The RIAA is a legal organization that acts overtly. It also doesn't consist of a bunch of companies agreeing to intentionally limit their core business activities.

Have we gotten the results from Curiosity's measurements during it's trip? I haven't seen anything come up but I thought that was one of the big things we were looking for - actual data on what to expect.

Tell that to denizens of Shanghai. 2 micron scale particles are surprisingly toxic to the respiratory system, and that's what choking Shanghai from their coal plants.

The US populace has no idea about what drives its energy costs. Keystone won't solve shit - it will however make a bunch of oil execs very rich, at the possible expense of thousands of kilometers of natural water resources. Oil is fungible - it makes no difference if it's refined in Canada or the US - the pipeline is purely about American oil interests getting to refine Canadian crude, as opposed to canadians, europeans, arabs or the chinese.

Demand is going up because demand is going up - keystone won't make a dent. But it might just end a bunch of important ecosystems.

But it was a research scale reactor. It would've been built out of on hand components, and costs cut where necessary - automated systems for new technology aren't easy to develop even if they're all understood principles. Far easier to have someone sleep next to the thing with an alarm clock and test the actual new technology.

Actually wind wise, the proliferation of anti-wind power sentiment is directly correllated with the arrival of lobbyists in small towns. Suddenly people go from mild interest to terrible concern that we just don't know that wind turbines don't cause cancer.

Cranks grab the nearest "mysterious" thing and claim to be exploiting it. It doesn't mean it can't actually do that, but they usually turn out to be devoid of the extraordinary evidence required to prove it.

Also from a self-funding perspetive: people are happier with buy-to-own then rent contracts, because it perceptually opens leeway for improvements in maintenance practice or cost-saving. At the very least it gives you a mark to aim for for "free" electricity.

Fusion is actually about 80 billion dollars away. Funding has asymptotically gone down since the 70s, so considering it in that context (i.e. a certain amount of equipment and researchers are generally needed to develop it) it's not surprising it's always 50 years away.

Bit errors per tb or whatever. Observing new hard drives don't last as long is also simply a product of the amount of physical atoms representing each bit getting smaller and smaller. There's a reason conspiracy theories die on Occam's Razor.

Also born of ignorance: conspiracy theories depend on every allegedly greedy company acting with surprising benevolence for it's community of allegedly greedy companies.

They all fall down where they simply assume that all these companies unanimously feel they'll be better off if they collaborate and suppress something. They never manage to explain why every individual conspirator wouldn't be working as hard as they can to eliminate the others, which gets especially murky when you consider that the individual companies aren't companies but people, and people get concerned about things like legacy and principles and whatever (which simultaneously leads to good things - tech companies building spaceships - and bad things - the Koch brothers believing they're still fighting communism or something).

I think we're all generally assuming that something will eventually be discovered, hopefully sooner rather then later.

It's notable that Zimmerman is only facing scrutiny because he probably followed a guy in his car, started the fight, and then shot him as well (which is rather similar to basically murder).

Someone coming onto your property and attacking you, in a Stand Your Ground state, I doubt would have to do much more then file a statement.

You spent a lot of words talking about how "the Earth doesn't care about climate change". You know, stating the obvious.

Well gee, good thing we established inanimate objects don't have opinions!

The one good point you have is diluted in a sea of bullshit (we should have nuclear power - of course, the nuclear industry tends to do a bad job of being trustworthy, but then at the edge of that we've got a government that's not really providing them with the right protections to allow them to be open and transparent either).

I don't know what you're raving on about with diesel.