Re: Unfortunate choice of letters

In the Antipodes, it's pronounced 'dub-dub-dub'.

I know, I know. Bloody colonials.

Re: Lazy Fat Americans.

While I don't think GMO belongs in this account (the trend was well established long before that became a recognised TLA), HFCS does have a lot to answer for.

If you haven't gone shopping in a US supermarket, and looked closely at the labels on basically everything, you wouldn't believe how common the stuff is over there. It's not just in drinks and candy and cakes and things that you'd think of as sweet - it's also in bread and yogurt and FSM only knows what else. I've even heard of it being added to honey and other kinds of syrup. And if it's in there (so I've heard, although don't know how true it is), it screws up your eating patterns something fierce.

Sure, the fat and sodium and processed food do their bit too. But HFCS is probably the biggest *single* contributing factor.

Re: Anti hunting hypothesis

What makes you think they're not doing it?

I remember having this argument years ago, about antique ivory. If the elephant was killed 100 years ago, surely it's not encouraging the hunting of animals now?

But the trouble is, all it does is divide the market. If you invent near-perfect fake ivory, now there's an exclusive, expensive market for real ivory, and a lower-class, more mass market for the fake stuff, plus of course a fraudulent market for the fake being passed off as real ivory. And now you've created plausible deniability for the trader ("It's fake ivory, nothing wrong with that" when talking to the authorities, but the opposite story when talking to customers).

But the rich customers will still want the real thing, and they'll go to great lengths to get it. Think the sort of people who buy 'wild salmon' or 'real caviar'. Some of them will be genuinely able to tell the difference. Others won't, but will still want the real thing to impress those who can.

Re: Fixing the wrong problem

It's an improvement because it makes the crime harder to commit.

Mugging to get a card and threatening to get a PIN? Easy-peasy. If you're quick on your feet, you can be back to the cashpoint before the victim has time to report the crime. (Assuming you have the elementary forethought to pinch his phone as well.)

Forcing someone to march with you at knifepoint into a public area where an unknown number of unknown people will see you both? Considerably harder, calls for a good deal more nerve and commitment on the part of the criminal.

Of course there's a workaround for the truly determined criminal. There probably always will be. But it becomes harder, and that reduces the total number of such crimes that get committed. That's a good thing.

Re: @John Smith 19

@Tom Welsh: I love it when people say "do the maths..."

A bottle of wine contains 750 ml of liquid. A unit of alcohol is defined as 10 ml of alcohol. So to get 11 units in a bottle, you're talking about wine that's 14.5% ABV. I submit that if you're drinking "the cheapest wine you can get in a supermarket" and it's 14.5% ABV, your liver and stomach are in a world of trouble.

A more typical strength, particularly for cheap plonk, would be 11%, making for 8 units per bottle. Some wines are significantly lower (and none the worse for that - part of our current problem is that there's a tendency towards making beer and wine stronger - but that's basically for fashion's sake, there's no taste-based reason for it).

Re: Stupid little boy

Well - not really. Because the law you quoted says "intending that the other would fear it would be carried out...".

In other words: the test is what Clarkson intended them to believe, not what they took it into their heads to believe. It would be trivially easy for his lawyer to argue "my client is well known for shooting his mouth off about all kinds of things and has never been known to follow through on a threat of serious violence, there was never any question that anyone would seriously feel threatened by him."

At which point, there's no case to answer, and no evidence to suggest otherwise. Indeed, if required, I'm sure the lawyer could come up with several other examples of the defendant making similar threats in a similar tone, none of which were ever meant seriously.

Re: Parental Responsibility

@Graham Marsden: Perhaps you will accept that society (whatever that is) does have some responsibilities to parents and children? And there's no reason why parents shouldn't be allowed to ask for whatever restrictions they think would be helpful, from the rest of society?

Whether The Rest Of Society, working through the democratic process, chooses to give them what they ask for, or something else, or nothing at all, is a different matter. But there's nothing wrong with them asking, surely?

