Posts by IDoNotThinkSo 158 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jul 2011
Maybe, but this is a UK website.
You could go up to the Jungfraujoch on a train if you want steep cog railways, to a height of 3454m, but we aren't in Switzerland either.
The weather in the Cairngorms is Oceanic rather than Continental, so the temperatures are slightly less extreme than in the US. I suspect there are actually more days of terrible weather in the Cairngorms than on Mount Washington, and they are spread throughout the year.
I don't think a few mph of windspeed either way makes much difference if you are out in it (although the anemometer on the railway actually measured 194mph in 2009).
Two climbers died on Cairngorm at a height of only 2400ft or so on a main path because they were unable to make the last few hundred yards to the car park into a wind-storm. Due to the oceanic nature of the environment, snow is often thawed and then refrozen into ice, which makes finding shelter extremely difficult.
Anyway, the expensive train set on Cairngorm is a bit of a white elephant, but an amusing one. I would normally walk up, though.
I'm guessing the point was that, yes, a human pilot can make a split second decision to land on the Hudson and pull that off, but a human pilot can also decide to press on without enough contingency fuel and crash into a mountainside. Or just decide to crash into a mountainside for the hell of it.
So just because an autopilot can't land on the Hudson (if that's even true) doesn't mean that it wouldn't be better overall.
This isn't going to work that well (other than as a first pass) as many flowers are very similar, and a large number of plants require you to look at more than the flower to separate them.
Portable DNA sequencing is the future, and it will probably reveal all sorts of interesting data about plant sub-species and population relationships.
You can already mow a meadow, whizz up the cuttings, and identify all the plants from the juice. Great Crested Newt surveys can already be done by taking a water sample and sending it off to check for environmental newt DNA instead of (much more expensive) trapping and night-time searches.
It surely won't be that long before your smartphone (or a similar sized machine) will able to do sequencing in the field.
There are plenty of better options if you really wanted something like this for nefarious use. 550g is quite a low payload as far as some UAVs / multicopters / model aircraft go.
However, the most recent incidents seem to involve people with no regard for their own safety, so why go to all that trouble?
Besides, almost everything can be used for ill. You can deliver a lot more than 550g with a car or a truck (ask the IRA) but we haven't banned them yet. Mobile phones make excellent triggers but we haven't banned those either.
I'm more interested in doing useful things with new technology than worrying about what anyone else might do with it.
The problem with pork is a parasite, Taenia solium:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taenia_solium
Best avoided if you can't cook it properly and/or the farming environment isn't controlled.
This is the main reason for several religions banning it. Probably sensible at the time...
It is definitely inclined at some angle. Possibly as much as 30 degrees.
You can see one of the antennas resting on the surface in the bottom right of the image.
Perhaps it bounced along until it hit a rock?
Worry is that the solar panels won't get enough power. Maybe they'll try and bounce it again with the harpoons, the drill, or the flywheel after they've done some science.
For software, I'm suprised the article doesn't mention ArduPilot (and developments thereof) given LOHAN.
I put together a hexacopter from various chinese bits and pieces for less than £200, loaded up Ardupilot, and now have a fully autonomous (automatic take off and landing) UAV.
I generally use it to take panoramic photographs by allowing it to take off straight up, hover at 50m or 100m, point at 8 compass points for 15 seconds each, and then land. I use a compact camera on auto (using CHDK). Works pretty well.
More complex flight patterns work fine but the simpler they are the easier it is to avoid flyaways.
This one can also be pre-programmed without carrying a laptop into the field.
No licence yet though - volunteering 'for amusement only'. I do adhere to the flight rules - insurance won't cover stupidity.
**much soldering and manual reading required**
A crisis caused by your competitors would come and suddenly etc
FTFY
In such circumstances you'd have to find somewhere else for the money, whence you end up down the investment or commercial bank road, or charge customers.
Alternatively, some of your shareholders might get a bit greedy and decide they want to do something else with the depositors money, so that they can get better returns.
Nice idea in theory though.
Most vegetables are trying to kill pests in one way or another, so they all contain various poisons. OK, we've bred some down to lower levels, but they are still there.
So when you eat your super-organic broccoli, you are consuming a cocktail of nasties, organic or not.
Anyway, sometimes those pesticides are good.
**Reaches for cup of tea**
The environmental benefits aren't entirely clear either. It may well be better for the local environment to produce organically, but if the productivity is lower, it means we have to have more land in agriculture. Which is better - less land farmed, or more land farmed at a lower intensity? Not that simple.
I get the same - funnily enough, it is also someone in Florida, who I managed to track down to an actual address based on the email content.
Unfortunately I can't find their real email address, which they obviously have a habit of getting wrong.
The dot has no meaning in Gmail.
"Very tiny" according to Ms Hodge. I'm not sure I'd call a couple of million shares 'tiny' if they are worth over £1m. That's just those in her name, as opposed to trust funds.
She may have no say in how the company is run, but she could always give away the shares if she doesn't want to benefit.
Anyway, the Islington children's care business was far worse.
Not just you.
Hodge and her family own a multimillion pound business called Stemcor (founded by her father) that indulges in just the same kind of tax avoidance that she criticises ("Transfer Pricing"). I believe her personal share is worth well north of £1m, although a lot more than that is held in trust funds (wonder why).
There isn't anything illegal about any of this, it is just a bit hypocritical when she goes off on one.
A golf club, like any 'club' anywhere, no matter what the premise for it, is a place to avoid.
A golf course is something different (and some manicured US style horror is not a golf course).
I'd like to seem them use that thing on the dunes of a links course in a good westerly.
Come for a jaunt round Machrihanish if you don't think it can be good exercise.
It isn't infallible - our local area has tree loss in an arable field which has always been an arable field, so perhaps a change in crop has fooled the algorithm.
It doesn't seem to have coped very well with the moorland vegetation in the UK, either.
However, as a broad brush to spot the major problems - pretty good!
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