You are correct, but you may have missed something:

Practically, solar power will help the individual, not industry. Industry is what requires the most power(on a individual basis) bar sugar cane factories and so forth which produce power and already sell it back in this end of the world. Solar power is not practical for an induction furnace (for example). It does not have a reliable enough output.

The utility will survive on things like steel mills that run induction furnaces 24/7 and can't realistically use solar power. In fact they may make a profit selling your excess solar to industry. Base load generation is never going away though. It may become nuclear or remain coal, but it isn't going anywhere.

http://xkcd.com/1343/

I am not entirely sure I would call making BASIC popular doing something for programming. It took me years to unlearn some of that rubbish...

The reason I don't run Gentoo is I would *want* to compile... *everything*... I have a problem...

Certainly I agree with you, there is a lot we don't know. The trouble is, at the moment, in order to speculate on this, we are leaving science and entering philosophy. Science does not have an answer for us here, and maybe never will. We have some math, but nothing that really means anything to us.

I would say that these questions cannot be objectively answered - there is no way to measure what happened 'before' since there is no frame of reference that would be meaningful to us and allow us to understand what 'happens' outside our little bubble of physics and space/time. How do we measure outside of space and time? What are we measuring for that matter? What does 'before', or 'cause' or 'effect' mean in such a reality?

As a self professed religious person, I believe there are subjective and unprovable answers. Others disagree and are happier with the questions. In either case it seems wise to not give up on looking.

We use these(industrial use). Virtually unbreakable, and quite neat. Not cheap though.

http://www.telegaertner.com/en...

There are plenty of manufacturers that do similar, they just worked out easiest to get for us.

Well, if there was no time 'before' the big bang, what does 'before' mean?

http://www.moxa.com/product/nport_5110.htm

Among other such devices... You would be surprised how many modern devices still come with RS232. In the case of Micro-Ohm resistance bridges, that would be all of them(that I have seen).

I have, on a fairly simple .NET app. Worked fine. But I can't claim exhaustive testing...

I have been down a 2km mineshaft(the shaft is deeper, but they only go down in +/-2km sections) in a 'cage'. There is no counterweight, but the AC winder that drops (yes, 'drops' is the right word) you and hauls you back out is pretty powerful. They account for cable weight and extension because there are rails in the cages and they need precision to match them up. They get about +/- 1cm. Operator skill is important..

Yes. It is possible even with old style cables, but to get anywhere in a reasonable time, you have to go bloody fast, and it is honestly really scary. It took us about 5 minutes to reach the bottom most of that time was slowing down. I don't recommend it for the the general public. Many shorter elevators are a far better idea. Can you imagine stopping at every floor for 1km?

At work I have a little AMD (1.6GHz I think) freebsd system with 2Gb of RAM that saturates gigabit easily. I have actually been quite impressed by the performance of ZFS. Perhaps I am easily impressed though. The last system we had was an off-the-shelf seagate home level NAS that ran some form of embedded linux and failed horribly.

It keeps complaining it wants another 2gb of RAM to enable prefetch or something, but I can't be bothered because it is really better than it needs to be, and it does provide me some minor redundancy.

unfortunately, I am no longer infected.

oh. mjwx beat me to it. Well played...

My hovercraft is full of eels.

Pretty much. Just bear in mind supernatural does not imply omniscient or omnipotent. Any being that can modify/break the rules of our universe would be supernatural(i.e. above our 'natural' laws.).