The US can do whatever they feel like doing because Fuck You

Well, Europe dropped the ball in the 20th century, so it got stuck taking care of all these problems. If Europe doesn't like the way the US handles it, all it has to do is get its shit together.

Get used to it... its gonna be a long and twisted road before this crap is over.

Well, it sure beats the "crap" that was going on before. And the way things are going, this will be "over" when the US decides its over, given that Europe and Asia are far more aggressive in restricting the liberty and privacy of their citizens.

European authorities can get personal data on Americans under Europe's (rather bad) laws when that data is hosted on European servers.It's not America's fault that Europeans have, for the most part, failed to create online services that are attractive to people.

If you think the entire planet was like Hawaii back then, you're sadly misinformed.

And if you think the entire planet was a burning hellhole, you're also sadly misinformed.

On balance, the planet was probably somewhat nicer for mammals than it is now.

Unfortunately, it's not just online trolls; the myth of "runaway greenhouse effects" is strong among global warming activists, including people like Hansen:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaway_greenhouse_effect

There used to be a very simple mechanism for protecting works to become orphaned: authors registered them with the Library of Congress. This also ensured that the work eventually could enter the public domain.

It was greedy European publishers that killed this, and then forced the US to comply. And now they are using orphan works legislation to enrich themselves; if you look at the European proposals for orphan works, they want to charge for the reproduction of such works and then redistribute the money to current publishers and authors. That is not how orphan works are supposed to work.

We should bring back mandatory copyright registration; it's the only sensible way of dealing with orphan works and the public domain.

There's nothing technically new in Apple's patent. What the patent is about is using a well-known wireless charging technique to charge a wireless powered local computing environment (as opposed to some other kind of device).

Apple basically missed the boat on wireless power, and now they are trying to grab whatever ridiculous patent they can to have a little bit of leverage.

Hopefully, the rest of the industry will tell them to go take a hike on making compliant products, and then sue Apple into oblivion for violating existing patents.

Of course, they won't "curb Internet freedoms". They'll simply "outlaw dangerous speech", "protect the faithful from being offended by blasphemers", "create taxes to compensate creative organizations like newspapers", and "track online use to protect children". But no Internet freedoms will be harmed. Right.

Who knew! I thought Cadbury just made disgusting sugar laden junk food.

So let me say this first: If you've met an Aspie and dismissed the condition because that person "seemed fine", then please consider that what you didn't see was the countless hours of practice and stress and anxiety of being able to pretend to be that way; the habitual exhaustion from the effort of doing so; the depression and abysmal self-esteem from never, never understanding the people around you or being able to tell whether people actually like you or not.

That's not a psychological condition, it's the human condition. And if, as an "Aspie", you deal with it by trying to figure it out intellectually instead of succumbing to alcohol, drugs, obesity, wild sex, or other self-destructive behavior, you're ahead of most other humans on this planet.

Unfortunately, decreasing the number of people said to have a condition is a good way to decrease its funding chances in the government subsidies to researchers.

When it comes to "curing" harmless behavioral differences, I consider that a good thing.

You still have provided no scientific support or argument for your two main claims: the possibility of a +10C temperature rise, and the possibility of an "extinction level event".

Neither the pamphlet nor the book you point to are credible scientific sources. The pamphlet bases many of its conclusions on the opinions of a few people and press articles, and the book is not a "meta study", it's a popular science book by an environmental activist with an agenda.

The government can do applied research without becoming a totalitarian state.

Yes, it can. I think it's a good thing when government pays for research.

What I object to is your repeated statements that that is the only way we could have gotten those technologies. That's not only unreasonable, it's historically wrong.

The problem isn't government, it's you and people like you.

True, demanding something doesn't guarantee you get it. On the other hand, *not* demanding something *does* guarantee you won't get it.

That's true in planned economies like the Soviet Union. In market economies, you don't have to demand things to have your needs met.

If nobody in the government demanded a satellite based navigation system, there wouldn't be GPS. If nobody in the government demanded a robust, survivable way of transporting data packets between heterogeneous networks, there wouldn't be the Internet. If nobody in the government demanded a way of automating a wide variety of computations, the computer as we know it wouldn't exist.

You're thinking like a good little totalitarian and fascist.

You don't understand. Chu is part of the government elite now. He used to have to obey the laws of physics, but these days, he just needs to snap his fingers and the universe bends to his will.

http://thebulletin.org/web-edition/columnists/kurt-zenz-house/the-limits-of-energy-storage-technology

The maximum theoretical potential of advanced lithium-ion batteries that haven't yet been demonstrated to work is still only about 6 percent of crude oil."