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Dubai’s debt problems drive Asian share prices down sharply.

Frankly, I haven’t been paying attention to this one. This is mainly because I know that Islamic law doesn’t approve of interest rate based banking. I had no idea that Dubai World was trading on ANY exchange.

Tokyo’s benchmark Nikkei fell 3.2% to 9,081.52, its lowest level since July. In Hong Kong, the Hang Seng was down 4.9% at 21,239.5.

Oil prices also fell. US crude dropped 4.5% to $74.51 a barrel and London Brent Crude was down $1.26 to $75.73.

Frankly, I haven’t looked at them.

It said on Wednesday it would ask creditors of the state-owned Dubai World and Nakheel to agree to a standstill on billions of dollars of debt as a first step towards restructuring.

Dubai World, the conglomerate that led the emirate’s expansion, had $59bn (£36bn) of liabilities as of August, a large proportion of Dubai’s total debt of $80bn. Nakheel was the builder of three palm shaped islands off Dubai.

The key words are “State Owned”. A little more investigation has revealed that that the liabilities consist mostly of bonds. What is worrisome is that Dubai also runs a huge Sovereign Fund that invested much into US and UK Banks at bail-out rates. The chain of liabilities could cause those loans to be called back early, before those banks had adequately recovered. It is all a domino game and it could halt, if not reverse, the current recovery.

This is not an issue in Europe but could be a real issue with the US and the UK¹ , who are currently dependent on these Sovereign Funds.

1. No, the UK is not a part of Continental Europe [↩]

All work published here, except those belonging to others, falls under US copyright law and I release no rights to modify. You may release links to my original articles but that is all.

Regardless of what the hypsters are saying, Google Chrome does not represent a new idea but it might challenge Microsoft. Even more at The Register. Yes, it is a paradigm shift … back to the past!

Summary

Those who primarily use their PC as a communications device will probably be well served with Chrome. Considering that those are the same folks that are likely to be oblivious members of a botnet, this is all to the good. Those of us that actually need local applications will stay with Windows, MacOS, or Linux.

Concept Benefits

Most of the benefits I see are for Enterprises. Most workers do not need local applications. In fact, most enterprise applications are better as web based applications. Just two days ago I downloaded and installed the NolaPro accounting package. It is completely free and while I am still evaluating it, it seems to be fairly complete. Instead of a client on every PC, one simply points the web browser to the accounting URL and voila! The best part is that you can have many different people access the same system and they do not have to have a client or pay Intuit Quick-Books seat-license fees. Other examples are webmail, customer databases, and eCommerce B2B applications.

Without the need or utility of installing local applications, the workstations become much more virus and wyrm proof. This will eliminate many security vulnerabilities. The same is true for the home and those home systems running Chrome will stop being members of a botnet or will be less likely to become one.

Concept Limits

What cannot be done on such a device are Word processing, Spreadsheets, and multi-media creation. These three things have always defeated attempts at virtualization simply because of performance requirements¹ .

One example is this article. Even though it is published on the Web and you are reading it via a browser, it is being written with Windows Live Writer. I do this even though there is a very good WSYWIG editor in Wordpress. This is because a compiled local client on my laptop is ever so much more responsive and less clunky. Spreadsheets have this problem in spades! Ajax might help but local clients are still more useful.

These are the sorts of applications that are the strength of the stand-alone PC and remain the strength even when it is connected. It is the sort of local processing that is still needed and what Chrome does not do.

In the case of an Internet outage, like I had yesterday morning² , you are basically screwed. On the other hand, I was merrily working away, completely oblivious to the outage until my father-in-law called to ask me about it .

Technology (Geek-speak here)

One thing that you cannot do with an Operating System like Chrome is software development. You cannot compile and execute local code unless special provisions are made. The only development that can be done is on the server side.

All hype aside, Cloud Computing is nothing more than the old 3270 connected mainframe, reborn. Okay, so it looks prettier and you click on ‘OK’ instead of pressing the Enter, Send, or Clear keys.

They may call it a Data Center instead of a Service Bureau but it is still where the heavy lifting gets done. Instead of an IBM System/360, it is an x86 box running Windows or Linux³ . It is NOT a new paradigm! At least, the costs have come down … for the moment⁴ .

So what does that mean for Google Chrome? It means that it turns a PC into a terminal. Albeit, it is not a simple terminal in the old sense. However, the old Wyse thin client is no worse⁵ . The point is that it is a 30-40 year old concept⁶ for which IBM owns most of the prior art, if not the actual patents. It moves the user interface out to Chrome and away from the server. This leaves the server free for the core application processing but burns massive amounts of bandwidth for communications. Then again, we do have the massive bandwidth available to burn these days .

