Depends on your definition of freedom. In those countries you could argue that children are free from religion imposed on them by their parents while they are at school, that women are free from the oppression of being forced to cover their faces, and that people are mostly free from the threat of violence so don't need to train themselves to kill and carry weapons.

Even banning holocaust denial could be argued to be similar to banning people shouting "fire" in a packed theatre. Both can lead to disastrous consequences.

Europe has a different idea of what freedom is. The US does not have a monopoly on the definition.

Described by me here, but others had the idea before: http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html#Princeton_University_Freecycle_Transportation_Network_--_an_internet_of_physical_packages

From there, as a disclosure to make it harder to patent it all:
------
Princeton University Freecycle Transportation Network -- an internet of physical packages

Here is just one more example of changes to PU's infrastructure and operations from a Post-Scarcity point of view. These might take burning another billion dollars of the PU endowment or so, but you will see soon another reason why money is going out of style anyway, whether PU does this or someone else. :-) But, there may well be reasonable objections to it, so consider it first mainly as a thought experiment in understanding Post-Scarcity style issues. Maybe it is both possible and worth doing, maybe it is neither.

A big problem in a post-scarcity society is not so much how to make abundance, but how to get rid of it. :-) The Freecycle network mentioned at the start is an example of that:
        http://www.freecycle.org/
Or, from Wikipedia:
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Freecycle_Network

        "The Freecycle Network (often abbreviated TFN or just known as Freecycle) is a non-profit organization ... that organizes a worldwide network of "gifting" groups, aiming to divert reusable goods from landfill. It provides a worldwide online registry, and coordinates the creation of local groups and forums for individuals and non-profits to offer and receive free items for reuse or recycling, promoting gift economics as a motivating cultural outlook. "Changing the world one gift at a time" is The Freecycle Network's official tagline. "

(Note that "Freecycle" is a trademark, so if PU used it, it would need permission.)

Obviously, long term the solution in a few decades might be general purpose nanotech 3D printers that can both "print" (or "compile") and "unprint" (or "decompile").
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age
Perhaps you don't believe that kind of 3D printing and unprinting is possible or even desirable (perhaps due to energy costs of disassembly). Or maybe you think 3D printing might be possible, but would take a long time. Or perhaps you expect much production and disposal may still be centralized at least at the neighborhood level. Or maybe you expect that people will still have sentimental attachments to specific items they wish to store and retrieve. So, until all those issues are resolved for 3D printing, how can PU handle the embarrasment of material riches it has now and will soon have more of? And how can it make it *easy* to do the same as "The Freecycle Network" does -- give away items to people who want them instead of sending them to a landfill?

Material transportation and storage systems (like Amazon uses) could play a big role here.
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos ('86)
As could interactive computer information systems on material goods (like eBay pioneered).
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meg_Whitman ('77)

How might these be used together?

Princeton University could put in place a system of kiosks around campus which had what looked like Star Trek matter replicators. These would all be connected underground to one or more warehouses. Whenever anyone needed anything on campus, they would go to a kiosk and flip through the display to find what they wanted in the warehouse. Then, using their university ID card, or something else, or nothing at all :-), they would request the item (say, a specific soccer ball they like) be delivered to the kiosk. Presumably, using fast robots, and maybe pneumatic tubes (perhaps in old steam tunnels), within minutes the item would be delivered into the kiosk's reception area. But here is the important point -- when the person was done with the item, rather than worry about storing the item in their dorm room, they could walk up to any kiosk and just put the ball back into a waiting container, where it would be scanned, identified, and moved back to a warehouse. See also the idea of "spimes":
        "When Blobjects Rule the Earth"
        http://www.boingboing.net/images/blobjects.htm

Think of this as a sort of "interlibrary loan" for any physical object.
        "Material Handling System"
        http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_hd59WUZg0
        "Han-Tek, Inc. Automated Conveyor, Palletizer, Wrapper"
        http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrpJCsoEzuU
        "The Art of Sortation in the Conveyor Industry"
        http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMEQgGcl1ik
Books could of course be put into the system too. Here is a video of automated handling of books:
        "Automated Materials Handling (AMH) system for books"
        http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTwxu9QEVzk
An automated system can even handle huge shipping container sized objects. like here:
        http://www.goldin.com.sg/index.aspx?uc=products_prodlist&CateID=50
        (Well, maybe not exactly like in that picture of collapsed containers. :-)
        (Also, I'm not affiliated with any of these places; I'm just picking examples from the web.)

