Hi Smidge,

Do you object to such claims because you believe them to be incorrect, or just pedantic and unhelpful?

I'm with you on the second point although I do bring it up as a logical conclusion when someone tries to distinguish between generating and storing energy, since most energy generated on Earth in turn comes from the sun.

Fair enough, but if you carry that logic far enough then fossil fuels aren't an energy source either. They're temporary storage for the sun's fusion energy.

Wind power is also solar. So are fossil fuels.

To move further up the pedantry scale, all solar energy is also nuclear.

Enjoy your fusion-powered car.

Correct. To be even more pedantic you could say it's nuclear power just like every other energy system on Earth other than the odd zero-point experiment producing a few femtowatts in a laboratory..

However you can consider that gravitational potential energy as an enormous buffer, since there is absolutely no correlation between hours of sunshine and hours of available energy from the system. There's also nothing mandating that the dam has to be filled by precipitation - dams employing pumps exist.

Clearly it's the rare but apparently also invasive comma-fish, often abbreviated as the ,

Gravity, from water in upstream catchment areas and falling from the sky as rain both into the catchment areas and directly into the dam.

How did the water get "up" in the first place? Well that's solar energy if you really want to get down to it which is, in turn, of course nuclear.

I'm not really sure what answer you're looking for there.

Gravitational potential energy cannot be used as an energy source.

Several hundred million people who use hydroelectric dams as their primary power source disagree.

Still not enough for the Mythbusters.

(On a more serious note though, how on Earth do they manage to store even a few microseconds of the footage from this beast?)

I haven't seen any of the articles, but I'm guessing the news about it has been spread in this fashion:

Rocket companies hate this. NASA has built a new type of engine using a simple trick. You will NEVER believe what happened when they switched it on. When I saw it, my mind was blown!
(Photo with a couple of red circles around guys in lab coats)

By necessity, not by definition.

It is conceivable, though as yet utterly unheard of, that tetrachromatism could come about by another mechanism, one that does not require both X chromosomes. Artificial retinas are one such path.

"Make people not do bad things" is a golden goose. Nobody has yet come up with a way to make that actually happen.

Nobody.

Until someone does, the next best thing is to remove people that do bad things from society so that it can continue to function.

Commonly this involves isolation from society (imprisonment) which also serves as positive punishment. Some call for further punishment such as public floggings or total removal from society by execution of course which in my PERSONAL opinion is going too far. Of course there will be people howling for vengeance, which is a bad motive, but don't let that blind you from the valid reasons for punishment.

While you're sitting dreaming of ways to stop people from doing bad things would you rather there were no penalty for crime, or have I myself now misrepresented your views?

That's just what Jesus said, sir.

Sorry, but that is a textbook strawman fallacy.

You have asserted that someone here does not desire for there to be no victims to care for (effectively "no crime"), instead choosing to opt for purging offenders from society. In doing so you have attempted to make yourself appear a more moral character than the GP to whom you replied.

The hard truth is that there is no realistic solution to the root cause of these problems. Do you really think that if there were, we wouldn't be already doing that?

This thing is going to happen again and again. Data you put there isn't really yours anyway, no matter what the T&Cs say.

No wonder personal LAMP servers with Postfix/Dovecot are springing up everywhere again.

I would just like to point out that the AI required to drive a train that effectively requires no steering nor split-second decisions is completely different to what would be required to acceptably drive a car.