What you have just described gives an artificial advantage (or disadvantage in the case of bittorrent) to managed protocols, discouraging innovation. A neutral network should not discriminate based on packet contents whatsoever. It is fundamentally impossible to fairly classify traffic, because there will always be unknown traffic and lack of agreement on priorities. In some cases, encryption may even prevent classification; why should those packets suffer? The only place where QoS is both functional and useful is on a customers own connection, where they set priorities among their own traffic.

Beyond that, an ISP has no business discriminating based on address or packet contents. The moment that is allowed, ISPs game the system. As seen, they invest in smart hardware capable of culling unwanted traffic rather than adding capacity, which inevitably results in a more congested network. This devalues the network for all non-priority traffic. There is exactly one good solution: add more capacity when necessary. This is the simplest, least expensive, and perfectly fair. It also ensures that there will be an excess of capacity available for innovative new protocols and uses.

A vote for Jill Stein is a vote for continued support of "green" energy fantasy. Her anti-nuclear position is proof that she is either deluded, or doesn't give a damn about the environment. Either way, she will support the endless and enormous subsidies for renewables, which ultimately provide very little energy and big problems for maintaining a reliable grid. It is time to cut all energy subsidies and let the CO2-free options compete on merit alone, and encourage affordable and reliable energy.

As disgusted as I am by both Trump and Clinton, at least the GOP platform is pro-nuclear and even encourages energy from thorium and development of advanced reactors. It also encourages fossil fuels which is unfortunate, but still better than the "green" position which will plunge us into energy poverty. At least it is more honest and direct, rather than green-washing the expansion of inefficient natural gas turbines required to support unreliable wind and solar energy. Incidentally, without the requirement to support renewables, more efficient gas turbines can be used, which would be even more environmentally friendly than running the inefficient renewable/gas combination, and do so at considerably lower cost.

As cool as a clean burning column of fire is, a vortex engine looks like a more practical use of the phenomenon. The idea is to capture the energy of a rising warm air column as in a solar updraft tower, though without needing to construct a tower. It also offers the potential to replace cooling towers, and extract energy from the significant amount of "waste" heat available at thermal or nuclear plants. (That heat need not be wasted, and can also be used for cogeneration. The higher temperature heat produced by advanced reactors like LFTR or other MSRs can also drive industrial processes including desalination, production of carbon-neutral synthetic fuels and ammonia, etc.)

Also see the atmospheric vortex engine.

Uranium mining is in the noise of todays mining activities, and would remain so even if we stopped mining coal. It can also be extracted directly from seawater, and from rare earth mine tailings which also contain thorium. Nuclear fuel is so energy dense that you barely need any at all; the worlds entire yearly energy demand could be met with byproducts from a single small rare earth mine. The tremendous energy density also puts the cost of the fuel in the noise, and even seawater extraction wouldn't impact energy costs more than a fraction of a cent per kWh.

To mention something so insignificant, you are either ignorant or drinking the green kool-aid. A hell of a lot more mining is needed for wind turbines and solar panels, and neither are remotely environmentally friendly to produce in the quantities needed. Nor do renewables replace fossil fuels, because they are not reliable.

Radiation killed about 50 at Chernobyl, and none at Fukushima and Three Mile Island. Meanwhile, pollution from burning fossil fuels causes millions of premature deaths every year. Even with a meltdown every year, nuclear would be a vast improvement if it replaced burning of fossil fuels, and incidents are increasingly unlikely with modern reactors, should people let us build them. (If one is objective, nuclear would even reduce loss of life over installation and maintenance of wind and solar generators, and at far less cost.)

The truth is, radiation is typically harmless, and can even be used to improve health. The body has repair mechanisms which routinely deal with an enormously greater amount of chemical damage from oxygen and such. It takes a whole lot of radiation to have any negative health effects, and current regulatory limits are based on bad science funded by fossil fuel interests.

People have been deceived for more than half a century, and mainstream “environmental” organizations such as Greenpeace, Friends of Earth, Sierra Club, NRDC, etc. continue the effort, often funded by those same interests. If you are genuinely concerned about the environment and climate change, look to ecological conservation groups and leading climate scientists, which uniformly support nuclear. It is the only option which is scalable to global needs and also has the smallest environmental footprint.

Learn more about radiation from Scientists for Accurate Radiation Information, or see the articles tagged LNT and Health Effects.

