"rather than see oneself as obliged to adhere to it." Obliged by what/whom to adhere to the ethical path? Would we not agree that our perception of what would be an ethical path in a given situation or in general must be influenced either by a culturally arrived at, or personally arrived at "code of ethics" or "heuristics for ethics"? And where do those come from? Are they not either inculcated by parents, story absorption, education, or cultural context and social pressure? And what is the source of all of those contextual elements being present front and centre in human society and existence? Might it not be an evolved cultural behaviour (as well as an evolved self-maintaining meme?), as well as perhaps a biological adaptation of our species to conceptualize and organize our behaviour so that we do well in the surrounding presence of that successful meme?

What is the basis of this ethics of which you speak. And please (for the love of God) don't say God. What criteria do you use to judge if something is ethical? Do we not find that behaviour/decision that is considered ethical is identical with that which would tend to promote co-operation? i.e. behaviour that tends (whether intended as such or not) toward encouraging the creation of the larger co-operating whole?

A better way to look at evolutionary competition is that a competing entity can decide/try, as one possible adaptation strategy, to co-operate with one or more of its former competitors. This can be looked at as purely an evolutionarily selfish move. You have just decided to increase the size of your "self" by allying partially or totally with the other(s). If the co-operation works out, then there will then be a new set of bigger (and generally more capable) competitors competing at the next level (not to mention generally eliminating/eating the remaining smaller players.) So, co-operation can be looked at as just a strategy in competition, which has a downside (diluting of the identity of your former self into a larger new self), but can have the enormous upside of increasing your techniques, power, and resources in the next level of competition. That definition of the purpose and effect of cooperation is true all the way up until there are no more competitors, and that probably can't happen, since the "uncooperative and entropizing environment" can be defined as just another competitor that should probably be co-operated with instead.

Can junk DNA be seen as "potentially useful junkyard parts" that some random mutation might re-activate into a gene or part of a gene? Is it actually handy to have these around to allow for rapid bigger changes of set of active genes than just a few small mutations in the active genes can do? It would seem that almost all such massive additions to what's active would be deleterious, but maybe they provide a safeguard against rapid change of environment. So how far off from "being coding" are these junk regions anyway, and does it ever happen that they get reactivated?

Well, working in a multi-disciplinary smart grid r&d team, I certainly have noticed a culture clash between the traditional power engineers and the software "charlatans".

Your post does nothing to dispel that perception.

One difference between the grid of today and the smart grid is the smart grid will need "distributed intelligence" at the edges, not just the center, of the grid.
To accommodate a significantly larger component of distributed generation and storage, it will need attributes such as:
- bi-directional power flow in the distribution network, with cooperating local decisions as to how best to reroute power,
- control via digital demand-response signals (which are only suggestions, to be implemented with local discretion) to smart buildings / microgrids at the edges of the grid.

There will need to be a distributed orchestration of slow acting energy balancing and optimizing systems (making balance feasible) with fast-acting power protection & control logic (reacting if balance is lost), and this orchestration will have to happen all over the place in the distribution network, not in one centralized distribution control centrer.

Infrastructure devices will have to be internetworked on a large scale.

Just saying "air gap" it is I'm afraid a trite solution that will not meet the "smart grid" requirement to adjust energy flows dynamically based on a mixture of large-area and local algorithms.

So, aside from "air gap", what do people propose for securing widely internetworked smart critical infrastucture?
1. Use a second physically completely separate Internet for infrastructure only?
2. Work harder on secure tunnelling technology, put it on the "real" Internet, and use security management best practices?
3. What else?

Look it up in the font of all wisdom: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phones_and_driving_safety (referenced studies).

People in general probably think handheld use is significantly more dangerous because legislators are not scientifically literate
and pass half-measures legislation.

Remember, common sense is neither common nor sensible. And 90% of conventional wisdom is wrong <= Including this.

I guess you just forgot to add these:

New York - 8 million
Los Angeles - 4 million
Chicago - 3 million

Who was it who said:
"One death is a tragedy - 85 million deaths is a statistic"

Well, whatever else it does, the recession does reduce GHG emissions:
http://www.c2es.org/facts-figures/us-emissions/trends

so the gas price increase worked, as far as reducing emissions goes, according to your causal analysis.

Now the trick of course is to use technological innovation to decouple GHG emissions growth from GDP.

"Restrained breeding means that private transportation is sustainable."

You do realize that 1 American = 13 Indians (for example) in terms of their GHG emissions.

So we would need 13x harsher breeding restraint amongst Americans than amongst Indians to make the policy fair.

