Your local experience is not indicative of the rest of the world. Many countries maintain excellent public schools, roads, etc. If your local infrastructure and services suck, it's probably due to limited funding as well as socio-economic factors (particularly income inequality). Pay more tax (and don't spend it all on the military), get better services.

You get what you pay for, regardless of how you pay.

China is currently putting together five pilot projects for different ways of pricing carbon emissions in different provinces. One of them will be based on the Australian emissions trading scheme (which has been erroneously labelled a 'tax').

Perth, Western Australia has recently upgraded and extended their train network. As far as I know it is now just as fast (and much more efficient) to get to the CBD by train.

It is also one of the most sprawling cities in the world.

The idea of the tax (which in Australia will increase each year before being market-based with a diminishing amount of emissions allowed) is to make big business and energy producers (which contributes a massive proportion of our emissions) change where they get their energy NOW because they know in a couple of years it will be ridiculously expensive to use dirty energy sources. That 'paper shuffling' is actually attached to a big incentive for business to change.

It may be too little, too late, but it's at least worth trying. Unfortunately people have forgotten that incredibly fast transitions that happened during WW2 - that is more or less what we need now.

If you read the comments on TFA, it appears it was written in the author's on time.

the smallest mining/waste footprint per joule, lowest fatality count per joule, lowest land-use per watt technology we have, renewables included

Does this take into account the cancer deaths from Chernobyl (between 30,000 and 985,000, depending on who you talk ask) and ultimately Fukushima, and the land degradation from nuclear fallout in both cases (which might be considered under both waste footprint and land-use-per-watt)? If so, do you have figures to show this (I am genuinely interested)? How do you calculate land-use-per-watt for roof-mounted photovoltaic systems (which effectively don't require developing any more land)?

For the record, in asking these questions, I am not implying that nuclear is worse than fossil fuels. I think they all have to go, and we already have the technological resources to replace them, at least for electricity production. What fossil fuels we have left should be saved for their more long-term uses such as creating steel, plastics, and (until we can get large-scale sustainable agriculture in place) fertiliser.

It's fine to disagree with someone's sense of humour. It's not fine to abuse them as a response. And, in case you missed it, there was actually someone playing the bagpipes in one of the photos.

Any serious study on the application of 100% renewable energy (and there are many) recognises that you need a combination of technologies, which, along with smart grid demand management, can generate enough energy when the other sources are less effective. If you include stored energy sources such as hyrdroelectric, solar thermal with salt storage, biomass generators, and in some places, geothermal, and your grid is geographically broad enough to be in multiple weather regions, you can cover you bases even on a still night with no waves. Studies in Germany, Catalonia (Spain), Japan and Australia have shown exactly how this can be done using current technology and real-world, year-round data on energy demand and weather conditions, including peaks and base load. (Sorry I don't have a link, I went to a lecture on this a few years back by a German professor who headed up three of the studies mentioned but I can't remember his name!)

Not necessarily. If you look at how they work, with multiple devices attached to a single hydro turbine, they may need to be installed in parallel to maintain a fairly even output and peak efficiency.

There's this stuff people use these days called 'paint'. They even put it on ships and submarine craft. Technology, I tell ya!

I agree. South Australia has a lot of roundabouts, mostly on minor roads but some at major intersections. The only time they seem to be problematic is when they are on busy roads and have more than four roads converging without a sufficient radius to handle the traffic. When two-lane roundabouts were introduced people had to get used to indicating as they leave the roundabout, and only using the right lane to turn right (i.e. across traffic in Australia). I have seen a lot more accidents at traffic lights in Adelaide than at roundabouts (though that may be because there are still more traffic lights on major intersections). Generally however they are much less frustrating than lights and help the traffic to flow relatively well, even in busy conditions.

A friend of mine who is a former defense lawyer mentioned that he would ask his young clients what they were doing before, for example, stealing a car. In most cases they were playing GTA or some similar game. Just because the statistics aren't collected doesn't mean they aren't there. (And yes, I know, correlation doesn't prove causation).

If you consider that an enormous amount of a person's social skills and moral values are developed through 'play' from a very you age - think about (to use a stereotype) two-year-old girls learning about nurturing by playing with baby dolls - you can see that 'virtual' scenarios can have as much impact on people's development as 'real' ones.

Is there some secondary way of establishing patent royalty eligibility without resorting to an expensive legal battle? If some company claims that my product violates their patent, it appears the only options are for me to go along with it and pay their royalties, or to see them in court.

To me (an Australian) the litigiousness of US culture and business is just as broken as the patent system, and it is sad to see this trend spreading here. It is a shame that judges can't (when appropriate) just say, "Stop being a greedy bastard!" and throw people in prison for pursuing money that they clearly don't have any right to. (I know this idea is plagued with problems but I reserve my right to be idealistic on occasion :).

Following the tragic events of 2001 and subsequent bombings in the UK and Spain I remember looking on hoping that people of the 'West' (leaders and general population alike) would take the opportunity to ask themselves the hard questions:

"Why would someone do this to us?
Why do some people hate us as a nation?
Have we treated some of our global neighbours poorly, and if so, what should we change, and how can we make amends?
Is our so-called 'freedom' despised by some because it comes at the expense of others?"

I am not implying for a second that any terrorist attack is justified, but that anyone who would instigate such an act must have some reason to sacrifice their life. If that reason has any truth in it, it should be considered and amended, not to encourage terrorism (a word I loathe as much for its overuse as for its realities and consequences) but to engender peace.

Sadly, democracy has a tendency to elect leaders who sport more pride, arrogance and blind patriotism (another word I hate) than humility.

... the use by the state of sexual accusations to destroy a public figure