* Posts by Arthur Dent

93 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Aug 2010

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Global warming much less serious than thought - new science

Arthur Dent
WTF?

@Goat Jam

"The East German FDR" ?????????

The FDR was (from 1949 to 1990) the WEST German Federal Republic, and the German Federal Republic is now the whole united Germany.

If you really think that the FDR was teh East German DDR then your dislike of the IPCC suggests that teh IPCC may not be quite as incompetent as I previously thought.

Adventures in mineral oil cooling

Arthur Dent

@spodula

Yeah, Austin is the Glasgow of the USA.

Salman Rushdie hissy-fit forces Facebook name U-turn

Arthur Dent

@oddie - yup, doubt.....

You are obviosly so completely bound by some North American Anglo-Saxon concept of how names work that you are not aware that some parts of the rest of the world have different conventions.

IN Scotland, we used to suffer badly from this: during teh 19th and most of teh 20th centuries the dominant English speakers provideed all the registrars of births, and they refused to record Gaelic names. So the parent's of someone whose name was Seumas Dhomhuill Mac a' Phi would be asked what the hell that meant, and when they replied "it's the Gaelic form of Donald's James Mac a Fee" the name would be registered as "Donald James MacAfee". So the patronymic is first, the personal name is second, and the family name is third (and all three names are completely screwed up, but that's not the point - the point is the re-ordering caused by different for order of nouns in genetive grammatical relationships).

Think of it this way: to many cultures the natural order of the names, when translated to English, is <father's name><my name><family name>; the second term in that string is the only real name, all the rest is just explaining which one of the people who use that real name you are.

I understand this because I suffer from it personally; and I suffer from the lunatic idea of translating names in the first place too: notice how the personal name in the above (which, incidentally, has no connection with me) changed from Seumas (which would be "Sheumais", which you probably know as "Hamish", in the vocative case) to James. If all your friends and family and neighbours call you "Hamish" how do you react when some total stranger starts calling you "Donald" instead, and would "James" be much better? One of my pet complaints about speakers (especially USAian ones) of English is how they don't understand that other cultures have other conventins and certainly don't understand that names are declined by grammatical case in many languages.

Ballmer shoots down Microsoft breakup advice

Arthur Dent
Facepalm

Re Problem is ...

AC 12:52..."It ignores the $14bn that was poured into it to kick it off.

Microsoft are very clever at hiding losses, so when people link to a single quarters earnings, it doesn't show the full story."

Lets see now, that's an investment which is returning a current profit of $1.6bn per quarter on that original $14bn. I make that a return of about 45%pa before taxes, and even on a discounted cash flow basis it's going to be well over 35%. If they scrapped that they would be demonstrating gross economic incompetence.

I never am able to understand why, when a some of projects are successful and are making a good return, there is always some one who will say "those projects ought tyo be scrapped because they cost too much to develop" - presumably because they are too stupid to realise that scrapping something that is earning a lot more than it is currently costing is the sure way to guarantee making the last possible profit (or the greatest possible loss if the development costs haven't already been recouped).

Happy 40th birthday, Intel 4004!

Arthur Dent
Boffin

Not the first

So Intel's public relations people are still perpetuating the myth.

The AL1 was the best part of a year before Intel's 4004 (it was in use by customers months before the 4004 was first announced) and needed no more support chips than the 4004 did, so it's hard to see how the 4004 could be considered the first.

EU: Check out our huge JavaScript appendage

Arthur Dent
Boffin

@Unlimited

"The language does matter when it's a prototype based, classless, dynamically typed abomination."

At least if it's that it's probably 100% safer than C++.

Blow for McKinnon as extradition treaty ruled 'not biased'

Arthur Dent
Unhappy

Re: American justice eh?

American justice is (despite all the court-room dramas that suggest such a thing exists) is an oxymoron.

Anyway, the claim than McKinnon's access to US military computers caused great costs (which include all the costs of securing systems which ought to have been secured in the first place) is pure nonsense, and any attempt to use those false numbers to justify a higher sentence is clearly injustice. The fact that the American authorities requiring this extradition have clearly stated there intent to so misuse these dishonest numbers ought to be enough to ensure that our government determines that this extradition will not take place. I'm appalled that it hasn't done so already.

