How do you search for european patents?

I wondered about that, too. I don't get any EP results, even if I search for an EP number. For example the patents listed on some Espacenet query, do not return any results on google.

No, even in the US the maintenance fees increase over time.

• Utility patent issue fee $1,740 (first 3.5 years)
• Maintenance fee @ 3.5 years $1,130 (next 4 years)
• Maintenance fee @ 7.5 years $2,850 (next 4 years)
• Maintenance fee @ 11.5 years $4,730 (next 5.5(?) years)

Source: http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/qs/ope/fee092611.htm#maintain

"Make patents renewable with a growing charge associated for each additional renewal"

Good news for you: this is already the case in most countries.

Now if only they'd port it to Android.

Lux for Android is an auto-screen dimmer, but it also has a 'night' mode with red hues. The red mode is not in the free version, so it will set you back 1 or 2 dollars.

That said, in the evening, I usually read in bed from my Android screen with low brightness and the lights off, and usually I will fall asleep within half an hour; I don't use the 'red mode' for that.

Friends come over and want to play a song on their fancy-pants phone, and they're already on my WLAN, but we have to hear the song through a singular tinny phone speaker because doing it any other way is a pain in the ass. It shouldn't be that way (and, no, DLNA is not the answer, but is instead part of the problem).

Why is DLNA not an option? I have a DLNA-capable receiver with decent loudspeakers, an old laptop running MiniDLNA for my music collection, and there are several Android apps that can stream music from the phone to the receiver using DLNA. (I don't use that feature, but I tested it and it works)

And the big surprise was that this receiver (Yamaha RXV473) could actually decode Ogg Vorbis streams, even though that was not advertised.

"the population (of Scotland) is small and the land is large."

I have been in Norway many times, including at remote places well above the arctic circle, which are at least as sparsely populated and it was better than here, although I sometimes had to stand upright rather than lie flat in my tent. At least I wasn't surrounded by steel.

Now in Edinburgh trying to post this over 3.5G...

Are you sure your phone is fully compatible with all the non-US frequencies?

I live in Netherlands, so I guess it is. I have always been curious to know at which frequency my phone is operating with various providers, but I couldn't find any Android apps that do this; apparently, the inner working of the phone radio is shielded from the user-facing APIs.

You should definitely have no problem at all in Edinburgh

It's less of a problem here in Edinburgh, indeed, but inside old-town buildings (pubs etc.) the coverage is sometimes bad. I don't know how thick the walls of those are. But it could also be a problem with my home provider (Vodafone Netherlands), which seemed to be in the Dutch news yesterday because of mobile internet disturbances - maybe also affecting customers abroad.

and through most of central Scotland. 3G is certainly patchy in the Highlands ... aside from the tops of mountains

I'm not sure which definition of Central Scotland you use, but I guess the Highlands is where I spent most of my holiday. My complaints are mainly about Pitlochry, Plockton, Kyle of Lochalsh, Fort William, the connections in between, and the train trip from Fort William to Glasgow).

My wife has a different phone and, although she is not trying to get internet access all the time, noticed the same thing: it's her first holiday destination since long with such unreliable mobile-phone coverage.

The map on Sensorly is misleading. I don't know how the gather data but,

They gather data from handsets running the Sensorly app in conjunction with GPS. Therefore you only get data for locations where there are or have been people and that tends to be along roads. In sparsely populated areas like Scotland, the data can be based on just one or two people.

If I need a box of M10x40 socket head cap screws in type 316 stainless steel, I'll go to a fastener store.

Others have already challenged the validity of this statement from the consumer's point of view. But how does the owner of the hardware store know what articles to keep on stock and from which suppliers to order them? With hardware stores, you might argue that it is a business where the products don't change much. But imagine that you are selling TVs, photo cameras, clothes, or home decoration products. You will have to visit trade fairs nad read business magazines, both of which are forms of advertising.