1. Largely related to system bandwidth v. communication bandwidth [↩]
2. No Internet connectivity from between Nyon and Coppet for 4 hours. [↩]
3. Actually, the performance is better for the x86 box. [↩]
4. Just wait until a significant number of companies go to the cloud and the Data Centers begin to consolidate. Data Center fees are bound to go up then. [↩]
5. why do you think Microsoft licensed Citrix and developed RDP? [↩]
6. APPN/APPC, LU 6.2, CUA/CUI, etc [↩]

All work published here, except those belonging to others, falls under US copyright law and I release no rights to modify. You may release links to my original articles but that is all.

A few days ago, the BBC published some charts itemizing cost of power and energy  in absolute terms.

Their analysis did miss a huge variable namely, the required kilo-watt hectares to implement each energy solution. This could be vastly more important that the cents/kWh that they do publish here.

It is a useful link. I intend to use it for more articles.

All work published here, except those belonging to others, falls under US copyright law and I release no rights to modify. You may release links to my original articles but that is all.

The following videos have one thing in common. They are all evidence of acts of piracy by Eco-terrorists. Through their action, they threaten human lives. Why are they not in jail with their ships impounded?

There are many more but I got tired of looking. Piracy on the high seas used to be a capital offence.

Edit: On air, land, and sea, regardless of the technicalities of the law, it is incumbent on the driver, pilot, captain to avoid collisions that are clearly avoidable. If you are driving and you see that you are going to collide with someone because they are running a red light, it is still up to you to hit your brakes and try and avoid the collision. If not, they can use the theory of contributory negligence. However, the Greenpeace captain was clearly in the wrong in that the collision was clearly avoidable, regardless of the technicality of the sea rules. The over-riding rule is to avoid a collision.

The second video with the Sea Sheppard is even more blatant and under extremely hazardous conditions as well¹ . The Sea Sheppard risked sinking both ships, with attendant loss of life.

1. Freezing water in the Antarctic circle. A man in the water, even in a survival suit, has less than 10 minutes of survivability. [↩]

All work published here, except those belonging to others, falls under US copyright law and I release no rights to modify. You may release links to my original articles but that is all.

Infrastructure¹ that’s what’s missing. Unlike the US, where almost everyone has access to a garage, Europeans, in general mostly live in apartments. This creates a huge problem for electric vehicles which need to be plugged in over-night to charge.

While the UK is trying, the on-street charging scheme is naive because it isn’t adequately protected from vandalism. The problem arises because recharging an electric vehicle  takes hours and not minutes. Pulling up to a charge station and plugging in for 15 min will not charge the car. It is one major advantage for the fueled vehicle; 15 minutes at the pump and you’re off for another 300 miles or so.

There is also the minor accounting issue of who is paying for the power and how you get billed for the correct amount.

All in all, the UK is making some effort that no one else is making, even if they are being dishonest about the real benefits² . It makes me wonder if Brits are generally dishonest people as a culture?³

1. One of these days I’ll bother to figure out how to deep link to BBC videos. [↩]
2. Electric cars only move the CO2 burden to the power plant and that does NOT make it better unless it is a non-polluting source like nuclear. This is counter to claims made that electric cars will reduce UK carbon footprint. [↩]
3. Not to worry, that was a joke. Americans are only slightly less gullible. [↩]

All work published here, except those belonging to others, falls under US copyright law and I release no rights to modify. You may release links to my original articles but that is all.

SG just sent me a link about the greenhouse effect. In this link I relearned the principles of adiabatic atmosphere . Mainly, the Devil’s Kitchen article summarizes that in the Counting cats in Zanzibar article.

Heat is not trapped by absorption by CO2. That is Wrong, Wrong, Wrong! Such trapping does go on, but it has no long-term effect on the temperature because the adiabatic lapse rate has overriding control. You can even theoretically get a greenhouse effect with no greenhouse gases at all! All you need is some high altitude cloud to radiate heat to space.

I may beg forgiveness on the grounds that it has been over 40 years since I was first taught this. That Sea level temperatures are dependent exclusively on atmospheric pressure and that the interglacial warm periods were brought about by an increase in atmospheric density, which raises the adiabatic pressure and therefore the temperature.

I agreed with one of the commenter’s posts there.

And truth to be told, we don’t really know all that well.” No, no, no. Truth be told, we don’t have a bloody clue. I spent a good deal of time over forty years writing mathematical models of physico-chemical phenomena, and supervising their writing, and based on that experience I judge that climate interactions are probably so intricate, and our knowledge of the individual ones is certainly so poor, that it’s just silly to put much weight on the climate model outputs. The problems are probably too taxing even for good scientists to crack soon, and Climate Scientists are, to generalise a bit, not even close to being good scientists. Inept duds might be nearer the mark.

