Several reasons:

* Capacitors may require a lot more space and weigh more for the same stored energy - fine at a fixed installation like a recharging station, but impractical in a car where size is a premium.

* Capacitors don't work like batteries - as you discharge them the voltage falls straight away, requiring more complex power regulation to give a consistent output voltage. Much easier to do in a fixed installation where size and complexity isn't a problem, but much more challenging in the confines of a car. Li-Ion type batteries maintain a reasonably steady voltage throughout their entire discharge cycle.

85,000 isn't that many for an industrial society to build when you consider the German car industry alone churns out 6 million cars alone (machines much more complex than wind turbines). Many of the UK's wind turbines are offshore too where the wind is very steady and easy to forecast, and enormous windfarms can be made to take advantage of some of the shallow seas around the UK.

Modern wind turbines (even at only 30% capacity) will run more like 1000-2000 homes each.

80,000 wind turbines sounds like a lot, but it's not really. Cars are much more complex machines than wind turbines, yet Germany churns out 6 million cars *every single year*. BMW alone probably builds 1 million cars a year in Germany.

You still need the extra electronics for LEDs run off DC. They require a regulator circuit (basically a small switch mode power supply). You can't just put in a series resistor with a high powered LED otherwise it would be no more efficient than an incandescent bulb.

The x86 decoder is as large as an entire ARM execution core, and what's more it makes the pipeline and branch prediction a lot more complex with the variable length instructions so necessitates yet more complexity. From an asm point of view (and probably the compiler writer's point of view), a modern RISC processor is simpler to write software for than CISC, things like having all the ALU instructions taking 3 operands, having 32 registers that are truly general purpose (x86 still has some instructions that only work with certain registers) etc. RISC is a bit of a misnomer too. There are CISC chips with fewer instructions than some RISC chips, in reality RISC should be called load and store since that's the main differentiator: ALU instructions on RISC only work on registers and immediate values (which makes the chip a lot simpler to implement), whereas CISC chips often have all sorts of addressing modes for ALU instructions.

Britain has a lot of little Hitlers who resent rules, but nonetheless love trying to help enforce petty rules. They usually are employed somewhere as a "jobsworth" (google the term) but when they are off the clock they enjoy continuing to be a jobsworth-type of person.

I was raised in MPH. I find it trivially easy to go to a km/h country. Just make sure the needle on the speedometer doesn't go much over the number posted on signs and you're OK. It's just not rocket science.

The UK still uses a white sign with a diagonal black bar across it (means "national speed limit applies"), so the UK is in the boat NZ was in in 1972.

The Irish managed it, or are you saying that people in the UK are inferior to the Irish and can't manage what the Irish did without too much trouble?

Peak oil isn't about quantity of oil, it's about rate of oil extraction. For example, Mexico's Cantarell field at its peak produced oil at a greater rate than the entire Canadian tar sands despite being around 0.1% of the size of what Canada has. We don't yet know whether the rate of production from this field will do anything at all to when peak oil happens.

It's not at all unusual for the 5v and 0v (Vcc and GND) lines to be in the middle of a DIP package (the Slashdot summary sort of implies it's an odd thing). It means the leads within the package are shorter for those lines, lowering parasitic inductance and capacitance for the power supply to the chip, generally you want the decoupling capacitors to be as close to the actual chip as possible so they can be as effective as possible as the power demands change. Putting the supply pins at opposite corners (like it's done on things like 14 pin 74-series standard logic) would very significantly lengthen the distance that the actual supply rails on the chip are from the decoupling capacitors.

The Z80 is still manufactured in classic form. It may be considered a trade secret and Faggin might not be at liberty to divulge anything about the inner workings of the chip without you signing an NDA.

Why not delegate them a third level domain? Your stuff on example.com, give your CDN control of cdn.example.com.

But ERM 2 is a pre-requisite of joining the euro, and there are no deadlines to join ERM 2, so Scotland could delay joining the Euro forever despite committing to adopt it by simply never joining ERM 2.

I don't think it will take as long as you expect to rejoin the EU (the UK will continue to exist on Friday if the vote is yes, it's at least a couple of years away for the first day of Scotland as a new sovereign nation in the event of a yes vote). The EU will make sure that Scotland is in by that deadline - for one, the Spanish fishing fleets won't tolerate being denied access to Scottish waters.