A conspicuous "global killer" hurtling towards us overcomes the basic psychological barriers which inhibit the acceptance of global warming as a genuine, urgent threat (and which currently our hobble cooperative efforts). It's a good deal harder to "deny" that a giant rock is going to strike the Earth than it is to disingenuously claim "the science isn't there" about the highly complex, scientifically abstract climate system.

The problem with global warming is that everyone has something to gain by cheating on any agreement that might be made.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

I think he means something more along the lines of sellers of applications. As a fan of linux, I can see this being awesome, but it would have a huge dark side. All the *nix only programs that are used to do important thing (like, you know, run the entire internet) would have to be released in Win and OSX forms. (nb, this would still only apply to the ones that actually cost money)

Voting doesn't necessarily mean majority-rule.

Reading their paper (RTF...P?), the words "masters", "doctorate", and "phd" don't appear outside of the footnotes. Wouldn't a large portion of the very best science students pursue a graduate education? Aren't people arguing we need more of those, not undergrads with a relatively generic degree in the sciences? The authors are asking the wrong questions.

These things are going to be way too expensive right now. You have serious frequency and intermittency issues which make the whole gig more expensive (requiring more tolerant equipment, fast-response storage, etc). The 'potential' sure is there, but it wont be happening. Long Island Offshore Wind Power (LIOWP) was scrapped over cost issues last year. Environmentalists and NIMBY whiners will complain about the impacts on the ocean floor, fish, birds (bah), and tourism. Even with a carbon price, coal and natural gas will probably be cheaper than offshore wind for at least a few decades. The current wind VC is all going into onshore applications, because it just makes more sense.

I wonder if all of these wonderful statistics (more dates, more sports, more movies) could be confounded with the average age of gamers? If the demographic skews younger the correlation with gaming isn't necessarily causation.