Posts by rh587 692 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Mar 2011
"To those en route, Microsoft explains how “some goods are banned completely” and cannot be brought into the country. That list includes narcotics, firearms, stun guns, obscene material and - yes - dead animals."
How queer, getting a foreign visitor's permit to bring firearms into the country is really quite straightforward. Of course the range of firearms you can have over here is limited somewhat (especially by American standards), but they're definitely not banned completely!
"Then this is the way to go. New content on Netflix at release. If you have to wait, people will pirate it and will probably never pay for it (despite claiming otherwise)."
Absolutely. BBC America's broadcast partners couldn't work out why the Dr Who Christmas Special got such low ratings given the overall popularity of the brand. The realisation was that the stupid idiots (for reasons best known to themselves) were broadcasting it on Boxing Day. After Christmas Dinner, hardcore American fans would go and find a torrent that had popped up from the UK broadcast a couple of hours previous, and they'd be able to sit down by 6pm US time and watch the Special.
Now they just find space in the schedules for Christmas Day. No one needs to download it because it's on when they actually want to watch it.
Similarly HBO got bitten on the ass by not providing any semblance of a legal route for Game of Thrones fans outside the US. No DVDs, Blu-Ray, Lovefilm, NetFlix. Nadda. So everyone pirates it. This is 2013 after all. They seem to learning from their mistakes though, lets hope more big media follow suit.
Piracy is wrong, but this is 2013, and big media need to get with the decade and realise if they dick about releasing a show months ahead in one region, or not making it available through legal channels in a prompt fashion then it WILL be pirated. Being impatient isn't a good reason for infringing copyright, but in the real world, it happens. In 1993 with the new-fangled intarwebz one could have some sympathy for them being caught out by new tech. But we're now in 2013. They've had 20 years to adapt their business model. No sympathy at all. Especially when big media are rampant infringers themselves. Even on their own patronising anti-piracy films!
The general consensus is anything that was cut off on Blighty when sea levels rose after the last ice age and the Channel flooded is considered native - at the time there was little to no "native" ecosystem as most of the country was covered in half a mile of ice, obliterating previous habitats. That was 10k years ago.
By contrast, american deer species were introduced just 100-200 years ago, at the same time as the other top predator species were being wiped out within these fair shores. So yes, they are non-native.
Species very rarely just move between continents of their own accord (well, Europe/Asia yes because it's land. To America, not so much). Typically if an animal can get from one landmass to another, so can their predators. Part of the ecosystem moves with them. There are exceptions, but not many.
For instance, during the ice age, a lot of areas that are now sea became land. Man walked up from Africa, along with deer, other animals - and wolves.
Subsequently some of them were cut off when the channel flooded - a cross section of a functional ecosystem.
Conversely when we brought deer from America, we did not bring any wild cats or wolves along for the ride.
That's for the abbatoir vets and meat examiners to check.
It's not rocket science - they have to check farm animals as well and reject those with parasites or other defects. When you see rabbit or wood pigeon on the menu in one of the better gastro-pubs with a chef who knows their game meat, that came from a local hunter, via a licensed game dealer (a different qualification from being a regular butcher) who is trained to spot unfit meat.
Even "farmed" deer live their life out in the countryside, susceptible to ticks and disease.
"Why would you ever put them on a publically accessed net? Aren't there personnel on station to adjust the settings? Like 24/7 at a power plant?
Is he making a problem so he can sell us the solution?"
Aircon is one example, but there are plenty of things that require outside connections - monitored alarms for instance. One could well envisage a scenario where neer do wells could cause chaos by tripping every monitored alarm in London. The monitoring firm (who would normally call the Police or their Security patrols) wouldn't know where to send Police or Security, and the noise pollution could cause substantial public concern or panic. Conversely it's conceivable that an alarm could be nullified with a man-in-the-middle attack or simply by being hacked into, allowing burglars access to a lucrative target at their leisure in the safe knowledge they won't be disturbed because the monitoring centre won't be getting any calls from the alarm box. Same could apply to remote access CCTV on campus sites and inserting a false video stream (21st century equivalent to putting a photo in front of the camera!).
