Hardly news; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowball_Earth .

OK, OK, it's a new paper and was presumably linked to the famous (to some of us) LPSC conference which is just winding up, but a bit more context would be nice.

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2010/ . (Hit the "Program with abstracts" link (PDF) for hours and hours of fascinating reading. LPSC abstracts are exactly the right length for the interested lay-person.)

I must admit I started reading this piece looking for the nutty global warming denialist angle; pleasantly surprised there isn't one. Keep it up please.

Has there ever been a time when UK small firms *weren't* complaining about taxes?

There's no practical way to prevent someone with an ordinary domain account from pulling a copy of the full GAL (global address list, NOT "the internal phonebook" as suggested up-thread.) Obviously it's not great to have names and email addresses leak, but it's not the end of the world either. They might be used for some social engineering attacks ("Hi Esmerelda, it's Martin Davis from IT here, could you pls reset your password to "123456", just for the next 10 minutes?" ) .

It can also be done by a bog-standard driveby download compromise, the spambot herders often use compromised corporate machines to dump the GAL for use as a list of spam targets.

Will be interested to see how big a slap on the wrist they get from the Information Commissioner dude. Token £5K fine and a "be more careful in future" is my bet.

If you really want to try to find problems with the rock solid science behind global warming, you need to go to much more authoritative sources than the trashy UK press. They're great at reporting which sleb's just had a boob job or who's shagging who, or political intrigue, but science reporting in the UK press universally sucks golfballs through hosepipes. Just ignore it all (and yes, I'd say the same for the majority of stuff that's right, IMO; 99/100 times, they're right for the wrong reasons, and wouldn't know a Hadley Cell if it kneed them in the testes and nicked their iPhones.

Go to the source.

Read the journal articles.

Or admit you can't be arsed, and go with the scientific consensus. But don't claim it's all bollocks because of some blindingly obvious thing that Simon Heffer claims climatologists have missed out or not understood.

The loss of the Shenandoah and the other two are strangely unknown to many, although the epic-ness of the fail rivals the R101, Hindenberg and other popular instances of the airship fail. Far more than you ever, etc: http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=Shenandoah+disaster&btnG=Search&meta=&aq=f&oq=

Great Friday night reading for those unfortunate geeks stuck at home staring at their Star Trek DVDs. Which is all of us, right? right???

A couple of mates and I were planning our own stab at amateur high-altitude phun this summer, but El Reg talking about it public means we'll probably be beaten to it by hordes of over-enthusiastic IT people flinging vast quantities of disposable income at it. I'd just like to warn anyone else thinking of having a go that it's REALLY REALLY HARD, and very expensive (apart from anything else you've no more than a one -in-two chance of recovering the payload, going on past launch stats, which means your custom flight computer, GPS, cellphone, shortwave transmitter (if you're going for the whole packet-radio live telemetry route), not to mention an expensive digital camera... plus all the blood sweat and tears you've put into it. So please don't bother trying. Not til next year, anyway...

PS Oh yeah and you need to give the CAA a month's heads-up to get a NOTAM out. Pilots tend to frown on aircraft drifting randomly through their flight paths, especially if they're not carrying a radar reflector and the first they know about it is a windscreen full of amateur geekery.

Grenade because _this is war_!

Private Eye readers with the fortitude to read some of the 8-point-type articles have been following this for several years now. Far from being "an attempt to smear the Tories", Cameron's had plenty of opportunities to ditch Coulson, who's obviously going to be a liability as long as he stays in that position, in the past. The closer it gets to the election, the bigger a disaster it will be for the Tories, and the more crap will stick to their brand. They've only got themselves to blame!

@Dino Saur 17:03 --

uk .gov network security services are provided by commercial vendors; their identity is a matter of public record.

I see defectivebydesign.org is off the air, presumably being packeted by outraged hordes of Jobbiephiles. Pathetic.

(Apologies if this is a dupe, El Reg (or my Firefox nightly build) hung when I hit "Submit" the first time round... I trust the firm lash of /B/-discipline will be wielded if this is a re-post)

A hat tip to Ben Goldacre (aka @bengoldacre, http://twitter.com/bengoldacre ) would have been nice.

http://www.badscience.net/2009/11/wtf/

Strange timing....

