Posts by Gary Hutchings
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SOEs do not have a government guarantee behind them, witness terralink's liquidation.
Kiwibank borrows as an independent corporate, and have a credit rating based on that, I am fairly sure the Electricity companies are the same.
I am unsure whether the ratings agency give them an easier ride because of their Crown ownership. but I guess that would be an internal decision for them.
If Kiwibank did have official backing I guess it would offer a large window for arbitraging against Government stock, which tends to have a lower interest rate than is offered by Kiwibank for Investments.
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For example in town your car sits stopped for long periods (If I drove a Prius up to the lights and sat there for 5 hours wouldn't it have better efficiency than any kind of diesel?)
Diesels are getting much better at stuff like that too with the use of Mild hybrid (or bigar$e starter motors)
From Wiki's mini page
From 2008, all MINI models will be equipped with BMW Efficient Dynamics technology. This includes a start-stop feature shutting off the engine when the car is stationary. When the gas pedal is depressed the engine is restarted with electricity generated from Brake Energy Regeneration.
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While a Prius is the current *Sexy* green vehicle,
You can also get similar and some times better milage out of some of the new Euro Diesels,
But Either way it is good to see people finally taking an interest in how much fuel it takes to get them from A to B, ( Probably a better outcome then that infamous "Carless" days of the past)
The promise of Diesel Hybrids in the next few years, will add even more to the "my car gets better milage than yours" wars that are likely to be the talk of the coffee cups in Grey lynn and Kelburn over the next few years :)
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Re: the Drury blog link, the updater is currently offline
"For the moment this updater has been removed due to problems found with Carbon/Cocoa apps"
:(,
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I also noted that Apple lopped $200 US off the price of the iPhone, (which generated much wailing and gnashing of fanboy early adopters teeth) making it now $399 US for 8GB, they also culled the 4GB one.
At that price point it is a obvious "upsell" from the "touch Ipod, which sells for $299 US,
I can see it now,
"I see you are interested in the Touch ipod,
Would you be you looking to upgrade your phone in the near future?
Well for an extra $100 bucks you can have all the features of the touch + a phone,
How will you be paying for this purchase":) -
(Still, it could be worse - Panah could be an atheist. How the hell are meant to prove that?)
He has been engaged in a long standing exchange of emails and letters with Richard Dawkins, and carries around books from Marx, Nietzsche, Satre and Betrand Russell :)
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Another plug for Firefox and Adblock plus (and flashblock),
They stop pages like stuff and the herald that dance around like Trevor mallard and Pete hodgson on Party pills,dead in their tracks. You get to filter what you want and tell the browser to actual remove the ad panes so the pages actually resemble what you want to see, It also totally stops those popup slide ins that I notice if I happen to be using someone elses machine that only has IE.
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They also added gigabit ethernet to the airport extreme base station, which is now looking much better as a "cheap n nasty" NAS solution, slave a USB HDD off it, stuff them in the back of a cupboard together and bo-ya.
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Yip, the New imacs look very shiny, but I am not sure about the new keyboard thou, flat keys are fine for laptops and occasional use, but for a fully featured desktop I will have to be convinced after a bit of "hands on sampling",
But the wireless one does look super cool...
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Check out that croissan'wich on damn cool, [insert obligatory homer drool] [followed closely by a double coronary]