What do you bury them with? Fossil fuel powered construction equipment? That's a bit like driving 10 miles to the recycling center with a six pack of soda cans because you don't have curb side pickup. ;)

Not when the trees die and release virtually all of that carbon back into the atmosphere as they decompose.

The watt is a measurement of power. The kilowatt-hour is a measurement of energy. 31 Gigawatts on its own is meaningless. That incandescent light bulb in your closet is rated for 100 watts, does that tell you how much it cost you to operate last month? The power consumption is useless without knowing how long the device was turned on, and it's easier to say "That light bulb consumed 15kWh last month" than to say "That 100 watt light bulb was turned on for 150 hours last month."

Modern hard drives identify bad sectors on the physical media and remap them in a way that is transparent to the operating system. Wiping the HD with /dev/zero will not zero out these sectors, because the OS does not see them, and the HD will not touch them once they're marked bad. If they contained confidential data prior to being marked bad then that data may well be recoverable. It's a huge long shot, but nation-states have the time and resources to chase such long shots.

Physical destruction is really the only way to be sure. Encrypting the drive from the get-go is the next best thing, since any bad sectors will contain encrypted data, though with the cheap price of drives these days you may just as well destroy it when you're done with it.

Sure it does. Human beings have been possessing the cutting edge weaponry of the day since the very first Homo sapiens picked up a rock and bashed in his neighbors head. Possession of weaponry is the quintessential natural law right. It can't even effectively be taken away in highly controlled environments, just ask the poor SOB who just got shanked in the prison shower.

DRM is the least of the problems with this game. They took what is inherently a single player game and turned it into social networking garbage. The online only model deprives you of the ability to play Sim City on the train, airplane, or litany of other unconnected places where you might want to play by yourself to pass the time. It deprives you of the ability to save your game, blow the city to hell with disasters, and resume playing afterwards. People might laugh at this, but that has been a huge part of the Sim City experience since the very first release in 1989. The servers don't speak to each other, so if you create a game on server A and have to use Server B tomorrow you can't play the city you spent hours creating. All of this is a huge problem, and that's without taking into account the DRM and completely inadequate server infrastructure.

The server model doesn't even make financial sense for EA -- ongoing expense for a one-time sale -- unless of course they intend to turn this game into a bunch of downloadable content where they "add" features (that have existed since Sim City 2000, i.e., subways and large maps) every few months for $20 a pop. This is almost certainly their plan, because it's the only way the server model can work without becoming a money pit.

I have played this game since I was ten years old and got the SNES version for Christmas. My sister and I used to spend hours in the public library playing Sim City 2000 before we had our first PC, saving our games on 5.25" floppy disks so we could play again tomorrow. I met many of my online friends -- most of whom I still communicate with -- through an old Majordomo mailing list that I found in a book about Sim City 2000. Hell, Sim City 2000 got me online in the first place. I learned how to make my own scenarios with nothing more than a hex editor and patience. I ignored the eye candy and stupid crossovers with The Sims in Sim City 3000 and Sim City 4 because they were at least smart enough to improve upon the underlying simulation model and keep it true to the franchise.

Disappointment does not begin to describe my feelings about this game, which was the first video game I've shelled out my coin for in five years. No, I'm not a pirate, I've just lost interest in gaming in general as I've aged, but this one had me genuinely excited in spite of my concerns about the online model and DRM. Guess I should have known better. I was one of the lucky ones, got a effortless (except for waiting two hours in chat queue) refund without any argument even though I bought it from Origin. Saved me the hassle of doing a credit card charge back, which is something I would highly recommend for anyone who can't get a refund through other channels. Vote with your wallet, it's the only thing EA understands.

I have the misfortune of living at ground zero for an ongoing wind farm build. 24/7 truck traffic, massive clouds of dust, hour plus highway shutdowns while they move their superloads, obnoxious subcontractors that ignore traffic laws, etc, etc. Then there's the ecological impact -- acres upon acres of wooded hilltops have been deforested. I truly had no idea how obnoxious it was until Google Earth got updated images. Take a look at some before and after photos of a large wind farm and see for yourself how bad it is.

All of this might be worth it if wind energy scaled the same as nuclear, or could provide the same power density, but both of those are utterly impossible. You'll never match nuclear reactions for power density, and the footprint of a nuclear power plant is no larger than that of any other modern industrial concern.

Everything in life is a tradeoff, but having lived near Three Mile Island, and now living in the midst of a wind farm, I'd take the former any day of the week. You simply didn't know TMI was there, unless you happened to have cause to drive by it. Contrast that to dozens of wind turbines, visible for miles around, along with the obnoxiousness of their build process.

Nuclear and low impact hydro are the way to go for base load. Natural gas, along with wind, and solar for the peak load.

What's involved in that verification process? Here in New York, all I'm allowed to do as a poll-worker is ask you for your address and signature. If the address you give doesn't match the address on file you can't vote. In theory we can challenge you if the signature doesn't match but that never happens. Signatures change over time, and we are hardly handwriting experts. There is essentially no mechanism in place to keep people from voting under your name, which is a double whammy because you lose your vote even as they get to cast multiple ones.

