Posts by David M 35 posts • joined 25 Mar 2008
Electric batteries are about fifty times the mass of airline fuel for a given amount of energy. Plus the batteries aren't consumed during flight, so the landing mass is the same as at take-off. And solar doesn't help - a panel the size of the aircraft would only produce a tiny fraction of the required energy.
The only realistic way to reduce airline fossil fuel consumption at the moment is to fly a lot less. And we're currently proving that this is perfectly viable.
Quite right - me included. But there are plenty of ways to take a holiday that don't involve flying. And I did say 'reduce', not 'eliminate'. For a start, recent experience has shown that the vast majority of business meetings can be held quite successfully without flying half-way around the world to be there in person.
Part of the response to climate change is going to have to be a dramatic reduction in flying. The recent effects on aviation of Boeing's bugs and of Covid-19 are just a preview of what will soon need to happen anyway. Boeing would do well to accept this, give up on developing new aircraft, and start redeploying its engineering resources onto more environmentally-friendly projects.
I wonder why they didn't try to to test the false-negative rate. It would have been easy to add a few known 'test' faces to the watchlist, and then ask those people to wander through Oxford Circus on random days of their own choosing, to see whether they got detected.
I suspect the reality is that the Met are hoping the idea that facial recognition is being deployed will discourage crime, regardless of whether the technology actually works or not.
If companies need the income from advertising, why not just have the option to directly charge users instead? If, for instance, Facebook charged (say) £3 per month in return for the promise of no advertising or tracking, they'd get broadly the same per-user income either way. News websites might want to charge per page view, as people probably wouldn't want a regular subscription to lots of them, so some kind of micro-payment provider would be useful, but none of this is particularly difficult to implement. It might turn out that most people are happy with the "free stuff+advertising+tracking" model, but those who didn't like it would have an alternative.
If you're interested in the history and effectiveness of drug policy, this talk by Professor David Nutt is interesting and well-argued. Professor Nutt was the government advisor who was famously sacked for trying to inject (sorry) some sanity into the drug debate.
onefang: your question, "No idea how it works when rotating it in place, does it even notice?", is answered in the video, where it says that they plan to build a version that can measure three orthogonal accelerations, and three rotations.
It's a shame they don't give any clues about the accuracy, or predictions about the timescale to make something commercially viable,
Part of the problem is that if, say, all your lightbulbs get recruited into a botnet, the manufacturer doesn't care as they've still sold some lightbulbs, and the owner doesn't care as the bulbs continue to work. So there's very little incentive to do anything about this. Plus many people have had the experience of a device getting worse or completely broken by a software update, so may be reluctant to do it unless there's an obvious benefit. Any solution will have to make the cost of being hacked significantly higher than the cost of security, for both manufacturer and owner.
I thought there were only two reasons for having smart meters: 1. so all the meter readers can be sacked, and 2. remote 'off' switch for when the subscriber gets behind on payments, and to temporarily disconnect people during periods of peak demand when it turns out that we didn't build enough power stations.
There is a difference between ability and interest. There are lots of things I could do perfectly well, but I choose not to because I'm just not that interested, and I think that's what's happening here. Lots of people have the necessary skills for a career in computing, but just don't feel drawn in that direction. I suspect that this, rather than ability, is the primary reason for there being so few women in computing and engineering, and it's this that we should be trying to understand.
I will only let go of my steering wheel when there isn't one, i.e. when the Autopilot functions like a chauffeur and is so reliable that the car design simply doesn't include the option of manual control. In the meantime, if I have to be alert enough to take over at a moment's notice, I might as well retain manual control all the time. Adaptive cruise control is fine, but if I could let go of the steering wheel I would inevitably stop paying proper attention to the road.
The security guru Bruce Schneier agrees that password changing is generally a bad idea.
As does Microsoft.
I gave up on multiplexes years ago. I now go to my local independent cinema. Nice big screen, decent sound, they know how to focus a projector, the food isn't over-priced, and the audience is always well-behaved. And many showings sell out, so they must be doing something right.
The prototype Concorde at Duxford Air Museum has an escape hatch in the floor. If that stood any chance of being usable, then something similar in a modern airliner should be fine. You'd still have to cut airspeed as much as possible, but you'd at least fall clear of the tail.
My relatively-new VW doesn't brake, but does display an alert if it thinks I'm about to crash into the vehicle in front. This has gone off a few times, and all were false positives. In one case, the road curved to the left and there was a right-turn sliproad on the bend with a car waiting - the system thought I was heading straight for this car so the alert went off, but actually the road curved off to the left of it. Had the brakes slammed on at this point, I would have been in danger of being hit from behind. I hope that the sensors get a lot more intelligent before automatic braking becomes commonplace.
I agree with all of the negative comments here. In particular the new layout is very wasteful of screen space, and I really hate to pop-out (or whatever they're called) menus that keep appearing when I don't want them, and covering up what I'm trying to read.
Suggestions:
1. Go back to the old site for the time being.
2. If you must do a redesign, make the focus on usability.
3. Make a beta of the new site available so that your readers can comment _before_ going live.
4. Your readers have huge cumulative experience in using and designing web-sites. Trust their opinions.
According to the article, the company was fined for failing to apply for a licence. For all we know, a licence may well have been granted if the company had bothered to apply for it. It sounds to me as though this isn't the US wanting to stop exporting crypto, it's the US wanting to make sure that it knows what crypto companies are exporting, and has the opportunity to stop it if necessary.
Absolutely. Driving is difficult. It's made almost entirely from distractions, but the vast majority of drivers cope with this perfectly well, every minute that they're behind the wheel. To ensure this, we require every driver to take some lessons and a test. Perhaps it's time to just accept that people are going to use the phone whilst driving and add this to the test, so drivers can learn how to do it safely.
"On his trip out of the gravity well..."
They are very much _in_ the gravity well. The ISS's altitude is around 370km which means it experiences around 90% of the gravity at the Earth's surface. However it's in free-fall, which means that the ISS, its contents and its crew are all falling at exactly the same rate, so they experience the illusion of zero gravity.
This was exactly my reaction to my new netbook. Initially great, but rapidly realising that the screen was too restrictive. Not too small, but needed more pixels.
I heard a rumour that 1024x600 resolution was a restriction imposed by Intel on machines with Atom processors. Anyone know if this is true?
I still find plenty of applications for my netbook, and I can work-around the resolution to some extent by disabling unnecessary toolbars and using full-screen modes more, but it's a shame that the potential of this form-factor isn't fully realised.
Isn't it just as likely that there are simply a significant number of bad drivers on the road? Such drivers are likely to
(a) have most of the accidents, and
(b) be on the phone a lot.
So the statistics would show a large correlation between accidents and mobile-phone use, but stopping the phone use won't help because they will still be bad drivers.
One could use similar logic to show that most accidents involve use of a steering wheel, so we should ban steering wheels.
I like the idea that federal officials had "painted themselves in a corner."
Were they all in the same corner painting themselves, I wonder, in some great departmental body-art extravaganza?
Or did they each find a separate, private corner in which to paint themselves?
We should be told.
Paris, because she can paint herself in any of my corners.
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