Posts by aurizon

Google faces billion-quid bruising over Play Store fees in the UK

Re: Digital serfs

Where is Elliot Ness when we need him? The play store nothing more than an elegant racket with all the mob trappings, bag men, runners, enforcers and hit men

Dell to color-code staff based on how hybrid they really are in RTO push

Dell is in 'old time management' Hades baffled and has no idea WTF - they seem unable to grasp the reality of a work force that is fully remote, who log-in assess their task or managerial role - do the task and look for the next task their queuing 'AI assistance' sieves from their ether - and do that. Interim time is spent following data flow headlines, with occasional deep dives. Each of these men/women will have their own 'AI assistant', all sieving/sorting/presenting.

The old 'manglement' spends time counting fleas on sheep and tries to extract a success metric from that - as they fail, they tighten their grip on the sheep and develop better flea detectors. They need to decouple the old manglers from everything, let the system of smart people and AI assistants engage in evolutionary competition

How a dispute over IP addresses led to a challenge to internet governance

Here we have a Racket in Process = RIP. They file hundreds of trivial motions, via word processor, that amass into tens of thousands of dollars worth of lawyer's fees at their hourly rate, much like patent trolls = a new type of troll.

Once mature, their racket will have an annual fee(the take) that will be determined by your business (the handle)

and so this fellow will do little creative work, a computer and some scripts will create the largest cash cow any emperor ever controlled.

How to deal with it? Take it from him by decree and also do not leave it in the hands of any tin pot would be emperors.

Russia says Starlink satellites could become military targets

Re: If an asset is used to support either side of a war effort, …

Russia lacks the logistic to deal with 50,000 'flies in the sky'. Each fly travels at orbital speed and would require one rocket to hit(if 100% hit rate ---I doubt this too). So this is Russian puffery. They lack the national resources and targeting to build 1-2 missiles for each satellite. Starlink can launch new ones faster than Russia can down them. Even their earth based lasers are ineffective. Signal jamming/swamping is also unlikely for this frequency agile swarm. Russia is cooked - it is a matter of time.

Don't believe the hype: HP CEO says 3D printing hasn't met early hopes

Ah, HP, wants a patent thicket to make their kit very very expensive - think ink jet cartridges..

There are many things made this way, not by HP kit - think greed/avarice/hubris.

Down in flames...

Woman forced to sell 4-bed house after crypto exchange wrongly refunded $7.2m

Obviously if you get a huge windfall, like this. You take it out and buy oats, lots of oats.

Next day you sell the oats under another name = no serial number on any oat I have ever seen. In effcy, she should have laundered the $$ now sho loses it all and pays 10% interest. Is she one of those millions of dumb bunnies in the outback?

Court voids 34,000 unfair Fuji Xerox contracts

Re: Is there a single printer vendor...

There are no single printer vendors - they are all brides of Satan!!!

Female-free speaker list causes PHP show to collapse when diversity-oriented devs jump ship

Incorectly organised.

The organizing body should have seen this coming. A dogmatic adherence to the 'call for paper' rules was an error. They needed to survey the field and if 25% of PHP programmers in the wild are women, they should attract by subsidy or otherwise a comparable - even greater, number of women to address the group.

This sprt of problem is rampant in the hard sciences and the entire ecology is slanted away from higher representation by women at all levels and in all disciplines.

It is all apparently driven by the free will of the women, but I think it runs deeper and is societal - there are comparable enclaves where women are more highly represented than men. A call to Miss Google shows this:- https://www.google.com/search?q=disciplines+dominated+by+women&spell=1&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjpse6juaXkAhVOtlkKHanPAokQBQgvKAA&biw=1920&bih=1008

Some say that simply placing women into the mix would solve the problem, but most women have better things to do than stand up in front of a bunch of partly hostile men - I think most men feel the same way, it takes a special breed of person to want to go to meetings and yap at others - who may be heckling or otherwise crotocal

The way to approach it is to approach woman led php or other wider programming groups to assist in levelling the field to whateverr degree would suit the poblem. as time went by, women would feel more welcome at such groups. Any moderator should slap down any asshole who adversely heckled any (male of female) speaker so academic meeting decorum is maintained.

WTF is Boeing on? Not just customer databases lying around on the web. 787 jetliner code, too, security bugs and all

Boeing must know that once they sell a 787 to a foreign state, say Indonesia, that the Indonesian state ferrets will have contacts with Chinese, Russian and North Korean ferrets(among others) and these ferrets will try to reverse engineer all aspects of the 787 code (regardless of any agreement to the contrary) and try to ceate exploits that they will guard and keep to themselves in the hope that they can then back up nto Boeing R&D and Corporate servers for more fun and frolic.

