I have a New Scientist that is over 20 years old that talked about a Concorde replacement. The reckoned even back then you could go twice as far with twice as many passengers for the same cost. That's a quarter of the ticket price of Concorde.

What I never got about Concorde is why they didn't do trans Pacific flights with a fuel stop at say Honolulu where you land fill with fuel and take off again without disembarking the passengers. Still much quicker than a 747 and opening up potentially lucrative Los Angeles/San Francisco to Tokyo routes.

It is a problem and I think you will find adding electric motors to the landing gear is the solution. It is likely to make it's way to ordinary planes as well for exactly the same reason.

Personally I would like to see using a satellite navigation system on a truck/lorry/HGV that is not designed for such purposes as an offence that will attract points on the license of the driver.

Then when they go down some inappropriate road and get stuck it is an automatic fine.

My personal favourite of stupid truck/HGV drivers is this incident in York (that's the historic city of York in England nothing to do with the interloper New York)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-e...

Good job the highest point in Guam is 407m above sea level and the highest point in the Northern Mariana islands is 965m above sea level, and that is before we build any structures to hold the antenna.

A better challenge would be pretty much any city in Europe.

What happens when due to a lack of testing your cheap OCP hardware has a design flaw and 10,000 servers all fail in a month?

That is the criticism I think, that there is too little testing in OCP designs to make sure critical design flaws don't exist. No amount of fault tolerant software design is going to save you from mass hardware failures.

That's called the Dell Optiplex line. The cases are all pretty much tool free, the models are available for over a year (18 months rings a bell) really cutting down on the number of images you need.

Even simple things like grabbing all the service tags and feeding them into the Dell website to see which ones are coming up on warranty expiry this month so you can go round and check nothing needs replacing is nailed to the ground.

You really have to separate the Dell consumer and business lines, they are like chalk and cheese.

Strictly speaking English grammar rules (I see you refer to Webster and I have no idea what American grammar rules are but you used English) state that if it begins with a vowel it should be "an" and if it begins with a consonant it should be "a". Last time I checked U was a vowel so strictly speaking it should be an.

All that aside I will admit that an USB sounds odd, but it's correct English grammar as taught to me at my school in England when growing up.

Problem for Russia is that low debt ratio came about purely on high oil and gas prices. Those have evaporated leaving a black hole in the countries finances and no way to plug it other than borrowing, which is hard because their credit rating is now literally junk or cuts aka austerity.

So while they may have a lower debt to GDP ratio than Germany they are in recession and no clear way to plug the hole other than a rise in oil and gas prices which looks increasingly unlikely.

And why does the rest of the world have an obligation to help them? They don't and right now those who have been trying to help them over the past five years have basically given up, and are likely to wash their hands of the whole situation.

It is amazing how many deluded people think the slave trade involved ships sailing up to the coast of Africa and grabbing people before sailing over the Atlantic. It was called the slave TRADE for a reason people. The ships sailed into ports in Africa where they purchased slaves from Africans.

Just exactly where is Russia going to get the cash to prop up Greece? Due to the global slump in oil prices Russia is struggling just to keep afloat itself. It certainly does not have cash to throw at Greece even if it wanted to.

Yeah and using partitions is bonkers as well. LVM is the way to go for anything that does not involve huge (we are talking 100's of TB upwards) clustered file systems.

You make it sound like Al Qaeda and Islamic State are the only terrorist organizations in existence. Sure Iran does not sponsor Islamic State, but there are definite links between Iran and Al Qaeda.

However Islamic State is not responsible for the majority of the worlds terrorism of the past 40 years, not even close. That would fall to the likes Hamas, Hezbollah, and in the past the PLO, all of which have received state sponsorship from Iran.

I and many others don't think Iran's pursuit of nuclear technology has anything to do with power generation, and that is the problem. There are far more cost effective options for Iran than nuclear power plants if what they want is electrical power generation.