AKA "toy RC aircraft".
Why was this not required before?
Numbers and capabilities.
Previously, powered RC aircraft ownership was significantly smaller and most toys were not powerful enough to be used at heigts and ranges where they could be a problem for commercial air traffic. RC aircraft that were large and powerful enough to present an issue to commercial aviation used to be extremerly expensive and/or a lot of effort to construct, this limited them to a small number of enthusiasts.
The capabilities you find in a modern sub US$1000 drone used to cost the same as a small car. This means a lot more people are buying them as toys rather than serious hobbies or for professional purposes.
I find it hard to be outraged by this, by bringing registration and licensing, they're legitimising their use rather than banning them. We license people to drive, we register our cars, hell, we even have to get them inspected yearly... there's no shortage of motor vehicles in the UK.
Why does Vermont, with no gun controls, have a lower murder rate?
Why does Venezuela, with a total gun prohibition, have some of the worlds highest murder rates?
So Vermont is a developing country with a recent history of civil war and unrest?
Here in the UK, we have sensible gun control and a much lower rate of murder and violent crime. Vermont is a large state with low population and still does worse than London.
I think Mac users stopped saying the Mac was immune about 10 years ago. My take on it is that out of the two major desktop options, Windows and Mac, the Mac is the safer bet.
Apple are still running the old "we're immune to malware" line in their advertisement. Of course they use weasel words like saying they meant "windows malware, not malware designed for macs" in the fine print. Almost every Mac user I've met still parrots the "immune to viruses" line even though viruses haven't been a real threat for ages (worms and other malware took over ages ago).
As for it being the safer OS... That hasn't been the case since Vista, take both OS's, Windows 10 and the latest version of OS X patch them, password them then put them on a public network, neither will be inherently insecure. Insecurity in both OS's is now entirely in the user and I've found Mac users have a false sense of security that encourages they take more risks. The biggest saving grace that Mac users have is that malware is a numbers game and there just aren't enough Macs to justify the attention.
And every time they tried to oppose something Obama wanted they were called racist or obstructionist.
No it wasn't. As far as obstructionist oppositions went, the Republicans were pretty successful. You really need a better lie.
Now it says a lot about how good the Obama government was when the best you can do is drag out this old lie. The worst thing you can say about them is that you pretended someone called you a bad word.
It also says a lot about how bad the Trump government is because instead of bringing up the accomplishments of the current administration, you're still having to talk about how bad you imagined the last one was.
Worth pointing out to those Americans who seem to forget every time something good happens to the UK economy:.
32 Million is a shed under half the UK's 65 million population. Working age adults (18-65) make up approximately 60% of the population. So where is that missing 7 million? Also, the working population will include the people under 18 and over 65 still working. This will probably push the figure up to 10 million at an educated guesstimate. Also as many have pointed out, they're deliberately ignoring the population not looking for work and those who are underemployed (zero hour contracts). The number they present is not trustworthy as a measure of unemployment (but its done for consistency's sake), it is purely a measure of the number of people who are employed.
The second issue is that the Brexit hasn't hit. Businesses are still in Brexit denial. We're still in the EU, businesses still have projects to deliver so staff are still required for this. Brexit will take a while sink in, firms in the UK are noticing a distinct drop in new orders as the uncertainty sets in, this will take a while to knock on to the deliveries side. Sales and marketing will be first out the door, but production staff will follow. With EU citizens leaving the UK due to the sagging pound, we're actually having a small jobs boom as working in the UK has become a lot less attractive to Europeans, so we're actually seeing the workforce itself contract (especially at the highly skilled end). Add to this that the UK, prior to Brexit was at its most buoyant since before the Credit Crunch/GFC.
Finally adding to the Brexit denial is the firm belief that Brexit is going to fail. That is likely as the EU will off the UK such a crappy deal that accepting it will be national suicide. Sure the angry xenophobes will be angry but they number extremely few and the UK will recover from its fit of pique in time.
What's worse is: Why have the ban if you're only going to implement it for a couple of months? Did they think that the terrorists were using frequent flyer miles that would expire?
Well its first aim was to make people think the Trump government was doing something(TM) about terrorism without having to spend money. Here it failed.
Now it's keeping you distracted from the other great failures of the Trump government. Security theatre is an integral part of bread and circuses.
