Posts by uncle sjohie

Since we don't have a driveway, and have to park in the street in front of our house, charging an electric car would mean running a cable from our house across the sidewalk to the car. And that goes for the majority of houses here in the Netherlands. I imagine that would give quite some health&safety risks, not to mention a whole new way for vandalism. And the people in those houses, constitute the bulk of car owners you need to convert to electric vehicles to make a serious environmental impact.

Re: So long old friend

I remember those times too. I flew, as 6 year old boy from Amsterdam to Miami with a KLM 747 in 1980, I also got pilot wings, crayons, a lot of attention from the flight attendants, and a nice tour of the cockpit. Nowadays, airplanes ar just flying busses/touringcars, all the romance is gone.

Re: Just basically awesome

The space shuttle had wings..

Re: Are you kidding?

I had the same experience, but with a Ford Fiesta on the Azores, those dinky 3-cylinder eco-soy-bean-latte engines always struggle with hills. 65hp in a Fiesta just doesn't cut it with any kind of elevation, even here in the Netherlands. That's just how it works out because of physics.

2 reasons

This is probably done for 2 reasons, to legally and financially separate VW form the other brands of the volkswagen Group, and for PR reasons, although all group brands with the 4 cylinder diesel engines are affected, so the PR nightmare is complete already.

Re: re: Not being funny but why on earth would immigrants want to go to Germany?

It's not so simple. Besides the Assad regime, there are 100 to 300 armed gangs in Syria who change allegiance on a daily basis, merge or just stop, IS is also fighting Al-Qaida, the "free Syrians" operating from inside Turkey fight all the above, and last but not least, there are the Kurds who are just fighting to survive. From an EU perspective there is not one group to give any serious support. Arming IS or Al-Qaida is a bad idea, like arming the mudjaheddin in Afghanistan turned out to be, ditto the Kurds (the PKK are genuine terrorists in their own right), and the the free Syrians have some ties to hamas/hezbolla in Lebanon.

Basically there is no group or faction that the west can back, to the the point of real soldiers fighting beside them against the regime, the gangs, Al-Qaida and the radicalized western youths that make up IS. I'm afraid the whole country will be a bloody mess the next decade. It's like the gangs of Mogadishu, the Balkan war, and the Palestine-Israeli conflict but with 5 instead of 2 parties, all rolled into one terrible mess.

The 2 Syrians I spoke to in Kos 2½ week ago, said they would probably have voted for Assad the next election, he was far from perfect, but under his regime there was no all-out guerrilla war like now.

The Greek tax problem mainly resides with the baby-boom generation, who after the colonels regime developed such a deep mistrust of any form of government, that they avoided paying taxes any way they could. I remember our holidays there in the nineties, cash payment in dutch guldens or deutchmarks was the norm, no taxes were ever paid by the Greek apartment owners. And the same group has managed to thwart the establishing of a proper cadastre, which is instrumental in recording property value, and the subsequent taxing of that property.

And running a railway company at a 3 million euro/day loss, with drivers getting double the pay of their German and Dutch colleagues doesn't help either. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/21/business/global/21rail.html?_r=1

I also remember an article stating that the Greek government has about 70 billion euro's of uncollected taxes on the books. How about they collect that, the northern European countries write off 100 billion, and the Greek government does as it has promised the third time around? That way we can move past this horrid mess with only losers.

Monitor Audio and Marantz always sound very good together in my opinion. I once heard a Marantz KI setup hooked to some Monitor Audio floorstanders a tenth of the price of the Marantz CD/amp combo, and it just rocked. Ditto for their AV/5.1 combinations.

Re: refuel...

Actually, the 787 we flew from Cuba back to Amsterdam, was being refueled at the stopover in Mexico, with all the passengers on board and the lights on. We were told to unfasten the seatbelts, and stay in our seats, while there was a stewardess positioned at every exit. So it wasn't completely shutdown.

Re: A modest haul

I was tempted to buy all the Bruce Springsteen reissues for my collection, but I already have the CD boxset, and don't even own a turntable, so I decided against it. Last year I did get the American Beauty EP, and it sounded pretty good on the Rega RP6 of my neighbor.