Of course controlling your heating and lighting from your phone to "save energy" is pointless in a domestic scale. In larger buildings it might be a serious cost saving. One that would be offset by having staff wandering around turning them up/down in the evening and morning - far more efficient to monitor from a central location, which can also spot anomalous behaviour and call a service tech, ideally before the office gets to sweltering point and someone takes the time to put in a call.
"For real authenticity these monitors would need to be capable of parallactic 3D (not the simple stereoscopic pseudo-3D of today's TVs) so if you move your head to see around a nearby tree, for example, what's behind the tree comes into view. And that technology is quite a long way off yet"
Some of the 3D Virtual Caves are doing some pretty incredible stuff already. Of course you usually have to wear 3D glasses with ping pong balls hanging off so the computer knows where you are in the room, but parallactics are sort of around in some implementations. Think about it, in an FPS the game is giving you a parallactic image, with elements of the scene appearing or disappearing as you move around the map, and that's just regular gaming hardware. Okay, doing that in 3D is more complicated, and at a resolution that's going to fool the eye on close inspection (4K+), but with the bank of servers you would run a virtual cave off of, that processing power is there. To a point.
Of course in a "holodeck" you're looking for massive and seamless immersive worlds without sitting and waiting for the next level to load! Not just short demonstration rooms to walk around in.
With omni-directional treadmills on a gimble you can even run or walk in all directions, and go uphill/downhill etc. Of course the other tactile bits (like walking on gravel or a beach rather than a treadmill) just aren't possible without some sort of forcefield technology that can form a tactile surface. And THAT is a long way off!
Fooling the eye isn't all that hard. It's all the other stuff that provided the true "holodeck experience"
"Or pay a nominal sum of money to obtain commercial software that already has these features, along with support?"
£600 / license is a nominal sum?
I'll grant there are much, much, much more expensive software packages out there, but I'd not deem it "nominal".
That's 50-100% more than most people's computers cost in the first place! For a young design grad on £25k/yr (generous), that's 2.4% of their salary. As an SME employer, that's quite a bit to spend on them, especially after you've just spent at least that much on a workstation for them (or more likely, bought a senior designer a new toy to free up an old machine for the noob), and a desk, and lighting, and electricity, and floor space in the office. So the question would be "Do they really, really, really need that to do their job, or is an Open Source offering going to enable them to do their job just as well?
If they work in print and need CMYK all day every day, right now, the answer will obviously be no. If they work in web graphics, it could quite possibly be yes. Horses for courses.
Similarly, a young design grad like that probably doesn't need an office suite at all, but if they do, it'll be for very, very basic tasks, for which LO or similar will be more than adequate for, rather than spending another £150-200 on MS Office.
The thing with open source is it's usually developed by someone to fill a very specific niche. If that niche happens to be your job, then more general proprietary tools probably won't hold a candle up to it. The interesting bit is when broader stuff like productivity suites start butting up against the proprietary alternatives.
"The UK will soon have a very large tanker fleet that could refuel a fleet of F-35B pretty much anywhere they need to go."
I see, and that tanker fleet will be able to operate off the carriers in support of F35B operations in, say, the South Atlantic?
If we were talking about RAF F-35Bs then you might have a point. But we're talking about naval deployments. The carriers can't carry any sort of refuelling aircraft because they have no cats and traps. Which means you're stuck with the standard range of an F-35B unless the Americans let us fuel off their naval tankers (except we'll be using incompatible drogue-and-probes no doubt) or you're within range of a friendly ground base anyway where you can operate FSTA/Voyager. In which case why are you piddling around with expensive carrier ops anyway when you could just fly the RAF into said friendly airbase?
The only thing that I agree with is that F-35C doesn't make sense either.
