While I agree with you in principle, there are practical problems with nuclear power.

The first is that they usually end up a lot more expensive to build, run, and decommission than estimated in the planning stage; partly due to stringent regulation, as well as the required expertise. Nuclear does need strong oversight, because it's way too tempting for operators to start cutting corners to save operating costs, and we have multiple examples of nuclear contamination when that happened. Yes, new designs are a lot safer - they're also more expensive, which is one reason that they haven't really been built. It's more cost effective to run old plants long past their original design date, which of course has risks.

The second is public acceptance. If green lobby groups had that kind of power to influence government policy, we wouldn't have a carbon crisis in the first place. The oil and gas lobbies are extremely well funded, and that's what's ultimately kept them top of the pile - money talks. Radioactive and nuclear are maximum NIMBY, that's just the general public's view of nuclear, and it has been since at least the 70s. Coal plants emit more radioactive waste in the smoke than an equivalent rated nuclear reactor, but that is definitely not the public perception, and swinging the public behind radical energy-policy change is going to be hard enough without also trying to sell nuclear as the solution which has a very poor general public image, not least due to Chernobyl and Fukushima.

Lastly, and the biggest one really - it's just too late. We should have embarked on mass building nuclear 20-30 years ago, but we didn't, and we have to deal with where we are now. We need to be bring online non-carbon energy plants fast, not in 15 years when new nuke plants would finally be going online. Not that we shouldn't start on new nuclear plants too to kill off the hardest-to-replace carbon plants, but to avoid the 2deg point we need to stop building carbon plants right now, and aggressively decommission the existing ones as the carbon footprint extends for decades for every plant. Solar and wind plants can go up relatively quickly, grid redesign to decentralise can continue more aggressively, and the improvements and lowered costs will get here sooner if we're actually building them in bulk rather than waiting for theoretical tech improvements.

As a species we've made some pretty bad decisions, but our lack of action on energy production even though we knew the consequences looks like it might well be the worst. The perfect being the enemy of the good applies just as much to not building solar and wind plants today as it does to not building nuclear plants in the past. Frankly, I'm not bothered personally whether we build nuclear, solar or both, as long as we start getting non-carbon power online fast.

Because otherwise insane(ly expensive) geoengineering projects like TFA - with major drawbacks - will be our last ditch chance.

"the pound is already re-stabilizing and didn't fall that far to start with!"

a) no it isn't
b) 10% isn't a big fall????

It's fallen to the lowest level since 1985. It's the 3rd largest currency fall ever, of any currency. It's twice the fall that happened on 'black wednesday' when we crashed out of the ERM - which caused a whopping recession and soaring interest rates.

The FTSE only stabilised after the Bank of England offered an extra £250 billion - yes, with a b - in liquidity to banks, who were amongst the hardest hit.

And that was ONE day of post referendum trading.

HSBC have said they will move at least 1000 jobs to the EU if the leave the single market. The rescue of Port Talbot - 11,000 jobs - is under threat as potential investors are backing out now due to Brexit. Tech, cars, financial services, and all other sorts companies that rely on exports to the EU are all looking at if they'll be better off in Ireland or Scotland (assuming it leaves the UK) to stay inside the EU single market.

The bonfire of the UK economy has literally only just started. Petrol is going up next week due to the sterling crash, electricity & gas prices will follow, and food prices will be going up soon - we import 40% of it.

Then they send you to prison for refusing to decrypt it?

See the UK for example - the RIP Act - where you can get a sentence of up to 2 years for failing to decrypt, when ordered, anything the police have a 'reasonable belief' that you have the keys to. Several animal rights' activists have already been convicted under this law.

Forget the password for that encrypted backup? Get sent an encrypted email you don't even have the key for? Have some file of randomly generated garbage you used to test drive throughput that might be mistaken for encrypted data? Better hope the police don't go looking for a reason to put you away...

Taxing them more simply means higher prices for all the customers.

Well that's simply horseshit. Paying their taxes increases their costs. Apple make a lot of profit, so paying taxes would reduce that profit. Profit is used for a lot of things; salary increases (rarely), growing the business by investing in new product designs, more staff etc etc, put in the bank for a rainy day, or paid to the shareholders in dividends or via share buy-back schemes.

