Just for the record, this is the simplest explanation for the difference between climate and weather I can think of: weather is saying that this next dice roll will be a five. Climate is saying that if you roll the dice many times about 1/6th of the results will be a five.

I wonder, would we be better off building it on the side of the Moon facing us as that we we'd still be able to communicate with it via a direct radio link. What advantages would building one on the far side have? A telescope's view of the sky would be the same: away from the Sun. Hmm, (thinking while typing here) but on the near side it would be looking towards Earth. I wonder if that would be a big deal from a light pollution perspective?

To give a bit more perspective: the aluminium smelter at Tomago, just North of Newcastle, Australia, uses 900MW. Together with the smelter at Kurri Kurri (Just West of Newcastle, ~350MW) they use ~14% of all base load capacity in NSW. So next time you're complaining about the LHC just remember that the aluminium in that can of soda came at the energy cost of ~54MJ/kg.

True, but "Significant obstruction to airflow due to operation in an abusive environment" should be. Why are Apple flying the health hazard flag? Surely it's much easier just to say that the increased dust buildup inside a machine causes failure due to overheating. Would they honour the warranty of a machine which has been operated in a factory full of sawdust? How about one which was operated in a laboratory and has corroded due to exposure to acid vapours?

However, a 42" plasma can uses almost twice a CRT. Eg a Panasonic TH-42PX60U is spec'ed at 390W. I'm guessing that people are annoyed by this legislation because it doesn't discriminate between LCDs and plasmas?

I didn't RTFA, but from the summary it would seem that each client has its own method for throttling. What they want to to is build a throttling algorithm into the BT protocol, hence standardizing the procedure. I guess this would make client coding easier, as the throttling would be achieved with a call to a BT library rather than a client coder having to write/find throttling code themselves.

I think you're under-estimating just how useful an electric car with a ~350km range would be.

The only trip such a car wouldn't be able to do is a ~>300km trip which didn't include an ~8hr break at the end. Now seriously, how often do most people drive like that?

In my home town of Newcastle, AU (world's biggest coal exporter, yay) most people drive ~20-30mins to work. Basically you can easily cross the town in 30mins during peak hour, I ride to Raymond Terrace which is 38km (50mins) from home.

Now, the motorbike I ride has a range of ~350km before it hits the reserve tank and hence needs re-filling about once a week. However every day it spends 6.5hrs sitting in the car park at a school and ~14hrs sitting in the garage at home. With that sort of charge time available conventional sockets (although not the grid, for wide-scale deployment) would be able to easily charge a Tesla Roadster. Add to that a Vectrix electric motor scooter would suit my commute (which is long by local standards) as it has a 100km range, although charging at work would be needed.

Anyway, that was all just a long way of re-iterating "yes, this type of car doesn't suit all trips, but it does suit the bulk of the driving time done by the bulk of people". Only with electric cars you have the convenience of being able to refuel at home instead of the of having to go to travel to a special refueling station. See? Bias against electric or petrol cars can exist, it's just a matter of perspective.

I've never studied social networking, but there's a chance that the viral model is still useful mathematically even though it's causal relationship is flawed. For example in semiconductor physics it is often useful to model electron holes as positive charge carriers even though only electrons are actually moving. Basically the idea I'm trying to put forward is that if a model has limits (and every physical model does) it can still be useful if these limits are well understood.

True, but in this context the word "unlimited" is being used to mean "you can't wear it out in 5 years". It's vaguely similar to "unlimited" Internet: The ISP may not slow you down at a set data limit, but you still can't pull more than ~300GB through a 1Mb connection per month.

But yeah, I don't like how marketing departments use the word unlimited either.

This finding also supports earlier research which showed the area of the brain associated with pain lighting up due to social rejection. There's a PDF from 2007 which describes the earlier research. It was also reported on the Australian Science show Catalyst.

People never seem to bring up the type of source either. Any realistic constant voltage source can only supply a limited amount of current. So an 11kV static discharge is limited to a harmless current while an 11kV switchboard is not.

On that note I quite like the 11kV rescue regulations an EE told me once. If somebody is getting electrocuted in an 11kV room you: 1) You let them die. 2) Turn off the power. 3) Sweep up the pieces.

Refrigeration comes to mind too, although it's just an idea without any evidence to back it up. Transport also allows more efficient agriculture as a crop need only be grown where it grows best. But yeah, machinery would be the big one. How many man-hours would it take to harvest 500 acres of wheat using basic hand tools? I'd guess that it only takes a few days at most with a modern harvester and 1 driver.

Australia has nice financial incentives for solar panels. Up until recently there were enough rebates that some companies would give you a grid connected 1kW PV system for free. Others would charge up to $1000 for labour, but $1/W isn't anything to sneeze at. The federal government has since stopped the rebates (a month earlier than they said they would, much to the dismay of the solar industry).

The NSW government did recently introduce their solar feed-in tariff of 60c/kWh, guaranteed for 20 years. The next highest is Queensland at ~40c I *think*. Essentially the government doesn't spend any money doing this, they just tell the utility companies how to credit people's bills, then expect them to charge the costs back to the rest of the users. It was estimated to increase the average household's bill (~24-30kWh/day) by $6-$9/year, depending on solar uptake.

If anybody is interested the two inventors of this technology where recently on the ABC's show "New Inventors". The episode they were in is here (mp4 format). Or you can probably find the clip which has only their invention here.

Indeed. In the words of Stalin: "Death solves all problems - No man, no problem."