Re: First hit is always free-ish.
it tends to screw up the formatting.
In my experience that's almost always down to font differences. It's worth looking online for some of the additional free fonts that match those used in MS tools.
6275 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Oct 2011
make social media, banks, and telcos jointly and severally responsible for all losses
All losses? It's not that easy, for several reasons.
Many of these scams work because greedy or stupid punters are willing to ignore the "if it looks too good to be true" rule in the hope of making a quick buck. If you buy a too-cheap Rolex from a guy down the pub, and it turns out (surprise!) to be a fake, should the publican be required to reimburse you? Why should the honest, sensible, customers of those businesses be on the hook to bail out all the dumb ones? Make no mistake, if a bank has to pay out compensation that money won't come from the bank, it will come from the bank's customers, which after all is where the bank gets all its money.
There's also the risk of unintended consequences, if people get used to the idea that they will always be bailed out when they do something stupid there's a risk that they will be more careless about scams: "It might be a scam, but who cares, I can't lose either way". There still needs to be some level of personal responsibility involved, even if that's not very trendy in these nanny-state days.
If there's negligence on the part of the bank or other platform then by all means make them pay, but it can't be a blanket rule.
Reminds me of a colleague who refused to pay motorway tolls with a credit card because "they" would know where he'd been. He could never explain who "they" were, nor why he thought anyone would care where he'd been.
Incidentally, paper cash usually has unique serial numbers, so is also very traceable.
A colleague discovered that the audio device on early Sun workstations had world write permissions, so you could rcp audio files to someone else's system. On one occasion he sent the noisy bit of Handel's Hallelujah Chorus to a machine being used by a fairly new team member on the floor below.
With impeccably unintentional timing she had just completed a successful demo to a visiting VIP when the system boomed "Haaallelujah! Haaallelujah!"
Apparently she just looked stunned, and stuttered "it's never done that before!"
You can't assume that dates like 2100 will only be of concern to programs that deal with "now", though. Anyone born today has an excellent chance of still being alive in 2100, so any programs that are expected to deal with life assurance or pensions for them may well have to handle dates up to 2120 and beyond. You don't want pension forecast reports to fail just because someone didn't care whether 2100 was a leap year or not.
which sends and records your GPS position continuously.
No it doesn't, that would be illegal and unusable (there are over 250 million cars in the EU). eCall makes an automated call to the emergency services if it detects that the vehicle has been in a crash, or if someone pushes the "help" button, and will then transmit position data.
The system description is quite clear:
" Your eCall system is only activated if your vehicle is involved in a serious accident. The rest of the time the system remains inactive. This means that when you are simply driving your vehicle, no tracking (registering your car's position or monitoring your driving) or transmission of data takes place.
When a call is made through your 112-based eCall system, your personal data is processed according to EU data protection rules. This means that the emergency services only receive the limited data they need to deal with the accident situation, your data is not stored for any longer than necessary, and is removed when no longer required.
It would be a violation of GDPR to do anything else.
These days a Skoda is a VW under the covers, just like an Audi is. The only real difference is a few more pennies spent on the quality of the interior plastics and fabrics for the VW and Audi. A Dacia isn't quite at that level, it's more like last-year's model Renault, but with fewer gadgets. Makes it quite appealing, more chance that the electrical bugs will have been worked out & fewer silly gadgets to get in the driver's way.
This means heat exports during the early years could be light, creating uncertainty for the stakeholders in a district heating network.
I'm not sure that's a valid argument, if you consider the whole picture.
An apartment building will need to be heated, say from a heat pump, and will consume a certain amount of electricity which can be known/planned. If the data centre is empty, then all the apartment heating comes from the local pump, but as DC capacity increases and heat generation rises the flow to the apartments will increase, and their electricity consumption will drop. At the same time, the DC consumption will increase. Rather than consider DC heat ouput as "waste" which can be used, consider the DC + apartment block as a closed system. Worst-case the apartment heat pump will be oversized at the start.
I'm still sceptical about the overall idea. I know people who live in buildings with a district heating system which is so uncontrollable that they adjust temperature by opening windows, even in midwinter, which is hardly an environmentally-friendly solution.
It took until the late 1980s for equipment like inexpensive 32-bit computers with onboard graphics, reasonably fast expansion buses (and thus, reasonably fast networking as a fairly cheap option) to start to be mainstream. Then Unix acquired networking support, as it still has.
I'd date Unix networking more from the late 1970s when UUCP became standard, or perhaps around 1975 with RFC681.
Mixing up France with the whole of Europe is a common mistake, often made by a certain kind of Briton
What a bizarre comment.
