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.

Both of the reports from the investigations by the "House of Commons Science and Technology Committee" and "Scientific Assessment Panel" exonerated Professor Jones and the CRU.

He acted within the UK FOI laws. All UK Government agencies act this way. If you make a FOI request at any level of UK government it will generally be rejected because under the FOI laws they can reject requests which cost too much to process. This means a government deparment can effectively refuse any FOI requests they choose.

This is a problem with the UK's transparency laws, and has no bearings on the credibility of any of the CRU research findings (In any case, this would be a problem with the University's protocol for the handling of FOI requests, not Professor Jones personally).

If you are accusing the CRU of scientific fraud, this is a very serious accusation, and you'd better have decent evidence to back up your claim; Not "They didn't respond to FOI requests."

Did you read the article that you linked to (and for that matter the original article that was linked in this slashdot article) ?
You are instigating the kind of political motivated persecution that both articles criticise.

From your article: "By equating controversial results with legal fraud, Mr. Cuccinelli demonstrates a dangerous disregard for scientific method and academic freedom. The remedy for unsatisfactory data or analysis is public criticism from peers and more data, not a politically tinged witch hunt or, worse, a civil penalty. Scientists and other academics inevitably will get things wrong, and they will use public funds in the process, because failure is as important to producing good scholarship as success."

Mann is being persecuted because he is pushing a view point that is politcally damaging to the republican Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, who incidentally also seems to believe another consipracy theory that Obama was born in Kenya and has faked his birth certificate.

Jones has already been cleared of wrongdoing in investigations, but still gets death threats made against him made by people who do not like his results.

>> 1. Giant Batteries/ Flywheels/ Water storage hills

If you have a few million hybrid and electric cars on the road, there are your batteries.

Only about 25% would be driven at any point in time. The rest can sit there storing energy when the wind is blowing, and returning energy to the grid at peak times, earning money for their owners.

>> You do realize, they've been in decline for about the last 18k years, right? Since the last glacial period.

Quite the pedant. The GP poster wasn't talking about a very tiny decline.
No-one is trying to claim that the climate doesn't change. The problem is how quickly it is currently changing.

If the temperature had been increasing for the last 18k years as fast as it has risen for the last few decades, we'd currently be experiencing temperatures nearing the 300 degrees Celcius mark, and the glaciers would have long since melted.

It's just another version of the Playstation 2 EyeToy, which was released in 2003.

Look, the Ancient Romans wrote that England's weather was too cold and too wet to grow grapes for making wine.

I didn't post to argue about the Roman civilization's taste in wine, just to disprove the myth that England was some kind of dry, warm wine growing paradise during Roman times. There are plenty of other sources of temperature data in England to support this assertion.