* Posts by Adam Nealis

142 posts • joined 8 Apr 2007


ProtonMail deletes 'we don't log your IP' boast from website after French climate activist reportedly arrested

Adam Nealis

I've posted a couple of questions on the protonmail subreddit about what happens if they get a court order.

There is never an official reply. Of course, I am just a non-entity, not worth replying to.

Brits unveil 'revolutionary' hydrogen-powered car

Adam Nealis

Sinclair C6?

Looks like a cheap and nasty version of the cars in the Gerry Anderson "UFO" TV series.

ISPs 'blindsided' by UK.gov's 'emergency' data retention and investigation powers law

Adam Nealis

Re: Nick Clegg = Idiot

Nick Clegg = Someone who does not give a shit.

DON'T PANIC: Facebook returns after 30-minute outage terror

Adam Nealis


0.8% is a plummet?

Got that in football fields or swimming pools?

Microsoft challenges US gov over attempts to search overseas data

Adam Nealis

"Amazing what you can do when your revenue stream is threatened"

Indeed. M$ finally grow a a pair.

Be interesting to see who really has the best lawyers.

Piketty thinks the 1% should cough up 80%. Discuss

Adam Nealis

Re: That assumes continuation of state education and the NHS

I disagree.

The article claims that one should include the effects of welfare spending on the wealth of an individual.

It's just a few more terms to add to the equation.

Should any of state pension, NHS, state education, etc. be reduced or fall to zero, then the contributions due to state pension, NHS, state education, etc. also fall. The effect is to simply reduce the total wealth.

Tech that we want (but they never seem to give us)

Adam Nealis

Re: The females in the house have this request:

Boys should sit to pee just like girls.

My wife trained me to do it when she had a hyper-sensitive nose while pregnant. It's much less messy.

Adam Nealis

Better FAX machines.

Why not a FAX machine that knows how to connect to the outside world, instead of trying to guess whether you have to dial a leading zero (or whatever) first?


Adam Nealis

Bandwidth or quantity?



Those numbers are not bandwidth.

Indestructible Death Stars blow up planets with glowing KILL RAY

Adam Nealis




Adam Nealis

Palemoon Portable is also an option

For those with no admin rights.

MtGox takes heat as reasons for Bitcoin FAIL surface

Adam Nealis

Re: Not MtGox's fault


MtGox fail to properly verify a given transaction.

MtGox fail.

Bill Gates to pull a Steve Jobs and SAVE MICROSOFT – report

Adam Nealis

"Gates is known as one of the pioneers of the PC era."


I can't shake off the idea that Gates is overrated. He seems to get max respect from other suits, not tech. types.

Adam Nealis

Re: I don't understand

I saw the same thing. THis is how I put it:

"But the idea that Gates would use his newfound free time to meddle with Microsoft's products might not sit well with those who argue that the software giant has remained mired in the past since Gates resigned as CEO in 2000."

Doesn't make sense. If MS was worse since he left, then wouldn't they think it would be better if he did meddle?

Microsoft: You've got it all WRONG. It's Apple's iPad playing catch-up with our Surface

Adam Nealis

And some sour grapes too.

"The post was titled "Apples and oranges", but he should probably have squeezed a bit of lemon in there too."

And some sour grapes too.

Adam Nealis

Re: I like him,

Just what I was thining, and there was your comment already there...

Microsoft's $7.1bn Nokia gobble: Why you should expect the unexpected

Adam Nealis

$ 7,100,000,000 at $ 40 per phone is

only 177,500,000 phones to sell to get their money back.

How long will that take?

Obama cancels meeting Putin in Russia, says Snowden 'a factor'

Adam Nealis

Cut 'em off, I say.

Too late. NAFTA won't let Canada do it. Or rather, if Canada tried the government would be sued.

Elon Musk's Grasshopper tops 300m, lands safely

Adam Nealis

Can we please have that in units of football fields?

"The 325-metre flight is higher than Manhattan's Chrysler building, London's Shard, or the Sydney Tower."

Higgs data shows alternate reality will SWALLOW UNIVERSE

Adam Nealis

The laws of physics will be different in the encroaching bubble.

I think.

Apple refreshes MacBook Pro range

Adam Nealis

Re: Please stop moaning about transat differences


The price disparity topic has been done to death many times over.


Adam Nealis

Re: pictures

Nice link.

From the article (my emphasis)


I wonder how far back "historical calving fronts" data go?

Adam Nealis
IT Angle

Why not football pitches and Olympic swimmimg pools?

The latter for volume of course.

More Steve Jobs iPad mini attacks from beyond the grave

Adam Nealis

Re: If a 7" device is not an iPhone and not an iPad - what is it?

"But I'm guessing the 7" device is an iPod."

