<quote><p>On another tack, a company has just come out with a machine that you can put your old water bottles and other plastic bits into, and it will melt them down and turn them into the 'wire' that goes into another company's 3D printer, so you can make your own widgets and toys.</p></quote>

Putting this together with the story about the oceans dying [http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/10/21/newser-ocean-pollution-overfishing/3143007/], perhaps we could build harvester/mining ships that could trawl the oceans for plastic flotsam/garbage and turn them into 3D printer "ink". Its hard to get people to clean up after themselves, but if there was money in it, people would go after this and it might actually help clean up some of our mess.

It's MOSSAD that has the dirt on them and them by the balls, not the NSA. :-)

First time I've seen no comments show up a few minutes into a Slashdot story going up.

Are most other people, like me, scratching their heads and trying to wrap their minds around this? :)

Mr. Brin lived in the Soviet Union until he was nearly 6 years old, and he said the experience of living under a totalitarian system that censored political speech influenced his thinking — and Google’s policy.

"Political speech" didn't directly influence him aged six, but the country, culture and attitude a lack of it created apparently did. Moreover, nothing in his comment claims he understood it was influencing him at the time... but it's perfectly reasonable that as a grown man with a clearer understanding of both politics and civil liberties, he would think back to his childhood experiences, combine that with what he now knows of the political situation at the time, and come to conclusions regarding the reasons for his childhood experiences.

While it is true that humans can not power much continuously, in this case there will be many humans in parallel, each providing power for very short periods.