I had dinner with a H.S. teacher recently and I was amazed at how things have changed. For example, it's now SOP for them to call the police when two kids get into a FIGHT. Even a basic fistfight with no weapons and no serious injuries. "Ridiculous" is right.
How does a kid being bullied not count as assault? Certainly when I was at school there was a lot of bullying going on and the school simply didn't care (even when people inevitably ended up injured). Whilst I'll agree that the first port of call should be for it to be handled internally in the school, if that doesn't work shouldn't the police be involved if only for the protection of the kids on the receiving end?
VAT was originally _supposed_ to only apply to "luxury goods"
Oh, and I should add that keeping yourself from freezing to death and being able to get to work are also luxuries, as fuel has VAT charged on it. I'm not sure what happens if you decide to chuck VAT-free cakes on the fire and use them as fuel...
That is nothing to do with Amazon. In the UK books rightfully are vat free, but ebooks aren't.
Depends what you mean by "rightfully". The VAT laws are incredibly inconsistent and arbitrary in the UK.
VAT was originally _supposed_ to only apply to "luxury goods", which is why cakes (which are presumably a bare essential) are tax free whilst sanitary towels, incontenance pads, etc (which are clearly luxury items) are taxable.
Similarly, a flapjack (i.e. a bar made out of cerial, fat and sugar) is VAT free whilst a cerial bar (which is, instead, made out of cerial, fat and sugar) is taxable.
So as you can see, the VAT rules are completely clear, consistent and intuitive with no chance of ambuiguity or misinterpretation.
Having hands that one of my kids once told me resembled bear paws... oversized and clumsy, something about the same size as the Galaxy S3 would be ideal for my purposes, because I've always found the iPhone display to be unusably tiny for anything involving complex interactivity (such as texting, for instance).
I think thats already available... Have you looked at the Galaxy S3, it sounds like that does what you want?
To sum my position up on the subject: If you want to "protect" your kids from sex, it is YOUR decision to do so and YOUR responsibility to do it. It's YOUR kids, you didn't ask me when you made them (how did you, if you're so anti-sex, I'm curious?), so don't bother me now!
Quite. That said, I think there is a lot to be said for ISPs providing services to customers beyond being a dumb pipe - no reason why your ISP can't operate a firewall for you instead of you having to have a firewall on your router. And similarly, *opt-in* filtering may be a sensible thing for the ISP to offer their customers instead of the customer having to go buy their own filtering system (and have the know-how to set it up).
However, this comes at a cost to the ISP and most of the people complaining would probably go for the cheapest ISP they can (who wouldn't offer these services), and then hold the ISP responsible when they discover their connection is unfiltered. ISPs themselves seem uninterested in offering these kinds of services - they've probably concluded the same as me that people simply won't pay extra for this stuff.
People want computers to Just Work, like their toaster - they don't want to learn how to make it work or pay someone who knows, they just want it to work. Well guess what, the internet is more complex than your toaster and it *does* require some knowledge, that's just how it is.
I could see a few groups who would enjoy to make sure you cannot access certain content. The idea is mostly that porn is dirty and bad and everyone who is against filtering it must be a pervert. Then, if it is installed, a certain group comes in and says that if you can filter porn out, you can certainly filter other content, too.
The issue is possibly not so much the idea that you can filter porn if you want to, but the fact that all the bills on the subject which are coming through seem to be mandating filtering by default and possibly allowing people to opt-out. How many people are going to phone their ISP and say "please opt me out of the filtering because I want to watch the dirty kinky porn"? Not only that, but now your ISP has to maintain and protect a list of people who want to watch porn, which is arguably rather sensitive information.
So once you have the majority filtered, because so few will opt out, you can start increasing the scope of the filter - you start out with the kiddy porn, because obviously no one could oppose that and anyone who opts out must be a kiddy fiddler, then all porn must be filtered, then "offensive" non-porn material - hate speech, anti-religion discussions, etc. It is a slippery slope until you end up with a very sanitised web where even political discussions could be filtered by default. Even better if the organisation behind the filtering has no public oversight and isn't answerable to anyone (which was the case with the IWF).
Whereas if you start with a opt-in system, only the people who are actually interested in being filtered will opt in, and where you only have a small proportion who are using a filtering system, there is a lot less scope for progressively blocking more and more content. For one thing, with the majority able to see and link to that content, the minority who are being filtered will constantly see how much the filters are blocking, and will turn them off again if it gets too much.
One thing that _would_ be useful for the government to do, is to legislate that adult entertainment websites insert HTTP headers to classify the content so that people who *want* to have their connection filtered can do so more reliably. Of course, porn comes from all over the world so that won't catch all websites, but if the EU and US both passed that sort of legislation then it would allow filtering systems to become much more accurate.
Also, some things that people forget: 1. Most home internet connections are used by all members of the family through a single NAT router - this means that a one-size-fits-all solution at the ISP is probably going to be fairly ineffective and tailoring content for all ages. 2. Filtering systems can stop the majority of "oops I accidentally stumbled across porn" incidents, but if someone actually wants to see porn they're going to find it and there's nothing technological you can do to stop that. 3. The best solution is a combination - a bit of filtering to avoid accidentally stumbling across porn (which is the purpose of google safesearch, etc.), education and discipline. Stop making sex such a taboo subject!
Disclaimer: I produce web filtering systems for schools in the UK.
Last time I looked the IWF were a criminal organisation. They are downloading and viewing child porn in order to rate web sites. However good their intentions, this is against the law.
No it isn't. The Sexual Offences Act 2003 explicitly protects IT staff who have to deal with illegal content as part of their job.
Example regarding "making" copies: "Where the authorities are satisfied that the facts indicate that the intention of the “making” was genuinely to prevent, investigate, or detect crime under the 1978 Act a prosecution would not be pursued, because the defence would apply"
Worse, this will likely end up with the same lack of accountability that the IWF ended up with, where the government didn't legislate the block list, they just threatened the ISPs with stricter legislation if they didn't 'voluntarily' comply, so you have a private organisation with no public oversight responsible for censoring almost every UK web connection.
Happilly pretty much anyone can avoid the IWF these days: although you've always been able to use an ISP who doesn't subscribe to the IWF, previously it was pretty much mandatory in schools due to BECTA requirements, but with BECTA now gone, no one cares about the IWF any more. Which is good, because not only were they unaccountable, they also grossly misrepresented themselves (e.g. they claim to be funded by "voluntary donations" but when you look into it, those "voluntary donations" are fixed non-voluntary amounts ranging in the thousands to the tens of thousands of pounds which you are required to pay in order to get access to their list of 100 or so URIs which they have proclaimed are kiddy-porn (including, on occasion, the likes of wikipedia). For comparison, other commercial URI categorisation databases come in at well under £1000 and contain several million URIs.
