Posts by Graham Bartlett 1643 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Mar 2007
"Bandar...says that the transactions were entirely proper and consistent with his role as a Saudi official."
Of course they were. For a Saudi official, especially one whose name ends with "al-Saud", syphoning massive amounts of cash into your own back pocket is entirely proper and consistent.
As for travelling heavy, I play in a band and also rent out my PA rig and sound-tech skills to other bands/events, so I have a Citroen Berlingo. I can easily fit all the PA rig, all my guitar gear, *and* all the other guitarist's gear into the back of it, and still have room for the guitarist and the singer. At that, it's still only about two-thirds loaded - I can still see out of the back window. I get 40mpg out of it whilst doing 80mph down the motorway fully-loaded. It was cheap to buy, is quiet to drive, and is being very reliable.
So why would anyone want an SUV that costs more, has less luggage space, is noiser, and uses more fuel...? Geet wise and buy an MPV instead.
Problem here is that this only covers items actually returned.
Suppose, like I did recently, you buy a new DVD writer drive for £20, and then you find that despite it claiming it could write to everything under the sun, actually it won't write DVD-R? You need a DVD drive though, and it works OK with DVD+R, so you decide you might as well live with it.
Or, like I did last year, you buy a Sudoku game for your mum, and she finds it stops working randomly. On opening the box up, you find that the only thing connecting one pin of the timing crystal to the PCB is a bit of solder flux. Yep, the good old-fashioned dry solder joint. Quick dab with a soldering iron, and mum now has something other than red wine to keep her out of trouble in the evening.
So the actual failure rate will be higher, because it ignores the cases where people either put up with the faults or fix it themselves.
You're assuming the victim can shoot the assailant first. The reality is that a mugger (or rapist) will almost certainly get you first - every news item I've ever seen said that the perpetrator was lying in wait in an alleyway or bushes. I don't care if you're some highly-trained quick-draw expert - even if you're expecting it and have your gun in your hand, anyone can cross 10ft of empty space and deck you from behind with a baseball bat before you can turn and fire, and if your gun is in a holster under a zipped jacket then your mugger/rapist had better be presenting you with written warning about a week in advance. The mugger/rapist then has a victim *and* a gun, so the victim doesn't just get mugged/raped, they also get murdered. Nice.
Yes, there is indeed more violent crime in the UK than the US - around 25% more last time I looked, IIRC. It's particularly bad in "tribal" situations - youth gangs, or rival football outfits. But murders are orders of magnitude lower. In the UK, the fact that someone gets shot or stabbed is national headline news. In the US, unless there's a whole bunch of people shot then it's almost business-as-usual. I know which one I'd rather live with - and I'll choose the one where I *do* live.
Of course, I'd rather not be beat up at all, which is why I stay alert on the streets at night and constantly check corners and other people, taking detours or crossing the road if I feel there might be a risk. Most muggings and rapes happen when the victim does something stupid like going on their own through some dark alley; this doesn't make it their fault, of course, but self-defence lesson 1 is to avoid situations that make you a potential victim.
"Our science team say we're looking at touchdown at 8 miles. Excuse me, that should read '8 Mile'. As in Detroit, where Eminem lived. Yes, our team got miles and millimetres mixed up this time. Sorry. We're projecting a safe landing if we can just divert all Northwest Airlines flights for a few hours - they're always late anyway, so no-one will notice. People in the target area, you say? Hell, we've been treating them like crap for years, why should we care now?"
PS: Not the Bulgarian variety, Fluffykins, you filthy-minded individual!
Actually AFAIK homosexuals didn't change the meaning; it was heterosexuals misunderstanding the then-alternative meaning of "gay" meaning "working as a prostitute". Hence the famous phrase "some of my best friends are gay" when originally used was meaning "some of my best friends are prostitutes". But it was used by a man talking about his male-prostitute friends.
And "gay" has since shifted meaning again to mean "naff". Many young folk actually would be surprised to hear that "that's so gay" would be interpreted by older people to be a homophobic insult, in roughly the same way that the word "spazz" when I was growing up in the 80s was used without meaning any insult to people with cerebral palsy.
