You want to look at ugly people? Think of the hotness!

hmmmm. I mainly agree, but as a point of accuracy...

900M is about right according to wikipedia

The thing is, for much of that time Earth would have been a ball of lava, so once it cooled down life got going quite quickly.

The summary actually says the the universe was about 15 million years old and would have lasted several million years. So...yeh, too short for anything useful to happen. One wonders what could be cool enough after only 15B years , and do you really need something as big as a planet?

OK, so the heavy elements began to be manufactured after just 3 million years, but were they manufactured in large numbers?

And how long does it take for those heavy elements to disperse through the universe and then coalesce into a planet around a suitable star? Seems like it might be longer than 15 million years.

And life took 500 million years to get started after Earth formed. For sure, for some of that time the Earth was too hot for life to occur but 15 million years seems too short for anything useful to happen. Maybe some RNA and some enzymes if you're lucky, but that would be about it.

Firstly, most of those desalination plants are already built, and second, I really doubt that getting to this water is simply a matter of "a few more pipes". Deep water oil rigs can cost Billions, plus you have to buy the rest of the infrastructure. The Sydney desalination plant "only" cost $1.08 Billion.

Not that I read TFA or anything, but since thuse aquifers are under the ocean, I'm pretty sure they've got nothing to do with the water table in Lybia.

In PNG human meat is referred to as "long pig"

And just for kicks, here is a Kangaroo giving himself a bouncy ride http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6VKtk1FesY

When Australia was first settled a few people did indeed try it. I remember a school teacher showing us some drawings of special saddles and other stuff that people had made for the purpose. The problem is that a roo large enough to carry a human is a powerful and aggressive animal, it puts up a hell of a fight. There were at least a couple of people that somehow managed to saddle the roo and then mount the saddle, but in both cases the roo just bashed them into a tree tree or something. The first seven people to try it were all killed. I've never heard of anyone trying it since.

I counter-guarantee that if you knew how awesome and useful it is, you wouldn't care how it is made. It should be called "magic sauce"

I generally agree with this, but people choosing to profit is not evil at this point in our evolution, and may never be.

This is true as far as their own IP goes, but this isn't generally true even for Apple and Microsoft. Google in particular is doing quite the opposite. They are providing access to all the information they can, for the cheapest possible price. I don't really see how any other large companies are doing this either.

You can't even accuse Microsoft of that. You might have argued they've slowed things down a bit, but "Dark Age" is pretty fucking far from reality.

There's some truthiness here, if you squint a bit...however the "information-poor" is rapidly heading towards zero. So what's really happening is that everyone is becoming enriched.

Screen Savers!

You can't realistically generate electricity with a thermocouple. With this thing you can.