Posts by Loyal Commenter

Re: Couldn't someone clevererer (and meaner?) than me

AdBlock blocks the requests to the spammer advertiser so that they are never made. It would block the internet to everyone not running an ad blocker. This would probably also have the effect of reducing malware infections by 99%.

Re: the "making tax digital” savings have been rated as “highly uncertain”

"Making tax digital" might as well mean, "counting it on our fingers," as far as successfully delivering any large IT project is concerned. By this government, or any previous one, dating back to the advent of counting machines.

Re: Good work

That game was indeed a classic.

Re: Sounds like that other film-within-a-film...

Or the in-film-TV series, "Ow My Balls!"

Re: C'mon guys, let's all just be friends - hello, Mr Corbyn, welcome to El Reg.

...and Corbyn is also non-religious, so unlikely to be singing any song with the lyric, "my Lord" in it...

Re: Our Next Double-Oh.

Maybe that's the plan.

And while the hipster eejits are telling all and sundry about the all new top secret social media web app they're working on, the real work is being done somewhere else by someone else away from the distraction.

There's an enormous market - or there will be, after the first terrorist quadcopter bomb

This is the sort of thing that the well respected security guru Bruce Schneier refers to as a 'movie plot threat' - improbable and overly specific to defend against, but scary sounding.

Re: Jingo

As pointed out in the article, China is notably not a signatory, so it's not even a situation of 'the rules' being written by America or by China, and even if it were, this is a false dichotomy - there are more individual concerns here than those of China and the US.

Personally, I'd like to see international treaties drawn up through a process of agreement from all involved, not through heavy-handedness from one, or a small group of actors. That would be inherently fairer. It concerns me that the bluster from the US appears to indicate that such heavy-handedness has been applied to produce a treaty that favours them over the other players, which in the end is nothing more than bullying on the global stage - in other words, business as usual.

Maybe we should just lock them all up for producing consistently annoying and aggravating advertisements, second only to perfume adverts in their pretentiousness.

Re: Economics is a science in the same way that string theory is

String 'theory' makes no predictions, and is used as a hypothetical explanation for observations. AS such, it is not technically a theory at all, and merely a hypothesis - an important aspect of a scientific theory is that it makes predictions that are falsifiable.

Economic 'theory', on the other hand, can and does make predictions, however, the outcome of those predictions is neither deterministic or reproducible (both also important aspects of a scientific theory).

So, in a way, you are correct; neither is a scientific theory, although for different reasons, so not 'in the same way'. It is also worth noting that string 'theory' could possibly be developed to make testable predictions, as it is not incompatible with actual physical theories, whereas economic 'theory', based upon a non-deterministic aspect of reality (human actions) cannot be adapted to become deterministic.

Re: Enemy combatant

This journalist was communicating with an enemy combatant. That counts as treason.

He needs prison. Or shooting.

Firstly, since ISIS is not a recognised state, technically its fighters are not legally 'enemy combatants'. Also, I'm pretty sure that there is no law that makes speaking to an enemy a treasonable offence. The logical conclusion of this viewpoint would be that anyone signing a peace treaty would be shot for it.

Also, if you were to try and acquire some bromine, it wouldn't be from a pharmacist, it would be from the likes of Sigma Aldrich, and I'm pretty sure they would be required to ask you some tricky questions when setting up your account. Given how nasty halogens are, I'd expect that if you were stupid enough to try to buy any of them in any significant quantity, without having a very good reason to do so (such as working as an industrial chemist), you'd probably find yourself getting an early morning visit from the anti terrorism squad.

"It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt."

- Mark Twain

I can't speak for Azure, or Office 365, not having used them, but I do have in-depth knowledge and experience of SQL Server, and found it to be rock solid.

Great, now I have an image of a transgendered Prince William in my head.

Re: There is NO Carbon forcing and NO phantom back radiation 'warming'....

Not a word about how as this warm carbon dioxide rises (as it naturally tends to do), then the chances of any radiation being re-emitted towards Earth drops, because Earth is a curved ball and not a flat surface?

The carbon dioxide (which is evenly distributed in the atmosphere due to mixing and entropy) absorbs and re-emits the radiation, it doesn't magically warm up and separate from the other constituent gases in the atmosphere. To suggest so implies a fundamental lack of understanding of physics on a number of levels.

Not a word about how much of the inbound sunlight (something on the order of 50%, IIRC) is actually infrared itself, and so will also be blocked by greenhouse gases, at least to some extent?

Except, of course, where I say exactly that by pointing out that it is at a higher frequency, in other words, at a shorter wavelength than that infrared radiation that is emitted by the ground.

The incoming radiation from the sun is actually spread broadly across the spectrum, from radio, through infrared, all the way up to ultraviolet and 'harder' radiation, which is blocked by the upper atmosphere. That which does reach the ground is absorbed and causes heating. This heating leads to the surface of the planet warming, and emitting black-body radiation, which has a different profile to its wavelength (depending on the temperature of the object emitting it). This has a much larger component in the frequency ranges that carbon dioxide molecules absorb at. If you don't know what this means (and you pretty obviously don't), I would suggest looking up the term 'black body radiation' on something like Wikipedia, which despite its faults is largely accurate on such topics. I would also suggest googling the terms "carbon dioxide infrared absorption profile", "earth black body emission profile" and "solar emission profile" and trying to understand how these are relevant to the conversation before you make a bigger fool of yourself. (hint - the results from such searches pretty neatly negate the argument you just made using real hard facts rather than opinions)

Re: Waste of time and money, you can't break the rules of biology.

