Power generation from solar falls in the winter. A lot.

It's not the loss of sunlight intensity that does it. It's the daylight hours. Your panels operate for a smaller fraction of the day.

The appeal is obvious: No pilot and no instruments means a lot of weight saving, and frees up precious passenger space.

Which is why China may well become a future leading nation in manned space research. When America loses a few astronauts, they shut down the program for the best part of a decade and spend hundreds of millions in investigation and refinement. When China loses someone, they'll carry on with the next launch while investigating quietly, then hold a ceremony to remember the patriotic sacrifice and remind the people what those lives were risked for.

It's also a bad choice of phrase, as currently 'VR legs' only work if you have either a lot of space or a very elaborate omnidirectional treadmill. Bit of a difficult problem that.

Though I suppose it might bring back the arcade? If you need a suspended harness or a sizeable warehouse for full-immersion runarounds, it's going to mean people traveling to places. Pressing a 'walk forward' button isn't going to be the same.

It causes illness for good reason. A mismatch between visual field angle and vestibular angle doesn't occur very often in a natural environment - the only place you'll find it is on a boat and when wearing head-mounted displays. Before those, it always indicated something impairing the vestibular system, which likely implied a poison. There's evolved response based on this: 'Visual/vestibular mismatch, probable poison detected, initiate purge of stomach contents before any more is absorbed and make a note not to eat the green berries.'

"general user ignorance"

It's worked for the last ten thousand years. No reason to expect it to change any time soon. Target enough people, you'll find someone who falls for it. Computers just take the leg-work out.

This is something that smart grid management should be able to help with. There are some energy-intensive industrial processes that can be turned on and off in seconds (Desalination, for example), and many domestic uses that can be delayed in time easily enough (The AC motor can wait a few minutes). If there's a way for the grid to signal in real time the available generating capacity, devices could adapt accordingly.

Supercaps have far, far too low an energy density.

I read China is experimenting with ultracap vehicles. They can run for minutes between charges. The vehicles are buses, with a pantograph wire at each stop: They recharge in an even shorter time, while passengers are boarding.

Most oil deposits are pre-dino. There's a little dino in some fields, but most are rather less exciting.

Hydrogen doesn't have to be cryogenic - it can also be densely stored within the crystal structure of exotic materials made from incredibly expensive rare elements.

Watt was just as bad himself: As soon as he came up with that peculiar gear arrangement he patented it himself.

Watt delayed steam tech by some years. He wasn't willing to work on high-pressure steam research himself - he regarded it as too dangerous, with the tendency of early high-pressure engines to explode if you sneezed around them - but he did use his many patents to drive out of business anyone who did start developing high-pressure technology.

According to the internet, every symptom may indicate cancer.

That's quite in-character for the OT God. He demands absoute loyalty and obedience, and a number of stories in the old testament are about him either requiring this loyalty be proven or showing what happens when it isn't. There are a number of occasions where he gives what seem like trivial, unimportant instructions (Do not eat the fruit, do not look at the burning city, do not touch the ark) then executes someone on the spot for some tiny violation. The entire story of Job is supposed to demonstrate the virtue of unquestioning obedience: God (Via his assistant) unleashes all manner of misery and suffering upon Job, killing his family, ruining him financially and inflicting him with horrible diseases entirely to show that Job, as a loyal Jew, will remain obedient and loyal no matter what circumstances throw at him - and sure enough, at the end, God restores his health and wealth. Though not the dead family.

It's good drama. A direct physical conflict between opposing characters, and one that allows the story to advance rapidly. It's a lot more exciting then having to put the case on hold for a day while the investigators file paperwork requesting a search warrant.

I also notice that in any crime series, if the suspect calls for their lawyer at any point they are *always* guilty of something - but innocent people never have their lawyer present. It seems that only the guilty have any reason to exercise their legal rights in TV-land. The innocent have nothing to fear from the police.

They are supposed to be discouraged from this though, because in practice 'reading body language' very often turns into 'everyone who isn't white is acting shifty.'