Posts by Ed Blackshaw 627 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Aug 2007
I think you'll find Belgium is a constitutional monarchy with a Northern coastline and that Luxembourg is a Grand Duchy, not a principality. In fact, the only tiny European principality I can think of is Monaco, which sits right on the Mediterranean Sea, but why let facts stand in the way of a xenophobic rant, eh?
I think the implication here is that since one of the major contributory factors towards developing type II diabetes is excessive consumption of sugary foods and lack of exercise, it's another way of saying 'fat and lazy'. You may as well ask what being a chain smoker has to do with it.
When one provider started selling 'unlimited' packages, other ISPs had to follow or go out of business. Just like Telewest got bought out by NTL, which in turn got bought out by Virgin.
OFCOM should have stamped on this practice immediately. And HARD. Unfortunately, OFCOM are a paper tiger, and would appear to be in the pockets of the likes of BT and Virgin.
So folks, what it comes down to is: blame those who had the power to regulate these arguably illegal practices and did nothing to do so. Probably because they had/have/will have financial connections to companies carrying out said practices*, so it would not have been in their interests to do so.
Always remember: to those in a position of power, where ther is insufficient oversight (judicial or otherwise) the problems of those who they have power over are a mere externality.
*Allegedly
Would that be 2098 people who they called on their landlines whilst they were eating their tea and who didn't hang up right away? If so, that's hardly likely to be an unskewed sample.
Or maybe it was 2098 people who were hanging around a the Arndale centre in Luton on a Thursday afternoon. Again, not so unskewed.
Or just maybe it was 2098 people randomly selected from Labour Party conference attendees?
Remember kids - there are lies, damn lies, statistics and government statistics.
They are gathering stats on how much unpatched software there is on users' systems, not on the OS. Bearing in mind that the average PC is going to have a fair amount of software installed which is not used on a daily basis, and that most software only checks for new patches when run (e.g. Firefox, Acrobat, etc.), it is hardly surprising that ther will be installations which are not fully up to date.
Forgive me if the whole thing seems like marketing FUD to sell me yet another product I don't need...
we get someone telling us "The internet is doomed because of X/Y/Z". If you are sold network capacity by an ISP and stay within the limits, any problems lie by definition with the service provider. They have sold you something they cannot provide. It makes no difference what protocol you are using - all they are doing is ferrying 1s and 0s between your gateway and someone else's.
The real problem is the fact that they have taken a gamble - they thought they could get away with selling what they don't have. The total bandwidth to the consumers far exceeds that which they can manage. The solution is for them to either upgrade the infrastructure to handle much greater bandwidth, or to stop mis-selling 'unlimited' packages. State a limit to the user and cut them off/charge them extra if they exceed it.
Is, IMHO an expression of mild surprise. But then, there are really no 'bad' words, it all depends on context. How can a word be deemed to be offensive,when it is the meaning conveyed by the word that has the potential to cause offence, and not the word itself? For instance, I find the use of any word to advertise the Sun 'newspaper' grossly offensive...
Graphite != Graphene.
I don't know too much about the materials used as moderators in nuclear reactors, but I'd be prepared to bet good money the graphite they use is composed of large blocks of disordered material in order to make its neutron-absorbing properties isotropic.
Graphene, on the other hand is a highly ordered material, being composed as it is of single 'sheets' of graphite.
Rather than purifiying it from bulk graphite, as you imply, it would be manufactured using some sort of plasma vapour deposition (PVD) technique to manufacture 1-atom thick sheets. I would imagine that these would be of negligable use in a nuclear reactor as your average high-velovity neutron is going to go straight through something that is one ten millionth of a millimetre thick.
I don't think you'd happen to have too much difficulty from the authorities if found to be transporting graphene-based electronics, in much the same way that customs aren't going to be too bothered about the gold-plating on the headphone jack on your mp3 player when you go through the airport, but might be interested in a little chat over a cup of tea if you were carrying a suitcase full of gold bullion...