You're building huge mid-heavy carriers, which you would only pay for if you wanted to run CATOBAR ops from. And then you're not only fielding jump jet fighters (which only need a helicopter carrier like HMS Ocean), but not fitting cats and traps for ancillary aircraft such as transports and AWACs. Which begs the question why we're not building a couple of HMS Ocean variants with ski jumps. That's all we need!
(expensive) F-35B with (cheap) light ski-jump carriers
OR
(expensive) F-35C / (cheap) F-18E/F with (expensive) CATOBAR mid-heavy carriers.
Building an expensive heavy (yet crippled) carrier for expensive jump jets is plain retarded.
Oh also, spares are cheap and readily available and our pilots already know how to fly F-18s as the RNAS are flying the American's to keep their fixed-wing skill set in order until whichever year in the 2020s is deemed by the almighty at BAE an appropriate moment to actually deliver the F-35 (for a small delivery fee of course).
Flyaway cost of an F-35B is $250m. So we won't actually be able to buy enough to field a full unit on the carriers.
Flyway cost of an F-18E/F Super Hornet (a far cry from the original F-18 Hornet) is $25m.
So for 50% the total outlay, we can have 5 times as many aircraft, which gives us full complements onboard, and oodles of airframes at home for training, so pilots are not squabbling over airframes for flying hours.
That leaves us several £bn of change to spend on Hawkeye/AWACs, light transport aircraft (with longer range and greater capacity) than whirlybirds, etc, etc, none of which will be usable on a non-Cats and Traps carrier. Which means we needn't have built big ones in the first place, and could just have had some new short carriers like our old ones.
At the end of the day, all likely future deployments involve humanitarian work, or beating up nations that won't shoot back (much). F18 is more than up to the task for the latter, and helicopters and STOL light-cargo aircraft (i.e. carrier aircraft!) are ideal for the former. Unless our masters are predicting a Pacific War against China, having the latest greatest jump-jet stealth plane that costs 10x as much and sacrifices payload, range and patrol time in return for stealth is pointless.
And the business is niche. Lets say Qualcomm are building a SoC and need a core. They license one of ARM's designs because they know it works and it saves them doing it themselves.
Lets say their total licence and royalty payment to ARM for that chip's fabrication run ends up at £1 per chip.
Well, Qualcomm also have to design the rest of the SoC that the ARM core is mounted on. Let's say that's £2. They might have to do some integration work for it's final application, another £1. Then they have to go and build a fabrication facility to make the chip and ship it, another £1.
Total chip cost = £5. Let's say they stuff an extra 50p or £1 on in profit for themselves. So Qualcomm's revenue per chip will on paper be 5.5x - 6x that of ARM's, but they have a shedload of extra expenses, and couldn't just pour the profit into R&D on their own range of cores, because they also have to do R&D on the fabrication processes, broader system design, etc. In my example above Qualcomm are making maybe 9-16% profit on each chip sold.
ARM by contrast (assuming this is a well-worn chip design that has passed the break-even point) are pocketing their £1 as pure profit that they can plough into their next gen product. And if someone comes along wanting to use that design, they can just roll out the plans at little to no cost (beyond lawyers fees to sort out the contract). A huge % of their revenue is profit.
If someone wants Qualcomm to make that SoC again, they have to go and physically make another one, with a 9-16% return on investment.
*Disclaimer, I have absolutely no idea what ARM's per-chip royalties look like, nor what the ratio in terms of ARM licensing cost compared to the other elements like SoC design/integration or fabrication run up to. My 1:2:1:1 ratio is plucked from thin air to make a point about why ARM generate far less revenue than the people who use their designs but are nevertheless wildly successful.
Errr, businesses have and do employ ex-cons and talented fraudsters to help secure their operations. You wouldn't hire a bank robber as a cashier, but you might hire one to consult on laying out a bank to make a robber's job harder and to help train the cashiers how to deal with robberies.
