Posts by JC_ 426 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Mar 2011
Do you mean TCO
Yes, because manufacturing is included in the price and installation and removal is not expensive and for small installations may even be 'free' if part of the roof for a new build.
Location is of course important. Here's a headline from Texas: A Texas Utility Offers a Nighttime Special: Free Electricity. It's for wind-generated power.
I'd rather take my chances with climate change. It might or might not kill me. Lack of electricity or any other energy I can afford definitely would.
It's always astonishing that people can decide when it suits them that capitalism will selectively fail. Right now you can buy solar panels at a cost that makes them supply energy at a price more or less equivalent to fossil-fuel power stations.
Yet somehow if fossil-fuels are priced to include their externalities, alternative power sources will neither be developed nor grown, despite the fact that they already exist and are being used right now.
'Greens' have encouraged fuel economy in cars - do you see the complete absence of cars or simply more efficient ones?
You can import food, even if it's 'too hot' to grow food
Only if you have something to pay for it with, which will be rather a problem when the petroleum runs out or becomes uneconomic, first.
The population of the UAE is 10 million, but only 1.4 million of them are citizens. Egypt, on the other hand, already has 82 million citizens and is a hell of a lot poorer.
The effects of climate change on these poor countries that are also utterly corrupt will be catastrophic.
You're certainly right that with industrial monocultures, we're basically eating oil, but there are alternative methods of production that while more labour-intensive are still productive and certainly more sustainable.
Michael Pollan (he of "eat food, mostly plants, not too much" fame) has written a lot on this with Polyface Farm the best known example.
For all its horror, the casualties of WWII were 'only' 3% of the global population; going from the forecast 9 billion down to 2 would be beyond horrific and hopefully not likely.
You are soon looking forward to a series of wars
It's quite ironic that the US military - not known for liberal tendencies - is forecasting and preparing for these situations as an outcome of AGW, while all of the supposedly pro-military Republican candidates for president flatly deny the existence of AGW.
It's going to be hellish in the worst-affected countries. Yemen is already a disaster heading for a catastrophe.
The proper perspective is that VW lied and cheated and people have died as a result. Not even VW customers, but people who had no choice but to breathe the pollution of VW vehicles.
Everyone knows about externalities, right?
The technology is already available - and in use - for instant roadside testing of emissions. It combines with license plate recognition (and therefore car make, model & year) to give real-world statistics.
This offers a simple solution: manufacturers vouch for their emissions levels and if they aren't met in real-world sampling then they pay a whopping fine per vehicle.
It would also have the benefit of catching owners who re-program the ECU, modify the exhaust etc.
VW has met the letter of the law
VW has publicly admitted cheating.
the climate change/eco scam is a multi billion $/£/€ business
had the Australian PM removed
So this is all part of the Anti-Abott-pro-Obama-space-lizard conspiracy? You might want to step away from the screen and experience the real world - you'll find it surprisingly different to what you think.
"However, that's not a reason to jail him, and what this article is about is criminal liability (if any)."
In Common Law countries there's the concept of Vicarious Liability, which could make him subject to prosecution.
I don't buy that he was unaware. Breaking into the US market was strategic for VW and they attempted it by mass-marketing diesels, unlike any other manufacturer. Only wilful ignorance could explain Winterkorn - a well known control freak - failing to ask his staff how they were going to achieve this miracle.
"people don't want crap cars"
Not a problem, because there basically aren't any crap cars these days. Here are the best sellers from 2014, any of which would seemed magically good 30 years ago.
Thus this sort of "cheating" is bound to happen over and over till reality is restored.
The reality is that this is cheating: after being presented with evidence of its wrongdoing, Volkswagen admitted that the cars contained defeat devices.
NOx and diesel particulates cause tens of thousands of premature deaths each year in the UK. This kind of cheating shouldn't attract just fines but criminal prosecutions of those who made the decision to cheat; they've literally taken innocent lives.
'97% of climate scientists' is a blatant lie. Look it up.
