If you really wanted to. But there's also China that's adding coal powered plants at the rate of the total coal plant capacity the US currently has every three years with no end in sight.
And don't kid yourself with renewable energy, in 2005 less than 7% of the energy in the US came from green energy, which was mainly from hydroelectric dams and you can't exactly build those things everywhere.

True, you can set up a surveillance system capturing every sneeze that's made, as long as it isn't abused you can't call in Big Brother.

But times change, a crisis will happen and looking back at history it doesn't take that much for an extremist to take over. But this time he or she will have all the tools to become Big Brother instantly. Even if the rebels find ways around the systems an oppressive government still has gigantic databases of stored surveillance to look up their possible opponents.

Just to support your comment, In Holland a label has to pay 7 eurocents to the local anti-piracy group, 'BREIN' for each song that is downloaded from their (clients) websites. BREIN than takes this money to pay it's own salaries and gives a little to the top10 artists from the hitlists. The kicker? the 7 cents need to be paid even if the song is free to download.

Your comment being voted as informative kind of defies the point your making. Comparing Slashdot to the social news sites Digg and reddit is a bad start with the difference in the type of articles on the frontpage as a major factor. Besides that, I don't mind reading comments that make no sense or are plain incorrect, I'll do the censoring myself thank you.

So you're basing you character on the fastest way to level instead of creating a character you like? I'd like to take thesixtyone.com as an example here. None of the listeners has a clue how the reward system exactly works so you end up bumping tracks purely on how much you like them. You don't worry if it's a smart investment because there's no way of predicting. The music is the only thing you have to pay attention to. Perhaps such a system only works with sites/games dedicated to a single subject, like music but it's interesting nonetheless.

I prefer games with an appearantly random point reward system so there's no best pattern to look for and abuse. At first it might a bit annoying to get much less points than the last time you did the exactly the same thing but soon enough you'll stop worrying and fully concentrate on the game without caring about your rank. And that's the best gaming experience you can have.