Re: oh no

And the day someone cannot call you due to a battery life problem with an iOS update, as happened just a week or so ago? They get fired?

If that is your attitude then you should be supplying locked down company phones that make very reliable phone calls and have good battery life, not expecting people to BYOD. I expect BlackBerry will be quite pleased to get a new Enterprise account.

Re: GUI for wimps, Give me the Command line Phone

Very good, but it should be phone /users /directory/aliases/mum --pots --dial

Re: Installed, uninstalled

Unfortunately, as that analysis was written by an ex-Nokia person who was totally committed to Meego, it can be summarised as "Tizen and Sailfish will rule the world, everything else is shit". The confusion of the author is demonstrated when he explains how Sailfish is a "premium OS perhaps aimed at the Vertu market", and then says its initial success will be in India and China.

Vertu owners don't know what OS their phones are running; they probably don't know their phone has an OS. In fact yesterday I was talking to a rather bright person not in IT (double first C Eng) who quite liked the Nokia 820 issued by the company, and thought that it was running the latest Android. The idea that anyone outside a few geeks gets excited over whether a phone runs Tizen or Sailfish is a bit delusional, I fear.

Re: Also...

You think Android is "on the horizon"? Are you posting from 2008?

Re: Classifying Cults and Religions

You are being extremely selective.

Catholic theologians publish openly, and in fact you can find entire books discussing heresies. Suppression of news of paedophiliac priests doesn't come under this category.

Catholic works of devotion and theology are freely available. You don't have to pay a certain amount to be allowed to read Aquinas.

The German church thing is - well, German. The Catholic Church in Germany is not the entire Church.

As for divorced remarried Catholics being beyond the pale - might be true in Ireland, I wonder what happens in the US?

By any reasonable standards the Catholic Church is not a cult. That does not mean, however, that its beliefs are not barking mad (which I happen to think about many of them).

Remember that until the 19th century (and beyond in some cases) doctors tried to treat illnesses by bleeding people. It is possible to have a fairly rational, scientific approach to life and still believe things that are manifestly untrue. At a pinch, I might add "and what about String Theory?", which I do consider to be a religion.

Re: Scientology is an obvious scam

Indeed, if the Catholic Church could, it would be running Europe with a theocracy as bonkers as those of Iran or Saudi. We have Luther, the Enlightenment and the Royal Navy to thank.

Cults

My supervisor in sociology of religion had a set of tests - is the belief system mainstream in a society? Does the religion have a set of its own academics studying it who make public reports on their research? Are new members provided with as much information as they want or are they told that as they progress, new secrets will be revealed? Are members required (as distinct from asked) to make a financial commitment? Are members told to cease to have anything to do with people who leave?

Score a majority and you have a cult. (Scientology would seem to comply). The difficult thing to define is "sect".

Re: Or imagine how a christian feels when he has to face up to evolution.

You do know Einstein was nonobservant Jewish? And that his beliefs were probably about as orthodox as those of Feynman?

I don't think that when Einstein said "Der Herrgott würfelt nicht" he was actually making a theological statement.

Unfortunately I read this article and now I have a nasty cough developing.

No, sorry, I lie, it's suppressed laughter at the idea that anybody could take Scientology seriously. The thing with the Avometer did it for me the moment I first heard about it.

On further thoughts, anybody who is sufficiently out there to take it seriously is obviously capable of anything. I had better be careful.

Re: I know someone who's like that.

Youth of today - we had all of that but we didn't have the marijuana to make it tolerable. Or the toy helicopters. We had to make do with transistor radios that made horrible noises, and model boats some of which still used valves in the control gear.

Ah, the past. Nostalgia really is not what it used to be.

Re: He's quite right

What would help even more is not allowing large supermarkets to threaten to bankrupt local councils if they oppose planning permission, with huge legal fees. A certain American-owned chain did it to our local council. Supermarkets have far too much economic power and their ability to frighten councils with hugely expensive litigation is an abuse.

