Solar is not cheaper than coal for two simple reasons. It is not noon 24 hours a day 7 days a week without clouds and the land you put it on is not free and neither is the cabling and switching of the power.

Lets run some basic numbers: lets assume 20% solar cells (pretty high) and lets assume 24 hour noon sun 7 days a week without clouds. At the equator that gives us about 160W per m2. So we need 188000m^2 of solar panels, or 18.75Ha, or a square 433 meters on each side completely covered in panels. Only thing is that facebook goes down after noon, or when its cloudy or in the winter or if the panels are not at the equator. Now factor all that in, add some extra capacity, storage and cabling and you quickly see how solar is *not* cheaper than coal.

The cost of solar power is *not* just price per watt at optimal illumination.

?? what? I have many linux boxes here with a range of nvidia cards. They all run at about the correct speed. As in at full speed with the expected performance you would get in windows.

Of course many of the mobile cards do have low expected performance... and are not cheap either. You pay for small or power saving it seems... But then laptops are not really where high performance gaming is at regardless of OS.

Why do you need to switch? I think you can use both.... If Desura has a game you really want, you don't have to dump all your steam games.

Linux... It gives you linux. Steam is not on linux yet if ever. There was a time i would reboot to windows to play games. I don't anymore. So these guys do get money out of me because i can get some linux games. Steam does not. However if they where to offer a linux client and had some of their games available on linux.....

As for why OS is better? Well in this case it means linux distro devs can fix bugs and keep it working if they care enough.

In what way was it debunked? By the fact that the western world didn't grind to a halt?

You can go above iron as well. Adding a single proton or neutron to most elements above iron still gives a net energy output. Quite a bit of output too.

D+D fusion produces T. Tritium has a half of about 12 years and decays via a low energy beta decay. Its not totally harmless or anything, but its pretty safe over all because of its low energy decay, and because it doesn't accumulate in any one organ if it does become bio available. However is a real bitch to keep contained.

Neutron activation is perhaps a bigger problem. When we get fusion working, using low Z elements should allow for pretty short half life activation products. So the structure would be safe in weeks to a few years. A poor choice of materials is probably still safe after 20 years or so.

Now. We don't have the machinery, computers and sensors now. There is no law of nature that says it can't be done. None... Don't limit your thinking to just today!

Just because you can't do it now does not mean we won't be able to do it some time in the future. Not sure what kind of engineer you are, but clearly a pretty bad one if you think the only things we will build in the future is only what we can build today.

Once upon a time we didn't have the means to build heaver than air craft. We didn't have the means to make 4GHz transistors, or turbofans or whatever.

Seriously "we can't (don't) do that now... so it can't be done" is really lame.

This uses the transit method where the planet passes between its star and earth, so the orbital plane needs to be edge on. You also need IIRC 3 transits to be a proper observation. Thus to detect earth you need to wait at least 3 years but no more than 4. Jupiter you need to wait up to 48 years! So yes its very biased. I believe this missions max life is 7 years. And yes the planets that are further out will take longer and be announced later.