* Posts by Rampant Spaniel

1813 publicly visible posts • joined 26 May 2011

UK NHS 850k Reply-all email fail: State health service blames Accenture

Rampant Spaniel

A similar thing happened at a few companies, virgin media / ntl being one. Somebody sent some idiotic email about thinking of a colour and then an object and the company had 48 hours of people emailing everyone "red hammer", "yellow hammer", or please unsubscribe me. It was hillarious, especially the emails from the chief bin lickers assistant commanding everyone to stop.

Lose a satellite? Us? China silent on fate of Gaofen civilian/spy sat

Rampant Spaniel

Re: Cities

America has vendors looser definition of cities which relate more to postal boundaries. An example would be Lāna`i city, population 1.4 if you include cats.

It also leads to some confusion with addresses where you have to put down your postal city but not your town i.e. you live in Nāpili which is a genuine area / town but your address is Lāhainā which is 10 miles away. It took a little getting used to for a Brit but it's just how they roll here.

Australia's Telstra and Optus outed as two of the world's six most expensive ISPs

Rampant Spaniel

Re: How does it actuallly work?

I just remembered Oz used to have a very unique bandwidth pricing method. If you rented a server anywhere else you typically paid for bandwidth either as a flat fee for the pipe, 9th percentile, per mbps or per Gb. There may have been a few others but they were the most common. I recall Oz had a weird system where you paid only for outgoing bandwidth, incoming was free, from a server standpoint. Not sure if they still do that. That would account for a reluctance to peer as well.

Rampant Spaniel

Re: How does it actuallly work?

Telstra charges their customers a nominal fee for access to the internet. They don't have an end to end link with the servers they want to access (assuming the other end isn't hosted on Telstra's network, in which case they are paying anyway).

When you have a server connected to the Internet you pay to have data taken off that server and delivered. The network you are connected to then either hands it off to another company (for payment or payment in kind) or if it can delivers it directly to the edge of the destination network.

If there were no paid transit the shortfall in revenue it generates would fall on either the server owner (and get passed on to you) or directly on you. There are quite a few companies that make their living serving as that connection from the server you want information off and the edge of your isp's network. Take them away and your isp then has to pay for a much larger network which you end up paying for.

Peering fees on a per mbps basis are minor, they aren't extortionate and on the few occasions they are you can usually get around it by buying routes from another network that connects with your desired destination.

What really hurts these situations is the disparity between ingres and egress. Cosnider netflix. You want to watch an episode of house of cards on your tablet. You whack play and your tablet sends a quick request and you get a stream of video coming at you. All your tablet really sends back are acknowledgements it received video. You are probably transmitting at 50-100kbps but receiving at 3000-4000kbps. If netflix had any sense they would use spare inbound capacity to run a backup service! That disparity between send and receive is what generally makes peering unatttactive. Especially since it's usually indirect anyway. Some company has already been paid to deliver the information, they just don't want to share their cut of the fee.

Put basically the cost of getting the information from server to you is shared by you and the server owner. Peering and transit exist to serve different situations, if you have access to trade then you get peering, if you want to dump data and can do jack in return you pay for transit. When you carpool and some guy never takes his turn to drive you aren't carpooling, you are a free taxi :)

Rampant Spaniel

Seriously? The model is basically that you pay for data egress, peering is generally only done where there is a sane ratio (usually up to about 5:1) in the exchange otherwise you aren't bringing enough to the table. A CDN usually has a very asymmetrical usage profile, they take very little data and need to get rid of a lot.

Now there is a second argument for peering, when it improves service to your end users.

I don't doubt that Telstra and Optus are doing this for financial reasons. They don't want to lose the revenue from the transit. While the data will still get to their customers it will either be over a different paid transit link or via someone else's peering (in which case there is a ratio in effect, if it gets tripped they end up having to pay for transit).

Transit is an important source of revenue for isps. What they are doing may be unwise to a degree, they are degrading service to their subs, but I find it hilarious that a company is complaining they effectively won't give them a product for free. CDN's are basically paid to get rid of data, yes they are paid to hold it in regional caches, but basically their job is to throw data at end users. They are now complaining because they have to pay for access to those end users?

