Posts by Ash 42 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Aug 2007
"ICO is an independent body, and it would not be appropriate for the Government to second guess its decisions."
*forehead slap* fucking LOL the hypocrisy is truly astounding! As if the government has any respect for independent bodies... witness Jacqui Smith completely ignoring the conclusions from the ACMD's report on drug harm: -
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/05/07/cannabis_upgraded/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/11/ecstasy_upgraded/
The sea is still massive and it's impressive coincidence they collided.
My guess would be that both captains happened to choose the same lat/long course as a whole number.
Ie humans are more likely to pick 52N / 33W than 52.1432N / 33.2542W as a destination... so both subs end up in exactly the same spot... if you catch my drift.
Wacky Jacqui is full on frothing at the mouth insane. I have no idea where she can justify spending these amounts of money, instead of actually spending it usefully on methods that may actually reduce crime such as, well I don't know... um more police officers?
Even if it goes ahead civil disobediance will kill the ID Card. People with principles, including myself, will refuse to carry the wretched things.
Surely the point of ideas like this (energy storage during peak output from renewables for use during low output) is that they work in tandem with other energy storage ideas (electric car batteries etc) to provide just PART of an overall solution. Arguing that this idea can't completely solve the problem is ridiculous.
Another article with the typical El reg editorial slant. It's hypocritical that they rubbish other media for having bias (rightly) whilst at the same time blatantly pushing their own anti-anything-green opinions, to the expense of decent and objective scientific analysis.
This makes me laugh. It's likely the American's have been using their signals intelligence to spy on foreign corporations and give their own companies a competitive edge for years. The same is bound to be true of government level spying, it's not like the American's would tolerate having no intelligence on the rising world power.
But of course it's a different matter when the glove is on the other hand.
It's obvious to me, economically and socially that having three million people smoke weed, and it being illegal and untaxed, is a batshit insane situation. The criminalisation of these people, who morally have done nothing wrong, is in IMO a disgusting insult, and greatly undermines respect in the rule of law and the decency of government.
Legalise and tax it, smoke a spliff, put on some good music and enjoy yourselves.
I get the feeling The Register is losing its way on its reporting of green issues. Let's see, skepticism is good and exposing fallacies in a lot of the gumph we seen been talked in the climate debate is excellent.
Recent articles however, including this one, seem only to exist to push an 'anti-green' policy. I don't want agenda's shoved down my throat, I want reasoned scientific examination of the complex issues involved. Stop taking individual sentences out of entire articles and completely ignoring the context they were written in, anyone can argue any old shit with that method.
So, how can we corrupt the data so that the database is unusable? What technologies can we employ to avoid detection? This is something that us geeks are in the ideal position to counter.
A few thousand people running webspiders that trawl through search results for 'jihad' 'bomb' etc should create enough false positives that any data mining becomes a lot more difficult.
Widespread use of encryption and offshore proxies?
If this crazy database that we cant afford goes through, I will do my best to fuck it up.
If I don't post on El Reg again, you know that i'm hooded and shackled in some government torture chamber.
I have built a small linux server (xubuntu based) from this solution and it works fine. It does exactly what I need without complaint and drawing a lot lot less power than leaving my main machine on.
Why haven't you discussed power usage at all? I was actually very disappointed with the whole power usage. Whats the use of having a cpu that draws 4watts when you stick it on a motherboard with a Northbridge that draws 20watts plus.
The fan on the northbridge made a fair bit of noise for me so I purchased a passive northbridge cooler to make it a silent solution, £5 well spent.
Checklist for next iteration
- Better overall chipset power usage
- 10/100/1000 network (not just 10/100)
- Passive cooled
Performance which this article focused so heavily on isn't an issue for my intended usage.
Ignoring el regs blatant 'push anything green sceptical' editorial slant this was a very interesting article.
It seems to me that a combination of nuclear, and wind power (with distributed storage) will be the most practical solution to our current oil dependence. It will be interesting to see if we have enough time to make the changes in our infrastructure before our pipelines get turned off though... the government will procrastinate and avoid any unpopular (but necessary) decisions of course. Up shit creek etc.
One thing in the article seemed blatantly wrong however. Assuming that having a warm house and hygeine cleanliness etc has to take up current levels of energy use. A few simple changes in improved housing insulation, micro generation of hot water from solar-thermal, low energy lightbulbs, cycling to work on nice days etc could markedly reduce energy usage in these basic areas. Individuals CAN make a difference.
The reason they have gone for the laptop 1.6ghz atom is because the chipset for the 230 has the power hungry and heat producing northbridge on board, whereas the chipset for the N270 consumes a lot less power.
The few watts they save on the CPU is irrelevant compared to the optimised chipset.
IMHO, The forces should be totally restyled into two branches 1) purely rapid response peacekeeping force 2) defence/deterrent
These uber-expensive nimrod style projects are just enormous pointless cash cows to prop up a sickly defense industry. There are far more important things the money should be spent on, such as education and healthcare.
Totally agreed Chris... 'just that bit easier' has the subtext 'but still be very very afraid people, sleep with one eye open'.
I'm sick of this culture of fear... its bloody ridiculous. I know BAE etc have to find people to sell their weapons to, and lots of deathboffins at Qinetiq need to be kept busy inventing interesting ways to dismember people, but leave my sleep out of this!
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