Posts by interested*observer

Watch out, everyone, here come the Coronavirus Cops, enjoying their little slice of power way too much

Finally, a media outlet that is giving voice to the many people who have legitimate concerns about the over reach of government authorities. Who asked them to be my nanny? I have been very troubled by the Los Angeles Mayor setting up a police state fed by Soviet style informants. Anything these autocrats think is in the public (or personal) good deserves a good squashing of civil rights.

Fortunately, here in North Carolina walking dogs has not been labeled “non essential” perhaps out of fear in an election year of a flare up in the Southern tendency to rebel. In fact, I’m proud of the Southern Governors leading the way with common sense plans to get society moving again.

But it takes some courage on the part of someone or someones in the media to demand accountability for the petty dictators.

My thank you to El Reg and the author for pushing back

Flying taxis? That'll be AFTER you've launched light sabres and anti-gravity skateboards

The passengers won't be driving the bus...

While it is entirely possible to have "licensed" pilots for these proposed Uber air taxis, I'm pretty sure Uber has no intention of making that the mode of piloting. In no small part because a pilot has such an impact on available payload that even if the pilot were paid nothing, it would still be uneconomical for them to fly people around.

Clearly, the idea is to pilot either unmanned or autonomously. The former could include a remote pilot, the latter a computer that does the whole thing as part of an urban integrated transportation management system. In either case, what would be the purpose of doing an extensive background and identity check on passengers? The passengers would be more like prisoners of the vehicle until receiving a soft touchdown at their destination and allowed off. Sort of like a Disney ride or a ski lift. They won't be able to cause the taxi to fly into anything the automated system wishes not to.

There are much bigger obstacles to urban air mobility than doing unneeded background checks on people beyond what is already done (valid credit card). The biggest two are the energy density of batteries and overall economics. The former is the harder problem to solve because it may not be solvable.

Renewable energy 'simply won't work': Top Google engineers

At last! A rational discussion of the plain truth. As an electrical engineering educator familiar with electrical power production, distribution, and consumption, I always challenge the overly simplified arguments for renewables with the true scale of human energy needs. The proponents of de-industrialization insist that we can have prosperity from impossibly small sources of energy. The greatest threat to the environment by far is the creation of unnecessarily vast human misery and disintegration of society through politically limited access to energy.

Antarctic ice shelf melt 'lowest ever recorded, global warming is not eroding it'

Re: *cough*

Well said. I have participated in U.S. Department of Energy sponsored meetings and at lunch during one of them I listened to a social scientist next to me launch in to explanations designed "to save the contradicted theory." It was delivered with such approbation that, from my limited personal observations, the policy making surrounding global climate change appears increasingly justified by pseudo-science.