"One of the comments levelled at self-service check in is that it has lost the human touch that people had when checking in at a traditional manned counter,"

So we're going to take away the last humans and replace them with mindless robots.

Well done.

Certainly aced that one.

(As an aside, I've just come through London Stansted including an extra hour in the security queues which went all the way back to the gate when you come off the plane, and I spent much of it yelling and attracting the attention of people around me - my primary beef was that the humans had no humanity, nobody had bothered to go down the line, tell us what we were waiting for, how long it was expected to take, what they could do for special cases - young children, disabled passengers, elderly passengers unable to stand in queue, etc. - or would even bother to do anything to help or give answers.

And when we got to the front, all the "electronic passport" aisles were gone and only the manned aisles were left. I know why they were removed - nobody uses them. They are too much a faff, you can't take children through them, if you're travelling with someone with a non-chipped passport, you have to separate and then wait (hope) blindly for each other on the other side, etc. so even when they were opened, less than 1% of the people there ever used them.

Sorry, if you want the human touch, you have to put humans in there AND then listen to the humans queuing alongside them AND then let those humans sort each other's problems out. Reliance on machines? When I got to the long-stay car park to retrieve my car, it wouldn't let my (immaculately preserved) ticket through two different barriers, so I had to press the button and get someone to let me out, costing me another 10 minutes. Thank god that wasn't my passport at the end of a hour-long queue.

My university had a school of mathematical sciences, a school of physical sciences, and a school of computer sciences.

If you think that all three are not only completely separate but also not interchangeable in places, then you haven't been taught enough science (of any kind) for an opinion to have much worth.

As a hint, I'm not a physicist. I flunked the physics module that I was required to do as part of my Mathematics & Computer Science degree. I have no need to defend physics. But saying that a theory based on mathematics cannot be science is to misunderstand the scientific purity of mathematics, and the entire point of the sciences all making up one big "science".

Technically, complex numbers do not exist. There are a purely mathematical construct. There is no square root of -1. It's impossible. It cannot and does not exist in our number space. Good luck doing an awful lot of physics without it, before even getting into quantum physics.

And the entirety of quantum physics, I'd like to point out, is basically maths. The fact is that it was maths that we thought HAD to be wrong, because if the maths was right, all this weird shit had to happen - and that we then went and found almost all of that weird shit was actually true in "real life" (i.e. physics) even where it makes hardly any sense to us.

And who figured out the biggest scientific discoveries in physics for the last 100 years? Theoretical physicists. And the primary tool used to do so? Mathematics. At some points, the maths didn't even EXIST and the theoretical physicists had to create the mathematics tool as they went along. So inventing whole new areas of mathematics, that had applications beyond physics.

Sorry, mate... maths is science. Science relies on maths. And off to the side of a lot of science are things that you would never consider "science" because they don't come under what your Science lessons at school taught. One of the biggest of those is Computer Science. Note that this subject DOES NOT INVOLVE any known, branded piece of software or hardware, beyond using them as a tool to find out new things.

Because even $9 an hour is a shitty, exploitative wage?

I feel sorry for countries that don't see this. Minimum wage in the UK at the moment is $10.70 an hour, and it's risen (and will continue to rise) by about 20-30p (50c) an hour every year.

And this, this is the ABSOLUTE MINIMUM legal wage we expect someone to pay. And it's still shitty. A young kid, with no home or family, works their arse off just as much as I do (if not more) for the same amount of time, gets home, and discovers he can barely pay rent and eat food. That's not a wage. And in that kind of "work environment", we can't expect people to choose work over social security, which harms everyone.

Minimum wage is about stopping employers exploiting desperate workers. It's NOT about generating jobs, or curing poverty. It's stopping exploitation. In the same way that regulating prostitution doesn't generate jobs (just the opposite) or cure poverty (again, just the opposite), it just stops someone exploiting another human being.

To then bring race into it destroys your argument. You can play the race card if you like, but to bring it in when race isn't mentioned at all is just - again - exploitation of humans.

And, as the stats here show, minimum wage does nothing to harm existing jobs. That means the employers KNEW they were exploiting workers, and could have stopped it at any time voluntarily by charging more / paying more wages, but didn't. Instead they waited until they were MADE to, kicked up a token fuss, and then carried on as normal without thousands of businesses going bankrupt because of it.

If you want to hire someone, pay a fair wage. That's the message. All those companies didn't sack all of their workers when the laws came in, so they NEED to hire someone. They just want to exploit those people as much as legally possible.

For someone that wants to play the race card in the way you did, I would think you'd be more concerned about ending unnecessary exploitation of low-earners by high-earners, not allowing them to continue.