And if you seriously don't think you have an interest in helping other people's kids to grow up into basically decent people, I suggest you rethink what 'growing up' implies. Those kids are the people who are going to be driving the ambulance when you collapse in your sheltered accommodation.

Re: @veti - Things I learned in several years of 'net-driven dating

Well, between 10 and 20 years ago the 'neutral environment' of choice (my choice, at least) was Usenet. More specifically, alt.fan.my_favourite_writer, though I hung about in a number of groups for a while.

Now, probably any number of web forums devoted to topics that interest people of both sexes. There must be *something* you're interested in that's not an instant turnoff to all women, surely?

The important point is that you don't go to these places just looking for love. If you do that, then you start viewing everyone through a weird filter that's not unlike having four pints of beer inside you, and your powers of discrimination start out about 60% below par. Instead, ou go to discuss something you enjoy, then to meet online 'friends' of all sorts.

When I first 'met' my spouse, I didn't even know what gender they were. Username and postings gave no clue. They were just one among several dozen online friends I'd made at that point, when we started exchanging e-mails and getting more personal.

Re: People should not be afraid of their Government...

Paranoid bull.

Fear is no basis for a healthy relationship. If governments are afraid of their people, they will plot against them.

And I don't own "my employer".

What was your point exactly?

Re: catonaut

No, a 'catonaut' ('katanaut') would be a home-loving person who is against sailing entirely. Or possibly a submariner, who sails in a downward direction.

One who navigates cats would be an 'ailonaut'.

This comment brought to you by the Overwhelming Urge to Counterpedantry.

Re: A bargain

@Manu T:

Nokia was the company that invented downloadable ringtones in the first place. If they've recanted on that, I for one will be flocking back to them.

Ob. XKCD.

Re: Good

You want to remap controls, get a PC. (Contrary to what you may have heard, PC gaming is very much alive and well. Just ask Valve. It just doesn't appear in shops any more. Just ask Valve again.)

Consoles are specifically for dumbed-down gaming, that's the whole point of them.

Re: I really wish people would stop doing this

if an iPod were a ton of metal that you had to keep in a special room and sit inside in order to listen to and cost several months' pay, then you'd have a point.

But the DS/3DS and the mobile phone do have a lot in common. They're the same size bracket, and the same price bracket. On top of that, they both compete for the same resources (pocket space and charger slots), and they both fulfil the role of 'cheap on-demand electronic entertainment'.

The fact that the phone has a whole bunch of other functions as well just makes it harder for the DS to hang on to its niche. The 3DS was a nice gimmick, but it's only a gimmick. In the long run, handheld consoles are dead in the water - unless they can come up with something that smartphones just can't do, and they haven't managed that yet.

I say this with regret, as a longtime Nintendo fan and owner of all major versions of the DS (one original, one DSi, one XL and one 3DS). But the comparison of sales between the DS (all models) and smartphones is not inappropriate.

Re: Odd, I'm beginning to think Lewis has an agenda...

Of course Lewis is paid to troll. It's the job of writers on a site like this to get pageviews. By any means necessary.

That's a surprisingly fine line to tread. If you just start making sh*t up out of nothing, no-one will take any notice. Conversely, if you just report what everyone else is reporting, no-one will take any notice.

One approach that does work, however, is to take stories that are true, and put a spin on them that will be hugely popular with one significant audience niche. It's what Fox News does, it's what Drudge Report and Media Matters and Huffington Post and basically all US political partisan blogs do. If you do it consistently, you can build up a fanatical loyalty with those people who are desperate to have their prejudices confirmed on a regular basis. And the debate in the Comments section is even better - that allows you to get people coming back multiple times to view the same page!

So now Lewis has a fanatically loyal following of people who think AGW is a huge fraud, and look to him to explain why the latest story is nothing to worry about. To them, it's reassuring. To the rest of the world, it's trolling.

Spoken like a confirmed non-parent. Has it occurred to you that 'making a safer environment' is part of 'taking responsibility' for your kids?

You do your best. You put child locks on the drawer with the sharp knives, and most of the others as well if you've got any sense. You buy a car with a decent secondary safety rating, you fit smoke alarms, you make sure that the climbable furniture isn't sitting directly beside the openable window....

