I have been around, I can tell, a lot longer than you have. I've been in countries with overbearing, corrupt Governments. Item 1, you have no idea what you are talking about. When you've failed to bribe a Mexican official or got involved with Spanish Mafia house building scams supported by corrupt local officials, or fallen foul of a South American or Russian "businessman" then you can post about it. Until then, don't exaggerate.
Item 2, terrorism is defined in UK law, and judges have to abide by that law. The definition is not "up to the authorities". It is made by Parliament. If you don't like the definition, write to your MP, join a political party or a pressure group (there are lots) and do something, don't just whine. And if you are a 16 year old posting from your bedroom, William Hague was addressing a Party conference at 16, and I was visiting Parliament several times a year at the same age. You have no excuses. We have senior MPs who get it - David Davis, Chris Huhne.
Item 3.Others have made the point that the UK has had animal rights activists every bit as bonkers and dangerous as US anti-abortion or anti-gun-control activists. But the point also needs to be made that law must be general and not have exceptions. Exceptions make bad law. If we start deciding who is or who is not a terrorist based on anything other than their actions and intentions, this is very dangerous for civil liberties.
Although I think this is an unfortunate law, it is difficult to see how it could be any different. What is your proposal to prevent organised crime using encrypted media to conceal their activities? Unless you can point to a workable alternative solution, you are just ranting.
If you are part of a terrorist cell (or a criminal gang) and the police obtain your encryption keys, telling the rest of your cell or gang will enable them to destroy their own compromised data before PC Plod arrives. That is the logic behind the law.
The alternative is to lock up everybody who has supplied keys until any legal case is over, so they cannot communicate the news. This would be worse.
Law is simply unable to keep up with the development of mass communications and freely distributable digital data. It's a simple as that. The options are to do a 16th century Japan and ban progress, or accept there will be problems en route.
Most modern UK houses have fly ash block as the inner wall of the double walled skin. It has been around for many years and its properties are well understood. Interestingly, its use was originally seen as a green win/win situation because it required less energy to produce than brick, and largely solved the problem of disposal of power station ash.
I've occasionally wondered if the real technological fix for nuclear waste would not be to wait till the short lived isotopes have fissioned (in dry cask storage) and then dilute the hell out of the stuff in concrete and brick plants. After all, we live in houses many of which emit small amounts of radon, and burn coal which contains uranium. So long as the level is background, it should be perfectly safe - and terrorist attack/geological damage proof. But sell that idea to the technological ignoramuses we have in charge of things nowadays.
I live in the Bath area of the UK. The main building material is Bath stone, considered very desirable because as dug out of the ground it is reasonably soft and easy to form, but over its life it absorbs carbon dioxide and becomes harder.
The house I live in is a mere 150 years old, but most of the street it is in was built between 1690 and 1695. In fact, our foundations go back to then. The composition and structure of Bath stone has been extensively studied, and I would imagine the results are just a small part of the data the technologists will take into account.
What are agriculture, developed economy, meritocracy and empiricism but technological advances themselves?
And when were the "many years" that that Jewish tribes dominated Europe?
Reading your post you seem to have some heavy axes to grind and keep trying to put things in that may be trolling. "(reformed) Christian civilisation?" Civil and marine engineering made plenty of progress under pre-reform Catholicism. The ancient Greek city states home of representative Government and Capitalism? Surely not. Athenian democracy was a brief experiment applied only to the prosperous citizens able to afford a hoplite panoply - it was more of an oligarchy.
I would rather go along with the idea that technological progress resulted from evolutionary pressure such as changing climate conditions, and pure luck. It is surely no coincidence that while iron making was known for many years, it did not take off until England, and then Germany, found they had plenty of coal and iron ore. The reason that geology was such a big deal in the early 19th century was the growing understanding of what kind of rock might have coal or iron ore underneath.
I think there is something in what you say, though much of it is an oversimplification of a complex history, but putting in nonsense about Jewish domination of Europe and suggesting that Protestantism was a cause, rather than a result, of technical progress can only weaken your argument.
I imagine that William the Bastard would have made much the same argument in 1066 AD. "Ships are now perfect and information and goods travel rapidly round the known world. New arts and manufactures quickly reach everybody. The Church has all knowledge from God and cannot be improved upon. We are fortunate not to live in the past when people were ignorant. Now if we could just persuade those backward Saxons to see sense, and stop fighting us, we could sort this country out really quickly."
