I've been home-working for 2 years now, and for most of the last year have been living somewhere far more interesting than my normal home (and about 5000 miles away). It's not often you get the opportunity to do this, so if living in another part of the world is something you've always wanted to do, why not combine the two?

What happens here if you get into a paper, scissors, rock situation? This is perfectly possible, yet the algorithm for determining a winner doesn't seem to allow for this possibility. Presumably you just end up in an infinite loop, while the participants end up getting progressively sucked dry with every round. Having said that, this would really mean they are all losers as their immune system failed to anticipate this threat and failed to save the participant as a result.

I find it usually disappears as a result of the misuse of apostrophe's.

Can you provide a link for that 25% figure? If my 1% figure is too simplistic or just plain wrong I'd like to know about it - it was years ago I read it.

One thing that is worth remembering is that plants have an energy conversion efficiency of about 1%, if I remember correctly. So although 12% may seem low it is still a lot better than nature achieves. This is worth bearing in mind when you see fields of oil seed rape or other energy crops being grown - it would be far more efficient to cover the land area with photovoltaics. You could even grow sheep in the gaps between the panels.

There, fixed that for you.

The idiots won't be reclining into your knees on Ryanair - the seats are non-reclinable, as a cost cutting measure.

Vikings were people who taught their kids how to be inherently cruel by forcing them to rip wigs off live birds at the age of three.

I'd always wondered where the term "bald as a coot" came from.

I never deal in perventages, it just seems...well, a bit percerted.

No, they're wearing their tin-foil jumpsuit instead.

For the slow readers among us.....I think you can summarise it as "Whatever the mainstream press tells you is the solution is probably totally unrealistic, and most likely based on some vested interests". But seriously, this is an excellent read. Full of technical facts and details about a whole range of things that consume energy, with order-of-magnitude calculations about how much each could be improved through technological progress.

(with credit to Calvin and Hobbes).

So they should tell you to shut your eyes before the nuclear bomb goes off, I presume.

There's a Geneva Convention specifically designed to cause blindness? Whatever will the Swiss think of next?

In Latin America I have often heard the box you plug the mouse, keyboard and monitor into referred to as the "CPU". Now having a hard drive inside your CPU, that would be cool :-)