I was worried that your failure to cite the specific "studies" you reference might mean you were not confident of their relevance or reliability.

However, I am entirely reassured now that you tell me they have been endorsed by both Elon Musk and Donald Trump.

Fortunately, you're not an urban planner.

Tube trains in London run in small tunnels that follow the twisty street pattern because the technology and property laws at the time of their construction meant that was the most economic approach. Mainline railways in the UK have a much smaller loading gauge than most of the rest of the world for similar historic reasons. Both systems had to be built using private capital so their was a strong incentive to invest the minimum needed for a quick return. We've been regretting it ever since as the limitations put severe constraints on the ability to expand capacity up to the present day.

If you want a decent urban transportation system, build one that's up to the task and use long-term civic financing to pay for it.

There's a more recent study conducted by the same hospital on "a representative sample of asymptomatic Bostonians" rather than a small number of passers-by on the street in an area which has continued to make local and national headlines with its sky-high rate of infections.

Properly conducted, the rate of antibodies in the general population was found to be around 10%. That's a long way off "herd immunity" and your assertion is unsupported by evidence.

Actually, most politicians are desperate to find out because it is key to determining when the lockdowns can safely be lifted and how quickly. There's been a reasonably robust study across Spain that suggests around 5% of the population may have been infected - Spain currently has around twice the deaths per million population as the US, though the US rate is ticking up fast. Other studies have come up with similar rates. The highest rate found anywhere yet was New York City with around 20%, though the State average was closer to 10%. Nowhere has a figure as high as 30% yet been found. Of course, you probably believe the numbers are all fake but I'm afraid speculation does not trump data.

Lockdowns are a sign of public health failure - they could largely have been avoided if proper testing and tracing had been implemented early. Having failed once it would be particularly stupid to fail a second time by prematurely encouraging phsyical proximity while infections continue at a high rate.

We didn't "let" China manufacture everything, we positively encouraged them to do it because it made it easy to externalise the environmental and social costs so we could continue to have cheap tat in abundance.

Surprise, surprise, China doesn't see its future as the world's sweatshop and spoil heap.

The problem here is that China is coupling its industrial capability to an increasingly imperial agenda. That situation is not going to be improved by holding China responsible for our own mistakes.

Actually it's not that simple. Germany was protecting its own steel industry with high import tariffs and exporting its own goods falsely marked with the trademarks of UK businesses. The British response was to require labelling which did deter people from buying the counterfeit goods, with the unintended consequence that only quality products that people really wanted labelled "Made in Germany" were found in the supply chain once the inferior products were removed.

I think the message is that if there is a genuine reason to object to market practices, then deal directly with those practices wherever you find them, don't fall back on casual racism to do the job for you.

Perhaps because it's entirely irrelevant? The law says it's a non-essential operation and should remain closed.

At some point, the law will say the factory should re-open if it can safely do so and the conditions in the factory will then be relevant.

It's likely incredible to most people outside the US that anyone in a supposedly democratic country would be promoting the argument that a rich man should be excused from the law because he claims to know better.

It really isn't: it's mostly some conditional and looping logic and decimal arithmetic.

However, most mainframe COBOL programs aren't just COBOL: the COBOL just wraps around macros for accessing databases or interacting with the teleprocessing environment (which queued up the inputs from the terminals, dispatched the appropriate bits of code and then returned the output from the right work unit to the right terminal). Depending on the age of the application, there's probably more of a requirement to understand CICS or IMS. That's where the expertise is likely to be thinner on the ground

The figures for cases are almost entirely worthless. Germany is doing widespread testing, like South Korea, so they're finding more low-level cases. The UK is only testing hospital patients so its figures miss anyone who has mild symptoms that don't require hospitalisation. You can't compare them in any meaningful way.

Both Germany and South Korea have been aggressively contact-tracing with the information that they got from their testing program and using it to isolate those who are infected. That is reflected in their present lower death rates. Whether this is sustainable in the longer term, for as long as it takes to find and deploy a vaccine is another matter. It's possible there may be no particular benefit to "flattening the curve" more than is necessary to allow hospitals to cope if the only way out of this is for most of us to have had the disease at some point.

Well, that might have been because at the time there was no real support for anything other than English in most of the application protocols, there was no common standard even for things like e-mail attachments and there was no commercial basis for public data services (joining the Internet involved hiring a point-to-point line and finding some government-funded institution that would let you join the party) and not even lip service was paid to ideas like quality of service. European PTTs at least envisaged a public network that allowed individuals and small businesses to communicate in their own language.

IP won because the US had a large homeogenous market, the European market was fragmented and data communications were considered a bit of a niche industry at the time. Exactly the same would have happened in the mobile phone market if it had not been for an insistence on standards which promoted competition.

There is very little functional difference between ISO CNLS + ISO Transport Class 4 and TCP/IP, except that limitations in the latter (such as address length and transport window size) were fixed. That's a proper standard that could easily have been adopted 30 years ago and all those people who were clamouring to adopt the "back of an envelope" TCP/IP wouldn't be tearing their hair out over IPv6 migration.

My most recent (Acer) laptop came with Windows 10 and it was insufferable a year ago - intrusive "suggestions" in the menus, hopelessly inconsistent owing to the unfinished transition to "universal" apps and clearly aimed at turning the "owner" into a profitable revenue stream.

I've been running Linux Mint and it's generally fine for day-to-day use. The touchpad freezes from time to time (seemingly a driver problem noone really knows how to fix). LibreOffice mostly works fine for domestic purposes and the things it makes a meal of (such as producing mailing labels) can be done with web-based services instead. I get video tearing, particularly if you scroll at the same time, but it's mostly fine. I don't do computer games, so I don't miss out there.

I have a Windows 7 VM I use from time to time for specific bits of software for which I have yet to find a suitable alternative, but its use is becoming less frequent.

For all its faults, it's better than the alternative and the alternative is only going to get worse.

Back in the 19th Century they used to say that about the US when it was ripping off the patents and copyrights of European industry and art.

Microsoft's investment in Uber has finally worked out for them!

I don't think the pundits concerned about robots taking over the world have taken sufficient account of the enthusiasm of people to be replaced because it would be "cool or fun".

But, I suppose, a world in which the family of a man who died 65 years ago sell his likeness for profit is not one that can endure.

The highest death rates occur in countries that don't have the infrastructure you would typically find in, say, Western Europe, nor the rigorous enforcement of vehicle maintenance standards and driving permits. They're also the places where autonomous vehicles are least likely to operate successfully.

It's quite possible that the mere replacement of conventional power units with electric traction will save more lives in the immediate vicinity of roads by virtue of reduced air pollution than casualties on the road itself may be fall through automation - we'll probably only ever know that in retrospect.

The self-driving vehicle industry exists only because it represents an economic opportunity to take control of a very significant market. Any human benefits that accrue are merely incidental, though may be used for marketing purposes.