Posts by R Callan
106 posts • joined Thursday 28th February 2008 04:52 GMT
But
It's the narrowest end of a microscope.
Allo Allo --- wots all this then
But that was perfectly alright as they were both Nancy boys
I really like
how MS Windows is posted as Malware :<)
Doctor
It may not really be in the spirit of things, but will they play "Talking 'bout my generation" at the ceremony?
I'm confused (again)
So these airships can only land by using upward thrust from the engines as they are heavier than the bouyancy of the gas bag. I presume that having landed that then the engines are put into either no up thrust or down thrust to maximise the negative bouyancy. You then claim that the weight penalty of a compression system would be excessive, but why not use the drive engines as compressors, seeing as how they are not needed for lift when the airship is on the ground? This is easily done by using one bank of the V8 as an engine to drive the other bank as a compressor. Half of a 4 l engine running at 3000 rpm will compress at least 3000 litres of gas to 150 psi per minute, 4 engines will compress 12000 litres/min.
The next problem is the weight of the storage system. No problem at all as soon as one stops thinking about dedicated and heavy cylinders. The floor of the cargo deck needs to be strong enough to handle the cargo, and the lightest way of getting the strength is to use extruded box section alloy. Connect all of the box sections together and use that as your storage "cylinder". Compression and storage of excess He for practically no weight penalty.
It just requires a little thinking outside of the norm.
Phew
I'm safe! Still using 2.6.27 kernal.
This seems to be more a symptom of "feature bloat" than anything else, that only affects those on the bleeding edge.
Not Using Ubuntu 10.04
The use of an alternative OS is not the be all and end all, But, using an alternative to I.E. and then customising it to look unlike any other person's browser might help. If a screen pops up that is not in your choice of browser or look (colour schemes, furniture etc.), it might help to alert people to the fact that they might not be where they think they are. If I was to get a screen that was default Win XP IE I would be very amused.
Disclaimer: I use a distro of Linux (not xBuntu) usually with FF that has been customised to my liking.
Minor nit
Coliforms (faecal or otherwise) are Enterobacteriaceae. Most Enterobacteriaceae are harmless in the gastro-intestinal tract, the major exceptions being Shigella and Salmonella and some Escherichia Coli which have been conjugated with Shigella.
Title? I'd like a Dukedom [sic] please.
The more things change the more they stay the same. The good old Fairey Rotodyne of 1957 would outdo any of these modern super-choppers in every respect except speed, and that could have been improved with a more aerodynamic shape plus more powerful engines. Perhaps someone should dust off the old plans and make a killing (financial of course).
Posted in Perseid meteors 'thrill star-gazers'
ISS times
And those times are valid for where?
El Reg is a Pommy site so they are GMT (BST?) times, or as NASA is a US organisation they are one of how many US times? Of course, I'm a Kiwi resident Pom so perhaps they refer to GMT-12 hours.
Confused? So was I.
Holly hocks in the pocket
Ariel was a judeo-christian archangel somewhat before the Bard used the name. Perhaps that explains why this mozzy nutcase is so offended?
Patch pain
**"The core of this patching issue is that the software industry has, so far, failed to come up with a unified patching solution that can help home users on a large scale; that is, encompassing all software programs." Secunia**
Except for Synaptic and Yum and Yast and ???? querying repositories. Could these people not remember that there are solutions to most problems available, even if it involves looking outside the windows.
Old Yorkshire saying
From Hull, Hell and Halifax may the good Lord deliver us. Note how Hull precedes Hell.
I think that the writers for this rag may be a bit wet behind the ears, but then the Hull is strictly speaking a river.
p.s. How can the East Riding still exist, i.e. be a third of a non-existent county?
Expat from the West Riding, from the days when Yorkshire (no qualifications) did exist.
Huh! Doh!
