There's also the issue of ETOPS. There was a time where legally a transoceanic airline flight required at least 3 engines. ETOPS (Extended-range Twin-engine Operational Performance Standards ... or Engines Turn or Passengers Swim) does away with that restriction, and over time larger and larger ETOPS limits have been introduced.

Actually, when a user-land process contains sensitive data and can run arbitrary code, it is a serious flaw. For example a web browser: contains in its memory space user passwords, authentication tokens, private keys etc. and can run arbitrary code from a remote source (Javascript). This could be exploited in a 'drive-by' manner with the user never being aware that it happened.

Reminds me of a joke I heard at the time. "You are flying in a plane whose fly by wire systems use Intel pentium processors. The Pentium implements IEEE floating point. How is IEEE pronounced when you are on the aircraft? Aieeeeeeee!!!"

You can do that. A Javascript POC has been written for the SPECTRE vulnerability (a related but different architectural problem to the one under discussion here: SPECTRE also abuses out of order execution and cache based information leakage). The SPECTRE vulnerability only will get you data from the same process's address space, but when that process is a browser and has things like authentication tokens, password managers and private keys it can still be a problem.

Leaking a user space program's own information can be a serious risk especially if that program can also execute arbitary code. A web browser is an example of such code. They have done a proof-of-concept where Javascript running on Chrome can leak information to a remote attacker information within Chrome's memory space. This could include sensitive information such as authentication tokens, private keys, the content of Chrome's password manager, etc.

Washing and reusing used to be a big thing in the UK: the dairies always did it on a big scale (they would deliver you milk, you'd use it, and put the empties out, the milk float that delivered the milk took the empties back to the dairy which would clean and re-use the bottle). There were soft drinks companies that also did the same thing.

This practise started dying out in the 1980s. There are still some dairies that do milk rounds and wash/reuse the bottles, but that's now a minority.

Well, except RISC did end up doing overwhelmingly well: ARM (which originally meant 'Acorn RISC machine') is now the most popular architecture, and ARM ships more cores in a year than x86 variants have in all time.

I wouldn't call it "hearing" a thud, any more than I hear my internal monologue. There was more of a perception of a thud sound, but it was distinct from if there was an actual thud sound. Interestingly if I didn't concentrate on the image, and kept it in my peripheral vision, the timbre of the "thud" would change, for instance it was more of a "twang" if I looked below the image so that it was in my upper peripheral vision.

With a bit of effort I could make the "thud" go away too, while looking directly at the image.

Magnetostriction. Your monitor, your old Amstrad CPC etc. usually will have some small switch mode DC-DC converters inside them, which will have at least one inductor. The frequency or at least duty cycle of the switching in the DC-DC converter will change as the load it is powering changes - for instance, as a CPU starts processing more complex instructions, or a circuit starts transitioning states frequently (e.g. to change pixel colours) - CMOS circuits draw more power when they go from one state to another.

The inductors often "sing" quietly (magnetostriction) and the frequency and/or timbre will change as the load changes. You can often really hear it if you put the device up against your ear.

We have a bit of a problem with electric vehicles here: about 50% of the housing stock has no off-street parking (let alone a garage). A huge percentage of our housing was built decades before cars were even invented. The thing is I live on an island and the most miles I can possibly do in a day would only be 60 or so, and an electric car would be ideal. I'd love to own one, but I can't because I have nowhere to charge it - there's no power anywhere near the car park at work, there's no power anywhere near the nearest place I can park to my house, and houses with driveways/garages command an incredible premium.

Until we get charging stations in enough car parks, then electric cars are a non-starter. Perhaps in 20 years time there will finally be charging points in my nearest car park, but it's going to involve the government having to spend a lot of money to get this infrastructure available (the car park belongs to them).

In the UK at least (and many European countries), 0 lbs of coal. The UK has had increasing numbers of days where no coal fired power station has been running at all. Coal is on the way out and will be gone completely within the next 20 years. An average of something like 50% of the UK's power is from low/no CO2 generation (nuclear, wind). The rest is CCGT (combined cycle gas turbine) which is very thermodynamically efficient especially when compared to a petrol engine in a car.

So at least here, you should be thinking of uranium and natual gas per mile, not coal.

He writes with an American accent, so I don't think he's in the UK.

My (Euro model) 2007 Honda Civic uses 5.5L/100km which is >50 Imperial MPG while having a large interior (fold the seats back and it makes a good compact van, it's a hatchback and a lot more space efficient than the US models - I have no idea why Honda doesn't sell the good version of the Civic over there).

If you're going to boil it down to "investing in metals gives you something with intrinsic metals", they don't. The only thing that has true intrinsic value is food and shelter.

No, they meant 1 : 0.461538461538.

Yes.

Big companies are often not at all joined up and often consider different divisions as competitors, not part of the same company. Quite often large companies are internally highly dysfunctional.

For instance, when I worked for IBM some years ago, we needed a display (basically a standalone monitor) for a system we were selling to an Extremely Large Competitor. IBM made just the display we needed itself, but they would only sell it to us - another IBM division - at full retail price, so we ended up using a competitor's display instead.