Hundreds of Mr A N OTHERs discovered on payrolls

Arthur Dent
Facepalm

@Field Marshal Von Krakenfart

<quote>all the other Salami slicing frauds use computers as part of the system but are dependant on having a computer to do it, i.e. the fraud could just as easily be performed using a manual system.</quote>

Insanity strikes again.

What on earth can Herr Krakenfart be on?

Chaos feared after Unix time-zone database is nuked

Arthur Dent
FAIL

@Rob Crawford

Anyone who thinks a mutton is a half space clearly hasn't a clue about typography. Sometimes a nut (half a mutton) is called a half space, but a mutton is never called a half-space.

Is the rest of your twaddle as inaccurate as your assertion that "em" means half space?

Who the hell cares about five nines anymore?

Arthur Dent
Flame

Re: Nuclear reactors work with TWELVE zeroes safety...

"I expect some downvotes here from whom didn't really understand the examples..."

I was appalled to see you hadn't collected a great big heap of downvotes. Do you think that 1e-12 is the chance that the PWR is broken out of the box, or something like that? I can't account for your conclusion any other way and, as the poster next after you pointed out, even that insane assumption wouldn't actually lead to your conclusion.

I wish the mnathematically/statistically illiterate would stop posting nonsensense about probability and other fields of maths.

'Major' C++ revision receives standards blessing

Arthur Dent

@nyelvmark

"I remember reading Stroustrup's book back in 1992. I kept finding things which made me think "OK, but why would you want to do such a thing?", and "What happened to the KISS* principle?".

Bjarne was carefully following his veresoin of the KISS principle. Tht's the one where KISS stands for "Keep It Stupid, Silly".

Apple sues NYC mom & pop shops

Arthur Dent
Meh

re To be fair ... @CD001

You are displaying hopeless ignorance about history there. The Act of Union (1707) has no relevance whatsover to whether there are Kings of England or not, since it created only a union of parliaments. The two countries had shared their Kings (apart from eleven years and a couple of months from 1649 to 1660, when Scotland had a King but England still had a Dictator instead) since James VI of Scotland added the English throne to his throne collection after 35 years and 8 months of being King of Scotland alone. England still had a King (James I, King of England) and Scotland still had a King (James VI, King of Scots), both being the same person despite the difference in numbers. It's just like today: Scotland has a Queen, and England has a Queen; they happen to be the same person.

As for England not really having Kings since about 1650, that is just pure nonsense. Charles II of Scotland (who added the throne of England to his throne collection early in the 12th year of his reign as King of Scotland) was very much a real King of England, probably the best King of England since Richard III. William of Orange and the early Hanoverian Georges were all rather powerful Kings of England (the early Georges had abandoned all pretence of being Kings of Scots, as opposed to Scotland being an appendage of their English Empire, almost wrecking the Union despite several attempts of the Union parliament to require a rational policy in Scotland). Probably the first English monarch who was not a "real King" was Victoria, and she wasn't a "real Queen" because she allowed the royal prerogative to become a venerated but never observed tradition instead of something which had real and effective consequences. Her grandfather's intransigence had destroyed one attempt to obtain a rational resollution of the status of Ireland, and bothe her uncle and her father had excercised a degree of control over parliament during their (brief) reigns - but she excercised no such control. So perhaps we can date ENgland's loss of any "real King" (if, as I think, by that you mean a monarch with real effetive power) to 1837, rather than to 1650 or 1707 as you suggested.

Arthur Dent

Seen to be done???

The judge ordered "that all documents remain under seal with access only to counsel for the parties and the court."

Whatever happened to the old-fashioned common law idea that justice must be seen to be done? This looks even worse than the loony "superinjunctions" that have provoked such a fuss in the UK, but it seems to have gone by without notice in the USA.

12% of UK don't carry cash

Arthur Dent

re:re:ATM Skimmers

quote: "Unfortunately, if we did that, UK cards wouldn't work in the US."

Don't blame the Americans - nor would they work in ATMs in much of Europe. My Euro debit card (on my Spanish bank account) has a word mag stripe, so I can't use it in most ATM's in Europe (that includes Spain - I'm not even sure that a damaged mag stripe lets a C&P card work in UK ATMs, there used to be something silly about reading the stripe to discover whether the card is C&P) until I get the bank to replace the card - which I have to collect from the bank branch in person (which seems a bit more secure than the setup for my UK debit card) which means I can't use it to get cash until I get back near where I'm based in winter - but I don't get problems in shops and restaurants if I want to use it, nor in car hire places, because they all disregard and connect to the chip.

