Re: International cooperation
Covered by the AC above. The American approach to any problem is to throw more resources at it, hence redundant chutes. ESA doesn't have that luxury so American chutes probably won't work.
2735 publicly visible posts • joined 29 Jul 2007
"Of course materials technology can also be applied to physical controls. It's possible engineer a throttle stick that bends if someone falls against it and then springs back to its normal shape."
I think they might be able to track down a few companies with expertise in that area though they may have to disable their internet filter to do it.
I like RTF for that too, despite it being Microsoft proprietary. At least with RTF you know that the formatting is more or less intended. Unfortunately, people won't use it for the same reason they persist with bad formatting – they have no clue about "all this technical stuff". (Even when it's supposed to be a part of their job.)
Not if you live in a one of these. For some reason they're big in japan.
Well it's not that it can't be done because the Docklands Light Railway has been doing it since freaking 1987. More like the fact that saving the cost of a one driver per several hundred passengers just doesn't make up for cost of the infrastructure changes (which would be massive). Not that this has anything to do with the case for or against driverless cars. Trains are not driven by sight so the problems are quite different.
People thought that Columbus was crazy sailing out into the vast unknown that was the Atlantic ocean when you could get to India perfectly adequately by the traditional coast-hugging method. That they were perhaps overly cautious doesn't mean they were afraid of falling off the edge of the world – the dangers of the open ocean are very real even today.
As mentioned above Microsoft Train Simulator has been continuously updated since MS abandoned. And it is still being updated by its current owner Dovetail Games despite Dovetail having brought out Train Sim World which boasts all the glossiness you'd expect from a contemporary title. For the same reason they keep FSX going – huge developer support and a massive back library of addons. Glossiness doesn't mean much if the depth isn't there as I suspect MS will find out.
Well, I was being a tad sarcastic there. Of course, people will believe the pee-pee tape if it surfaces. Or not according to their pre-existing beliefs. (I don't count myself as an exception to that.) And yes, there's a growing contempt for facts in politics. But a commitment to facts has never been about believing photographs. The camera doesn't lie but it always deceives – it has always been potentially a tool of of propaganda. So really we have lost nothing.