Can someone please explain what this distinction is that Americans are making between holidays and vacation days? It's not something that's familiar to me.

I get 5 (usually) bank holidays in a year, i.e. public holidays when the vast majority of people are off work, 25 days paid holiday and I can build up 8 days worth of flexi leave in a year. By default I can only carry 5 days over and use them within 2 months but in practise if there's a good justification, like that it benefits the project, then I can carry over whatever I like.

Pounds are a measure of force. The mass unit you are looking for is the slug.

It's not so bad until people start using pounds force and pounds mass interchangeably and cancelling quantities against each other that are not dimensionally equivalent

You absolutely should not have the same punishment for rape as for murder. Doing so gives rapists a big incentive to kill their victims: without the victim as a witness they're much less likely to get caught and if the penalty is identical....

This should hold true whether you think the death penalty is a good idea or not.

Not really necessary if you just have a copper plate connected with copper wires. There won't be any electrolytic action so long as that RF ground is d.c. isolated from everything else metallic i.e. you couple it to your radio via a low-leakage capacitor that is transparent to the RF but doesn't allow any d.c. currents to circulate between that copper plate and anything else that is metallic and immersed in the sea water.

I think I've had 4 keyboards in the last ten years. I started with a Dell "Quietkey" (it isn't) that I think is late 90s, then I switched to the keyboard that came with my new PC, went through it in under a year, got through a couple more cheap ones and now I'm back with the (not-so-)Quietkey. I'll change that when it breaks.

I'm curious now, and having to resist the temptation to take it apart to find something with a date code.

The IMEI is not just "easily readable" it's sent unencrypted whenever a call is made. This was a deliberate design choice, it could have been sent after the encrypted connection was established but the writers of the specification chose otherwise - the motivations for this have never been explained but a lot of people have drawn their own conclusions.

In any case my point is that it's even easier than TFA suggests to obtain someone's IMEI.

I'm left handed and right-eyed, but my left, non dominant eye has better vision. If I have my glasses with me I shoot light rifles and those with shaped grips right handed and heavier guns left handed. Without my glasses I always shoot left handed. I started left handed and then switched to this when I realised how much better I was using my dominant eye. I can cope with the bolt being on the right but shaped grips are just a pain in the backside. I tend to prefer Martini action as they're usually completely ambidextrous.

I'm left-handed and British, I drive a manual car and change gear with my left hand. If I've got only one hand on the wheel it's usually my right but I'm cool with both. I've driven the occasional left-hand drive car and after half an hour or so I'm used to reaching on my right for the gear stick, likewise on tractors with the stick in the middle. I don't think it makes a lot of difference.

What I find hardest to get used to is the position of the indicators (turn signals) when I change between cars. The majority (but far from all) of cars on the road in the UK seem to have them on the left and the wipers on the right, I drive an older british-made car with indicators on the right and wipers on the dash and I get that one wrong more often than anything else. The other one is strangely enough the throttle travel, after driving a friends car for a while I get in mine and think it's gutless and underpowered, right until I realise/remember there's a full two inches more travel on the pedal :-)

I like the digital photo frame idea for playing videos. Cheaper, less complicated and smaller than a laptop. I really wouldn't worry about powering it, throw the original brick in the box anyway but if we can't manage to provide a 12V dc supply in 25 years time we've got bigger problems.

Of course for storing video really long time put it on film and use the technicolour process - three monochrome prints will last far longer than a single colour print.

Having just spotted this post: http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2980517&cid=40664271 which links here: http://lightsailenergy.com/tech.html I've realised someone's found a way to make it nearly isothermal.

It's actually a pretty good idea, it uses the latent heat of evaporation of water mixed with the air to store the thermal energy

If you can make it truly isothermal then your efficiency is as good as the adiabatic method but that's even more difficult to do. If you go isothermal then you deliberately cool the air as you're compressing it, allowing you to store a greater amount of air in the same volume for a given pressure. Imagine vast heat exchangers dumping that extra heat into the environment. But to re-gain that energy you have to expand it isothermally as well, similarly large heat exchangers pulling the heat back in from the environment. The whole thing runs at constant temperature and, in the ideal case, without thermodynamic losses.

Unfortunately isothermal processes tend to be slow to give the temperatures time to equalise which isn't good for power. It's also hard to expand air isothermally when you want that expansion to happen in a turbine, right where it's a pain in the backside to put a huge heat exchanger.

Accepted it's not a true transmission in the sense of a diesel-electric locomotive because there is energy storage, but every Joule that makes it to the wheels came from the petrol.

I suppose I was thinking more of a series-hybrid where the torque/rpm matching to the wheels is a function of the electric drive rather than the more typical parallel design of most production hybrids today where the motor and engine share a mechanical transmission. The former has big advantages in terms of being able to keep the engine in it's optimum rpm for maximum efficiency (or power, emissions, or any other parameter that is easier to optimise under constant rpm conditions).

More like IC with an electric transmission. Unless it's a plug-in hybrid of course.