Posts by mhenriday

Say what one will, no one can accuse Morpheus

of sleeping on the job ! Looked more like a nightmare to me....

Henri

Kudos to the Glaswegian physicists,

to Nature for allowing us ordinary mortals to read the paper, and not least, to Richard for giving us a heads-up !...

Henri

Interesting news, Richard,

but your source is rather short on specifics - while it claims « a safe, cost-effective battery with high energy density», it provides no figures at all. I realise that Walter Murdoch was not related to Keith Rupert, but could there be a common aversion to quantification lurking there ?...

Henri

As any fule who has lived and worked in China kno,

dialectical differences in the pronunciation of the so-called «common language» (普通话) are many and not infrequently mutually unintelligible. One can't help wondering if, given the prevalence of smart phones and what seems to be a desire for voice recognision and natural language processing technology in that country, these latter are going to do as much, if not more to standardise the Chinese spoken language than radio and television have done these last six decades....

Henri

The exploitation of students in China's vocational education system,

well described in the pdf file to which Phil provides a link, reminds me, for some odd reason, of the way so-called «internships» and «job-training programmes» are currently used to extract unpaid labour from students and others in North America and Europe. Here relations between capital and labour have moved decisively in favour of the former during the last three decades ; I hope that will not prove to be the case in the coming three decades in China....

Henri

I fear, Ian, that in concentrating on Mr Ferdowsi,

you neglected the really vital story, which can be found here : http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/international/earth-hails-successful-mars-invasion-2012080637126?utm_campaign=08082012. Earth bacteria colonising Mars is one thing, but imagine if that «peace, philosophy, and so forth» infected the rover and managed in some fashion to make its way to this planet....

Henri

What strikes me as interesting about this prize

is that in choosing the first awardees, Yuri Borisovich Milner was willing to go out on a limb and give prizes to researchers whose theories have not (yet ?) been validated (to the degree that any theory can be said to be validated). Sort of like awarding a prize to Peter Ware Higgs, Robert Brout, François Englert & Co for the Higgs mechanism/boson back in, say, 1970. It will be interesting to see whether awardees themselves, who will choose future rounds of prize winners, will dare to be so bold....

Henri

This is merely George Gideon Oliver Osborne's way

of reducing the UK's budget deficit - and if you fail to grasp how the new £500m field allowance will aid in that worthy task, you are probably an over-age chav who should be ASBOed immediately....

Henri

«Unfortunately for Motorola, the phone still appears to be broadly-rectangular [sic !],

a shape which we all now know certain corporate residents of Cupertino invented long before Euclid started fooling with geometry.»

Shouldn't that read ««Unfortunately for Motorola, the phone still appears to be broadly rectangular, a shape which we all now know certain corporate residents of Cupertino invented long before Euclid - and Lucy Haeran Koh - started fooling with geometry» ? After all, credit where credit is due....

Henri

Ms Chan hit the nail on the head :

«Debby Chan, a project officer at SACOM who exposed alleged malpractice at Apple ODM Foxconn, argued that bribery is only part of the problem with audits and that the root problem is the absence of genuine trade unions in China», but given the attitude of a large number of members of the US Congress towards trade unions (at least US trade unions), it is more than a tad ironic to hear these complaints about factory working conditions and wages being aired in a US Congressional hearing....

Henri

«Usually, initiatives to crack down on pornography, malware

and fraudulent web sites are nothing more than a cover for something far more important to Party bosses – shutting down online political dissent.» You do have evidence for that statement, do you not, Phil - given your long and initmate association with «Party bosses» ? Or are you suggesting that when the police shut down this network (which, unless more serious issues were uncovered (pardon the pun !) than pornography, I suggest is an egregious waste of police resources, which even in China are not unlimited), it was all a mistake, and they actually intended to so something else (and twice as nefarous - after all, they're Chinese) entirely ? The article would have been greatly improved by editing out that last superciliously ignorant little paragraph....

Henri

«It further paints Keller as a government patsy ....»

That about nails it, innit ?...

Henri

Aren't critics being a tad too negative here ?

Rather than an «unprecedented insult» to women, shouldn't «0xB16B00B5» instead be regarded as an unprecendented encouragement to plastic surgeons ? After all, they get paid to put the implants in and then, when it is discovered how dodgy they are, they get paid to take them out again. A real win-win !...

Henri

Nice article, Richard - as usual -

but perhaps you could explain to me why the usual Reg stalwarts - none named, none forgotten - have refrained from commenting on the report by the BEST team and ertwhile skeptic Richard Muller to the effect that 1) global warming is real and 2) that it is largely anthropogenic. In addition to Professor Muller's own OpEd in the «NY Times», to which you kindly provide a link, a fairly lengthy article on the matter can be found in yesterday's «Guardian» : http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/jul/29/climate-change-sceptics-change-mind?CMP=EMCNEWEML1355....

Henri

Thanks for the update, Richard -

nice to see a Reg article which just reports the fact, ma'am, without including the author's (not Mr Chirgwin's) ideological ballast !...