So I think it's going to be a very long time before we can drop that mag stripe regardless of what the US does. We need the banks in countries where everyone but the banks uses the chip-and-pin capabilities of the cards to use those capabilities too. Somehow I doubt if banks in Greece will be able to afford new ATM tech any time soon.

Arthur Dent
WTF?

@Bluenose re: except

"Have you tried to buy an airline ticket, car, theatre or concert tickets or any one of a host of other items with cash. Probably not because you would realise that its rarely possible to do it."

Airline ticket: yes, tried and succeeded several times (but usually use a card)

Car: yes, tried and succeeded several times (but more often write cheque; used card just once)

concert tickets:yes, cash works fine for more than 50% of the concerts I go to

theatre tickets: yes, cash works fine for more than 50% of my theatre visits.

host of other items: well, I don't buy my fixed line phone service, my internet access, my electricity, my domestic gas, my life assurance, my tv license, my water rates, or my council rates with cash - direct debit is much more convenient; but cards are pretty useless for any of those. And I don't do internet shopping with cash (it would be difficult), and tend to do car insurance, car tax, tv licence with cards. When I was paying into a private pension fund, I did that by direct debit for regular payments and used a card only for one-off payments. Tube tickets - used a card for Oyster automatic topup; train tickets - cash or card depending on how much.

Apart from internet shopping, my main uses of card are paying for restaurant, meals, restocking the booze cupboard, and supermarket shopping if I'm buying a lot, and car hire when not in the UK (where my car lives).

"rarely possible"??? Rubbish, all the things you named can easily be bought with cash.

Oops! Ofcom's DCMS's own blocking easily visible to world+dog

Arthur Dent

Re: Nice try

The link doesn't work in Firefox 5.0 with Noscript 2.1.1.1. and HTPS Everywhere 0.9.7.

It works fine in IE 8.0.6001.18702. So not too late, just wrong tool.

Isolated human genes can be patented, US court rules

Arthur Dent

One of three had it right

Looks as if just one out of the three appeal judges had a clue. Bryson thought the process claims OK, and the vastly wide DNA claims nonsense. Seems about right to me (although he seemed a bit soft on some of the DNA claims).

Let's hope that the next court up the chain prefers his position to the nonsense promoted bythe other two judges.

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

Arthur Dent
Headmaster

@JeeBee

"Of course the inquiry found that the actual science performed was without fault."

It found nothing of the sort. The report of the enquiry states:

24. It should be noted that in making these findings, the Review Team is making no

statement regarding the correctness of any of these analyses in representing global

temperature trends. We do not address any alleged deficiencies such as allowance

for non climatic effects or the significant drop in station number post 1991. We do

not address any possible deficiencies of the method. These are entirely matters for

proper scientific study and debate and lie outside the scope of this Review.

In other words, the review didn't address the question of whether the science was without fault: it addressed only the questions of whether there was any provable deliberate falsification of results (and, if you read the report, you will see that it found none - because althought it looks as if there was an attempt at fiddling by cherry picking data it was, if it did happen, an unsuccessful attempt) and whether proper disclosure of the data used was made to scientists who requested it - the enquiry concluded that it wasn't and made a formal finding to that effect:

32. Finding: The Review finds that as a matter of good scientific practice (and having

established the precedent with CRUTEM1986) CRU should have made available

an unambiguous list of the stations used in each of the versions of CRUTEM at

the time of publication. In the absence of this, CRU was unhelpful and defensive

and should have responded throughout to requests for this information in a more

timely way.

Arthur Dent

Re: "seems odd"

"three different investigations (that I know of) concluded that the only thing the scientists were guilty of was being really disorganised and not sharing their research clearly"

I guess those three include the CCE Review report to which you refer later. Frankly, anyone who reads section 4.2 8 of that report is likely to form the conclusion that this was a whitewash determined in advance (erroneously, I think, as 6.6 32 is very damaging to the reputation of the scientists concerned - but it does seem clear that this describes an attempt to adjust the data to better fit the model - it's also true that it was a pretty unsuccessful attempt - so perhaps it was only an attempt and not real data fiddling, and i seems odd that the review didn't have a finding that that was bad practise despite its ineffectiveness; we have to ask perhaps if it was one of a serious of such attempts, which Jones' email does seem to suggest).