The TV is part of their environment. Once they're old enough to know how to turn it on for themselves, how exactly do you propose we keep them away from it? Throw it out? - then they'll go around their friends' house, where they'll spend every minute glued to it because it's forbidden at home.

If you don't have kids, which I'm currently willing to bet a months' salary you don't, then you have absolutely not the first beginnings of a notion of a clue of a breath of an idea what "taking responsibility" means. So, while I respect your right to watch whatever you want on your TV/interwebs/whatever in the privacy of your own home - please respect my right to express my opinion as to how those things can be more helpfully controlled.

Thank you.

Re: Please use other sources to research the actual case before posting more idiocy

@AC 18:49

My words about there being no difference between holding a gun to his head and pulling the trigger are emotional for a good reason and are certainly worth considering. They are soley to bring attention to this tradgedy.

I'm sorry, you don't get to decide whether your words are "worth considering", at least not by anyone except yourself. As for "bringing attention" to this tragedy - good grief, it's had headlines on every media outlet in the world and a good fraction of all known blogs - how much more attention do you think you're bringing exactly?

That Swartz cannot have his day in court to prove his innocence... - is tragic, sure. But let's be honest - he was never going to "prove his innocence" in court, because he wasn't innocent. He broke the law, he knew he was breaking the law, and he knew there was plenty of evidence to prove he'd done it. The best, the very best that he could have achieved in court was to make a few speeches about how stupid the law is and how it needs to be changed, which might or might not have made a few rumbles of publicity but, let's face it, nothiing like what he's got now.

Civil disobedience is a fine and noble thing, but when you break the law you have to be prepared to face the consequences - no matter how just your cause. Thoreau knew that. So did Gandhi, and Solzhenitsyn, and Nelson Mandela, and Rosa Parks, and everyone else who ever achieved anydamnthing by those means. These people spent time - long time, in some cases - in jail for what they believed.

And if they hadn't been willing to do that, we'd never have heard of them.

Re: Obama's Justice Department is Cruel and Vindictive.

@AC 16:30: That the Obama Administration is in the pocket of Big Media should surprise nobody who's been paying attention for at least a couple of years. A hypothetical Romney administration might have been less so, but only because it would have been so busy scratching the backs of his supporters. (For instance, I have no doubt at all that if Romney were in the White House, the FAA would never have ordered the grounding of all Boeing 787s.)

So let's not pretend there is a political solution to this mess, at least not one that involves any party or structure currently existing in the USA. Politicians just don't give a rat's arse about the occasional martyr, right up until the point where he manages to achieve global headlines.

I guess maybe Swartz knew that, and he saw there was one, and only one, way in which he could make those sorts of headlines. Maybe he was looking to immortalise himself in the same way as Mohamed Bouazizi. If so, I wish he'd been right, but I very much doubt it. Martyrs don't cut that much ice in the west - we're too busy arguing about whose brand of scumsucking demagogues is better or worse than the alternative.

One word:

Kickstarter.

Re: "It certainly doesn’t sound as ridiculous as sending Bruce Willis up there."

OK, so Apophis has an estimated mass of approximately 27 e9 kg, and its mean orbital speed is about 30 km/s.

Bruce Willis is quite a big guy, has an estimated mass of about 95 kg. Let's call it a nice round 100 kg for ease of calculations.

If we could somehow accelerate him to 0.1 of the speed of light, then ignoring relativistic effects, he'd hit Apophis with a kinetic energy of 45 petajoules. For comparison, that's about the energy of a 1 MT nuclear bomb. If we timed him to hit Apophis at the point where it had just passed Earth and was heading back out into space, he would speed it up by a paltry 11 cm per second.

The good news is that if Apophis were in geostationary orbit at the time, he would be enough to knock it out of Earth orbit completely. The bad news is, it wouldn't be enough to knock it out of the Earth's orbital path round the sun, and thus prevent it from threatening us again.

Could we use him to knock Apophis into a different orbital plane, thus ensuring that it would only cross our path once every several thousand years? Ah, I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

Re: In order to pass the Bridge of Eternal Peril, you must first answer this question...

