Pretty much.

Just remember, if the government has the power to do anything you want, it also has the power to do anything that guy over there wants.

His best interests aren't necessarily your best interests. And he may have more money to buy legislation than you do.

Hmm, live in the USA, near a metropolitan area (New Orleans is across the lake).

Had a power interruption here this year. Long enough to reset the clock I'm looking at.

Only power outage I can think of that was long enough to be notable (more than momentary) was Katrina....

Course, the fact that my computers are either laptops or on UPS means I really don't care all that much about power outages.

We need to stop charging money to our children's credit cards, start sending money to it, pay it off completely, and start putting money in savings.

Hmm, sounds like you're ignoring the advice of all the best economists - remember, saving for a rainy day is bad for the economy...we're supposed to spend every penny we make or the economy will go south....

And 15 years ago I bought a massive 2GB drive for $350.

Seems to me that I bought my first 85 MB HDD for about that much 30 or so years ago....

Standford-degreed Google engineer

Stanford, damnit!

Just because the idiot editor let it slip by is no really good reason for everyone to pretend to idiocy themselves....

Oh, and I read the article you're quoting earlier. Wind and Solar are competitive as long as you include the massive subsidies they're currently getting. Enough so that the wind and solar industries are fighting to keep those subsidies (several of which are due to expire soon) intact....

Actually, I think politicians like this care about three things:

All of your "three things" reduce to number 2 - get power. Money and reelections are just part of the Power equation.

It can be reduced even further - all politicians are in the business because they like telling other people what to do. For your own good, of course. Really, trust me - it's for your own good....

Ideally, when electric cars are 'everywhere' you'll be able to pull into your restaurant of choice and start charging up.

Intriguing theory you have about where you're likely to find 5KV electrical connections. Note that since wiring would have to be added to wherever these charging stations are, the infrastructure investment is going to be non-trivial, and so is not nearly so likely to be just everywhere as you might suspect. Much more likely that that sort of connection will be made to specialized places, sort of like a gas station.

If this math holds up, the next interstellar island is further away than we thought... and we are likely going to be a very lonely species.

This math says pretty much nothing about our neighborhood. Remember, one in ten can just as easily be 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0 as 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1.

Even more importantly, this say nothing about our galaxy's likelihood of having life (basically, 100% right now)....

though the details are classified, I believe most bombs on ICBMs are somewhere in the megatonish range.

Try MIRV's in the 50-100 kt range.

The only MT range bombs we've ever put on ICBMs were the 5MT (reportedly) bombs on the Titans, which were decommissioned decades ago.

No comments about Soviet/Russian or Chinese or British or French weapons.

But really, who cares which is faster, which do you think about first when deciding what car to buy;
Fuel economy, price, style, carrying capacity, cost of maintenance, or speed of fill up?

I don't think about speed of fillup at all, because the time required is pretty much inconsequential for any "normal" car.

On the other hand, if the choice i were making included a car that could fill up in five minutes and a car that took a minimum of half an hour, then yes it would make a difference. And not in favour of the half hour fillup....

If you look at the worst ongoing conflicts [wikipedia.org] the biggest and worst are always about religion

Alas, WW2 doesn't seem to have been about religion, and it's still the largest war in human history (and if it were split into two separate wars, they'd be the two largest wars in history).

A healthy hunter-gatherer lifestyle seems preferable to dying from lack of clean water.

What makes you think hunter/gatherers historically had access to clean water? What makes you think that water that the rest of the animal kingdom has been crapping and pissing in is "clean water"?