You can recover data from metal dust? A few seconds with a grinder on the disk faces should work quite well. Disassembly and physical destruction doesn't seem the easiest way, but it would work.

Why do republicans always side with large corporations?

The same reason the Democrats do - fund raising. It's not like the Dem's don't have their own corporate favorites, like GE, who wangled waivers from ObamaCare. They now even have their own version of crooked corporate friends in Solyndra.

Obama is a politician, anything good becomes public quickly, whatever is hidden isn't so good. If he had earned straight As, it would have been a NYTimes headline for a month before the 2008 election, just to prove how much smarter than Bush he was.

Since power plants aren't things that you can just switch on and off on a whim,

Time to turn in your nerd license while you take a refresher EE/power course. Peaking plants, often natural gas burning turbines, are designed to be turned on and off as needed.

There may be idle machinery, but no wasted electrical potential. What do you think all those thousands of power EEs do with their time if not make sure the grid is reasonably efficient?

http://battleland.blogs.time.com/2011/07/05/u-s-navys-brand-new-aluminum-ship-foiled-by-seawater/

Rust no, but oxidize yes.

The question isn't one of models, but of facts. Professor Richard Lindzen has a recent paper out that shows that 16 different climate models predict a positive feedback effect in the upper atmosphere, while the satellite record shows a negative feedback.

Hmmm. So agreeing with Richard Lindzen (MIT Professor of Meteorology) that the facts don't all agree with AGW makes you a Republican and an anti-science type? Seems to me to be an ignorant position on your part.

What you suggest might happen in the emergency room is charity. And since when did any offer of charity return a right of control over the charity recipient? That doesn't happen under any set of ethics or morals I know of. Nor is forcing the hospital to give free service a charitable act.

Only a slave owner has the right to demand products or services be given to him or her as a right. There is no right to health care in a free society.

It's the reason for Henry Petroski's famous remark that "The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry."

Hmm.. Just maybe that extra cycle time might now be spent doing something constructive that we did not do when cycle time was dear? Sending and receiving email used to be quite cheap. But add in cryptographic signatures (rfc 4871) and the cycle time spent on one piece of mail goes up an order of magnitude.

The software industry would be derelict if it didn't try to find something useful and profitable to do with the extra cycles granted it. Well, I suppose there are exceptions. I find youtube.com to be useful, even if Google doesn't find it profitable.

Do a search on "smokey yunic adiabatic". He was working on this 10-20 years ago.

I agree, but for a different reason. The problem is that IT does improve productivity, it's just that it isn't as much productivity as it maybe could be. This is not $6T that we ever had, it's $6T that we might get if we could perfect IT. But since IT involves people, it's never going to be perfect. Since we never had the $6T to begin with, it's not a loss.

You mean except for the fact that humans had a hand in the Little Ice Age as well?

Got a link for that? Somebody worried about all the whale oil being burnt? Not enough warm blooded animals swimming in the deep so the ocean cooled?

I was standing on top of a mountain

Standing on a high point tends to give you a clear path to cell towers quite some distance away. Flat land, like North Dakota gives great reception 30 miles from a cell tower as there are no obstructions. And even if it's populated like farm towns in the Midwest, and everybody has a phone - well most farmers spend most time working, not yakking and there aren't enough folks in a 30 mile circle to need that many cell towers.

And labor in Sikkim is probably cheaper than labor in the USA, so building that cell tower was cheaper.

You are right that the business model of locked-in phones is a pain, but your examples of better service are apples & oranges if you are comparing the sparse farmers of Sikkim to the densely packed IPhone users of Silcon Valley.

Other than it is liquid and burns in air, and at a low enough temp not to melt the engine parts.

More important might be that not much is known about what politicians will do ....