Finally, I leave you with a link to a PDF that challenges the concept of global warming itself.¹

It is going to be both interesting and telling if anything like these arguments are going to be allowed by the organizers of the Copenhagen Conference on Global Warming.

1. I do not agree with the extreme point of that view. We are clearly in a global warming trend and have been for 12,000 years. I simply state that we do not control it nor do we have any hope of controlling it. [↩]

All work published here, except those belonging to others, falls under US copyright law and I release no rights to modify. You may release links to my original articles but that is all.

After some testing, I found that I can better the battery life by a few hours. The trick is to dim the backlight and refrain from wireless usage.

Wireless usage hmm … almost useless?

WiFi:

1. No Active Directory support so the device cannot access local server shares¹ .
2. Almost every website, including my own, uses fixed width at 1024 pix. That is much too wide for this bitty screen, even in landscape mode.
3. Windows update doesn’t work.

Bluetooth:

1. Laptop Bluetooth drivers are FUBAR
2. Even when it worked, I was still better off connected via cable because of the battery issues; It can also pick up a smidge of an extra charge.
3. My Motorola K1t phone has a crippled Bluetooth capability² and cannot participate in a PAN (Personal Area Network).

So with the radios disabled and backlight at minimum, I can get almost 8 hours from the bats.

That still means that twice daily sync, via cable, is a requirement. Actually, as soon as I sit by the laptop, I plug the damned thing in for both a sync and a charge. Then again, that is not any worse than I was doing with the Palm TX before it quit syncing. All in all, I am satisfied. Bluetooth sync would be nice but I still need to recharge the PDA. Even with the 4,000 mahr battery pack, plugging it in at night is still recommended.

1. It was a good test of internal security though [↩]
2. I will never buy Motorola phones again! [↩]

All work published here, except those belonging to others, falls under US copyright law and I release no rights to modify. You may release links to my original articles but that is all.

I have to admit that John Batchelor has a point. The Republican Party is in its last days, presided over by Palin and Company.

The most melodramatic turn in the fairy tale of “conservative financial expert” Doug Hoffman rising up on the shoulders of Republican celebrities such as Fred Thompson, Steve Forbes, and Dick Armey to contest the special election in the 23rd New York Congressional district against the regular Republican incumbent is that this is not a simple story about winning on Tuesday. No, this is a story about the sneaky takeover of the shabby GOP remnant by the most arrogant creatures in American politics, the Club for Growth and their fair-weather companions, the hungry Republican zombies.

It’s not just John Batchelor, Palin has been doing her share.

The transformation of the Republican Party by the rise of conservative, evangelical, and Southern movements disables the Republicans from grooming a new generation of female candidates.

Of course it is really sad to see this

Former Republican congressional candidate Dede Scozzafava cried real tears Saturday as she conceded the right-wingers had pushed her out of her race. Even though her local party had picked her to run in Tuesday’s election for the upstate New York seat vacated by the new secretary of the Army, John McHugh, her support for abortion and gay marriage made her too liberal for the new national party. Insurgent Republicans, led by Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck, mounted a candidate on the conservative line, and fought Scozzafava so effectively that she turned tail and ran. She then endorsed the Democrat.

My fellow Republicans, if you really want to become marginalized, chase out the centrists. All that will be left with are the Religious Right nutjobs that comprise less than 30% of American voters. The Religious Right are 40% of the Party but they are ONLY 40% of the party and that is less than 30% of Americans.

While the road to hell is paved with good intentions, the road to obscurity is paved with extremism. The GOP lost me on the last election¹ because of this extremist crap. They are now well on the way towards losing the rest of us.

As much as the Religious Right loses me on the Republican side, the Socialist Left repels me on the Democrat side. To my mind, they are flip sides of a coin that I want nothing to do with. Do we start an American Constitutional Centrist party?

1. I backed Obama along with Powell [↩]

All work published here, except those belonging to others, falls under US copyright law and I release no rights to modify. You may release links to my original articles but that is all.

I don’t think so! Running nude through a crowd, in my day known as streaking, is not by any stretch a sex crime.

A charge of indecent exposure could have led to participants being registered as sexual offenders.

People may have been concerned over the Nude Pumpkin run but making it a sex crime is completely beyond the pale. It is no worse than streaking and why is indecent exposure a crime in the first place?

The fall of America is passed and the land of the free isn’t.

But that’s the point behind the run, isn’t it?

All work published here, except those belonging to others, falls under US copyright law and I release no rights to modify. You may release links to my original articles but that is all.

In a huge effort to combat file sharing in the UK, the UK gov is really creating a cesspool of civil rights issues.

