Posts by James Micallef

Re: The Main Difference

"decades of double blind trials, peer review " etc etc

In the main that's true, but there's one thing that I can't understand about modern drug trials, and that's the way they treat the placebo effect as if it were simply an error in their stats, when it really is a measurable effect. Saying a sugar pill is 'just a placebo' is ignoring an actually quite amazing thing, which is that many humans can heal themselves just by the power of thought. And this is not some new-age happy-clappy fairy dust, it is a REAL effect that keeps on getting proven in every single drug trial that has ever been held. PLUS it has no side-effects while many real drugs have a whole list of side-effects that is sometimes scary to read.

I guess there's no money in studying why and how some people are curing themselves just by thinking that they're being cured, and finding ways to replicate that consciously.

Re: "...this year's Dance your PhD competition..."

'You cannot be Sirius!'

That's exactly the point! I love it that these guys aren't taking themselves too seriously, and it's also great to see some scientists getting out of their labs and enjoying themslves. All good fun

Re: Inquiring minds...

Re "This suggests that 'electromagnetic hypersensitivity' is unrelated to the presence of electromagnetic fields", I would suggest that the KNOWLEDGE about the presence of an electromagnetic field is enough. The guy BELIEVES he feels bad around E-M radiation, and he 'knows' it's there, so he feels bad - nocebo effect = opposite of Placebo effect.

I think it's GLOBAL temperature not US

although it's not specifically highlighted I read the article to mean global temperature... otherwise the global heat maps are just confusing and misleading.

I DO have a quibble with this paragraph though: "temperature monitoring and assessment techniques have indeed come a long way since ... we'll trust the NCDC to have made the appropriate adjustments."

I simply do not believe that a proper global temperature record for 1880 can be in the least valid (and possibly not even if it's just US). Firstly, the accuracy of instruments might not have been so good. Secondly, the calibration of instruments relative to each other around the whole globe would not have been consistent enough. Thirdly, if we're talking about GLOBAL temperature average, the sparsity of weather stations around the globe means that no record can be correct. Temperatures can vary significantly within 100-200 km, so extrapolating data between weather stations 500+ km apart will not be accurate enough. When combining all these factors, the combined margin of error will be higher than the 1 degree Celcius 'difference from the average' being observed.

The only accurate and reliable global temperature average we have is satellite, from about 1970 onwards

Re: There is no doubt about it

"rampant inflation" - US inflation is 7% in the last 4 years (http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/), so LESS than 2% per year, hardly 'Rampant', so stocks ARE soaring.

"Obama insists on picking winners and losers" WTF?? You have no idea how an economy works, do you? A president doesn't get to decide which stocks go up and down, nor does he get to decide which companies get government grants. ALL stocks in the US are up, not just those of specific sectors.

"inflation is a direct result of Obama's (and Bernake's) policies" inflation isn't rampant, but I do grant you that 'QE = printing money'. It's not ideal, and higher inflation WILL probably result, but when interest rates are so low it makes sense for the US gov to borrow more. You know what would have been even better? If GWB hadn't spunked away a huge surplus on giving tax rebates to wealthy people and fighting 2 unfunded and unnecessary wars (well OK, te war in Afghanistan was maybe necessary but still unfunded, Iraq was both unnecessary and unfunded). Using QE money to buy votes? You've been watching too much Fox!

"the cornerstones of the collapse in the US were all Democratic initiatives " Hey, I don't have a horse in this race, I'm not even American, but I DO call it as I see it, and I can see what's in front of my nose. Clinton left the US in fantastic financial shape with a huge budget surplus. Bush screwed it up. I don't think Republicans are evil or dasdardly, but they ARE mathematically challenged with respect to budgets. (Hint - If the top tax rate is 80% as it was in Reagan's time, then lowering it WILL increase the economy. When people like Romney are paying 15% tax rate, lowering taxes isn't helping the economy.)

Final FYI - that's bull***t. If that were true, the markets would have tanked / stayed flat 2009-2010 and then soared 2011-2012. In reality the markets had a fairly constant rise, so that's your theory debunked. And I think the matches / flamethrower anaology is a bit more appropriately applied to the people who were itching for any excuse to invade Iran 10 years ago and are now itching for an excuse to invade Iran.

I agree that Stromberg has got to be high on the list. He scores highly for his Proper 'Bond villain' base + supertanker with private army. Also the harpoon gun under the table adds a personal touch to his killings. Somehow having minions do all the dirty work seems to me to be too 'remote' to be a proper villain.

Blofeld is the 'classic' Bond villain, it's just that for me just pressing a button and having someone die, or being basically a 'CEO' of a villanous organisation without getting your hands dirty doesn't cut it. At the top end of the REALLY getting your hands dirty scale is Sanchez who is personally handling a couple of rather gruesome killings.

Incidentally, why is teh list a mix of master-minds and henchmen. Odd-Job and Jaws are fearsome opponents but not much in the way of brains. Why not have a vote for best super-villain and another vote for best henchman?

screw Navarone...

