Posts by Ian Johnston 1040 posts • joined 28 Sep 2007
China has masterfully exploited the greed of Western corporations by providing them with cheap labour and factories, while at the same time learning all the technology and R&D that the US put decades of effort to.
Though let's not forget that the US obtained much of its space technology from the Third Reich.
Although the judge criticised the PA for its refusal to go along with this demand, it is common sense that you can't avoid naming someone without knowing precisely which names to leave out of reporting.
This has always worried me about superinjunctions. If the existence of an injunction is secret, how do we know what not to say about whom?
I have a proper, grown up professional contract which means that I have no set working hours; I just have to get the job done. The French scheme would be completely impractical for me and my professional colleagues because none of us knows when the others are working and so it would be damn nearly impossible to send a group email when all the recipients were working.
As so often with EU legislation, what looks worker friendly is anything but. It's really an attempt to get everyone to work 9-5.
If I was an electric car maker - and there are probably good reasons why I am not - I would sell cars with a 100 mile range battery (big enough for most commutes a and local trips) but make provision for a further 300+ miles' worth which could be rented by the week for holidays and other long trips. Of course some people would want the long range from the start, but most people don't need it.
Ten minutes for 800 miles? A Tesla 3 Long Range has a 75 kWh battery and a certified range of 353 miles. Assuming that motor design and aerodynamics don't do anything startling, that means 170 kWh for 800 miles, which over 10 minutes is just a shade over 1 MW. That's ... quite a lot of power. Using 415V 3-phase AC, it's 1500A. Using a typical 600V DC fast charger, it's 1700A
In short, getting the power to the charger will be an issue and getting the power from the charger to the car will be a HUGE issue.
"Victim" is not a boolean variable. Some victims aren't to blame, sure, but some are partly or wholly to blame for what happens to them. Easy example: the courts decided that George Zimmerman was entitled to defend himself with lethal force against Trayvon Martin. Do you think that he, as a victim, was entirely blameless?
Every time I have to plug in a 3.5mm jack to something with multiple ports, it's like I'm in some kind of quantum hell. It's just random whether I get the right one or not.
And if you're using Linux, the effects will be completely random as well.
Tried to make an import Zoom call with Xubuntu yesterday. Previous one worked fine. For important one, the system would only let Zoom choose the webcam as microphone, but would only show input from the actual microphone.
Their investigators were seriously impressive people, backed up by a bunch of ex-services personnel whose job was to stand behind the investigators looking Very Big And Scary during interviews.
Though of course if you were lucky you got Call-Me-Dave and a few billion written off instead.
Agreed. Apollo cost 2.5% of GDP, on average, for ten years. That would be $500bn per year at the moment, which sounds like a lot until you remember that the US spends half as much again on its military.
SOP for NASA for decades seems to have been "Announce new launch system, with grandiose plans. Make half hearted efforts to implement it. Cancel. Lather, repeat". It's now forty years since they introduced a human carrying vehicle and ten years since they had one working.
I'm getting a lift with my next door neighbour later today. She has a car (obviously) and an electricity supply. However, since the electricity supply is in her 1st floor flat, and the car lives in whichever space she can find along 200m of residents' parking spaces, charging an EV would be a whisker difficult.
So she has a petrol car. No petrol pump, true, but since recharging with petrol takes about 3 minutes, that's not really an issue.
For all the blame heaped on senior managers - and richly deserved - how many IT staff the the PO and Fujitsu knew of the problems and the false prosecutions and did precisely nothing about it? Dozens? Scores? Hundreds? Everyone from programmers to help desk staff must have know what was going on.
An acquaintance of mine was called in to track down quality control problems at a Very Famous British Car Manufacturer. It took him one night to find the issue: the night shift, unsupervised by managers who did not deign to work after 5pm, were keeping one good bodyshell aside and putting it through the metrology system every time another one came off the line and was due to be tested. As a result every shell produced "passed" and went on to be fitted out, regardless of how bad it was.
Note: No Glaswegian would ever call it "The Clockwork Orange", which is a term used exclusively by London journalists. The Glasgow name for it was "The Subway", even though it became "The Underground" at electrification in the 30s. The name changed back recently, on the basis that if we hadn't accepted the new name after eighty years we probably weren't going to.
Sheer fantasy, I'm afraid. There is not the slightest prospect of Mars ever - let alone within a hundred years - having a settlement, economy or industry. There is nothing there worth going for and even at Space X rate the cost of getting a single person there is enormous. The Sahara and Antarctica would be better prospects for colonisation.
Isaac Asimov was a third rate writer, not a prophet. Sorry.
That's because the qualification for working in a museum now is a Masters in Museum Studies (actual title may vary) on top of a social science degree. Hardly any "curators" know anything about the exhibits other than how to arrange them to look pretty together. The National Museum of Scotland is bad for this, but the nadir is the truly appalling Riverside Museum in Glasgow, which is basically one of Zaha Hadid's awful buildings decorated with the contents of a closed museum. Nice to look at but God help you if you actually want to find out about anything.
When I was a student I went to a talk by the then director of the Science Museum and asked what I should do if I wanted a job there. "First get a doctorate in a science subject, then call us" was his reply. How times have changed.
You do realize that the latitude of Austin Texas is lower than any point in Europe, I assume.
And Moscow is on almost exactly the same latitude as Berwick-up-Tweed. Latitude is only one factor influencing climate: Texas is so big that it has eight different climate types: see https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2d/Texas_K%C3%B6ppen.svg
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