I work in San Francisco and live in East Bay. My house is a block away from a Transbay bus stop, and with its use of the carpool lanes I can get into the city faster via bus than is possible in a car. Once in the city, I can either stroll for a pleasant walk along the Embarcadero to my office or I can ride a Muni for under a buck, and the latter drops me off next door to Safeway with their Sriracha Sausage Breakfast Burritos ($2.71 including tax).

It's easier, faster, and cheaper to ride the bus than drive, and I get breakfast burritos. I'm living the dream.

I used to and still would if my work hadn't moved further away than it already was (from a 10 mile commute that I could bike in an hour to a 14-17 mile commute depending on route that takes more like an hour-and-a-half at 12 miles an hour (and that is biking hard - most of it is really hilly terrain and lots of stoplights and signs). I really can't afford to spend 3 hours of my day commuting - two is my breaking point, and it's a 15 minute each way drive, even at rush hour (suburb-to-suburb). I never did that in winter, but I used to bike 3-5 miles to various jobs year round. Even with windchills hitting -40 (C, F, same thing) I did that commute, often hot because I was buried in layers and wearing snow-pants and wool socks. For rain I wore something called a slick suit (? - something like that) - a racing motorcycle rain jacket I bought at a garage sale, waterproof pants (same sale), and a plastic bag under my helmet (and if it was bad, goggles).

It's even worse for me - gotta walk 10 minutes to the stop at 7AM, catch the express downtown waiting at a completely exposed bench (sucks in hot of summer and cold of winter - or I can walk another 15 for a covered one), then either pay extra to catch the train that runs every 20 minutes (that would be a no brainer if free) or wait an hour for a bus going out of downtown that takes 25 minutes to get back on the freeway due to downtown congestion, then wait for and catch a city circular (usually less than 20 minutes) that still drops me a 10 minute walk from work. Easily a 2 hour commute, if not more. Honestly, it is faster to bike, and it isn't a fast bike route - about 17 miles on the paths or 14 if you trespass across the train hub (which I usually do unless trains are blocking it, and there's only really one place you can feasibly cross where the embankments aren't too steep, which is conveniently visible from the bike path).

This is a wonderful idea, as long as: the people facing backward don't puke on takeoff; flight attendants don't mind breaking up the inevitable fistfights; and you remove the bathrooms so that there's no temptation for the 6'4" next to the window to want to pee mid-flight. Except for all the horrible downsides, I don't see any drawbacks.

Not to mention compensation isn't always just in pay, especially when talking about Silicon Valley. A friend of mine moved from the Midwest to California because he was an expert on a proprietary system after the other expert in the world died of a heart attack. They bought him a "modest" million-and-a-half dollar house comparable to the one he lived in before (no more than $100000 - he sold about the time I bought and we had comparable houses) and gave him a million dollar signing bonus if he stayed on for two years. He's been there over 20. I don't know his salary, but the last time I spoke to him he said his kids are set up for life (unlike me, he hit it huge with stock options, but I'm sure his salary isn't bad, either).

This is very much true - I eked out a living in California and shared a cramped apartment. Took a pay cut to move back to the Midwest (where my family is from), bought a house and almost have it paid off. The first couple of years I had a house-mate, but after my salary started skyrocketing I stopped sharing until I met my wife-to-be (and now wife).

The U.S. military slaughtered bison to control native populations. Small herds were kept and bred by private ranchers to save the species from extinction.

Underestimating time needed happens all the time in the software industry. It probably is worse in the gaming industry where publishing deadlines often get set 6 months or more in advance, but I still get hit with guaranteed release dates for customer commitments at my job now where I've put in ~100 hour weeks to fulfill (telecommuting many of these probably saved my marriage, as I would work 4 hours after my wife went to bed). Still, it is nothing like the 160 hour weeks in the office for a game release crunch (and no, that isn't all work - I slept on beanbag chairs in the testing room and they catered in meals, but at some point you're just so burned out and stinking of feet that you need a night sleeping at home and a long shower).