...do they have high-res pics of the island of Lesbos?

What I really can't understand...

I don't know what the law is there in Oz, but this situation seems similair-ish to what happened in UK and Europe - Google's unauthorised slurping of wifi data could be construed as a violatio of one of any number of hacking laws, but instead of Google being subpoenaed for the data as it could be used in a case against them, they are allowed to delete it. Not only that, but Google somehow spin it in a way that they are deleting the data as a 'punishment' or as a favour to teh government when in reality they're probably chuffed that they're allowed to delete evidence of what is a potentially criminal act on their part

Re: Though

+10 for redundancy and good design

Re: ...but the eye damage is real

1) the article is lumping all different powers of lasers together,giving a total number of incidents. I don't doubt either the availability nor the danger of high-powered lasers, but what percentage of them is actually used in these incidents, as opposed to the low-power 'teacher-pointing-to-a-blackboard' variety?

2) What's the exposure time neede to cause damage? It's hard enough to keep a laser fixed on a static target at km-scale ranges, when it's a (very fast-) moving target, how many of these incidents have the light in the cockpit for more than a few ms?

3) Modern airliners are capable of taking off and landing completely automatically

So all things considered I think the chances of a plane crash due to a laser pointer are as theoretical as the 'plane-will-crash-if-a-mobile-phone-is-turned-on', and is basically scaremongering. Still, if you get your kicks out of laser targeting as a sort of sport, why not just target the rear of the plane? The 'difficulty' of aiming the laser is identical and you aren't being an antisocial bastard shining your laser in people's eyes.

Re: so, how much coffee is a "cup"?

In the US and Canada, 'cup' sizes are more like children's seaside buckets. Who the hell drink cofee in pints??

Since what's important is the concentration, not just the size, the correct measure for coffee consumption is 'shots of espresso', although that sounds a bit boring. We need a standard El Reg unit for cofee consumption!

Re: Aliens done it.

"So there is no mechanism for protecting against a pressure differential between source/target locations for a stargate?"

It's uncanny how XKCD already has an answer to anything - http://what-if.xkcd.com/14/

"would happen if you opened a portal between Boston (sea level) and Mexico City (elev. 8000+ feet)?"

Re: Has anyone asked the Mayans?

I can just imagine modern civilisation collapsing (due to a global thermonuclear overpopulation GMO nanobot insect warming catastrophe no doubt no doubt), and our future descendants, their civilisation rising from the ashes of ours, pointing to our calendar and saying "OMG - the Gregorian calendar only has 4 digits, what will happen when 9999 turns to 10,000??? End of the world OMG!!!!"

It's the same thing innit?

" they produce cheap mobile phones"

The concern isn't bout their phones, it's about their network switching gear

Re: Thinth

Yeah, what's teh point of 'thinnest ever'? Surely there's some cutoff point where the phone just gets very awkward to handle. Also, the biggest component in the back of every phone is the battery, and the on area smartphones really suck compared to non-smartphones is battery life. I wonder what percentage of smartphone owners would happily accept a 0.5mm thicker phone for an extra hour battery life, I suspect it would be quite high.

Good job with the weight reduction though. Pre-smartphone the lightest phones were about 70-80g, so breaking back below the 100g level is a sensible target.

Re: Hush, now.

The article was wtitten by James Hansen, you can take it as read that when he refers to Climate Change he is referring to human-caused climate change

Re: Brinksmanship

Agree 100% that medium-term (50 to 100-year) bulk supply of reliable energy requires nuclear as renewables still need improving + capacity-building and fossil fuels get scarcer. But, to be completely honest, since this article is about cost, it has to be acknowledged that nuclear power is expensive. Not unreasonable expensive, but certainly more than fossil fuels, and energy prices will go up long-term . Tough shit, that's the way the cookie crumbles, I doubt there will ever be a time when energy is as cheap as it is now, when we (humanity as a whole) are living off the 'inheritance' of millions of year of captured sunlight converted into oil/coal/gas (and blowing through that inheritance at an impressive rate)

The world needs to build up a global non-fossil supply of about 20-25 TW within the next century or else it's going to be one hell of a hangover when the party's over

Re: Tiny, tiny lasers

Piranhas with Lasers!!

Re: 10 years

Thanks for expanding the explanation. I would agree 100% that whether anyone on the US side ever got persecuted for negligence has no bearing on McKinnon's innocence or guilt. The reason for my posing the question is that the absence of any steps taken against anyone in the US would give weight to the defence's argument that the prosecution/extradition is being pursued very heavily as a political / face-saving / finding a scapegoat, while if on the other hand some steps were taken towards the accountability of whoever was responsible for the security of the hacked systems (even if such steps were taken without any publicity), it would negate this argument.

Regarding cost, point taken if the hack was really extending o dozens of servers as seems the case, while many of teh reports I have read seem to indicate it was just a coupe of servers at NASA

Re: Two things are worthyof note.