Apple has stupendous amounts of past profit stashed away as cash reserves in offshore banks, because it doesn't have anything else it can think of to do with it.

Increasing prices to pay their taxes, rather than take a slightly smaller profit makes no sense, because their revenues already far outstrip costs. If a higher price would be more profitable for them (vs decreasing sales), they'd already be charging it.

Apple, like Google, Vodafone, Amazon and any number of multinationals pay hardly any tax in the countries that buy their products. They make their revenue from western countries, but use complex arrangements with shell corporations, intra-company loans, licence payments etc so that those profits are then recorded in 0-tax tiny countries. Thus much higher profits - which ultimately largely end up going to the shareholders (which of course, includes the CEO and other top management). The shareholders are largely already the wealthy, because they're the only ones able to use their money to invest in large amounts of shares instead of you know, buying stuff to live on. Even if the money doesn't go directly out in dividends, it's used to increase the share prices, which has the same effect.

So instead of paying for the infrastructure they use in western countries, for the social safety nets their workers have in europe etc, for the educations their workers get, by paying the pitiful amounts of tax rates they actually should - they divert them to offshore holdings and they end up making the already rich richer.

It's incredibly regressive. In addition, smaller national companies can't pull the same tricks, have lower profits to invest in growing their business, and is a good part of the reason the big multinationals got so big in the first place and displace smaller companies from the marketplace. Who, incidentally, also pay better wages on average.

UK corporation tax rate is 18%, hardly extortionate for the amount they benefit from selling in the UK. And hardly any of the multinationals actually pay anything like that rate, many pay nothing at all - meaning us working stiffs have to pick up the difference to pay for the NHS, roads, police, firemen, social security, pensions etc etc etc, all of which have been under heavy pressure precisely because the government isn't getting enough taxes in to pay for our already thinly stretched services.

Companies in the 50's and 60's used to include social responsibility for their workforce and their communities as part of their thinking - they knew that having customers able to afford their products was a good thing for them in the long run. Now it's all about maximising share price in the shortest possible time, and screw the long term, the workforce, the customer and anyone other than the very richest.

It depends what is meant by devops.

If it means the sysadmins and developers talk to each other and work together in a healthy relationship to deliver stable, scalable apps with heavy use of automation to cut down scut work and human error from both sides - that meet the goals of the organisation - then you're doing it right.

If it's just a synonym for badly run agile, with devs slapping together whatever to meet arbitrary goals rushed into production with insufficient testing, while sysadmins end up firefighting all the time because devs just frack it up even worse now they push direct to production; then it's just another bullshit buzzword.

Sysadmins need to be part coder these days to do their job properly with automation and flexibility; devs need to be part sysadmin so they can factor performance and stability within sane budgets into their designs.

I'm a traditional sysadmin, but I've brushed up on my coding from my undergrad days the last couple of years, and have a couple of my own projects deployed now. I work pretty closely with our 3rd party developers, so can understand and support their requirements better, and they work with me rather than round me. Is that devops? I dunno, but it beats the hell out of the usual silo'd suspicion and blame game.

Buggy drivers are still a problem - last I checked, elite:dangerous + amd + win 10 was still a broken mess that works fine on 7 or 8.1. There have been numerous problems with the saitek X55 windows 10 driver. A number of old printers also no longer work.

And of course, if you're using windows media centre, then installing windows 10 will murder it.

That's just the broken stuff I know about from personal/friends experience, off the cuff. I'm sure there are many more. You've also got to factor the privacy implications of all the stuff windows 10 sends back in exchange for your 'free' upgrade.

Windows 8.1 + startisback works fine, and I see no good reason to 'upgrade' any time soon.

I think the placebo effects often come from getting to spend some real time and sit down with someone who will discuss your problem at length, come up with a 'solution' and tailor it just for you.

They then hand you your bottle of water, and off you go, happy that you've been given proper attention and care by a 'professional', compared to the 7 minute appointment where the over-worked and rushed GP had to try and figure out what was actually wrong, whether it was treatable, and what treatment or referral to give, without actually lying to the patient.

