The Slamlander

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?

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 …

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 … …

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 .

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.

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 .

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.

Where I detail some common-sense disclaimers. It is sad that I feel that I have to do this.

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.

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.