BT have definitely been 'forgetting' to tell people.

I discovered quite recently that I appear to be on an ARC, and I was definitely not told when I signed up, and have never been sent a reminder letter.

In fact, according to BT's claim above, I should have received the reminder letter last week.

Guess what - I didn't.

In professional audio we call those 'China Watts'

They are often absolute maximum instantaneous power, which is a figure that tells you almost nothing at all about the amplifier.

In this case it looks like it's probably not full china wattage, but peak power.

Amplifiers should also never draw their max. rating because that would usually be clipping, thus trashing the whole system.

I am still amused by the fact that no hifi parts uses professional connectors, and few have any balanced connections.

They'd be wonderful if they were open

My local one is 2 miles away.

It should be great, except that it opens at 9am and closes at 5:30pm weekdays, 12:30pm Saturday.

When they fail to deliver, according to the card I have to wait until after 12:30pm the next day.

So I can't go on a weekday without missing work, and if they try to deliver on a Friday I can't pick it up the next day either.

All told, pretty useless.

Thankfully my work is happy for me to get packages delivered, it only costs me a pint for the warehouse team every few months!

There are exactly ZERO applications for this.

This is a stupid, ignorant and incredibly dangerous suggestion.

If the police want to close down a site, they should get a court order. End of story.

The only possible reason for not wanting to get a court order to close down a site, is that the applicant thinks that they probably won't get it.

If they don't think they would be able to get a court order, then they shouldn't be trying to take down the site in the first place.

Court orders do not take very long to get.

If this actually does happen, then the first couple might happen quietly but pretty soon a legitimate small business or organisation will be affected and they *will* go all the way to the EU if necessary.

I'm increasingly worried by the attitude of some police organisations who behave as if the law doesn't apply to them. That's the attitude that those rioters had - how about the police try setting a good example instead of a bad one?

Wrong.

If your credit card details or any other 'juicy' data was on a website long enough for the police to notice, than they've been up long enough for everyone interested to find them as well.

This is really talking about situations where the police don't want to bother getting a court order - in other words, the occasions where they don't think they can get one.

So, that's when they don't have enough (or any) evidence and when they have no intention of actually trying to catch and prosecute someone but just want to 'disrupt' their activities.

The goal of the issues group was supposedly about sites selling fakes or non-extant product, eg tickets to Glastonbury or the Olympics.

There are already ways to do that, and those ways include methods of actually catching the people responsible.

Getting the domain closed down won't help catch anybody.

I've just tried to make my Windows 7 Explorer match that screenshot, and it won't.

On "Large", the silly icon is bigger than the one in their screenshot, and on "Medium" it's smaller.

The "Small" size is the default one.

I have 24 files visible when in the same location at the same window size using the default "Small" icon size.

If I'm in a 'normal' folder instead of a special one I can see 26-and-a-bit files.

And what's with the shitty antialiasing in the Windows 7 screenshot?

Exactly. You still struggle after 3+ years of using it almost every day?

By any stretch of the imagination, that's clearly an abject failure.

How long do *you* think it should take to learn where the features you want to use are?

Personally, the bit that drives me potty is the "Hide all the documents you're working with when you try to save one of them".

Sorry, but under what circumstances can that ever be a good idea?

@Nuke - Entirely plausible they spent the same - tariffs are not random numbers!

Almost all monthly mobile contracts are 'round numbers'*, and many operators will price-match to get your custom.

So you might switch from a £20 pcm tariff to another £20 pcm tariff - but this one includes a nicer phone/more minutes/texts/internet/understandable customer services or some other improvement.

To put it another way, you could pay the same for a better product.

However, I would have expected a decent survey to state the percentage that got a 'better deal at the same price' by switching, so still a FAIL!

*Some were round at 17.5% VAT and just increased by the difference in VAT, while others oddly did things like change £10 pcm to £12 pcm instead.

@Some Beggar

Thanks for that, however you might want to read some of the papers listed instead of throwing a hissy fit.

The top result is rather telling:

Sensitivity analysis of the climate of a chaotic system - DANIEL J. LEA et al. TELLUS A, Oct 2000

To put it succinctly, that paper is in fact saying that a fair bit of the climate science is bollocks, due to misunderstandings of chaotic systems.

Which is pretty much what I said above.

Love to, but the video won't play in IE6,7,8 or Firefox 5.

Rather odd that they should choose to prevent the vast majority of corporate clients from viewing the video, given that the vast majority of MSDN subscribers are corporates.

@Tim

Re-read "g e"'s post, this time look at the full sentence.

The important bit was "who's funding & existence tends to rely on spouting it"

Aside from the poor grammar, the point is very important.

If your livelihood depends on you agreeing with a pre-determined result, then you are very likely to ignore any evidence to the contrary, or even fudge the data and/or methodology to give the pre-determined answer.

