Interesting, thank you.

Given that I no longer see differential pricing in any of my own retail bills, and given remarks from BT execs some time ago that they'd like the differentials to go away, I assumed that they'd gone at wholesale level too.

What ratios are there in the wholesale pricing, eg is it still anything like 4:1 between the highest and lowest by time of day?

Rgds

Damon

No offence to Vi users but have you ever tried using Emacs? With those kinds of finger gymnastics the Emacs user would win a knife fight in a heartbeat.

Years back I heard a rumour that at a conference in Australia that Theo de Raadt and a relatively big name Linux contributor got in an argument over autoconf which ended with them being physically restrained.

I don't know if it's true but it's one of the more awesome things I've heard.

google boys are not. They chase what they consider to be the good dollars. The others, chase the easy dollars, no matter how corrupt it based on.

and yet, he got a loan that was paid off.

OTOH, the real problem is not loans to businesses, but when we make huge tax breaks to monster businesses such oil companies, GM, Ford, etc to take work offshore, rather than keep it here.

Actually, you do not know that for sure.
Google has been focused on an Autonomous system. That is true. But, so far, no car maker has expressed an interest in it.
As such, there is no reason to believe that they will not consider building their own cars. And if they were to do so, I am guessing that they will Work with Tesla to make their own.

Seriously, the google boys are some of the most important business guys going. However, unlike most of the business ppl, such as Romney, Fiorina, McNerney, Welsh, Koch bros, etc, they focus on nothing but making money and have no interest in the future of America or Mankind.

The idea of pushing for OLD homes to have solar added is a mistake. In addition, paying subsidies for it, is just plain wrong since it is causing solar companies to focus on just those locations.

Instead, at a US national level, we should put in place several regs and 1 new subsidy, while removing all of the other subsidies for Solar:
1) require that ALL utilities to buy up to 10% of a buildings excess electricity that is generated via on-site AE. IOW, if a building is expected to USE 1MW / month, then .1MW / month can be sold to the utility. In addition, it needs to be bought at the top that the utilitity pays for that time, to any other provider, including buying it from other providers.
2) require that ALL new buildings of 5 stories and less to have enough on-site AE to equal the HVAC energy needs (and require heating and cooling). Note that such a building with only enough on-site to equal the HVAC will likely not be selling much if any to the utility. However, if they decide to increase it, to the point that they equal 110% of their energy needs, then the utility must buy the extra 10%. Note that the smart developers will focus on lower energy costs buildings with better insulation and hopefully geo-thermal HVAC, since all forms of AE is actually expensive.
3) provide a TIME-LIMITED subsidy for energy storage. It should be in terms of max amount and must be able to hook up to the utility, company, or resident and provide the power. In particular, Utilities should be encouraged to move from 1 big grid, into small grids in which a storage is sitting there between the local grid and the big power grid.

With this approach, it will help utilities convert to storage, and lower their costs of energy production. In addition, it will stop new buildings from adding draw to the grid. Basically, it will help lower the real energy costs for all.

It's called 'scarcity pricing' if you want to keep emotion out of it.

Sometimes it's needed to help prevent a service being overwhelmed: our phone calls used to cost 4x more 9am to 1pm than 6pm to 8am because our phone service (government run) had limited available bandwidth. Now that is no longer an issue (largely c/o fibre optics) there is no pricing surcharge for the daytime peak. Nor even for national vs local calls in the UK. It was a premium charge or lots of failed calls, including for those who really had no alternative to using the morning business slot.

Rgds

Damon

HFT *is* constrained by the physical world, eg the speed of light. Been there, helped with the networking for that.

As to relative levels of thuggery between HFT and Uber... I've never used Uber, so I can't say.

Rgds

Damon

Seriously, these are removing competition, not improving it.
What is needed is to encourage companies to compete against each other, not just turn themselves into companies for takeovers so that the executives walk away with large golden parachutes.

WRT data comm, with comcast-TW merger, it will remove real competition. As such, if this is to be allowed to happen, we need to require that all laws that reward monopolies in data comm, to be removed. Cities should be allowed to put in their own network as long private can come in. Likewise, just because comcast-tw is in a place, does not mean that google should be prevented from coming in.

Uhh, the blog post was by a medical doctor, and it was filled with facts.

Probably because his actions on a talk show aren't covered by malpractice.

Fine:

For recommendations in The Dr Oz Show, evidence supported 46%, contradicted 15%, and was not found for 39%.

Just last month I watched a truck rear end a minivan at a stop light then decide to make a run for it. In the process he forced a girl to jump out of the way (or get run over) then flew over a sidewalk around a blind corner (if anyone had been walking there he could have killed them).

Fortunately several people caught the license plate, he had a record already and with this latest infraction he'll likely be off the roads for a while. That most definitely could save lives.

What you don't have it the right to arbitrarily declare the laws we don't like to be unjust. There are times when there's real rights involved and civil disobedience is justified, I don't think a novel way of running a taxi service qualifies.

Should the law be changed to allow Uber-like services? Probably.

But that doesn't mean Uber can simply ignore the current laws.

That doesn't mean they know it's dangerous, it just means that they know it will make people think it's dangerous.

I don't think your concerns are the factor that's pushing the GMO labelling movement. And there are other regulatory ways to address your concerns that have nothing to do with labelling.

That's the question of a chemical designed to have a pharmacological effect that they didn't know how to properly test at the time.

With GMOs we're talking about chemicals that we're already ingesting as part of other foods.

And yes it's possible that it will contain some compound that will turn out to be harmful, but that's absolutely true of any food. It could even be safer since we're going to know a lot more about the chemicals in a GMO apple than the chemicals in the countless varieties of normal apples.

Meh, there's a lot of things that wouldn't harm me but I really wouldn't want to drink (particularly when handed to me by a hostile interviewer). He was stupid and a bit misleading in how he brought up the drinking example since he implied it wasn't just non-toxic but actually drinkable, but he was fundamentally truthful.

There's also the question of what he means by harm, it might not cause hospitalization or serious side effects, but it might cause him to throw up and have a horrible taste in his mouth for days.

[...]

Lets look at those socks. You can see the colour, what about the cotton? Was the cotton from a GMO cotton plant? Did it come from an organic farm? Which pesticides did they use? Were the trucks used to transport it carbon neutral? Was the farmer independent or part of a conglomerate? Did they use dye X that some random blog claimed was a carcinogen? etc

There are thousands of things the consumer might want to know but they can't all possibly fit on the package. Instead the government mandates a few pieces of information they think you need to know, if the government puts GMO labelling on foods then the government is suggesting that the GMO status is so important (ie potentially dangerous) that the consumer needs to be informed.

Yes I know a lot of people want to know if the food is GMO, but their desire to know is based on faulty science.

I've got concerns about the corporate influence or the monoculture that GMOs create. But the health concerns are bogus.

What's the difference between a GMO and non-GMO food? The GMO food can potentially create a slightly different set of chemicals. We can assess it's safety the same way we assess the safety of any piece of food, look at what those chemicals are and see if any are dangerous. Pretending the GMO origin of the food creates some mysterious threat without any plausible mechanism is anti-science.