This is a pretty disingenuous argument, and one that is used by disappointingly frequently by squirming Lib Dems. This is the wording of the pledge:

Nothing about being in government, and it's pretty clear that the wording allows for them being in a coalition. This was a personal promise made by individuals, not just a manifesto point.

It is enormously frustrating for scientists in a wide range of areas that they are required to hold a higher standard of integrity than the politicians, journalists and religious groups that oppose them, and yet this does not appear to carry adequate weight in public and political decision-making.

"We have suggested that Samsung were infringing on our IP. DISREGARD THAT, I SUCK COCKS"

When you've been slapped down for contempt of court, your next action really shouldn't be this kind of open contempt. I wonder how Apple's UK employees feel about this disrespect to their courts?

Comment the subject fail is.

Why has it become "good" writing to hedge everything you ever say? Out with it, man!

Because humans are rubbish at accounting for sustainability; we only ever look at current availability. There'll always be someone who cares less that can undercut you.

You're generalising; "the public" is a hopelessly vague term. A "high" church with statues etc. is not really aimed at children who haven't had a Christian upbringing, they are aimed at people brought up in that tradition; pretty analogous to science professionals, no? They are open to visitors so that people can pray outside of services, as well as appreciate their art and architecture. An exhibition about evolution is actually likely to be directly aimed at family groups like yours: one of the first things I learned about science communication is that you should never aim anything at "the general public" as you can't please everyone.

Anyway, we're wondering off the point a little. I think we're actually on the same side here; there's a reason churches prefer to teach their religion to children in a sugar-coated way rather than throw them in at the deep end.

You should try taking them to a professional conference for evolutionary biologists and see how much they enjoy that.

Seconded. I take glee in the simplicity and power of apt on my netbook, whereas MacPorts is always a last resort. Too much frustration trying to track down the right package name, only to discover that I'm not getting what I expected (e.g. the MacPorts version of yafc doesn't support tab completion). Next time I set a mac up I'm trying Homebrew.

Is that compared to the energy taken to commission/decommission, or is that compared with the low cost of fossil fuels which don't have to pay for the destruction they will unleash? Current consensus seems to be that it's likely climate change will wreck us before the oil runs out, so relying on current economics is not a very helpful way of decision-making.

And continuing the analogy, it is really helpful if you're playing in a band to have a basic working understanding of everyone else's instruments. It means you can ask the bassist to use more hammer-ons in this section, and understand why the singer can't do endless loud high notes.

What is "rap music"? Rapping is a technique which is used across a wide range of genres (acid jazz, hip-hop, grime...) "Rap music" is only a slightly more precise term than "guitar bands".

These things should be roughly interchangeable. The Water Online article gives a nice plot with "water permeability" in units of "L/cm2/day/MPa", showing a 2-3 order difference on a log scale. This is a slightly odd set of units, but essentially this is a flux/pressure applied. That is a pretty good metric for membrane performance. Pressure and area will scale with cost and energy in a roughly linear fashion; membrane technology is notorious for not enjoying economy of scale in the same way traditional operations such as distillation do. As this is a theoretical model, we don't know what additional costs and issues there might be in terms of auxiliary systems.

You still can't run away from osmotic pressure. If you have a membrane with a different concentration on each side, the solvent (water in this case) will tend to flow to the more concentrated side. This is true even if the membrane offers no resistance; it's simply diffusion at work. This effect is osmosis. In order to counteract this effect, an additional pressure of water is needed to pass water through the membrane. It's called reverse osmosis because you are opposing the usual behaviour of osmosis. If you run the process in "dead-end" mode like a coffee filter, as many seem to be suggesting here, the problem will not be "clogging", the problem will be the huge pressure build-up as salt at the filter becomes more and more concentrated.

TLDR; it's still reverse osmosis, because no membrane can make osmotic pressure disappear.

All of which is not to say that this isn't a very promising proposal. It shouldn't be toooooo hard to test this in the lab in the near future.