The college where I teach just renovated its science center. I'm very happy with the tabletop power we have in our new physics classroom, and I think the "lessons learned" apply to a kitchen too:

  Don't do low-voltage DC. It'll never be the voltage you want, and plug standardization is a nightmare.
  Don't put outlets on the top of the table. You'll spill, drop crumbs, and ruin the outlets.
  Think about spilled liquids. A lot.
  Make sure you can move the table to the other side of the room without cutting wires.

Our new physics lab classroom has long, heavy wooden "butcher block" tables with a top that overhangs the edge by an inch. The outlets are on the front edge of the table, protected from liquids by the overhang. The outlet boxes run to a heavy-duty cable with a male plug on the end: you plug the tables into a recessed floor box.

There is no deep water in the Baltic Sea: it's only about 50 meters deep in most places. The OTEC guys are talking about depths 20 times that.

which is dumping it back into the environment.

..but it's not dumping it back into the *ocean*, which is what the original poster said.

If you're going to be pedantic, I've got you out-gunned.

I hope they hired a marine engineer to work out the anti-fouling issues. The system may work great now, but in a couple months every single surface exposed to seawater will be covered with barnacles and algae. The article mentions cleaning heat exchangers as part of maintenance, but some of this crap can't be scrubbed off without a chisel.

Read the article: after leaving the data center, the heat is sent to a heat pump where it's used to heat houses.

Hey, cut the Prenda guys some slack. They really need to earn some spending money, what with their upcoming dismissal from the bar and possible RICO prosecution...

Oops, we got so wrapped up in the whole "money buys power" thing that we forgot to make sure we wanted to buy the same stuff.

I wouldn't know, I bought Illustrator CS3 TEN YEARS AGO and it still works fine for everything I do.

I want cloud storage! My boss says it's going to be the next big thing to contextualize our value process, so I have to have it! Hmm, let's see:

13 months of Creative Cloud with 20 GB of cloud storage: $650
Infinity months of Creative Suite 6 plus 13 months of 25 GB Google Drive storage: $635
Being able to put non-Adobe files in my cloud storage: priceless.

Slashdot interviewing MacAfee? Somebody call the U.S. Strategic Paranoia Reserve, we're going to have to tap into it.

As an aside, are there any functions where the integral approaches infinity (for positive values of x) as f(x) approaches zero (asymptotically or otherwise)???

Yes. f(x) = 1/x is the standard example.

“When will the world’s supply of oil be exhausted?” asked the MIT economist Morris Adelman, perhaps the most important exponent of this view. “The best one-word answer: never.” Effectively, energy supplies are infinite.

This is dead wrong. The economic argument says that oil production is tied to the profitability of ever-more-expensive production technologies. We will never "run out of oil" because eventually we won't be able to afford to extract it, but this will happen while there's still oil in the ground. There's a similar physics argument, based on "energy return on energy invested": fossil fuel production ends when the energy required to pull it out of the ground is greater than the energy of the fuel itself. There will still be some in the ground, and it might be useful for making expensive chemicals, dyes, or lubricants, but it's pointless as a fuel.

So no, we won't ever run out of oil. But we will reach a point where you can't have any. To characterize this situation as "infinite supply" is ludicrous.

Point taken, I forgot what I was on about in the original post.

It doesn't have to be a carbon tax. Road mile taxes, or higher gasoline taxes would serve the same purpose in this instance. But when you get to the level of encouraging very specific behaviors like getting grocery delivery, I think that the combination of not knowing if this really incentivizes the right behavior, and the cost of setting up such schemes, makes these "solutions" worse than the status quo.

You've just explained why it has to be a carbon tax rather than a road mile tax, gasoline tax, etc -- to ensure you incentivize (?) the right behavior, you apply tax pressure on the specific thing you want to avoid, rather than encouraging specific behaviors that might or might not get the job done in an optimal way.

I'm a free-market environmentalist. I say, monetize the external costs of environmental damage, and let the market figure out the best strategy for saving the planet.

I imagine they may even throw away less because of the very tight margins they run.

I don't see why a corner shop would have tighter margins than a supermarket: the retail food business is a cut-throat game, and everyone in it is running at the razor's edge between a few percent profit and driving away their fickle customers.

Anyway, the point I'm making is about the statistics of small numbers. A supermarket with 10,000 customers a week can count on selling, say, 100 cucumbers a week, pretty reliably. A corner shop with 200 customers a week might sell 2 cucumbers a week on average, but some weeks it'll be 5, some weeks it'll be zero. So they'll probably stock 5 a week, and have to throw them all out half the time.