I have heard a few stories about the Rover; one of the senior engineers on the project was an elderly, but still very clever neighbour who I talked to a few times about the car he worked on during the mid-50's.

From what he told me, to drive the car was fun; the turbine whine made it very distinctive and the car handling was improved by engine placement & reduced weight over the standard Rover V8. He used to be able to borrow one prototype car at times to drive home, despite it not being strictly road legal. Apparently quite the sensation in the small town where he lived.

He also talked about the problems; the gear-box which was heavy, expensive and complex, reducing some of the advantages of having a gas-turbine in the first place. You can see why; at the time manual gear-boxes were relatively crude anyway, and to engage first you had to couple with a turbine 'idling' and 35,000rpm.

The thirst for lubrication oil and petrol at a time when petrol in the UK went from being rationed to just being expensive was not good timing, though 12mpg was not that bad compared with big Rolls Royce engines. The car also gave a whole new perspective on turbo lag; acceleration & de-acceleration was not that great when you had to wait for the turbine to spin up to get the full 100+HP.. and then brake the turbine to slow it down again (wasting fuel).

  Main problem he talked about was heat. An aircraft (or boat) can dump the waste heat out the back without any concern, and gas-turbines are more efficient at low temperatures at altitude, but in a road legal car... they apparently tried dumping the exhaust out under-car vents, (melting the tar-seal), out the back (burn hazard to anybody walking behind the car) and finally venting above the car. The later models used large complex heat-exchanges to try and cool the exhaust and scavenge waste heat, but it was still a big engineering challenge.

AFAIK one never crashed, but a minor accident would be interesting if you had a turbine spinning at 50,000rpm under the bonnet.. I imagine it would throw hot metal a long way.

All this of course was done starting in the 1940's, with the prototype in 1950.. years ahead of Chrysler who sounds like they went through the same process of discovering the draw-backs.

The gas-turbine could probably be mated with a hybrid drive-train to avoid many of the issues faced by Rover and Chrysler, but I am still sceptical; so many revolutionary engine designs including the Wankel rotary don't become mainstream as conventional piston internal combustion engines, despite the theoretical draw-backs, have evolved and been refined over such as long time that its difficult to bet them in all aspects without failing in cost, size, power, economy, noise, lag or other criteria.

I think you should read 1984 by George Orwell and consider what would happen if the war is never over?

After all, what is your (or your Governments) estimated date for when the 'war on terror' be over?

As a lowly software dev, if I said I was going to embark on a very important, critical but big complex job that would take trillions of dollars, the people paying might want to have some oversight as to how it would end and if the money was being well spent. Even to ask if it was working a few years down the line.

And what would create greater harm - a government operating with total immunity from criticism, keeping everything secret (even if it turns our that they got into a bit of creative torture or genocide), or the possiblity that some information published endangers some individuals in a country at war. It seems to me that somebody local working with Americans in Afganistan might be endangered anyway.

Local New Zealand bank account; government guaranteed and a choice of conservative, profitable (mostly Australian owned) banks that all sailed through the Financial melt-down without any major concerns.

Six month to 1 year investment is about 5% return. US dollar returns might change, but probably not a lot.

Easy when you know how.

But you would think a business like Google, EBay or whoever might be able to turn $1 investment in their business into a 5% return. If not, why the hell would be people be risking investment into these businesses at all?

Rubbish/Garbage

Mozilla push out updates every day to millions of installs. They know how many FF instances fire up and ask if there are any updates,so can count them pretty accurately. In-fact they probably undercount as they will miss people not going for updates.

Not to mention the third party evidence; numbers of people hitting major public sites that have a user agent identifying FF version; I doubt that any of these will be cloaked IE versions ;-)

You can look at browser stats online; my Google stats show that browsers hitting my (tech) site about 50+% are running FF, 30% IE and the rest Chrome/Safari etc. YMMV.

You suggest that MS don't know how many users?

I suspect that they know how many pretty well, as they must audit CAL usage on enough sites to get a sample. Or do MS not care if people buy one CAL and use it for 10000 users? I know that when a company I was with applied for MS site license, they provided lots of information to MS, including running automated tools that combed the network.

This is assuming that SharePoint does not phone home of course... If it was my product, I certain would add this in to the validation routine.

You forgot: two screens, twice the size, twice the cost and twice the power consumption of an iPhone/iPod Touch, (the screen is a key component in these devices for power and cost). I guessing that when people buy e-book readers, size, cost and power consumption are all important. And screen size does not seem critical - my daughter reads most of her online books on a current generation iPod, so any future Apple device that is bigger would probably be 'enough'.

Microsoft at this point has to support Office on the iPhone (like they do with OSX) as that device is quickly becoming a bigger market than Microsoft Mobile. Otherwise, people will turn to competing products.

