* Posts by NomNomNom

2280 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Apr 2011

COMET WILL DEFINITELY NOT HIT EARTH – NASA

NomNomNom

read between the lines

"Comet Elenin will make its closest approach to Earth on 16 October, at which point it will be 22 million miles away – more than 90 times as far off as the Moon."

that means the moon is only 244444 miles away. What's the moon doing that close? Didn't NASA have to fly millions of miles in the 60s to land on the moon? This tallies with my personal observations that recently the moon is appearing a lot bigger in the sky than I remember as a kid. Of course it has to fall down eventually but surely not this year. Does the moon go up and down in a cycle? It's funny how NASA even mentioned the moon there when the story was about a comet noone even knows about. I recommend watching the astronomological news closely from here on in.

Dog fight game bitten with pro-PETA virus

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I think

PETA's point is that if you become desensalized to violence against small animals you might accidentally kill a child one day. If a small child fell into a trap you had set for foxes and then you'd be like "oh we didnt consider children would get that small" and people would shake their heads and PETA would be there to say thanks a lot cornz1 for proving our point.

NomNomNom

Im not

im not defending PETA here but I can see there point about the dnagers of a game where dogs fight other dogs cuz I think it will encourage the kids to fight with dogs and I know its just a game but wolfenstein 3d was just a game too but see world war II actually happened so sometimes the lines between reality and fact get blurred if we arent careful.

DARPA drops another HTV-2

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this

money could have been wasted more efficiently bailing out the banks

University rats on Sydney suburb

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well

that's 3 sexist comments out of 4

going to need to do better than that to achieve 5 9s

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i spoke too soon

4/5 after the refresh

UK police warns off hacktivists

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cant we

cant we just banish these hackers to somewhere on the internet they can do no harm?

20 years exile in second life or world of warcraft should work

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other people

dont give a crap either way

Dragon Bannatyne threatens to break arms of 'Russian' bloke

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LOL

In Soviet Russia, local man threatens your daughter for money.

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investment opportunity

Hi my names Nomnomnom and I am looking for a £25,000 investment in my company, Russian Limb Breaking Ltd.

London plods raid Wikipedia in counter-anarchist operation

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s

sympathizer!

It's official: IE users are dumb as a bag of hammers

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its

its because we all go to the Operaah and have amazing dinner parties filled with other incredibly smart people

'Missing heat': Is global warmth vanishing into space?

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its not an ad hom

The thing is Roy Spencer has appealed to having investigated the subject of evolution in detail scientifically:

"Twenty years ago, as a PhD scientist, I intensely studied the evolution versus intelligent design controversy for about two years. And finally, despite my previous acceptance of evolutionary theory as "fact," I came to the realization that intelligent design, as a theory of origins, is no more religious, and no less scientific, than evolutionism."

http://www.ideasinactiontv.com/tcs_daily/2005/08/faith-based-evolution.html

Something is wrong if you proclaim to have studied the issue as a PhD scientist and conclude that the theory of evolution is a religion.

Spencer is a signatory of the Cornwall Alliance which has "An Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming":

"We believe Earth and its ecosystems—created by God’s intelligent design and infinite power and sustained by His faithful providence —are robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting, admirably suited for human flourishing, and displaying His glory. Earth’s climate system is no exception. Recent global warming is one of many natural cycles of warming and cooling in geologic history."

http://www.cornwallalliance.org/articles/read/an-evangelical-declaration-on-global-warming/

And recently Spencer said: "I view my job a little like a legislator, supported by the taxpayer, to protect the interests of the taxpayer and to minimize the role of government"

You have to worry that Spencer believes on faith that climate sensitivity is low because he thinks God wouldn't have made an Earth humans could dangerously harm themselves with through fossil fuel emissions, and is setting out to argue this because he sees it his job to prevent any solution which would involve the role of the government.

For all the crying skeptics do about funding of climate scientists, I think the above is a far more disturbing indicator of potential bias.

NomNomNom

subs surfacing at the pole

"Sea levels have been rising at more or less the same rate for 100's of years - since the end of the little ice age"

No, sea level rise is faster in the last few decades than earlier, which is as you would expect as the world is now warmer.

"there is strong historical evidence of past periods of low arctic ice - eg. when US subs surfaced at the pole in 1958 and 1959."

Subs try to surface in leads. These are holes in the ice pack that occur even when the ice is thick.. These don't require ice free pole. Plus observations of ice extent by countries at the poles do not show an ice free pole occurred in the 50s or 60s.

Antarctic sea ice is actually currently below average. Global sea ice even almost reached a new low, the record holder being summer 2007.

UK Cops 'duped' into arresting wrong LulzSec suspect

NomNomNom

the problem with anonymity

is noone will miss you if you were to suddenly "disappear"

George Lucas defeated by Stormtrooper helmet man

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well duh

If it happened in the future how would we know about it to create a movie? All movies are based on events that happened in the past, not the future.

A FYI time travel is now officially impossible so don't pull that one

UK Govt refuses to ban shale gas 'fracking'

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ghgs

Unspoken are the additional greenhouse gas emissions from tapping into this new fossil carbon source of energy. As if oil and coal weren't enough lets go after shale gas too.

