* Posts by NikT

20 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Feb 2010

EE's not-spot-busting small cell trial delights Cumbrian villagers

NikT
Megaphone

SEGN

Well, I'd only want it close by, so perhaps:

SEHNBy - Someone Else's House Near By

or

NtMNIMG, pronuounced Nit-m-ning - Near to Me, Not in My Garden

Nik

Vodafone dodges UK corporation tax bill - AGAIN

NikT

Re: Isn't this the same Vodafone...

That's because companies are taxed on their profits, not on cashflow. The sale of the Verizon stake merely changes the asset that Vodaphone owns from being 45% of a JV to a smaller % of the Verizon parent business and a pile of cash. Unless the new shares + cash are valued at more than the original shares, no profit was generated by the transaction.

It also happens that the sale is tax exempt as a 'substantial shareholding' , in just the same way that selling your house is tax exempt. It is because the law says it is.

Nothing to see here, next story please.

Listen, Google and Amazon: Soon we may not even use tape for COLD STORAGE

NikT
FAIL

"You would need to be certain that data longevity and integrity on disk was the same or better than disk. And if it was then the conclusion would be inescapable:"

I'd be willing to bet that they're about the same.

How to get a Raspberry Pi to take over your Robot House

NikT

Re: Reg ongoing feature?

Certainly - the ability to monitor the output from my solar panels and switch off non-time sensitive high-drain systems like recharging the car or running the immersion heater would be great.

Lesser-spotted Raspberry Pi FINALLY dished up

NikT

VAT for schools

Schools always pay VAT, as do businesses. VAT registered organization just get the chance to reclaim it (or offset it against the output VAT they've collected...)

Peugeot 3008 HYbrid4

NikT
Go

Bring it on...

Can't comment on the reliability of French auto electrics becasue to do so would be to tempt fate with respect to my 187,000 mile, 11-year-old Peugeot , which to date has been trouble free in that respect.

However, I drove the 3008 Hybrid4 last summer, and I too was impressed. We were at low speed on a short track, but the switch from electric only to diesel was very smooth indeed. The rep told me that the electric drive will kick in whenever you put your foot down, just for a couple of seconds to mask the turbo-lag.

Becrypt disk crypto earns first Brit spook kitemark

NikT
Megaphone

Missing the point...

I think you're missing the point here - this scheme is for banks and agencies that see the need to carry the personal details of their clients round on laptops but can't stop their staff leaving them on trains. The sort of stuff that the ICO keeps handing out larger and larger fines for. If their crypto is CESG approved then they can show they've taken all reasonable steps to prevent the loss of data.

Google finally admits it wants to OWN YOU

NikT

bears defacating in woods?

To be honest, the only surprise in this to me was that Google wasn't doing this already. Correlating information to individuals to serve advertisers, as Alex Gollner points out, is what Google does.

Amateur balloonists conquer Atlantic

NikT
Go

I hate to be a Party Pooper, but the last signal was at 9:46, at which point the baloon was at 11,000' descending at around 4000' per minute. With locations coming in every two minutes, it's likely that the battery failed due to a sudden ingress of salt water a good few hours before this story was published.

Boffins: Japan was hit by 'double-wave' tsunami

NikT
WTF?

Dodgy stats?

Is it really a 1 in 10 million chance that we saw this? I'd like to see the derivation of that number.

Boffins build bionic battery

NikT
Mushroom

Think of the kids!

All well and good, but it's going to fry the rest of the phone as it tries to draw 50 amps through tha dinky little charger...

Britain's Harrier jump-jets reprieved to fly and fight again

NikT
FAIL

Poor...

More misleading, pro-US, Pro-RN, Anti UK, Anti-RAF rubbish from the former Naval officer. When will the Reg defence desk hire someone who can write accurate reports?

Lemmings

NikT
Thumb Up

Great Stuff!

Excellent game - I even have a version with the first six or so levels on my Palm M515 - 160x160 resolution!

UK, US ink boffinry pact on laser fusion 'star power'

NikT

It's been officially upgraded to "something on the quite distant horizon"

Hundreds of Brit pubs to offer free WiFi

NikT
Thumb Down

100 != "hundreds"

How many are there? A hundred or many hundreds?

Jobs: Apple succession plans are 'hogwash'

NikT
FAIL

They should be...

Any publicly traded company ought to have succession plans, even if they don't have a messianic CEO with a poor health record. It would be highly irresponsible of the board not to have one.

Peugeot iOn e-car

NikT

Chare at Weekends?

The great thing about EVs is that you can charge them every night.

Nanotech nerds assemble überfast-charge battery

NikT

Power to charge

Re: Dr Insanity:

A decent EV battery is 50-100 KWh in capacity. In order to charge that in 5 minutes (comparable to filling with petrol) you need to push between 600KW and 1.2MW into the car. Unless you have a very high voltage (and the associated problems that that brings) this will need a lot of current.

EV users charge their cars every night, so only need to charge away from home if doing a daily journey in excess of the car's range. The comparison with filling a legacy car with liquid fuel isn't really valid.

Electric cars not as 'green' as advertised

NikT
Stop

Wider impacts apply everywhere

If you're going to compare the cost of generating electricity then you also need to include the energy required to produce petrol. It doesn't just come out of the ground ready to use - it takes about 7kWH to produce a gallon of petrol (energy which an EV could use to drive 30 miles) and that's before you've started to distribute it.

There's no such thing as a free lunch, so of course EVs use energy, but please try to compare like with like.

The myth of Britain's manufacturing decline

NikT
Go

Effect of out-sourcing

All good stuff. It seems to me that the other overlooked effect is that of outsourcing of non-core functions. Whereas previously all the 60,000+ people who work for my firm in the UK would have had a Standard Industry Code related to manufacturing, a whole load of them are now counted as service industry types. These people (catering, cleaning, IT, HR, to name but a few) still do the same jobs, many of them at the same desks - just for a different employer.

Nothing has changed, but thousands of people have been moved from manufacturing to services.