@mondoman - thanks for the clarification

@everyone else - Please do not get caught up in the AGW debate, which is frankly irrelevant in the big scheme of things. We need a long-term stable supply of energy, long-term we will run out of fossil fuels, and really it doesn't make too much difference if this happens in 100 years or 200, we need to start working on solutions now. Current Earth consumption is 12 TW and with the rate of population increase AND development in developing countries, we're going to be using at least 20 TW by the end of the century. Globally we need to be adding something like 100GW a year of solar, wind, nuclear etc EVERY YEAR for the next couple of centuries. That should be more than enough reason to invest more and more in non-fossil fuels and start winding down the use of fossil fuels, without needing to get into quasi-religious arguments about whether fossil fuel use is overheating the planet.

"unfortunately they only way to balance the power seems to be to take a few of the small guys as collateral damage"

That's easy to say when you're not part of the "collateral damage" yourself. Personally I agree with the general premise that copyright laws are flawed, but NOT in the way that Google et al make out. Current copyright law favours the big media producers over the little ones because they have the resources to identify their copyrighted works that others are profiting from without paying. The certainly don't have any orphan works, and they aggressively (and successfully) push for ever-increasing copyright extensions because god forbid that a 60-year-old film or book could be freely available.

Google profits from non-copyright work because it doesn't produce and content but profits from aggregation and distribution of 'free' content, so of course it wants more content to be free. Google can (1) lobby to effectively make all work not produced by a big studio an orphan work that it can profit from. This is easy for Google, and it screws the small photographers, independent artists and filmmakers etc. Or they can (2) lobby to reduce copyright terms - this would open a huge amount of material for Google to profit from, but (a) it doesn't want to take on the movie studios and record companies, preferring to pick on the small guys and (b) it knows that if popular 25-year old works went out of copyright there would be a whole new industry coming into being to compete with Google to provide access to these works.

Google is acting like a bully, picking on the small guys for profit because it won't take on the big boys. How about, instead of making public all orphaned works and making it really easy to orphan a work, we change Copyright law to make it no longer than 25 years from first publication, and make it illegal to remove or otherwise alter metadata from a media file unless you're the copyright owner?

Re: Who the f*ck is Alfred Wagner?

An opera composer?

Re: Large UPS

Why bother? there isn't any way for anyone not physically standing at your desk to know whether your laptop is plugged in or not. If you say it wasn't plugged in, who's going to prove otherwise?

Re: Scale drawings of screens

"your one anecdotal opinion trumps tens of millions of people " wtf??

I don't know where you got 'trumps' from, I nowhere said that my opinion is better than anyone else's. I clearly state that my opinion is my opinion and everyone is entitled to their own. You seem to have taken my comment as somehow being pro-apple, when it was nothing of the sort, in fact I also clearly specify that I'm commenting on form factor, not OS

Re: Hey, it's international cuisine alright

They call it "Le Big Mac"

at Burger King a whopper is still a whopper (probably with an accent on the 'e' and a throaty 'r' )

Control??

A true simulation will be REALLY boring, you have to wait minutes between making a move and getting some feedback!

If they actually did get a properly working system 1 year late and £28mln over a £385mln budget (+7%), it would actually be a triumph compared to the usual mess in gov IT.

However I gather from the article that actually it's 1 year behind and £28mln over without there being a working system that has been delivered??

Re: How come? Here's How Come...

@turtle - mostly correct except you take into account the 'per user' revenue without factoring in the number of users. 0.08 cents per user per month (an artist with 0.01% of plays) is certainly a pittance, but if the service expands enough (something like 100 million users worldwide), then 0.08 cents per user per month is $80,000 a month.

Of course because of the 'long tail' effect, the lion's share of revenue will still go to the major artists,and it's more likely that a more niche artist will be getting 1 play in a million (more like 0.0001% then), even then it would be $800 / mth, not too shoddy

Re: 1. Exploit human weakness. 2. PROFIT!

Actually that's quite right.

- Open a number of accounts with £10 pre-paid, put £20 in each for total of £30

- Gamble the £30 in each account. Since bookies make money on the odds, on average you will lose, but with tight odds margins you should average winnings of about 95% of the stake *. With 95% (ie 5% losses), your accounts would average £28.50, of which you only put in £20, so £8.50 free money

- On all winning accounts you have more than £30 obtained by gambling £30 so you can withdraw and close. Losing accounts you just close.

Of course bookies will know this and will have many controls in place to make sure email accounts are not being reused and are valid, and to make sure that bets are placed by humans not by bots, that bets are coming from many different IP addresses etc so it probably wouldn't work on a large scale.

* for example red/black or odd/even on roulette, winnings are 200% (double the stake), odds of winning 18/37 so on average you make 97% of the stake

Re: Just one word of advice.....

It's bloody stupid of the people wanting to ban porn to NOT want porn TLDs. Porn-specific TLDs will be a doddle to block, if they had any sense their best strategy is to force all porn to be registered as a porn-TLD-ghetto that can then be closed off.

This is the same reason why porn-peddlers are also strongly against porn-specific TLDs. Why pay 10 times for 10 domains when your .com is raking in the cash just fine??