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Comment Re:Who is the "our"? (Score 1) 71

All Wopke Hoekstra is doing is talking his way into the chair of Climate Chief, saying all the things the EU members want to hear.

In the Netherlands, he is not seen as reliable. There was this issue after the last elections, where the big parties claim to start a new style of government (without all the lies). Hoekstra was leader of the CDA, and sometime during the negotiations to form a government, there turned up a note saying "Omtzigt; position elsewhere". Omtzigt was a CDA politician as well, but a critical one and the people of the CDA didn't like him anymore.

Both Hoekstra (CDA) and Kaag (D66) said they knew nothing of that note and pointed their fingers towards Mark Rutte (VVD). Later it turned out all three knew about that note. So much for a new style of government ;)

By the way, Omtzigt started a new party (NSC) and in the polls for 22 November is around 15% of the voters, while the CDA is below 5%. That is how popular the CDA of Hoekstra is today.

Comment He has a point (Score 1) 101

I simply don't understand why people want to keep using RHEL distributions, when Red Hat doesn't want them as a user/customer anymore. That is simply setting yourself up for abuse.

There are 100s of distributions to choose from, why choose one that doesn't want you as a user? I simply don't understand this subbornness of people.

Comment Re: Smart (Score 1) 190

Current EV batteries have ~1500-2000 charge cycle lifespans.

That's at max charge/discharge rates.

Discharging a 70kWh battery pack by 70% at 5kW (the p90 of the power draw of my house) is 0.1C.

EV-class batteries used in residential solar systems with discharge at up to 1C and charging at 0.5C have warranties covering 3500+ cycles.

You'd need about 10c/kWh profit before it makes sense to sell back (or about 1c/kWh/$1000 it costs for a battery).

The price difference between peak and off-peak on PG&Es EV-A rate plan is at least 20c/kWh (partial peak) and up to 31c/kWh, for EV-B it's between 11c to 31c/kWh (at least in summer).

Comment Re: Smart (Score 1) 190

"nobody is going to want to use their expensive to replace EV battery in this way."

Surely that would depend on the rates offered?

If time-of-use rates were updated accurately reflect energy costs, it might become advantageous to do this (and fund battery replacements from grid credits).

Alternatively, in countries where feed-in tariffs are much lower than consumption tariffs, use the V2G to power the house and lower the electricity bill, reducing demand on the grid.

Comment Re: Smart (Score 1) 190

The summary says:

"Current time-of-use rates encourage consumers to switch electricity use to nighttime whenever possible, like running the dishwasher and charging EVs. This rate structure reflects the time before significant solar and wind power supplies when demand threatened to exceed supply during the day, especially late afternoons in the summer. Today, California has excess electricity during late mornings and early afternoons, thanks mainly to its solar capacity."

This is non-sensical.

The whole point of time-of-use rates is to encourage energy use when it is most abundant.

If the time-of-use rates were updated to reflect the times when excess energy is available, this "problem" would simply disappear, as EVs set to charge at the lowest price would do the right thing.

Someone here isn't thinking, but I'm not sure if it's the author or whoever sets the time-of-use rates.

Comment Re:An appropriate phone (Score 1) 15

You could look into the phones from Fairphone or Volla, though I am not sure how far they are with running mainline kernels instead of Android kernels.
Sony Xperia phones can be rooted and unlocked as well, they are often used for Sailfish, a Finnish Linux distro, coming forth out of Nokia Meego.

Comment Flagship market moved to Apple (Score 1) 11

I would think that Mediatek is big in low-end and mid-end. According to the report that is even growing. But the flagship market in the US is moving towards Apple phones with their own chips. That is cutting into the marketshare of Qualcom.

I wonder what the trend worldwide is, in many countries Android flagship phones are still being sold widely and Apple doesn't have the marketshare as in the US, I can imagine Qualcom having more marketshare worldwide.

Comment Re:Government stupidity (Score 2) 151

The main issue with these conversions is that the money assigned to turnover large-nationwide systems is allotted only once every 25 years or so. In developing countries especially so - since they don't have spare billions.

This is not the case in South Africa, where SARS is one of the most well-funded Government entities.

So even if they managers completely understand the pitfalls of this approach, they have to make the thing work until their next system upgrade grant comes along. This is why they adopt this interim solution. It's not *always* ignorance of technology. On the other hand, your comment betrays an ignorance of logistics and economics.

I think in this case, it *is* ignorance. If you don't agree, watch this interview with a previous head of IT at SARS (had been there for over a year at the time of the interview). You may want to start here and watch about 5 minutes, from where she talks about the migration off of Flash to where she says their "level of functionality is an uptime of 99.6%".

Comment Re:So ... (Score 1) 151

No, if you can't file online, you would have to complete submission on paper forms. Paper-based filing has an earlier deadline, so if you only realise when trying to file online, you would have to also pay a penalty. Also, South Africa's public services aren't very well run, so filing on paper will probably require spending 2 days waiting to be served at a SARS office.

Comment Personal income tax filing not affected (Score 2) 151

> As SARS tweeted on January 12, the agency was impacted by the time-bomb mechanism, and starting that day, the agency was unable to receive any tax filings via its web portal, where the upload forms were designed as Flash widgets.

The actual tweet says "SARS is aware of certain forms not loading correctly due to Adobe Flash.".

It doesn't say that all tax filing is affected.

Actually, October 2020 was the first time I haven't needed Flash to submit my personal taxes to SARS. For the past few years I have had to use Chrome, and in 2019 also jump through some hoops in Chrome to enable Flash, to submit my personal tax information, but this year I could just use Firefox.

There are other tax types that are impacted, but not all tax filing is impacted.

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