No;

he was referring to the "drink no more than x units per week" as being arbitary and pulled out of someone's bum; not the idea of a 'unit' itself.

Reliable like Trigger's broom

Ahem; "Around a third of the TV's parts are not original, however, though they were replaced with parts identical to the originals."

Things often do keep working for a long time, as long as you replace the components when they break.

@DrXym: It's the jump to "you must do this now!" thats the problem

It's one thing saying "the climate is changing due to man's CO2 emmissions"- there is as you say a lot of evidence for that.

The problem that most people have is the doom predictions based on tenuous and often discredited modelling of the effects of that; and the instructions to "stop doing X" which are supposed to stop the doom from happening.

It's very different saying "CO2 is causing the world to warm" and saying "everyone must be stopped from doing XYZ otherwise the sea will consume London".

Oh no!

So, it reduces the amount of "shit don't get that near me" waste, but increases the amount of "probably unsafe to insert rectally" waste.

Yeah, sounds like a real bad deal to me.

The vast vast majority of 'low level waste' is just general waste that has a sticker that says "from Sellafield" on it, and is about as radioactive as a pile of banana skins. It's normally just landfilled the same as household waste is.

I doubt that Mr Page would be happy to have any kind of waste disposed of in his house, even piles of common-or-garden builder's rubble. Mr Page probably wouldn't want you in his house either, but that doesn't mean you're dangerously radioactive. Just dangerously full of shit.

TV detective work ain't exactly realistic

It's like in the UK's very own Spooks, where they have instant access to every CCTV camera in London (which are all in HD) to track a pedestrian suspect in real time, except on the tube where no CCTV exists. They can implant a grain-of-sand sized combined GPS tracker and audio bug into the neck of an agent, but when a suspect gets away in a car with known numberplates, MI5 are mysteriously unaware of the (real) national ANPR system that would soon pick said car up.

There are of course a number of options as to why this might be;

1) It's part of a conspiracy to make real world crims unaware of the real capabilities of the security services; or

2) TV writers are themselves unaware of the real capabilities of the security services, and when they are aware of something they tend to discard it if that would make the story cooler/flow better/easier to write

@AC

But I thought Radon was the secret to a nice relaxing bath?

@DavCrav

"If this happens, let's see whether employers would actually pass the entire ER NI onto the staff, or miraculously not"

Disclosure: I am an employer

What would really happen is both; some employers would pass on the difference, others wouldn't. Those that don't would in the short term see reduced costs and therefore extra profits. That extra money would be in the pot to pay existing and/or new employees with.

The fact of the matter is that someone being 'paid' £24000 is actually costing their employer £27072, and the employee in question is actually receiving £18484. The employer pays this as the labour in question is worth £27k to them, and the employee considers the soul destroying drudgery worth the £18k

If employer's NI ceased to exist; the labour would still be worth £27k to them (at least for the existing job we're discussing here). Therefore the pay for that particular person could rise to that without the employer suffering. If the money wasn't passed on, the money would probably stay in the conceptual pay pot and be there for future rises or new employees, and even if the employer just banks it as profit it'll still be spent somewhere (towards a new Jag? redecorations?). If there's any competition whatsoever for the business, then the competitors will be doing the same sums. If employer A can afford £27k for a widget polisher, then employer B probably can too, meaning there will be increased pressure for pay rises because the others can afford to 'pay more' at the same actual cost.

Nitrogen is a well known asphyxiant too;

and that's in the air all around you! Run away! Panic!

I've also heard that they're injecting Dihydrogen Monoxide into the reactors, which is a well known corrosive solvent that is found in the vast majority of malignant cancers.

What?

The Telegraph has consistently been one of the more alarmist papers, both about Fukushima and world events generally.

@minionzero

You're right; every banker in the world was directly involved in foisting subprime mortgages and other dubious loans onto people who had no responsibility whatsoever for ensuring that they could repay loans that they took out. /sarcasm

I think you're totally and maybe dangerously wrong about this, but hell; you're probably a nice bloke, enjoy your evening. :)

FFS, the cuts and the bailout are separate things, and;

The current recession has multiple and interconnected causes, of which the 'bankers' are one.