***It's wrong anyway - NASA have 2005, 1998, 2002, 2003 and 2004 (in that order) as the warmest years on record,***
NASA of course have records that go all the way back to the Roman Warm Period? Um, no, just for a few of the most recent years. Even the CET record only goes back 260 years, right into the depths of the Little Ice Age. By quoting NASA you are cherry picking as much as the original comment, but you are also arguing from authority which is a common fallacy.
***The MWP was not warmer than the current period, it was drier and it was a localised effect.***
If you can deign to read a "sceptical" site, may I suggest you check out http://www.co2science.org/data/timemap/mwpmap.html to see the studies regarding the MWP. Links are included to at least abstracts of the papers. It looks pretty global to me.
***Sea ice in the Arctic is thinning and diminishing,***
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2009/06/16/historic-variation-in-arctic-ice-tony-b/ gives a nice overview of historic records. It again may be best to follow the links to the original documents whenever possible. It appears as though the recent ice loss in the Arctic is not unusual or unprecedented.
***So the ice in the Himalayas isn't going as fast as one report says. But the evidence is clear, the vast majority of Himalayan glaciers are retreating.***
A quick search on Himalayan Glacier Retreat and ignoring the IPCC reports but only taking independent specialist reports suggests that although the glaciers may have been retreating since 1850 (about the end of the Little Ice Age) there generally is consensus that there is insufficient evidence to make a statement one way or the other.
***Yes the climate has always changed, but its rarely been changing as fast as it is now in human history***
Implicit in this statement is that climate has previously changed as fast as it is now (assuming that the observed change is not due to some artifact). The question becomes "what caused these obviously non-human climate changes in the past, and why is the present change necessarily human-caused? Without valid answers all we can state is that present climate change is not distinguishable from other natural climate change.
Science is not about taking an hypothesis and assuming it to be true, but formulating the hypothesis and the trying to disprove it. Failure to disprove the hypothesis strengthens the supposition that it is "correct", but it is still susceptible to being disproved at any time. An hypothesis cannot be "proved" but can be disproved with one contrary observation.
Titles?
I have a vague memory of some famous Englishman, who had an American mother, making the comment "Two peoples separated by a common language. If anyone should know I expect he would. Now who was he? Oh, the younger son of the Duke of Marlborough, the Honourable Right Honourable Sir Winston Churchill. 'Ad a luv'ly way wiv words, ahr Winny.
Dear sir,
You may be able to spell the word "furor" but I fail to see why you are making such a furore over it. You do, of course, realise that the terminal "e" in furore is pronounced, or do you?
I do however agree that the expression "step up" with or without the addition of "to the plate" should be banned forthwith. All English speakers know that the expression should be "walk to the middle" or "take guard" (please note the "u").
Also to be banned:
All references to American field wrestling with a ball somewhere as "football".
The naming of the ultimate letter of the alphabet as 'zeee". It is of course "zed". There are already too many letters ?ee without adding more and creating greater confusion.
p.s. can this funny looking device be exchanged for a classic Mills 36 grenade, this is of course an English site.
Posted in Nuke-bunker-nobbling US megabomb delayed
A couple of minor problems
"Tirpitz" was disabled and finally sunk with Tallboys not Grandslams.
A "sortie" is one flight by one aircraft.
Because "Tirpitz" was in a remote and distant fjord it was easily protected by Freya (early warning radar) and smoke screens. If the target could not be seen due to smoke it was very difficult to hit. The critical damage that caused it to be transfered from Assenfjord to Tromso was caused by "I think that's the target so here's one for luck" bombing. One hit on the bow and two near misses caused irreparable damage. Most of the aircraft on the raid returned to Yagodnik in Russia with the bombs still on board. (They were too expensive and took too long to make to be jettisoned when they were not dropped on target.)
Bombing with Grandslams, usually against viaducts and similar civil engineering works, was not intended to hit the target, but to near miss it and let the seismic effects do the required damage.
