Posts by mhenriday
940 posts • joined Friday 18th December 2009 15:00 GMT
Re: Taxes? No thank you.
Hej då - vi kommer nog inte att sakna en så ansvarskännande person som Du tydligen är ! Men snälle, när Du blivit riktigt gammal och vill ha bra sjukvård, kom gärna inte tillbaka hit, utan sök den i skatteparadiset som Du flyttat till ! Det räcker med en Lars Erik Einar Gustafsson....
Henri
«Black hole burping out x-rays» ?
No, no ; black holes are far too well-bred to do anything like that. A little Hawking radiation perhaps - and even that's never been conclusively observed - but certainly nothing so gross as x-rays !...
Henri
«China's armed forces have directly benefited
from the expanding Chinese civilian economy ...» Well, that does seem frightening, especially given that the US military has not directly benefited from the expanding US civilian economy ever since the end of WW II - at least under periods when the latter was expanding....
Henri
Signed the petition.
Bomb-Disposal Officer and Chief (on the Reg) Climate-Change Denier Lewis Page and yours truly on the same side of an issue ! I'm watching pigs flying by outside my window at the moment....
Henri
Re: Not so fast
Excellent points, FutureShock999, but perhaps addressed to the wrong person. One can't really expect Matt Bryant - who with his brilliant caricature of WikLeaks' name has once more revealed exactly what it is he needs to compensate for by appealing to the power of the United States and corporations incorporated there - to comprehend such advanced matters. Neither of his heads appears to be adequate for its respective job....
Henri
Too bad so many of the manuscripts regarding Archimedes' work
seem to have been used by Christian monks to write their religious tracts on, depriving us - and, not least, earlier generations - of vital knowledge on ancient Greek maths and physics. It's enough to give the term «palimpsest» a bad name !...
Henri
«Trusted CAs must not supply surveillance equipment to repressive regimes»
With all due respect, Mozilla - to which I am, by the way, immensely grateful for a wonderful product and, not least, for busting Microsoft's web browser quasi-monopoly - can you provide an example of any other kinds of «regime», i e, government, than repressive ones ? Perhaps the above statement should be modified to «Trusted CAs must not supply surveillance equipment to governments, corporations, organisations, etc, etc» ?...
Henri
Re: Well. Regardless.
«Perhaps the Swedes are just single-minded like that.» Let me point out that while not true of Swedes as a whole, most certainly our Swedish governments have shown themselves to be very «simple-minded» in demonstrating their loyalty to their masters in Washington. Prior to 1943 and Stalingrad, their loyalties were elsewhere....
Henri
Mr Manning would have to pluck the prize
from Thorbjørn Jagland's (né Johansen) cold, dead hands, so the odds of this happening are one big goose egg. But it would, admittedly restore the grievously injured reputation of Den norske Nobelkomite in one fell swoop....
Henri
Re: Thinking, Thinking...
Hardly surprising - what is research into the nature and origin of the universe compared with the ability to murder people at a distance ?...
Henri
Re: Ouch
But you see, Andy, Apple has a patent on FTL-travel, which allows it to patent things which were invented previously according to the lights (pardon the pun !) of those of us whose experience of time-like intervals is limited by the speed of light in vacuo. Apple ha sempre ragione !...
Henri
Thanks, Lewis -
now I'm waiting for your coming article demonstrating that this cold spot in the Universe around 13.4 thousand million years ago shows conclusively that global warming (on Earth) is a hoax....
Henri
Re: I don't understand
The marriageable age for males in China is 22 years, for females 20 years....
Henri
Re: Which Chinese Calendars?
As a matter of fact, the traditional Chinese calendar is not a lunar, but rather a lunisolar calendar - otherwise, instead of occurring between 21 January and 20 February in the solar Gregorian calendar that most of us, including people in China, use, the traditional Chinese new year would, like, e g, the month of Ramadan in the Islamic calender, wander throughout all the months of year....
Henri
«Microsoft’s goal is to transfer all 360 million Hotmail inboxes
by the summer. Hotmail is still the world's largest free email service.» According to a blog posted by Google SVP Sundar Pichai on 28 June 2012, «Gmail, which launched in 2004, has evolved from a simple email service to the primary mode of communication for more than 425 million active users globally». As far as I know 425 million > 360 million ; does the Reg disagree with my maths or does it dispute Mr Pichai's figures ?...
Henri
Did I click on «The Smoking Gun» by mistake -
or has there been a merger with the Reg which I managed to miss in the the media flow ?...
Henri
«When a voltage is applied across the sandwich,
the hottest electrons tunnel across the insulator into the superconductor. As they do make the journey, the electrons carry heat and vibrational energy with them.
So where's the quantum physics in that, you might ask.»
Naive as I am, I have always regarded «tunneling» itself as a quantum phenomenon. Are Richard and the Reg claiming that it can now be explained by classical, pre-20th century physics ?...