The unfolding energy crisis in South Australia was foreseeable and foreseen

Certainly, but hydro resources are typically maxed out or nonexistent throughout most of the world. Existing systems aside, dams also have a significant negative impact on ecosystems and expansion should be avoided where possible.

Nuclear on the other hand, can be deployed virtually anywhere on a very small footprint with minimal resources, and enables stable and low cost electricity for 60+ years. There are a number of other countries that employ nuclear at a large scale to nearly eliminate fossil fueled generation. France was 80% nuclear at one point, before EU renewable targets started dragging them backward. There are no examples of large scale renewable deployments that actually deliver upon the promises, nor does the data provide any realistic expectation that it is even remotely possible.

See the real time data for how Ontario achieves this. In 2015, they produced 90% of their energy from non-fossil sources. (60% nuclear + 24% hydro)

This is total BS; even with immense investment the world over, wind and solar haven't even made a dent in fossil fuel consumption. If anything, they cement the position of fossil fuels required for backing up their intermittent and unreliable power. See a short video about the reality of Germany's wind and solar, or one of the many articles about Germany's return to coal for providing reliable power. Their attempt to phase out nuclear has been a very expensive failure, and only succeeded in ramping coal consumption, including construction of new plants.

Notice the need to reaffirm their nonsense not once, but three times. The data does not support their position, so they continue to repeat the lie. Sadly, this often works.

Opposed Piston Opposed Cylinder engines have two pairs of pistons facing one another, each in a cylinder on opposite sides of the crankshaft. There is no cylinder head, just a ring of ports for intake and exhaust in the cylinder walls near where the pistons bottom out. With a slight timing offset, the exhaust ports will open before the intake ports. It is a fascinating design, simple and elegant, with very few moving parts and a high power density. The engine is completely balanced, and all of the linear forces cancel, leaving little load on the bearings, just torque. There are other interesting concepts out there, but this one is actually being mass produced today.

Electric cars are certainly attractive, but the reality is that hydrocarbon fuels are going nowhere. The energy density and flexibility are simply too great, and we have an immense amount of infrastructure and equipment that make use of them. The fastest way to a greener world isn't through electric cars, but rather synthetic carbon-neutral fuels, which can be efficiently produced using heat from nuclear reactors. Nuclear Ammonia is particularly interesting, because the feedstocks are readily available from air and water. Other replacement fuels can also be synthesized, but extracting carbon from air or water will add to the cost.

Rather than ever more oppressive laws that strip the people of power, it would be more effective to consider the motivations of those who would commit violent crimes. It is the pervasive poverty and egregious wealth inequality that drives most crime, along with our worsening system of injustice. Similarly, we should be considering the causes of terrorism, rather than allowing our leaders to exploit it to cow us with fear.

When the minimum standard of living becomes sufficient to afford everyone a decent existence, such problems will naturally disappear. Desperate and hopeless people will do terrible things, and no amount of force is going to prevent that. Fortunately, outside of the mentally ill, few would risk a comfortable life to engage in serious criminal activities. (Assuming a reasonable set of laws and fair enforcement.) Even the religious fanatics would see their numbers dwindle, with no oppression needed.

With abundant and cheap energy, eliminating poverty is entirely possible. That result will not come from energy conservation and renewables alone though; it will require nuclear power. Objectively speaking, nuclear energy has the lowest cost and least environmental and health impact of any energy source, and advanced reactors can do better yet. The Star Trek economy is within reach, if only people had the courage to embrace a change for the better, and to rein in the special interests.

Here is what James Hansen has to say about it. Even that is probably not enough though; a fee on CO2 may have some effect in the developed world, but the rest can not afford it, and will not accept such limitations. Even the terrible consequences looming are nothing next to the abject poverty that billions are subjected to daily. As bad as burning coal is, inexpensive fossil fuels still offer a desperately needed improvement in their lives, and it is not right to deny that to anyone in such circumstances. (It is also better than burning wood, as many "environmentalists" would have us do.)

The only practical way forward that results in rapid decarbonization, is to offer the developing countries a cheaper option, before the countless gigawatts of planned coal fired capacity are actually built. We know that nuclear can rapidly displace coal, as it has done so in the past in a number of countries. China is ramping up conventional nuclear, and developing advanced reactors. Newer mass produced LFTR or Thorcon reactors will make nuclear energy even cheaper and safer yet. See also Thorium: energy cheaper than coal for details.

