WE don't lack the will.

We lack the power.

The ones with the power lack the will (or desire) - because their power depends on control of generation of energy through resources they control; namely fossil fuels. They're not going to give up that power while they have it. Not voluntarily.

The reason thorium never hurt anybody, is because it is complete fantasy. Nobody has ever built one that has demonstrated any degree of industrial reliability and usefulness. Thorium is up there with Fusion, as far as being a demonstrated technology.

I work for a very big, bureaucratic company. Communication tool needs are really different for different scales of companies.

I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, and have a lab across the bay with a couple of coworkers that I generally go to once or twice a week. My current supervisor is in Atlanta; I've never met him in person. I worked for my previous supervisor for a year before I met him. I've worked for my director for about 5 years (he's in Indianapolis, and I've never met him in person.) We work with a bunch of developers and operations folks around the US and some in Eurasia. We use all those tools, and they've got different purposes. For maintaining documentation that sticks around, sometimes it's useful to have wikis and similar web sites that users can edit; for shorter-term documentation, we use tools that are designed for faster communication, and haven't really figured out how to handle the problem of obsolete chunks of information, which is harder on less-aggressively-managed systems.

Social networks are another point in the communications spectrum. For dealing with bug reports or feature suggestions from users, they're less formal than ticket tracking systems, but sometimes that's useful. If some developer wants to steal my ideas or listen to my rants\\\\ insightful comments, that's just fine. We've been starting to do a lot more with social networks, and we'll see how well it handles the problems of disposing of conversations that don't need to be kept around or are no longer current, or keeping information accessible that is current.

At $DAYJOB, we've had a variety of work collaboration tools over the years similar to the then-current* social networking tools. The most useful ones are instant messaging and wikis (or wiki-equivalents), and internal Usenet groups back in the day. Apparently having little badges next to your name is something that some current social networks do, so ours has that also (I haven't used it; I suspect there's some sort of "VMware User - Achievement Unlocked!" sort of thing.)

And we do have games, like "Guess which Wiki pages are current or abandoned!" and "Guess which User Stories in Rally are current vs. long-irrelevant!" (If you win the latter one, you get to submit your own user stories under the ones the Scrum Master is going to reject for this sprint, instead of under the ones he's not even going to look at.)

I will post a less-cynical note elsewhere in this discussion :-)

* ok, actually similar to the then-slightly-out-of-date social networking fads, rather than the actually current ones...

Sir Tim is a Brit, but he was working at CERN, an international collaboration in Europe. Somebody once said that Sir Tim invented 80-90% of what the web needed, while Ted Nelson invented 120%, which is why we use HTTP/HTML instead of Xanadu.

URLs were really the big win - most previous hypertext systems were contained on single platforms, whether it was Apple Hypercard or whatever, while URLs let the hypertext connect pages by multiple authors and organizations. The other big win was including pictures in practical widespread formats.

HTML wasn't as big an invention - it was a derivative of SGML, and five years before the web I was a newbie on documentation standards committees that were using SGML and vector-based graphics standards (and even back then, there were people who got that the big win was content description, not format description, and many of the problems we have today are because too many people lost sight of that and wanted authors to control presentation instead of readers, forcing us to deal with flash and Javascript and lots of other brokenness.)

Traditionally the US government celebrates July 4th by wiretapping the Entire Internet. Didn't you know?

Yes, that's no different from any other day.

Of course they don't. CERN is an international organization, after all!

It's July 1, and friends of mine have used it as an excuse for a party when it's on a more convenient day, especially if they have Canadians around.

There was an event at a nearby university last weekend that had fireworks I could hear. My local community will have a concert and fireworks in the park on July 4th, as will several communities up and down the freeway from here. (I won't be going; traffic is a horrendous fail :-) There have been a few random illegal fireworks every night all week, and I suspect there'll be more tonight, lots more tomorrow, some Saturday, a few Sunday.

Some years ago there was a nearby highway construction project that had a 20-foot-high pile of dirt around for a couple of years. Folks from my neighborhood would bring our lawn chairs up their for July 4th evening, and we had a decent view of the nearest couple of sets of official fireworks and random illegal ones as well.

It's not a planet unless it's a planet. And if it's generating radiation through fusion, it's a star of some kind.