Lattice fins have been used on space rockets going back to Soyuz and N-1.

He's referring to a graph that was recently discussed on /., where various levels of funding are graphed against the probable time to develop a working fusion reactor. That graph shows the current level of funding as never achieving its goal.

You can get various fun cars powered by motorbike engines these days. Several based on the old Lotus 7 (e.g. Westfield, Tiger) are in your 200 bhp/1000 lbs ballpark. Tiger do or did 2-engine versions (2WD, with one driving each rear wheel or 4WD, one per axle). You can even get a 2.8 litre V8 which is 2 Hayabusa blocks on a common crankshaft; with a supercharger if you wish. Hartley builds the engine, used by Radical and Ariel.

they seem to have fixed the site. For the last few months, opening the home page or doing a search locked up my browser for a minute or more. Today both stay responsive throughout the loading process. It's finally usable again!

no death is acceptable pursuing leasure activities. We should ban mountain climbing, parachute jumping, diving, all non-commercial travel including driving, and need I go on?

(tagged: drivel)

You say that like it's a good thing.

At a file size of 100 Mb, Word is barely usable (especially if you have Autosave on [1]). I still have nightmares about a job a couple years ago that involved such files.

1: and the larger the file, the more likely you'll need it at some point.

That is exactly how markets work in cases where you don't want to end up with multiple competing systems. We've seen this with the Bluray/HD-DVD debacle, with VHS vs. Beta vs. V2000, and in the financial sector with credit cards.

The end goal of all participants is a monopoly, and the quickest way to get there is by forming alliances or buying out the competition. The largest alliance benefits from network effects and soon can offer lower prices than the competition. The majority of consumers vote based on price, not on technical merits, and we end up with the largest alliance/best-networked player as the monopolist.

All I'm saying is that this isn't the best way to decide which system should be used for important, big-impact items such as payment systems. There should be standardization, not a commercial free-for-all.

No, I'm saying there should be ONE contactless pay system, not several competing systems. Because if the market decides, you just get the biggest player, not the best system. This was worked out long ago for money, it's not called "legal tender" for nothing; companies aren't free to come up with their own coins and bills. Why should abstractions of coins and bills be any different?

I know why the market shouldn't decide this. Having multiple incompatible payment schemes would be bloody annoying. It's like the credit card market before all the players consolidated into Visa and MasterCard: tons of money will be invested in the losing solution, that's a lot of money down the drain that could have been put to better use.

Hm. Ignore parent, Cloudflare is used by the website I'm trying to connect to, not my ISP. Not properly awake yet.

My ISP apparently uses Cloudflare. The only information I have to this effect is the error page when I try to connect to a website that's down. So what can I do to avoid Cloudflare? Change ISPs and hope they don't use Cloudflare?

Well, he wasn't wrong. In a fighter jet, the task of driving/flying is vastly simpler than on land, so it's easier to combine driving and targeting. When you're flying, all you have to do is a. not hit the ground and b. point the aircraft in the general direction of the enemy. Weapons are mostly fire-and-forget to minimize pilot workload.
On the ground, there's lots of micromanagement in steering around obstacles, reading the soil to make sure you don't get stuck in a bog etc. In a tank, you have the added complication that the main gun points in a different direction than the vehicle which makes is hard to combine driving and targeting. And the main weapon is unguided, so targeting is manual.