As I was reading that article, my thought was "Who wrote this crap?" Tendentious scare-mongering and blatant misrepresentation of
Then I looked at the URL at the top of my web browser. thebulletin.org. Ah. Figures. If I'd looked at where that link went before I clicked on it, I'd probably not have bothered.
Ah well, looking on the bright side, at least it wasn't a goatse link.
In a TED Talk debate by Stuart Brand and someone who was taking the "All we need is sunny days when the wind is blowing energy" type person, Stuart Brand made the statement:
"I am not so much pro-nuclear as I am pro-artithmetic."
This, big-time. Industrial-technological civilization is not compatible with "energy only on sunny days when the wind is blowing". The numbers just do not add up for the energy storage schemes proposed.
Aritimetic denialism seems to rule the day among most of the people who claim to be oh so very concerned about CO2, alas.
If you haven't seen or used modern Fortran and think it's anything like Fortran 66/77 then you're mistaken.
As Seymore Cray said, when asked what the scientific programming language of the 21st Century would be, "I have no idea what it will look like, but I'm sure it will be called Fortran."
Meanwhile, nobody has solved the Drake Equation, to actually give us the correct odds of either extreme.
No, but one term in it, the probability of a star having planets, has recently been determined to be pretty close to 1.0.
Doesn't tell us anything about abiogenesis, etc., of course.
Fortunately, I've got a friend who does taxes professionally. I suspect what he bills me is less than his normal rate.
I used to use software (Anything But TurboTax: IA! IA! INTUIT FTHAGAN!!!) but one year, I dumped a bunch of ESPP stock into a managed investment account, which does well, but THE TAX FORMS!!! It's a metropolitan phone book sized stack of paper, and I could not figure out what of all those pages and pages and pages of numbers in very small print were supposed to go in what boxes of the tax forms.
As violent Rambo-esque fantasies started to dance around in my brain (which at my age and shape (round) is really ridiculous) I decided to seek professional help, and that's what I've done ever since.
Has Jackson forgotten what happened 15 years ago when he brought his extortion racket to the Valley and tried it out on T.J. Rodgers over at Cypress.
Heh heh... Great quote from T. J. Rodgers: "Jessie Jackson is like a seagull. He flies in, craps all over everything, then flies back out again."
But "Sunny days when the wind is blowing" energy alone can not power an industrial-technological civilization, which requires 24x7 energy.
I get the impression that destroying our industrial-technological civiliation is considered a feature, not a bug, by many.
The rest are arithmetic deniers.
Besides, the developing world is not going to go back to the subsistence economy they've just begun emerging from. "Been there, done that, didn't like it."
When Comcast rolled out the new cable modems in San Jose, they not only increased the bandwidth of the internet connection, they also removed the cap. At some point "real soon now", I expect some of the traffic on the Comcast side of the cable coming into my house will, theoretically, occasionally be used by someone driving by with the wifi enabled on their cell phone. I see enough "Xfinity WiFi Hotspots" on my own phone when driving around that I spect they're already starting this.
It seems to be a reasonable tradeoff for a considerably faster connection to the internet, and no longer having to worry about the bandwidth cap. (Which I never had gotten very close to, anyway, but it's nice that it's no longer an issue.
As for security, I set the Comcast's wifi up as my guest network, and everything I care about inside the house is firewalled off on the other side of my own router, running DD-WRT, with a different wifi password. I'm not any less secure than I was before.
There was a classic Analog story by that name ages ago, a decade or so before "Jurassic Park"... Somebody (deceased, alas) thought it would be a good idea to clone a T-Rex. Hijinks ensue.
"At this point, the subject was approximately three stories tall, as evidenced by the lack of damage and fatalities above the third floor."
HOLY MACRO!