First mistake: These values are for a US/Western life. The values for "foreigners", especially third-world countries where most of the casualties will be, is MUCH lower. Also when there will be a famine, the first casualties will be the "weak": elderly, handicapped, children, women ...
Economically speaking, some of them will be net profits.

Second mistake: The economic loss as you calculate will be in the countries of origin. This will reduce the world economy, but will have less impact on the western world. This has the pervert effect that western economy will have a greater percentage of the world wealth and as a consequence a greater influence, so why would anyone want to invest in a worse future?

Third mistake: You assume the US cares about the financial well-being of others. Investors will lay off hundreds of thousands of people to gain 3% more return on their investment. The cost of keeping a pet is greater than the cost of medication and nutrition of a few African/Asian children.

Forth mistake: You assume (the majority of) people will plan ahead and/or see the consequence of their actions. Look at all the debt we rack up. Look at how we "bury" our waste (including nuclear) like putting it in the ground will make it magically disappear. Look at how people (ab)use antibiotics.

Fifth mistake: You assume the loss of money will be evenly spread amongst all people. This is untrue as we can see in the economic crisis. The wealthy/powerful, who decide policies, will see little impact while the poor/weak will take the biggest hit.

No need. When prices will have sufficiently risen, you will have no more money to buy these products.

It is very easy. CO2 is mainly a by-product of our energy consumption. When there are no more cheap energy sources (oil), people will be forced to use less energy by the ever increasing prices. Between 1990-2000 1 barrel of crude oil on average costed less than $20. Between 2000-2004 it went up to $30. Now it is at $100: why do you think that is? Kyoto? Off course not. Did your income go up 3x since 2004? No? So the same amount of energy is taking up a greater portion of your available budget. This will continue until one of two things will happen:
1) People will start using less energy: either by using more power efficient technologies or by abandoning comfort because it will be too expensive
2) We find a new cheap sustainable alternative energy source (nuclear fission is definitely not viable before 2020)

If prices triple again in the next 10 years, will you continue to burn whatever you can afford or will you then start reducing your energy usage (insulating, smaller car, ...)?

Good luck. You obviously never tried this and got burned to the ground by the "netfilter" guys because their "NAT IS EVIL" mantra.

AFAIK there IS NO IPv6 NAT available at all with iptables (unlike openBSD). Their suggestion: "use reverse proxies".

Heck even a single command to administer everything is too much to ask (they are separate protocols, but then again every other application which binds to :: will serve both 4 and 6). You'll have to duplicate each firewall rule set.

Is this some kind of inside joke like half of the code is dead (LibreOffice) or there are many different formats doing the same?

I am totally lost and confused by your "analogy". The whole idea about an analogy is that you make it SIMPLE by using well known concepts.

So then what were you saying? It is like powerpoint? Or Outlook?

Please do not take this wrong way. It is meant as positive criticism: try to find better analogies, it helps the both of us. :)

I don't know what you make in a month and the type of finish/comfort you have in your house, but typically I would say one would spend (in EUR) 5k in sand/cement/concrete blocks (foundation, support structures), 2-3k for steel/rebarb, 3-4k in wood (roof) + 2k in tiles, 8k in bricks, 3k in wiring/electrics, 9k for central heating, 3k for insulation, 6k for windows, ...
And these are just raw materials and very conservative estimates, no labor, carpentry (stairs/doors) or decoration.
That means you'd have to earn (net) more than 21k/month, but I would guess most (including myself) don't get anything near that amount.

When we tell jokes about US, they are about (E)U.
When you tell jokes about EU, they are about us.

If you don't understand, don't worry, get rid of your principles, education and .... erm ... that third thing ... ooops.

True, but it means higher standard of living. At current efficiency the whole world can not enjoy the same mobility we (West) have enjoyed for so long.
Why would someone in Africa or Asia not be allowed the same privileges as us? Demand will come eventually and if there is not enough to go around someone will get the short end. Ever noticed how commodities are becoming more expensive? It is the Chinese buying up resources (including food).

False. It is not because your house is properly insulated that you will not put it on a comfortable 21ÂC but at a blistering 40ÂC. It is not because your car is 13 times as efficient that you will drive 13 times as much.

We are not there yet. It is better to have 100 devices each consuming 1W than 1 device that consumes 400W. Off course 100 devices consuming 1W is worse than no device at all ... but I don't feel like going back to the stone age.

You assumed wrong. I live in a developed country. ;)

Never said they didn't, but it may very well be true. I am quite sure my Atom laptop or ARM netbook uses less power than anything remotely comparable from that era.

Exactly what I said: "use less power for the same amount of processing capacity"

So what is your point? You now have a higher resolution and bigger screen using less power and probably cheaper than your old 14"? I guess you missed my point. My point was that lower power usage does not mean loss of jobs, nor does it mean we have to compromise on "standards of living" or even on price as the parent suggested. Look at the quote I replied to.

This is bullshit. I could ask for a citation too. What I found on the net is that a Beetle had an average consumption of 13 L/100km. As you took a small car, I will compare it to the BMW 1 series which has an advertised consumption of 5.8 L/100 km. In tests it shows "real" usage is about 6.8 L/100 km and when you "play" with it on the track you get about 11.8 L/100 km. So even on the tracks, in "sports" mode using the airco and soundsystem you still consume less than normal use of a Beetle. Have you ever looked at the numbers for today's cars?

