The basic premise is sound, though. Humans have only inferences for temperature data going back through Earth's history with ever-greater margins of error the further back one goes, and only roughly 200 years of somewhat-accurate temperature data measurements.

200 years of somewhat-accurate data but where from? Of course, we have somewhat-accurate data from the middle of a large continent like Africa, don't we? Oh shit, we don't, so let's use some kind of analogue instead and massage those figures into shape. Rinse & repeat for huge areas of the planet.

Then tell me, from your absurdly inadequate models, that you know what the climate is going to be like in a 100 years time because 95% of "climate scientists" (whatever the hell one of those is) agree on it.

95% of computer users think that Windows is a good OS. That doesn't make that true either.

Such "climate heresy" doesn't fly in universities though just through pure social pressure; your academic career will be toast if you don't go with the orthodoxy and you will also be a social pariah, for good measure. Every reason to go with the flow, even though that impulse may likely be subconscious.

The only part I dispute is that they can reliably tell what aspects of that may be genuinely attributable to "climate change".

I dispute it too. They've got the grand total of 14 years data and they're drawing possible conclusions about "climate change"?

I'll clue the folks in at NASA: the Earth has been around for ~4 billion years. When your satellite has been up there for a billion years or 2, then get back to me with your analysis.

Until then, your analysis has little more credibility than me sticking my head outside tomorrow morning and saying: "The climate is changing & we're all doomed! Oh, BTW, about that research money..."

I can't tell if you are joking or serious.

The scam artist has been building electric cars and rockets for years. The real things. Do you know any other scam artists doing that?

He has built less cars than Ferrari have in the same time and his production line is always just "...6 months away from producing <insert ludicrous figure> cars". The other differences between Tesla and Ferrari is that the cars Ferrari build is not done at a thundering loss and nor are they dishonestly pitched to customers so that they think they're self-driving with the inevitable tragic results.

As for the rockets, they are cross-subsidised and he has entirely failed to address the Arianespace CEO's pertinent observations:

"challenges of reusability ... have not disappeared. ... The stress on stage or engine structures of high-speed passage through the atmosphere, the performance penalty of reserving fuel for the return flight instead of maximizing rocket lift capacity, the need for many annual launches to make the economics work – all remain issues."

The Falcon 9 engine is supposed to be re-usable but only half a dozen or so have been re-used so far and then only once.

The fact of the matter is that with rocket engines you design them with a very small safety factor & hence the materials are at their limits. To do otherwise means excess material and more weight. To do otherwise and use fuel (which itself needs carrying aloft) to land the now shagged engine is absurd.

To top things off, last week in a conference call with financial types, he basically tells them to go and boil their heads when they ask him tricky finance type questions and then even more insultingly only responds to the "When are you going to build a space elevator out of unobtainium, Elon?" type questions from fanbois.

By doing that, he just pissed over any chance of getting further investment from the big players and has just hastened the demise of his shonky companies.

The tragedy is not only the lives he has taken in order to satisfy his ego but the chilling effect it will have on future investment for people who aren't charlatans.

I had a look at the pictures and they've clearly just been knocked up in photoshop.

If his bogus company truly was putting the "finishing touches" to a tunnel, then he wouldn't have to do that or put another 'imagineered' video up on Instagram because a real video would be impressive enough!

He would also tell us where exactly the tunnel goes from and to.

I've had enough of this scam artists bollocks. He should be thrown in prison; which I think he will be in the not too distant future.

Exactly how is giving money for direct efforts going to help in any way at all?

How's it going to help? It's going to help Mr.Turnbull get re-elected along with his interesting ideas about how Australian law trumps mathematical law, of course.

Actually, I don't think it will help him in that regard. I suspect this is just some largesse for 'mates' before he gets booted out of office.

When I was hitchhiking in Queensland for a few months over 30 years ago, corruption was rife within the state government and pretty much on open display with a streak of shit named Joh Bjelke-Petersen perched at the top of the pile. In that respect, I doubt if things have changed much. Although 'Uncle Joh' is well dead, I'm sure his 'inheritance' lives on.

Despite that, tropical Queensland, on and next to the reef (ie. Rockhampton & north), was a pretty good place to be for a young man. That was a time before tourism had really taken off but there were some ominous signs. I wouldn't want to go back now as I'd probably just end up seriously depressed about what it's turned in to.