The project team had recently announced that they were about to try something that they'd previously said would be a last desperate, nothing-to-lose technique - using the robot arm to try to move dust and sand out of the way of the wheels. (The main problem with this, apart from it being very unlikely to help, is that it might well b0rk the scientific instruments on the end of the arm, eg. the Mossbauer spectrometer. However they then unexpectedly tried a new driving technique: reversing, which is to say moving further along in the direction it was going when it first got stuck. (Spirit's been mostly driving backwards for a couple of years now, since the front-right wheel popped. It's much easier to drag than push a locked-up wheel, of course.) To general astonishment in the community, progress has been pretty dramatic -several cm of movement, which is more than has been seen since last May. She's definitely not out of the woods yet - in fact hasn't quite reached the end of the track she'd followed when driving into the hidden crater in the first place - but it was looking promising at least.

Hurrrm well, have to wait til I get home and jump on the forum to find out WTF gives.

A "develooper" or "dev-looper" is a programmer who is round the twist, mad as a sack of snakes, or a couple of drives short of a RAID shelf. Or, to put it another way, someone who thinks Java is superior to Perl.

Big thumbs up to the IT manager. Sounds like a good place to work - not that drunken stupidity is tolerated, but that they're not vindictive and petty minded. Good on ya!

@Neil Stansbury

"Could someone explain why, now having had a high number of successful landings on Mars NASA would now choose such a horribly complex completely new landing process?"

I'll have a go.

("EDL" = "entry, descent, landing", aka The Six Minutes of Terror.)

The problem is mass. MSL is a huge beast, the general size comparison for the USians is "VW Beetle-sized". This is significantly bigger than the Phoenix lander (2008, EDL consisted of with aerobraking with a heatshield, then hypersonic parachutes, then drop out the bottom of the backshell and fly down to the surface on small thrusters) and the wildly over-successful MERs, Spirit and Opportunity (EDL: aerobraking, hypersonic parachutes, rapel down a line, inflate airbags, fire last-minute hack sideways-motion-damping rocket half-way up the stack, cut tether, bounce to a standstill, deflate airbags, self-right, open up.) MER was pushing the envelope on the mass that airbags can cope with; MSL would shred 'em in seconds, with unfortunate consequences (lithobraking.) There's also the problem that because the Martian atmosphere is so thin, you really need to land at as low an elevation as possible, so that your chute gets the chance to slow you down to the sort of speeds where you can fire up forward-facing thrusters: these tend not to like starting up with pointing into hypersonic airflows.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Science_Laboratory#Landing_system

What I don't know, off-hand, is why they need the tether/bridle/winch mechanism, rather than flying the whole stack down to the surface, releasing the rover on contact, and then flying off to make an interesting hole in the nearby scenery. Of course, that doesn't mean there isn't a very good one, just that I don't know / have forgotten it :>

AJS Rayl's detailed monthly update at the Planetary Society has more detail of the unexpected earth voltage, busticated motors board, not-working/working/not-working front right wheel, and the chances of survival.

Oppy's still going strong, though, on it's epic journey towards the distant rim of Endeavour crater.

http://www.planetary.org/news/2010/1231_Mars_Exploration_Rovers_Update_Spirit.html

> Why would I want to descend on carcasses is way beyond me..

>

To go through their pockets and look for loose change, of course.

@mark 65: the "concrete link [ of global warming, I assume you mean?] with human activity" was unequivocally demonstrated many years ago. If you don't know that, you really aren't qualified to comment. May I suggest David Archer's free online lectures on climatology 101?

http://geoflop.uchicago.edu/forecast/docs/lectures.html

(There's an accompanying textbook aimed at reasonably numerate non-specialists at the undergrad level: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Global-Warming-Understanding-David-Archer/dp/1405140399/ Both highly recommended. In particular Chapter 1 covers the basic thermodynamics of the CO2 greenhouse mechanism, which is something almost never explained in "Intro to AGW" material aimed at people lacking knowledge of basic physics or mathematics.)

