Following the tragic events of 2001 and subsequent bombings in the UK and Spain I remember looking on hoping that people of the 'West' (leaders and general population alike) would take the opportunity to ask themselves the hard questions:

"Why would someone do this to us?
Why do some people hate us as a nation?
Have we treated some of our global neighbours poorly, and if so, what should we change, and how can we make amends?
Is our so-called 'freedom' despised by some because it comes at the expense of others?"

I am not implying for a second that any terrorist attack is justified, but that anyone who would instigate such an act must have some reason to sacrifice their life. If that reason has any truth in it, it should be considered and amended, not to encourage terrorism (a word I loathe as much for its overuse as for its realities and consequences) but to engender peace.

Sadly, democracy has a tendency to elect leaders who sport more pride, arrogance and blind patriotism (another word I hate) than humility.

... the use by the state of sexual accusations to destroy a public figure

A friend of mine built a sustainable, passive-solar-design house for her family a few years ago which uses no active heating and cooling yet stays within the comfortable temperature zone year round, with the exception of a handful of days in the middle of a 45-degree-celsius heat wave (she has the graphs to prove it). Its cost was at the lower end of the scale - low enough to fit into the 'affordable' category here in temperate South Australia - even on a per-square-metre basis, in spite of the need for high retaining walls (it is on a sloping block). It is a very small house by local suburban standards (90m^2) but clever use of space means it feels spacious and has plenty of room for a young family of four. It uses standard building techniques, constructed mostly of ColorBond (coated corrugated iron - quite common here), with beautiful polished-concrete flooring (which they polished themselves) for thermal mass. As far as I know one of the main hurdles was getting approval for a grey water system, which is very difficult here.

On another note, my wife is now doing her thesis on how to encourage builders to incorporate basic sustainability principles like passive solar - which don't have to cost any more than what they currently build - into the design of the homes they build. It seems that for many it's just a matter of knowing how to do it, and seeing that it's possible - and that it doesn't need to be more difficult or expensive.

Sorry to those of you who are still stuck in the imperial measurement system :)

In my state (South Australia) people are contracted to use speed cameras. It doesn't take a rocket scientist, or a cop, to use one. Many people claim that the speed cameras tend to be located where many people speed, but not in the places where speeding is most dangerous - i.e., they are there purely for raising revenue for the state. Whether or not this is true, it is apparent that there is money to be made out of enforcing speed limits. The author is simply approaching this from a perspective of social entrepreneurship, which could well work if he can demonstrate that they provide a service (speeding offence detection) that the police are currently not equipped to do themselves, that can at the same time provide revenue for the police if they cooperate and subcontract out these services. As it is potentially self-funding it has more going for it than a lot of other suggestions, which tend to cost more while providing no additional revenue.

Stricter driving tests are great, but they are all but useless if there are resource issues when it comes to enforcing the laws. What's to say that people won't just drive unlicensed? Secondly, just because you CAN drive safely doesn't mean you WILL. A driver might pass the strictest of tests, but put him in a fast car with a few mates and you can see different quality of driving altogether.

I hear memcache is a pretty secure and efficient away of storing data on the net.

One thing that seems to be missed in the discussion (not that I have read all the research or anything) is the factor that bees forage. They don't just stay in the immediate vicinity of their hives, they go and hunt, then go and tell their workmates where to look. So if the food is rarely very close to the towers (which is likely since many towers, at least in cities, are on the top of tall buildings, not in lush gardens), they will rarely get particularly close to them. But suppose a forager happens to find a good food source with a tower nearby - but far enough that he can still find his way back? Many of the worker bees head to the area and start collecting happily, but gradually get closer and closer to the tower as they progress through the area. The initial find might be a "safe" distance, but the bulk of the hive could end up disoriented by the end of the day and never make it back to the hive.

True. But cell phone towers have much higher signal strength than mobile phones. IANAPhysicist, but might a close-range phone be used as an analogue for a longer-range tower?

A more interesting alternative experiment taking into account the inverse square law would be:

1. Place dozens of hives around a mobile/cell phone tower at varying distances
2. Ensure main food sources are not close to the tower
3. Ensure the site would is low in other influencing factors such as pesticides
4. Track the hive activity/productivity over time
5. Turn the tower on, and continue tracking, and check for...
6. profit!

Sure, get their input, but people can only speak from their experience. Maybe no-one in the team (of only four) has ever worked in a 'round table' layout. Maybe they have a preferred layout, but that layout in practice could reduce overall productivity. Just because they are intelligent doesn't mean they know all the answers to all the questions. You could just say "re-arrange the desks in x fashion and see if productivity/staff satisfaction improves" but if you read the question fully they are looking at buying new furniture and hoping for an optimal solution. And let's face it, not all developers will come through with the best answer to such a question.

I am sick of people responding with "geez, work it out for yourself" to valid questions from people seeking answers to practical questions with sometimes-unclear answers. Isn't that what "Ask Slashdot" is about? Some people seem to shoot down every article that is posted on Slashdot and complain about the ongoing lack of quality submissions... well why would you bother submitting if you're just going to get slammed? And yet some of these supposedly stupid questions end up resulting in some really interesting and informative debate.

Sheesh.

I guess a whole bunch of corporations that have US senators on their payrolls (officially or not) will have to sign up then?

Better still, send them a link that points to goatse, but then redirects to a Youtube clip of Cthulhu singing Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up". That'll show em!

...and from 1972-1988 University Education was free in Australia, as it still is in some European countries (Norway is one AFAIK)

Crayon Physics is a great game for playing with the basic physics properties of different types of objects in a finger-painting-simple kind of way. It's not comprehensive and it doesn't teach you the theory or equations behind what's happening, but it's great fun and encourages you to think about physics problems in different ways. Physics fun for the whole family (myself included)!