Exactly. Fortunately for you most European and some Asian countries are doing the right things and leading the future. It is quite sad to see the US is even unable to ratify the Kyoto protocol. It shows how the US economy is no longer leading innovation, but is rusted in their old ways.

That is bullshit. Insulating your house increases your living standard and reduces costs (less heating/cooling required). How does that "kill" the economy? It should even allow for cheaper oil (less demand). If you can save money and get better comfort, how is this bad?

Look at BMW and Mercedes. You think they compromised on power or comfort with their new line of fuel efficient cars? When you don't lose as much time at the gas station and reduce toxins how is this bad?

Household appliances use less power. This means I can now use both the washer and dryer simultaneously on the same circuit without losing the circuit breaker. When you can do more with less. How is this bad?

CPUs and other electronics use less power for the same amount of processing capacity in each generation. Higher efficiency means longer battery life, smaller/lighter components as less cooling is required, ...
You think we would have smartphones and iPads if components were as energy efficient as they were in the 60s? 70s? 80s? 90s? 2000s (P4 anyone?)? When you can have things which could not exist before, how is this bad?

I am not saying this is true for all branches of the economy, but get your head out of the sand.
Recycling (= renewable resources) is an increasing branch in our economy and we could no longer live without as we simply do not have access to cheap resources and the same will be true for energy.
A lot of our devices and habits are VERY inefficient. Every house wastes energy for generating heat (heating, cooking) and cooling (airco, fridge) at the same time. Increasing the efficiency means cutting back on costs and emissions while standards of living increases for everyone. Did you hear about passive houses? They use residual heat from appliances to heat the house.
How great would it be if each building was self sufficient and would have "the grid" only as a fall-back option? How cool would it be if you could drive to the store on the cooking grease of the previous meal? How much better would it be if you did not need to drive to work at all (work from home)?

We are now using resources which took millions of years to form. You think we can keep this pace for another 500 years? 300 years? 100 years (this may be in the lifetime of my daughter which is 3 years old now)? 50 years (this may still be in my lifetime)? Who are we to use up all the resources for our enjoyment now and leave nothing for future generations? Our current habits are UNSUSTAINABLE and HAVE to change.
Either we make changes ourselves or something cataclysmic will happen before 2150. We are at a crossroad between the responsible and the irresponsible way. Changing habits (responsible) takes effort but could preserve prosperity. The irresponsible road leads to destruction.
You remember the days when we had acid rain?
You remember the days when the hole in the ozone layer was growing?
You remember the days when nuclear waste was dumped in the oceans?

Economies and standards of living today dependent too much on cheap energy and cheap credit. Both will crumble eventually. Better prepare yourself or get wiped out and as we saw with the credit crunch (credit went away briefly), it can happen VERY fast and incur irreparable damage.
Energy efficiency (aka reduction in emissions) is essential to our way of life (short term < 70 years) and even survival (long term > 300 years).

Yeah, our downfall can only come from WMDs (Whining and Mass Delays)
Fortunately we have our elite army of supranational bureaucrats ... Eurostat will come back in a couple of months when they know with great certainty about our strength ... Unless some of the member states have presented fraudulent numbers.

Europe doesn't need to shoot down any satellite. We have the awesome power of our commission and they will stop any GPS signal dead in its tracks.
See how effective US missiles will be when their coordinates are a week in customs trying to clear all required documents and permissions.

And for a ground war. Thanks to our import taxes, over 30% of all your forces will have to fight for us. Your tanks will not meet our EURO5 norm so they will be prohibited on our soil.

HAH. In your face.

They should do this more often.
It is not that they will get sued for copyright infringement or revealing trade secrets ...

If all malware were put freely on the internet, wouldn't that dry up some of the revenue streams for the authors? Sure, you will briefly see a spike in derivatives, but I believe the way to combat covert actions is not by covert counter-actions, but by bringing it all in the open.

When you consider this to be a battle, there are a number of things which would make sense:

1) Choose your battleground where you have a tactical advantage. Draw them in the open as "we" are more numerous and have more firepower.

2) Disrupt their supply lines by removing incentives to start writing malware. When they are selling their malware, buy one copy and provide it for free. This will remove a lot of their demand as they will have to start charging more and increase their exposure (larger money transactions will stand out more) or drive them deeper underground which makes them harder to find and buy from.

3) Increase your defences by making genuine software more secure and harder to exploit. "We" are making progress in this area.

4) Decrease their firepower by implementing more control on the ISP level. This may be dangerous as there might be "civilian casualties" but spam zombies are easily identified. Remove zombie hosts from the network. Remove ISPs who do not take action on the zombies from the network. Reduce bandwidth from countries who do not take action on the ISPs. This will have an added bonus that it will also disrupt some of their revenue streams. What is the point of raising a botnet army when you cannot do anything with it?

5) Demoralise their troops by taking legal action. Seize their spoils of war (assets) and their freedom (PoW).

6) Moralise your own troops by increasing incentives to write good code and identify problems. Have them rated like their financial health and increase/decrease tax rates accordingly as would interest rates. This will give incentives to write secure code rather than rush something out the door. When problems arise, security holes are patched as quickly as they are discovered and it allows companies to pay security researchers for their effort. It may even convince some of the black hatters (mercenaries) to switch sides as it becomes more profitable.

The whole island was shifted 7 meters to the west. How will that impact the GPS time keeping? Will everything keep on working as advertised or will software (coordinates) need to be updated?
As for the speed of light: 300.000 km/s = 300 m/s or 23.3 ns difference