Posts by Michael H.F. Wilkinson
1888 posts • joined Tuesday 24th April 2007 14:31 GMT
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Posted in Koran-burning 'pastor' loses website
It's the old freedom vs license issue
Freedom is fine, and we are not stopping him. We can call him an idiot, and he SHOULD be held (directly or indirectly) responsible for ANY damage or deaths caused by this action, especially because he has been warned about the consequences. Freedom is empty without responsibility.
Posted in Koran-burning 'pastor' loses website
In ancient Babylon
The dove was a symbol of war (emblazoned on the the banners of their army), as I recall. Maybe that was where he got his ideas from.
Posted in Koran-burning 'pastor' loses website
In a furnace, specially made for him
stoked with bibles?
Posted in Koran-burning 'pastor' loses website
If even Sarah Palin thinks you are too radically right-wing
perhaps you might start thinking?
Oh, wait, this is a fundamentalist, so thinking is probably considered sinful.
What really makes me sick is that in a time when I hear several Muslim groups are shifting their end of Ramadan feast so that they do not coincide the September 11, out of respect for those who died, we have an idiot like this tarring all Muslims with the same brush.
BTW, could they not fine him on environmental charges?
As I read the article
the branding was with the initials GMP POTU. How many people instantly associate that with the police (without first reading this piece)? I could well imagine accessing the stick in order to find out who it belonged to (on a secure Linux box). If he then found that the police was seriously bungling things, I could well imagine reporting this to the paper AND returning the stick to the police.
Posted in Acer Stream Android smartphone
Nice looking phone
As I am going to upgrade shortly, I will certainly check it out
And Saint Atilla raised on high his handgrenade!!!!
Excellent!!
But don't you mean the people's popular front? or the popular people's front?
And of course gods are created
in the image of their believers: some are quite benign, others are homicidal lunatics (just like people, really). The problem is the different ones to often go by the same name. This gives rise to confusion, evidence of which abounds above ;-)
Big brother because he is the nearest thing to the big beard in the sky many believe in.
Refer to Prattchet's "Small Gods"
for one of the best analyses on this topic.
Voltaire's statement that self-mockery is the highest human value also springs to mind here
as in
freedom of religion except for those who think differently from me!!!!!!!
true, and the dolphins too
INFIDELS, the lot of them!!!!!
DEATH TO ALL TEDDYBEARS!!!
I've always found them suspicious
they did this for the face
but at high res it is just a rock
But then ...
everything on Mars is extraterrestrial (except Vikings, Rovers and other stuff we sent, if you insist)
It's interplanetary snooker!
At least it wasn't potted into a black hole (only scores 1 point, as it is a red ball)
Or it was the ship at Milliways
which looked like a fish, moved like a fish, but steered like a cow (the one that crashed into the third moon of Jaglan Beta).
Is that not banned
under the Geneva Convention?
You can actually find a book
by C. Northcote Parkinson called Parkinson's Law. It pops up second hand sometimes. It's hilarious and all too true!! It did not contain the above anecdote.
and saying
wibble
Precisely!
Fancy Harmony causing strife!
You have to laugh
The ending
is particularly neat
Back on form is the BOFH!!
And then of course
87.3 % of all statistics are made up!
It has ...
got us going.
Obviously.
And here me with my battered old Sony-Ericsson
Posted in Perseid meteors - brace for endazzlement
Real men watch the Bootids
and have the nadgers frozen off:
4 Jan 1979, 3:00 a.m., Bootid swarm beautiful, but -27.3 Celsius.
Great show though!
Posted in SCO rises from the dead (again)
precisely
"Come back here you yellow bastard, I'll bite your legs of!"
why don't they die: "Death's too good for them" (as the Vogon captain said)
Intriguing?
"It is intriguing to consider what private use in this day and age such a vast underground facility could be utilised for."
Wine cellar!!
Actually
I run 11.2 on my notebook after serial crashes and freezes with Ubuntu. It may be great when it works, but if something is wrong it is MUCH harder to fix. I never changed my big desktop to Ubuntu: the things wont boot in 9.10 because I have an NVidia GPU feature, and 4 crashes in one evening whilst working on 9.04 cured me from Ubuntu for a while. OpenSUSE is a very decent product, especially because it allows me sufficient control.
I might consider switching to Fedora, but things like integration of facebook and twitter into the OS as promoted by Ubuntu make me steer very clear of it indeed.
So the fact that ....
an expensive popular phone has a design fault is not newsworthy in a tech rag like the reg? Besides, it is the denial that the fault exists, and the lame excuses made which are the main news here.