Henri
«If you don't think a source is trustworthy, either explain why -
or just ignore them. But don't take the bits that you agree with, ignore the rest and assume your readers are too stupid/lazy to click a link and read for themselves.» AC, what are you trying to do - ruin Mr Page's business model ?...
Henri
Re: No picture?
Just click the AFP link provided in Phil's text, Dexter, and you're home free....
Henri
Sure that those dastardly Iranians -
or perhaps the Chinese - rather than the good, upstanding residents of the US of A , don't lie behind these outrages as well ?...
Henri
«... but as the NYT points out "American officials have not offered
any technical evidence to back up their claims".» But you see, US officials, unlike the rest of us, are not constrained by evidence or lack of same - they are still running that old «faith-based reality» meme. One shouldn't, however, go so far as to congratulate these officials for this «innovation» - telling lies about the other side goes a long way back. Remember British propaganda about the Boche bayonetting babies in Belgium during the Great War ?...
Henri
That, of course, is the real point -
all this business about «the mark of the beast» is simply so much quasi-religious froth that makes it titillating for people in the US (and no few commentators here on the Reg) to follow.Are authorities to be allowed to track us all in this «not intrusive to the pupil in the slightest» manner - beginning, of course, with the schools and the elderly, as it's so obviously for a «good purpose», i e, their «safety», or are people to be allowed to opt out, after the disadvantages of doing so have been explained to them ? O brave new world, That has such people in't....
Henri
«...the $500,000 pilot program, which is paid for from the education budget.»
Good to see that the «education budget [sic !]» in the sovereign state of Texas is being used to track students, rather than teach them. Had me worried there for a bit....
Henri
«The problem is: you can't just turn up and expect people
will be dumb enough to forget Apple.»
««The problem is: you can't just turn up and expect people will be smart enough to forget Apple.»
Fixed the typo for you, Gavin ; you can buy me a beer next time we meet....
Henri
Re: As it should be
What a pity that this obvious candidate for US Secretary of State/Secretary of Defense has chosen to remain anonymous !...
Henri
«While more work needs to be done before we can develop actual gadgets ...»
Not to knock the research - with or without the intake of Fosters (exported or no) - but haven't we heard that sort of thing before ?...
Henri
Re: I'll believe it when...
or when prototypes are «stolen» in a daring operation which involves tying up the cleaning staff at gunpoint....
Henri
Re: Ubuntu for phones ..
I found this 22 minute-long video of great interest - but one might be advised to hop over the first five minutes, in which Mr Shuttleworth tells us, over and over and over again, how wonderful the Unity interface is on desktops (declaration: I abhor Unity, but like Ubuntu, which is why I use the Cinnamon desktop environment on my Ubuntu 12.04 and 12.10 boxes). In any event, Ubuntu certainly seems worth a try on mobile phones - it seems to offer quite a few excellent solutions to interface problems on the format ! Hope the Reg will folllow up with a review !...
Henri
How does this «robbery» relate to
«inadvertently» leaving a new version of the iPhone in a bar ? All that free publicity ? The marketing department strikes again....
Henri
One instructive context in which Ian Thomson's article should be read
is this one by Gavin Clarke in the very same issue of the Reg. A bargain, indeed !...
Henri
Re: The Two-Faced USA Trumping Up Yet More False Accusations
Mr Bryant, the commentariat's expert on just about eveything and everybody, is like a clock that doesn't even manage to be right twice a day - or once a day. if it be a 24 hour clock. But he does provide comic relief, in the event that one is easily amused....
Henri
Re: Maybe North Korea is opening up?
Amazing - a serious comment on a topic dealing with North Korea and no downvotes from people who've never been there and who know no more about the country than what they are told in their local rag or by Faux News ! What's the Reg coming to ?!! In any event, kudos, Schultz - and I hope that the downvotes I hereby provoke from the commentariat are addressed to this comment rather than yours !...
Henri
Re: Dunno.@Matt Bryant
Anonymous Coward, you must realise that dear Mr Bryant is our recognised authority on everything - from Julian Assange (whose very name, for some reason, seems to wreck havoc with Mr Bryant's keyboard skills) to the IT abilities of Arab youth (on which his expertise is demonstrated because, he tells us, that he has seen that Saudis use «foreigners» to do the real work - quel surprise ! - without, of course, mentioning the provenance of these «foreigners» ; mayhap some were from other Arab countries ?). So do take care when referring to this expert as a «twerp» ; perhaps a still more appropriate formulation would result from shortening yours by one letter, while retaining the initial two....
Henri
Re: article totally misses the point
«Estimated costs amount to $10-15m, not £10m.» Given that the current (4 January 2013) conversion rate between GBP and USD is 1.62 : 1, the distinction between «$10-15m» and «£10m» (why this use of «m», rather than «M» to mean «millions» (10^6) ?!!) hardly seems significant....
