It was built in Japan, which has dominated commercial shipbuilding over the past 40 years. It doesn't dominate quite as much anymore, but it still has a large share of the market. It's basically Japan and South Korea building most ships; China is spending massive amounts of money to break into the market, but is still under 10%.

Hell, +/- 1000 pounds would probably be good enough, and even that might be more sensitive than actually needed. A typical shipping container weighs on the order of ~30,000-50,000 pounds (~15,000-25,000 kg). A ship isn't going to sink because a declared-as-40,000 lb container was actually 40,050 lbs. Even if a company loading 1,000 containers systemically mis-declared by 50 lbs and they all got loaded in some asymmetrical way, that'd still only be a 50,000 lbs error, equal to about one shipping container. A modern cargo ship is not going to sink because of an asymmetric load, or an over-load, equal to one shipping container.

If underdeclaring weight became a stability problem sufficient to sink the ship, my guess is that a substantial number of the containers were reporting numbers way off the real values.

Above a certain level, though, you start to pull in the wrong kinds of people. You can definitely get a better professor for $100k than $60k, and probably can get a top one for $200k. But if you're paying an administrator $600k? Now you start pulling in people who don't care about academia, and are just in it for the money. I think it might be better not incentivizing them to jump to academia; academic administration is becoming a revolving door of people from industry and government doing 3-year stints to put on their CV, when it would be better served by people with some kind of actual knowledge about, and commitment to, research and education.

"UC officials believe that her Cabinet experiences –- which include helping to lead responses to hurricanes and tornadoes and overseeing some anti-terrorism measures — will help UC administer its federal energy and nuclear weapons labs and aid its federally funded research in medicine and other areas."

It's a good thing there's no need to have the head of a university system have experience in anything like education or research. All that matters is those security-industry connections!

Kind of a tangent, but fwiw the Vatican no longer handles its own prosecutions or imprisonments. Under the Lateran Treaty of 1929, the Vatican has autonomy in policing, but prosecution is handled by the Vatican handing the prisoner over to the Italian court system and requesting them to be prosecuted:

At the request of the Holy See, or by its delegate who may be appointed in single cases or permanently, Italy shall provide within her for the punishment of offences committed within the Vatican City, save and except when the author of the offence shall have taken refuge in Italian territory, in which event he shall immediately be proceeded against according to the provisions of the Italian laws.

There are fields with worse job prospects, yes, like much of the humanities. But the kind of person who can do well in an EE program has better alternatives these days. Hell, you have better prospects making websites in Ruby.

Whether the U.S. having a bunch of web-devs and no hard engineering talent is good long-term is another story. But today, if you want a well-paying job, pick up a web technology, not EE.

Well, this was reportedly done "with the blessing of the Australian government", so the odds of the Australian government punishing Telestra (or themselves) seem low.

The summary does not tell me what this thing, apparently popular in Beijing, actually is! You could at least link their website. :)

Anyway, looking at their website, it looks like it's a "cloud operating system", i.e. infrastructure for managing a cluster in a virtualized, "cloud-like" way. Does anyone know how it compares to other such platforms, like Eucalyptus and the confusingly-similar-in-name CloudStack?

Come on, jerks, the efficient solution has been known since 1980.

But when you say "goes 10x further per [unit fuel]" you're talking about it the other way! I.e. this one gets 110 km/L, 10 times more km per liter than your car that gets around 11 km/L.

If instead you're comparing 9 L/100km to 0.9 L/100km, that's not talking about how much distance you get per liter, but about how many liters you use per distance, i.e. the rate of fuel consumption. Of course, they're equivalent ratios; it's just a reciprocal.

There's a category of neighborhood electric vehicles that are basically glorified golf carts. They can go about 30 mph, in some states can legally go on roads up to posted speed limits of 45 mph, and don't weigh much.

Which of the two widely used metric standards do you want? ;-)

If you're from one of the countries that uses the km/L measure (Netherlands, Denmark, Japan, Korea, etc.), then this Volkswagen prototype gets about 110 km/L.

If you're from one of the countries that uses the L/100km measure (Germany, Italy, Australia, etc.), then this prototype uses about 0.90 L/100km.

Perhaps they aren't wrecking the world's economy, but the Chinese Environmental Ministry is doing its best to damage the worldwide environment. Most noticeably in their region, where smog blankets Chinese cities and sometimes other countries' cities, too.

If your local DMV has an online appointment system, it's way better than it used to be with the old show-up-and-wait system. Was in and out within 15 minutes last time.

Nothing is stopping you from choosing to pay for your own healthcare in cash, out of pocket, ye olde free-market way.