that's the other thing... $25 would have made this a non-issue.

Actually, I have two providers, and in cases of emergency, I still can go to the office. So much for redundancy.

I think you didn't get the parent. Before the disaster, you screen the people who will be affected by it and designate the survivors. Those people get tags to be easily spotted and identified. Thus you can rescue the survivors easily and don't need to waste time on people not deemed worthy to be alive.

Even if I get spam that claims to be from my bank, I can see it being spam because I got similar spam allegedly from other banks I never did business with. The same with the two messages of unclear status, I seem to have with so many sites, that the one that claimed to have sent by a site I actually have an account with was easily spotted.

The quickest numbers I could find say that at the scales of large power-plants, the generator is very efficient, but the turbine not so much, around 50%. This would put the system as a whole at around 40% efficency sunlight -> electricity. That's competitive with the best solar voltaic systems tested in the lab, and 50-100% better than practical systems on the market. Assuming their system really does scale up to power plant sizes, of course.

Bat Dad

The demonstration video of the origami wheel was not about climbing obstacles, it was using the foldable wheel as some gear replacement with continous transmission ratio.

Every institution abuses their power. Governments are just the scape goats U.S. Americans like to butcher. Other countries have banks, other big corporations or the neighbouring country to beat at. Stop blaming the government for all failures, or at least start distributing your blame more fairly.

This is a different scenario and thus a different solution.

In the late 1980ies, the Nuclear Research Facility at Rossendorf near Dresden, Germany had two Amigas 2000 as central processing units for their accelerator experiments. It was fascinating, because Rossendorf was in communist East Germany, and the Amigas probably were bought half-legally for obscene amounts of (east german) money. But appearently they urgently needed the 32bit processing capability and were using selfdeveloped Zorro cards for the signal reception and processing.

It's because the fundamental equation that relates a rocket's performance and the mass fuel it requires to orbital velocities is exponential. This makes it work out so that any chemical rocket leaving earth has to have the vast majority of its weight as fuel, where as a rocket leaving the moon only about half of its weight as fuel.

What's more, the entire lunar module and its fuel supply is dead weight as far as the earth launch is concerned, which makes the earth rocket and its fuel multiple all the bigger. Then there's the issue of bringing along enough fuel to slow down the craft into lunar orbit, and escaping lunar orbit back to earth. The lunar lander didn't need to handle any of that, either.

And what would be the result? The UK would face a treaty violation suit and would have to pay a monthly or yearly sum to the E.U. until they are in compliance again.

Sique: error. --sexy not implemented

Of course I am just an algorithm, and the velvet worms never appeared in the actual article.

I'm sure the NSA has the widest spread program to do so. No other country routinely collects all information of all people all over the world (though they claim not to collect the information about U.S. citizens under certain conditions). And for UK, they are already in conflict with the European High Court about collecting this information.

And at the same time, the NSA is the most useless organisation when it comes to fight domestic terrorism, as the only fact related to domestic terrorism they ever uncovered was a money transfer by a San Diego cab driver to a charity in Somalia which is considered a front to a terrorist organisation.