We used to pay for transit in our DC. The rates are relatively small at those levels of commit and you can usually score access at peering exchanges for port fees alone. Oz always did have a weird market, I'm not shocked Europe would have a more liberal approach to peering but that doesn't make it wrong.

Cash-strapped Sprint to raise $2.2bn by flogging off its network hardware

Rampant Spaniel

Sprint has suffered from years of epic mismanagement. From the disastrous Nextel merger in 2005 onwards. That meter gave them the low band spectrum they needed but it had only really started to be deployed in the past 3 years. The deployed wimax which was a misstep (although they had a build out deadline which left them no choice). They have constantly promised the moon only to deliver so late that they have already been outdone by even tmobile.

They have huge Hugh band spectrum reserves but needed to basically rebuild their entire network to take advantage of them. This frequently involved purchasing fiber from either their competitors or suppliers which get a lot more money from their competitors. Things weren't quick which didn't help. Their network was caught out by the jump in data demand and their response was slow and badly executed.

They could have done a lot, they had a great reputation which they seem to have pissed away. They are finally delivering on their promises which is good. The problem is they are not in great financial shape and their new owner could drop some dollar love on them but seems hesitant to. Sadly their future is unclear, I'm hoping their lead a great turnaround. The money massaging is either presale moves or the start of a significant assault on the industry.

Hopefully their new CEO has cleaned house enough as they have been pathetic for a decade.

Stop whining, America: Your LTE makes Europe look slow

Rampant Spaniel

Re: Coverage

Wade, I live on an island maybe 100 miles long with 160000 people on it. Theres gaps in coverage in the middle of town, out of town it gets even worse. Partially its the geography but mostly a half assed approach and a network density setup for voice in sub 1 GHz spectrum thats struggling with data related issues like lte cell breathing.

Rampant Spaniel

I live in the states and the situation varies wildly from location to location and provider to provider.I was shocked upon first moving here just how poor the coverage was in rural areas. Even the much vaunted Verizon had large swathes of the state uncovered or the service was so poor so as to be useless. Speed was also poor, tmobile (the 'cheap carrier') actually had some of the best speeds due to their hspda service although their coverage was the worst.

The advent of mobile video seemed to bring att, verizon and sprint to their knees, at least here. I got a verizon tablet and the speeds were pathetic on lte (sub 1mbps) even when close to and in clear sight of a verizon tower. When they had ~35m subscribers tmobile also had great speeds, now with nearly double that number they are slowing down. The poster child for speed is usually sprint where they have rolled out their 3xCA EBS\BRS network although that speed is usually only evident during offpeak hours.

I know they love to boast of having the best everything here but with cell service it just isnt the case. Things are improving but not quickly. Use is outstripping capacity expansion and valuable spectrum is tied up supporting legacy (less spectrally efficient) technologies.

Rampant Spaniel

Re: Speed not the problem

What monopoly? the vast majority of the country has access to at least 3 if not 4 major national carriers and a multitude of mvnos and regional carriers. The wireline business is a cartel, you usually only have one option the wireless is not (although there is an argument for some collusion between the big two). As for service I have 2 lines with unlimited calls, texts, lte data and calls the a bunch of other countries for 105 plus taxes a month.

Bone-dry British tech SMBs miss out on UK.gov cash shower

Rampant Spaniel

Re: Almost infinite monkeys

3 monkeys, 30 minutes.

The next Cuban gristle crisis: US Navy warship powered by beef fat

Rampant Spaniel

Better not take it to India!

Late night server rebuild led to 'nightmares about mutilated corpses'

Rampant Spaniel

Iddqd ftw

JetBlue blames Verizon after data center outage cripples flights

Rampant Spaniel

Re: Beancounters

Yes it is :) their dc should not be so easily taken offline. The blame should be shared by both companies. Jet blue also just learned a valuable lesson about carrier neutral vs carrier dc's.

Taking out a well designed dc requires a fluff up of epic proportions. Ev1's Houston dc got taken offline because an electrician dropped a spanner into the main power switched cabinet in exactly the wrong position. Not only did Murphy do a little dance but it took out a significant amount of their power switching equipment and pdu's. Maybe Verizon hired the same tech?

