Should've done it outside with bigger ballons.

At worst there would still be 8 lifes left.

Sexy Gravediggers

How else would one experience the joys of learning!?

In this joke an attempted murder actually succeeds.

Start doing lots of stretching and flexibility exercises in preparation to kissing my ass goodbye.

And the graphics resolution is AMAZING!

Making it to orbital height briefly is not making to orbit, it's just a balistic trajectory that happens to have a high enough apogee.

It takes more energy (possibly much more) than that to actually "make it to orbit" a state which amongst other things has the noteable characteristic that things don't just fall down from it immediatelly after reaching it (they can, over time, end up falling down from lower orbits were there is drag from the top of Earths athmosphere, but when things just go up and the fall back down again they haven't made it to orbit)

Every single inventive, artistic and even entrepreneurial person out there who is not the scion of a high middle class or richer family will be free to scratch his or her itch without fear of falling so far that he or she becomes homeless or unable to feed his or her children.

Plenty of people around with lots of want and capability to make things but either those things aren't rewarded with lots of momey by present day society or they're great at doing but not at selling.

I wouldn't at all be surprised if Universal income gives birth to a new Golden Age, assuming the present day "winners" (through the great achievment of popping-out from the right vagina) let it happen.

They go all the way in on their projects and don't just pull out when they're about to finish.

It's funny how the "People in this group (to which I just happen to belong by chance of birth) need some form of compensation for past injustices done to some (others) that just happen to be in this group" is incredibly popular amongst those brought up in a "greed is good" society...

Look mate, a system that says "greed is good" and yet expects that Lawmakers and Law-enforcers will work only for the good of the system (i.e. not be greedy) is about as utopian as bloody Communism.

The so called Crony Capitalism is the natural end state of Capitalism as those entrusted with the powers of the State just subvert it to get de facto immunity whilst they pillage it because, guess what, they're as greedy as everybody else and power attracts mainly those who don't feel the burden of responsability towards others when holding it.

The "solution" of less State (i.e Neoliberalism) is even worse as it makes Money the only Power in the land - reducing the power that citizens in democracies indirectly have through their vote - and that way lies either Anarchy or Feudalism (the latter if we're "lucky").

Personally I do believe we need some Capitalism, though heavilly overseen by something else so as to block it from subverting Democracy or destroying our societies through its main actors' natural tendency to cause Tragedy Of The Commons situations at pretty much all levels.

Paint the top crust red and you get ginger bread.

Stick a toothpick on the right place pointing up: ginger bread man.

When living in the UK I quickly learned never to give those guys direct access to my acount such as via a Direct Debt: without it, their mistakes are their problem to solve, with it their mistakes are your problem to solve.

Get invoice; check it; call them and ask for proof you spent 3 years worth of power consumption in a single month and pointing out that their meter reading on that invoice is totally different from what the meter says; get an updated correct invoice.

Compare that to the chain of problems that's the result of your bank account going into overdraft by a couple of tens of thousands of pounds...

It's not even that they're doing it on purpose: it's just that they employ people for peanuts to maximize their £££ in profits hence mistakes are far more likely and if they're not the ones bearing the costs of such mistakes (and given the laughably corrupt UK Regulators, they're not) they won't spend a single penny to put in place procedures to catch those mistakes.

Orban is the pimp and Hungary is the one being prostituted.

Genetics works at a much more massive scale (numbers and time wise) unless there's the kind of trully exceptional circumstances where almost all individuals of a tribe perish without leaving any descendands (in which case only the genetical material of the survivours could possibly carry on forward), so most of it is to do with tiny differences in the probability to reproduce which over many generations and across millions of individuals cause a certain characteristic to become preponderant.

So a single generation (or two or three) going through starvation wouldn't do much to the genes themselves unless it was so extreme that the "only handlfull of survivors, no living descendents for the others" situation happenned (and even then it would only affect that tribe and might later dilute itself to non-existence through intermixing with other tribes)

Epigenetics on the other hand has to do with proteins that surround the genome but are not the DNA itself, which can toggle genes ON/OFF or influence their expression, which can change during an individual's life due to environmental factors and which can also be passed from parents to children. It seems to be a far more reactive mechanism but also one which is more temporary.

Whilst epigenetics also has to do with genes, it is something only recently discovered and in it the information is not stored in the DNA.

Depends on how you count them - number of heads, number of arms divided by two, number of torsos...

I think I used the wrong terminology.

By "higher" I meant with a higher Apoapsis and Periapsis, so an orbit further out than GEO.

It's not possible to have an orbit fully above or below "the ring" (I presume you mean the orbital plane) - the best you can do is an orbit which is part of the time above and part of the time below, i.e. with an orbital tilt.

This makes sense if you think of the methaphor were you are rotating a bucket full of water at the end of a rope: if you try and make it go higher in relation to the hand which holds the rope you'll find it just goes down at the other end of the circle, making inclined circle, half the time above that point and half below.

The very same effects that keep an object in orbit by pulling it towards the Earth also pull it down when higher and up when lower, effectivelly forcing the orbit to be in a mathematical plane that includes the Earth, though a plane that can be different than the normal orbital plane.