"meant that it would have taken an massive amount of incompetance to make the 'come back' a failure"
Good job RTD was up to that challenge then and could inject a suitable amount of incompetence. Like George Lucas with Star Wars, he simply doesn't realise how bad a writer he is. :-( And to be honest, anyone could have restarted Doctor Who at any time over the last 15 years. There was *never* any lack of enthusiasm with the viewing public; the only strange things were (a) that it got cancelled in the first place, and (b) that no-one thought to restart it before now.
I actually like the fact that there's some kind of relationship going on between the Doctor and his companions. And the fact that if he holds onto anyone for too long, he'll have to watch them die - that's an important new idea that the original series never covered. But the whole "Doctor as Jesus" thing which RTD persists in putting in every episode - no. Just no.
As for comedy - there should be some, but the whole thing shouldn't be played for laughs. "Blink" was a classic of that type - the humour is more edgy because what's going on around is so dark. Yes, it's always been a kids programme - but it was always a *scary* kids programme. The moment it stops being scary, it's lost its reason for existing. And the Peter Kay episode was probably the worst piece of TV I've ever seen.
I have no problems with business, not even for arms. The issue with Al-Yamamah is that $1bn of bribes to individuals in the Saudi court (particularly Prince Bandar) provided that business, and that successive UK governments back to Thatcher were directly involved in this bribery. This makes Westland and other similar bribery scandals look like chicken-feed. Not only that, butTony Blair then stopped the investigation - no-one else would have the power to tell the Attorney-General to drop it.
Why do women go to the loo in pairs?
I mean, if you're both having a few drinks and they happen to hit your bladders at about the same time, that's understandable. And if it's an excuse to get away from the blokes and have a private chat, that's fine too. But when two women head into the same *stall* together...?
Yes, yes, I know one possible explanation - but sadly for the state of men's fantasies, that probably doesn't match up with the statistics. So is it just they just feel such a need to gossip that they can't bear to stop even when they're having a slash? Or is there some deeper female conspiracy at work here which needs to be revealed? Sadly the few people who maybe could tell us have been arrested for drilling holes in toilet walls and aren't in a position to provide information. So can the Moderatrix enlighten us on what's going on here?
I note that transponders are a major part of the equation.
This is currently a hot topic amongst pilots, since Your Tax Pounds At Work (as funnelled through the CAA) are insisting that in the near future, all aircraft of any description will need to carry a transponder.
The initial proposal was simply ludicrous, since it also covered hang-gliders, paragliders, balloons and sky-divers. Bear in mind that current transponders are the size of a briefcase and need serious current (ie. a car battery) to run them. The CAA insisted that mandating their fitment would create a market for someone to develop smaller, better transponders. Everyone said they were talking rubbish and it would destroy sport aviation. Consultation meetings found that of the people who dreamed this up, there wasn't a single person who'd done any gliding, hang-gliding, paragliding, ballooning or sky-diving.
They've now dropped the more insane end of the proposals - hang-gliders, paragliders and sky-divers are now exempt. Fixed-wing gliders and microlights are still caught though. One reason given for this is safety - but a glider pilot pointed out during consultation that there hasn't been a single mid-air collision between a glider and a powered aircraft in 50 years, and fitting transponders to gliders is unlikely to help prevent glider-vs-glider mid-airs, since gliders are unlikely to have the gear to *receive* transponder signals (another large box of kit in its own right).
But the original proposal made it clear why it was happening - so that UAVs could roam the skies freely, safe from nasty fleshy pilots.
They've sadly ignored the fact that we also share the sky with non-human aviators. Swans, geese and other birds don't generally carry transponders, and a full-size goose hitting your windscreen at 100mph is not a recipe for a healthy aircraft (although it's a good recipe for goose mince).
You're missing the elephant-sized point that's in the room.
Scientists usually don't create panics. Journalists usually create panics, based on scientists saying "this might possibly dodgy, so let's see if it's really a problem". Examples: MMR, thimerosol (sp?), cellphone masts, "Silent Spring", GM crops, Brent Spar - the list of non-events whipped up by publicists in need of a cheap story just goes on and on.
