Let's see, he cuts off IR#1 at 1830, which pretty much misses the entire steamship revolution and the invention of so many consumer goods of the 19th century, not to mention, the facilitation of mass immigration to the USA by all those steamships, the openning of the west due to practical railroads.

Then, he cuts off the next IR at 1900, and thus misses aircraft, the widespread adoption of the telephone and radio, and consumer appliances.

And then, having decided that aircraft, telephones, radio and steamships were useless, he says that the next 60 years of IT will mean absolutely nothing.

I would be inclined to think he is totally wrong.

Here's the whole problem. Even if we reduced CO2 emissions to ZERO, it could still take hundreds of years for the oceans to uptake the excess CO2 and transfer it to the bottom. So, right now, mitigation and risk management are the strategy.

Musk once alluded to a better manufacturing process for actually building rockets. So, instead of saying that he's taking shortcuts and what not and doesn't have layers of bureacracy, what if he just has a cheaper way to build rockets that are better?

Is that it simplifies language binding. If you have the core stuff written in C, its fairly easy to bind to it from any language, whereas C++ is much more difficult - if not impossible, as I don't even think there is a standard C++ ABI. Certainly not on Windows. So, if you have your core os stuff written with C bindings, then, any language maker can talk to it, so that, if users want OOP languages, they can use anyone of them, not just C++.

I was a programmer that helped put together document management systems for people trying to get some compensation for the rather extensive environmental damages caused by the nuclear weapons industry and I feel a few facts are in order:

a) All nuke stuff is already privatized. It's subcontracted out or has been to players like EG&G, Dupont, and others.
b) Originally, no contractor in their right mind would touch the manhattan project. So the government indemnified them.
c) Layers of secrecy already exist within the privatized world, and unaccountability. And the military has a hand in it is as well, obviously.

Bottom line is, the result is, we got the bombs, the mess that was made is appalling, and the full story may never really be known. The moral is, it doesn't matter who does it, civilian or military, per say, as much as, what is needed is a genuine degree of openness and accountability and that is extremely hard to do when you also have to keep everything a secret. People abuse the system.

Will this armed paramilitary wear brown shirts and make sure that any "abnormal" citizens are detained and interrogated?

You do realise that to most people in most parts of the civilized/first world, this sounds completely insane, right?

Two handguns for self defence? Insane. Guess what I have for self-defence in the first world country where I live? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Not even a bat or knife. Times I have been violently murdered or robbed so far: 0.

A "standard" .223 carbine... that you can buy at a neighbourhood variety store. Insane.

A shotgun, "pretty typical for hunting small game". Insane.

Even more insane, though, is this idea that your hobby/paranoia (which are the two reasons you implicitly think people should have guns) outweighs other people's safety.

Where I live, you actually don't see guns, other than small handguns, in holsters, carried by the police. That's it.

Guns don't kill people, people kill people. Guns just make people way more effective at killing each other. That's what they are for. Take up archery, buy a can of mace, and stop being so completely ridiculous about your weapon-infested society.

http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/research/hicrc/firearms-research/guns-and-death/index.html

I'm probably an ignorant southerner, but isn't "Gold Coast" just a fancy name for "the outer suburbs of Brisbane"?

And if their maps wrongly placed their destination in completely the wrong place, they'd be equally screwed.

What's your point?

Before there is too much stupidity, if you've never been to Australia, please realise:

1. It's huge. Really huge. I live in one out of two of the closer-together cities in Australia, and they're about 800kms apart. In the other direction, the next major city is 2,500kms away.

2. It's mostly empty (in terms of civilization). Think of driving through rural Utah or Arizona, which are quite similar to the Australian bush.

3. It's mostly flat and full of similar looking landscape.

4. National parks and non-national park areas often look quite similar.

5. There's usually only one or two ways to get around in the country.

6. Mildura is a small town in the middle of bloody nowhere. If I was driving there from here I'd expect to pass through a handful of tiny settlements on the way.

So if you are relying on your GPS to get you somewhere outside a major city, it's actually quite plausible and reasonable that you might not have much idea that you're being led off in the wrong direction until you (don't) get there.

It's also quite plausible that you can die - it has happened before. People get lost, they run out of fuel, they don't have water, the temperature easily gets up into the 40-50C range and - dead.

Given that Windows 7 (what I use... haven't tried 8) still natively runs things designed for Windows 95 and 98, I'm not sure when or how you think Steam is going to "stop working" on Windows.

Disney movies won't play in my bluray player anymore. (Pixar/Disney.) Everything else does.

Letting Hamas and other terrorist organizations use Twitter keeps them in reach. Do you really want them to make their own, harder to find, twitter. At least this way, everyone can know what they are thinking.

The numbers the Guardian cites are somewhat dated and don't reflect the very recent American switch over from coal to natural gas. Many electricity operators have converted their coal plants to burn natural gas instead, because hydrofracking has made natural gas so cheap in the USA. This trend will continue and the result has been a net reduction in CO2 emissions, so much so that right now I believe the USA is on track to beat the EU at the CO2 reduction game (kickass!), because the Germans are retiring their nukes and using coal now in the winter.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/428947/a-drop-in-us-co2-emissions/

and, while I disagree with this article about the risks / rewards of fracking, it is worth pointing out that as America switches to natural gas, the Europeans are buying our coal...

http://www.zmescience.com/ecology/environmental-issues/co2-drop-us-25092012/

But, we humans ARE chimpanzee groups in a loose sort of way.