This is an area I have some peripheral involvement with. For retrofitted sails on bulkers, the figure of 10% saving in fuel is the usual one mentioned rather than 20%. However given the long life of ships, there is much more interest in retrofit than in new build.
You mention container ships. I haven't seen anything explicit on these, and I think the reason is probably that they cruise much faster than bulkers and tankers, which means the potential savings from sail is smaller. I would have thought 20% optimistic even for a new-build.
Retro fit is clearly a preferred path for a new approach given ship life spans and size of existing global transport fleet.
My gut objection to the container approach taken above in the first link was existing container locking mechanisms for ships can struggle in severe weather to keep the boxes on the boat .. additional forces from a sail (in good weather) might well mimic the forces that break stacks in bad weather.
Your point is well taken, I might suggest that container ships could be segregated into fast and slow cargo and that might help somewhat with total fleet fuel consumption. (pure spitball notion).
I'm sure there's plenty of businesses out there who'd love to advertise near zero or zero emissions transport for their goods, with the caveat that they have to plan a few more months ahead.
Also if possible, use a unique email address for each site. I know that's not feasible for most people, and some sites (e.g. LinkedIn) are structured so that email addresses become linked, but it does provide useful isolation.
No. I oppose any formal requirement to practice software development. And this isn't because I disagree about the requirement to be ethical, but because it would draw a moat of "professionalisation" around software development, excluding new entrants. It's a fashionable trend across many disciplines: it starts innocuously with informal groups and seminars. Then someone starts one or more professional bodies which devise some sort of qualification. Then they start charging a yearly or triennial renewal fee for that qualification. Then they try to make it impossible to get work without their qualification. The profession comes under the thumb of people who spend their time getting on to the committees which control these professional bodies.
That can be reasonable for something like medicine or structural engineering. But is it appropriate for a developer cranking out Javascript or Excel macros? This is pulling up the drawbridge behind you, excluding anyone who comes to the profession through informal means - and in my generation, that meant almost everyone. It also means that you will need to determine how much of your time you dedicate to politics.
Those are all fair points, but the Internet and smartphones happened. Software is a necessity for existing in society these days. Yeah it sucks that we'd be pulling up the drawbridge. Donate some of your software developer salary to non-profits to make testing accessible to whichever groups you see as the younger version of you to assuage your guilt. Crowdstrike shouldn't have been possible. Mulitple airlines going down for days because they botched an upgrade because it wasn't properly resourced. Someone cranking out some silly shit on the weekend doesn't need licensing, but having unprotected S3 buckets full of drivers license photos of your users in this day and age should be criminally liable.
There you are discussing ability and responsibility. Those are entirely different matters from a professional association requiring you to sign up to a code of ethics.
They are not. That's the point of a professional association, to connect ability with responsibility. It defines what competence looks like and how to enforce it when it fails. Without that link, you just have people claiming skill with no mechanism for accountability. Most of software already looks like that which is the entire problem!
It's always interesting to read of "soft" things like customs lasting, as opposed to "hard" archaeology and architecture. While far simpler, one of my favourites is the Uffington White Horse (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uffington_White_Horse), which has been regularly re-packed with chalk for at least 2500 years.
Sort of. That used to be the case, and it's still what they teach on those courses. However there are now "20mph zones". These are signed on entry, but do not have the repeated small 20 signs of a normal 20mph limit. This means that you can no longer tell whether you are in a 30 or a 20. I have once seen something marked as a "40mph zone" but I suspect that this was a local aberration and did not have a similar rule.
From memory, I think we put ours (an FX80 rather than the MX80) in a box to keep the sound down. It was used with an [HP86](https://archive.org/details/PersonalComputerWorld1982-10/pag...) controlling some lab equipment. Setting that up was my first paid job.
I think they were mandatory for Doctors medical practices after some point in Germany.
There the Epsons were called the "Ärztedrucker" because Doctors they used them for "carbon copy" prescriptions. Even after Laser- or Inkjetprinters were common. No carbon copy possible there. And they had to be carbon copied, for legal reasons.
Are we talking about Word, or a text editor? They seem to be saying the latter, particularly given the comparison with vi. I consistently get about half a second to open TextEdit on an M1, and that seems to be due to the opening animation.
You mention container ships. I haven't seen anything explicit on these, and I think the reason is probably that they cruise much faster than bulkers and tankers, which means the potential savings from sail is smaller. I would have thought 20% optimistic even for a new-build.
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