Posts by AListair 6

Oh, no: The electric cars at CES are getting all emotional

Re: People are now starting to realise

where they getting their petrol from? have they got secret petrol refineries in luxemburg?

Germany building coal plants is dumb, but is no reason to stop moving vehicles to electric as they are fundamentally more efficient. and as you say the luxemburgers are effectively using carbon free electricity re-imported from germany

Re: Carbon free electricity

one of the major issues with renewbles is that it's hard to match demand and supply.. having lots of cars plugged in is a great way to soak up excess overnight power. The UK has installed TONS on wind turbines and more are coming, this is a really compatible use-case.

but even apart from this, petrol enigines are really inefficient, (circa 25-30%) and making and distributing petrol is in itself energy intensive... so even if you generate all your enegry from natural gas, and send it to an electric vehicle, it's still better than petrol is now PLUS when you do install green sources it means they can be fully utilised and upgrade the whole system.

oh and the whole not choking people in cities thing is also a notable driver.

At last they stopped bothering with indicators on a BMW

will save the drivers wondering what they are for

'Admin error': AWS in dead company data centre planning application snafu in Oxfordshire

planning permission is given to the site

not the owner, the local authority dont really care who the applicant is.

it's nothing to do with them really.

Hate to deflate the conspiracy theories

But there is no tax or planning advantage to gaining the permission under a different name. Planning permission is given to the site, not the applicant, so if Joe Bloggs made the application then sold the site, the permission is still there and John Smith is free to build the permitted scheme. You don't even need to own a site to apply for planning permission on it, though in england you need their permission. In scotland I could submit an application to build 2 bed maisonette on the top of the scottish parliament and as long as i pay my £150 they'd consider it.

The only control is on the copyright of the design, but that is easily dealt with and wouldn't be a problem in this case.

The reason will either be to hide their plans and make them slightly harder to find for nefarious purposes, or to avoid any "anti-amazon" campaigners hijack the process... or litterally to hide their building layouts, others might seek to copy the arrangement.

alternatively it could well be that a separate development company is buying the sites, putting in the application then selling the lot to amazon.

BYOD is a PITA: Employee devices cost firms £61 a month

Re: I'm unsurprised

I work for a large multi-national co, the problem I have with the supplied kit is that it's been bought in bulk as a one-siz-fits-all solution.

I'm a pretty mobile worker, traveling a lot so my heavy ass laptop with shitty battery is a major pain in the back.. and shoulders.

Any my piece of crap blackberry is just so old it's a joke. (and they've locked out tethering, so i end up spending £40 per month on hotel/train/airport wifi what i really dont need)

BYOD is one way to solve this, having a user focussed IT strategy would be better.

Also for our company, running google mail and web accessible intranet byod should be a lot easier to impliment. We still need access to one drive via vpn.. but I assime that'll move to a google drive -type-system at some point.

Asteroid miners hunt for platinum, leave all common sense in glovebox

Re: Uhm... No.

It's an interesting point, what would nasa pay for a large ball of floating ice and carbon in a nice earth orbit... on the way to mars perhaps.

Re: robots

and it's even cooler... can we give them laser beams

This is assuming the products are the same

I mean I don't know what proportion of platium is used in jewelery. but 'platinum certified from space' isn't the same product as 'boring old platinum'... start sprogging out star shaped jewelery for the arabs and billionaires, then down to just the regular rich folk.... it isn't stupid to think the material price would be doubled.

If they can make a new market for it (and its hard not to see that the publicity would be huge) then they will have a pretty unbreakable monopoly on that new differentiated product.

EFF accuses Warner of spamming DMCA takedown notices

Dave Gorman had a bit of a problem wiht a false DMCA request the other day

http://gormano.blogspot.com/2012/03/if-this-picture-looks-bit-familiar-it.html

Clear Channel turns digital billboards into 'store fronts'

Magners is posh cider?

oh dear.

How I used Space Shuttle tech to insulate the living room

please tell me you did an interstitial condensation calculation?

Otherwise there is a serious risk of water vapour condensing on your nice cold timber frame and rotting it.

Adding insulation to the inside of a house is a much poorer way to do it that adding to the outide, as you have no thermal mass and the structure is cold and liable to freeze. Adidng an insulated render to the outside of the building would probably have been much more effective.

Biometric harvest network can handle just 700k a year

Given that edinburgh is further west than cardiff

i Doubt it's the most westerly branch

/pub quiz knoledge

Mystic Met Office abandons long range forecasts

to be fair

they actually predicted a 60% chance of it being a very hot summer.

which might have been perfectly accurate.. it was the press release and the media that got it wrong.

Wired defines the storage 'PornYear'

Given the media's unwillingness

to use anything as usefull as Watts Joules or KW/hr When talking about green energy perhaps you should add units of power and energy to the convertor (just mix them up together, journalists don't know the difference anyway)

I'd propose

'enough to power a house' (this can be a random number)

'enough to boil a cup of tea'

'Enough to power the streetlights in birmingham' (during the day)

'Enough to power a town the size of Stoke'

Chavez decries evils of PlayStation

And of course

Austrailia