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."

Plenty of other countries (Europe, Canada, Australia) have similar systems, and it hasn't ended with gulags and mass killings.

A basic lifestyle is just that:

Just enough to get you a room in a share house in a less desirable area, and just enough to get some food on the table.

Education and health are free (or almost free) in case you want to improve yourself or hit an emergency.

Long term unemployed still generally have to go to job interviews regularly and will get their money cut off if they refuse employment.

This kind of system works great when a recession hits too, since you don't have millions of people suddenly panicing about losing their jobs and halting all spending at the same time.

Event better, electric cars that are only going to see minimal use on certain days could be configured to draw electricity from the grid at off peak times, and feed it back into the grid during peak times, potentially earning the owner money.

In Australia we have four major banks that all charge these fees, and almost always match each other on all their fees.

Whenever a viable competitor pops up, one of the big four banks just buys the new bank up.

I pay $2.00 each time I use an ATM that belongs to my bank, and up to double that for an ATM that doesn't belong to my bank.

Yes, and according to maps and text from the middle ages, the North Pole was also a green paradise since this was the place where the Garden of Eden was located.

Apparently there was also an island of virgins located somewhere near Greenland !

Why?

Can you access your local mayor's email account?
Can you download the full schematics for the space shuttle?
Why isn't your local police department's incident reporting system completely open source?

I'm all for increased transparency, but there is no reason that all information from publicly funded work should be publicly available.

Because:
- Overheads. The costs of doing this would be huge.
- A lot of publicly funded work is done by private companies, who might not want to release their work to their competitors.
- Most people don't want every piece of work, every correspondance that they've ever done accessible by everyone for the rest of time.

It is fair to see the final reports/papers/etc... produced by most government departments, and some information on how those results were obtained, which is pretty much what happens for most government funded scientific agencies.