Posts by Dave 15

'Liberator': Proof that you can't make a working gun in a 3D printer

Re: Its a start,

Both sides had clunky muzzle loaders - but you yankees had to rely on help from the French, at least we had more pride

Crap

Sorry, but the article is crap.

Guns come in several varieties. One variety is rifled - a rifle! Some pistols and even large field guns and British army tank guns are also rifled. Rifling is used to spin the projectile, this spin stabilizes the projectile meaning that it flies in a straight line and you can aim it.

Other guns are 'smooth bore' - most notably most American tank and field guns, old naval cannon of the type used at Trafalgar and original blunderbuss and shotguns. Here the projectile (or projectiles) are not spin stabilized. In the case of modern tank and field guns the projectile has fins - in the barrel of the gun these are surrounded by cabots which fall away as the projectile exits the barrel - these fins stabilize the projectile. In the case of things like old ships cannon and shotguns - theres no stabilization and its a trifle hit and miss whether you it or miss a target - especially at more than a few yards.

While it certainly would be possible to print a rifled barrel it is difficult to see how the plastic used could be made hard enough to survive more than one shot. But then, a British tank gun isn't designed to survive very many and it is made of metal (the life expectancy of a tank on a battle field is depressingly low).

The chance of the gun working once are pretty high, chances of twice, probably quite low. But then you could potentially print a bullet or two as well... even plastic going fast enough can do some reasonable amount of damage - especially if you put some poison in the tip.

I don't know whether this was basically responsible for the panic in the USA when the gun was demonstrated, but removing the blueprints has no real effect - the ideas are out there now and now the technology has rendered the airport scanners obsolete.

EU boffins in plan for 'more nutritious' horsemeat ice cream

Re: am I reading that right?

I suspect its bull :)

Of course some stuff like hide is used for shoes and so forth. Bones are used for whatever bones are used for (isn't it to help making bone china nice and thin and semi transparent) but I think the vast majority of the rest is fed to us one way or another.

The interesting thing is that you aren't allowed to feed your left over dinner to pigs anymore (pigswill is banned) - probably because the stuff they feed us is so bloody bad we aren't allowed to be that cruel to pigs!

Don't worry

Don't worry dear, its only the same as an ice cream...

Re: Using as much of the slaughtered animal as possible,

Indeed, some breeds of dogs (esp Bull terriers for some reason) are actually allergic to wheat and other fillers used in biscuits, tinned and dried commercial dog foods (they get major skin infections and problems especially around their feet) - the meat products - even from the less pleasant sounding bits - are far better for dogs than the commercial treats.

As to eating all the unpleasant bits - 'beef' in 'burgers' normally comes from a cow/bull - but where from you really really don't want to know - but does it matter? Not once its been nicely cooked on the bbq and washed down with some decent beer.

If you've bought DRM'd film files from Acetrax, here's the bad news

illegal download sites

Who can wonder at the continued interest in downloading 'illegal' copies when the 'legal' copies are basically such a disaster?

Rogue Nokia splinter cell drops its Jolla phone A-BOMB

Re: unlikely that Nokia would invest in another flavour

Asha is S40, nothing else.

Re: unlikely that Nokia would invest in another flavour

Symbian no longer outsells windows phone - mainly though because Nokia aren't making them. In total units shipped it will be a few decades before windows overtakes Symbian.

Re: Would be hilarious if Jolla becomes bigger than Nokia in a few years

What, 5million a quarter, the burning platform was managing 30million a quarter in a smaller market

Nokia aren't totally dead yet but they are so far back in the race that it seems unlikely that they will again rise beyond tail end charlies. Don't forget that many of their 'smart phone' sales aren't actually smartphones - they reclassified some oft he old s40 phones (which definitely aren't windows phone, aren't smart etc etc) as 'smart phones' so their sales figures wouldn't look the disaster they are!

Re: Rolling upgrade

Have already asked for the specs for the back bit to see about providing such things as keyboard and camera upgrades...

I think the idea will catch on.

Re: Oh really?

The idea is sound.

