GPS devices that update their maps from the internet violate this patent.

Why does it matter if you update your maps from the internet or a CD that is sent to you every six months?

That is a very obvious feature to add to a GPS device, and I'd be surprised if there wasn't a GPS device that did this before 1998.

It sounds to me like the arguments that a lot of anti-climate science people make boil down to "someone got something wrong several decades ago" (in this case 25 years ago, in the case of global cooling there was a paper published in the 1970s that was singled out).

These are very similar to the arguments that the anti-evolution crowd makes: "Darwin himself admitted that he didn't understand how the eye evolved"

You're seriously claiming that you don't believe that models done on a few MHz processor are any different to those on a processor hundreds of thousands times faster? Try telling that to anyone who has tried to model drug or molecule interactions.

You don't have to wait a decade or two. Just do a comparison with models from five years ago. You would have years of temperature data to compare against instead of cherry picking a model that is almost three decades old.

In 1988 the 386 processor (33MHz) had just been released.

I would definitely expect climate models from 1988 to be very basic compared with any predictions from recent years.

You're using predictions from 1988, with temperature data from back in 2006.

Surely there's newer predictions and temperature data than that? We're almost up to 2012 now (25 years later).

You are dodgy and purposely trying to mislead.

"Brendan Nyhan at the University of Michigan undertook a study that found that when people were shown information that proved that their beliefs were wrong they actually became more entrenched in their original beliefs. This is known in the business as 'backfire'. And what's more, highly intelligent people tend to suffer backfire more than less intelligent people do, making us immune to any facts that are counter to our strongly held beliefs."

I guess it comes down to who you trust more: The Academy of Sciences, NASA, CSIRO, the Royal Academy, and all the major scientific institutions of the world, or the Daily Mail science section, which commonly has articles like the 100 foot killer snake stalking people in Borneo:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1149743/Picture-100ft-long-snake-sparks-fears-mythical-monster-Borneo.html

If you have a lot of your power getting generated by solar then you'll have a drop off of power generation in the evening/night.

Your car would be able to return some of that power to the grid at evening peak times after you've driven home from work.

Only if you regularly have unplanned trips of 200 kms or so (Not the average driver). Short unplanned trips won't be a problem.

The worst that happens anyway is that you have to stop off and recharge on the way; same as can happen with a petrol vehicle.

This is the exact reason that we should worry about nuclear power. As an engineer, I know that politics and price are generally involved in making engineering decisions.

- All engineers make mistakes. I'm sure that there were many good engineers involved with Fukushima.
- Software programmers make mistakes.
- Natural disasters happen.
- Corruption happens.
- Builders make mistakes and swap parts for cheaper parts to save money.
- Lack of oversight happens.
- Maintenance gets cut to save money.
- Safety measures get reduced to save money.
- Security gets reduced to save money.

It would be nice to have an energy producing technology that doesn't fail so catastrophically, doesn't require such high levels of safety and security, and doesn't have all the issues around waste disposal.

Those egghead scientists in their ivory towers. What have they ever done for us?

I don't know about you, but if there's a difference of opinion between the scientific institutions of the world and some conservative talk-back radio hosts/bloggers, generally I'd side with the scientific institutions of the world - they have a very good track record when there's this much scientific consensus on a topic.

Can you even name a time when there was complete consensus between NASA, the Royal Academy, the National Academy of Sciences, CSIRO, and every other major scientific institution of the world and they were wrong?

And you even go on to suggest that we teach every whack-job's pet theories in schools and ask students to make up their own minds?
Learning about perpetual motion machines and how water can cure cancer has no place in a science classroom. It is misleading and a complete waste of time and resources.

Configurable.

I write software for card access systems.

Smaller systems can record an event when the card was swiped, when the door was opened, when the door was closed and when the lock is engaged or disengaged.
They'll also record an event if the door was opened without a successful card swipe.

Most decent electronic locks will return this kind of data.

Remember that the 8.9 magnitude quake struck 100km from the reactors, so the intensity of the quake would have been a lot less at the reactors than at the epicentre.

There were 34 earthquakes recorded of magnitudes ranging from 8.0 to 9.5 in the 20th century (three stronger than the recent one).
Do you think that the reactor could have withstood a direct hit from any one of these 34 quakes?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_20th-century_earthquakes

And also

1) Create a mobile phone app that can detect winners from a photograph and send the results along with a log in ID to your web-server.

2) Give this app to many people who work behind the counters of these stores in return for half the profits.

Thankfully we have these plucky bloggers with hearts of gold, keeping an eye on all those eggheads in their ivory towers - Scientists are always trying to mislead us with their "theories" and "models".

I also read a blog the other day asserting that global warming was caused by Aliens with some relationship to Hitler.

Me - I'd rather listen to NASA, The National Academy of Sciences, and all the other major Scientific institutions of the world, than some blogger. Sure research organizations publish papers and documents containing mistakes; that's the nature of science.

"Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the “body of fact” that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy. Within the business we recognise that a controversy exists. However, with the general public the consensus is that cigarettes are in some way harmful to the health. If we are successful in establishing a controversy at the public level, then there is an opportunity to put across the real facts about smoking and health. Doubt is also the limit of our “product”. Unfortunately, we cannot take a position directly opposing the anti-cigarette forces and say that cigarettes are a contributor to good health. No information that we have supports such a claim."