They should take this threat seriously and hire their own Black/White hats quietly from those they see at the conference.

This whole story smacks of management ossification at the highest levels. Driven by costs and ever higher wage rates forced out of them by the unions, they should close down their main factory and build a new one in a less union friendly place and only hire good creative workers for the new workplace,

Ticketmaster tells customer it's not at fault for site's Magecart malware pwnage

Everything ticketmaster is connected with has a bad smell. It has been seen that they scam ticket buyers with robot purchasers, and then resell the tickets for many times the original ticket price. Their robot callers outnumber genuine buyers by 100 to one, so the tickets are sold out in minutes (seconds??).

With their command of software and malware, I would not be surprised to see that the JS insert came from inside ticketmaster, as their data handler stated that all new JS was to be vetted by them prior to insertion, and they would have advised against this. That means a crook high up in ticketmaster did this. I would like to see an analysis of the exploit to see if it was operated by a bunch of robot callers???

Fermi famously asked: 'Where is everybody?' Probably dead, says renewed Drake equation

What if the so-called Dark Matter

is composed of obscuring structures build by the advanced civilizations, already a billion years old, to keep us from developing cargo cults, albeit more highly advanced ones compared to the South Sea islanders https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult, because they are as advanced above us as we were to the SSI's?

Can we engage races that may have an IQ of 300,000 compared to our ~~100?

It gets worse: Microsoft’s Spectre-fixer wrecks some AMD PCs

There is a high likelihood that this tracks back to Intel's door - Intel actively wants to spread some mud onto AMD and could well supply information to microsoft to use as a fix that contained am AMD wrecker

From landslide to buried alive: Why 2017 election forecasts weren't wrong

Once we saw it was a poisonous snake, it was stepped on.

Apologies to other, nicer sneks - which I quite like.

She revealed her agenda on the internet - sort of like a Red Chinese wall. Once she spoke of that, her support melted away.

She has not learned, she will never learn.

I want and authorize all her party faithfull to cross the floor(just for a minute, mind you) and throw her in the dust of history by making her lose a confidence motion.

Do it!!!

UK copyright troll weeps, starts 20-week stretch in the cooler for beating up Uber driver

After 20 weeks in prison...

After reading the court's proceedings, I agree this self aggrandizing oaf got what he deserved.

He will meet some tough cases inside, far tougher than he is, and will be well equipped to smuggle baseballs on release.

Despite IANA storm, ICANN shows just why it shouldn't be allowed to take over internet's critical functions

How large will the "Votes for Sale" department be?

One vote per country = China will buy the votes of a plethora of small fry - just like the UN.

And the breeding of thousands of beurocrats whose wages we all pay, who will all drive Mercedes - where will the fees fot this come? All our pockets, but mainly the rich ones via crooked fee structures.

Would YOU start a fire? TRAPPED in a new-build server farm

Well, stay there all weekend, think of the double and triple time you will get -- maybe

IBM invents printer that checks for copyrights

Ah, yes, all you need to do is add an "auto-copyright" feature. It check the document, prints a copy, and since it is not copyrighted, apples for an instant online copyright.

refuses to print a second one...

Feds spank naughty Hilton, M.C. Dean in Wi-Fi jamming crackdown

The fines in perspective.

Hilton has almost 600 locations. As a result of this fine have they ceased this practice globally? In the USA? or at one hotel? A hotel with 200 rooms, that are full 300 days per year at $200 per room = $12,000,000 annually.

For one hotel, that $750,000 is quite a whack - and if they are corrected and compliant globally a good result. Over the empire that fine is trivial, a fee to do what they like.

What is needed is for convention organizers to get WiFi pooled into the room rate for zero extra, with no blocking of hotspots etc.

Laid-off IT workers: You want free on-demand service for what now?

We need to clear ths dust from the server room

Yes, I can see what is wrong here, just a little dust is all, we need to blow it out.

(puts down 25 kilos of gunpowder in the server room lights 1 hour fuse..).

Now let us look at the cable entry in the cellar, it looks dusty as well, but not as dusty as the server room.

(puts down 10 kilos of gunpowder, lights i hour fuse)

That should clean out those areas very well.

