Posts by DaveDaveDave 257 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Sep 2010
But there's no chance he'd be found not guilty, given that he admits to rape and simply claims to have found a legal loophole allowing him to rape without being guilty of a criminal offence. It's odd that his actual defence hasn't got more attention, except that he managed to distract from that with the bonkers conspiracy theories until everyone got bored.
Good question, and one I can't be bothered to go and look up numbers for. Without plugging in numbers, we can just talk about what factors might be responsible.
Really, there are two routes we can go down here. We can posit that coaches and planes aren't paying their way, and so are effectively receiving greater subsidies than rail in the form of things like discounted road-use payments. Or we can go the other way and argue that qualitatively if not quantitatively, rail is a better service which people are happy to pay more for. The latter accords better with my personal prejudices, so I'm going for that one.
Basically, because the idea that we should is thinly-veiled antisemitic propaganda, based on old blood-libels updated to the modern day, with 'bankers' in place of 'Jews'. Most people know that at some kind of subconscious level, and it explains both the fervent support of those like you, calling for lynch mobs, and the reluctance normal people feel to have anything to do with your hatred.
" My 1993 BMW 525tds will unlock the driver door automatically when you try to slam it with lock "button" pressed down."
I'm not sure if it's mandatory, but it's long been standard for cars to do that. You have to pull up the outside handle while closing it to stop it automatically unlocking.
Any sentence that includes the words 'here's a minimum wage' will end up in some ludicrous contradiction because it's such a bonkers concept. Supposedly it's a nice idea to tell people 'your labour is not valuable enough for you to be permitted to sell it in our society'. Sounds pretty damn harsh to me if you're not then giving them some training or other help to increase the value of their labour.
Of course the minimum wage's history is that it's always been an instrument of oppression, from when it was first brought in in the US to stop 'negro' workers getting jobs until today.
"But what would you cut? Health? Defence? Unemployment benefits? Pensions? Education? The UK government has averaged just under 40% of GDP in spending in the last 35 years, which means it's going to need to average taxes of about 40% of GDP. I suspect it will be very hard to move it very far from that, and keep the voters onside."
Is the level of wastage and inefficiency we currently have inevitable, something we should just accept as a cost of government, or is it something that we can work on and reduce over time as we get better at government? I have no doubt that an efficiently run government would be able to do everything currently done for a significantly lower price, although I do concede that creating any such thing would be even more than 'very hard'.
The good CEOs are revered precisely because, as you mention, a bad one can tank a company. They're few and far between, of course, hence the competition to find and retain them.
"I believe Zero Hedge even charted Stan O'Neal's (Merrill Lynch CEO) golf handicap getting better whilst his company went to shit."
You shouldn't believe anything you read on ZH. They just make stuff up out of thin air when they feel like it. It astonishes me that people cite a source which repeatedly spreads ludicrous antisemitic conspiracy theories about the Zionist World Government.
" I think all individuals should pay some tax (even on welfare payments)."
Then you are lacking a fully-functional moral compass. Some things - e.g, murder - are just morally wrong, and taxing poor people even a small amount of what little they have is one of them.
Seriously, what goes through the head of someone like you? 'I know, here's a great idea, it involves taking money from poor people and that's not evil at all'?
"This was at a time when most thought it was flat."
There has never been such a time. The idea's ludicrous to any sailor who goes out to sea, since you can see the curvature of the earth when you do so. And most people just never thought about it at all.
If you asked most people more than a few hundred years ago 'is the earth flat?' they'd look at you like you were an idiot and point to the nearest hill (or in Norfolk, pebble) as an example of non-flatness. A discussion of the shape of the planet would have been to them much like discussing whether space is curved is to most people today.
"It was considered "prior art" because it was still originally "published" and in the "public domain" even though the only way of finding out about it was to go to the actual american university library in question."
Yes, because the point isn't that you're accused of copying the other chap(/ess). It's that if two people have come up with the same idea, that rather invalidates the claim that it's worthy of patent protection.
At the moment there are an awful lot of patents granted which also shouldn't be, for other reasons, so it's a bit unfair on you that you run afoul of one of the few protections still working properly, but the solution is to fix the rest of the problems, not to abolish the working part.
