Problem solved.

Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.

It is NOT bleedingly obvious. For once, the dropoff was much sharper than a normal sunset. Also, it came at a time of peak solar power production, early afternoon on a clear, sunny spring day. Real preparations and plans had to be made. If that makes it easier for the IT crowd to understand, compare it to the Y2K bug. The reason why nothing major happened back then was not because the threat was exaggerated, but because actual code fixing has happened.

If we will ever have large-scale use for Helium 3, it will be for power generation. In which case synthesizing it would make it merely a form of energy storage like hydrogen.

Like, "Yes".

Does it even matter who owns a nuclear power company? Those companies are highly regulated, they serve the same group of people that pay taxes (i.e. everybody), and if they are too big to fail, and something goes wrong for them financially, they will be bailed out with tax money anyway. Not to mention massive subsidies, which have been approved recently , just before the new EU commission took over.

Come on. You can use the same argument on broadcasting basically any activity, sports and music in particular. What's the fun in watching someone play tennis or the violin when you can do it yourself? Well, some can't do it themselves, and most cannot do it nearly as proficiently as the talents/professionals they are watching. Word mincing aside, there is an actual "Ludum Dare" channel on Twitch already. It lets people broadcast how they write a video game over a weekend, and I can assure you it has several thousand viewers when it's on, so there's your proof that there is an audience for people writing code.

Ludum Dare, the competition to write a game from scratch over a weekend, already has its own Twitch channel, and it has several thousand viewers across a good 20 streamers when it's on. So while the efforts of A.P. to get people to watch other people code are appreciated, he's not exactly the first.

What's the point of recording history, if not going over it again?

While I do regret the real financial consequences for creators whose content I consume and appreciate, the annoyance factor and sometimes security risks of online advertising far outstrip my capacity for caring. Pure text ads would be fine by me, but as soon as ads start screaming at me audio-visually, I turn them the fuck off, no matter how much I like the content they surround.

Do you want a James Bond-style supervillain? Because that's how you create James Bond-style supervillains.

The more people you teach to do X, the more of them will end up at the far end of the bell curve for competence at X, and those will be, to stay in your analogy, the rocket surgeons of their time for X.

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.