WRONG! Each pixel is about 0.9mm wide (diagonally), so definitely around about your supposed perception resolution and the last thing I want to see is individual pixels, I want to perceive smooth sharp lines and curved edges not a jaggy mess or edges anti-aliased into a blur.

Okay, I was (sensibly I thought) quoting the edge dimensions of the pixel, not the diagonal size (the only thing ever quoted in diagonal size appears to be screen sizes for marketing purposes). Using Pythagoras' theorem, a square pixel of 0.56mm would actually have a diagonal size of slightly under 0.8mm, but lets not split hairs here. Unless you have an image on your screen with high contrast between non-moving pixels (e.g. an individual black pixel on a white background), you aren't going to make out the edge anyway. I'm not aware of anything you might want to display on a TV that has this sort of characteristic, so the points that you are making are ones that are commonly known as nonsense.

If you were using a high resolution screen close up for detailed design work then being able to cram more onto the screen at a resolution where you can discern individual pixels is useful, which is why a full 1080p HD computer monitor is a useful tool. I personally have very good vision and can just about discern individual pixels on a 24" version of such a screen at a distance of around 18 inches. This is useful when making sure design layouts are pixel-perfect etc. But other than that you probably wouldn't notice if the resolution was halved, particularly if viewing the sort of moving images which would be typical of a movie or broadcast TV.

Also, I might point out that anti-aliasing as a technique (as opposed to linear sampling) generally allows better resolution of things that are around the size of a single pixel, especially when in motion, without them appearing and disappearing, so in contrast to edges being 'anti-aliased into a blur', anti-aliasing is a thing to be favoured - ask any gamer and they'll explain why you should buy a graphics card that can manage it.

Re: life span

Here, fixed that for you:

If humans were allowed to live in the area they would become sick would have an unspecified increase in their risk of becoming sick from certain illnesses, if whatever was going to kill them anyway didn't first after a few decades.

Of course, if humans were allowed to live there, they would be in a largely rural environment, which would probably lead to a lifestyle involving a greater amount of exercise, and healthier diet involving more fruit and vegetables than they would otherwise consume, which in turn would probably reduce the rate or morbidity and mortality from various diseases such as heart disease and diabetes. It;s hard to say whether this would counterbalance the small increased risk from the slightly elevated background radiation levels.

Re: If the water based lava was under the surface...

I'll just leave this here, and walk away...

obligatory XKCD

Re: I fear this has gotten out of hand

You live in a republic. A democratic republic, to be sure, but a republic none the less.

Actually I (and I suspect most people here since this is a .co.uk website) live in a constitutional monarchy.

As it stands now, I bet the ratio of men who have used a "sex robot" compared to women who have is minuscule

It depends on what you define as a 'sex robot'. It could be argued that women (and indeed some men) have been using these for years and have refined them down to the point where they consist of only the essential 'part', and a place to put the batteries.

Re: @Loyal Commenter

A quick goolging turns up the Grauniad's article on the matter:

"The attorney general, Jeremy Wright QC, was consulted about whether it would be legal to carry out the attack. His office referred all questions to No 10. The prime minister’s spokesman said the legal advice would not be published. The Foreign Office declined to comment on whether its legal advisers had been consulted."

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/sep/07/right-of-self-defence-legal-debate-syria-drone-strike

Re: Political Correctness Lunacy

Isn't most of the job of a parent to indoctrinate their kids.

I thought it was the job of parents to raise and educate their kids. We could all do with less of the indoctrination bit really, it's the root cause of this sort of lunacy.

The healthy position is to teach children how to ask questions, not to teach them to accept everything they are told.

Without that sort of attitude, we'd be living in a pre-enlightenment society, which would be fine only for those at the very top of religious organisations.

Re: So it is true...

@Ragequit - I was thinking the same thing.

If the device and its firmware are properly designed, the low-level RF controller should be encapsulated so that is in control of the frequency, and anything that uses it cannot request a frequency outside of the allowed bands. I see no problem in that part of the firmware being regulated, certified, and locked down. Anything above that on the tech stack doesn't need regulation (at least not for this purpose).

Re: Twice?

This man, of course, has not been found guilty of rape, making your comment quite impressively defamatory.

I should clarify my point - in this particular case we don't know the facts of the case, and even if we did, we would not know whether a rape took place, and whether this particular man was responsible. All we know is that he was found not guilty, which means that there was insufficient evidence to secure a prosecution.

All this is incidental to my actual point, which is that saying it is someone's fault that they got raped twice, because they had been raped once before is utterly wrong-headed, and is blaming the victim. Victim blaming is one of the many reasons that rape cases fail to bring a conviction, not because the defendant is innocent, but because the victim is made to feel unable to give evidence in court. The term for this in use by those who know what they are talking about is, "re-victimisation".

So, my point is this - there is only ever one person to blame for a rape, and that is the rapist. The victim could be wearing provocative clothing, acting flirty, or even lying naked in the middle of the street, and it would not change that fact. However, it is also a sad fact that many people do say things like, "she shouldn't have led him on," or "she shouldn't have been that drunk," or "she shouldn't have been anywhere near him if he'd raped her once already."