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Comment Re:Delivered at the wind farm? (Score 2) 178

It's right there in the summary - "land on makeshift dirt runways adjacent to wind farms". I have my doubts about the practicality of that - large planes generally need a tarmac runway. You're going to need some interesting landing gear to land a plane that size on a soft surface. And enough flat ground to lay out a very long runway.

Comment Re:Interesting option... (Score 1) 99

The main issue if you have PVC in your plastic is that burning it can produce some nasty chlorine compounds in the exhaust. And if you don't have PVC in your plastic - how sure are you that you don't?

The innovative bit here seems to be separating the chlorine out of a PVC mix, leaving only hydrocarbons which can be safely burned.

Comment Re: It doesn't seem so odd (Score 2) 169

No, Scotland and Wales don't have so much of an issue. I don't really know what the situation is in Northern Ireland but haven't heard much about shortages there. Scotland and Wales are wetter and hillier that England, and less densely populated. A good part of the English midlands actually gets their water from Wales.
Not to say that there's no issues outside England, but it's certainly in England that there's most concern.

Comment Re:It's called demand and supply. (Score 1) 20

That's not the same thing. While they vary their price, everyone still sees the same price. If there's a lot of demand, the price goes up for everyone, while if they need to fill seats the price goes down for everyone. The proposed pricing uses AI to work out how much each person is willing to pay and offer them a personal price. So they might offer me a seat for $400 because I'm broke and/or stingy, while charging you $1000 since they think you're well off and will pay whatever they ask.

To some extent it's not new - coupons and rebates are the same sort of idea, as people who aren't prepared to pay high prices will put in the legwork while those who don't care will just pay what's on the price tag. But there's nothing stopping someone rich jumping through the hoops too. The difference here is that if the AI thinks you're rich you can't jump through the hoop as they'll take the hoop away.

Comment Re:They are compliant (Score 1) 89

They think they're compliant. If you disagree, you're free to take them to court - though the legal bills will be huge.

They offer you the source code, and you're allowed to distribute it. They won't (and can't) take legal action against you for doing that, and they will honour all their contracts with you regardless. They won't do anything to you at all. They will just decline to do any new business with you in future. That's certainly against the spirit of the GPL. Is it against the letter? Well, that's what lawyers get paid big bucks for.

Comment Re:UK "Life Sentence" may be only 15 years in pris (Score 1) 45

Yes, it might be. It's a peculiarity of the way sentencing works. Once a sentence is passed, it can't be increased (except by appeal in limited circumstances), so the headline figure is actually the maximum. You'll probably get let out sooner, but you're "on license", not actually free. If you don't behave - even if you're not convicted of a new crime - you're back in jail.

With a life sentence, unless you get one of the rare "whole life tariffs", you'll probably get released at some point. But you're still "on license" - forever. Misbehave and you're straight back in jail, even if you've been out for years. And the parole board doesn't have to let you out when the tariff is up - you could be in for your whole life anyway if the parole board doesn't think you should be released.

Comment Re:Seems difficult (Score 1) 30

The Apollo missions were manually piloted (with computer assistance). Computers may be good but "land a spacecraft on an unmapped lunar surface" is still a challenge. Also Apollo was intended to take off from the moon so had a lot of fuel on board, which gives more scope for modifying the landing trajectory and even aborting the landing.

Comment Re:Saving Face. (Score 1) 124

No, it's just ambiguous syntax as usual. Nikon is being described as "Japanese" and a "camera maker". Which is correct - Nikon is headquartered in Japan, and makes cameras. They're not claiming to be a "Japanese-camera maker", i.e. a maker of Japanese cameras, which they are not. To be precise, they're a "Japanese Chinese-camera maker" - a Japanese company that makes Chinese cameras.

Comment Re: China actually did something similar (Score 4, Interesting) 46

The fundamental issue is that explosions aren't a very efficient method of excavation. A lot of energy gets expended moving earth that didn't need moving, or that falls back in the hole. And it tends to produces circular(ish) holes which isn't ideal for making a channel. That might not matter so much if the power source is cheap, but it does mean you're using quite big bombs in proportion to the useful excavation you get. And bigger bombs mean more fallout. You'd do better putting the nuclear material in a reactor connected to a generator driving an electric excavator.

Comment Re:Unicode is a bug (Score 1) 69

Unicode is arguably the wrong tool for the job. It was designed to represent all human writing, across every language, living or dead. Even within one language, defining the character set unambiguously is difficult. Across multiple languages it's practically impossible. So Unicode goes for an inclusive approach - if something is plausibly a character of a human language, there's at least one way to represent it in Unicode. Possibly multiple ways, which is preferred over no ways. And uniqueness and identity of characters is poorly defined.

In contrast, computer code, including URLs, requires a robust definition of uniqueness and identity. Two URLs are either identical or not. And they're supposed to be human-readable, so non-identical URLs should not appear identical to a human. Which is impossible if URLs are allowed to consist of an unrestricted string of Unicode characters.

Comment Re: Repeat after me (Score 2) 214

It's not "completely upended". It's currently perfectly legal for a human to read all the copyrighted works they want, learn from them, and produce their own works based on what they've read. It's not immediately obvious that a machine doing the same thing is contrary to the principles of copyright. Of course in either case if the output is too closely based on a small set of works then it's an infringement, but that doesn't mean that the training itself is.
That's not so say that there isn't an issue of course - a machine can read far more than a human could in a reasonable time, and has a much better memory with theoretically unlimited capacity, and at some point a change in quantity becomes a change in quality. The real answer would be for lawmakers to update the law to clarify exactly where the boundaries are, but most of them seem more interested in party politics and grandstanding than trying to actually solve issues.

Comment Re: 7 slots. a-z + 1-9 (no 0 because O vs 0) (Score 1) 186

Hmm, well I used the figure for car sales, but I guess commercial vehicles and motorbikes need to be added on. Then there's cars being re-registered from other states. Do cars get a new number if they're de-registered and re-registered later? And I guess some combinations are probably banned as they spell something offensive. Some numbers seem to have been skipped, and you need a bit of headroom to give you time to bring in a new system. So 45 years is about right.

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