Posts by Chris Miller 3550 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Apr 2007
for the drop, it would have happened if the figures had been released on schedule. The trouble is that there are lots of naive investors (not always small ones) who see a company that's growing exponentially and assume that this will continue forever. When (as is inevitable) they miss a quarter, said naive investors all shout "sell, sell".
Very droll. In reality, there were two types of millennium bug. On one hand there were millions of lines of Cobol using PIC 99 to represent the year that, without attention, would have resulted in financial systems failing. The boondoggle was related to PC clocks, with used car salesmen going round visiting PHBs (for some reason they always liked to bypass the techies) and telling them that their thousands of PCs would all stop working on 1/1/2000 unless they bought their magic program at £16 a copy.
You're new here, aren't you?
Actually, I see your 4th anniversary was this week, so congratulations. Haven't you read any of the articles before? If you want a science digest without the light-hearted linguistic and technical spin typical of ElReg, there's no shortage of sites for you.
Neither I nor A. Nervosa above are arguing that the suggested punishment is sensible or appropriate. But, if you believe the 'collective punishment' argument, than it becomes impossible to punish anyone with dependants, because to do so would also affect them. For this reason, no legal system accepts this argument, instead asserting that the convicted person should have considered the consequences before carrying out their illegal action.
There are many good arguments that have been advanced against this proposal, but collective punishment isn't one of them.
Good reply, Tim, although I think you originally claimed others didn't understand the long-term effects, when the reality is that no-one can quantify them. Cornwall Council made a political move, informed by the dreaded 'precautionary principle' - if you really want to avoid Radon exposure, moving away from Cornwall is probably your best bet.
So Tim, you claim to understand how low levels of ionizing radiation affect the body over long periods of exposure. Congratulations! Write up your study and get it published - a Nobel for Physiology or Medicine surely awaits.
In the real world, the issue is not well understood (i.e. we don't have much of a clue). In the absence of good information, some people insist on applying the 'precautionary principle', and assume that a few percent increase over background will (in the long term) cause an increase of a few percent in cancer mortality. In practice, no such effect has been observed in areas with naturally raised levels of radiation, such as Cornwall or Aberdeen, or in atom bomb survivors - so the assumption is probably incorrect.
Don't confuse us with facts. It's far easier to post sneering comments about 'sky fairies' and 'invisible friends' than to try to understand modern religious concepts. And if the 20th century taught us anything, it's surely that atheists are capable of murder and torture on a scale that would have made Torquemada blush.
No, no, Mike - it's only the presence of those 30,000 fonctionnaires in the Berlaymont that prevents the Bundeswehr panzers from once more rolling down the Champs Élysées, NATO had nothing to do with it. As Tom Lehrer remarked: "Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize."
Fleming was fond of naming characters for real people. Auric Goldfinger was named after the architect Ernő Goldfinger (designer of, inter alia, London's Trellick Tower) and Bond himself after the author of the definitive Birds of the West Indies.
I'm sure we weren't the only ones to tell the pointy-haired boss that it stood for Computer Location Interface Tracker.
Unfortunately, it divided the user community into two classes: those that couldn't use a TrackPoint; and those that couldn't use a GlidePad. This caused problems if you wanted a single supplier for your laptop fleet, solved when mfrs (Dell) started producing laptops with both types of device.
It's the other way round. Anyone who opens their corporate network and allows any old malware-infected device to be connected, deserves everything they get (which will be a lot of pain). What I'm happy to do is provide a secure WLAN unconnected to the corporate network with only Internet access (probably filtered to block nasty and/or time-wasting stuff). From there (or from your roaming portable device, or from an Internet café) you can access a virtual (Citrix) image of your corporate workspace. Enjoy!
If you can bear it, watch Adam Boulton's face as this gets broadcast some 8 hours before the 'watershed'.
According to the infallible (or, at least, plausible) Wikipedia, there are no indigenous Icelandic animals, except the Arctic Fox (Polar Bears and bats blown off course are sporadic visitors). The others are domestic animals ferried over by the Vikings: sheep, cows, goats*, horses, mink, rabbits and dogs plus their commensals: mice and rats. Why anyone would wish to collect together an assemblage of their vulvas is left as an exercise for the reader.
* Insert inevitable goatse joke here.
No-one seriously doubts that CO2 is increasing or that burning fossil fuels is a major contributor. Where it gets tricky are questions like these:
(a) what will be the future rate of CO2 emissions - depends in large part on economic assumptions of future growth in GDP (which hasn't been very much over the last few years) and technological ones about the energy sources needed to support it.
(b) what will be the impact on climate - which is what this paper is about, one of many positive and negative feedback loops whose magnitude is not well understood (science-speak for 'no-one has a clue').
Try answering these questions without using the words 'could', 'might' or probably'.
We've heard of it. It will never happen of course, because there's a quantifiable cost associated with it, whereas the cost of a security breach is much less tangible, and is someone else's problem, and anyway is covered in our 100-page security manual that all new entrants were instructed to read in their spare moments.
If your IT workers aren't aware of your security policy, what's the chance that Joe Schmo in the call centre has read it and knows enough not to reveal his password to the person claiming to be calling from the helpdesk?