Plenty of people bought new covers for their old Nokia phones - customising the outside of the phone for themselves. Indeed Sendo made quite a business out of having a stock phone with covers they supplied to allow them to sell phones to clubs like ManU. This is a clip on cover that goes a bit further. So now not only do you have a cover with your favourite football teams colours, but maybe a 'favourite' plugged into their website, maybe even a password to access games or live feeds.... all sorts of possibilities are bought forward.

Yes, you could do it another way, but this way is a brilliant idea as not everyones granny is tech literate.

Re: Ota tuo, vihreä robotti Google!

It is a risk, if the product is a success and it is a largely private concern it may well be that Nokia can't buy it. I certainly wouldn't sell a successful phone manufacturing company to them... I might well wait a few years and buy Nokia just for the pleasure of sacking Elop and the board that supports him.

Re: Microsoft isn't worried...

Plan B has got to be the only one that could succeed and probably includes some gardening tuition for Elop (I certainly hope so)

we will see...

I think your commenting here as descended to a new low of argumentative stupid statement for the sake of it.

Re: maybe not DOA, but certainly insignificant...

What makes you think that? The cover thing is cool and with a few little chinese companies and market stalls thinking they can make a buck or two there will be a supply of interesting add ons.

As for the OS - no one really gives a toss, they'll see Android compatible and be happy if they believe the rest of the phone is good looking enough.

And your reason for that?

I love peoples off the cuff comments which are not backed up by any argument - lucid or otherwise. Why is it dead? It has a very interesting fun feature which is unique, it works with the apps which most people now want, it looks good, the price is fine... now, just what was it we were supposed to laugh at as we zipped off to buy yet another Samsung imitation iPhone?

Re: Mmm...

don't get fooled by numbers games, My PC has stacks and stacks and runs like a dog because it has a load of MS crap plastered all over it. My older machine has less crap but also less memory and does far more far quicker.

16gb is more than enough... my first 'real' machine had 512K - yes K, and the biggest hard drive you could buy at any affordable price - 32M - yes M (most folk had a 20mb)

I have placed my order and look forward to the arrival, I am also looking at the case and wondering whether there is money to be made in making a case with a chip and some good apps and things... remember the old clip on cases Nokias had - how well they sold on every street market... now imagine that but BETTER :) :)

UK.gov STILL wants to tout pupil data – don't use the word 'product'

Not the first

Suffolk County Council took it upon themselves to have some random bloke come in and photograph all the kids in my sons school, all of these photos along with names, addresses and parents details were then posted (yes posted) on unprotected media to a company that then produced 'bus passes' from them which were in turn posted to every kids home.

Apparently we were all sent a letter (by the letters being put in the kids pigeon hole for them to bring home) which allowed us to opt out of this.

So all the kids names, addresses and photographs were sent unencrypted to a random unchecked company and then the cards with photo and name on them sent in ordinary post back to the houses... no chance of any compromise there then.

Of course, want to teach the kids rugby or football.... you need major vetting and checking....

Why UK slid £150m to tax-exempt phone-mast master Arqiva

Foreign companies financed by British tax payers

Always has been pointless - doesn't produce jobs, demand or anything for the UK, yet both Labour and Conservatives are full on about sending our money abroad. They do it as 'aid' to China, India et al, or by buying planes from the Americans, cars from the Germans, Army lorries from the French, Uniforms from the Chinese...

Until this stops the UK is doomed to continue shrinking and rely ever more on making it up by pretending that a tax inspector produces 'GDP' and that financial shinnanigans is 'real' money.

You thought only Google dodges UK taxes? So do all the Brit firms

Answer is simple

Tax using a turnover tax. I pay my income tax on the amount of money the company gives me NOT on the profit I make from going to work. Tax companies in the same way - on the turnover.

All of this tax evasion then goes.

Simples

Microsoft: All RIGHT, you can have your Start button back

Re: Once again...

Open source is all very well IF it (a) works, (b) does what you want.

In my experience (a) is at best that it works significantly less well than Microsoft - and the 'support' from Microsoft has got worse over the years but is still not as bad as the support you get from the 'community' (who by and large seem to believe you are stupid for asking, and even more stupid for not knowing without asking). (b) In many cases the open source stuff doesn't do what I want - sometimes yes, but really not that often.

