Posts by John Savard

US woman cuffed for 'booking strippers for 16th birthday bash'

Re: Give an automatic rifle

Actually, U.S. Armed Forces personnel are legally allowed to drink, even if they're under 21. They are exempted from state drinking age laws.

Chip daddy Mead: 'A bunch of big egos' are strangling science

Unfortunately

Despite Dr. Mead's qualifications, he ought to be aware that on this subject, he is allowing himself to sound a lot like a crank. Why?

One thing is that it's very commonplace for cranks to dismiss the advanced mathematics involved in a lot of physics as unnecessary or irrelevant. Holism, of course, has very New Age-y associations.

But the real problem with his - theories? - isn't that I feel uncomfortable with the kind of theory they are. Instead, although that could be the fault of the brevity of the article, it is that he seems to have chosen them on the basis of what he does feel comfortable with, rather than on the basis that led to quantum mechanics and relativity: observations that conflicted with pre-existing theory.

The universe speaks: 'It's time to get off your rock!'

Re: Space Monkeys

If we get enough people off Earth within the Solar System, soon enough mankind will be able to build reflectors to control enough of the Sun's output that we will be able to vaporize any pesky asteroid just about when we feel like it.

And then we'll have the resources to think about other stars.

Re: Space Monkeys

People like you are fated to perish from a plague spread by an un-sanitized telephone.

I Care Now

Yes, but aside from those who die caring about their death and suffering at the time they are experiencing it, which would be enough reason to stop the asteroid if it were about to hit now, and enough reason to prepare to stop it if we care about our descendants, even if it happened in the distant future, we who live now may care that our accomplishments and achievements will be forgotten and go to waste.

Kiwi Coroner says Coca-Cola helped kill woman

Sorry State

It's a pitty that in today's litigious climate, and in today's world of the nanny state, Coca-Cola felt compelled to issue a denial. Of course a sugary drink - and with phosphoric acid, which dissolves apatite, to boot - can cause problems if not used responsibly. Does that mean people should have to be legal adults before they can buy soft drinks, or that they should only be sold from behind the counter? Extreme cases are extreme cases; should all overweight (never mind fat) people be institutionalized, so they can't overeat any more?

Men's rights activists: Symantec branded us a 'hate group'

Over the top

Yes, classing it as a hate site is probably over the top. However, many men's rights organizations, in addressing such matters as the injustice of assessing child support against men when paternity is, shall we say, misattributed, don't always approach these issues in a balanced way with the goal of providing justice for men consistently with the equality of women - instead, at least some individual men's rights advocates advocate throwing out child support altogether.

They may reject claims that they're trying to turn back the clock on the equality of women, but they do tend to leave themselves open to the charge, at least, that they would end up doing so in some specific areas.

There are some feminists, of course, who would like to classify every right-to-life organization as a hate group, so, yes, that isn't quite enough.

Remember that Xeon E7-Itanium convergence? FUHGEDDABOUDIT

There Is Still Hope

Perhaps future successors of the Xeon E7 could include a small amount of extra logic on the chip to alternatively decode Itanium instructions instead of x86 instructions. That would really give people wanting a choice between Itanium and x86 value for their money, as they could flexibly switch between both in the same box with the same chip.

That would let the Itanium easily take advantage of future x86 improvements without Intel having to devote a lot of effort to supporting it.

Study: Gay marriage support linked to pr0n consumption

Good and Bad

I remember one study used to tell us how bad pornography was, by noting that people who view more porn are less likely to support as severe penalties for rapists. Instead of drawing strange conclusions, though, isn't it simpler to expect that people with a more negative or judgmental attitude to sex will be less likely to support gay marriage, more likely to regard rape as a very serious crime (unless they blame the victim; look at the attitudes unearthed in India, which aren't dead here), and less likely to permit themselves to watch porn?

Euro boffins plan supercomputer to SIMULATE HUMAN BRAIN

Re: Wrong target?

Indeed, digital immortality is a wonderful hope that we should be working towards.

Re: Ethics of killing a computer...

Killing a thinking, feeling being without just cause is wrong - and if the laws discriminate against electronic brains, so much the worse for the man-made governments that would think to violate the eternal laws of God!

However, a previous brain simulation attempt involved only simulating the merest fraction of the brain; we may not be close to the point at which ethical considerations actually apply.