Rampant Spaniel

Re: Not everyone ignores the DR plan

Not to mention that many dc's get paid by their utility to switch to generator power at times of extreme demand on the grid. The dc gets to test it's generators for free and the utility gets a significant drop in demand. Iirc super bowel Sunday is an example of one of those times.

Rampant Spaniel

What kind of DC gets taken out like that? There should have been a UPS covering it until the generators spin up.

Plus the whole point of the cloud is multiple locations for redundancy.

Boozing is unsafe at ‘any level’, thunders chief UK.gov quack

Rampant Spaniel

Re: Cannabis

I don't personally care one way or the other about its use, but it is not legal in the USA in general. Over 20 states have medical use exceptions that allow limited cultivation and use at home, I think a couple went further and did legalize / decriminalize it, but it's technically still illegal even there until the feds decide. Plus while it's legal in a few places you can still be fired for failing a drugs test for it and you can't drive under the influence. So basically the entire situation is fubar :) I just don't want anyone getting off a plane, sparking up and spending 20 years in the slammer :) Use is widespread but lots of people get in varying degrees of trouble for it.

Canada may allow it, but they even accept the French and put gravy on cheesy chips.

Rampant Spaniel

Well she can **** right off.

Great, so they will be shutting down all the bars in the Palace of Westminster and stopping them buying drinks on expenses then!

Who is this witch? how is she a dame and what planet is she currently in orbit of? It is crap like this that lends even more credence to the assertion that the political classes should be loaded onto a giant trebuchet and fired sunwards.

Ps lived the Billy connelly reference, I remember having that on a cassette for a school trip and playing it on the coach radio.

Android 6 on Galaxy Note 3?

Rampant Spaniel

No, and its unlikely. I have one, I love it but its had two years worth of updates. It may get some extended security patches but I don't believe it will get marshmallow officially. It may get support via a 3rd party rout such as cyanogenmod.

I'm actually looking for a tablet and samsungs treatment of their tablet owners is the primary reason I am looking elsewhere. I cant believe people dropped upwards of $700 on the 12.2 inch note and many of them are stuck on kitkat.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news :( I'm going to hang onto my note 3 for another year or two but unless they bring back removable batteries and sd card I'm probably getting an LG.

Post-pub nosh neckfiller special: The WHO bacon sarnie of death

Rampant Spaniel

Re: Going hannibal with the weiners...

It did show a partial match to the leader of a certain political party.

Rampant Spaniel

Going hannibal with the weiners...

A recent study found 2% of hot dog samples tested contained human DNA ;) probably contaminated samples but food for thought :) sarnie needed a slice of savory duck to really amp up the risk!

Post-pub nosh neckfiller: Bacon and egg sushi

Rampant Spaniel

Has anyone ever tried bibimbap after a shesh? I doubt you could make it (unless you are Korean and have all the fixings as leftovers) but it would probably do the job quite well.

Rampant Spaniel

Re: I understand the bacon and egg part

I hear you, I thought the same until I moved to Hawaii. It depends on the fish. Cod will make you ill, but ahi (tuna) should never be cooked, it's obscenely good raw. I probably wouldn't try it with stuff bought from somewhere like Tesco though.

Rampant Spaniel

Get back to Hawaii and try some poke :) A bowl of spicy poke (siracha, wasabi, and mayo for the sauce) helps remove the fuzz from inside the skull, you can even go half and half with Kahiko style and replenish any lost salts. Coupled with a bacon sandwich is the best post supping breakfast I've found.

Bloke cuffed for blowing low-flying camera drone to bits with shotgun

Rampant Spaniel

Re: I sort of agree

Bullshit. If some pervert was sat in the tree in it garden videotaping my girls his sorry ass would be arrested and detained until the police arrive and he would be off to jail. Using a pervcopter to achieve the same should result in the same. There are many people out there using these sensibly and then there are idiots who fly them by airports or over private areas. We just start practicing with the fire hoses when we see one. I hope this guy gets nothing more than a telling off. The four perverts should be charged with voyerism or whatever the local statue would be. A hot air balloon is not the same, now if someone was flying one 20 ft above our land and filming my kids, damn right words will be had.

Evil computers sense you’re in a hurry and mess with your head

Rampant Spaniel

Re: Church people

Nooo, that would be Canadians! What's the difference between a canoe and a canuk? Canoes tip.

