The problem with this is that coal plants can't operate this way. A typical coal plant takes 4-8 hours to reach full power from a warm start and can take 24 hours to cold start. This is why we currently use them for baseload power and use other sources (mostly natural gas and hydro) for load following.

I figured with your sig you would realize there is a lot more to the political spectrum than just the left/right false dichotomy that the US system presents. The voting system ensures that the system will never change from 2 dominant political parties, but it would be nice to at least get a better party than the two shitfests we have now.

You are vastly overestimating the density of these patches, probably due to media sensationalism. For example, the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" has a density of 4 particles per cubic meter of water. These particles are quite small, even microscopic. I know the news stories make it sound like it is just this mass of garbage floating around but that's just not how it is. From the Wikipedia article linked above:

"and the relatively low density of the plastic debris at, in one scientific study, 5.1 kilograms of plastic per square kilometer of ocean area"

I doubt it would be cost-effective to process a square kilometer of seawater to get that paltry amount of plastic, even assuming you could recover 100% of it.

The IRS says Bitcoin is legally property, if you think that doesn't hold the force of law go ahead and try to defy them on that.

The difference is that if it is open source you can actually do something about it. If you are using a closed-source solution there is no way to verify if it backdoored or not. With open source there are the same possibilities for backdoors (especially on a product like Truecrypt which has very few core developers) but you have a much better chance of finding the backdoor if you suspect it exists.

Nope, it won't be a show trial -- it will be a secret trial because "terrorism". The Truecrypt devs wouldn't be able to speak out because they would be in jail.

They can. Unfortunately the NRA is against such technology because "Obama wants to confiscate our guns!".

Sure, conducting a transaction with another citizen is doubleplusungood. What we really need is more middlemen inserting themselves into every transaction, because we don't have nearly enough of that.

A sample return would be valuable. Even if we have geologists (or aresologists) on-site, we will probably be able to do a better analysis on Earth.

We already have answers to many of those questions, why would we need to ask them again?

The IRS policy is to keep email for 6 months. Users may keep email for longer than 6 months in local PST files. It doesn't appear that individual workstations were backed up, assumably the server is (but the 6 months of email from the server is not missing). The rest of your questions are also about backups, if they aren't backing up individual computers then they probably aren't relevant.

If a hacker can recover plaintext passwords by compromising your admin account you have failed as an admin. The most they should be able to recover is a (hopefully salted) password hash.

That's inaccurate. People with larger bodies have a higher basal metabolism rate than skinnier people. If a fat person and a skinny person are eating the same amount of calories, either the fat person will lose weight or the skinny person will gain weight (with all other things being equal). This is why people who are dieting and losing weight often plateau at a lower weight, once they lose some weight their body isn't working as hard (the heart is more efficient, the skeletal muscles have to lift less weight, etc.) and their intake starts to equal their burn rate rather than having a deficit.

Salt Lake CIty has some other things going for it, like being right next to Utopia cities and being close to Google Fiber's existing network in Provo. Google already interconnects with Utopia so it would probably not require as much infrastructure for Google to deploy in Salt Lake as it would in other cities.

If you don't trust the word of The Phantom Mensch, how about Stephen Hawking, he's pretty smart:

"If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn't turn out well for the Native Americans,"
"We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet."

Yeah, and why does the Tachyon have a name, it is only theoretical too! Also, the Higgs Boson shouldn't have had a name until recently, they should have called it "The boson that Higgs postulated" until they actually observed it.

Sometimes, when you are talking about something it is helpful to give it a name so that every time you talk about it you don't have to refer to it as "the planetoid that may or may not have crashed into the Earth in its early history, forming the moon".