The biz secretary confirmed today that proposals on unlawful file sharing, outlined in the government’s Digital Britain consultation paper in June, would form the basis of measures in the upcoming Digital Economy Bill in late November

My question is; why can they not bring this sort of effort against spammers?

All work published here, except those belonging to others, falls under US copyright law and I release no rights to modify. You may release links to my original articles but that is all.

Palm TX v. iPAQ 110 Classic

Palm TX	iPAQ 110 Classic
Palm OS Garnet	Windows Mobile 6.1

The pictures are close to relative scale in that the TX is slightly larger, with a larger and better screen. While browsing available forums I read much wailing and gnashing of teeth by TX owners having to switch for almost all the same reasons that I did; the Palm TX is now an orphan¹ . While it worked, it was great and basically set the standard of PDA functionality. However, Hotsync and Vista do not play well together. Actually, the fault is Vista and exacerbated by Palm’s inept failure to support.

This is worth a few words in the context of the new Palm Pre; Do NOT buy one! Palm is an inept organization that has absolutely NO loyalty to its customer base. The Pre, like the TX uses Palm’s proprietary OS, albeit a new one. When Palm stops supporting it’s OS, like they did the Palm OS, your expensive smart phone will quickly become an expensive paperweight. It takes continuous effort to keep up with M$’s fluid standards and Palm has a ten year proven track record of failing to make the required investment in software development and support. They even went so far as to spin the Palm OS off into a separate company so that they would not have to support it² .

This getting dangerously close to becoming an anti-Palm rant so I won’t go further in that direction.

Functionality

Palm OS is not a multi-tasking OS. When you switch to another application, the previous application is halted with its state saved until it gets called back into the foreground. Yes, that’s Computer Science Tech talk. What that boils down to is that unless you are actually doing something in the foreground thread the Palm’s processor is completely halted. This is why Palm battery life is in terms of weeks. My Palm TX has gone as long as six weeks without a recharge³ . But the more you use it, the shorter its battery charge will last. This also why I never ran multimedia applications on it. The built-in MP3 player cuts battery life down to days but still far longer than the iPAQ’s few hours. This also applies to the TX’s Bluetooth and WiFi radios.

Windows Mobile 6.1 (WM6.1, from now on) is a real multi-tasking OS. One key indicator of this is that the iPAQ automatically detects the presence of its Host⁴ and runs a continuous sync, whether it is via Bluetooth or the USB cable. The TX has to explicitly run a Hotsync session and once done, will not run another until you explicitly tell it to again. The impact on battery life is enormous⁵ . But the trade-off is some really cool potential for the iPAQ⁶ . For one thing, I can record a meeting on the built-in voice recorder while taking notes at the same time.

Oh yes, stroke recognition is much better on the iPAQ whereas the Palm TX only recognizes Graffiti ™.

So far …

All in all, I like it. I am already up to the day-timer/planner functionality I am used to with the Palm TX (even reading eBooks) and I am looking into List managers and Project planners.

More later …

1. No longer supported by Palm or anyone else. [↩]
2. One of the dumbest moves possible [↩]
3. My Palm III typically went three months on a set of batteries. [↩]
4. My HP Pavilion DV6505ez laptop. [↩]
5. 4-6 hours max autonomy [↩]
6. It comes with a 1200 mAhr battery and I have seen 4000 mAhr expansion packs for it, which takes autonomy out to about 15 hours. I also have a rechargeable Nickel Metal Hydride (NMH) battery pack that can quickly field charge any micro-USB device from 4 AA or AAA NMH batteries. A trick not possible with the TX. Neither can the TX charge from my laptop USB outlets where both my phone and the iPAQ can. [↩]

All work published here, except those belonging to others, falls under US copyright law and I release no rights to modify. You may release links to my original articles but that is all.

It is truly unbelievable as to how many times I’ve run into this. I got it from this guy. He hasn’t the time-in-grade I’ve got. I’ve actually experienced this with more than one client, including Northrup-Grumman (Who has actually managed to stick me like this twice) .

The gal at the hair dresser presented most of the arguments that I’ve heard but the final, at the restaurant,

Show us how you made it so that we can do this on our own …

That’s classic …

All work published here, except those belonging to others, falls under US copyright law and I release no rights to modify. You may release links to my original articles but that is all.

SG used her award points to get me a replacement for my now unusable Palm TX. It’s an HP iPAQ 110, running Windows Mobile 6.1.

Just a little smaller than the TX, it still has a usable screen. It connects via USB, WiFi, and Bluetooth. More importantly, it can synchronize with Outlook 2007 on Vista Ultimate. This is something that my Palm TX stopped being able to do about a year ago and Palm wasn’t able to fix it before they ‘End-of-life’ed the Palm TX product line and everything associated with the Palm OS¹.