I'm on holiday in the UK (Scotland, that is) and I have been rather unimpressed by the cell phone coverage here. Since I'm roaming, I can see the coverage for various providers (Vodafone, T-Mobile, O2, Orange). From within buses and trains on the countryside, most of the time there is zero coverage for any provider. In villages and small towns, Vodafone/O2/Orange have 2G coverage (at crawling 1 kbyte/s-or-less speeds), but only if you are outdoors in the right street; indoors and just around the corner, the signal may drop to zero bars. T-mobile has 3G, but even in fewer places than the other ones (I suppose 3G has inherently a smaller range from the tower). And I won't talk about using a cell phone while walking on a trail in the mountains/hills/shore... Even while walking around in the center of Edinburgh, I regularly get zero bars.

The good thing about it is that in the trains, buses, and restaurants, the other people are not bothering me with their phone conversations. :-)

There's a website that collects coverage data through an Android app and publishes them online: Sensorly, which confirms that it's mostly 2G in Scotland. Regarding spatial coverage, it suffers a bit from undersampling, though.

Note: my experience is from an HTC Desire S phone in a silicone rubber casing; I noticed in the past that the silicon reduces the GPS sensitivity, but I never noticed a difference for 2G/3G signals.

Those are http headers for a CGI script. Perl used to be popular for dynamic pages on websites. Slashdot still uses Perl, by the way.

I use Mosaic 0.99 and other old browsers at times. No, really.

How did you manage to do this? I while ago I tried to compile Mosaic, for nostalgia's sake, but it won't compile under with a modern libc/gcc. I also searched for the old Slackware versions, to run on a VM, but they are gone as well (as are my old Infomagic cd boxes).

So first of all, where did I say separately?

Not explicitly, but I wanted to avoid a discussion involving the absorption of sunlight by air (e.g. low pressure on a mountain top). As a physicist I don't see how air pressure variations in the range 80-110 kPa would have any measurable effect on the PV efficiency, assuming all other parameters being kept equal. The same for 'humidity' which you mention in this post.

And I have yet to see an inverter last for more than 5 years without any sort of defect

Maybe you have been unlucky. I have a small (600 Wp) PV system on the roof, which is 12 years old now, without inverter problems. So, there is my anecdote.

The insolation values used are questionable.

I assume that you refer to the 1700/1000 kWh/year for South and Middle Europe? According to the official EU data for insolation, this doesn't look unreasonable. Why do you think it is? (Note: the insolation on that map is per horizontal square meter; for example at 1510 kWh/(m2 a) insolation in Northern Spain, an inclined solar panel will do 1730 kWh/(m2 a) and a 2-axis tracking panel will do even 2240 kWh/(m2a).)

panels are actually made in South-East Asia where dirty coal plants without air filters are still in common use.

That may be possible, but that is not the point of our discussion. I appreciate that you have taken the time to clarify your original unreferenced statements, but I still see handwaving arguments that I cannot argue aboutg, such as:

You know very well what I mean.
Obviously temperature is the most important factor, and even that one is often left out of the equation when they do these sort of calculations
the efficiency of the manufacturing process is also significantly lower

And I won't [provide a reference] for the simple reason that you'll just claim my source is invalid.

Maybe because you know yourself that the source is invalid? What kind of argument is this?

I have yet to see a proper counter argument based on independent data from somebody with an EE degree (solid state physics will do as well).

Well, I do have a Masters degree in solid state physics, a Ph.D. degree in spectroscopy, and I work in the semiconductor industry. But I do not claim that I have in-depth knowledge of the economics of the solar-cell industry. Your statement that it depends on air pressure (separately from the amount/quality of sun light) makes no sense to me. The performance of GaAs cells is not relevant in this discussion because they are not used to compete with conventional power plants.

I have no idea where I read the analysis in 2003, but this is what a minute of Google provides today:

• US DOE: What is the energy payback for PV? - Energy payback for current thin-film modules is 3 years (including frame, mining, transportation, and so on) "Based on models and real data, the idea that PV cannot pay back its energy investment is simply a myth"
• Energy Payback of Roof Mounted Photovoltaic Cells with an overview of different estimation methods, and discussion of how to account for the human labor involved. Most estimates are a couple of years, but indeed, there are estimation methods that will lead you to large values, e.g. if you assume that single-purpose concrete structures have to be erected to mount the PV cells, and that it is a one-off project involving a large amount of engineering.