I like this title and the first part of this article which also applies to this idea:
        "How shipping containers shortened the life span of petro-civilization"
        http://www.culturechange.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=159&Itemid=1

        "In 2005, roughly 18 million containers worldwide made over 200 million trips (wikipedia). Containers come in many sizes, an average one is 40 feet long, 8 feet wide, and 8 feet high, the size of three 10 by 10 foot bedrooms. There are 1,300 foot-long ships now that can carry 7,250 of them. It's mind boggling to think about how different the world is now. My grandparents ate what was in season, an orange was a precious Christmas gift. Today, the Japanese are eating Wyoming beef and we're driving Japanese cars. Before containers were used to move cargo, port cities had long piers where boxes and bales were moved by sweat and muscle onto ships. Longshoremen lived within two miles of the docks in cheap housing. Now the piers are gone and the only sweat comes from yuppies on treadmills in luxury apartments. The cost of moving products by any means, whether truck, train, or ship, was often so high most goods were made locally. Factories were often located near ports to shorten the distance of getting products to ships. The idea of containerization was around for a long time, and a few companies experimented with doing this and failed for various reasons. It took Malcolm McLean, the founder of Sea-Land, and standardization, to make containerization really take off. The cost of shipping goods, whether the container was on land or water, dropped so drastically, that suddenly it made more economic sense for a factory to be located wherever land, labor, and electricity were inexpensive. Millions of high-paying factory jobs were lost as containerization made it possible for factories to move overseas."

My father, a merchant mariner for about a quarter century around WWII, saw the rise of container ships. He liked the idea, even though some of his liveliehood for a time depended on knowing how to operate things like steam-powered cranes (when no one else around knew anymore). Still, that article misses the big post-scarcity picture and assumes a lasting energy crisis. :-( Guess they don't know about Nanosolar and similar renewable energy initiatives -- or the ones PU might make soon. :-)

There are several variations on the idea that are easy to make. The kiosks could be dispensed with (as well as ripping up parts of campus yet again :-) and the system could respond to requests made anywhere on campus from a wired or wireless computer (or even a cell phone). Delivery robots could bring the object to where it was requested, or even to where the person was as they moved to around campus, perhaps tracked via their cell phone or some other way (Star Trek TNG style badges?)
        "Willow Garage - RoboDevelopment 2007"
        http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47-H0R0OCA0
Or one could make hybrids of kiosks that were serviced by above ground deliver robots. Or, one could even dispense with the delivery infrastructure, and just expect people to go to a fully automated warehouse directly. Or even a partially automated one. Items could be moved between various warehouses on campus or put in delivery robots near expected needs to increase response time. Likely a few standard metal or plastic container sizes would be selected and used. Items in the warehouse would either be stored in the transport container or transferred to shelving. One container might have lots of room if occupied with, say, half-used pencils, and so other things could be added, with the expectation that if a container shows up with a half dozen unrelated things -- a tennis racket, at unused bra still in the original packaging, some marbles, a CD of Grover Washington's music, and a saxophone, the person getting the delivery would just take *whatever* they wanted in addition to what was requested, and the delivery system would rescan (laser 3D imaging? RFID? stereo vision? Smell sensors?) and put the rest back into inventory. One of the things you could request from the system is empty containers to put things in -- these might come directly or bundled inside other containers.

Here are some further twists. Everything a student or alumnus put into the system could perhaps (check with the tax lawyers) be considered a "donation" to Princeton University, same as given to Good Will or the Salvation Army. The university could supply the student or his or her parents or guardians with a detailed receipt of everything put into the system for tax deduction purposes. No more situations like my wife encounters at some such places, where high quality donated items get left out in the rain from lack of room or staff. Note that groups like the Salvation Army could make use of this system, scanning the system's inventory for worn things that could be fixed up with a little effort.

