A reasonable debate between groups of airheads who have not the slightest idea what they are talking about? That'll be interesting.

Consider that on the one side we have a revealed religion that depends on global climate models that embody all they think they know about climate. The GCMs really do not seem to work. They clearly run way too hot. So that causes a frantic effort to identify what is wrong with the models and fix it? Of course not. The response is to make stuff up, throw excrement, and yell insults at anyone who suggests that maybe there is a need to put a foundation under the "climate science" superstructure.

And there are skeptics who really don't have a theory of their own other than the obvious, and perhaps trivial contention that climate alarmists are ignorant, ill behaved, whack jobs. Never mind that their own behavior frequently is less than exemplary.

And neither side seems to have any conception of the problems entailed in delivering an adequate supply of essentials and luxuries to 10 billion human beings later in this century. Much less any willingness to work at developing realistic solutions to the numerous problems that will be encountered. On the one hand we have a bunch of "green" deus ex machina solutions that probably are going to work poorly when they work at all. On the other there is a belief in the improbable theory that God and an unregulated free market will provide abundance for all without any effort or planning.

Anybody seen any signs of adult behavior in this circus?

Dead on. I haven't used such. My first two questions would be.

1. How easy are they to use for someone whose usage is only an hour or two every few weeks? There's a lot of stuff out there that's great if you use it all the time but are somewhere between annoying and hateful for the casual user.

2. Can you easily mix in and edit text -- including, and especially. code or pseudo-code fragments? This seems to software design tooling, not storyboarding or conventional artwork production.

You'll waste the whole meeting fiddling with the technology and getting used to the UI.

I'm old and retired and far past meeting age (thank god). But my take is.

You'll not only waste the first meeting. Probably much of the first six meetings. And significant chunks of later meetings. And probably you'll need to spend time training any new participants in later meetings.

And ... you probably want computers with real keyboards so people can type notes and make corrections and not have to worry about spurious touches doing stupid things.

I've never encountered any sort of computer drawing tool that wasn't excrutiatingly painful when compared to paper and something pencil-like. Doesn't mean one or more don't exist. But usability for graphics in a free wheeling environment really is something you should consider.

Not that what the poster wants isn't desirable. But what is really wanted is probably a process that can be "imported" and adopted to local needs, not a technology you can order 8 of from your hardware monger. In particular one should view any off-the-shelf commercial solution with the same attitude you'd take toward a large dog who is growling at you and foaming a bit around the mouth.

Would salesmen lie to you? You betcha. It is what salesmen do.

Who needs astrologers when we have computer models?

We probably need some sort of government program to retrain astrologers faced with technical obsolesence as network administrators of C++ programmers.

Solution: use natural language

Interesting idea. ten to one, you would get a great lesson in how ambiguous "natural language" is. A language that does not distinguish between inclusive and exclusive OR, has no rules for resolving the order/priority of ANDs and ORs when both occur in a clause, and which has a rather cavalier approach to NOT ("Isn't the door open?" is likely to mean "I think the door is open" rather than "Is the door closed?") may not be the ideal medium for communicating your wishes to a box.

Not that I know anything at all about this specific eReader, but I do know that the military in general tends to prefer old, proven technology for electronics. That's because they can assess the reliability of stuff that has been around a while. Newer stuff is probably better/more capable, cheaper. But you'd prefer not to find out that x component is an exception in a situation where replacing x component is going to be impossible.. On top of that, they tend to prefer stuff that is known to work in gawdawful environments -- high or low humidity, high or low temperature, lots of salt water, etc. Bottom line: the rom in these things is probably old and small capacity.

Note, for example, that the kid's iPad failed when onlookers were dousing runners with water during a marathon on a dreadfully hot and humid day. Doesn't mean the iPad is a poorly designed box. But it would not be the kind of box the military would prefer.

Emacs and Vim are both terribly unproductive text editors.

I don't know if I'd go that far, but I've loathed vi since before many of the folks posting here were born and I've never really warmed to emacs although I did give it a serious try once. Look (dammit), I have to learn a set of keystroke conventions (CUA pretty much) to use my web browsers. What possible reason would I have to learn a different set conventions for code editing? I use kwrite in x-windows and jed on the rare occasions that X isn't available. When I used Windows, I used some enhanced Notepad or other that doesn't work right under Wine. I've long since forgotten its name. I use Windows as infrequently as possible, and in the one or two hours a year I have to work in Windows, Notepad seems to be adequate.

IMHO, vi was a crummy text editor -- only a slight improvement over ed -- in 1980 and although modern vi-s are vastly improved, they really aren't anything special. I think I see the point to emacs, but I think you either love it or you don't. I don't.