@Brian Miller Which institution awarded you your PhD? What was it's subject? (Obviously you must have doctorate-level knowledge of the field to be able to make such as sweeping statement. Otherwise, you'd just be some no-nothing wingnut who would prefer to believe in conspiracy theories than accept something that you think might affect your standard of living, and I'm sure El Reg wouldn't run a comment like that.)

1. nuclear-powered launchers are fantasy. Never going to happen. Zis is not nuts, zis is super-nuts. iMlite, might I suggest Aviation Leak is a better source than the Daily Mail?

2. STS is dead, done and dusted in September 2010 or thereabouts. No chance of any refitting or refactoring; aerospace museums are already jostling for the opportunity to take one of the three remaining Orbiters (Endeavour, Atlantis and Discovery.) One's earmarked for the Smithsonian, of course.

3. The "Ares V - lite" vehicle was... Ares I. There's no way an Ares V could be used for routine ISS crew-rotation missions, so that either goes to SpaceX' Dragon capsule (who's launched, the Falcon-9, is being readied for it's first launch right now:

http://www.spacex.com/updates.php

4. IMO, Ares V without I makes less sense than I without V. The only real justification for V (apart from willy-waving about having something competitive to Ariane 5 in lifting capacity) is for pushing large masses beyond LEO. Manned missions to the moon and Mars are often mentioned, because Dubya thought it would be a great soundbite and had a slim chance of making him the 21st century Kennedy. Alas, they completely omitted to provide the budget to do it with. Hence (partly) the horrible squeeze on unmanned probes. After MSL in 2011, there's nothing on the drawing-board until some vaguely hypothesised joint rovers project with ESA. (The latter's contrib is based on Exo-Mars, which began as an ambitious attempt to do a Mars rover in the MER class, then slipped, over-spent it's budget, slipped and slipped again. It smells doomed to me.)

5. Off-topic: as one commentard to others, you lot do know that some of your tax goes to the European Space Agency, ESA, right? That they're currently operating flagship-class orbiters at Mars and Venus, the recently launched Planck and Kepler space telescopes, and assorted other current missions?

No, I didn't think so.

From everything I've seen of the way EDS have treated some loyal hardworking and essential staff at my employer who were unceremoniously sold off to EDS (now HP), the only surprise is that stuff like this doesn't happen more often. Morale must be so low that anyone with any clue and hireability (in the form of good solid experience on their CV) must be jamming the exits in their rush to abandon ship.

Pint because remember: alcohol makes the managers go away.

Defective By Design!

http://www.defectivebydesign.org/

Hopefully not too late to point out that, following some good campaigning work by Private Eye (who labour under a number of such NSL-like secret injunctions) and the Guardian (remember Trafigura?) a number of worthies including the blessed @bengoldacre launched a campaign to fix the ludicrous and execrable UK libel laws and bring and end to the particularly pernicious phenomena of libel tourism.

http://www.badscience.net/2009/12/libel-reform/

Write to your MP now!

You can now get a little tube of ointment from your chemist that'll clear that up.

@breakfast, 13:30 GMT: You're thinking of Bostrom's simulation argument - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_reality#Arguments .

AC @15:01 -- the low mark was deserved. Firstly it's known that it's impossible to produce future predictions in principle, /even with perfect knowledge of the position & velocity of all particles/, and it's not necessary to resort to quantum mechanics to prove this. Secondly you can't hypothesise a computer outside the universe; if it exists, it's in the universe and would therefore have to recursively simulate itself.

...but the presence of fluvial channels on Mars has been well-established since Mariner 9 discovered it in 1972. Not really news...