Democrats don't like voter ID laws, because they feel (with some justification) that their base is less likely to have ID and more likely to be burdened by the process of obtaining it. I'm not sure what the solution is, but we need something that's more secure than what's currently in place across much of the country.

If Klingon culture comes to voting, can I challenge the winner to a fight to the death if I don't approve of his policies? I'll wager that neither BHO or WMR have experience handling a Bat'leth.

I already listed some of the reasons why. In no particular order:

1) It will undermine the NPT.
2) It will ignite a regional arms race with Iran's Sunni neighbors, encouraging them to seek their own nuclear deterrent.
3) Israel will have to publicly declare her nuclear arsenal, which will further undermine the NPT, and make it that much more likely that the Sunni states pursue nuclear arms of their own.
4) The destabilization of the Middle East will inflate oil prices, which will encourage further Great Power (the EU, the US, China, Japan, India) meddling in the region, with unpredictable consequences.
5) Europe, Russia, India, and China will be forced to pursue missile defense technology, which has the potential of igniting a nuclear arms race that would put the Cold War to shame.

It's not "world ending" but nothing good can come of it. There is a reason why the entire civilized world is united behind economic and diplomatic sanctions. Russia and China watered them down more than the West wanted, but they still supported them. What does that tell you?

Well, to pick one of my many pet peeves with the legislation, they imposed excise taxes on medical devices, which covers everything from pacemakers to hearing aids to contact lenses. How exactly are new taxes on medical products going to bring down costs? Why should a pacemaker be taxed at all? It's not exactly a luxury item.

Except they won't be. For starters, the legislation specifically denies the IRS any enforcement power whatsoever. You can simply refuse to pay the penalty and the most they can do is send you a strongly worded letter. They can't put liens on your property, haul you into court, audit you, or use any of the other enforcement mechanisms at their disposal. More to the point, it's cheaper to pay the penalty than it is to carry health insurance. With guaranteed issue why bother having insurance at all, until you need it? An analogy here would be if you had the ability to buy flood insurance as the upstream levee failed, or the ability to purchase homeowners insurance after the house caught on fire.

Notwithstanding all of the above, the costs imposed on the medical system by deadbeats are vastly overstated, and even at that the mandate won't do much to address them. Deadbeats play a small part in the inflation of healthcare costs, bigger issues not addressed by the ACA include the ever increasing cost of malpractice insurance, an overly burdensome regulatory system, a broken patent system, a shortage of primary care providers, and the incomprehensible nightmare that is medical billing. The latter is something that nobody outside of the industry ever talks about, as a overly simple analogy, imagine the PITA it would be to go through your car insurance carrier to pay for oil changes and wiper blades.

This is one of the best articles I've ever read about our healthcare system. It does not push a left or right wing agenda. It outlines issues with the system that both the Republicans and Democrats refuse to talk about. Give it a read, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts about it.

I'm sorry that you are completely blind to the consequences of a nuclear armed Iran. This isn't some neo-con fantasy, virtually the entire world is opposed to the concept of a nuclear armed Iran. The Europeans don't want it -- they are already within range of Iranian missiles. The Chinese and Japanese don't want it -- anything that disrupts the flow of Middle Eastern oil/raises prices will hurt their economies. The prospect of the NPT going down in flames is something that concerns all civilized nations, even those without economic interests in the Middle East.

The only real question at this point is will the Mullahs back down? If they don't, the best they can hope for is to become the North Korea of the Middle East. They'll be completely isolated both economically and diplomatically. War may still come, though I earnestly hope that it doesn't get to that point.

You don't have to be an "aging cold warrior" to fear the geopolitical consequences of a nuclear armed Iran. One of the biggest fears is that her Sunni neighbors would feel compelled to obtain their own nuclear deterrent. The resulting arms race would further destabilize the region, undermine the NPT, and increase the odds of a nuclear device falling into the hands of non-state actors.

China actually likes the status quo, she spends none of her own blood and treasure, yet has full access to the oil she needs to grow her economy. China, Japan, and the EU all rely on Middle Eastern oil to fuel their economies. The power vacuum would be filled by all three of the aforementioned superpowers, with unpredictable geopolitical consequences. A particularly scary scenario is Japan renouncing Article 9 in order to deploy forces to the Middle East. Such a move would inflame passions in China (and other Asian countries), further destabilize an already tenuous relationship between two economic superpowers, and ignite an arms race that ends with a nuclear-armed Japan. India is in there too, they already have nuclear weapons, and a billion people, so that's one hell of a geopolitical wild card to consider.

For the time being at least, the United States remaining engaged in the Middle East is the least lousy of the available options. As an American, I'm not particularly fond of my tax dollars subsidizing the defense of China's oil, but hey, it sure beats the hell out of WW3.

As I said, it's within the margin of error, which is generally 3 to 5 points, depending on the poll. I originally said, "MI may well prove to be competitive." It's certainly more competitive than BHO having a 97+% chance of victory. Even Intrade (where people have to put up real money, would Mr. Silver be willing to do that?) doesn't give him those kinds of odds.

I'd might willing to get behind the notion of turning it over to the US Navy; decades of reactor operation without any significant radioactive releases or (nuclear related) accidents. Not so sure that we want to see it turned over a civilian bureaucracy though.