So far, I’ve been able to get it to do what I want, with a bit of tinkering. While the Palm had a number of problems, it was a very good daily planner/organizer. This is one thing thing that Mickeysoft Look Out still hasn’t learned to do well² .

This thing runs WinMob6 and that has basically been tweaked to be a Smartphone OS. … Hello people! Wake up! a Smartphone is NOT a PDA! Convergence is fine but folks haven’t yet figured out that the usage is way different. Jobs has it right and the iPhone makes a really lousy PDA³ . The problem is that M$ hasn’t really figured that out yet.

M$ keeps wanting me to use Windows Live. That’s basically a cloud computing thingy that Microsoft has been pushing recently. What happens when I am behind a client’s firewall and their policies will not allow me WiFi access? Okay, I could use the Bluetooth cell-phone connection and HSDPA access to the internet but at what cost?⁴ .

I’ll post more as I work my way through this .

1. This is particularly aggravating for me as I’ve been a Palm user since the original Palm. But, everyone is going Smartphone crazy, Palm being one of them. [↩]
2. Why do I have to make a separate entry to get a deadline start mark on the Task list? Yes, I want automatic milestones! [↩]
3. as SG’s boss found out the hard way. [↩]
4. Trust me Swisscom is very expensive there and we haven’t mentioned roaming charges for when I am abroad, which takes about a half-hour drive to either France or Germany. [↩]

All work published here, except those belonging to others, falls under US copyright law and I release no rights to modify. You may release links to my original articles but that is all.

I have never heard of a cat having a comfort toy before, until we got Zhinn.

Yes, he is also getting larger (5.8Kg). We should have paid attention to the size of his paws when he moved in.

This is actually the second Mousie. The first one got lost and Zhinn was disconsolate until we got a replacement. Now, it is always on or around our bed and Zhinn guards it with fervor. Neither does he play with it too hard. He has other bat-toys which he plays with mercilessly but not Mousie.

All work published here, except those belonging to others, falls under US copyright law and I release no rights to modify. You may release links to my original articles but that is all.

That is much more honest than claiming it is ‘free’ when WiFi becomes available on trains in Scotland. Actually, it isn’t too bad an idea except that most journeys are less than 1/2 hour long.

The SFF here (Swiss train system) has been mulling over the idea for quite some time and they are even putting in a part of the infrastructure. However, it will be far from ‘free’ since the cost will be built into the price of the trains ticket (As it will no doubt be for the Scots). They are saying that it will not raise the train fare even one centime.

SG and I are heavy train users as we do not even own a car. Less than 25% of Swiss electricity comes from fossil fuels.

Hydropower plants contributed 52.4% to Switzerland’s overall electricity production, followed by nuclear power plants (42.2%) and conventional thermal and other power plants (5.4%).

But getting back to WiFi, it will be a good thing to make WiFi available on the trains but most commuters have too short a ride to take proper advantage of it. Those with longer commutes¹ will enjoy it only if they ride the less compacted first class cars, as the second class cars resemble more closely the sardine can with no room to deploy a laptop² .

1. i.e. from Lausanne to Geneva [↩]
2. Still, at least a PDA may be deployed usefully. [↩]

All work published here, except those belonging to others, falls under US copyright law and I release no rights to modify. You may release links to my original articles but that is all.

I originally posted this here.

We actually don’t need to spend money to fix this. A real 4-point plan should look like this:

1. Get employers out of the health business and eliminate self-insurance. This will make Health Insurance portable from employer to employer. It will also end one of the biggest tax scams going.
2. Require every insurer to accept any paying client, with no exceptions for pre-existing conditions.
3. Institute price and performance regulations for the insurers and place regulatory caps on annual profits.
4. Make illegal any pre-existing conditions clauses on existing contracts.

This actually should cost less than the current healthcare proposals and insure everyone.

All work published here, except those belonging to others, falls under US copyright law and I release no rights to modify. You may release links to my original articles but that is all.

as now given in footers that they now add to every post. I now feel the need to make my own disclaimers. Since I am the legitimate content creator, my rights over-ride theirs.