My old hand held gps could run over 60 hours tracking my position, recording it along with the precision, number of satellites used to receive it, and some other data to my SD card, sometime displaying the local map and my recent track, all while only using 2 1.5V 1600mAh batteries, using 12 years old technology. iPhones & android devices GPS positionning is much less precise than this old device, and use much more power. WTH.
Phones are a bit different as they're more like general purpose computers. I've yet to see a GPS device that functions as fast or smoothly as my phone... that didn't cost as much as my phone. Most cheap GPSs are plagued with bad resitive touch screens and incomplete data-sets that make findinf addresses painful.
In 2014, I has a Samsung Galaxy Nexus, with this phone I navigated from San Luis Obispo to San Francisco on a single charge, that was a 10 hour drive given various stopovers on Highway 1. I ended up doing this because I'd left my car charging kit back in Australia. The Nexus 5x I have now has over twice the battery life, not all phones have terrible battery life.
Do we actually need to name trains? Also do we need articles on Train names? On slashdot?
There are a lot of things we dont need on public transport... but being able to call it Trainy McTrainface is a lot nicer than British Rail Class 458. This makes for nicer journies in Europe where intercity trains are a common form of transport.
If the EU laws work outside Europe, won't China'a laws work outside of China? Why pay for the big firewall, they could just demand removal of all "objectionable" content! Be careful what you wish for....
The fact that powerful nations can put pressure on other nations, even other powerful nations are the reason the US has foisted it's terrible copyright laws on every other country on earth.
They did this by economic and diplomatic pressure.
The EU, for all its flaws are relatively benign. The biggest thing you'll have to worry about is having to call Champagne produced in California, "sparkling wine".
As an Australian, you can pay $15/mo for Foxtel Now "Pop pack", which includes Game of Thrones and a bunch of other TV shows.
That's cheaper than Americans who pay for HBO GO who have to pay $15USD
But that involves giving money to the most evil man on the planet. Given the fact that they cant actually do anything but send warnings to Australians, it's a no brainier.
If you want my money, you need to give me the video forever, which I can watch on my schedule, in a format I find acceptable and from a source I dont find evil. Right now, torrents beats the legitimate option on 3 or more of those criteria.
A long time ago, news was spoken, and you decided to believe, or not to believe, the person telling the tale.
There are some news sources that are still written in a way to present facts, rather than opinions and allow the reader to make up their own mind.
These are often derided as "biased lefty propaganda" by those who are used to the Fox News style of "pissing on your back and telling you its raining" presenting opinions rather than facts.
Yea- no. Sorry. UK takes the cake when it comes to batshit insane. It's right next California, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and all of the lower states in the USA. Different reasons each may be insane, but none-the-less. The UK leads the way in terms of being batshit insane when it comes to theft of people's means (ie taxes are nothing more than theft by one group of people to boost that of another), privacy, freedom, security, and liberty.
Sorry, but that takes the Batshit Insane award of the week.
Taxation isn't theft, taxation pays for civilisation. It pays for roads, emergency services, the military, education, health care and many other things.
Imagine how much roads would cost if you had to pay tolls for every single one of them. That would be real theft. Just think about health care US compared the UK. In the UK the government pays US$4400 per person per year to provide the world class NHS. In the US, the government pays US$9000+ and then the user is expected to pay again, most people will get an inferior service to the NHS because they cant afford to go to the clinics exclusively for the rich.
Ahem. Breitbart and Infowars are set up on the business model of selling advertising space on shocking lies. I don't know about those other ones.
That is also the business model of most Murdoch news establishments, The Australian, Fox News, The Daily Mail. All of them are click-bait turned to 11 and employ the kind of tactics that Buzzfeed can only dream of.
Their business models depend on people not thinking rationally because irrational people are more susceptible to advertising (by associating it with a strong emotion).
CNN, NYT, et al. are following an advertising business model, but not the same one. They're relying on numbers. When you start running click-bait scare stories, you marginalise your audience to a small number of people who want to be made angry (this is why Murdoch is losing money hand over fist). As such, they cant get away with publishing such obvious falsehoods. Sure they exaggerate, but outright, bold faced lying is something they try to avoid because they'll lose reputation, readers and advertising revenue.
I dont explicitly trust any news source, verify everything. However there are sources I implicitly distrust like Fox News or the Daily Mail. In the off chance they've published something factual, it'll be reported somewhere less biased and prone to lying. Sources like Fox are so unashamed of their bias that most of their stories cant even be believed by a 5 yr old.
If running from a T-Rex was an actual concern, I would venture most people would be fit enough to pull it off.