Now, some of this comes from a particularly poor experience when installing linux and having it tell me that the graphics monitor that had done graphics for the last 10 years wasn't capable, and the ensuing battle to try and get it all to work - a battle that I lost and gave up on after several months of wasted time and effort, but the fact is that it NEEDS to just work out of the box before the mainstream will be bothered.

Struggling at work is what I am paid to do, when I get home I want my computer to work as the tool it is, rather like the spanners in my toolbox just work.

shut down

Frankly shut down should just be a power switch like it used to be... I hate all this stupid waiting when I want to stop the machine... it should start and stop instantly - and I do mean instantly - if it can't it Bulmer should put his not inconsiderable weight behind making the engineers fix that problem.

Yet another Cabinet-level ID card farce

Re: Flip-flopping

Opposition.... is the job of her majesties opposition. As far as I am concerned if the current government says white is white then the opposition should be arguing white is black... primarily because this system is designed to try and force the government to argue its case. The problem lies when we have either an overwhelming majority for the government where the government MP's are spineless and won't vote against their own party because they won't get up the slippery pole, or we have a situation where the opposition won't oppose and therefore won't force the government to correctly consider and argue things.

Unfortunately as we all know we have both of the problems above in spades, with no one in westminster actively holding the government to account (and haven't had for decades). This leads to c**** policies from civil servants passed on by ministers, passed through by MP's who need not be there creating total and utter havoc throughout the country...

Including:

the jump into europe

scrapping of our entire aerospace industry

destruction of mining, shipbuilding, car manufacture - indeed any manufacture

destruction of IT by passing the largest contracts to India and America

ID cards

banking

defence

tax

benefits...

in fact the list includes absolutely everything that either party has touched in the last 60 years.

Climate change forces women into prostitution - US politicians

Some are

Sorry, as you allude some are forced into prostitution with the sex slave trade. Some are also in a position where there is no really viable alternative in order to gain the money required for their drug habit, huge brood of children or whatever.

However, if we stopped pretending in the UK that prostitution is an evil, it is something dirty best hidden, it is somehow 'stoppable' if only we could force the various participants to be 'moral' we would be able to tackle these criminal versions of the 'trade', be better placed to protect the people who are involved (willing or not), control the number of prostitutes strutting their stuff in front of schools or residential areas and maybe even collect some taxes. But we prefer to go on as if anyone has ever found a way to make inroads into stopping the trade. Even trying to scare everyone that aids was rife and every whore was going to give you a combination of aids and other 'souvenirs' failed to stop the trade.

The situation is easy to imagine... bloke goes into brothel, finds a bunch of 14 year old girls with black eyes and bruises, then daren't report it to the police because he has committed an illegal act by trying to procure the services of a prostitute.

Re: nooo waayyyy

:)

Yup, went to a lap dancing club on a mates stag night some years ago. When I was in IT and earning around £200 a week the girl in the club was happily expecting to take £300 a NIGHT tax free - and she wasn't even allowing people more than a look at her almost undressed self dancing. Yup, if I wasn't an ugly beer gutted bloke with a hairy chest and bandy legs I might try it, certainly pays well.

Re: Bad?

Really? I think the whole business of blathering on about this is pretty offensive in the first place. To be honest prostitution has been around pretty much as long as humans have had a barter system for anything, ifor most people its pretty much a non-event and immaterial. If we were rather more open and tolerant we might not be sweeping it under the carpet. At the stage where it is no longer a hidden taboo it is possible that the people who cause real problems - those trafficking women (and occasionally girls/men/boys) might get caught out and bought to justice.

If global warming really exists as more than just another excuse to tax the hell out of everyone then we should stop allowing the import of Chinese and Indian goods made with energy from unclean polluting world destroying coal power plants. If it isn't real (the situation I suspect) then frankly we should get back to normality and stop taxing Europe/America into total economic oblivion. Certainly to then suggest that global warming is going to lead to mass prostitution I can only guess that if all the dire predictions come true mass prostitution will actually be very much a trivial problem compared to the mass starvation, homelessness, loss of land space etc etc etc

Bad?

Supply/demand... more supply, lower cost, not all bad :)

Sorry, was that not politically correct?

