I have been worried for a long time about the ephemeral nature of all of our digital life. We are headed for the biggest gap in human knowledge (for future generations) since Sumerian/Akkadian/Assyrian cuneiform clay tablets were replaced by alphabetic text on papyrus. Baked clay tablets have survived unchanged until today as long as they are not physically broken. But papyrus disintegrates over time unless stored in extremely dry environments like the clay jars that housed the dead sea scrolls. Similarly, the very existence of all of our data for the past 40 years (except for the very small portion printed off into books), lives on only at the pleasure of whoever maintains the storage or the device makers of the hardware needed to store or retrieve it. With the flip of a switch, everything you have written, created, or contributed to can simply disappear. Or even in the shorter term, it can become unavailable due to technical obsolescence. Anyone out there ever found an old 5.25" floppy or a zip drive with files that you never thought to transfer to other media? I have. All of those files are for all practical purposes lost to me.

Government dictating the economic decisions of private businesses and implementing labor staffing level by regulatory fiat. What could POSSIBLY go wrong? Karl Marx thanks you. Don't worry, there won't be any need for checkout lanes at all when the shelves are empty comrades! Welcome to the workers paradise of the Socialist Republic of Oregon. You have nothing to lose but your chains (and your private property).

Self interest is hard coded into the human firmware. You can ignore it and pretend it isn't there (socialism and communism), or you can be realistic and at least try to make the best possible use of it (capitalism). Capitalism does make some people extremely rich. It also makes the vast majority of people much better off than they would have been otherwise. No economic system can change human nature. It only changes the membership of the small cabal of people who hold the power (Meet the new boss, same as the old boss). We have religion and philosophy to try and reign in our personal self destructive demons and to strengthen our better Angels. Economics is not designed for that. The simple acid test is this, if the capitalistic American Economy is so unfair and terrible, why is EVERYONE trying to come here? If our capitalist system is the evil abomination many make it out to be, then immigration shouldn't be an issue in our politics, right?

Plus is it true that every adult citizen keeps a fully automatic assault weapon in their homes as apart of a true national militia? Woo-hoo!!!!! (Plus, a county that still produces EXCELLENT mechanical watch movements)

This raises a good point. Unless CO2 captured by any biological organism is GEOLOGICALLY sequestered (ie removed from the biosphere), it get re-released as a respiratory product of some biological organism (be it consumer, scavenger, or decomposer). You almost have to bury the wood or algae or whatever it in a deep underground repository cut off from the atmosphere (or shoot it into space) or all you are doing is just adding another temporary node in the biological carbon cycle. The whole underlying concept behind "greenhouse CO2" as a problem is that the global CO2 levels increase precisely because we remove carbon from Geological sequestration (as fossil fuels buried over hundreds of million years) and re inject it into the biosphere in a century or so. The only real solution is to return carbon to geologic sequestration. And that is not easy or cheap. I think eventually we have to engineer some time of mega structure to reduce solar inputs. The carbon genie isn't going back into the bottle. Maybe a giant super sunshade at Lagrange Point L1?

You obviously have not set up a modern, open standards based Enterprise Infrastructure. A modern LAMP stack is easier to set up and manage than sliced bread. And oh yes, I have been FORCED to use MS in the Enterprise, and it is always an excruciating experience. The whole MS approach has always been that they know betetr than you do how your software should be set up. Their interfaces and "wizards" are dumbed down to the lowest common denominator. I have to spend WAY too much time reading through dense KB notes and online "help" trying to figure out how to script anything other than the most basic functionality or having to use the lame defaults that MS has picked ahead of time for me to use.

"You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately... Depart, I say; and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!"

And don't forget.......you can rearrange the letters in Steve Balmer to spell "Beer vat smell" -OR- "Tremble slave"

Wait a minute, didn't I read about glowing trees back in the Simarillion? Seems like the Tolkien Estate can show prior art.

Don't forget the Demon Core :)

Yes I understand the concept of quantitative risk assesment. My believe is that you can make the results come out any way you want by tweaking the inputs by tiny amounts. It is policy argument masquerading as science. I have no particular dog in this hunt as it were. All approaches at energy come with risks. I say lets use them all and let economics eventually pick the winner.

I would say we should just hold out for dilithium crystals; but then I remembered their impact in terms of human trafficing.

And we haven't even discussed the impacts of extracting the coal. Have you ever seen a large strip mine with dragline in person? Wow!

The North Koreans are accepting spent fuels rods for safe and efficient displosal, no cash down and no questions asked!!!

That's a pretty precise attempt at a measurement for a very nebulous idea. Now we wait for the "other" study from the Fossil Fuel's industry groups I guess. This sort of wildly speculative "guess" at something that is basically unmeasureable due to the large number of variables and assumptions only makes it more difficult to get the public to believe the results of more meaningful and relevant studies when that time comes.