One little thing I always like to point out to particularly overzealous veggie types is where their tofu is coming from. Whilst I know where the meat I eat comes from (it is organically produced on a farm in Devon), the soya used to make tofu isn't grown in this country. The breakdown is something like this*:
US 40%
Brazil 24%
Argentina 18%
China 8%
India 3%
Paraguay 2%
Other 5%
So you pretty much have a choice there - grown in the US from GM Monsanto beans, or in Brazil or Argentina on ex-rainforest. Add on your transport, processing costs, etc.
and it suddenly doesn't seem so 'ethical' any more. Plus, as previously mentioned, it tastes like shit.
*(http://www.soystats.com/2005/page_30.htm)
"And the only time the production of ricin has amounted to anything has been when a lone indigent nut, Roger Bergendorff, poisoned himself, non-fatally, with castor seed powder."
Might I point the author in the direction of one Georgi Markov, defector from communist Bulgaria, who was poisoned on March 1st 1978, by a pellet containing ricin, which was injected under his skin, most probably from the tip of an umbrella wielded by a KGB assassin.
The question now should be: Is anyone of non-caucasion appearance carrying an umbrella under significant risk from SO15?
If you'd read anything he has had to say on the matter, he has made it pretty clear that he won't comment on the whole Phorm thing due to it being a conflict of interests since BT bought his company (Counterpane) last year. He has had plenty to say about similiar companies in the USA.
For those with any interest in the whole field of security (computer or otherwise), his opinions are usually rational and well balanced and he is a well known critic of what has come to be called 'security theater' (his term, hence the Merkin spelling).
If anything, I feel sorry for the guy, whose hands are obviously tied and who therefore cannot openly criticise the [allegedly] clearly dodgy goings-on with Phorm and BT whilst at the same time being one of the few people most suited to casting aspersions upon them from a professional point of view.
Along with the demographics of the (pitifully small sample of) respondents. Also, were any 'statistical techniques' applied to the data, such as removing 'outliers' - e.g. asking 10,000 people, then discarding the 7,500 who gave inconvenient answers.
There are lies, damn lies, statistics, and then government statistics.
There should never ever ever be any exemption to any law just because you happen to be a politician. If you don't think the law should apply to you, then why should it apply to anyone else? McCain cosied up to the MPAssA and got burned. Maybe there's a lesson here for all toady politicians?
...by pointing out that it was pretty much the Russians that 'saved our asses in WW2', whereas our septic cousins waited until it was obvious who was going to win and then came over and had sex with our women while we were all off fighting the Luftwaffe?
Except the stuff we already have is taken from planes, not satellites, which is why most of the stuff on 'a famous search engine' earth is a few years out of date and missing his-res images on sparsely populated areas (the Peloponnese peninsular in Southern Greece is a good example of this).
Au contraire! - The hottest planet in the solar system is actually Venus, because of its runaway greenhouse effect. Mercury, being much smaller, and so close to the sun, has had any atmosphere stripped away by the solar wind so cannot suffer the same fate. Still, it's a bit warmer than you or I would find comfortable but nowhere near hot enough to melt most types of rock.
"As visible light doesn't penetrate walls or travel round corners, the developers say that the system would be more secure than present-day WiFi"
Light doesn't travel round corners, but it does reflect off things quite well - after all it is our primary way of interacting with the world around us. Light also does not travel through walls, but windows don't seem to provide much of an issue.
I would have thought that monochromatic light sources, such as those produced by LEDs would actually make these problems worse, as unlike radio-frequency waves, coherence of the reflected light would probably remain high for quite some distance, as long as an observer has a sensitive enough way of picking up the photons. Like any freely-available commercial CCD for instance...
If the builder left a door-sized hole in the wall covered by a tarpaulin and didn't tell the buyer about it, then a burglar wandered in and made off with their new plasma TV, I would expect that there would be a pretty strong case to be answer there.
I think it's pretty much a question of degree. I wouldn't hold a builder responsible if the front door was fitted with a cheap lock that could be easily forced - I wouldn't expect anything expensive unless it had been explicitly stated.
The same goes for software - glaringingly obvious security holes suggest negligence on the part of the developer, but there will always be bugs and unforeseen circumstances where software can break down. The reality is that real-world software is not perfect because developers have to work to deadlines and within budgetary constraints.
The danger is that the government will pass some ill-considered law that holds software developers responsible for fixing every flaw, no matter how minor, that is ever discovered in a piece of software. That would put people out of business, as it would increase the cost of software by an order of magnitude.
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