That's lame. I guess you can still get satellite TV though.

If it was bad then it is worse now. You had TV Series. A lot was sitcoms sure but you had sci-fi, action, etc as well.

Today you have reality shows and news you've read on the Internet two days before.

Apple has filed patents on its own flavor of wireless charging, a "near field" or resonant technology
Resonant wireless electricity transmission was invented by Nikolas Tesla over 100 years ago.

but no products have as yet come to market
That part is just like Nikolas Teslas work too.

A lot of people have been working on this on the past decade. It's probably been displayed on every IDF (Intel Developer Forum) since by so many companies that I can't even remember the names of them all. That and Peltier cooling.

Regarding fishing stocks:
http://www.nature.com/news/201...
http://www.planetexperts.com/t...

As for deforestation it would be a LOT worse if we didn't use chemical fertilizer to increase crop yields.

There's some talk on TED about overgrazing and soil erosion.

"fossil fuel based fertilizers" is bunk. Nitrogen fertilizer is usually produced via an ammonia process (NH3) where nitrogen (N2) collected from air is mixed with hydrogen (H2) to produce ammonia. The hydrogen can be produced using a variety of methods. Currently the cheapest method uses steam reforming of natural gas but you could use a variety of other methods including a thermochemical hybrid sulfur process which uses water (H2O) as a feedstock and solar thermal energy or some other high temperature heat source (e.g. a Generation IV nuclear reactor).

A bankrupt wind farm falls into disrepair and may lose significant capacity due to lack of maintenance before it gets sold off to someone else.

Also someone in the 1960s or 1970s could claim that all future energy generation was going to be nuclear. In reality growth usually follows logistic curves. Just don't mention that to mdsolar.

There are all sorts of hidden costs in wind. Interconnect costs are one factor as you are connecting a wallop of low capacity generators. Then there is the cost of energy storage and backup generation when you have a high fraction of wind power. To cover wind power generation shortfalls you keep spooling natural gas fired power plants up and down, thereby losing generation efficiency, and increasing fuel burn. Also you need to install reversible pumps in dams to turn them into pumped storage. As a result of converting dams into basically giant batteries the cost of hydroelectric generated electricity goes up.

As for Facebook:

http://arstechnica.com/informa...

Like Google, Facebook designs its own servers and has them built by ODMs (original design manufacturers) in Taiwan and China, rather than OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) like HP or Dell. By rolling its own, Facebook eliminates what Frankovsky calls "gratuitous differentiation," hardware features that make servers unique but do not benefit Facebook.

"Most of our new gear is built by ODMs like Quanta," the company said in an e-mail response to one of our follow-up questions. "We do multi-source all our gear, and if an OEM can build to our standards and bring it in within 5 percent, then they are usually in those multi-source discussions."

http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/ar...

Almost 50 percent of Quanta’s revenue comes from HP, data compiled by Bloomberg show. It’s also selling hardware directly to Google (GOOG) and Amazon.com (AMZN), which require massive collections of servers to keep their websites humming.

So you were saying?

They "designed it" to a similar degree to what someone like HP or Dell does. Or Alienware. Or whatever. They ask the Taiwanese "build me this" and they built it.

I guess most of the work Google did was regarding the power supply, cooling architecture, etc.

I know you are joking but there are more efficient methods of heating than resistive heating. Namely heat pumps.

Do you think Google or Facebook buy millions of server nodes from Dell or HP? No. They just order direct from the manufacturers in China and Taiwan (e.g. Foxconn, Pegatron, Compal, Quanta) that companies like Dell and HP use.

So much for it being a reliable store of data. That's the unreliable bit.

They want you to put all your data in the cloud but then don't guarantee it will be stored properly.

Actually if you look at what happened in both Germany and France nuclear is subsidizing green power. They're taxing nuclear generated electricity to give guaranteed profits on green electricity which is bought at a guaranteed price much higher than the price you can buy nuclear power.

The wind power construction drive is one of the big reasons why the EU is stuck in a quagmire of debt right now. The other was the housing construction binge.