The problem with trying to USE Van der Waals forces for anything is that in order to stick together, both surfaces must be microscopically smooth

Better not tell Geckos about that, they'll die out once they hear.

I can understand the taxi drivers' alarm but they're like Hansome cab drivers in the 18th century - change will come, sorry. But how about getting upset about something more important, everyone? Like the constant erosion of your freedom and privacy by the state? By the constant erosion of your wealth and societal benefits by bankers and other sundry plutarchs? Protest about something that matters, while you can.

Anything that has to lift itself against gravity will need to expend energy to do so. Wheels on the other hand, don't expend energy just keeping the vehicle off the ground (ignoring small effects like rolling resistance). It doesn't make sense to replace a passive lifting device like a wheel with something that will need a ton of extra fuel before it even moves from A to B. It is OK for aircraft since the distances, speed and number of people moved per flight makes it worthwhile, but for a ground-based vehicle it makes no sense whatsoever. We already have roads, and the best lifting device to use with them are wheels. For the same reason Maglev trains are unlikely to succeed - it just doesn't add up to a gain replacing wheels with magnetic levitation.

It doesn't make any difference whether the TT is passed 'legitimately' or by 'tricking', the point is that if the test is valid (which is obviously a huge debate in itself), then a trick sufficiently sophisticated to pass it must be considered just as intelligent as passing the test legitimately. What difference does it make?

Real intelligence is nothing but a sophisticated trick pulled off by having a sufficient density of firing neurons. We're all performing that trick constantly. Some better than others actually - there are plenty of people I meet that couldn't pass the Turing Test.

Maybe he deserved this, sounds like it.

But it doesn't justify the mass surveillance being put in all over our public spaces. It can't even be justified on the cost, but far worse is the erosion of your freedom to go about your business without being tracked and monitored permanently. It might catch the odd transgressor, but that is not an acceptable enough reason to piss away all our privacy.

Oh but you have nothing to hide, so what? Well, it was Joseph Goebbels who first made that pithy remark about having nothing to fear, and look where that ended up - many perfectly innocent people had everything to fear.

The only reasonable response to mass CCTV is for everyone to wear a balaclava. Once the system is rendered useless, they might reconsider spending taxpayer's money on it. And it sends a strong message that we simply don't want to be tracked, even if we are not criminals.

Don't buy peacetime designs - they are never great. The urgency of war forces designers and engineers to act quickly, with well-defined briefs and no extraneous "nice to have"s; peacetime designs are the opposite - bloated, every Tom Dick and Harry involved wants his pet add-on, and no pressure to get it out the door.

All the great military aircraft ever built have been produced in wartime for the jobs needed doing right then. And I include Vietnam and the Cold War among them. The post-soviet skirmished the west has got involved in don't seem to need fighter planes at all, and in the meantime, the bloated F-35 slithers along, as unpopular as Jabba the Hut.

Surely you mean you couldn't care less? But yeah, good for you, having a gas guzzler that drinks fuel wastefully, pollutes the planet, is a hazard to other road users, pedestrians, and even you. Fuck the rest of the world, you have every right (you believe) to be as damn selfish and entitled as you want. Or, you know, grow up.

The square brackets [ ] and colons : just hurt my mental debugger

Your example doesn't get to the point and power of Obj-C syntax, which is clarity of intent. Source code is for humans, so make it bloody obvious what you mean.

C/C++: someObject->setColor(0.4,0.3,1.0,0.5);

Obj-C: [someObject setColorRed:0.4 green:0.3 blue:1.0 alpha:0.5];

In the C code, what the hell are all those parameters, what do they mean? I need to look up some external reference to find out. In the Obj-C case, it's obvious, the parameter names are part of the name of the function, so when writing and reading code, the intent is clear. The square brackets are really not an issue once you've used the language for more than 5 minutes, and actually these days they're not even needed for simple properties - you can use the familiar dot notation if you want. Looks like Swift retains the explicit parameter naming, albeit within round brackets, so it's a bit of a hybrid. I'd hate to see named parameters disappear, they really are an invaluable aid to productivity and above all, understanding of a piece of code.

This still seems baffling. But WWDC is next week, so maybe that will shed some light on the real story.

And here are the results: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=182AepOJjMs I guess he wasn't that good after all. Actually if you look into the story here it's really tragic.

In Objective-C of course ;-)

- (BOOL) isKnownMacVirus:(NSURL*) url
{
return NO;
}

Wrong. The body was made from waste cotton fibre bonded with phenol resin. It's a great material - light, strong, reasonably eco-friendly, non-corrosive. It's not a million miles from carbon fibre or even what this article is talking about. The rest of the Trabant was a conventional spot-welded steel monocoque.

It's lazy stereotyping to mock the Trabant without actually looking at how it was made. Sure, the design was dated and yes, the engines were terrible, but they were reliable and cheap, and actually a much more efficient car than most of the gas-guzzlers made in the west.

My main gripe about the Trabant's build quality was the poor panel fit, but that's not an inherent drawback of the materials it was made from, just a side-effect of somewhat old-fashioned tooling.

What autosave seems to miss is that deliberately NOT saving something is an active choice at times. If I have a document - a graphics file say - and I want to just try a quick experiment but don't intend to permanently change the file, then that's my active choice. But autosave subverts that, making the 'experiment' far from quick, and a lot more long-winded. You have to duplicate the file or open a copy, or else undo or back out the change afterwards. It's much more work.

An app we develop (Mac) provides a preference so that you can opt-out of the system's standard autosave and do it manually. It's proved to be an extremely popular feature.

This guy could do with learning about Gerald Ratner. Never heard of him? Google will help. He's not saying the cars are 'crap' of course, but it certainly seems like a very odd way to promote his brand.

The Concorde was most definitely NOT a failure. In scheduled service for 27 years? Almost 50,000 flights at supersonic speed? That's not a failure - plenty of "classic" aircraft have not flown anywhere near as long. Concorde's main problem was that the USA took against it out of spite, because they didn't like to be beaten in aerospace technology. (which is weird, because Britain and Europe certainly admired the contemporary achievements of Apollo, and the 747, etc). That meant that it wasn't the economic success it should have been, but it was and remains a technical triumph.