It might just be the remote control for the iTV

Nexus 7 and Surface: A bonanza for landfill miners

Adam Nealis

Re: An extremely pessimistic article this

"So what you're saying is that Google and Microsoft will never be able to catch up with the iPad and therefore should just let Apple have free reign in the tablet market?"

I don't think AO is saying that Apple should have free reign. He is just saying that surface and nexus 7 don't pose a threat.

"You say that the reason the Kindle and iPad are successful is because of their content market - a point I agree with. But content does not grow on trees - device first, then the content grows. Expecting a device to launch an iPad-equivalent amount of content available is foolishness."

What content exclusively requires a Kindle or an iPad?

Menage á tablet: Apple vs Amazon vs Google

Adam Nealis

What have Apple to do with it?

All the author has to go on viz apple is that they only denied once that they don't do 7".

So all the author has to go on in terms of facts is that Apple are competing in the 7" space by not having a product in that form factor.

iPhones, iPads to be FULL OF FACEBOOK and NOT GOOGLE

Adam Nealis

NFC = "No F@cking Chance"?

WTF does NFC stand for?

LinkedIn admits site hack, adds pinch of salt to passwords

Adam Nealis

Re: Why only 6.5M entries?

Maybe change it again unless you're sure the change now has added salt.

Touchscreens to get finger friendly

Adam Nealis
Thumb Up

Re: I know it's a bit gimmicky but...

I don't think it's gimmicky at all.

If it works as I expect, when applied to tablets it should reduce the need for a separate keyboard and therefore a track pad.

Oracle gobbles upstart Facebook, Instagram biz tout

Adam Nealis

Re: Oracle Gobbles Upstart Facebook

I think you got it the wrong way round.

It sounds like Larry, not Zucks is doing the sucking.

Which would make Larry the bitch.

Core Wars: Inside Intel's power struggle with NVIDIA

Adam Nealis

Not much will change.

In the grand scheme of things.

The first parallel programming language I can remember is/ was OCCAM, introduced in 1983. That's nearly 40 years for parallel programming to take over and it hasn't.

I am not aware of any cross compiler that is generic enough to optimise for an arbitrary architecture. So to optimise, people are needed. People are the most expensive part of the bangs to the buck equation. There's a fine line between parallelise and paralyse.

Most software is "optimised" by upgrading the hardware it runs on.

Intel will win market share with MIC because it is a big company, because of the ease of porting code to the class of performance problems that can be addressed in this way without expensive rewrites but deliver nice performance multiples.

It will be interesting to see how Nvidia penetrate the various scales of the supercomputing market. But how big is that market in terms of shipped units? But to the investor in relatively small Nvidia, it might be higher earnings per share than MIC for Intel.

Microsoft scrapes Windows Azure name off cloudy kit

Adam Nealis
Thumb Down

Errr... they bought Visio

And to my mind promptly gutted it of a lot of useful add-ons.

Microsoft's dumpster-diver partner strategy is rubbish

Adam Nealis


"All of which leaves Microsoft in a quandary: consumers are leaving Windows Phone in droves"

Er, was there ever as much as a whole drove of MoPho consumers in the first place?

Greenland glaciers not set to cause disastrous sea level rises - study

Adam Nealis

no clear indication... that the glaciers will stop gaining speed

That sentence stood out to me too, and did not seem to accord with the thrust of LP's latest uninformed rant.

Nympho hauled to loon-cooler after serial bonkathon brutality

Adam Nealis

Jones Crusher

Deadly jaws

Better get the gauze


She can push, she can shove

'til it's just a nub

Windows 8: Thrown into a multi-tasking mosh pit

Adam Nealis

Re: So many words...

"Just because you don't understand the words, doesn't mean it's "wankword bingo"."

But is isn't a paradigm shift either based on the original Kuhnian meaning of the term.

OTOH it may just be "innovation". But as an innovation is supposed to be a significant improvement, the "improvement" part is so far subjective.


Adam Nealis

Watching the Fanboi queues form.

If only google maps were in real time.


We need a BOFH to hack into the nearest police surveillance cameras and make it a webcam.

Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet

Adam Nealis
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Re: Typo

While you're there, can you arrange to move that sodding "report abuse" button to the right of the optional picture? It takes up far too much space.

Melting Arctic leads to snowy winters

Adam Nealis

Re: that is scientific theory

Ah, the Andrew Orlowski approach.


Adam Nealis

Re: I always seem to find the "don't panic about peak oil" arguments circular...

Any serious discussion of "Peak Oil" should talk about depletion rates, and how long the stuff is likely to last at such rates. Peak Oil is not even defined in the Citigroup paper.