AT&T, Verizon and pals eat own head in effort to kill off net neutrality

Rampant Spaniel

And of the legal and political systems are worth anything somewhere a judge should we heating up a vat of cat vomit to drown AT&T's entire board and C level staff in.

Citizens United did not validate their position, it highlighted exactly how wrong it is. You cannot bribe your way to being able to bribe and expect it to be viewed as right. You may have temporarily purchased the right not to be prosecuted for it, but it is still wrong. All this lobbying crap and trying to make the situation worse so you can claim it should never have been happened is utter, contemptible shyte. Any sane judge would at best ensure their more stringent rules would apply and apply only to them. Then throw them in jail for wasting the courts time. Companies should have the opportunity to put forward their concerns, but this should be in public, without financial finagling and campaign contributions and without the use of third parties.

Just because they don't like it does not mean they should be able to buy their way out of it. There are many laws and government programs I don't like but I accept as part of living in a vaguely democratic society. AT&T and friends need to accept that they have to bend to the will of the electorate, assuming it doesn't contravene a higher law. They should also consider the idea that perhaps if they had behaved less like absolute Berkshire hunts in the past they would not have attracted such attention.

Oz dad-and-son team rattle tin for homemade reusable spaceplane

Rampant Spaniel

Re: They look great in the photo

You could have read his bio on kickstarter.

Rampant Spaniel

Re: Father and Son

Well said, its great to see kids getting the opportunity to try things like this. Well worth donating! I hope local schools will get involved as well, get the kids seeing science in action.

Wheely, wheely mad: Petrolheads fume over buggy Formula One app

Rampant Spaniel

Re: The Ecclestone Effect

So Max is in charge of it now then? ;)

Microsoft: Free Windows 10 for THIEVES and PIRATES? They can GET STUFFED

Rampant Spaniel

I'm glad they cleared that up!

One thing he seemed to say is that perhaps if you have one genuine license but another machine without one you may get a break on the cost?

There does come a point where enough is enough with upgrade costs, especially when the benefits are sometimes tenuous or fabricated. The free upgrade from 7&8 to 10 is most welcome, especially if 10 is as good as 7.

If it could be done in a manner to reduce potential abuse a household license \ family pack (they did this with office iirc) might get them more converts. Get Windows and Office for the whole household for a sane fee.

4K refresh sees Blu-ray climb to 100GB, again

Rampant Spaniel

Thankfully you obviously haven't bred yet!

Rampant Spaniel

Stop being so bloody sensible!

IIRC you can actually do something similar with streaming. You could add your dvd to your streaming library (for a small fee) and then upgrade to the HD stream for another couple of dollars (about 16 pence). I think it might have been on flikster? Not quite the same as physical media and greatly reduced bitrates, but a similar concept.

Given we cant even get the buggers to replace scratched media at a sane cost I don't hold out much hope, but I think you are right about an exchange program driving up adoption.

Eco-loons hack Thirty Meter Telescope website to help the 'natives'

Rampant Spaniel

Re: building on the Temple Mount

Please remember you are dealing with a culture with different attitudes towards some things. Storing waste there, digging into the summit to put in the tanks, that is an issue in itself. It might not seem an issue to a western mindset, I totally understand that, but to the people who actually own that mountain it is a huge issue. Breaking ground had cultural significance, from planting kalo with an o'o. Honestly it's hard to explain, I don't to be condescending but it's an entirely different culture so what you think might be the issue could not be.

There are environmental concerns but mostly it is cultural. Yes leach fields would be worse, but they are banned here now anyway (unless that law was revoked). The act of digging into the mauna to store trash is pretty damn offensive. That the agreement to limit the telescopes was repeatedly ignored by the very people who drew it up is just typical of the mentality of the proponents. Their word is worth nothing. They will just take what they want.

The scale of the impact is an interesting point. It is 'only' 1.8 acres of building. There are preserves up there but the people who own the land want the entire summit preserved add the entire summit is sacred. It's like building a small brothel in the Vatican and saying oh its only a small percentage. Then floating a blimp 180 for above the Vatican with a picture of a growler and a pair of knockers on it . This telescope will have a noticeable impact on the skyline due to its height. A constant reminder for those living there that money buys anything, legal or not.

