Have you seen the new twice as expensive, but only two-color Plasma from a little Japanese Company called Kobayashi Maru?

Key-value storage? That sounds like the ordinary file system to me.

What may be catastrophic about AGW is not simply that it's occurring. As you note the Earth has gone through large climate changes before. The catastrophic part is that it looks like we'll see changes in 200 years that would take thousands of years during a natural climate shift. Natural systems aren't well adapted to handle that rapid of a change. The human race is almost totally dependent on many of those natural systems for its health and well being for the time being. Any disruption of those systems is likely to be disruptive to our civilization. We'll adapt I imagine but some of it probably won't be fun.

When you talk about the AR4's "devastating" projections are you taking into account the time frame? For instance it projects sea level rise of something like 0.5 meters by 2100. That's like 1/5 inch per year. (More recent projections however project 1-2 meters of SLR by 2100.) The change is slow on human time scales but it keeps going. More of the AR4 projections have been found to be conservative than overstated.

If I'm still around and functional in 20 years I'll buy you dinner in the restaurant of your choice just to celebrate that.

That doesn't mean an experienced PHP programmer can't write secure code. I write database driven websites 6 days a week in PHP, and never use any of the dangerous methods in PHP.

We have our own API for escaping SQL strings, our own API for pulling data out of the HTTP request, our own API for converting a string into html.

Yes, PHP has a bunch of crap, but no-one forced you to use them. It's perfectly feasible to treat PHP like a lower level language, such as C, where you're forced to write all those little utility functions, because they aren't built in.

That doesn't really make sense on the modern internet, because most of the traffic is what you download - be it web pages, JPGs, MPGs, or streamed video. From a technical standpoint this is being sent to you, but (in general) at your request.

Also, a system where every website in the world gets billed by every ISP in the world would be an administrative nightmare.

But surely the telephone poles and wiring conduits would also be owned by the company that put them there? Also I imagine much of the cost is the process of stringing the wires and any digging and refilling.

If you are suggesting that local government could provide the poles and conduits, is there any reason they shouldn't also provide the lines?

Certainly they need to advertise any applicable data charges or limits. But why would you want a burst line instead of a data limit? I don't see the advantage, at least not for normal usage patterns. What most people want is full speed when they are using the internet, without being charged for full speed 24/7.

Theoretically I suppose if you were sent unsolicited packets this would run up your meter, but AFAIK this has never become a problem in New Zealand.

Of course, most people don't want to risk being faced with an unexpectedly large bill, which is why most ISPs in New Zealand offer capped plans: instead of paying extra when you hit your limit, your bandwidth gets cut down.