Today is your lucky day. From wikipedia:

    The Middelgrunden offshore wind farm---with 20 turbines the world's largest offshore farm at the time it was built in 2000

which is more than a decade ago.

Indeed several people survived the Indian Ocean tsunami while in a small fishermen boat just a few miles off shore from areas that were completely devastated. They described a minor brow passing under them, without even realizing that it was a major tsunami.

Same holds for the massive Sanriku Tsunami in 1896: "Fishermen twenty miles out to sea didn't notice the wave pass under their boats because it only had a height at the time of about fifteen inches,"

This. I'm one of those people who naturally works in "duck mode". All cool on the surface, a shit storm under water. Usually only around a year or two after I join a team does higher management realizes how much I got done, and more importantly how much I managed to get my team to do, by coaching, inspiring and cajoling.

I've never worked in a stack rank place, but if I ever did, I don't think I would last long enough to prove my worth.

I wonder why you forgot to mention that solar is on a Moore's Law-like curve, and hence already cheaper today than some sources of energy in use today and expected to be cheaper than most sources of energy within a decade.

http://www.treehugger.com/slideshows/renewable-energy/important-graph-cost-solar-headed-parity-coal-and-gas/

Word on the street is that AT&T billings for intelligence related activities were around $2 billion a year total, between FBI NSA, CIA and other security organizations.

Except that the Surface Pro is not a tablet. I hate the thing (I have a company provided one), but a regardless of my dislike for the thing a Surface Pro is a laplet, that is, a laptop/tablet hybrid not tablet.

Around here we saw a similar astroturf campaign agains wind power. Call in radio shows were full of irate "farmers" complaining against wind mills. I spent a week in the region talking to actual farmers and they were all in favor of wind mills. They average farmer here earns somewhere between $30K-100K of rental income from the windmill companies and they couldn't be more thrilled about it.

Usage patterns like those you describe hold for milder climates like the New England and Northern Europe. For sunnier climes the peak occurs in the middle of the day when the temperature goes up and ACs work overtime. As well, one could program the residential ACs to come on around noon and lower tto 50-60F by 4pm.

By the time people come home it would be back up to around 70F with no further demands at night since temperature drops rapidly past 5pm in Winter. In the summer this is not a problem since sunset is later which allows home ACs to run for an extra hour or two on solar.

Right, because majority opinion has always been a reliable way to judge the quality of something, e.g. bell bottom pants, mullets, Justin Bieber, George W. Bush.

Part of the problem is that a critic can sit down for two hours watch a movie and write a meaningful review. This is not possible when it comes to software.

Let me use a real life example: I was an early proponent of Java since my first few interactions with it in 1994 were positive. Only when I was is deep in the bowels of the beast did I start to see the problems: flawed parameter passing model, the "everything has to be an object" religion (which ironically is violated by built in data types), the "you must write a preamble bigger than COBOL's to have a well designed piece of code", the horrible graphics library that if first shipped with, etc.

After that I realized that maybe moving to Java is not such a good idea after all. I think the popularity of C#/Haskell/Scala/C++11/Python are a result of this realization.

Can we do away with the "correlation vs causation" meme every time someone quotes a study? This might be news to you but 99% of scientists already know this and control for it. But more importantly, in matters like this a correlation is enough to stop building until a proper explanation path is developed.

Actually every experimental deep geothermal hole we've dug so far had measurable impacts on geyser an even earthquake activity. I believe in geothermal as a great source of energy, but evidence thus far suggests we should proceed with caution.

But they are more directional, counteracting the broadband effect. Plus are there really any observatories near NYC? I think you are just complaining for complaining sake.

There is a middle ground which comes from the Scottish system. The judge rules at the same time whether the case was reasonable, even if not proven. So the verdicts available are not guilty, not proven, and guilty.

We could then make that, by default, "not guilty" for the other side means you have to pay their expenses and not proven means each pays their own way.

You mean like that other common rocket fuel, gasoline, which is used in the Russian R-12 also known as the Scud missile? Yeap, we would never use that in a car.