I live in Berlin and there is massive building going on. Everywhere there are apartment blocks being built. The 'problem,' if you can call it that is that Berlin is crazy cheap compared with almost any other major European city and at the same time hugely popular because of its (deserved) reputation as being open, inclusive and exciting. I think prices in Berlin will equalise over the next twenty years or so with the rest of Germany and evidently so do many other people, who are buying up everything available and renting it out just to cover costs getting the capital gain.

here are another couple:

Starman another Carpenter movie; super sickly but a nice storyline, beautiful score and Karen Allen's finest work (ok, I mean she's a girl-next-door-hottie).

Also The Man Who Fell to Earth because Bowie, of course, but also the idea that alien visitors might be fragile and vulnerable rather than powerful and destructive.

It's sort of perfect, and therefore boring. I always thought 2010 was a better film; there was a lot of hype over the accuracy of the weightlessness scenes.

GE, P&W and Rolls-Royce will sell engines to any company their government's sanctions will allow. RR sold RB211-535E4 engines to Tupolov for a B-757 competitor the Tu-204. It was 90% of the Boeing for half the price and sold well in non-western markets. It was a sweet plane; the Russians have a more academic approach to engineering and apply science where we in the west apply economics.

I'm not so sure. Firstly the price would have to increase significantly and then you'd have to find investors happy to wait 20 years for a return. The Russians can already build pretty good airliners, but they are a long way from being competitive with Boeing or Airbus. There is only one credible future competitor and that is China; they will keep throwing money at it until they get there.

There is a second problem, which is there aren't enough experienced aerospace engineers to deliver the industry's current programs.

Disclaimer: 30 years working in aerospace...

You are the first poster I've read who understood the article. It doesn't matter if laptops are more powerful than phones or tablets. What matters is that the currently available PCs allow you and me to write code, compile and ship. And this we will lose because the PC will morph into another locked-down platform. Kudos AC friend.

Who has only one primary machine when you can buy a decent PC for a day's fee? Plus it has to bork pretty damned hard to kill your dual-boot OSs and backups.

Settings -> Start -> 'Occasionally show suggestions in Start' -> OFF.

Without wanting to pick a side in the sexism war, I had exactly the same impression regarding Andre Norton and whilst I have read thousands of SF books I cannot remember enjoying anything by female authors.

To put it bluntly, only male authors are likely to write something autistic enough with which I can identify. Female authors insist on including relationship crap.

That's fine in regular fiction, but in sci-fi I want spaceships and mayhem.

Whilst I'm on my soapbox, it bugs the hell out of me that when even one of my favourite authors, e.g. Iain M Banks introduces a main character who is female, she is invariably stunningly attractive. Why can't she be just someone ok looking, but a good laugh and handy in a space bar brawl?

Sir, I invite you to leave my lawn.

Fury Road was lukewarm at best. It was good in that it was not quite so terrible as 'Thunderdome'. When one of the main characters is a peat bog, it cannot really compare with the truly dystopian 'Wasteland' (1) or the insanely violent 'Road Warrior' (2).

The Martian had a lot of women in strong roles, even if not the main character.

+1 for Foobar2000. I have 167GB of music and Foobar is pretty much instant. You could also set up a mini-server using Daphile which lets you control playback over a web interface or Logitech client. Both have options for bit-perfect playback. Nice toys.

You just won a virtual mod point (funny) :-)

Exactly this. You would not believe the crippling requirements we are now forced to meet for new commercial aircraft projects. We lost ONE Concorde and scrapped the fleet when it wasn't even due to a fault of the aircraft itself. I was saddened when we lost one shuttle, I was appalled when we lost a second one; that should have been impossible.