Where I live, the solar companies are howling loudly about a reduction in the feed-in tariff (subsidy) provided to PV from eight times the wholesale electricity cost to a mere four times. At this, lower price, apparently solar power is not viable and a lot of proposed projects are being cancelled.
If solar is so cheap, how come it's not viable at five times the standard price of electricity?
Games are often available at a lower price on physical media, strangely, and I suspect the price would be a lot higher if the *only* place to get them was Steam.
And it's easy to be "commercially independent" when the public is forced to pay your bills if they have a television, even if they just use their TV to watch DVD's and never watch your network.
Actually, the licence is to receive television broadcasts, not to watch DVDs or even possess a TV set. So no, you don't need a licence if you only watch DVDs. Watching live internet streams of stations that are also broadcast conventionally *does* need a licence though, even if you're not using an actual TV set to do it.
Again: new plants (very efficient) replace old plant (very inefficient) do you get it?
A little better, not much. But a little better than awful is nothing to boast about.
Scrubbers aren't 100% effective and do nothing for CO2, coal is still the most polluting energy source.
Oh, and Germany's co2 emissions are higher than my country's (both totally and per capita) if we're going for comparisons. We also have coal power stations but at least aren't building any more.
The people predicting 4000 deaths from Chernobyl are the World Health Organisation, not a bunch of "nuclear fan boys". Though I believe they later revised their estimate to 10,000.
Regarding the new coal plants. Most of them are intended to replace old ones...
Which you shouldn't be doing if you care at all about environmental issues, as the Germans claim to do. Coal is the dirtiest energy source we have - mining, air pollution, greenhouse gases, the lot. Extolling the virtues of green energy while building new coal plants is rank hypocrisy.
When they offered 512k connections with no data cap, that worked out to around 150GB/month downloaded (not counting upload) if you ran it flat out...
Yes, but it was at 50:1 contention, or a rather measly 10 kbps/user average, so not everyone could do that. The average user now uses much more than the 3 GB per month that that would allow.
It is technological improvements mostly. Computerised switching means there is little to no human involvement in the average telephone call,
That was true in the GPO days too, Strowger and crossbar switches weren't exactly new technology even then.
What's really helped reduce the cost of long distance communications is fibre, which delivers much higher capacity for a given price than microwave or coax.
So, I want to control my toaster from my bedroom and from my smartphone. And my kitchen.
If you wanted to do this with IPv4 and a NAT, how would you do it? Rely on everything that you want to connect to it being on the LAN? You can achieve the same thing by having the device only accept connections from addresses corresponding to the LAN. This is an easy enough check for the device to do, it could work that way by default. No need for a separate firewall.
If you wanted to have it accessible from outside (on IPv4 behind a NAT) then you'd presumably have to tell the device to accept connections and the NAT to forward a port, whereas on IPv6 you wouldn't need the port forwarding. Either way, the security would be the same - an unwanted external attacker could attack both scenarios with equal ease.
What "security" would it need? It just needs to not do something stupid like accept and trust connections from anywhere on the planet. That's not too hard, surely? Just don't open any ports that you don't need. If you do need it, then you'd need to port forward with a NAT too, so no security gain there.
It really depends on your computers, IP toasters and whatever not sucking. There's *no* good reason for a modern home device to be vulnerable out of the box just by being connected to a network, separate firewall or not. These issues have been known about for a long time. Even Microsoft have got the hang of it now.
YOU may know how to configure a modern firewall properly, but mom and pop won't, and they'll have their toaster on the wild and wooly IPv6 internet.
Then perhaps it's about time that manufacturers put some thought into security rather than blaming something else if their devices get pwned. There's no reason why a home appliance should need a separate firewall to be secure.
Even Microsoft have got the hang of it now - I had my Vista box on a public IPv4 address for months without problems.
How is that better than simply having each address correspond to a unique machine? Seems more of a hack to me, and of course you can't use a "standard" port (e.g. 80) on more than one machine.
One bright spot in this is that the plant is built on bedrock, and the containment vessel seems to have held.
At least one of them didn't, hence all the iodine and caesium isotopes spreading over a large area. From what I've read it's pretty certain that reactor 2's containment failed, the status of the others is less clear.
Modern nuclear plants *are* PWRs or BWRs. Everything else is experimental or abandoned.
But even if a nuclear plant can load follow, there is little economic benefit in doing so. Most of the cost of nuclear power is the cost of building the plant in the first place, which you obviously don't get back by not using it. Similarly, staff costs remain the same. That leaves fuel, but that really is a small percentage.
