There were some management failures that preceded all this that nobody here has noted:
1. The pitot tubes were known to ice up under extreme conditions. Airbus decided they ought to be replaced but didn't require this only suggested it, very much downplaying the urgency.
2. Air France seeing that this was not a mandatory change decided not to replace the pitot tubes until the next major service of each plane. Several other airlines thought this could be a serious safety issue and replaced them as soon as possible.
3. There were many flights from South America to Europe that night. A severe storm over the mid-Atlantic had been forecast. All planes except one decided to fly around it. AF447 was the only flight to try to fly over it. When flying very high over a major storm the plane is likey to encounter rain at very low temperatures - hence the risk with a dodgy pitot tube. It is known that Air France management was at the time very keen that pilots choose the cheapest route whenever possible: did they put pressure on this captain to not divert and therefore use extra fuel? I don't know as nobody seems to have enquired into this.
4. I note that the captain also chose to take a nap just when the plane, flown by two not very experienced pilots, was about to enter nnd try to fly over this major storm,

Then there is the question of the design of the autopilot system. These and the pitot tubes are duplicated but redundancy only helps if there are random failures. Here the failure was a design fault, and not surprisingly both pitot tubes failed in the same way a few seconds apart. But then the autopilot dropped out because the pitot tubes provide the air-speed measurement. There are obviously other ways of estimating air speed as GPS and radar will give you the ground speed and the velocity of the winds is known approximately from met forecasts. It seems to me a design fault in autopilots that they simply give up if they don't have all their sensors working. The assumption is, I suppose, that a competent human pilot is always there to take over. A faulty assumption in this case.

I agree as well. Firefox is still my default browser but the list of sites that I have to access via Chrome or Edge is getting rather long. If only the Firefox developers would fix the bugs then they might get more users. Who cares about the pastel gradients and the like? Not me.

Back in the 1960s here in the UK we tried abandoning daylight saving time as an experiment. After 3 years there was so much demand for a return to daylight saving time that we returned to the hour time shift twice a year and have put up with it ever since. I guess it depends on what latitude and timezone you are in, but here around 52 degrees north you get at most 8 hours of daylight for some months in the winter. If you work something like a 7 or 8 hour day then you can't get daylight for both trips from home in the morning and back home at night. But when we had British Summer Time all year an awful lot of us found that it was dark both in the morning when going to work/school (or whatever), and going home again in the evening. With daylight saving time the evenings were dark, but at least it was light in the morning for the majority of commuter journeys. That it almost certainly why Daylight Saving time was popular and still is, at least among those old enough to remember the 1960s experiment. But there's nothing like an experiment to prove it - as long as it is reversible should it prove to be unpopular. Why don't you try?

LiveScience said "At a maximum range of 440 miles — including 40 miles using solar power and 400 miles using electricity". So what does the solar power produce - steam?

I don't understand why the voter details were held centrally at all. Voter registration in the UK is with a council official called a Returning Officer, and the data only need ot be stored locally. If not held centrally it would have been much harder for it to get hacked.

Sending a text from a phone located in some remote region will just depend on it knowing when the next Iridium spacecraft passes over, so it will be fairly easy, given enough transmitter power and a suitable antenna. But receiving a message sent from space to some mobile phone will be much harder, as the Iridium network will not generally have any idea where on Earth that phone is. It would be hopelessly inefficient to have all satellites broadcast the message all over the world. The cellphone network only works by maintaining a huge distributed database which essentially knows which cell phone base stations are nearest to every mobile phone in the world at every instant, essentially by pinging each phone every minute or two. Doing something similar on a satellite network will be much harder.

Well the Chinese economy has hardly been affected at all by the pandemic - they are one of the very few countries to have shown growth in the last 12 months. To be sure, there a few other countries that have been barely affected by the virus, so far at least, but all of them are quite small or isolated ones, like New Zealand. All other major economies except China have been more badly affected than during any year in the last few hundred years. So we should be asking: was this predictable? Did China deliberately release a virus that they thought they could deal with, albeit with some damage to their own population, on the grounds that it would affect their major competitors much more? I don't know the answers - but it ought to be discussed.

They don't seem to cover what happens when, as is inevitable before long, a train breaks down between stations. Then you are in a small fuselage with limited air supply and perhaps only dwindling battery power. In a conventional train you can use the emergency door opener to escape or if in a tunnel exit via doors in the front or rear cabs. But in a hyperloop cabin you have only vacuum outside, so if you do that all your air will vanish. Then even if you have your own space-suit to survive in the resulting vacuum, you are in a tube perhaps dozens of metres below the surface. That doesn't seem an easy problem to solve.

Yes but most planes don't have software that makes them liable to crash, despite the best efforts of the pilots, if their AOA sensor is faulty.

But Boeing's solution is to have both angle-of-attach sensors connected. But if they give discrepant readings there's no easy way of telling which of them is wrong, so this really isn't a very satisfactory fix. They really need three sensors to have a fully redundant system. For myself, I will simply not fly 737MAX. If this means avoiding Ryanair, who have said they won't tell passengers which type of plane they are about to fly, then I can manage without them. Or indeed carriers in other parts of the world who use these planes.

I live in the UK. I'm old enough to remember the late 1960s when we had an experiment with summer time all year round. At our latitude either going to work or coming home has to be in the dark for a few months in the winter, but with "summer time" in the winter it meant that it didn't get light until after 9am and got dark again by 5pm, so for most people it meant two journeys in the dark instead of just one. I found the experience pretty unpleasant and maybe dangerous on a bike. Apparently many others had the same opinion. Because of public reaction, the experiment was ended after a couple of years although it had been intended to be permanent. So if you guys want a change to permanent summer time - make sure it's an experiment that can be reversed it it makes things worse.

A member of my family got an XPS13 a year or so back (Windows version of course). The trackpad/cursor system is simply awful - cursor sometimes jiggles around for a minute or so uncontrollably, and at other times the trackpad simply does not respond to touches. We've tried downloading numerous driver and BIOS updates until we got fed up, but nothing cures it. I've seen other reports of the same, so I think it's a well-known fault with the hardware which Dell can't be bothered to fix. My advice would be to check the machine out very carefully indeed before buying.

Meanwhile a NYT article supports Boeing by saying it's all the fault of the airlines who hire inexperienced pilots: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/0... It doesn't explain how, if it needs considerable experience to fly a 737Max, new pilots are ever going to get the required experience.

Here in the UK they have never been legal on public land, because the only vehicles allowed on pavements (sidewalks) are those used by the disabled and infants, and they are not legal on roads because they do not have two independent braking systems, as do all legal pedal cycles. Problem solved. Except not quite, because the police are unfortunately not all that keen on enforcement. At least it has kept hire companies from operating here, and if you try to buy one, vendors like Amazon are forced to tell you that they can only be used legally on private land. I'm a little surprised, actually, that the default laws and roads and sidewalks don't apply in other countries and so automatically make scooters illegal.

Research many years ago suggests that it's the fourth power of the weight, so almost all road damage comes from big trucks.