A bad economy and an energy bill that is *completely reversible at any later date* isn't going to topple them to the point they aren't Britain anymore.
You do realise that you can't just build new power stations overnight and no-one wants to build nuclear stations in Britain right now because the government can't decide whether they want them or hate them?
The cult of AGW has gone way beyond harmless Malthusian eccentricity - it's now killing old ladies.
The funny part is that the British media complain about 'global warming' on the one page and old ladies dying from 'fuel poverty' on the next. The high cost of energy being due to the government's farcical anti-'global warming' programs seems to pass them by.
Or perhaps they just have big investments in 'wind farms'.
Why does it take three friggin' days to dock with the ISS? I never quite understood why it takes so long to do that sort of thing?
First the rocket needs to launch in the correct orbital plane, regardless of where ISS is in its orbit. Then it has to synchronise the orbit so that it can perform a transfer from the initial parking orbit to where ISS is.
If you wanted a direct launch to ISS you'd have to wait until the ISS orbit crosses your launch site, and it's in the right place in that orbit. Which won't happen very often.
Or you could cut the payload to zero so you can carry enough extra fuel to match orbit during the launch. But that rather defeats the purpose of launching something there in the first place.
Everyone knows that in a real war a carrier fleet is just a target-rich environment. Carriers are great for bombing third-world nations who can't shoot back, but not much use against modern missiles and submarines.
In 10-20 years, LEO point-to-point flights will be the modern equivalent of the Concorde. All of the convenience and none of the sonic boom.
Except a quarter of the time you'll be accelerating at 3g so drinking your champagne will be tricky, half the time you'll be in zero-g so drinking it will be impossible, and the rest of the time you'll be braking at 1-2g so you would have a chance to drink it but it will already have splattered all over the cabin during the first three quarters of the flight.
Voluntary sterilization/birth control programs for the people here on earth to try and bend the exponential growth curve into a linear, or even flat, one
Most of the first world would be seeing declining populations if not for immigration from countries with high birth rates; both because the new immigrants increase the population directly and they tend to retain higher birth rates for at least a generation or two.
Stop pretending that spending hundreds of trillions of dollars to send a couple dozen people to another planet is any sort of a "solution" for overpopulation.
No-one in their right mind is suggesting 'spending hundreds of trillions of dollars to send a couple dozen people to another planet', so that's just a straw man. The majority of people who are serious about space colonization are looking for ways to make it cheaper, not ways to waste trillions of dollars.
Well, obviously they did have a rendezvous element, it's just that the target wasn't moving terribly fast (relatively speaking) and there was a valid launch window more or less every day.
There was a valid launch window every once in a while, because they had to arrive at their landing site early in the lunar morning so that their entire stay was during the lunar day and, I believe, so that the sun was still low so it they wouldn't exceed LEM cooling margins.
They were somewhat flexible in launch time during that window because they would spend some time in orbit around the moon before landing, so if they had to pick a launch window an hour or two earlier than the ideal because of other constraints, they could potentially wait a few orbits before the landing.
If you look up the NASA documents on Apollo launch planning there were a number of constraints they had to work within. Unfortunately I can't remember them all:).
Yes, the future of the human race. The exponential-growth problem alone means terrible hardships if we cannot emigrate off of this planet. If we don't start trying now, before there's a problem, how will we ever make it when the problem is in full swing and all resources are put to treating the problem instead of what can be the only cure: Space colonization.
The problem is that you can't cure exponential growth with space colonization. What you can do is ensure that some of the human race gets a chance to survive against exponential growth.
However, given that many countries are seeing declining birth rates now, that's probably not really a big issue.
Why would any advertiser place their ads on Facebook next to a picture of their friend from high-school throwing up, when they can place their ad in traditional print media next to a picture of Kate Moss in Vogue or on TV next to Leighton Meester in Gossip Girl?
In my experience software development in the 90s generally meant 'here's an operating system, write a bunch of code to do stuff'. We'd write everything other than the basic OS libraries that came with the system.
Today, we typically 'outsource' much of that work by finding libraries that people have already written and using those. The majority of development work is tying those libraries together with the logic required to make a particular application work. No-one in their right mind is going to write their own database when they can just use SQLite, MySQL, Postgres, the various NoSQLs etc, unless they have a specific requirement they can't meet.
So pulling in proven third-party code that does what you need can work well. But hiring them to implement code that you've decided you need to produce from scratch? Not so much.
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He also discounts postal voting. Dropping a ballot in a mailbox isn't that inconvenient.
Postal voting is notoriously corrupt.
Of course online voting is unlikely to be much better.
A bad economy and an energy bill that is *completely reversible at any later date* isn't going to topple them to the point they aren't Britain anymore.
You do realise that you can't just build new power stations overnight and no-one wants to build nuclear stations in Britain right now because the government can't decide whether they want them or hate them?
Given the staggering decline in north sea production, because its all gone, I don't think this is terribly relevant.
Considering that Britain appears to have enough shale gas to power it for centuries, that doesn't seem to be a problem.
The cult of AGW has gone way beyond harmless Malthusian eccentricity - it's now killing old ladies.
The funny part is that the British media complain about 'global warming' on the one page and old ladies dying from 'fuel poverty' on the next. The high cost of energy being due to the government's farcical anti-'global warming' programs seems to pass them by.
Or perhaps they just have big investments in 'wind farms'.
At this rate they won't have to tell the last person out to turn out the lights because they'll be going out well before that point.