Henry Ford had those production numbers one hundred years ago.

I would recommend the tried and true industrial production method: Locate and hire a guy who's been a keystone at a competitor's assembly line.

That's where one of his major problems is. He might have been able to tempt top mech/man engineers who can set up a production line and make it sing when he started out years ago. Not any longer.

Any he did have, will have long left the sinking ship. They will have kept quiet publicly due to their NDAs but the word will have got around the industry by word of mouth.

Engineers don't like working for people who don't know what they are doing and have a somewhat strained relationship with the truth.

He's blamed his suppliers, he's blamed his robots....when is he going to throw his remaining engineers under the bus? Before the company goes titsup? Or do they get to hang on until it goes titsup?

Has anyone ever said that? Everyone I've seen points out that the issue is Tesla has no experience building at scale and has had issues with QA / consistency on their existing lines.

You've largely hit the nail on the head. This is just another example of Musk talking Grade 'A' horseshit.

Nowadays, to produce cars cheaply, at scale and acceptable quality, you have to use automation wherever you can. Musk has failed on all 3 of those counts:

* Not cheaply. Regularly running through half a billion bucks a quarter or thereabouts.

* As you say, the quality of the cars has reportedly been shite. Ask matey who crashed into a barrier just how good the softs for his Autopilot are....oh yeah, you can't because he's dead.

* As for the numbers, it very much sounds like he has been selling pre-production units to inflate his already dire production numbers. Tesla reported their quarterly production numbers to the SEC. Unfortunately, the folks on the Street don't seem to be as highly educated as me and obviously missed out on their primary school basic arithmetic. From the numbers given:

$ echo "(9766 - 2020)/11" | bc -e "scale=0"
704

So ignoring the last week of that quarter & it's heavily massaged & spun figure, they're struggling to knock out under 800 cars of shitty quality a week.

He wouldn't be trying to mislead investors with his filing would he? I thought that was some sort of criminal offence.

From TFA:

There are of course small features I would like to see added to Windows Mail, like being able to set formatted signatures (as opposed to just plain text), but that's hardly a priority.

If it's not plain text then it doesn't belong in the body of an email. That's what attachments are for.

He doesn't do his credibility as a sensible and informed critic of MUAs any good with that statement. Although, to be fair, he's probably correct in saying that the current Windows mail client is a POS; they always have been.

MS, along with most of the other software vendors, are trying to force their victims^H^Hcustomers to their 'cloud' offerings and potentially never ending huge revenue stream. It may work for a few years but eventually businesses might just wise-up to the fact that running your apps on Azure, which has a tendency to go up and down with the regularity of a whore's drawers, is probably not the best way to run your business.

postfix, procmail and mutt for the win.

If the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia is interested in it, then I'm not.

His track record is not good:

• Building new city in Saudi at vast expense to attract businesses and tourists. Pitch: "If getting hanged and flogged is your bag then you're coming to the right place!"
• Started never ending war in Yemen with resulting starvation, huge cholera epidemic and attendant death and destruction from high explosive supplied by US and UK.
• Kidnapped Lebanon's leader and made him resign on Saudi TV.
• Kidnapped 300 of the wealthiest and most powerful in the country and shook them down. Result: turned them into 300 slightly poorer but still powerful enemies.
• Came to London and spunked a million quid on adverts featuring his gurning face and telling us British peasants how wonderful Saudi now is thanks to him. We may be fucking stupid but please...
• Has invested 750 million in Virgin Galactica (aka virgin on the ridiculous) Branson's doomed "space" effort that isn't close to orbital.
• Opening dozens of cinemas in Saudi although 'Snow White' likely to be banned. Some tart without a burkha sleeping with 7 dwarves? Are you sure?

Tl;Dr: MbS is a moron and bellend. Hence, Virgin Hyperloop must be doomed.

So after decades of treating diabetics as either type 1 or 2, they wake up to the idea that things might be a little bit more complicated than that.

Yet, I an insulin-dependent diabetic am still nowhere to be found in their expanded categorisation.

I was ~35 when I was diagnosed with diabetes. This was well over a year after almost dying from acute pancreatitis.

It's well known in the literature (if not by common sense) that if the pancreas goes bonkers then there is a reasonable chance that the patient will probably become diabetic to some extent, since the pancreas is where insulin is produced. It was seemingly unknown to the cock holsters who treated me, though.

