If you have enough turbines the wind is always blowing somewhere, and the overall output of the entire fleet never drops below some predictable level.

You can have enough more than enough electricity generated in the east for the east, and more than enough in the west for the west. The problem comes when we have to move electricity. It's not lossless.

Wholesale, we had _negative_ energy prices for about a month last year in the EU because of lots of wind and a warm autumn. It was cheaper to pay people to take electricity than to shut down the turbines providing it. If it were possible to move energy about easily, this obviously would not have happened.

You really should publish the work you've done identifying IQ as a physical aspect of the brain

Really? Ok.... the first person has a brain, the second has no brain. Which do you think will have a higher IQ?

If you said the first person, you're identifying IQ as a physical aspect of the brain.

Race is a social term used to generalize the ancestry of a person. It's to vague to make a prediction about the genes, and their expression, in a particular person.

No it's not. If you are black, you're more likely to have sickle cell anemia than if you're white, by a large margin. If you smoke, you're more likely to get lung cancer, by a large margin. Both of these facts are useful for deciding upon health policy and treatment.

I'm willing to bet that the light skin adaption was acquired from Neanderthals, not evolved by Homo Sapian.

You'd lose that bet. The map at the bottom of this page shows a good correlation between skin colour and distance from the equator, both amongst those groups with Neanderthal genes _and_ those without.

Come on.... which arguments?

This man has claimed shit loads of things that have been pure crap. Do you really need references?

Of course privacy is important, everyone knows it's important, we don't need some washed up crapware peddler to tell us that.

If laser eye surgery is out of the question for you, despite having a ton of reasons why glasses and contacts are bad, I'd have to ask why? It's not _that_ expensive.

Off topic : Bad eyesight seems to be the only disability that it's ok to make fun out of. At least they do some good adverts, though.

This is not to protect Premier League teams, this is to protect smaller league teams. Most Premier League teams operate at a profit, especially the smaller ones, due to the huge TV revenues.

For Americans who don't know, there are over 100 full time professional football (soccer) teams in the England alone, and they're relatively well supported. Here's the attendances for today's games in League 2, averaging about 4,000. League 2 is the 4th division in the UK, the worst fully professional division (Premiership > Championship > League 1 > League 2.... it used to be just division 1, 2, 3 & 4, but marketing). Sheffield Utd, in League 1, got 20,000 today.

I think one of the big differences between US sport and just about everywhere else is that there's promotion and relegation just about everywhere else. Teams in the US can be completely shit, and it can be an advantage because they get good draft picks the next season. If you're shit in England, you get booted down a league, whoever you are.

p.s. I'm a Colchester Utd fan (League 1).

if the barycenter is not in the middle of earth, then the earth wobbles as the moon goes around.

The barycenter for any two objects is never the middle of either. It's always somewhere on a line directly between the two centres of mass. Every individual satellite that humanity has launched makes the earth wobble a little bit (albeit a miniscule amount).

Interestingly, Jupiter is the only planet which has it's barycenter with the sun outside of the sun.

The definition of whether something orbits something else, or whether it is a binary system is pretty arbitrary. It would be nice and neat if we could say that if the barycenter is inside the larger body, the smaller body is orbiting the larger, but that would mean that Jupiter would not be orbiting the sun.

I've certainly seen games where a SSD made a BIG difference to loading times (roller coaster tycoon 3 springs to mind)

RCT3 takes about 10 seconds to start up on mine, and about 10 seconds to load a level. After that, it does everything on the fly. You'll load a level once every few hours or so (10000 seconds), so an SSD would result in a performance increase of about 0.1% on my system.

I run a couple of cheap stock 7200rpm hard drives striped, so a bit faster than most.

My view is that suicide is a result of a mental illness.

It saddens me that self determination is considered mental illness by you. I have the absolute right to kill myself, and probably will do some day. It's not because my life is dreary or soul destroying, it's because I'll be able to choose how I die.

My view is that people hanging on to life desperately is a result of a mental illness.

It was a great replacement for cassettes (even if Sony and retailers initially made the mistake of pushing it as a competitor to the CD).

They were a great replacement for CDs for audiobooks. The CD is diabolical for audiobooks... Robert Jordan's "Wheel of Time" series is 144 hours long, on audiobook, which makes CDs a little impractical.

Hate speech is not illegal in the United States. That's a European policy not an American one.

Whilst there are fewer hate speech laws in the US, I'd guess there are more laws restricting speech against the government, ie sedition. "Seditious Conspiracy" is planning on bringing down the US government. No violence is necessary.

The hate speech laws in the UK are rarely used. I absolutely agree with you that they should not have been passed. What's interesting is that they were passed in order to protect minorities (in theory), and a disproportionate number of people prosecuted with them have been minorities.

Well, Scientology is a cult, and a moneymaking enterprise. Everyone knows that.

I wouldn't be for taking kids away from parents just because they're Scientologists, though... and that's never happened, either.

No, Google collects data about people. That's how they can get a relevant search when you search for someone's name. It's not metadata, it's just data about individual people.

That being said, I don't think it should be the responsibility of google to filter their data based on individual requests. It's really difficult to do, and the only reason they're complying is because the EU is a huge market.