Posted in Doing the maths on Copenhagen
re debate
Might I suggest you contact Brenchley, he's been trying for years to get a debate, particularly with Mr. Gore, without success. As he always says, do not believe anything anyone says especially him, but go to the data and make up your own mind. There is on YouTube a video of him talking to a Norwegian Greenpeace/warmist supporter outside a conference in Berlin. It gives a good example of the difference between "believers" and "sceptics".
Posted in Doing the maths on Copenhagen
Absolute codswallop!
Might I suggest that you engage brain before opening mouth. There is more and more research coming out, both peer reviewed and not (disregarding that the peer review system has been seriously abused), that the data provided via CRU and IPCC and the "consensus" opinion arising from it is wrong. It has been generated through politics and not science. Whenever rank amateurs investigate critical details the doubts multiply until they exceed any reasonable doubt.
Examples:
The US climate records are claimed to be the worlds best, but their measuring stations fail the minimum standard in 89% of cases, merely for siting. They do not adequately account fot Urban heat Island effect, but "adjustments" are made that always give a rise in temperature that raw data ( if available) does not. Upward adjustments without adequate explanation have also occured in Australia and New Zealand and these adjustments account for all of the claimed temperature rise in the stations investigated. In fact it was pointed out in a paper published in 1980 that NZ data was not suitable for long term monitoring or for temperature trend analysis.
The infamous Mann "hockey stick" graph was invalidated by McIntyre and McKitrick in 2003 but is still often seen, including in IPCC publications and presentations. The Medieval Warm Period which was warmer than today definitely existed otherwise how were grapes grown in Northumbria, Greenland and Newfoundland?
The Briffa tree ring analysis from Yamal, Siberia has been shown to depend upon cherry picking of data and ignoring the majority of the data points, and even then *one* tree skewed the results towards the desired end. If either this tree was excluded or all of the others were included then the temperature series changed character completely. There was also the infamous "Mann 'Nature' trick" of not including in the graph data that did not conform to the required result and hoping that it would not be noticed in the spaghetti graph.
I could go on but enough is enough but the present warming trend, assuming that it is still with us as there has been no warming for 9 years, cannot be put down to anthropogenic causes as both temperature rise and rate of rise are not uncommon in recent geological history.
Posted in 'Steve Jobs' repeals AT&T iPhone prank
Titular title
The only thing resembling a joke regarding Fake "Steve" a.k.a. Dan Lyings a.k.a. Dan Lyons is Lyons himself. If he was to follow the advice in the BG's song "I Started a Joke" , either physically or metaphorically, then he would do the world a service ---- finally.
North v South glaciers.
There has been a lot of fearmongering here in NZ regarding the retreat of our glaciers, and it has been put down to "Global Warming". There is no doubt that the planet has been warming for the last 150 years, but that is due to us coming out of the "Little Ice Age". The size of glaciers is due primarily to snow fall, not temperature per se, but why the snowfall has reduced, and since when,
seeing that the mountains are in the "roaring 40s" I would not like to hazard a guess.
p.s. the mountains in question are quite high, there are 223 named mountains exceeding 7,500 ft (6,750 metres) in height, plus a number of unnamed ones in a range approx 500 miles in length.
Sea level change
Since the end of the last ice age, about 10,000 years, the Earth's oceans have risen 400 feet or ~125 metres. I calculate this to be an average of 125mm/century or 3 times the 40 mm/century that the warmists are predicting. There is in fact evidence that the oceans have dropped (~ 300mm) in recent times due to greater evaporation, which ends up as snow on the Great Southern Continent.
Are you missing something? Probably yes.
Have you seen the results of a survey regarding the quality of US monitoring stations, reputedly the worlds best system? Only 3% of the stations meet the best standard and 8% the second. Only stations meeting these standards can be considered to produce valid results. 54% of the stations do not meet the worst standard, where observations are expected to differ from reality by as much as 5K , but by an unknown and variable amount.
Have you seen the results from a replotting of the temperature records from Darwin, Australia. The raw data gives no or possibly a slight reduction in temperatures since the station opened in the 19th century. The official "homogenised" data shows an increase of (from memory) 8K since 1941.
