Where I'm from, people join motorcycle clubs to deal drugs, run protection rackets and applying discipline to people, mostly those who have debts. So your analogy doesn't work for me.

In essence the more specific CO2 output (that is per unit of air/fuel) is better, because it means that the engine is achieving a more complete combustion. That basically means you can extract more energy out of combustion. The reality is, while specific outputs may look bad in some cases, the real world application is an engine with improved efficiency, using less fuel, meaning overall, less CO2.

There are always going to be by-products, such as NOx and some CO emissions, as unavoidable things happen in the combustion chamber, the gap between the piston and cylinder wall is one where you get incomplete combustion, and black carbon build up.

• To summarise what happens to improve efficiency, there are a few things that get looked at;
• - Reduce friction, which is obviously losing energy just rotating the engine. This is beneficial in smaller engines, as they have fewer cam lobes, fewer bearings, less pistons to move, but getting tolerances, better lubrication and better materials also helps a lot.
• - Improve combustion, this directly improves efficiency, obviously you don't want to be pushing unburnt fuel into the exhaust, so making sure you get complete combustion, or generate as much heat as possible from a unit of fuel, is very useful.
• - Improve the speed of combustion. This might be difficult to understand, but combustion takes time, and during that time the motor is always moving. The spark gets initiated about 15-40 before the piston reaches its top of travel, that also means that pressure builds up while the combustion chamber is reducing in size, making it work against it, obviously a loss of power. The quicker controlled combustion can be, the less pressure you get acting against the upwards stroke. The timing also is advantageous if maximum pressure is around the point where the connecting rod is at a right angle to the crank journal.

Now a lot can be done with these things, but, factors also at play are, statutory emissions requirements, reliability of an engine, and longevity. These all can potentially prohibit certain things from happening to improve engine efficiency further.

I get the feeling that aggressive drivers who frequently change lanes with little room, do a lot to slow traffic down.

One of the things that should be possible now is to network traffic lights and make their timing dynamic to cope with flow and the movement of traffic. Too often I find my self stopping at every set of lights along the way, and it's a massive waste, all the energy to move from a stop, just to lose it all in braking to a stop.

I understand it won't be perfect, and maybe it might be better with the theoretical capabilities of a quantum computer, but my experience is that the quickest way to get places where I live is to avoid traffic lights as much as possible.

It's still not allowed here (IANAL, but this is my vague understanding), publishers are meant to check facts, the onus is put on them not to defame, it even makes broadcasters responsible for remarks made by guests or people not on the payroll of the station. Since defamation is a civil matter, there are going to be two ways to defend it; one prove that it's true (in which case it's no longer defamatory, case closed) or fight the damages claim (which is basically admitting that defamatory remarks were published/broadcast). I'm sure if there is a plethora of publishers who have published it, then it would be easy to prove that the one in court can't be held responsible for the whole damages claim. With that said, the loser in any court case in Australia is liable for the other parties court costs, so while the damages award may be low, the legal costs probably won't be.

That will depend on jurisdiction. In Australia, where I am, it depends on who published the defamatory remarks. So in your example, both sources are liable, the ones who initially published it, and the ones who republished it.

If he has a case, the wikipedia article would have to have lies and fabrications. I don't think it's unreasonable to go to court for defamation, when the material published isn't true. If it is true, then that's a whole different matter.

I've got a Nigerian neighbour (I live in Australia) who fills containers with electronics and sends them to Africa. I spoke to him about it and he said that they repair the stuff there, and reuse most of it. Considering that the analogue TV signal was switched off last year, and essentially all CRT TV's don't work, a lot have been dumped on streets, and they naturally been picking them up for free.

So it's surprising that they so blatantly claim that they're dumping them, when I can hardly see the sense in spending the money on shipping containers half way across the globe, only to dump it there, when it has already been dumped here. Clearly there's some thing going on which the business world isn't particularly keen on. If this person jailed was being paid to dispose of garbage and he was just dumping it in countries that don't care about dumping, then that's a different matter, but I get the feeling that our garbage is somewhat more valuable in developing countries.

What about Rugby? League and Union as well?

Bioware's soul has been eaten out by EA. As only a passive observer, that spark that originally was there seems to have fizzled out.

Exactly! All I require is $500,000,000.

Yea I agree, it's also losing all of its publicity momentum. I do wonder if steamOS will be a success, as I'm not particularly convinced about it.

I think that's completely correct. My imagination likes to think that in a similar situation, the designers of windows 8 were sitting around a board room table, 'brainstorming' and some one comes up with their own gem of "how about we get rid of the start button!".

That's correct, it's the fact that the patent expired, and much cheaper devices could be made and sold without problems. However, I do think that 20 years ago, the state of CAD software and processing power wouldn't have had the best time on home computers. The slicers that create the gcode do take a fair bit of number crunching. I think it would have made printing much slower, significantly more so than it already is.

I think VR is DOA, even if all the problems with it get solved. It will probably be 3D TV v2.0 by stealth.