The immediately ensuing paragraphs indicate very clearly that the CRU people weren't "disorganised and not sharing their research clearly" as you claim but, rather, well-organised and determined to ensure that their research was not shared. Put this together with the statement that the review body didn't have the resources to analyse all the data (other emails etcetera) and the quoted emails that indicated that large amounts of other email had been miraculously deleted just before FOI requests arrived and it makes one very suspicious of anything that came out of CRU.

And of course the most interesting piece of the report is one you clearly didn't read: section 6.4 24 on page 49 - clearly the review did not establish the correctness of the CRU's conclusions or even attempt to analyse the alleged deficiencies in their methods (the latter was, I think, the cause of the select committee's very negative reaction to this report)

19,000 papers leaked to protest 'war against knowledge'

Arthur Dent

@ @ "My approach"

For me, the frequency with which this fails to work makes me think that most journals have terms which do NOT permit the author to publish their papers on their own websites.

The "war on knowledge" argument is not a specious one: it's quite clear that some publishers want to take as much money as they can and want to prevent access even to things in which they once held a copyright (now expired) without them taking a cut.

Arthur Dent
Boffin

re: It's all a con

"All the UK Research Councils plus Wellcome have a OA funding mandate of deposit into UKPMC after 6 months."

That would be interesting if it were true, but actually it is false. It applies only to articles published in Life Sciences journals - most science (physics, chemistry, astronomy, geology, mathematics, computer science...) is not covered, neither I believe are pure humanities papers (which are the province of AHRC). Not all UK research councils fund life sciences research! Maybe 2 or 3 UK RCs are involved, but I think that more than half of RCUK's seven members are rather unlikely to be concerned with papers of interest to UKPMC.

Arthur Dent
WTF?

@J 3

What makes you think the publishers do any typesetting?

In the last quarter of a century they have all asked either for camera ready copy or for LaTex conforming to a particluar template which will go into a machine that produces film without any typesetting other than that explicity defined in the LaTex source provided by the author.

Radio 4 bumped off Freeview by Gaelic TV

Arthur Dent
Flame

Re various comments

Gaelic is not spoken only in Scotland, it's still spoken in Canada. I know a couple of Australians who are native speakers too (but I think the numbers there are extremely small).

All the viewing figues are underestimates, because the counters don't check how many people outside of Scotland (in England, Wales, NI, and Mann) watch it (via satellite); the numbers are small, but do affect the total.

The idiots who have made comments about only crofters speaking it are just that: idiots. I'm not a crofter, for one, and never have been.

People have paid licence fees (radio and/or TV) to fund the BBC for a very long time, during which most of which time (at least for the first 50 years; indeed for the first 20 years there was no Gaelic output at all) the ratio of Gaelic to English BBC output was only a tiny fraction of the ratio of Gaelic to English speakers. So those whinging about the cost of BBC Alba now should just look on it as pay off for the decades when the Gaels were subsidising all the English rubbish that the BBC pushed out - at least that would be a reasonable way of looking at it if it weren't for the fact the the English are being largely let off the hook because a large part of the cost isn't paid from the license fee.

Anyway, it's pretty clear from some of the comments here that our language is still threatened by "the foreigners' great ill-will", but as the poet said a few centuries ago, "Mhair i fòs is cha téid a glòir air chall dh'aindeoin gò is mìoruin mhóir nan Gall". Or as another said a century and a half ago, "Tha mi sgìth de luchd na beurla" (I'm fed up with English speakers) - I agree with her, the comments here have rendered me seachd seann sgìth dhiubh.

California set to impose 'Amazon Tax'

Arthur Dent
Boffin

Re: They'll manage

"California! Don't let Amazon say they can't do this. They manage VAT perfectly well in Europe."

No they don't. They cock it up some of the time. In fact they keep on charging VAT at the UK rate when delivering to territories for which they should not charge any VAT. An email generates a refund with no problem, but they haven't yet managed to fix the system to charge the right tax automatically (and the problem's been there quite some time).

Cabinet Office outlines gov-portal 'ID assurance' plans

Arthur Dent
WTF?

Re:If you trust Gov.UK to run secure web sites...

The search suggested by dephormation.org.uk is interesting, but instead of just looking at the number of hits it's worth looking at some of those hits. (And it's also worth noting that .gov.uk is not an organisation at all, let alone an organisation that has websites or provides secure hosting for websites - its a UK SLD, ffs!)