Brits on benefits: 'Dole office site only works on PCs over 10 YEARS OLD'

skills shortage... what in India?

We are talking about the UK government, theres no way on Gods clean earth they would spend the money in the UK, so they must be suffering from a skills shortage in India or similar

Ten ancestors of the netbook

Re: Sigh!

Sent that info as a correction, a polite note back apparently the cock up is fixed

The BBC are not immune either their stupid cretinous reporters also had the latest nokia s40 as a symbian device and needed correcting.

Would love to know the not quite dead bit... no development at nokia due to stupid elop but is there something going on outside? I had a request for some info on symbian - the sort of technical stuff that implied someone was going to use it again... I'd be happy, very happy to see that. Compared to these hellish variants on the desk top windows and desk top unix os's symbian was really epoc32 which was properly designed ground up for smallish embedded devices (not so small as nucleus etc but at least not desk top sizes and powers).

Re: Psion Series 5

Quite literally in some ways... all of the Symbian devices - so right up to the Nokia 808 pureview, but including phones from SonyEricsson (UIQ UI rather than S60 UI) and many other devices in Japan and elsewhere ran Symbian, which was Epoc32, the OS in the 5MX (and the 5). Indeed look under the covers and you'll still find 'EPOC' libraries and files in the smartphones.

And contrary to the BBC's view that the iPhone was the first smartphone, the Symbian ones had been selling in millions and had about a 10 year headstart. When Nokias idiot CEO classed them as a burning platform they had a higher market share than the current Apple one :)

Re: Craptastic?

There were other things about the series 5 (and its variant the 5mx)...

It worked for more than a couple of hours on a couple of AA batteries you could pick up almost anywhere

It didn't require you to lug a power supply the size of a car around and find the right sort of mains outlet after a couple of hours (unlike the current fondle slabs)

It had keyboard AND touch screen so you could point, select and type - better than the current fondle slabs.

It folded so the keyboard and screen were protected so while in your pocket it didn't end up a scratched up piece of shit (like the current fondle slabs).

In fact, all told, it was a damned site better device than anything you can buy today. What a pity it wasn't updated to a series 5 colourMX and perhaps it could have acquired wireless modem ... oh it sort of did as a nokia communicator - not quite as good a piece of design but better than the junk available today.

Judge of EU beauty contest for 'sexy' startups is VC backer of winner

Democracy?

Wouldn't bother to save it to be honest - my mums use of democracy extends to always voting for the party whose leader has the smartest looking suit (sorry Miliband - she thinks yours is crap).

Really, democracy is really a bunch of crooks leading a bunch of ignorant, under educated, un interested, pointless fools. Basically sooner we allow Darwin in to cull the 90% of the population that isn't worth a fig the better - for all thats left and the environment.

As to the corruption - what does anyone expect - the world is corrupt, the western 'democratic' world doesn't like to talk about bribes but frankly is more corrupt than any of the worlds worst dictatorships, backward banana republics or just about anything from history. This is just another sad example. Will the firm lose its grant? Will the guy be imprisoned for the abuse? Not a chance - so more will happen.

UK.Gov passes Instagram Act: All your pics belong to everyone now

Our special relationship

Our 'special relationship' strikes again. Once more the UK government (and it is true of both Labour and Conservative through history) have bent us over and presented our collective........ for the US to have its wanton way with - naturally without any reciprocation, and payment or any benefit for the UK - there are probably 'personal' payments and benefits for the legislators and civil servants involved - but certainly nothing for the rest of us.

Time and again - over this, over our industry, our defense, our going to war at the Americans request. Ever since they really put us over the barrel in the second world war, used us and the Russians to defeat the Germans and taking everything we had to pay for it then coming along pretending they did the work and hoovering up the entire world to form their own mega empire.

Guess we don't have any choice now ... we could fight back but we've sold our soul, scrapped all our industrial might, our ability to put together a fighter plane or missile, and sit and watch without a care while the USA takes from everyone (and I do mean everyone) to spend more on 'defense' than the next 20 or is it 30 biggest spenders can afford. Why? To maintain an offensive capability that ensures all but a few renegade nations bend over and do as they are told.