Schoolgirl's Hello Kitty catonaut soars to 93,000ft

Re: Excellent

The poor are poorer in the United States, yes, but there are also many more people who are quite well-off.

Android gets tipsy on Wine, runs WINDOWS apps

Qemu

It is true that Wine, on Linux systems, is normally used on x86 Linux systems, to handle the OS calls. So additional software would be needed on the typical ARM-based Android device. But there's a well-known choice for that job in Linux as well - Qemu. So it's not as if instruction set emulation will have to be written from scratch.

BANG and the server's gone: Man gets 8 months for destroying work computers

Pity

It's a pity that his former employers can't sue the prison where he will be held for the other £31,000 - to come from the costs of feeding and housing him.

Schmidt slams China as world's most prolific hacker

Driven

I found it amusing that he considered it a bad consequence of Chinese hacking that tech companies would be "driven closer to their governments" in the Western democracies. It's not clear to me why it's a bad thing for businesses to think about the national interest and not just making money - because, in a democracy, the government does represent the genuine national interest. Or is he dreaming of some Libertarian utopia as the desirable human future?

Netbooks were a GOOD thing and we threw them under a bus

Clearly

"We" didn't throw netbooks under the bus, Microsoft did, by failing to make available usable versions of Windows with reasonable hardware requirements.

Sadly, the option of using Ubuntu, for example, is really only a theoretical possibility for most of the market.

Three years since his Sun gobble, what hath Ellison wrought?

RAS and Nehalem-EX

At the time of Oracle's purchase of Sun, the SPARC was one of a limited number of choices if you wanted RAS features - you could get an IBM or Unisys mainframe, or use an Itanium. So I figured right away that having the ability to run Oracle's databases on something appropriate (for some accounts) other than IBM hardware (they have their own databases) was the big reason behind the purchase - not Java as the wave of the future.

Then, shortly after the purchase, Intel announced Nehalem-EX, now the Xeon E7, and so RAS is available in the commodity x86 world. It seems like Oracle wasted its money.

Star Trek saviour JJ Abrams joins the dark side: Star Wars VII

Re: Ughhh

Hey, you can find the things you sign for UPS packages with, you can find automatic doors that slide sideways, and you can find the SONY Mini Disc. Some of Star Trek is fact now. One can't expect everything; there has to be some poetic license.

Re: Ughhh

In the case of the Star Wars franchise, since this is a sequel, not a remake, he won't need to resort to anything like that.

But favoring Star Wars over Star Trek is still of the dark side.

Pop tix touts slung in the cooler for 4 years after £3m web scam

Sentence

Well, four years in jail is appropriate if every penny of the stolen money was recovered and returned to the victims.

If, on the other hand, they come up short, they should be motivated to try harder by facing the death sentence in that case. We really need to deter crime effectively enough so that no one tries things like this any more, so that we can move on to the next problem.

Panasonic: We'll save Earth by turning CO2 into booze

Re: So, perpetual energy, right?

Maybe I'm going to power a car, and I don't want to carry those solar power panels with me. Or maybe I want to drive somewhere at night.

Already Have The Technology

We can already just about completely halt carbon dioxide emissions from energy use. Methane from eating meat is a different matter.

AFAIK, there's no way to split carbon dioxide into oxygen and carbon that's as simple as electrolyzing water. I thought this was a big problem, since hydrogen fuelled cars are awkward just as electric cars are with current technology. (My goal is to get all our energy from nuclear power that we aren't already getting from hydroelectricity. But since motor fuel stores energy well, wind and solar are now welcome.)

But then I remembered about Robert Zubrin, and how he used hydrogen to make useful fuel for coming back from Mars out of carbon dioxide. But the Sabatier process makes methane or carbon monoxide, and methane is also on the bulky side as a vehicle fuel.

I turned to the Wikipedia article on the Fischer-Tropsch process. That made, I thought, motor fuel from coal: great for energy independence, bad for carbon emissions. But I was surprised to see that its feedstocks were methane or carbon monoxide - presumably made from coal the way coal gas was made to light Victorian lamps!