The news is (mostly) copy/pasted from Reuters, AFP, etc (and ElReg from time to time) - you may as well go there direct if that's what you want. But there is still investigative journalism, which (if you want it) needs to be paid for somehow, and unique content in the form of editorial comment, which is why (some) people pay for the Grauniad rather than the Times/Sun/Mail.
The real purpose of the proposed levy is to allow GMG to keep Rusbridger, Polly Twaddle, Old Uncle Moonbat and all in fine wines and Tuscan villas, while churning out hypocritical why-oh-why pieces about the rich and tax evaders. Personally, I'd be happy to pay £2 a month never to hear from them again.
http://www.dft.gov.uk/statistics/releases/reported-road-casualties-gb-main-results-2011/
http://www.nhtsa.gov/PR/NHTSA-05-11
US traffic deaths have dropped by 25% over 5 years - so they were well over 40,000 just a few years ago - there's been a few % reduction in miles driven due to the hike in gas prices. The US vehicle-miles figure is 10x higher than the UK's, but (of course) the huge difference in road types makes a straight comparison problematic.
* Yes, I know you're still using Gopher.
"Dividends are counted as income and subject to income tax"
Not quite. To over-simplify (naturally, the actual position is hugely complex and demands highly-paid tax-lawyers and accountants): dividends are subject to higher-rate tax only, they are assumed to be basic tax paid, since the business that paid them will have been subject to Corporation Tax. So they don't allow you to make vast tax savings unless you've got a partner that has a tax-free allowance that can be used.
It's a conservation problem too. You can persuade people to stump up money to save the Giant Panda or Lowland Gorilla - at a push, maybe even the Tasmanian Devil. But no-one's going to give money to save a small black beetle that looks much the same as a million other black beetles, but has different genitalia*.
* Seriously, that's often the most reliable way to tell species of Coleoptera apart. Particularly true of ladybirds/ladybugs, apparently.
In principle, shorting means selling shares you own in the hope that you can buy them back later when the price has fallen. Nowadays, this is done through options, and borrowing the shares that you are shorting has been standard practice for many years - but still someone has to own real shares in the business.
Naked shorting means doing this without you (or anyone else) ever owning the shares in question. Some people think this is an abuse of the system, and certainly if things don't go the way you hope and the share price rockets instead of falling, you're exposed to unlimited liabilities.
Urban myth, I'm afraid (i assume you're referring to the Habsheim accident). He didn't have the engines spooled up enough to make it over the trees. The presence or absence of fly-by-wire made no difference to the outcome (though it may have lulled the pilot into a false sense of invulnerability, these were very early days as you say).
I agree - in principle, greater automation has led to greater safety, the stats speak for themselves. I can't think of any instances where pure automation on its own has resulted in a crash, though there have certainly been instances of automation 'losing it' and human pilots rescuing the situation. And, of course, prior to the extensive use of computer automation in the cockpit, almost all accidents could be ascribed to mechanical failure and/or human error.
A hidden trap with automated systems is there tendency to deal with a deteriorating situation by applying correction until they run out of authority and then dropping out, handing an almost unflyable aircraft to the human pilots. An example of this was the Turkish 737 that crashed near Schiphol, it's true that the pilots could have spotted what was happening, but in this case, sadly, they didn't.
I've a good friend who is heavily involved with software development and fault analysis in this area (safety-critical software). I put it to him (speaking as a rank amateur) that it ought to be possible for the automation to project a current trend and give some advance warning along the lines of 'if things carry on this way, I'm going to run out of control authority in 30 seconds' or something. Of course, this has been thought of. The arguments against are too many false positives and introducing an extra layer of complexity into the software.
You need to try that line on someone who holds an ATPL, h4rm0ny. You may get an explanation of the workload of a pilot (or you may get a busted lip, but there's always a cost to gaining knowledge).
I can't think of the incident you describe, but I can easily think of two recent incidents (the landing in the Hudson and the BA 777 into Heathrow) where the presence of a human pilot led to the survival of all on board, when pure automatics would undoubtedly have left everyone dead.
Anyway, no far-paying passenger is ready to board a plane without a human pilot. And I can't see that changing anytime soon.
I think you may be correct that it can't be totally eliminated, but it can be reduced to the point at which it's essentially inaudible. NASA have been experimenting for years with this problem - one method is a long probe which generates a small shock wave ahead of the main parts of the aircraft.
Actually, it was the legislature, not the judiciary that was first compared with sausage manufacture:
Je weniger die Leute darüber wissen, wie Würste und Gesetze gemacht werden, desto besser schlafen sie nachts. (The less that people know about how sausages and laws are made, the better they sleep at night.) - Prince Otto Eduard Leopold von Bismarck, Duke of Lauenburg (1815-1898)
My advice would be to rummage through the bargain bins at your local PC outlet (or virtually) and buy last year's model. There's very little difference in spec, and you should be able to get comparable performance for <<£300. Look for a 4GB system with a free memory slot - a 4GB SODIMM costs just over £10 and is generally the best and simplest performance boost.
Don't forget to reinstall your preferred OS to eliminate all the bloatware the manufacturers love to load these babies with. You really don't need a 6-month 'free' trial of McAfee AV.
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