After 5 years of constant fiscal stimulation, US inflation is storming out of sight at a hair-raising -- 2% per annum. That's hardly Zimbabwean.

As for "how do I spend USD20 per tonne of CO2" -- that's not even a hard question. If the political will existed (ha!), you'd spend it in tax, every time you buy fuel or energy. And manufacturers, distributors and the like would be spending it on the same basis, meaning that it would be factored into their expenses, and thus into every price you pay.

None of this is groundbreaking, it doesn't even require any significant new paperwork. Of course in real life it *will* require that, because in real life it will be implemented by people whose primary goal is to generate work for their cronies, but that's because we still choose to build our society on this tragic everyone-for-themselves model.

Re: That technogy already exists.

No, CHP is different. That's when you take the heat output and sell it as heat, which is incredibly efficient if you happen to have someone or something nearby that wants a lot of heat.

What the GP was talking about was "combined cycle" generation - you take the waste heat from your primary generation process, and and use it to generate yet more electricity, thus increasing your overall efficiency.

Two entirely different principles, and not entirely compatible with each other (i.e. you can't do both with the same plant, at least not without seriously compromising efficiency).

Re: Flat Earth Experts

They were better informed "then", than you appear to be now.

Clue: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_Flat_Earth

I noticed that. There's a weird superstition grown up in America, which the author seems to buy into, that 'energy self-sufficiency' has some relation to 'cheap fuel'.

Newsflash: gas, like oil, is a global market. If world prices double, what makes you imagine that people who produce it in the USA will continue to sell it there at depressed prices, when they could easily multiply their profits by exporting it?

And yes, of course the oil companies will continue to make obscene profits. How else could they continue to buy off their own investigators? To say nothing of the press.

Re: Lobbying

I for one am glad that Shell and BP are spending money on renewables, both from an environmental perspective and as someone who wants those companies, as pillars of the economy, to have a future.

Like when IBM branched out from making manual typewriters into computers - it makes perfect sense that they should research the next generation of technology, even while they're still making money from today's.

In 30-40 years' time, I like to think, neither of those companies will still be considered an 'oil' company. They'll have reinvented themselves as 'energy' companies, and will be household names as purveyors of solar panels and wind turbines and inverters and batteries and all that jazz. And that's a good thing, and we should applaud it.

Re: Re His decade of stress ends today

It's worse than that. According to US law, they have absolutely no problem with snatching him off the street in London, bundling him onto a plane and flying him out to the US without even telling the British authorities or government what they're doing.

Upon arrival, they can (of course) prosecute him for whatever they want, up to and including "entering the US illegally".

See http://catherinem.wordpress.com/2007/12/31/right-of-extradition-of-british-nationals-to-usa/ for more details.

Re: You can sue anybody

Really? When exactly did Congress vote to fund an agency to violate the sovereignty of friendly countries, to tap the phones of civilian businessmen, in order to enforce Hollywood's copyrights? Perhaps you'd like to nominate this agency as a candidate to be thrown over the fiscal cliff.

And when you've researched the answer to that, perhaps you could point to where it says that the Fourth Amendment doesn't apply to "foreigners of the US".

There's a reason for that

It does happen - remember Dmitry Sklyarov? - but 'nice people', by definition, are not publicity whores and don't know how to milk it like Dotcom does.

Dotcom is scum, but he knows how to play the media. Oops, sorry, that should be: "Dotcom is scum, and therefore he knows how to play the media."

Kim Dotcom wouldn't know what "the high road" was, not if you gave him your car keys and an iPhone to navigate and told him it was the way to eternal bliss. The man is a natural-born bottom-feeder.

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Fragrant

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Re: Hypocracy

Yeah, well... if you happen to know the addresses of any would-be legislators "who will act more honestly", please do share.

We've looked, and frankly it's a gruesome choice. Most people with the brains to understand the tax system are too busy making money to want to change it; and most people who do want to change it, don't understand it, and therefore vote for their choice of knaves, idiots or lunatics who believe or claim they can do something about it.