willyt

69 ms·

721.
by willyt 12y ago
Yes. But the way the system in the UK works is the worst of both worlds. Openreach is a private company (a subsidiary of BT I believe), which has been granted a monopoly and as a result has to be constantly audited by the government at grea
722.
by willyt 12y ago
Human capital. Fertile ground is better used for food crops rather than animal feed crops. Marginal land is most efficient for grazing livestock. But hill farmed livestock is labour intensive and skilled dirty uncomfortable work to boot. L
723.
by willyt 12y ago
Whoops, you're right. I should have said 'Based on my experience of working in NYC, America has the most restrictive regs...' US States have about the same power over regulations as individual European countries have in the E
724.
by willyt 12y ago
I'm an Architect and I've worked on projects in Britain, France, Italy, Korea and the US (NYC). America has the most prescriptive and least flexible zoning and building regulations I have seen.
725.
by willyt 12y ago
Why does nobody ever mention BitTorrent sync as an alternative in these discussions? Is there some reason why it's not favoured that I have missed? Edit: Just in case this reads as baiting somehow, it's not it's a genuine que
726.
by willyt 12y ago
You should see this stuff. http://aardvark.co.nz/pjet/ Pretty crazy. He got some attention in the news a few years ago with his DIY cruise missile project.
727.
by willyt 12y ago
Buildings in Hong Kong are much taller on average therefore you don't need as many elevator instances to serve them. About 150m is the best height to optimise elevator floor area take versus area gained from additional floors. From the
728.
by willyt 12y ago
I'd be happy in a flat or a house. The right space is more important. I live in a small 2 bedroom house and I wish I just had a tiny 2m square study, somewhere which was my own space where I could e.g. safely leave my soldering iron se
729.
by willyt 12y ago
The EU regulation is about preventing lead contamination of the waste stream.
730.
by willyt 12y ago
From the article, ITER is currently projected at $15B which is not that much for a construction project of this scale. The crossrail project in London is costing ~$25B. Heathrow terminal 5 cost ~$6.5B. Also, it's not unusual for the co
731.
by willyt 12y ago
Also Railways, Post and other infrastructure are all things that make perfect sense as nationalised industries. They often end up as monopolies anyway in a free market so they might as well be state monopolies with democratic accountability
732.
by willyt 12y ago
Its a dangerous game though as young people are unpredictable. I'm trying to find a link to the source but I read recently that the far right Jorge Haider was elected in Austria in the first election after 16/17 year olds were giv
733.
by willyt 12y ago
Apple needs x86 to run existing apps. Who would accept a a big slow down for a slightly cheaper laptop. x86 intel chips are a RISC design with a glue layer which grafts x86 on the outside. Could Apple design an x86 chip with an ARM RISC cor
734.
by willyt 12y ago
Where it only makes sense to build one of some piece of infrastructure, isn't it really obvious that it should always be owned by the people? I suspect that this applies to quite a few things: cable data networks, wireless data network
735.
by willyt 12y ago
It would be incredibly interesting to see a forecast for Europe just now. I wonder if the data he collected is available somewhere?
736.
by willyt 12y ago
I think that's how it works in the UK. When the lidar detector catches you speeding it fires off a camera that takes 2 photos of the vehicle a set time apart. The car's progress is manually compared against a gauge painted on the
737.
Researchers devise stealthy attack that reprograms USB device firmware(arstechnica.com)
12 points by willyt 12y ago|0 comments
738.
by willyt 12y ago
I expect it will be just like what happens when billion pound construction projects go wrong. There is already a specialised civil court that decides on these types of cases in the UK; the Technology and Construction Court.
739.
by willyt 12y ago
You would also need to take an arduino and ftdi cable, then you'll be able to interface with anything
740.
by willyt 13y ago
I've sat in on two caesarians as a father. One 'emergency' and one EMERGENCY!!!. The way I could tell the difference was that the first was as you describe and the second was disturbingly like a TV hospital drama. Both ended
741.
by willyt 13y ago
In an office I used to work in the personal assistants were adept at forging their boss' signatures for exactly the same reasons that these machines are used. I think this is probably quite common.
742.
by willyt 13y ago
You can't see the laser dot in sunlight at a distance > 10m and for some measurements keeping the point steady is important but hard to do without a tripod. In both cases the laser can be inaccurate as you can't be confident in
743.
by willyt 13y ago
Re the other pings. I have read elsewhere that the trip time for the ping is an implementation detail which is stored in some kind of routing table on board the satellite. It's used to calculate an efficient time division multiplexing
744.
by willyt 13y ago
The trouble is, trains require a certain density to be economic and to run a frequent enough service to be convenient. The ideal city density for an efficient metro service is roughly equivalent to streets of 4 or 5 storey apartment blocks.
745.
by willyt 13y ago
And here's a view from another angle: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/05/clash-c...
746.
by willyt 13y ago
It used to freak people out, others would flash their headlights at you if you had them on in the daytime. Now all new cars automatically put sidelights on during daytime anyway, I think its a (pretty sensible) EU regulation.
747.
by willyt 13y ago
White Fang by Jack London is excellent. Also the original Jungle Book stories by Rudyard Kipling are beautiful as well, if a little colonial in places. My favourite when I was little was Rikki-Tikki-Tavi. Both are in the public domain so ca
748.
by willyt 13y ago
You need at least 4 story tenements to make rail based public transport viable. You can go a bit less dense with buses but not much. Refer to 'Cities for a Small Planet'. Ricky Burdet at the LSE has done quite a bit of research in
749.
by willyt 13y ago
Any computer which can advertise vnc over mDNS (which apple calls 'Rendezvous') will show up in finder sidebar. I have my own custom a raspberryPi image set up to do this out of the box. You can get this going on any Linux box by
750.
by willyt 13y ago
As a counterpoint, I work on my own now, having worked in open plan offices for years, and I find it hard to concentrate because I feel lonely. My ideal office size would be somewhere between 5 and 10 people in a room all working on the sam

More ›