You don't have to run faster than the T-Rex, you have to run faster than the other people running.
The T-Rex may have been capable of short burst of greater speed, similar to Crocodiles that can more at quite a fair clip to attack, but most of the time move rather ponderously.
As is well known, Intel's toughest competition ain't AMD: it's Intel's own, previous CPUs,
This is emphatically not the case with Apple. Apple's compeittion is Android and competition is strong. Allow me to explain.
There are two types of Iphone buyers.
1. The type that upgrades every year (or two if they're in a restrictive contract).
2. The kind that doesn't care what kind of phone they have.
The first type, they will buy the next Iphone no matter what is or isn't changed. They're too emotionally invested to change, they've spent years building their persona around the Iphone, it doesn't matter if the new Iphone had a single changed icon or whether it's purposely designed to give the user random electric shocks, they will buy it because they wont change their mind from the OMG, JesusPhone, OMFG.
The second type will buy whatever is in their budget and meets their needs at the time. Some will upgrade when their contract ends, others will keep phones until they die. Their motivations are many, but the difference between them and the first kind is that they aren't emotionally invested in their phones. Its just a phone to them, not the second coming. My housemate is like this, he's still got a *gasp* Iphone4. He doesn't care, in fact he gets more hate than me (I'm Android) for daring to say the JesusPhone is just an ordinary phone, no more special than any other phone.
Apples problem is that the second type of Iphone owner outnumber the first. Iphone market share in western nations has been shrinking for years with strong competition from Android at all price points. Apple has been hiding this for years by expanding into new markets, however with their recent entry into India and China, they can no longer do this.
There is no more "he said/she said" with a Tesla. That car will tell investigators everything.
If you get into an accident driving one, everything you did is logged and will be submitted into court if it goes that far.
Most cars do this now. There was a recent report in the UK about a base model Ford Fiesta which logged the driver exceeding the speed limit before they crashed.
If I did nothing wrong, I want my car to exonerate me.
If it was my fault, then I deserve what I have coming.
He said / she said is a terrible system.
"I was exceeding the speed limit and take full responsibility officer"
- No-one Ever.
The problem you have with "Autopilot" is that the idiots that use it think that the car is driving so they're automagically protected and they have zero responsibility what so ever. I guarantee that for years to come we will see law suits saying "I wasn't driving, it was the car, remove my responsibility and give me money". Such law suits may even bury Tesla despite the law stating that the driver was in control of the vehicle even if it was in autopilot. Lawyers will find any loophole in the small print or lack of warning messaged (think McDonalds Hot Coffee). In the end such systems will require another system to ensure the driver is paying attention (capacitive pads on the steering wheel, cameras to monitor head and pupil position).
Sales of US based VPN's to people in the UK double in a matter of weeks.
The US?
With their crazy laws, insane president and that extradition treaty... Hell no, I'll just use the same Norwegian end point I use to access torrent sites.
Our conservative government may be batshit insane but the US's makes our government look well and truly grounded in reality.
Visits to foreign-hosted porn sites from the UK mysteriously skyrocket after 2018/04. VPN services experience a slight bump as well.
What makes you think this isn't already the case? I cant think of a single major porn site that is located in the UK.
Most already have an age gateway that asks if you're 18 (because there's no lying on the interwebs, right). Asking for anything more than that will be a spectacular failure.
Re-imagining the Doctor has been kinda the point ever since the first re-generation. The whole idea of the show for N years now has been 'OK, now we've got a new primary, how's this one different'. If that doesn't work for you, I can't see why you'd have watched Eccleston, let alone be commenting on the subject.
Really?
I thought it was a (rather ingenious) way of covering up the replacement of a major actor.
Then again, Doctor Who has never been ashamed of pulling out a little deus ex machina.
Voyager had a lot of problems, Janeway as a woman Capitan, isn't that much of a big deal compared to the other problems.
The problem with Janeway as a captain wasn't that she was a woman, it was that she was insufferably annoying and terribly inconsistent as a character. Heard she wasn't the easiest actor to get along with either.
Slashdot Mirror
AKA "toy RC aircraft".
Why was this not required before?
Numbers and capabilities.
Previously, powered RC aircraft ownership was significantly smaller and most toys were not powerful enough to be used at heigts and ranges where they could be a problem for commercial air traffic. RC aircraft that were large and powerful enough to present an issue to commercial aviation used to be extremerly expensive and/or a lot of effort to construct, this limited them to a small number of enthusiasts.
