DAMN I wish I had karma to give you. I am by far the oldest member of my R+D team, and by far the most innovative and risk averse.

James Dyson is an asshole. He bleats about wanting more engineers, but he only want the cheap young ones he can pay as little as possible and toss aside. He isn't even a qualified engineer himself. People like Dyson say we need more engineers, but when the UK starting salary for grad engineers is between 26- 30K GBP , they are too cheap. Until we can make a real scarcity of engineers that isn't going to change

This is dumber than "I've done nothing that I want to hide", but not by much.

In the 1820s, Stephenson built the world's very first passenger railroad across a bog. If it wasn't impossible in 1820, its not impossible now...

Amish ?
Bullshit. I know Amish guys in Central Pa with better texting deals for their cellulars than me. And they have more power tools than me.

What a delicious piece of irony. Well done.

And from the tiny diamonds before we can now grow large gem quality ones. Same with Graphene, and a long way from the Samsung process.

And yet, I read about a team in Cambridge in the UK who have a new low temperature process that can create graphene in industrial quantities.

http://cambridgenanosystems.co...

Which is rather Stross' point. Here is an example where the cultural norm is wildly different from your own, and you can't imagine it. It might be perfectly acceptable in that culture to say "not interested", it was also important, in the context of the culture Bujold was describing, for reproduction to be controlled, because of extremely limited resources under a dome colony. An extra mouth to feed, and lungs to breath the air was significant to everyone's resources.

http://thinkprogress.org/elect...

http://thinkprogress.org/elect...

The steppers are now all "microstepped", which basically means you don't see quantisation from the drives, but you can't "beat" field rotation, and you'd be surprised how few de-rotators are out there - the imaging guys pretty well all use equatorials, with their attendant problems.

ALL mounts have their issues - an equatorial can't view the area around the celestial pole, and is rarely as stiff as an alt-az for the money. An Alt-az has the field rotation issue, and can't view its zenith.

Mount wars get like computer language wars....

The trouble with Alt-az mounts for imaging is the field rotation, which changes with the scope position, take 10 minute exposures, and you're screwed.

He means the late John Dobson.
I was pretty sure he was immortal. I was wrong.

You'd think so wouldn't you, but no, its not, and the BBC is VERY cagey about rights management.

One of the problems of Lasik is the size of the corrected pupil is often not as large as that of your fully dark adapted pupil, and, as an amateur astronomer, it leaves artefacts in your field of view that are objectionable.