More Climate Change Nonsense

We're at a tipping point on climate change they say, the Arctic ice is going:

A catastrophic collapse of the Arctic sea ice could lead to radical climate changes in the northern hemisphere according to scientists who warn that the rapid melting is at a "tipping point" beyond which it may not recover.

The scientists attribute the loss of some 38,000 square miles of sea ice - an area the size of Alaska - to rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as well as to natural variability in Arctic ice.

Ever since satellite measurements of the Arctic sea ice began in 1979, the surface area covered by summer sea ice has retreated from the long-term average. This has increased the rate of coastal erosion from Alaska to Siberia and caused problems for polar bears, which rely on sea ice for hunting seals.

However, in recent years the rate of melting has accelerated and the sea ice is showing signs of not recovering even during the cold, dark months of the Arctic winter. This has led to even less sea ice at the start of the summer melting season.

Mark Serreze, a senior glaciologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, said the world was heading towards a situation where the Arctic will soon be almost totally ice-free during summer, which could have a dramatic impact on weather patterns across the northern hemisphere.

"When the ice thins to a vulnerable state, the bottom will drop out and we may quickly move into a new, seasonally ice-free state of the Arctic," Dr Serreze said.

Personally I think it's excellent. Think of all that oil we can drill for now the ice has gone!

Hotter, Smaller Sheep

Climate change is changing the size of sheep on a Scottish isle:

While every physics pupil knows that heat can usually be relied on to make objects expand, for the semi-wild sheep of the Outer Hebrides it appears to have the opposite effect.

Observations of Soay sheep on Hirta island have shown that the warmer temperatures associated with global warming allow more smaller animals to survive the winter. And with greater numbers of smaller sheep living through the cold months, the average size of the animals falls.

Research led by Imperial College London, published in the journal Science, is the first to establish a direct link between the genetic changes of an animal population and climate change. It indicates that mankind, on top of the ecological legacy of causing species to become extinct or vastly reduced in number, is leaving an evolutionary legacy by affecting natural selection.

On Hirta, the researchers used a combination of population data and field observations to track the size of individual sheep and how their survival rates influenced their numbers.

It's the mass to surface ratio there, smaller sheep just couldn't control their temperatures in the colder winters. So who says climate change is all bad then?

Microsoft and the patent damages.

Apparently Alcatel Lucent owns patents on MP3 files and players, which is why Microsoft has been hit with damages of over $1.5 billion:

A U.S. federal jury found that Microsoft Corp. (MSFT.O: Quote, Profile, Research) infringed audio patents held by Alcatel-Lucent (ALU.PA: Quote, Profile, Research) (ALU.N: Quote, Profile, Research) and should pay $1.52 billion in damages, the No. 1 software maker said on Thursday.

Microsoft said it plans to first ask the trial judge to knock down the ruling and will appeal if necessary. It said the verdict is unsupported by the law and that it had already licensed the technology in question from Germany's Fraunhofer.

Alcatel-Lucent had accused the world's biggest software maker of infringing patents related to standards used for playing MP3 digital music files.

If this judgement stands then Alcatel may well go after other people as well, like Apple: and any damages would be far more wounding to the smaller company which relies upon iPods in a way that Microsoft does not rely upon audio products.

China Relaxes Censorship

China has relaxed their censorship of two Taiwanese newspapers:

China has allowed access to Internet versions of two of Taiwan's top daily newspapers after blocking them for years for fear they would spread anti-Communist propaganda, a Taiwan official said on Monday.

Taiwan's Mainland Affairs Council said that users in the populous Pearl River Delta and other parts of China over the past two weeks had accessed previously blocked Web sites run by the China Times (news.chinatimes.com) and the United Daily News (http://udn.com/NEWS/)

A search of the sites in Beijing found the United Daily was accessible but the China Times was still blocked.

A welcome sign of course but still a long long way to go before China can be said to have anything resembling free speech.

 

Technorati tags: Taiwan, China

Clever People In Scotland

Sigh. If you're going to go out and commit a crime maybe you might want to tell your mates not to video it and then post it to YouTube?

Police investigating an incident last December in which 15 to 20 youths trashed a Edinburgh Burger King were given an unexpected helping hand when readers of a local paper tracked down footage of the outrage on YouTube.

According to the Evening News, one of the gang used his mobile phone to film his pals "hurling chairs and exchanging punches as terrified staff cowered behind the counter". The miscreants fled before police could intervene, but the cameraman later rather brilliantly posted a one minute, 30 second clip of the carnage on YouTube.

Dim or what?

Technorati tags: You Tube, Scotland, criminals, idiot

PS3 Shipments

Looks like Sony might not be able to make it's forecast shipments for the PS3: 

 

Sony's plan to ship 2m PlayStation 3 consoles worldwide by the end of the year and a further 4m PS3s by the end of March 2007 is still "within our reach", company President Ryoji Chubachi told reporters this week.

Chubachi admitted Sony's efforts had been hindered by the limited availability of the blue lasers used within the console to read Blu-ray Discs and game media, an issue that ensured PS3 mass production didn't begin as a soon as the company had hoped.

It's the blue lasers that are a problem, is it? That must mean a shortage of gallium nitride. Can't see why there'd be any shortage of that though. Maybe it's just the manufacturing capcity?

 

Technorati tags: Sony, PS3, Blue laser, GaN

Nokia 9290

The Nokia 9290 is a mobile phone for the US market.

The technical specifications are as follows:

Introducing the Nokia 9290 Communicator, the one device that keeps users in constant touch with their colleagues, customers, and suppliers. Increasing productivity and performance while interfacing with the existing systems makes the Nokia 9290 the right tool for business.
	Integrated design
	Wireless office
	Powerful PDA
	E-mail with attachments
	Internet access
	Integrated cellular phone with speakerphone

Forfurther details and specifications please go to the Nokia 9290 web page.