Is this the Russia that denied having any active units in the Crimean region of Ukraine? Hmm... who to believe...

Phillip.

A bit like they were not invading the Crimean region of Ukraine?

Phillip.
PS you should probably look at a map. Ukraine is quite big.

Russians are being paid to flood the site with propaganda. Unfortunately it doesn't make any sense so you can't argue with it. You just have to sift through the crap to find the real comments.

Phillip.

I'm bewildered. Is this a real post or something computer generated? If the latter then the algorithms need some tweaking as it's the most bizarre drivel I have ever read.

Phillip.

It hasn't. This latest invasion by Russia is of interest to all free countries in the world. Putin has provoked that start of WW3, and we can forget for now this "economic crisis" which pales into insignificance compared to this Russian aggression. And to get ourselves completely off Russian gas is going to need some new tech otherwise we are going to suffer a lot of economic pain.

Phillip.

It's a shame /. doesn't have a way of allowing Anonymous comments but the ability to kill them off based on an IP. Then I could read this thread without all the spam from the Russian troll above.

Phillip.

Wow that is some pretty powerful Russian propaganda you have been drinking there. Calling normal peaceful Ukranians "fascists"? Check. Calling it a "violent overthrow" despite it not being one? Check. Calling the government "ultra nationalist"? Check. Blaming the US despite them having nothing to do with anything? Check. Russians have a "right to use force"? Check.

Thanks for popping in Putin, but your deluded views aren't welcome here.

Phillip.

You've been listening to too much Russian propaganda. A peaceful revolution kicked out a corrupt Russian puppet president in Ukraine (you notice Yanakovich has gone to live with his mate Putin in Russia?). Ukraine wanted to build strong trade links with Europe and Russia. Russia wanted Ukraine to itself. Now Putin has had a tantrum and has vowed to destroy Ukraine.

Of course the West wants peace. However when a crazed dictator starts invading European countries then you need to sit up and take notice. This is the 3rd time he has invaded Europe recently.

Phillip.

Putin's first instinct is to go to war. He has invaded Ukraine once and gotten away with it. He is invading a second time. Next will be Moldova. Then Georgia. Then Latvia. Then the rest of Europe until it is under Putin's rule. Better to stop him on his doorstep, rather than wait until he is parading himself through Paris.

Phillip.

I think you commented on the wrong thread. This one is about the 2nd invasion of Ukraine by Russia, not the US going into Iraq.

Phillip.

A couple thousand small claims cases a month might be more effective than a class action suit for getting their act cleaned up.

Did I just invent an open source / populist / minarchist alternative to the class action lawsuit? B-)

This is going to go no where unless he can get an independent expert to certify that his measuring technique is accurate.

We're talking small claims court here (where proceures are much more relaxed due to the small amount of the dispute) and civil procedure (where the standard of proof is "preponderance of evidence", not "beyond a reasonable doubt".

Also: A suitable expert shouldn't be THAT hard to find, and (with open source and things like the Raspbery Pi and Beagle Bone available for platforms), independently engineering a meter to check the first one should be quick work - and something a customer of another ISP might want to do, as well.

Heh. Once it's done it could be published open-source, bringing the tool into the hands of the technically-literate masses. A couple thousand small claims cases a month might be more effective than a class action suit for getting their act cleaned up.

A pitty, thugh. By the time this was discovered I had done an outline for a five-volume fiction cycle, working through at least four genres, based on the sun going "putt" from time to time. B-b

The Arthur C. Clarke sci-fi novel "The Songs Of Distant Earth" (1986) used the Case Of The Missing Neutrinos as the opening premise [followed by "the sun is about to nova" and humanity having] a few hundred years to develop interstellar-travel technology before the Sun went nova. 'Twas a good story.

Indeed it was.

In mine, though, there was nothing wrong with the sun at all. It's just that the high neutrino flux makes other physical phenomena more apparent and (by book three) usable at a practical level. FTL interstellar travel IS developed by the fifth book (when things are fully sorted out), which is in hard science fiction space-opera form.

