It's the 'pre-installed' part that's key. There are lots of times when I sit down at a Windows machine, and I either don't have the owner's permission to install stuff, or even if I do it's going to take 30 minutes just to get everything installed, before I can even start working on the actual problems at hand.

I'd say trust is a survival mechanism. Gullibility is trusting people you should not be trusting, and I don't think it has much survival value :)

Oh, it's stable enough these days. Windows' real unforgivable sin is that it ships without bash, vim, and ssh pre-installed.

My God -- quantum computing has arrived!

Perhaps you would be interested in a BMW i8?

Hmm, a sort of environmental extortion racket? I like it, but somehow the Canadians don't strike me as quite the type to try it. Maybe I'm wrong about that. :)

Are you sure? Because while the relevant technologies will have no doubt advanced by 2025, the scale of the problem will be that much larger by that time as well. It's not obvious (to me anyway) how one would predict where the "sweet spot" would be, or if there even is going to be one -- it's entirely possible that the problems will continuously grow faster than the technology needed to solve them, so that it will never be cheaper or easier to combat climate change than it is today.

Er, why does it seem that?

Is it because any aliens that come here are going to want to take our resources? That seems unlikely, since any aliens capable of coming here would also be quite capable of gathering all the raw materials they need from other locations closer to wherever they came from -- avoiding interstellar freight costs is a huge incentive. (the exception might be "exotic" materials that can be found only on Earth, e.g. DNA, which might explain the cattle abductions -- but they only need samples of that since it's straightforward enough to duplicate as necessary)

Phooey. It only failed because they didn't use XML.

The standard IT solution for this problem is to encode the data as DNA and inject it into a few dozen cockroaches, which you then drive to the nearest KFC and set free.

If you ever need to restore from backup, just put some twinkies in a bowl outside your door, and some copies of your data will be available to you by morning.

That raises the question: Least costly to whom?

If, for example, the carbon emissions from your cheap energy today are going to result in my air conditioning bill doubling next year, shouldn't you be held liable to compensate me for the costs you incurred?

Or on a larger scale, if Shell's tar-sands pollution over the next few years causes Miami to have to be evacuated in, say, 2025, should the cost of losing Miami and relocating all of its people not be somehow factored in to our calculations about what is really "cheapest"? Otherwise we're just robbing Peter to pay Paul.

Possibly true, but that isn't much help for those of us who plan to live (and have our descendants live) during the next few centuries.

Given the relative densities of gold and water, you might want to reconsider that plan ;^)

Hmm. So you get easy access to amazing hardware that previous generations could only fantasize about, at bargain-basement prices, and still you manage to find a way to get upset about it, because somewhere out there, somebody might be making a profit by supplying you with products you want at a price you're willing to pay.

I'm finding it a bit difficult to feel much sympathy for your plight.

OP does point to a real issue though -- drive capacity is increasing faster than drive bandwidth. That means that as time goes on, it takes longer and longer for full-disk operations (e.g. drive backups) to complete.

Since NAND access is (at least in principle) parallelizable, perhaps there is some new SD interface that can increase the transfer rate so that we can keep up for a while longer? I certainly don't much look forward to waiting 15 hours to make a copy of my 5TB SD card...

Commie lib here: because the GOP's tax cut proposals always amount to massive cuts for their hyper-rich campaign donors, coupled with a fig-leaf of minor tax savings for everyone else, followed one year later by the inevitable budget crunch

that then impacts the quality of life of everyone except those who can afford to seal themselves away from society. It's a grift -- everyone but the GOP's campaign funders end up poorer afterwards.