Why does the government need to guarantee loans? Because it doesn't make enough sense for sane people to back. If it will pay for itself and give reasonable return while generating cost-competetive power, it doesn't need the governement guaranteeing it with your money. Unless they've already succeeded in their campaign to destroy the ability to raise free capital in this country.

Nah, I didn't really learn anything from that article, but I'm not too surprised. But there's still value in it by being a seed to /. to get all the contributed ideas and alternatives you see here.

Most times I read ./ just for the story links and disregard all the idiot responses. But on a story like this I figured I could get some useful pointers from the discussion, and I did.

Ten years ago many readers here were probably raiding Dad's cache of floppies, not buying their own. Not most, perhaps, but many.

opendns.com

I find man pages to usually be concise, to the point, and extremely helpful. I hate it when I find there is no man page for a program for which I have a question. I remember when we got our first Unix Sytem 3 v7 system in the '80s. The entire sum of the documentation consisted of one binder of man pages, and one binder of troff-formatted documentation on things like flex, yacc, troff, etc. And it was sufficient for an intelligent neophyte (yours truly), but it certainly wouldn't be suitable for Grandma or my accountant.

The problem with mitigation techniques that rely upon some ongoing activity is that when it is disrupted for any reason, the accumulated upward pressure on temperature is still there which could have sudden, catastrophic effects. (Regardless of whether I'm conviced of the anthropogenic causes of climate change.)

In 2003 the annual global consuption of diesel fuel was 684,022 million liters. That's almost 181 Billion gallons. The 340 million gallons they speak of is about 0.2% of annual consumption, if my math and units translations are right -- haven't finished my first cup o' diesel this yet this morning.

I kid not ... we had to write our programs in Hollerith code by marking cards in pencil. They were 40-column cards so there was a little more room, and a key to the code was printed on the cards in each column to make it, well, possible if not reasonable. The idea was to get programs written offline and run by passing them through the optical card reader, lessening the demand on the handfull of terminals we had. (Maybe the teacher, who really was a good teacher, wanted to run the program himself sometimes to check the results?) In practice, we'd write and debug on the terminals, then transcribe a printout onto the cards to hand in. :-P

problem solved.

you do NOT get to do whatever you want whenever you want. Those rights were temporarily forfeited upon conviction. Sounds like a good idea to me.

Shut up and drink your kool-ade n/t