Carlos

Not having any children in secondary school I am not able to judge on the quality of the education, but from a purely financial point of view centralising secondary education into fewer schools would be an obvious thing to look at. If that is not seen as acceptable, what other measures for reducing the education budget (a lot) should be looked at? And would that actually have a bigger impact on children's education?

It'd be very easy to put the turbines into Google Earth. I am not sure how good their ground model is for Shetland though - the good data is all kept by the OS to sell. It'd come down to what you expected from it, a quick and easy look round to get the overall idea, or an exact view from your house.

Balancing out the power loads will certainly become more complicated as the mix of sources expands, but you could look at things like using wind power when available to pump the water up in hydro schemes, which then might give you some room to drop the base levels of supply..... or it might not..... there are likely to be advantages, and they are not likely to be as large as the "headline" MW figures would suggest.

The climate change predictions for the north of Europe are for increased rainfall and more severe storms. General predictions are for the greater increase in severe rainfall to be in the summer. If you trawl the Met Office website you can get the Lerwick weather records since they started in 1931, and those show a pretty steady increase in Shetland's annual rainfall of about 25% over that time - yes the weather really was "better" when we were young So far the summer rainfall has actually stayed almost constant here, with an even increase in the other seasons. There is a definite trend of "wet" and "dry" years, and that hasn't really changed just the mean line keeps moving up.

A model would actually give a very poor impression of the actual impact. The letter askes for a 1:1000 scale model..... well, if that model is to cover the 50km from Lerwick to Northmavine, that model would be 50m long.... a bit big for indoor display maybe..... If on the other hand you made it a more practical scale, say 2m long, then the wind turbines would come out at about 4mm tall...... The turbines are not a big impact on the scale of Shetland, any impact is on a human scale, and models are not the best way to show that.

There is certainly a lot of exaggeration of the likely effects of climate change. Sea level rises of 10s of meters, and mass extinctions etc etc. Unfortunately, when you bring it down to the likely changes, things are still bad enough. It is not so much that life cannot adapt to the new climate, the historical temperature records show that it just keeps on going, the biggest problem is that human society is very adapted to the current setup, with not a lot of spare capacity in the system to deal with changes smoothly. A run of a few years of "different" weather, crop yields down 10%, inflation, shortage of fossil fuels, market crash..... If you look through human history you will find a whole string of societies which have rises, prospered and then died off quickly. In a lot of cases that can be traced to over expansion during a string of "good" years, followed by a crash when they cannot adapt to the downswing in the cycle. Since 1751 roughly 315 billion tons of carbon have been released to the atmosphere from the consumption of fossil fuels and cement production. Half of these emissions have occurred since the mid 1970s. Just because the changes are not particularly clear as of yet, it does not mean they will not come. You say that income from the windfarm depends on government subsidy, and that is true, but again unfortunately that is only a factor if energy prices across the board stay much the same. I'd like that to be true, it'd certainly help us out, but the only sensible prediction is that prices will keep rising.

Truecrypt

Out of interest, any idea how many gigs a year would be likely to sell more than 600 tickets a night?

I predict the Knab Rd roundabout becomes a surprise accident blackspot, as queues of Shetlinkers form all trying to see if they can make the turn......

I'd agree that anybody signing contracts should be very aware of the fine print of any offer, but on the other hand there does seem to be some very creative book keeping that goes on in the entertainment industry - Lord of the Rings trilogy only managed $830,000 profit did it?

Yup, risk and severity - "how likely it is" and "how bad it would be". If a 10T asteroid hits my house the fatalities would also be 100% for sure......

There was an economic study done some years back..... Interesting answer is that if all existing broadband users paid $10 per month extra, then all music ever recorded could be available for free to everybody, and the record companies would still make the same incomes...... I don't see a feasible way to beat the P2P technology in the long run, so it seems strange there is not more push for alternative funding models.....

Did I not read the next generation of P2P software in the works is encrypted end to end? If not 100% technically impossible to stop, then at least very very expensive in time and effort for the ISP.

If they are going to build all the roads that were on the last plan, 900,000m3 is not even close...... unless they are expecting to dig out suitable rock along the way. Edit. some more digging The Scord and Brindister quarries produce about 65,000m3 per year between them.

Whatever your views on the merits of the windfarm, have you thought about the financial assessment side of it? It brings up so many unknowns..... Present cost of electricity per unit, fine..... cost per unit in 2030 anybody? Cost of doing the connector now..... against cost in 2030...... against value of having it in place for future (tidal energy?) projects...... and so on... Depending how you want to do the books, the windfarm may cost 10 times what it will produce, or may be a great investment even loosing millions per year for it's 20 year "life".

So, sharia law is open to interpretation, and interpretations differ? Could give some issues if you try to apply it as law, especially given the mixture of cultures that come under "Muslim" in the UK? Would we end up with, say breach of contract, cases held under UK law where A thought sharia law variant 6F was going to be applied, but B thought it would obviously be variant 6G?

A 400m radius gives Lerwick some problems, that takes in Bolts, Town Hall, Victoria Pier and all points seaward.....

There's no excuse at all, but if you are at the junction and looking at a car coming from the south, the only real way to judge the distance is by the size of the car, you cannot really locate it as being alongside anything. Judging by the amount of cars pulling out of there when they shouldn't it seems to give some people a problem, certainly it's the only junction that I approach thinking ahead to not assume people will stop, having had some "adventures" myself. It's the same general issue though, compared with most places we have few bits of road with real issues, the worst you can say is that there are still a few places that can cause you a problem if you drive badly.

Globally, what % of existing power stations are sited close to powerful tidal streams?

Had a quick look round to see what was there and found this mix of stuff...... [seeqpod]http://www.seeqpod.com/music/?plid=e55f8985ca[/seeqpod]

I think the issue is more with the long flat straight approach, where there are few "landmarks" to judge the car's distance, and little perspective to help either. I doubt a stop line would help too much, as most cars that pull out in front of me stop, wait, think about it, and then pull out anyway....... Best just to assume they will do that and be ready for it....

I don't follow tennis either, but saw that the first time the other day, and thought it was an interesting way of using the technology without slowing the game, and making it self-policing to an extent as you need to be sure before you risk one of your calls. I'd see it as the ref calling things as normal, with no change, and the managers free to ask him to review any decision at all..... but just 3 times a game say. "Come on, the guy dived!".... OK, do you really want to use a call on that?

How about something like they are using in tennis: Say each manager has 3 "calls" through the game, when he can ask the ref to stop the game and review things on video playback and keep/change the decision after that, but only 3. One more thing to berate the manager for getting wrong after the game too

I'd have said it was the valley and the burn that funneled the water from the hill to that place, where the underpass maybe made things worse immediately downstream. I think that's a different thing from the roads causing the landslides.

Cutting deep ditches across hillsides of peat is asking for trouble for sure, but I'd point out that none of the south end landslips started anywhere near any roads drainage. Normal road construction avoids peaty ground as much as it can, because it's expensive to build there, which is an issue VE will have to deal with.