Stop bombing the Middle East for a few hours, or stop the global mass surveillance for a few minutes, and you're set for the year. But hey, at least you have your priorities straigth.

I bet open-pit mining for coal, uranium looks SO much better in your typical landscape, and the pollution from burning coal doesn't kill very many birds.

Generally, a public company will invest only if there is an expectation of an acceptable return, or if they are forced to by actual regulation. Businesses like power, water, public transportation, telecommunication, and others require huge investments to get into the market, where possible at all, so there is no real competition either.

http://i.stack.imgur.com/sgctZ...

Wow, 6 years ahead of expectations? Sounds a lot like how publicly traded companies set lower goals so they can over-achieve them. Germany already has over 50% renewable electric power on sunny days, while having about the same insolation as Alaska. 50% by 2025 doesn't seem awfully ambitious to me, especially in Australia. They have the sunshine hours and they have the large, unused areas. What the hell is stopping them? I can only guess: lack of political will.

The way I see it, he had the mutually exclusive choices of revealing nothing, making an ineffectual internal complaint, and doing what he has done. If he had actually raised substantial concerns, officially or otherwise, he would have lost his security clearances in a heartbeat.

That may be a rhetoric criticism to be leveled against Google, but the law has a different opinion. Google and their users have entered mutual contractual obligations. Whether or not those obligations directly involve money in any way does not matter.

A customer is someone who receives a service from a company, even if the (monetary) price for that service is zero. Google and their users have agreed on certain terms which gives the customer some rights (using the services offered by Google), and Google some rights (collecting and using the customer's personal information for ads, etc.)

Uranium mining is hazardous to the miners and local/regional residents because of the radioactivity they are exposed to, uses large quantities of water to reduce airborne uranium dust, and uses a lot of fossil fuel to separate the uranium from the gangue and to transport it to the consuming power plants. Therefore, nuclear also kills every day. It just doesn't usually happen in the country using the nuclear fuel, so it's effectively Somebody Else's Problem, but a problem nonetheless. Nuclear power is NOT carbon neutral by a long shot, much less environmentally neutral.

And if that fails, at least give us a standardized interface to share our data, for saving costs.

You seem to forget the asteroid launched at and hitting Earth by bugs (implausible as that may be, but that's the story)

Stanley Cubrick did it in 1971, and it's been a classic since. Ah yes, the old ultra-violet. Nothing like milk plus to sharpen you up a bit.

This time it's not political critters developing a shred of common sense, it's political critters channeling civil society's common sense and massive protests. For once, they have worked.

"Unable to connect to database server"

1. Make the proof for P=NP the new CAPTCHA
2. Wait for crackers to solve it.
3. Profit!!