Posts by Graham Dawson 2678 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Mar 2007
Not so crazy. You'd need as much if not more fuel to carry the extra weight of the lifting and control surfaces, it would dramatically increase the cost of each launch and it would introduce a lot more potential failure points. This way is cheaper, simpler and I'd wager a lot more reliable.
It's not "just" a soft landing either. Bringing back the early rocket stages for refurbishing and reuse will slash the cost of launches.
He wouldn't be "forced" to do anything.THere are two ways this can play out.
1) the libertarian utopia where everything is paid for via subscription to private entities. No taxes, but you want to travel long-distance (basically anything involving a car) you'd have to pay a toll. And so on and so forth.
2 Shift everything back to sales tax, like it USED to be before they implemented the ridiculous and intrusive income taxes. Sales taxes are a tax on consumption and inherently fair as everyone pays proportionate to their spending power. You can even band it if you like, set tax rates to vary depending on the retail cost of the items in question and set a zero rate on food, which would probably please quite a lot of people.
I tried a Hershey bar in the states. It was gritty, tasteless plastic rubbish.
Tried one again recently because there's an American import thing down the road from me (that apparently Tesco feels the need to compete with). It wasn't half bad. Still felt a bit like plastic, but they'd done something to change the recipe so it doesn't taste like arse.
I also had a twinkie a while back. I really don't understand why they were so popular.
Ah now you're moving the goalposts aren't you? You said there's no support for wacom on tablet PCs when there is (and that support is via the wacom driver, which only the most esoteric and ancient of distros won't have), so now it's not support for wacom per se but for a subset of input methods that make use of pen technologies in general.
So rather than saying "no support for wacom on a tablet PC" what you should really say is "no unified handwriting recognition input method" which is a rather different kettle of fish. In addition, rather than being unusable as you initially claimed, a tablet PC with any major distro installed is likely to be very useful. It just doesn't quite do what you want out of the box.
Considering how popular the third-party stylus market is with the iPad I really wonder why there's all this angry hate about it. Perhaps it's because they're stuck with silly capacitive things whereas anyone with a proper digitiser-enabled tablet gets something far superior?
Ooh, stylus envy...
@AC: "Someone like me" is a significant enough proportion of the population for Samsung to not only consider this a good idea, but for them to make a fair bit of cash implementing it. Guess I'm not that far from the middle of the bell curve after all eh?
If it was *just* a stylus I'd agree, but it's a wacom digitiser as well. Very, VERY handy for someone like me who likes to sit about and doodle in the off-times. You can also use most older wacom pens with it (the one for my old cintiq works perfectly).
Incidentally, recommended app for anyone with a Note: Layer Paint. It's a relatively simple but practical art program, very cheap and better than any of the alternatives I've tried up to now. Far better brush engine than Sketchbook Pro, you aren't limited in your canvas size and naturally it works with the pressure-sensitivity of the digitiser as well.
Samsung (and another tablet that has a digitiser) are so far ahead of Apple on this that it's almost laughable when the fanbois try to belittle a feature like this. Of course it's a "step backwards" to have a superior additional interface!
O levels were phased out in the early 80s - before I was even in senior school - and brick laying is a highly skilled profession that I doubt one in 20 of the people who post here could do to any degree of competence.
If you're going to mock, be smart about it.
What are they teaching kids in schools these days eh?
I don't know what college you went to but I did Design Tech and Software Development (writing Pascal oddly enough) at Hyde Clarendon and that put me in pretty good stead for a great many future endeavours. Of course that was in the 90s, when A Levels still meant something and were actually hard. So hard that I got an E in both subjects.
The work I turned in for them would get me an A* today. It was good work, but the expectations were that much higher back then.
The commission is the executive and primary legislative branch of the EU's government, it seems fair to mention that they're appointed given how much power they wield and how little control and oversight we, the peoples of Europe, have over their activities. It's hardly frothing.
Comparing that to a journalist's "unelected" position isn't even apples and walnuts, never mind oranges.
Given that higher intelligence tends to correlate with a higher instance of autism spectrum disorders and a higher chance of displaying particular classes of mental illness such as schizophrenia and - if you count it as a mental illness - sociopathy, I'd say no, it's not likely at all.
Of course education and intelligence don't correlate all that well these days. You only have to look at the prevalence of poorly researched statistical metastudies that "prove" everything is bad for you and good for you in quick succession to see that. Perhaps it depends how you define education.
Starvation in africa isn't caused by a lack of food. The majority of the continent is so fertile that you can find something to eat all year round without really trying.