If anything, DRM actually encourages the "average cunsumer" to copy by virtue of making the official product inferior to the copies.
The average consumer may find they want to do something entirely reasonable with the content they purchased (watch a DVD in a different region, skip adverts on a DVD, watch some movie on a device that doesn't support the DRM being used, watch a HD movie on a TV that doesn't do HDCP, etc.) They find they can't do this with their legally purchased media, so end up downloading an illegal copy instead. After doing this a few times, they start to question why the hell they are paying for something they are having to copy illegally in order to use and give up on the whole "paying" bit.
Unless you can completely eliminate *everyone's* ability to post a DRM-free copy on the internet, you can't prevent this. Your best choice is to stop making the legit versions inferior to the illicit ones.
The only things I see holding back LED bulbs are misinformation and lack of availability (Home Depot is the only major brick and mortar store I've found that carries them).
We can see here, 2 GU10 bulbs. The one on the left is a 28W halogen, the one on the right is a 4.5W LED bulb (they both have a similar beam angle - 36 degrees for the halogen, 35 degrees for the LED). Both claim to be "equivalent" to a 35W "conventional" (by which I assume they mean tungsten) bulb. However, look at the light output - the halogen claims to output 600 lumen whilst the LED bulb says 200 lumen. So clearly different manufacturers use different criteria for what "equivalent" means - the halogen appears to be saying that its total light output is equivalent to a 35W tungsten, whilst the LED bulb appears to be saying that its brightness is equivalent to a (presumably unshaded) 35W tungsten. By the criteria used for the LED bulb, you could manufacture a tungsten bulb that is labelled as being "more efficient" than a tungsten bulb, simply by narrowing the beam angle with a reflector!
Some of the bigger brands put even less information on their packaging - on the same shelves were Phillips 5W LED GU10 bulbs that simply gave an "equivalent to" figure - no information about how many lumens or candela they output, no information about beam angle.
Also, people shopping for bulbs are almost certainly going to be doing like-for-like replacement: if I'm buying a GU10 bulb then the chances are I'm replacing an existing GU10 bulb, which is almost certainly going to be a halogen (since traditionally GU10s are halogen), not an unshaded tungsten bulb with an almost isotropic radiant flux. So telling me what "conventional" bulb it is equivalent to (whether thats done by comparing lumens or candela) is pretty much useless. Instead, I'm most likely to want to know what wattage of halogen its going to replace - if I've got a 50W halogen GU10 already and I'm buying an LED bulb, I want to know which LED bulb will give me the same results as the bulb I'm replacing.
How is anyone supposed to make a decision when the information provided is either nonexistent or unstandardised and misleading?
What I needed is for a standardisation of the information provided: 1. The actual wattage of the bulb - i.e. how much power it is going to draw. 2. The total light output in lumens. 3. The brightness in candela. Especially important for bulbs that are traditionally used unshaded, such as GU10s. 4. The beam angle. Again, important for bulbs that are usually unshaded. 5. Colour temperature. 6. What standard bulb this is equivalent to for a like-for-like replacement (i.e. if you're replacing a conventional ~isotropic tungsten bulb then it should be compared against that, if you're replacing a halogen GU10 then that bulb should be the comparison instead). Obviously this becomes problematic where the beam angles are different (e.g. I just bought a LED GU10 with a 120 degree beam - far wider than you'll get from a standard halogen GU10). 7. The life expectancy of the bulb.
And this information should be printed on *all* bulbs, even the conventional ones, so that someone in a shop can pick up any 2 bulbs and compare the information between them.
I was under the impression that the EU had, several years ago, made some of this information (such as the lumen output) mandatory, but there are still a lot of bulbs on the shelves that don't include any of this data.
The white led are in fact blue LEDs with a phosphor layer which "shifts" the emission spectrum towards green and red. Thus, white LEDs looks bluer or "colder" (associated with ice).
White LEDs are actually ultraviolet LEDs with a phosphor layer. You can get a wide variety of emission spectra - for example, I just got a 2800K LED bulb which is somewhere between a normal tungsten bulb (~2600K) and a halogen (~3000K). And of course you can go to the "colder" side - there are 5000K and 6000K bulbs available.
What is the point of putting a creative commons license on data that is not copyrightable. Anyone can take the data and do anything they want with it and there is nothing anyone can do about it. If it were otherwise, no one would be able to broadcast the temperature without permission from the weather office. How well would that system work?
You can't copyright facts, but there are copyright-style laws covering a collection of facts organised into a database. That said, creative commons probably isn't the right licence for the same reason it wasn't the right licence for open street map (who have now migrated to a different permissive licence designed for databases of facts).
So, at the rate that tech is expanding, what would be the time frame for google glass technology to be permanently implanted in our brain via a wireless computer chip. Full time interaction with the internet, with of course full time tracking/monitoring all we see, access, and think. We'll all be walking versions of "My Favorite Martian", sans the 'visible' antenna. Less than 100 years away? 20 years away? The future looks both extremely cool and very frightening to me at the same time.
Don't forget overlaying adverts onto everything you see... If its anywhere near as accurate as Facebook's advertising, looking at your wife will automatically show you singles ads...
Well, they must get some... Anyway, I think you're forgetting about business travellers.
I'm talking a 5.5 hour train journey on a Sunday night that arrives at the destination at 1:30am on Monday morning... I really can't imagine they get any business travellers, let alone business travellers who are expecting to get any work done...
They can (quite convincingly) argue that the cost is worth it for a long trip, because they can actually work during the journey, unlike in a car or even a plane.
For some routes, potentially. However, I would question the productivity of someone on the train - are you really going to find a 5.5 hour train journey more productive than a 3 hour car journey and 2.5 hours of proper work? Especially when some of the train journey involves changing trains, waiting around on platforms, etc.
On a train you can phone, use the internet, effectively hold business meetings with colleagues, and so on.
Again, depends on the route. On one route I recently travelled on the train, I was without a 3G signal for around 90% of the journey and the train's wifi was almost unusable. Holding "business meetings" by phone is ok right until you go into a tunn-- (which on some routes you do very frequently).
I personally would only take the train somewhere if I was being paid expenses, as you say for personal use (if you don't book weeks in advance) it is just too expensive.
The thing is, for business use I'd take my time into consideration far more and this would make me less likely to take the train - ignoring the expense of the train, having to faff around getting to the station in the first place, spending much longer on the train than I would driving and then having to get from the station at the other end sounds like a complete waste of my time to me, which is significant if I could be getting paid by the hour for that time instead.
I'm no great fan of BT, but I shudder to think what it would be like if a load of different private companies tried to do it instead.