Of course, by that time "magic" is hard science (though its engineering is more like animal husbandry), religion has merged with psychology, and one of the crew members (or is he the FTL engine?) is (and must be) a literal god. (For the engineering crew chief think "Scotty in Druidic Robes"...) Using a god plus a nuclear reactor for the engine leads to complications (but not the ones you're probably thinking of right now).

No, not like Clarke's story at all. More like Keith Laumer collaborates with Larry Niven. B-)

Take them to small claims court.

Ask for the difference between the billing tier your meter says you should be in and the one they charged you for. Dump your data in a reasonably clear format and show and explain it to the judge. Be prepared to swear that it is correct.

If they overcharge you next month, do it again.

Keep it up until they fix the meter so the agreement is close enough for you to be happy with it (or until the judge gets tired of it and issues an order - either to you or them - to make the cases stop.) It's not barratry - no matter how vexing to the utility - if the suits are legitimate, with real grounds asking for restitution for real damages, nor if the the suits are repeated because there are new instances of the tort.

First time through, ask for all the months for which you have data that shows overcharging. (If you can demonstrate a rule for the systematic overcharging, ask for the overcharges back to the instalation of the system, but be prepared for the judge to reject that.) Up to the small claims price and time limits, of course.

Be polite to the judge. Assume he's smart enough to understand this if you explain it clearly. (Judges don't get to be judges without being smart and good at figuring these things out.)

The other interesting result would be if the expected neutrino type was not detected by this experiment, invalidating the hypothesis. This would raise further questions such as: is there some other mechanism powering the Sun? Is there something deficient in our understanding of neutrinos that prevented us from detecting them despite them being there?

That almost happened, in the early days of neutrino dectection - before things like old mines full of purified water and 3-D arrays of photodetectors running for months at a time, and you could count the number of detected neutrinos on two hands (in bi-quinary so you could go a bit higher than ten). This was when the detectors could only detect the type of neutrino directly generated by fusion reactions, and before the discovery of neutrino oscillation, when it wasn't yet clear whether neutrinos had no, or very very little, rest mass.

Early numbers, and their error bounds, made it clear that there weren't enough neutrinos being detected. (This was known for years as the "missing neutrino problem".) But the earliest ones WERE about right for a situation where all the stars EXCEPT the sun were running by fusion and the sun was out.

That may sound odd. But there was a very cute explanation that made it plausible:

The gradual gravitatonal collapse of the sun, as heat is radiated away, could power it for millenia. It's nowhere near enough to power it long enough to explain the fossil record, but it IS enough to have kept it running for historic time. Meanwhile, if a fusion reaction were to start up near the center of such a ball of collapsing gas, it would also take many years for the heat to make it to the surface. Neutrinos (which go through the sun like marbles through a light mist) are about the only signature of what's going on in there NOW.

But suppose, instead of fusing continuously, stars were reciprocating engines. They might run without fusion for centuries, or millenia, until they were compressed enough to "light up" at the center. Then the fusion heat and reaction products might make the reaction ramp up. They'd burn for a little while (which would heat them up and expand them mabye a few inches), until the decreased density and/or reduction in fuel and/or accumulation of reaction products "put the fire out" again. Repeat for the life of the star.

In this scenario, if our sun happened to be between "putts (and the very nearest stars didn't happen to have an unusual distribution of where they were in their cycles), you'd see the same neutrio flux from the rest of the sky as if all the rest of the stars were running continuous fusion. That's because it's the average of stars that are "on" and "off", and comes out to the same amount of total fusion and neutrinos.

Of course later data, both larger samples and detectors that could "see" the other neutrino types, put the kibosh on that model. A big part of it was the discovery of neutrino oscillations, allowing a stream of neutrinos that started out as one type in the sun to arrive as a mix of the three types. (This means that neutrinos have a non-zero rest mass, fly slightly slower than light, and thus experience time and are ABLE to change from one type to another.)

A pitty, thugh. By the time this was discovered I had done an outline for a five-volume fiction cycle, working through at least four genres, based on the sun going "putt" from time to time. B-b