Such fudging could be deliberate or a subconscious bias, but that doesn't really matter - the result is the same.

To give a trivial example:

The ASA requires that all adverts have 'evidence' to back up the claims made in the advert.

If a cosmetics company asked you to test a new cosmetic face cream for them, are you more likely to get paid and/or re-hired later for saying "This face cream is great" or "This face cream is the same as all the other face creams"?

So, unsurprisingly all these face cream tests done to support the advertising campaigns always deliberately fudge the methodology to make an "It's great" result more likely - eg no comparisons to other products, vague and leading survey questions (Is your skin softer now?) etc.

- If you've ever taken part in a street survey of a product you'll easily spot the way the questions are phrased to give the answer they want.

Back to the original context:

The majority of research into Climate Change is being done by groups who are being paid by organisations with a clear vested interest in one particular result. (This bias does swing both ways)

I don't think anybody seriously thinks that the climate isn't changing - the historical record is very clear on that - the bit that is contentious is the idea that humanity is a significant factor in causing it.

Personally, I'm very much in the "Not Proven" camp for the hypothesis that human-action is significant.

None of the published model results are believable (for or against), if only for the simple fact that none of them have error bars.

The world climate is known to be a chaotic system - therefore, to make a useful prediction you need to vary all the starting conditions in both directions and re-run the model for the full range of likely starting conditions, and the same again for any inputs that might change during the run (human CO2 output for example).

(Measuring chaotic systems is more complicated than that, but you get the general idea)

If you don't do that, you'll get one *possible* outcome, but have no idea of how probable that outcome actually is.

Nobody seems to be doing that - or at least, nobody seems to be publishing results showing the range and probability map of predictions their models make.

If you know where one of those is, I'd be really interested to see it.

The French must be OK at it, as 75% of their generation is nuclear.

I find it hard to believe that they have demand fluctuations tiny enough for 75% to be running at constant output, even allowing for their relatively large export market. That said, the remainder is mostly hydro which is extremely good at load-following.

On the 'no-subsidy' front - the people who want to build the new UK nukes don't think they need a subsidy to do so, and clearly believe that they'll make a useful profit from doing so. Otherwise, they wouldn't have bid for the contracts.

EDF have rather a lot of experience of building and running nuclear plants - they've built and run more than the UK ever has, so I would tend to trust their cost estimates. (Sure, in France they're subsidised, but they'll at least know what the totals were.)

So do EDF need their reality detectors adjusting? I'm just going by what they have signed up to do in the UK - zero subsidy to build four EPR reactors. However, I gather that the intended turn-on date of 2017 is still 'dependant on financing', which does not sound good right now.

That said, totally agree with you on the energy-security front. It's not in the generation companies interest to build much 'spare' capacity, they make more money if energy is scarce than if it is plentiful. Regulation of that market has been rather poor so far.

Finally - something most of the pro-Wind Greens don't appear to understand is that large-penetration of Wind is going to waste one heck of a lot of that irreplaceable gas, simply to avoid a black start situation, let alone rolling blackouts. We should also be expecting noticeable demand-management as well - more commonly known as rolling blackouts.

Add increased electric transport penetration (like we're supposed to be trying for), and our future energy security looks even bleaker.

So the thing is, if you're right then we are utterly screwed, so I'm really hoping that you're at least partially wrong and that nuclear power generation does play a big role in the near future.

Fortunately it's impossible to know whether anybody copied the contents*

Thus it becomes clear - if an eeevil person ever finds data that they want to steal, they should simply copy it and then hand it in to the police.

The ICO, the data holder and everyone else will then believe that no data was stolen at all and they can go ahead with their evil plans with no risk of discovery.

Because data can't be copied, right? Copying 26,000 electronic records from a USB stick would take several days to copy, like photocopying 26,000 paper records.

And again - who is the contractor? Why is the directly responsible company allowed secrecy, while the merely indirectly responsible organisations are not?

*There's an 'un' missing somewhere. Ten points to whoever spots it.

You know what's even more funny?

The same corporations who are building the wind farms are the ones who are building and running the gas plants that take up the slack when we have the wrong kind of wind.

They get to take us for a ride in every direction - huge subsidies for wind electricity, payments for *not* running their wind, increased prices for their gas, and payments to keep their gas warm and ready to sync.

What fun, eh?

Unlike you, I actually read the National Grid's report.

"Operating the Electricity Transmission Networks in 2020 - Update June 2011"

I suggest you read it. It is most enlightening (pun intended)

I would say that it's quite likely that they know far more about generation and how the Grid works than you do.

They think that having the 2020 target of 30GW of installed capacity of wind will result in several events each year where 15GW is lost in two hours. When that happens, if we don't have the warm spares, then we get a very large blackout.

15GW is a hell of a lot of power to lose in two hours. That's half our current coal plants, or all our current nukes and wind dying simultaneously.

