What I was getting at is that this type of scheme will get other countries looking at the solution and if that solution can be used within their city/town.

With a diesel bus having a range of 300 miles, timetables and the number of buses used, and the ability to interchange them quickly between routes, it will have taken years to bed the time tables in.

With the above system you are adding a 2.5 hour downtime per day to each bus. This is quite a complicated thing to factor in.

The reality is, that this type of system will become popular when they solve the ability to replace a spent battery pack in under a minute.

I do think this is a proof of concept, but to make it marketable worldwide, you need to be able to demonstrate how flexible such a system is.

My concern with this is that the solution limits you to certain routes. You could not have this operate on a rural bus route. Asking passengers to wait 30 minutes while the bus is recharged would be a bit ridiculous.

I don't understand why they didn't have an interchangeable battery pack. This would have allowed the bus to quickly swap out the exhausted pack and replace it with a new one and you could put the swapping stations at strategic points around the city/rural area.

I think it's one to watch, but until they solve the 'rural' issue this will only work in cities.

I get where you are coming from and I think it comes down to your own personal experience with WoW.

In my case there were usually 5-10 people sitting on Vent chatting while playing. So it becomes a social outlet. Although I cannot find a link to it, there is a massive social aspect to WoW, that is underpinned by the concept of the guild.

I had some great times, but a lot of it was down to the people you played with on a nightly basis.

There was a secondary reason for me quitting, I was taking off three months to work on a couple of projects and the last thing I needed was some sort of game sitting there that I could play whenever.

Personally I recognise in myself that I have an addictive personality, but usually I pick up a game play it for a week or two then move on. With WoW it was the first game where the 'social' aspect became more important than the actual game. I was using it as a chat client. (Hint Blizzard bring out a RealId chat client!)

I have made many real life friends out of the game. I can only thank Blizzard for that, but I also recognise that the game has certain aspects to it that are not compatible with my life at the moment and I really wanted to make a clean break. Cata seemed the right point.

Yeah my wife is sleeping with me again :P

I'm banking on Diablo 3!

I gave away all my gold (about 120k), sold all my gear, deleted all my characters, waved good bye to guild friends (which is one of the major pressures to play) and un-subscribed.

Boy have I been tempted to go back, but if the urge gets too great, I take a lump of wood, whittle a small penguin, stare at it for 5 minutes, look in the mirror and tell myself that I have achieved more in those 5 minutes than any achievement/raid boss kill would ever do.

Interestingly enough our fortnightly games night had become a WoW LAN party (5 of us). With me quitting WoW, we have rediscovered board games and those nights have been a lot more mentally stimulating than any WoW dungeon crawl I can remember.

WoW is an amazing life-sink that you justify because of the other 20-40 other people in your guild wasting their lives away playing a game that never ends. I can't fault them for playing, but some of them are failing school and divorcing over this game.

"You" have a choice as to whether or not to purchase that item. It's called consumer pressure.

I was very specific. I wanted to buy something for my daughter to take home that was American made, in a place, that is sold world wide, as a great American experience (and it was).

It's a real shame that the American dream is primarily selling Chinese products.

Then again, the irony of a Florida Wal-Mart selling Californian orange juice seem to have been lost on our hosts. They bought it because it was a few cents cheaper than the Florida OJ.

We went to Disney in Florida a couple of years ago, and as an experiment, I tried to buy an American made product/toy for my daughter inside the parks. I just couldn't do it. Cheap seems to be the focus of corporate America.

The food is rather hoot over there.

But isn't that the point. This card is aimed at the gamer who wants run 23 or 58fps for 4 hours every day and wants to make an investment that will be good enough for the next 2 years.

What the new 68 series cards indicate is that they don't cut the mustard or more precisely are expensive for what they do and that there are better cheaper cards out on the market. That is a real shame.

You are right however. I am particularly interested in is cards capable of running 3 screens.

Review is here

And for those who don't want to rtfa, the author did a cost per fps evaluation:
"Somewhat surprisingly, it's the 5850 that trips up being the worst offender here – effectively costing you £5.06 for each frame per second on average across our tests at 1,920 x 1,080.

The new cards, the Radeon 6870 and 6850 meanwhile roll in at £4.35 and £3.86 respectively, which looks pricey compared to the GTX 460's £3.36 per fps."

Personally I was going to hold fire on the purchase of a new machine to see if these cards are worth considering, but I might as well get on with buying it with a GTX 460 configuration.

Although you are probably not aware of it, most trading arms of the banks are at war against each other, trying to determine the trading algorythms each of them use, and deploy trading engines that take advantage of any weaknesses. It's one of the reasons you see an immense amount of mathmatical talent recruited by the Banks.

The problem I find with this, is that, unless the t&cs they signed to indicated that they should report any flaws in the bank's trading system, then this is actually a failure on the bank's part to test their systems.

I was part of the team that developed the short-term collision alert system for Swanick, UK. This type of prediction is unnecessary and not very useful to air traffic controllers, particularly in Europe, where each air space has a different way of dealing with traffic.

For example, pilots want to get their aircraft to specific altitudes to conserve fuel (usually around 29,000ft). In the UK, ATC keeps strict vertical and horizontal seperations, in France, they just let them hit the altitude they want, then play a complicated game of checkers with the planes.

In Greece, seperation over certain space is maintained by transponders on the ground, so spacing has to be a lot more forgiving, which also limits the throughput of the aircraft.

So in principle a plane, will fly at an optimum altitude and at a certain speed at that altitude primarily to conserve fuel. However when coming into an airport, control of altitude (and speed to a certain extent) will be handed to local ATC.

Of note, ATC will 'hand off' a plane to the next air space by assigning a new frequency upon which the plane should be communicating. Planes fly with a specifi flight plan.

Now unguided rockets.....that's a completely different matter.