Of the first 20 hits delivered by Google today using that search, 13 had been fixed when I looked at them - they would no longer be hits if google looked at them again; one of the fixes was extreme - the website now consists of a single page (apparently used to catch 404 errors) which says something like "this site is now defunct". One of the remaining hits was a page which allowed comments from the public, without moderation: it had been comment-bombed (unmoderated comments are probably a bad ideas, but moderation brings the risk of moderator-induced bias in comments). Two were pages from a website that has been defunct for five or six years (I wish LG associations would clear up behind themselves instead of leaving ancient junk lying around and susceptible to attack when they move on to be hosted by a larger organisation). The remaining four were from one small parish council, probably set up by a part time town clerk with practically no understanding of IT with assistance from enthusiastic but security-unaware amateurs. None of the sites (whether fixed or still defaced) were national government sites - they all belonged to local government, LGAs, or Quangos.

I don't think that this sample of 20 hits provides any evidence that UK national government websites are careless about security (that's not to say that such evidence is not available elsewhere).

It does demonstrate that the idea that being in the .gov.uk domain doesn't guarantee that a website is secure - but no-one could resonably expect it to, when .gov.uk includes the websites of parish councils whose only employee is a part-time town clerk who has no IT experience at all, websites of associations of local government bodies which have only slightly greater staffing resources (a part time administrator and a full time secretary), and websites of current or former local government bodies and quangos which either no longer exist or which no longer maintain that website because they discovered how difficult it was to do properly and joined some larger group the cost of bringing in someone at least partly qualified to set things up properly could be shared, but forgot to eliminate the old site (or thought that just making the default page redirect to their main page on the new shared site was all they needed to do).

WikiLeaks releases classified files on Guantánamo Bay

Arthur Dent

our values as a nation

Well done Pentagon spokesman. Your "our values as a nation" tells us exactly what you think the citizens of the United States feel their values are. Exactly those values so bravely displayed by Saddam Hussein, by Muammar Gadaffi, by Heinrich Himmler and by Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria.

I had thought that it was only the PR idiots who put together Pentagon statements and the PR team of the department of Homeland Security (and a couple of senile senators) who thought those were the values of a once decent nation. The comments here trying to justify the disgraceful events of recent history have changed my belief: I now believe that those are indeed the values of a vociferous part of the nation, which has become a nation which must be despised by all decent people.

Brussels threatens to name ISPs with 'doubtful' market practices

Arthur Dent
Boffin

Looks a bit incoherent to me

It's fine by me if Kroess tries to enforce some honesty in advertising by ISPs. In fact if she does that so that we can have a sensible market for ISP services it will be an excellent thing. However a single figure for bit rate would not be a reasonable way of describing the service, since their is contention. It has to be somethink like a maximum figure, an mean figure, a median figure, and a minimum figure where the figures are to be measured over say a 1 second interval. And there has to be an equally good description of the upload speeds. However, her rhetoric seems to indicate that's she's been taken in by the ridiculous claims of the network neutrality advocates that the development of new network facilities which are charged differently will destroy the internet; so she may have the opposite effect to that she probably intends, and contribute to a contraction of network capacity as operators pull out because it becomes impossible for them to make a profit. I hope I am wrong on this, but the rhetoric of "neutrality" is there plain to see and if it prevails it will severly damage the internet.

But even forcing the ISPs to state what they will deliver is fraught with technical difficulties. It would also be necessary to specify where the contracted bandwidth will reach - sitting here I have far more bandwidth and far lower latency to Madrid than I do to Delhi, and there is exactly nothing that my ISP (Telefonica) can do about that the bandwidth to Dehli - networks between here and there just can't handle it. So it's quite possible that the description of the service to be provided becomes far too complex for the average consumer (so many Mb/s to there, so many kb/s to there, and so on) unless the ISP goes for a lowest common denominator and says something like "I can sell you 100kb/s down and 100kb/s up because that's the most that can be achieved on the worst internet connection from here" even though it's vastly less that what I might get (and indeed need) on most of the sites that I visit - and then of course the ISP would be perfectly correct to throttle me down to 100kb/s always; and the ISP can't offer a 500kb/s service at any price if the rules are put together badly, because it will be "regulated" out of existence for failing to deliver what it offered because the connection to Chitral never achieves that. And all the people baying about having a single simple number that specifies what you get and the ISP being required to provide that number all the time wherever you are downloading from are heading straight for badly constructed rules.