Conversely, when scientists get het up enough to stand up as a group and say "There's a really big problem, and we're all going to suffer if we don't collectively fix this", generally there's a pretty good reason to do it. Examples: thalidomide, CFCs, BSE, Y2K, acid rain, smoking (active and passive). And the reason all those didn't cause more problems was that people *DID* do something about them. Even then, it wasn't so great - check with people suffering from the effects of thalidomide or BSE. Or with the entire nation of Australia, who had to majorly change their attitude to exposure to the sun.
"Few icebergs" doesn't equal the complete opening of the Northwest Passage for the first time in the recorded history of North America, which is what's imminent. Larsen B wasn't an isolated incident or an accident.
Generally, it's an article that would grace the pages of the Daily Express. Pointing out that NASA and co have been applying correction factors to their older numbers, with the clear implication that NASA have falsified the numbers with the correction factors, for example. The fact that people in the 1920s had no idea about heat islands etc. is then given as NASA's excuse for fiddling the figures.
Maybe sticking with IT would be easier. Suppose version 9.8.7 of WinStone had a known bug in it which caused it to overestimate by 2%. Then a competent tester would apply a 2% reduction to figures from that version or increase the results of previous tests by 2%, to ensure that all tests were working from a level playing field.
The problem we've got here is the same as the creationists' quote of "teach the controversy". The joke is that for people who actually work in the area, there *is* no controversy. For sure, there's plenty of debate about how much, how fast, and just plain how. But the only reports of controversy are from people who get some reward from reporting it, whether from vested interests funding them directly or simply by being paid for publishing. The latter is the biggest problem, for the same reason that misreporting on MMR vaccination to sell papers directly caused the current outbreak of those diseases.
First off, Arwen as a character is very much present in the extended film version, albeit via flashback. She's the reason for Elrond reforging the sword Narsil, because she'd already renounced her immortality. And it's why Aragorn has such a tough choice - it's not just a choice between whether he becomes king or not, but also whether she lives forever or dies with him. In the book though, I agree, she's a bit of a non-entity. (And in the screen film versions, *all* the characters are non-entities, because it was mostly characterisation that they cut.)
And there *is* a back story for Aragorn and Arwen in an appendix to LotR. JRRT wrote it because he wanted to fill in the characters' history. He couldn't find anywhere to put it in the main body of the book though, but he thought it was too important to leave out, so it went in as an appendix.
Sure there are good writers in Hollywood. They just don't get used much, or don't get a chance to do their thing because a committee is outvoting them. But a good director will let them do their thing. On recent fantasy films, Bridge to Terebithia and Pan's Labyrinth (the latter by del Toro) were very well written indeed.
So we've got the prequel on the Aragorn and Arwen love story, already written by JRRT. We've got Denethor and Theoden taking up leadership - not documented, but scope for good stories. Possibly younger versions of Eomer, Grima, Faramir and Boromir, all with interesting back stories. How the wizards and their allies discovered the Necromancer was really Sauron, Sauron's move to Mordor, and the beginning of assaults in earnest on Gondor and Rohan. Almost certainly the corruption of Denethor and Saruman via the palantirs - *very* story-worthy. Perhaps even the start of the elves' departure on the White Ships, bearing in mind that this hadn't started during Bilbo's time, but was well underway by the time of LotR.
In other words, there's an absolute stack of material to be working with. All they need is a scriptwriter who can do it justice. On past evidence, del Toro is probably well set to do this.
All the people recommending paper or chiselled rocks as a storage medium are missing two vital points.
The first is data density. Anyone who did any coding in the 80s and 90s knows all about the experience of churning out pages of fan-fold paper from a dot-matrix printer. If you've never had this particular pleasure, maybe you just don't have a grasp on how *big* computer programs are, line-wise, when stored on some physical medium. If you're one of these people, let's take an example. Let's say your paper can fit 200 lines per side. And let's say your code is something significantly complex, and something you might want to archive for posterity. Reagan's SDI project was estimated to be 6 million LOC, so let's take that for an example. At 400 lines per side and printing double-sided, that's 15,000 sheets of paper. Standard office paper is about 0.1mm thick per sheet - let's say we use lightweight paper that's half that, to save space. Then we're looking at 75cm of shelf space to store that. And this is just one version - if this is a serious project, we might have a couple hundred releases. That makes 150m of shelf space. Now let's think digital - at 6 million LOC and 80 chars per line, those couple hundred releases make 457MB, which would comfortably fit on a 2cmx1cmx0.5cm memory stick. If we cover that shelf with memory sticks side-by-side and stack them 10 high, that gets us 150,000 memory sticks. If we use triple-triple redundancy, throw away the 9 current memory sticks when one fails, and use memory sticks with a lifespan of 5 years, that buys us 3333 years of storage without loss of data. That's better than the Egyptians managed with carved rocks.