France was actually one of the earliest countries to have proper drains, largely due to Napoleon, but at that time they didn't appreciate the advantages of separating foul and rainwater drains. The disadvantage of being an early adopter, others learn from your mistakes.
When I had a garage built in the UK, I wanted to have it plumbed for a washing machine, and one problem for the builder was extending the foul drain to keep the two systems separate, as required by local law.
The previous poster implied that the UK was behind Europe, in not separating the systems. I'm simply pointing out that this is a nonsensical generalisation.
built separate sewage and storm drains like they do in Europe.
You've never walked around a French city and smelled the sewage drifting up from the drains in the street, then?
Population increase could have been *planned for*.
Like in Gloucestershire, where Thames Water has been trying to build a new reservoir for 30 years, but been constantly blocked by NIMBYs, who nevertheless complain constantly about hosepipe bans?
No-one needs a 100kWh battery in their car
Well, you could argue that no-one needs a car at all, there are countries in the world where private car ownership isn't viable. I would not want to live in such a country.
On the other hand, if you want an EV with similar range to an ICE vehicle, you do need a battery of that general size.
You seem to have forgotten everything else on a car which is needed to make the petrol do anything useful
Not at all, but most of them have equivalents in an EV, you may not have a gearbox but you still have a transmission. You need a heat pump for heating/AC and various things which are driven from the engine in an ICE vehicle need electrical equivalents.
The simple check is to compare the weights of equivalent cars, for example an ICE VW Golf weights in at around 1250kg, the e-Golf at 1540kg.
and it's already quite possible to convert an ICE to EV
With equivalent performance? Citation Required.
V2G is already popular amongst those who can do it.
There will always be fanbois. I admire your optimism if you think it will ever work for the whole driving population. It is naive to assume that a V2G grid will be run for the benefits of the consumers rather than the suppliers. Once your vehicle becomes a resource on their grid, rather than a customer who pays for supply, they will decide when you get power, and how much. Not my idea of motoring.
I'd also considered tapping off the vacuum from both sides of the brake booster, then using this to control air, or vacuum, or hydraulic, or whatever for trailer brakes
Works for trains... :-)
but then it's probably just as easy to tap into the hydraulic brake lines.
I'd imagine it's not so easy to allow quick (dis)connect without letting air or moisture into the lines, so taking a feed from pedal or vacuum is probably more reliable. Or perhaps go for an electric/servo model.
FUD territory much?
Where? The figures are correct.
EVs don't need to weigh more than an ICE vehicle, but *all* cars are grossly overweight nowadays.
You know of a 100kWh battery that weighs the same as 50l of petrol? EVs are generally 300-500kg heavier than the equivalent ICE model. I do agree that all vehicles are excessively heavy, but that's at least in part due to obligatory safety equipment and "driver aids".
We seriously need to have a two part VED: an emissions rate (based on point of use emissions) and a mass rate (based on the cube of axle weight) - you pay both, so a heavy car would pay more than a light one, and a more polluting car would pay more than a less polluting one.
If you're going the be that specific, then perhaps there should also be a tax based on the environmental costs of production, like mining minerals and rare metals, maybe on a reducing basis with age over the expected life of the car as the production "eco damage" is amortised? Won't be great for EVs, though.
Of course, beware of unexpected consequences. Paris has just brought in punitive parking charges to penalise SUV drivers, but they included a weight-based element. Even allowing BEVs to have 400kg more than ICE, it's still causing a lot of upset because many EVs are caught. It'll be cheaper to buy a fairly recent ICE vehicle than an EV if you need to park in Paris.
So no, overnight won't become "peak"
I didn't say it would, I said that off-peak will disappear. The total UK energy use for road transport is much the same as current electricity use. Once that all comes from the grid, in evenings and overnight as people come home from work & charge, the demand curve will flatten and there will be no need to bribe people to use electricity overnight. It'll be the same price all day.
the grid will operate more dynamically, since there will be substantially more "delayed usage" loads which can be intelligently scheduled. V2G will also be able to support the grid at times of high demand, reducing the demand for peaker plants - and therefore reducing the cost of *all* energy.
I admire your optimism, but I believe it is misplaced. People like certainty and consistency, and I can't see V2G being popular, it's too altruistic for mass adoption.
so long as you have hot water when you open the tap
Which is why people are delighted to rip-out old hot water tanks and storage heaters, to use gas combi boilers instead, there's a guarantee of heat on-demand, no worries about whether the tank will have been heated enough. It's a question of perception.
And if collecting and selling it is illegal, then the buyers can be charged with receiving stolen property (and perhaps conspiracy to commit wire fraud, always good for a few more years) as well. Two birds with one stone.