People seem to be missing the obvious point that the 50% rate is mostly about trying to trap the Tories into looking like the party of the rich if they say they will get rid of it. Unfortunately for labour cameron isn’t going to fall for it.

Try here:

http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/sustainable/book/tex/ps/327.370.pdf

France 83
Sweden 87
Canada 220
Austria 250
Belgium 335
European Union 353
Finland 399
Spain 408
Japan 483
Portugal 525
United Kingdom 580
Luxembourg 590
Germany 601
USA 613
Netherlands 652
Italy 667
Ireland 784
Greece 864
Denmark 881

(gCO2 per kWh of electricity)

Sweden and France generate a lot of Nuclear hence low figures for them.

Another solution to this would be to persuade everyone to stop using quite so much electricity. Turn appliances off overnight. Force businesses to turn their lights off when nobody is there. (Where I work for instance there are approximately 1000 people. The vast majority leave their PCs on overnight as it takes so long to start them up next day.)

One problem with that is the word “force” – what does this mean exactly?

Another is, there might well be good reasons why for example PCs are left on overnight in offices, virus scans and network backups for example. High electricity prices might convince IT managers to think of ways around this, and low power laptops replacing desktops will help. But where I work many machines are doing proper work all night, not just the servers but people’s desktop machines are used overnight to build and test our software. Lights being on in offices might just mean people are working late, and if they are all on late at night the cleaners are in.

But the big problem is that, if everyone just does a little, the net result is… little. Talk of turning off mobile phone chargers etc. is hugely to miss the point – if I walk or cycle to work just one day a year it saves the same amount of energy as leaving all my ipods, phones, wifi, computer etc. turned on for how long exactly? (answer – probably longer than you think).

They are beautiful, as are many other things humans built – emley moor transmitter, ribblehead viaduct, the millau gorge bridge, and so on.

Something has gone wrong in our culture when so many people are afraid to build anything.

Antigee – there’s already a windfarm above langsett, I think it looks fine from cut gate. Don’t forget you can also see the woodhead road, and in the distance, emley
Moor transmitter and several coal power stations in west and north Yorkshire…

Rudeboy, St Patrick was from what is now called Wales but it doesn’t stop the Irish celebrating International Guinness Marketing Day.

I’m sure there might be an important point about not being able to use intercept evidence in court (which would be a good idea) – but on the other hand, I struggle to understand how the police can possibly have been convinced that an attack was imminent enough for them to act as they did (they are still claiming that Quick’s faux pas only brought the operation forward by ‘hours’), and yet there turn out to be no evidence whatsoever – not even for a charge of conspiracy.

http://www.singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/police-intelligence

Did someone just say that the damned united is bad movie because they couldn’t afford to recreate 1974 ellnd rd with CG? Seems harsh… Not seen the film yet but the book is superb.

I find it I interesting that the 80s recession was supposedly because an economy based on making stuff was out of date. Now the economy based on buying Chinese goods with borrowed Chinese money has turned out to be pants, we’re all supposed to panic. Well forgive me for thinking that it was all very predictable.

When are they going to tow london to the mid atlantic and sink it, that’s what I want to know.

Sheffield now doesn’t feel like Sheffield in the 80s yet, and I don’t expect it to.

Kill Bill was a disapointment though. Yeah I get the Kung Fu / spaghetti western movie references etc., yes every frame looks beautiful, yes the comic book dialogue and over the top style is deliberate, narrative deconstructed as always, etc…

But when is Tarantino going to grow up and use his immense talent to make something not aimed at his own inner 16 year old? He seemed to be getting there with Jackie Brown (beleiveable characters you care about!) but then regressed again.

I recently saw The Big Lebowski for the first time. After the hype I was expecting a treat, but … uhhh … is that it??

OMG

2nd Blade Runner. We switched off. And we switched off Withnail.

I think I need a sit down…

Apocalypse Now
Withnail and I

Just terrible, both of them.

Get out!

My nomination is The Piano. Oh and The Matrix, what a load of tosh.

In our case we got a further 10% discount from the LBS for bulk.

And you don’t have to use any intermediaries who charge, your company can organize it all itself. It’s just a tax break like any of the others your employer is probably used to claiming.

Same transmitter, but channels are bundled together in groups called multiplexes, which I think are on different frequencies. Your local transmitter is probably only able to broadcast certain frequencies at reduced power. Apparently when the analog signal is turned off there will be much more available bandwidth so they won’t need to broadcast on these unsuitable frequencies.

That’s what my electronic engineer friend told me anyway :-)

so what’s the point? – I’m not bothered about waiting but it bothers me not understanding why they just don’t change immediately

Because when the next pedestrian turns up 10 seconds after you they’ll press the button again and traffic is stopped twice. By putting in a short delay there’s a chance that peds will cross in groups rather than singly. Presumably there should also be a delay once they’ve been activated so that they don’t change again without a delay.

That said, increasingly lights seem to favour peds over road users – I can’t see the benefit myself, you sit in a 5 minute traffic jam to get to the shops but then can cross from the car park to the bank without having to wait 20 seconds. Don’t they realise pedestrians and drivers are the same people?

