They do. They're called "how to vote cards". As you walk into the polling booth you're handed bits of paper from people representing many of the major parties. They contain facsimiles of the ballot papers which have been filled in to their liking, allowing you to copy the vote your favourite party wants without thinking.

Woops, screwed that up a bit eh? Meh, it gets the idea across.

For reference, here's another analogy I thought up: "Climate is saying that one in every six rolls of a die will be a five. Weather is trying to say that the next roll is definetly a five". It's not perfect as the outcome of any roll of the die is independent of previous results while weather is somewhat predictable, but that's a subtlety that someone who misunderstands the difference between weather and climate isn't likely to pick up on.

That method works to some degree. The problem is that it requires a good memory of what's open and where it is. This feature seems to give you a graphical snapshot of everything which, for some people, would make finding an open tab faster given that a) they don't have to remember where is is and b) it allows their brain to process graphical rather than textual information.

Nobody has said this yet, but why don't nerds want this information? I would love to know how much power a phone emits, because it would help me choose a phone which will work as far away from the tower as possible by going for the highest power model.

With the numbers in the article I calculated 167W/m^2, or about 6% given the nominal 1000W/m^2 of incident solar radiation. I'm not sure if that's 24 hour output though, depending on how much night time output those numbers include the efficiency could be almost double. This is an overall system efficiency too, so I'm going to put this project into the "pretty reasonable" catagory. This form of low carbon electricity generation has the big advantage of producing much more consistant output, which is great for allowing controlled smoothing out of wind output.

Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce

At least the minister's response quoted in the article is positive. The summary butchered it:

"This is a good question but not a question to destroy our project," Oettinger said. "This question must be answered by a good answer and so we need ways to ensure that our import of electricity is from renewables."

Telstra's universal service obligation is what makes them horribly expensive for the bulk of the population. They seem to have a policy of a nation wide pricing structure, so city customers essentially subsidise country customers. Maybe, just maybe, this will result in slightly lower prices from them and therefore more competition. Right now the only city Telstra customers are the mums, dads and grandparents who don't want to research telecommunications services (because, frankly, it's boring at bat shit) and go with Telstra because it's a name they've always been with.

Also don't forget that the size of the writes can make a big difference. If it writes in 512-byte sectors then writing one byte causes the same wear as writing 512. I've got no idea how to predict a shortened lifespan given this fact, it's highly dependent on the user's usage habits. All I can say for sure is that the only time a drive will get close to it's expected lifespan is if it's used in something like a video editing environment where all writes are large, contiguous files. God help you if you ran squid on one though, or accidentally let Windows use it for virtual memory.

As a suburban inhabitant who's used to small mobile phones it's natural for you to assume that satellite phone size is a major issue, but for people who would regularly require satellite phones they only need to have a better cost:performance* ratio than remote communication alternatives, such as HF radio.

*performance in this context would be a subjective measure which includes factors such as reliability, size, weight etc.

Just for the record, this is the simplest explanation for the difference between climate and weather I can think of: weather is saying that this next dice roll will be a five. Climate is saying that if you roll the dice many times about 1/6th of the results will be a five.

I wonder, would we be better off building it on the side of the Moon facing us as that we we'd still be able to communicate with it via a direct radio link. What advantages would building one on the far side have? A telescope's view of the sky would be the same: away from the Sun. Hmm, (thinking while typing here) but on the near side it would be looking towards Earth. I wonder if that would be a big deal from a light pollution perspective?

To give a bit more perspective: the aluminium smelter at Tomago, just North of Newcastle, Australia, uses 900MW. Together with the smelter at Kurri Kurri (Just West of Newcastle, ~350MW) they use ~14% of all base load capacity in NSW. So next time you're complaining about the LHC just remember that the aluminium in that can of soda came at the energy cost of ~54MJ/kg.