Aside from airports, the only place I get asked to show ID is occasionally when I buy alcohol and at my age that is a complement.

The previous conservative government introduced the requirement for voter ID in the UK not because there was any voter fraud, repeated investigations found almost none, rather it was a half-arsed attempt at US style voter disenfranchisement and all it did was give the opposition a huge majority. Also this is how the British do non-compliance. People vote with any kind of ID, bank cards, work IDs, anything to comply with the letter of the law but giving a two fingered salute to the spirit of it.

Elnor and his companies were always like this, it's just that they aren't even pretending like they're hiding it any more.

That would depend on which anglophone culture you're from. To Brits and Australians the word "bullshit" is not that vulgar, we've far, far more vulgar language.

Russians do not mind a boot on their neck, so long as it's a Russian boot.

I've recently started to read a translation of Tsushima by Alexsey Novikov-Priboy. He was a sailor in the Imperial Russian Navy at the battle of Tsushima (1905 for those playing along at home) and it does a really good job of explaining why people supported Communism, it wasn't that Communism was good, even back then people knew it wasn't but the system in place was even worse. Unaccountable leaders, the wealthy being untouchable, no benefit and lots of burdens for the common man... Sound familiar?

To put that into perspective, an 8 hour shift at 60 MPH (maximum speed limit for a HGV in the UK) is 480 miles, that would be for an owner operator who, as you pointed out, often does more than 8 hours. Company owned artics and lorries are often run 24 hours a day as different drivers operate the same lorry in shifts. Especially for local delivery vehicles (which are the ones likely to be doing fewer miles in town), when the first driver finishes his shift and gets back to the depot, the next driver climbs into his farts.

I'd be more optimistic about the ability to deliver an approximate equivalent if there were someone paying for them to do so(the economics of ordinary satellite launches seem to favor fitting within what a given delivery vehicle can handle, rather than bolting things together, so it's not 100% assured; but seems likely); but less clear on replicating the incentive structure.

It's not that the ISS is totally useless; but it currently justifies an awful lot of launches, including manned, more or less by being there. Gotta launch that crew lest the ISS be empty which would be bad because reasons, and have to launch those supplies because there's a crew on the ISS. They do find scientific things to shove into modules; but the arrangement is such that no project is ever called on to justify the ISS, which is just sort of assumed.

Short of the feds just paying some contractors and calling it a 'private' ISS replacement; it's less clear that there's much private sector incentive to build an ISS-like; judging by quite vigorous stream of privately justified satellites designed to not be bolted together and the relative absence of jostling for ISS experiment space. If it were worth that much we'd presumably be up to our eyes in sordid stories of people pulling lobbying stunts to try to exploit it on the cheap through regulatory capture; but we aren't really.

And here I thought that 'AI' was supposed to be leading to a flowering of specialized-for-purpose software that would previously have been infeasible to build due to resource constraints; but one of the most heavily capitalized outfits in the bubble can't cope with a chromium reskin and a couple of electron apps?

Brexit has already shrunk our economy by at least 60%.

Both major parties are in the pockets of big business and they'll put a stop to this nonsense before it gets that far. Yay corruption.

The thing is, the UK safety laws don't apply in China where you can sell unsafe toys to children.

That's the crux of the matter, UK law applies in the UK only. #Chan is right to tell OfCom to go pound sand (with a 21" retractable baton).

By and large the UK gets laws right, safety without giving up liberty (despite what the far right propaganda says) however this is one of the cases where they've got it horribly wrong simply because they didn't understand the technology involved. The people who created these laws (previous conservative government, for those who didn't know) genuinely think that the internet is like broadcast TV and that people will regularly be accidentally exposed to "the porn".

I suspect that he's doing some weasel-wording in terms of use cases in part just to make his proposal sound more novel and more hypergrowth-capable than it actually is. Aside from the question of why you'd want to put your money on a convicted fraud who was unable to deliver a simpler project; it's just not clear how novel, and how favorable for the frothy growth that VCs love, the proposal is.

Talking about "AI powered planes" seems like a way of trying to ignore the fact that 'drones', which are incidentally often rather small but need not be, are something others have been actively and aggressively exploring for years to decades now; with the accompanying question of why we'd be interested in a latecomer with a hype deck; and talking about 'AI' rather than 'autopilot' seems like a way of trying to ignore the number of aircraft that(while they do not go uncrewed today for regulatory purposes) are capable of executing most of their flight under the control of some (relatively) simple and well understood feedback systems; or the hybrid systems (like the predator and reaper drones, which at this point are old enough that some of them have cycled out of service) that would temporarily bring a human in to do hands on stick for particular operations but could mostly buzz around unattended so that a single operator could handle several of them at the same time.

There's clearly a lot of use case for aircraft that don't require a pilot; it's just much less clear how much room there is for it to be an exciting mostly unfilled space where revolutions will happen and there are enormous fortunes to justify the enormous risks; rather than actually being a combination of bulk civil aviation where the existing autopilots are probably 90% there but nobody really wants the blowback of cutting the pilot out; and all the various drone applications where people who aren't this guy are years ahead of him.

Going by "Walmart said that both patents were "unrelated to dynamic pricing," as the patent issued in January was specific to markdowns" it sounds like they are going to try the argument that it's not evil dynamic pricing; it's glorious personalized savings!

Those are the same thing arrived at by superficially different routes, obviously; but in terms of the psychology it wouldn't be at all surprising if you can convince people that being offered discounts calculated to be just big enough to get them to bite is totally awesome; where being offered prices just below the level that makes them scream is brutal oppression even though it's the same price, so I wouldn't bet against it working.

Clearly they got the patent, so somebody was convinced; but I'm puzzled by what you could actually patent at this sort of scale. I could imagine an specific implementation involving some genuinely clever techniques that might be novel enough to patent; or a specific good implementation being a juicy trade secret; but at a high level "try to do some price discrimination while balancing sales rate and margin" sounds like a classic "ancient obvious thing; but we envision a system involving a computer" patent.

The problem isn't that there is not a way to deal with this, the problem is America, specifically the overriding belief that "government bad, company good" despite all evidence to the contrary.

They fail to understand why the EU regulating tech giants is so important and why Europeans agree with it... and that it's pretty much the only thing protecting them and still they'll rally against any attempt to reign in the unchecked power of large corporations.

We're talking about politicians here, they don't want to understand what they're doing, they just want to make it look like they're doing something.

I came here to look for this and add it if I didn't find it.

Lunar "soil" is essentially neutral, just needs some additives. Conversely, Martian "soil" is actually poisonous. Additives alone aren't sufficient to get things to grow in it, you need to remove the poisonous parts first.

Net: It's easier to grow plants in lunar rather than Martian "soil".