The surface of Earth is hardly enough to give people food they want. Why would anyone think it's enough to drive the much more hungry cars and super-computers? :)

Anyway some regulation wave of 5% of fuel should be bio-ethanol drove the food prices to the skies just 1-2 years ago.

I think that accident didn't happen because of the infancy of the technology but because of chains human mistakes operating the facility including turning off the protection mechanism etc.

I think it strengthens and weakens your point at the same time. The technology is already foolproof and we are dumb not to use it. The humans operating the technology are idiots or some of them are idiots. The more plants you have the more chance you'll get some idiot melting it down.

Maybe some regulations can decrease this probability by orders of magnitude though.

There are test reactors that produce the same amount of energy that it eats for controlling the plasma. See the ITER project for example (i hope it gets built, some usual childish problems around the place and etc hinders the project somewhat) http://www.iter.org/a/index_nav_1.htm

Who cares they don't. I don't think that we can completely kill our planet with waste and other craps. The oil and natural gas is so rare, it's simply not enough the provide all the energy to finish ourselves by waste. When it will be damn expensive to get some energy (and wind and solar panels are more expensive now, and will be when palladium becomes rare too) then people starts to look for saving energy. All problems solved.

That means 'they are NOT financially sound investments'... :)

To be more precise, limited to some tens of years... The cheapest kind of oil will be depleted in 10-20 years, your lifetime! :)

When the world starts massive computing using javascript, I think I quit IT. :)

I see the poor programmers thousands of miles away from their routers jammed with idiot traffic configs trying to fix a bug knowing the WORLD is waiting for their patch... would be bad.

Maybe a lot of people think that evolution is a kind of convergence to perfectness. Not at all. What evolution is: everyone will survive who is not bad enough to die before making its offspring. So if times come when a good brain eats too much resources and dumb brains are good - just give it a million years and dumbness rules. Then other times come and a good brain has to develop again. No sign of convergence to perfectness.

If you see evolution that way, the article is no surprise.

The formula is not so simple. Hardware for Google is REALLY expensive - big numbers, big money. Now think of it a bit, what if Google had a small number of dumb programmers. Hmm. How much hardware would Google need in such situation? :) Much more, 5*big number = 5*big money. So, programmers expensive? Not simply true.

I would like to see the ESLA! (End Submarine Licence Agreement)

Soldiers and so are not professional IT men, so they can be told that MS is a big company, BAE is so professional, they can do something professional. Anyway, that's the truth maybe. Linux is a no-go, as it's community written, and such is not good enough on paper, who will support it etc. Redhat cannot tell the military that 'no, we didn't make this but try to support' :) It's a nuclear submarine! MS did it, BAE did it, they can support it! Or not.... :) I could sleep better with a solaris for example...

yeah, then blue "screen" of death comes :)

What if it restarts at 3am because of an 'important' update? :D