Genuine question from someone who has never worked in this space: What were the better options?

Yeah, I don't get this either. There seem to be a few factors.

Firstly, it's a big consultancy doing government work. The consultancy rates start at £1k per person per day for a junior and head north from there. Let's say they average £2k per person per day, so your £200 million overrun works out to about 100,000 person-days or about 500-man-years.

Secondly, the organisations they are doing the work for are admittedly large, complex, bound up in endless regulation and unwilling to change. When a small business adopts an accountancy package, they basically change their processes to fit the package. At a certain scale, "the accounting software won't let me do that" is the default answer to why the accounts department insists on an employee jumping through a particularly ridiculous hoop. But these organisations are big enough that they expect the software to adapt to them, except every little group of people does things slightly differently and none of them are willing to change. In some cases, changing would mean all sorts of regulatory compliance work or is simply not possible because of regulatory constraints. This is the most valid excuse for the mess Birmingham is in.

Thirdly, planning this sort of work is non-trivial. People are not endlessly fungible, so if the process mapping necessitated by point 2 runs over, as it almost certainly will, you can easily end up with a large software engineering department sat twiddling its thumbs waiting for the output of the business consultancy department. At £2k per day. Do you redeploy them onto other projects, knowing that when they are needed you will have to get a whole new team up to speed and delay the project by even more? Or do you bill the customer - who probably caused they delay - for them to sit and do nothing for several months?

But it beggars belief that any piece of software can take 500 man-years to write and test. Especially when it's not being written from scratch, it's mostly just configuring an off-the-shelf piece of software.

Someone, somewhere should have learnt how to do these projects well by now and be eating Oracle's lunch for them.

Oracle have been trying a new trick recently.

When they quote for a piece of work, the customer looks interested and asks about the payment schedule. "All up-front" the Oracle rep says.

"You're insane! Even if we trusted you like that, we don't have the money in this year's budget."

"Calm down, we can help with that. Let me introduce you to my friend over here at Oracle Financial Services. He'll lend you the money to pay us up-front and you pay it back in easy instalments."

"Eh? Okay, well, if that's the way you want to play it..."

Four years later, the project is two years overdue and a hundred million or so over budget and the customer starts asking what's actually been done on it and tries witholding a payment. At this point, they discover that Oracle Financial Services is legally very carefully separated from Oracle and has no interest whatsoever in the project, but is very firm that the payments have to arrive on time or they will book a date in court. They're just there providing financial services, the project is nothing to do with them.

I think you might be surprised how much personal independence people are willing to give up if it works out cheaper. See eg the willingness to sign over any personal data at all to gain access to a news website for free. No, not everyone, but the vast majority will.

But that's the crucial question: Does it work out cheaper than owning a car? The fact they don't make the comparison probably tells you everything you need to know.

"Rich" is a relative term here. School teachers aren't going to retire onto their yacht and sail about the world at the age of 50, but they also have a reasonable income and a guaranteed job so long as they don't actually molest the students. Compared to the Times Rich List, they're poor. Compared to half the kids they teach -- particularly the ones this sort of measure is aimed at -- they're rich.

Which is why anyone even suggesting anything besides the wet market theory was ridiculed, we were told to clean all surfaces touched by someone with covid within 72 hours, told that masks did no good etc etc etc, right?

The numbers here are somewhat misleading because solar has such a low capacity factor. 50GW capacity probably equates to something like 10GW of average power output (ie about 10GWYr of output across a year - somewhere around five hours of peak output per day) though calculating the exact figure would require detailed knowledge of where it was all installed.

The problem is with slow chargers, which often plug into a standard 240V outlet. I charge my car using one. But I also have my whole system on RCDs (AFAICT this is the European name for what's being required?) and don't have a problem.

ABC paid $15 million in defamation damages for calling him a rapist but, hey, whatever.

Where has the author of this summary been for the last year? It's like Kamala Harris just ... never happened.

He also ... um ... didn't defeat Joe Biden, who pulled out several months before the election. I know journalistic standards are falling these days but this summary is just wild.

It's absolutely the sort of thing I'd buy ... for the right price. ReMarkable has had me interested for a long time, but it runs Android and doesn't have Play, so half the apps I would use it for (ie my book shelf in Play Books) won't work. A Debian-based tablet would be great. The comparable device seems to be the BOOX Go 10.3 - currently retailing for nearly $400, so I guess that's the price point they need to beat.

I'm not clear whether the relaunch includes an upgrade. 4GB RAM is pretty slim for a Linux system these days, even if it is one that can't play video. The 7-year-old 4-core Coretex-A55 at 1.8GHz is likewise probably serviceable but isn't going to set the world on fire.

That's fine for thermoplastics and it's fine so long as you don't care about eg what colour it is. Not all plastics respond to heat by melting (there are quite a wide variety of plastics that undergo polymerisation with heat, so heating them makes them more solid, not less), but the big problem of this kind of direct-use recycling is that it only works if you can first sort the plastic into all the different types and colours. There are only a middle-sized handful of basic plastic types, but there are a dizzying array of small variations for different purposes. If all you care about the material properties is that they can go through a 3D printer and make something that's solid enough when you overengineer it to a degree then that's fine; if you care about cutting every last penny from the cost of producing things and about making things that are "just right" then it's not going to cut it.

You also need to be able to effectively remove all the labels and any residue of foodstuffs etc. That's easy enough to do on a small scale for your household recycling but it's labour intensive; it's quite difficult to do very cheaply and at a large scale. The advantage of the "advanced recycling" process is that it involves a refining step that removes all the contaminants.

Well, compared to making plastic and then dumping it, and compared to pulling fuel out of the ground and burning it, this is actually an improvement - the carbon is used twice, once as a plastic and then again as a fuel. It's not exactly a circular economy though.

It all sounds like it went so well; it's "a partial failure during the final moments of landing," it's an "anomaly" causing "higher-than-expected landing altitude."

Then "You can watch the landing attempt *and explosion* here."