Henri
Governments have been doing this for years and years ; cf, e g,
Hermann Wilhelm Göring's well-known remark from his prison cell («Naturlich das einfache Volk ... in jedem Land») on how to get a balking people to accept a war of aggresion or Arthur Hendrick Vandenberg's famous advice to Harry Truman that the latter would have to «scare the hell out of the American people»to get the US Congress to pass military aid packages to the Greek and Turkish governments, in order to prevent them from being toppled by their own people. Nothing new under the sun....
Henri
Nothing like checking one's sources or knowing what one's talking about...
«Galileo only has three birds in the sky right now». Strange, is it not, that the people responsible seem to think there are four ? But then again. I'm reading el Reg....
Henri
Ernst Mach
would have been proud at this emphasis on recipes - or mises en pratique> ! If you can't make it, you don't own it !...
Henri
Bet I know who Phil
believes lies behind the attack....
Henri
«UK smartphoners prefer Android,
but not as much as their EU brethren» Hmmm. And UKIP supporters ?...
Henri
Re: Ledswinger
«And in a proper market economy a floating exchange rate ...» Interesting ! Are you telling us that prior to the US going off the gold standard in 1971 and the collapse of Bretton Woods a couple of years later, that none of the North American and European economies, between wihich exchange rates were fixed according to the decisions of governments, were «proper market econom[ies]» ? Or is that merely a term you swing around like a club to smash phenomena of which you don't approve (X is not a proper market economy !), without understanding what it means ? Do you consider Germany a «proper market economy» ? The United States, with its constant bullying of other countries to revalue their courrencies and its own history of frequent «quantative easing» ?...
Henri
Just say No !
to patents on mathematical algorithms (and rectangles with rounded corners)....
Henri
I only hope that these idiotic caps on wired services
don't become part of daily life here in Sweden as well ! But given our propensity to take after (nearly) all the worst developments in the US and given our present government, which greatly favours corporation profits over customer interests, I'm not particularly sanguine....
Henri
«Sharp-eyed Reg readers may, however, be wondering
why Weiren, whose title relates to lunar exploration, is talking about asteroid encounters.» Sharp-eyed Reg readers, Simon, may indeed be wondering why a well-read person like yourself is unaware that the surname of the «chief designer of China's lunar probe program» is Wu. Weiren is his given name....
Henri
Re: Go Chinese!
Have to agree that more international cooperation is needed in human space endeavours. Getting to and returning from Luna, at a mean distance of some 384 400 km from Earth, was one thing, but getting humans to and returning them from Mars, with a distance from Earth at close approach which ranges from 54 to 103 million km, and other small obstacles (think radiation, etc) on the way is an entirely different matter entirely. But alas, so long as troglodytes like US Representative Frank Rudolph Wolf are allowed to render it impossible for NASA to cooperate in any form with its Chinese counterpart, such cooperation will have to wait....
Henri
Ian, you might want to consider rewriting the following passage :
«The seven earliest galaxies were part of the first wave that "re-ionized" the universe by breaking down the hydrogen to form the other elements found today». The re-ionisation of the universe via the emission of sufficiently energetic electromagnetic radiation to detach the electron from the nucleus in the hydrogen atom could possibly be referred to as «breaking down the hydrogen», even if that is not, perhaps, the most felicitous description possible, but this process has nothing to do with the formation of «the other elements found today», which were produced by fusion processes in the stars (and in supernovae), not by light striking clouds of neutral hydrogen in the early universe....
Henri
Why couldn't they do a feature film
about «[s]nake-fondling blonde nude punts Polish coffins» instead ? Or did they wish to avoid infringing upon the Reg copyright ?...
Henri
Re: «It must be all those Windows licences that they're using -
perhaps there should be a chinese version of Linux to bring balance to the trade?» There is, indeed, at least one Chinese version of Linux, Red Flag Linux. Never tested it, so can't say how good it is....
Henri
Posted in China plans astro-farms on Mars
The Chinese seem to have opted for a conservative strategy
of small, small steps - a strategy which at least hitherto seems to be serving them well. And while cultural generalisations äre admittedly suspect, perhaps the Chinese, with their five millennia of continuous civilisation, are more disposed than most to take the long view, even when it comes to projects to put a colony on Mars. Note also that has far as we know and perhaps contrary to the expetations of those who love to hate the country - «with it's [sic !] blatant disregard for health and safety and human rights» , they haven't yet lost a space man or woman. Leaving aside moral aspects, a simple consideration of the training costs involved would militate against risk-taking with the lives of these individuals. Riding a rocket is never risk free, but it strikes me as extremely unlikely that the leadership of the Chinese space programme would exert less care to keep their people safe and sound than their counterparts in Russia or the US....
Henri
My 3 metre-long labrador
just won best in show at the local dog show. Helluva time stuffing her in the car, however....
Henri