Please explain how using government money to send Tang and Cheez Wiz barely out of the Earth's atmosphere is valuable or interesting?
Because the same spacecraft, if successful, will later be used to put tourists in orbit.
And SpaceX have plenty of non-government customers lined up for Falcon launches in the future.
You mean like the one Constellation had?
No. This one is actually affordable.
Why does it take three friggin' days to dock with the ISS? I never quite understood why it takes so long to do that sort of thing?
First the rocket needs to launch in the correct orbital plane, regardless of where ISS is in its orbit. Then it has to synchronise the orbit so that it can perform a transfer from the initial parking orbit to where ISS is.
If you wanted a direct launch to ISS you'd have to wait until the ISS orbit crosses your launch site, and it's in the right place in that orbit. Which won't happen very often.
Or you could cut the payload to zero so you can carry enough extra fuel to match orbit during the launch. But that rather defeats the purpose of launching something there in the first place.
If you think the default solution to society's problems is for the judicial branch to override the laws of the land, you are asking for trouble.
Given that the vast majority of new laws are blatantly unconstitutional, that's precisely what I would expect the judicial branch to be doing.
So allow me: Apple is a perfect example of what unregulated free markets result in.
Yeah, because copyrights, patents and the other sticks that Apple uses to beat the competition are products of an 'unregulated free market'.
Apple is a perfect example of what government-mandated monopolies result in.
Nobody is knocking at your door, nobody has destroyed your chance at promotion and nobody has kidnapped your children.
Yet.
Why they are exempt from various quota talks?
Everyone knows that in a real war a carrier fleet is just a target-rich environment. Carriers are great for bombing third-world nations who can't shoot back, but not much use against modern missiles and submarines.
They probably had to move manufacturing to China to maintain their lasting record for poor reliability.
Fortunately my mother's maiden name is v6g1sH6Ynr.
In 10-20 years, LEO point-to-point flights will be the modern equivalent of the Concorde. All of the convenience and none of the sonic boom.
Except a quarter of the time you'll be accelerating at 3g so drinking your champagne will be tricky, half the time you'll be in zero-g so drinking it will be impossible, and the rest of the time you'll be braking at 1-2g so you would have a chance to drink it but it will already have splattered all over the cabin during the first three quarters of the flight.
Voluntary sterilization/birth control programs for the people here on earth to try and bend the exponential growth curve into a linear, or even flat, one
Most of the first world would be seeing declining populations if not for immigration from countries with high birth rates; both because the new immigrants increase the population directly and they tend to retain higher birth rates for at least a generation or two.
Stop pretending that spending hundreds of trillions of dollars to send a couple dozen people to another planet is any sort of a "solution" for overpopulation.
No-one in their right mind is suggesting 'spending hundreds of trillions of dollars to send a couple dozen people to another planet', so that's just a straw man. The majority of people who are serious about space colonization are looking for ways to make it cheaper, not ways to waste trillions of dollars.
Well, obviously they did have a rendezvous element, it's just that the target wasn't moving terribly fast (relatively speaking) and there was a valid launch window more or less every day.
There was a valid launch window every once in a while, because they had to arrive at their landing site early in the lunar morning so that their entire stay was during the lunar day and, I believe, so that the sun was still low so it they wouldn't exceed LEM cooling margins.
They were somewhat flexible in launch time during that window because they would spend some time in orbit around the moon before landing, so if they had to pick a launch window an hour or two earlier than the ideal because of other constraints, they could potentially wait a few orbits before the landing.
If you look up the NASA documents on Apollo launch planning there were a number of constraints they had to work within. Unfortunately I can't remember them all :).
Yes, the future of the human race. The exponential-growth problem alone means terrible hardships if we cannot emigrate off of this planet. If we don't start trying now, before there's a problem, how will we ever make it when the problem is in full swing and all resources are put to treating the problem instead of what can be the only cure: Space colonization.
The problem is that you can't cure exponential growth with space colonization. What you can do is ensure that some of the human race gets a chance to survive against exponential growth.
However, given that many countries are seeing declining birth rates now, that's probably not really a big issue.
It might help if the summary mentioned some games they'd produced, so we'd know whether to care.
Why would any advertiser place their ads on Facebook next to a picture of their friend from high-school throwing up, when they can place their ad in traditional print media next to a picture of Kate Moss in Vogue or on TV next to Leighton Meester in Gossip Girl?
People still print ads? On paper?
The funny part is that the Chinese are complaining that they can't find new workers willing to work for peanuts any more.
Trust me people no nation ever improved its status with factories.
Except all the countries who had industrial revolutions and built large manufacturing bases.
That's what I thought. I remembered reading about that law years ago so I couldn't understand why they'd need a new one.
In my experience software development in the 90s generally meant 'here's an operating system, write a bunch of code to do stuff'. We'd write everything other than the basic OS libraries that came with the system.
Today, we typically 'outsource' much of that work by finding libraries that people have already written and using those. The majority of development work is tying those libraries together with the logic required to make a particular application work. No-one in their right mind is going to write their own database when they can just use SQLite, MySQL, Postgres, the various NoSQLs etc, unless they have a specific requirement they can't meet.
So pulling in proven third-party code that does what you need can work well. But hiring them to implement code that you've decided you need to produce from scratch? Not so much.
My IP camera came with an undocument passwordless root login if you telnet to a particular port. Does that count as an exploit or a vulnerability?
Certainly someone must have pointed out it because it was removed in the firmware update.