Posts by Nonymous Crowd Nerd

POD RACING: SpaceX will build the Hyperloop railgun tube-way – you bring the ride

What speeds up also needs to slow down.

Maybe I'm missing something, but surely the test vehicle will have to stop, and if it fails to stop on it's own, there'll will need to be a way to stop it without killing the occupants, whether these are just guinea pigs, or guinea pigs of the human variety. How on earth can this be achieved on a track only a mile long?

Add to this the fact that the technology is likely to result in an acceleration that is totally pants (a technical term that I'm guessing Mr Musk will be familiar with).

And the result I'm predicting will be some rather embarrassingly slow tests. Or a decision quite soon to spend a few millions on a longer track.

Oz battery bossmen: Fingers will be burned in the Tesla goldrush

Re: Cost Per kWh

Good to see someone getting to the actual numbers. For some people the numbers come out better than you suggest though, I think. For us in the UK, for instance, electricity costs rather more than the price you imply. And for someone with enough renewable power that they're close to being able to go off-grid, there's the standing charge that can also be avoided. Numbers like these also help to apply a ceiling to the prices that the grid suppliers can charge in the longer run. If they know that the substantial increases that were being predicted a few years ago would lead to many people going off-grid, then the prices for grid electricity aren't likely to rise too much. In turn this helps to cap the wholesale price of gas and ultimately of crude oil.

Vodafone didn't have a £6bn tax bill. Sort yourselves out, Lefties

Re: Good article.

No. Bad article. It attempts to over-complicate the simple popular demand that corporate profits should be taxed somewhere. Tim buries himself in the legalise of what proportion of the profits were or were not made in Luxembourg, when we can all be pretty confident that no real value was ever added in Luxembourg whatsoever!

His argument is legally complex but more importantly morally bankrupt.

I do agree, however, that the Daily Mail may not be to heavily into the "business of news"...

Tesla bumps up Model S P85D acceleration – with software update

Good to know the Americans have cracked Europe!

Odd no one has noticed the delightful sentence

"Tesla Superchargers span routes from Exeter to Edinburgh, allowing access to Europe."

I guess this comes straight from the Tesla press release. And it's heartwarming for us Brits to learn that the Americans still imagine Europe as a continent stretching all the way from the south of England to about a third of the way through Scotland.

Microsoft fires legal salvo at phone 'tech support' scammers

Re: RE: ".........(law enforcement) have AFAIK pretty much ignored the problem....."

I think you might have hit the nail on the head with your mention of Telcos. There are many, many phone scams going unchecked these days. So many, they might represent the majority of calls on a considerable number of land lines.

The cynic in me can see Telcos lobbying behind the scenes in favour of a less than eager response from the "enforcement authorities". Or it could be that they're just bone idle - or stupid. Or all of the above.

Why did it take antivirus giants YEARS to drill into super-scary Regin? Symantec responds...

Are we considering the obvious

OK, so we've been told for years not see conspiracies under every bed, but this looks like the real thing to me. In others words, the antivirus guys have known about this, and other government sponsored malware, for years and have kept quiet because the government organisations have appealed to their sense of patriotism, or bribed them, or bullied them, or blackmailed them, or...

And they're coming clean now because they're afraid of a second Edward Snowden spilling the beans and ruining their anti-malware credibility.