Blaming 'bankers' is like there being a plane crash, and you beating a local lorry driver over the head because he's one of the "transport men" who are 'responsible'.

AND the generally accepted wisdom is that allowing the banks to fail would have resulted in a far worse recession than we have/are currently experiencing. How many lives would be 'wrecked' then? But that'd be OK, after all the 'bankers' would have been 'punished', right?

RE Declaration of interests

Mikew, could you please declare your interests. Are you being paid by the wind turbine industry to post downbeat messages about this nuclear incident?

.. wow, this Ad Hominem 'declare someone to be a shill' stuff is piss-easy, isn't it?

How would that encourage the use of public transport;

one would assume that £0.40/mile for driving could be deducted from gross income also?

God forbid that we realise that cars contain people;

and most of the time (outside London at least) a particular crossing will be set to give the one person who might cross per hour a good half minute to traverse the several yards of road, while keeping a couple of hundred people in cars/lorries/buses waiting at a red light.

OMFG!

Then someone would be able to determine the geographic co-ordinates of your street address! They could do this on their local machine, in addition to being able to do this on Google Maps, Bing Maps, etc etc etc etc etc!

To be fair to Brum;

Every single pothole I've reported to the council has been fixed fairly quickly; and the worst stretches (eg Belgrave Middleway) have been completely resurfaced instead of patched.

If you want to see real potholes go to south Staffs....

Agree, but

I agree with everything you've said, but there is an upside. For a particular chip that *is* examined closely, it is easier to audit the functions of the hardware than it is to examine any firmware programmed into it.

You can if you really want to X-ray (or dissolve the casing and use a microscope, etc) a chip and see all the circuitry, and given a little computation devise the full functionality of it. Extracting the firmware from a device that doesn't want you to have it is very difficult.

(All is AFAIK, if I'm wrong say so :) )

PS: From what you say it seems you think that the US Gov. (for one) is planning using 'trojan horse' ASICs as an espionage tool. Do you think that (in the US) this could be achieved with products from major manufacturers; and do you think this could be done with the OEM's knowledge, or do you think they would use more covert means (eg. agent working in production)?

No.

What will happen is this technology will basically allow cheap ASICs to displace "microcontroller-and-software" based systems, for applications where an ASIC would be better (eg for high performance). As such, any new hardware bugs will replace software bugs; and for high performance real time kit software bugs are particularly devious and are a big problem.

Overall reliability will probably go up.

/ex hardware man

I found the value

"amazon marketplace and ebay for a little extra work would offer a far better deal"

The "little extra work" is the value the retailers add, along with being a 'known' place to go and some peace of mind in getting cash there-and-then, as opposed to a hopeful payment from some bloke elsewhere.

I have the answer

"Leaving aside the technical and philosophical flaws with the idea, examining all the worlds websites to decide which are naughty and which are nice is going to be an astronomically expensive and never ending process. So who's gonna pay for it?"

The government is investigating using a well experienced contractor based at the North Pole. Apparently this contractor is so scrupulous about their naughty/nice list that they even check it twice. Hence the announcement at this time of year...

Just like speed cameras I suppoose;

in that they could be said to "only monitor speeds when high speed is detected", ie they (generally) only record/transmit speed/numberplate data* when their internal logic is activated by a speed >x.

It would be trivial and the best technical solution to have each of the microphones in the network sit dormant until activated by a sound >XdB, and then they begin processing/recording the sound input and transmitting the appropiate data to HQ.

I imagine the processing involves a little DSP to differentiate 'gunshot' type cracks from all other loud noises, and precise timing of the sound against something like a GPS clock. If you get the precise time that a given sound has reached at least 3 known points, the origin can then be calculated.

*referring to 'traditional' Gatso-type cameras, not ANPR or other hi-tech trickery.

£1k x 20Mil = £20 Billion

You're telling me that a single drug depencency unit costs £20,000,000,000 per year?

Do you know what *could* be bought/done/built with £20Bn of government money (deficit/debt repayment aside)?

500 miles of new motorway

20% of the entire NHS annual budget

Or to look at it in terms of existing tax receipts..

Half of all corporation tax

1/6 of all income tax

About the same as current tobacco&alcohol duties combined

£20,000,000,000 is a lot of money you know.