Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Well, there's one logical consequence (Score 1) 148

The big difference is that there is immense pressure on women in China to marry young. By the time they are 30 they are considered "left on the shelf" and unlikely to ever marry or have children.

Having children is a very big deal, because the expectation is that those children will look after you in old age... Or after age 35, apparently.

Of course things are changing as young women want careers now, and are choosing to have only one or two children, but it's still a big source of pressure. One of the chief complaints of Western incels is that women have too much freedom and independence, meaning they are not forced to marry said incels.

China may get there eventually, but of course the other big difference is that the Chinese government is very likely to intervene if it ever becomes a serious problem. I expect they will start to push for more children soon.

Comment Re:Just bought... (Score 4, Interesting) 154

The handful of American characters in the trilogy like Frederick Tyler and Thomas Wade are particularly interesting, since they look so much like fun-house mirror distortions of Hollywood archetypes. I think it's a combination of the image we project to the world, and China's interpretation of that image. The result feels eerily familiar yet strange.

A common problem the world over. As a Brit, I get it with British people written by Americans. Japanese characters written by Westerners get it a lot. It's quite rare for authors to do a decent job with more than one culture, it seems.

It works in reverse too. A lot of the criticise I see of the Three Body Problem novels is down to people not understanding how Chinese people think about things. Again, the same applies to Japanese stories, and even when the translator provides notes to try to help the reader, it's usually insufficient. I thought I understood a lot of stuff until I actually learned Japanese and stopped relying on subtitles, at which point I realized that the translators were giving a paraphrased and Americanized version of the characters and plot that was only superficially the same.

Comment Re: Just bought... (Score 1) 154

I always thought it was odd that it took so long for Linux to get a decent scripting language. Well, arguably it still doesn't... You have shell scripts, Python, and stuff like Perl.

Decades ago we had ARexx for Amiga computers. Powerful scripting that could interact with applications and automate them. There have been a few attempts to replicate it over the years, but nothing comes close.

Comment Re:Starship (Score 1) 27

Maybe, but if you want to carry a small return vehicle then you need a way to deploy it. With a Starship landed on its tail, they will need to robotically deploy a rover to collect samples, and carry a rocket large enough to return those samples to orbit, where presumably a second Starship would be waiting. And maybe a third tanker one, to carry the fuel needed to get home.

There is a lot of tech that needs to be developed. Meanwhile China is likely to focus on just getting anything back, to claim the first place prize. I think that's why NASA has recently said it wants to simplify the mission too.

I also doubt that Starship will be ready this year. It might reach orbit, but that's a long way from being able to perform the mission required of it by NASA for the Moon landing. It needs to re-fuel in orbit, and then get to the Moon, and perform an automated soft landing. Then they need to man-rate it, which means escape systems and the like. There is a lot more work to do.

Comment Re:Orders of magnitude (Score 1) 152

When I bought an EV over a decade ago, part of the deal was that Nissan were helping to build the UK's first charging network. They ensured that the infrastructure was there. I understand that Tesla later did something similar in the US.

Toyota don't seem to have done that with hydrogen filling stations. I'd say that consumers had a reasonable expectation that they would. A buyback seems reasonable, with deductions for mileage.

Comment Re:Selling solar to PG&E (Score 1) 320

If you are paying 40-50c per kWh, it seems like you must have paid a lot for the battery, or use very little, for it not to pay for itself in 12 years.

That said, you would be unlucky if it didn't last a lot more than 12 years. If the manufacturer set a 12 year warranty then they would expect the vast majority to last longer, otherwise they would be giving away a lot of free batteries.

In the UK, where electricity is actually cheaper than that, the payback time for a battery is typically 6-7 years. It can be even shorter if you have an EV, or work from home.

Comment Re:High quality problem (Score 1) 320

The problem is that it's not a free market. The value of energy exported to the grid doesn't reflect things like how clean the energy is, and utilities are trying to get the most value out of their existing installations before transitioning them to renewables. The government has to intervene to protect the environment.

As more and more people generate their own electricity in ways that don't drain shared resources (solar panels tend not to shade your neighbours), we will have to move energy production to an infrastructure model like roads. Say the grid was treated like roads, a common network we can all use, paid for out of taxation.

Comment Re:The Google monopoly (Score 1) 41

Try F-Droid. All apps are open source and most are ad-free.

As for updates, Google fixed that years ago. They update all the OS components separately via the Play Store, the same as apps. It's only the OS kernel and other core parts that doesn't get updated, but that isn't a huge deal because any malware has to get through the layers of Android protections on top before it can touch the OS.

Comment Re:It's not 'Homegrown' (Score 1) 41

Weird that you would cite "Mainland China" here, when the same thing is entirely true of Western manufacturers.

Android is built on top of Linux, although to be fair the APIs are original.
Linux is a clone of Unix.
Unix is an evolution of Multics.

Apple iOS is built on BSD.

Turns out that nobody really writes stuff from scratch now, it's all built on something else.

As for "homegrown", if you buy some seeds that someone else grew and plant them yourself, I imagine you would probably call that homegrown. It's not a good choice of word, but it's not entirely inaccurate.

Slashdot Top Deals

Anyone can make an omelet with eggs. The trick is to make one with none.

Working...