Besides, that kind of policy (restrined breeding, in any reasonable form) would not work fast enough to lower GHG emissions fast enough to prevent catastrophic climate change. 1/2 of emissions is industrial, not individual consumer, anyway.
Your suggested policy would take several generations to start making a dent, and we simply don't have that time.

It's not really about attractiveness.
It's about intergenerational and global ethics.

The market has failed on this one, because people, en mass, are not long term thinkers enough, nor rational cause-effect and probability thinkers enough, to value what they ought to value. And the market is driven by what people value.
Let me highlight the market problem another way. How much would you pay annually for an insurance policy that would prevent your descendants in 200 years from living in post-civilized chaos, water wars, and utter poverty? Thought so.

"First of all, that would more than double the cost of gas, "

Yep. That's the idea:
  - Disincentivize and decrease usage of harmful thing
  - Provide incentive for innovation in newly tilted market playing field to create effective alternatives faster.

"second of all, that would have no effect on debt or deficit, the bill would have to be written specifically so that the money could only be used to pay debt, otherwise it would all get spent on tax cuts or Homeland Security."

or legislate that the revenue be used only to fund basic R&D in alternative energy and transportation technologies.

"Also, any increase in gas prices generally leads to an overall increase in product prices, because it costs more to ship everything."

Until you perfect electric and hydrogen transportation infrastructure, and also use a lot more high-speed electric rail transportation.

"You really want to clean up the environment? Instead of artificially raising the price of gas even more (there is $1-$2 per gallon worth of taxes at the pump already), take all the money we currently spend on the military, and use it instead to build so many solar and wind farms that it forces electricity costs down, hopefully to the point where coal and gasoline look expensive in comparison."

Coal power is highly immoral given what is known today (2x GHG emissions of gasoline, 4x emissions of natural gas, per unit of energy), and should be phased out globally with top priority and haste.

"When you want to teach a dog a new trick, dog treats work a lot better than shock collars. The same rule applies when you are trying to teach an entire nation, it's better to give incentives for doing "good" than punishment for doing "bad"."

Ok so give some of the carbon tax back as bus passes and temporary increases in electric car subsidies (until they become competitive on their own. An electric car is a way simpler, and at comparable volume should be substantially cheaper, machine than a conventional car.)

"Also, "carbon taxes" and "carbon credits" are a complete joke. It leads to odd situations where power plants and industrial factories are now buying up old refrigerant and incinerating it because, according to the law, destroying a pound of refrigerant earns enough "carbon credits" to offset a pound of carbon pollution, and it's currently cheaper to buy and destroy a pound of refrigerant than it is to actually remove a pound of carbon from the smokestack. The part that makes this really stupid, is that the refrigerant would have likely been reused in another piece of equipment, and would have never ended up in the atmosphere in the first place."

Carbon credits, agreed, are useless, because they involve accountancy, and accountants, despite their reputation for dullness, are super creative. Cheating is and will be rampant in a carbon credit market. And no, you don't deserve credit for agreeing not to chop down the remaining forests. That's a slight of hand that will fool the news media and the public but not the physics of the planet.
A carbon tax at source on the other hand would be simple to administer and hard to cheat. And to calibrate it you just keep turning it up til you measure a reduction in fossil fuel use and GHG emissions on an annual basis.

I agree that the tax would be unfair if alternatives were not funded well at the same time.

As well as transit infrastructure, it could also fund battery and ultracapacitor R&D, so you could buy an electric car that would compete with a regular car on range, performance, and price.

We have to make a fundamental change in transportation and energy infrastructure as fast as turning on a dime, in case you've been living in a cave and haven't heard or haven't done the math. We have the technology and innovation capacity. We just can't get out of the fossil fuel energy trap because we've optimized the economy for its exploitation. Pricing carbon emissions is the only way to make that leap. Those who do not make that leap will be utterly condemned in the tales told by the next few generations.

And no I'm not rich. I just have my blinders off and my priorities adjusted to know that I can't justify being part of the incredibly destructive status quo.
And why don't you take that time on the bus not stressing out about manouvering in traffic to program the next big thing on your laptop.

with a nice little carbon tax with a "starter" rate of say $5 per gallon of gas imposed.
It would kill two birds with one stone:
      1. Put the brakes on the rate of expansion of fossil fuel use and GHG emissions growth
      2. Start making a dent in the US deficit and debt

But of course, being a rational, sensible, simple, and effective policy, this would naturally be political suicide.

Jesus these jumped up apes are chattery!