So it gives some people relief for symptoms because they've been given reassurance and time they don't get on the NHS. Rather than funding homeopathy, we should be funding more GPs. And change the rules to allow them to prescribe sugar pills if they want, instead of sending patients away with nothing...

The reason behind it was to stop companies (e.g. amazon, apple and google) setting up shop in the lowest tax countries in the EU (luxembourg and ireland), and thus by only charging a low rate of VAT when exporting to the rest of the EU. This enables them to beat smaller domestic companies on final price, pay less tax overall, and funnels what little tax is collected into these tax havens. So the bigger EU countries were seeing a hefty fall in their direct VAT receipts, and loss of business from domestic companies to these giants that can relocate where they like, thus employment costs and indirect tax losses.

Fixing it by harmonizing VAT rates would require treaty changes and be politically hard to hand one of the big financial levers to the european central bank, especially given not all countries are in the eurozone - imagine the US forcing all state sales taxes to the same rate, set by the fed, and you get the idea.

Thus making companies pay VAT in the buyer's country, not the seller's. What they should have done though is put in a threshold, so companies/sole traders below a certain size were exempt, but that was opposed by some so it was dropped, and well, here we are where a mechanism intended to help small traders against the multinationals is a lot easier for the big boys to follow, particularly the requirements to keep id information about buyer location. Once they roll it out for physical goods too, it's going to be such a cluster f**k.

Hopefully though, the rise of MOSS compliant payment processors should make the system easier to follow - you just put a disclaimer up that final price will be based on the buyers VAT rate, and let the payment processor calculate the right rate and store the records.

I think it would increasingly create problems with EU legislation not to have USB port on telephone

Well, sort of. The goal was to get rid of the umpteen different standards for phone chargers, so you wouldn't end with all the obsolete ones going to landfill or polluting recyclers - the goal being able to change any mobile phone with any charger; and have that roll over onto other small devices via halo effect, though current requirements mean tablets et al aren't actually part of the standard per se.

They do have to provide microusb as an option for phone chargers, as the vast majority of devices currently use that. If the device the changer comes with has microusb, they can provide a hard-wired microusb charger. Alternatively, and this is what pretty much everyone does, they can provide a charger with a USB-A female socket, and a standard A -> microusb cable. Either is called a common External Power Supply.

If the device uses an alternative standard, i.e. lightning or type-c, then they still need to ship a common EPS, and make available an adapter for use with microUSB. The usual method of course, and the one apple follows, is to ship a power supply with a USB-A plug, and the USB-lightning adapter. Once phones turn up with type-c connectors (if they haven't already?) in the EU, they will likely do the same. As long as they ALSO make available (it doesn't have to be 'in box') an adapter for the device to use hard-wired microUSB adapters, then they're complying.

So now, any microUSB device can be charged from any mobile phone charger, including apple (though obviously not necessarily at max speed). Any non microUSB device can also be charged from other makers chargers, either by using a type A -> lightning/type C cable, or a microUSB adapter on the phone itself if the charger is the rare hard-wired type.

Long term, the regulations will no doubt be updated once microUSB devices go on the wane, and type-c provision will become the norm. But since almost all chargers use the USB A option, swapping out the cable is simple without needing to replace -and bin - the entire charger.

The problem with sales taxes - which we do have in the UK, VAT @20% - is that they're highly regressive. i.e. the people earning the least (pensioners, low wage workers) end up paying a much bigger share of their income than those at the top of the pile - the richest pay very little sales tax as a proportion of their income. As a result, the poor stay poor, and the rich get ever richer. And assuming we don't want the poorest to literally starve, we end up subsidising their costs with welfare benefits, social housing, etc etc - which have to be paid for somehow, and the middle classes don't have fancy tax accountants to move their money out of the reach of the taxman, as the wealthy and corporations do.

So you keep the poor poor, hollow out the middle classes, and the wealthy get ever more wealthy at a faster rate than anyone else. They then buy media companies, news companies et al to promote their views and systems, such as those that channel ever more amounts of money via companies into their own pockets via government subsidy (check out much money Walmart, and by extension the Walton family make from social assistance costs for their workers for just one example, or similarly amazon). They even end up becoming politicians and sponsoring politicians to sponsor laws that benefit them directly.

