1. There's a great deal of work being done on energy efficiency already
2. We've already deployed a lot of energy efficiency technology.
3. Even so, making large absolute cuts in energy usage is unlikely (it hasn't happened anywhere).
4. America's population is still growing rapidly. So even if per-capita energy usage goes down, absolute usage will go up.
5. Even if developed countries do make substantial absolute cuts in energy usage, it's unrealistic for the developing world to do so.

If we're nitpicking, C is not strictly a subset of C++, but it's close enough. Anyway, your argument is flawed. If a feature is unnecessary and makes programs harder to write, debug, and maintain, a language that omits it can be superior to one that includes it. Let's imagine, for instance, a "comefrom" construct that you can insert in arbitrary locations in your code. Would a language that supported "comefrom" be superior to one that doesn't?

For those that don't bother to read TFA, the one-sentence summary is that "offsets", where rather than paying the tax companies pay for credits obtained for emission-cutting programs in agriculture or in developing countries, are often dubious because the "offsets" are not properly audited and often just pay for activities that would have occurred anyway without the subsidy This is relatively easy to fix. Just tighten up the rules on offsets. It doesn't damn emissions trading in general.

SLS exists by Congressional mandate, to send cash to ATK and the other Shuttle contractors. It'll probably never fly.

I wonder how much of Apple's determination to use IP to force competitors out of the marketplace was due to Steve Jobs personally. A more pragmatic boss might take a different view.

The vast majority of that Chernobyl death toll is a projection based on a very small increased risk of cancer across millions of people in the region. It is statistically impossible to detect whether Chernobyl is actually having the projected effect. No such analysis has yet been conducted for Fukushima.

Yes, and letting loose Ron Paul on the US government would be like a company replacing all their Windows desktops with VT100 terminals connected to a server running Gentoo overnight, and telling the secretaries and PHB's that, hey, you've got C and Perl installed, so you can build the functionality you want better yourselves. You clearly have no idea whatsoever of the immense amount of pain and dislocation that would be caused by such a "refactoring".

If you assume the LNT (theory A) the cumulative effects of the dose at Fukushima on the surrounding population might be a 0.1% increase in cancer deaths over what would be expected. Given that there are 100,000 people in the vicinity, that might be 100 extra deaths (pulling numbers out of my backside here, but they are plausible to within an order of magnitude). The trouble is that a sample size of 100,000 isn't enough to reliably demonstrate a 0.1% increase in cancer rates, in the same way that tossing a coin 100,000 times isn't enough to reliably demonstrate that a coin comes up heads 50.1% of the time rather than 50. There's no way in the world we'll ever get this kind of data from human studies absent global nuclear war, in which case we'll have more important things to worry about. The only plausible way you might useful data would be a very, very large scale animal study, probably costing many millions of dollars.

Yes, that is *very* quick. It's within cooee of the BMW M5, which, if not the world's fastest sedan, is very close to it. Another way of looking at it - that's an average of 0.6G of acceleration. Peak acceleration at low speeds would be even higher. But even 0.6G is getting slammed - hard - into the back of your seat.

It's worth pointing out that they've chosen the most favourable acceleration statistic to quote. Electric cars are extremely quick at lower speeds, but their acceleration tails off more quickly than petrol-engined vehicles. Over the quarter-mile (standard dragstrip distance) or around a racetrack, I wouldn't expect the Model S to get anywhere near an M5.

However, for a luxury sedan, the Tesla will be more than fast enough, will have that instant throttle response that makes overtaking a breeze, and be eerily quiet. If I could afford one, I'd buy one.

A rocket lower stage isn't *that* big or heavy. Say it costs $500,000 to ship it back. That's still a massive win, right?

It's simplistic to think of governmental budgets in the same way you might think of a household budget. Go and read some introductory microeconomics and contemporary political debate will simultaneously start to make more sense, and look utterly infantile.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of Wikileaks, I would take anything said in Assange's "autobiography", unauthorized or not, with several spoonfuls of salt. An article by Robert Manne struggles with some of the computing-related stuff, but fills in some useful background.

As he puts it:

There is, however, a problem. Journalists as senior as David Leigh of the Guardian or John F. Burns of the New York Times in general accept on trust many of Assange’s stories about himself. They do not understand that, like many natural writers, he has fashioned his life into a fable.

Many universities/consortia have supercomputers available on which researchers can apply for (or buy) time. For example, my university is a member of VPAC, which has a big-arse cluster shared between a number of institutions. She might get much better bang for buck if she uses the money for that, rather than splashing out for dedicated hardware.

With 21st century technology and systems, the variability of alternative energy sources can be compensated over types or distances and easily create a reliable baseline equivalent.

I've no doubt it can be done. The question is "at what cost"?

At the present time, the answer would be very f-ing expensively. Solar panels and wind turbines are becoming increasingly cheap. Energy storage technologies are coming down in price much more slowly.

However, they try to do so with a bit more subtlety than Adams' imagined Golgafrinchan macroeconomists.

And immensely more subtlety than our friend the OP, whom is utterly delusional. Encouraging currency hoarding rates roughly up there with Caucescu's "export everything" policy as the silliest economic policy idea of all time.