There IS some fascinating work underway on shallow low-latitude ice deposits - indeed you can see textbook lateral moraines in places with a bit of poking around on the online HiRISE data browser/viewer - not to mention Mallin / Edgett's classic discovery of contemporary gully formation on crater walls that shows features such as braided channels generally considered diagnostic of fluid (and presumably liquid) flows . If I know all this, why'm I lurking on El Reg? Well, with a degree in pure mathematics and another in planetary science, it was either that or back to the dole queue on Monday... </reference>

I'm enjoying watching the cognitive dissonance of supporting the Human Rights Act in the name of personal freedoms make the heads of the particular Daily Mail-reading commentards explode

Where've I heard this before? Oh yeah

http://news.google.com/news/search?aq=f&pz=1&cf=all&ned=uk&hl=en&q=a.a.+gill

...is laughing fit to burst.

Mmmm, mandatory IPSec part of the protocol... network users given literally millions of unique, globally routed IP addresses (a /64 being a standard allocation)... No tiresome NAT to faff about with, so every client is (or can be) a server, just as the gods of IP originally intended...

@Gordon Matson Posted Wednesday 28th October 2009 13:47 GMT

> Until convicted of a crime, as opposed to suspected any

> sanctions or punishments can't be legal? Or did Mandy

> change the law when I wasn't looking?

>

What, so companies can't sack people unless they've broken the law? I can't send my kid to bed with no porridge for breakfast if he didn't play nice with his sister? The England selectors can't drop players who are out of form?

That's an extraordinary claim. Where is your extraordinary evidence?

As a long-term martyr to the cause of (don't laugh!)... The Strawbs, it would it would have to be the title song from their 1978 album... "Burning For You".

Or possibly Spiritualized, "Soul on Fire". Or Johnny Cash "Ring of Fire", "(Feeling) Hot! Hot! Hot!" ... or anything by the Friendly Fires...

Grenade, because I'm going to leave a few hundred nicker to bribe the undertaker to shove one up my corpse's arse before screwing down the lid. Always wanted to go out with a bang...

Aren't you getting tired of it yet?

Troll, -1.

Got me thinking this was a story about Alabama 3... http://www.alabama3.co.uk/en/containers/profile/the_band is the only Larry Love ANYONE needs in their heart.

Sweet pretty country acid-house all night long!

CERNites should take a tip from their colleagues at the European Southern Observatory. The largest optical telescopes in the world today have mirrors of around 10m (e.g. the famous Keck telescopes on Hawaii - yes, being American, they had to build two of 'em.) 35-foot mirrors are tricky things to build, due to the accuracies required of the glass-polishers, which are of the order of the wavelength of light.)

Doodling on napkins in Italian restaurants, the photon-bucket brigade chose straight-forward naming conventions for proposals to bust through the 10m barrier. Unfortunately it seems the OWL has too much poke for these cash-starved times, so they've gone for the ELT proposal instead, with a mere 42m aperture.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_optical_reflecting_telescopes#Under_construction_or_planned

So, I'm the only one who thinks speed limits in general are a good idea, rather than a conspiracy to raise funds / annoy drivers / institute a police state.

I've lost two friends in car crashes, one aged 17, the other 26. And none from any other cause. Just one data point, of course, plural of 'anecdote' isn't 'data', and so on and so forth.

Oh wait, I see an AC at 06:03 on the 3rd October has the same attitude as me.

PS yes I've been nicked by GATSOs a couple of times, and guess what, I keep a closer eye on the limit nowadays. To be fair I often go ~10mph faster (except in 30 zones and slower, where the difference is proportionally much greater). Obviously if cameras were to start firing at 1mph over the limit rather than the 10mph as is the case round here, I'd have to slow down a bit more.

GO: implement this scheme. Trauma surgeons will thank you (and transplant surgeons curse, as the number of donorcycle riders giving generously of their non-head-mounted organs drops.

Paging Mr Spigott...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ty68LPKRQQQ

Water ice, probably finely mixed amongst regolith, makes manned lunar exploration easier the way that a coat of paint makes a chocolate fireguard more effective. The statement is technically accurate, but makes no difference whatever to the result.

FAIL because that's what attempts at any but the most token boot-in-the-dust Apollo-like programme of manned exploration (let alone beyond the earth/moon system) will do. And I've £1000 here for a charity of the winner's choice to anyone who'd like to bet that I'm wrong. (Seriously, at longbets.org .)

http://zfoneproject.com/index.html

"Where NASA got it wrong": http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00002083/

Phil Stooke rules OK.

