I don't understand why the voter details were held centrally at all. Voter registration in the UK is with a council official called a Returning Officer, and the data only need ot be stored locally. If not held centrally it would have been much harder for it to get hacked.

Sending a text from a phone located in some remote region will just depend on it knowing when the next Iridium spacecraft passes over, so it will be fairly easy, given enough transmitter power and a suitable antenna. But receiving a message sent from space to some mobile phone will be much harder, as the Iridium network will not generally have any idea where on Earth that phone is. It would be hopelessly inefficient to have all satellites broadcast the message all over the world. The cellphone network only works by maintaining a huge distributed database which essentially knows which cell phone base stations are nearest to every mobile phone in the world at every instant, essentially by pinging each phone every minute or two. Doing something similar on a satellite network will be much harder.

Well the Chinese economy has hardly been affected at all by the pandemic - they are one of the very few countries to have shown growth in the last 12 months. To be sure, there a few other countries that have been barely affected by the virus, so far at least, but all of them are quite small or isolated ones, like New Zealand. All other major economies except China have been more badly affected than during any year in the last few hundred years. So we should be asking: was this predictable? Did China deliberately release a virus that they thought they could deal with, albeit with some damage to their own population, on the grounds that it would affect their major competitors much more? I don't know the answers - but it ought to be discussed.

They don't seem to cover what happens when, as is inevitable before long, a train breaks down between stations. Then you are in a small fuselage with limited air supply and perhaps only dwindling battery power. In a conventional train you can use the emergency door opener to escape or if in a tunnel exit via doors in the front or rear cabs. But in a hyperloop cabin you have only vacuum outside, so if you do that all your air will vanish. Then even if you have your own space-suit to survive in the resulting vacuum, you are in a tube perhaps dozens of metres below the surface. That doesn't seem an easy problem to solve.

Yes but most planes don't have software that makes them liable to crash, despite the best efforts of the pilots, if their AOA sensor is faulty.

But Boeing's solution is to have both angle-of-attach sensors connected. But if they give discrepant readings there's no easy way of telling which of them is wrong, so this really isn't a very satisfactory fix. They really need three sensors to have a fully redundant system. For myself, I will simply not fly 737MAX. If this means avoiding Ryanair, who have said they won't tell passengers which type of plane they are about to fly, then I can manage without them. Or indeed carriers in other parts of the world who use these planes.

I live in the UK. I'm old enough to remember the late 1960s when we had an experiment with summer time all year round. At our latitude either going to work or coming home has to be in the dark for a few months in the winter, but with "summer time" in the winter it meant that it didn't get light until after 9am and got dark again by 5pm, so for most people it meant two journeys in the dark instead of just one. I found the experience pretty unpleasant and maybe dangerous on a bike. Apparently many others had the same opinion. Because of public reaction, the experiment was ended after a couple of years although it had been intended to be permanent. So if you guys want a change to permanent summer time - make sure it's an experiment that can be reversed it it makes things worse.

A member of my family got an XPS13 a year or so back (Windows version of course). The trackpad/cursor system is simply awful - cursor sometimes jiggles around for a minute or so uncontrollably, and at other times the trackpad simply does not respond to touches. We've tried downloading numerous driver and BIOS updates until we got fed up, but nothing cures it. I've seen other reports of the same, so I think it's a well-known fault with the hardware which Dell can't be bothered to fix. My advice would be to check the machine out very carefully indeed before buying.

Meanwhile a NYT article supports Boeing by saying it's all the fault of the airlines who hire inexperienced pilots: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/0... It doesn't explain how, if it needs considerable experience to fly a 737Max, new pilots are ever going to get the required experience.

Here in the UK they have never been legal on public land, because the only vehicles allowed on pavements (sidewalks) are those used by the disabled and infants, and they are not legal on roads because they do not have two independent braking systems, as do all legal pedal cycles. Problem solved. Except not quite, because the police are unfortunately not all that keen on enforcement. At least it has kept hire companies from operating here, and if you try to buy one, vendors like Amazon are forced to tell you that they can only be used legally on private land. I'm a little surprised, actually, that the default laws and roads and sidewalks don't apply in other countries and so automatically make scooters illegal.

Research many years ago suggests that it's the fourth power of the weight, so almost all road damage comes from big trucks.

I don't understand what is being proposed here. I have a bog standard Android phone and have already installed Firefox and I also use DuckDuckGo as my search engine. Maybe I can't uninstall Google Chrome, but I don't have to use it. So what am I missing in this announcement?

Seen from a European perspective, this linking of anit-evolution with religion is rather strange. The Pope is happy with evolution, so is the Archbishop of Canterbury, and indeed all the mainstream Christian churches. As an aside: how they reconcile their bible and the observable facts doesn't bear inquiring in too closely, but they all claim to accept evolution as scientific fact. So the fact that maybe 50% of europeans call themselves religious isn't incompatible with the fact that something over 80% of europeans accept evolution. I don't understand why things are different in the USA.

Thanks for that comment. I thought that it must be something like that. But a contact lens that blocks out almost all visible light except a tiny bit at the red end must make the user almost without usable sight. Wouldn't someone banging into the furniture in a casino and groping around them all the itme make someone suspicious? I retain a profoud scepticism that that there is anything in this story at all.