Posts by Nick Kew 2841 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jan 2007
That's why we need tidal energy. The renewable that's also reliable and predictable - at least while we have the moon and sun!
Together with a system for aggregating poser from different sources, so while one tidal generator is at low-generation phase, others at full blast take over. We could call it a National Grid. Oh, wait, we already have one, built back in the days when investing wasn't a dirty word.
Once again, we have an illustration of why corporation tax is not fit for purpose and should be replaced with an alternative tax structure.
Of course, direct alternatives ain't easy: they are all flawed. One the UK has moved towards - reducing corporation tax but introducing a new tax on dividends - is linked to the shareholders' tax status and thus easy to avoid (though the minority who can't avoid it will be among the well-to-do). VAT, income tax and employment tax (NI) are valid alternatives and would be more so with a level playing field, but are historically overtaxed as easy pickings for HMRC.
Here's a better idea we won't see in the foreseeable future.
I have a little liquor glass (inherited; I don't know how old it is but I think it's at least two generations above me), looks almost like a small eggcup from a distance.
When full, it displays a very NSFW lady. When you drink up, she disappears.
You're being had. Myra is actually ant. Not mosquito, nor even midge. And the 'damp' eludes me too. If asked to deconstruct the word, I'd guess the ant might suggest hard work and/or teamwork, while the Mack merely hints at something Scottish.
On the basis that proper scotch is Whisky while certain lesser imitations use the spelling Whiskey, perhaps a Swedish blend might take Whiskea as another alternative?
Surely I can't be the only commentard to have read that thinking you want the services of Mr Lipwig?
Oh, and re:
"Does anyone here remember ..."
I presume any such question is intentionally rhetorical? If we start on what we remember, it won't take long to to become Four Yorkshiremen.
Of course. Brexit countdown through contraction in the economy and government revenues to the halving in real terms of those two great sacred cows, the state pension and the NHS.
But current profligate spending promises are a poison pill to hurt Labour (and libdems, if they make an electoral comeback at Westminster). Take away whatever space they might have to appear more generous, and push them to promising what everyone will know is pie-in-the-sky.
It's amazing what companies can get away with. You or me, we wouldn't dare pull that kind of stunt.
You or I wouldn't need to. But if we had a barrister, they'd regard it as perfectly normal.
How is this claimed to be relevant? If Rabinowitz is claiming it's relevant, could he not have summonsed them himself to give whatever evidence he expects them to have?
British Leyland only ever existed as a government bailout of a lame duck. The first(?) of a long, long succession of taxpayer bailouts as it got reorganised under different names like jaguar, land rover, etc.
Under the circumstances, how could it ever have been anything other than rotten?
The big milestone in reaching that point was the Attlee government and post-war socialism. What you describe is what happened after that, as a generation of union leaders continued to fight the battles of their own youth, turning the movement into entitled bullies and crippling the country until Mrs T. pushed back on them.
Since then, they've been a much more balanced force. They serve a valid purpose, but it's when they do something a bit dumb that it's most likely to hit the news.
But whoever thought that headline "dismissive"? The Reg may not be for you!
Perl4 is a historic footnote. It was only with Perl5 and CPAN (and the rise of the Web) that it attained a Big Community and Ecosystem, and maintainability became an issue.
When I first hacked Perl, both 4 and 5 existed in parallel depending on what system you were using. At the level of a quick&dirty hack (erm, I expect that'll be pretty-much any pre-CPAN perl) the differences are immaterial.
HK still has not merely internet, but the full suite of social meeja. As in, what Western governments are very keen to exercise control over and possibly cut in the event of civil unrest.
Contrast what happens in a proper democracy. Like cutting off all communications in Indian Kashmir (and without even the provocation of rioting)!
There is the "do it badly" approach: if your reputation is sufficient to get away with it, you consciously commit "quick and dirty" in the expectation that it'll draw in others to Do It Right, and start getting more seriously involved in the community from there.
Commentards have already pointed out that quality as measured by the tool used may bear little relation to objective quality or to a project's own guidelines.
The other crucial consideration is where pull requests feature in a project's workflow. If a project decrees that all contributions (including the core team) happen through pull requests - a workflow making the pull request the focus of code review - then you'll get a high acceptance rate based on most of them being 'core'. Perhaps the study should've correlated those acceptance rates with the proportion of all code commits coming through pull requests?
Wot, no girlies? Sod this for an event: if my employer is sending me on a knees-up, it can jolly well at least have some totty on hand!
(not me personally - I can't recollect ever going to an event where I knew in advance what the balance was - beyond the kind of "techie events are predominantly male" generality).
Doesn't the fact that those sites are still available in Hong Kong tell us something? The government reaction to some pretty nasty scenes has been remarkably restrained. I wonder how many Western countries would temporarily block social media at times of civil unrest? The contrast to the closure of much more than just social media in Indian Kashmir seems pretty stark: never-democratic HK now clearly has vastly more freedom than established democracy India.
Anyone here remember Demon billing?
I had Demon when I first returned to Blighty, back in dialup days. Paid a year up-front ('cos it was cheaper than monthly). They never took a second year's payment[1], nor made any attempt to contact me about it, despite having email and snail-mail addresses and phone number. I wasn't paying attention, so the first I heard of it was when I got a letter from debt collectors!
After one or two other UK ISPs, I ended up with Plusnet, where I enjoyed a decade of connectivity free of the kind of problems that push one to change. Until the move to a house with ADSL estimated max speed 0.5M (no fibre), and the Virgin nightmare to make dialup look like a golden age ...
[1] Or that might have been two years OK and a third year vanished: memory is hazy.
Cameron acted for the leavers. First that non-deal with "concessions" that were less than those provided by the EU's normal rules - e.g. four years for EU migrants to qualify for UK benefits, when EU standard rules make that five years unless a host country chooses to be more generous. Then the non-campaign with heavily gerrymandered electorate - e.g. dropping the manifesto promise to enfranchise Brits abroad.
Of course Boris wanted and expected Cameron to stay on and take the blame. That was a deft manoeuvre to avoid becoming leader in 2016 without being seen to chicken out!
Compromised old developer account: hmmm, perhaps something to learn lessons from. Expire inactive devs, or at least require a cryptographically secure reactivation of an account?
About a week trojan lifetime: nasty, but at least it was limited. You didn't tell us whether the dev who discovered it is himself a member of that particular dev team, and thus would've seen it even if it hadn't been open source.
Here in Blighty Huawei doesn't appear to be priced as a premium brand. Real-world prices in the ballpark of Motorola/Lenovo, half the cheapest Samsung, quarter of the cheapest iphone.
Peaches have been good this season.
But I've been enjoying them without any thoughts of pleasures of a different kind.
Hmmm. Perhaps just as well if they're associated with the wrong orifice. I hope I can still enjoy them (the fruit) after reading that. At least the watermelon suggestion (below) conjures only a humorous/cartoonish image.
It's not at all Punch (which was great in a different way). Today's Eye is full of serious investigative journalism that's lacking - or at best a token corner - in the more mainstream press.
And the best ever cover headline three weeks ago in its Loon Landing Souvenir Issue: "The Ego has Landed".
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