Breakfast is wrong, don’t bother even if I’m cycling or running into work. Then again it’s only 1.5 miles…

Tell me about your bicycle…

I’ve heard this from Kahil Gibran’s “The Prophet” at more than one wedding:

http://leb.net/gibran/works/prophet/prophet3.html

sootyandjim – no, his point is that Israel’s reasons for defending itself can be made to sound similar to Germany’s reasons for WW2. He’s wrong, but that’s his position.

Grizzlygus was making some sort of rhetorical point I think, though badly as he seems to have lost everyone. Not easy to follow his arguments IMHO.

Did I say that? No, I didn’t. Yawn.

what are they doing in Lebanon – surely they should go home ?

Well surely the point is that they are already home, since nearly all of them were born in Lebanon – but they are not given citizenship.

And hardly fair to suggest that Lebanon’s problems are all caused by Israel – what about Syria’s constant interference? If you’re looking for fascist comparisons look no further than the Baath party.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_camps#The_war_of_the_camps

Jordan also fought a war against the PLO.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_September_in_Jordan

So Palestinians in Lebanon, Eygpt etc are regularly bombed, their children shot by soldiers, they are denied food and medicine, and their homes are bulldozed by army bulldozers ?

Perhaps you have a short memory?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Lebanon_Conflict

It really irritates me at football too. I assume it’s people who want to get out the car park first ..

The Left used to love Israel, now they hate it.

This probably tells us more about the left than it does about Israel, I think.

Everone is very quiet on the subject of Palistinian rights in neighbouring countries that have cynically and callously refused them citizenship or basic freedoms so as to use their plight as a stick to beat Israel. No-one comes out of the situation smeliing of roses.

Gotta love elbent and gg agreeing with each other so violently!

GrahamS – same here (Sheffield) senior software engineers are on about 35k ish, less senior on £25k+, similar for post sales support. A little more perhaps for presales types jetting round the world to customer sites. Managers in the £40k + area. I’m sure the sales manager makes a good wedge if he gets his targets.

porterclough – You’d be surprised. Six figure salaries for great developers are still out there and the average is still probably 40+.

Not round here they’re not. ;-(

All the people I know in IT earn around 3-4 times that, they are all code monkeys in the city though

I doubt that “code monkeys” get that much, even in the madness of the square mile… some talented people working stupid hours and on call 24/7 might earn good money but, that much?

You won’t walk into a job on £35k after a few weeks training in basic computer maintenance. Maybe with a degree and 10 years experience… I find it hard to beleive 35k is an average, it’s certainly not the figure you see for most programming jobs advertised.

Boards of Canada might be up your street…

If i don’t have to spend a half hour washing the bike after a ride then it’s ‘dry’

I did, so it was wet ;-)

Hope Cross / Blackley Clough on Sunday was a quagmire, never seen it so wet.

Sheffield has pot holes in the traffic humps…

Nukes are not carbon neurtal anyway – over the lifetime of the station including all carbon dioxide produced they are not much better than a coal station. All that concrete and so on.

Again, let’s just see by looking at the numbers. Quoting from MacKay’s book:

+++
Mythconceptions

Two widely-cited defects of nuclear power are construction costs, and
waste. Let’s examine some aspects of these issues.

1) “Building a nuclear power station requires huge amounts of con-
crete and steel, materials whose creation involves huge CO2
pollution.”

The steel and concrete in a 1 GW nuclear power station have a carbon
footprint of roughly 300 000 t CO2.

Spreading this “huge” number over a 25-year reactor life we can express
this contribution to the carbon intensity in the standard units (g CO2
per kWh(e)),
carbon intensity
associated with construction = 300× 109 g
106 kW(e) × 220 000 h
= 1.4 g/kWh(e),

which is much smaller than the fossil-fuel benchmark of 400 g CO2/kWh(e).
The IPCC estimates that the total carbon intensity of nuclear power (in-
cluding construction, fuel processing, and decommissioning) is less than
40 g CO2/kWh(e) (Sims et al., 2007).

Please don’t get me wrong: I’m not trying to be pro-nuclear. I’m just
pro-arithmetic.
+++

(http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c24/page_169.shtml)

I’m prepared to beleive Scotland could manage on renewables, because the population is so small. But the numbers don’t add up for the UK, never mind Europe as a whole.

TJ said:

This is why I say a lot of this debate is about faith.

It does seem that way, but it should not be. It should be about numbers.

The numbers say we need nukes.

coffeeking – you’re not supposed to actually know (or care about) any actual figures in this sort of debate, the rule is you start from, say, an irrational hatred of wind/nuclear (delete as applicable) and then state blithely that there is “plenty” of whatever you are in favour of, and “not enough” of whatever you are against.

;-)

FYI, anyone who is actually interested in any of this stuff should read this book, available free:

http://www.withouthotair.com

Ignore druidh, he’s wrong. All thing fall at the same rate regardless of mass – heavier objects do not fall faster.

However, objects with large area are subject to more wind resistance, so if you weigh more but don’t need to punch a bigger hole in the air you will accelerate faster and have a higher terminal velocity.