I hate to break this to you: Every drop of water you've ever drank or bathed in has at one point been dinosaur piss. It's true. And all that great soil? Microbe or worm offal. And you can't live without it!

This is why trying to apply Moore's law to life in general as if it dominates over all other factors is just asking for trouble.

In the meantime, find a nice car and double your speed every 18 seconds continuously and let us know how that goes - okay? :)

I think you might have missed what's happened to jobs and college costs in the US over the past decade. In this case, it's creating a sinkhole effect: it deprives people of the means to change their situation and confines them to just getting by.

I would not trust this conclusion. Simple dilution does not mean absence of risk. Despite this being a comment on Slashdot, I read to the end where I'm struck by this conclusion:

"Although the seas in the immediate vicinity of Fukushima probably experienced a very high dose of radioactivity during the months immediately after the disaster, as long as none of the isotopes accumulate in any organisms, the effects are unlikely to be long-lasting."

I strongly suggest looking up scholar.google.com and checking the isotopes: http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2011/03/21/134567288/radiation-by-the-numbers-isotopes-to-watch

Off-handed dismissal of bioaccumulation risks is rather shocking. There are also differences between exposure to radiation and having a radioactive particle lodged within your body for prolonged, embedded exposure.

Would the NOAA lie to us about radiation or oil or anything? You already have your answer just simply by their track record on the Gulf of Mexico disaster. Just the very numbers of the official estimates and how they only changed from ridiculously minimal to realistic shows there are dishonest interests involved.

http://www.reefrelieffounders.com/drilling/2012/01/24/ee-scientist-is-accused-of-lowballing-size-of-gulf-spill/
http://www.floridaoilspilllaw.com/

While some are pointing to the obligatory http://xkcd.com/radiation/ and I respect Randall, the lowballed numbers we are receiving from media with vested interests don't rank this disaster accurately. Even hardened robots can't last more than a few hours at the Fukushima 1 plant where the radiation is 73 sevierts, and that warrants careful examination of what we're told the risks are to broader areas. http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/nn20120329a1.html

Whatever the truth is about Fukushima, it isn't coming from the NOAA.

There's a troubling aspect of this thinking, and that's that people expect there to be a single smoking gun and either the pesticides are it, or there aren't.

Living beings don't fit neatly into that. They process a large variety of inputs and can adapt to a number of stressors and heal; in fact, in machine culture we seem to take it for granted that living systems are at 100% because we're used to machines that are either working or very conspicuously broken.

Bees have been shipped about fields, worked harder than even their natures. They're exposed to crops now genetically modified to include pesticides in their pollen. The sprays being used are increasingly pushed into use for profit without review. This leaves them in such a weakened state that if a mite finishes them off, you can't say it was just one factor.

If you want a resilient system, you've got to pay attention to all of these factors.

No, the way to secure ourselves against 1973 is to get as many of our needs met locally and sensibly as possible. I'm talking food and medicine gardened with little to no oil requirement, and durable instead of disposable goods made with local materials. Those things are possible and being done - just google Transition Towns, for example.

The industrial system requires 400 gallons of oil per person to farm using methods wherein efficiency is not as important as the profits of the middlemen between you and the farmer. Drilling for more oil output is just an attempt to stall the consequences.

Simply put, we have a finite resource that is running out, and transitioning to a lifestyle built from the ground up around not being dependent can fix that issue. However, it gets a lot harder to live off the land when it's badly polluted. When the Gulf and the heartland start looking like Nigeria with its oil spills, it's too late - the oil will become too costly only a little later, and you've destroyed the alternatives.

How about this: I can switch my motherboard and video card out and not only not buy a new copy of Windows, I don't need to twiddle drivers. I can even remaster onto a live-bootable USB drive and work on it on a completely different machine, long as it's i686 or x86_64. Everything I need is a few clicks away in synaptic or in apt-get from the command line, and once installed, it generally stays that way.

A huge slew of apps are already bundled for free, and if I want to start getting creative codewise, there are a bunch of open source games to hack on, and the toolchain is already bundled up and free.

I didn't get nickeled and dimed to get extra software bundles: I get to try out new things for free as a community participant, not a lousy pirate. Creative participation is right there.

That's why I run a Linux desktop, and keep a Mac notebook for on-the-go music and a sleep mode that works. I quit dual-booting Windows four years ago and feel great.

You're free to decide whether that's for you.

*Laugh* Seriously but no, it's not an arbitary few thousand years. They're insisting that it's less than 6,000 years because of a literal reading of genealogies leading back to Adam and Eve while being illiterate in ancient Hebrew culture and numerology, and there's an obsession in christian circles with a 7,000 year cycle with a sabbath millenium at the end.

They're just trying really hard to live in another world and damn the physics.

Actually, solar costs have been falling dramatically, and if we were looking at the big picture, a solar panel delivering energy on-site is already often cheaper due to cutting out losses to electrical resistance, additional conversions between AC and DC. If subsidies weren't horribly skewed to suit the Big Oil lobby, you'd see more. There's still a lot going on, and if you combine solar thermal panels and a passive solar remodeling of your home, the remaining electricity load will be within the means of a much smaller, more affordable PV setup.

That's not an issue. A smart grid can use solar, wind, and wave energy as available and needed and balance it out. Concentrated solar thermal and laddermill-style wind generators which go far up enough to where there is always wind can supply baseload. It's more efficient to produce energy in smaller amounts near the demand when on demand than to store it long-term.

If they work but they can't be patented for major profits for pharmaceutical partners, then they're the devil. Keep the bias in these sources in mind; I've seen folks suffer because completely legitimate generic drugs are being taken off the market in favor of new, patented medicines with worse side effects. Alternative medicine is what they'd like to take off the market too!

What's interesting is that the more wealthy and powerful often then steer society right over a cliff. If they retreat into gated communities, keep their kids out of the public schools, eat different food, and shrug off environmental concerns where other people have to live (i.e. "Louisiana isn't the only place that has shrimp"), they're completely out of touch and not cognizant of real and serious problems, whether or not they were actually brighter or more gifted to begin with.

The current ruckus over the Keystone XL comes to mind when dyed-in-the-wool Republicans are suddenly realizing what it means to have a corner-cutting fossil fuel industry endangering the environment when by environment we're talking about where we live and work and farm and make a living. Suddenly they're with the environmentalists. It's great, but all of a sudden an issue is seen differently when it's close at hand. The onus is on creating more informed empathy, not on questioning the masses' right to have a voice in society.

There's a lot of criminality plainly in the history books about how wealth has been distributed. It has more to do with ruthlessness and privilege than with hard work in most cases. Once put into the mean side of that outcome, do you shove all the most polluting industries next to their homes, bid down wages until folks are working huge numbers of hours just to make ends meet with no time for deeper analysis of the world, turn the public schools into a joke, make the media discourse a non-stop sponsored infomercial, and then get to gripe with any legitimacy about how those folks can't vote right?

That's why, watching our country and this post, I can't help but think of how patricians mostly just had surreal, detached, useless conversations in their country villas when the Vandals sacked Rome.

Top-heavy societies just don't last.

Having had insomnia and tackled it one time around with sleeping pills and another time around by kicking energy drinks, caffeine, sugars, and artificial additives to the curb and integrating healthy food and teas, I can tell you there's a difference.

Like most anything that leads to trading on Wall Street, sleeping pills are about making money off of your ailments, not bettering your health.

Wouldn't balloons or maglev catapults be good alternatives for first stage boosters? Both would feature considerably less energy input.

Because the ancient Hebrews wouldn't let a good story get in the way of their numerology. What, you thought that was literal?