Eh? Firstly, antisemitism categorically did not die out in the forties, but that's by-the-by. The point is that this is old 20s propaganda in new clothes. It's total nonsense, whether you believe it's genuinely aimed at bankers, or is used as a proxy.
That's just tired old antisemitic propaganda being dressed up as bash-the-bankers and trotted out all over again. The reality is that the vast, overwhelming majority of investment is long-term. Even if everyone was ignoring long-term opportunities, those opportunities would be underpriced, there would be excess profits to be made, and the market would chase those: the whole idea is so much nonsense, designed as propaganda to sway the ignorant. Evidently successfully.
You appear to be accusing the Graun of deliberate (and illegal) price manipulation. Of course the GMG pension fund has always been as ruthlessly exploitative as you'd expect from the bunch of hypocrites over there, but I'm not aware they've begun leveraging their media platform to move into organised crime. Frankly, I think your assertion is ludicrous. They're just idiots, not very clever crooks.
Silly. Go read some basic definitions.
"Just because Shell has assets it MIGHT eventually pump out and sell in the future doesn't mean that the company's value today should be equal to those assets theoretical value today"
Yes, yes it does. Because those values are discounted by various factors like the ones you mention, the discount rate, and so-on.
You've missed the point. The Graun thinks (entirely wrongly) that the companies' valuations _today_ include all that future oil at full prices. But the valuations do not include any such thing. That oil is already regarded as worthless by the markets, so there's no need to have some kind of market correction to a point where it's regarded as worthless.
"But housing scarcity? The evidence is against that: we have more house per head of population than ever in our history."
Good lord, talk about denial. We have a terrible, appalling, housing shortage in London and the SE. That is not offset by hundreds of thousands of unwanted homes in Ebbw Vale or Manchester or wherever.
It's one thing to allow your prejudices to form your opinion, but another entirely when they force you to deny reality.
I didn't read much past this bit
:
"Add the ridiculous surcharge of £4 for not paying by direct debit – when a BACS payment costs BT nothing to receive"
It does, of course, cost any similar company significant sums to chase non-payers, so payments by direct debit are much cheaper for the company to receive, regardless of bank fees.
Your proposed procedure's entirely unrealistic. Don't forget, some overwhelmingly large proportion of the copyright claims is entirely valid - my guess would be 99.99%+. (Have a look at Youtube when the football is on, for example: every goal is posted and removed dozens of times in the five minutes after it happens.)
Let's also concede that every teenager uploading a copyrighted video of some kind or other is going to reply to the takedown claiming it's not copyright.
"If we're talking fundamentals, the size of the world economy is the difference between all the stuff we've ever mined, harvested or extracted and all the stuff we've thrown away, burnt, lost, worn out, rusted, blown up or eaten."
No, it simply isn't. So that's your entire argument out the window, then. You've entirely omitted the value added by human endeavour. Very obviously, for example, the value of a smartphone is more than that of the sand and sand-like ores used to make it.
Tim, we go over this every time you mention Singapore: their figures are simply made-up. The reality is that 80%+ of their population has no access to the public healthcare system at all, so it's massively inequitable. It's also, once you factor the proportion of the population actually being treated, no more efficient than the US.
"I once asked a group of French ski instructors why they all used "Atomic" skis, when the brand had a piss-poor reputation of snapping in half after a weeks gentle use."
I don't know what they may have told you, but the actual reason was because they had a good mass-discount deal with Atomic negotiated on condition of exclusivity: they got cheap skis, but weren't allowed to use anything else.
"Encouraging people to spend money on cat videos or music videos doesn't increase wealth, it merely reallocates it. Like a lottery, its a tax on the not-so-bright."
Ah yes, the classic 'I know better than the fools how they should spend their money'. Funny how that particular piece of nastiness always rears its ugly head in discussions like this, but those pushing it are always opposed to extending the principle to themselves.
"Time was when economists insisted that it was also a "store of value", but with negative real interest rates and (intentionally under-reported) inflation that's not been the case for quite a few years now."
Er, no, _economists_ have always insisted that being a store of value made something a bad currency.
"What does that actually equate to in terms of the economic savings to passengers? How does that compare to say, the difference between the 1950s and the 1970s when in the 1950s, passengers were having to stop off in Newfoundland and Ireland for fuel and it took around 20 hours?"
