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.

This keeps coming up. The effects of an electromagnetic pulse and a solar storm are completely different. EMP is a big RF pulse with a risetime in the nanoseconds. This is a risk to input transistors connected to external wiring. Twisted pair, coax, and small mobile devices are relatively immune. Fiber optics are totally immune.

Solar storms induce DC voltages across long distances of conductive landscape. This is a risk only to transformers with grounded center taps connected to long transmission lines.

Here are the PJM power grid emergency procedures for geomagnetic events. They had to be implemented for a day two years ago. Almost nobody outside of power grid operators noticed.

Neither am I willing to take the word of some random dude on the Internet. Barring any more proof, I don't think we should be putting any stock in this.

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.

Nifty. But is it preserved when sold?

This guy hasn't even shipped a product.

Considering the failure of 3D TV and 3D movies, 3D headsets have to be viewed as an iffy business proposition. The Oculus Rift may turn out to be the Segway of display devices.

They have? I haven't gotten any free books. I think you're making shit up.

Memory transistors are about a thousand times larger than CPU transistors. Do try to keep up.

That's pathetic. All that effort to make a super-thin device, and you have to put it another case to protect it. Nokia would laugh.

Get a non-toy phone.

It's amusing that Apple can't get sapphire-coated glass to work. Sapphire glass for checkout scanners is a standard product. Every Home Depot checkout scanner has sapphire-coated glass. People slide metal tools across those for years without damage.

There are always "patented mining claims" for sale in my state. Does the patent convey with the title?

I'm not worried about the peeping tom. I'm worried about the peeping tom who is in fact a government snitch, since nearly any private activity could be construed as illegal, given the right spin and a motivated prosecutor, especially in a climate of moral panic.