Re: Tale spinning is the new breaking news ..... same as the old broken news

"hating on" - I hate that Americanism.Just a thought.

Iran doesn't hate the West. The Iranian Government has very anti-American elements in it, and some anti-British elements. Shooting down a passenger plane is likely to give ammunition to the anti-Americans who wanted to make a retaliatory gesture - but not so obviously that the US would then bomb them. One assumes it was meant to happen over water, leaving the cause as a mystery, but the bomb went off too soon.

Libya supported PIRA because the PIRA told Quadhafi that they were Trotskyites and committed to world revolution. They forgot to mention the bit about Catholicism. Quadhafi thought he was helping liberate a small oppressed country from the Imperial yoke. There was logic, although crazy logic, in what he was doing. Bringing down a plane, what was the point of that?

Re: "Koreans are like that"

I know that. The entire post is not to be taken seriously.

Re: The simple answer is

Lots of mining explosive would do the job. Basically oil and an oxidising agent. Getting 10kt yield out of a fuel air mixture would require a very, very big cavern, about 1/50 of a cubic kilometre. The requirements for mining explosive are much more modest.

Perhaps that's why the North Koreans train all those people in mass gymnastics; the North Korean Bomb will weigh about 10 kilotonnes and have to be lugged down South on a huge trailer pulled by the entire population, possibly shaped like a very large horse. They're working on the basis that the border guards won't suspect several million people pulling a big cart all the way to the centre of Seoul, before they all run off in various directions.

As a plot it sucks, but then the North Korean government is delusional.

Re: Tale spinning is the new breaking news ..... same as the old broken news

I have always assumed that Locherbie was Iranian retaliation for a US missile cruiser shooting down an Iranian passenger aircraft - and for which nobody in the US was ever brought to trial, let alone convicted. Libya may have given the Iranians access, but surely it wasn't on their own account.

Locherbie was nothing to do with Islamic terrorism and everything to do with a monstrous crime committed by the US. And I write that as someone who agrees 100% with Salman Rushdie on the Iranian theocracy.

Re: Previous NK tests yeilded zero radioactivity

Be very worried. Koreans are like that. Early Hyundais were pretty crap, then they were quite good, now they are heading up to be a world beating car maker.

Before long North Korea will be selling really cheap but quite adequate nukes, the next thing is they will be offering to build a plant in the US to supply the American market, and recruiting all those unemployed nuclear engineers. Then every survival nut in the US will want their own H-bomb in case the bad guys also have one.

I just hope to die of natural causes before the mass extinction event that will cause such puzzlement among the cockroaches when they eventually evolve civilisation.

Re: Vacuum state of the universe

No, a Dyson sphere is an all too real construct designed to frustrate people who just wanted to get the dust off the floor. Personally I prefer VAX, simply because it shares a name with a minicomputer that also blew a lot of hot air out of a hole round the back,

Re: @ Change an input and “you get a different end of the universe.

Upvoted for sneaking T S Eliot into a thread on cosmology.

Perhaps there is another universe out there that consists entirely of dark matter. Then it could have begun, not with a bang, but a WIMPer.

Re: Spider Robinson covered this a few years ago

Not dumb and stupid enough for Hollywood. I watched the last Batman film with the family, over 2 hours of my life I won't get back again (guys, you could disable any fusion bomb with small arms, you just need to disrupt the trigger. More holes in the plot than in a tonne of P-doped silicon). By comparison, Blish's wildest fantasy is close to sober fact.

Re: Vacuum state of the universe

The dodgiest thing of all is how big the Universe was supposed to be at the end of inflation - about a centimetre across. The period of inflation has to be extremely small to expand to that size while exceeding the speed of light at the moving boundary.

I get the feeling that most journalists who refer to "inflation" think of the Universe as being quite big at the time.

Re: yawn

I have read it. Twice. My comment stands.

Re: yawn

How can you have a maths free overview of cosmology? Other than the one that starts "it's big, it's very big..." and that has been done already.

Re: Muse racing?