The most publicised example of a black hat going white would be Frank Abagnale consulting on secure documents and check fraud, but he led the FBI a merry dance for years and earned a reputation as a forger par excellence. He's not just a kid who managed to fire an SQL injection in some software whilst he was developing an app for it...
True, but students usually need to buy their own textbooks. Spunking AU$4-6m on ipads when (in my experience), most university IT rooms are over-crowded and under-equipped with a dearth of basics like working printers seems like an horrific waste of money. You could lay out a series of superb IT rooms for that money.
Also, the joys of digital distribution means students are now required to buy textbooks "new", depriving them of the time honoured tradition of buying second hand from older students and flogging them on to the next generation (most academic textbooks are not updated on an annual basis and good for a few years).
Of course I suppose one can argue that with no print costs, and increased revenue from everyone having to buy new, the per-download cost of textbooks will fall, and authors can issue updates on an annual basis (or indeed with whatever regularity they like) without the publisher having to do another print run.
In other news, kangaroos might fly, probably on the private tropical island now inhabited by academic book authors who have seen digital sales go through the roof...
"900 Gunshot deaths"
What a meaningless term. it makes no distinction between deaths at the barrel of legally held firearms, illegally held firearms, or indeed suicides (in 2010, 66% of all firearm-related deaths in the US were suicides - banning all guns wouldn't change that, you'd just see the distribution of methods move to a more British environment where hanging, poisoning, drowning and jumping off high things become more popular).
- If you want to reduce homicides committed with legally owned firearms, then legislation might help - extra checks for depression, etc.
- If you want to reduce homicides committed with illegal firearms, legislation won't do squat - they're already breaking the law by just possessing them. That becomes the remit of law enforcement - Operation Trident type territory for guns & gangs units.
- If you want to reduce suicides by firearm (the most common type of death-by-firearm in the US), then you need to invest in mental health care. The two largest mental health treatment centres in the US are in prisons. If you're not wealthy, the only sensible way to get mental treatment is to get charged or convicted and referred to a criminal health centre. Which is rather shutting the door after the horse has bolted. You could add more checks for depression during firearm purchase, but people would just turn to other methods - as they did in Australia when they tried it. They went after the guns, not the root causes of why people were contemplating suicide in the first place.
Just saying "guns shot deaths - stop demz!" is an impossibility. It's a very varied issue, some cases involving criminality, some none at all. If Obama is going to go after it with legislation he's going to ignore two of the 3 major causes of firearm deaths (suicide and criminals) all for the sake of going after legal users and sayiong "we banned the bad gunz. vote fer us".
Yes, yes you do want to leave him with a limp.
A live prisoner is a burden on his colleagues who then need to medivac him out.
Or alternatively can be taken as POW and questioned, potentially providing a source of humint if you can entice him to volunteer more than the personal details the Geneva Convention requires.
War is about wounding, not killing (unless you absolutely have to). Once he ceases to be a threat, your job is done, and "being alive" does not necessarily constitute a threat.
Plus, as others have more than adequately mentioned, getting shot hurts. You may be able to carry on running in CoD, taking 4/5 shots to die from a "wimpy" 9mm, but in real life your average solider will be rolling around on the floor shouting "ow fuckity ow. You shot me!" whilst painting the decor a damp shade of claret.
We had a big Dyson fan in the office to replace a tower fan in the corner. Went back after one day. They work, but to get any sensible airflow you have to wind them up, at which point the tiny fan in the base takes on the acoustic characteristics of a small jet engine. We got another generic, conventional fan for 25% the price of the dyson which was capable scattering papers across the office with narry a whisper.
The desktop versions might work better, but all in all a nice idea badly implemented, just like most of his other ideas.
I refer the good commentard to the voyages of Christopher Columbus, and later to the Challenger Expedition - the first dedicated Oceanographic Voyage aimed purely at surveying the oceans and collecting scientific samples (as opposed to moar gold). The sailors of the Columbus expeditions were literally sailing into the unknown, and although the Challenger crew had an idea where they were going, they were exploring the unknown - for 4 years. Humanity is full of explorers, and now we've mapped our own planet pretty well, we're doing two things - going to the deeps that we haven't mapped (c.f. Branson and Cameron's missions to the Marianas Trench), and travelling off the surface of this rock we inhabit.
