The really compelling part is that electricity stored in aluminium can be transported without any energy loss. Alumina can be found in most of the world, so if you have local access to cheap power you can create aluminium there, be it in Iceland or the Saharan desert. Then you can fill up a freighter with it and go nice and slow across the atlantic ocean and deliver it in the US or China.

I met these people last year and they talked about filling up a supertanker with Aluminium in Norway or Iceland and then having it connect to the US power grid and deliver electricity.

What incompatibility? Btrfs is fully POSIX compliant.

And I'd be curious to hear what's so fantastic about NTFS.

ExFAT is designed for use on SD cards and other portable storage units that get moved around.

According to an episode of This American Life suicides often inspire other suicides except in situation where it has somehow gone wrong and has led to a gruesome death or mutilated corpse or something similar. In Norway, where I live, there is a policy of not commenting on suicides if it can be avoided. So, whenever a random 18 year old boy or girl kills him/herself it goes without notice in the media. If a minister kills himself it is of course reported upon. I think the media in your town has gotten it right.

which is derived from the indian word "vegitarianash" meaning something akin to "bad hunter".

What is it with this fear that someone will make a buck? It does not diminish the value of the original work, rather it ads to it. The county should focus on what their job is and if somebody actually manages to create something valuable from that - great!

I think there are uses for non-newtonian fluids. My wife's car uses such fluids to power the 4x4 drive. When there is a difference in speed on the front and back axial the fluids tense up and block, delivering power of the rear axial. A very simple and robust solutions that works fairly well.

It fails to load in Chrome but works flawlessly in Firefox. Is somebody not eating their dogfood?

and it leads to increased efficiency. Those people can on to fulfill other functions. This is mainly the reason we're not all farmers anymore like in the stone age.

I think this is a good thing, but I'm still baffled by people actually using it. AFAIK there is no escape hatch, no way of getting a little special component to run. Say, your app suddenly needs Stunnel, Varnish or HA-Proxy, what do you do? I'm guessing you don't want to tie the app down across two data centers. Anyone ever used App Engine that might supply us with some actual experience?

I can get an extra SIM on for my unlimited data plan for 20-25 NOK per month (~3-4 USD). I'd gladly pay that to have unlimited data on my tablet. However, I'm a bit more hesitant shelling out at least 1000 NOK (190 USD with todays currency) extra to have the 3G chips there in the first place.