Posts by John Hughes 645 publicly visible posts • joined 8 May 2008
"pretty sure if the data backed global warming, or pointed to it or was in any way positive about it, the data would be released pretty damned quickly."
What data?
This isn't about "data". This is about the discussions about how to write the various IPCC AR's. If you want the data read the AR's.
"As Dennis Woodside, CEO Motorola Mobility, said: “Most people in the world can’t afford a $500, $600 phone. In fact, the average price of a smartphone today, in the world, is close to $200. The problem is that experience that smartphones in this class provide is really, really bad… they’re slow, they’re buggy, their screens are too small.”"
Just a random example: http://www.fastcardtech.com/ZTE%20N986
$150 for a quad core phone with a 5 inch screen.
About what you'd expect from a has-been dump that managed to put *ONE* satelite into orbit and promptly cancelled the program (*)
((*) Well, the tossers actually cancelled the program *before* the launch, but since the bugger was ready to go they launched it anyway).
What was important about the whole Bletchley park thing was the industrialisation of espionage.
*EVERY SINGLE ENIGMA TRANSMISSION WAS RECORDED*
*EVERY SINGLE ENIGMA TRANSMISSION WAS DECODED*
Thousands of people worked on the project.
Although it started in the UK, by the end of the war most of the effort was being run from the US.
The NSA is the direct descendant of this. The current mess is simply the natural outcome. Did anyone seriously think they'd just shut up shop in 1945?
"That is not actually true. A foreign power cannot go to a US company and demand that a backdoor is placed in their software or that their private keys are handed over."
But, unfortunately it seems that a Foreign Power (the US) can go to French, German and UK companies and demand that backdoors are put in place.
Heads need to roll over this affair - British, French and German heads.
The NSA is getting away with this shit beacause the default has been "do what the Americans want".
The claim in the article is crazy. If Orange tried to get people to pay like that for data Free would slaughter them.
Their 2 EUR/month contract has a 0,99EUR data option - 20 megabytes and 0,05EUR/extra megabyte,
So that's 17EUR for your 300MB (2 hours phone calls, unlimited SMS included, and unlimited use of Free's WIFI network)
Their 20 EUR/month contract gives you up to 3 Gigabytes, with EDGE speeds over that. And unlimited calls in France, unlimited calls to EU landlines, and unlimited calls to the US, unlimited use of Free's Wifi network.
How's about this for a thouht experiement. Imagine that the Sun stayed the same but all the CO2 and water vapour disappeared from our atmosphere.
Would you expect the surface temperature to fall, or rise, or stay the same?
(Hint: you're lying in bed, someone steals your blankie. What happens?)
No, "solar quiet spells" cannot cause ice ages.
"the coming solar minimum - and/or volcanic eruptions that may occur in coming centuries - though it might seem like a minor effect, could actually be quite capable of triggering another small Ice Age.."
No it couldn't.
Because the "Little Ice Age" wasn't an Ice Age. It was a cold period of the current Ice Age. Yes, we don't have to worry about the Earth entering an Ice Age because we're already in one and have been for about 2.6 million years.
"My father was a headmaster, I'm pretty sure that this action would have had one of his students either temporarily or permanently excluded. "
Legal behaviour outside of school hours, off of school property could get you expelled?
"I also don't really have a problem with the head telling the Uni he applied to the sort of person that he is."
One should always denounce thoughtcrime - it's what BB wants you to do.
"There's room for a market leader, a worthy competitor, and a plucky underdog."
Doesn't actualy fit the real situation.
Look at the graph in this article:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/08/20/this-chart-shows-how-far-behind-apple-is-in-the-global-phone-market/
33% of phones are made by "other", around the same as the market leader, Samsung, more than twice the "worthy competitor" Apple (13%).
Why on earth do you want a CANDU?
CANDU is a machine for turning natural uranium into plutonium - it's the best way of getting a bomb on the cheap that anyone knows.
If you want sexy long term you want a liquid salt thorium reactor.
If you want reliable in the short term you want an LWR. (And you need to learn the French lesson - build a shitload of identical reactors, stop fiddling around with new designs for each plant).
" Given that there are 24 such frames every second, you’re looking at an astronomical storage requirement: 288MB per second, 17.3GB per minute. Or 1.6TB for a 90-minute movie. "
1.6TB is not "an astronomical storage requirement".
Cheap SATA disks are areound 4TB last I looked.
"If I have access to your computer it's game over."
Maybe.
" I can go to certmgr.msc and steal client certificates, insert trusted certificates for fake sites."
No, you don't have root access.
"I could boot up a backtrack live CD and add an administrator account to windows,"
Not running windows. If you reboot my machine you can't access the disk 'cos you don't know the decryption key.
"deactivate your AV and add a rootkit, then poison your DNS by going to your hosts file."
No, you don't have root access.
"I could just copy netcat onto your machine and run it with nc -l -e cmd.exe -p 9999 and I have a backdoor into your machine.... "
Yes, you could do this. You'd have access to all my local files. Wouldn't be able to get my files from the NFS server 'cos you don't have a kerberos ticket.
"I could change your proxy settings to go through a client proxy I've setup, and then accept all the certificate alerts as "trusted".... now I can see all your SSL connections with passwords included in clear text."
Yup, you could do that.
In other words you could do nothing bad to me if I lock my screen.
Memo to self - keep locking screen when away from desk. Also makes sure boss can't see the porn I'm reading when I'm supposed to be working.
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