I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.

We're talking about a ZX Spectrum, right?

I know they had a Word-processor and probably a spreadsheet for the Speccy, but that's hardly an average use case.

Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy were elegant tho, elegant and awesome!

The last option doesn't seem to be exclusive to the others. ie any level of programmer can feel they're good enough to criticise.

Should have been a checkbox and not a radio button on that one.

Hydrogen is less explosive than petrol.

Hidenburg era airships didn't have plastics to make the gasbags from, modern Hydrogen airships could be safer than petrol powered road vehicles which crash and burn regularly.

The difficulty with all large, lighter than air craft is ground handling. You have a massive, bouyant structure and a small breath of air results in a huge amount of momentum which can all too easily result in the airship hitting things and damaging itself or them.

The solution is to never come below 30,000 feet, higher if the ground rises, launch once and use triplanes to get on and off.

Relevant picture

All the clever sensing is done by the bacteria, all they've done is attach a big flag to the bacteria so that when it does what it does we can tell.

Whilst this may be very useful, it's hardly outwitting nature, or creating new forms of life, or doing anything that'd be likely to be disastrous in any way.

It's as tho putting a radio collar on a polar bear turns it into some cyborg killing machine.

Pic

mmmmm carrots.

Corporation tax is typically 20% https://www.gov.uk/corporation-tax-rates/rates and so yes it is more than they would have had to pay.

and yes, this is a semi-futile move on behalf of the HMRC, because the bean counters have already worked out how to avoid it, but c'est la vie.

Well the average uk household uses 4.6 MWh/year so yeah, you use 5 times what I'm used to having to provide. I suppose that's the price of living in desert and not acclimatising your body to the heat.

It's worth noting that installing renewable energy generating kit on your roof will increase the value of your house. So even if you decide to leave before you've paid off the costs of the installation you should be able to recoup all your investment by increasing the sale price of the house.

But really you need to address your flagrant overuse of electricity.

Might I suggest wearing fewer clothes ;P

Seriously maybe think about redesigning your dwelling to be passively/naturally cool, I recall seeing a system of vents with damp cloths hung under the house to "aircon" homes in the outback (no grid so power is a series expense out there) which worked quite well, and I suspect that the Egyptians and so forth also know a thing or two about keeping buildings cool in hot places without having to run a compressor.

Wowsers, you either use a fuck-ton of electricity or have a remarkably small roof area.

I installed PV for 10 years in .uk (a much less sunny place than .tx) and was able, in most cases, to offset people's entire annual usage with a north/south roof, east/west roofs present much more of a challenge.

The ownership of the panels barely affects their electrical function, I suppose there might be some efficiencies of scale if the utility own all the panels on all the roofs in the street and can wire them all up to one big inverter. But as big inverters tend to be made up of lots of small inverters I'm not even sure if this is true.

There does tend to be an ownership issue with roofspace tho, there are some companies who rent roofspace from individuals install PV and then profit from being the middleman, but that tends to be less financially rewarding for the roof owner and as the capital investment for a small (~4kW peak) system is relatively low (~$8k I'd guess) it's not a model that's often used. The utility very infrequently owns power stations, even the big ones, they tend to be owned by private enterprise and then trade electricity to the utility, or at least that's how it is here in .uk

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/mechanical-switch-keyboard,2955-18.html

I cannot help that much of the world is deluded. That is not an Engineering problem. I also discourage engineers who seek to work on sexy projects.

Oh indeed, but if we're talking about domestic scale storage then lead-acid is the solution most people go for. Although someone here was on about Iron-Nickel. Regardless, I agree chemo-electric storage is useful for it's portability, but it's energy density, in-out efficiency and leakage rates mean it's not really suited for Grid scale storage, with the possible exception of Vanadium flow, http://www.triplepundit.com/2014/12/vanadium-flow-batteries-gaining-commercial-clean-tech-traction/

But the costs to mankind of not sorting the energy issue is likely higher, but far more difficult to express in monetary value.

There's a few more active players Pumped Heat, Hot Salt, Tidal Lagoons, Steam Accumulators, Raising a Weight, the technologies exist, it's just noone wants to invest in them because there is no market for storing energy.

Storage is today's big issue in the energy world.

Having said that, the cost of a storage system used to double the cost of a 3-4 kW (peak) PV system about 5 years ago. I expect since then the prices of PV has fallen more sharply than the price of lead acid batteries, meaning it may well now triple, but still it's hardly "very expensive".

It is cheaper, and more optimal electrically, to sell the power to the grid and then buy it back from another generator when you aren't generating. Of course that doesn't work if everyone is using the same kind of generators and there's no storage, which is why we need storage. As many storage technologies suffer from efficiencies of scale it probably makes more sense to at least partially centralise the storage.

What probably needs to happen (it certainly needs to happen in .uk) is the energy market needs to be restructured so as to make storing energy profitable, then companies will set up to do it.

Whilst what you say is true there's the refilling time to take into account.

A full tank of liquid fuel takes minutes to pour in.

A full 'tank' of electricity takes hours.

Not to mention that a full tank of liquid fuel gets you about 700 miles of travel whereas a full battery only ~350

See there's a not often remembered problem with horses and population density.

Shit. Yes, that's the problem, not just me being rude.

Before the invention of the horseless carriage London was suffering greatly from a horse-shit re-distribution issue, the plan always was to load the shit onto barges and ship it downstream to Kent (that Kent is know as "The Garden of England" is a not unrelated fact), but there were serious issues with the collection of all the turds and their loading onto the barges.

So whilst there's many great benefits from using beasts of burden (you can always eat your ride if it breaks down) they are not a universal panacea.