There are thousands of geologists, astrobiologists, and the like who would bite your hand off for the chance to spend 6 months experimenting on the surface of Mars. The 3 year round trip is less than an Olympic cycle - and thousands of people put their lives and careers on hold for those sorts of periods to train for their discipline (I'm talking about the amateur/semi-pro athletes who make huge personal sacrifices to pursue their passion, not the fully funded types who have made a career of sport and don't need to worry about paying the rent, although once upon a time they were semi-pro too).
Who wouldn't want to be the next Neil Armstrong?
Also yes, even non-Martian astronauts train for years before they fly. Britain's sole astronaut won't get a seat until 2018/19 at the earliest, but he's training now, and has been for a couple of years, and that's just for ISS missions, which is only 250miles over your head.
Yup, cities cause their own flash floods. In nature, rain hits soil and soaks in, moving as groundwater at speeds of the order of linguni/day (or hits tree leaves/vegetation and evaporates, or drips down to the ground sometime later, thus being slowed further before it reaches a water course). In cities, it flows into storm sewers and is piped out at metres a second, usually into a river, causing a very rapid and very sharp peak in river levels shortly after the rain starts falling.
Rather than having to build huge storm sewer networks, many areas just require that new houses are now built with soakaways buried in the garden for draining roof run-off, rather than draining into a municipal storm drain. Similarly, car parks are increasingly built with buffering tanks or large soakaways fed by the drains from the car park, so water soaks away locally instead of into a sewer where it then needs to be taken somewhere and got rid of.
In some areas planning regs - whilst encouraging development of off-road parking to reduce street congestion (such as turning a front garden into a parking space), mandate that such conversions use gravel, not an impermeable surface. Again, preventing that run-off becoming a burden on the drainage network.
Water management is a massive part of any modern building or civil engineering project, especially if you're paving a large impermeable area (like a car park). Consider a small one acre car park. Half an inch of rain (0.0127m), over an acre (~63mx63m) is more than 50 tonnes of water (~0.02 Olympic swimming pools). Most retail parks are much larger than that, and in the UK, we get a lot more rain. Tis a lot of water to get rid of.
The "korean laser" was a orbital mirror reflecting and focussing sunlight, not a laser.
Of course that has it's own set of impracticalities, but you avoid the problems of sourcing a suitable power source, engineering for heat dissipation, etc that plagued Blofeld's diamond laser.
"I do however have a considerable problem with snide gits representing the company concerned saying things like "And for those who are still are stuck in the past" by way of brushing off questions about that design decision."
Here here. These are desktops - they can afford to be a little more bulky than their portable notebook counterparts. Especially one which is built into a 27" monitor - that's a lot of body, even if it is uber-thin. It's a 27" desktop - it's not going anywhere, it can weigh as much as you like - makes it less nickable if anyone breaks in!
Aesthetically, I actually don't like the new thin profile so much as the Mid-2010 Generation iMacs (one of which I'm typing on), and it's not like you can actually tell the difference when you're sat in front of it...
Worse, from a pragmatic and usability viewpoint, given Apple have high penetration in the creative industries (one of the few industries they have any penetration in whatsoever), the inability to either rip media from a CD or DVD or indeed say, burn the media you've generated for a client to a DVD (so they can actually play it without buying a smart TV with USB port or fiddle with the right dongle to make it talk to their laptop) seems more than a little perverse.
Yes yes, I know, everyone has ipods or smartphones or unholy non-Apple MP3 players, but when you've been in the meeting rooms of Fortune 100 companies and their A/V provision is a steam-driven 25" CRT monitor with the world's first DVD player, having a shiny macbook with a slew of adaptors to DVI/VGA/HDMI is less than helpful. You actually need a spare copy on old optical media sometimes!