Well, the point really is that where you have a single infrastructure, privatisation doesn't seem sensible. Admittedly it seems to have been moderately successful in the case of BT, although we'll never know how well state ownership would've handled the internet age.
For true competition, you'd have several companies, each running their own network, and when you find one is incompetent, expensive, whatever you could switch to another. Obviously that is relatively infeasible because of the build-out cost of the physical network though. However, thats exactly how it works for the MNOs and that seems to have worked out pretty well in the grand scheme of things.
Overall if you either get a good advance deal or are rich enough that the cost is neligable to you it's hard to beat first class train travel as a comfortable way of getting to/from london.
OTOH I don't know why anyone would buy a first class ticket from manchester to leeds because the "first class" on those trains is not deserving of the name
Getting to/from London is possibly one of the more useful things you can use a train for, owing to how bad it is to drive in London (that said, there have been a couple of times when I saw the train price and said "sod that" and either drove and parked to the centre of london or drove to the outskirts and took the tube the rest of the way).
My typical train journey (second class, not to london) involves: 1. Get from the house to the station in the city centre: parking at the station is a non-option because of the amount they charge, similarly taking a taxi is about the same as half the cost of the train journey itself. Taking a bus would be an option, except that the busses are usually scheduled so that there's a long wait between the bus arriving at the station and the train leaving (to the point that its actually faster to just walk the whole way, which takes about an hour). Also the busses stop running after 18:30 and don't run at all on Sundays. So usually I either walk (an hour) or cycle (15 minutes). 2. The first leg of the train journey takes about an hour. Then I have a short (15 minute) wait for the next train. 3. The second leg of the journey takes about 3.5 hours or so. This gets me into my destination city. However, I need to go out to one of the small stations a few miles out from the city, and that train only runs every hour so I usually have a 30 minute wait. 4. The final train takes about 15 minutes, and from there its just a short (5 minute) walk to my destination.
So this adds up to about 5.75 hours.
If I wanted to do any work-type stuff, I could do maybe 4 hours once you take into account getting laptop out, packing away, etc. on the trains. Also the second train doesn't have power sockets, so I'm down to battery power for that. Although the first train does have power sockets, First aren't great at keeping their trains in good repair and they frequently don't work. And that's *only* if I manage to get a table and 2 of the seats at that table are empty - 4 people around a table makes it far too cramped to work, airline seats are too cramped to work (elbowing the person next to you while typing isn't good form). Either way, I'm not hugely productive on a noisy train.
Alternatively, I can drive, which takes 3 hours, is door to door (so no faffing with trying to get to the station), and I don't have to stick to a specific schedule (if I get 10 minutes late it doesn't matter when travelling by car, whereas by train it does - not only would I have to wait an hour for the next train, but I would have to buy a new ticket at great expense). Taking the train is cheaper than driving if I book 2 weeks in advance. If I don't then it is far more expensive.
(Oh, and before anyone starts going on about "you haven't taken the cost of owning the car into consideration": no, I haven't, because the public transport is generally so poor that I have to have a car *anyway* for other journeys)
That depends on the cities in question, and whether you are really keen on optimizing for costs or whether you care about how long it takes as well.
For most long distance journies, your choice is: 1. Take the intercity, which gives you a choice of exactly one operator. 2. Take a long series of interconnecting very slow local trains, where each leg of the journey gives you a choice of exactly one operator. 3. Take a bunch of intercity trains that go via a very circuitous route, where each leg gives you a choice of exactly one operator.
(2) and (3) would usually be more expensive, take an unfeasibly long time and open you up to being completely screwed if one of the trains is delayed (since you would have one ticket for each leg instead of a single end-to-end ticket, and that makes you liable if you miss one of your trains due to the preceeding train being delayed).
(1) is usually several times the cost of driving unless booked several weeks in advance, and for a lot of routes is slower than driving.
It's usually (always?) the case that if you want the fastest vaguely sane option, you pay more.
Except in the case of the british rail network, the "fastest vaguely sane option" is usually to drive instead of taking the train...
I frequently take the train for a specific journey, and the _only_ reason I do that is because if I book it 2 weeks in advance its cheaper than driving. If I don't book it that far in advance, its considerably more expensive than driving; and since the train takes twice as long as a car to get there, I wouldn't take the train in that situation. Hell, if I wanted to travel first class it would cost *4 to 5 times* what it costs to drive, for a journey that takes twice as long as driving - that's a complete WTF.
We're in the same boat in NL: privatisation of railways hasn't worked since there is no real competition
I don't quite understand the problems with the rail network in the UK, despite the lack of competition with other train operators. I often travel late on Sunday evenings - if I book a couple of weeks in advance then the train works out cheaper than driving (although it takes considerably longer and is less convenient since I need to actually get to the station and have to stick to a schedule); conversely if I book the same train closer to the time of travel, it costs several times the cost of driving. This is not a crowded route - I'm often the only person in a carriage so it isn't as if I'm competing with other passengers for a space.
So clearly, if I have to make a relatively last minute decision to travel, I take the car because its far cheaper and more convenient - by overcharging, the train operator is losing my business because they are in competition with the road network.
Similarly, I usually travel second class - a first class ticket on *exactly the same train* goes for £150 (that's about 4x the cost of driving). Who on earth is going to pay such a high price to travel on a train when they could drive in half the time? I wouldn't be surprised if you could get a taxi for that price. I can't imagine they get *any* passengers in the first class carriage.
Early on, the former state telco was forced to share the local loop with other phone companies and ISPs at a fixed fee, and the telecoms watchdog kept a close eye on them. As a result, there was real competition on a more or less level playing field, which quickly brought down prices and increased service levels.
That's more or less how it worked in the UK too - BT were heavilly regulated to ensure they allowed other ISPs to use their equipment at a fair price (either by BT providing the local loop, DSLAM and backhaul to the ISP, or by the ISP installing their own DSLAM and backhaul and paying BT for the use of the local loop). What has surprised me most is that exchanges that are deemed to have "competition" (lots of third party DSLAMs), are now deregulated and this hasn't caused any problems, even though BT are still the monopoly owner of the local loops. Similarly, BT are the sole provider of FTTC and FTTP (BT own the cabinet and the local loop) and yet this still seems to have strong competition from the ISPs.
Competition seems to be working in the energy sector as well: the infrastructure is separated from the suppliers so you can buy electricity from whomever you want.
I must admit I'm not a huge fan of the privatisation of domestic energy suppliers: the electricity is still flowing over the same grid from the same generators, its just that we've introduced a load of middle-men into the mix. The energy supplier who you pay is essentially just a broker who matches customers with power stations. I don't have a better solution, but adding middle men doesn't seem like the right thing to do.