Well, for starters it equates to massive cost-savings for today's passengers. Airline tickets are massively cheaper in real terms now than they were in the seventies.
And as for range, the 737-200 had range of 1900 nautical miles. Modern 737-NGs have a max range of 6340 nautical miles. Obviously that gives vastly increased route-options for narrowbodies. (All figures at MTOW.)
Then there's the 747. In the early seventies you could get the 747-100, which had a max range of 5300nmi. Modern 747s have a range of 8000nmi.
The jet-plane's-haven't-improved idea is even more ridiculous that Tim makes clear. To quote a commenter I saw recently on another site:
"There have been and continue to be large and impressive improvements in their: reliability, fuel efficiency, NOx emissions, CO2 emissions, noise levels, soot & smoke emissions, weight reduction and thrust rating (especially in proportion to weight). The latest Jet powered Aircraft are getting 2.4 to 2.5 Liters/passenger/100km fuel efficiency! The previous generation was around 4.5 to 6.5 and in the 70's it was around 10L/Pass/100Km! The Concorde was 16.6L/Pass/100Km!"
Other than that, given this is a tech site, I think it's worth looking at the costs of the computer revolution. It's basic common-sense that we expect the widespread adoption of new technologies to reduce growth in the shorter term - when consumers do it, we talk about the early-adoption penalty. Arguably, we've been putting resources into building up to a level where we can really exploit IT.
Commensurately, it has been argued that the roots of the previous boom were in the industrial revolution, and what we saw in the boom was the opportunity for rapid exploitation that eventually resulted from all the effort put in earlier.
"Or you could get a sweetheart deal with a car manufacturer, like Car2Go did for Smart cars for their "pick anywhere, drop off anywhere, pay by the minute" car rental service. That'd be Car2Go that pulled out of the UK earlier this year because they couldn't make any money"
Er, the reason C2G flopped here is that they didn't follow that model here. It was 'pick it up at a specific point, drop it back to the same point, pay by the hour/day'. Utterly pointless, and no surprise it flopped.
""Specifying an algorithm to a useful degree without handwaving is practically the same amount of work required to actually code up that same algorithm in an appropriate language, modulo a few bits of punctuation or whitespace""
You have it the wrong way around, as do many moronic PHBs. Proper planning makes coding trivial. It's trivial turning proper pseudo-code into real working code because the hard part - working out what to do when and how - has already been done. So yes, if you've described your algorithm properly a monkey could code it, but that's the whole point of producing the description in the first place.
There's a simple trick for medium-security passwords with daft requirements for numbers and letters. Pick yourself an algorithm for constructing an alphanumeric password based on the keyboard layout - 1q2w3e4r being a ridiculously simple example - and then all you have to remember is your pattern. If they insist on you changing it frequently, you can simply move the pattern about on the keyboard.
Y'know, if Assange was so worried that the US was trying to get him, perhaps he should have considered not raping two women in Sweden and then fleeing the country. Of course, he's not actually worried about the US at all, but simply about being found guilty of the rapes he foolishly admitted to before realising they were in fact crimes under Swedish law.
Video-calling is a bit too difficult to access, but in any case doesn't really work on phones. The problem isn't making a call - you could imagine calling someone up and saying 'hey, look at this cool scenery' or something in the same way you might snap a pic or record a video. The problem is that we don't look at videos and pictures on our phones very much - we prefer to view them on larger screens.
Skype video calling, on a big screen and with a decent quality webcam and microphone at the other end, is like having a magic window to somewhere a long way away. It's a brilliant concept, when used right, and when the technology works.
What else varies in a well-defined manner with altitude, apart from pressure and temperature? Ozone concentration. A suitable ozone sensor will set you back all of £20 or so.
Here you go:
http://sumaoutlet.com/mq131-ozone-gas-detection-module-gas-sensor-ozone-sensor-module-p-3723.html?zenid=itfhuhkjudlj6u4ug116fqnrg1
You evidently have something against VM, because you're just making crap up.
The throttling for 100meg customers kicks in after 20 gig of downloads between 10am and 3pm, then the same again between 4 and 9. The only people who have a 1.5GB cap are those on VM's legacy cheapest deal. Oh yes, and for everyone above 20Mb/s, throttling is only 50%, not 75%.
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