Disclaimers

1. I write for grownup adults. If parents allow their brats unrestricted access to the Internet then that is not my problem and I refuse to write for kiddies. The Internet has always been for adults. Kids¹ really do not belong on it. Any complaints should be directed to my ISP. Oh wait, I am my own ISP. Then  talk to my hosting provider; hmm, I am self hosted. I guess that means that you are SOL² then.
2. Since my LiveJournal posts are fed from my Wordpress Blog, talking to Livejournal staff and management will not help you either .
3. The evidence I provide as links to other sites, are links to other sites. I do not control their content and I refuse all liability for them. Go see those authors if you don’t like their content.
4. I present the truth as I see it and to the best of my knowledge and ability to discern. I may well be wrong. As with every other pundit on this planet, I don’t usually think I am when I write it.
5. Photos that I post are not guaranteed to be work-safe. They may include naked cats and other indecencies. Your standards of decency may not agree with mine. I post what I post and if you don’t like it, lump it.
6. I reserve the right to edit and rewrite any article that I have ever written, in perpetuity.
7. I also reserve the right to change my mind or even replace it.
8. All my works, either in image or print, in any media, remains my work and no one else’s.
9. All work published here, except those belonging to others, falls under US copyright law and I release no rights to modify. You may release links to my original articles but that is all.
10. Only those posts originating on the Slamlander website are legitimate posts All my Livejournal posts originate from there through a crosspost feed that I provide.

1. including the childishly naive. [↩]
2. Shit out of luck! [↩]

All work published here, except those belonging to others, falls under US copyright law and I release no rights to modify. You may release links to my original articles but that is all.

It seems that the 450ppm levels batted around political circles today are problematic; they aren’t low enough.

The new research was able to look back to the Miocene period, which began a little over 20 million years ago.

At the start of the period, carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere stood at about 400 parts per million (ppm) before beginning to decline about 14 million years ago – a trend that eventually led to formation of the Antarctic icecap and perennial sea ice cover in the Arctic.

The high concentrations were probably sustained by prolonged volcanic activity in what is now the Columbia River basin of North America, where rock formations called flood basalts relate a history of molten rock flowing routinely onto the planet’s surface.

In the intervening millennia, CO2 concentrations have been much lower; in the last few million years they cycled between 180ppm and 280ppm in rhythm with the sequence of ice ages and warmer interglacial periods.

Note carefully the link between volcanism and Ice Ages. It’s a cinch that human civilization wasn’t around back then so It had to be nature.

Now, humanity’s emissions of greenhouse gases are pushing towards the 400ppm range, which will very likely be reached within a decade.

Here is where they make the typical leap and accuse our civilization of the rise in CO2. They ignore the huge rise in volcanism in this century. Our emission of GHGs are nothing compared to volcanism.

"What we have shown is that in the last period when CO2 levels were sustained at levels close to where they are today, there was no icecap on Antarctica and sea levels were 25-40m higher," said research leader Aradhna Tripati from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA).

There are two problems with this statement: 1) 20M years ago, Antarctica wasn’t where it is today¹ and 2) Best estimates I have heard, if all the ice in the world melts, is a 10-15 meter rise in sea levels.

At the Rio Earth Summit of 1992, governments pledged to stabilise greenhouse gas concentrations "at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system".

What that level is has been the subject of intense debate down the years; but one figure currently receiving a lot of support is 450ppm.

That’s all fine and dandy but it assumes that we humans generate ALL the GHGs found in nature and that simply isn’t so. A majority of the volcanoes on the planet are currently erupting on a steady basis. When was the last time anyone claimed that they could stop a volcano from erupting?

We could eliminate all anthropogenic CO2 sources and still be in the shit. Worse, we would not have a technical civilization left that is capable of saving us. The seas would rise and we would lack the resources to move out of the way.

The Earth will warm or not as nature wills. It is our job to adapt or die. Thinking that we can stop global warming is choosing to die. Getting our civilization out of the flood plains is choosing to live.

1. It was much further north … tectonic plate theory [↩]

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The BBC has finally gotten honest about the evidence regarding man-caused global warming. The facts simply do not support the preposition.

For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.

And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.

Duh! I’ve said it time and again the primary cause of GHGs is volcanism and that has been true for billions of years. Were our climate that susceptible to CO2 then it would be much more variable than it is. One volcano eclipses our total civilization’s CO2 output by many orders of magnitude¹ . No butterfly’s wings are that strong and in fact, the butterfly theory is itself unproven² .

Climate change skeptics, who passionately and consistently argue that man’s influence on our climate is overstated, say they saw it coming.

I and many others have always argued that the sun is the root cause of climate change. It is a variable star after all. After that, it is volcanism and there is some argument to be made that they can be linked. Those that argue anthropogenic generation of CO2 always ignore volcanism as a leading cause of CO2. I submit that you need both elevated levels of CO2 and increased solar activity.

During the last few decades of the 20th Century, our planet did warm quickly.

But it is completely eclipsed by the warming experienced since 12,000 years ago. Sea levels rose about 400 feet since then. The warming trend that we have seen recently was only a continuation of the last 12,000 years.

After all 98% of the Earth’s warmth comes from the Sun.

But research conducted two years ago, and published by the Royal Society, seemed to rule out solar influences.