The correct answers are:
a) make companies pay a living wage, instead of making up the difference with subsidies
b) make companies and the wealthy pay their share of taxes instead of letting them continuously decrease it, because they benefit from a functional and well ordered society (educated and healthy workers, good transport, reliable infrastructure etc etc) more than anyone, they just don't want to pay for it
c) stop the vast amount of 'soft' money going into politics and media ownership as in any other circumstance it would be called bribery and corruption.

'Flat' sales taxes benefit the wealthiest the most. They are not the answer.

I'm also a linux user that's ended up on OSX due to management.

Totalfinder is less essential than it used to be, but it's still damn useful for fixing most of the flaws in finder, not least because it adds a shortcut to toggle hidden files/folders, shift-cmd-.

Like you, I've got an acceleration fix to make it work linearly - just what I'm used to, and I use windows + linux at home, so it makes more sense to change OSX.

I've found having a magic trackpad pretty handy for the gesture support. It works fine as your sole pointer, but I find it a bit wearing on my fingertip, so still use a real mouse for that (I hate the apple mice). But the trackpad is next to my other hand, and the gestures for swiping sideways between fullscreen apps (including parallels), swipe up for mission control (all windows and Spaces) and swipe down (current app windows) are quite useful, and I don't have to take my hand off my mouse to do them.

While there are alternative shortcuts for end/start line, I just remap home and end to work that way, using Karabiner (free).
The case insensitive thing you just have to live with. It is possible to format and reinstall OSX on case-sensitive HFS+, but it will break some stuff in subtle ways.

App wise, apart from total finder, you definitely want iterm2, and sublime text. Best terminal and text editor, respectively - and sublime text works on linux and windows too, which is awesome.

I have got used to running OSX most of the time at the office. I haven't had to make that many changes, and it does make a really nice coding setup - much nicer than windows for managing/coding linux hosted webapps etc. Lets not kid ourselves, we always make tweaks and changes to any OS to get it the way we like - I know I don't leave kubuntu in stock settings for long, or windows! Would I pay the price premium for a mac at home? Hell no, I much prefer being able to rebuild my own hardware. But when someone else is paying the bill? I can live with them.

Under Amazon's retail agreement, the publisher's set the book price that amazon paid. Amazon then set the price for customers - amazon had various prices for books, rather than a flat rate. Some were loss leaders - a common enough tactic in the retail world, big book chains do it all the time - but amazon's ebook division was profitable on its own merits - something a DOJ investigation confirmed. That's not dumping, and there were other competitors in the ebook space that were also profitable. If the publishers weren't happy with their margins - which were comparable to other retail models - they were fully entitled to go to amazon and negotiate new retail rates individually, just like they do with other book retailers.

Apple looked at that model, saw they weren't going to make their usual profit margin, and went to the big publishers. Apple said 'we'll let you set the final customer price, we'll take 30%, and an agreement that you won't let any other seller undercut us'. The publishers saw this is as a chance to raise prices and make more profit, and stitch up amazon at the same time. The publishers went to amazon all around the same time, and said, 'these are the new terms. Agree to them, or no more ebooks'. Given Amazon then was facing a choice between no ebooks at all, and the new terms, they rolled over.

Collusion to raise prices is illegal, for very good reason - it defeats the purpose of free markets, that of delivering the best product for the lowest price. And that was what they did. Higher prices across the board, more profit for apple and the big publishers, with no improvement to the product, through collusion. If the publishers wanted higher prices, they could have charged them to amazon individually; or set up their own book store with higher prices. And that would have been competition. But they chose not to compete in the marketplace, but arrange a back-room stitchup deal to raise prices for customers. And all the publishers have now settled with the DoJ for doing so.

Apple could have competed with Amazon; there was nothing stopping them setting their own prices, and making it so easy to use that people would use them instead even if they were more expensive for some books. Or offer other value-added services. Or shock, actually compete on price, it's not like apple was some startup tight on cash! They chose not to do any of that. And now they have to pay for the harm they did - which was artificially higher prices for books. They didn't increase competition; they made a deal with the publishers to lock in a higher profit margin for themselves and nobble their competitors at the same time. That's the exact opposite of competition.