Like, gosh, space for instance?

The ISS isn't exactly sitting there in a cosy blanket with a fire on... it's fighting against things just as cold.

Also, the amount of insulation you can carry is ENORMOUS (because most insulation is nothing more than pockets of gas trapped in a thin substrate, so think "expanding foam" instead of "brick"). Insulation means you don't care what it is outside - once the inside has been warmed once, you are only fighting the speed which heat leaks through the insulation. Anything decent and modern and we're talking minimal loss.

Otherwise, quite literally, you would die camping in the Antarctic with only clothes and a little tent to keep you warm.

Heat's not the problem, if you've already got the power, the infrastructure, the ability to move the materials, to shore up the place, build a structure, move into it, and live independently inside it.

Customers.

You're paying for a service, and nowhere does it say that they will discriminate against a particular service, such as Netflix.

It's obstructive business, against your customer's best interests, for no particular reason. It will also violate any given "net neutrality" laws that are / may come into effect.

Those laws are the answers. The reason for their existence is this sort of unnecessary posturing. And governments make companies do a lot of things against a company's best interests - all the time. It would be in the company's best interest to not pay tax, screw over its customers, not ship goods that have been paid for, be monopolistic, collude with others to enforce market prices, etc. The laws are brought in to stop that shit in the PEOPLE'S best interest, not the company's.

Not saying it's anywhere near perfect, but your post seems to want to back a corporation screwing over its customers and then (falsely) blaming its competitors and random third-party companies for that.

Further to my post:

The Mallard was steam-powered. It had 157.7kN of tractive effort. That's force (thrust) before rolling resistance.

Each one of those jets has 23kN of thrust before resistance. So two of them is still less than half of the Mallard EVEN IF you assume that half it's total energy is wasted trying to push the wheels at that speed.

And this had been 30 years earlier. Within only months of being built, and then going on to retirement as a normal train in 1963. This train had done it, casually, in testing, within weeks of being made, not on a test-track, and then served for 30 years before the jet-train had even existed.

And the drivers were in no doubt that it could have gone faster but they were on ordinary in-service train tracks with a 15mph speed limit at one point in their run! They weren't even really trying, and certainly couldn't have dared to try it as if it were a full-on effort to max out the speed as it was on a normal rail line through the British countryside.

Does this not just scream that, actually, strapping a couple of jets to something doesn't make it the "fastest" anything compared to decent engineering?

Sorry, I'm not a train nut, but I'm infinitely more impressed by the Mallard than I am some jet-train.

Charge entry to the convention.

So in 1966 it took two jet engines to reach 184mph.

Whereas in 1938 it took only a quite ordinary, in-service steam train to get to 125mph.

Does anyone think that, by comparison, the jet-engine thing isn't really that impressive?

IT department.
List of all domains.
Expiry date of those domains, culled from WHOIS.

How hard is it? Ten minute job. And you KNOW what domains you have to use - you've been including them in game titles, software on the systems you put out, and keeping those domains running somewhere.

This is NOT a huge task. Even for a multi-million dollar company with 10,000 domains. Hell, it's barely an IT task... more an office admin kind of thing (did they have to "renew" their subscription to the newspapers and tech journals? Were they caught off-guard? Did they have to budget and contract for that? And they're not even business-critical).

Sorry, but I'd go straight to the head of IT, demand to know how it was allowed to get close to expiration, let alone past it. And I guarantee you they'd have a spreadsheet to hand on with their documentation to their successor, who will have on their job description "Manage domain renewals" (if they haven't already).

Fuck, this is an Outlook calendar kind of note, if that. But if I was Sony, I'd be fucked if I wouldn't have it plugged into bog-standard IT helpdesk software like every other contract, renewal and scheduled update required.

So, whose responsible for not documenting it?

Somewhere in Sony, some IT guy KNOWS what would happen if that domain went offline. He knows that it shouldn't be allowed to happen. The beancounters know that it costs to much for the consequences, so they'd have to authorise it whatever.

Thus, someone, somewhere KNOWS this critical business element is a possible point of failure but NOBODY bothers to create that documented procedure.

It's not like the process is opaque, or that nobody could have predicted it... enough people inside Sony should know that there should be a procedure, and thus someone, somewhere is responsible for making sure that procedure is scheduled, documented, well-known and that it "belongs" to someone.

It's a company problem, because none of that happened. And it didn't happen because of a people problem. The technical problem? You're telling me that NOT ONE SYSTEM inside Sony was set up to check that the domain doesn't expire, to fallover to a second domain in the case of problems, to check that email account that was mysteriously unchecked for several weeks despite being the WHOIS contact, etc.?