So you pretend that the earthquake would not have broken the containments and cooling pipes ? That's simply not true.
Well, it didn't at Fukushima Daiichi, so there's no reason why it would have done for other reactor designs assuming they were built to the same seismic standards. It lost coolant because of no power to operate pumps, not because the pipes were broken.
While I have a manual, I don't think automatics give significantly less control in practice - we're not talking about racing, you shouldn't be driving close enough to the limits where it matters. In some cases, such as busy city driving, having one less thing to think about could be a safety advantage.
Honestly, I love to bash Apple's policies as much as the next guy, but you have to admit they do one thing almost nobody else does: wait for a product to fully mature before releasing it.
Is why the help application didn't work properly for months on Tiger? Pretty basic thing to overlook. Having to get my soldering iron out to replace the battery in my iPod Touch isn't exactly the epitome of user friendliness either, and neither is Safari crashing frequently on it.
I buy a lot of books, I have tried going digital a couple of times and it sucks in so many levels I don't even want to get started. The show stopper, whatsoever, remains one thing: When you buy digital you end up with a copy of nothing (yeah that still is pretty much nothing).
If the information is nothing, why bother buying a book when you can just buy a box of paper for a much lower price?
$4 a gallon is still one of the cheapest fuel prices on the planet, by a huge margin.
It's one of the cheapest in the developed world, yes. But places like Saudi Arabia, Iran and Venezuela subsidise petrol heavily, resulting in absurdly cheap fuel.
My own experience with Virgin was not so rosy. Yes, I got the advertised speed - *sometimes*. Other times, the network was so congested that packet loss was about 10% and the connection was essentially unusable. By contrast the ADSL connections I've used (Sky and Be) had a slower peak speed but were much more consistent, and interactive performance (such as web browsing) was much better.
Maybe they've improved, or it varies with area, but it really put me off using them again.
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Where I live, the solar companies are howling loudly about a reduction in the feed-in tariff (subsidy) provided to PV from eight times the wholesale electricity cost to a mere four times. At this, lower price, apparently solar power is not viable and a lot of proposed projects are being cancelled.
If solar is so cheap, how come it's not viable at five times the standard price of electricity?
Well, I paid £5 less for Portal 2 on Amazon than Steam were charging. Steam is sometimes cheaper, but not always, it's worth searching around.
Games are often available at a lower price on physical media, strangely, and I suspect the price would be a lot higher if the *only* place to get them was Steam.
And it's easy to be "commercially independent" when the public is forced to pay your bills if they have a television, even if they just use their TV to watch DVD's and never watch your network.
Actually, the licence is to receive television broadcasts, not to watch DVDs or even possess a TV set. So no, you don't need a licence if you only watch DVDs. Watching live internet streams of stations that are also broadcast conventionally *does* need a licence though, even if you're not using an actual TV set to do it.
Again: new plants (very efficient) replace old plant (very inefficient) do you get it?
A little better, not much. But a little better than awful is nothing to boast about.
Scrubbers aren't 100% effective and do nothing for CO2, coal is still the most polluting energy source.
Oh, and Germany's co2 emissions are higher than my country's (both totally and per capita) if we're going for comparisons. We also have coal power stations but at least aren't building any more.
The people predicting 4000 deaths from Chernobyl are the World Health Organisation, not a bunch of "nuclear fan boys". Though I believe they later revised their estimate to 10,000.
Regarding the new coal plants. Most of them are intended to replace old ones ...
Which you shouldn't be doing if you care at all about environmental issues, as the Germans claim to do. Coal is the dirtiest energy source we have - mining, air pollution, greenhouse gases, the lot. Extolling the virtues of green energy while building new coal plants is rank hypocrisy.
When they offered 512k connections with no data cap, that worked out to around 150GB/month downloaded (not counting upload) if you ran it flat out...
Yes, but it was at 50:1 contention, or a rather measly 10 kbps/user average, so not everyone could do that. The average user now uses much more than the 3 GB per month that that would allow.
It is technological improvements mostly. Computerised switching means there is little to no human involvement in the average telephone call,
That was true in the GPO days too, Strowger and crossbar switches weren't exactly new technology even then.
What's really helped reduce the cost of long distance communications is fibre, which delivers much higher capacity for a given price than microwave or coax.
So, I want to control my toaster from my bedroom and from my smartphone. And my kitchen.
