The characteristic of most deserts is not that there's a lot of salt water, but that there's not a lot of water no matter what. Granted, there are deserts that run into oceans or seas, but there's a whole lot of desert terrain that isn't. The reason why they tend to get an unusual amount of solar power is that they don't get the clouds or precipitation. So, why would we want desert-based desalinization plants?

The difference is that when you make someone who starts up a business pay all of the country's taxes, they're forced to simply pass that along to consumers as higher prices. The consumers pay the taxes regardless, always. Businesses can't exist without people buying their goods and services.

Strange. I live in the American Midwest, and I see lots of people around me. When I go for a drive in the countryside, I pass through a lot of farms and small towns. You'd think people actually lived here.

Could the US feed the world?

IIRC, feeding plants to cows to get beef is about 10% efficient, so let's assume that each of about 300 million Americans is eating effectively ten times as much as is needed. Then, the US could feed about three billion people, or less than half the population.

Water availability is not just a matter of cities. California has some farmland that is very productive, except that it requires considerably more water than it actually gets.

++ Would read again.

I've got a porter and an ale bubbling away at home, as we speak. Bonus: Don't throw away the spent grains! Make bread instead!

You could compare the progress under communist dictatorship to progress under Peter the Great. Both were strong top-down pushes for modernization in a very backward country, and both had big effects on Russia's economic progress. However, I don't think Peter was a Communist.

I think professionals should wear suits, and I'm highly competent, as demonstrated by the many world class projects on my CV.

Your view of the world is flawed.

The US has a primarily capitalist economy, and certainly wouldn't be socialist even if some of modern capitalism's worst excesses were eliminated.

You're so caught up in your desire to defend your ridiculous "free expression" ideology that you won't acknowledge that facts exist, or that lies exist. There's a huge blind spot that you can't see past because you've decided that your ideology is beyond critical examination.

That pedantic crap about "thinking hard" just reinforces that for all your cleverness, you're just another idiot who has been crippled by his preconceptions.

You should probably stick to the contrived world of the chessboard and leave the real world problems to others.

If they are serious, they should buy Symantec Encryption Desktop (formerly PGP Desktop) from Symantec and open source the full version of that. It has a decent UI, works well with Outlook and Thunderbird, and does well on Windows, OS X, and Linux. That would give decent security on the hard disk level, file container, and individual file level. Even directories can be encrypted, CFS/EncFS like.

Possible but unlikely. The main reason why SOPA and PIPA were not passed wasn't the protests and website shutdowns, but the fact that Russia and China made it firm that cutting their websites from the Internet would be viewed as the same thing as a naval blockade... an act of war. With Congress afraid of their own shadow, it is no wonder why they backed down, saying it was the will of the people.

No way the entire Internet will be shut down by the US. First thing that will happen is that the UN would get handed ICANN's responsibilities, and the Internet would be up... but under new management.

Second thing is that no US Congressperson would allow it to happen. They get too much money directly from foreign donors, or indirectly companies made rich by foreign trade, which would be shut down in a trade war almost immediately.

I can see SIPRNet or NIPRNet having a master switch that shuts all core nodes of those down, but the Internet? Extremely unlikely. There is just too much big money that relies on the Internet, and if they can afford billions of dollars of computers for HFT, they can afford to get a President impeached who might even think of harming their business model.

Depends partly on how new the subject. If it has something to do with computers, I can probably learn it faster at my present mumble years of age than when I was 20. Something like music theory I'm not so sure about. I've lost a few mental steps, but I've learned a whole lot about how to learn.

As the dad of two young kids, just finding time to work, spend a reasonable amount of time being there for them, doing the daily chores around the house and (maybe) sleeping is a miracle some days. Older people who work 9-5 and have families want to keep them. Especially if their spouse/partner also works, there's _never_ enough time to do anything. I used to be able to do whatever crazy crunch project (I'm in systems engineering, not development, but it's not that dissimilar.) Now, I'm finding that there really has to be a justification for spending the extra effort. It is a trade off - even if I wanted to, which I don't, I couldn't go work for a startup and pull back to back 90 hour weeks. Being a dad and doing it right is a massive time commitment. Whenever I hear about anyone who is having a kid soon, I frankly tell them that they need to go and do everything they wanted to do in the next few months...because sometimes it seems like there's zero free time. And when you do have downtime, you're so wiped out that you can't do anything other than crash.

That said, as one gets older and more experienced, they're less likely to make the mistakes that require the constant 90 hour weeks. And what you may see as burnout may just be people getting wise to the fact that it's not worth slaving over a job. You owe it to the company to work hard while you're there, I grant you that. But people who have lives outside of work really need that work/life split that everyone keeps trying to get rid of. My strategy for dealing with this is as follows -- I know I have to keep my skills at least somewhat fresh in case I'm unexpectedly unemployed. So I try to add myself to just about anything new at work (and usually succeed.) That covers a lot of the skill building. And yes, I do have to spend a fair amount of time reading and tinkering outside of work, but that's been severely curtailed. I think it'll get better once the kiddies can do more things for themselves, but for now it's a real challenge.

There's a difference between chemistry and chemical engineering. If you don't care, and you're not independently wealthy, go the chemical engineering route.

The rich don't need good service. They'll pay their $9k each, get pissed off, and the site will be down after a couple of years due to non-renewals; meanwhile, the site founders will have made $10-20 million (2,000 people, your numbers, times $9k = $18M) and can retire quite comfortably.

I wish I had thought of it....