You are assuming that the present state of our knowledge and technical development is so superior that the old norms cease to apply. But that's because the next game-transforming serendipitous discovery hasn't happened, and until it happens you won't know what it will be.
Assuming your first line to be true (I am dubious because if you know NT Greek, as presumably you must with a PhD in the NT, writing "gamete" instead of "gamut" would have set an alarm bell ringing):
This is nothing to do with theology. The examples quoted make it clear that this is a political issue. One of the most depressing things for people like me, who went to a small university in the English fens before deciding that engineering was more interesting and of more benefit to the human race, is that US fundamentalists completely confuse politics and religion. The madness is spreading to the Anglican Church in the UK, where Nigerian politics is now more important than good relations with the Episcopalians.
US fundamentalism takes the form of assigning religious worth to capitalism - if God loves you, you will be materially rich - and also aligns itself with backward notions about Creationism and ID which are more about trying to prove liberals "wrong" than spreading light. The simple fact is that it requires really determined blinkers to believe either that Bible literalism has very deep roots (certainly St. Augustine would have wondered what these people were on about) or that the enormous body of information about geology and biology built up in the last 200 years admits of a fundamentalist interpretation.
To be blunt, if these seminaries were doing their jobs they would be teaching pastoral care, teaching how the New Testament (rather than some cherry picked collection of political positions) can be made relevant today, and preparing their students to heal wounds in society and reduce polarisation between social groups. Instead, they appear to be giving course credits for less violent versions of the activities that give the Taliban a bad name.
You say that seminaries are schools for training pastors, and I agree they should be. But we should then not defend "seminaries" that are training schools for bigoted ideologues who will seek to stir up division in society and spread ignorance. If this man Dembski cannot see why he is wrong on this, he needs to be hit on the head with the Sermon on the Mount till he gets a clue.
Neurologists have shown that cats have fewer neurons than dogs and some of their brain functions are reduced. The cat lifestyle requires a lot of sitting around doing nothing, and this implies that most of the time a big brain is a waste of energy. The cat brain is focussed on hunting alone. The dog brain is focussed on hunting in packs, which requires good development of parts of the brain that support co-operation. We've made use of that in selecting them to let us be the head of the pack.
The cat doesn't care what you think because, in effect, like a human psychopath the relevant bit of brain is too small. This, btw, is why neurologists prefer cats for experiments. The results aren't affected by how the cat feels about its handler today, or the sudden dislike it's taken to the researcher.
(Incidentally it's a US company despite the name). Isn't this a case where the US Government should be sued since they own the USPTO? The publishers of Brittanica shouldn't be sued because they didn't grant the patent. I think this is a really interesting idea. Companies affected by piss-poor patent granting by the USPTO should start a class action against the US Government to enforce proper patent investigation. Up till now large companies have been beneficiaries of the system more than losers, so have had no incentive to rock the boat. Small companies may have stayed quiet in case they came across a doubtfully patentable but potentially profitable idea. But once bad patents start to be invalidated, they are potentially losers, and so the balance swings towards trying to reform the system.
I'd moderate this insightful had I not run out of points. The simple fact is that unless you are already established in a business, and you just want to extend your reach - your supply or possibly customer chain - your best bet is to stay in your own country because you have years of experience of living there. I'm not a fan of Western triumphalism, far from it, but anyone who thinks that there are fortunes to be made just by emigrating should look at the real history of the growth of the US. Many of the people who went West did so because they were failing in the established, well off East. And today? The US East Coast is still where much of the money is, and California is suffering economically. Despite the apparent opportunities of boundless land, minerals and eventually oil, the East leveraged its installed base of civilisation, knowledge and business relationships to stay dominant. The same could well happen with the West and China. It still makes sense to follow the old adage and do not run after money, but go where the money is.
I've been told, and I have no proof, that in fact nicotine withdrawal reduces brain function, and getting the fix just restores normality. Nicotine causes permanent changes in the brain.
This is an argument against Intelligent Design: for God to design a plant to do that, he would have to be malicious. That, or work for the tobacco industry.
You are right about the rest but you are wrong there. You are assuming an infinite supply of heat at the higher temperature. However, the CPU produces a limited amount of heat. Assuming CPU consumption doesn't vary that significantly with die temperature - which may not be the case, admittedly - the amount of heat the heatsink has to remove is unaffected by the thermal transfer. This may sound backwards but it makes sense if you think about it.
