Posts by Dave Bell

That stuff about evenly-distributed wind turbines suggests to me that the model used by these researchers is still at the spherical cow level. It sounds like they have a standard solar-input model, which distinguishes between sea and land, and they've turned down the dial for the land, to represent the energy soaked up by wind turbines.

Do they even allow for the reality that a wind turbine essentially transfers energy from rural to urban areas? That's going to change the detail of what global warming does. It only changes the overall effect if fossil fuel consumption drops.

Lewis, you might have wasted time on criticising a mathematical simplification as though it were a real problem with the logistics.

So we have a horribly biased form, built on some very suspect assumptions, not all of# them having toi do with the nature of porn.

And, in my experience, it ain't no use talking to my local MP. He's sucking on the same teat as the Conservative Party, and no way will he challenge the party line.

Good news, but why does it have to be Sony? What happened to all the British manufacturers?

I expect somebody will blame the workers, if they ever notice this. Funny how well British manufacturing industry does when the people at the top of the corporation aren't British.

Some Assembly Required

I suspect part of this is the assembly cost.

You maybe can get less expensive parts than go into the small laptops, but the cost at the factory gate becomes dominated by the assembly costs.

Yes, I still have an Eee 701SD. A new battery is worth getting, and replacement keyboards are worth it too, though fitting them is a bit of a fiddle. The high-capacity batteries are a little ungainly. I wonder what the life of the SSD is, but I have a big SDHC card storing my data, so if the thing bricks, I'm OK.

I don't know what spec they use for the threads, but I bet they wouldn't have had the same problem with a Whitworth thread.

OK, that's Java deleted from my system.

A General Warning

The active ingredients in these things are NOT water soluble.

This makes pepper spray something really nasty: your tears can't clear it from your eyes.

I've seen reports elsewhere which have the FBI saying the big problem is non-Google apps stores. This problem would go away if you could only get the apps through Google.

It would be sort of nice if every Android device supported the Google store. I suspect they get confused about Open Source as well.

Somebody tell the BBC

The video on the BBC web-empire has been erratic all week, pages saying the flash viewer wasn't supported, and indicating you should download the current version.

Do B&N have the necessary rights to sell any e-books in the UK? The US publisher of a book, with the rights to sell an e-book edition in the USA, is not the same entity as the UK/Europe publisher. US-sourced ebooks have been announced as in the Amazon UK pipeline, they're very casual about what's available for pre-order, and promptly withdrawn when the UK publisher notices.

I just checked, and CollectPlus have a couple of agents near me. It looks a decent option, though there are also a few horror stories on the Internet. It doesn't take many such stories to look way too prominent.

It used to be, when you paid by debit/credit card, that they would only deliver to the card address. Has that safeguard against the crooks ended?

Hidden costs

I've sometimes thought I should have paid a bit more, got one or two more features, and if I were charging for the time I spent fixing the deficiencies, such as no access to the Google Store, the tablet I have would look pretty expensive.

But it's no surprise that people are buying cheap, and the HDMI socket on mine does get used. It's more useful to me than Bluetooth.

What can you buy?

There was this guy called Martin Luther who had something to say about whether you could buy the help of a deity. You don't have to agree with the details of his belief to think he might be right on that point.

I have friends and acquaintance who are witches. They warned me about this sort of thing. According to their belief system, you shouldn't sell your craft. They put something of themselves into a working, and can you really buy a person?

A few years later I was in hospital after a road accident. Spell or prayer, you can use a lot of labels for the good wishes of friends, and I'd do the same for them.

Not everything can be bought or sold in the market. Not every debt we have can be itemised, counted, and precisely repaid.

Done right, the "cloud" handles things that can be a lot of bother. For some company making a lot of data available to download, it can spread the network load over multiple sites. There are security issues, but you get redundant storage of your data, if the job is done right.

Most of us ordinary users don't pay enough attention to these things.