Re: Why aren't our sanctions against NK already maxed out?

International diplomacy, military doctrine, and common sense, all agree on the fact that it's not a good idea to back a nuclear armed dictator, into to tight of a corner.

But the last 2 years have seen a subtle shift in the attitude towards North Korea by the USA and South Korea. Until then, NK would do something provocative, like setting off some half assed underground nuclear firecracker, or shoot off a rocket over the sea of Japan, and negotiate some fuel-oil of lift of a few sanctions for stopping. Now they just ignore them if it's possible, and don't offer anything. Then they back down on their own accord.

Re: Pop goes Samsung's glossy image.

That would be the same Apple, who had to be jerked into line by an Italian judge to give EU customers the 2 year warranty they are entitled to by EU law? And for free, not as an extra warranty-plan?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/02/apple_extends_eu_warranty/

Or you could get a second sim for your existing contract?

Re: The only good profit is an obscene profit?

Samsung and the other chaebol companies in South Korea almost own the complete political system, there horse really does decide which direction the cart is being pulled. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/tax-evasion-bribery-and-pricefixing-how-samsung-became-the-giant-that-ate-korea-8510588.html

Re: Float? More like Sink!

Would you mind an even-cheaper company entering the market, if you were one of the SpaceX shareholders?

Re: Space Race?

I think a lot of people would care, since a lot of consumer products like PNA's and in-car navigation systems can't use the signals of those other navigation satellites. Only more recent systems like the TomTom Go, are able to use Glonass as well as GPS.

Professional receivers from Leica, Trimble and Topconn etc already accept all of those signals, or can be made to do so with a firmware upgrade in most cases.

Re: tempted

I was born with a heart defect, but I was successfully operated at the age of three, and have been proclaimed healthy by my cardiologist. Still, 35 years after the operation, the occasional pain/cramp in my chest like everybody else has once in a while, makes me wonder.... So knowing isn't always a good thing in my book.

And with the current medical diagnostic possibilities, they can find something minutely wrong in anybody. But that doesn't say anything about a cure for what they found.

Re: God that thing is ugly

Those professionals sometimes would like a good keelhauling for some of their customers. One female member of the Ford family is know for walking on her semi-finished yacht, pointing to the solid walnut veneer in the master cabin, and say "paint it all blue". Making the 3 expert carpenters, who had been working 2 weeks nonstop on those panels, leave the wharf whilst crying their eyes out..

Re: NUKES IN SPACE!!?!

How about we shoot off those green types in the next rocket to mars?

Re: I don't get the fuss

It takes a minute or so to get some DVD's to chuck into your laptop bag, but a little longer to download them. :-)

Re: titles are for toffs.

If you used to sell B&O products, you should also be aware of their excellent service, even 10+ years after purchase, or in the case of the old beocenter 2200 of my parents, >25 years. When my father asked for a replacement needle for the turntable a few years ago, it was on stock at the distributor, and at the shop ready for pickup 2 days later.

And let's not forget the excellent manuals they provide with all of their kit, made by actual people, and not by running the Chinese thru babelfish like most companies do. I remember my parents buying an beocenter 9500, and me running off for some speaker cable. When I got back, my mother was busy programming the radio-stations.

These things and service cost money too...

My own HiFi system sounded better than the 9500, at half the price, but my mother couldn't get it to work...

Re: It's all so depressing...

That doesn't really matter, since you can move the airbase it flies off. Just park the carrier roughly in the right area, and presto.

Actually

There are some good reasons to buy monster cables, especially their higher end hdmi cables with guaranteed bandwidths. Those reasons don't apply to your average home, so in that case it's a waste of money. But if you have a dedicated home theatre room, you don't want to rip out the wall to replace the hdmi cable going to your new and shiny 4k projector hanging on the ceiling in 2 years time, and then it starts to make sense to spend a few hundred quid on a more futureproof hdmi cable. There are some interesting youtube video's comparing cheap, medium priced and the hig end monster cables, with a skeptical audio-journalist and testing done at the Aussie moster cable lab. The results may be an eye-opener. :-)