The scientists’ main approach was simple: to look at solar output and cosmic ray intensity over the last 30-40 years, and compare those trends with the graph for global average surface temperature.

But they failed to account for one thing … Thermal Inertia. Take the heat off a boiling pot and it doesn’t cool down immediately. In fact, its temperature may even continue to rise for a bit. It takes some time for the heat to escape. For the earth it induces a multi-decade year lag.

But one solar scientist Piers Corbyn from Weatheraction, a company specializing in long range weather forecasting, disagrees.

He claims that solar charged particles impact us far more than is currently accepted, so much so he says that they are almost entirely responsible for what happens to global temperatures.

He is scheduled to deliver his paper at the end of the month an I, for one, am looking forward to it.

One thing is for sure. It seems the debate about what is causing global warming is far from over. Indeed some would say it is hotting up³.

Yes, the debate is far from over as we learn more of the truth. We also need to cover other inconvenient facts such as; There were many periods during deep global ice ages where CO2 levels were higher than they are today and yet those Ice Ages persisted. In scientific terms, that knocks the entire CO2 causation theory flat and this is without having to disprove anthropogenesis⁴ .

Those who called for the Kyoto accords had acknowledged at the time that the evidence wasn’t really there for anthropogenic global warming and that it was only strongly suspected. In the years since, that simple fact seems to have gotten lost. Even many of the scientists, like Professor Latif⁵, need to stop blaming mankind and start looking for the real culprit. It certainly isn’t us because we haven’t been around long enough.

1. The actual relationship of anthropogenic GHGs to volcanic emitted GHGs is on the order of 1:1000; Yes, that’s four orders of magnitude, note the number of zeros. [↩]
2. Like using Fibonacci series to predict stock market behavior. Sometimes it works but mostly it doesn’t. [↩]
3. This is a British-ism that is growing in use and  increasingly annoying me; it is not ‘hotting up’ the correct term is ‘heating up’ and this guy is supposed to be an educated writer! [↩]
4. A fancy scientific sounding way of saying ‘human causation’. [↩]
5. Whose models are seriously flawed in many important ways [↩]

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Yet another article where the BBC gets it wrong. While the SVP is not my most favored party, they have a fine point here. Minarets are not just a quaint architectural feature of a mosque. They are intended for a mullah/Imam to got up to preach their sermon to the ENTIRE town, even if they aren’t Muslim. It was only a few years ago when a similar measure was proposed to prohibit the ringing of church bells on Sunday. This is the same thing. One cannot have minarets and then not allow mullahs to preach to the town.

Switzerland is home to some 300,000 Muslims, who make up about 4% of the population.

This is to prevent the 96% of the rest of us from having to put up with the wailing mullahs. If the Muslims want to hear it then the simply have to actually go to their mosque. The rest of us shouldn’t be forced to deal with it. Ergo, ban the minarets.

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In an article about a huge controversy The BBC describes it but never produces the substance. The Czech leader wants a footnote on the new EU charter but nowhere does the BBC actually say what the content of that footnote is to be, not even the nature of it!

The new condition came up during a phone conversation between Mr Klaus and Swedish PM Fredrik Reinfeldt, current holder of the EU presidency.

Mr Reinfeldt said the requested footnote was linked to the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights.

One would think that on something this important, the text would at least be mentioned.

The treaty has a reference to the Charter of Fundamental Rights, which covers a wide range of EU citizens’ rights. The charter will become legally binding once Lisbon enters into force, although the UK has an opt-out¹ from it.

One hopes that eventually the BBC hires writers that can actually write articles that have a point.

PS. Yes I’m back.

1. This means that the UK doesn’t care, right? [↩]

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Evony is a massively multiplayer version of Age of Empires combined with elements of Civilization. It is a Player-verses-Player game. One can login and play as an individual or one can join an alliance of other players. While the former is allowed, the latter is considered the wiser move.

The problem with it is that it doesn’t stop. This is one of my problems with these sorts of games and a problem with Player v. Player  games in general. You can spend massive amounts of time building cities and resources only to have some brat pinch it all off you while you are getting some sleep or working on other needful things.

The game itself is bug-ridden and, written in Flash, consumes massive amounts of computer resources. More importantly, it has been consuming massive amounts of my attention for the past month. Fortunately, it has only managed to consume 30USD of my money. If you are getting the point that the game is greedy then you get the idea.

My problem is that I have a book to review and publish, another that needs to be pushed forward, and yet another that needs to be completed. Were that not enough, I have to improve my French and solicit clients in the Genève-Lausanne corridor. Time and attention for all this is what the game has been consuming and I really can’t afford that.

Needless to say, my wife has been increasingly concerned over my involvement in Evony, to the detriment from my other activities.

