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Comment People keep ignoring the energy storage problem (Score 1) 298

In order for solar power to be really useful you must be able to store the energy for use when there is no sun. As far as I can tell the only effective way of doing this at the moment is by reverse pumping the water in hydro electric plants. I don't think Morocco has much of this. Therefore they will have to backup this power station with gas powered stations or something like that. The statement in the description "will eventually provide 1.1 million people in Morocco with power" is misleading and should really be "will eventually provide 1.1 million people in Morocco with some power". or more accuratly "will eventually provide some people in Morocco with some power" as I suspect this power will be going to a grid and thus distributed over the whole country.

Comment Improving web browsing colors (Score 2) 197

I have an eye condition called Fuchs dystrophy which basically means my vision is slightly foggy. I mostly see things okay but when it comes to small text and certain color schemes I really struggle. For example grey text on a white background is really a strain for me to read. One thing I have found that helps with web browsing is a plugin called Stylish. This allows you to change the css file of web pages with your own. For example I read slash dot using white text on black ground with this and can do the same on many web sites. Its not perfect of course though. Some web sites cant be fixed in this way.

Comment Similar accident same plane in 2009 (Score 1) 506

Interestingly there was a similar accident in 2009. In that case a BA flight landed short of the runway at Heathrow. They decided in that case that it was due to a blocked fuel filter which had led to a sudden loss of power on the final approach. They fixed the problem for the future by redesigning the filter. Possibilities that come to find are 1. They haven't applied the repair to this plane 2. The crash investigators were mistaken about the cause of the accident and it was actually due to something else.

Comment Re:Television Importance Fading (Score 1) 134

Ads are the main reason I cant watch TV. Over here (Australia) some channels have as much as a quarter of their air time dedicated to adverts. I timed it once, 7 1/2 minute of programs to 2 1/2 minutes of ads. If you imagine the average person spending an hour a day watching TV, thats 1/4 an hour a day of ads or about 2 1/2 days a year. I visited France a few years back and they have a much better system. They have adverts, but they are only placed between the programs.

Comment Television Importance Fading (Score 5, Insightful) 134

When I was younger I used to watch a lot of televsion and even look forward to the shows. Nowadays I dont even have a television, I get all my information from the Web. Television is no longer informative, watch a documentary and you'll spend an hour watching repeated film clips and commentary interspersed with maybe 20 minutes of adverts. Much more efficient reading articles on the web for what you are interested in. Television is just light entertainment. Also with the news, each countries news agencies have their own narrow agendas so you never really get the full picture of world events. Much better to visit online news sites of different countries and political views. Then you'll understand much better how things came to be the way they are.

Comment Re:Apps (Score 1) 1215

The main deciding factor for me is wether the app I want to run is available for the operating system in question. With windows the answer to that question is nearly always yes. Dont care too much about the underlying mechanics of the os. In the past I have been mainly a games developer and as nearly all game develpment systems are built round windows, I had to use that.

Comment Annoyed by award shows (Score 3, Interesting) 29

Am I the only one who gets annoyed by the endless award shows that get thrown at us endlessly in the media nowadays? Dont people realize that a lot of them are advertising in disguise? If some eminent games designer or whatever thinks a game is good he can write an editorial telling us all about it or a review. Ithink I'll make up my own games award, Probably know one will pat attention to it but then that will be because I dont have the money to promote it or have the right connections rather than not knowing anything about games.

Comment What if PC spec to low to update? (Score 1) 712

My parents have a PC running XP. Its spec is to low to install windows 7 or vista. Looks like they'll either have to fork out some money for a new PC or else put up with the virus threat. Another point I thought of. If the spec for later versions of windows is higher does this not then mean that they run will slower compared to ealier versions of windows? So even if they could update they would be getting a worse performance. I think a lot of the people with the older version of windows are going to be oldies who have no idea about how to update windows or install linux as an alternative.

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