Posts by Some Beggar 882 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jul 2009
Care to give any evidence for this paranoid worldguv fantasy of yours?
Perhaps you could explain the mechanism by which this conspiracy has taken place? Where do this imaginary billions come from? And how do they magically make their way into the researchers' pockets given that the accounts of all funding bodies and research institutions are publically available?
You spanner.
It's a widely cited paper from 2000.
You claimed that nobody was doing this kind of study when in fact it has been studied for at least 10 years. You were talking nonsense when it would have taken a five minute google scholar search to check your facts. I'm not sure why my pointing this out qualifies as a hissy fit, but if you'd rather interpret it as that instead of simply taking it as an attempt to improve your knowledge then that's your choice.
"Consensus does not exist in science or math."
Consensus has been a fundamental part of science for over two hundred years.
You're free to join the debate and try to change the consensus. Do some research. Publish some papers. Present some posters at a scientific meeting. Send a letter to a journal. Hell ... you could just send an email to a relevant researcher putting forward your contribution.
Or ... you know ... you could just froth on an internet messageboard.
The medieval warm period was local, not global:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/globalwarming/medieval.html
I don't know why you think people would mind you making this assertion. It is made with clockwork predictability in any discussion of climate change. It's not exactly hard to refute.
Citation needed.
The most recent survey of researchers (in the US under the previous government) showed that researchers were _more_ likely to get funding for research that challenged the current consensus on climate change. And the average funding and salary figures for climate-related research weren't even in the top five.
The climate gravy train is a complete myth. If you want to get on a research gravy train then you go into pharmaceuticals, geology (for fossil fuel funding) or mathematics (for market modelling).
It can also be argued that plums are obese beetles. That doesn't stop it from being bollocks.
The consensus view on climate change is not a simple toss-of-a-coin calculation of probability; it is a correlation of a vast amount of data over a prolonged period backed up by a highly complicated pile of causative theory. Do you really think 95% of relevant researchers would come down on one side of an argument if it was as simplistic as a 50-50 guess?
The only real conclusion is that some assumptions in some models will need to be re-visited in light of some new results. That's not altogether exciting to Joe Public, but it's what a lot of scientific research looks like. (Which is a reason - not an excuse - for the way many journalists exaggerate or leap to unjustified conclusions to spice up the news.)
The researchers themselves are quite clear that nobody can yet extrapolate from these results to any firm conclusions about the way the climate works or what role man's activity has played in it.
"All it would take is for your partner to think you were cheating for them to slightly up or lower your dose enough to cause you problems leaving the house, for example."
That's not how insulin works. A slight decrease would have no short term effect. A slight increase would lead to hypoglycaemia which, depending on the subject, would mean obvious symptoms followed by a quick dose of glucose and an inspection of the pump, or falling into a coma. And if a malicious partner wanted to feck about with a diabetic's blood sugar then there are many other much simpler ways they could do it, from swapping fast- and slow-acting insulins to putting sugar instead of sweetener in a cup of coffee.
I'm sure people can dream up a hundred different ways this hack could be exploited that might make it into a CSI:Miami script, but nobody has yet come up with a realistic real world risk.
"The Medtronic spokeswoman didn't address Radcliffe's claims directly, but said the “risk of deliberate, malicious or unauthorized manipulation of our insulin pumps is extremely low.” Maybe, but it's telling that a diabetic hacker thinks otherwise."
Exactly how is this telling? And what do you think it is telling of?
The risk _IS_ extremely low. It is low to the point of being negligible. It is not anything that a typical user would even begin to worry about. Insulin dependant diabetics have a hundred more important things to worry about before this even enters their heads and a dozen different ways they can end up in hospital that are hundreds or thousands of times more likely than this supposed hack.
The story is that a hacker has managed to find a chink in one of the devices he owns and has used it for some self-promotion. The fact that it is an insulin pump is neither here nor there. I hope he gets a job out of it ... he clearly has some technical skills. But that's as far as it goes. Arguing that "oh but he's diabetic" is irrelevant to the point of being patronising.