When people put things into the system, like any donor, they might attach conditions. They might say anyone can order up the object. Or they might say only Princetonians could order the object forever. Or maybe for three years. Or they could say that if the object was unrequested for a few years by Princetonians, it could then be distributed off campus. There is an issue here of whether the original donor's license follows the object forever (the Spime idea) or just until the next person gets the object. There are all sorts of licensing combinations. All sorts of restrictions. But ideally, rather than have a lot of licenses, our society might settle on a few basic approaches -- like three years for PU then OK for anybody. Or something like that. Part of the problem here is that we are involved in a *transition* to post-scarcity. So, things that might work differently in the future when everyone moves objects around as easily as data packets on the internet (through container boxes that are the physical analogy of digital packets), and when everyone trusts in the abundance of the system enough not to feel a compulsion to hoard or not feeling they have to take things out of the system just to sell things. So, some aspects of setting licenses (the GPL is an example) have to do with managing that transition in a way that makes something work now, and makes future progress possible. Obviously, PU doesn't want crowds on Nassau Street sucking out all its office supplies for resale the first day. So, maybe one has to think about a plan with stages of licenses. As well as related social norms. This book has some related ideas:
        "The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia" by Ursula K. Le Guin
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dispossessed

Obviously, a variation on this is also that in some cases only the person who put the object into the system could get it back out -- or someone he or she allows (for a fee or not). But what would be the fun of that? :-) But yes, perhaps there would be some of that -- people hoarding using the system. But, one could look at reports of that, and then perhaps give these people help in overcoming their need to hoard. The good news for hoarding is that if a hoarder decides to become a sharer, the change only requires a few mouse clicks. :-) Maybe to discourage hoarding, a storage fee could be charged for such hoarded items stored with restricted delivery instructions? And I would expect any commercial use of the system would also slowly decline over time as a relative percentage of use, after perhaps an initial relative flurry of commerce, same as with the digital internet after it went beyond academia.

Eventually a lot of junk might accumulate in the system -- old shoes, broken balloons, obsolete one-Google-equivalent laptops, :-) stuff like that. So how to get rid of it all? One possibility is to just set up a Kiosk on Nassau Street and let anyone in the world pick what they want and just take it away. Or the materials could be listed on eBay as free (except for shipping or handling). Or, the system could be interlinked with a similar one at Yale, and presumably the old shoes and last year's dresses would flow that way. :-) Or, let's call it, "vintage clothing". :-) And if they did not, PU could set up terminals in materially poor places like, say, the country of Malawi
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavily_Indebted_Poor_Countries
or the city of Trenton, NJ
        http://www.isles.org/
or wherever and periodically ship out whatever was asked for via containers. People in materially poor countries would have to be patient to get their used shoes or worn glasses, but many of them already are very good at patience. Eventually this entire system could be used globally. Imagine, say, you leave stuff you don't want in containers on the street. As the Postal Service or UPS comes by to drop things off, they also pick up those containers to put into the system. Essentially, at that point this Freecycle-ish material goods version of the internet might begin to dominate global trade. And people might also use it for business needs as well as sending gifts to family and friends. Fees for business use might cover all the costs of operating it, like craigslist only charges for certain ads. But, eventually, I would expect this would all diminish the value of money to the point where people would just maintain this system for the same reason people operate their local garbage collection systems or mail delivery system. Also, if you're like me you're tired of all those empty leftover Amazon boxes piling up, so if the containers used were sturdier, the empties even could just be left at the curb to be picked up and put into use elsewhere, perhaps for years and thousands of trips around the world.

The system might have an aspect that allows people globally to submit requests of things they might like. Maybe they want them for free (preferred) or maybe they would be willing to pay for them (or bid for them) or maybe they might by willing to trade other items for them. Amazon has "wish lists"; this system could also have "wishes". If you live in a materially poor country, you might put in a "wish" for, say, a good pair of boots, size 9. Maybe someday someone at Princeton who is having a bad day might decide to cheer themselves up by giving you their used pair, or might buy you a new set and put it in the system for delivery -- or even buy you a new one entirely through the system. Physical stores would likely of course decline as this system was widely adopted -- many would become virtual stores, their inventory just store securely in some part of the system. (This might free up a lot of space on Nassau Street for the university to use for expansion. :-) In general, one would want this system to be designed to make it easy to give gifts. Maybe it might be tied in with a way that people could blog about their lives or make video diaries, making this idea similar in some ways to "microcredit" but typically as a gift. As with Heifer, maybe you might ask the recipient to pass on a similar gift someday to someone (or a similar gift in proportion to their wealth, since a pair of boots might be a trivial gift for the donor but most of the recipient's wealth).