If they wanted to show goodwill they would have offered to remove the broken telescopes up there. It's just cheaper to build on virgin ground.

Rampant Spaniel

Re: Direct action

The government did offer Hawaiians a chance at 'tribal' status but it was turned down. There were two main points, 1- it would mean relinquishing sovereignty. Whilst the Americans are he and in charge there is a fairly solid legal argument that they didn't ever do it legally, via conquest, or treaty etc. They actually used a joint resolution of Congress which cannot affect land outside the borders of the US, so there are some valid questions. I don't see it resulting in a sovereign Hawaii but they do.

2- nation with in a nation is more technically nation under a nation. Any laws passed by a tribe are still subject to overturn by the federal government.

Personally I think the future lies in a compromise, others don't. I do think it's not right that Kanaka should have to protest building on their own land. You'd never get away with doing it on Christian is Muslim land.

As regards the comments about idols, many kanaka were converted, many adopted both religions and some just kept quiet and kept their beliefs which is why it still exists today.

Rampant Spaniel

Re: building on the Temple Mount

Just some a few corrections to your post.

1- there are 3 5000 gallon tanks. One for water, one for waste water and one for chemical waste. The are also another two 25000 gallon tanks for the fire supression system and a 2000 gallon tank for diesel. You need to read the EIS.

2- the ownership is actually quite important. The land is owned by the people protesting up there. Along with about a third of all land here it is ceded land, held in trust by the state until the Hawaiians form their own government. The same state who lost a $600 m lawsuit over mismanagement of that land. If it was federal that wouldn't be the case.

3- the elevation does matter. It has an impact on the skyline. This is something protected here, we changed some safety railings and had to do a change of elevation permit as they were 2 inches taller (still about waist height) yet they get a free ride on 180 feet?

The entire mountain to is sacred. The hawaiians have been protesting the building on their own land for decades. Whilst there are altars and specific sites within the summit area that doesn't mean somewhere without an altar isn't sacred. In the part they may have been beaten and some may have been paid off but hopefully this time will be different.

Rampant Spaniel

Re: building on the Temple Mount

Sadly the tmt is huge, much larger than anything up there. 18 stories tall and a 5 acre footprint (plus grading area ) with giant underground storage tanks for toxic waste. There isn't anything like it up there, most are 3 to 8 stories (keck is 8). It is also being built on virgin ground, new access roads are being constructed and graded over the original dirt tracks used to survey.

I am pro telescope, just not with it being there. They had the option to remove broken telescopes and reuse that land but opted not too. They could have trucked waste out but opted not too. They could have presented a decommissioning plan and put funds in trust to cover it but they opted not to. Haleakala has a new facility going up, dkist?, which isn't attracting the same opposition for many reasons.

Rampant Spaniel

Re: It has recently become my belief...

Honestly that is not the case. This protest is the straw that broke the camels back. For decades maoli have been treated as second class citizens, devoid of rights. Their burials have been exhumed by bulldozer and dumped on the side to make way for hotels and malls. Their sacred sites have been mined for runway material, used as toxic dumps and practice battlegrounds. They have been evicted from their own land because despite being promised that their land would inure to their heirs as originally intended found that whilst the state constitution protected this, it was overruled by the US constitution.

Tell me that if I took a bulldozer to a christian cemetery there wouldn't be an outcry, yet repeatedly the same happens here and it's viewed as nothing. A developer locally was trying to build a house on top of a heiau (temple) which contained several important burials. Most were marked and they were not allowed to go near those (they don't own the land where the burials are but do own adjacent plots) but they ignored this and apparently they found 'chicken bones' which they threw into the ocean removing any proof. Tell me how you would feel if that happened to you? It happened to my family a couple of years ago. So if you find people less reasonable than perhaps you might expect, please consider there may be reasons.

I have no doubt that the kanaka maoli have benefited from the shield provided by the US government. However, they have also suffered, been beaten in schools for speaking their language, kicked off their own land, deprived of water for farming only to be offered to buy back the very same water at grossly inflated rates, humiliated and thrown into poverty. Organisations that are supposed to benefit them work against them, time and time again they find themselves having to fight all the way to the supreme court, to win and still find that the judgement is simply ignored locally.