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Botnets: The Killer App

botnets – the killer web app (2007)

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1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen ()
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien (X)
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte ()
4 Harry Potter Series – JK Rowling (X)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee (X)
6 The Bible () – The Jewish version, except the parts in Aramaic.
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte (X)
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell (X)
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman ()
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens (X)
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott ()
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy ()
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller (X)
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (X)
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier ()
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien (X)
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk ()
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger ()
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger ( )
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot ()
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell (X)
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald (X)
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens ()
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy (X)
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams (X)
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky () – Mostly high school punishment.
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck (X)
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll (X)
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame (X)
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy (X)
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens (X)
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis (X)
34 Emma – Jane Austen ()
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen ()
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis (X)
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini ()
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres ()
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden (X)
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne ()
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell (X)
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown (X)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez ()
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving ()
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins ()
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery (X)
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy (X)
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood ()
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding (X)
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan ()
Total so far: 04/50
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel ()
52 Dune – Frank Herbert (X)
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons ()
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen (X)
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth ()
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon ()
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens (X)
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley (X)
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime – Mark Haddon ()
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez ()
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck (X)
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov (X)
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt ()
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold ()
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas (X)
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac (X)
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy ()
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding ()
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie ()
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville (X)
Total so far: 05/70
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens (X)
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker (X)
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett ()
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson ()
75 Ulysses – James Joyce (X)
76 The Inferno – Dante Alighieri (X)
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome ()
78 Germinal – Emile Zola (X)
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray (X)
80 Possession – AS Byatt ()
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens (X)
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell ()
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker (X)
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro ()
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert (X)
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry ()
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White (X)
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom (X)
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (X)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton ()
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad ()
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery (X)
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks ()
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams (X)
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole (X)
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute ()
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas (X)
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare (X)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl ()
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo (X)

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It is called The Daily Beast. I have been watching it for some time and have even commented there. The debate is lively and many are actually informed. I will be linking to quite a few of their articles in the future, mostly under polyticks and econ.

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Gary McKinnon is heading for a potential 70 year, all expanses paid, vacation in the US. I had my issues with this but many of my reservations have since been answered. It appears that there is an extradition treaty that requires Probable Cause to be proven. Such probable cause has indeed been proven, even without the scum’s confession.

Speaking outside the High Court, his mother, Janis Sharp, said her son had been "naive enough to admit to computer misuse without having a lawyer and without one being present".

"We are heartbroken. If the law says it’s fair to destroy someone’s life in this way then it’s a bad law."

So Janis, you are advocating that your son lie to the courts? Actually, this sort of shows where your scum got his world view from and you should be facing charges along with him. You certainly didn’t do any sort of decent job teaching him either civilized behavior or rational thinking.

His lawyers say the authorities have not given proper consideration to his Asperger’s Syndrome, which could have "disastrous consequences," including suicide, if he was to be extradited.

Like Asperger’s is the new equivalent of non compos mentis? If the courts buy into this then they prove themselves non compos mentis and the UK will once more live down to my expectations.

If he gets the full 70 years then he’ll die in jail and his mental health won’t become a public problem. The twit knew exactly what he was doing when he did it. He cracked into systems that weren’t his and even caused some systems crashes during a sensitive time. He had never learnt the most basic of modern civilized behavior; Even if the front door is wide open, if it is not your house AND you don’t have an invitation: KEEP OUT!

All work published here, except those belonging to others, falls under US copyright law and I release no rights to modify. You may release links to my original articles but that is all.

I had quite a few requests for pix of Zhinn with his eyes open. The problem is that the only time he sits still is when he closes his eyes.

He was very interested in the camera for this one

Here I’m trying to get his attention

Damn, I got it. Had to extract may hand before [it became] the blood sacrifice though.

Five tries later, I got this one.

Sheer luck landed me this pose.

and then this one, once he settled back down.

I learned something about Zhinn from this session, he is more lively than a ferret. When he slows or stops, he goes half-lidded and pops them back open to get around again.

Oh well, I hope this post isn’t too long.

Side note: Note that I am not using Flicker for these. I get much better results inserting them directly into Wordpress though LiveWriter, which means that the images are sourced on my server.

All work published here, except those belonging to others, falls under US copyright law and I release no rights to modify. You may release links to my original articles but that is all.

All work published here, except those belonging to others, falls under US copyright law and I release no rights to modify. You may release links to my original articles but that is all.

It seems that there is an issue betwixt LiveWriter and Flicker. Oh well, the images are on ‘Images of Zhinn’

All work published here, except those belonging to others, falls under US copyright law and I release no rights to modify. You may release links to my original articles but that is all.