"essence of life" is an interesting choice of words. Here, read this.

Here's a few choice quotes:

Life is not one of the great scientific unknowns. Live and dead mice are not indistinguishable. No one today expects microbes to spontaneously come into being. Creating life from scratch is a technical problem, not a theoretical one. If stating so is pedantic then so be it.

Let me say this another way.. How are you so sure it's dead?

Pulse?

How quaint. When I need to know something, my computer travels back in time and alters history so that I always knew it.

If all of your measurements are the same, you're either not very good at taking measurements, or you're not very good at killing mice.

You better let the Nobel people know to get his prize ready, because he's right. Entropy is unlikely to decrease in a closed system. But it can.

I suppose it's going to be a while before we run out of alpha emitters. So the Wikipedia page is wrong then, when it says Helium is a finite resource. Last time I trust Wikipedia (yeah right:).

You said it slowly dissipates into space. That means the rate it leaves the atmosphere is low, so the rate it is replenished is low, and that's the limiting extraction rate.

According to this (that didn't take long), the rate Helium leaves the atmosphere is 50g/s, or 3e5 cm^3/s. The National Helium Reserve is 1e9 m^3. So, extracting all of the Helium from the atmosphere before it escapes, it would take 1e9 m^3 / (3e5 cm^3/s), or over 100 years to replace the reserves.

But extracting all of it is hopelessly unrealistic. I don't know, but it seems even 1% would be ambitious. So now we're looking at tens of thousands of years.

So either the national reserve is ridiculously large, or removing it from the atmosphere is not going to be a solution to the shortage. Right? Or am I missing something (else)?

That makes more sense, thanks. I mean, what's so special about booting from the network, why does it have to be wifi, and why do you need a special device?

Here in Seattle, most of the buses that don't get on the freeway are electric trolleys, and many of the ones that do drive on the freeway are hybrids. They looked like this in 1940, now they look like this.

Interesting. The last sentence on the Wikipedia page for helium:

So how does that work?

I take it you have some reservations about the veracity of his assertions?

I believe they are only allowed to burn bunker fuel out in international waters anyway.

But without forks, we'd have a single unified Linux which everyone would use. Who would want that?

People who like spoons.

I'm getting 65 Meg down and 12 Meg up on my commiecast connection in Seattle... we pay for 50/10...

...That said, they had to come out and work on the lines, as before we were lucky to get 12 Meg down and 5 Meg up...

Just tangentially, it sounds like people living in the parts of town where the previous mayor was talking about implementing municipal broadband all got upgraded infrastructure, probably as the ISP majors tried to argue that municipal broadband wasn't needed. In contrast, I'm in Northgate, still reasonably dense and still well within in the city limits, but our neighborhood was outside of the areas marked for municipal broadband rollout -- and I'm still stuck with 4 down / 1.5 up.

Cheers,