C, C++, C#, Java, Php, Python, Ruby, Go, D, Perl, etc., are all dead, most programmers just don't know it yet. They're dead because they cannot easily adapt to the new multi-core reality. Quad core machines are common place now. 16 core machines will be common within two years, with hundred core machines not far off. The only way to make good use of this power is with a language that has no deadlock cases and no critical sections. There are few languages that meet those requirements. There are even fewer that can continue operating despite bugs and can evolve without down-time. Erlang is the only language I know that meets all these future necessities. Coding in anything else means a short system lifespan.

IANAL but my reading of court cases found that internet traffic was not treated as on a "wire" like a phone. It was instead treated as a broadcast like a CB radio. The law therefore views internet traffic as being on "public channels" and therefore eavesdropping is perfectly legal. Employers, ISPs, government officials and Joe public can all legally eavesdrop on traffic. I'd love for someone to show I'm wrong though!

Vacuum is lighter than helium. We could always fill them with vacuum. America has rich natural reserves of that stuff.

People just love picturesque fanciful solutions to problems. They love the idea of pleasant Dutch-like windmills turning in the gentle breeze, or raising healthy green corn to make friendly ethanol, or shiny happy solar panels under a crystal blue sky. It makes them all warm and fuzzy. It's a smiley face on that frowny problem. If only it weren't for those the nasty science details: lunatic costs, minuscule power production, nasty secondary environmental consequences.

I love fantasy land but there's a reality to confront -- civilization's energy requirements grow exponentially. Hundreds of thousands of years ago we used kilowatts. A few thousand years go it was megawatts. Today we use terawatts. Energy requirements aren't going to go down, no matter what some treehuger tells you. Thirty years from now we need solutions that produce petawatts. So if you're going to solve the future energy problem, what sort of solution do you implement? Happy little windmills that produce one billionth of what you need, and do it unreliably?

There's only one solution I know to this problem, and that's Thorium reactors. It's the only solution that gives us petawatts in thirty years without miracles. It's the only solution that doesn't destroy the environment. It's the only solution that has plenty enough fuel to last us until we move to exawatts.

This situation doesn't make any sense given a few seconds consideration. Just tell them the passkey -- just not the correct one. When it doesn't decrypt the file say "Well it should... maybe you guys broke something." They can't prove you gave them the wrong passkey. If pressed say the obvious -- "Hey! Laptops are easy to break, maybe you guys were too rough with it, it's always been finicky, or maybe you guys screwed it up." What are they going to do now? How do they prove your memory of the passkey is faulty?

Some simple facts to explain why it works:
1. Garbage contains a lot of energy (hydrocarbons in plastics, rubber, food, paper, etc).
2. Garbage contains some metals (aluminum, iron, copper, zinc, nickle, etc).
3. Garbage contains a far amount of inert material (earth, ceramics, etc).

So, you run everything through a big grinder, feed the dust to an electric torch which turns it into plasma, which of course breaks all those fancy compounds down into simpler elements:
1. Hydrocarbon gas - synthgas (methane like stuff).
2. Steam -- the water trapped in plant materials mostly (grass clippings, banana peals, stuff like that).
3. Metallic gas - which you can optionally separate by element if you have the right equipment.
4. Slag - inert silica mostly, mixed with other crud (which you can use as building materials).

Important thing to remember is the electric torch doesn't burn the garbage -- burning is inefficient and pointless. You want to separate all the various elements so you can make efficient use of them:
1. The hydrocarbons are pull off as synthgas, which you use some of to run a generator to power the torch and the surplus you sell to a conventional natural gas power planet for profit!
2. The steam which you separate and sell to as heat for commercial or residential use.
3. The metals you sell as scrap -- either high or low quality depending on your ability to separate the elements from the plasma.
4. The silica slag you can mold into pavers while it's still hot, or spin into a ceramic like wool as insulation, or into black pebbles as ground cover or whatnot.

The process has a number of advantages:
1. It is profitable -- it produces more energy than it consumes.
2. It's low tech -- you can set up the facility inside the garbage dump and avoid shipping the garbage around.
3. It sterile -- it consumes medical waste, contaminated material, toxic junk as readily as normal waste and it reduces it all to simple lemony fresh clean compounds (makes the birds sing). You can't feed it radioactive material obviously, as that would foul up the works.
4. It's happy -- converts garbage back into useful things.

Biggest obstacle has been the patents on the process which expired a year or two ago. Rejoice, garbage is the new valuable resource!