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Comment Oh bollocks. (Score 1) 594

The test pilot who unfortunately lost his life knew the risks. No one forced him to take the job. Equally no one should be able to tell him he couldn't do it because all he was testing was an aircraft to give rich people thrill rides. The article is just asinine.

Comment Re:warnings are out there (Score 1) 495

Weather and climate prediction are two entirely different things.

Here's an analogy, it doesn't involve cars:

Take a pot of water and put it on the stove top, and turn the stove on. The analogy of the weather forecaster is that the weather forecaster is trying to predict every eddy, every bubble, every current in the pot of water. It gets extremely difficult to predict all the eddies even 10 seconds from now. The climate scientist on the other hand is just trying to predict the bulk temperature of the water in 2 minutes time. This is much easier to do and can be done with a lot more accuracy. In terms of global warming, the climate scientist is predicting how the rate of change will differ if you now put a lid on the pan, and what difference it will make if you (say) only half cover the pot versus putting the lid on completely.

Comment Re:History is written by the victors (Score 1) 495

Why would we end up with more arable land? Sure if you're used to looking at a Mercator projection map it looks like there's an awful lot of land above 60 degrees north, but simple geometry will tell you that this is not so, the horizontal distance shrinks in proportion to the cosine of degrees above the equator. For instance if you draw a square on a Mercator projection map at the equator, and this square is 1km x 1km and then moved this square up to 40N (where much of the arable currently is), the actual size underneath this square would now be 0.76km x 1km. Move this to 60N and it's now 0.5km x 1km, As you go further north, the horizontal dimension gets smaller at a much faster rate, go another 10 degrees north up to 70N and now your square is only 0.34km x 1km, so an area at 70N north that looks as big as an area at 40N is in reality only 45% of the area of the same sized looking area at 40N (and not only that you start running into the Arctic Ocean).

Comment Re:On the other hand... (Score 4, Insightful) 700

This has the potential though to backfire quite badly on FTDI. The vast majority of users don't know that the thing they bought is fake, all they know is that it's FTDI branded and all of a sudden it doesn't work, and they blame FTDI, and FTDI gets a bad reputation for unreliable crap (even though the hardware was counterfeit).

Comment Re:Sigh! (Score 3, Insightful) 173

I shouldn't have to remind you of the things in the modern world that depends on real-time instructions from software.

You are not one of those things! You GIVE orders to computers, not take! The computer is supposed to be your bitch. Thirty years ago people worried about Terminators, and now I find out that all Skynet has to do, is nicely tell people to jump off cliffs. I can't wait until Google Surgeon, when everyone thinks they should just blindly do what they're told, preferably with impatience and in real time.

Google Surgeon [speaking slowly]: "Snip the art--"

Doctor: [snip] "Yeahyeah doesanyoneknowhow tospeedupthisthing'sspeech?"

Google Surgeon: "--ery, but first, clamp off the blood supply so the patient doesn't bleed to death."

Comment Re:More changes I don't want ... (Score -1, Flamebait) 173

It is positively dangerous when you have to go round a roundabout twice for it to catch up! (In a 40 ton rig).

WTF? How can a mapping program possibly be dangerous or time-sensitive?

(Please don't tell me you are one of those MORONS who relies on software for real-time instructions, instead of having your own plan that was possibly originally aided by software. If you're a moron, then it's not the software that's dangerous; it's that some even bigger, stupider moron allowed you to drive a 40 ton vehicle (or even a 1 ton vehicle) on roads that might have other people within a quarter mile.)

All I can think of, is that the slowness is somehow keeping you from being able to review your route before you it's time for you to leave, so that you end up driving faster to catch up.

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