The surprise there is that people complain about having a free market, and can't seem to be bothered to select the best offer: they would prefer to pay a set price even if that price is higher than what they'd pay on the free market.
I think a lot of this (at least here in the UK) isn't helped by a complete lack of transparency from the suppliers. The prices the suppliers charge vary vastly from region to region and very few of them actually publish their prices. Frequently, the only way to shop around is to use a "price comparitor" (either third party or on the energy company's own website), enter lots of information such as your location and your annual energy consumption and look to see what they estimate you'll pay in total. Why can't they just publish how much they are going to charge for each KWh?
There's also a whole lot of mis-selling of energy - lots of direct sales people (
However, I would be willing to bet my mortgage and my left testicle that the mobile carriers will say "this service is x% better than the 3G network, so we need to charge the consumer at least x% more than they paid for 3G services" irrespective of the relative cost of the 3G and 4G services to the provider.
Prices reflect what the market will bear, not the underlying cost of the service. The same would be true no matter how much they had paid for the licence. The difference is that with a lower licence cost, there is more competition and that reduces the price that the market will bear. Also, a higher profit margin means more money can be invested into infrastructure, increasing the buildout speed (at the moment, 4G is utterly useless because its only available in heavilly populated areas where you can already get wifi. The telcos need to build into the lesser populated areas for it to become useful - whilst starting in the heavilly populated areas allows them to claim to cover a high proportion of the population, I'd suggest its a bad strategy because that proportion of the population are exactly the people who don't need the service).
Reducing the cost to big business in the hope that there is a trickle-down effect will not see all of those savings go in Management bonuses at the mobile companies
That would be true if the buyers of the spectrum were the same companies in both the "high cost" and "low cost" scenarios. However, that's not the case - the reduced licence cost allows additional companies to compete who otherwise wouldn't have been in the running at all, and that drives prices down for the customer.
That being said I'm generally against selling off publically owned infrastructure since I have rarely seen it work out well and it tends to end with some form of cartel that effectively has a license to tax the public. In this case selling the spectrum was the thing to do, unless you want the govt. to' do what? Rent it out?
I think whether selling off infrastructure is a good idea depends on whether it can sensibly turn into a competing market.
A good example is the rail network - there is only one rail network, which means that you can't have competition (if I want to make a long distance journey between two cities, I don't get to choose between lots of competing operators - there is one company that operates that route and I'm stuck with them, which means no competition and that's bad for the customer). This has resulted in a very bad situation for the public - the British rail network is an unmitegated disaster these days.
Although, that said, despite the phone network being a similar situation, that seems to have worked out surprisingly well (despite the fact that we're mostly stuck with using BT for the local-loop, and they are utterly utterly incompetent).
When 3G was rolled out in the UK, the cost to the customer was prohibitively expensive that uptake was pretty slow,
So, the same as 4G then...
At the moment 4G is completely pointless: - Its only availble in highly populated built up areas (i.e. where there are already plenty of wifi hotspots) - Its pretty expensive (although EE have at least made their pricing slightly saner since their initial launch, which saw them bundling lots of free talktime and SMS but charging through the nose for data - what exactly do they think people will upgrade to 4G for?) - There's still not a lot of hardware that supports 4G
3G had very similar problems (ok, so it wasn't competing with wifi, but it was expensive, not widely supported by hardware and had terrible coverage). 4G will improve, just as 3G did, but for now I don't see the value in paying more for 4G network access.
Gradually, it's come down to a more reasonable price, but it's still prohibitively limited by bandwidth for the majority of people - 250MB per month is often considered generous.
Really? You can get some pretty cheap contracts offering gigabytes per month. Personally, I'm on a PAYG plan - I get 150MB "free" (expires after 45 days) every time I add £5 to my account balance, and I can purchase a 2GB bundle (expires after 30 days) for £5, which is taken from that account balance. As it happens, I often don't need more than 150MB over 45 days, so assuming I didn't use the phone for anything else that would be £5 for 75 days worth of data (so £2/month), but worst case its £5/month for over 2GB of data/month, which seems a pretty reasonable deal to me.
If you want to use 3G as a home internet connection then you probably want more than 2GB, but there are still pretty good options here - a quick look at Three's pricing shows they do a 10GB for £15.
It is absolutely ideal for a tidal power station. Virtually free energy.
Its ideal if you completely discount the environmental damage it would cause to hundreds of square kilometres. If the only thing you care about it monetary cost then its perfect - thankfully a lot of people can see beyond the pure financial implications.
So I suppose it was inevitable that the misguided green/ecology lobby would get the project killed.
I'm certainly not a tree hugger, but none of the environmental concerns seem to be misguided to me. Destroying vast areas of habitat is really bad, especially habitat that is in extremely short supply because we have _already_ destroyed much of it around the UK. There are better alternatives.
Tidal Power stations are not remotely as polluting and intrusive as traditional coal or gas burning ones.
I never said they were - I certainly wouldn't advocate building coal or gas baseload power stations.
Yes it would end surfing upstream but so what??? Surfing off the coast of Cornwall should be unaffected.
I don't think surfing was ever a big part of the decision process, but the statement above is pretty nuts - "it's ok to do $bad_thing to a large area because some other people who live elsewhere in the world would be unaffected". We can use that argument to justify pretty much any $bad_thing as being ok. Maybe the justification you were looking for is "its ok to do $bad_thing because it won't adversely affect me".
any more destructive than contamination of groundwater with frack juice and methane?
Just because one technology (fracking) has an ambiguous environmental record doesn't mean that you must instead use another technology that will certainly lead to serious ecological problems. There are a number of alternatives which are pretty environmentally sound compared to both fracking and the severn barrage.
A few years ago (2008?), much was made of the tidal capture planned for the Bristol Channel. The study on which the argument of both sides was based had calculated that capturing enough energy in the channel would supply the entire energy needs of England, Wales, Scotland and Eire, all the outlying islands and the North Sea Oil Rigs, and still only deplete 5% of the total amount of energy passing through the channel at any time. Capturing 100% of the energy would not only supply most of Europe, it would also result in a glass-smooth Bristol Channel. The surfing fraternity won the argument, saying that even a 5% drop in tidal energy would kill the tourism industry in the area since most of the coastal tourism in the area relied on the four foot breakers*!
*Yep, that's what was said. The Bristol Channel has a 47 foot tidal range, which is pretty much the highest tidal range of any estuary on the British coastline.
No, the environmental crowd (quite rightly, for once) succesfully argued that the destruction of vast areas of mud flats would be ecologically disasterous for the local wildlife.
Slashdot Mirror
I had dinner with a H.S. teacher recently and I was amazed at how things have changed. For example, it's now SOP for them to call the police when two kids get into a FIGHT. Even a basic fistfight with no weapons and no serious injuries. "Ridiculous" is right.
