Posts by Alan Brown

Re: "there was a margin of error of around 2 to 3 per cent for any forecast"

"Latest polls show X on 53% and Y on 47% so it still a statistical dead heat"

Similar in many countries where the margin of error is specifically mentioned and explained periodically.

The difference in this country is a wildly partisan press wanting to push the agenda of their party and willing to selectively interpret what pollsters give them to make it so.

Re: Mandatory voting.

Regarding voting patterns with PR: "Of course, the results would probably have been different"

Absolutely. All you need to do to verify that is look at voting patterns in New Zealand before and after they switched from FPTP to MMP ~20 years ago.

The really interesting part is how minor parties(*) manage to spectacularly self-destruct when they get a few seats and find the relentless gaze of the media unearthing the less-than-savoury pasts of various members.(**)

(*) Particularly the Christian fundamentalist variety - who have tended to respond by erasing the people in question entirely from their official media as if they never existed.

(**) convictions and investigations for large-scale fraud, child abuse and domestic abuse figure highly.

Re: Mandatory voting.

"There's not many people who can reasonably claim to not be able to spare the time sometime between 7am and 10pm, even on a weekday. "

There are many who can reasonably claim to not be able to access one particular polling station, which is one of the requirements at the moment.

I grew up in New Zealand which has a Westminster democracy. You are entitled to walk into any polling station in your electorate and vote without hassle. If you're outside your electorate you can walk into _any_ polling station and cast a "special vote" (which are handled separately, counted and then dispatched to the home electorate for confirmation). Voting is always on weekends.

The result is that the _lowest_ electoral turnout the country has ever had since WW2 was about 85% (and resulted in a lot of navelgazing about why people weren't voting), with figures usually being closer to 90%

The current way things are done is almost ideally setup to discourage voting.

Re: Hmm

"I observed quite a few tories billboard posters and signs getting defaced, but didn't see a single labour one getting the same treatment."

In my area the only ones I noticed being defaced were the ones illegally placed on public land.

Apparently the tories are entitled to use roadside verges as their advertising space whilst noone else is allowed to do so. Others might call it flyposting but I can't possibly comment.

Re: First Past the Post

"The financial position of the country with its lavish overspending during a boom is not the fault of the banks."

There wasn't that much overspending - especially compared with the amount of oil money pissed against a wall by successive conservative governments in an attempt to woo voters.

The double whammy was that the crash happened AND the oil money started drying up about the same time. Deregulation made the crash inevitable, given that the regulations in question were created in response to (and to prevent recurrances of) virtually identical crashes in the past.

"It was Blair that insisted on the party being the main thing on the vote"

The day you accept that people elect _parties_, not individuals is the day you accept that proportional representation is needed.

My personal preference is for the MMP(also known as "AV") with 4-5% threshold option as this gives best proportionality and has worked well for decades in the countries that have tried it.

There is _nothing_ intrinsically wrong with a party not holding a majority in parliament. This forces government by concensus and reins in the more ideologically extreme policies. Problems arise when they're desperate willing to do deals with extremist minor parties to gain a majority as it gives those minor parties a degree of influence vastly in excess of their size (See "kingmakers")

Re: (energy price cap FFS)

The climate change act is good - and not because of sea level changes; there are nastier bogeys waiting if we don't slash our carbon emissions. (See: 'anoxic oceanic event', 'leptav sea methane emissions' and 'storegga slides', then work out what the impact of 1-5GT of methane bubbling off the siberian continental shelf might be)

Fixation on renewables is double unplus good. Even with the country carpetted in windmills and solar panels there isn't enough electricity production available to replace all carbon-emitting processes, by a factor of 6-8. Yes you could just replace all carbon-emitting power generation but factoring in transportation, heating and industrial processes makes "just replacing current generation" woefully insufficient.

The amount of money being ploughed into renewables in _this_ country alone could pay for at least a dozen nuclear power plants which would produce far more reliable power (we need about 60-70 of them) for a far lower environmental impact than renewables.

Re: If he had been in the UK

"Sacking people is now an art form to certain HR types - you know why they sacked you, they know why they sacked you, but the reasons for the tribunal are completely different."

Which is why you should ALWAYS record all meetings with the HR types.

When the recording shows what they told you is different to what they told the tribunal, fecal matter hits spinny thing not just for that case but for any previous ones. (and their credibility is shot in future cases)

Re: Crazy ideas?

Even in Columbus' time people were very well aware that the earth was round.

Columbus was crazy not because he thought it was a sphere, but because he thought it was around 1/2 the size everyone else did. He was expecting to find Asia only a few hundred miles off the european coast and came dangerously close to mutiny as the voyage went on far longer than his sailors expected. (He also falsified the ship's log to give sailors the idea they'd sailed a far shorter distance than they really had.)

(And this is all quite apart from the havoc he wreaked in the Americas)

Re: Worse..

California's problem is the same as South Australia's.

