Graeme’s

Bye, Mandriva. Unity, PCLOS, Mint or Debian?

Posted by Graeme in Software at 8:19 pm on Thursday, 23 September 2010

With Mandriva Linux looking to have a few rough months, its a good time for me to look at alternatives. I am a bit of a distro-hopper (jumping from one LInux distribution to another), but I keep coming back to Mandriva (more…)

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How to get someone (innocent) jailed

Posted by Graeme in Politics,Software at 3:55 pm on Monday, 13 September 2010

The fact that people can be convicted using evidence that only exists in electronic form makes it stunningly easy to frame someone, if you can get brief physical access to their computer, or you can fool them into inserting a malicious CD or USB drive into their computer. Here are some methods of doing it. (more…)

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Why do geeks pick such bad names?

Posted by Graeme in Software at 12:07 pm on Thursday, 9 September 2010

I assume that someone who puts a lot of trouble into writing a piece of software, wants people to actually use it: so why pick names like The GIMP and Gigolo? Both are good pieces of software, but the names convey embarrassment rather than cool. (more…)

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Do the British really hate foreigners that much?

Posted by Graeme in Economics,Politics at 1:01 pm on Wednesday, 8 September 2010

The government has so far come up with two ideas to reduce cap immigration, both of which would be highly damaging to the country:

  1. Let fewer students in
  2. Reduce the number of foreign workers

Take the first as it has had less attention. Educating foreign students is highly profitable for Britain and earns huge amount of money. It is like an extended, and far more profitable, version of tourism. (more…)

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Demand Media IPO

Posted by Graeme in Internet,Shares at 7:37 am on Sunday, 15 August 2010

I usually comment only on British companies (as investments, that is), but I also like to keep an eye on tech and internet companies, and on anything that illustrates a point. Demand Media falls in to both categories. (more…)

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Terrorists are fools, politicians help them

Posted by Graeme in Politics at 7:06 am on Thursday, 31 December 2009

This is partly the result of a discussion on Slashdot on why terorists are disproportionately engineers, and partly a follow up to my previous post about the staggering incompetence of most terrorists. There is also the issue of how the media and politicians actively help terrorists achieve their goals. (more…)

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Great crash and credit crunch similarities.

Posted by Graeme in Business & Investment,Economics at 10:59 am on Sunday, 20 December 2009

I have been reading Galbraith’s The Great Crash of 1929 and a lot of similarities have struck me, not all of which seem to have been noticed by everyone. (more…)

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Gold is not an investment

Posted by Graeme in Business & Investment at 9:16 am on Saturday, 19 December 2009

Richard Beddard has been annoying the gold bugs. This puts me in the unusual position of agreeing with him. (more…)

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How to break up oligopolists

Posted by Graeme in Economics,Politics at 10:32 am on Wednesday, 16 December 2009

The most discussed problem with my proposals on how to fix capitalism is how one decides which companies to break up, and how one goes about doing it. Needless to say, I do have some answers (more…)

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SETI@Home sacking and the death of local newspapers

Posted by Graeme in Wrong at 11:11 am on Thursday, 3 December 2009

Two newspapers and a local radio station cover the same story, and it looks like two different stories. At the very least, one account is so incomplete as to be misleading. (more…)

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