It probably isn't worth wasting time on ACs who are full of rubbish (there's just too many) but here you go, from NASA:
97% of god botherers believe in a deity. I still wont take their word for it no matter how delusional them and their followers call me
Scientists are the exact opposite of your 'god-botherers'. People who ignore all the evidence - and the agreement of the experts - are the deluded ones.
Here are some coherent reasons to oppose measures to prevent AGW:
* I don't want to
* It's a hard problem
* I won't be around for the effects of AGW
* My income depends on not trying to prevent AGW
All of these are selfish, but at least honest.
The extreme cults of absolute denier and absolute warmist both look like nuts but it is the warmist cult that is abusing our lives to appease their beliefs. I dont know anyone on the fence who is happy about that
This is the equivalent of the old saw "flat-earthers vs. scientists; opinions about the shape of the earth differ". 97% of climate scientists support the theory of AGW. It isn't cultish to accept the opinion of the overwhelming majority of experts, it's sensible; pretending otherwise is delusional.
Cryptolocker targets network shares that are mapped to a local drive, so \\MyNas\MyFiles would be fine but Z:\MyFiles would be toast.
However, as people have pointed out, RAID isn't backup - it just helps availability. What you need are copies of the files over time, so as CryptoXXX creates encrypted, current versions, the old copies are untouched and can be used in the restoration.
At home we use CrashPlan for this. When Cryptolocker first broke out, they reportedly came up with a utility to make restoring from a point in time (i.e. pre-infection) a bit easier.
The problem with enforcement is that there is none. LTDA boasts about how successful it is at getting drivers off on the few occasions that they are ticketed. Despite being a tiny part of the transport network they have outsize representation on the TfL board. 30,000 drivers are represented; half a million cyclists aren't.
Traffic enforcement ought to be enforced by a body separate from the police and council, so that effective enforcement doesn't affect how motorists view these groups; basically, it needs to be done by a technocratic group that don't care if (bad) drivers think that they're bastards.
Secondly, enforcement needs to actually happen. For that there needs to be an objective measure of how bad the driving is; if, for example, a sample of red-light cameras show violations above a threshold, then up goes the enforcement strictness so that it's brought down.
Finally, give the enforcement agents some real encouragement: 10% of the fines as a commission!
"You don't want your swap file on an SSD, unless you want to kill it early ..."
The last SSD endurance test I saw had the first device failing after 0.75 Petabytes of writes, while the others were approaching 2PB. With that kind of endurance and their ever increasing capacity, it's pretty unlikely that the swap file will cause a problem.
Every laptop in our office came with an SSD and only one of them (mine!) has a regular HDD, as well. Along with every phone and tablet around, they all swap to SSD and the manufacturers seem to be happy with that.
Gather your data, stick in a new HDD (or be bold/foolish and wipe the current one), new OS, the software you actually need, and finally restore your data
This bit is the sticking point - having to call up the vendors and hope that they'll let you 'activate' another time with the same license key. Penance for not obeying RMS, I know, I know...
" I have been cycling 24 miles a day in London from zone 4 to Holborn and back - its awesome!"
You've been breathing the fumes too deeply - cycling in London sucks! It's better than the alternatives, but could be so much better with a little investment and some traffic enforcement.
Anyway, good on you for cycling so much and staying chipper - I do 22 miles per day and find that a grind by the end of the week or earlier when the cabs/weather/plane trees misbehave.
It's a commute, not a race! E-bikes are a brilliant idea for getting people out on a bike when they don't have the strength (or motivation) to cycle hard.
In my experience in London it's not the hills that hurt, since there aren't many, but the traffic lights. 70 of them between home and work mean a lot of standing starts and tired legs by the end of the week.
In a society with over 2m people unemployed and an unfunded state pension, and a budget deficit, the "cost" to the rest of society is negative. The Department against Transport use a circa £1.2m "willing to pay" value for road deaths that is totally spurious, but even then we're talking less than £5bn. That's the tragic thing for lefties about maths - the answers are often wrong and have to be made up.
£34 billion. That's the government estimate of value of prevention of road accidents. Where does your £5bn number come from? Did you make it up?
Also, how much would you demand from a drunken driver to compensate for just one year of your child's life?
