Note: skylights are poor thermally and let a lot of heat out. Also I had one in a previous house in the bathroom where the seal was so bad (thus clearly leaking air too) that I had the surreal experience of being hailed on in the bath.

Also, have skylights ways from south (if you're in the northern hemisphere) to avoid excessive glare and overheating.

BTW, I have triple glazing now! Overall heat consumption from natural gas was 3000kWh last year and electricity 1700kWh.

http://www.earth.org.uk/saving...

Rgds

Damon

EU regulations require appliances in actual standby to use no more than 0.1W, which is less than a neon indicator bulb, and *is* good.

My cable TV box uses 15W and consequently I make sure that it is turned off completely, along with TV and DVD else it would be responsible for ~10W of our entire electricity bill.

http://www.earth.org.uk/saving...

I have prototype voice detection circuit sitting on my bend that is using tens of microwatts to detect occupancy, so milliwatts should be plenty to do the instant-on job for those too damn idle to press a button.

tl;dr: 10W is *crap* for an always-on device doing nothing.

Rgds

Damon

One that saves more than that in electricity within a year or two, and avoids high replacement maintenance costs on top in commercial settings.

What crazy world has people continuing to complain about the cost of petrol relative to hay while whining that the motorways seem so unfriendly for their horse and cart?

Rgds

Damon

...but I wish it wasn't news!

Rgds

Damon

Hi,

I'm certainly NOT in the "government is always worse that private corporations" camp, but it is indeed perfectly possible to create replacements worse than the original, and governments of all colours and countries remind us of this from time to time, even when all their intentions are good.

Rgds

Damon

The UK and Germany, as relatively solvent and sane parts of the EU are both well to the left of US politics, and various aspects of US outlook from religion to guns to science denial are inexplicable from over here. Not strictly left/right but probably as much to do with the general level of education.

Rgds

Damon

Uh no, sadly.

For example, Vodafone's "Mobile Broadband" dongles have apparently failed to work with OS X Yosemite (ie the current version) for a similar length of time for me and many others (the software crashes immediately) and Vodafone's 3rd-line tech support admits there is no fix (the person I spoke to is a Mac user himself and was rather embarrassed), but apparently Vodafone is happy to go on charging for the service and deflecting efforts to get a resolution.

eg http://forum.vodafone.co.uk/t5...

So, although I have been a generally happy customer for most of Vodafone's existence I think, in this aspect they share all the aspects of incompetence that certain people assume to be the sole preserve of government.

I cancelled service and a refund is very very slowly happening. (Vodafone gives you a credit but somehow fails to apply it to the account, as a matter of routine, so goes on taking new money.)

Rgds

Damon

Have you noticed the small place called Europe over the other side of the Atlantic?

Almost all of it bar the openly racist parties is to the left of almost all of the US politically.

Rgds

Damon

I suspect you've not been there.

It's amazing how much can be accomplished putting one foot in front of the other.

Rgds

Damon

Because it is *new* and promising and interesting. No one claimed *perfect*.

It's a common lament on /. but if you don't want to hear about stuff until it's on the shelves in your local store stop wasting time reading /. and other information outlets, else stop whining when you get an early heads up.

Really.

Tell me what potential life-saving breakthrough *you* made today, please.

Put this way your point sounds more reasonable I think, though I still believe that the "praise in public, censure in private" rule of thumb is key, so I'd be less keen on making the whole thing public.

Anyway, I agree that this stuff is hard.

Rgds

Damon

Few of us are that driven by rules to the exclusion of social mores. And attempting to run a group that way will exclude those who aren't, I suggest, which may be a useful set of people for all sorts of contingent and correlated reasons (eg people with especially good empathy and outreach and comms skills).

Rgds

Damon

And changing our entire frame of reference twice a year in some places at vaguely similar but not the same dates, to me does not meet that test.

We have things called computers and calendars these days with which we could adjust the running hours of our businesses, schools, etc, *if necessary* to the seasons.

My local graveyard manages it.

I run as much as possible on UTC.

Rgds

Damon

Just because *you* don't get SPAM doesn't mean that it isn't a problem in a number of ways.

I get 10,000+ SPAM attempts per day. I;d have to give up well-known and memorable emails addresses to begin to trim it.

Legit inbound and outbound mails get lots in the SPAM wars, eg people miss important mails of mine, and I miss theirs.

SPAM traffic also wastes bandwidth and power in my networking equipment and servers; visible and significant for a partly off-grid system for example.

SPAM filters are a poor fix for a pernicious problem that has destroyed what was a wonderful communications service. I was using email before SPAM existed.

Rgds

Damon

The reductio ad absurdum is obvious.

Sad, and I suspect, just lazy.

Rgds

Damon