As a computer scientist
I fail to see how non-native code (using proper optimization) could be slower than code running on a virtual machine, even if methods like JIT compilation are used. Whatever happens, the VM must issue a series of instructions to the physical machine. Thus there are two actions needed: translation from VM opcodes to physical opcodes and executions of these opcodes. These same instructions could be compiled and built beforehand, so we only need to run the opcodes of the physical machine. The only possible exception is improved branch prediction at run-time, but this can actually throw a bit of a spanner in the works of JIT compilation as well, because the prediction ITSELF has to be done at run time, making compilation more expensive.
There are many situations in which you do not notice much difference between Java and native code, because the native code is waiting for user input for more clock cycles. In the background however, this can impact actual power consumption. I know several (seriously) power-conscious embedded-systems researchers NONE of whom use Java, ALL use C.
Hydrogen does not easily go bang
even if you shoot at it. The small holes caused by bullets of WW-I fighters often failed to have an impact. Even phosphorous-coated tracers had difficulty bringing the zeppelins down, because oxygen mixed with the hydrogen neither quick enough or in large enough quantities.
You need a fairly powerful incendiary to make these things explode.
Posted in Apple: we've sold a lot of iPhone 4s
as I stated
I am not anti-Apple. It was just a knee-jerk response to the first line in the article. Had the rest been about buying sprouts/bicycles/ hovercrafts full of eels/whatever, the response would be much the same.
Don't panic
Posted in Apple: we've sold a lot of iPhone 4s
Of course
1.7 million people can be wrong. Never underestimate humanity's ability to get things very very wrong indeed, PREFERABLY all at once, in large unthinking masses. Think of all the people who believe in <INSERT DEITY OTHER THAN PERSONAL CHOICE/ ANY DEITY AT ALL IF ATHEIST>.
This is not an anti-Apple point I am making. Just stating the bleeding obvious.
And of course, I might be wrong ;-)
Posted in Jobs tells iPhone users to get a grip
Actually, you have very MANY photons
because of Planck's law
E = h f
with E the energy of a photon, H Planck's constant and f the frequency. Only at very short wavelengths (think visible light) do individual photons have a measurable effect (such as the photo-electric effect, explained by Einstein using Planck's law, which got him his Nobel prize (NOT relativity)). At radio wavelengths you have so MANY photons that the statistics of individual photons average out and only the wave behaviour is evident.
Lambda calculus
Patent law explicitly forbids me to patent mathematical equations. I invent new ones quite frequently, but cannot patent them. They are not even covered by copyright (in most legal systems). Every program can be expressed in Lambda calculus as a (very complicated) equation. Therefore, every prgram should be excluded from patentability.
The core of this argument was put forward I think in IEEE Computer Magazine a few years back. Still makes sense to me.
Somewhat premature
Predicting sunspot cycles is not such an accurate science. At the moment the sun is very quiet. The sun has gone through much longer periods of very low sunspot activity (Maunder minimum). I do not know of any reliable models that can predict such activity over even a short time span.
Scaremongering?
Posted in Linux wins the SCO vs Novell case
I will drink to that
Hopefully SCO will go bust shortly
(SCO = Some Common Orifice?)
You mean
like making it horrible to share data between apps? That makes life a lot easier does it not.
Deary me, a locked file system: no iPad for me then
and your argument is?
A rather feeble ad hominem reply to an actual argument that sharing files between apps has been made very difficult, and is an obstacle to ease of use. Apple touts ease of use as important (rather hard to deny), so why this set up which will not just make life harder, but creates all sorts of duplicates, eating up file space.
Please indicate what this has to do with earnings?
with a pint
of real ale!!
I'll drink to that
Indeed, so who is going to prosecute?
Anyone want a bet on that?
Again: it depends on the country
Some countries have a legal system that does not mean seeking justice against a big corporation means going bankrupt .
But then he wanted to call it
1948
gfruio0gffuiioufiuodfdfoip
(post must contain letters)
Unfair conditions
Can be thrown out by judges in many countries.
Someone should have the balls (and pockets) to challenge them in court
More importantly, do they have
ssh?
If so I would be fine (apart from parting with too much money)
Actually in the Netherlands
Apple's stance might well be illegal. If you simply do not allow an app, that would probably be OK, but throwing it out AFTER it previously had been approved, that is unreasonable, UNLESS the developer made changes which make it unacceptable. Even then the previously approved app should still be allowed.
Given the great asymmetry in power between Apple and most of its developers, a judge in the Netherlands might quite easily throw out the catchall "we can reject anything for any reason we like, and change our minds any time" parts of any contract as being unfair and unreasonable.
But MS don't even control ...
the software they run themselves properly
sorry, couldn't resist
Weird orbital changes
may simply be slingshot effect of moon. I also do not know what the principal plane of the orbit is, and foreshortening can cause WEIRD effects.
<large friendly letters>
DON'T PANIC
</large friendly letters>
even the moon
can be focused on easily. EVERY telescope has plenty of leeway to deal with thermal expansion. The current object is easily far enough away.