Naturally, there's the fine detail of government laws and/or taxes to force people to use expensive carbon-neutral motor fuel instead of the stuff extracted from the ground cheaply by fracking and so on - country X being reluctant to do this and place itself at a disadvantage if country Y doesn't do so. But surely that's easy to overcome if we're all DOOMED otherwise, isn't it?

Meet قلب, the programming language that uses Arabic script

Kashida

I think that putting the basic commands of a computer language in Arabic - or Thai, or Armenian, or French - is a perfectly legitimate idea. Really, to be neutral, the Latin equivalents of "if", "then", "goto" and so on should be the standard.

However, while an attractive appearance of formatted programs is a good thing, there are high-quality Arabic typefaces that implement a feature called "kashida" properly, with graceful curved extensions to the joins between letters. Presumably, a programming language works with ordinary fonts, to I am a bit concerned that this aesthetic feature will not succeed.

Mozilla picks JavaScript titan Eich to lead charge against 'Droid, iOS

If I Made Smartphones

...or tablets, since a closed OS like Android or even iOS actually makes sense for a device that connects to the telephone network;

I'd offer one that could boot up into Tizen, Sailfish, Ubuntu for Smartphones, or the Firefox OS. Because I think that a tablet that is also a "real computer" is a very important product category, something that meets a real need... but that need won't be met if we have to wait for the market to pick a winner from such a crowded field.

The more likely result is that they'll all fail. They need, instead, to join forces.

Tech giants don't invent the future, they package it

Once Upon a Time

IBM didn't invent pipelining - and, in fact, on both the STRETCH (IBM 7030) and the IBM 360/91, it worked rather poorly for them. But on the Model 91, they did, with Tomasulo's algorithm, invent out-of-order execution.

They did invent cache, the hard disk, vacuum column tape drives, among other innovations.

I'm not trying to use IBM's laurels to claim that it's still an innovator today, but rather to argue that not being an innovator any longer isn't likely to be a route to success comparable to their past glories. That isn't to say that IBM has a choice.

Perhaps the biggest reason why big companies don't often succeed at re-inventing themselves enough to become innovators once again is because the space where there's room for innovation is in unexplored products, only a small fraction of which become successes. That's the place for small startups, because the usual outcome is failure.

Still, IBM could yet end up unseating either or both of Intel and Microsoft if they should stumble. In fact, given Windows 8, perhaps dusting off OS/2 is worth a tiny effort...

Iron Man to fly Chinese mobe-maker TCL around the world

History

It certainly is true that if you look at the Iron Man comic book, in the beginning Tony Stark got his suit, and the wound that led to him requiring its chest plate as an early version of the pacemaker, in the jungles of Vietnam; he had been fighting Russian spies for ages - and in a relatively recent comic, from the 1980s, he expressed his distaste for the Chinese totalitarian regime when circumstances pressed him to make a visit to that country (he had the suit project a hologram of a flunky to give the impression that Iron Man didn't have a secret identity, but was just a name used by whichever Stark security guard was wearing it at the time).

So, yes, Iron Man is an odd representative for a Mainland Chinese product. Taiwanese or South Korean firms, though, would have done nicely.

Inside the new climate row as Mystic Met Office goes cool on warming

Re: @TkH11: Right to down play

Who needs to cripple the economy? They've invented nuclear power, after all, so abandoning fossil fuels doesn't have to mean going begging for energy.

No Trend?

It certainly seemed to me that there is a definite gradual upwards trend in rainfall shown by the data on the graph given, despite the scatter of the data points, of 100 mm about every hundred years. It's odd, though, that the trend seems to have remained uniform and linear for such a long time if the effect is man-made.

Big screened quad-core Chinese beasts splash down at CES

My Dream

A clamshell device with a phablet size screen, so it goes in the pocket (albeit barely) where the part that folds down folds out further or slides out or something... to give one a full-sized keyboard.

That lets you run real software with a real operating system, like Linux (not a Linux-based operating system like Android, but Linux where you can run gcc if you want) or x86 Windows (as opposed to Windows RT or CE or Mobile) or OS X (as opposed to iOS).

Of course, to do that it would probably have to be a mere wi-fi tablet and not a telephone, although it could have a telephone tacked on (the virus risk would be too high otherwise).

They have UMPCs in Japan and South Korea already, but at a price premium for the size that North American and European customers aren't interested in paying, so they've been non-starters. But the technology marches on to the point where a pocket computer like that could even be cheap.

