Wind generation on this scale already exists : Last year the 2nd phase of Hornsea windfarm (in the North Sea, off the UK coast) was completed - phase 1 + 2 combined can generate 2.6 GW and it took about 2 years to construct each phase.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... (Hornsea Wind Farm wik article)

Obviously to cover the variable output the wind farms should be over-provisioned and combined with storage and transmission grid interconnects (the UK currently has a little over 7 GW of HVDC connections to other countries according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... and is constructing more)

The quickest solution (to at least get a functioning MVP) would be to let users supply a format string with format-specifiers from the standard library (for printf / String.Format / object.ToString) for whichever tech-stack you are using and live with whatever limitations they have (unless you are using JavaScript - which probably has no single 'standard' library for this)

Then when you've got that working figure out how to make a GUI to guide users through the complexity of creating a valid format string for the data type they are dealing with.

Depending on how you are receiving the data, you probably have 2 problems to deal with - parsing the incoming data (i.e. if datetimes are received as strings, or unixtime or other...) and then re-formatting the data to display.

Risks and limitations with this approach:
* There ARE security vulnerabilities in format strings - depending on the tech stack. Securing this with either a pick-list or trying to validate free-text strings may limit their capability.
* You are exposing implementation details to the user (whether it is python / dotNet / C / Java / JavaScript format specifiers)

This does sound like the perfect use-case for the cloud (of the 'rent a VM' type of cloud, such as AWS or Azure) - both for short term access to vastly more CPU, RAM or storage than you would reasonably want to be sharing a room with and also for the huge network bandwidth to the rest of the internet typically available from a cloud datacentre (AWS as an example capping out at 224GB RAM or 42TB or local storage).

However this is E.S.R. we are talking about so, aside from the possible issues with whether any of the cloud providers are compatible with his larger philsophical aims, who knows what other interesting ideas he might come up with given access to much more powerful personal computer hardware rather than having his creativity shackled by the limitations of his current systems.

Another good suggestion for Asimov is his short story "The Last Question" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T... which succinctly covers a vast timespan.

re:

Unusually these days for a politician she was originally a science graduate ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Thatcher#Early_life_and_education ) rather than coming in as a career politician or purely legal background (although she did switch track and become a barrister)

Some of this showed through in her leadership style - trying to do the logical thing for the best long term results (at least in her analysis) rather than trying to win the popularity contest and appealing to the masses. Sometimes this worked out (surely everyone can at least agree that earning the nickname 'iron lady' is pretty cool? and my memories of the 80s are that most peoples standard of living improved significantly) but in other cases it contributed to her downfall - e.g. the per-person 'poll tax' vs. a property-based tax for local services (such as rubbish/refuse collection) surely makes some logical sense to many slashdot readers? but unfortunately it made a larger number of people pay more tax than those unaffected / getting a a tax reduction so it was a political disaster.

for 1-4, In parallel we really need to solve the much more difficult http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_law problem first re: overpopulation.

Otherwise the more food and water an area can provide in a perfect scenario the greater the end suffering will be when some inevitable problems occurs and the now larger population's demand's exceed what the land can supply : either due to war, drought/crop-failure or just the feedback delay between successfully increasing child survival rate and there being a baby-boomers population spike in high-consumption adults.

Maybe Education can help with that, but even in '1st-world' countries we still seem to have a problem with some people having many more children than they have the means to support themselves (currently a bit of a hot political topic in the UK with the government wanting to try and reduce the cost of supporting people on 'benefits')

The battery gives unlimited cycles*

--
*fair use policy applies.

Are we part way through a transition from shops being where you both browse / research products and purchase them, to separating these two phases of the shopping process.

The way I see it there is still a need for bricks & morter 'showrooms' where you can go and compare products side-by-side or even try them out in real life : e.g when buying a netbook / laptop, I always go to the local PC world or similar to try out the different keyboards and see how the displays look.

