Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward 26130 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Dec 2009
The limit on building nuclear power plants is the application process and accompanying paperwork.
The mass of paperwork needed to build a plant is larger than the mass of the final plant, the mass of paper clips and staples in the paper work is larger than the mass of fuel it will use during it's life.
If we can reduce the cost of the steel used in the paperclips and staples we can make nuclear power profitable again !
And their SLAs guarantee that the data on this life insurance policy or land deed will be available in 99years time?
That all my data won't dissapear if the US suspects that somebody on Amazon is hosting a pirate movie?
And there is no price rise when I suddenly want to move all my data off their platform to a competitor?
We don't get mail delivery to our door anymore.
There is a bank of locking mailboxes at the end of the street and a couple of larger lockers.
If they need to deliver a parcel they put it in a locker and put the key in your mail box.
And because it's a rural area, UPS and Fedex drop stuff off at the post office who know you and give you a call when something big arrives
But unlikely, even liquid hydrogen is only 1/4 the density of petrol and i can't see how you can adsorb a material to a higher density than a bulk liquid.
ps Explosiveness of the gas isn't a big deal. It's a lot less explosive than LPG and only risky over a very small range of concentrations. A bigger problem is that keeping it under high pressure needs lots of metal and hydrogen under pressure does nasty stuff to metal, keeping it as a liquid is even worse.
The book is so amazing that the soylent green is people (spoiler!) is the LEAST shocking thing about the world he describes.
An amazing writer that produced the most shocking future SF dystopian novel, a historical series where cavemen live under intelligent dinosaurs, the first steampunk novel and a couple of the funniest parody series as well as the stainless steel rat
The big button thing works really for phones/tablets with a dozen apps.
Install visual studio on win8 and every tiny little exe gets its own button on the start page.
So you get to find all those Jet-DB resource compiler systools that you never used while you are looking for the actual IDE.
Enterprise customers had their own caching solution.
Desktop users that wanted more speed bought SSDs for the C drive
The only customers that needed a hybrid drive were laptop users with only one drive slot who needed speed AND lots of storage = a fairly niche market.
>This is actually the aim of the Single Market.
So have a single corporate tax rate across the Eu !
The single market was supposed to stop countries keeping out competitors from other countries by unfair tax and duty - shouldn't be too difficult to prevent the opposite.
What if it prevents the creation of other business that would be worth more than it cost to collect the data?
So no sat-navs or A-Z in the UK because the govt had the copyright on all the mapping data and prevented competitors. Or you had no credit card address verification because all the users of your site needed a PAF license.
Imagine if the UK charged Ordnance Survey or Postal Address File levels of fees on DNS lookups. The UK would recover the cost of running nominet - but the US would have all that internet stuff and UK business would be restricted to sending the occasional email (priced the as a first class stamp)
"Sir Bernard said: "I think I should have been prevented from going to to the Soviet Union because they obviously knew we had been used as a defence centre."
I wasn't allowed to go to a Pink Floyd concert in Berlin in 1990 - a year AFTER the wall came down, because I would lose my security clearance for a very boring project making a telescope to track satellites. And they let a top radio and radar expert go to Moscow at the height of the cold war?????
ps of course it's always possible the vetting people were unaware of the cold war and wouldn't let me go to Berlin in case I let slip the details of our plans at Waterloo.
Sorry - didn't really make my point clear. It wasn't the women that were the problem - it was the policy.
So the government will decide we need more women in IT. Universities will be "incentivized" to get more women through it's programs. The only incentive universities have is entrance requirements and pass marks, so these will be adjusted to get 50% of women passing.
Similarly the govt can't do anything to make private companies hire women, but it can insist that govt IT jobs or govt IT contracts are 50% women.
The result of this is unlikely to be a rise in the status of women in IT !
Fortunately the previous set of "Women in IT" just retired.
Working on a govt contract with an anonymous British AerospacE company was a bit surprised that more than half the programmers on a pretty technical/nerdy satellite tracking project were women, and most were 50+.
Talking to some of them the history was. They were working for Gec/Marconi/Honeywell in the late 70s/early 80s when somebody decided there needed to be more women in IT. Programming is just typing right, so they "retrained" the secretaries as programmers. Some were good, and would have been good SW engineers if they had the opportunities at the time - the others ? Well suppose you took some typists, gave them a couple of week course on Fortran 77 and then put them in a govt job where they could never be fired......
Funnily enough the only British bank that hasn't managed to piss me off for the last 20years is First Direct - ironiclly owned/part of HSBC.
ps. HSBC is even more incompetent here in the colonies. The world's favourite bank - in the same way that Malaria is the world's favourite parasite.
Was always an economic one - it said that they most cost effective way of making devices was to put more on a wafer. In the good times it was basically the same cost to build each new fab at a smaller rule size. The problem with going to 22nm has been that it now costs more than 2x as much to put 2x as many devices on the wafer - so you are, at the moment, cheaper sticking to 28nm.
It's worth noting that while these games may be appropriate to the mean streets of LA - they do not represent Australia's unique cultural heritage. It's time for the undoubted talent of Oz's own programmers to shine through
If they launched Abo-killer where your task was to wipe out the native population - you could use it schools to get kids interested in history.
