If you're going to live in the house for at least the break-even time then yes, you probably can't lose. However, I'm less convinced that it adds so much to the value of the house: if there are 2 identical houses for sale, but one of them has a brand new £20K installation of PV panels on the roof, are people really going to pay £20K more for that one? I suspect not, because its an up-front cost and some people simply won't be able to afford that much up-front. (Ok, so people will tack it onto the mortgage, but that means convincing the bank to give you a bigger mortgage).

So that is why new houses aren't built with PV panels - because it almost certainly doesn't raise the sale value of the house by the amount spent on the panels.

In general, solar panels work well for the rich but not so well for the poor: If you've bought the house you're going to live in for a significant number of years and you can afford the large up-front cost of the panels then it's a good investment. But only the richer part of the population can do this, so subsidising solar power actually just ends up transferring wealth from the poor to the rich, which is why it's contraversial.

I think this is a bit of a red herring. If the company cares about customer service then you shouldn't need to complain on a public forum to get them to pay attention - they should provide a customer support line and actually take all calls to it seriously.

Now you've hit the nail on the head. Social media is actually a problem for companies: prior to social media, a company screws up, you complain, they ignore you, you moan about it to about 3 of your mates. Now, a company screws up, you complain, they ignore you, you moan about it on twitter, it goes viral and a hundred thousand people see how badly the company treated you. The company isn't interested in helping their customer (if they were, they would've helped their customer whether or not it turned into a PR disaster), instead they are interested in avoiding really bad PR - really bad PR that wouldn't ever have happened without social media.

I don't use Twitter, but I have sometimes wondered whether its worth getting an account just to make complaints, since complaints on Twitter seem to attract a much quicker and more helpful response than calls directly to customer services.

Who exactly do you suggest? Coz the only way I can see to do as you say is to simply not vote for anyone, and I can't see how that's going to help.

Short of a bloody revolt, what exactly can the citizens do about it?

How do you determine what is unnatural? Over the years astronomers have picked up *lots* of signals that had no natural explanation at the time but do now...

Personally I think the whole thing is likely a waste of time - we've only been using radio for interplanetary communications for a few decades and things are now rapidly moving towards laser communications. Assuming another civilisation follows a similar path, the time between "not advanced enough to detect" and "too advanced to detect" seems pretty short.

I think you're rather missing the point of Fedora. The whole point is a Free, rapid release cycle distribution to track the (b)leading edge technologies. The good stuff that drops out of this goes into RHEL a few years later, whilst the bad stuff is abandoned. If you wanted a long-term-support distro, why did you choose a rapid release cycle one in the first place? RHEL, CentOS or Scientific Linux are much more sensible if your're not interested in the latest features; but you can't have both - you can't have the latest stuff that was only developed last month unless you go with a rapid release cycle distro.

Economic advantages, of course, but also a whole swathe of good laws have come from the EU. The anti-EU crowd always like to point at the bad laws (and of course, there are some) as a reason to leave whilst completely ignoring all the good laws that are only here as a result of the EU.

If the sentence has been served then is it really in anyone's interest to keep persecuting someone for an crime that they once committed?

If someone is still a danger to the public, they shouldn't be allowed out in public unsupervised. If they aren't a danger to the public then the public doesn't need to know.

Telcos know where the call entered their network. On the originating network, this means that they can accurately know which subscriber line it came from and bill as appropriate. On transit / destination networks, the identity of the originator is not known with confidence, nor does it need to be for billing purposes (the destination network is not billing the original subscriber; they may be billing the network that passed the call on to them (originator or transit), and of course they know which network that was, but not the identity of the actual originating subscriber.

AFAIK there is no requirement for a network to pass ANI data to another network when a call crosses between them. It certainly isn't required for the operation of the network itself (the signalling traffic is routed by point code and the media is identified by circuit - the only telephone number actually required for call routing is the callee's and even that is only required for call setup; of course, SS7 networks are not transparent end-to-end networks like the internet, so the "originating point code" that the callee sees isn't going to be the actual originating point code, especially if the call originated off-network).

Heck, VoIP gateways aren't usually going to provide a meaningful ANI anyway.

Most of the time there is absolutely no way to know which mail server is responsible for sending mail for a particular address. People can publish SPF records which provide you with this information, but very few people do, so you can't rely on this.

You can look at the MX records to see which servers can receive mail for that domain, but that doesn't tell you which can send mail, so again you can't rely on this at all.

You can do sender verification callouts, but this only confirms that the address is valid, not that the message you are receiving actually came from it. Also, sender verification callouts are considered a Bad Thing, since they can be abused to create a reflection DDoS attack.

If you want to set up a mail server that will only accept mail from systems that publish SPF records then by all means you can do so and you'll massively cut the amount of spam you receive. You'll also massively cut the amount of legitimate mail you get too.

For the same reason your email server accepts emails with fake sender addresses - it's usually not possible for the telco to know that its fake.

Offices and shopping centres already use a lot of power. I'm not sure why the existence of electric cars really changes anything - they haven't installed PV to cover their usual energy consumption so why would they install PV to charge your car?

Not at all. The amount of power used by CMOS hardware is basically proportional to the number of transistors that are being switched, and how frequently they are switching. So each time you capture a frame you have to:
  - reset the sensor's pixels
  - read the sensor's pixels
  - amplify the signal
  - debayer the data
  - possibly compress the data
  - store the data somewhere
Each of these steps will take a certain amount of energy. Obviously the more frequently you capture a picture, the more frequently you have to do all of the above and so the power consumption increases. There's a reason why your laptop or phone puts the CPU to sleep between operations, and it's the same reason why your computer gets hot when asked to do more work.

Open source and public domain are not the same things - most open source data is copyrighted and made available through a suitably permissive licence. Break that licence and you can be sued just as easily as if you were breaking a closed source licence.

It would also seem reasonable for the 30 second prebuffer to run at a reduced frame rate to save battery.