So does this seem like an overreaction in isolation, sure I can see that, but in the context of the past 200 years it is a massive under reaction. If the people behind the project and the people that came before them had acted with any decency things would probably be different. If people had honored previous agreements, had cleaned up after themselves etc, then perhaps there wouldn't be this protest. Also please remember that on one side of this are paid PR specialists, media ad buys and slush finds. On the other are hard working individuals that just want to coexist and be respected. This is just the chickens coming home to roost.

Rampant Spaniel

Re: I love my spotted owl rare.

heh I'll let you go and tele Lanakila and the others up there they are from the mainland :)

Funny you should mention the GMO issue. The papaya is one of the few examples where the use of GMO is pretty justified. The issue we found here is the GMO's were indirectly killing reefs and turtles. You also have to understand this is set against the backdrop of the legacy of the plantations. Our aquifers are still polluted by the fumigants, pesticides and herbicides used by the cane and pineapple industry over the past century. The majority of the 'anti gmo' protesters were against the bribery, the lack of transparency, and the dangers not specifically from the GMO aspect but from the fact the GMO was fone to promote tolerance of high levels of herbicide and or production of pesticides by the plants themselves.

What was found was that certain types of agriculture were resulting in high levels of nitrogen run off due to poor nitrogen fixation by the crops (resulting in higher levels of N fertilizer being used). This was then caused eutrophication of algae, killing reefs and causing an explosion of cancers in the turtle population. A lot of work is still to be done on the mechanisms and ruling out simple correlation rather than an actual cause (which could happen) but given the history here I think caution is understandable. Not everyone had that approach, some just hate gmo's, personally I think they have a place. I do think they have to be used with caution. The irony of it being Hawai'i is palpable. If it wasn't for the diversity provided by the maoli cotton (called Ma'o) the industry would on its knees. Whe mass plantations of cotton were hit by blight and insects it was natural hybridizing with Hawaiian cotton that provided a resistance. Normally Ma'o wouldn't be grown commercially, the spreadsheets say no, but it was the 'crazy hippie' kanakas that grew it for cultural uses that provided the answer. Moving to mono cropping of designed plants leaves you at the mercy of companies who charge crazy money for seeds. We grow up to 60 varieties of tomatoes (just as one example from the farm), save our own seeds at basically zero cost. We are narrowing it down to maybe 20 of the better varieties for sale but will keep rotating the rest through to keep valid seed. When we bought in some corn seeds we paid a fraction of the cost for organic corn as we would have done for GMO corn, we have the freedom to cross breed the corns and we can save the seeds, also no chemicals required. I do worry about the GMO corn crossing with our corn and finding myself on the end of a lawsuit. I'm personally not all that happy about the corn producing bt toxins (not something we use, although some large organic farms do). I'd like the choice and I'd like to know we can keep their stock isolated, something thats' difficult on small islands.

Plus some of it came down to trust. On the one hand you have farmers who pay for independent experts to check on their farming practices, on the other you have seed and chemical companies who pay politicians to pass laws to prevent people finding out what is happening on the farms. Which makes you suspicious?

It's disturbing to see how the world perceived what went on here with that. No doubt helped by news papers remembering which large chemical companies buy adverts in their papers.

Rampant Spaniel

Re: This is why you can't have nice thigns

How so? The kickbacks aren't going to the people on mauna o wakea? Also which telescopes were closed, there are broken ones up there but funnily enough the folks that built them don't want to remove them like they promised.

The barrels comment is spot on. Many wheels will be greased for many years to come from this project. There are lots of kanaka maoli who would always oppose a development like this, but many more who oppose it based on the conduct of the people proposing this project and the ones in charge of the previous projects. You can only break your word so many times before nobody believes you. Unless you are a politician of course. The delays etc might be benefitting contractors and the local portable lua company but not the kanaks on the mauna who are off work to protest.

Rampant Spaniel

Re: And they are celebrating because...?

The majority of the people protesting are being silent on this. They are torn between appreciating the show of support and the publicity and the fact that they are bound by kapu aloha. This basically means that they are required by a moral code to protest peacefully and with love and respect. They didn't ask for the support from anonymous. They haven't applauded it nor have they criticized it.