Henri

You posed the question, Phil :

«So who do we believe? A federal court and a shamed defence contractor hit with a $75m fine, or the Chinese government?» Any reason to prefer the account of one of the two parties to this dispute to that of the other - aside from your evident antipathy for China ? Or do you mean that «federal court[s] and [...] shamed defence contractor[s]» would never lie - so long as they are located in the US ? Rather than asking a rhetorical question, you might want to try doing some journalism for a change and investigating the matter sufficiently so that you can provide a credible answer to a serious query....

Henri

Considering the nature of the crimes committed by Mr Blair

and the offenses committed by this Mr Hussain and the respective consequences for each of them, I can't help wanting to simplify Martin Luther King's famous dictum to the effect that «... the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice» to the somewhat more accurate «the arc of the moral universe is bent»....

Henri

Have to agree, Phil - those Chinese are baaad !

After all, China has around 30 % of known rare earth reserves (as pointed out by Tim above, neither W nor Mo are among the so-called «rare earths», i e, the lanthanides plus Sc and Y) and produces about 97 % of those available on the market. This would seem to mean that countries with 70 % of known reserves produce approximately 3 % of the rare earths available on the market. The obvious conclusion to draw from all this is that it is those dastardly Chinese who are holding the market to ransom and that the other countries sitting on all those reserves and which don't choose to produce for the market have nothing at all to do with any lack of these materials there. Right, Phil ?...

Henri

Phil, to put Huawei's Q2 results in perspective,

wouldn't it have been wise to compare with Ericsson's, which showed a 1 % increase in net sales (-17 % in networks) YoY, but a sharp (63 %) decline in net income (http://www.ericsson.com/res/investors/docs/q-reports/2012/6month12-en.pdf) ? Under these circumstances, Huawei doesn't seem to be doing so bad....

Henri

Velkopopovický - in both pale and dark versions ?

Those were Russians of culture, as any Švejk fan kno. Don't blame them for emptying the tins first ; I'd certainly have done the same....

Be waiting for them down at U Kalicha at six in the evening after the War*...

Henri

*Pity now that we seem to be going back to wars that really take a long time to come to an end, like the Thirty Years War or the Hundred Years War, rather than relatively limited conflicts like WW I, in which Švejk and his comrades played so honourable a role....

Have to congratulate the US government, the MPAA, the RIAA and the local vassals

in New Zealand - they've actually made me feel sympathy for and brotherhood with «Kim Dotcom». Not a mean achievement, but they did it all by themselves with just a wee bit of help from all their money and their thuggish SWAT teams....

Henri

Steven Anthony Ballmer and Mark Penn - wow !

Now there's a pair with the technical and intellectual credentials to make everybody disable any other search motor they may have, in sancta simplicitas, been using and rush to Badda Bing Badda Boom ! Bet Hillary «we came, we saw, he died» Rodham Clinton is with them from the get-go !...

Henri

Will one really have to sit on a UK bog

in order to access this research ? That may be asking rather much of the more squeamish prospective readers among us....

Henri

I want those «green and orange highlights»

as a «smart phone» app - and I want it NOW !...

Henri

Well, I for one am relieved to learn that Judge Harvey has recused himself -

after all, judges are allowed - indeed, encouraged - to be members of societies dedicated to promoting the interests of so-called «rights holders» (MPAA, RIAA, and organisations of that ilk) and judge in cases directly affecting these interests, as is the custom here in Sweden (cf the infamous «Pirate Bay» trials), but to publicly express opinions which do not promote these interests is a No No. Order has at last been restored ; «God/the US goverment/MPAA/RIAA/'s in his Heaven/All's right with the world»....

Henri

«The US House of Representatives Intelligence Committee is investigating

alleged ties with the Chinese government after fears were raised that kit produced by the two telecoms giants could give back door access to state-sponsored snoopers.» Please do enlighten me, Phil - was the esteemed committee - the name of which hardly describes the qualities of its members (who have, however, shown themselves extermely clever at collecting «campaign contributions») referring to such «state-sponsored snoopers» as the NSA, the CIA, etc, etc ?...

Henri

«The only note of real pessimism in the past few months

has come from Samsung, whose China CEO, Kim Young-ha, went on record in May complaining the government's austerity measures were hurting consumer demand.» On the other hand, the Chinese government has since then moved to loosen credit in order to mitigate the slowdown ; only time will tell if they can succeed in successfully manoeuvring between the Scylla of stagnation and the Charybdis of inflation....

Henri

Just for the sake of argument,

may I suggest that a more appropriate country to compare with China (area : 9,640,821 km2, population 1 339 724 852 persons) in this regard would be India (area : 3,287,263 km2, population : 1 210 193 422 persons) rather than the UK (area : 243,610 km2, population : 63 162 000 persons) ?...

Henri

This may sound naive or at least terribly old-fashioned,

but have the Acer execs considered producing better quality products as a means to gaining users' trust ?...

Henri