The containers to use in this system would be the subject of a lot of study themselves. Maybe they even might expand and contract some as needed. Perhaps they would have some kind of auto-expanding cushioning material for preventing damage during shipment or storage. Some might even be self-guiding. Many might have open tops or be pallets with standard attachment systems. Boxes might come in a variety of material or formats (cardboard, plastic, metal, wood, etc.) each with their own international standards governing bar code placement or label format or robotic attachment handle or RFID locator or wireless network hardware or sensors or whatever other aspects were important. Some box styles might have active climate control (to stay hot or cold for a time).

There might be standards for opening and closing boxes, so you might have the house robots or receiving automation open boxes for you in advance and inspect and repack the contents, if you were nervous about the delivery. Routing hardware on routes within the system might do that as well for suspicious packages. Some boxes might be sealed with tape, but I'd expect many would have alternative ways of opening and closing, perhaps with electronic locks (active or passive).

I'm expecting most of these container boxes might be in the range of sizes of typical Amazon boxes. That is, about from shoe box sized to microwave sized. But some might be smaller and some might be huge -- like for storing your car when you arrive on campus. (See, I said I'd solve the parking problem. :-)
        "Amazing Parking System"
        http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azUqCkov4k8&NR=1
But if you don't like that solution, just use the self-driving automobile software PU will develop as above and have the cars park themselves at a distant lot and return on demand. :-)

Parking your car in the system brings up security. You might only want your car or other item to be released back to you or someone you authorize. You might only want it stored in particular secure places and only handled by certain secure processes. You might want it only contained in containers meeting certain requirements or standards, or only transferred to similar containers or only inspected by certain processes you agree to. You might want the container to keep a visual record of whoever accesses it. If you allow others to use your car, you might want to have the container scan your car before someone else takes it out as well as when someone puts it back in storage (like rental companies do). This way you can see if someone did not take good care of it. In the transition period from a scarcity world view to a post scarcity world view, people might use these features to run rental businesses for any kind of equipment or products -- cars, lawnmowers, jewelery, tuxedos, and so on. There are a lot of things to think about there when looking at the system from the stand point of use for only transient storage (the service like a parcel locker at an airport supplies).

When I was at IBM Research about ten years ago (contracting), IBM held a future-oriented brainstorming session with high school students. One of the sessions related to the future of packaging. They talked about things like having a GPS in every package. And maybe digital paper as the display on the package (run by a limited computer, and in thirty years a "limited" cheap computer might be more powerful then one of today's supercomputers :-). Add in a solar panel or inductor or isotope generator (or even cold fusion :-) to the package, along with a wireless network link, and you have essentially a complete OLPC computer system. Imagine a world so wealthy that anybody who even got a discarded Amazon box had access to all the world's knowledge for "free to the user". :-) Maybe working towards such a future might help justify Princeton's continued existence as a going concern, instead of a "going out of business sale" dissolution to provide $100 networked computers to every poor family on the planet right now? Or maybe not. It might still depend on who you ask which appears better.

Maybe it's time again to ask high school students what the future could be like? And here is another place to start, as well:
        "Google search on reuseable/reusable containers"
        http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=reuseable+containers
        http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=reusable+containers
Or people could ask Historical Societies (or old alumni) what life was like back with a "milkman" and horse cart. :-)
        "The Milkman"
        http://www.newstatesman.com/200605290047

Some styles of boxes might have cameras or microphones or other sensors too, enabling them to directly scan the materials put in them or identify the person closing or opening them. Other boxes might use services at kiosks or delivery trucks to scan their contents as they were opened and closed. The design of kiosks, deliver trucks, delivery robots, and delivery points outside homes would itself take some thought -- sensors, security, privacy, climate control like refrigeration, and so on.

