Posts by Vic

> Most of us accept some sites are 'undesirable' and that search engines should not link to those

"First they came for the communists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist."

Many of us do not accept your initial premise.

Vic.

> Isn't the EU designed to make it easy for business by overriding

> country-specific decision-making?

No.

The EU has some serious problems, but if you compare it to, say, the US, it's far friendlier to individuals than is our westward friends...

Vic.

> However I don't think most activist want to actually solve the problem.

I can't begin to express how wrong is this belief.

Vic.

> and which company do you work for .????

Struggling with this irony thing, huh?

Vic.

> if you think about £1500 over 3/4 years on buying or subsidising phones is a lot

I do.

Vic.

> Nokia was on a burning platform

I still don't believe that, however many times I read it.

Nokia was in trouble, that much is for certain. But it was selling well, and had healthy profits. The whole "burning platform" thing is nonsense; it had a mid-term problem that needed careful management.

Instead, they brought in Elop. And then the platforms most certainly were alight.

Vic.

> They should have stuck with Meego/Maemo6 and released the N9 properly world wide

Yes.

I'd have bought one.

Vic.

> Runs well on simple hardware

Simple hardware? The Lumia 800 is a 1.4GHz processor.

I still administer web servers with less grunt than that...

Vic.

> for Nokia to start knocking out some decent Droids.

They could put that together in no time flat. And it might well save the company.

Will they do it? Will they buggery.

Vic.

You registered just to barf that one out?

A "moral high ground" username, a bunch of toss in the comment, ...

I smell something disingenuous.

Vic.

> Is there no equivalent of "double jeopardy" in UK jurisprudence?

There used to be. A few years ago, the law was changed such that you now *can* be tried more than once for the same offence - but that's thankfully very rare.

But note that in this case, a retrial was ordered. This voids the whole of the first trial and starts again - it would have been the proper procedure even when we had effective protection against double jeopardy.

Vic.

> I can think of a few three and four lane 30 zones in London

Four-lane roads that aren't in residential areas in London?

Vic.

> No it is because they wanted to pull someone, no houses, 4 lane road

It is very rare to find such a road designated as a 30mph limit. Perhaps you'd like to tell us which road it was...

Vic.

> I was pulled for overtaking a Police car doing 20mph in a 30mph limit.

30mph limits are generally residential. Whilst overtaking possibilities exist, they are necessarily limited. The police car doing 20mph is a bit of a giveaway that *he* believes visibility to be limited.

> Then you get grilled for half hour, why did you overtake, what were you doing

If the police driver was correct in his assessment - and many of them are P1s, so that's a reasonable assumption - then he saw you performing a dangerous overtake in a situation where visibility was so restricted as to cause him to drive slowly. I should say you got off lightly.

> Harrasment I think.

Actually, it sounds to me like a copper doing his job. Why do you consider your opinion of the safe speed for that situation to be more appropriate that a professional driver with much more training and experience than you've got?

Vic.

> That strikes us normal people as a tad one sided.

Not me. Are you implying I'm not normal?

Vic.

> It's "until".

It's "unless"

> From the latin ei incumbit probatio qui dicit, non qui negat

Note that your Latin phrase does not include any word for "until"[1] or "unless"[2].

Vic.

[1] I'd use "donec"

[2] nisi

Re: but not as serious as rape.

And that is why the punishment is less.

Vic.

> innocent until proven guilty.

Innocent *unless* proven guilty. It's an important distinction.

Vic.

> But do you seriously expect these people to base their decisions

> solely on the information they are given?

Yes.

HTH, HAND, etc.

Vic.

> google, you use to be so good.

Google came from out of nowhere and took the business from AltaVista, HotBot, and the like because they offered fast, lightweight results without excessive advertising or other farting around.

Google has now become that which it replaced.

It is only a matter of time before someone does to Google what it did to its predecessors...

Vic.

> they promise not to track.

I think I will start using them for exactly that reason.

It *really* annoys me that Google's results are all Google URLs that redirect. Aside from the tracking issue, it also means that copy/paste is useless.

Perhaps I'll write a FF plugin to extract the real URLs...

Vic.

> What browser / version / OS are you using?

Currently Firefox 3.6.24 on Fedora 14, also running Flashblock[1].

The problem is something to do with the Javascript that replaces the banner at the top with a big Flash advert. That's the bit that oscillates.

Vic.

[1] I always used to allow Flash on sites like ElReg, because I understand you need to run ads like that to keep the revenue lowing in. But then it got *so* intrusive, it had to go...

> the browser flashed and redrew the screen again and again

I get something similar when I click the "in reply to" link.

It makes using the "newest" ordering rather tricky - especially when people don't quote any of the post they're referring to...

Vic.

> Make 'em earn their money the old fashioned way*

Ronald Reagan said precisely one thing of use:

"It has been said that politics is the second oldest profession. I have learned that it bears a striking resemblance to the first."

Vic.

Re: Delta-v

> It's not that hard to find out instead of guessing

It's a delta, right, in the v, right, hence the name "delta v".

</holly>

Vic.

> Do you remember the bottles with the spring top and rubber washer?

Do you remember the bottles with a glass marble inside, held closed only by pressure?

I still have a couple of those...

Vic.

> I was betting on this. I actually got here from theregister.com :)

And what's in your address bar now - .com or .co.uk ?

Vic.

> And the downvotes begin....right......now!

What - after mentioning the Winchester?

Vic.

> You can get all time zone names and their UTC offsets here

No you can't.

There's no mention of the Moosejaw Creek meridian there.

Vic.

> Well, pump storage is in use

Yes it is, but the way in which it is implemented differs dramatically from the proposal to pour water into a mine.

> use excess electricity when available to pump water back up behind hydro-electric dam

OK, look at the salient points there:-

- The water is pumped back up along an existing water channel. This means you don't have to deal with water getting somewhere you don't want it

- The water is pumped back uphill, not downhill into a mine.

- The water tank is made up of the naturally-occurring basin and an artificial dam wall. This means that the *enormous* weight of water in the reservoir is supported by bedrock; this would not be the case if trying to create a reservoir inside a mine

- The water reservoir is *huge*. Really - just look at the size of the lake at the top of any hydroelectric project. Trying to build a reservoir of that sort of size in mine is simply a non-starter.

There are many reasons to use pumped storage alongside a hydroelectric plant. None of these make sense in a mine.

Vic.

> You store it in the higher levels, release it to the lower levels as required

So the mine is essentially irrelevant to the plan; you're building a tank above the lowest point and pumping to it.

Now do the maths on how big a tank you need to be useful...

> Pneumatic refers to air, trapped above the water reservoir and compressed

So you're not pressurising the water system, you're pressurising the airgap around it.

The water significantly reduces the amount of energy you can store because it is incompressible. So if you try pressurising a tank that is full, you get no benefit whatsoever.

Vic.