The second point is security, particularly multi-site security. Sure, parchment stored safely lasts a long time - but one good fire will trash them all. Sure, it'll also trash computers, but synchronising data between computers on different sites is an exercise that has already been solved, requires no human interaction, and can be achieved without loss or corruption of data. Synchronising parchment documents across multiple sites, OTOH, requires thousands of monks painstakingly copying this information from one document to another, and there's always the risk of errors creeping in.
What magical teleportation? Did I blink and miss something?
As for the sequel, it's got fairly fertile ground to cover between Hobbit and LotR. The beginning of Saruman's corruption, Denethor and Theoden at the peaks of their powers as leaders, Faramir and Boromir also finding their feet as leaders, exactly why Denethor thinks Faramir is a failure, Aragorn falling in love with Arwen and rejecting his birthright, etc..
Some of this was already sketched in by JRRT, so it's not like they're completely starting from scratch. And JRRT couldn't write dialogue or characters anyway, so there's no reason a decent scriptwriter (see Pan's Labyrinth) shouldn't do a pretty good job of it.
(what a wonderful name...)
Possibly the AC was influenced by the fact that there were many more collaborators than resistance fighters back then. Or that Charles de Gaulle was allowed by the Allies to call himself head of the French army (with rather dubious justification), thereby allowing him to become president of France, at which point he indulged in a whole lot of Anglophobia. Or by present-day EC trade subsidies propping up the French farming industry with money from the rest of Europe. Or by institutional corruption within the EC, in which French politicians are actively involved (although to be fair, the Italians are out-corruptioning everyone).
And yeah, I don't see why Camerone is seen as so great. Like the Charge of the Light Brigade, it should be seen as more of an object lesson in how not to do it. If there was a serious point to it (like the 300 Spartans holding things up until reinforcements could take over) then fine, but otherwise it should serve as an example that if you're going to get beat and the rest of your army won't benefit, it's probably more useful for you to bug out and fight another day.
Mass of heaviest manmade satellite in orbit - 6500kg. Mass of asteroid - 2.6x10^10kg. So 4 million times heavier.
For reference, a top-spec Range Rover weighs around 3100kg - add passengers and luggage, and call it 4000kg. A sugarcube weighs approximately 1g.
Who thinks that throwing a sugarcube at a speeding Range Rover would change its direction? (If you do, I suspect your sugarcube had a little extra *something* added to it. ;-) So I think the kiddy's calculations have dropped a decimal place somewhere. In other words, he's got it wrong - and also it wasn't spotted by his science teacher, which may be a worrying report on the state of teaching in Germany.
Unless of course he was calculating the probability of it coming closer than the satellites. In which case he's still wrong - NASA are happily telling us that it *will* be closer than a geostationary satellite, so the probability is 1, not 1 in 450.
(The icon saying "may contain technical content". It doesn't, but apparently the principle of conservation of momentum is beyond some people, particularly media people. Ho hum.)
So you get your wireless router. "Great", you think, "now I can work wirelessly." Not so fast, young padawan, because first you need to configure it. "No problems, it's wireless." And you know the passcode to talk to it? "Ah..." Where's your PC? "Upstairs." Where's the router? "Downstairs." And you don't know the passcode, so your PC can't talk to the router? "Err..."
The sad truth is that unless your wireless router defaults to "wide open, come and get me", there ain't any way your PC upstairs can talk to the wireless router downstairs. If you've got an Ethernet port on your PC then you can bring the router upstairs, plug it in with a Cat5 and set it up that way, then bring it back downstairs. But if you haven't (and many PCs don't come with Ethernet), you're right out of luck.
Unless your PC can guess what the passcode is. And that's presumably where this comes in. Sure, it ain't bombproof, but it's shipping with enough security that out-of-the-box it's protected, instead of being wide open for a while until you get round to configuring your security.
