Re: Smoke and mirrors...

It's the same system as I use to get 100mpg from my car.

By pre-filling the tank with excess waste petrol siphoned out of other cars in the car park at work I can boost the efficiency of each regular fill.

Re: Well

But since CH4 is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2 shouldn't they get a green eco-subside for disposing of the potentially planet destroying methane?

Re: Better idea, sea level pumped storage.

We simply need to build more mountains.

Most of the nice mountains aren't where anybody wants to live (Wales or Scotland) while the majority of the population live in SE England without so much as a decent hill.

If we were to simply move Snowdonia to the Thames estuary we would provide lots of pumped storage, recreational activities and get rid of Essex in one simple operation - I commend this proposal to the house.

Re: @Psyx

It doesn't really make a lot of sense to compare the efficiency of a thermal plant to solar.

If you are saying solar is useless because it's total free energy in / electrical out is less than the Carnot efficiency of burning coal then you should also include the solar energy to make the coal in the first place.

On the other hand saying it's useless because it's expensive and unreliable is perfectly true

Re: Any chance of a significant increase in the taxes they pay?

If they were doing business in a place with no functioning government -eg Somalia - their cost of business would be higher.

They work in the UK, they benefit directly and indirectly from a lot of UK government services and they pay nothing toward that because of an accounting trick.

If they are allowed to opt out of paying for things they don't directly use - why can't I?

I don't have kids so I shouldn't pay for schools, I don't live in London so I shouldn't pay for the M25, the tube, or the olympics, the USSR has never attacked me so I don't want to pay for Trident, I don't vote tory so I shouldn't pay for any duck islands or moat cleaning etc etc

By your arguments I should only pay road tax and for the bins collecting.

Re: Amazon are useless these days

To be fair amazon do stock a slightly larger range than your local pizza place.

Ask for a pizza topped with fresh peruvian elderberries and smoked Coelacanth and they might take more than 30mins.

In New York they were doing 30min cycle messenger delivery for in-stock items. So if you ordered the new Dan Brown novel they would have somebody in lycra come round and slap you quicker than you could walk to the shops.

Re: Burn the life preservers for warmth!

On the other hand it's always nice to have some stupid foreigners to laugh at - especially with the cold winter months approaching.

Re: Great timing

>In fact, the more I think about it the more likely it is I'll sneak off early.

Have we discovered the root cause of the Greek economic situation?

Re: Any chance of a significant increase in the taxes they pay?

>why would it be to the UK

Because they expect to hire UK workers who can read and write, from schools funded by UK tax payers.

They expect those workers to get free medical care, rather than having to pay $1000/month as they do for their workers in the US.

They expect UK police to guard their premises. They expect the UK's armed forces to stop bands of guerrilla pirates sweeping out of the hills and raiding their stores (not applicable in Scotland)

They expect roads and streeet signs and other infrastructure to deliver their goods.

As I explained to the man that wanted to collect the council tax - I may live in this house but I'm legally incorporated in Narnia. So unless you send a talking lion around I'm not paying

Re: Any chance of a significant increase in the taxes they pay?

All these extra jobs are a cost to Amazon, so they will make a bigger "loss" in the UK and probably get a tax rebate.

Re: wtf?

You might be interested in a new prouct me and some friends at IBM are working on.

It's a small cheap standalone computer that can operate without a connection to a corporate mainframe, but just sit on your desk, and do your work, when you need it, rather than just be a terminal.

We are thinking of calling it personal computer.

Re: Bricktop

We are having a public enquiry here into how the police failed to catch a serial killer for 10years:

"You know that man we keep arresting for violence to women?"

"The one with van we keep seeing in the redlight district ?"

"Should we interview him?"

"No need - we went out to his pig farm and there were no sign of lots of murdered prostitutes"

Re: My sky daddy can beat up yours

To be fair they do have a reason to be cautious.

The last time the Greeks pissed off the Gods lots of people got chained to rocks, impregnated by swans and spent a hell of a long time trying to sail back from turkey.

Re: For a while it was even more popular than LPs...

But that's perfectly justified by the cost of converting all the studio equipment for digital - the EU said so.

They still have to pay back the costs of the CD mastering for Dark SIde of the Moon - that's why it's perfectly justified to charge 25quid for it.

Re: Oh clever.

Show a Greece that is bankrupt now a German charity case and highlight it on international media to be the same 3rd world dictatorship with corrupt police and politicians that it was in the 70s

I would say he had done this rather effectively

Re: Is there any truth

Shouldn't be a problem

As we are constantly told we didn't buy a CD we bought a non-transferable license to listen to the music.

So simply go into HMV with the proof of purchase mark from the inlay and take a fresh CD out of a box for free

Re: Not a bad idea

The problem is that disk space is cheap

A small company has 10-20PCs with 200Gb spare on each so 1-2 Tb of distributed capacity. So rather than go and buy a $100 2Tb USB drive (and a spare so they have an offsite backup) they run this?

So the market is a company with 10,000 PCs sitting around, eg banks, who have data that isn't important enough to justify some proper sort of server.

