Dumb question, I suppose. But, given that the earth rotates, and given that the flywheels will have a huge angular momentum, are they gimbaled? The article says they're suspended in a vacuum, levitated on a magnetic field, which is cool. But if they're not gimbaled a huge amount of energy will be wasted fighting precession as the earth rotates.

I assume the people making these things are smart and know their shit. I'm just curious how a problem like this is solved. If not gimbals, what?

Every post here is (understandably) negative. But, come on kids, we are not the audience here. Programmers are not the audience. Hackers are not the audience. Gamers are not the audience.

People who spend all day on facebook, gmail and last.fm are the audience. And this is probably a very good solution for them.

If only there were some motive force to life other than money. If only!

Actually, adobe is. I can't recal the name of the project, but Adobe's writing a canvas-based flash renderer in JS.

Canvas is actually the right way to go, because despite all the comments in this thread about how HTML-5 is "officially as powerful as flash" now, the fact is flash does still have some advantages, like bitmap filters.

Those can be implemented from scratch in a canvas-based renderer, whereas any attempts via dynamic SVG will be subject to whatever support SVG has for filters.

In short, by implementing a from-scratch canvas-based renderer, Adobe gets full control over the pixel pipeline, which allows them to get pixel-perfect rendering. Flash is, believe it or not, a very high quality renderer, and Adobe likely doesn't want to lose that.

Hey, I just want to thank you for a good & sensible writeup.

I am one of those people who architect his life about sensible transportation. I recently bought a house in washington dc, and ride my bike to work daily. I've been a bicycle commuter for 10 years, and have made my living arrangements favor bike commuting accordingly. It's actually pretty wonderful, I spend 15 minutes on my bike every morning and evening to get to work ( and if necessary, to stop at the grocery store on my way home ).

Frankly, it's an absolute joy. My colleagues bitch and moan about traffic, yet they insist on living as far as possible from where they work and spend more than half of every day.

Anyway, I had to comment simply because so many internet discussion threads about cycling tend to devolve into name calling and internet-tough-guy-ism.

You know, I just wanted to let you know that we yanks know perfectly well what an arse is, we don't need to have your mystical moon-man speak translated for us.

Yes yes yes, it must make you feel all high-falutin-etc to condescend to let us in on your colloquialisms. But it's not a secret. We know what arse means. We also know that you call a car's trunk a "boot", and that you like to spell color with a 'u'.

We get it. Carry on.