Well, again we enter the realm of made up numbers. Funny thing is, when I blow my nose after a trip on the underground, all this black snot comes out. When I look at the crap spewed out by the average bus or taxi, looks a lot worse than the pollution from cars, and the emissions per passenger km support the visual observation. Are health conditions less bad when the pollution comes from public transport?
London 'black snot' is brake dust. In this case, what you see can't hurt you - your nasal mucus has trapped the particles and no harm has been done.
What can and will kill you are the small particulates that you can't see and lodge in your lungs. They will cause cardiovascular disease. Not seeing them won't help; children in the seventies could not see the lead in exhaust fumes but it damaged their brains nevertheless..
Being a fat b@stard has far more to do with eating too much crap than it does with exercise. Do the maths (again).
Exercise has next to nothing to do with it. The 'obesogenic environment' in which we live does.
Don't be so naive.
Indeed.
Perhaps you should not be so smug about naiveté yourself.
to use such a huge catch-all as "tattoos are so ugly" I find rather sad.
True, but if he'd just the qualifier 'most' then he'd be quite right (and I say that as someone with a tattoo and plenty of scars).
Not many look good to start with (IMHO) but zero of them improve with age - skin sags, inks fade and regret often sinks in.
Hopefully the woman with the post-masectomy tattoos will want them all her life.
The issue here is more around if Apple know / knew about this issue before his purchase
Putting on my dev hat, this really doesn't count as an "issue". If someone wearing a nose ring gets it tangled up in a towel (yes, really) we wouldn't call on towel manufacturers to sort it out for them, and the same goes here.
On the bright side, mums and dads will finally have an argument to use against sleeve tattoos that their darlings will consider.
One reason the IRS can't do things to simplify tax is because Intuit vociferously lobbies against it.
Comically, Intuit claims that easy filing would hurt the poor.
Not to be conspiracy-minded, but some corporations and one political party in the US have a vested interest in making government look incompent, and they do their very best to achieve this. Blame them, not the IRS.
(Also liked the Daft Punk putdown too - weren't they briefly top ten material about 15 years or so ago?
What cave were you living in in 2013? "Get Lucky" was huge and is a pretty catchy tune - check it out with Stephen Colbert and tell me you don't like it :)
"disorderly conduct" is on the books in the US, not the UK, the same as "lewd and lascivious behavior". Besides which, Channel 4 isn't a court of law and she wasn't on trial.
Otherwise, a certain US football player would have been able to squash the video of him knocking out his fiancee at a Casino.
That went to court, right? Not just to television? This was broadcast for titillation and it just isn't on. There's no defence.
I've seen girls pissing in the street during Hogmanay and felt a bit self-righteous about it, but to put it in the public domain would never cross my mind. People make mistakes and any punishment has to be proportionate to the harm done.
Why did the comment by =5 got downvoted, without anyone having the courtesy of explaining their disagreement?
'Cause it's impossible to explain and so very easy to press the downvote link?
Presumably all the down-voters think that eternal, public humiliation is a proportionate response to the situation, rather than simply paying a fine for punishment and compensation for the actual damage done.
"Why the down votes people?"
Trolling with "Micros~1" and "Insecure Exposer" I'd guess. Same as using "Crapple" and similar playground insults, it marks out a time-waster.
"The only thing about IE that can be "removed" is the front end that fires it up in a browser window that you see."
How should a developer display HTML in a Windows application, which is a common thing to do? Should they include the source for Chromium instead of using the built-in HTML renderer of the OS?
Brussels' muddled competition policy has reflected the worst of all possible worlds.
Worse than Mexico, where America Movil has over 70% market share which costs Mexico an estimated "$25 billion per year" and which has made its owner the richest man in the world?
In fact, which large country has a better competition policy than the EU?
It always amazes me when folk from abroad rock up in a new job in a country they have never lived in before and start talking about "work/life balance".
I think that's unduly harsh on the interviewee. Anyone that gives up a chunk of pay is doing it for something that's more valuable to them, such as time off and a view of the sea instead of the A40.
Poms will know they are making progress on the integration front when they are referred to as a Brit rather than a Pom, its a big step up.
