The summary specifies average speed, presumably over short haul, including wait time on the ground. On this basis, high speed trains are competitive.

> Why is any harm allowed free of cost? Publicly fund research to put a dollar figure
> on the current marginal damage done by carbon dioxide emissions as well as on
> the cost to cleanup. Take the minimum of those two values and just tax the
> emissions at that rate, plus maybe a small percentage markup, right from the start.

The research has been done: http://www.jbs.cam.ac.uk/research/working_papers/2011/wp1109.pdf

It says the US should pay $250/tonne of CO2. I'm sure this would be high enough to change behaviour, but imagine the political system capable of putting this in place. I think subsidising renewables and CCS directly to try to make them cheaper than (unabated) fossil fuels, with a lower carbon tax, is more likely to work.

Um. My router has a 'guest network' with a separate SSID. Many free-from-your-ISP routers now do. For a tech news website, there are an astonishing lack of tech solutions in the comments here.

I've got an n9 and it's hands down the best phone I've ever owned. The swipe interface is awesome, and the hardware is beautiful - it won the Red Dot award after all. My only gripe is that it doesn't automatically disconnect an idle 3g connection, but the clever people at http://talk.maemo.org/ have got a decent enough workaround with profilematic. I only wish I'd be able to buy a new version in 9 months' time. I'll probably buy a Jolla / Ubuntu phone if the hardware is good enough. Given how much of a failure WP8 has been, I still think it's not too late for Nokia to change course. Bring on Meltemi.

Let's get real - the summary says that Canada and Russia will benefit, but the reality is that the very large numbers of people living near the coast will want to move to Canada and Russia, perhaps violently so. Large migrations driven by environmental disaster in the past have rarely been friendly. I doubt future migrations will be easy and painless.

Well, maybe not coal because of the amount of CO2 coal emits, but you have to factor in the conversion efficiency - 25% for badly designed mass burn vs 56% for CCGT; the amount of water that has to be evaporated before the rubbish will burn; and the amount of energy/carbon that went into plastic production (if you're comparing against recycling or reuse). A recent ENDS report (respected UK environmental trade journal) reported that if the amount of biomass in waste is below 65%, you get less CO2 from just burning gas - this calculation excludes embedded CO2 in plastics. The other problem with burning waste is that it's not a very good way of getting value out of waste. Put simply, a tonne of recycled plastic is worth more than the amount of electricity you get when you burn that tonne of plastic. The trouble is that Europe (Sweden in this case) has overinvested in burning infrastructure, so has to feed the incineration plants.

Mod parent up! The decision to EOL Symbian sort of makes sense, though it was totally stupid to say so. The decision to axe Meego was stupidity in the extreme. The N9 swipe user interface is so transparently superior to WP7/8, Android, and iOS that this alone should have told Nokia to keep Meego alive. It also does all that normal back-end stuff (bluetooth OBEX push, actual multitasking, etc) that WP still doesn't do. And the N9 won loads of awards and tech blog / reviewer love. I'm not a developer, so don't understand if Qt makes it as easy to port things as Nokia implied, but if apps are the measure of the ecosystem, it's hardly better than WP.

I'm writing this from a n9. It's not perfect, but is only a little behind Apple in usability and much less confusing to normal users than Android. More importantly, it's miles ahead of WP7 in almost every way. With Qt and symbian app portability, Nokia would be better off than with WP7 and Elop.

Surely there doesn't need to be a markup if you're buying your stuff from a much more geographically spread planet. If shipping costs + import duties are so low, it just sounds like price gouging.

Your metaphor lacks one detail: all the bridges are toll bridges, and the Gen I bridges are still making money for their owners. As a result, they're reasonably happy to keep charging people to cross while they pay PR companies to promote newer, more exciting bridges which they aren't choosing to build (but could be persuaded to do so if Government helped them to pay for these spanky new bridges).

Unless your energy comes from tidal generation, which is lunar powered.

Gah. My company's IT security policy is exactly like this: if you can't use your computer, you can't get viruses, right?

You don't have to look too far - the EU carbon trading market was recently hacked, with 30 million euros stolen. Two weeks later it's still down.

Sadface. Still no mobile optimisation means opera mobile takes forever to load /.

Yep. Average UK household electricity consumption is around 4000kWh per annum; around 16000kWh for gas, so whether this is electricity or total energy makes a huge difference. Also, 99% of people have no idea because kWh are a bit of an alien unit to most people, and because energy bills make it difficult to figure out how much you actually use. Bring on smart meters, I say.