The right approach to this is to cover parking spots for electric cars with solar panels. That gives you enough surface area to get a reasonable charge. Since electric cars are still fairly rare, you only need a few such spots in a shopping center or business park.

Hey, you know what they say: if something's worth doing, it's worth overdoing!

(Also, in retrospect, the tongue-in-cheek didn't translate to text as successfully as the sarcasm.)

Um, anywhere? Hydroelectric plants, windmills (even low-tech Dutch-stereotype ones, if necessary), steam-turbine generators fueled with anything flammable (wood, trash, soybean oil, whale oil, dead bodies -- anything!)... oh yeah, or you could even just do solar thermal and skip the PV entirely.

You might want to check and see if there is a "Makerspace" (community workshop) in your area. The one's I'm familiar with have better machines than home users can afford, because the cost is split up amongst multiple people. Some of them are for-profit ventures, others are non-profit membership type places.

> I can't imagine I would need/want to 3D print something that often that having my own 3D printer would make sense.

What will likely happen is home centers/hardware stores, or independent businesses, will have pro-grade 3D printers that you can go to and print stuff out when you need it, like the Office Depot/Max/Staples stores have a copy center in the back with pro-grade Xerox machines.

> Everything else is wood, glass, polished chrome or brass, electronics, plant or animal based cloth/textiles

Hence why makerspaces are becoming popular, and why I am working on self-expanding production (where you make parts for more machines to expand your capabilities). A home 3D printer simply won't satisfy most needs that people have. A makerspace (community workshop) can afford to have multiple computer-controlled machines (CNC Router, laser, etc.) that can work in different materials and different sizes. For example, a 4x8 foot router table can cut up an entire sheet of plywood to make self-assembled furniture. Such a device is reasonable for a community shop, but unreasonable for most home users.

The next step will be a "MakerNet". A single community workshop may not have all the machines to make a desired product. So when you want something, software will divide up the product design files and send them out to multiple locations, who between them can do all the various parts.

Netflix is a struggling, midsized company. Amazon is bigger than Comcast. Netflix doesn't actually buy all that much bandwidth, as they use a clever CDN (much of which is host by Amazon). Amazon is, I think, the one of the bigger ISP customers in the world (not sure who actually has the biggest pipe in the world these days, but Amazon is up there). For a lot of consumer ISP customers (the kind of customers they like, the ones that don't do much), Amazon == online shopping.

Microsoft and Google are similarly powerful. You can kick Netflix around, but that short list are the most cash-rich and tech aggressive companies around (needing facebook to make the list of heavy-hitters complete).

Give it time, it's growing. It won't ever have titles from EA of course (and nothing of value was lost), but indie dev studios have discovered it, and the percentage of new small titles available on both Steam and GOG is growing. And who knows, with the success of their own AAA title, some of the bigger studios might finally cave as well - at least those not so arrogant as to be exclusive to their own homebrew distribution network.

And what do you suggest knowing about it can accomplish? The number of politicians who are the ones to benefit from the broken system barely even constitute statistical noise.

This bullshit about it being the voters' fault is because morons DON'T understand Duverger's law and still cling to the delusion that everything would be unicorn farts and fairy semen if everyone would just "catch on" and vote for fringe 3rd parties.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, the Hen Housing Project still just gets to choose from two choices for the Vulpine HOA.

That might be more of a valid analogy and less of an obvious shill if the "recipient" of overnight delivery was already paying for it.

I suspect that the latter directly impacts the former.

Oligarchies don't have to listen to anyone, sadly. Everyone needs to learn how to do everything for ourselves or we'll become extinct when all the resources run out. (sooner than you think)

We'll all have to learn how to adapt to space without governments if we are to survive as people. If you were to set a course for a distant nebula, nobody could catch you as long as you kept your heading.

But that kind of travel is very far off. One breakthrough could trigger a chain reaction... a singularity.

Linux on the desktop is easy now. What are you talking about? Do you work at MSFT? Apple? Google?

WHO DO YOU WORK FOR? ;-)