Of course, one can also imagine doing this without the containers. Robots of various types (humanoid or cart-like) with dexterous manipulators could carry items and put them on shelves -- like human slaves once did and in some places still do. :-(
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery
But as with people, if we develop sentient robots to help with this task, then we have to start thinking about rights for them too.
        "Robots could one day demand the same citizen's rights as humans, according to a study by the British government."
        http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6200005.stm

Also, as it might be fun to help out others, somehow this system, like the one in "The Skills of Xanadu", might make it easy for people to know when something needed to be moved from near where they are to somewhere else they are thinking of going, so they can deliver it just for the fun of it and the joy of service. So, while the robots are cool to me, there are ways to look at this system that might avoid them. Imagine people might even load a few boxes into their car or truck to carry along as hitchhikers to move a little closer to their destination. This used to be how letters were delivered before centralized post offices. You'd write a letter and give it to someone going in the general direction, and they might later pass it on to someone else going even closer. There are aspects of that in the internet routing of today.

Once one sees this internet of things in standard containers as an analogy to the internet of bits in standard packets, then a lot more analogies flow from that. You can have public repositories of objects and private ones. Some services might start off as free, some an paid. Some packets might be free, some expensive. People might bid on items, or they might bid to get rid of them. :-) Or there might be fixed prices, user varying prices, or no prices at all. You might cache things you might want soon locally, in local storage systems, which are like local networks (LANS) but gatewayed to this larger "Internet of things". You might have firewalls or packet sniffing tools. :-) Packages might be periodically opened and the contents transferred to new containers to interface with different networks (UPS, the post office, etc.). And the contents of open-top on-campus containers or pallets might be transferred to closed containers as the objects crossed the campus "firewall" or vice-versa. Some packages might be split up into multiple packets; some might be condensed together into one package. Packets might arrive at a location and have the contents processed (by people or robots) with the result put back into another packet. Perhaps cardboard containers that arrive on campus might be opened in a "firewall" like mail room and repackaged into more sophisticated containers (or not) for storage and delivery on campus. Similarly, when materials were to go off campus, they might be transferred to other types of containers (or not). And so on. This twelve minute movie visualizes digital packets as real ones, so look at it for inspiration:
        "Warriors of the Net"
        http://www.warriorsofthe.net/
I saw that movie a few months ago and perhaps it unconsciously inspired this overall idea.

One might also think about the way materials stream in cells.
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cytoplasmic_streaming

To be extra clear, this idea is not exactly the same as the "Internet of Things" currently described here:
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_of_Things
That focuses more on putting "things" on the internet in the sense of interacting with them remotely, as well as tagging them to track their movements. Those may well be part of the future. What I talk about here is more about moving real things around in a standardized way typically with standardized physical containers or standard ways of manipulating and tracking most objects by people, robots, or automation. That web page description does not yet encompass standard ways of routing items, such as any post office or package delivery service already does. So, the proposal here is a little closer to spirit to what those Yalies are up to:
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_W._Smith

        "In 1962, Smith entered Yale University. While attending Yale, he wrote a paper for an economics class, outlining overnight delivery service in a computer information age. Folklore suggests he received a C for this paper although in a later interview he claims that when asked he told a reporter "I dont know what grade, probably made my usual C". The paper became the idea of FedEx (for years, the sample package displayed in the company's print advertisements featured a return address at Yale). Smith became a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity and Skull and Bones. He received his Bachelor's degree in economics in 1966. In his college years, he was a friend of George W. Bush. Smith was also friends with John Kerry and shared an enthusiasm for aviation with Kerry and was a flying partner with him."

Note that all sorts of things might be put into the system, even bottles of dangerous chemicals, refrigeration-required biohazards like yesterday's chili, or the inevitable guns that campus security will end up with. :-( So, one might start thinking about limited access to some items, perhaps based on some personal record of certification. However, I'd expect *most* items would not need to be restricted. Kind of like on Star Trek -- you might expect that if a five year old asks a matter replicator for a "Hand Phaser" that at worst they get a toy version. But if they ask for a soccer ball or a telescope, why not oblige with a real one?

Here is an example of a delivery robot for dangerous things, especially biohazards:
        "Secure and efficient transportation of lab specimens throughout a healthcare facility"
        http://www.speciminder.com/
Certainly working on those seems better to me than all the time and money the USA is now putting into developing this:
        "Dalek"
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalek

But in general, the carriers would not need to be secure, since while it might be OK to grab something going by (the system could just fetch something similar), causing another user an extra delay would probably be seen as very rude.