Review: Nokia Lumia 720

Re: @ Dave 15 RE : Really!!!

I can't say that I find either android or iphone to be very user friendly - too many pages of stuff applications that aren't where I want, not always obvious and the touch screen really fails to work well with my fat little fingers. It doesn't make them better if they are the only ones out there, just sad that there isn't more choice. As for the development environment the iPhone one was horrendous the last time I tried it (all be it a couple of years back), for android I've not done a great deal but had a play and wasn't very impressed.

Personally I'd probably dig out an old S60 phone for a smart phone - does all the same stuff, generally good build (not always), range of form factors, decent cameras etc etc). Or if I couldn't find one that was still working in the box of old ones I'd get a blackberry so I could have the keyboard.

Re: @Dave 15

I don't want to 'stand still' - I want to keep walking when I answer the phone, when I dial someone to tell them I'm late etc.

And NO it does NOT work in the car, bus, train - the shaking and wobbling ensure you don't get the right places.

There were plenty of smart phones around with keyboards - and they were better. there were even some that managed to combine keyboards AND big screens.

My brain can cope with navigating, walking and so forth while operating the phone - and without getting run over.

Re: Almost perfect

You're complaining about the UI not the OS - I know they are getting a bit confused these days.

The problem with ALL modern phones is that they've all gone for touch screens - these just do NOT work in mobile situations - walking, on a train, in a bus, in a car... you just can't tap the right part of the screen consistently enough.

Worse none of them protect the screen without buying some ugly awful and nasty piece of c*(** to wrap it up in.

What a lot of people want is something small, neat, with buttons, a clear display and perhaps something really old fashioned like a 'flip' - I had a Z5, the flip meant I did NOT need a lock/unlock thing, the buttons meant I could dial or message on the move, the jog dial meant I could navigate web pages with ease (the browser fitting every web page to screen width helped hugely here, as did its ability to start rendering before the whole page was downloaded enabling you to leap through many links without waiting days), and of course the flip could be set to answer/hang up calls when you opened and closed it. Last, but not least, the flip also protected the microphone from wind and other environmental noise so people could actually here what you were saying.

Browsers and RAM

As I read the review he was talking about the browser app being in memory and dropping pages from the cache. There are often different reasons for this. Some pages have a tag in them to prevent them being cached - often true with pages that expect the data will change quickly. Other times the browser itself might be very 'hefty' and take up a lot of room, or sometimes tries to do something really dumb like keep the raw page in memory.

When I worked on Microsoft Mobile Explorer (not created by Microsoft but by STNC and then bought by them) the page was tokenised on the way into the browser, information we couldn't use was chucked, tags for things like font size changes because bits on the text data, as did bolds, italic and similar. End tags were discarded etc etc. This was done even more efficiently in the browser than it was by WAP (we could render both HTML and WML) - to the point where even compiled WAP pages were stored smaller in our browser memory than they had been delivered. This allowed us to keep far more web pages in memory than people expected.

Re: Really !!!

In truth I wouldn't have thought claiming to be better than Android and iPhone was that much of a claim, can't see how it would be that easy to be worse!

Problem is that just like the two the tight fisted folk have gone on with the touch screen stupidity, I like real buttons to do real jobs.

Re: Almost perfect

Down voted you for a couple of reasons.

First, clearly just an anti Microsoft knee jerk reaction (same as the first post) with little thought behind it - and no suggestion as to what would be better and why.

Second, it is a consumer device. Do you know any teenage kids that give a damn about the OS rather than the 'coolness' of the device? How many bought an iPhone for iOS? How many know what Android is based on? How many ever had a clue about the OS in the Nokia phones, Ericsson phones, Sony, Motorola? Did it make a damn of difference to the phone? Even if you decide that as a 'smart phone' the underlying OS might matter it doesn't to the end user, merely to the developer who is trying to sell you an application. In the case of that the development environment for windows is well known and pretty good.

I don't like Elop, I won't buy a single Nokia phone while they employ the guy. I don't like him because he closed down Symbian where I had worked and he closed down the team I did work for because after 2 years work by hundreds of dedicated engineers we were dismissed because he "didn't know" what we were doing... any CEO taking that much money and sinking a company as huge, profitable and forward thinking as Nokia deserves nothing in the way of respect or support.