Although there have been Telsas written off because they were parked in garages without a charger while their owners were away for a few months, and the battery was depleted to the point it needed to be replaced.

Re: How did they score those patents

You've read and analysed all the claims then?

Or just read the reg headline?

They don't the, patent probably includes somewhere in clause 87, some novel step about eg. adding a hash of the SSID and approx location to the database to speed up the search of possible nearby wifis

Patents are very rarely about the headline use, it's almost always about one tiny step in the implementation.

Re: TeeCee

You can't I have a business method patent on doing precisely that

Re: Sauce

Perhaps if you read some print journalism you would have a richer and more diverse vocabulary to eloquently express your dissatisfaction of the scheme?

Or you could just download our new Stephen Fry comment generator app.

Re: back again!

They succeeded in Canada - we pay 30cents on each blank CD.

There was a $1/Gb tax proposal on MP3 players but it was defeated

Unfortunately the scheme doesn't actually cover it's own costs, so no money actually goes to Celine Dion.

But it does mean that small bands selling their own CDs at gigs pay the levy on their blanks.

Re: This is serious

Wouldn't it be easier to simply give SKY a tax exemption?

If the idea is simply to transfer lots of money from the pockets of taxpayer to pockets of an australian media baron.

Re: Why stop at news?

I propose a 1 pound ISP tax to pay for all the free porn on the internet.

The money will be distributed by some formula based on Brazilian funbags and 1/number of cups - determined by reg readers.

Re: @Ledswinger

Although if you go into the supermarket and explain that you don't watch ITV they will knock 2p off a mars bar.

Re: Drive anywhere for free...

I can do this using RFID technology called an Oyster card.

There is an up-front cost, but it's a lot less than a Tesla

Re: No problems will be incurred by air traffic control

Or another way to look at it - there are 6000 people supporting those actually doing any work.

How many actual air traffic controller desks are there compared to all these managers, HR, publicity etc ?

Re: Extreme Capitalism

Fortunately the process is reversible.

Under the "Great Leader" Sheffield was transformed from a noisy grimy industrial city into a landscape of open spaces and green (well brown) fields - pretty soon it will just be a small fishing village.

Re: Love that place..

>. Isn't it a good job we've never built aircraft carriers.

Quote from the BBC article - "For now the carrier has no operational aircraft "

Once more china is just producing blatant copies of UK inventions

You're forgetting the power of backward compatibility !

If the DoD was involved we would still be publishing data in Trilobite compatible formats

Re: Fool Me Once Shame on You...

i think there should be annual tax holidays, just for a week or so around the middle of April

Re: Tax shouldn't be taxing

That's exactly what happens now - all the money Microsoft make in the USA they pay tax on in the USA.

But Microsoft USA make almost no money because they have to pay Microsoft Grand-Cayman for the rights to the Microsoft name and pay Microsoft Lichtenstein for the license to the software.

Re: Plug in cars ain't green.

>Large scale power generation is always more efficient than small local sources,

Multiplied by transmission losses, multiplied by charger efficency, multiplied by motor efficency

Then that's only true for the same sort of power generation. Ultimately power generation efficency depends on the temperature of the combustion cycle.

A diesel engine in a car could be more efficent than burning coal in a power station 1000km away

Re: How I would program it...

I assume that nay car with a complex and vital component made by Lucas already has a pretty effective immobiliser

Re: Cable...

Bikes are still a bit vulnerable to a sophisticated "putting it in the back of a van" attack.

>Guess they could just ring your doorbell - you answer - they poke knife at you and ask for your keys -

No - even car thieves don't want to risk getting any bodily fluids from a BMW driver on them, it might be contagious

Re: My Vauxhall (Opel)..

So you didn't buy a Landie because they are vulnerable to being lifted out of a carpark by a crane - and you consider this a security failing !

Isn't that a bit like complaining to the landlord is someone crashes a plane into your office ?

Re: put a lock on the OBD port

>- program keys from nothing = main dealer

IIRC Merc did this for their super-ninja-laser-cut-kryptonite keys.

Unfortunately they allowed any dealer to order the keys - and didn't get suspicious when some dealer in Borat-istan was requesting new key codes for 1000s of cars.

Re: Certain criminal threats - do not exist when cars are designed

>I don't recall Beemers being particularly cheap to begin with?!

But imagine if BMW managed to get the legislation overturned so that they could only be serviced by a BMW dealer and only MOT'ed/smogged by a dealer.

"I'm sorry sir your 1 year old car's ashtray is full and we don't service that model anymore" - "would sir like to buy a new one"?

Re: Not breaking the law

So it was you !

How did the pictures come out ?

Given some of the root CA that common browsers include you wouldn't have to do much.

I'm sure there is Russian/Liberian/etc CA that would issue you a cert for google.com with no questions asked.

Re: There is some logic ...

Well BT should just jolly well write to these chaps and get them to change the name of their road.

One day of course they will be able to talk on the new fangled telephone - as soon as the exchange is ready.