kiujhygthyujik

The story is a good example of why these projects fail in the UK and the USA.

Leaving aside the staff problems - British Airports Authority (who run Heathrow) and the RMT (Rail maritime and Transport workers union) have a history of confrontation which makes the whole Isreali-Palestinian thing look like a family game of scrabble.

Just to pick one example, the software was left in debug mode. Everybody knew this but it took 3 days to find the person with the contractual permission to tell them to turn debugging off. Not for any technical reason but just because everything was done by such a mesh of semi-privatized companies, contractors, sub-contractors, outsourcers etc that nobody knew who was in charge.

The UK has just abandoned an ID card scheme setup by the previous government. It's costing 20m quid to just work out how has done what, and who is owed what in order to shut the project down.

Heathrow was built at the peak of the UK housing boom - the stories of rates paid to electricians and plumbers at Heathrow made bankers blush.

We can already write individual atoms on a surface with a atomic force microscope. So at one bit per atom position we could encode 10Pb in about 0.1micromoles of xenon atoms on a silicon substrate.

Well under what nature can do.

Well one was built by a state elite gerontocracy who have centuries of being in charge and an utter contempt for the workers building the terminal and the ultimate users.

and the other was buill by the chinese