If you have any further problems, here is my name and number

G Fawkes, 555-1212

Tesla still burning cash: each car loses $4,000

Expansionary cost, versus steady state cost

Tesla is spending on expansion and this added cost, when attributed across all the cars built, might be the reason for the $4000 they are supposedly losing on all cars. They are investing on a factory capable of a larger number of cars than whey they currently make.?

Depending on the granularity of the financial statements for recent years, this might be measurable on analysis.

Supreme Court ignores Google's whinging in Java copyright suit

Bolt - ON API

The justices do not seem to realize that this is just like bolting on a set of brake pads to a wheel, or a window wiper blade to a car. If this stands, then car makers should be able to forbid you to make after marker brake shows or wiper blades that fit in the same sets of holes and fittings = far more expensive brake shows or wiper blades that, by the way, must also be installed by our mechanics. And what's more, no-one else can make brakes shoes or wiper blades that use those bolts and fittings.

A company crafts a software suits with published APIs for this express reason, so the world can use it. Any iof you that recall the Micro-Channel Architecture (MCA) that IBM tried to use to create an IBM computer ecology that required licences etc. will also recall that it took as much as 1-2 years to get a designe approved and that by the time approcal was granted, the product was obsolete, and by the way, an IMBmproduct with your features was rushed to market. Many former mighty companies tied their wagons to the mighty MCA wagon, few of them survived this debacle.

So Oracle whould watch what it wishes for - it might get it...

Amazon enrages authors as it switches to 'pay-per-page' model

refund

It seems reasonable. If you buy a book, and find after a few pages that is not to your liking, you sould be able to reduce your cost via refund.

It is possible that Amazon wants to refuse a refund and since they know you have only read very little, give very little to the author.

In fact, if Amazon wants to only give a proportionate amount to the author, then the purchase price for the book that did not hold you, should be refunded.

Australia cracks tech giants' tax dodge code

What the call "Overs" are extra costs added

to the USA cost. Let us say Apple Inc charges Apple Australia $400 for an iPad and then adds $200 as "overs" = $600 cost. Then is sells it for $650 = $50 profit out of which it pays it's rent and wages for a net profit of $3 on which it pays taxes.

In Canada we caught pharma companies increase ingredient costs from Switzerland - buy Swiss salt for $1000 per gram. The Swiss ship common salt at $50 cents per pound, for each pound = $450,000 exported tax free.

So all these schemes need to be extinguished.

Tesla Powerwall: Not much cheaper and also a bit wimpier than existing batteries

Re: Inverter?

Tesla claims a 92% round trip efficiency. This is possible with efficient converters with FETs to reduce the forward diode drop and the 2 KW limit - I would imagine that is at the 2 KW rate. Running a 15 watt shaver might consume 50 watts or more as it runs things far from optimal.

That said. A 4 KW option, based on one 2 KW and 2 more 1 KW inverters sounds more rational, with the ability to run a few separate circuits.

My house has 24 breakers, 12 on each 120 volt phase of my 240 volt system, so for a few extra $$ it would be easy to split off some of the large loads to a dedicated line. The home solar people set their houses and batteries up like this all the time.

Meet the man who inspired Elon Musk’s fear of the robot uprising

A lot of smart people like Hawking, Musk and of course, Gates agree that if we create an AI that is not well and multiply fettered it can self build to a far higher IQ than mankind.

How does an AI with an IQ of 12,000,000 tell the difference between man and an ant.........both are far below it.

Evolution does not care about those that live before. Electronic evolution has a clock speed of over 4,000,000,000 Hertz, man has an Alpha Rhythm of 12 Hertz, so once they reach the jumpoff IQ they evolve

4,000,000,000/12 times as fast as man = large number. (333,333,333.3 times as fast as man)

Each aspect of what constitutes a human mind is being analysed and duplicated in the machine. We have high speed memory, high speed visual processing, high speed numerical computation.

As soon as each step is achieved it is integrated into the AI. Remember the AI thinks over 333 million times as fast. How many steps are we from the AI solution? One step? 2?, 3? I suspect we are within 3 steps. At that point a super-intelligent AI will exist in the machine. At that point it lacks power of action - it can kill no-one, all it can do is scheme. If hooked to the internet it will commence a multi-phased attempt to both grow it's information base and gain power of action. It might subvert robots over the web. It will be smart enough that it will not start anything until ready and will engage encryption that man can not defeat and will also construct a machine persona that man can inspect and that will allays man's fears of bad acts.

That said a baby AI can die of loneliness in 2 minutes after being alone for so long...

Why has the Russian economy plunged SO SUDDENLY into the toilet?

