Posts by Chris Miller 3550 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Apr 2007
Are you the same pseudonymous poster who makes the identical comment on every one of his articles in The Times? I may have missed the connection between non-executive chairmanship of a failed financial services organisation and zoology, but otherwise yours is simply an ad hominem attack.
Matt Ridley in today's Times also takes a swipe at Ehrlich:
Paul Ehrlich [...] forecast in 1975 that half of all the species in tropical rainforests would be gone by 2005. Yet not a single bird or mammal that we know of has gone extinct in a tropical rainforest.
Matt (who has an Oxford DPhil in zoology) points out that the vast majority of species extinctions are on islands where invasive species (rats, cats, mice etc) have been accidentally introduced.
"ask themselves if any evidence would convince them that humans are changing the climate due to their greenhouse gas emissions"
If you'd bothered to read any of Lewis's previous, you'd have noticed that (unsurprisingly for a Cambridge science graduate) he never suggests that emitting sufficient quantities of CO2 and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere has no potential to affect the climate. The obvious questions that then arise are "how much" and "what should we do about it", and it's on these topics that reasonable discussion ought to be possible, if you could just stop erecting straw men for long enough.
Thanks in advance.
What have you got to protect?
How valuable is it (to you or to someone else)?
Where are the threats coming from?
Then you're in a position to decide what to do about it and how much it's worth spending on protection.
If you're holding data that could attract the interest of state operators, as an SME you're basically stuffed (unless, perhaps, you can get assistance from your own state operators), but most SMEs won't have (maybe in the case Trevor quotes, your IP address differed from that of the intended target by a couple of transposed digits).
So what would you have proposed for a referendum (apart from a single choice of 'Graham Marsden's guaranteed perfect voting system') - a list of 103 different and increasingly complex and swivel-eyed sixth form debating society solutions? At least then you could stand in the corner crying that the 'winning' result only got a minority of the votes cast and "it's so unfair" (© every stroppy teenager on the planet).
I really do suggest you read up on Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, though I doubt you'd ever be able to understand it. I'll even Google it for you.
Our 'broken' electoral system did exactly what it's meant to do (with the occasional statistical fluke, like 2010) - deliver a working majority for the most popular party. People who hate FPTP never seem to specify precisely which system they think would be an improvement (perhaps some of them have read and understood Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, though I doubt it). But if we'd had absolute PR, we'd have a working coalition of Conservative, UKIP and Ulster Unionist MPs; whether or not you think that would be an improvement or have led to less austerity (except, presumably, in Northern Ireland) is a matter of taste.
At the insistence of the LibDems the electorate were offered an alternative to FPTP just a few years ago. They roundly booted it into touch, much to the consternation of our North London 'opinion formers'.
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary.
Wealth of Nations Adam Smith (1723–1790)
"You can't defend yourselves well if you don't know what systems you have and where your data is,"
True, but in a large organisation running many hundreds or thousands of server instances (most of them virtual, of course) the chances that the poor old admins are aware of every single one of them are slim to none. And even if you're confident that you have such control today, you probably won't tomorrow.
Your security defences need to be sufficiently powerful and flexible to cope with the inevitable 'rogue' server.
Good luck trying to replace IP on every computer in the world. We've been trying with IPv6 (which, incidentally, handles end-to-end encryption far better than IPv4) for 20 years, with 'limited' success.
And getting everyone to encrypt everything all the time would require some system of universal PKI. Even better luck getting that to work.
Finally, most of these large-scale data thefts have been carried out by internal malware, introduced because someone clicked a link on an apparently legitimate email. How will universal encryption prevent that? It might even make the problem worse by inhibiting scanning of incoming emails.
I share your doubts about the 'reality' of CPI/RPI. It often looks like government economists coming in and adjusting the 'basket', saying: "out go boring old bread and milk, in come exciting flat screen tellies and PCs". But the thing we all know about tellies and PCs (and similar electronic consumer goods) is that, whatever the price is today, in 6 months you'll be able to get the identical item for 10% less - a significant degree of deflation is baked in.
I was with Co-op (Midshires) energy for a couple of years a few years back (as they had the best rates) - set up an account and updated my meter readings online with no problems. Then I moved to another supplier for a couple of years. Now I'm back with Co-op again (as they have the best rates), but their IT has become mystifyingly crap, and I haven't yet been able to enter a meter reading since I rejoined.
If they truly believed that, they were so naive that they really shouldn't be allowed to run around unsupervised. If you're going into negotiations with your friends and allies, wouldn't you appreciate a briefing on their likely position? That's a job for intelligence - always has been and always will be.
Of course, in reality, these are politicians - they know and understand that perfectly well, they're just posturing for their public.
There are legitimate doubts about GR - we know, because of conflicts with quantum observations, that it must break down at some suitably tiny scale; and there are serious cosmologists investigating modified gravitational theories, since there's still no sign of a suitable candidate to constitute 'dark matter'. But no-one believes that it could be replaced by some theory following an inverse cube law - any modification must be infinitesimal on most human scales to avoid conflict with day-to-day experience.
Similarly, despite your straw man, no-one seriously doubts that increased CO2 emissions will tend to cause global temperatures to rise. But the legitimate questions this raises are "rise by how much?" and "what are the effects of that?" - and no-one has any solid answers to these questions. So before we commit to actions which will significantly diminish developed economies and condemn many millions in developing economies to a continuing miserable existence, it's reasonable to question the scientific consensus.
It sounds like* they had a massive power surge that tripped the generators and/or the switch gear. I expect they have redundant systems out the wazoo, but if you've no power coming through, you're on air for only as long as the UPS batteries last (and if your power distribution system is fried, not even that long).
* Disclaimer: I have no knowledge of Belgium air traffic systems or the circumstances of this particular problem.
Treadmills were widely used in English prisons during the 19th century. Mainly for punishment, but in some cases they were used to supplement windmills.
Not if my experience of taxi drivers in the greater NY area is typical. Many (most?) of them appear to have arrived in the country only recently, passed their driving test in some third world location, and have no local knowledge (I had to direct one to Newark airport).
The contrast with a London 'black cab' could hardly be greater.
Happy though I am to blame Brown for anything and everything (since most of it, as you point out, was actually his fault) and the changes to taxation of pension funds certainly didn't help, speaking as a (lapsed) actuary, the demise of final salary schemes was already assured.
Basically, defined benefits schemes (their proper name) only really work if you can (expect to) remain a member for at least 20, preferably 30 years. And the number of jobs where that's a realistic expectation is vanishingly small (maybe teachers or the NHS, but very few in private enterprise). If (as the great majority of people now do) you change employers every few years, you don't have time to build up significant benefits with any of them, and while (in theory) you could transfer accrued benefits from one scheme to another, the two sets of actuaries tend to take contrary views of the values* involved, so you end up with far less in benefits than you might expect.
* That's their job - they're paid to protect the benefits of the people already in the schemes, not to facilitate transfers between them.
States may not go bankrupt, but currently hospitals in Athens are running out of painkillers and money to pay nurses. We may be about to see how close they can get to bankruptcy.
Sadly for Syriza, promising the electorate that 2+2=5 doesn't alter the rules of (financial) arithmetic.
But isn't that skewed by all the 'debt' hidden in Brown's beloved PFI contracts, and hence off balance sheet? While it may not technically be debt, the country is committed to paying fixed amounts for long periods (often decades) into the future, which smells an awful lot like debt to me.
Lump all that in with the 'real' debt and we're getting perilously close to that 120%.
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