Zawodny says that the most logical first application of LENR is the home reactor, which would produce heat and electricity for the home while charging the family electric car. Another area is in transportation, with the light, portable reactors powering supersonic aircraft and flying cars without the danger or radiation. It could even be used to power a space plane capable of reaching orbit without stages or external fuel tanks.

The list of potential applications reminds me of the Fallout series of video games. For those of you who haven't played or read about the world in those games, technological philosophies stopped at around the 1950's - 1960's, e.g. once they had fission reactors they stopped looking for better methods. The games take place in the post-nuclear winter era after the inevitable global-thermonuclear war. Houses, cars and most other forms of transportation and structures all had their own nuclear fission reactors built in for generating unlimited power. Nuclear fallout shelters were placed just about every square mile and were actually just covers for running unethical scientific experiments on communities and population groups, though I suppose they did actually serve the shelter purpose as well in some cases.

Actually, I would say that the biggest problem is that you can't really do much of anything if your user isn't admin level on a windows system. That's why almost every windows user is an administrator on the local machine. Even in enterprise level networks, this is the case with security vulnerabilities mitigated by group policies and patches.

On a *nix box a user can still install programs and use resources as long as it's not making changes outside that user's account. (i.e. restricted to that user's processes and home directory). On a windows machine, without administrative access you can't really do much more than access the internet and run maybe 1/4 of the programs available as long as they're already installed and aren't configured to do something goofy like access the registry or use a location outside the user's home directory or the system temp folders for doing file work.

Unfortunately, most windows programs seems to have been designed to expect administrative access in order to function properly even after installation

• trick the user into granting it privilege
• gain privileged access via a local exploit

I would argue that these two arguments are always valid since there will always be users who aren't paying attention or are ignorant of what's going on with their own machine, and because it's extremely difficult to find and fix every exploit in any large piece of software.

I would still argue that though a worm could flourish under a specific user's account, it would still allow the damage be contained to that one user's account. Would you agree?

Do you also challenge my point's validity concerning traditional viruses, activex drive-by downloads, and the like? If so, what advantage would there be for desktop users in not having root access for all users, in your opinion?

Let's be fair about where they built the city. It was founded back in 1718. They didn't really know much about weather patterns back then. Not to mention that it was initially french, then went to the spanish after the seven years war (transition was from 1763 to 69), then became part of the United States through the Louisiana Purchase in 1803.

So where it's built is something we can blame the French for, we didn't get it until almost an entire century later. The levees... well, they've been relying on the natural levees since the place was initially founded to avoid major catastrophes and problems with levees, both natural and otherwise, is nothing new for that city. We are all aware of it now because of how horribly our emergency services responded to Katrina, which opened the door to the worst, which we all got to have spoon fed to us by our news media.

Here's some history, btw: http://www.madere.com/history.html