(disclaimer: I'm type 1 diabetic, have worked on the development of wireless medical devices but have no direct or indirect connection with this manufacturer)
Why would it matter that you have a 24/96 DAC at the end of the digital path when the source material is a CD or internet radio station or CD-quality (or sub-CD-quality) digital file? That Wolfson DAC is used in lots of devices like this; I'm sure it's very good but it doesn't magically increase the sampling rate or bit rate of the material.
Did Cambridge Audio press release print the details on the DAC in upper case bold or something?
The charger switches itself off when the current drawn by the device it is charging drops below a certain threshold. All this means (for all but the most simplistic devices) is that the device under charge has switched from constant current to constant voltage charging. Your battery indicator may have all its bars lit but it has really only reached something like 80 or 85% of full charge.
You're not saving any net energy. You are simply charging the phone a little less each time. The prinicipal energy sink is the device itself ... how much energy you use depends on how much you use that, not how you charge the battery.
Eco my arse. They've just coloured it green.
"But you cannot over-ride the pump unit to give you ALL the insulin in one go!!"
I can give myself as much or as little insulin as I like whenever I like. I am in complete day-to-day control of my insulin.
"Thats my point....
Sheesh......"
Your point was bollocks. Several people have tried to explain why your point was bollocks. If you had a bit of dignity at this point you would acknowledge that you were wrong and thank people for improving your understanding. But you'll probably just slink away or post some more backpedaling sprinkled with exclamation marks. Grow up.
"since when did a patient decide exactley how much of their medication they need."
Adults with type 1 diabetes (like me) typically manage their condition themselves. I measure my blood glucose, estimate the carbs that I'm eating and the exercise that I'm taking and decide how much insulin I need to inject. I meet with a diabetes consultant or specialist nurse every six months to discuss how this self-management is going.
"At no point should a user be able to modify this out side some pre set parameters without a medical proffesionals say so."
I'm afraid you're simply wrong. Not just for diabetes but for many other long-term conditions, so-called "expert patient" schemes where the individual is given day-to-day control are quite commonplace. The days when such conditions were micro-managed by a medical professional are (happily) long since passed.
Of that small population, a small subset will be using a pump rather than pens, and a smaller subset of those will be using a pump whose dose can be adjusted wirelessly, and an even smaller subset of those will be using the particular type of pump whose vulnerability your imaginary wireless murder machine would be targetting. So if you're lucky, you'll find one potential victim in every thousand packed tube carriages.
Worst. Serial. Killer. Ever.
Really? Take a small-ish annual figure and sum it over fifty odd years to get a somewhat larger figure ... and that's "staggering"? When I went to school that was called "arithmetic".
Jesus wept. If that's really supposed to shock and stagger the average reader of that press release then that's a more tragic reflection on the state of our education system than the A level results and the Brian Cox effect.
Strictly speaking, Ofcom (is OfCon a hilarious pun or a typo?) and the BBC are both quite clear that PLTs can cause interference and irritation to beardy and/or spotty amateur radio bods. They're just not going to throw anybody in clink for using it.
http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/enforcement/spectrum-enforcement/plt/
Can you expand on what you mean by double selling spectrum?
If you mean living on a million acre farm with your nearest neighbour a sun-bleached bison skull then fair enough ... but plenty of the UK is sufficiently far from an urban hub to make wireless broadband a more sensible option than laying new cables. Pretty much the whole of Scotland apart from the Glasgow/Edinburgh belt, for example. Large parts of the south of England that haven't (yet) been swallowed up into the M3/M4 commuter corridor. Wales ... although that will obviously depend on the introduction of electricity and literacy.
Glastonbury will soon need a once-yearly terabit interweb connection just to support the torrent of "oh my god I'm in a field listening to a dreary Live Nation act" Twittery.
(I honestly don't know how to rephrase this such that it won't fracture the seemingly porcelain sensibilities of the author. Do I need to put a nice smiley and some kisses at the end?)
This really is shoddy.
A bland assertion by a former _associate_ professor with no qualifications or publications in medicine or any relevant discipline but with an admirable record of pro-tobacco lobbying. And a statement by a radiologist (a radiologist??) based on interviews with thirty of his neighbours with self-diagnosed sleeping trouble.
Well that's plenty evidence for me. Down with windfarms! Boo! Hiss! Boo!
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