Most cornucopians will, when pressed, admit oil is a finite resource. Then cognitive dissonance kicks in and they will wave their hands and say "but we don't have to worry for N decades" and revert to behaving as if oil was infinite.

Conventional economists may refuse to answer yes or no, but insist that somehow price will force oil to be created.

Go to here


Search for "#5. Economists are trained to believe" and read that section.

Economists as a class have very unphysical models of the world. In some areas these models are useful approximations. In others, not. If economics was a science, there would be be a lot of soul-searching going on in the profession as they struggled to understand why the major market crashes of this century occurred, and why they missed them, and why they don't know what to do about their aftermath. So in my eyes they are a profession with no more integrity or moral standing than estate agents, politicians or investment bankers.

The point is, the authors of the report cited by AO was produced by Economists working for an Investment Bank.

"Resurging North American Oil Production and the Death of the Peak Oil Hypothesis", I'm not sure if the Citigroup paper takes into account the recent significant downward revisions by the US GS of the amount of shale gas/ unconventional oil estimated to be under the ground in the mainland USA.

In these articles, we hear how a separate group of analysts at a bank (Barclays Capital) reach the opposite conclusion:



Adam Nealis

Re: Interesting Arguments

The simplistic economics argument as put forward os largely unphysical.

It assumes infinite supply (as if the cost can magically make oil appear).

It assumes infinite substitutability (e.g. synthetic oil for "real" oil).

It ignores the energy cost of mining a unit of energy.

Some economists are actually intelligent, yet they don't realise their ideas don't always apply properly. So one can forgive AO for not thinking too hard about it either - especially as to do so would hurt his cornucopian proclivities.

Since the stuff is finite, it will run out.

Peak Oil will be a supply problem first, irrespective the amount stil in the ground, known or unknown.

Adam Nealis
Thumb Up


In terms of EROI, you are saying EROI = 1 = EIOI ?

We're not quite at 1:1 yet. It would become uneconomic to use oil as an energy source before we got to 1:1. Unconventional oil is reckoned to give you a 5:1. Conventional oil is a bit less than 20:1 these days.

AO is a cornucopianist. His reasoning is often clear. But he doesn't really understand, or chooses to ignore, all the salient data. As a journalist he is not very objective.

Adam Nealis
Thumb Up

Re: Do The Math

I would have mentioned it, but you got there first.

There's also "Without Hot Air" http://www.withouthotair.com/ by David McKay.

Court rejects Tesla’s latest libel spat with Top Gear

Adam Nealis
Thumb Up

Re: Re: Re: Re: can you say class action ?

"Well done to Tesla for now building in a system to tell them when the car is neglected and the silly irresponsible customer needs a slap to remind them to plug it in."

Yeah. Very 'Merikin. Akin to McDonald's having to put "this is hot" warnings on their pop tarts.

Apple TV stock shortage sparks new gadget rumour fever

Adam Nealis
Thumb Up

There's clearly two seperate markets...


Sort of an iPod nano, but the TV version.


Adam Nealis


Not that I agree with it, but I would rather my Oyster data be scanned than be subjected to the occasional "special investigation" by your Constitution-upholding TSA brutes.

New sat data shows Himalayan glaciers hardly melting at all

Adam Nealis

And economics is an exact science, is it?

Economics is given far more credence in political circles than, say, climatology.

Mozilla releases Firefox 10, adds developer tools

Adam Nealis

I thought they promised no more restarts after add-on updates.

Maybe I got it wrong, or confused that feature with another browser.

Annoyances that still remain:

1. Go to the Add-Ons screen. There is "Get Add-ons", but once you get an Add-On, it becomes an "Extension". Why two name sfor the same thing? And WTF are "Plugins" for anyway?

2. This dialogue box has always been broken. Else I carry round some Add-On/ Extension/ Plugins that are messing it up:


So suppose one checks "Do this automatically" and downloads, the next time, "Do this automatically" is checked, but I still get the damned dailogue box and I still have to click OK. Is this PICNIC or is this "Windows Automation" at work?

WD's MyBook takes a Thunderbolt to the chest

Adam Nealis

*MPAA suffers collective heart failure*

*MPAA suffers collective heart failure*

I live in hope.


Adam Nealis
Black Helicopters

Make tea. Hold your nose while drinking. Apparently.

The psilocybin is not active until hydrolysed. Stomach acids do this. Hence the 30 - 60 minute delay before onset of "symptoms" and the feeling of having been ripped off if you didn't pick them yourself but bought them. Allegedly.

Apparently if you boil them in water, this will hydrolyse the stuff for you, so when it is imbibed it gets to work right away.

My friend tells me someone he knows would pinch his nose and drink the lot in one go. That way you only taste the last mouthful after you let go of your nose. Even Vimto doesn't render it palatable. Supposedly.



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