They also think that they'll have to pay the wind plants to stay off a lot of the time - they are actually already doing this to avoid breaking the distribution.

Now, in their estimation, they reckon it'll cost around £286 million just to manage wind variability, and somewhere between £565 and 945 million for the operating reserve requirement.

That's on top of the cost of the wind plants themselves.

Finally, they know that this will require "demand management", using smart meters and other similar devices.

Translated into English, that means they are already planning on rolling blackouts. "Gone Green" appears to mean "Sometimes, Gone Dark"

As to your anti-nuke stance - hate to tell you this, but since the dawn of civilian nuclear power there have been exactly four nasty accidents in the world, only one of which actually killed anybody *at all*.

Physics fail there

Gravity alone cannot cause objects to rotate*, because it acts on the centre of gravity - thus there is no moment.

From the point of view of the accelerometer, it will see the rocket thrust, then zero once that burns out.

It'll stay at zero until atmospheric resistance starts to become noticeable (going fast enough in dense enough air), at which point it'll read the atmospheric drag acceleration only. That's not necessarily in the direction of 'up/down' though!

Gyros are the only way to get an orientation.

*I'm excluding very high spacial curvature here, we're not near an object that massive!

!? El REg is paid for by advertisers.

They're not public service, they are under no obligation to give any kind of balanced view.

That said, this research is probably bogus for the same reason the EMF research reported today is bogus.

However, anti-addick, you are either an idiot or genuinely want to wear a hair shirt.

Wind farms simply *cannot* provide enough reliable electricity for you to continue living your lifestyle. Source: National Grid study of wind farm penetration.

Do you accept that you can't have the heating, lighting, ventilation, computing, transport and food that you currently enjoy on demand because of the rolling blackouts that will become both *necessary* and *commonplace* if wind really does reach the current target penetration?

I don't. I do not want to be spending such ridiculous amounts of my tax money supporting something that can only cause me pain - both financial due to the extremely high cost and personal due to the blackouts. (Note that blackouts can and do kill people.)

Wind farms are simply not fit for being used as a significant generating source, and it doesn't matter how good we get at making them, they still won't be. To avoid rolling blackouts, we have to have at least 5 days of backup power available because the entire country and all our neighbours can be in the doldrums for that long.

National Grid say that the target wind penetration can lose 15GW of generation in a couple of hours. At the moment such a loss is *impossible* - even disconnecting Drax (4GW) wouldn't do that!

They also think that the only way to maintain current service levels with such a lot of wind is to have gas plants running 'hot' 24 hours a day, ready to sync at a few minutes notice.

That's a lot of wasted CO2 - burning loads of hydrocarbon to keep the backup plants hot, just to cover for when the wind gets too strong or too weak.

If you genuinely want to be Green, then you should be *against* wind.

It can't provide our current demand without burning *more* hydrocarbon than at present.

Now, if we want to move to electric vehicles (any kind) instead of burning hydrocarbons in our cars, trains, buses, lorries etc , we're going to need *more* electricity than we currently have.

So, how do you plan on doing that?

Nuclear power is the only currently feasible way of generating enough sustainable low-to-zero carbon power. The French know this, and we actually buy a lot from them.

Sure, in the future we might find more compact and efficient ways to store large amounts of electricity, and other ways to generate large amounts of environmentally-friendly electricity predictably and on demand.

Helium is dead easy to buy and transport.

Hydrogen less so - if nothing else, the insurance people don't appear to like it when you carry significant quantities of compressed flammable gases around.

It's generally considered a bad thing if your hire car catches fire or explodes.

Wrong. Read the judgement - Try Page 8.

"On the merits, we reverse the district court’s decision that Myriad’s composition claims to “isolated” DNA molecules cover patent-ineligible products of nature under § 101 since the molecules as claimed do not exist in nature."

How clear would you like?

That is a direct and clear judgement that the DNA fragment ITSELF may be patented, supposedly because the specific fragment isn't completely isolated in a living animal.

And that is the most heinously stupid judgement possible - it is exactly equivalent to saying that one can patent a piece of seal fur that doesn't include the flippers is patentable because all living seals have flippers.

Nobody is objecting to the idea of being able to patent a specific process whereby such a DNA fragment may be isolated.

It's worse than that - the car does know the date.

The car actually knows the same amount of information that the mobile phone does, because in this situation the car *is* a mobile phone.

So it knows the exact date and time and its approximate location from the local cell. It probably knows quite a bit more than that as well - I don't know exactly what's in the cellular network handshake.

Real-time clocks are also dirt cheap, and GPS receivers are very cheap as well - you only need one satellite to know the time within a couple of seconds, get a position fix and you know the time with the accuracy of a pretty good atomic clock.

Aside from all that, it could simply be done the same way the remote key fobs work with the auto-resynced pseudorandom number generators.

I'm actually rather shocked that it doesn't appear to be.