Well, I guess all measures work only to a certain extent. You could equally ask if a paid data backup service covers the case of a 10km asteroid obliterating all life on Earth, or a nuclear war. But that doesn't mean that botching it by not adopting reasonably workable measures is justified by these extreme examples.

Perhaps mass spread of smart appliances and a bit of weather prediction could change things a bit. Your dishwasher, washing machine, accumulation heaters etc. would use the generated electricity whenever it would be available but not desirable to sell back.

Also, when it comes to handling all simple 404, there could be a browser extension that would redirect you to archive.org. People would be able to use that on existing content. It's what I'm already doing manually, only this would be faster.

By the way, I always thought that URIs were supposed to handle precisely this - that they were supposed to be unique, universally accessible identifiers for contents and resources - identifiers that, once assigned, wouldn't need to be changed to access the same contents or resources in the future. Oh, hell. Now we have to add extra layers on top of that?

Furthermore, they completely forgot the obvious ethical dilemma of an InfoWorld web site programmer tasked with implementing multi-paged articles.

Uh...you reorient the solar panels? (If you don't have solar trackers already, that is.)

That much is perfectly fine, but why should a customer who decreases his electricity consumption by, say, 5 kWh per day by means of installing solar batteries be treated differently than a customer who decreases his electricity consumption by 5 kWh per day by means of buying more energy-saving home appliances?

We can't have scientists doing experiments like these! Think of all the minimum wage jobs workers!

It's the editing of the submission that I find (mis)leading.

If by "making shit up as I go", you mean "recalling interesting stuff from books I've read years ago", then yes. Otherwise you're not making too much sense.

I'm not sure it's about the limestone "not staying there", I always understood it as a matter of increasing the crust's overall absorbing capability, by circulating it over greater thickness of rock layers. If you absorb as much CO2 in a comparatively thin (but static) layer of rocks near the surface as you can (with the absorption speed steadily decreasing), what happens then to the rest of atmospheric CO2? That might just be the thing that happened to Venus. Or not. I'm not the expert, I'm afraid.

If you bothered to read the article (or the book I linked), you'd find out that plate tectonics is crucial in the long-term carbon cycle that snatches carbon-containing minerals and, passing through subduction zones, deposits them in the depths of the Earth. (I'm not a geologist but I also vaguely recall that the hydration of these minerals contributes to the increased levels volcanic activity near the subduction zones, by means of lowering the melting point of rocks - which is how the cycle gets closed, since this volcanic activity releases the carbon back.)

(Just to be a little bit more specific, this was about the "how important plate tectonics may be to life" part, not about new findings in the area of plate tectonics mechanisms which I'm sure are new.)

I believe I've read similar arguments some time ago in a book titled Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe. It was published a decade ago. So it's a slow news day again, I guess. ;-)

Code golf. And no, I don't think we should allow larger code holes that one-liners.

See, suddenly a good reason to buy those solar panels and that battery system for the basement...