Posts by Lord Voldemortgage 236 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jul 2012
"Little rocks like this aren't a big issue survival-of-the-species-wise and by the time they get close enough to be spotted and a reliable track calculated there's bugger all we could do about it anyway."
I guess that because they are not planet-killers there might be something we could do - evacuate an area, for example, if we had time.
"over the next 12 month the vast majority of XP boxes will disappear from the Internet and get replaced by Win7 or Win8"
If the various interests could get their acts together this might be a good time to push Linux in the home - businesses will mostly move from XP to Win 7 (or maybe even Win 8) but home users who feel the impact of the initial capital expenditure more keenly might welcome an alternative.
Steam to be the deciding factor?
"What do the French know that the rest of the world doesn't? Why aren't they afraid of it?"
The French have a policy of self-sustainability for energy that overrides other concerns (and I applaud them for it).
Along with their large investment in wind and hydro generation they also have nuclear (and again I applaud this).
This doesn't mean they are not afraid of it though, just that they are able to bribe and bully their poorer areas like Normandy into accepting nuclear. (Incidentally the reactor at Flamanville is going to be at least twice as expensive as the original estimates, is already late, and won't be operational for at least another four years).
"It's not like he took anything from the company itself. He hasn't "permanently deprived" them of anything they were interested in keeping (though I understand that implicit assumptions cannot form explicit permission to do so). Even if the physical acts were technically different, he was basically taking rubbish out of a bin."
Or was he taking rubbish out of a recycling bin before said bin went to a company that would pay based on the value of its contents?
The articles here and on thisisderbyshire aren't really clear on the matter but it does look like the council uses a third party to carry out precisely the sort of stripping and resale that Mr Holwell was doing and would receive a cut of the proceeds - if this is the case then it is a much more obvious theft.
"Who certified £10k's worth of saleable kit as scrap?"
It's not clear that anyone did.
Items were "marked for disposal" but as the council say they use a third party to refurbish and resell old IT kit it might well be that the items in question were destined for that process rather than the bin.
"The last paragraph obviously indicates the refurbishing but the rest of the article makes it sound like they were destined for the bin"
It seems he took memory and hard drives from items that were 'marked for disposal' - as you say it's not clear that 'disposal' means 'chuck into landfill' or if this is the point at which the kit is passed on to the third party for refurb / resale but as he still had access to them it's fair to assume that hadn't at that point been sent off site so either someone had decided to bypass the third party refurb option for that kit or he was cherry-picking precisely the sort of stuff that third party would have found most useful.
How much time and effort was required? Staff have to be paid and a few grand does not go all that far.
It's not just the sales but any follow-up on defective kit, shipping problems etc etc not to mention the problems with the legal restrictions on how a local authority is able to raise funds.
It may be that some items were classed as scrap when there might in fact have been a use for them but that does not mean it would be right (or even economically efficient) for a local authority to set itself up as a second-hand component sales business to try and eke out every last penny.
"My computing device. I get to decide what it downloads and displays. Don't want to serve me content? Go ahead and block me, I'm cool with that. Just please don't try to tell ME what to do with MY device."
Playing devil's advocate with that, wouldn't Google be entitled to say something like "Our app store / OS. We get to decide what it provides and uploads. Don't want to use our systems? Go ahead and run something else, we're cool with that. Just please don't try to tell US what to do with OUR software." ?
It's a genuine conflict with neither side exactly in the wrong - I block adverts but also use sites like gmail and The Register which depend on advertising revenue to keep running. I'm aware this makes me something of a useless sponger in their eyes.
I would have been with you on that but for me this still needs some work - unlike Swype or FlexT9 it's not very good on words with doubled letters or where swiping through letters gives an alternative word - it's always gives me "point" when I mean "pint" making it almost completely useless for the normal sort of messages I send.
Things have been improving through the betas though so it is well worth trying the final version to see how you get on.
"The obvious thing for Australia to do is go nuclear ... we just need to bite the bullet and build some nuclear plants."
Would it be correct to say Oz is also best placed to deal with nuclear waste disposal issues which would make it an even more attractive solution? - lots of mines a long way from populated areas (many of which the uranium was hauled out of in the first place).
With enough cheap energy around desalination becomes less of a drag too.
Until someone works out an economic way of burning cane toads and poisonous spiders, nuclear looks like a good fit down under.
Jared Earle - why do you care?
