Bram: Why start by turning all this great
high-grade energy into heat? Photons are about as
clean an energy source as ever there was, albeit oscillating
three or four orders of magnitude faster than we can quite
manage to rectify efficiently yet. Lightning is already
electricity! You need extreme temperatures to get any
respectable efficiency from a heat engine, and all a heat
engine does is turn dirty heat into clean motion.
The problem with lightning is that it releases an extreme
energy burst (1.21 gW? :-) in a millisecond, but you
usually need smaller amounts of power over a longer period.
Therefore, what you need is really a storage system
that can absorb a huge amount of energy in an instant,
and then feed it (all of it!) back slowly.
Run the lightning through a coil to generate a magnetic
field, and use the field to loft a heavy object that
releases gravitational potential energy as it descends.
mrd: I can't imagine you neglected to
put a "$" at the end of your regular expression to anchor
it to the end of the file name...
Evolution 1.4.5 crashed, twice. Back it goes onto my
GNOME panel, even though it's quite a lot better,
crashwise, (maybe 5x) than 1.4.4. Crashiness seems to be
triggered by searching, FWIW.