Let's assume that 95 watts have to be removed. Given a constant airflow at constant temperature, the heatsink fins will have to be at a particular temperature (Newton's law of cooling) to dissipate 95 watts to air, and this will be a constant temperature under the stated conditions - call it T1.
Now consider the interface between the heatsink and the heat source. The heatsink base is at a constant temperature T2, so that T2-T1 is the temperature difference caused by the heat removal at the fin surfaces. The die surface is at a higher temperature T3. The temperature difference T3-T2 is needed to drive the heat transfer across the interface. The closer to a perfect conductor if heat is the interface, the smaller is T3-T2.
Thus no matter what material is used in the interface, the base of the heatsink should be at the same temperature.
So, summarising:
T1 is determined by the heat flow through the heatsink, air flow and air temperature, and a rough constant for the heatsink design.
T2 is determined by the heat flow through the heatsink, and T1.
T3 is determined by the heat output of the die, the thermal performance of the interface, and T2.
No matter how good the thermal paste is, the die temperature can never go below T2. Therefore, the heatsink is still the limiting factor.
What is the actual density and particle size, and how near the surface is it concentrated? Although the Pacific is enormous, it might actually be possible to do something with some kind of filter system, given long enough. After all, the East Anglian fens were drained by pumps running for over 100 years, so long term projects are not exactly unheard of. Something that stops plastic and allows through fish - there's a challenge.
The plot can be summarised thus: Hero goes for a trip through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven, all of which are stuffed with Florentines or other Italians. There is a lot of talking, mostly about politics or philosophy. Nothing actually happens. The moment anything looks like being problematic, an angelic messenger arrives and sorts it out without intervention of the hero.
I mean, I am genuinely puzzled. I know the Commedia fairly well, and I've read most of it in the original. And I simply cannot imagine how you turn it into a game.
Unless of course the author has merely nicked the characters?
See this month's Scientific American. Average European/Japanese gas mileage is already about 60% higher than it is in the US and still improving. And Nissan is building a battery factory in the UK.
Either McKinnon had open access to unsecured information and no intention of committing a crime - which makes him innocent of any crime under UK common law - or he didn't. The US Administration wants to say that he had no access to anything sensitive, but that he should still be tried for a crime. This is stupid. The UK Government is supposed to have signed the UN Convention on Human Rights as enshrined in European law. They are trying to circumvent it. They are both stupid and malicious.
The British Government is dead set on getting him extradited. They are obsessed with being seen as being tough on "cybercrime" in case the US removes our already piddling access to their secret data. The US only wants McKinnon because they are more likely to get a conviction with a long sentence as he is not a US citizen.
Really, it's the admins of those insecure computers who should be prosecuted. I thought it was a federal offense negligently to give access to secret data?
Educate kids, expose them to everything from Bach to bluegrass and widen their tastes. Make them realise the stuff peddled by the big chains is actually junk produced by performers whose only real merit to the RIAA members is that they are contracted to them. That will in the long term destroy the RIAA, because their business model works by trying to reduce the range of what consumers buy. The logic behind that being that they can create a monopoly only by restricting what the customers want. Anybody anywhere can put a group together and record something original or out of copyright, so the RIAA members want to ensure that there's no demand for it. Creating demand that they cannot manipulate, and thus creating competition, is the only real way to get rid of them.
Nansen built a boat strong enough to be able to survive trapping in pack ice (the Fram) to prove that the Arctic ice actually drifts - which he did. The Soviet Union has had nuclear powered icebreakers for a long time, and if I was as rich as Warren Buffett that is one toy I would certainly buy myself. However, neither of these designs is an economic cargo carrying ship. The point here is that a vessel built to commercial standards can safely embark on the trip, therefore something has changed.
Think of the Darien Gap. It has been navigated by vehicles, rather special purpose ones. If you read that it was now being served by a regular truck route, you might suspect things had changed a bit.
This may be a very important story, but it references as evidence two websites which are used by conspiracy nuts, one of which appears to be broken - not/.ed, just broken - and no independent confirmation of the claims. Can anybody give any links to any mainstream news or science sites which are reporting this?
I think he just knows a lot more about IC engines than you do, and you haven't understood. You're looking at his post from the POV of a home mechanic, but he's actually talking engineering. He means that multi-cylinder engines have smaller cylinders, reducing the problem of plug placement, though as we all know, larger cylinders can be made more thermally efficient because the combustion chamber area to volume ratio is smaller, reducing thermal losses.