Once you exceed 3-4% intermittent sources (wind and solar), your grid becomes extremely fragile when combined with "Must take" rules and feedin tarriff rates which are stupidly high

At this level of penetration it's time to start killing off the the hidden subsidies - solar/wind operators don't have to pay for the backing generator capacity that's required to handle no wind/no sun - by requiring them to start using systems to smooth output such that they can be baseload sources.

IE: Elon's battery banks should be paid for by the renewables suppliers, NOT by the grid operators. else it's even more hidden subsidy going into their pockets.

Re: Worse..

"They will literally be so cheap that they will make sense anywhere south of Edinburgh. Huge brute forcing of the power problem but feasible."

People keep claiming this, but moving to a low carbon future needs to take into account that the maximum you can reasonably achieve by carpetting the countryside in windmills and solar panels is to replace existing power generation capacity (solar and wind are still less than the UK's nuclear output).

That overlooks that electricity only accounts for 30-40% of carbon emissions, so once you factor that in, you have a large shortfall to make up given that replacing heating, transportation, industrial processes etc with electrically-sourced energy is going to need 6-8 times more electricity than is currently produced (and then there's the issue of developing countries, which will need to ramp their power production up even faster and with greater multipliers)

The only viable long-term methods are nuclear - fusion or fission - and right now commercially viable fusion is still "somewhere over the horizon", so we'd better get our ducks in order. Nuclear is quite safe but molten salt systems pretty much eliminate ALL the nuclear accident causes we've seen in the last 70 years whilst also making enough heat that you don't need to site next to waterways (derating in hot weather to preserve river life/vulnerabilities to tsunamis) whilst still getting increased thermal efficiency, so not getting them commercialised and rolled out is rather silly.

From a biosphere point of view (NOT sea level rises) we can't afford to keep pumping CO2 into the atmosphere until fusion is ready. Geological history shows CO2 spikes go nicely with oceanic

anoxic events and mass extinctions. As an animal with a particularly oxygen-hungry lifestyle we're rather high on the "first against the wall" list if that happens.

Re: Worse..

The US dollar has been the international trading currency of choice for decades because it's stable (Gold backing went away a long time ago) and the use of it drives the USA Hegemony (in the same way that use of the franc and pound did in past times. The days of the UK being a major world power went away the day that international trade stopped being done in Sterling.)

It's been postulated that one of the driving forces behind GulfWar2 was that Saddam was trading oil in Euros and that tolerating expanding international trade using the currency was seen by US interests as a more important threat than any "weapons of mass destruction" could possibly be.

Re: Who still uses farenheight for things like this ?

Even Myanmar is switching to metric now....

Re: let me guess...

"And it has to produce at least 5 times as much energy as you put into it in order to make useful power, due to the ~20% thermal efficiency of a typical steam plant"

That's "put into it" at the actual sharp end. Inefficiencies along the feedin process (lasers etc) come into play too, such that to achieve breakeven (electrical power out for electrical power in) it's more likely to require at least 100-fold amplification in the actual fusion unit, more likely 1000-fold.

Even after fusion gets to the point where it's a practical reality it's likely to take 25 years to become commercially viable. We need to get moving on LFTRs in the meantime.

Re: Old-fashioned...

90% of everything published/released is crap. It was true then and it's true now.

Soulless zombie bands have always existed. The difference when looking back is that you're looking through the filter of time that allows you to see the reasonable 10% of what was released and ignore the rest.

The same applies to books. Most of what's published aren't fit to wipe your arse with and thankfully will be forgotten next year let alone next decade.

Re: "You wouldn't bill me every time I take a book off my shelf"

They tried (and failed) to shut down public libraries.

They tried (and failed) to make the sale of secondhand books illegal.

They tried (and failed) to make the sale of secondhand records/tapes/CDs/DVDs illegal.

They tried (and failed) to make the same of home video recorders illegal.

They tried (and mostly suceeded) to make the sale of secondhand computer software illegal.

They've suceeded with ebooks and downloads and there have been some attempts using this as leverage to try (again) to get resale of secondhand physical media restricted along with new restrictions on libraries.

Re: re: pay for the good/services

"The price is whatever the supplier believes they can maximize their profits at."

In a truely competitive market supplier prices will coverge on a cost + small margin model.

In the current market, suppliers manipulate the laws to prevent competition and can therefore charge what they want up to the point where they encounter consumer resistance - think of the piracy side of things as that consumer resistance in action.

This kind of supplier abuse is the exact reason why royal patents were abolished entirely a few hundred years ago and then the system recreated to give a fairer market. The USA's deliberate non-recognition of foreign copyright/patents until recently (and china's effective simliar policy) acted as similar reformation devices but it's clear that since WW2 things have been sewn up tighter and tighter on the supply side. It's time for another set of wide-ranging reforms which don't hand excess power to the creators and middlemen (especially the middlemen, who are generally ripping off both creators and consumers with gay abandon)

Re: Welcome to the UK

If the job isn't as specified then the dolt doesn't get paid AND gets to wear the cost of making good.

