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Comment Re:Diesel? (Score 1) 462

If you want a fair comparison you need to take that 76MPG and multiply it by 2/3rd to get the rough equivalent in gas. Or if you like in Europe you can compare the carbon emissions per mile on the sticker which you will find are roughly equivalent to the gas model. The only time you see a difference is if one of the engines is advantaged by a turbo charger.

I think the Fiat 500 petrol (gas) models are actually lower CO2 than the diesel - try here: http://www.nextgreencar.com/ne...

For other manufacturers it's usually the diesels that are quite a lot lower in CO2 than their petrol equivalents. Maybe Fiat makes a good petrol engine and a lousy diesel - but I think it's more likely that diesel engines are better at larger scale, and just don't seem to work so well in very small cars.

Comment Re:Never used this keystroke (Score 1) 521

I read an article that Microsoft got rid of the start->shutdown button to turn off your computer. This freaked people out, even though for 15 years you've been able to just hit the power button and it would turn off properly.

Yeah, but isn't it idiotic that to stop everything and shut down your computer, you clicked on "Start"?

Yep. In fact almost to decades ago when the start menu arrived (with Win 95 I think) that was major complaint - "how do I shut down, start ?, but that's the last place you'd look to shut down". Personally, from a Unix background, I thought it was perfectly reasonable to "start" a "shutdown", but hey - the majority seemed to think that the file menu of program manager was the logical place...

Now everyone's complaining that they took it away from "start" and put it under "power" on the settings menu.

Some things don't change - "people don't like change" is one.

Comment Re:For go's sake (Score 1) 552

Some (most?) of the world's major religions, and most legal jurisdictions, emphatically do _not_ provide for a patient, even terminally ill, to make that decision and to action it (themselves or by proxy). That's a lot of humans you are condemning (ok, some of them are politicians and religious leaders who won;t change rules to match what is now the majority viewpoint, but still).

Some people think that, for instance, those who work for Dignitas (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dignitas_(assisted_dying_organisation)) are horrible people, precisely because they work to enable the patient to "get to decide that herself".

Maybe you are thinking it's ok the other way round, i.e. the patient can decide to live - but it's one and the same decision (keep me alive or let me die), and in most places it's not the patient's decision to make.

Comment Re:Time (Score 1) 552

Seconded. Stroke prognosis, especially so soon, is a gamble at best and I believe brain stem stroke is doubly so (and this isn't even a straightforward one of those given tumour involved). I've had a relative have a severe brain stem stroke, so have some personal knowledge.

How much recovery she will get is unknown - even a year from now. Don't believe doctors if they say there is no hope of further improvement - do believe the ones who just say they don't know.. Because they don't.

Don't bother investing time and energy in fancy tech solutions now. Seriously. You have no idea what capabilities will be in a week let alone a month - your tech could be irrelevant by then and the time and effort the patient spends learning it would be better used, at this point, in learning / re-wiring brain to breathe again (for a start). The time to look at assistance tech is months down the line when the motor capabilities have more or less settled (but may still change for the better - see above about not giving up hope). For now I would guess that simple blink charts, that someone suggested further up the page, are your best bet.

Secondly, do not think you can solve the tiredness, or increase the useful communication time, with tech. Fatigue (chronic) is very common in stroke victims, but I don't think it is like "normal" fatigue, walking may tire them, eating may tire them, talking may tire them - but just sitting listening may tire them just as much. Basically, understand that her useful interaction time, before she _needs_ to sleep, _may_ be measured in minutes - and that that _may_ be permanent no matter how far the recovery of motor control gets. You, as a family, need to work out how to cope with that - but it's people not tech. I don't think anyone knows why stroke victims are often so tired, but we don't know how the brain re-wires itself either, we just know that in some stroke victims it does. Some think that the brain uses sleep time to re-wire - join the dots... but it's just speculation.

Comment Re:"No reliable solution" (Score 1) 415

Guess it depends where you are. Here, I haven't had anything other than effectively unlimited-texts plan for years, even on very cheap feature phone plans. In fact I think even some of our old payg sims have an unlimited texts option if we top up enough each month (don't know - they are only now in kids' / emergency spare phones).
Minutes and data, on the other hand, are always limited (at easy to hit limits) unless you pay a lot more.

Comment Re:Slackware (Score 1) 533

Damn,

I meant:
I use Slackware since 1995 and I have never viewed it as "alternative" before ;-)

So young grasshopper, what is SLS then? Slackware was the first alternative Linux distribution.

Torn between saying mod parent up, and pointing out that SLS was actually the alternative to MCC Interim, which itself was the wimpy cop-out alternative to H.J Lu's boot-root from back when men were real men and floppies were actually floppy...

Comment Re:Clueless (Score 1) 345

[Mod or post, mod or post, ah feck it - post. Someone else mod parent up.]

And to add to that, the vast majority of the world's ATMs actually run.... Windows XP. Yes, they do, google it (plenty of articles) if you don't believe.
Replacement cost for most of the ATM network would be enormous.

Then there's point-of-sale stuff...

So sure yes, let's pull all the plugs on Win XP systems like the article says - just give me a chance to get to the supermarket and the gun store first.

Comment Re:No thanks on Nuclear proliferation... (Score 1) 281

If the land can be used for farming but not houses because of infrasound, then it is still uninhabitable. Further, if there are no houses there is typically little energy demand in the area, therefore you need long distance interconnect which brings its own environmental concerns - e.g. http://www.theguardian.com/env...

Offshore wind marine environment damage is an EU concern, not mine: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-e...

Oh, and oil rigs can be havens for _some_ marine life too... doesn't mean oil is environment benefit overall.

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