Batman's head < Churk Norris' thighs

No, assuming a non-zero divergence, which is everything because even the most highly collimated laser beam experiences diffraction. Whether your radiation is best described as a sphere or a cone, you're subject to the inverse-square law.

Nevertheless good post, and indeed wireless power is possible -- but I think it will remain limited to either low power applications which are more a feature of the modern world than Tesla's, or very specific applications where high-power laser power transmission is feasible. Tesla's dream of every home powered wirelessly is probably not going to come to pass.

More like:

"Hey, the horse has escaped! Quick, close the barn door!"

If we were going to penalize China for dumping and try to protect domestic solar industry, waiting until after Solyndra et. al. folded was kinda dumb.

Yeah, and CPU SIMD instruction sets include approximation instructions for inverse and inverse square root.

My question is whether they have controlled for where the error occurs. The nice thing about approximations is that you know what the error is. If you can have bit errors anywhere including the MSB then you're going to be limited to situations where you don't actually care about the answer in which case it's more energy efficient to just not do it for a savings of 100%. :P

I'm guessing that's part of why they only get 15% -- because they can only be sloppy in certain parts of the circuits.

Why, it didn't help the first time. :)

So yeah, UK weirdness aside, Svalbad and Taiwain are the only ones that break the "rule"? That's odd. Is there some dispute about Svalbad or something? Or is Google just being weird?

Yes it's the same font as used for every other state or province (or territory ala Puerto Rico). It is not an example of what the GP was talking about.

This is much more interesting. Svarlbard is part of the Kingdom of Norway. This made me wonder about Ireland, part of the UK, but also given the same font. China's provinces -- including the island of Hainan -- don't use that font, only Taiwan.

But still, it seems the separation isn't clear-cut and you can't infer Google's opinion nationhood in some edge-cases which I'm sure they consider a feature.

Maybe step one would be asking your lawyer what "acts of god" means in a legal context...

I know, I know: whoosh.

This is exactly why we threw that tea in the harbor!

Huh. So are there any "regions" which aren't "countries" according to people who don't have a vested political interest in them not being countries, or is this literally a "Let's make China happy" weasel?

Um, you can look at Google Maps yourself and see that I'm telling the truth. Or you could try to justify your baseless claim by using poetic verbiage. Which would be more adult?