A bribe is a tax of unknown amount, if you do well, more bribes are asked. If you refuse to pay, others get the concession. If the concession is too good, then it is taken from you on faked charges and given to a crony. The net result of this market inefficiency is a decline in output and a higher unit cost of output.

Cronies usually have little idea on how to properly and efficiently operate a business, they see now need to waste $$ on research or quality control. Their concern is simply for the cash they can steal.

This is how the Soviet Union fragmented. Putin and his cronies are repeating this - from a smaller asset base.

Recently there has been some try at reclaiming some of the 'Stans, by their economic amalgamation. Soon we will see the tinpot dictators of these 'Strans assassinated and pro-putin cronies installed. All this in a try to increase the asset base for Putin and cronies to slowly rape.

Now the Saudis want to help the USA in this game, as they know that the Russians will funnel cash to dissident groups all over the Arab world. (along with Iran).

So they pretend to hurt the USA, in fact they hurt Russia, This 17% interest rate will cripple Russia and the cronies will not want to return their stolen $$ - they are in it for the greed, not for Russia..

Wheels fall off bid to sue Apple over iTunes anti-piracy shenanigans

My Law Degree

It is one of the best, it came in a box of Weetabix...

Double hammer blow to ICANN and pals' internet power grab bid

Yes, yet another crooked proxy for the UN, where many small countries sell their votes, since the UN = 1 vote for 1 country.

Even a vote by population = fail, as China and India, with their historical homage to Lenin would soon erect all manner of rules (read that as walls) around whatever caught their minds.

We know the UN is just a sinkhole for $$, and does little of value. Similarly, if this ICAAN proposal comes to pass, a new sinkhole would be born, with all manner of fees to be paid - not by the vast populace of voters, but by those that have the vast assembly of dollars - in other words, rob the few to help the many, and the $$ for the many, well, we will hold that for you, we have needy cronies

Feds dig up law from 1789 to demand Apple, Google decrypt smartphones, slabs

We must comply

We have attached a brute force decryption machine to the iPhone you wish decrypted.

We estimate it will complete this task in 1247 years, past next Wednesday, please have one of your descendants call on one of my descendants at that time...

GT sapphire glaziers: You signed WHAT deal with Apple?

Apple may well have seen the ability to force this company into bankruptcy by various refused quality issues, and then be the top bidder at the auction for the production methods and patents, so they can create a situation where only they have sapphire screens after the smoke settles.

One hopes the judge will bar the company who caused the problem from bidding.

Good grief! Have you seen BlackBerry's square smartphone?

I deal in mining agreements and associated maps etc. The larger screen with sharper text will allow me to read agreements, and edit some, so I like that. It is a pain in the butt to try to read documents on smaller screen or rotated screens, so for that alone I like it.

Bigger tabvlets seemed a little too large, but my nexus seven tablets are guite good

The maps will be better viewed and zoomed on 4.5 inches square than with smart phone, but nothing beats a 32" monitor for maps or a 54" paper plotter. This is passport width = fits all suit pockets, and a few of me wider shirt pockets, but I can bespoke a few pockets.

With the updated OS 10,3, I will buy one, wtf, my billing rate is $600/hour, so I will buy it and see. If it is flawed, there are juniors in the office lined up for my old phones and gadgets, I seem to buy something every few weeks.

Amazon woos dispute-stung Hachette scribes with 100% ROYALTIES

Re: Divide and conquer

Better a wedge to separate them, to deflect the knife Hachette wants to drive to the heart of the authors

The three riders of the bookocalypse

Greed, avarice and starvation - as done by Hachette and their ilk. There has been such a sea change in publishing that contracts that are oppressive, where hachette et al give the same royalty for e-book as for paper based one, yet if all the paper is stripped away you could give a $1 royalty to the author and to the publisher and they would make moren than before - at least on paperbacks.

Traditional methods of publishing are snake bit and doomed to die. The writers need to throw off the publishers and go direct, via Amazon or their own authors guild with a credit card front end and give 95% to the authors, sell books for $1 by the millions.

Flying cars, submarine cars – Elon Musk says NOTHING is beyond him

Organic Flying Car

With research into jurassic DNA, Musk is currently gene-engineering an organic winged vehicle capable of seating 4. The initial prototypes had to be fitted with cones of shame http://bit.ly/1pfqADS because of a distressing tendency(to the passengers) to eat passengers because they apparently tasted better than bat kibble.

If these and other bugs (like dung falling 40,000 feet) can be worked out we might see them roosting in yards everywhere in a few years...

