they consist of cells covered with chitin, that we cannot digest.

you could use thousands year old technique of tourniquet to increase pressure in soft bottle ;-)

and after a while UK will become the second happiest country in world.

i must apologise for not reading the hackaday article. still my point stands.

hacking single purpose thing for single person in need, produces way more value than attempting to work out more general (and expensive) hardware, that never gets built.

to clarify your concern about open format: the official mean of publication of law is in paper format (comes tree times a week, costs about a beer) and on internet (html markup and pdf. free of charge and on searchable web page)
the english translation is posted on that page along with the official, latvian text, and is translated rather well.

actually the more or less "fair use" is built in section 19. but i haven't studied what it means exactly in other countries, that use the exact phrase, so i can't offer more insightful comment.

the textbook actually costs about 6 lats each part (11 dolalrs) there are 4 parts and 4 practical parts (5 dollars each)
for comarison average monthly salary in latvia is about 350 lats give or take.

actually the whole law in english is availible here. http://www.vvc.gov.lv/export/sites/default/docs/LRTA/Likumi/Copyright_law.doc
but we have rather heavy corruption in that matter.

because of EU regulations.

because virtually no office, shop, or business depends on natural light anymore. Ever since artificial lighting became the norm, the scheme only "benefits" people of the latter group who support the former group, such as banks.
depends? no, but still there is reason to use it, if you think about it.

I work in smallish light industry plant, and we have approximately 180 fluorescent lights running all the time. at approx 108 watts per fixture it comes to about 19 kilowatts (or some 80A) power draw.

A factory i visited had lots of big skylights (basically 3mx2m polycarbonate sheets) and we worked for whole week without turning electrical lighting on at all, as lighting was adequate for the work.

As a slashdot reader, i can imagine, You can understand the benifits of using solar energy directly, instead of converting it in plants-animals-fossil-generators-lighting fixtures chain.

lego. the hardware version.
don't make your kid sit and stare at one point (screen) sitting in one pose (chair). it's bad for health.

there is nothing really to fall behind. we all learned, how to use keyboard and mouse at much later age. he still wont be able to blind type for a while (hands too small) and mastering mouse for 6 year old takes minutes, while 3y.o. will struggle due to mouse size compared to hand size.

i am also sure, that for understanding algorhytmic thinking, there are ways outside the limiting screen.

depends if you are 20 or 79.
at some point you realise, that you are indeed mortal, and start looking for options to buy some more time.

The question is - what industry exactly we will lose?
I still find this article insightful - http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2010/01/selling-paper.html

So I misunderstood. I should have realised, that point 2) pretty much has the same meaning as i wrote. Sorry about that.

If you refer to the third option as "solaris" kind of contact, then You might want to reread the book.

There wasn't even clear agreement if ocean realised, what it was, that it was interacting with.