Randall C. Kennedy was an InfoWorld blogger known for his outrageous, inflammatory posts. Often these posts appeared to disregard the facts, overinflate the issues, or otherwise ignore the tenets of basic journalism in favor of sensationalism and manufactured furor.

Combine this with the fact that the guy is already very comfortable using a pseudonym then I heartily recommend him for the post of Slashdot editor!

There are no things that user is supposed to "decide" if they should or should not be allowed to run as root/admin -- there are things that should always run as admin, and things that shouldn't.

Well, that's not really true. If you're looking at it at an executable level, then there are at least a few executables that are quite reasonably run at both privilege levels. Even at a command level, if you do "./configure --prefix=$HOME/my/install/location" then "make", then "make install" is something you'll probably be running as yourself. If you omit the --prefix part, then "make install" will need to be run as root.

Make laws that prefer the rights of corporations over the rights of actual human beings. I don't see how this could possibly go wrong.

XP was just very passive with it. More or less, when you quit an app in XP it treated the RAM similar to HD space: It marked it as free, but didn't remove any data. If you subsequently loaded the same app and the data was still there, it was much faster since it wasn't read back from disk. Now none of this showed up in the RAM meter in XP, it showed the memory as free, not noting that some of it was a cache.

In Vista and 7, this process is more obvious, and aggressive. For one, it'll tell you about the cache. It tells you the total RAM, RAM allocated, RAM used for cached, RAM available for use to programs, and RAM currently unused. So you can see a system with only 500MB of RAM "free" but 6.5GB "available". That just means that there is 500MB of RAM for which Windows has found no use at all at this point, but there is 6.5GB total it could give to programs, should it be needed. Also, they are more intelligent about what goes in RAM, watching which programs are loaded frequently and having part or all of those ready to go, rather than just what was run last.

Vista was a little less clear about RAM availability and more aggressive with caching than 7, but the basic operation is the same.

"what if they collected the fresh water vapour that is evaporating off the salt water as well?" I was thinking that might actually be a good idea, with a slight tweak. Instead of collecting the evaporated water as a byproduct of this process, why not combine this with the process of reverse osmosis. One of the major difficulties with reverse osmosis (in addition to the energy requirement) is that it produces a highly concentrated brine that must be disposed of. Instead of dumping it back in the ocean, why not first use it to fuel this type of osmosis as well? That way, the process is not limited by the amount of heat in the environment because it does not need to evaporate any new source of water.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the US have naval submarines that are powered by nuclear reactors. And aren't those subs often docked near populated ports, San Diego for example. Thus, we have already accepted the risk of having nuclear power in populated areas, so it seems odd to be afraid of adding a few civilian nuclear reactors that are not in highly populated areas.

"I cannot imagine that it would take decades or centuries for dissolved CO2 to diffuse a few miles through water, even with a pressure gradient. I'd imagine months at most, more likely days." It depends on where we dump the CO2. If it is added to the Northern Atlantic near Western Europe where the ocean currents descend, the CO2 could be sequestered for a thousand years. It would get trapped in the Thermohaline cycle and would not be able to resurface until the water in which it is trapped also resurfaces.

Although this would reduce the amount of energy used for cooling, heating costs would go up. For most people, it takes far more energy to heat a house than cool it. It takes 1200 KWh to cool a house in a temperate climate for a year, but it takes 12000 KWh to heat one . It is more useful to look for ways to heat a house more efficiently than cool it.