Fukushima on Thursday: Prospects starting to look good

Arthur Dent
Happy

Actually...

"Read a proper and unbiased article somewhere on the amount of _RADIOACTIVE_ material which is dumped into the atmosphere by a coal burning plant without proper filters (which is the case in China). That is besides all other pollutants."

That's a good idea.

About 6 decades ago Otto Frisch wrote a short piece on the safety of coal burning plants, pointing out the very severe pollution with radioactive material that they generate. At the time he held the Jacksonian Chair of Natural Philiosophy at Cambridge University, and a few years earlier he was one of the authors of the Frisch-Peierls memorandum (which described how to use conventional explosives to obtain criticality at lower mass, and the effects the resultant fission explosion would have, including a good description of the fallout) so he should probably be regarded as fairly well qualified on topics like radioactive pollution. Maybe Lomax could read his "On the safety of coal burning power stations" (I think that was the title) if he can find a copy and the words aren't too long for him.

ECJ gender ruling 'could throw insurance into turmoil'

Arthur Dent
WTF?

This is nonsense

The ECJ in its ruling is clearly stating that the decision of the European Parliament and the European Commission that the directive concerned would have national opt-outs not limited by time is something it is empowered to overrule - in other words, the legislators don't decide what the law is (neither the elected ones in the European Parliament no the appointed ones in the Commission), and no matter what the text of the law says the ECJ can say it means something completely different.

How did we ever get here? It doesn't even matter whether the decision is a good one or a bad one in the sense that this discrimination should not or should be permitted, what matters is that this court has arrogated to itself the right to make new law whichdiirectly contradicts the laws put in place by the legislative bodies empowered by the various treaties to determine what the law shall be.

Mid-Atlantic Ocean temperatures peaked in 1998

Arthur Dent
FAIL

Cherry picking data

<quote>1998 was an unusually hot year. Can you tell me what the trend is like if you chose 1997 or 1999 as your reference point?</quote>

Read the article, jonathanb, and you'll see why no-one can give you a meaningful answer using 1997 or 1999 as the point of division.

1998 was the last year of the recent upward trend of the mean close to surface temperatures on the 24.5N parallel in the Atlantic. This steady increase (which lasted about 42 years) was followed by a decline and in the following 8 years that area of ocean lost more that half the temperature increase gained in the preceeding 42 years. You can't campare behaviour on two sides of a turning point by taking something other than the turning point as your base point, it would make no sense.

It's quite clear that the rapid decrease was not caused by global warming, but was part of the ordinary short term variation in ocean temperatures in that area caused by short term wind variations leading to slightly different current patterns. That's pointed out in the article quite straightforwardly.

All the comments about how this relates to global warming and slagging off the article as being written from a NNCC-sceptic POV are bullshit, and your reference to "cherry picking" is probably the stupidest.

BA flights website grounded by snow

Arthur Dent
Flame

"nonsens isNonsense" is NOT nonsense

Alister, this is not somethiong that happens once per generation at Heathrow. Last year (2009) flights were cancelled because of snow at Heathrow in February and in December. It happened also in February 2008. In recent years the average number of periods of flight cancellations at Heathrow caused by snow is more than one per year. So basing your ideas about the economics of having clearing equipment available on some crackpot theory that it happens only once in fifty years is not "common sense", a trait which you appear to be sadly lacking, but pure nonsense.

UK.gov ignores 'net neutrality' campaigners

Arthur Dent
Boffin

Amusing!