I can't think of any instance where I've cost a project, but I'm sure they exist. OTOH, I did have a workaround for a $5 million dollar contract where the customer was going to reject our Linux port due to a bug I found and reported. The developer and pubs person assigned the defect were laid off after 9/11 so the defect slipped through to the customer. Fortunately, I overheard a sales person talking about it and supplied the workaround, saving the contract.

Fukushima had generators that were floodable and a sea wall that was too low. Neither of those would be allowed for US plants (the generator issue was called out in the US and corrected years ago). The plant ran on battery backup for a day, but then was powerless. If they hadn't lost power, there would have been no meltdown.

I don't know about Besse (in fact, first I've heard his name), but at least the NRC has some teeth. I still think the nuclear lobby influences them, though. Vastly better than the AEC, however, where they had the dual job of promoting and regulating nuclear power, which created a conflict of interest.

And the article then didn't have a single thing about nuclear accidents. It was about some protesters they broke into an enriched uranium storage facility's grounds. Had these been highly skilled terrorists, they'd need to break into the actual facility, kill or disable the guards, steal the uranium and escape before reinforcements showed up... and then would have to assemble a bomb with it. A dirty bomb with uranium would be a waste of time, as you'd do vastly more damage with conventional explosives - with a dirty bomb you want a fast alpha emitter like polonium that gets breathed in or eaten or a fast decaying gamma emitter (almost certainly too dangerous to handle without special equipment) if you want to do any damage at all with the radioactive part of it, so we're talking about a real nuclear weapon. That means either smuggling the uranium out of the country and assembling the bomb and then getting it somewhere for detonation or attempting to secretly manufacture and detonate it in the country with every authority in the country looking for you. Oh, and the uranium you stole needs to be enriched enough to be used in weapons. If you got the wrong stuff, it may only be useful for power plants.

I don't know about you, but IMO we're hitting impossibly unrealistic scenarios.

The addresses are longer, so there will be a bit of a hit because of that, but I suspect the routing table for IPv6 between you and that site has fewer nodes and those nodes are overloaded. Either that or the government is weighting certain nodes to route your data to specific places like England and back so they can vacuum it all up and use it for domestic spying. That would be the paranoid option, as they definitely wouldn't do something like that. Or would they?

I live in a moderately large city and a densely packed suburb, but have had that problem for years, but only because I refuse to do business with Comcast. The providers outside of Comcast seem disinterested in updating any hardware in the neighborhood because we lack businesses. Comcast, OTOH, has rolled out new services to my neighborhood first, exactly because we are densely packed and they care less about business services than selling TV package bundles (internet is secondary, businesses are a bonus, but not a big TV draw). CenturyLink has added service to the north, south, and west of me almost certainly because they are densely packed with businesses.

That said, Comcast's TV packages were too spendy for my tastes, and that caused me to go down the rabbit hole of not bundling with them, and then they charged me $10 a month for not doing that, and then that makes CenturyLink cheaper for internet, and so on. I honestly think it should be illegal to bundle your own products at a discount. It is anti-competitive to undercut competition only through bundling your own products, and especially when the competition doesn't offer the same range of products because you're a regulated monopoly (i.e. nobody else can run cable lines by law - they have a monopoly on this).

Now someone convince my ISP to upgrade their damn hardware already (PPPoE that only supports IPv4). My machines and domain were configured to support IPv6 for a decade-and-a-half now, but only one ISP supported it. Had to drop that line (run by COVAD) due to the expense and not needing 99.9% uptime requirements (because I stopped running a business on it - it now runs my hobby site).

The market loves when we have formal documents laid down by the Formal Documents People confirming what we've been telling our bosses for years. I would bet large sums of money that some tech, somewhere, just walked out of a meeting happy because he finally has permission to deprecate a long-broken system.

The price of solar and wind construction is finally starting to get to parity with other energy forms and you tack on the expense and replacement cost of batteries, and probably patented designs that manufacturers will charge a fortune to use...

Your "2-5 years" is now pessimistically 22-25 years.

I'd put my money on mechanical storage in the short term (vacuum sealed flywheel). It is more lossy than battery storage, but for short term is cheap, gives on-demand energy, and well out of patent (though more efficient designs may be patented).