That being said, WildBlue offers Satellite internet plans with 12Mbps down and 3Mbps up pretty much everywhere in the US starting at $50/mo . I just got back from spending a week at dad's cabin way up in the mountains of northern Idaho and had email, facebook, pandora and youtube all week long courtesy of a WildBlue dish. The ~600MS latency of course makes some applications like VOIP problematic, but it more than meets the basic definition of "broadband internet".

So by their own definition, the figure of 19million Americans not being able to get "broadband" is horse shit.

There are lies, damn lies and then there are statistics.

Yeah, crappy poll. Most of the options are things that did come to pass, if not widely available...

Flying car: http://www.terrafugia.com/
Personal Jet Pack: (there have been several) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_pack
Robot Maid: http://www.irobot.com/us/
Automated house: http://www.thehomeautomationstore.com/ More advanced examples have been built but I don't have any links at the moment...
Computer Teacher: Wow, really? My kid's leapfrog comes to mind to start with...
Underwater City: I voted for this one as it's the only one that really seems to have not really been done. Although a Typhoon Class almost qualifies:) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoon_class_submarine
Pill Food: So done... http://www.campingsurvival.com/surtabnewcon.html http://amazinggrass.com/product/56/Green-SuperFood-Capsules-150-count.html
CowboyNeal-1000: So "1989" it's not even funny.

I live in the Portland, Oregon area. I can tell you it's not much less gloomy and wet here. Record rainfall in both June and July. Now it's the beginning of August and I am wearing a coat in the middle of the day to stay warm. Feels more like an ice age then global warming here.

The issue goes beyond the immediate area of the storm though (no matter how big) since the affected datacenter serves the world. If all (or a significant portion) of your servers are in one basket and that basket is offline, destroyed or just dark, it impacts people and businesses in other areas who would not otherwise be affected by the storm. Now suddenly the economic and social impact of a natural disaster is magnified just because it happened to hit one of these concentrated data centers.

There's also the fact that there's nothing about the manufacture of solar panels which requires the production of greenhouse gases

This statement is incorrect. There are greenhouse gases (hexafluoroethane [C2F6], nitrogen trifluoride [NF3], and sulfur hexafluoride [SF6]) that are a bi-products of the chemical processes of creating the layers of material on the glass of the solar panel. Their "greenhouse effect" is 14,000 - 26,000 times more potent then CO2. Manufacturers in the US are required to take steps to capture the gases so it does not escape into the atmosphere, but from what I have read it's pretty much impossible to get all of it. And there is the issue of what to do with the gasses once captured. And I am guessing the cheap panel makers in China are not as environmentally conscious.

We cut the cable cord while having: Samsung 55" 240hz LED with Onkyo 5.1 surround receiver and Blu-Ray in the family room plus a Samsung 42" Plasma in the bedroom. Most of the OTA HD is actually better quality then much of the cable and satillite I have watched so that actually is a win. And there have only been exactly two shows that I really missed watching that were on cable, not nearly enough to justify the hefty price tag to keep cable (MUCH cheaper to just buy the seasons of those shows on DVD when they come out if you MUST watch them). Watching Blu-Rays/DVDs is of course un-related to if you have cable or not. Not much on Hulu anymore and while we have Netflix, we rarely use it so that will probably get the boot soon too. Not having the extra money in our budget for cable was the factor that caused us to dump it in the first place. But at this point, even if we had extra $100 bills laying around, I would find it difficult to justify buying cable again.

They have started putting up wind turbines. There has been much uproar about it though due to how they change the landscape.

Yes, kids tend to grow oddly enough! The setup you linked works for about the first year of the youngest kid's life, at which point they will grow out of the carrier and you will need 3 regular car seats...which will not fit no matter how you slice it. Unless you have some new type of children I have not heard about that never grow beyond infant size...