The point about the placement of the ignition point is good thinking. You are using TDC to mean crank angle, but that's not what it means. It means when the piston is, literally, at top dead center. If the ignition point is determined by a laser, it can be set to a position on the upstroke which will actually be covered by the piston at TDC, though the crown is below it when ignition occurs. This means much more flexibility in the placement of the ignition point, possibly leading to new combustion chamber profiles which were previously impossible. Although at first sight it seems odd, once ignition has started the rising piston will push the ignited gas upwards. Perhaps this is where a ceramic or cermet insert in the crown could come into its own.
I found 15, though none above the rank of knight, which is about right from what I know of the family history post-Conquest (they lapsed into obscurity in Norfolk, and don't really reappear until the 16th cent.)
However, I have to ask - if the male line died out, how do you come to have your surname? Cadet branch?
So far, mobile fuel cells have been shown to have enormous problems with things like vibration tolerance, catalytic poisoning, the difficulty of containing electrolyte, and the fact that many of the more effective design have to be worked at temperatures higher than an IC engine, drastically reducing the efficiency. The methanol cartridge fuel cell still hasn't appeared for laptops, and the last one I saw on the market produced about 48W at a cost of over $4000. Expect a working vehicle fuel cell design actually to need a lot of pumps, control gear, safety equipment and pollution control (if the product is water and/or carbon dioxide, how do you remove the water as steam without carrying over electrolyte?). It may well be that when all this is factored in, the IC engine is actually more efficient.
Another way to see the point, look at the difference between a Honda lawnmower engine and a Honda car engine. The lawnmower engine is probably as simple as a basic fuel cell, with very few moving parts.
Because incremental improvement is a lot cheaper than replacing an entire infrastructure. One thing an awful lot of geeks don't seem to grasp is the sheer cost and timescale of e.g. migrating to fuel cells or EVs, compared to incremental improvements. In Europe, modern gasoline fueled cars are about as efficient as Diesels were 15 years ago, and Diesels are between 10-20% more efficient than they were then. The engines are also much lighter and more reliable, i.e. lower external costs. In that time the penetration of EV and fuel cell technology is effectively zero. If we'd stuck with the status quo and waited for the magic bullet, we would actually have achieved nothing - because battery and fuel cell technology is taking a lot longer than anyone expected, and in the meantime they have to achieve ever better performance just to keep up.
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Item 2, terrorism is defined in UK law, and judges have to abide by that law. The definition is not "up to the authorities". It is made by Parliament. If you don't like the definition, write to your MP, join a political party or a pressure group (there are lots) and do something, don't just whine. And if you are a 16 year old posting from your bedroom, William Hague was addressing a Party conference at 16, and I was visiting Parliament several times a year at the same age. You have no excuses. We have senior MPs who get it - David Davis, Chris Huhne.
Item 3.Others have made the point that the UK has had animal rights activists every bit as bonkers and dangerous as US anti-abortion or anti-gun-control activists. But the point also needs to be made that law must be general and not have exceptions. Exceptions make bad law. If we start deciding who is or who is not a terrorist based on anything other than their actions and intentions, this is very dangerous for civil liberties.
Although I think this is an unfortunate law, it is difficult to see how it could be any different. What is your proposal to prevent organised crime using encrypted media to conceal their activities? Unless you can point to a workable alternative solution, you are just ranting.
The alternative is to lock up everybody who has supplied keys until any legal case is over, so they cannot communicate the news. This would be worse.
Law is simply unable to keep up with the development of mass communications and freely distributable digital data. It's a simple as that. The options are to do a 16th century Japan and ban progress, or accept there will be problems en route.
I've occasionally wondered if the real technological fix for nuclear waste would not be to wait till the short lived isotopes have fissioned (in dry cask storage) and then dilute the hell out of the stuff in concrete and brick plants. After all, we live in houses many of which emit small amounts of radon, and burn coal which contains uranium. So long as the level is background, it should be perfectly safe - and terrorist attack/geological damage proof. But sell that idea to the technological ignoramuses we have in charge of things nowadays.
The house I live in is a mere 150 years old, but most of the street it is in was built between 1690 and 1695. In fact, our foundations go back to then. The composition and structure of Bath stone has been extensively studied, and I would imagine the results are just a small part of the data the technologists will take into account.
And your point was, again?
And when were the "many years" that that Jewish tribes dominated Europe?