I don't think anyone believes the attack would do anything more than cause a few headaches for sys admins. What it did do is gain publicity for the cause.

Lanakila who has been speaking publicly about the cause has repeatedly stressed people must not be destructive in their protests. Go try and build the TMT on temple mount and tell me what reaction you think you would get :)

Rampant Spaniel

Re: Green scientists

Again, this is exactly the misconceptions that cause problems to begin with.

Firstly the mauna o wakea is home to wildlife. The silverswords are amazing. It might be sparse up there but it also has a beauty in its own right, above and beyond the cultural importance.

Secondly, we spend plenty of time trying to keep invasive species out to protect what is already there. I can understand the idea of introducing and experimenting, but Hawai'i is fairly small. Many of its species are unique and also endangered. If this were not the case it would make sense to experiment, but past experiments have shown that all that happens is diversity disappears. Hosmer's grove on Haleakala is proof of that.

Thirdly, as I mentioned above, this is one of the most sacred sites to na kanaka maoli. Just being there without performing the correct protocol is viewed as improper. There might not be many kanaks left but that doesn't mean they don't have a right to say what happens. Technically this is actually their land. It just happens that the people mandated to manage it seem to have a habbit of collecting brown envelopes. Scientists have been building up there for decades, every time they promise it is the last telescope they turn round and need to build another and refuse to remove the broken ones. There are a few idiots who drive up there and get stuck, theres a shot last week of one of the tmt construction vehicles that ran off the road.

The actual ownership is disputed, the observatory district is currently leased to UH by the BLNR which is a state entity. You may be getting mixed up with Halaeakala? which is a national park and federal. Mauna kea iirc is seeded lands so it technically held by the state until a Hawaiian government is formed. The dispute arises between the American view I mention above and the kanaka view that the USA never legally acquired the kingdom of hawai'i. Dr David Keanu Sai wrote a dissertation on the legality. What you believe is up to you, I just wanted to supply both sides on that point for anyone interested.

Rampant Spaniel

Re: Direct action

Wow some incredible ignorance there!

There are two significant areas of concern here over the building of the TMT. First and foremost there is a deep misunderstanding about the sacredness of the mountain. The summit (and others) are Wao Akua or basically the realm of the gods. It is not a case of only the area around an ahu (shrine) is sacred, but the entire peak is viewed and the literal home of the gods (Poliahu, Lilinoe, Waiau, & Kahoupokane). It is their mount olympus, viewed as an overlap with the heavens, a direct portal.

You can mock, you can point to the low numbers of 'believers' but how many followers does a religion need to have protection? Go try built the telescope on temple mount and see what reaction you get. Na Kanaka Maoli have followed kapu aloha, they have protested peacefully and have used every legal avenue open to them (and no illegal ones).

The issue they have come up against is the second point. Money, corruption and being held to account. An agreement was made after an extensive review process to limit the number of telescopes to 13 and keep them within a specific area. When #14 was proposed and people objected it was decided that Keck 1 and 2 were actually really just one after a few brown envelopes changed hands. Now they want to build number 15 and if you read the 2000+ pages of EIS (environmental impact study) and planning documents their sole justification for breaking their agreement on the limit is 'we have already done so much damage this won't be noticed'. Development was supposed to be limited, yet any agreement made is ignored as soon as it is inconvenient. How is that legal? You expect people not to protest that?

This is not an issue for 'a few natives' this has support from haoles and maoli alike. By far the biggest income to the economy is tourism, those tourists come for the beauty. Yet repeatedly that beauty is degraded as the expense of irresponsible development that is permitted only due to lobbying. The current governor has had his nominations for offices repeatedly refused due to them being lobbyists.

The argument is not against science nor astronomy, but about the cost. There are other locations for the TMT. It could be built with the VLT in Chile. This is just another case of bribery to cut some corners. If it went to Chile the bribes would go with it. There are inoperable telescopes up there which the operators refuse to remove. TMT is several times larger than any of the current observatories and would have a significant impact.

