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]
> "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/
I wondered what the driver was for this as well. I can see 2 main reasons- 1) narrow pedestrian streets and unpaved paths were probably easier to navigate with two wheels and
2) BECAUSE GYROSCOPES!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Canada is rapidly changing under Harper (Canadian Bush). I wouldn't trust anything in Canada either. I wish someone woukd start looking at places in Europe with stronger privacy laws like Germany. Or if Iceland had better connections to place it in Iceland.
An explanation for non-Canadians: In response to criticism to the Conservatives' "lawful access" legislation, which would require Canadian ISPs to install monitoring equipment on their networks and allow government warrant-less access to user data, our Public Safety Minister, Vic Toews, famously said: "You're either with the government, or with the child molesters"
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
[1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6781339100e3d...