It's amusing in a way to see how so many people rant about net neutrality without having a clue what it's about. It's already been said, but let's say it again: net neutrality is not about not capping bandwidth (as a scientist I deplore the use of the term "bandwidth" to mean what it's being used to mean here, but if I use the proper term most of the clueless will not understand me). It is about maintaining a "one size fits all" myth together with a ludicrous charging model linked to an outrageously unfair concept of "fair charging". Even the (true in the real world) idea that real-time interactive work has different latency requirements for its communications than does background bulk file sharing seems to be anathema to advocates of this spurious neutrality, as does the idea that people should be able to buy higher quality by paying for it. I strongly recommend Bob Briscoe's paper on fairness (http://bobbriscoe.net/projects/2020comms/refb/fair_ccr.pdf) for one view of an alternative to so-called "neutrality", and Frank Kelly's numerous papers on related topics for a solid grounding in the science of shared networks (a list of his papers can be found at http://www.statslab.cam.ac.uk/~frank/PAPERS/ One particular paper, "Explicit Congestion Control: charging, fairness and admission management", written in collaboration with Gaurav Raina, is perhaps a good starting point in the net neutrality context: http://www.statslab.cam.ac.uk/~frank/PAPERS/ecc.pdf) - and I hope that some of those who have commented above will take the trouble to educate themselves by looking at some of this scientific literature rather than the propaganda spewed out on this topic by the likes of Google and the BBC; but the tone of many of the comments suggests that this is a forlorn hope.

No wonder CompSci grads are unemployed

Arthur Dent
Flame

Re: On the button (AC 1/11/2010 12:58 GMT)

<quote>Personally, I don't care what languages who have or what DBs you have used. But you must have more than one language and know when to use different ones; and at least have good SQL. Know that and I can teach you how our shop works. But without that you are a drone.<unquote>

What barbarous nonsense. Ted Codd studied maths and knew nothing of SQL when he invented the relational model for databases without which SQL would never have never existed. I was a lot younger than Ted, but was doing research in databases and information retrieval long before SQL was invented. SQL is just another language (actally a badly screwed up version of Ted Codd's idea for a relational calculus based language) and saying that someone who doesn't know that particular language is a "drone" for that reason is total garbage (and I say this as someone whose last two technical director/VP level jobs were based partly on my SQL expertise, not as someone who wants to claim SQL doesn't matter because they don't know it).

<quote>We used to have an education system that was the envy of the world. Where did it all go wrong?<unquote>

When they began to let idiots who think some particular computer language is an essential part of CS eductaion have some influence? (Unfortunately that really has happened, and at a large number of Universties that language is Basic, and - o tempora, o mores - at an even larger number it is Java; but the real bad news is that it's yet more often C++.)

Gov axes £35bn Severn Barrage tide-energy scheme

Arthur Dent
FAIL

Re: storage

It seems clear that at least one anonymous coward thinks that high tide is simultaneous everywhere on the GB coast. since it hasn't occurred to him that 10 tidal generators could be built in positions such that no two have a slack time within an hour of each other - so only one would having a slack time at any given time.

Spanish fascist decries Franco Eurovision slur

Arthur Dent
Headmaster

re: he's dead

@Jimmy Floyd: To understand what "Viva Franco" actually means you could try using a decent Spanish dictionary.

The 22nd edition of the Diccionario de la Lengua Española of La Real Academia Española gives twelve meanings for the verb "vivir", of which one (the seventh) is specifically applicable after death/ It has nothing to do with life after death or rising from the grave or anything of that sort, as this dictionary definition is "Mantenerse o durar en la fama o en la memoria después de muerto" - now just take the secon person singular imperative of that and you have the meaning or "Viva" in "Viva Franco".

You can check this at

http://buscon.rae.es/draeI/SrvltGUIBusUsual?TIPO_HTML=2&TIPO_BUS=3&LEMA=vivir

No legal privilege for accountants, says Court of Appeal

Arthur Dent
FAIL

re: RIPA trumps *everything

No it doesn't.

If the authorities have in their possession an encrypted copy of what would have been, did they not have that copy, a privileged document and acquired it in such a manner that the acquisition did not breach privilege, then they can require an unencrypted copy (or in some circumstances a decryption key) to be provided.

That doesn't enable them to acquire a privileged document, just to acquire a plain text copy of a document that properly and legally came to be in their possession in encrypted form without any breach of privilage.

Unless I've misunderstood it all completely; I'm not a lawyer.

MS offers Security Essentials to small business

Arthur Dent

Re: Don't trust them

MS updates my Outlook spam filter quite often. Have you perhaps disabled Microsoft Update on the machines it doesn't get updated on?

There is a real MS update screwup but that is with root certs - treated as an optional update so it won't happen automatically.

Gordon Brown joins World Wide Web Foundation

Arthur Dent
Grenade

Why not...?

"If we're including the Dr tag, why not just refer to him by his proper first name, James?