Since people might put *anything* into the system, including bombs like yesterday's dining hall mystery meat dish, the system might need smell sensors as well as advanced vision software to detect such situations. Obviously, the NSA would get their paws into such a system, so why no just invite them in at the start to help fund it all and make it "secure"? :-) As long as, with "Security-Enhanced Linux", the results should be F/OSS.
        http://www.nsa.gov/selinux/

        "As part of its Information Assurance mission, the National Security Agency has long been involved with the computer security research community in investigating a wide range of computer security topics including operating system security. Recognizing the critical role of operating system security mechanisms in supporting security at higher levels, researchers from NSA's National Information Assurance Research Laboratory have been investigating an architecture that can provide the necessary security functionality in a manner that can meet the security needs of a wide range of computing environments."

Naturally, such a system could also be used to route unused food to a composting facility, or obvious garbage to a waste disposal or recycling center. PU people have good ideas; I'm sure they will think of completely unexpected uses for the system. :-) Also, "interdisciplinary" studies as Professor Tilghman seems fond of may help here. I used to be more interested in engineering self-reliant systems until I came, through studying ecology, to read about Island Biogeography, and see the interplay of self-reliant and networked systems in maximizing diversity.
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_biogeography
No doubt, even in expansion into space, the future will entail networks of otherwise self-replicating space habitats, making some things locally, and exchanging others (even if just information and people and genetic materials and some hard to make goods). That's the way bacteria work on Earth today -- they are self-replicating but still part of a vast network exchanging genetic material by various means.

More motivation for PU to move towards Freecycling and openness and post-scarcity ideals

I outline the above in part as a disclosure to prevent some patents. Although, as people have been handling containers and transferring objects with and without barcodes, RFID, machine vision, automation and robots for decades, chances are all (or almost all) of the key related patents have been filed and have expired already. :-)

And, after I wrote this, I came across this short essay and I am sure there are many such examples if you look:
        "Automatic Delivery Systems" by John McCarthy, Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at Stanford University
        http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/future/delivery.html

        "An automatic delivery system is a system for the transmission of material objects between homes, stores, offices etc. with as much as possible of the convenience of the telephone system used for the transmission of information. First we shall discuss how such a system might look to a user. Then we shall discuss the advantages of such as system and what it might be worth. Finally, we shall propose some ways of implementing the system and try to estimate how much it might cost. (Except for specifically designated 1995-96 notes, this essay was written in the 1970s.) "

Although, while that and many other "technological cornucopian" notions on John McCarthy's site make a lot of sense to me, without some notion of social equity or a gift economy, he risks the distopia Marshall Brain outlines in his story "Manna", where all these services are just for the rich and the poor are literally swept aside by robots.
[2013: See the Elysium trailer for what this might look like: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elysium_(film) ]

And sorry if this idea eventually forces Amazon and eBay out of business, or at least, their current businesses. A bit of a conflict of interest there of course -- does PU move in a way that may be seen as working directly against the short term interests of their richest alums, who may even be trustees at some point? And it even treads directly on Yalie "Skull and Bones" turf of FedEx. This echoes themes in the Domhoff book previously mentioned on why things don't change. Still, there are thousands of other universities that might start experimenting along these lines, so does PU want to get left behind? You see why I don't name my graduate advisor. What a pickle. :-)

Solar panels started as very expensive niche products about 50 years ago with satellite power, then for calculators, then for no-wire yard lights, then for off-grid homes and things like supplementing generator power for portable traffic lights for road construction. Now solar panels have dropped so far in price they are going mainstream with "grid parity" in various places including India (and maybe in a few years almost everywhere including the northern USA).

In the 1980s, people were talking about exactly this sort of progression for solar panels, and it has played out pretty much as outlined.

So, yes, this strategy can make a lot of sense for other things like biofuels, especially in a society that otherwise has become very risk adverse or incapable of making long-term investments. But even in a society willing to take risks, an incremental path can still make a lot of sense.

With renewables, the first most cost effective step was almost always to become more energy efficient (like insulating a home and replacing low-effeciency appliances). Then, renewables have an easier time handling the remaining load, and the money saved by the energy efficiency improvements could be used to fund that conversion. So, another incremental approach.

