Because they were bound to be plugged in to recharge anyway. That way they're doubling as batteries for the building.

I present you... Non-US keyboards!

They do annoy the heck of me tho.

An electrical heater is not a system, it's just part of one. The system itself would at least involve the energy source and the transporting medium, where the losses continue to hold true the fact that there's no 100% efficiency in any system. If there were, Entropy would have no meaning.

If you take the isolated case of the heater as being 100% efficient because in itself it's able to convert 100% of its input energy into wanted heat (which itself is discutable, since there may still be losses through electro-magnetic emissions, vibrations, etc. that would not be captured by the room and transformed into heat, even though all that would be as negligible as contesting gravity acceleration as not being 9.8m/s^2 in most cases), you'd just as well pick a heat pump which, with the same amount of input energy, "produces" 3 times more heat.

Heat pumps are 300% efficient. Maybe we should use heat pumps instead of electric cars.

What I meant is that the fact seems to be "electricity is way more efficient than combustion" rather than "electricity is 100% efficient. Gas is not".

As far as my ignorance in the laws of Physics goes, it's simply impossible to have any system running at 100% efficiency because it automatically implies zero loss of energy.

Electric systems lose energy everywhere: conduction materials have impedance, motors have friction *and* generate inductive impedance, photons are created...

I think you may have gotten your fact wrong.

How about playing the evil guy to unite the Earth governments under a single goal and thus avoid the general destruction of humanity? Hmm, that sounds familiar.

Ok, I got it! Fight AGAINST the destruction of OTHER impressive things like the Great Wall of China, the Everest, Iguassu Falls and such, instead of DESTRUCTING a Manhattan-like city while fighting the enemy.

Thank you for putting into words what I have been feeling since I watched it.

What I kept from the film was interminable mass-destruction scenes with little care to a believable script. A waste of good character canon. I can't imagine why any significant number of (new) fans would look for any other merchandising or media after that.

Road maintenance is already a problem on many a government's budget. I have the impression that adding a complex system of energy delivery which includes encryption and selective power-up seems too complex.

I understand that as meaning "this group doesn't know how to pick their targets".

So let's put people trying to make things better at risk?

The awareness I get from this is that hackers can give a huge blow against whistle blowers with no real "net gain" to any cause.

No, because it puts an end to "long term". To maximize entropy over time, one needs to keep as many options open as possible, so that one pushes the "end" to as far as possible.

Isn't it interesting, though, that if the Universe really follows this principle, that such a system would evolve into finite lives?

The only thing the two designs have in common is that they both have wings. This is the model that Santos Dumont successfully presented in 1906. And this is the model that the Wright Brothers used to be the first to fly an airplane.

Note that Santos Dumont's model takes off on its own and lands, while the Wrights' model is launched by an external device and cannot land without crashing (since it doesn't have wheels).

Thanks to a Santos Dumont's invention, the Demoiselle (Google translation), which was released to the public domain by the author.

Actually, I seem to remember my MSX-Basic 1.1 to be limited to 255 characters per line of code.

Ok, what about "digital release makes it extremely easy for the consumer to decide which songs are worth buying"?