How does a kid being bullied not count as assault? Certainly when I was at school there was a lot of bullying going on and the school simply didn't care (even when people inevitably ended up injured). Whilst I'll agree that the first port of call should be for it to be handled internally in the school, if that doesn't work shouldn't the police be involved if only for the protection of the kids on the receiving end?
VAT was originally _supposed_ to only apply to "luxury goods"
Oh, and I should add that keeping yourself from freezing to death and being able to get to work are also luxuries, as fuel has VAT charged on it. I'm not sure what happens if you decide to chuck VAT-free cakes on the fire and use them as fuel...
That is nothing to do with Amazon. In the UK books rightfully are vat free, but ebooks aren't.
Depends what you mean by "rightfully". The VAT laws are incredibly inconsistent and arbitrary in the UK.
VAT was originally _supposed_ to only apply to "luxury goods", which is why cakes (which are presumably a bare essential) are tax free whilst sanitary towels, incontenance pads, etc (which are clearly luxury items) are taxable.
Similarly, a flapjack (i.e. a bar made out of cerial, fat and sugar) is VAT free whilst a cerial bar (which is, instead, made out of cerial, fat and sugar) is taxable.
So as you can see, the VAT rules are completely clear, consistent and intuitive with no chance of ambuiguity or misinterpretation.
Having hands that one of my kids once told me resembled bear paws... oversized and clumsy, something about the same size as the Galaxy S3 would be ideal for my purposes, because I've always found the iPhone display to be unusably tiny for anything involving complex interactivity (such as texting, for instance).
I think thats already available... Have you looked at the Galaxy S3, it sounds like that does what you want?
To sum my position up on the subject: If you want to "protect" your kids from sex, it is YOUR decision to do so and YOUR responsibility to do it. It's YOUR kids, you didn't ask me when you made them (how did you, if you're so anti-sex, I'm curious?), so don't bother me now!
Quite. That said, I think there is a lot to be said for ISPs providing services to customers beyond being a dumb pipe - no reason why your ISP can't operate a firewall for you instead of you having to have a firewall on your router. And similarly, *opt-in* filtering may be a sensible thing for the ISP to offer their customers instead of the customer having to go buy their own filtering system (and have the know-how to set it up).
However, this comes at a cost to the ISP and most of the people complaining would probably go for the cheapest ISP they can (who wouldn't offer these services), and then hold the ISP responsible when they discover their connection is unfiltered. ISPs themselves seem uninterested in offering these kinds of services - they've probably concluded the same as me that people simply won't pay extra for this stuff.
People want computers to Just Work, like their toaster - they don't want to learn how to make it work or pay someone who knows, they just want it to work. Well guess what, the internet is more complex than your toaster and it *does* require some knowledge, that's just how it is.
I could see a few groups who would enjoy to make sure you cannot access certain content. The idea is mostly that porn is dirty and bad and everyone who is against filtering it must be a pervert. Then, if it is installed, a certain group comes in and says that if you can filter porn out, you can certainly filter other content, too.
The issue is possibly not so much the idea that you can filter porn if you want to, but the fact that all the bills on the subject which are coming through seem to be mandating filtering by default and possibly allowing people to opt-out. How many people are going to phone their ISP and say "please opt me out of the filtering because I want to watch the dirty kinky porn"? Not only that, but now your ISP has to maintain and protect a list of people who want to watch porn, which is arguably rather sensitive information.
So once you have the majority filtered, because so few will opt out, you can start increasing the scope of the filter - you start out with the kiddy porn, because obviously no one could oppose that and anyone who opts out must be a kiddy fiddler, then all porn must be filtered, then "offensive" non-porn material - hate speech, anti-religion discussions, etc. It is a slippery slope until you end up with a very sanitised web where even political discussions could be filtered by default. Even better if the organisation behind the filtering has no public oversight and isn't answerable to anyone (which was the case with the IWF).
Whereas if you start with a opt-in system, only the people who are actually interested in being filtered will opt in, and where you only have a small proportion who are using a filtering system, there is a lot less scope for progressively blocking more and more content. For one thing, with the majority able to see and link to that content, the minority who are being filtered will constantly see how much the filters are blocking, and will turn them off again if it gets too much.
One thing that _would_ be useful for the government to do, is to legislate that adult entertainment websites insert HTTP headers to classify the content so that people who *want* to have their connection filtered can do so more reliably. Of course, porn comes from all over the world so that won't catch all websites, but if the EU and US both passed that sort of legislation then it would allow filtering systems to become much more accurate.
Also, some things that people forget:
1. Most home internet connections are used by all members of the family through a single NAT router - this means that a one-size-fits-all solution at the ISP is probably going to be fairly ineffective and tailoring content for all ages.
2. Filtering systems can stop the majority of "oops I accidentally stumbled across porn" incidents, but if someone actually wants to see porn they're going to find it and there's nothing technological you can do to stop that.
3. The best solution is a combination - a bit of filtering to avoid accidentally stumbling across porn (which is the purpose of google safesearch, etc.), education and discipline. Stop making sex such a taboo subject!
Disclaimer: I produce web filtering systems for schools in the UK.
Last time I looked the IWF were a criminal organisation. They are downloading and viewing child porn in order to rate web sites. However good their intentions, this is against the law.
No it isn't. The Sexual Offences Act 2003 explicitly protects IT staff who have to deal with illegal content as part of their job.
Example regarding "making" copies: "Where the authorities are satisfied that the facts indicate that the intention of the “making” was genuinely to prevent, investigate, or detect crime under the 1978 Act a prosecution would not be pursued, because the defence would apply"
Worse, this will likely end up with the same lack of accountability that the IWF ended up with, where the government didn't legislate the block list, they just threatened the ISPs with stricter legislation if they didn't 'voluntarily' comply, so you have a private organisation with no public oversight responsible for censoring almost every UK web connection.
Happilly pretty much anyone can avoid the IWF these days: although you've always been able to use an ISP who doesn't subscribe to the IWF, previously it was pretty much mandatory in schools due to BECTA requirements, but with BECTA now gone, no one cares about the IWF any more. Which is good, because not only were they unaccountable, they also grossly misrepresented themselves (e.g. they claim to be funded by "voluntary donations" but when you look into it, those "voluntary donations" are fixed non-voluntary amounts ranging in the thousands to the tens of thousands of pounds which you are required to pay in order to get access to their list of 100 or so URIs which they have proclaimed are kiddy-porn (including, on occasion, the likes of wikipedia). For comparison, other commercial URI categorisation databases come in at well under £1000 and contain several million URIs.