Not that I want you stay on Chrome for any particular reason (I've gravitated to mostly using firefox myself, for other reasons) but I do use this web-store hosted extension - backstop - for blocking 'backspace sometimes blows away your entire comment instead of deleting one character' idiocy.

Netflix is paying level 3, a tier 1 provider for access. All the tier 1's interconnect with each other for free (by definition) - they're basically the backbone of the internet for global transit.

Customers pay a consumer ISP, like comcast, for access to the internet, i.e. access to the tier 1 network. So both ends are paying for their connection, all they need is for both networks to be connected in a datacentre somewhere - both ISPs pay for their own equipment, and when that link gets congested, they add more/faster interconnect ports, paid for by the customers that are paying for their side of the link. And that's how it works basically everywhere except the US now.

Because Comcast, along with the other big US consumer ISPs are saying to netflix - a customer of another ISP altogether - 'nice traffic, shame if something happened to it.' And charging extra for a 'fast' path to their network. They've deliberately let the interconnect to level 3 become congested, and are refusing to upgrade it, affecting netflix and all other services that comcast customers request from level 3's network. Netflix offers to host their CDN cache servers inside comcast's network, so it does't have to all go via the level 3 interconnect, comcast refuse.

So basically comcast are singling out netflix, as a competitor to their own video services, and demanding money with menaces. Successfully.

Comcast's argument that more traffic comes in from level 3 than goes out - well duh, they're a retail ISP, and they provide much faster download connections than upload, and put restrictions on what services customers can put on that upload. Of course they're largely going to be seeing more traffic come in than go out. Netflix said they could change their client so as much traffic went up as came down, and comcast said that wouldn't make a difference, thus blowing that argument out of the water.

Given the natural and legally provisioned regional monopolies the cable companies in the US have got themselves, they've got their own customers over a barrel. They can let the interconnects go to shit, and the customers are stuck with it.

5 of the 6 permanently congested links to level 3's network are in the US. It's absolutely obvious that with the FCC unwilling to exert its existing regulatory authority, and congress' refusal to step in as it would be 'government regulating the internet', you have a textbook example of oligopoly abuse. Free markets cannot exist when monopolists abuse their market controlling power, and netflix is just the start. Enforcing regulation against monopolists abusing their position is the only practical, effective answer, and it's high time the FCC used its power to do just that.

Apply common carrier status to regional monopoly cable companies, and the sooner the better.

At the same time, you should understand that you can't "inherit" a deficit. The idea is poppycock.

Of course you can. If you inherit an economy in recession, your tax receipts are low, and your spending on entitlements - that spending which people are legally entitled to have - neither of which can be corrected by presidential or congressional fiat. Then you add a couple of wars to that, necessitating paying those troops and for their equipment etc, another substantial expense it will take time to correct even if you start on ending the war on day 1. You have numerous other spending that is politically untouchable, as the various lobbies will end the career of any politician that touches it, so congress won't touch it with a barge pole.

Only a relatively small portion of the budget is called 'discretionary spending' for a reason. And then you have a congress that is majority controlled by a party that wants to cut taxes (on the rich, mainly) at every opportunity no matter the situation, and is prepared to shut down the government entirely if it doesn't get its way.

So you can't legally cut much of the spending, and you're under constant pressure to cut taxes, not raise them. Your predecessor left you a huge recession, a massive red ink bank bailout, huge military and entitlement spending, and a completely intransigent congress. He's a president, not the magician he would have needed to be to pull out a balanced budget on day 1. There simply wasn't the legal leeway to massively cut spending or massively raise taxes to do so.

Don't just take my word for it - have a look at this graph of obama's time of spending vs bush for some additional background.

Then you factor in that relief and stimulus spending during a recession is considered the correct economic policy to reverse the recession and end it quicker. Once the recession is over, then you can implement austerity to reduce the deficit. Doing austerity too early just worsens the recession, and we end up back in the 1930s. Borrowing money early to get through a crisis is generally considered the right thing to do from prior experience. So a balanced budget on day 1 would have been a really bad idea anyway even if it had been possible.