Comment Re:Big Old Liar (Score 1) 276
He doesn't mention Chinese tea houses. Tea has been important in China for thousands of years but Polo makes no mention of it.
He doesn't mention Chinese tea houses. Tea has been important in China for thousands of years but Polo makes no mention of it.
HIV is a mutated version of a chimpanzee virus,
... which probably made the species-jump through contact with infected blood while handling bush meat.
Okay, was there no monkey meat business before 1920s? Why did it make the jump only at that time? How exactly does a virus change from a chimp version to a human version?
It made the jump because of the large local population, fed by modern transportation systems. Previously it hadn't been possible to support a million people in such a small area.
In fact I know a guy who works as a butcher. He got badly sick at one point from exposure to blood from a butchered animal. Not sure if it happened because he had an open wound. It does seem to be an occupational hazard for butchers.
Yes I would agree. Its just that I used to hang around the test stand in the engine factory for the Australian fleet of FA/18 jets and those things are very loud.
IIRC there was a product advertised some years ago. Its basically a contractors truck with an integrated generator. The focus is on supplying power to a construction site, and traction runs off the same power source.
I can't wait for to be woken at 5 AM when the turbine generator fires up outside my bedroom window
Its just like a British milk float. It spends a lot of its time stopped, so an engine which doesn't need to idle is more efficient.
More to the point its like being afraid of flying sharks. You could make a shark fly but it wouldn't be a particularly dangerous predator once you got it working.
Doesn't work that way in aerospace. The client pays for maintenance. Margins on development are small and the risk for developers is very high. If the airlines insisted on free fixes, the developer would just disappear. They don't want that to happen so they pay for the extra work.
As long as passengers are willing to pay for the upgraded gear with the price of their tickets.
Those poor, poor airline operators.
Passengers will pay.
Thinking about this on the train this morning I reckon you could get close by using Doppler sensing sonar along a corridor with one way doors at each end. A Doppler shift which indicates somebody going the wrong way would disable both doors until humans sort it out. It could probably be augmented with a camera based system. There would inevitably be false positives from kids darting around, etc but you wouldn't have to shut down the terminal.
(we assume most people aren't complete morons in Australia).
Did you _see_ the results of the last election?
Touche.
But in our defence, only 32% of people voted for the Libs, the remaining 13% was made up of the various national parties. The 5% that got them over the post were due to dodgy preference deals.
But realistically the dregs of Labor weren't getting back in to office.
How about one of those big fans they use for indoor skydiving, but oriented horizontally and pointed away from airside.
I found a nokia at a tram stop once. It was just the internal structure and battery, but a bit of hunting around in the gutter revealed the case. It had been dropped on the road and repeatedly run over. I snapped the lot together and found the most frequently dialed numbers (parents in Malaysia, not calling there to say I had found their daughters phone smashed on a road in Melbourne). Called her boyfriend and he arranged for me to drop off the phone. Very strong bits of gear, Nokias.
The cost of feathers has risen, even down is up!