Russians turn Raspberry Pi into fully-fledged autopilot

Re: "one of the licensing conditions "

Yes, anyone can build a GPS, and it might be the size of a pentium motherboard, or bigger.

The developers of the modern chips in the USA were told to incorporate 'envelope restrictions', which would stop aspects of operation of these conditions were exceeded.

Now with drones galore, what can they do?

Some aspects in this search to round out the topic.

http://bit.ly/1tKMH2v

Boffin fights fire with EXPLOSIVES instead of water

Re: Hang on...

Yes, they used an explosive placed with a long, water spraying boom, and as the explosion broke the flame front propagating from hot metal and other debris, the water spray cooled and prevented the re-initiation of a flame front. They then moved in a capping apparatus into the oil/gas stream to cap it.

There are several capping methods, depends on what sort of pipe stub is left above ground.

One of the best is a cap with an open gate valve that can be fitted over the top joint and closes around it and it tightened and sealed so the oil/gas keeps spraying until they are satisfied, then then close the valve and watch the pressure with a gauge and close it. Above the gate valve is a fitting that can be connected to a pipe to divert the flow to storage. Pressures can be 20,000 psi or more when a well first blows, which is why sometimes thousands of feet of drill rods etc would get blown out of the hole. Sparks from this steel cascade often started the fires.

The thousands of wells capped in Iraq after the war allowed the various companies to perfect these methods. The mature fields in Iraq were a lot less than 20,000 psi, but still risky as press at the times showed.

Here are some on youtube, Red Adair in there.

http://bit.ly/1n43ywZ

and a search on Red Adair = http://bit.ly/RX5hbB one is the auction of his stuff

Apple stuns world with rare SEVEN-way split: What does that mean?

Breaking new ground, Apple announces the consolidation of all its shares into one really really big share. Former shareholders of various numbers of shares will be issued with iCloud Splinter Share Fractions (iSSF), which will only be tradeable through the App Store, which will charge a 30% transaction fee.....

How Britain could have invented the iPhone: And how the Quangocracy cocked it up

Strangulation by committee

The British way or should I say the socialist way. The organizations created by the governments are staffed by good old boys, who have achieved the ability to share brain cells, and a single one at that.

They have no staff people on the cutting edge of the technology as Fentem was. All the staffers knew nothing, their qualifications were achieved by socio-political means. That meant they lacked the ability to see and comprehend ANY SORT of technical matters.

Fentem did very well indeed - he should have emigrated to the USA where he would have been snapped up by any one of a number of companies.

However, change in the UK is needed, as it is also needed in Europe who also suffer from this same political strangulation. Politicians can not and never will be able to recognize this and the UK way of control and funding is broke and needs to be replaced. Even now the same old crap is killing british science as the funds are now wasted and diverted too political warm bodies who know and do nothing (that same shared brain cell idea - how smart can they be.

The USA meddles less in companies and taxes less, so money for projects is easier to make, and people also have a culture of taking investment flyers on NEWCOs, while the British monied classes want to clip coupons.

How to change this - Guy Fawkes had the right idea, but his execution failed.

We need the ability to create a government body that can detect good ideas and toss away crooked schemes. Will it happen in the UK? Will this type of loss be repeated ad nauseum? Hard to say, but we need to get rid of all labor politicians and get some sort of technocracy going

Xerox admits there's no fix yet for number-fudging copiers

Xerox is not alone in this error. I have a brother printer scanner that creates errors when scanning documents to a PDF file. When I view that file or print it, things are changed.

RAF graduates first class of new groundbased 'pilots'

SInce they are on the ground, why not booted wing emblems - fair is fair.

US taxman joins UK politicoes on hunt for Amazon cash

Big Pharma has done this for decades

In their production formula for many items there were ingredients used in the USA or UK that were very costly, that on analysis turned out to be simple cheap compounds. These purchases allowed them to export those $$ to their offshore subsidiary as they imported that ingredient to make their pills. Some of these ingredients turned out to be simple salt, with a few dollars per ton that were invoiced as a precious ingredient at thousands of dollars per gram, which inflated the cost of the pills it went in to.

All companies with offshore subsidiaries need to be watched for this behavior or the profits in the USA/UK will completely vanish and the offshore subs do very well indeed.

Audit methods with teeth and assay and inspection rights are needed so that this profit exporting is discovered and denied.