Note: these are only 2 examples of many independent research projects that can be found.
If simple people can come up with totally different results from the same data as the "Climatologists", and the measurements do not appear to be reliable for "the worlds best system" how can you say that this is "one of most researched, debated areas of science"? This is particularly so with inferences from the e-mails that the somewhat incestuous group of climatologists have done everything in their power to stifle checking of their data, results and conclusions even to censoring the "deniers". Incidentally a true scientist is virtually by definition a sceptic as that scientist knows that the "truth" is only what has not yet been shown to be untrue, and the "truth" is only demonstrated by repeated and independent failures to demonstrate any untruth. Science is never settled and consensus has no place in science. Advances are always produced by an individual who comes up with a concept that is different to the current perceived (consensus) wisdom.
Not only am I not in the US
but I presume that Gooooooogle is conforming to The Privacy Act 1993. After all, we are all obliged to obey the "law", ignorance is no excuse. Herr Gauleiter Schmidt can find it with his own search engine to find the act.
Posted in NHS IT spree faces cutbacks
If "the NHS "could not function""
how has it functioned in the many years since its inception without IT systems?
On a personal note, my very first job on leaving school was in the local regional hospital (not in the U.K.), which had approx 100 beds. It offered all of the services one would expect, but not the specialised ones, such as oncology. The hospital also performed all the lab. tests and x-rays for the GPs up to 20 miles around. Total admin staff (remember this is pre-computers) 11 people!
The hospital is still about the same size but even though fully computerised (if you can call it that as they use MS systems) the admin. has grown to over 150 people! It's so bad that they took over the nurses residence and turned that into offices. Every department now has substantial admin staffs of their own instead of just the receptionist/secretary that some had if the head of dept. did not do his.her own office work.
Expanding IT/Admin is merely following Parkinson's (?) Law. The only answer is to reurn every 10 years to the staffing levels of 10 years previously, not throw other peoples money at a non-existent problem.
Perpetual motion machines
The only approximate perpetual motion is the universe. I wonder? If I can patent the universe in the States then all Usians owe me a fortune for using my invention.
Posted in VW unveils slippery four-seat hybrid
Nope, too heavy
My first car, a 2 door 4 seater weighed 800 pounds. It may have been an even then ancient '36 A7 Ruby but surely things have, in some respects, gone backwards in the past 80 odd years.
@Shaggy & AC
As any Yorkshireman knows Illkla Moor is in the West Riding of Yorkshire. That's what it was when I was born a little south and east of Illkley and attempts by the toffee nosed southerners to minimise and denigrate the heartland of England should be fought against at all costs.
Incidentally, a bar is a gate or gatehouse. York has some fine examples built into the walls. They were very useful for displaying the heads of non-Yorkshire troublemakers. Perhaps the practice could be reinstated?
p.s. could the grenade symbol be changed to a good old-fashioned Mills bomb? These funny yankee things don't really match with a .uk domain
Posted in Boffins boast newfangled rootkit blocker
Ummmm
If this is a Microsoft initiative why did they not target the ability of the most common OS family to withstand root-kit attacks? Instead they used an uncommon OS that is often run by the more computer savvy.
If they had run this demonstration on all versions of MS Windows in regular use then people would take a greater degree of interest. As it stands, the implication is that Ubuntu, and other Linux OSs, are the common target of root-kits.
Title?
As Monday* was Labour Day, what do you expect?
*Down here in NZ anyway. Don't you love public holidays?
Also
Do all of those Blista machines with their upgrade rights to 7 each count as 2 licences? That must make some difference.
Posted in NZ town cans rabbit-chucking contest
Minor question
How could any rabbits be "humanely" killed during a pig hunting contest? As pig hunting in NZ is done with a pack of dogs that corner and hold the pig until the hunter arrives with a large knife, the bunnies could only be killed by dogs tearing them to pieces. That is decidedly u(i)nhuman(e).