"Top British climate boffins have said that the only practical hope for arresting global warming is the use of "geoengineering" - techniques intended to reduce the effects of CO2 emissions, as opposed to reducing the CO2 emissions themselves."

No, that is exactly what they DID NOT say, very clearly, multiple times.

See for instance the BBC piece ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/-/1/hi/sci/tech/8231387.stm )

"...they also stressed that the potential of geo-engineering should not divert governments away from their efforts to reduce carbon emissions."

I really wish El Reg would stop embarrassing itself by trying to cover climate change, you just make yourselves look stupid pursuing this nutcase agenda.

As the article hints, this area's starting to explode lately. It's almost as if lots of smart experienced tech experts, rather than moan about the state of idiocracy and democratic disconnect, suddenly found themselves with time on their hands after 15 years of working 80 hour weeks...

The granddaddy is http://www.mysociety.org of course, but http://rewiredstate.org looks interesting, too, if a little short of resources right now (judging by the number of "vandalised section, please help!" notes.)

Any chance of a WIN! icon to go with FAIL next time the icons are refreshed?

> I've been told in the fall that because my wife weighs too

> much they are dropping us so I'll have no coverage. I

> am strongly in favor of ANY change!

>

Sorry, but am I the only one thinking the change you need is to trade in your salad-dodger? Paris is looking, I hear

Remember, chaps, you're not supposed to screw up your grand ideals and degnerate to a level lower than the last government until you've been in office for at *least* a term and a half. Going into the campaign with a manifesto loaded with fail puts us straight back in the 60s/70s, when both main parties were widely regarded as completely useless and the choice was between the lesser of two evils.

Andrew, DO fuck off, there's a good chap. You're boring.

What's up with the supposed black-project Aurora thing - is that still (?) taken seriously, or is it strictly a fringe fantasy? Personally, as an armchair fan of shit than goes fast who doesn't spend a lot of time keeping up on such matters, I'd love to believe it's true, even if it's no damn use to man nor beast. Anyone care to comment? Yes, we speak SpaceAlien.

Adobe certainly do have a point, and of course post-production can't and shouldn't be banned. However Titian and the other rennaissance masters were produced far, far more realistic representations of typical female body shapes. It's not hard to contrast any depiction of women from "Déjeuner sur l'herbe" backwards with the typical examples of female beauty presented in the mass media today. And whilst it's true that men's body-images are increasingly getting battered by unrealistic images of rippling, buffed and ripped hunks, the fact remains that anorexia and other eating disorders, and the other forms of self-harm (cutting & burning in particular) are still much more prevalent in women than men (although the rate in men is growing.) Therefore the Lib Dem MP has a point, albeit an entirely unexceptional and unoriginal one, when she points that that mass media representations of women put unrealistic expectations in the minds of many girls and young women, and that there are some horrible and occasionally fatal consequences of that. And that it sucks.

Further reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odalisque

How many people rocking up to cisco.com intending to spend a few million on new high-capacity border routers found the site down, shrugged and said "Well, they must not want my money then! Oh well, better head for Vendor J instead"? None at all? Guess so.

Face it, when cisco.com (or oracle.com, microsoft.com, yadda yadda) goes down for an hour or two, it gives us a chuckle for a minute or two. It certainly doesn't damage the company. Same thing applies to security compromises - whisper it, despite the FUD from all the vendors, very very few companies suffer more than annoyance and inconvenience from a security breach. (The exceptions I'm aware of are CC processors who had their contracts revoked for flouting PCI standards, but consider for example TJX - comprehensively pwned, no damage at all to their reputation or trading status.

Surely, renewable energy is far more expensive than the fossil fuel flavour? And anyway, all this global warming malarkey's a conspiracy amongst tree-huggers, bogus "scientists" and miserablist English winge-rockers to get lots of fat grant money and send us all back to the stone age, right? It must be, because Andrew Orlowski told us so, and of course one random IT hack knows more about it than any number of so-called "climatologists"?