These summits which result in plans too cowardly to even mention the words carbon dioxide or nuclear are perverse. Until nuclear is at least acknowledged and proposals are on the table for encouraging development and deployment of advanced reactors, they are a total waste of time.

are an environmental catastrophe. Solar panels and wind turbines require huge quantities of rare earth elements, and they all come from China today--even the ore mined in the US is shipped to China for processing. Until this is addressed, the so-called "green" technologies are not remotely green. Restoring our local rare earth industry would also enable local manufacturing of high-tech products, most all of which has been moved to China, for access to their rare earth resources.

There is no shortage of rare earths, and they could be mined and produced locally in an environmentally friendly manner. However, it would require changing the insane regulations surrounding thorium, which drove the industry to China in the first place. Concentrated ores invariably have high thorium concentrations, and the thorium could easily be separated and safely stored if only regulations allowed it. It is just barely radioactive, not water soluble, found in rocks everywhere anyway, and probably the least problematic of the mining wastes. Even ingesting it is essentially harmless; only inhaling thorium dust is of real concern. As it is a metal, there is a rather trivial way of preventing that from happening.

While this town may be shunning solar for the wrong reasons, there are good reasons. The area looks heavily wooded as well, and clearing vast areas of forest to collect a pitiful amount of unreliable solar energy is not productive. Moreover, unlike wind, PV solar does not coexist with vegetation at all, as even a stray leaf can damage the cells. The entire solar farm becomes a lifeless monument of irony to Big Green, which will long outlive the panels themselves.

Sadly, the greenest and most promising energy source is equally hampered by insane regulation. Nuclear is not only the least resource intensive, it also has the least environmental impact by far, and has proven to rapidly scale and displace fossil fuels in a number of countries.

They make it sound like mapping squares to a sphere only introduces a minor deformity near the poles, but it inflates the required addressing space by a factor of four. If instead they used an efficient and nearly uniform mapping like a Goldberg polyhedron, it would reduce the set of words required from 40k to about 25k to address a similar area.

It would require a little more calculation for the mapping, but it seems more consistent with the goals of the system. The icosahedral symmetry also allows for another interesting possibility of using one of the faces of the Dymaxion map as a part of the address. The region would then be specified by a single letter, and then 3 words chosen from a set of less than 9000. Even if the region is not made explicit, the mapping could take advantage of the fact that a number of the faces are primarily water.

The three word address is an interesting idea, but it may not be wise to assume that every language has 40000 words at its disposal. I also question the value of being able to specify an arbitrary address, when people may not have the hardware to do the mapping translation, or a means of navigating to the location. I'm guessing that many of those places without real roads may also lack things like electricity.

Hydro is great if you don't mind the expansive ecosystem loss to reservoirs and occasional dam failure, like the one at Banqiao which killed 171,000 people and cost 11 million their homes.

There was a time when environmentalists recognized the extensive damage wrought by hydro, and fought tooth and nail against its expansion. These days though, "environmentalists" are shameless enough to apply the green label to burning forests and crops--actual environmental impacts be damned. Or wind backed up by inefficient peaking gas plants where the combination is actually worse than exclusively running efficient combined cycle gas turbines, both by environmental and economic metrics. When "environmentalists" are pushing natural gas as the "green" option, something is seriously wrong. It would behoove the supporters of those organizations to learn where their funding comes from.

This poll demonstrates the problem perfectly, with "Unlimited power from the sun" taking the lead. Data centers require reliable power 24x7, and the sun does not provide that, no matter how much wishful thinking is applied. Popular opinion reflects that people can't do math, and they continue to make or at least support stupid decisions, which would leave us with an entirely non-functional Internet if they had their way.

Attempting anything at scale in space with chemical rocketry is utterly foolish. Also, even if we put people on Mars, they need a dense, compact, and reliable source of power. Nothing but nuclear engines and reactors even remotely fit the demanding requirements for long-term space activites. A molten salt reactor can be made compact enough to power an airplane, and would be suitable for use in a Mars colony, providing electricity, heat, and production of chemical fuels. The endeavor was scrapped because ICBMs made it obsolete, but the only practical challenge was shielding, and that would not be an issue on mars.

In any case, we have a much greater need to develop the technology here on earth first; nuclear power is the only option capable of providing clean and reliable energy at the scale humanity requires. Until people can accept that, we will continue to waste massive resources on the fantasy of wind/solar, while our reliable power continues to be provided by fossil fuels, or worse yet, by burning trees or other "biofuels".