I feel that this is just the first step in stopping pig hunting and letting another destructive animal continue wiping out native flora and fauna.
lloyds.com/any stupid people
I checked as you suggested using FF and Konq and noticed that the file extensions are .asp, meaning of course that they are using Microsoft. It does not bode well for their system security.
I also wonder how they take the recent recommendations from both sides of the Big pond that on-line banking should be done with non-installed OS's, as the live CD's that I have seen do not include either Exploder or Netscrape.
I wonder
what would the animal welfare persons reaction would have been if the farmer had answered "Outdoors, where they belong". In many parts of the world farm animals only go indoors to:
Be milked, keeps the farmer dry and rain out of the milk
To be shorn, shearers hate the rain
To be slaughtered, health and safety and all that.
Serious question
Are the Dutch courts going to go after all of the other torrent trackers such as Goggle. Yaboo, Bling? TPB have not hosted the torrents, merely pointed to where they are. Also are Dutch Telecom, or whatever they call themselves, going to be done for allowing internet traffic, which might or might not contain copyright infringing material.
Perhaps the Netherlands should retire from the 21st century and stick their collective heads up their nether regions.
Posted in Toyota Prius fourth-generation e-car
@James Cook
I also remember Jezza showing that a BMW M5 is more economical than a Prius. Drive the Prius hard (ie slowly) and the Beemer did about (thinks hard) 3 mpg more.
How could Pluto be overhead
When he's the god of the underworld?
Is Illinois part of the lunatic bible belt? Should they really be advocating non-christian myths?
Paris because he knew what happened when you got on the wrong side of the gods.
To paraphrase
P.C. Humpty-Dumpty
The law is whatever I say it is!
Windows 7 flaw
Perhaps Microsoft is seeing the writing on the wall. This past week I have handed out more copies of Linux (Mepis 8) than ever before. More and more people are willing to at least look at Linux, a major change. Most of these people are those who have relatively recently purchased a new computer which invariably came with vista pre-installed. There is also a simmering discontent with the additional costs to getting a really usable system, including word processing and spreadsheet programmes. There is additionally discontent with the need for anti-virus and anti-malware programmes with windows with the overheads that they require.
As an aside, the computer I use at work has recently black screened with the message that "Windows Genuine Advantage" has detected that it has an unregistered copy of XP. As this is a small company and they buy their computers with the OS already installed, are Microsoft accusing the supplier of copyright infringement? If that is so then IBM, the producer of the computer might be interested. (The computer in question is a genuine IBM pre Lenovo which gives an indication of its age). They do not seem to like being accused of copyright infringement ala SCO.
@The Bug
The choice of emergency number had to do with the design of the old rotary telephones. U.K. 'phones were numbered from 9 to 0 going clockwise. EnZed 'phones were numbered 1 to 0 going clockwise. The U.K. "9" is (was) in the same position as the EnZed "1" i.e. it gave the longest time to return to rest when dialed. (Across the ditch the Strines placed "0" in the same position, that is why they use "000" as their emergency #). To have the same potential problems in EnZed as the Poms we would have to use "000" as a non-emergency emergency number.
p.s. what sort of penguins do you have down the road, little blues or yellow eyed?
Penguin because they live in the boxes in front of me :-)
The Microsoft innovation problem
As many people have claimed all over the web, Microsoft have never produced any significant innovation. Their "innovations" seem to come down to:
A: Buy a company/product that is innovative.
B: Re-implement some-one else's innovation.
These abilities can be put down to a company that has too much influence and cash (arguably from predatory monopolist behaviour.) Perhaps that is their "Innovation".
Posted in US cops called to McDonalds menu cock-up
911 is
an abuse of the emergency number. I know of at least three other emergency numbers in the world, but due to the 'merkin propaganda machine to my knowledge 2 of them have had to install a divergence for 911 to the correct number! If I was to call 000, 111, 999 or any other in the states would it be diverted, or would that be an abuse of the emergency call system?
