> keep your car in a heated garage at night
Only if you are lucky enough to have one!
579 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Sep 2007
> According to that link over one in 30 petrol-powered cars catch fire. Really?
That sounds high to me as well, although they can often be on the roads for 10 years+ which might put it up a bit but not that much otherwise our roads would be shut all the time while they put car fires out.
> cancellation of Phase 2b (to the East Midlands
Very happy with that as it would have left a viaduct through the middle if the town (Long Eaton) at the level of our bedrooms.....Mind you it would have been fun during my retirement watching them struggle to build the damn thing at the bottom of my garden, I was going to take daily photo's to build my own time lapse...
But then does all this "faster faster" approach make accidental stock market crashes more likely by everyone triggering "sell sell sell"? I think they have a circuit breaker that trips the stock market if the transaction volumes exceed a certain value???
I am with many people here who don't want this lane keeping etc stuff but I and my family love plugging the phone into the ApplePlay (others are available) and it just working for music, satnav, hand free phone, plus automatic lights and wipers are great.
However I don't need any more than Cruise control, would like it has already been mentioned to adapt to slower traffic and going downhill, but that is about it. You can keep the rest of the self driving stuff thank you!
We had that when we were house clearing after a bereavement, yes it was old but still perfectly usable wardrobes and other furniture but nobody wanted it. Yet you hear of people desperate for that stuff.
Some stress relief with a sledgehammer and a few trips to the council tip was the result.
> the casual hobbyist is finding some of the options are closing off.
This is so true, many modern devices are available in surface mount only and if you have older eyes and hands (like me), well just forget surface mount - too small, too fiddly.
Having stated my hobby in the late 70's I have seen lots of change, usually for the better but for the hobbyist I fear SM will be the death knell and we will just be left connecting pre-made modules and programming a few PICs...
ps I love PICs, so not intending to put them down here!
Wish I could upvote more than once, here too I have had to beat win10 to within an inch of its life to make it nice to use - and stick to 7 where possible.
If 12 needs MS account to log on etc then that will still lie dead in the water for me - everything I have uses local accounts
> wildfires happen when brush and undergrowth i
I did read some time back that by stopping wildfires which nature uses to clear out all the combustible material that we just make them worse when one does happen.
Yes Climate Change is making some places drier and others wetter, and we do need to reduce human made emissions but it needs to be done in a sustainable and practical way. As has been pointed out we just can't turn oil** fossil fuels off overnight without something to replace them or human society will totally disintegrate.
** Yes oil will STILL be needed as a many things in our modern world are made from it, not just fuels - this is what many people are failing to understand
> People didn't know they were on the list until they were told to leave their desk immediately
Been through that at a previous UK company is what is probably the worst day most people go though, I survived but seeing people get called in and then escorted out is not nice.
But at least they all got pay in lieu of notice being as this is the UK (+ redundancy)
> The internet in the late 90s / early 2000s was far preferable to now. There were enough people with basic HTML skills that there were large numbers of sites on specific things, hobbies and club sites - visual design often quite basic, but many with meaningful content.
And the web sites were coded to be as lightweight as possible due to the slower connection speeds, now you get any and all bloat, ads and gods knows how many links to other sites.
I can still remember hand coding my first html pages using notpad and it was lots of fun learning it.
> After a few pints everything starts to seem very clear and absolute, to me: there are very few problems that can't be solved by culling.
I've lost track of the number of problems we have solved during discussions at the pub - only problem is that we seem to have a memory commit issue as we can't remember anything the next morning.
> gravity being a LOT lower means it doesn't need the rocket motors to be running at 100% (landing or lift off) on the Lunar/Martian surface
I thought the problem with Mars is that has an appreciable gravity but very little atmosphere which makes landing very challenging, so it will need a fairly big firework to get into orbit
> ratings of the power transistors
Similar thing at home with some touch sensitive bedside lamps, touch the base and they came on dim, touch again and got brighter before they cycled to off after the 4th touch, very nice.
we had 3 "almost" identical, 1 from John Lewis and 2 cheaper ones from ASDA, the cheaper ones failed after the bulb failed for the first time as their triacs were rated right on the limit, whilst the JL one is still going years later as it has a much beefier (volts and amps rating) triac.
> empathy (measured as the ability to figure out others emotions from pictures) decreased with rank in corporations
I would say that is more of a disconnect from meeting people the higher up the ivory towers they get.
Basically big corporations are like the huge dinosaurs that (allegedly!) took s long time to realise that the tail had been bitten off, they become huge and unwieldy with the turning response of a supertanker and innovation just seems to bleed out of them the more detached from reality they become
> What's the average age of a car in the UK
Well mine is just over your average at 12.5 here in the (petrol,UK), plan is to replace it with upon retiring just before the "ban" with another one that should (prangs permitting) last another 15 or until they take my licence away !
> So how does the UK, with <1% of the world's population need >10% of global expenditure to reach net zero? Easy.. Just look at HS2
And we are a very congested build up Island, so much of these works involves digging up and knocking down other infrastructure