That's really more of a federal government thing than an Ontario one.

Ontario would just require subtitles.

It's okay, though; as a Torontonian, I forgive you for not being able to make the distinction. It is the centre of the universe, after all.

Obviously a battery factory will have some amount of batteries on site. The 2400 MWh/day figure from the article would be around 30 000 full Model S battery packs, so going completely off-grid using whatever batteries they have lying around is unfeasible. Anyway, no point in not using them, right?

Aww, jeez, thanks for the spoiler alert! They just started talking about that cruiser. :(

Can't the wind farms just use gas turbines instead of batteries as long as those are cheaper? I'd assume batteries will be used if/when they become the cheapest way to handle the balancing.

Some day soon, in some areas, there will be enough solar to handle most power needs at peak insolation. When that happens, we'll have significantly cheaper grid power in the day than during the night. Then we'll see how much of the balancing water can do and if batteries can outcompete gas for the rest.

If you have a source of melting fresh water, water around it will be slightly higher as long as the melting continues, as it takes time for the meltoff to mix with the rest of the ocean. It's just a 2mm difference over maybe a thousand km of sea (which is why the intuitive "should immediately even out" idea doesn't work) so I doubt you could make the same effect visible in a bathtub.

More fun statistics, from Wikipedia:

• - Canada has 67% Christians and the United States has 73%
• - 24% of Canadians and 20% of Americans declare no religious affiliation.
• - Only 7% of Canadians are Evangelicals compared to the US's 30-35%.

...I was going somewhere with the Evangelicals stat, since they're generally the most fervent, but then I realised that there are plenty of insufferably stolid palaeoconservative Anglicans in the UK and it wasn't really a point worth making.

It really comes down to the fundamental collectivist-vs-individualist difference between the Canadian and American cultures, I think; despite Stephen Harper's best efforts to destroy the country, our charter of rights and freedoms was still a missive about how we were free from harassment by peers (thus sending the message "we are all siblings"), as contrasted with the American declaration of independence's emphasis on being free from harassment by authority (thus sending the message "you are free to do as you please"). Interestingly, a hundred years ago you would not really find this; Canada was just as much of a racist hellhole as the US at the time, although as there were practically no black people we could only complain about other European ethnicities. It was only as our population and economy fell behind, and we started accepting in huge numbers of immigrants following World War II, that this really started to take shape.

I'm sure the relatively weak levels of religious conviction help too (only 25% of Christians attend church regularly in Canada; above the rates of Northern Europe but far below the rate in the US) and that is doubtlessly a function of what flavour (can we call them 'distros' yet?) of Christianity is in question, too, since many Anglican ministers now preach actual biblical scholarship (my favourite quote, heavily paraphrased, is "Hell (as a threat) was invented in the Middle Ages") rather than what most think of as the typical naive system of "swallow-and-enjoy-your-life-textbook-with-no-critical-thinking" morality. Whatever the exact impact of each component is, it doesn't really jive with the idea of excluding us poor little minority atheists.

...except maybe in profoundly Catholic areas. I bet they care more in Newfoundland and Quebec. British Columbia is barely half Christian (54.9%) so you can bet they sure don't.

I was purely playing devil's advocate; honestly, I agree, it seems that there are plenty of safeguards against this sort of thing. Usually the topic comes up in the context of entire corrupt departments, IIRC.

Everyone likes accountability when they have control over it. The cops would have control over the tapes, right? So they get to choose which parts to show and which parts to "inconveniently lose." Every other time this topic has come up on Slashdot, there's been quite a cynical kerfuffle about precisely this.

Not to be confused with the furniture, which has far more shrubberies in it.

Apps request permissions for different pieces of hardware on a case-by-case basis. The average user might raise some eyebrows if an app that shouldn't need it wants to access your microphone, but access to gyroscope data might not even require user acceptance.

I'm quite certain they named it after the sound it made when it first erupted.

Well, at least it wasn't a... eukaryotic strain of flu virus?

As long as it's cold enough, how cold doesn't matter. Why wouldn't that make sense?

Belarusian uses a Latin-style "i" in place of the typical Cyrillic short i... So you can still phish admirably with "paypaI" and never leave Cyrillic. e, x, c, y, i, o, p, a: how many words can you make?