The craziness is in the idea that the cloud can replace local storage. Unless you can afford your own fibre to the home, there just isn't enough bandwidth for that. The UK's internet was built on assumptions made a decade ago, and we saw the consequences in the general sluggishness during the Olympics. The BBC did a fine job on the video streaming, but everything was enough slower to respond to notice.

Do we over-emphasise connection speeds in the ISP business, letting them feed us their "up to" claims, and their "unlimited" falsehoods, and ignoring the quality of what sits behind that front? Until the mass-market internet can sell us something more real, how can we depend on the cloud?

And for things such as backups there needs to be trust. Can we trust the modern corporate world?

I met Harry Harrison a few times. He was, in a very real sense, "one of us", part of a community of writers and enthusastic readers who carried on a long conversation, through books and other writing and late-night conversations in bars (and now on the internet, though I never came across HH there). And the article notices some of that, with the cross-reference between "Starship Troopers" and "Bill, The Galactic Hero". There was a time when everyone was sure of the Three Laws of Robotics. and HH wrote stories about the sorts of robot that were not built according to those principles. I don't know if that sense of sustained conversation is unique to SF and fantasy writing, but it is part of what makes it seem more alive, more relevant, than other sorts of fiction.

If you see a copy of "Vendetta for the Saint", grab it. It's not his name on the cover, but he's the guy who wrote it. Slippery Jim is, in some ways, a descendant of Simon Templar, and it is a pretty good Saint adventure.

There's another reason for using such an image: a human face is rather easy to get "wrong", we seem to be wired to notice such things. It's the sort of effect that lurks in the background of the uncanny valley idea.

The thread would work, but it would have to be going into some sort of insert, and that would push up the manufacturing cost.

I also have my doubts about the head design. Reliable assembly sets some limits on the head design. It's not good if assembly damages the screw heads.

This design doesn't make sense.

Mixed feelings

It's arguable that the show organisers were a little too inflexible--should they have made allowances for game characters? But that raises the obvious question of character design. This area doesn't need a prudish backlash, but it is depressing to see the way that women are depicted in computer games. And superhero comics can be as bad. It's not just the exaggerated anatomy, it's the apparent ignorance of the artists as the characters stand in implausible poses,

And, while I can appreciate the view, I do feel a little insulted that the companies think that this is what is needed to sell the product. In the end, I don't think that either the game companies or the show organisers are treating women with respect. To both, they are just a visual trigger for a sexual reaction.

The real problem is that Amazon has such a huge chunk of the market, sometimes sets remarkably low prices, and authors are wondering if they can make enough money from writing books that they can make a living.

The balance here might be tricky. but Amazon is getting away with a lot, both dodging tax liabilities and paying less to the people doing the vital work of writing new books. The DoJ, and its equivalents elsewhere, are letting Amazon get away with a huge market manipulation, one which cuts prices but may wreck the business of publishing.

And Amazon isn't a book company any more. They're doing internet sales and delivery, and are little different from the supermarkets, big enough to ride roughshod over their suppliers. Like the supermarkets, they don't cut their costs by greater efficiency, they cut their costs by abusing the suppliers.

What the DoJ says about this particular deal is mostly right. But is any lawyer going to say they were wrong? And the DoJ is letting Amazon get away with it, while hounding the publishers who are trying to find an alternative.

It's in the nature of the British legal system that there are two sides with contrary opinions, but if this is right, isn't the Home Office legal team being a bit careless in choosing their medical expert? More than that, what sort of Doctor would accept the job, knowing they lacked experience?

Of course there is bias in your source: have you believed them too easily? I guess we should let the court decide.

They cannot win

Assuming this is something police officers carry while working...

It needs to be rugged.

It needs a good battery life.

And it will be used by people who aren't in the habit of figuring out the latest shiny by themselves: setting up training costs time and money.

The results are always going to look expensive and out of date.

Back in the day, it was worth a company putting some corporate small-change into checking the Cold Fusion claims. It was the Pascal's Wager of its time: the cost was low and the potential pay-off was huge.

This time around, it has all the features of a scam.