The problem is surviving the disease and war endemic to vast swathes of the continent long enough to eat your lunch. Zimbabwe used to be the breadbasket of Africa until it was torn apart by an authoritarian madman. The most fertile piece of ground on earth reduced to starvation.
Even in the north of the continent food grows quite easily. The perpetual ethiopian famine was caused by the wars with eritrea and somalia. It's hard to grow food to survive when infantry battalions keep yomping over your field and dropping landmines everywhere. There would be little starvation in africa were it not for the dictators and warlords that we prop up with all that feel-good foreign aid we keep sending.
The plans for nuclear weapons are available on the internet, the materials are generally easily sourced and you can manufacture a crude but functional nuke for next to nothing.
... provided you have access to some uranium.
Sit and think about it for a moment and you'll realise that freedom of information doesn't automatically translate into threat.
The scientific consensus held that the sun orbited the earth, ulcers were caused by excess stomach acid, plate tectonics was a silly myth and that piltdown man was the genuine article.
Consensus is a good predictor of a group of people agreeing on something. Any relation to truth and reality are entirely coincidental.
It's more likely that they'd want a direct freight link from the continent to Liverpool. At the moment it' cheaper to take freight across the north sea to Hull, drive it along the M62 and re-load it at Liverpool for transport across the atlantic than it is to sail around the country, but it would be cheaper still to load it on a train somewhere and freight it up to Manchester for transshipment via a local train or trucks to Liverpool.
Just consider it from the strategic perspective of the EU as a whole and the economic reasoning becomes blindingly clear.
There may not be an economic case at the national level, but at the European level there's certainly a political dimension to HS2. It links the major UK cities into the european rail network. The whole project is built to a continental loading gauge and will be running continental freight as well as passenger services. This is because it's all part of the ongoing process of transport integration across the EU.
In that light there might be a better economic argument to be made than "it'll get us to London a bit faster". Better-integrated transportation links within the EU can be argued to have a very positive potential economic impact, though of course the primary drive of everything the EU does is "ever closer union"... perhaps that's why our politicians are so leery about giving credit where it's due.
And of course transportation policy is an EU exclusive competence anyway. HS2 would likely go ahead no matter what.
You may think this is a good thing, you may think this is a bad thing. What annoys me is that our alleged betters in Westminster feel the need to lie to us about the source of it all. They take credit for things they haven't done- oh wait, they're politicians, that's all they ever do anyway...
tl;dr an economic case can be made if you realise that HS2 has an EU dimension; it's the EU wot done it anyway. Why won't talk about either of these things?
Incidentally, it's worth noting that travelling first-class off-peak with Virgin is only £15 more expensive than standard class and you get free food and booze for that, plus access to the first-class lounge in Euston and all the free hot chocolate you can consume while you wait for your train to finally turn up after all the delays. No mortgage required.
Canals had 100% of the bulk transportation market for a very long time. Didn't stop the railways eating their lunch. And the railways had almost the entire long-distance and bulk transport market overland for about a century in Europe and the US, but that didn't stop the car and the aeroplane eating *their* lunch.
When a clearly superior technology arrives (and we're not talking about competing similar technologies like VHS or Beta, which were essentially the same thing - this is video tape vs DVD), it will eventually dominate even when an incumbent uses force (either directly or via influence over the state) to try and prevent it.
Likewise. Maemo was a great thing, but it suffered the problem Nokia always seems to suffer: every time they have a great thing they shoot it and re-invent it a week later.
If you could say nothing else good about Elop you could say this: he forced them to dopt a platform and stick with it. It may not be the best (personally I think windows phone is shite but others obviously disagree) but at least they're being consistent now. Consistency is what Nokia needed to supply, rather than Maemo turning to Meego-but-it's-really-still-maemo-underneath turning to Meego with a different packaging system turning to Meltemi or whatever they were doing next...
You know I avoid paying huge amounts of income tax all the time? I don't earn enough to qualify for the top bracket so I avoid paying that tax.
I also avoid paying VAT on items that I don't buy and I avoid paying inheritance tax by being alive.
Go read a dictionary. Learn what these words mean before you spout your nonsense again.
You had a belt! My dad 'ad to thrash us with a strip of our own flesh torn from our backs cause we'd eaten our belts months ago. And he'd make us cure it with our own teeth first!
@Brewster I didn't mean feeding the freezer, that's too expensive. Bulk dry goods and tinned food, that's what I'm talking about. They last longer than frozen foods too.
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