Was Sylvia Plath anyone's muse? To be one of the Ennead you have to inspire creative activity in somebody else, not do it yourself. As well as being something of a poet, Plath merely inspired Hughes to demonstrate what utter bastards poets can be (see also Robert Lowell) and last time I checked, that wasn't on the list.

Yes, yes, off topic thread hijacking, I know, but really the idea of muse racing is far more interesting than some Twitter spat between people in an occupation not exactly famous for its high ethical standards.

Well, python isn't a word relevant to computing, and without reading the application I don't know how many classes they have filed under. Further, there is no reason for anyone to be fined. They apply, someone objects. Personally I think the people who did a DOS attack were stupid -way to go, antagonising people in the PTO before proper process is exhausted, thus suggesting you doubt their ability to do their jobs. It makes me think Python people may be a bit juvenile.

Re: Eventually

That will happen in the UK 30 milliseconds after Cameron and his mates decide to use Facebook logins for access to benefits. Follow the money.

Re: If an asteroid wants to wipe out mankind, it had better hurry

I can assure you that significant concentrations of NH4 (ammonium ion) in the atmosphere would have dramatic effects on life on Earth. And given the effect of only a few hundred ppm of carbon dioxide, the rest of your statement is pure monckton, too.

Re: Space Monkeys

Exactly. Any feasible space ship will have nothing like the radiation hardening and ability to handle minor meteorite strikes, let alone the ecological stability. Trying to ensure the survival of the human race by building spaceships is like trying to ensure the survival of a ship's passengers by throwing some of them off with life jackets and hoping they land somewhere.

Re: The *real* reason he's suing.

No, it's drooping.

Re: Chubby Checker is still alive?

They do, and all three of us who still use Palm phones have access to it. Nothing gets updated any more, though. Nobody has even bothered to develop a game in which you keep dunking Leo Apotheker in a shark tank. But I have never seen this application.

In a sane country the damages might be assessed at around 90 downloads at 99c = $90 with a rounding error, but in the US it's like the lottery - juries hand out insane damages in the hope that one day they might be able to sue someone and become rich. It was tried over here, but thank Dawkins the ambulance chasers mostly went bust.

Re: Helen Boaden

Now now.

As Winston Churchill so nearly said about the BBC, never in the field of management has so much money been paid to people with such nebulous job titles.

Under Thompson, didn't they start off with 9 management levels and manage to reduce it to 7, sort of? It would be interesting to read a bovine excrement free explanation of why so many levels were needed and why so many people needed to do so much managing.

Re: Doesn't go far enough

Didn't you get the memo? Witchcraft was a Russian mole.

Re: Mobile market

Eadon, give it a bit of a rest and learn how to troll more subtly, OK?

Read P J O'Rourke, he's an obnoxious right wing prat but he does know how to keep people reading.

Re: <probably mistaken pedant>

You are right; I had a decimal point in the wrong place, which will teach me to try to do rough conversions between American and world units in my head.

It looks like this phone only needs to survive a pistol shot. Disappointing, but may tell us something about its target market.

Re: Paper loses

Terry Pratchett's Soul Music ought to lock up a Kindle, given his views on personal Dis-organisers.

Re: So let's see if I understand this ... because it is really important*

Boeing will inevitably carry the can because they won't sell some aeroplanes for a bit. I doubt that Samsung laptop sales will be much affected, because bricked laptops don't make people think of falling out of the sky screaming.

Whether Boeing sues the supplier is going to depend on specifications, specifications, specifications. I remember a very nasty "you are going to have to compensate us" meeting at a customer once going very quiet as we wheeled out (a) the original specification and (b) the evidence that we adhered to it and (c) the evidence that the operating envelope had been exceeded by the customer.

The customer's engineers took me out to lunch because they knew that the original design had been compromised at the behest of the product designers. And no, it wasn't an Apple aerial.

Re: I'm not Eadon...

You remind me of a French taxi-driver's comment on why a well known crook had just been re-elected Mayor:

"C'est un vieux con, mais c'est notre vieux con a nous."