Make sure you don't confuse "achievable" with "economically achievable." With some R&D we could put a man on the moon again, but that doesn't mean it wouldn't effect other government (or private) spending.

Sure. It was this line:

It's over-enthusiastic editorializing.

I'm glad you mentioned the economic trade-offs. Too often proponents of one or the other forget there are consequences to decisions.

I can't believe the Obama administration think there remains some economic trade off with CAFE standards. They should just mandate a 100 MPG CAFE standard for 2013. Heck, that gives car manufacturers over a year to invent new technology and implement it, or just stop selling gasoline cars and sell electrical ones, and overload the electrical grid. (And if you think I'm trolling, you didn't read the post summary.)

You've just begged the question of the economics of the issue. Load and supply management is the problem I outlined, and it's freakin' hard with solar and wind.

Hydro is great if you happen to be somewhere where a hydro plant already exists. Dams are very hard to build now (at least in the U.S.) because of environmental restrictions. Dams have a tendency to drown things upstream.

No, but it still requires a massive area of mirrors, has the standard difficulties with long-range transmission, and now you have lots of waste heat to manage, since you're messing with the ecosystem. The costs and secondary effects kill the idea for large-scale rollout.

When solar can generate power at night, and wind when it can generate power while it's calm.

No one has ever said that it doesn't generate power, just that it's cost ineffective, and requires traditionally generated power in any event to even out the peaks and valleys.

I do like opera's email (aka M2), but I still have thunderbird installed, mostly because Opera has never included S/MIME or GPG/PGP support. Nor smart card authentication, for that matter. I've been using Opera since version 3, and even paid for versions back when that was their model. I just wish they'd let me digitally sign emails and login to websites with my smart card.

SHOCKER: GPS enabled phones know where they are! And when they integrate with an online mapping service, the service knows where the phone is! Can't I just use have a phone with a space-based geolocation system, and not have to know to turn it off if I don't want it to tell me where I am?

Which is why forcing net neutrality is, at best, worthless.

It's Comcast's network, so they should not be forced to put a Netflix server there. And, when they don't, Comcast's customers will punish them. Many will leave -- I did.

If net neutrality is involved the federal government will study the problem, take both sides into account, determine that the market is over-saturated on video anyway, change their opinion based on the new high-bandwidth streaming video PACs, and force in a Netflix server right in time for the IPv6 rollout.

Which is why trying to force net neutrality on the system is ridiculous. People are already voting with their dollars.

Politically, I think it was more of an exchange of space science / engineering dollars disappearing to placate the entitlement spending crowd. Space is frequently a whipping boy "we need to take care of [X] down here on earth before we go to [the moon|Mars]".

SpaceX had already launched before the 2008 elections, and the shuttle program has been a dead man walking for years. Granted, I prefer commercial space exploitation than government, but in Mr. Obama's case I think it was a happy coincidence of interests, not a core philosophy change.

We don't have the basic science for nuclear fusion, though. Mars is largely an engineering problem, not science.

SpaceX is building rockets, so they are doing things in line with going to Mars.

Space programs take a quite a long time to develop. The average government satellite takes around 12-16 years from development to operation. They have to think 10-20 years out.

Well, since the US economy dwarfs every other country's, I'm guessing that they should use more imperial measurements. Heck, if you can't do the math for three feet to the yard, how should you be trusted to use pi? Europeans probably get 1.33381 for an answer when they should get 1.33382.

You're right on. Just because someone doesn't want to buy a product at the price offered doesn't make it a market failure. It just means there wasn't a sale. Far too many people throw around the phrase "market failure" when what they really mean is "the market isn't doing what I want it to do."