nobody31415926

Then hope that the senator for <different state> doesn't block the purchase unless you agree to build it in their state. There is a reason that Nasa has facilities in 50states and it's not just for the airmiles

I'm sure the FBI monitors CEO for purchases of large quantities of piranhas and white cats with diamond collars.

And yet their competitor, the Atlas rocket - uses a Russian engine ?

So it's apparently OK for strategic US rockets used to launch military payloads, to use Russian engines but not for a private company to employ Canadians.

And if a rather more brilliant and more important code breaker, Bill Tutte, had been recognised by Canada they would have a silicon valley now.

Actually I think Nasa's approach is to design as best they can - then have layers of management each add a a factor of 10 to the assumed level of safety until it's sufficiently safe.

In the Challenger accident the engineers estimated the chance of a fatal accident at 1:100 , the next level of management 1:1000 senior management at 1:10,000 and the official Nasa press release 1:300,000

Presumably by adding more levels of management they could have made it even safer!

Perhaps if they designed it so that when a single joint on a single booster failed it didn't explode they might have had a better image

If you were asked to bid on a contract to build the space shuttle, with conflicting and changing requirements from the NSA, Air Force and Nasa, with no guarantee on how many they will buy and no ability to sell to any other customer - you woudn't agree to a fixed price contract!

Especially when it would take years and billions of $ to even estimate what the cost to build it would be.

Especially if nobody ever gets to see your finished product in one piece - people generally don't file patents on bombs for example.

Although ironically the Germans did file a patent on an anti-handling bomb fuse that they subsequently used in WWII

In other words it's the sort of testing a commercial aircraft engine maker would do - not what nasa would do.

The engines on your 777 are designed so that a 6ft long fan blade moving faster than the speed of sound can break off and not go through the engine cowling and into your lap. They blow up $30M engines in testing to prove this

123? That's the same password I have on my luggage

Is it perhaps because you aren't allowed to read eBooks to your children ?

http://www.lessig.org/content/standard/0,1902,22914,00.html

There was the company that sold the US a system to find hidden messages in Al Jazera videos - I think that got a few people a trip to the orange suited holiday camp before everybody discovered it was a con

Haven't used the iphone/android versions but I use this http://www.3cx.com/VOIP/sip-phone.html on my office PC instead of a 'real' voip phone.

And nobody in Victoria drives at more than 30km/h !

Data costs in canada are even higher than voice costs!

skype is only available on some androids and charges calls against your voice minutes.

I think the difference is that if a US law maker said "but wont this have a bad effect on the poor?" everybody else in congress bursts out laughing!

Technically insurance isn't mandatory in the US if you are rich enough. At least in Ca if you could show enough assets you can self-insure

Even worse in canada - all incoming firms have to be Canadian owned and financed. Try raising the money for a nation wide set of phone masts if you aren't allowed overseas investors

They did it because they made motor insurance mandatory and it would be unfair to force someone to have something that the market didn't have to provide.

In europe it's essentially impossible for anyone under 21 to get insurance ( without tricks like being listed on parent's cover ) even though the law says you can drive at 17. Typical rates for liability-only on a 17 year old are $10K/year

Imagine living in a rural part of BC where work and shopping is 20 miles away and the insurance companies all charge $10K for drivers under 21.

Yes it's unfair that as a middle age driver I pay 2-3x as much as I would in europe in order to cover a west vancouver millionaire's kid in a ferrari. But it's also unfair that I'm paying for elementary schools for someone else's kid or subsidizing somebody else's cancer treatment.

In other news - bears discovered to shit in the woods and pope a catholic shock discovery.

Footnotes moved to the end of the book.

Illustrations missing or put together in a block in the middle of the book.

Tables converted into justified text,equations missing, source code reflowed into an obsfurcated paragraph

Synchronizing two clocks in different positions is very difficult since relativity always comes in as you are moving a third clock between them. It's essentially impossible if you don't know the gravity field encountered by the moving clock.

Well known among geeks - is it well known among the public?

I'm not talking paranoid - the government are spying on me - public, but what about doctors, lawyers, pharmacy, social services, employment tribunals, unions.

There is a lot of confidential information I can track about you by simply pulling plank bits of paper or envelopes from your garbage.

GPS onboard clock is corrected for relativity due to it's orbit height and speed so it's clock time is approximately correct

But measuring the simultaneity of an event between two different points with a moving clock is a lot trick.

LEO wasn't mechanical it was electronic (Lyons Electronic Office), as was Colossus(Bletchley park)

Babbage's computer was mechanical, but it was in 1832 - before even the 8008 was popular. Remember at this time, silicon Valley was still Mexican!

Humour seems to track with sun position. When the sun is above GMT votes for humour go up, once it reaches GMT-5 to GMT-8 humour get's downvoted.

No any wheat - otherwise any seed company would only ever make a single sale

There are two types.

Backscatter x-rays which use a low dose (hopefully) of x-rays but instead of measuring those that go through you 9as in a medical x-ray for bones) they measure the x-rays reflected back by metal objects such as guns and knives.

These do give you a dose of x-rays, hopefully a properly installed, maintained and operated system will limit this to a safe dose.

The alternative are mm-wave radar (terahertz imaging) these use similar radio waves to a mobile phone (but at lower power) They measure the change in the radio signal returned from metal and fluids in your body. Since they work on the same technology as mobile phones (but even lower power) they are assumed to be safe(r)

Clever - so having failed to ban alcohol they just let market forces take their natural course and produce a beer that nobody would want to drink.

Since they presumably had access to Pasteur's book (even if it was in French) and so knew how to grow the correct yeast for beer - how did they manage to produce Budweiser and Miller ?

Seed companies do exactly this.

You buy their seed to grow wheat, you have a license to grow the wheat but you can't keep any of it to plant next year.

You have a license to use their wheat seeds but not use the copies the plant is making.