A satellite in a prograde GEO circles the Earth at the exact same speed as the Earth rotates so stands still over the same point of the Earth, which is very usefull.

A satellite at the same altitude (i.e. same apoapsis and periapsis) in a retrograde orbit circles the Earth in the exact REVERSE speed of the Earth's rotation, so it will pass over all points on the ground under its orbit two times a day, which is pretty much useless (specifically the "exactly two times a day" part is useless).

Somebody else explained this was meant to actually be a little higher than GEO orbit and going in the opposite direction, so its purpose was to watch the satellites in GEO orbit rather than anything on the planet Earth.

PS: Think I've posted this as answer to the wrong post, but the point still stands.

Actually sorta that but maybe not in the way you meant it: it's unlikelly that the drone will be in communication with the home base as it's supposed to be autonomous and besides the whole radio thing is commonly used to detect enemy forces so it's the kind of thing any decent system designer would think of, plus GPS receivers are passive - they merelly listen to signals from satellites and use them for triangulation - so there are no emissions from those either.

However, every electric thing does emit some amount of noise in the radio spectrum and the engines possibly also (due to the sparks used to ignite the fuel), so maybe a ground-based wideband receiver with a directional antenna (and it doesn't even need to be a narrow reception window) aiming with the appropriate angle up (basically just enough to stop detecting ground-based devices) will detect them as, even though the signals are weak, there is normally nothing in the air that emits signals quite like that all the way up to Low Earth Orbit (and maybe not even there if the sparks in the engine are what is being detected). Other possibilities involve balloons as there are antenna configurations which allow avoiding catching signals from below, so the "line of sight" of a balloon (just tethered in place) for detection is probably quite long.

I just wanted to aplaud you for your post's wonderful combination of well explained and just the right amount of creepy.

Absolutely, the run lasted until the mid XXth century.

(Although some of the stuff you list as "great firsts" didn't turn out quite as amazing as all that or was much better done elsewhere)

After that, not so much. I can only think of graphene, a discovery rather than an actual implementation (and which, by the way, has yet to produce actual practical results anywhere close to matching the grandiose announcement of how groundbreaking a discovery it was).

For a country of 60 million people with all the wealth and institutions it still has left of from the age of Empire, Britain has been punching below its weight since maybe the late 70s or early 80s.

As I said, modern Britain isn't a country of doers, it's a country of talkers (a subsection of whom seems specialized in relentelessly celebrating past glories) or at least a country that rewards tall stories and swindling your fellow man far beyond merit in execution and the direction of travel seems to remain a worsenning of things in that regard.

It's thus not surprising to see a story like this selling this Great British Achievement (tm) which turns out to be a plan to start work on planning it and is clearly a play for getting more funding.

Modern Britain is nowhere near at the same level as 19th century Britain when it comes to the Science & Tech of its age.

Nowadays the country specializes in talk, not in doing.

It's the exact same complete-total-detachement-from-reality strategy when it comes to the truth as the Russian Government.

In the old days the Tories were actually pro-Nazi until the nazis invaded their neighbours and in the present day the Tories accepted tons of money from the new nazis in Russia until they invaded their neighbours.

Politically they're a lot more close to betters-leading-lessers nationalist authoritarian populism of Russia than they like to admit, though geostrategically they're in different sides and that's quite likely because they almost always follow the lead of the US (one wonders what would be the geostrategical posture of Tory-Britain if the US did not exist).

Mind you, at least England isn't drawn towards strongmen type leaders.

Elsewhere:

"This paragraph requires items of radio equipment, listed in a new Annex (Part I) added by the proposal, to comply with the charging interface and charging communication protocol described in that new Annex."

There's also a whole bit about the Comission giving itself powers to change the rules for devices which are not charged wirelessly.

You can't just read one bit of a proposal for ammendment without the context of the Directive 2014/53/EU which is the one being ammended and think you found some kind of loophole that nobody else saw.

I mean, you can, but that's just slightly megalomaniac fantasising.

If Apple does try to see if they can go around, I'm sure the courts will be happy to deliberate on whether they are compliant with the ammended Directive 2014/53/EU as whole or not, all the while Apple's phones are blocked from sale in the EU (the way compliance is designed for the Single Market is not having the supplier getting to sell their products whilst its compliance is in dispute as that would open a massive backdoor for the sale of knowingly non-compliant devices during the time it took for things to go through court in the end they would just stop selling having pocketed the money in the meanwhile and start it all over again with a new product).

EU regulator: "This product is not Compliant and cannot be sold in the EU. Any devices already on sale must be removed from sale. Here's a fine based on Apple's Worldwide Revenue for having hidden this built-in charge limitation mechanism in their application for the CE mark".

(And possibly whomever decided to hide such a mechanism in their application for compliance would, separatelly and as an individual, be charged with the crime of Fraud).

The best that Apple would be able to do here is appeal it all to the highest courts of the EU, were they would loose and meanwhile their phone would be blocked from sale in the 2nd largest market of the World.