Mine's the one with pockets full of legacy hardware formats.
Working for an online publisher, we are bemused by the non-availability of anything better than 4Mbps in most of Stoke on Trent. A couple of exchanges are slated for FTTC in the dim and distant future, but many areas including new business parks still aren't. Same goes for Rugeley - presumably the Amazon Depot has it's own arrangement.
It's made all the more galling when you find exchanges such as Worplesdon and Brookwood - small villages in rural Surrey - or indeed Alsager - a little collection of houses north of Stoke have inexplicably had FTTC for ages. If the government are serious about encouraging business anywhere other than London, then they could do with leaning on BT to give the rural South-East a rest and deal with a few towns and cities north of the M4. The irony is we can get faster 3G speeds than we can get wired!
"Seriously, if you need a 30% tax break to write profitable video games (an unnecessary luxury, by any standard), then maybe you shouldn't BE writing video games."
I read part of the argument as being that modern games do not fit with a classic Development-Release cycle that most products follow. If I'm JCB, I spend money developing an excavator, then I spend money to build it before selling it and paying the taxman a proportion of my profit after deducting both my manufacturing and development costs.
In modern gaming, free additional content packs and such are a business expense and as such should arguably be counted pre-tax. However, they can't because of the >1yr nature of their release.
For instance I buy a game for £40. It cost £25 to develop and distribute, so the developer is taxed on their £15 profit. A year later, they release (for free) additional content worth £5.
Had that content been available and bundled with the game at release time, they would have made only £10 profit and only paid tax on that £10.
As it is, they've paid tax for £15 despite only making £10 on that game. Of course, one can argue that that is simply an expense of attracting users to stick with their product, which is true, but then it's not a luxury - it's expected of developers and people abandon products which are perceived as stingy and do not offer "added value" down the line. That means we put ourselves at a disadvantage since everyone else seems to be offering tax breaks, which would be a shame as we have some stonking good studios who have produced some of gaming's greatest franchises.
(I have deliberately left patches and updates out as that's the equivalent of a recall and the manufacturer obviously should be absorbing that cost, just as Toyota do, on a regular basis...).
Quite. Valve let you do this on the Steam platform - you're entirely at liberty to gift games to other users. You can't play any more but your friend can. Of course if Steam goes bump then no one can play (unless they released patches to allow all software to run without calling home and authenticating), but they are at least addressing the matter of ownership, and the fact I can gift a physical disk to someone, so why not a license?
They did. All the shooting events are going on as normal. Foreign rifle shooters and shotgunners just had to get temporary permits whilst their UK counterparts already held those guns on Firearm and Shotgun Certificates. The only ones that caused a bit of paperwork were the cartridge pistols for Sport Pistol, Rapid Fire Pistol and 50metre Pistol which have to come directly form the Home Office (FACs/SGCs are issued by your local Police Force).
The pistols needed section 5 permits from the Home Office for the duration of the Games, but all the other airguns are legal here, as are the firearms (with the right licence).
The move to laser guns was a move by the World Pentathlon Association for reasons best known to themselves. Nothing to do with UK laws (we allow air pistols anyway). Their claim was it would be easier and safer to run events with laser pistols, but since 10m air ranges are not hard to set up, and I know of no major safety incidents or injuries on one, that was a fairly poor excuse.
All it did was hack off a lot of Pentathletes who had to go and spend moolah on laser pistols (and couldn't part ex on their air pistols because they still need those for local and national comps until all the relevant national governing bodies catch up and buy the targetry needed).
There's no recoil to speak of with the air pistols either. But you did at least have to have a decent technique as you still had a small but significant lock time and barrel time.
Unless they have built in a delay, the shot will be basically instantaneous, which makes the whole affair trivially easy.
There's been a lot of grumbling as it impacts the grassroots rather deeply - most local competitions can't afford electronic targetry, and would prefer to use good old falling plates with air pistols, which leads to a split between grassroots and national level competition, and those on the boundaries needing two pistols, which will have slightly different weights, balances, and react differently.