Boffins create quantum gas with temperature BELOW absolute zero

A Simple Explanation

Think of a plastic cylinder containing marbles.

If it just sits there, they're all at the bottom.

If you shake it back and forth a small distance, the marbles will bounce up and down. The faster you shake it, the more often a marble will hit the top of the cylinder.

You could work out a mathematical formula for how much it's being shook randomly based on the logarithm of the ratio between the density of marbles at the top and bottom. As the amount of random shaking approaches infinity, the number of marbles at the top and the bottom would approach equality.

Now jerk the whole cylinder down quickly instead of shaking it. The marbles will go to the top. So the formula will give a negative logarithm, but that means more than infinite shaking instead of less than no shaking.

Indeed

I remember that one of my first assignments when taking a Scientific Russian course in 1972 was to translate an article which noted that systems at negative absolute temperatures were the basis of lasers. I assume, though, that the research is new because it involves negative absolute temperatures - hotter than infinity, not colder than zero - in a different kind of quantum system, one where they weren't previously produced.

Where do old supercomputers go to die? New Mexico

Location, location, location

The thing to do would be to move it somewhere with hydroelectricity. Then the extra power usage would have no carbon footprint, as well as being less of a cost issue.

'SHUT THE F**K UP!' The moment Linus Torvalds ruined a dev's year

Not as Bad as I Thought

I'd be upset too at someone who left a bug lying around in as critical a piece of code as an OS kernel.

Yes, hundreds upon hundreds of websites CAN all be wrong

No Right Answer

Looking on the web, I've found two other versions of the lyric...

I'm tired of living with freaks

and

I'm tired of hypocrite freaks

...perhaps listening to the song will help decide between them.

Tibetan monks lose their TVs as China's censors raid monasteries

Obvious Solution Missed

There was a window of opportunity, between the fall of the Soviet Union, and China's acquisition of a second-strike capability. Regime change should have taken place then.

The LINUX TABLET IS THE FUTURE - and it always will be

Re: I still don't get…

Well, why is there a "war" between Windows and Linux? After all, it is now known that Windows uses some code from BSD, just as Darwin does.

The point is that despite Wine, Windows software can't be relied upon to run on a Linux machine - and Macintosh software doesn't run on Linux machines either, because the GUI does have its own API, which figures prominently in applications. They run different applications, so they are different platforms.

Since the Macintosh operating system is owned by Apple, if you need to use a Macintosh, you are less free in some senses than if you could use Linux instead. The trouble is, though, that you're still more free in other senses if you use Windows, since that's what most of the applications are being written for.

It Would be Lovely

...if MeeGo, Mer, Sailfish, or Tizen were widely available on tablets. But the fact that these different projects have divided possible interest has delayed the hope that a version of Linux with a tablet GUI and access to most Linux applications might become easily available on tablets.

Re: I still don't get…

The GPL limits you from putting limits on other people. It prevents the situation where slight obvious enhancements to a BSD-licensed item are copyrighted or patented by someone, restricting its further usability.

That stunt hasn't happened yet,as OS X is not an example, sin the post-GPL era, but before the Free Software movement I think there were some cautionary examples; think of how Macsyma nearly disappeared until Maxima came along.

I'm not saying the GPL is perfect; certainly the LGPL can be too restrictive for its intended purpose.

Re: I still don't get…

You used to be able to defer updates on Windows; of course, you had to choose in advance for Windows to ask your permission before updating. Which is important if you're using a laptop, which you may want to unplug on short notice.

To the World

Windows is the ability to run Windows applications, and Linux is the ability to run Linux applications.

I realize Android devices typically run on ARM hardware, not x86, but I can't see a way on my Android tablet to build, say, FontForge from source. In fact, I can't find GCC on it anywhere.

The OS = the platform, not so much the UI. The applications it lets you run. What bits of code it uses matters not, except to tech aficionados. Android may be a moral victory for Linux, but it's not a market share victory that encourages people to develop for Linux.

What Counts

But try running GCC on an Android device without having rooted it first. Android is not a means of running most Linux applications not specifically written for Android.

Fragmentation

I was wondering why there weren't Linux tablets out there already, since they would offer a full OS that could be scaled to a smaller processor. (Microsoft could sew up that market, though, by making Windows 3.1 available again.)

