Posts by fero

"The result was quite possibly the most expensive legislation ever passed by Parliament."

Actually wouldn't the most expensive be Income Tax, introduced in 1799?

" Just 3.2 per cent of the internet-connected population does 88 per cent of infringement."

So quite a few people then. I'm guessing in the half to a million people range?

Lady Gaga was reported to have received just over £100 from Spotify in 2009 after her song Poker Face was played more than a million times.

How does that amount compare to a million listens on terrestrial radio?

All this talk of reselling games ignores another large area of the used game market - that of people who pass a game they have finished on to family and friends, for free.

Most of my relatives have Wii's and they constantly swap games around. A few relatives also have Xbox360's and again, games are passed around. I suspect this market is massively overlooked!

Introduce any charge at all, and this exchange is killed off. That won't mean more games are bought, more like less next-gen consoles are bought...

I found all three buzby's. They are not difficult, look for obvious areas where you can make out people standing. Shame the competition only recognizes your first find.

Someone will always spout off about how they still pay tax through VAT and employee income tax. This is true however the real issue is how they have a competitive advantage over the local competitors who can't bend tax rules like this. The small players can't compete, end up going out of business, the international corporations then dominate and guess what, prices go up, customers don't gain, and the tax man still loses out.

I wish the UK petition system had an "oppose" option as I often see petitions that I disagree with.

I read this paper just an hour before reading Lewis's interpretation. Sadly the research in no way invalidates the global warming calculations. It just changes some of the predicted effects of global warming with regards to drought.

The problem that the research looked at is the "Palmer Drought Severity Index" (PDSI) that is used to measure drought. The PDSI calculates drought by looking at the difference between precipitation and evaporation. The issue is with determining evaporation (can't be measured directly). The research increases the number of factors used to calculate precipitation.

Unfortunately the lead author (Anthony Watts) is funded by the Heartland Institute so he is not a neutral researcher. His draft paper (not peer reviewed) has already had a lot of the theories rebutted by other researchers.

To quote Wikipedia:

The Heartland Institute is an American conservative and libertarian public policy think tank based in Chicago, which advocates free market policies. The Institute is designated as a 501(c)(3) non-profit by the Internal Revenue Service and has a full-time staff of 40, including editors and senior fellows. The Institute was founded in 1984 and conducts research and advocacy work on issues including government spending, taxation, healthcare, tobacco policy, hydraulic fracturing, global warming, information technology, and free-market environmentalism.

In the 1990s, the group worked with the tobacco company Philip Morris to question the science linking secondhand smoke to health risks, and to lobby against government public-health reforms. More recently, the Institute has focused on questioning the science of climate change, and was described by the New York Times as "the primary American organization pushing climate change skepticism." The Institute has sponsored meetings of climate change skeptics, and has been reported to promote public school curricula challenging the scientific consensus on climate change.

The Maunder minimum has been closely studied and its effect is thought to be a 1C cooling over the period. As we are now looking at a minimum of 2C warming any new Maunder minimum will only slow down the effect, and when the Maunder minimum ends there will be an accelerated rise in temperature as the cooling effect disappears.

As usual Lewis cherry-picks the papers to report upon, and then cherry-picks the findings of the report!

The report does NOT say "Droughts, heatwaves not such a big deal". What it does say is that the effect depends upon what time of year the droughts and heatwaves hit, and recommends that climate models are improved to show seasonal variations. This also implies having better localised climate models and merging with ecosystem models.

Has no one read the paper or even the preview?

To quote:

Here we show that GICs, excluding the Greenland and Antarctic peripheral GICs, lost mass at a rate of 148 ± 30 Gt yr−1 from January 2003 to December 2010

But:

The high mountains of Asia, in particular, show a mass loss of only 4 ± 20 Gt yr−1 for 2003–2010

So the high mountains of Asia are showing a lower loss compared to previous research BUT overall losses are 148 ± 30 Gt yr despite the correction in the high Asian mountain numbers...