Eagles: the Politically Correct way to kill windmills ...

well, it should have been "big d*ck"; because well, that was what the nukes were all about.

Yes indeed! Big Duck (and Cover) (SFW)

If you're scared about the correct layout of your documents, why don't you try out some test documents first, or push your own documents through the officeshots.org round-trip test suite? And be sure to complain if something doesn't render your correct ODF document properly.

N.B. I have seen in the past that not all test engines are on-line all the time.

Next up: They sue Google, Apple, Samsung, and all the others for infringing on "their" work.

Probably NOT. Probably some lesser known company like Vringo or Intellectual Ventures, who have nothing at all to do wiht Microsoft (legally), will sue Google Apple Samsung et. al. for infringing on "their" work.

The patents are already gone. Watch the cup with the pea here: http://www.vringoip.com/cgi-bin/index.pl.

I am amused and impressed by your reading comprehension.

When I looked at the map, I saw the following countries were missing from the list (plus lots of Oceania countries): Russia, China, Taiwan, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, East Timor, Fiji, Ecuador, Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala.

Isn't it odd that at least Russia, China, Taiwan, Indonesia and Panama are excluded? I'd imagine they do lots of trade across the Pacific Ocean (for Panama I meant transport rather than production).

CO2 absorbs only a very narrow and specific wavelength. THAT is understood.

Look at the peak at 700 reciproke centimeter in figure 2 on this webpage:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/empirical-evidence-for-co2-enhanced-greenhouse-effect-advanced.htm
It is the broadest peak in the spectrum!

Don't believe me, google images CO2 IR absorption spectrum (N.B. often the scale is right to left)
google it yourself ffs
One article I found that shows the very broad peak at around 675 cm-1 is a PDF from a US military document from 1976. Are you saying they're into the tree-hugger conspiracy now?

Well duh. they're probably OWNED by the State. At least they should be?

That's right; it seems that now it works as a subtle tax on the people that don't have solar panels / subsidy to those who do. Obviously, so the state can steer citizens towards installing solar panels.

(I'm not making a value judgement on that, btw).

If I read the thread correctly, the utility was forced to pay retail rate for power until the breakeven point, but wholesale if (at the end of the year) the consumer turned out to have been a net producer.

Or the sodium-sulfur battery (ironically, invented by TEPCO, I believe). Cheap material, just a bit explosive so keep it away from rainwater and air.

The best idea I've read is, to store it in the form of extra cooling for cold storage (e.g. meat) warehouses. Electricity surplus supply is used in some kind of "smart grid" to cool the warehouse below its normal temperature, and then it's allowed to warm up again to -18C or so when electricity demand is high (and electricity prices to cool your meat warehouse are high). The grid has a "storage" load balancing supplier, and the meat warehouse has spot-market adapted electricity prices (buy when cheap, don't buy when expensive).

This is America, where undercutting the large corporations doesn't make you a good citizen, it makes you an enemy of the state.
If people had solar, that would undercut oil. And they're not going to allow that.

Well, here's something to think about; a nice "teh eevil terrists" counter-argument: Distributed power generation, like solar or spread-out wind, is terrorism-proof. It would take thousands of coordinated attacks (people climbing around on your roof wearing a bomb girdle ?!?) to take down the grid in case of terrorism or war.
On the other hand, a centralized nuclear power plant, or a coal power plant, is NOT terrorism proof. It needs just a single terrorist engineer, undercover for as long as it takes to be in the "inner circle" with access to the "Homer Simpson control room" to bring the grid down.

This argument was particularly potent in the '70s-'80s, when governments seriously considered building fast breeder reactors: You'd need a police state to protect the reactor from terrorists so it doesn't contaminate your own country; and you'd need a surveillance state for background checks on the engineers allowed to operate it. Basically, you'd need a police state. With central control of the electricity (just cut off any provinces or states that get too "uppity").
Of course, some people were obviously all FOR it.

Utilities are weird though.. there was a complicated operation done on the utilities in the Netherlands, whereby 1 company owns the entire grid (Tennet, government-owned I believe) and the other ones compete on a spot market to provide electricity on it. There are all kinds of subtleties involved to make it efficient; I don't understand the half of it.

I do remember seeing a picture in the newspaper about a 2-person utility company, grinning in front of their Ferrari. I presume they were some kind of go-in-between provider.

Taking your example of roads: how would you picture a road system for a city that allows for multiple "road providers?" How would new players enter the market?

<humor>
That's easy: just learn from the history of messr. Richard Turpin
</humor>

(I added the humor tag in case Roman Mir thought I was serious)