The capabilities you find in a modern sub US$1000 drone used to cost the same as a small car. This means a lot more people are buying them as toys rather than serious hobbies or for professional purposes.
I find it hard to be outraged by this, by bringing registration and licensing, they're legitimising their use rather than banning them. We license people to drive, we register our cars, hell, we even have to get them inspected yearly... there's no shortage of motor vehicles in the UK.
Why does Vermont, with no gun controls, have a lower murder rate?
Why does Venezuela, with a total gun prohibition, have some of the worlds highest murder rates?
So Vermont is a developing country with a recent history of civil war and unrest?
Here in the UK, we have sensible gun control and a much lower rate of murder and violent crime. Vermont is a large state with low population and still does worse than London.
I think Mac users stopped saying the Mac was immune about 10 years ago. My take on it is that out of the two major desktop options, Windows and Mac, the Mac is the safer bet.
Apple are still running the old "we're immune to malware" line in their advertisement. Of course they use weasel words like saying they meant "windows malware, not malware designed for macs" in the fine print. Almost every Mac user I've met still parrots the "immune to viruses" line even though viruses haven't been a real threat for ages (worms and other malware took over ages ago).
As for it being the safer OS... That hasn't been the case since Vista, take both OS's, Windows 10 and the latest version of OS X patch them, password them then put them on a public network, neither will be inherently insecure. Insecurity in both OS's is now entirely in the user and I've found Mac users have a false sense of security that encourages they take more risks. The biggest saving grace that Mac users have is that malware is a numbers game and there just aren't enough Macs to justify the attention.
And every time they tried to oppose something Obama wanted they were called racist or obstructionist.
No it wasn't. As far as obstructionist oppositions went, the Republicans were pretty successful. You really need a better lie.
Now it says a lot about how good the Obama government was when the best you can do is drag out this old lie. The worst thing you can say about them is that you pretended someone called you a bad word.
It also says a lot about how bad the Trump government is because instead of bringing up the accomplishments of the current administration, you're still having to talk about how bad you imagined the last one was.
Worth pointing out to those Americans who seem to forget every time something good happens to the UK economy: .
32 Million is a shed under half the UK's 65 million population. Working age adults (18-65) make up approximately 60% of the population. So where is that missing 7 million? Also, the working population will include the people under 18 and over 65 still working. This will probably push the figure up to 10 million at an educated guesstimate. Also as many have pointed out, they're deliberately ignoring the population not looking for work and those who are underemployed (zero hour contracts). The number they present is not trustworthy as a measure of unemployment (but its done for consistency's sake), it is purely a measure of the number of people who are employed.
The second issue is that the Brexit hasn't hit. Businesses are still in Brexit denial. We're still in the EU, businesses still have projects to deliver so staff are still required for this. Brexit will take a while sink in, firms in the UK are noticing a distinct drop in new orders as the uncertainty sets in, this will take a while to knock on to the deliveries side. Sales and marketing will be first out the door, but production staff will follow. With EU citizens leaving the UK due to the sagging pound, we're actually having a small jobs boom as working in the UK has become a lot less attractive to Europeans, so we're actually seeing the workforce itself contract (especially at the highly skilled end). Add to this that the UK, prior to Brexit was at its most buoyant since before the Credit Crunch/GFC.
Finally adding to the Brexit denial is the firm belief that Brexit is going to fail. That is likely as the EU will off the UK such a crappy deal that accepting it will be national suicide. Sure the angry xenophobes will be angry but they number extremely few and the UK will recover from its fit of pique in time.
I fell of Ubuntu when they moved the X, + and - buttons over to the wrong (left hand) side of the windows.
I've switched to Linux Mint and never looked back. So...
Dearest Ubuntu,
if you want to get users back, move the buttons back to the correct side.
What's worse is: Why have the ban if you're only going to implement it for a couple of months? Did they think that the terrorists were using frequent flyer miles that would expire?
Well its first aim was to make people think the Trump government was doing something(TM) about terrorism without having to spend money. Here it failed.
Now it's keeping you distracted from the other great failures of the Trump government. Security theatre is an integral part of bread and circuses.
My old hand held gps could run over 60 hours tracking my position, recording it along with the precision, number of satellites used to receive it, and some other data to my SD card, sometime displaying the local map and my recent track, all while only using 2 1.5V 1600mAh batteries, using 12 years old technology. iPhones & android devices GPS positionning is much less precise than this old device, and use much more power. WTH.