Still, what the solar industry wanted more than anything was a "level playing field" where coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear would pay their true costs up front. Those "externality" costs include pollution, health damage, defending long supply lines militarily, meltdown risk, and even the politically corrosive effect of large centralized power systems on a democracy. If those costs had to be paid up front for those other technologies, renewables (as well as energy conservation like passive solar homes) would have probably been cost effective since the 1970s. See the book "Brittle Power" and similar writings by the Lovins for more on that:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power

Unfortunately, the renewable industry lost hope for that in the 1980s Reagan years especially, with the push there to allow companies to privatize gains but socialize costs. So, the renewable industry was forced to turn to this incremental strategy even though they should have won in a fair market decades ago.

I wonder if it will let you list music, software, movies and other intellectual property? These days you don't usually own it, you simply have a license to use it under very limited circumstances. Claiming ownership could be considered copyright infringement or "theft" if you are the RIAA/MPAA.

Deaths/kilowatt(hour) is cherry picked because it ignores two crucial factors while making nuclear look good compared to coal and gas:

1. Most of the problems have not been deaths, but harm to health and financial losses.

2. The cost of this level of safety has been astronomical, especially when compared to the relative inherent safety of other technologies.

It's not reasonable, the US is extremely inefficient. Germand and Japanese people use about 1/3th the energy that the average US citizen does, and yet they are not freezing cold in the winter or wondering around in the dark every night.

We already know how fucked up California's deregulated energy market is. Smart meters work well in areas that are properly regulated, where they have to pay a fair price for solar and are only allowed to charge based on load during well defined periods (so at night it must be cheap by law).

You are doing it wrong. The idea with smart meters is to communicate price changes and load to appliances so they can make decisions based on how the OWNER has programmed them. If you want to save some cash you can tell your fridge to go a few degrees lower at night so that it doesn't need quite so much energy to maintain an acceptable level during the day. You can tell your heating to warm up water at night and store it instead of at 7AM when everyone else is trying to do the same. Rather than turning the air-con off due to cost you can tell it to just back off when electricity is expensive and make the most of it at cheap times.

Don't buy all the FUD, it's just people with a vested interest trying to scare you and apparently doing a good job of it.

It seems like Japanese manufacturers like BSD for some reason. Panasonic use it in their TVs, as do Sharp IIRC. Honda were using it for their in-car entertainment/navigation systems, not sure if they still do.

Will Sony bother keeping their OS up to date? Seems like they would want to keep the platform stable so that games released on day one still work seven years down the line without patches. That means keeping in any bugs that might break things in subtle ways if fixed.

The transaction is taxable in many places, although since pigs are not currency you would have to pay the government with real money.

Technology is getting more energy efficient, not less. Laptops run for longer on smaller batteries and boot up faster than ever before. Tablets rarely ever get turned off, yet use a fraction of the energy of a desktop PC and replace many of its functions.

LED lighting is as bright as incandescent and produces nicer colour, yet uses only a fraction of the energy. I've been looking at Panasonic's dome lights which produce 5,500lm (about 4x 100W incandescents) but lights the room evenly, comes with a remote control and can change between warm white and daylight colour modes. When we eventually get them in the west our lives will be made better by them and we will save energy.

Cars now go further on less fuel but are faster and quieter than before. Less pollution from cars improves everyone's health. Insulating your house produces a nicer environment than adding more power heating or air-con.

The idea that we must keep using more energy to maintain or improve our quality of life is nonsense. The exact opposite is true.

More likely anyone who owns certain fertilizers or a pressure cooker in a metropolitan area will be getting a knock from the anti-terrorism squad.

Should be interesting when people start putting their gun collections on there.

Don't you have an energy rating system in the US? In Europe appliances like fridges come with a rating from AAA to G, with AAA being the best. Over the years fridges have steadily improved to the point where most are now A rated or above.

Rather than trying vent excess heat you might as well use it to say heat water. Some fridges offer that feature, either dispensing warm water or sending eat to a central water heating system.

Actually meltdown could have been averted even in this eventuality if the emergency cooling plumbing had worked. Unfortunately a valve was left in the wrong position so much of the water pumped in to cool the reactors by fire engines was syphoned off into a holding tank and never reached them. If there had been some way to determine the position of the valve in the event of a power failure this would not have happened and the meltdowns/explosions could have been avoided.

A lot of new information has come to light in the years since the Fukushima disaster but it doesn't seem to get reported much outside of Japan. People assume it was a single major design flaw or point of failure, but actually there were several major flaws and several missed opportunities to avert disaster.