It's not "none of the above". It's "all of the above".

Stop blaming some mystical, magical entity when - actually - some guy in Sony fucked up and the people above him weren't doing their job to check he hadn't fucked up and/or hadn't taken account of what to do if he had fucked up.

I think because of the scientific method, you come at it from the other direction.

Someone did some maths. That suggests that it does give matter mass, and in doing so also predicts certain decays.

Then you look for those decays. The chances of those decays occurring completely at random in the exact way your maths predict, in any other circumstance, are immensely small. Thus - if the decays are there - it's probable that you were right.

It's like saying, we know there is a certain kind of Yeti in this forest. The maths tells us that its footsteps will look a certain way, walk so far, stay confined to this area, etc.. And when we and others go looking - eliminating all bias they can - we happen to find footsteps exactly like that, exactly where we expected, exactly how we expected.

Now it doesn't mean it IS a Yeti. It doesn't mean it's even our kind of Yeti. It just means that - from complete assumption and logical consequences of that reasoning, we happen to find exactly what we'd expect if we were right. The chances of us being wrong but something SO SIMILAR happening in the exact right place is immensely tiny and - statistically, predictable enough that you can try to eliminate it as much as possible. This is all that "99.9999%" certainty junk that you see. For things to decay in that way, we're 99.9999% certain that it is because of the original assumption and not anything else along the way (including random chance).

When you come at it, arse-backwards like that, the chances of you being wrong are small. Unless, of course, some other animal that's equally as unknown happens to completely coincidentally make the exact same footprints. In which case, that's STILL a win for maths/science. We found something out by poking around in the right places that we never knew before and - given the similarity - our maths can't have been far wrong in the first place. And we can spot the error, correct for it, and try to understand it.

Nobody is seriously saying "this is EXACTLY what we thought". They are saying, when we test under the assumptions made, the evidence of reality appears to fit this best, subject to a certain accuracy. Other hypotheses that predict similar results in the same area either don't exist (which is suggestive that you're right but still has to be proven) or have to be proved wrong in order to get close to making such statements.

You shouldn't have to lie to cancel service.

Why do you want to cancel?
Because I fucking do.

But why?
Because you shits don't get that when a customer wants to cancel, you cancel.

But why?
This is your official notice that I've cancelled. I've recorded it. Send me a bill for anything past and I'll take you to court.
Goodbye.

In my country, recycling consists of putting some of the paper back into paper processes (not unlike has been done for a long while), melting down the "easy" plastics, and selling them on. A lot of the rest is sent abroad and landfilled. It was the result of several news stories - fact is, the effort in collecting that plastic probably outweighs the energy saved by reusing them. Have you seen the process that you have to put a bit of used paper through to make it saleable again?

Recycling is about not using up the raw material (oil), not saving energy. To collect, clean, filter, melt-down and redistribute that paper or plastic costs a ton of energy, not least our own. Want to save the planet? Don't let it get on there in the first place and (in my case) make it illegal to post adverts through my door (several dozen sheets of glossy paper every single day).

Carpooling? That's again about resource conservation of oil, not energy-saving. Even buying the cheapest electric bike would do a bucket more than any amount of carpooling.

Turning down the heating? That's real energy-saving, I don't deny that - that's kind of the point of what I'm talking about where that outweighs EVERY OTHER MEASURE by orders of magnitude.

However, there's a limit to the amount you can car-pool and turn down a thermostat (or put off turning on the a/c). You can't sit and freeze/boil, so it's about accepting a different tolerance to your comfort level. If you live without a/c, or with a/c that's energy "free", then - as I say - that's to be respected, but knocking down a degree when you always could have and never needed it that warm in the first place?

Feeling big because you dropped the thermostat to 20 one day because you didn't notice cold that day? That's pathetic. Especially if you then have to ramp it up /down all day long later to compensate.

People are not aware, that's the problem. Where I work, I label the printers with a total cost per page - the cost of the energy, the cost of the paper, the cost of the ink, all added together. People are shocked. So they turn the printer off to "save energy" every five minutes. The cost of the initial boot on a large photocopier is often more than 8 hours of standby, not to mention the wait for the 10-minute boot process where everyone goes off and turns on the other printers to see if they are any faster.

It's about the bigger picture and, sorry, but your low-hanging fruit are really a waste of time. Lightbulbs? You'd have to leave an energy saver on constantly for several days to cope with forgetting you'd boiled the kettle and having to boil it again (which could take seconds on already-warm water).