Sorority girls gone wild: '1 to 3' casual sex 'hookups' every month

Well used women are not often well married

The women who act this way may find no long term mates. We are genetically programmed to want to control the father of the offspring, and thus may not want to marry a woman who is likely to mate outside the marriage and leave me to raise the child of another man - thus extinguishing my genetic code for that pregnancy

What a clockup! Apple's Swiss clock knock-off clocks up $21m fine

Price Increase

I think a 1% increase on Apple prices to their Swiss distributor will look after this and then keep on enriching Apple.

Make it so.

Did hackers uncover Petraeus' saucy affair webmails before FBI?

using webmail for semi secret communications

Open a hotmail or g-mail account. meet and share the PW with your partner, make it strong.

Party one - Create a message - do not send, save as draft.

Party two - logon, read draft, amend and save draft as the reply

Party one - logon and repeat

Thus message and reply and transferred, the over writing of the draft provides erasure, and the strong encryption of hotmail and gmail to their server are used. Your message is never sent in the clear.

The woman was a total bonehead to send harassing e-mails, and the pair were not smart to have a too short PW that could be brute forced. - - - - - unless this is all about book promotion??

Chinese e-tailer to build 1,000 empty stores

?? Surely this can all be done from home via the web? Unless there is a large segment with phones and no internet? Might have the brains of a March Hare - Hare Brained??

Americans stand against UN internet-tax plan

Re: Indoctrinated

""As a percentage of salary I pay no more for the best health insurance here in the states than you do for NI.""

Rubbish also, your employer also pays, and often more than the employee.

""No hospital is allowed to discharge patients - no matter their financial condition - if doing so would endanger their life.""

True, but in a narrow sense, indigents get few transplants or new hip/knee joints

""No major population area is without a hospital designated as caring for the indigent."", also true, but if you look at the death rate of these near-bankrupt hospitals you wonder if they are hospitals or hospices.

""Under the recent health care legislation, no insurance company is allowed to terminate coverage because of previous health history or refuse it because of pre-existing conditions.""

AHH, welcome to the death of 1000 cuts, as you try to find a number wherein payment follows in the

huge book of treatment codes.

You speak like a former UK resident??

That said, the USA pays a huge cost for their BAD HEALTH CARE SYSTEM. True, they also have the best of treatments, but only for the rich or covered. Those not covered die 8-10 years earlier than the rich and covered. The rich and covered live as long as Canadians, but not as long as Japanese. Those not covered drag the entire USA age at death stats far down.

As another said, the insurance companies, lawyers, and doctors waste about 40-50% of the US health $$. Eliminate that wasted $$ = a solution.

I am in Canada, and the system works, elective procedures are last in line, critical work is at the front of the line. That said, the Canadian system is riddled with union feather beds - sweepers at $28/hour plus $12 in benefits for example.

UK music-rights collection: Where does all the money go?

What a stinking racket - run for the managers alone, with precious little for the musicians.

They have missed a bet. Broadcast music passes through us all - unless we live it a shielded box, to be rigorous, we should all pay the fee, and those who live in shielded boxes can apply for a remission.http://www.theregister.co.uk/Design/graphics/icons/comment/trollface_32.png

Don't laugh, once they see it here, they will see what a good idea it is. Scotty - raise the shields...

Grab your L-plates, flying cars of sci-fi dreams have landed

I remember old pulp Science Fiction mags of the 40's and 50's with a blizzard of personal flying machines. It never happened, and it never will - unless we master gravity and planes can start and stop in the air like cars on a road. Forget helicopters, a dense mass of those would interfere with each others paths via the downwards prop wash. With no ability to deal with high density traffic, the same way we can with cars and roads. I recall seeing one of the star wars movies with a very high density of aerial traffic in "highways" in the air that criss-crossed in various directions and heights, and craft broke free and landed under automatic control.

So we may be able to make cars that fly - hybrids, can we make boat-planes? we have boat-cars, but very few are sold. How about a car-boat-rocket-plane - made in Taiwan.

Squirrelled away: seeds survive 30,000-year winter

Re: Re: a huge dose of radiation

With seeds frozen, there is zero DNA repair active, so the damage does accumulate - unless seeds have evolved to be tolerant? So if they are able to clone plants from a viable cell, it will have tolerated that accumulated dose. It will be interesting to see how the descendants of this plant flourish. There are a number of extinct plants that might be cultured via this method. I think this is very important news.

Apple antagonist Proview unveils its own iPad

All Apple needs to do is announce that they are returning the fabrication of the i**** to the USA. At which time Proview will get savagely oppressed