If anything, DRM actually encourages the "average cunsumer" to copy by virtue of making the official product inferior to the copies.
The average consumer may find they want to do something entirely reasonable with the content they purchased (watch a DVD in a different region, skip adverts on a DVD, watch some movie on a device that doesn't support the DRM being used, watch a HD movie on a TV that doesn't do HDCP, etc.) They find they can't do this with their legally purchased media, so end up downloading an illegal copy instead. After doing this a few times, they start to question why the hell they are paying for something they are having to copy illegally in order to use and give up on the whole "paying" bit.
Unless you can completely eliminate *everyone's* ability to post a DRM-free copy on the internet, you can't prevent this. Your best choice is to stop making the legit versions inferior to the illicit ones.
The only things I see holding back LED bulbs are misinformation and lack of availability (Home Depot is the only major brick and mortar store I've found that carries them).
I agree, except for replacing "misinformation" with "confusing information", and the manufacturers are responsible for this. Take for example the following photo:
https://fbcdn-sphotos-a-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-prn1/11607_10151447644678611_203176319_n.jpg
We can see here, 2 GU10 bulbs. The one on the left is a 28W halogen, the one on the right is a 4.5W LED bulb (they both have a similar beam angle - 36 degrees for the halogen, 35 degrees for the LED). Both claim to be "equivalent" to a 35W "conventional" (by which I assume they mean tungsten) bulb. However, look at the light output - the halogen claims to output 600 lumen whilst the LED bulb says 200 lumen. So clearly different manufacturers use different criteria for what "equivalent" means - the halogen appears to be saying that its total light output is equivalent to a 35W tungsten, whilst the LED bulb appears to be saying that its brightness is equivalent to a (presumably unshaded) 35W tungsten. By the criteria used for the LED bulb, you could manufacture a tungsten bulb that is labelled as being "more efficient" than a tungsten bulb, simply by narrowing the beam angle with a reflector!
Some of the bigger brands put even less information on their packaging - on the same shelves were Phillips 5W LED GU10 bulbs that simply gave an "equivalent to" figure - no information about how many lumens or candela they output, no information about beam angle.
Also, people shopping for bulbs are almost certainly going to be doing like-for-like replacement: if I'm buying a GU10 bulb then the chances are I'm replacing an existing GU10 bulb, which is almost certainly going to be a halogen (since traditionally GU10s are halogen), not an unshaded tungsten bulb with an almost isotropic radiant flux. So telling me what "conventional" bulb it is equivalent to (whether thats done by comparing lumens or candela) is pretty much useless. Instead, I'm most likely to want to know what wattage of halogen its going to replace - if I've got a 50W halogen GU10 already and I'm buying an LED bulb, I want to know which LED bulb will give me the same results as the bulb I'm replacing.
How is anyone supposed to make a decision when the information provided is either nonexistent or unstandardised and misleading?
What I needed is for a standardisation of the information provided:
1. The actual wattage of the bulb - i.e. how much power it is going to draw.
2. The total light output in lumens.
3. The brightness in candela. Especially important for bulbs that are traditionally used unshaded, such as GU10s.
4. The beam angle. Again, important for bulbs that are usually unshaded.
5. Colour temperature.
6. What standard bulb this is equivalent to for a like-for-like replacement (i.e. if you're replacing a conventional ~isotropic tungsten bulb then it should be compared against that, if you're replacing a halogen GU10 then that bulb should be the comparison instead). Obviously this becomes problematic where the beam angles are different (e.g. I just bought a LED GU10 with a 120 degree beam - far wider than you'll get from a standard halogen GU10).
7. The life expectancy of the bulb.
And this information should be printed on *all* bulbs, even the conventional ones, so that someone in a shop can pick up any 2 bulbs and compare the information between them.
I was under the impression that the EU had, several years ago, made some of this information (such as the lumen output) mandatory, but there are still a lot of bulbs on the shelves that don't include any of this data.
The white led are in fact blue LEDs with a phosphor layer which "shifts" the emission spectrum towards green and red. Thus, white LEDs looks bluer or "colder" (associated with ice).
White LEDs are actually ultraviolet LEDs with a phosphor layer. You can get a wide variety of emission spectra - for example, I just got a 2800K LED bulb which is somewhere between a normal tungsten bulb (~2600K) and a halogen (~3000K). And of course you can go to the "colder" side - there are 5000K and 6000K bulbs available.
What is the point of putting a creative commons license on data that is not copyrightable. Anyone can take the data and do anything they want with it and there is nothing anyone can do about it. If it were otherwise, no one would be able to broadcast the temperature without permission from the weather office. How well would that system work?
You can't copyright facts, but there are copyright-style laws covering a collection of facts organised into a database. That said, creative commons probably isn't the right licence for the same reason it wasn't the right licence for open street map (who have now migrated to a different permissive licence designed for databases of facts).
So, at the rate that tech is expanding, what would be the time frame for google glass technology to be permanently implanted in our brain via a wireless computer chip. Full time interaction with the internet, with of course full time tracking/monitoring all we see, access, and think. We'll all be walking versions of "My Favorite Martian", sans the 'visible' antenna. Less than 100 years away? 20 years away? The future looks both extremely cool and very frightening to me at the same time.
Don't forget overlaying adverts onto everything you see... If its anywhere near as accurate as Facebook's advertising, looking at your wife will automatically show you singles ads...
Well, they must get some... Anyway, I think you're forgetting about business travellers.
I'm talking a 5.5 hour train journey on a Sunday night that arrives at the destination at 1:30am on Monday morning... I really can't imagine they get any business travellers, let alone business travellers who are expecting to get any work done...
They can (quite convincingly) argue that the cost is worth it for a long trip, because they can actually work during the journey, unlike in a car or even a plane.
For some routes, potentially. However, I would question the productivity of someone on the train - are you really going to find a 5.5 hour train journey more productive than a 3 hour car journey and 2.5 hours of proper work? Especially when some of the train journey involves changing trains, waiting around on platforms, etc.
On a train you can phone, use the internet, effectively hold business meetings with colleagues, and so on.
Again, depends on the route. On one route I recently travelled on the train, I was without a 3G signal for around 90% of the journey and the train's wifi was almost unusable. Holding "business meetings" by phone is ok right until you go into a tunn-- (which on some routes you do very frequently).
I personally would only take the train somewhere if I was being paid expenses, as you say for personal use (if you don't book weeks in advance) it is just too expensive.
The thing is, for business use I'd take my time into consideration far more and this would make me less likely to take the train - ignoring the expense of the train, having to faff around getting to the station in the first place, spending much longer on the train than I would driving and then having to get from the station at the other end sounds like a complete waste of my time to me, which is significant if I could be getting paid by the hour for that time instead.
