* Posts by Daniel Rendall

5 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Apr 2008

Brit global warming skeptics now outnumber believers

Daniel Rendall

Getting the arguments

They don't get the arguments though, do they? They get a lot of industry-funded misinformation. So all this tells us is that it pays to spend large amounts of money misinforming the public. Unfortunately, this doesn't change the laws of physics.

National Rail tweaks departure board API, 'orders' coder to kill site

Daniel Rendall

Just to be clear

The £4.99 is paying for a nice helpful app which makes use of the data feed and offers some useful extra features. Not for the data. If you want to access the data for free, you are entirely welcome to use Safari on the iPhone to browse the NRE site.

Pirate Bay loses trial: defendants face prison time, hefty fines

Daniel Rendall

This doesn't really apply to Google

Google, it could be argued has substantial non-infringing uses. The fact that it may throw up links to torrents of copyrighted material is unfortunate, but that is not its raison d'etre. This is not a defence open to The Pirate Bay. In the first page of hits for 'Browse Movies' at the moment I see Watchmen, Hotel for Dogs, Monsters vs. Aliens, Tropic Thunder, Wolverine...

Despite the plucky rhetoric of the PB apologists, the Pirate Bay exists purely as a resource to enable unprincipled cheapskates to enjoy the product of other people's labours, without any intention of rewarding those labours. Forget the spiel about 'new business models', if this becomes the dominant paradigm for 'consuming culture' then culture will simply not be created - you can play the well-worn card about the ridiculous salaries afforded to the big stars and I'd have a modicum of sympathy, but sets will not be built, lights will not be rigged, sound will not be designed and costumes will not be made if the relatively lowly people involved are not paid. And it's hard to see how the "business model" espoused by PB advocates will pay them. Maybe I'm missing something.

Oxford don offered $10,000 for proof terrorist penned Obama memoir

Daniel Rendall

A syllogism is born

"In short, there is an argument to counter Dr Millican's analysis, and seeing as both rely on theoretical analysis they are both just as liable to be right or wrong, with equal vailidity (sic)."

Is this an example of a general pattern?

A and B are competing arguments.

A and B both rely on theoretical analysis.

Therefore A and B are equally likely to be right or wrong, and equally valid.

Looks suspiciously like the "reasoning" used by the Christian right to argue the case for their particular brand of ignorance being taught in science classes...

Official: OOXML approved as international standard

Daniel Rendall

So where were the objections?

To quote from Alex Brown's blog:

"Recently my standards colleague Inigo Surguy wrote a blog entry advising readers how to submit comments on the DIS. Guess how many good technical comments we received. I'll give you a clue: it was a good round number. In fact, guess how many truly meaningful technical objections were emailed to BSI over the whole course of the project. I can remember two. By contrast of course, there were a gabillion emails which were either form letters of MS origin, or copy-and-paste jobs from noooxml.org."

I would have assumed, given the huge rumpus these proceedings have generated, that the BSI would have been inundated with solid technical reasons why OOXML shouldn't become a standard. Evidently this didn't happen - I can only conclude that most of the anti-OOXML zealots are all mouth and no trousers.

Which is a shame, since as a die-hard Linux / OpenOffice user I'd have liked to have seen MS beaten on this one.