Crypto shocker: 'Perfect cipher' dates back to telegraphs

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flawed

public key cryptography is flawed as it relies on keeping a private key safe. It's impossible to keep anything safe unless you destroy it first

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So

This is just another form of security through obscurity. Instead of sending a plaintext message you are just obscuring it with a key and now instead of needing the hide the message you have to hide the key. So in a way the key now becomes the message. This is why all key based encryption systems are bunk. You still have something that needs protecting and delivering and because it's no longer the message people get lulled into a false sense of security.

As for unbreakable - any plaintext message is unbreakable if you destroy it afterwards so that there's nothing to break. The strongest form of security is not to send messages in the first place. I always say if you need to communicate with other people you are doing something wrong.

Kit steals Mac login passwords through FireWire port

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just carry a gun around with you

thats the best security

'There's too much climate change denial on the BBC'

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In fact

"Again, it is definitely wise to move towards more sustainable energy sources, but I am certainly not sure the solar cycle is not involved in some way."

That's the thing. It is involved, it contributes a cycle of magnitude ~0.1C over 11 years. Hence when skeptics argue warming slowed down over the last 10 years, it just so happens that period ends with a very low solar cycle minimum so....

NomNomNom

Mars getting warmer?

According to who? Me thinks thats outdated and by now probably false information. Not only is it irrelevant, and misleading, but probably false.

The BBC would have to be biased to push that.

LulzSec say they'll release big Murdoch email archive

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hmm

if only we could get at Hitlers emails that might be very revealing. Does anyone know if he deleted everything before he shot himself?

CERN 'gags' physicists in cosmic ray climate experiment

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huh?

No-one asserts Earth will become like Venus, at least no-one relevant.

"If it were that easy to flip the climate with inbuilt positive feedback it should have happened man times in the past when levels were higher than they are now."

Positive feedback means the climate changes a great deal. And it has. Past climate is exaftly the kind of thing you'd expect if climate changes were amplified. If they were being dapended by negative feedbacks the Earth's temperature should have hardly change over time.

"Personally I think water circulation is the key to everything. More energy means higher hotter cloud tops means more energy radiated away to space.

Ocean currents stabilise things as well. cold fresh water sinks and droves latitudinal convectors, cooling the tropics and warming the poles."

Which begs the question - why wasn't any of that enough to stop the Earth getting much warmer in the past?

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t

the ozone hole returns every year. But it's now stopped getting larger and larger and soon will get smaller and smaller and return back to 1950s levels.

Segway death blamed on good manners

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segway

Proper use of a segway:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1zmAJ7M4BM

Google turning us into forgetful morons, warn boffins

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intellisense

is like this

Murdochs won't talk to MPs over phone-hacking scandal

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maybe

send in the SAS to eliminate...i mean "extract" him

Over 900 police staff caught misusing databases

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huh?

what's the point in being a police officer if you can't even investigate your own neighbours for crimes? this is another form of political correctness going mad.

Here's a hypothetical situation to get you thinking. Say you are a police officer and a new neighbour moves into your street out of the blue. He hasn't introduced himself and noone even saw him move in. He doesn't appear to have a family. The curtains are always drawn. Every evening he drives off and comes back in the dead of the night unloading strange containers. He carries a disturbing gait and a manner of clothing typically observed upon those with a subversive agenda. There are vulnerable children living on the street.

Now if you are a police officer isn't it your duty to look him up on the police database and tell your neighbours what you find? In fact arguably it would be a deriliction of duty not to. As usual the common sense side of the story rarely gets a look in.

Hunt refers News Corp/BSkyB bid to Competition Commish

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ill send you a voice mail

nt

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If your argument is so good

how come you are chosing to remain anonymous?

the whole pedotricians argument is a fallacy. Apart from one or two isolated incidents most of the people hunted down and hounded by the News of the World were actual pedophiles. Some of those pedophiles might have even been pedotricians (who knows? not us anymore now that the News of the World has gone they can't report on it anymore)

It's funny that everyone is always banging on about Sarah's Law all the time but when push comes to shove and a paper actually implements an anti-pedo system that will work, the public scupper it just because of a bunch of phone calls.

"A question, How many paedophiles went underground after they were outed?"

Exactly. And now that News of the World is gone a flood of pedophiles are going to come out of the woodwork. Yet have you heard any government warnings to parents to be vigilant in coming days? I haven't. Like the banking crisis it will go ignored until its too late.

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sad

its shameful to see politicians falling over themselves to do the public's bidding. A bunch of fuss over a few phone hacks doesn't justify this "outcry". A little mentioned effect of News of the World closing is that there will be from now on more pedophiles in the UK. News of the World was instrumental in finding pedophiels and releasing their addresses to the public (and yes that might have involved hacking pedophile phones - so what?) but now they are gone. I hope those guardian and telegraph readers who bulled News of the World into closing are pleased with what they are done...well done guys thanks for getting rid of a british tradition

'Meltdown Monday' Anonymous hackers leak military mails

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oh look

its the net jihadists invoking godwins law

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yes

"does anyhone know aht, other than waterboarding and sleep deprivbation, goes on in non-US-Military installations in friendly countries?"