Phones are a bit different as they're more like general purpose computers. I've yet to see a GPS device that functions as fast or smoothly as my phone... that didn't cost as much as my phone. Most cheap GPSs are plagued with bad resitive touch screens and incomplete data-sets that make findinf addresses painful.
In 2014, I has a Samsung Galaxy Nexus, with this phone I navigated from San Luis Obispo to San Francisco on a single charge, that was a 10 hour drive given various stopovers on Highway 1. I ended up doing this because I'd left my car charging kit back in Australia. The Nexus 5x I have now has over twice the battery life, not all phones have terrible battery life.
This,
Nobody expects the Spanish Indigestion.
Do we actually need to name trains? Also do we need articles on Train names? On slashdot?
There are a lot of things we dont need on public transport... but being able to call it Trainy McTrainface is a lot nicer than British Rail Class 458. This makes for nicer journies in Europe where intercity trains are a common form of transport.
If the EU laws work outside Europe, won't China'a laws work outside of China? Why pay for the big firewall, they could just demand removal of all "objectionable" content! Be careful what you wish for....
The fact that powerful nations can put pressure on other nations, even other powerful nations are the reason the US has foisted it's terrible copyright laws on every other country on earth.
They did this by economic and diplomatic pressure.
The EU, for all its flaws are relatively benign. The biggest thing you'll have to worry about is having to call Champagne produced in California, "sparkling wine".
As an Australian, you can pay $15/mo for Foxtel Now "Pop pack", which includes Game of Thrones and a bunch of other TV shows.
That's cheaper than Americans who pay for HBO GO who have to pay $15USD
https://www.foxtel.com.au/now/...
But that involves giving money to the most evil man on the planet. Given the fact that they cant actually do anything but send warnings to Australians, it's a no brainier.
If you want my money, you need to give me the video forever, which I can watch on my schedule, in a format I find acceptable and from a source I dont find evil. Right now, torrents beats the legitimate option on 3 or more of those criteria.
A long time ago, news was spoken, and you decided to believe, or not to believe, the person telling the tale.
There are some news sources that are still written in a way to present facts, rather than opinions and allow the reader to make up their own mind.
These are often derided as "biased lefty propaganda" by those who are used to the Fox News style of "pissing on your back and telling you its raining" presenting opinions rather than facts.
Yea- no. Sorry. UK takes the cake when it comes to batshit insane. It's right next California, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and all of the lower states in the USA. Different reasons each may be insane, but none-the-less. The UK leads the way in terms of being batshit insane when it comes to theft of people's means (ie taxes are nothing more than theft by one group of people to boost that of another), privacy, freedom, security, and liberty.
Sorry, but that takes the Batshit Insane award of the week.
Taxation isn't theft, taxation pays for civilisation. It pays for roads, emergency services, the military, education, health care and many other things.
Imagine how much roads would cost if you had to pay tolls for every single one of them. That would be real theft. Just think about health care US compared the UK. In the UK the government pays US$4400 per person per year to provide the world class NHS. In the US, the government pays US$9000+ and then the user is expected to pay again, most people will get an inferior service to the NHS because they cant afford to go to the clinics exclusively for the rich.
Ahem. Breitbart and Infowars are set up on the business model of selling advertising space on shocking lies. I don't know about those other ones.
That is also the business model of most Murdoch news establishments, The Australian, Fox News, The Daily Mail. All of them are click-bait turned to 11 and employ the kind of tactics that Buzzfeed can only dream of.
Their business models depend on people not thinking rationally because irrational people are more susceptible to advertising (by associating it with a strong emotion).
CNN, NYT, et al. are following an advertising business model, but not the same one. They're relying on numbers. When you start running click-bait scare stories, you marginalise your audience to a small number of people who want to be made angry (this is why Murdoch is losing money hand over fist). As such, they cant get away with publishing such obvious falsehoods. Sure they exaggerate, but outright, bold faced lying is something they try to avoid because they'll lose reputation, readers and advertising revenue.
I dont explicitly trust any news source, verify everything. However there are sources I implicitly distrust like Fox News or the Daily Mail. In the off chance they've published something factual, it'll be reported somewhere less biased and prone to lying. Sources like Fox are so unashamed of their bias that most of their stories cant even be believed by a 5 yr old.
So, survival of the fittest?
It is not the strongest or fastest of the snacks that survive, but the one who kneecaps the others.
