Because what are laser beams without them?

It's the only way to be sure. Don't forget those safety glasses!

It's not that bloggers are great, but what passes for journalism in the USA is little more than a bad joke. Fact checking? Broad knowledge of the world? Deep thought? When was the last time you saw any of that from a "professional" mainstream media journalist? Even the Economist has become hopelessly myopic and superficial.

That's not the only reason. Intellectually, most of the journalism majors I met in college were fighting it out with education majors for last place. Try and explain something as complex as resource depletion or peak oil, and their heads looked like they'd explode.

Consequently I find that I read bloggers with great enthusiasm (e.g. nakedcapitalism.com), while simply rolling my eyes at the "news" on MSNBC, Fox or NPR.

We probably won't be able to economically sustain the production and use of hydrocarbons at an industrial scale much beyond the next 30 years (We run out of money first, then net energy, rapidly followed by supply chain breakage all the while enjoying price feedback spikes). That takes about 300 exajoules of heat energy off the table each year, plus many fewer particulates and much less CO2. While that may not be enough to stop the methane releases that spiral global warming out of control, we at least slow it down.

Oh, and about 6 billion of us die from starvation.

Cheers!

That's the new reality. The laws just haven't been changed yet. Yet. And yes, the terrorists have won, by making the government and law enforcement do the terrorism for them.

1% of military funds diverted to the development of scalable, human-like artificial intelligence would probably render war obsolete as all resource issues were solved as a side effect, not to mention giving us affordable interstellar travel.

Assuming either is possible. An AI can only help in the domain of solvable problems. Some won't be. It's the inherent limitation of AI>

So, I'm sure that you'll have no problem coming up with a single concrete example where it's cheaper and easier to do this on, or from the moon, rather than Earth....

One. Just one real example.

The moon is a symbol, but there's no *practical* reason to go there, establish a base, a colony, or a really good restaurant. Near earth orbital stations, in contrast, might be developed profitably for power stations, zero G manufacturing of exotic materials, ubiquitous satellite-based internet, and so on.

The focus on the moon and Mars is just cold war era, retro silliness. We have limited resources to throw at space. This is the time to throw them at something that will give us some return.

As companies grow, it's more profitable to buy legislation then compete. The move to expand the H1-B visa program is a perfect example. The best employee is a slave. The closest we get to that in the USA is an H1-B serf. CEOs across the board will try and purchase legislation that reduces their labor costs by insuring a supply of imported serfs, since remote serfs often prove to be less useful.

That's the reality. Anything coming out of the mouth of a CEO or a media company(s) where that CEO sits on the board, is simply self-serving noise.

could possibly be as bad as what Microsoft's own management is doing to Microsoft every day.

For Russia, China or the USA. Economic sanctions imposed on any one of these countries would damage the others. A real land and sea war would soon show just how little extra oil we have to throw around and would use up the remaining cheap, high net energy oil faster. Rising oil prices would again, severely all three economies. If the war continued long enough, this would be a permanent condition.

So, "yay!" to the oil crisis and monetary interdependence. We probably won't have a big shooting war again - just a few minor proxy wars here and there in Asia, Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Middle East. Of course, this is a definite "Not Yay!" if you happen to live in one of these places.

3,850,000 exajoules. Yes, that's a big number all right. As a humorous aside, the hydrocarbon cornucopians believe that there are 10 trillion barrels of oil left in the hydrocarbon horizon of the Earth. I don't doubt them either, though I know it won't help at all.

The problem with oil is declining energy return and increasing price over time. The problems with solar are line losses, intermittent supply, storage (the big one) and borderline energy return (i.e. about 7:1). Of these, storage is the one we have to solve to keep supply chain viability. Currently the best commercial batteries have about 12 percent of the energy by volume of gasoline. We still can't run an airplane on them. We might, with sufficient panels and good weather, run oceangoing ships. There are higher efficiency panels of course, and better batteries have recently been developed. Both use expensive, rare materials. Moreover, these things have to be manufactured and deployed, a process which takes money and time, both of which will be in short supply by the time this becomes a significant problem.

Cognitively speaking, big numbers hide all the annoying engineering details that make the big numbers meaningless. There are (effectively) an infinite hydrocarbons on Titan and Jupiter, which for obvious reason will never be economically nor energetically profitable to exploit as fuel in our lifetime. Just because there's a lot of sunlight doesn't mean that it can all be exploited in an economically or energetically profitable manner either, not to mention the disastrous ecological consequences of blocking major areas of sunlight, (though this is solvable).

Energy is effectively infinite, but not at a rate that's going to effectively substitute for the 160 exajoules per year currently provided by hydrocarbon energy. While I'm a big fan or renewables, even with a full-on effort at conversion, you're just not going to be able to sustain an interdependent, international supply chain based on *cheap* energy, nor will you feed 7 billion+ humans.

The coming population bottleneck can't be avoided. We will, as a species, one day exist on sustainable energy - all of the remaining 300 to 500 million of us, if we're lucky, and we don't throw too many nukes around to celebrate the transition.

We'll have resources forever.!Jesus and Santa Clause and the EIA said so! There's infinite oil and gas! We find more every year RIGHT HERE IN THE USA, don't we?! And we have infinite water! Infinite phosphates! Infinite free money! Golly gosh-a-rootie, the whole ding dang show will just go on *forever* because we have God and TECHNOLOGY on our side!

Whoo, that was too much sarcasm. I have to lie down now.

Here's a short list of interface lies....

1) My error message is meaningful and helpful.
Sure. Like, "Can't find file" with no explicit reference ON THE DIALOG as to the the file name you typed in or the path it was supposed to be in, because God knows, we wouldn't want the user to be able to tell IN A SECOND where the problem was. No, let's make the user *dig* for it.

2) It's OK to shove warning and alert dialogs into people's faces.
After all, when we're at a restaruant, don't we *all* want the waiter to interrupt every few seconds with the night's special, warnings about peanuts, and the effect of alcohol on pregnant women. It's just as wonderful and helpful in software.

3) It's OK to make users wait.
Because users care *so much* about your little issues with processes or your inability to put things into separate threads while you keep the interface alive. I mean, when you're in a restaurant, don't you *love* it when the waiter ignores you because they've got something better to do?

4) It's best to steal input focus from the user.
After all, who knows where they'll type? And so what if they're already doing something else, what could be more important than MY little dialog? Modal dialog, of course, because they shouldn't do anything else until they pay attention to ME!

5) We'll help the user by refreshing his whole screen!
I mean, there's just nothing better than the waiter who rearranges everything on the table after you've started eating, just to make sure you have everything and the food is truly fresh! Of course, this couldn't be a bad habit of lazy, uncaring programmers who couldn't be bothered to get the screen or list right the first time before presentation. No. Certainly not.