I think they force you to read judgemental register comments 24/7 until you break

Aussie carbon tax in actually-makes-sense shocker

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so far

We've had decades of research and experts on the issue are convinced human CO2 emissions will warm the Earth

Acting suprised that people believe CO2 emissions will warm the planet is bizzare given that's what science is telling us.

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strawman

you ignore the radiative effects of the CO2, and it's effects on ocean pH.

This is a bit like ignoring the bad effects of raw sewage and arguing that raw sewage is fertilizer == life == great for dumping into rivers.

News International grabs SunOnSunday.co.uk domain

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exactly

People listen into their phone messages all the time. Supposedly when joe public does it it's fine, but when a journalist does it, it's a crime. It's one rule for them another for everyone else.

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shameful

It's a shame the News of the World has been effectively bullied into closing by shrill crowd of ill wishers. Sure there are genuine issues concerning a bunch of phone related stuff, but the so-called "public outcry" is greatly exagerated, seemingly consisting of kids on Tweeter and Facebook stirring up trouble. Yet notice noone ever blames the internet nowadays. Oh wait the News of the World would have blamed the internet....but oh they've been sacrificed at the alter of public opinion....whooops that was an own goal wasn't it?

The blame News of the World game is now being milked by politicians who discracefully just fall over themselves to do the publics bidding. I am sure all of this will blow over soon enough and I look forward to the Sun on Sunday and hope the new broadsheet will remain faithful to it's older form.

Chinese coal blamed for global warming er... cooling

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title

solar output has been flat for decades.

There are not similar warming and cooling trends on mars and even pluto. I recommend you do a quick google search

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title

the significant variables are the most obvious ones. It's been decades and the list of significant variables hasn't changed. We can quite validly make calculations at this point.

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title

you forget that when those predictions of warming were made by Hansen, skeptics were still arguing over whether it had warmed at all. They certainly didn't expect any warming or cooling. Hansen called it. Quibble over the magnitude of warming all you want, but Hansen was only out by about 20% and he was using knowledge from 1988

ICO orders release of (mostly useless) weather station data

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t

has roy spencer released the UAH source code yet?

No

How is the skeptic campaign going on that? Smeared him by implying he's hidden his source code yet? Have any FOIA requests in progress on that to force him to release it?

No I am sure you don't. Crickets. Double standards. As expected.

NomNomNom

t

It IS contested. By those who know what they are talking about.

The skeptics ballsed up on it. They claimed (and some still ignorantly do) that the station dropout in GHCN had a cooling effect because some of the stations that dropped out were from cold high latitudes.

It really shows they haven't a clue that they thought removal of cold stations would produce a warming effect. Might sound intuitive but if you understand how the temperature records are compiled it's clear that's bogus. Yet some of the biggest and "brightest" skeptics spread that claim anyway.

NomNomNom

t

I notice in the new article says:

"A large number of station records outside the United States were removed between 1988 and 1992, resulting in more interpolation. Critics say this cooled the 20th Century temperature record."

No mention that the claim was already shown to be false last year*. No mention that the critics are completely illogical to conclude a station dropout would cause a cooling effect rather than a warming.

One thing about these articles, they don't point out that the temperature data IS available to verify.

NomNomNom

t

"In all likelyhood, there were several scientists behind the scenes working feverishly to come up with an equation (or set thereof) to match the existing data that could then be used to predict future trends"

That isn't remotely how it's done. The datasets are not input into models. The models are not merely extrapolating datasets.

NomNomNom

On nitpicking

When I run stress tests I get slightly different numbers each time. According to this article this means what I am doing is just not science. Even though the stress test results are pretty much consistant. It's machine and network "weather" creating noise that make the results slightly different each time.

I can imagine a kind of (admittedly unfunny) dilbert cartoon where the Boss demands the test results are replicated. Completed in 203.1 seconds? Reproduce that result! You can't?? Incompetence!

Hackers pierce network with jerry-rigged mouse

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Color me skeptical

What makes me suspicious is the impossibility of guaranteeing the user is away from the computer when the malware takes over control. Surely 60 seconds after a machine turns on the user is using the keyboard and mouse to log in?

So it looks like this exploit presumes the user will go for a coffee after starting the machine up. Fair enough, but what stops them coming back to the room find the mouse moving across the desk of it's own volition and the keys on their keyboard moving up and down as if the invisible man were sitting there? Anyone in that situation is probably going to realize something is wrong.

At the very least you would reach for the mouse and try to hold it down so it can't move anymore. I don't know how powerful their mouse mover is but I imagine an average man would be able to hold the mouse in place with one hand while calling IT/security with the other.

So this exploit claim just seems a bit fishy to me.

What would be actually clever would be to put malware into the coffee machine too so that it delays the person getting back to the machine (the coffee machine could be made to say "cleaning process - please wait 4 minutes")

Vatican launches second website in just 2000 years

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satin

the satinist bible for men of the cloth

'Robots can save America', says Obama

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robots

they might be able to save america but will they ever understand love?