The linked article about the nuclear plant problems in Japan is chock full of technical errors and omissions. He skips the primary danger of exposed fuel rods, the danger Japan is facing: thermal damage to the fuel rods themselves, prior to the total meltdown stage, means your steam pressure releases now contain primary radionuclides! He states that the melted fuel rods aren't hot enough to melt steel and concrete, when they most certainly are! (They melted sizeable chunks of the containment vessels at TMI and Chernobyl.) He fails to correctly describe what emergency core cooling systems do and how. He miss-states the actual danger of graphite-moderated reactors: it isn't that graphite is flammable, it's that you're using it as a moderator (as thus, water as some of the neutron absorption) and that makes the system inherently unstable. Once you reach the point of worrying about the graphite burning, you're way past the tremendous explosion/meltdown phase.

As someone who works in the solar and wind controls business, let me state: this is not a surprise or really even a problem. People who install big wind and solar systems understand, because of the payback horizon of such installations, the limitations of the local distribution system. It is completely normal for big turbines to have to feather/furl/divert themselves during strong wind. The owners and installers design for this. It's factored into the payback time of the project!

The problem here is the sensationalist reporting. Yes, we need better electricity distribution systems for distributed generation, but we in the industry know that. We've known it for years. The guys who financed and installed the system at Columbia River Gorge almost certainly knew it.

So, yes, pump money into building bigger lines in the right places, but that's something we've been doing for more than fifty years. Generation locations are rarely at consumption locations, after all, and that was true for coal, natural gas, etc., just as it is for wind, hydro, and solar. The only problem here is that our 1990's generation locations aren't where tomorrow's generation locations are.

My solution:

• main partition is Win XP
• second tiny partition for /boot
• rest of the drive is an encrypted LVM partition with Linux

When I go to travel, I edit my grub menu and enable (uncomment) "hiddenmenu", make sure the default is to boot to XP and the default timeout is just a couple seconds. If you want more stealth, force the machine to boot XP always, recoverable only if you boot off a Live CD (Knoppix, et al) and go re-enable booting to Linux. If you want even more, put your grub and /boot on a thumb drive.

Agent boots up the laptop, perfectly benign Win XP computer. If they want to clone the drive and examine it off-line at their leisure, they're more than welcome.

Of course, I've long ago forgotten my encryption password, so I can't boot into it even if compelled by a court. I guess that makes me a terrarist.