That's already there. Example one: notification drawer swipe down to open (been there since forever, though), and now in ICS you can also remove notifications by swiping them off to the side. Example two: Chrome Beta, where swiping left and right from the edge of the screen switches tabs; and in the tab list, swiping aside is used to close tab. Example three: task switcher in ICS. It's pretty much webOS cards, except stacked vertically. Again, swipe aside to close.

The achievement isn't that a private company can come along and launch it - that's been true for a while now, it's just that no-one could be bothered.

The real achievement here is the operational cost per launch (note, this does not include R&D costs, so the argument for "how much money went into developing" does not apply).

A corporation with power sufficiently unrestricted to wage open war is indistinguishable from an authoritarian government.

After a few beers. Naked, in the moonlight.

So you say that the least fortunate don't deserve the strippers and the booze? How, how, how unthoughtful of you!

My first guess of how this fire happened is that someone had done some welding in a compartment and something caught fire. Usually the Navy is pretty good about removing flamables in the area. They even go so far to have a "fire watch" for several hours after the welding was done to ensure that nothing catches fire. it will be interesting to hear what the root cause is.

That's standard procedure for welding (mandated by the insurance companies). And welding could well still be the root cause: in one place I worked, a fire broke out after smoldering unnoticed for over eight hours.

Or it could be a short-circuit and we just got lucky that it occurred on a drydock rather than at sea. Or *drumroll* terrorism.

Am I the only one who saw the comment about space pirates and thought, "awesome!"?

Residential power here in Iceland is 6-7 US cents per kilowatt hour, so I can only imagine that industrial-scale power is even cheaper. We're really sitting on more power production potential than we know what to do with, it's almost ridiculous. I mean, hot water goes to 90% of houses and people waste it like crazy, there's huge heated pools, etc... and a quarter of this hot water comes just from downtown alone, little sheds mixed in with the buildings. In Öskjuhlíð they drilled a 90 meter pipe into the ground, put a choke in the top, a water drip... and it's now an artificial geyser. Heat is just everywhere. 1/3rd of the lava on the planet in the past 500 years has come from Iceland. Traditionally, we've "exported" this power by making stuff here with it, like aluminum (importing all the inputs and exporting the metal). There are three smelters in the country, and even the smallest uses more power than all the homes and businesses combined. But we're still only using about 20% of our conventional high temperature geo (not counting using magma as an input, which was recently shown to be feasable at Krafla, not counting EGS, etc - and geo exploration has been quite minimal due to there being so much available already), virtually none of our low temperature geo (2/3rds of the country's primary energy is geothermal waters at 100-150C, and the target distribution temperature is 80C, but it just gets mixed with cold to bring it down that low), about 15% of our hydro, essentially none of our huge wind (makes the midwestern US look tame, but there's only one turbine in the entire country), tides (also quite large), etc. This country has just huge amounts of generation potential but nothing to use it on.

I'm sure you know more about the difficulties involved than I. But it's a very serious subject that's been discussed for decades, and now seems to finally be making some headway. There's even a conference going on right now about it.

Now, that's not to say that it's not without controversy on this side. Namely, because people here love having massive amounts of unspoiled wilderness, and up here, even geothermal is controversial just because you have to build roads and lines into it. And people also worry about our cheap electricity getting more expensive if we start selling to the UK.

Solar is not the wrong tech for, for example, Spain, which is well within HVDC distance for the UK. And claiming that in the entire UK there's no suitable land for the relatively small amount of area required for pumped hydro is just plain silly. And, FYI, it's already started.

An interesting goal, but keep in mind that some countries have been changing their jus sanguinis citizenship laws to have a cut-off point, such that only the first generation born abroad are automatically citizens - their children (i.e. your grandchildren) wouldn't be. I recall Canada being one such country, but not the only one.