Given the ever-rising urgency of doing exactly this: converting CO2 back to carbon and oxygen, it MAY soon be the best use for a lot of energy.

Why is a quote from the dying St. Francis your signature ? (Just curious.)

Photographed it at 6 AM CEST, at ~18 degrees above the Western horizon. Orange-red, with the upper (NE) limb still slightly yellow. Near-perfect viewing conditions: moderately frosty weather, clear sky, dry atmosphere (for AT conditions, that is), no wind to speak of.

"Inbox Infinity". Have been practicing this for years. If I don't answer and it's really important, they'll re-email. Or call. Or text. Or send a letter, or the police.

That's exactly what I mean. The EU is stopping funding and subsidies for coal mining as of today. Not "banning all coal mining", as this futurism website and the headline here on /. suggest. The former is a fact, documented by you (ffkom). The latter is a sensationalist blowing-up of that fact into non-existent proportions, documented by no data or secondary sources. Also known as fake news. Which is my point, and I maintain it.

Only the cited website (futurism.com), reddit and slashdot are carrying this "news". I'm putting it between quotation marks, as it isn't news: it's fake. Not a single respectable online news source, not a single respectable newspaper carries this. Also, I'd never heard about futurism.com before I read this "article". Moreover, I live in the EU, am professionally familiar with the EU regulation mechanism and am the CTO of a company whose technology, among other use cases, is used to detect fake news. And fake this news is.
 
Don't get me wrong: I'd love for this to be true, for many reasons. But it isn't. msmash has fallen prey to a fake.

Wow! A slashdot commenter who read "Vol de nuit". To me, it is one of the most moving books in all of French literature. I must have read it ten times at least. In my imagination, that pilot is still somewhere over the southern Atlantic, his engine humming away above the clouds, the aircraft forever drifting in moonlight.

Indeed. I read all three volumes in the series. Couldn't put any and each of them down until the last sentence. Especially Dark Forest Deterrence hooked itself into my thoughts, I'm still gnawing at the subject, its necessity and the likelihood of its necessity. Cixin Liu is a master.

"My Brilliant Friend", by Italian (pseudonym) author Elena Ferrante. I read it in the original Italian (yes, it's a blessing to know that language well enough to read literature in it), and the book's beauty made me stop dead in my tracks, taking my breath away several times.

"Process and Reality", originally appeared in 1929, by philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, who arguably was the last of the System-Building philosophers. He stands at a scarcely-populated height, together with Leibniz, Malebranche and Spinoza. I needed Sherburne's "A Key to Whitehead's 'Process and Reality'" to see the hidden order in Whitehead's magnum opus, as "[it is a] book that in richness and suggestiveness is unsurpassed... but in opacity is monumental".
 
"The Road to Relativity", but Guttfreund and Renn, on the coming-into-being of Einstein's theories.

"The Meaning of Relativity", by Einstein himself. No comments needed.

In total around 100 books, including large swaths of the Russell and Norvig classic on Artificial Intelligence.

This is bitching and griping at a high level. You're a member of an affluent, Western society, with an income you can spend online; you can actually spend it on worthless gadgets like IoT ovens with a videocamera inside and an app, or dildos - or on valuable items like books. You'll get those items, worthless or valuable, delivered to your doorstep. Within days. What the fuck are you complaining about ?

The world is on fire and immersed in ignorance, but hey - dildo delivery delay must be two days, not an hour more.

I've always been of the opinion that grown-up men don't "hang out" - only teenagers do that. Hence I've never used, or proposed the use of, that awful thing that is Google Hangouts. Also, as one of the last entrenched BlackBerry OS users (yes, that's right: you'll have to pry that BlackBerry Passport from my cold, dead fingers), I was shielded from it anyways.

Only weeks ago, the most alarming IPCC report ever was published, stating that very drastic measures, at a planetary scale, are necessary in a very short time frame, to keep global warming at less than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures. In the Neherlands, in the wake of this report, environmental ngos scoffed at corporations advocating exactly this approach, as it would, they fear, give them a blank check to keep polluting and not do anything about the root of the climate change problem: emisison of CO2. And although I would advocate the measure (and developing the technology for sure would be a cool thing), I do indeed see a problem here. Relying on CCS (Carbon Capture and Storage) could make entire societies dependent upon it, a bit like taking fentany for a toothache, instead of doing the sensible thing and going to the dentist. Donella Meadows, in her seminal book "Thinking in Systems", names this as one of the classical "system traps".

As a co-founder, shareholder and executive of an Austrian start-up, I concur. Shareholders in Europe do not "run" corporations. The executives appointed by the shareholders run corporations in the best interest of the latter.