Your "2009" iPad 2 was released in March 2011, so it's not quite as old as you think. ;)

But transporting it is expensive, so much so that it can be cheaper to produce new glass from sand.

Producing glass from sand isn't much more difficult than producing glass from glass. That's the main reason glass recycling isn't that useful.

Aluminium is much easier to produce from aluminium than from bauxite.

The employees are being flushed. Seems clear and direct enough.

Would be amusing to see what would happen if every Walmart in America tried to unionize. They can't all experience plumbing issues, because there'd be nothing left except some confused buyers and warehouse staff. Oh, and a few hundred thousand shipping containers filled to the brim with Dora the Explorer dolls and Hello Kitty t-shirts.

Well.... perhaps some men can just admire what she's achieved rather than think about having sex with her.

I'm not going to degrade this reply with what I just thought about.

I wonder when it'll become acceptable for male captains to wear skirts.

The Borg's adaptability always sucked. The entire notion that once you understand something you can counteract and adapt to it is bogus.

We've had big lumps of metal fired by explosives for over 500 years, and even now, after half a millennium of amazing technological advancement, if you're in the way of a big lump of metal fired by an explosive the only thing that is going to save you is a bigger lump of metal between you and it.

Getting better big lumps of metal to fire first and stopping the enemy from firing big lumps of metal at you in the first place is the only real countermeasure.

All that being said, I agree with you about the Borg queen and the Borg ideal.

Germany's wind turbines ran into this problem when it was warm and windy all over Europe for a couple of weeks a couple of winters back. They ended up paying other companies to take their produced energy; that was obviously deemed cheaper than just turning them all off and starting them again.

I'd guess that solar's easier to turn off though, at least on a small scale - you just cover it up.

drinkypoo, be honest. It essentially all gets released back in mature forests. Do you think that which doesn't goes somewhere magical?

There isn't new coal being created by trees at the moment, that we've seen, at any significant rate.

You've got to take it on a species-by-species basis. Take, for example, Sequoia Sempervirens. Right up until the trees fall down because they outgrow their root systems, older trees put on more mass and thus fix more CO2 than the same area filled to capacity with younger trees.

Then they die, and decompose, releasing nearly all that CO2 back into the atmosphere.

Even trees which aren't getting taller are often getting thicker, so the question for a given species is whether younger or older members put on more mass for a given area. Virtually all of the non-water mass of all vegetation is carbon, and nearly all of the carbon of all vegetation (even relatively high soil carbon users like corn) comes from the air.

Yes, trees that are growing do take carbon out of the atmosphere. After they die, it gets released back. Hence mature forests are essentially carbon neutral.

Now, if we did something else with the dead wood, such as burning it instead of coal, or using it as a building material, it would be a net positive (perhaps not ultimately with the latter - nearly all wood rots eventually). Many species and ecosystems, however, are dependent upon rotting trees; removing them could have adverse effects on the ecosystem.

Whilst technically true, your statement is also misleading (if you meant to imply foxes are more closely related to cats than they are to dogs). Wolves, jackals, dogs and foxes are all Canids. Foxes are also more closely related to seals, otters, skunks, weasels, red pandas, bears and walruses than they are to cats (the Caniformia suborder contains all these, felines are in a different suborder).

You may be thinking of Hyenas, which are more closely related to cats than dogs.

cold fjord : What is your evidence that he had mental problems? He certainly had different values, but that isn't the same as being mentally ill. If anything your claim of "obvious mental problems" and that they "decided to make of show out of it for their own propaganda machine" indicates you probably don't understand what was happening.

cold fjord : So yes, it appears he may be mentally ill.

Stop trying to dispute facts that people state that disagree with your worldview without having even done very simple research, please. Please, just stop.

In the UK, truth is essentially always a valid defense.

The big difference between UK law and US law, as I can see it, is that in the UK the person who made the defamatory statement has to prove it. The defamed is under no obligation under law to say anything at all, they can just bring it to court, as long as they say it's false. The onus is on the defamer rather than the defamed, they have to show why they said it.

Also, this doesn't stop most of our newspapers reporting absolute bollocks half the time, but most of the celebrities reported upon would prefer to be in the papers than out of them, so false stories aren't challenged.

Just FYI, in Japan, it doesn't mater if it's true. You cannot post anything that would bring financial harm to a company. True facts or not, if you post negative things just to hurt a company, you're breaking the law in Japan.

If you post negative things with the intent of hurting a company, you're a bit odd anyway. If you post negative things to help other consumers make a decision between products or services, that's absolutely fine in Japanese law. If this was not the case, all Japanese reviews would be top marks every time, or be illegal.

Truth is not a mutually exclusive binary state of True / False.

Of course not. "How many integers are there between one and five (not including one and five)" is an example of a question that has a precise answer that is true, but not binary.

I don't quite understand the difficulty with the "When did you stop beating your wife?" question. It's got a blatantly false (in most cases) statement right at its heart. All it's actually asking is a timeframe, nothing else. "You used to beat your wife. When did you stop?" is clearer, but less confusing, so less popular.

It's a loaded question, and you've got to hit the assumptions, not the question.

"We released an almost vanilla fork of Android Lollipop because it's the easiest thing to do to step away from Cyanogenmod."

  And that's actually a good thing, because picking up an "Android" phone that's running some perplexing launcher with everything in the wrong place and packed with dozens of horrible branded apps that you can't remove is utterly stupid (Yes, Samsung, I'm looking at you).