Any kiwi that keeps on referring to an ex-pat as a 'Pom' is being a dick. If you're in the habit of doing this, then please stop as you're embarrassing the rest of us.
I'd like to see 50/50 split in parliament between PR and FPtP and everyone get two votes, one for each section.
That's exactly what Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) is and what it will give you. Half the seats in parliament are electoral ones and the balance are allocated to ensure each party's proportion of members closely matches its proportion of votes.
There can of course be slight variations when the seats are allocated - for example, a stand-alone candidate who scrapes through will likely have slightly more 'representation' than she is due by votes, but it's a trifling problem and still vastly fairer than FPTP.
NZ switched after a series of governments that were more radical than the country as a whole; despite some initial discomfort with coalition government, PR is now thoroughly.embedded. In the 2011 referendum, 58% of voters chose to keep MMP against any alternative.
Bonding would also be an option if needed, we already have half a dozen telephone lines, of which a couple could be bonded, allowing us to use VOIP and ditch the rest.
Our small office of 12 people has FTTC and it's great (lucky us), but using it for VoIP is something we've often considered but never quite had the courage for. The internet connection has only gone down a couple of times in the past few years, but the plain old phone lines have never died. Once I learned that a SLA just meant getting just a pro-rata refund for the time the connection was down, my confidence went.
Has anyone out there taken the gamble? If so, how'd it go?
Prices start at around £1,500 for a model with a conventional 1920x1080 display, but it’ll cost you £1,848.00 to step up to a "quad-HD" display with 3200x1800 resolution.
It's worth keeping in mind the Dell Outlet store (and those for the other manufacturers). I'm typing this on my M3800 with the quad-HD screen and it cost £1,050 + VAT a few months ago. Even in the regular shop there is always a discount code available.
finding somewhere to store your 4TB of personal data that doesn't cost several limbs
CrashPlan is unlimited for £40 or so per year. The upload speed was about 5Mb/s (but with compressed data, so double that) out of the 16Mb/s upstream connection available.
C - what's C? Ignorance is bliss :/
Parking fees + parking fines = parking costs/maintenance + cost of enforcement is the theory.
But that ignores all the other costs and externalities, so it's hardly neutral.
If I park in the disabled bay and therefore deny it to a disabled person, what fine should I get? Just the few quid that I would have paid to park in a legitimate bay?
The fact is that most parking offenses are selfish behaviour that impose a small cost on a lot of other people; drivers who get ticketed whine loudly because they feel the fine acutely, but they don't see the costs and inconvenience they've caused.
In theory, as the parking restrictions were revenue-neutral this ought to have no effect.
What does making parking restrictions "revenue neutral" actually mean? Is it fines = cost of enforcement? Or do you take into account the opportunity cost caused by some wanker double-parking and blocking the way for all other road-users, or worse, causing accidents?
I would argue that it would be best to put the "temptation" to work and have the free-market solve the problem - license parking wardens, put them on commission and have them ticket as much as they're able to.
the subsidised market ... often creates opportunities that a more transparent hardware purchase market is less likely to offer. At any point in time there will be something good that somebody really needs to shift, and if you're flexible then there's bargains to be had.
True, but only if the bargain happens to be available when your contract is up for renewal. In the UK it's no big deal to switch to PAYG to wait for a bargain between contracts, but in the US, is that a realistic option? It seems like everyone is locked into contracts (T-Mobile customers excepted) and if you have to pay the contract price, you might as well just get the most expensive phone.
According to Mozilla, there are 2.3 million users of NoScript. While that's a lot, it's a small proportion of Firefox users, let alone all browsers.
Anyway, the OS is shown in the user agent ID string. That can be faked of course, but not many bother.
Here's an example of Slater's blogging: after a 28 year old man died in a car-crash, in which he was a passenger, Slater writes: "Feral dies in Greymouth, did world a favour"
Slater is a vile individual who slimes and slanders and does so for money. The fact that the PM, journalists and members of the National Party are all embarrassed by their links with him shows that it's a view shared across the political spectrum.
"Surf his website" - if you do, shower afterward.
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