Reading your post you seem to have some heavy axes to grind and keep trying to put things in that may be trolling. "(reformed) Christian civilisation?" Civil and marine engineering made plenty of progress under pre-reform Catholicism. The ancient Greek city states home of representative Government and Capitalism? Surely not. Athenian democracy was a brief experiment applied only to the prosperous citizens able to afford a hoplite panoply - it was more of an oligarchy.
I would rather go along with the idea that technological progress resulted from evolutionary pressure such as changing climate conditions, and pure luck. It is surely no coincidence that while iron making was known for many years, it did not take off until England, and then Germany, found they had plenty of coal and iron ore. The reason that geology was such a big deal in the early 19th century was the growing understanding of what kind of rock might have coal or iron ore underneath.
I think there is something in what you say, though much of it is an oversimplification of a complex history, but putting in nonsense about Jewish domination of Europe and suggesting that Protestantism was a cause, rather than a result, of technical progress can only weaken your argument.
You are assuming that the present state of our knowledge and technical development is so superior that the old norms cease to apply. But that's because the next game-transforming serendipitous discovery hasn't happened, and until it happens you won't know what it will be.
This is nothing to do with theology. The examples quoted make it clear that this is a political issue. One of the most depressing things for people like me, who went to a small university in the English fens before deciding that engineering was more interesting and of more benefit to the human race, is that US fundamentalists completely confuse politics and religion. The madness is spreading to the Anglican Church in the UK, where Nigerian politics is now more important than good relations with the Episcopalians.
US fundamentalism takes the form of assigning religious worth to capitalism - if God loves you, you will be materially rich - and also aligns itself with backward notions about Creationism and ID which are more about trying to prove liberals "wrong" than spreading light. The simple fact is that it requires really determined blinkers to believe either that Bible literalism has very deep roots (certainly St. Augustine would have wondered what these people were on about) or that the enormous body of information about geology and biology built up in the last 200 years admits of a fundamentalist interpretation.
To be blunt, if these seminaries were doing their jobs they would be teaching pastoral care, teaching how the New Testament (rather than some cherry picked collection of political positions) can be made relevant today, and preparing their students to heal wounds in society and reduce polarisation between social groups. Instead, they appear to be giving course credits for less violent versions of the activities that give the Taliban a bad name.
You say that seminaries are schools for training pastors, and I agree they should be. But we should then not defend "seminaries" that are training schools for bigoted ideologues who will seek to stir up division in society and spread ignorance. If this man Dembski cannot see why he is wrong on this, he needs to be hit on the head with the Sermon on the Mount till he gets a clue.
The cat doesn't care what you think because, in effect, like a human psychopath the relevant bit of brain is too small. This, btw, is why neurologists prefer cats for experiments. The results aren't affected by how the cat feels about its handler today, or the sudden dislike it's taken to the researcher.
(Incidentally it's a US company despite the name). Isn't this a case where the US Government should be sued since they own the USPTO? The publishers of Brittanica shouldn't be sued because they didn't grant the patent. I think this is a really interesting idea. Companies affected by piss-poor patent granting by the USPTO should start a class action against the US Government to enforce proper patent investigation. Up till now large companies have been beneficiaries of the system more than losers, so have had no incentive to rock the boat. Small companies may have stayed quiet in case they came across a doubtfully patentable but potentially profitable idea. But once bad patents start to be invalidated, they are potentially losers, and so the balance swings towards trying to reform the system.
I'd moderate this insightful had I not run out of points. The simple fact is that unless you are already established in a business, and you just want to extend your reach - your supply or possibly customer chain - your best bet is to stay in your own country because you have years of experience of living there. I'm not a fan of Western triumphalism, far from it, but anyone who thinks that there are fortunes to be made just by emigrating should look at the real history of the growth of the US. Many of the people who went West did so because they were failing in the established, well off East. And today? The US East Coast is still where much of the money is, and California is suffering economically. Despite the apparent opportunities of boundless land, minerals and eventually oil, the East leveraged its installed base of civilisation, knowledge and business relationships to stay dominant. The same could well happen with the West and China. It still makes sense to follow the old adage and do not run after money, but go where the money is.
This is an argument against Intelligent Design: for God to design a plant to do that, he would have to be malicious. That, or work for the tobacco industry.
Let's assume that 95 watts have to be removed. Given a constant airflow at constant temperature, the heatsink fins will have to be at a particular temperature (Newton's law of cooling) to dissipate 95 watts to air, and this will be a constant temperature under the stated conditions - call it T1.