Chip rumor-gasm: Intel to buy Altera! Samsung to buy AMD! ... or not

Rampant Spaniel

Re: Samsung AMD one sounds a bit rubbish

The name doesn't need to change, it just needs to be structured as a reverse acquisition. It was the same with NTL and Telewest .

Rampant Spaniel

Re: Samsung AMD one sounds a bit rubbish

As a consumer who has switched between amd and intel over the years I can see some sense in this. I just bougth an amd because it was i5/i7 speed for i3 pricing (in a sale). AMD has a place in the market, they are doing some interesting things compared to intel, but they dont have the scale behind them. The question for us as consumers is would an acquisition by Samsung leave them better able to take on Intel? Access to current generation fabbing would work for AMD and bring even better economies of scale for Samsung. Access to all the GPU tech would make for interesting moves in the ARM products from Samsung. If Samsung can get them for a sensible price it could work out very well for everyone, especially us. I can dream anyway!

Galileo! Galileo! Galileo good to go after six-week recovery effort

Rampant Spaniel

Re: Inservice dates anyone?

True, but in fairness the military knew what they wanted, knew who to get in from, and how to implement their plan. Brussels on the other hand will have changed their mind about the spec 6 times, employed their half wit relatives as consultants, and blown most of the initial budget on junkets to Thailand and the other half on the then necessary penicillin.

Having worked for a company with a multi billion pound government contact (railway renewal) I can honestly say I have never seen people know less about what they want our need yet so willing to throw (other people's) money at a problem. It was so bad we ended up changing to a cost plus billing model because they changed their mind so frequently. Genuinely huge amounts of money were routinely wasted. I wonder if it would be the same if the shortfall came from their pension fund.

'Just a kid' Zuck's word is his bond ... but NOT in his backyard, lawsuit claims

Rampant Spaniel

Sorry but seriously, you knock millions off a sale and don't have the reason for the discount documented in blood and witnessed?

Pathetic PC sales just cost us a BILLION dollars, cries Intel

Rampant Spaniel

I agree to a point on the graphics. It makes more sense on an in than an i7 to me. Short of them actually putting discrete class graphics on die (then you have power / heat / memory bandwidth concerns) I felt the higher end chips either needed basic or no graphics. The current situation is kind of a halfway house, especially for desktops. I understand with laptops it makes a lot more sense. I'm probably in the minority as usual though :)

With a desktop is cheap and easy to throw in a graphics card. If a top end i7 is $300 and half the die is GPU, is that GPU on a level with a $150 discrete card? I'd rather have 8 cores and add a discrete card and upgrade it later if needed but 8 cores is a lot more money.

Rampant Spaniel

For too long they have just released incremental, minor upgrades. They haven't really produced anything earth shattering. They release i7's with huge areas of the die devoted to graphics that many won't use. When they do nix the graphics and add more cores they charge a fortune for it. If you want my money you need to do better than a 10-12% increase in performance.

I just built a new desktop after maybe 5 years with the old one. I went with the amd 8350, not because I am a fan but because the MB, SSD, RAM, antex case, psu, CPU and gfx card came to about $400 in a sale. It's not as fast as an i7, but for lightroom, coupled with the ssd, it's plenty fast enough. It has also saved me a fortune on the heating bill. The AMD isn't better but for the $125 I paid for it I don't have buyers remorse, it combined with an ssd made the better choice then even an i5 for the same total cost.

I respect intels play it safe approach with (mostly) regular release cycles but I think the lack of serious high end competition from AMD has allowed them to rest on their laurels. I would have liked to see them be brave and ditch an upgrade cycle since they keep slipping and bring forward skylake. I'm looking to get a tablet soon and I would love a goldmont chip to be in it but thats probably not going to be for ages. So I will wait, perhaps by then AMD will be using 16nm and be able to compete a little better?

Spending $700 - $1000 on a new desktop is a fairly serious commitment, if you want to get people to spend it you have to deliver a decent jump. It's too easy to look at what you have already and go it's just not worth the cost for a modest speed bump. ymmv

Menopausal killer whales are wise old birds

Rampant Spaniel

True. And any parent of older kids knows the grandparent is chuckling away to themselves thinking "they think a newborn is hard? Wait till the little bugger gets mobile, or hits their teenage years"

Rampant Spaniel

Jake is that you? Or shitpeas?