There is a similar electricity tracker at http://energynumbers.info/gbgrid . The main notable difference is that this one adds embedded wind to the window power total. Embedded wind refers to power stations which aren't connected to the metering system so they will show up as lowered demand (the tooltip for wind on the gridwatch site mentions this).
"If you need heat, it's much more fuel efficient to just burn fuel and not bother turning it into electricity in an intermediate step."
This isn't always true. Carnot's Theorem works in reverse as well, so you can use a heat pump (like an air con unit) so get more heat out of your electricity than just dumping it into a coil. This is actually practical and is being done today for heating houses, you can easily beat the other inefficiencies because the temperature difference that you are trying to create for your house is much smaller than the one between the gas furnace and the ambient temperature around the power station.
For heating a pan though I think this is unlikely to be practical any time soon.
It is hard to use clear terminology without getting very technical. The basic idea is that a gas power station has a limited efficiency, I think about 55% of the chemical energy in the gas becomes electrical energy. This is due to a mixture of engineering limitations and fundamental thermodynamic limits of a heat engine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_engine#Efficiency).
So for gas hobs to beat induction hobs, if we assume 100% efficiency for an induction hob (electrical energy to heat energy in the food), the pan needs to get >55% of the chemical energy from the gas into the food.
I don't have any figures but it isn't infeasible that a gas hob could be more efficient.
Gas is certainly more efficient. And every time local fire departments get called out for CO alarms or gas smells, I'm reminded why I had the gas line on the house I bought disconnected anyway.
I am from the UK and here it is 28 days minimum holiday [1]. I believe it is fairly common to have the 8 days bank holiday as fixed days and then 20 days chosen by the employee initially. After working at a company for a period in increase in the holiday allowance would be expected. After one year at my work I am on 25 + 8 days, there is flexibility to work on some of the bank holidays, taking the holiday at a different time, as long as the office will be open (pretty much every time apart from Christmas).
I'm not sure I would call the system more sophisticated than AoE, it is very similar. There are three phases; Village, Town and City which work similarly to the AoE series, unlocking units, buildings and technologies. The idea behind only having three is that the first age in AoE tended to be quite limited so in 0 A.D. the aim is to make the village phase more significant with it being more like the second age in AoE2/AoM in terms of available units.
No, the game is set in the period from 500 B.C. to 1 B.C. and during that period firing while moving was not common. It could possibly be added for some types of high quality horse archers but isn't a high priority.
It was certainly common in the east. The Battle of Carrhae (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Carrhae) was at 56 B.C. and is one of the most famous examples of an engagement with horse archers who could fire while moving from that era.
Even well before then the Scythians were known for their horse archer armies and were tricky to defeat.
I know it doesn't seem like a big thing, but if Romans can form testudos while moving, then it seems only fair to have true horse archers. Both so that players can accurately recreate the tactics (horse archers + heavy cavalry were the mainstay of several eastern factions which people might want to mod in) and just because they're more interesting that way. Otherwise the game's horse archers are little more than fast moving foot archers, which doesn't allow for much more creativity.
I was thinking of games like Starcraft where even flying units had to stop before firing, as opposed to Total Annihilation where most (all?) units could fire on the move. So I guess I'm concerned about the ability of units to do multiple things at once, which os something every game should have.
To clarify, there has been support for multiplayer games for a long time. Currently you connect to other players by entering the host player's ip address.
What is currently being worked on is a lobby system so you can create an account and view listings of what games are being hosted. The work is probably going to be added to the game soon, then further improvements like a ranking system can be added in the future.
I work on a large piece of C++ software (millions of lines) and unfortunately this feature does not work well enough to be worth using. The first problem is that it takes far too long, much longer than the rename method and waiting to recompile. The other pretty serious problem is that it sometimes misses references so I just can't trust it.
As an extreme counter example I visited rural South Sudan, this is one of the poorest parts of the world, people are subsistence farming so their monetary income is very low. Some people struggle to pay school fees of 20 South Sudanese Pounds ($6.88) a term (3 terms a year).
Government funding is pretty limited so a lot of schools are supported by the church there, I think the funds are mainly provided by Christian organisations outside of the country.
My theory is that people with a better education are more keen on education. In South Sudan the people in church leadership are highly educated compared with the average person.
Why are you comparing based on size? Surely it is sensible to try and compare economically similar. Western and Northern Europe is probably the best comparison, with a combined population of something like 280 Million, not too far from the US. The murder rates are 1.0 and 1.5 respectively, far lower than the US. The whole of Europe includes Eastern Europe which is much less similar to the US and has a higher murder rate.
