mleh...

Users who care that much will probably root - I'm being pushed to it not by this but by the veritable tsunami of crap that comes with Sense. Shame - I quite like Sense as a UI.

It is the only major design fault of the Desire, and probably the main reason I'll look to upgrade soon. Shame - I really like this phone, even after over a year.

Wind power: Even worse than you thought

re: In other words, a free market can only exist in theory

Er, yes, exactly - so whingeing about wind generation (or anything else, for that matter) being uncompetitive in a free market is pointless - the energy market is not and never will be free.

Government carbon taxes and subsidies to renewable technologies are an attempt to partially internalise that particular externality. Since we (in the form of our elected goverments) attach a monetary value (admittedly, not well-defined) to carbon emmisions, it seems reasonable that we offer a (nominally) similar amount of our taxes to non-carbon-emitting power production methods.

For nuclear, the subsidy is in the form of waste disposal, which is hideously expensive (largely because of our paranoia about all things containing either of the words nuclear or atomic).

Re: To those people so fixated on renewables...

> its economic 'viability' is completely artificial and in a free market it would be a dismal failure

We can't really know that because we don't have a free market in power generation - fossil fuel providers have not internalised the massive cost of the carbon they pump into the atmosphere. Nuclear and renewables are not fighting on a level playing-field, so it is not a free market - even with government "carbon taxes". Nuclear is effectively subsidised too, since the transport and disposal of waste is almost entirely paid for by the tax-payer, rather than than the producers.

A truly free market requires that there is no subsidy of any kind and for all players to have fully internalised any costs associated with their product.

Samsung intros 'skinnier than iPad 2' tablets

Hopelessly blue?

Really? I've compared my a friend's Galaxy S with both an iPhone (3GS and 4) and a Desire HD. Eye-wateringly intense colours, maybe, but definitely not "hopelessly blue". Is it some kind of scattering caused by the reality distortion field, perhaps?

Blofeld's Japanese volcano base erupts

Re: I've not read anywhere but...

Er, well, yeah, but only in the sense that every fault that borders the pacific plate is, technically, part of the same plate boundary. Given that there aren't any plates that exist entirely within another, every fault on the earth is, techically, connected to every other...

Traffic-light plague sweeps UK: Safety culture strangles Blighty

re: Justification

Oh, and one other thing that other cyclists can use as a reasonable justification for riding through red lights. Cyclists who do so (in London, anyway) are statistically safer than those that don't. Perhaps that's because of the almost universal abuse of the Advanced Stop Line area by vehicles (which is an offence, incidentally)?

Reading and comprehension.

Did I say or imply anywhere in my post either that it's OK or that I do it? I was simply pointing out that, despite all the hot air about cyclists going through red lights, more vehicles do it and do so in a much more dangerous way. For some reason many people have a massive blind spot to that, while accusing cyclists of leading the country to anarchy with their traffic-light-ignoring schemes.

For the record, I observe all traffic signals, including the apparently optional-to-vehicles amber light.

@Fred Dibmah

If your helmet cracked then it likely did next to no good at all - it is designed to absorb energy by permanently compressing the polystyrene liner and it takes much less energy to crack it. That was simply a failure.

If you didn't even suffer concussion, then you probably would have been uninjured without a helmet - in fact, without the extra inch or so of plasic wrapped around your head, you might not have involved your head at all. Perhaps the helmet actually put you at greater risk of a rotational brain injury and you were lucky to come away unscathed despite it?

Re: Sorry, but

Perhaps it is a Bristol thing. Up here in Edinburgh, there are plenty of cyclists that ignore the lights, but many more who obey them. Cars, buses, taxis, trucks and vans: nearly every change of the lights sees someone go through on amber or red. I'm sure there would be a higher percentage of vehicle drivers ignoring the lights if it wasn't for that pesky minority that obstructive stops on a red.

The difference? Generally, the cyclists will slow down, look both ways and, once they're happy (to their own criteria for risk assessment) move through the lights slowly. Vehicle drivers will generally see a light going amber and put their foot down, often accelerating to well past the speed limit, before hurtling across the junction.

Damn cyclists.

Oh, and on the funding thing, Dave - I own a car and a motorcycle, so pay VED and insurance tax twice along with the fuel duty and VAT I incur when I am driving/motorbiking, and pay a lot more than average income tax. So, here is one cyclist - and there are a lot more like me - that has contibuted "MUCH MORE than their fair share".

Re: Surprisingly illegal

That is technically true, since, according to the Road Traffic Act 1988, traffic lights or road signs apply to "a person driving or propelling a vehicle". A cyclist pushing a bike is propelling a vehicle.

If, however, you pick your bike up and walk it across the junction, you're fine. There is case law to support this, but I can't find it at the moment.

Apple iOS dominates Euro smartphone usage

Re: Android is fading out like everyone predicted...

So, this is what it looks like inside the reality-distortion bubble.

Mmmmm, fruity...

Sex offenders will get a review – after 15 years

re: Erm...

So what you're saying is that there should be some kind of review process - perhaps after, say, 15 years?

BBC apologises for Top Gear outrage

Point of view of another foreigner, this time in Scotland

I've also spent time in many countries and I think you're talking out of your fundamental orifice. Every nation I have ever been to engages in this type of humour and every nation without exception contains large numbers of people who believe that are superior to everyone else simply because of the accident of geography that was their birth.

I agree that Clarkson gets paid too much of the license fee, though...

Liberal Google, Yahoo!, Apple hurting America claims Reagan

re: Ha

While he might have started as a liberal Democrat - Reagan a leftie? Really? The man who said "If an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house, it is his right to do so"? The man who campaigned against the welfare state as Governor of California on a platform of sending "the welfare bums back to work"? The man who fired 11345 air-traffic controllers for going on strike? The man who invented 'Trickle-down economics', who slashed taxes and massively increased defence spending while poverty increased, was a commie-lovin' pinko leftie?

I've got nothing against Reagan, but left-wing - by anyone's standards, then or now - he was not.