Posts by mhenriday

(A modernised version of) Matthew 26:52 :

«... for all they that take the lawyer shall perish with the lawyer» ?...

Henri

Here in Sweden we have a locution,

«det skadar ingen fattig» (it doesn't hurt any poor people). Apt here, at least as regards Apple....

Henri

Many things may perhaps be said about the course chosen

by Helena Drnovšek Zorko, the Slovenian ambassador to Japan, but compared to our Swedish ambassador, Lars Gunnar Axel Vargö, to whom the signing of this abomination of a treaty seems to have been merely a matter of business as usual, Ms Zorko is a true heroine. Kudos !...

Henri

The best comment I've seen on this truly earth-shaking matter

I found on this YouTube website (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5skXveebh8). Way to go, Max Rufus !...

Henri

«She [Kimberly Moffit] has a masters.»

Good for her ! She's obviously made use of her academic credentials to both make money and get into the public eye, which our economist friends tell us is the be all and end all of higher studies. A true citizen of the modern world !...

Henri

I think most of us realise that it would be to our benefit as consumers

to see another major player emerge in the extremely oligopolistic HDD market. But of course, to those who allow their dislike of China to override every other concern - and who ignore such facts that (essential components for) most HDDs are presently made in that bastion of freedom and democracy, not to say equitable labour relations, Thailand (which is one of the reasons that the floods in that country had such an effect on prices), rather than in, say, our lovely and o-so-democratic Europe - this is really bad news....

Henri

Wow ! Newton Leroy Gingrich

is on his way !...

Henri

To paraphrase the Bard,

something is rotten in the state of Sweden, that wholly owned subsidiary to a wholly owned subsidiary to the MPAA and the RIAA. But we didn't need the ghost of an independent Högsta Domstol (Supreme Court) to tell us that, did we ?...

Henri

Perhaps the Reg should consider hiring a proofreader ?

«The Chinese telco powerhouse will retain the CIP team, which is located in Ipswich, to will [sic !] form the core of the new Huawei UK R&D centre as part of its global network.»

«EEDA said the investment was a success story for CIP which was originally owned by a US consortium and was acquitted [sic !] by EEDA in 2003 to save it from shut down.»

'Nuff' said....

Henri

Nice to see a well-reasoned article that presents a recent scientific report

with regard to the changes occurring in our climate in the Reg, where such are a rarity. Then again, it was written by Richard Chirgwin, who unlike certain other Reg contributors, seems to exert himself to understand the subject matter on which he reports....

Yes, dear «Josh 15», I confess to being an obsequious toady, and will now go sit in the corner with a dunce cap on my head....

Henri

A tale of two quotes

Apple CEO Tim Cook : «We care about every worker in our worldwide supply chain».

Hon Hai (owner of subsidiary Foxconn) chairman Guo Taiming (aka Terry Gou) : «Hon Hai has a workforce of over one million worldwide and as human beings are also animals, to manage one million animals gives me a headache».

The difference between the caring Mr Cook, on the one hand, and the rather less caring Mr Guo, on the other ? What the latter really thinks gets by his PR consultants to a higher degree than in the former case....

Henri

Up the boffins !

'Bout time the worm turned !...

Henri

Keep it up, Neelie !

And while we're waiting, there's always Adblock Plus - thank you, Wladimir Palant !...

Henri

Ah, Lewis, what a divinely-gifted satirist you are !

Putting a trade-mark icon after every instance of Mr Assange's surname is indeed a stroke of rare genius - only to be compared to those we see coming from the compromised keyboard of a certain poster to these threads who no doubt will soon show up here. Persons, however, who wish to read a less biased - if also less self-satisfied - piece on Mr Assange might instead want to consider turning to Michael Hasting's interview with him in a recent issue of Rolling Stone (http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/julian-assange-the-rolling-stone-interview-20120118). But then journalism is a pedestrian trade, is it not, when compared to the products of the divine afflatus with which you seem to be filled ?...

Henri

One of those rare occasions when our beloved European Commission

(not «the EU», Bill ; there's a difference) does take an initiative in the interests of the citizens and residents of member countries - another rare instance which springs to mind was the mandating of the browser-choice screen. Let us hope that more effort is devoted to this sort of thing, rather than to bailing out banks (and their shareholders) and saving the moribund project known as the Euro....

Henri

Great letter - almost up to the Heinrich Heine precedent !

(The greater subtlety of this latter is perhaps due to the fact that it was directed to a more sophisticated and better educated public than today's.) Being unsophisticated myself, I do hope that WikiLeaks will get hold of of the original and publish it unredacted, so that we can see what's hiding under all that black ink....

Henri

This is one of the few instances where I'd really like to see Windows -

and why not Windows XP or even Windows ME - being used as the OS, rather than an updated Linux distro....

Henri

The Vatican may very well have recycled Wikipedia articles on the persons chosen

to be cardinals, but I find it difficult to see that in that event any major harm was done to the general public (although admittedly, acknowledging the source would have been a fine gesture). What does worry me, however, is a sneaking suspicion that the Wikipedia articles may have been penned by Vatican employees - given hagiographers' tendency to be more concerned with telling a good yarn than reporting more prosaic versions of events, in this case it is Wikipedia readers who might want to take these biographical sketches cum grano salis....