Why on Earth would it matter to you if Microsoft's shops or Samsung's shops looked like Apple's shops?
Tesco's shops look like Sainsbury's shops and Asda's shop and Morrison's shops - so what? How do the customers suffer as a result?
If it is a good layout for a shop why not welcome the fact that it is widely used?
How could anyone possibly love a company that doesn't give a shit about them so much that they are prepared to come out and defend nonsense like this in public?
" we need wind farms for greener energy,"
I'm not sure I know exactly what 'greener' means and (therefore) I'm also not sure it is an inherently Good Thing.
If it is just energy production with lower CO2 emissions then I'm in favour assuming all other things being as near equal as they can be.
If it means energy production that satisfies all people who would describe themselves as being in favour of "Green" things then it is much less clear that we need it at all.
"Worst case scenario? Humans manage to wipe themselves out some time over the next couple of hundred years. Ah well. That will teach us then."
I think that's what the ' "we're doomed" climate panic-mongers' are saying.
I admire your more philosophical attitude but I have to say, wimpy thought it may be of me, that I'd be a bit upset if that happened.
"Perhaps the warming of the two decades prior to 1998 was just natural variation"
Perhaps. How might this "natural variation" have occurred? And what has meant that it has not reversed?
I'm all for alternative suggestions but just shrugging and going "well, nature did it" doesn't seem like enough.
"Even if they hadn't been losing money, as others have pointed out, the answer would be "as little as humanly possible", like any company worth its salt.
Seriously, I'm going to start forwarding posters like you to the "Tax Bores" section of the Speak You're Branes archive. Company in "legally reducing tax bill" shocker, film at 11."
You almost seem proud that these companies are doing all they can to limits of the letters of the law, and well beyond the spirit or the intention, to profit at the expense of, ultimately, everyone else including you and me.
People are going to lose their jobs over this over this and even if you don't give a shit about them surely you are irked at the idea of having to support them.
I see no reason to congratulate companies for legally reducing tax bills regardless of the consequences just because there is no option (or reason if you prefer) to punish them. It is done to our detriment and we should be pissed off about it.
"Easy way - legalise all drugs and tax them. (Keep the quality high and at a price that cannot be matched by the criminals.)"
What criminals? Once the drugs are legal there are no criminals.
And who else would be ready to supply this new market?
The former criminals would become the new legitimate entrepreneurs and the only issue would be around collecting the relevant tax / duty.
Smuggling would therefore continue at some level but it might well be possible to convince the new industry this was something it ought to help police - the cost of doing so is easily outweighed by the benefits of being 'legit' - a competitor who was rocking the boat and at the same time undercutting your supply would be welcome to no one.
God I wanted those toys so much.
I did have an Angel Interceptor Airfix model
The legal ins and outs are not my forte but (as expressed in the Reg article) this is clearly behaviour that Apple's customer's ought to resist.
Whether or not is is overly bulky, unattractive or not cool enough you'd want every option possible for your power hungry devices to get charged - if this thing is going to exist you'd want it to be able to hook up to your iPhone just in case.
"Also AOAKN occurs twice in the message. Why would anyone send the same thing twice in a message?"
Well, possibly, I suppose - if it a series of reports from different positions / observers at different times and each needed to be attributed for example.
Still this does all sound rather unlikely.
"I've said it before and I'll say it again.... "
Anyone else's heart sink when they read that opening?
Anyway.
You can pardon someone for a crime they have committed, there's nothing inherently illogical in that even if it is not what is done in the UK.
Pardons generally do not remove the conviction but (can) express official forgiveness for committing the crime.
"You committed a crime only because our laws were wrong" is an appropriate expression of the sentiment here.
In some systems a free pardon means that the pardoned party is considered never to have committed a crime at all.
I'm not suggesting that we in the UK are not best served by the thinking expressed by Lord McNally but there's nothing absolute about the matter.
I don't get it, why do people dislike Windows 3 so much?
Well, actually that's obvious, it crashed a lot and was difficult to network but I don't get the grief given to Program Manager which was a perfectly usable launcher that is not too far removed from some of the better phone interfaces of today (and my phone now has a great deal higher screen resolution than my PCs of the Windows 3.x days).
It does seem low but if you go to the industry and ask them what to expect and they say it won't be as much as 0.5 then setting the safety limit there is a logical move - if the industry comes back and says, "Hang on, that will cause us unnecessary problems" then you have to wonder if they were being entirely accurate with their initial estimates.
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