No they didn't - they started off with the four elements of air, earth, fire and water. Then they realised that there were maybe a score of "elements" (even the concept was vague), and there was no systematic organisation or predictive value from it. This took a few hundred years. Most importantly they did not realise the that properties of the elements repeat themselves (which is where the concept of the periodic part of the name comes from).

The comment that they created a "fairly accurate periodic chart" is risible.

This for some reason is at 5 interesting despite being completely wrong.

What happened was that at the original pretrial hearings the Judge struck out the defence of honest opinion, which would have been a defence against the BCA's claim of libel (not an absolute defence - if the BCA could establish that the opinion was based on malice then it could prevail).

What Simon Singh did win was the appeal against this judgement. Faced with the extemely strong likelyhood that Singh had a suitable defence the BCA withdrew.

He had an earlier win as well by winning the rigth to appeal after having it rejected twice.

[[Actually if it had had the 5MP iPhone 4 camera, (which is probably what he assumed since I assumed it too until I looked at the tech specs) he would not have been joking, that could replace a P&S for most people.]]

You don't understand the difference between "better than" and "willing to settle for."

People who are replacing their digital cameras for the iPhone 4 camera are not doing so because it is better than their point and shoot. It's not. They're giving up a number of features they don't understand, don't know how to work, or don't find important for a single button, slower operation, and lower image quality.

When I were a lad it were the Three Yorkshiremen sketch.

On't radio.

Are these studies the follow-ups mentioned here?

http://archives.cnn.com/2002/TECH/science/08/07/contrails.climate/index.html

Apart from it being unethical, suddenly you have a criminal conspiracy where a lot of people know the truth you are trying to hide. Not wise, and they'll be screwed because not many people would want to be involved in a criminal conspiracy to help their employer.

There is also the question in their minds about what the German government knew already. If they don't give back any data or give back fake data that is not consistent with what the government already know - they are screwed.

Finally, even if the government does not know anything apart from what is in the public domain, the challenges of trying to fake enough data to be convincing would be immense, and it would be fairly straightforward for the Government to spot the fraud if there was anything less than a stellar job done. And, once more, they're screwed. And faking the data is another conspiracy - see point one.

So it would be extremely difficult and risky to try and cover it up. And they would have no real benefit - people (like me) who think they are unethical already won't change our opinion, and others, who have a more positive view, will not particularly change theirs. So the downsides of their limited confession are small.

They may or may not be evil, but they ain't stupid.

Not initially - they originally said:

"Networks also send information to other computers that are using the network, called payload data, but Google does not collect or store payload data."

This was wrong and was in response to claims that Google was collecting payload data. The thought this could be in error is ridiculous. First they'd have to accidently collect the data, and then they'd have to accidently not notice even when they went to look for it.

They only (finally) admitted they were collecting payload data when the German government asked for the collected data to audit exactly what was being collected.

That would have been fatal - the German government was either on a fishing expedition or already knew what was being collected. For Google to have deliberately deleted data in response to a Government request would have been insane - going to prison, massive fines and "they're evil" type of insanity.

That would have been untenable - they just happen to find out after they had threatened with an audit.

So they did the only vague credible course of action left open to them

The problem is that few believe they are being honest - acccidently collecting hundreds of gigs of data and not noticing either after you've processed your (our) data or after you've said you've checked and there is defintely no data there.

I'll leave with a final thought - Google claimed that they have never used the data in any product. Given that they claim they didn't even know they had the data until recently how can they possibly make the categorical and emphatic claim that they had never used it in any product. I'd have believed a statement that they didn't believed they had used the data, but were currently auditing to make sure or something. But another straight denial? It makes them look like a six year old caught with their hand in the cookie jar - every answer given to cast themselves in the best possible light with only a vague connection with the truth.

TFA is wrong - the most recent hung parliament was 1997 (before the election that year). Second most recent was 1977.

Full details in http://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons/lib/research/briefings/snpc-04951.pdf

My main machine is a P4 1.6Ghz with 2GB of RAM running XP. I did upgrade the video card a year or two ago with something that has a whole 128MB of RAM on it.

4 IDE drives, USB 2.0 (just "full speed" not "high-speed") and an external firewire 400 drive with a flaky controller makes for a...well, sluggish computing experience.

Lately, I've started to give up on it for any sort of heavy lifting (Adobe Lightroom). I started looking at building a new one again, but pretty much have figured out that Dell can do all the work for me for the same money. (for what I can spend)

My favourite Greenpeace press release contained the following sentence:

"In the twenty years since the Chernobyl tragedy, the world's worst nuclear accident, there have been nearly [FILL IN ALARMIST AND ARMAGEDDONIST FACTOID HERE]"

Yes - the bit in caps is theirs.

If you read the bottom of page two/top of page three you'll see that Childs actually sent an email saying "I know you all are trying to figure out how I can get into this network." which demonstrates that he knowing caused a denial of service (the service being the ability to administrate the network).

Since HP already own 3COM, who spun off Palm in 2000 (with a first day valuation of something like 30 times what they are paying for it today), one could almost say that Palm is being bought back after 10 (not so happy) years as an independent company.

This keep cropping up in this thread, and I don't know why. The policy is online, and does not contain the word "Mayor", or the phrase "designated agent", or any of the many other things that are supposedly in it. So he did not follow policy in this respect.

What is in the policy is the actual policy for system level passwords, and the enable password for network kit is definitely a system level password. It states:

"All production system-level passwords must be part of the security administered global password management database."

Simple, clear, and Childs was definitely in breach of it: only he has these enable passwords, and did not put them in the database.

For him to argue that the rules for personal passwords applied to system-level passwords and take it to ridiculous extremes - well, this was always bound to end in tears.

I would say England is more diverse - in London there are more than 300 different languages spoken in schools (and an estimated 700 spoken in all). For comparison in Los Angeles there are 92 spoken in schools (and 224 in all).

I agree though - anyone who thinks the US is not open to other cultures has strange opinions.