Hitting fucktards in the wallet is about the only way to educate them.

"I've seen someone handed a package for not getting the course. Three times."

Said package consisting of a trip to the front door accompanied by 2 guys from security, whilst carrying a small cardboard box of your personal belongings?

Re: "it doesn't work"

We had a customer who complained that her main program kept disappearing down to a corner of the screen and she insisted we come out and fix it (which meant de-minimise the iconised program.)

After several visits, she swore black and blue she wasn't minimising it and claimed our staff were somehow doing it remotely and no matter how many times we showed her how to minimise/unminimise the program, she insisted that she couldn't expand it once minimised. When we started charging for callouts, she rapidly decided to become an ex-customer (no big deal for us, she was one of the ones who cost far more than their income)

Several years later, her husband admitted minimising the software when web browsing and hadn't said anything at the time because that would mean admitting to using "her" computer when she wasn't around (it was a family machine, apparently).

"8 bits on the data, and 6 useful bits from the monitor."

You'd be surprised what you had stash in those 2 bits.

Take a look in the 1990s-era Usenet postings of Claudia Schiffer gifs sometime.

Napalm requires signoffs.

Lusers like this deserve P45s.

Perhaps this kind of tactic can be used to sort out who's for the chop in the next round of redundancies.

Re: do not enter the hypen!

> business users sitting with the developers and literally going "ah no.. I mean.. blah, blah, blah"

But that's not what you wrote in the legally binding contract.

No problem. There will be a small extra charge per off-contract change with a minimum fee of £250k

Re: Definition of fail

"A variant on that is getting another contract to fix all the problems in the original piece of work."

I know a couple of companies that _specialise_ in going into sites where a specific other company has failed(*) and fixing the project to work properly (despite never being able to work off the original design)

They do it quickly and cheaply, which results in very happy customers and an almost guaranteed stream of future work.

(*) "SOC" specialises in large glossy advertising, telling customers that they need things they don't, moving goalposts, contacts through the old boys network and eye watering charges for both the initial project and any variations from it. The projects will never work as specified, resulting in mountains of extra-contract work to make it run (badly). This company bounces from victim to victim and because it avoids tech-savvy customers, the warnings about them are never seen until too late.

Re: Don't give me no static ...

"pretty much all countries ban mobile phones around petrol stations despite there being no evidence of a single fire caused by one, and indeed plenty of research to show it's not actually possible"

In the days of CB and landmobile it was easily possible to draw sparks from the nozzle to the car(*) when the transmitter was keyed. When electronic pumps came along more than a few hams discovered that keying the linear amp in the boot would cause the counters to stop whilst fuel kept flowing.

"mobile phones have transmitters, therefore mobile phones are dangerous" - or at least that's the mindset you have to contend with. Explanations of the differences between 300mw (Max), 25W and 2kW either go straight over their heads or they don't want to have to deal with the hassle of arguing with someone about what power their transmitter is putting out when a flat ban is easy.

(*) Fuel nozzle fires are small and easily put out. One of the other dangers of autoflow handles is one being pulled out and spraying fuel everywhere although modern ones have protection against that too.

Re: Don't give me no static ...

"The static builds up only as you pull your butt away from the seat"

And treating the seat with suitable antistatic fabric spray helps a lot, if there's no metal part of the vehicle you can hang onto as you get up (I had one car that was rotten for this due to the amount of plastic panelling and polyester seat fabric. The eventual cure was a couple of bits of foil tape discreetly located in the grab handle hollow with grounding wire attached to the body.)

This may (should) be something that carmakers have sorted by now. Conductive plastics aren't difficult to specify.

Re: Swings and roundabouts

"What you save in Windows licences, you'll have to pay in retraining staff."

Retraining is "once", licenses are recurring.

"Stick-in-the-mud" users, unless bringing provable value to the organisation are the same people who make the NHS experience so demoralising ("Computer says NO") for patients AND staff. Identifying and expunging them outright is likely to result in a better running organisation at lower overall costs.

Re: Replacing Linux with Windows, based on *cost*?

> Novell Netware did live kernel patching.

So does linux, if you want it to.

Re: Replacing Linux with Windows, based on *cost*?

" it's only a bloody UI..."

It's only a bloody UI for linux too.

Re: Replacing Linux with Windows, based on *cost*?

"In Munich's case they went to a lot of trouble to customise their own distro. That might have been a mistake if they then have to redo some of the work that's already been done by the original packagers."

In Munich's case there wasn't a suitable distro to base off when they started, That's changed.

Also in Munich's case, the vast majority of the installations are thin clients with the actual legwork being done on central servers. Part of the costs were involved in allowing local USB/CDrom/soundcard etc to be accesible to the remote server (and is now part of standard linux suites). The savings in not having to buy heftier hardware on 3-5 year cycles outweighed that kind of software investment.