What I found is that Nokia's MeeGo, the likeliest candidate, still lives on, but it's been forked: Sailfish on one hand, and something I can't even Google up again on the other.

Wind, solar could provide 99.9% of ALL POWER by 2030

Re: Ummm... this is a MODELED finding?

No, it isn't a billion-to-one chance. Now that we know the right combination, we can use it. Apparently, their discovery is that to have just barely enough wind and solar generation capacity to meet average demand would require too much storage - so, instead, have lots of excess capacity, so there will have to be a great lack of wind before one needs to turn to batteries.

But, hey, even if they're all wet, there's still nuclear, so it is true we don't need carbon.

Australian Prime Minister: Mayan calendar 'true'

Re: A Clever Leader

I certainly agree that she was obviously speaking in jest, and not telling anyone that there was a legitimate concern with respect to the coming of a new baktun.

Samsung: Demand for mobes forced 16hr days on factory slaves

Fault

This stuff isn't Samsung's fault - or Apple's, or Sanyo's, or Sony's... it's the fault of some of the businessmen in China who are in the supply business being greedy, and the Chinese government letting them get away with it.

It's not as if we could overnight switch to getting our cheap stuff manufactured in India, or go back to paying more to keep jobs in Taiwan and South Korea... paying enough to keep jobs in Japan, the U.S., and Europe hardly bears thinking about.

Ultimately, though, since we don't sell much foreigners need to buy, we will have to stop importing oil even, never mind "cheap" foreign manufactured goods.

In the long run, you can't spend money on imports if you don't earn every penny of that money with exports; not even Adam Smith can change that simple fact, even if it's in the economic interests of some businessmen to obfuscate it.

Adam Smith did have some valid and useful insights, though, because mercantilism, in its day, went to excess: money is for spending, not hoarding, and so one wants balanced trade, not one-way exporting only, as was the goal then, any more than we can have one-way importing only, which is what seems to approach the situation now.

Sex offender wins case against Facebook vigilantism

Solution

Vigilantism is not the solution, but we cannot tolerate any recidivism by child molesters. Obviously, if recidivism takes place, the sentences given for the offence are inadequate.

So the solution is to regard child molestation as on a par with hijacking a plane and flying it in to a building, killing thousands - if all convicted child molesters remained in prison until they died, then clearly no vigilantes would bother them at their homes.

Well, perhaps one more step is needed to entirely eliminate the risk of vigilantism: no one who commited such acts should fail to be convicted because of some technicality (i.e. suspects are held indefinitely if the police are confident of their guilt, until such time as the police are also confident that their case can achieve a conviction, as is the case in Guantanamo)... and I can understand that this would cause some concern that a dishonest police officer could use such a system against an innocent man.

Intel roadmap leak shows quad-core Atoms for 2014

Competition

A quad-core Atom is a more power-efficient way to deliver throughput than a single-core faster chip, so I'm not too surprised, given all the quad-core ARM chips out there.

But why isn't Intel considering a sixteen-core Atom to compete with AMD's Opteron 6300?

Glorious silicon globes could hold key to elusive PERFECT kilogram

What Puzzles Me

If we know that the mass of the International Prototype Kilogram is changing, then we must have some way of telling that. Which means we already have a better way to define the kilogram, which we should be using while we're waiting.

Boffins biff over ‘twisted radio’

Actually

Things like 56k modems used multiple states of amplitude and phase to put more data down a telephone line, even though the actual baud rate was limited by telephone bandwidth.

So there is a precedent for varying something continuously to have no definite limit to the amount of data you can transmit: the actual limit is set by noise. If there was no noise on telephone lines, you could use ten times - or a thousand times - as many amplitude levels, and transmit more data.

World Bank says world likely to warm by four degrees

Everybody's Not Talking

Cutting energy use massively would also harm the world's poorest people - although different ones, affecting China more, and tropical countries with few non-food exports less.

The only good alternative, in my opinion, is a massive switch to nuclear power. Good luck getting people to agree to that - if both major parties in countries like the U.S. and Britain were firmly committed to such a strategy, so that political campaigns against it would be ineffective, it could happen... but these days, bipartisan support for the obviously necessary no longer can be counted upon.