That's right, his actual name is James Brown. "

It may surprise you to know, Mr Isurrenderall, that in a large part of Scotland and some of Northern England the name normally used is the middle name, not the first. If that does surprise you, please evaluate whether you are an ignorant and arrogrant bigot with neither knowledge nor respect for cultures other than your own provincial prejudices. If it doesn't surprise you, what reason did you have for posting nonsense?

Anyway, everyone knows that Gordon Brown is a failed Chancellor, a failed Prime Minister, a failed Party Leader, and a widely reviled and disliked character. So let's not call him James Brown - doing so might let him escape his deserver reputation. There you go, I've answered your stupid question twice for you now.

Government calls for intellectual property evidence

Arthur Dent
Boffin

Software patents in the UK

Why does anyone pretend that the UK (or the EEC) doesn't permit software patents? We've had them for years. I used to work for a large UK company where software developers were encouraged to patent their ideas for out employer's benefit (with the help of some people very competent at formulating claims) by a bonus for every patent application that passed the company's internal checks. We were even forbidden to publish in technical journals until we could put a "patent applied for" footnote on the abstract. My unit produced a lot of patent applications, almost all resultingg in granted patents. These were for real innovation, the result of intensive research, with no prior art discovered in a serious search before the applications were filed - but although they didn't display all the faults of the US system they were still, for all practical purposes, software patents. I would be very surprised if the experience of anyone who has done serious computing research in the UK (whether in industry or in a university) is any different.

Frankly, I wish we didn't have software patents (despite having collected some bonuses for applying for them) because I know that bureaucracies will generally not be able to distinguish a new invention in software from a trivial application of well-known principles, and neither will the courts. Unfortunately internatiopnal treaties require us to enforce utter nonsense patents approved in the US. Maybe what we should be doing is requiring non-European patents to pass a review considering prior art and inventive step and non-obviousness before they can be enforced in Europe - I suspect most of the bad US software patents would become unenforceable here, although some would inevitably slip through the checks.

People have no bloody idea about saving energy

Arthur Dent
Boffin

Radioactive decay

<quote>Radioactive decay happens at constant speed_ and it's a process which don't give a damn if it's happening in nature or in a nuclear reactor.<unquote>

God in heavens! I have nevr seen a better demonstration that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing than that piece of total drivel!

Have you heard or moderating nuclear reactors - ie controlling the chance of a neutron released by the fission of one nucleus to cause nother nucleus to split? This is changing the decay rate, and is how the therrmal output of a reactor is controlled. Do you not realise that a fission bomb is just a fission reactor in which that chance has got too close to 1, and that the decay takes place very rapidly in a bomb? Heaven help us, learn a little about physics and nuclear engineering before posting and then perhaps you won't post such blatant nonsense.

BBC dumps Gulf oil spill on Middlesbrough

Arthur Dent

Re "However"

<quote>The RAF found it easier to drop two Grand Slam bombs (total 8 tons of Torpex) rather than lift a spare* municipal swimming pool into low orbit.</quote>

8 tons of Torpex sounds more like either two Tallboys or a single Grand Slam than two Grand Slams (Grand Slam was the 22000 lb camouflet bomb; Tallboy was the 12000 lb version).

More choosing maths A-Level

Arthur Dent

Whatever happened to

good old-fashioned S-levels? The new A* appears to be a dumbed down version of these.

Over the last 40 years, the maths syllabi for A-level have lost a lot of topics and some of the comments above seem to suggest that the syllabus for A level additional maths has become identical to that for A level maths, which is appalling if true. The maths syllabus has gained just one topic (trivial set theory) to compensate for all those it has lost. I think the narrowing down began about 35 or 40 years ago, but the hard data I have is the papers from the 50s and early 60s (that we used for practise in the A-level courses) and papers from around 1990 (which I used for excercises for a couple of kids I was helping) which contained a much narrower range of questions than had been the case in the 50s and 60s and had quite a few questions questions (particularly on calculus) that were the sort of thing that could have turned up on O-level Maths or O-level Add Maths papers in the 60s.

For example there appears to be nothing on numerical methods now, but at a bog-standard comprehensive in the early 60s I was taught various numerical techniques for solving various problems, and taught to use a rotary pinwheel calculator to excercise those techniques and to discover in practise that the good methods not only were much more efficient than the bad ones but also much more accurate (less rounding error). There's nothing like that in schools today (a modern course would of course need to use a computer rather than a mechanical calculator).

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