Is it really that difficult to acquire a lethal dose of a drug without doctor assistance? : For a young kid, no, but for a elderly totally. Anybody will tell you to simply shell out a hundred buck to get heroin or coke and buzz away your life. But can you simply imagine how an old lady would feel trying to get coke/heroin in a shady neighborhood? In fact there's most chance she would get mugged of her cash and left in pain.

Thorium reactor designs are somewhat "new" or unproven compared to actual nuclear reactor. The nuclear reactors operators are somewhat conservative, but it's quite understandable. You don't want something going wrong when you mess with radioactivity. But we should see Molten-salt thorium reactor in a somewhat near future, India having bought the right to build them.

Somebody here failed his geography class...

A turbo getting clogged by grease leftover means that the fuel didn't burn totally . It can be caused by a compression leak, an fuel:air ratio being too high or oil being poorly filtered. You should however take a particular care of the injectors, as oil impurity as a bad tendency to clog them. Getting bigger injector usually helps. And I'm pretty sure that you can get a chip tuned for better handling of bio-diesel. BTW there's additive you can buy that really helps decrease oil viscosity.

I guess it's time to upgrade to SSD. Imagine how the price will go down if all the demand for HDD goes to SSD. Sure it will spike until production can step up, but in the end it would help a lot.

Don't worry, the ecosystem will balance back before we get to the non returning point. It's been proven that if a population isn't controlled anymore by any selective pressure, a new selective pressure will arise and reestablish the correct population/resources ratio. Don't you see what's going on? Population increase is going on in already over populated area which are usually poor and undeveloped. This create a the perfect environment for a new epidemic. The first world is also extremely reliant on petrol and electronics. A solar flare big enough to knock down completely our power grid could let most of our population to starve. The economy is going badly, there's unrest in developing nation, political tension all over the world. Don't you see what's coming? We're on the edge of the ravine and all it takes is a small tips for our civilization to collapse. Hell we'll surely give it to ourselves. Don't believe me? Look back at the roman empire.

Arrakis climate isn't regulated. But others, like Caladan, are.

Frank Herbert has thought the idea in Dune, with satellite controlling the climate. Geoengineering and terraforming is maybe science fiction for now, but I'd love to see Mars and Venus altered to support life. Agreed with today's technologies it would take a millennium, but once we get started, development would accelerate and we'd get better and better at it.

Lawn is a small example, but think about how much plant byproducts are trashed : food, leaves, wood, paper, cardboard. The implication is not only in generating fuel, but could give another twist to waste management. There's already process to convert general trash to fuel. Let's recycle what can be, than convert to fuel what need to be trashed. The only things left would be non organic materials like stone and metal. Let's also be realistic in saying that every plant waste can't be composted, as the compost needs to be used somewhere and farmers already have more than enough of animal fertilizer.

Cellulose is part of every plant. Everything from cut grass to wood surplus and maze cane could be used to do it. This imply that a city could harvest lawn and convert it locally to fuel. This has a huge implication over fuel production.

They didn't standardized on fuel. At the automobile beginnings, you used what you had available as fuel and engine where conceived that way. It's not until late that even producer have been able to regulate strictly quality (octane level) and that a common process prevailed. If 100+ octane level would have been common at that time, it's what we would be running on today.

No it will not. This is a canadian ruling and as such, it's only binding in Canada. Now let's say any company deposit a complain to ICANN or get's a ruling in the US against a canadian company operating a web site infringing on their copyright or IP (let's say a torrent site), than domain could be seized by ICE, allowed that the registred domain is part of a TLD operated under US juridiction (com, net, org...). However, if the domain is a .CA, the domain cannot be seized. The plaintiff can however gets the judgment and try to make it stand under a canadian court It's worth noting that canadian law favor actual property and individuals over Intellectual property and big corporation, if you compare to other country. We don't have software patents and file sharing still has little treat here. That's one of the reason why we do get on the worst country to fight against piracy list of the US. And we like it that way :)

Actually, that's how big minecraft servers run, using RAMDrive and dumping the save to a disk once in a while.

So, someone building a shooting range in his basement, stock piling weapons and ammo, or building pipebombs for fun, all of this, in their privacy, would run free?

I guest you live in the US. In Canada there's lot of web boutique that have .com TLD and it sometime confusing to know we're the shop is. Or if they ship in Canada and you don't know they are in the US then you end up with a custom fee. It's true that if they'd ended with .ca, that would be clearer, but then most other people wouldn't think they could ship to other countries. The thing is, the TLD doesn't guarantee the web site origin. Would someone in the US shop on a .ru website? Most won't, simply because of the TLD, but the company could have a shop in the US. Most companies use the .com TLD because it's international and more recognizable. But it doesn't ensure they doing business internationally. TLDs are a conventions that is being misused. That's why I think they could be discarded.