The problem with nuclear, besides technical safety factors which we can overcome by not being stupid and putting backup generators and pumps in a sub-basement in a tsunami zone, is that its not "sustainable" - we can only scrape enough fissionable material off the Earth and from sea-water to last 5B years. Oh wait, the Sun will red-giant an burn the Earth up in about 5B years... Maybe it is sustainable if we develop some good solar cells by then - and solar shields...

A wise old Sgt Major told me "Keep your head up and your butt down when you have a Kevlar helmet"

You know, something like this happened in the Welsh village of Cwmtaff once. Wink, wink - anyone get the reference?

Its called the Soldier Wearable Acoustic Targeting System (SWATS) - and as a former Army Ranger (and a current QinetiQ employee) - I can tell you its a very cool and useful item. Bullets can whiz by you without you knowing where they came from. This little device at least gives you an estimate based on the sonic shockwave and gives you a heads up as to where a shooter might be. Not super high-tech, but super-useful if you're being shot at.

Enema of the state might be more appropriate here!

So based on this new estimate, the Great Galactic Barrier is further, and all of this time we have been afraid to voyage out to far and fall off the edge... Perhaps the final frontier is further out there! Now if we can just get DARPA or NASA to fund the Cochrane or Cubierre drive...

Japan has a homicide rate of 1.1 murder per 100,000 compared to the USA of 8.7 per 100,00 - far less murder and mayhem. We average about 11 firearm deaths per 100,00 (accidents account for much of this) while Japan averages less than 1 death per 100,00. We're leading in homicides and firearm death - USA! USA! USA! Now about pencils, kids don't seem to have a big problem there... lets start with reducing the guns freely available.

If you're not sure where these trends are going, see my analysis slide here: http://photos-b.ak.fbcdn.net/photos-ak-snc1/v4737/98/32/1489056585/n1489056585_30373265_1693711.jpg IPv6 transition is going too slow, so we are going to have many painful bandaids, like NAT in Carrier Cores, trading and splitting large address blocks, and other fixes that will lower QOS and raise operational expenditure (OPEX) for the Internet - and especially the Internet Service Providers who have been operating a slim margins for some time. How do you avoid this? Deploy IPv6 for your perimeter services and outward facing systems (www server, ecommerce servers, external application servers, VPN, DNS, etc) now and get your IPv6 security in place. This is what Google has done now. In 2012 when this becomes an issue, you can enable IPv6 to your desktop users and hopefully, if anyone besides you and Google has their external services ready, you can see everyone elses external IPv6 services!!!