Henri

Doesn't this particular satellite deserve a more spectacular end ?

«Re-enter[ing] the Earth's atmosphere and burn[ing] up» seems an all too low-key finalé for a satellite which has performed such service - the least one could ask is that it be sent to a better universe via a black hole (yes, I know that what is currently believed to be the nearest black hole, V4641 Sagitarii lies about 24K light years away, but noblesse oblige)....

Henri

Well, I must agree with the rebalancing act performed by Dr McLeroy et consortes

over at MiniTrue (my apologies - the Texas Board of Education) - calling capitalism «capitalism» isn't at all in line with Newspeak standards ! But somehow I doubt that Apple is quite the firm to take on these troglodytes, given its own dedication to its (patented and product-registered form of) Newspeak....

Big Brother, because somehow he seemed most appropriate here....

Henri

Contrary to the doomsday predictions

which flew about when IBM sold its PC business to (gasp !) those dastardly Chinese, the latter have made Lenovo a success by concentrating on, inter alia, quality. Acer's products, on the other hand, have not been known for this particular quality, as the firm recently admitted (or rather, adumbrated) in a press release (reported in the Reg) to the effect that it was going to start producing more up-market products. Let us hope that Signor Lanci's move from Acer to Lenovo rather reflects a desire on his part to work with a manufacturer with whom product quality is central than a desire to Acerise Lenovo !...

Henri

But all the pundits wisely nod their heads in unison

Given that there is an IT angle to this story,

and the Reg is an IT publication, why was such information as the OS used on the hapless stenographer's machine and the anti-virus programme - if any - installed omitted from the article ? Or is the answer, at least to the first query, so obvious as not to require comment ?...

Henri

What do they mean by «first» ?!!

Not to name any names, but haven't people been following the prelude to the US presidential elections to be held later this year ?...

Henri

Note the last paragraph

in which Professor Barrau (who, by the way, sports a nice ponytail, like our Minister of Finance here in Sweden) «adds that there may even be signatures observable in the universe’s microwave background radiation». That would really be fantastic - more or less on a par with the observation of the Higgs bosun expected/hoped to come from CERN during the coming year....

Henri

Kudos to Samsung !

Hope they continue to produce good phones and tablets - and drop the killer robots (on which, no doubt, Apple has already taken out several patents and design registrations)....

Henri

«The first thing we do, let's ...»

«Apple'sTM letter, dated December 23, requested an additional month for a team of [gimlet-eyed lizards - sorry, unable to reproduce the cross-out MHD] lawyers to [squeeze the last possible billable hour out of a trivial sideshow] decide whether the company will lodge an objection.» Lawyers are what lawyers are - nothing new here - and Apple is what Apple is (has become) - a blight on and hinder for all innovation that the firm doesn't control...

Henri

Ah, Lewis-Little, the Sky Is Falling

and it's all the fault of THOSE DASTARDLY CHINESE !...

With the demise of the Soviet Union, whatever would we do to keep those enormous military budgets intact, without a plethora of Emmanuel Goldsteins sporting an epicanthal fold ( those «Aryan» Iranians don't really cut the mustard) ?!!...

Henri

«... accidental bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade»

Sure, John, the Easter Bunny told me, too, that it was accidental - the «smart» missile had inadvertently been replaced by one that barely made it to O-level....

Henri

Nice post, Richard !

A minor caveat : you write that «[t]he “signature” that distinguishes a Higgs event from a quark collision is this: the Higgs converts all of its mass – obeying e=mc2 – into energy in the form of the photons; and the colliding quarks have much lower mass». Most quarks, as shown in this table (http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/particles/quark.html) are estimated to have masses in the MeV range, or some three orders of magnitude less than that hypothesised for the Higgs boson, but Bottom quarks are in the GeV range, and Top quarks, at an estimated 172 GeV, would actually be more massive than the Higgs boson. In any event, nice work at Cern ; it will be interesting to see if subsequent data will push the degree of confirmation to the desired 5σ....

Henri

Hope the Australian courts

show a greater degree of independence from the so-called «rights-holders» organisations than their counterparts do in Sweden and put P to the these organisations' attempts to make ISPs their unpaid police against end users....

Henri

I hadn't even noticed that

David William Donald Cameron, George Gideon Oliver Osborne, William Jefferson Hague, et al had been away ! Guess I'll have to change my reading glasses....

Henri

It's only money !

What surprises me is that the invoice shown doesn't have a lot of stains from sweet-sour pork and maotai spirits on it - perhaps it's a clean copy made after the banquet ? In any event, as the Chinese say, 干杯！...

Henri

Surely this article should have been entitled

«Spam meets silicone» (please note the final «e») in good Reg tradition ?...

Henri

«The challenge for Linux Mint now

is to transform interest into hard users, he [Michael Hall] concludes.» Guess I'm going to become one of those Mint «hard users», due - you guessed it ! - to my dissatisfaction with the Unity interface and the fact that the option to use a Gnome2 variation has been removed on Ubuntu 11.10. I simply find it more convenient and much faster to work with customised launch icons (which don't bounce around and have fits, à la OS X) in the GUI top panel. But I'm grateful to Canonical for services provided ever since Dapper and wish them the best of luck. Hope I find current and future versions of Mint as good as I found previous versions of Ubuntu !...

Henri