Which, per Steve and Xander, should include a MAC address whitelist for most home users.
Alice Cooper doesn't play guitar. He cops a great attitude, but doesn't play a musical instrument. In that sense, Guitar Hero players are *exactly* like Alice Cooper.
Why in the name of all that's holy would people want this game anyway? You can get a cheap electric guitar and amp for under £100, and then you can actually make music and play properly! Guitar Hero is to music what a 5-year-old's scooter is to a Harley Davidson. And that comparison is probably unfair on the scooter.
As for crocks of shit, something smells in your post.
First off, if you check the patent that Juillien kindly gave you a reference to (nice one dude), it says: "To form this semiconductor, atomic hydrogen is used to neutralize compensating contaminants. Alternatively, the semiconductor dopant and hydrogen are introduced into the undoped semiconductor together, and later, the hydrogen is removed leaving an acceptably compensation free wide band-gap semiconductor." In other words, this isn't covering some untried theoretical concept, it's covering a very real method, solving a real-world problem, which this woman has spent some time figuring out.
Second off, how much design of non-software items have you ever done? Hell, are you even old enough to work? Did you ever think about physical processes, where it takes man-years of work to figure out just the right system to make something happen? No you didn't. Now go away and don't post again until you've had a real job and know something about what you're talking about.
No, the world wouldn't stop turning without patents. But there would be much less innovation. The only people who'd try stuff out would be amateurs. For professionals (and most importantly for companies) there's no point putting years of your life into research when anyone can simply take a plaster mould of your new engine design and make rip-off copies. If you're doing this as a hobby, this might not worry you, but if you wanted to feed and clothe your children from the results of your work though, this would be a problem. You'd be better off working at Mickey D's instead of inventing a 100mpg engine, figuring out how to make better artificial limbs, or working out how to clean up oil slicks.
Another day, another article about commenting. Oh joy.
The second-to-last paragraph says it all. Code says "what and how", comments say "why" and add any other details not apparent from the code. But this has been the standard opinion amongst all professional software engineers for years. XP tried the "no-comments" system as a reaction to over-documentation, and all real software engineers quickly found that actually there was a *reason* some of that documentation existed. We know this now, and we've known it since approximately 6 months after XP was first invented.
So why yet another article on the same bloody subject? Please, enough already.
Excuse me for wondering why a Mark1 mirror wouldn't do the same job?
As for firing round corners, it kind of ignores the point that accurate firing requires not only knowing where the enemy is, but being able to point a gun at them with a degree of precision. If anyone's ever tried taking pictures using a digi-camera with a Canon-style swivelling screen, you'll be aware how difficult this is. Not only is the "arms-length" position unsuited to fine motor control, but the unusual angle is incompatible with your brain's positioning feedback system. Learning to get round this is similar to learning how to balance on a surfboard, where your dry-land balancing reflexes will throw you into the water. It's not impossible, but it's hard.
And as for "turning every soldier into a marksman", 6x magnification ain't that great, and you can achieve that anyway with basic WWI-issue telescopic sights.
Nope, still no full Access support, as in ability to read Access forms and reports (which are fairly widely used in practise, believe it or not).
It'd also be nice if Calc formula functions were fully compatible with their Excel equivalents, which they aren't. I had to do some formula rework when I moved to OO.
It'd be even nicer if Calc gave you the option of whether you want to use semicolons or commas for separators - as someone migrating from Excel, having to rewrite a formula because I forgot halfway through what Calc's arbitrarily-changed system uses is a PITA. If Calc was remotely compatible with anything else in this then I wouldn't mind, but as a software engineer for 15 years, I've never seen a language which uses semicolons to separate function parameters. Why did the OO team think that Calc formulas would be a good place to try this? Beats the hell out of me.
No, that's trademarks. Patents are a different matter.
However, if you think that someone's infringing on your patent, you do have to tell them what the patent is when you issue your cease-and-desist warning. (Yes, James Pickett, patents *are* published. Which of the millions of patents in existence do you think MS are talking about? Are you volunteering to read every one to find out? Now go away.) And you don't get damages unless the person/organisation involved continues in violation of the cease-and-desist.