Also, on the lead front, it's not hard. Lay down matting in front of the targets (which will also have a hard backstop) and sweep up afterwards. It's only 10m air pistol, not shotgun or 1000yd rifle - very easy to contain the lead.
Have you any idea how much time and expense goes into collecting an ice core? Especially in Antarctica you are constrained by time, the short summer, funding, as well as the capacity of the refrigerated lockers in the transport to bring those cores back to somewhere with the lab facilities to properly analyse them. 5 or 10 cores is a very decent sample provided they're taken from a stable site where the ice has built up consistently and not melted/re-frozen or been otherwise contaminated or compromised. To get the deep cores you can be drilling for quite some time to go back a few thousand years. Given the expense of getting to Antarctica, driving or flying a drill rig to the selected site, camping and being supported at that site, and then getting the cores back uncompromised, they tend to be at a bit of a premium.
Also bear in mind this is refining work that was probably done using different ice cores, so the total ice cores used in the overall development of this paper will be higher.
The selection process was probably "the ones that were available". One can't be picky when you're looking at data sources of this value and rarity.
As an oceanography student my dissertation on currents in a bit of the English Channel started off by describing the experiment that I'd like to do, and then went on to describe the buoys I would actually be getting data off and their limitations for the task at hand. Obviously most BSc students do not have a 7-figure budget with to go and deploy their own monitoring array for their dissertation, although I did get to play with someone else's non-ideal 7-figure array.
And not only do they want him really really bad, but it's on suspicion of a complaint which was dropped by the Swedish Public Prosecutors and only reared it's ugly ugly head the week after Cablegate broke and Assange officially became persona non gratia in the States.
Of course I'm not suggesting the Yanks did anything so underhand as to lean on the Swedes to reinstate the charges and at the very least smear his reputation, if not get him locked up, but other suspicious types have have been known to mutter suggestions to such an effect...
@bamalam
"Note that 75% of launch vehicles have had a failure in their first three launches while the Falcon 9 has been an unqualified success."
Although to be fair they lost 3/3 Falcon 1 vehicles. However, having learnt how to launch a rocket without shunting stages into each other they've done very well with Falcon 9.
Unfortunately the new sign, loyalty cards and revamped interior/murals that they had done a couple of years after the LOTR films rather rule out any sort of "coincidental" similarity. They should have left the murals up to the artist's interpretation and used more a more "traditional" aesthetic rather than trying to pay homage to the films.
@AC 11:00
On this occasion, I'd side with Lewis. This isn't about American/European - Lewis is roundly slapping ULA as well as the ESA. If the Americans had a capsule he'd probably be criticising that as well.
ATV cost close to $1.8bn to develop and it's neither human-rated not does it even have to survive re-entry.
Per-capsule cost is $400m a pop.
For <$1bn, SpaceX have a man-rated re-entry capable capsule AND a man-rated rocket.
It is not ATV's fault that it cannot re-enter or fly manned - it's not designed to and that is not a problem. It does what it needs to do well. But re-entry and life support are two of the more complex and difficult things to get right. The fact that ATV cost $1.8bn when it doesn't have life support nor does it have to handle the complexities of re-entry is a travesty that the established space industry needs to get a grip on if they expect to compete with SpaceX.
ATV is a pressure vessel with guidance systems, docking ring and maneuvering thrusters.
Dragon is that plus life support and heat shield, but for half the price...
Where did the spare billion go?
Filling a minister's inbox with thousands of identical pro-forma e-mails is a waste of his/her time. That is to say - a waste of your taxes.
If you have something original to say, compose an e-mail detailing your thoughts and send it in.
If you are incapable of forming structured sentences or considered arguments, then make your mark on a petition which allows said minister to read it once and say "Hmm, at least 40,000 people agree with that."
D'oh, because that's how one feels after spending hours of public-funded time wading through identical emails.