Now consider the interface between the heatsink and the heat source. The heatsink base is at a constant temperature T2, so that T2-T1 is the temperature difference caused by the heat removal at the fin surfaces. The die surface is at a higher temperature T3. The temperature difference T3-T2 is needed to drive the heat transfer across the interface. The closer to a perfect conductor if heat is the interface, the smaller is T3-T2.
Thus no matter what material is used in the interface, the base of the heatsink should be at the same temperature.
So, summarising:
T1 is determined by the heat flow through the heatsink, air flow and air temperature, and a rough constant for the heatsink design.
T2 is determined by the heat flow through the heatsink, and T1.
T3 is determined by the heat output of the die, the thermal performance of the interface, and T2.
No matter how good the thermal paste is, the die temperature can never go below T2. Therefore, the heatsink is still the limiting factor.
What is the actual density and particle size, and how near the surface is it concentrated? Although the Pacific is enormous, it might actually be possible to do something with some kind of filter system, given long enough. After all, the East Anglian fens were drained by pumps running for over 100 years, so long term projects are not exactly unheard of. Something that stops plastic and allows through fish - there's a challenge.
I mean, I am genuinely puzzled. I know the Commedia fairly well, and I've read most of it in the original. And I simply cannot imagine how you turn it into a game.
Unless of course the author has merely nicked the characters?
See this month's Scientific American. Average European/Japanese gas mileage is already about 60% higher than it is in the US and still improving. And Nissan is building a battery factory in the UK.
Either McKinnon had open access to unsecured information and no intention of committing a crime - which makes him innocent of any crime under UK common law - or he didn't. The US Administration wants to say that he had no access to anything sensitive, but that he should still be tried for a crime. This is stupid. The UK Government is supposed to have signed the UN Convention on Human Rights as enshrined in European law. They are trying to circumvent it. They are both stupid and malicious.
Really, it's the admins of those insecure computers who should be prosecuted. I thought it was a federal offense negligently to give access to secret data?
Educate kids, expose them to everything from Bach to bluegrass and widen their tastes. Make them realise the stuff peddled by the big chains is actually junk produced by performers whose only real merit to the RIAA members is that they are contracted to them. That will in the long term destroy the RIAA, because their business model works by trying to reduce the range of what consumers buy. The logic behind that being that they can create a monopoly only by restricting what the customers want. Anybody anywhere can put a group together and record something original or out of copyright, so the RIAA members want to ensure that there's no demand for it. Creating demand that they cannot manipulate, and thus creating competition, is the only real way to get rid of them.
Think of the Darien Gap. It has been navigated by vehicles, rather special purpose ones. If you read that it was now being served by a regular truck route, you might suspect things had changed a bit.
Though 1984 isn't a bad choice, Fahrenheit 411 would have been ever better.
This may be a very important story, but it references as evidence two websites which are used by conspiracy nuts, one of which appears to be broken - not /.ed, just broken - and no independent confirmation of the claims. Can anybody give any links to any mainstream news or science sites which are reporting this?
The point about the placement of the ignition point is good thinking. You are using TDC to mean crank angle, but that's not what it means. It means when the piston is, literally, at top dead center. If the ignition point is determined by a laser, it can be set to a position on the upstroke which will actually be covered by the piston at TDC, though the crown is below it when ignition occurs. This means much more flexibility in the placement of the ignition point, possibly leading to new combustion chamber profiles which were previously impossible. Although at first sight it seems odd, once ignition has started the rising piston will push the ignited gas upwards. Perhaps this is where a ceramic or cermet insert in the crown could come into its own.
However, I have to ask - if the male line died out, how do you come to have your surname? Cadet branch?
Another way to see the point, look at the difference between a Honda lawnmower engine and a Honda car engine. The lawnmower engine is probably as simple as a basic fuel cell, with very few moving parts.
Because incremental improvement is a lot cheaper than replacing an entire infrastructure. One thing an awful lot of geeks don't seem to grasp is the sheer cost and timescale of e.g. migrating to fuel cells or EVs, compared to incremental improvements. In Europe, modern gasoline fueled cars are about as efficient as Diesels were 15 years ago, and Diesels are between 10-20% more efficient than they were then. The engines are also much lighter and more reliable, i.e. lower external costs. In that time the penetration of EV and fuel cell technology is effectively zero. If we'd stuck with the status quo and waited for the magic bullet, we would actually have achieved nothing - because battery and fuel cell technology is taking a lot longer than anyone expected, and in the meantime they have to achieve ever better performance just to keep up.