So if MS do issue a C-and-D, the projects concerned can close downloads for a few weeks while they figure out workarounds, and then reopen. (Or while they get evidence in place to show they were there first.) If MS don't do a C-and-D, they're simply blowing air.
Re house quality, many (or even most) houses in the US are timber-framed. The outside is then faced with wood or plastic, and the inside is plasterboard. So no problems getting a bullet through. As far as drills go, a likely problem would be drill-bit length. I know I'd happily put a bullet through a wall if it saved me buying a $20 bit *AND* I knew there was no-one in the line of fire.
Sure, the parents are crap, and kids should be protected from the parents.
But how? When an adult buys a classification-18 game, does the checkout assistant have to say "Now you're not buying that for your children, are you" every time? What makes games different from videos and DVDs, or for that matter from cigarettes, alcohol, knives, glue and lighter fluid?
The AC comment further down suggesting that adults don't realise how realistic games are now really doesn't hold water. I'm 34, which means I was 18 when Doom hit the scene. There are plenty of parents my age, and they've got no excuse. Besides which, it only takes even a cursory glance at the screen to see what quality the graphics are today.
As has been said over and over, once there's a big "18" label slapped across the game, and vendors can only sell to over-18s, there really isn't much else you can do. The problem isn't so much informing parents as getting parents to give a crap about their children; it's merely a symptom of a deeper problem with their parenting, and changing the rules on computer games ain't going to fix it. Once-a-year mandatory parenting classes might be a plan, but what do you reckon the odds are of getting that past the government, given that there's not even enough money for playschools? Or past the bleeding hearts who reckon government shouldn't interfere in child-raising?
The point isn't that moral objections are bad, but that moral objections should be based on objectivity.
From first principles, there can be no moral objections to any experimentation on anything that's completely unable to feel or respond to any sensation. We then have a sliding scale of acceptability after that point based mostly on mental complexity, from fruit flies which can be (and are) used for anything, through to primates which don't get a choice but where experimentation is very limited, and finally experiments on humans where the people concerned get to say whether the experiment is acceptable to them or not. Note that these may indeed be more dangerous than some primate experiments, but the participants choose whether to participate. I know if I had 6 weeks to live, I'd happily take part in the human version of an MD50 trial if it meant someone else later might survive.
Under that system, acceptability of Josef Mengele's experiments still fails. (And ditto the Porton Down anthrax tests on servicemen, incidentally.)
The problem comes when religion hits the scene. Religion says that a particular cluster of inanimate, insensate cells contain a "soul" and therefore cannot be used for experiments. This lacks any objective basis in science, medicine or philosophy. If you believe that, fine; I can't change your mind on something that's inherently unprovable. But should you then have the right to stop other people who *don't* believe that from taking actions based on *their* belief: namely the belief that these cells aren't sacrosanct and that the human lives saved from these experiments *are* worth saving?
The heart icon, because the religious groups opposed organ transplants and IVF treatment using precisely the same reasoning. Do we still think organ donation and IVF are the work of the Devil? Not round my way, pal.
You should be able to detect non-breeder tendencies, given the gender of Adam and his partner. ;-)
And Adam's other half wasn't a fraudster. At least, I've never met the bloke, but I'm in as good a position to vouch for his non-fraudster-ness as the poor dumb sod doing the interviews. To be fair, the interviewers probably know it's a farce too, but it's a farce that pays their wages, so no-one's going to shout too loudly in case the goose stops laying its golden eggs.
It's not either-or. EGR is *very* well-known, and all manufacturers use it already. And they also know about its limits.
Re "lean-burn" engines, they have the problem that they lower some emissions but increase others (Nox). So not great there either. If a catalyst could shift the remaining emissions then fine, but it turns out that the exhaust output of a lean-burn engine makes it difficult to catalyse (translation: much more expensive cat needed). Eventually it might still come back, but only if emissions targets are unreachable except by spending more on the catalyst.
And lean-burn is 100% unconnected to the leaded/unleaded petrol issue. Whether leaded petrol was really as damaging as suggested isn't completely known AFAIK (especially compared to the LRP additives), but it has no bearing on the issues here, except insofar as leaded petrol is incompatible with catalysts.
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