So another set of overpaid cock holsters come up with this staggering finding. /s

When I was diagnosed ~20 years ago, I grovelled around the 'net via Excite! and found a paper where the author identified maybe a dozen different types of diabetes including mine. Some 20 yrs later, they produce a considerably crappier paper and are lauded like they've split the fucking atom...

WTF? Read my sig.

This is little more than confirmation of what was already known:

Diabetes damages your vascular system. Even if your blood glucose control is excellent, you will still get periods when your BG goes high and your blood vessels will get deposits on their walls and hence restrict supply of oxygenated blood to the tissues that require it.

The results are systemic. If you don't get enough oxygen to tissues that need it, they will die. That includes not only the well recognised bits that get damaged by diabetes: retinas, kidneys, feet etc. but stuff that most medics don't recognise: the rest of your body including your brain.

I speak with some experience: I'm an insulin-dependent diabetic. I've got a loss of feeling in my feet although my retinas are still reasonable.

Yet there must be ongoing damage to the fine vasculature in my nut. My experience of living with people who have dementia is that the effects are insidious and you don't initially notice it. It's effects have an exponential progress, IMO.

I'm 55 now but I reckon within 10 years, I'll be too bonkers to put finger to keyboard. I hope to die before then.

From the summary:

Facial detection is nothing new, even for mobile devices,....

I call BS!

I just gave my girlfriend a facial and did my iPhone detect it? Did it fuck.

I want my money back! Do you hear me Tim Cooke?

Disclaimer:

• 1. Don't own a mobile device let alone an iPhone.
• 2. So old and decrepit, can only get an erection with assistance of a couple of splints and a roll of duct tape.
• 3. Haven't had a girlfriend in years, you insensitive clods. (See 1 & 2)

As an engineer,...

You are obviously not an engineer in the way I'm familiar with in the UK. ie. chartered and at a minimum a member of your professional institute: mech, civil, electrical, whatever; they've all got their own professional body. Except software "engineers", of course.

I've been in engineering organizations releasing new products that had life saving or threatening potential. It is always an agonizing, scary hard call as to when you've passed the threshold of risk.

The fact that you agonize over whether to release a possibly dangerous product to the public strongly suggests to me that just like Mr. Musk you are not an engineer at all but just another wannabe.

If you were a professional, chartered engineer, there would be no "agonizing". You do not sign-off on a possibly dangerous product. Period.

Why? Because if somebody gets seriously hurt, or worse dies, you or your company will be on the receiving end of a very expensive lawsuit. Multiply the expense x10 in US, at least.

But what's considerably worse for you, is that you will be kicked out of your institute, you will no longer be able to practice and your career will lie in burning ruins around you.

As for any future employment whatsoever, see how: "killed and maimed people" goes down on your CV/resume with prospective employers.

That is why Musk's engineers are bailing and why I said in my previous post that no proper engineer would work for him if they valued their social standing, employment prospects, financial wellbeing and conscience.

That the fountain of BS that is Elon Musk allegedly put personal profit ahead of people's lives?

It seems incredible to me that any engineer who values their career would do any work for him in any shape or form.

I've heard him described as "a latter day Edison".

Unfortunately, Musk knows as much about engineering as Sonny Bono did about downhill skiing.

I think he's a naturally slothful person, sluggish and indolent, a dawdling flaneur, content to waste his life spread eagled on pillows forever indulging himself in the pleasures of the palm.

TL;DR: A complete wanker.

He also plans to bore faster, but not all of the details have come out on this yet.

An Elon Musk project where the engineering "details" haven't come out yet? Tell me it ain't so.

One has, however, which is simultaneous casing and boring, rather than bore/stop/case. There's a number of changes to the head that they're looking to make, but they haven't been discussed yet.

Simultaneous lining and boring has been a done deal for decades. I refer you to the Channel Tunnel.

I don't know what kind of bedrock they would be boring through but they all come up against something they didn't expect. Doesn't matter if it's sedimentary or metamorphic rock in the case of the English Channel or igneous rock in the Swiss alps. Add to that an area that is prone to earthquakes....piece of piss, right?

I think I've seen enough of Elon Musk to determine that he is full of shit and preys on people who know precisely fuck all about engineering...or anything else, for that matter. That includes the politicians who give him vast subsidies for whatever is the latest delusional bollocks he happens to come out with.