Some of us remember Steve Ballmer laughing at the Apple iPhone, or MS claiming the Zune (and before that 'Plays for Sure') would take on Apple iPods, so any time somebody thinks that a new bit of Microsoft Vapourware is going to give "Apple a tough time competing with this thing", then I would take it with a big grain of salt.

Besides.. you think Nintendo might give this thing some competition as well should they wish.

Fucking retarded?

Depends. Is the X-plane source code open?

If not, then maybe they wanted their own source so they could interface with their own hardware, aircraft models or other combat simulators?

I'm not saying that X-plane could not achieve exactly what they what, but generally a whole lot of research goes into seeing what is available COTS before deciding to roll there own. And often there is good reason; such as they have an integrated total combat simulation that incorporates drones, AWACS, ground-based units, naval units etc and they need a flight sim that allows pilots to exercise within a total environment.

Does X-Plane do that off the shelf?

And, who says they didn't start with some existing flight sim source code; maybe not X-plane, but there are others.

I think you missed the whole point of the web thing.

Don't like google search and really want to you yahoo, bing/live/whatever today? Go ahead and bookmark a new URL and use it.
Don't like gmail; there are plenty of alternatives.
Don't like google apps? Go ahead and use Zoho or whatever you like.

You can run any non-google web-based software you want; including my companies analysis software that used to be restricted to Windows desktops, but now runs on all OS's thanks to our move to the web.

Hell of a lot easier to open a different URL than installing VM's or re-booting into another OS, to run some software that happens to use another API.

  In fact I really like the idea of having a basic Linux kernel (free with the hardware) that boots up ChromeOS from flash in a few seconds and allows me to quickly and securely browse, do webmail etc; a big percentage of what most people use their computers for on a regular basis. My kids for instance play flash based games & pretty much only use our Windows XP home computers as a dedicated Firefox launcher - though XP gets in the way when it takes 2 minutes to wake up & be ready to use.

At the same time, I still need the ability to boot different (VMs?) off that kernel, so when I need native software for speed/richness of UI/security, I can fire up instances of Ubuntu/Eclipse for dev work, or Windows/Photoshop etc. And if a zero day exploit takes down ChromeOS, all my work environments are safe.

For others like my parents, who never back up email, photos or buy/install software other than anti-virus crap that slows their machine to a crawl I would love to get them to run Chrome of something that gives them what they need & nothing more or less.

Is is really a "dissenting scientific opinion" if the person concerned is
      a) not a scientist
      b) the report is an opinion piece with no original research and no peer review?

Real scientists achieve consensus by arguing their case using evidence, not copying and pasting discredited crap from websites like this guy appears to have done.

For sources, you may want to start with say Wikipedia which links to some very good sources. Don't do what Carlin does and pick some contrarian websites. Given your comments below, I suspect you have not been looking a decent sources for a start.

1) Please give references if you are going to claim figures like 0.04 degrees. Severe economic responses (Kyoto doesn't seem all that severe) would give more over the long run, but if you don't believe in GW, why believe the best model would only give a 0.04 decrease?

2) There does not have to be severe economic consequences to lower the temperature; one valid response to global warming is to do nothing, or very little. On the other hand the economic consequences of doing nothing could be much higher; I personally would pay for power from coal-powered stations vs renewal energy sources than deal with drought.

GW is not a "fairy tale". 2 minutes reading the Wikipedia article (you have done that right?) would show the weight of evidence for GW. You can argue about how much is human generated, how much affect it will have and the best responses but to dismiss it as a story is to show a critical lack of understanding right up there with flat earth brigade.

I won't mod you down, I will spend a few minutes to answer your post, even though it reads as a troll. But will you actually take the time to read unbiased sources, or just spend your time complaining about being mod down?

To explain where you are wrong:
"Clouds and sunspots have more effect on climate than carbon dioxide ever will".

You think that climate scientists missed the big shiny thing in the sky every day? You would be wrong; huge amounts of research have gone into examining the amount of input from solar 'forcing' - and the result is simply that you are wrong. "Direct measurements of solar output since 1978 show a steady rise and fall over the 11-year sunspot cycle, but no upwards or downward trend"
[http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11650-climate-myths-global-warming-is-down-to-the-sun-not-humans.html]

And carbon dioxide; you have a point to some extent in that it is just one of the most important factors and not the sole factor.. but "A simplified summary is that about 50% of the greenhouse effect is due to water vapour, 25% due to clouds, 20% to CO2, with other gases accounting for the remainder". I personally think of it as being like a bath or basin filling with water; in the past over very long periods of time, the flow of water (heat) coming in is roughly balance by the amount of water flowing out the plug hole. But CO2 and other gases is like somebody dumping some tissues in water; but a big thing by themselves but enough to partial block the plug hole causing a overflow.
[http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11652-climate-myths-co2-isnt-the-most-important-greenhouse-gas.html]