If you wanted to do this with IPv4 and a NAT, how would you do it? Rely on everything that you want to connect to it being on the LAN? You can achieve the same thing by having the device only accept connections from addresses corresponding to the LAN. This is an easy enough check for the device to do, it could work that way by default. No need for a separate firewall.
If you wanted to have it accessible from outside (on IPv4 behind a NAT) then you'd presumably have to tell the device to accept connections and the NAT to forward a port, whereas on IPv6 you wouldn't need the port forwarding. Either way, the security would be the same - an unwanted external attacker could attack both scenarios with equal ease.
What "security" would it need? It just needs to not do something stupid like accept and trust connections from anywhere on the planet. That's not too hard, surely? Just don't open any ports that you don't need. If you do need it, then you'd need to port forward with a NAT too, so no security gain there.
It really depends on your computers, IP toasters and whatever not sucking. There's *no* good reason for a modern home device to be vulnerable out of the box just by being connected to a network, separate firewall or not. These issues have been known about for a long time. Even Microsoft have got the hang of it now.
YOU may know how to configure a modern firewall properly, but mom and pop won't, and they'll have their toaster on the wild and wooly IPv6 internet.
Then perhaps it's about time that manufacturers put some thought into security rather than blaming something else if their devices get pwned. There's no reason why a home appliance should need a separate firewall to be secure.
Even Microsoft have got the hang of it now - I had my Vista box on a public IPv4 address for months without problems.
How is that better than simply having each address correspond to a unique machine? Seems more of a hack to me, and of course you can't use a "standard" port (e.g. 80) on more than one machine.
One bright spot in this is that the plant is built on bedrock, and the containment vessel seems to have held.
At least one of them didn't, hence all the iodine and caesium isotopes spreading over a large area. From what I've read it's pretty certain that reactor 2's containment failed, the status of the others is less clear.
Modern nuclear plants *are* PWRs or BWRs. Everything else is experimental or abandoned.
But even if a nuclear plant can load follow, there is little economic benefit in doing so. Most of the cost of nuclear power is the cost of building the plant in the first place, which you obviously don't get back by not using it. Similarly, staff costs remain the same. That leaves fuel, but that really is a small percentage.
You heel/toe the brake and throttle, and the other foot on the clutch. Just takes coordination.
Well yes, you *can* do it that way, but the handbrake method gets the job done just as well and with a lower risk of error.
So you pretend that the earthquake would not have broken the containments and cooling pipes ? That's simply not true.
Well, it didn't at Fukushima Daiichi, so there's no reason why it would have done for other reactor designs assuming they were built to the same seismic standards. It lost coolant because of no power to operate pumps, not because the pipes were broken.
While I have a manual, I don't think automatics give significantly less control in practice - we're not talking about racing, you shouldn't be driving close enough to the limits where it matters. In some cases, such as busy city driving, having one less thing to think about could be a safety advantage.
Oh, criticising Apple is now trolling is it? Everything I said there was true. God save us from fanboys with mod points.
Honestly, I love to bash Apple's policies as much as the next guy, but you have to admit they do one thing almost nobody else does: wait for a product to fully mature before releasing it.
Is why the help application didn't work properly for months on Tiger? Pretty basic thing to overlook. Having to get my soldering iron out to replace the battery in my iPod Touch isn't exactly the epitome of user friendliness either, and neither is Safari crashing frequently on it.
So what was your point? You aren't buying nothing with ebooks, you're buying information.
I buy a lot of books, I have tried going digital a couple of times and it sucks in so many levels I don't even want to get started. The show stopper, whatsoever, remains one thing: When you buy digital you end up with a copy of nothing (yeah that still is pretty much nothing).
If the information is nothing, why bother buying a book when you can just buy a box of paper for a much lower price?
$4 a gallon is still one of the cheapest fuel prices on the planet, by a huge margin.
It's one of the cheapest in the developed world, yes. But places like Saudi Arabia, Iran and Venezuela subsidise petrol heavily, resulting in absurdly cheap fuel.
My own experience with Virgin was not so rosy. Yes, I got the advertised speed - *sometimes*. Other times, the network was so congested that packet loss was about 10% and the connection was essentially unusable. By contrast the ADSL connections I've used (Sky and Be) had a slower peak speed but were much more consistent, and interactive performance (such as web browsing) was much better.
Maybe they've improved, or it varies with area, but it really put me off using them again.