As to the OS, well, it is ONLY there to provide basic services so who cares what it is really? No one.

Eric Schmidt defends Google's teeny UK tax payouts - again

Re: Of course she pays tax

Takes balls and drive? Not really, 25 quid and a visit to a website. Making the company successful takes a lot of luck, some serious amount of money behind you to pay the bills you incur while the parasite customers don't pay for the services/goods you have provided them, and of course the money you need to live on while the company gets to the point it supports you - I've started several companies, most on the scrap heap due to unpaid bills, the rest on the scrap heap because they couldn't sustain me, myself and I.

The most annoying thing is that yes, for a small 1 man band company the risk and reward is generally (not always but generally) down to the person that started it. Sometimes they have a helping hand - large amounts of cash, rich families etc. (think Bill Gates and I believe Richard Branson - though I am not certain about the wealth of his family). But for people like Schmidt it is more to do with going to the right school and being chums with the right people.. Its not like his previous company was a roaring success (its dead Jim), yet he still got appointed to this company and has made a not so small fortune on the back of work people had done before he joined. I'd love to see just how much of the current profit/turnover was down to any decisions he has made since he joined - I would guess either none, or a very small amount.

Re: Who to blame?

Please explain why it is so stupid. My income tax is a tax on turnover, because clearly I am a making a vast profit from going to work.... well, perhaps I would if I could have a house near work, could cycle, wear what ever I wanted, didn't need to have spent time and money on training, hadn't got to eat, drink and all those other little thing so I don't peg out on the job...

It is NOT stupid to tax companies on their turnover (indeed, VAT could easily be swapped to do just that if we got rid of the stupid claim back bits),

A billion dollar company IS making massive profits, or it is on the way out anyway. It doesn't matter which is true a tax on turnover is still good (taking a proper 'share' of the profit or hastening the company on its way to restructure or fix its fundamental problems). Taxing profit for companies has clearly failed... the profits are quickly (and in the case of company law actually properly) removed to locations where they aren't taxed, and then distributed to the share holders - most of whom are stinking rich already.

Re: Who to blame?

It wouldn't destroy business. First the example is pretty extreme, assuming however you are correct then you put your price up, or costs down.

If the price is up then of course you are less competitive, but then all your competitors are now paying tax at the same rate that you are, so either they to will have to put their costs up, in which case nothing much changes, or they are more efficient and are going to kill you eventually anyway.

If you chose to go for the costs down option then you will become more competitive and will win more market share - bolstering profit and growing.

Of course, my version of the tax stuff in the UK for companies specifically limits the tax to transactions in the UK - so you would have a 3rd option - export, under my scheme the export would not attract UK tax... much better all round.

You don't

You don't need co-operation on tax law at all.

Implement a UK business tax based purely on transactions in the UK

If starbucks or google don't want to pay it they can't do business here.

So they leave

If people want coffee made for them or an internet search engine then some up and at them young shark in the UK - or perhaps a competitor from overseas who doesn't mind the tax - will step up and provide the service, thus providing tax in the UK.

What really p***** me off about starbucks, google, amazon et al is that they are taking employment away from the UK, increasing the costs in the UK, not paying into the UK and finding all sorts of excuses for it. The British government (run by the wholly un British and anti British civil service) aids and abets this. The local corner shop can't offshore their profits so pay tax, starbucks can offshore it so don't, thus when it comes to being able to compete starbucks already has a 20% advantage.

I have to admit to wondering about setting up a company in the bahamas or where ever specifically to help US companies avoid paying tax in the US (and of course offering the same service to the UK smaller guys)

Re: Crap argument

Simpler...; income in the UK == tax.

I don't get my legit expenses back - no allowance for the fact I have to look smart at work, have to drive here using my petrol in a car I buy, tax and insure for that purpose. Further students these days will even have to pay for the training they need for the job...

I would be happy enough to see UK companies exporting to the rest of the world not paying tax on those exports... would fix our balance of payments problems. But companies like Google, Starbucks etc. should pay tax on the business they do here - the cups of coffee and the adverts. Why? Because that way they can't 'offshore' the money by ludicrous 'charges' from 'tax free head office' - and that needs to be like that because my corner shop can't offshore its tax in the same way so it is patently completely unfair.