However to make the purchase, it is clearly more efficient and therefore cheaper to sell through either giant mail-order only warehouses (e.g. order from amazon, or order direct from the manufacturer) or something like Argos for when you want to be able to collect it yourself same-day.

The problem is how the showrooms get payed for? will we move instead to individual manfactures paying for showpiece storefronts (maybe Apple stores already are this? do they expect to make a profit on on-store sales, or are they just giant adverts driving their sales through other channels?)

The current middle-ground that retailers seem to be using is the online 'reserve and collect' - but they still tend to be keeping the much of their stock on the shelves rather than having it all more efficiently stacked away in a warehouse out the back.

Here you've highlighted probably the biggest problem to overcome : how to allow voters to verify that their own vote has been correctly counted (and be able to prove that the vote was rigged if not), but in an anonymous and deniable way (to avoid coercion) : it may not be possible to have both at the same time (but I'm not an expert on the subject : maybe the unreadable-article has an answer).

OTOH if we live in a society where you may later be threatened in to proving how you voted (showing your hash-receipt, revealing your private crypto-key or password, revealing what secret mark / signature you put on your ballot paper etc. depending on how any such verification system is implemented), democracy would seem to have failed us anyway and the actual results of any such sham election probably irrelevant.

Indeed, it is a tricky problem - I was trying to keep it simple and just answer the parent's post about what such a system might offer over and above today's sytems : I was hoping it was implied that it would also include existing features such as anonymity (and telling you how many votes each candidate / option received)

In an ideal system, anybody should be able to independantly verify the following (which currently can't be done in a simple paper based ballot)

• was _my_ vote counted correctly for the candidate I selected (or not counted if I chose not to participate)
• Are all the votes that have been counted attributable to real voters
• has each person voted either 0 or 1 times

Unfortunately I can't RTFA to see how many of these ideals the proposed system achieves, as it seems to be a video rather than a text based article.

The BBC news article on this ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-11632944 ) has a selection of comments from other people in the industry too - I think this one sums it up better for me than the quotes from Broughton (re-quoting from bbc article):

1 : put the windows-taskbar (or linux desktop equivilent) on the side(s) of the screen - ideally the left side otherwise it slows down the time taken to hit the scroll bar or window-close buttons with the mouse. You'll have to make it a bit wider than it normally is tall and learn to live with only viewing the 1st few letters of the window titles.

2 : combine as many menus or toolbars together as possible - eg. in Firefox have the menu, back/fwd buttons and URL location all on the same line. Not all windows apps seem to allow you to put toolbar buttons on the same line as the menus, but wherever that feature exists you should use it.

3 : Remove all the other toolbars / excess status-bars - use the menus or learn keyboard shortcuts for your favourite applications (using the keyboard shortcuts is vastly more productive than hunting the toolbar buttons)

4 : Modify the window theme to make the fonts and icons for menus, window-titles, scroll-bars and min/max/close buttons as small as possible that you can still read them / click on them.

5 : (this one I have more problems with) - try using auto-hiding menus / panes / taskbar (notably in visual-studio which has many many panes of useful info). This one I'm not so keen on because it slows me down considerably, having to first move the mouse to make a pane show, then move the mouse to select the item of interest. Similarly you can try to use full-screen mode in apps that have it available and you don't need to view multiple apps concurrently.

You are right (but somehow got marked as 'Troll') - I should have worded it as you suggest : "patents can, at least in some circumstances, stifle innovation"

Mind you this is Slashdot and where would we be without spelling mistakes, uninformed opinions and sweeping generalisations?

I was at the london science museum last week and saw something interesting on the information board regarding one of the steam engines on display. Unfortunately I didn't think to take a photograph / transcribe it, but this blog gives a summary: http://www.currybet.net/cbet_blog/2006/08/engineering-parallels-at-the-s.php

To quote the blog's transcription of the caption:

So even the science museum is suggesting that patent's stiffle innovation, and have been doing so for over 200 years