The oldest system is (according to Wikipedia) 999. 911 is obviously an unauthourised derivative under copyright and should be banned, or at least have to pay punitive damages of $150,00 per call.
So Her Majesty
being the head of the government, will have her address withheld? Downing St. houses will be rented to the prols. so that MPs can live in secrecy? Didn't think so.
Dick the butcher (credit to the bard) had the right idea "first we will hang all the lawyers". MPs make the laws so they must be lawyers.
AC 12:42
Any change in technology brings MASSIVE (your word) costs, but it has been done innumerable times throughout history. Would the internal combustion engine have displaced the horse if people were as short sighted as you? Think about the costs of retraining all those grooms, saddlers, farriers etc. When CadCam came in? Draughtsmen had to be retrained in the use of computers and the software and discard their pencils. When the automatic lathe replaced manual lathes. The turners had to be retrained, they did not automagically have the ability to use the new technology.
Improvements always have a cost, and getting free of the shackles of any particular monopolist will have a significant cost. But, if secret "standards" and closed applications are replaced with open ones it is a one time cost. Any well written application will be easily transferred from one platform to another. Many (most?) FLOSS applications run equally well on Linux, various Unixs, Mac and Windows. Equally there are many closed source applications that do the same and I would hope that any supplier of software worth their salt could port their software to any platform.
IE8
is a major browser? I thought it was still in beta. The major variants of IE would be 6 and 7 with possibly a few 5s left in the world.
Of course the current variants of IE have about as many holes as a gill net.
A query, if Safari is based on the Konqueror rendering engine, how come Konqueror does not seem to have all of these discovered weaknesses?
Most of this comes back to the polititians
Once upon a time the UK had any number of producers of military hardware. In the name of "rationalisation", the government of the day insisted that mass amalgamations took place. The end result was of course that there was no competition. You ended up with one supplier of everything. As this single supplier has an absolute monopoly they can do and say whatever they like.
Add into this governments who did everything in their power to emasculate British industry and you end up with not having the ability to manufacture the simplest items, like say refrigerators. Then it can be seen that the present situation was planned.
I got my coat ages ago (thanks mum and dad)
Posted in Harry Potter hangs up wand in 2011
A major summer blockbuster?
Since when has July been summer all over the world. To many people it is the middle of winter.
Perhaps a wider view of the world is in order.
Green is a catchcry
that is being overused. Recently here in NZ a well known computer maker has been advertising their airy-fairy laptop as being "The Greener Computer". Why? Because it has a glass and aluminium (mispronounced) case, and it does not contain heavy metals such as mercury. All well and good on the surface because everyone here knows that aluminium is produced with hydro-electricity. Except, which is not commonly known, the production of each mole of Al produces 1.5 moles of CO2 (2.4 tons of CO2/ton of Al). The production also produces quite a lot of fluorides and fluorine which end up in the air, the reason for those very tall stacks. Trace amounts of heavy metals such as lead and mercury are also an unwanted byproduct. Trace amounts does not sound too bad until the sheer quantity of production is considered, and then it becomes a large absolute amount.
Aluminium, although recycleable which the adverts emphasise, is not infinitely so. Up to 15% of the input to a recycling plant is lost as aluminium oxide dross.
Glass is not so bad as it is recyclable almost infinitely and requires a lot less energy to make it formable. However, how is the glass removed from the Al case? I would suggest that no recycling plant would accept such a case as they only want aluminium or glass, making the whole thing non-recyclable.
It can thus be seen that the greenness can be disputed by a simple internet search, but this requires that people take claims with a grain of salt which rarely happens, because "green" is a catchcry that everyone must agree with or be considered anti-planet.
Posted in Sony shows off wacky fuel cell designs
@Frank Bough
I would suggest that virtually all liquids, with the possible exception of triple glass distilled hydrated hydronium hydroxide, are rather ungood for one's health. Therefore as a safety precaution, do not drink any liquid full stop.