Of course it'll help sometimes. "Restricted Visibility" isn't just for people. It'll surely apply to vehicle on-board sensors also. The ability to "see" potential hazards obscured by terrain, vegetation, traffic, looking directly into the rising or setting sun, etc isn't going to solve all or even most problems. But it'll help.

And frankly, self driving cars are going to need all the help they can get -- especially once one gets down off the freeways onto roads shared with pedestrians, bicycles, skateboards, joggers, drunks, wildlife, livestock, tree limbs, etc,etc, etc.

Pumped storage is great in theory. In practice, it's got some problems -- including, but not limited to -- inefficiency, lack of suitable sites, and evironmental issues from constantly fluctuating water levels. But the BIG problem is the huge amount of water that has to be moved to buffer energy to meet the electricity needs a modern industrial society on low wind days.

wind doesn't vary on a minute by minute basis, though.

I think perhaps you need to get outside of the basement occasionally and actually experience this wind phenomenon.

There are two different definitions of 'base load' in common use:

- In one definition, the base load is the minimum amount of power that must be provided at any given time and situation. Ideally, every utility will be able to meet its base load requirements even if all the variable load sources (wind, solar, etc) are simultaneously unavailable. Base Load generation facilities are power plants that can reasonably be expected to be available at any time for as long as is needed -- coal and gas powered power plants, nuclear plants, hydroelectric power.

- In the other definition, base load facilities are those which must be run at full output if that is possible in order to satisfy economic expectations and eventually pay for the investment in the facility. Unpredictable sources like wind are likely to be baseline load under the second definition, but not the first.

There are two problem areas here:

- Using the first definition, a utility must be able to somehow satisfy maximum demand even if major variable supplies are unavailable.

- Using the second definition, base load sources must be given priority lest the owners lose money. If utility owners routinely lose money, there will be no new utilities built, and possibly no maintenance of existing facilities. The problem is that most power sources are base load sources under this definition, thus everyone must have priority.

I've been through most of this thread and see a lot of gratiutious nastiness, a bit of serious discussion of GUIs vs CLIs, and some humor. But few answers to the original question. Anyway, there are a great many little and not so little tools out there. It's unclear what OS the OP is using, but if he/she can get access to a Unix system, there are a zillion command line tools in the /bin and /usr/bin directories (probably. I imagine there are distributions where the binaries have been "improved" to some other location(s)).

On unixlike systems "man whatever" and/or "info whatever" and/or "whatever --help" will likely get some usage information (which may be a bit incomprehensible in some cases). Many -- by no means all -- of these programs are available on multiple platforms

some useful websites for little tools -- not that all the stuff there is multiplatform,useful, or even usable
    - https://github.org/
    - http://sourceforge.net/
    - http://www.onethingwell.org/
    - http://tinyapps.org/blog/

The UNIX shell model for the last three decades is, you run a program and the shell finds it in the path, forks a child process, execs the program and waits on the child process. When the child process exits, the shell resumes and has the return status of the child process available for examination. And that does actually have its place. But it doesn't need to be all there is anymore.

It's not the mechanism you have in mind, but appending an & to the end of a shell command will run the command without locking up the user interface. For that matter, you can detach from a running CLI program with ^Z.. There are ways to reattach of course, but I don't remember what they are as I never use them.

Maybe "walled garden" isn't the proper term, but there are some legitimate gripes about GUIs.

1. As a practical matter, they are more or less unscriptable -- which means that tedious,repetitive tasks like backups, malware scans, etc frequently require my attention instead of being left to the computer which is much better at tedious, repetitive tasks than I am. I didn't buy this thing to make my life more difficult.

2. GUIs are hard to write and harder to test (because of the user can do any damn thing any time they wish aspect). As a result they are frequently buggy.

3. For those of us who use relatively minimal hardware (and there are a LOT of computers out here that are underpowered relative to the applications and OSes inflicted on them), GUIs tend to be kind of slow. Virtually every time I visit a doctor or other professional, I hear complaints about slow boots, eternal logins, slow software, etc, etc, etc.

4. The number of people who think they can design an effective, easy to use, GUI interface seems to be MUCH smaller than the number who can actually do so.

That said, GUIs have a valid place in the universe. For example, I don't think I'd care to try to do Google Maps from the command line. But the idea that GUIs are inherently superior to CLIs for all purposes has always seemed very odd to me.

For the money you're paying a service, why not just hoop up an inexpensive machine for a server, put a TB or two in it?

Fires, thefts, etc can happen to pretty much anyone. There's something to be said for encrypted off-site storage. OTOH, there's no particular reason that can't be on a usb flash drive in the glove compartment of a car. (I'd suggest in the trunk under the spare tire instead). After all, the data is encrypted. What can possibly go wrong?)