Sure, we can make pence here and there, but it's totally wiped out, completely, by ignorance of the larger things. And often such energy-saving is directly at the expense of some other limited resource, usually a non-renewable one (e.g. the materials used in solar panels, CFL bulbs, etc.).

The reason my dad - a 60's child bringing me up in the 70's- stopped telling me to unplug everything at night? Because I did the maths and showed him the worst possible scenario. And then plugged in an energy meter and showed him the actual (lesser) result. It was so little for most things that it just wasn't worth wasting breath on, let alone the personal energy to go around at night switching things off (fire concerns aside). And that was 20 years ago.

The things that matter are being ignored PRECISELY for the worthless low-hanging fruit that make lives unnecessarily uncomfortable for the sake of some false peace of mind. And then those people will go on holiday where there's a hot tub, wipe out several dozen times their annual saving, and not give it a second thought. I'd much rather we took things seriously and forgot about lightbulbs, standby, etc. and thought more about several dozen miles of motorways illuminated 24 hours a day, or superstores that put heaters on the entrances and then put the freezer aisles near the entrance. The energy pissed away on the large items totally swamps your conscious (and almost certainly conscientious) efforts on the little things.

I'm not even sure about the mathematics of having several dozen large lorries come to collect general waste, then several dozen more to collect recyclable waste, then several dozen MORE (all different lorries) to collect compostable waste, all visiting the same houses in the same order and in peak periods (rather than, say, when they won't be holding up queues of traffic and fighting through traffic themselves). Just that, to me, wipes out any saving that I might have had in separating out such wastes. And I happen to know that the guy with the waste contracts from the council owns the recycling firms - they are being paid by my taxes to collect my rubbish to send to their own company to recycle it, claim a huge tax rebate / incentive grant, and then sell on the result to - ME!

Most things about energy saving are NOT about saving energy at all. And the message is totally lost because of that.

"just put a little button on them to activate the socket"

You mean like a switch?

Granted, some countries have unswitched outlets (I'm in Italy now and they generally have just sockets, no switches), but if you Googled for a second I bet you could find some for your country. In the UK, virtually every outlet is switched.

To be honest, it wouldn't make that much a difference to my life. Things allowed on standby are on standby for a reason - I'm lazy and don't want to wait for them to warm up every time I use them.

Because they're pissing about changing a couple of lightbulbs and thinking that changes the world, while their heating is still whacked up, they drink umpteen cups of tea/coffee, and their solar panels do SHIT for actually reducing their bills after costing so much energy and resources to produce.

Sorry, I'm in agreement that we should probably be reducing our energy use. But whenever people tell me that they've done something along those lines, I invariably feel that it's a complete waste of time. If you do "save energy" at one point, it's because you've used more to get to that point in the first place, or used up some even rarer mineral in order to do so. People only count the "last mile" of energy use and not all the stuff before that.

And I actually handle energy-reduction in the same way I handle people who diet. Sorry, if your self-control and nutritional knowledge is such that you think any particular energy-saving scheme / diet is actually doing anything more than making you THINK you're achieving something that you couldn't achieve by just setting a decent overall limit and NOT going over it, then you're really not understanding what you're doing. As soon as someone tells me that "a diet" didn't work, I judge them, not the diet. Chances are that, if followed correctly, any diet will lose you weight.

Similarly for energy-saving, people are embarrassed to tell you - or worse, just don't know - how much energy they've actually saved by doing so. They'll extrapolate from what the packet says and tell you that they "probably" saved X amount of energy (or "should have lost X pounds") and given that the actual figure is inherently measurable, I write them off as idiots unless they actually did save/lose that much. Either they didn't stick to the plan, or the plan they followed is complete bullshit and they never realised.

Want to impress me with your energy-saving? Stop using external energy, yet continue to live a modern life. It's possible. But nobody actually does it because it means compromise, time and dedication.

Sticking yet-another-device to measure your energy, driving an electric car that cost more than every car I've ever owned added together, or putting up a solar panel that will never recoup its purchase cost does not impress me. Tell me that in the winter you turn off the electricity and gas supply to your house, and I'll be incredibly impressed.

The school I work for put in a whole roof of solar panels a few years ago. Even with a completely open site, with perfect-facing on their roofs, with all the equipment in the world to feed it back to the grid, with even a little fancy display to show parents how much energy they've produced - they haven't made a profit and don't expect to for several years (by which time, they envisage that maintenance and normal building work will wipe out the solar panel viability anyway). Sure, you CAN deploy solar panels and make an energy profit - but the vast majority that I see, I can't begin to fathom when they'll start actually paying back.