If running from a T-Rex was an actual concern, I would venture most people would be fit enough to pull it off.
You don't have to run faster than the T-Rex, you have to run faster than the other people running.
The T-Rex may have been capable of short burst of greater speed, similar to Crocodiles that can more at quite a fair clip to attack, but most of the time move rather ponderously.
As is well known, Intel's toughest competition ain't AMD: it's Intel's own, previous CPUs,
This is emphatically not the case with Apple. Apple's compeittion is Android and competition is strong. Allow me to explain.
There are two types of Iphone buyers.
1. The type that upgrades every year (or two if they're in a restrictive contract).
2. The kind that doesn't care what kind of phone they have.
The first type, they will buy the next Iphone no matter what is or isn't changed. They're too emotionally invested to change, they've spent years building their persona around the Iphone, it doesn't matter if the new Iphone had a single changed icon or whether it's purposely designed to give the user random electric shocks, they will buy it because they wont change their mind from the OMG, JesusPhone, OMFG.
The second type will buy whatever is in their budget and meets their needs at the time. Some will upgrade when their contract ends, others will keep phones until they die. Their motivations are many, but the difference between them and the first kind is that they aren't emotionally invested in their phones. Its just a phone to them, not the second coming. My housemate is like this, he's still got a *gasp* Iphone4. He doesn't care, in fact he gets more hate than me (I'm Android) for daring to say the JesusPhone is just an ordinary phone, no more special than any other phone.
Apples problem is that the second type of Iphone owner outnumber the first. Iphone market share in western nations has been shrinking for years with strong competition from Android at all price points. Apple has been hiding this for years by expanding into new markets, however with their recent entry into India and China, they can no longer do this.
TIL that phones in the UK are extremely heavy.
Yes, they are much heavier on this side of the pond, hence Englishmen are quite strong. That is why you never want to spill their pint.
I said it before here https://slashdot.org/comments.... and I'll say it again.
There is no more "he said/she said" with a Tesla. That car will tell investigators everything.
If you get into an accident driving one, everything you did is logged and will be submitted into court if it goes that far.
Most cars do this now. There was a recent report in the UK about a base model Ford Fiesta which logged the driver exceeding the speed limit before they crashed.
Another reason why you want to keep an old car.
Which, IMHO, is a good thing.
If I did nothing wrong, I want my car to exonerate me.
If it was my fault, then I deserve what I have coming.
He said / she said is a terrible system.
"I was exceeding the speed limit and take full responsibility officer"
- No-one Ever.
The problem you have with "Autopilot" is that the idiots that use it think that the car is driving so they're automagically protected and they have zero responsibility what so ever. I guarantee that for years to come we will see law suits saying "I wasn't driving, it was the car, remove my responsibility and give me money". Such law suits may even bury Tesla despite the law stating that the driver was in control of the vehicle even if it was in autopilot. Lawyers will find any loophole in the small print or lack of warning messaged (think McDonalds Hot Coffee). In the end such systems will require another system to ensure the driver is paying attention (capacitive pads on the steering wheel, cameras to monitor head and pupil position).
Sales of US based VPN's to people in the UK double in a matter of weeks.
The US?
With their crazy laws, insane president and that extradition treaty... Hell no, I'll just use the same Norwegian end point I use to access torrent sites.
Our conservative government may be batshit insane but the US's makes our government look well and truly grounded in reality.
Visits to foreign-hosted porn sites from the UK mysteriously skyrocket after 2018/04. VPN services experience a slight bump as well.
What makes you think this isn't already the case? I cant think of a single major porn site that is located in the UK.
Most already have an age gateway that asks if you're 18 (because there's no lying on the interwebs, right). Asking for anything more than that will be a spectacular failure.
Re-imagining the Doctor has been kinda the point ever since the first re-generation. The whole idea of the show for N years now has been 'OK, now we've got a new primary, how's this one different'. If that doesn't work for you, I can't see why you'd have watched Eccleston, let alone be commenting on the subject.
Really?
I thought it was a (rather ingenious) way of covering up the replacement of a major actor.
Then again, Doctor Who has never been ashamed of pulling out a little deus ex machina.
Voyager had a lot of problems, Janeway as a woman Capitan, isn't that much of a big deal compared to the other problems.
The problem with Janeway as a captain wasn't that she was a woman, it was that she was insufferably annoying and terribly inconsistent as a character. Heard she wasn't the easiest actor to get along with either.