bofussing

The reason why British people are able to afford large and expensive vehicles is the heavy reliance on credit. 84% of new cars were bought on finance in 2024[1]

[1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6781339100e3d...

> "People are often content with using the tried and true, code-prescribed systems," he said.

Unlike aircraft that are made in a carefully controlled factory environment; building sites can be harsh places to work and fastening systems have to have the flexibility and design margins to cope with this.

Unless glues start getting a track record of being significantly better (cost, strength, resilience) than current fastening systems I doubt we will see much adoption.

From the article it is not clear what the motivation for the design was. Some efficiency might have been gained from having two wheels but the heavy gyro would surely have negated this.

A modern take on this is Lit Motors C-1 which aims to provide efficiency of a motorcycle with the safety and comfort of a car. http://litmotors.com/c1/

Michael Foale (dual American and British Citizen) was on the Internation Space Station in 2003. He still holds the cumulative-time-in-space record for a UK citizen. He was a NASA astronaut whilst on the ISS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Foale

The Sirius Sled Patrol in Northern Greenland use a Glock chambered for the 10mm Auto after experience showed that the 9mm Parabellum was insufficient in polar bear encounters.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sl%C3%A6depatruljen_Sirius#Equi...

The Economist did a similar story 3 years ago

http://www.economist.com/node/21525847

The Ubuntu Gnome spin looks very promising with the combination of the Ubuntu ecosystem and the Gnome desktop environment.

the only fly in the ointment (for me at least) is the distros uncertain future as Canonical developers are not keen on moving to the latest version of Gnome (http://www.webupd8.org/2013/10/ubuntu-1404-lts-to-stay-on-gt...) and longer term the focus will be on QT and other technologies as Unity and Mir mature.

Daniel Robbins also left, he has since set up a Gentoo meta-distribution called Funtoo http://www.funtoo.org/

The fact that Identi.ca is based in Canada is certainly one of my stronger reasons for wanting to use this micro-blogging service over US based Twitter. Canadians seem to give a damn about privacy.

Too bad so many Internet properties are based in the US or are US owned, until we get to the bottom of this NSA debacle these can all be viewed as honeypots for the feds.

Bo

Singapore was one of the earliest adopters of a national firewall (back in the late 90s). I am sure this will be the primary tool in monitoring any 'misuse' of the Internet by the powers that be. Bo

The phone specification is similar to the original ZTE Blade [1] also known as the Orange San Francisco. This originally went on sale nearly 2.5 years ago with Android 2.1 and by today's standards is considered low end.

If Firefox OS provides as good or better user experience than Android 2.1 on such modest hardware, Mozilla have every chance to carve out a market in low end smartphones.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZTE_Blade

Samsung is backing the development of the EFL libraries behind E17 for the Tizen (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tizen) initiative. Possibly a hedge against Android.

Also note that E17/EFL is supporting Wayland (http://wayland.freedesktop.org/toolkits.html) - forward looking indeed.

Bo

A 220 floor building is a hugely complex engineering feat to pull off which will have little in common with the 30 floor hotel that Broad previously manufactured and erected. The difference cannot be overstated; from the structural elements needed to support something approaching 3000 feet (including the sheer loads from wind) to the highly specialised services required (lifts, water, drainage, fire services, power distribution etc.). On top of this there are the technicalities and logistics of manufacturing and assembling something this big and tall in such a short time. There will be a lot of specialist and custom engineering involved.

So what is the point? If Broad's mission is manufacture cost effective, easy to erect and energy efficient tower blocks then the 220/F monster seems an unlikely direction to take. The average tower block in any but the most crowded city is unlikely to much over 30 floors. And from a cost and energy efficiency standpoint there are diminishing returns on very tall buildings anyway.

All in all I think this is more of a publicity stunt than a reality.

I am sure the legions of budding professional sailors hope that the America's Cup series will be a commercial success too. The line-up of sailors in the current series is literally a who's who of elite sailors, if they cannot do well out of this series the prospects are not bright for those further down the food chain.

The problem with client-side Javascript code is largely a result of the horrible DOM. Once you are free of that server side Javascript looks a lot more doable.

The FreedomBox Foundation inspired by Eben Moglen and which raised over US$85k earlier this year on KickStarter is also looking to cover this space through software and hardware:

http://freedomboxfoundation.org/ http://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox