The negative effects you describe are minor next to the dramatic negative effects from continued carbon release, where estimated social and environment costs run into the hundreds of billions in the US alone.

Every major study has concluded that the costs of inaction greatly outweigh the costs of action on climate change, and that these costs are both increasing as we delay.

Congratulations on almost finishing the summary.

That's largely offset by the low mass. Half the mass means half the force required to turn or stop it, which means you only need half the traction.

For what? You can freely skip the part where it asks for one, and ignore or hide any Google services. Always been possible.

Your're doing it wrong? Switching to Bing or Yahoo on my Nexus 10 works as expected for me.

Also, Android doesn't require a Google account - you're asked for one on initial startup, but there's a Skip button that bypasses it. If you go further, change a few key settings (such as search provider) and perhaps sideload one of the many non-Google app stores, your Android device can be used without Google ever seeing it.

Because *you* consider the options and make the choice for yourself, instead of some corporation that doesn't know anything about your situation.

If you don't trust yourself with that responsibility, then of course you're free to hand it to Apple instead.

Actually, since Google have already patched the Play Store, it's still a safe channel. So you'd still have to sideload to risk being affected.

I'm curious; do you still get that $12 if you post as AC?

Depends on your viewing distance. 50" is twice 24", so the pixels will be twice as large - but if you're viewing from twice as far away, they'll look the same - they'll be the same angular size of 1.5 arc-minutes. If you're viewing from further than 4', they'll look smaller. At over 6' distance, your 50" Full HD screen's pixels will be 1 arc-minute or less, which is what some people call "retina" quality.

A 4.7" 720p phone at 12" viewing distance has an angular pixel size of about 0.91 arc-minutes, a 24" 1080p screen at 24" distance is about 1.56 arc-minutes (bigger apparent pixels), and pixels on a 5" 1080p screen on an Oculus Rift at 3" distance have an angular size of about 2.60 arc-minutes. Then there's magnification from the optics on top of that.

So no, even a 1080p Oculus Rift will have pixels that look around twice the size as the pixels on your monitor, and three times the size of the best phones. But it'll still be a huge improvement over the current 7" 720p Dev Kit, which is 5.46 arc-minutes.

I'm guessing you don't have your screen 3" from your face, with magnifying lenses.

Everyone I've shown my Rift to has been delighted by the experience of being inside the game world. The immersion is unquestionably impressive, despite the many flaws. Oculus nailed the important parts of delivering real VR (low-latency, high-FoV) at a cheap price - but I don't think their success is assured yet.

Things like resolution will certainly help, though most people quickly looked past the chunky screen-door effect, and I'm sure it'll get smaller, lighter and cheaper too. What concerns me is that all but one of the dozen-plus people I showed it to experienced some degree of simulator sickness within 15 minutes, including myself. Most of those had no prior problems with fast FPS games, and it appears to me to be tied largely to the greater immersion. This usually reduced a lot after a handful of sessions, but I feel that this may be a real barrier to adoption - professionals can work through that, but I think a lot of gamers and casual users will have one go, quickly feel sick, and be put off.

More appropriate game design will surely help, and by minimising lateral & spinning movements and sharp accelerations, I think people can be eased into it. But this is outside Oculus' control, many games will do it poorly at first, and I'm expecting a pretty severe backlash when it hits the market, given the current hype. I just hope VR will survive it.

These diagrams might help answer your first question at least.

Indeed - 175g is around what a 30Ah 12V battery would weigh (sans casing etc). A complete 5kg battery would probably store 25x that, or over 700Ah.

It's also interesting to note some of the performance graphs for this electrolyte. Figure S2 shows capacity as beginning to level off at 1200mAh/g after 300 cycles - it appears to start off with over 6x that.

Even better, a Riverside IPA. Aussie beer has come a really long way in the last few years.