I'm no great fan of BT, but I shudder to think what it would be like if a load of different private companies tried to do it instead.
Well, the point really is that where you have a single infrastructure, privatisation doesn't seem sensible. Admittedly it seems to have been moderately successful in the case of BT, although we'll never know how well state ownership would've handled the internet age.
For true competition, you'd have several companies, each running their own network, and when you find one is incompetent, expensive, whatever you could switch to another. Obviously that is relatively infeasible because of the build-out cost of the physical network though. However, thats exactly how it works for the MNOs and that seems to have worked out pretty well in the grand scheme of things.
Overall if you either get a good advance deal or are rich enough that the cost is neligable to you it's hard to beat first class train travel as a comfortable way of getting to/from london.
OTOH I don't know why anyone would buy a first class ticket from manchester to leeds because the "first class" on those trains is not deserving of the name
Getting to/from London is possibly one of the more useful things you can use a train for, owing to how bad it is to drive in London (that said, there have been a couple of times when I saw the train price and said "sod that" and either drove and parked to the centre of london or drove to the outskirts and took the tube the rest of the way).
My typical train journey (second class, not to london) involves:
1. Get from the house to the station in the city centre: parking at the station is a non-option because of the amount they charge, similarly taking a taxi is about the same as half the cost of the train journey itself. Taking a bus would be an option, except that the busses are usually scheduled so that there's a long wait between the bus arriving at the station and the train leaving (to the point that its actually faster to just walk the whole way, which takes about an hour). Also the busses stop running after 18:30 and don't run at all on Sundays. So usually I either walk (an hour) or cycle (15 minutes).
2. The first leg of the train journey takes about an hour. Then I have a short (15 minute) wait for the next train.
3. The second leg of the journey takes about 3.5 hours or so. This gets me into my destination city. However, I need to go out to one of the small stations a few miles out from the city, and that train only runs every hour so I usually have a 30 minute wait.
4. The final train takes about 15 minutes, and from there its just a short (5 minute) walk to my destination.
So this adds up to about 5.75 hours.
If I wanted to do any work-type stuff, I could do maybe 4 hours once you take into account getting laptop out, packing away, etc. on the trains. Also the second train doesn't have power sockets, so I'm down to battery power for that. Although the first train does have power sockets, First aren't great at keeping their trains in good repair and they frequently don't work. And that's *only* if I manage to get a table and 2 of the seats at that table are empty - 4 people around a table makes it far too cramped to work, airline seats are too cramped to work (elbowing the person next to you while typing isn't good form). Either way, I'm not hugely productive on a noisy train.
Alternatively, I can drive, which takes 3 hours, is door to door (so no faffing with trying to get to the station), and I don't have to stick to a specific schedule (if I get 10 minutes late it doesn't matter when travelling by car, whereas by train it does - not only would I have to wait an hour for the next train, but I would have to buy a new ticket at great expense). Taking the train is cheaper than driving if I book 2 weeks in advance. If I don't then it is far more expensive.
(Oh, and before anyone starts going on about "you haven't taken the cost of owning the car into consideration": no, I haven't, because the public transport is generally so poor that I have to have a car *anyway* for other journeys)
That depends on the cities in question, and whether you are really keen on optimizing for costs or whether you care about how long it takes as well.
For most long distance journies, your choice is:
1. Take the intercity, which gives you a choice of exactly one operator.
2. Take a long series of interconnecting very slow local trains, where each leg of the journey gives you a choice of exactly one operator.
3. Take a bunch of intercity trains that go via a very circuitous route, where each leg gives you a choice of exactly one operator.
(2) and (3) would usually be more expensive, take an unfeasibly long time and open you up to being completely screwed if one of the trains is delayed (since you would have one ticket for each leg instead of a single end-to-end ticket, and that makes you liable if you miss one of your trains due to the preceeding train being delayed).
(1) is usually several times the cost of driving unless booked several weeks in advance, and for a lot of routes is slower than driving.
It's usually (always?) the case that if you want the fastest vaguely sane option, you pay more.
Except in the case of the british rail network, the "fastest vaguely sane option" is usually to drive instead of taking the train...
I frequently take the train for a specific journey, and the _only_ reason I do that is because if I book it 2 weeks in advance its cheaper than driving. If I don't book it that far in advance, its considerably more expensive than driving; and since the train takes twice as long as a car to get there, I wouldn't take the train in that situation. Hell, if I wanted to travel first class it would cost *4 to 5 times* what it costs to drive, for a journey that takes twice as long as driving - that's a complete WTF.
We're in the same boat in NL: privatisation of railways hasn't worked since there is no real competition
I don't quite understand the problems with the rail network in the UK, despite the lack of competition with other train operators. I often travel late on Sunday evenings - if I book a couple of weeks in advance then the train works out cheaper than driving (although it takes considerably longer and is less convenient since I need to actually get to the station and have to stick to a schedule); conversely if I book the same train closer to the time of travel, it costs several times the cost of driving. This is not a crowded route - I'm often the only person in a carriage so it isn't as if I'm competing with other passengers for a space.
So clearly, if I have to make a relatively last minute decision to travel, I take the car because its far cheaper and more convenient - by overcharging, the train operator is losing my business because they are in competition with the road network.
Similarly, I usually travel second class - a first class ticket on *exactly the same train* goes for £150 (that's about 4x the cost of driving). Who on earth is going to pay such a high price to travel on a train when they could drive in half the time? I wouldn't be surprised if you could get a taxi for that price. I can't imagine they get *any* passengers in the first class carriage.
Early on, the former state telco was forced to share the local loop with other phone companies and ISPs at a fixed fee, and the telecoms watchdog kept a close eye on them. As a result, there was real competition on a more or less level playing field, which quickly brought down prices and increased service levels.
That's more or less how it worked in the UK too - BT were heavilly regulated to ensure they allowed other ISPs to use their equipment at a fair price (either by BT providing the local loop, DSLAM and backhaul to the ISP, or by the ISP installing their own DSLAM and backhaul and paying BT for the use of the local loop). What has surprised me most is that exchanges that are deemed to have "competition" (lots of third party DSLAMs), are now deregulated and this hasn't caused any problems, even though BT are still the monopoly owner of the local loops. Similarly, BT are the sole provider of FTTC and FTTP (BT own the cabinet and the local loop) and yet this still seems to have strong competition from the ISPs.
Competition seems to be working in the energy sector as well: the infrastructure is separated from the suppliers so you can buy electricity from whomever you want.
I must admit I'm not a huge fan of the privatisation of domestic energy suppliers: the electricity is still flowing over the same grid from the same generators, its just that we've introduced a load of middle-men into the mix. The energy supplier who you pay is essentially just a broker who matches customers with power stations. I don't have a better solution, but adding middle men doesn't seem like the right thing to do.
