A better option would be to combine these with something like Aeroscraft cargo blimp to haul 60 tons od stuff in hours (20 -30) to disaster area and then do the delivery by drones.

The stuff could be preassembled kits of food rations, water purification, wide-spectrum antibiotics, perhaps a heater packaged in a light sheltering material with simple, drawn, cuilturally independent instructions in every item.

I'd be much more inclined towards proper, standardized DRM, if the "rights" included my rights, too. The content provider could keep the right to create copies of the content, but I would have the ownership of that particular copy to do whatever I please to do with it. Enjoy, loan, sell, destroy...

Check out Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine: http://www.jnrbm.com/ :-)

Anyway, I was taught early on this is one of the main reasons to attend conferences -- after seeing an interesting presentation (or even poster) about stuff close to yours, you go for a beer or two with the presenter and hear all the failures they suffered and the wrong turns they took on the way. And share your own, too.

The body of science is so much more than just the published papers, you know.

33 or so billion metric tonnes of CO2 annually (assuming all energy comes from this here novelty) requires quite a big hole, doesn't it?

Well no -- if it's for example medical or health care research, then you do have to get explicit, specific, informed concent that can be withdrawn at any time...
There has to be some limits in a civilized society, you know!

I believe there was practically no private research, since Myriad was founded after the gene was already located in chromosome 17 and it was only a matter of time for the teams in different universities to pinpoint the location and find out the sequence. Furthermore, the company was founded by some of the university researchers that took part (well, their labs took part, at least) in the search for the gene.
Myriad was funded to patent the gene, to put it plain and simple. And by holding a patent not just to their gene test, but any BRCA1 sequence test, they have prevented anybody else for figuring out *why* mutations in BRCA1 may cause breast cancer.

You got a lot wrong in your comment, but let's consider only the thing concerning nuclear power generation:
- with all the mining, processing and delivering of fuel plus the ridiculous amounts of concrete required for safe reactor building the CO2e/W of nuclear is approaching that of coal. - nuclear power is generated by huge units, 100's MW, so when they go offline (and they do, eventually) you need a lot of backup power, and it can't be nuclear since it has to be available at moments notice. - there are limited places to build nuclear plants, since they require lots of cool, clean water to operate, and those are becoming rare with global warming I so hope that the luddites would stop pushing for old solutions and would embrace new technology.

Which one you have difficulties with:
- CO2 is a "green house" gas, it traps heat - Humans are pumping it to the atmosphere 40 billion tonnes per year

The logical step from those two to the Antropogenic in AGW is so small and obvious that when Arrhenius figured out the first one and knew the second one 120 years ago, he could make it without any evidence or measurement.
In the realm of physics it's easy to figure things out way before you can get any evidence...

"Rewarding employers" does nothing in the long term, and only 'distorts the markets' in the short term, so it should have never been used, albeit it seems to be the idiocy du jour.
Think about it: if there's no purchasing power, no matter how much the employer is rewarded, there's no cash flow to keep the business viable. On the other hand, if there is purchasing power and thus business, the employer doesn't need subsidies to survive.
The best thing to do to national economy is to tax/destroy wealth at the top and create it at the bottom.
That, and tax/moderate the financial markets regressively, but in relation to time between purchase and sale -- and start from 99.5% or so regressing to 15% in about ten years, forcing investors to care about the long term health of companies and aiming for stable and predictable markets.
Oh, and cut the copyright to 25 years from first publication. But that's negotiable.

Sorry, but just for clarification: are you against roll calls, too? It is "location tracking", after all. RFID is but a mere technical extension of already existing tracking, is it not?

In your ideal world, could I live my life at the same time as a productive member of society and yet completely anonymous to everybody else?

Exactly! This is pretty much what the paternity tests do -- they can rule out paternity 100%, but only give a "good possibility" of fatherhood.
I gather the police will have to have other lines of supporting evidence, too. Which, I assume, are easy to come by if the guy did it. There will be inconsistencies in his story, places he shouldn't have been, places he should have been etc.

It's not that slippery a slope. At least, where I live, neither DNA collected for any research purpose or fingerprints for passports can not be used in criminal investigation, no matter what. That's the law.
Now, it can be argued that the law can e changed anytime "the government" feels like it, but then again, by the same logic the law could also be changed to require everybody to wear AV-recording devices 24/7 at the convenience of "the government"...

You are right, and we have all suffocated!! Or, maybe you are not right...

Oh, it's even easier. You just show people using their computers with only a mouse while having to hold the screen up with the other hand. After three seconds, when the obvious moronity strikes the audience, you show a pure touchscreen phone, and a voice ask "Who ever came up with such a stupid idea?"

Then, maybe, we could get our portable computers with some decent input devices...

The grandparent is a marvelous example of so called sceptics angaging in no scepticism at all, while the parent is a beatiful example of journalists making the actual effort to check, and doublecheck the sources. Too bad one cannot argue a person out of a posititon he didn't argue himself into...