Re: The tax laws are open to all...

Kudos? He joined in 2001 when Google was already huge, Before that he was ceo at Novell - as I recollect that company ended in pretty much humiliating failure... which kind of illustrates a point I made about going from failure to failure getting richer... he won't be poor when google makes a wrong bet eventually and declines even more rapidly than it grew

Re: The tax laws are open to all...

'Create you own'....

Cobblers

Most - the vast vast majority - of those with money and in charge of huge multi-nationals didn't create it or take the risks. They have the right old school tie, no more and no less. Worse still is that they go from failure to failure at the top of the tree barely pausing for long enough to assess the massive damage they have done to other peoples lives.

Who is running Boots? What did he manage to wreck last time - wasn't it one of our major banks? What about that egit at the top of Nokia? Look at his cv - a list of failures. The same goes for almost all of them (Branson, Dyson and some others are rare exceptions, but in the most cases still got a leg up in the form of capital from reasonably rich families and friends).

Re: Hmm... @ AC no 1

No, what she is doing might be legal but it is not moral and it is not right.

The fact was pointed out, she 'earns' a minimal wage to avoid paying tax and has a personal income of around 4x the average. She doesn't pay tax on her income. Her employees might, but that doesn't excuse her not.

I spend my money in the UK, does that mean I should be exempt from paying tax here because I help the British economy by spending my money here? And if so how is that anyone pays tax????

This is the argument being used.

As to other peoples comments about finding smarter politicians, thats the problem, the politicians are too smart, they are looking after themselves and their financially rich backers first, the rest of us can go hang. After all the majority of women who voted for Blair did so for his 'nice smile', those who didn't like Gordon didn't like him because he was grumpy, my mum thinks Cameron is 'wonderful' - because his suit fits properly and she also thinks Milliband is bad because his suit doesn't! The British public are far too stupid, ill informed, ignorant and frankly lazy to elect anyone who wants to help the country succeed.

Tax is actually really bloody simple.

Single flat tax on all income - from what ever source. You avoid the problems of starvation and so forth which led to the complex benefits and the stupid tax allowance schemes by paying a single flat benefit to all adults.

For companies the tax is equally simple - a single flat tax on all transactions done in the UK or crossing the UK border to another country - including on bank transactions. I don't give a fig about your 'profit' because I get taxed on the money that comes into my account (income tax) and the money that goes out (VAT) regardless of the fact that each year I end up with a bigger mountain of debt.

Making tax simple would deny lots of civil servants jobs and stop the MP's helping their rich friends, that is the ONLY reason it doesn't happen.

The rich continue to abuse the rest and to justify their actions by the flimsiest of pathetic excuses.

The fast-growing energy source set to replace oil: Yes, it's coal

Re: A fart in a hurricane

Stupidly not all the decent hydro sites are in use. Mildenhall used to have a mill generating leccy for the town and nearby village. The machinery is actually still in the mill building - and the river etc etc are all still there. However the mill has been converted to flats and the machinery painted pretty and decommissioned.

Re: REminds me of a report...@Graham Dawson

Didcot power station was built to provide waste heat to Didcot town... unfortunately they didn't actually provide it - probably to do with losing out on the ability to charge tax on it all - so instead the waste heat goes up the cooling towers without even being used with a stirling engine to get a little extra energy... but hey ho, still rather see us using that power station than trying to rely on the wind blowing at the right time.

In the end all the government here and the EU are doing is nailing the coffin lid down on all our industry, office and other jobs, hiking the costs for the ever dwindling number of workers and making sure they return the whole continent (literally) to the dark ages while China and India just do what the hell they like.

If CO2 were a real problem we'd do something about stopping imports from there... but it isn't so we won't.

Re: REminds me of a report in the 1970's "Coal Bridge to the Future."

Why do you think a modern Indian station burns less coal per Mwh than a '70's station? My 'super efficient' modern car burns just as much petrol a mile as my '80's petrol guzzling sports car. EXACTLY the same. And a good deal MORE than my old Morris Minor.