The surprise there is that people complain about having a free market, and can't seem to be bothered to select the best offer: they would prefer to pay a set price even if that price is higher than what they'd pay on the free market.
I think a lot of this (at least here in the UK) isn't helped by a complete lack of transparency from the suppliers. The prices the suppliers charge vary vastly from region to region and very few of them actually publish their prices. Frequently, the only way to shop around is to use a "price comparitor" (either third party or on the energy company's own website), enter lots of information such as your location and your annual energy consumption and look to see what they estimate you'll pay in total. Why can't they just publish how much they are going to charge for each KWh?
There's also a whole lot of mis-selling of energy - lots of direct sales people (
However, I would be willing to bet my mortgage and my left testicle that the mobile carriers will say "this service is x% better than the 3G network, so we need to charge the consumer at least x% more than they paid for 3G services" irrespective of the relative cost of the 3G and 4G services to the provider.
Prices reflect what the market will bear, not the underlying cost of the service. The same would be true no matter how much they had paid for the licence. The difference is that with a lower licence cost, there is more competition and that reduces the price that the market will bear. Also, a higher profit margin means more money can be invested into infrastructure, increasing the buildout speed (at the moment, 4G is utterly useless because its only available in heavilly populated areas where you can already get wifi. The telcos need to build into the lesser populated areas for it to become useful - whilst starting in the heavilly populated areas allows them to claim to cover a high proportion of the population, I'd suggest its a bad strategy because that proportion of the population are exactly the people who don't need the service).
Reducing the cost to big business in the hope that there is a trickle-down effect will not see all of those savings go in Management bonuses at the mobile companies
That would be true if the buyers of the spectrum were the same companies in both the "high cost" and "low cost" scenarios. However, that's not the case - the reduced licence cost allows additional companies to compete who otherwise wouldn't have been in the running at all, and that drives prices down for the customer.
That being said I'm generally against selling off publically owned infrastructure since I have rarely seen it work out well and it tends to end with some form of cartel that effectively has a license to tax the public. In this case selling the spectrum was the thing to do, unless you want the govt. to' do what? Rent it out?
I think whether selling off infrastructure is a good idea depends on whether it can sensibly turn into a competing market.
A good example is the rail network - there is only one rail network, which means that you can't have competition (if I want to make a long distance journey between two cities, I don't get to choose between lots of competing operators - there is one company that operates that route and I'm stuck with them, which means no competition and that's bad for the customer). This has resulted in a very bad situation for the public - the British rail network is an unmitegated disaster these days.
Although, that said, despite the phone network being a similar situation, that seems to have worked out surprisingly well (despite the fact that we're mostly stuck with using BT for the local-loop, and they are utterly utterly incompetent).
When 3G was rolled out in the UK, the cost to the customer was prohibitively expensive that uptake was pretty slow,
So, the same as 4G then...
At the moment 4G is completely pointless:
- Its only availble in highly populated built up areas (i.e. where there are already plenty of wifi hotspots)
- Its pretty expensive (although EE have at least made their pricing slightly saner since their initial launch, which saw them bundling lots of free talktime and SMS but charging through the nose for data - what exactly do they think people will upgrade to 4G for?)
- There's still not a lot of hardware that supports 4G
3G had very similar problems (ok, so it wasn't competing with wifi, but it was expensive, not widely supported by hardware and had terrible coverage). 4G will improve, just as 3G did, but for now I don't see the value in paying more for 4G network access.
Gradually, it's come down to a more reasonable price, but it's still prohibitively limited by bandwidth for the majority of people - 250MB per month is often considered generous.
Really? You can get some pretty cheap contracts offering gigabytes per month. Personally, I'm on a PAYG plan - I get 150MB "free" (expires after 45 days) every time I add £5 to my account balance, and I can purchase a 2GB bundle (expires after 30 days) for £5, which is taken from that account balance. As it happens, I often don't need more than 150MB over 45 days, so assuming I didn't use the phone for anything else that would be £5 for 75 days worth of data (so £2/month), but worst case its £5/month for over 2GB of data/month, which seems a pretty reasonable deal to me.
If you want to use 3G as a home internet connection then you probably want more than 2GB, but there are still pretty good options here - a quick look at Three's pricing shows they do a 10GB for £15.
It is absolutely ideal for a tidal power station. Virtually free energy.
Its ideal if you completely discount the environmental damage it would cause to hundreds of square kilometres. If the only thing you care about it monetary cost then its perfect - thankfully a lot of people can see beyond the pure financial implications.
So I suppose it was inevitable that the misguided green/ecology lobby would get the project killed.
I'm certainly not a tree hugger, but none of the environmental concerns seem to be misguided to me. Destroying vast areas of habitat is really bad, especially habitat that is in extremely short supply because we have _already_ destroyed much of it around the UK. There are better alternatives.
Tidal Power stations are not remotely as polluting and intrusive as traditional coal or gas burning ones.
I never said they were - I certainly wouldn't advocate building coal or gas baseload power stations.
Yes it would end surfing upstream but so what??? Surfing off the coast of Cornwall should be unaffected.
I don't think surfing was ever a big part of the decision process, but the statement above is pretty nuts - "it's ok to do $bad_thing to a large area because some other people who live elsewhere in the world would be unaffected". We can use that argument to justify pretty much any $bad_thing as being ok. Maybe the justification you were looking for is "its ok to do $bad_thing because it won't adversely affect me".
any more destructive than contamination of groundwater with frack juice and methane?
Just because one technology (fracking) has an ambiguous environmental record doesn't mean that you must instead use another technology that will certainly lead to serious ecological problems. There are a number of alternatives which are pretty environmentally sound compared to both fracking and the severn barrage.
Titanium frames, you were saying?
What about the screws?
A few years ago (2008?), much was made of the tidal capture planned for the Bristol Channel. The study on which the argument of both sides was based had calculated that capturing enough energy in the channel would supply the entire energy needs of England, Wales, Scotland and Eire, all the outlying islands and the North Sea Oil Rigs, and still only deplete 5% of the total amount of energy passing through the channel at any time. Capturing 100% of the energy would not only supply most of Europe, it would also result in a glass-smooth Bristol Channel. The surfing fraternity won the argument, saying that even a 5% drop in tidal energy would kill the tourism industry in the area since most of the coastal tourism in the area relied on the four foot breakers*!
*Yep, that's what was said. The Bristol Channel has a 47 foot tidal range, which is pretty much the highest tidal range of any estuary on the British coastline.
No, the environmental crowd (quite rightly, for once) succesfully argued that the destruction of vast areas of mud flats would be ecologically disasterous for the local wildlife.