Beyond the issues of when the sun does not shine, the costs and environmental impacts of the panels and inverter components of solar make it un-attractive both from an economic and environmental perspective. I have a 3.2Kw system on my roof, but only because I only passively care about the environment and the cost of it was 100% subsidized by local, state and federal grants and tax incentives. If I had to buy it all outright myself, it would have never paid for itself...even with projected increases in utility rates and good luck with the inverter not burning out. As for the environmental impact...I read recently that each panel made results in 4x it's weight in toxic waste and greenhouse gasses produced as a side effect. A bit haunting...but hey, they were free to me:) And don't start with the "you're tax dollars paid for that", I have to pay taxes either way, at least this way I am getting something I can use for it besides the crumbling roads I drive on.

I have found most Americans that have SUVs have them for the combination of two needs: They need to tow things sometimes (boat/trailer) so a more powerful engine is needed that is only found in trucks/SUVs and they have more kids than can legally fit into a car. 50 years ago if you had more then two kids you just crammed them in whereever. Now you are required by law to have each child in a government approved car seat that takes up half the car AND have them all in the back seat. Most cars cannot fit more than two child seats (properly secured).

The factor you seem to be missing is the effect this type of system has on human behavior. When you have a choice and choose to have insurance or pay out of pocket, there is responsibility attached. You chose to go to the doctor only when you need to and your costs [should] remain reasonable. Once your healthcare becomes free (to those who leech off the system) or forced on you, then your human nature will no longer care how much that resource is used (or abused). At which time doctors become overwhelmed with people complaining about every little ache or pain just because they can. Some good friends of mine are firemen and see the ugly side of this sort of behavior every day. They get called out to some lady's house and take her by ambulance to the ER. Why? Because she is on state programs anyway, doesn't drive and she needed to get a prescription filled and she knows that somebody else will have to pay for it in the end. Cheaper to call 911 for her then a Taxi. So probably a $10,000 bill between ambulance, ER and related charges for a $50 prescription that all ends up getting paid through government mandated medical cost "taxes". This stuff happens every single day. You no longer have to wonder why healthcare costs are so high. My point is that "obamacare" obviously does not remedy this sort of situation, only make it available for more people and encourage them to abuse the system too.

Much like my women, I like my clients to have a little substance to them.

Not quite. Currently they are only paying for essentially the people that know how to "work the system" and some other people who actually need assistance. With this universal law, now they will be paying for everyone regardless.

This was actually tried in Washington state back in '93. First insurance premiums went up substantially (up to 400% in same cases by '97) causing a significant number of people to end up without insurance anyway. By '99 all the private insurers had thrown up their hands and pulled out of the state leaving only the state run programs to "insure" people. This was a complete disaster and in '00 the legislature repealed most of the law and now there are some private insurers back again. Medicare and Medicaid have already put this country into a financial situation that is probably unrecoverable. This will only accelerate a full on budget disaster. Quick background: comparatively speaking, the US had more debt after WWII then we do now. But we were able to pay much of it off in the years after the war. But at that time, 1/3 of the total federal budget was not paying for Medicare/Medicaid because those programs did not exist yet. Fast forward to today, and you have a situation where between those parasite programs, essential programs and interest, we are in a hole that probably cannot be escaped. War spending is only adding insult to injury. 4 years ago, with some drastic actions it was still possible to escape the debt black hole. Today, it's a 99% certainty that our economy will experience a complete economic collapse (Greek style) at some point in the future (the only question is how long we can maintain the status quo before that happens).

Stargoat's answer is pretty good. I'll add the next step above that for when you just cant have stuff do down: hardware virtualization with clustering. You can do this with VMware, but it's expensive and you need a dedicated High Availability SAN which is $$$$$$. I have implemented a simple version running SAN software with failover on top of normal servers (Starwind does this and has some cool features). But the best solution would be the new fully integrated solutions that are coming out like this: http://scalecomputing.com/hc3/

No matter how you slice it, it's expensive to do it right. That's just the nature of high availability. After many years of trying to do high availability "on the cheap". I can authoritatively say that there is no "silver bullet".

I don't see any distinction between the two in the IT field (which is what we are talking about here).