Yeah. Same here. I mean, I had a copy of Publisher, but loads of others used Powerpoint. Our tutor advised us that "CorelDraw is the industry standard".
Yeah. Right, like we have the time or inclination to go out, spend money on, and learn a totally new tool. We're students of science, not philosophy! We were all wading our way through MATLAB tutorials at the time.
There's a fine line between managing with the wrong tool and spending so long learning the proper tool that any time saving is gone.
We all got good marks - content is king, as well as bearing in mind the most important lesson - assume your readers have had a couple of glasses of wine, and pitch your posters accordingly.
I remember one of my first lectures at uni where we delved into some concept. Didn't understand a word that the (very good Researcher/not very good Lecturer) said. Then he popped up a diagram and it all dropped into place. Result :)
He used in carefully though. Photos or graphs on powerpoint, everything else verbal or worked through on the blackboard.
I use it for supporting diagrams and graphs, but make judicious use of the White-out function. Pop a graph up whilst its relevant, then blank the screen - they're supposed to be listening to me, not drifting off into space, staring at the pretty picture.
If I'm delivering a presentation, then I do need to actually deliver it. If I'm putting all the bullet points up, I might as well have just e-mailed them the script/notes and they can stay at home.
Magnus_Pym
Posted Wednesday 29th June 2011 14:09 GMT
, if they are so crap, did the Bush administration buy them? And why did the Canadians? Surely <sarcasm> Everyone knows US kit is best</sarcasm>.
They're not crap, they're great helicopters, but the problem is cost/benefit. They do a bit more than comparable aircraft (e.g. Black Hawk), and a bit better, but at a vastly increased price on account of their limited sales and production runs. They've never got as far as being "off the shelf".
Of course for Presidential choppers, cost is (almost) no issue, so the Yanks went for the best airframes money could buy. However, at this point they then loused up the retro-fit for Presidential standards. When you're getting 14-seat helicopters costing as much as an AF1-spec 747, then you've got to question your procurement and the likely ongoing running costs.
I'm with Lewis on this one. Merlins are great, but the limited benefits they offer are simply not worth the massive additional financial cost. We actually would have been better off with a bunch of cheap off-the-shelf tried and tested Black Hawks with established spare-part supply lines. They'd have cost less, given us better a/c availability and our troops in the sand pit would have more extensive lifting facility. In this case, quantity over quality.
The TB thing is a massive red herring. Maybe badgers have a role, maybe they don't.
What is odd is that they are afforded an unprecedented level of protection. If foxes are taking your lambs, you can shoot them. If rabbits reach epic populations and damage crops or strip your grazing land bare, you can cull.
If badgers tear your grassland to pieces, undermine buildings with their sets and reach nuisance population densities, you can't do anything.
The protection was brought in of course because overzealous corners of the farming community were trying to drive them to extinction with widespread culling and gassing.
We have now come too far the other way, offering the common badger a level of protection normally reserved for critically endangered species.
This isn't a blind killing activity either. If you have a shy fox that doesn't bother you, you let it alone - if you shoot it for the hell of it, neighbouring foxes will move in, and they may be less respectful of your chicken shed. Conversely if you've got an exceptionally bold animal breaking in on a regular basis and wreaking havoc, then have at it.
Badgers are the only pest species that farmers have no control over, and we must ask ourselves what justification there is for that - we can shoot foxes, deer and rabbit, but not badger?
@ Owen Carter - maybe farmers don't all have PhDs in epidemiology, but your theory that herds are mixing and matching on a daily basis is woefully misinformed. If you had any concept of the volume of paperwork that stock movements incur in 2011 you'd rethink that statement. Sheep for instance can only live on 3 farms in their lives. Once they've been sold twice, the only person their 3rd owner can sell them to is the butcher. Cattle are a bit different, but the idea they never stop moving is grossly inaccurate.
After FMD, and with the current crippling movement restrictions imposed if you get a TB reactor, most farmers are paranoid about bio-security.
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