I agree with the rest of your post, but ship's diesel motors used on transport ships are about as efficient as you can make an engine run. For the vast majority of their time, they run at the ideal fuel/output ratio you can get. This is not because of environmental concerns, but because it saves fuel (and money) to the companies running the ships. True, the engines are larger, but you could do worse than looking at what they do to find the most efficient ways to run a diesel engine :)

Yup, that racket annoys me to the point where I try not to buy anything neither at the airport nor on the plane. Except for that I generally don't care about food and drink prices while travelling. At my local airport one company has an agreement about providing all food and pub services (apart from a couple of franchise stores) at the airport, and the prices are absolutely ridiculous.

I've noted a few exceptions, though. Both Munich airport and Las Palmas had pleasant outdoor cafés with food and drinks, with prices a bit cheaper than typical main street tourist places in those respective cities. Not your local corner joint, but better than expectations for airports.

Departing from Stansted, London last week, I had the cheapest pint of beer of the whole trip. £3.25 for a very nice stout (Saddle Black). Granted, we stayed in central London, where prices are high, and that particular pint was a promotion, but it was still actually good value :)

I, too, find this very irksome in some 3D movies. Avatar was pretty good in that respect, some of the Harry Potter movies were really, really bad. The thing is that my eyes will wander over the scene, and it is tiresome when my eyes instinctively try to focus on those out-of-focus areas. It does not happen in 2D, but 3D fools my brain into believing that focusing is possible. And yes, this is an artistic decision on the director's part which doesn't work for me at all, as it does *not* translate from the 2D equivalent.

I haven't gamed much in 3D, but I found it a very pleasant experience when I tried it in a store (I think the game was Crysis 2). I only played for a few minutes, it might have been tiring after a longer period of time, but I'm pretty sure that what made it so *good* during gameplay compared to watching a 3D movie was that the whole scene was in focus.

I don't understand that argument. Private homes generating the extra power in daytime are not the ones that cause a higher load; the offices and factories which are most active active during regular work hours does that. More power input to the grid at peak hours means that power plants could be throttled down. Of course utilities run for profit would oppose this change, which is why they try to make it economically unviable for customers. It makes a lot of sense for a society if your goal is to minimize peak output requirements for power plants, or limit the usage of some environmentally unfriendly, but easily throttleable electricity sources like coal plants.

That's more interesting than you would guess; your dogs know Morse. Dah = [t]elephone, dah dah = "[M]r. Watson—Come here—I want to see you", dah dah dah = [o]vert burglary attempt.

On a more serious note, I would guess that your dogs perceive the three ring modes as three different sounds, they're not actually counting rings. Dogs are good at responding to learned sounds. Sorry for the earlier snarkiness :)

Yes, it is in the UK as well, which was advantageous to sales the years after its release. People could drive it with an MC licence, and save a bit on taxes: "[...] the Robin can be driven by holders of a B1 category driving licence[3] in the United Kingdom, and registered and taxed at motorcycle rates[...]".

I'll only name one, since you specifically asked for only one. As you know, EULAs are bullshit.

I'm curious, I live in an European country. Here, the law serves as a baseline for which benefits you can contractually sign away. Basically, the parts of a contract which takes away rights accorded to you by law are illegal, and they are ignored in a contractual dispute (and the author of the contract might be punished if the offending company is in contempt of the law by even including such clauses).

I would suppose that the right to sue is prettty integral to US (as it is to many other countries' ) laws, and would be something that cannot be contractually removed, even in a signed paper contract, much less this "a-like-says-you-sign-a-contract" policy. I surmise that the lawyers of this company have thought of this, so my question is: why is this even possible? Serious question, I'm curious about how such legal obligations can be "signed" away.

I apologise for nitpickery, but that struck a nerve with me. A friend, who is an extremely successful salesperson employed at HP, talked about 50K IOPS for their top NAS many years ago without having any inclination what it meant. My modifications to the abbreviations are abominations, I know, but to me they seem more precise :)

Off-topic, but I would advise you to keep off-site backups as well. A friend of mine kept three physical backups of all the pictures and videos of his kids, which where completely useless when his house was burglared and they stole all his computer equipment. He lost everything, and those files were invaluable to him, he would have paid any amount of money to get them back. Anything can happen to a single physical site, from a fire to a direct lightning strike which fries all your equipment. Use a fire-and-forget off-site backup solution to mitigate those risks.

I use Crashplan to keep off-site backups at a friend's place as well as the cloud, but any service that enables you to keep a complete off-site backup is probably OK. Crashplan enables me to keep backups of everything, not just "critical files". Oh, and test recovery as well.

Good it works for you. I don't know if your last paragraph referred to the OPW or the UI. I don't really have strong opinions one way or the other about their getting involved with the OPW, but to me the main bad decision was that they essentially made Gnome 3 into something completely different, while removing as many features as possible. Many people, including me, used Gnome because they basically liked how it worked. The current Gnome 3 should have been a fork, which could very well have been managed by the same people. They could have sanctioned that the current Mate devs managed *their* version, still under the Gnome umbrella.

Their attitude when confronted with the reality of the majority of users' opinions certainly don't garner much sympathy from me, either. If they had acted in a different manner, and certainly if they had gotten rid of their attitude, they would have had many more supporters now when they're in financial straits.

But... what if all the users are mistaken, and the Gnome designers are right? How can they continue to do the right thing without support or money? :)

Yup, you're correct, and I went a little overboard. My apologies.

Yes, of course I meant a reactionless means of propulsion, which was *exactly* what meta-monkey's post was talking about (the fuel *is* the reaction mass in a chemical rocket engine), and incidentally it was the very word you used without any inclination about its meaning. He even gave you a hint about Newton's laws, look them up, pay attention to the words "action" and "reaction". The third law has never been proven wrong, any reactionless engine would earn you an extremely easy Nobel price.

"Every electric engine" would not help us doing spacecraft propulsion without reaction mass. I don't suppose you actually read the Wiki page you linked to, as I think your understanding of "reactionless" still is a trainwreck.

You obviously have absolutely no idea what you're talking about, but feel free to mention just one of the plenty "reaction less" engines (or drives, whatever) that we have. Please don't mention "electric engines" again unless they are reactionless.

Normally I would just leave this inane discussion, but I am feeling grumpy today.

I think this is what's going on: when something is burning, the flame you see is just glowing hot air, heated by the energy from the combustion. The flame is not part of the combustion, just the side effect. In this video you see glowing hot air heated by compression and possibly the shock wave from the projectile. Same result, but the energy source is different.

If you've seen a meteor (streak of light in the sky at night, or a visible fireball with a trail if you're really, really lucky), the principle is the same, nothing is burning. The heat come from compression of the air in front of it, and the light you see is from the superheated air in its wake (and a little from the glowing meteorite).