That is pretty much how industry works. There is a right way to shut down a plant, and it involves a lot of things done in the right order. You can do an emergency shut down, and that will not kill anyone, but you will at minimum have to throw a lot of the stuff away that was going through the plant at the time.

Steel works are about a worst-case example of this. Lose power at the wrong time and you have no-longer-melted steel stuck in all the wrong places with no way to remove it. Removing this risk is impossible.

It is difficult to think of something LESS secure than plugging USB sticks into production equipment. I will take ethernet over that any time. At least the ethernet controller and driver is likely to be fairly secure, unlike the USB host and driver.

Systems which are insulated from the Internet rarely get security updates and security reviews often miss them. Yet all it takes is a compromised laptop on the wrong network or a USB stick inserted into the wrong machine, and suddenly the whole "secure" network is up for the taking.

Critical systems should be designed to function despite FSB, Mossad, and the NSA all have having direct access to every LAN. Alas, that is practically impossible to achieve today, industrial systems and management functions do not have the necessary security features to work in such an environment.

I know it is cheating, but you can fairly easily do 1000 miles per tank in a modern diesel, as long as you stay below 60mph or so and avoid cities. I did around 40l for around 1200km over a couple of weeks in a rented BMW.

They work for bilingual users. Case-insensitive file systems are limited to languages with identical case folding. The rest of us are screwed.

Case sensitivity is locale-dependent. If the user is bilingual, the file system then has to guess which language the user is thinking in when opening files.

You missed the memo. You people are supposed to be on the Jewish side against Islam now.

Well, Iraq was pushed to collapse. That did not go so well. Syria was pushed to collapse. Not ideal either.

Burma/Myanmar was not pushed to collapse, and instead relations were softened. That is going fairly well.

I am not sure the push-to-collapse strategy has any successes to its name. Well possibly Germany 1945.

The problem with electric pianos is likely to be the speaker, not the electronics.

A nuclear reactor has a life span in decades, and needs more than a decade to pay itself back. There is no way anyone is going to make that investment when the business case involves something as speculative as tar sand. Tar sand is barely profitable now, who knows what it will be like in 2 or 5 years, never mind the 20+ you need to justify building a reactor.

Oil from a well causes considerably less CO2 emission compared to oil from tar sands. The tar sand does not boil itself.

More or less, yes. An actual extraction tax which would provide revenue (and replace harmful wage taxes) would be infinitely preferable, of course. However that is not on the table,

The difficulty of transporting oil away from the tar sands works as a tax on that oil. A tax which is applied right at the production of the worst kind of fossil fuel we currently have. Keystone XL will remove most of that tax. As it is, tar sand oil is right on the cusp of being economical, and therefore lowering the costs is going to increase production a lot.

What if the set of cost neutral solutions is empty?

This is not true. Both solar and wind can scale as far as you want. There are few places where at least one is not an option, and both can generate way more energy than the world uses (particularly solar).

Given the current construction times for nuclear reactors in the West which approaches a couple of decades from proposal to first production, nuclear is likely to be too little, too late. But by all means, build some nuclear power plants. Particularly if you are in a country which is fucked when it comes to solar and wind, like England.