Every major idea for alternate fuels is practically impossible (and when you take the human condition/profit/tradeoffs/greed into it, completely impossible) and the tradeoffs are all horrible with anything other than solar.

Biofuels cause food displacement, land clearing, and are a net "bad" for the environment. Plus they would force people living on subsadies to work for a living and they have lobbies to prevent such things from happening.

Hydrogen is dangerous to store, and ALL US hydrogen regulation plans have language making it illegal to refill your car at home and the requirement for all hydrogen cars to have proprietary fittings that you can't "just tap into" (Ie you can't make and compress your own. ( that cuts into business profits and taxable income so it won't happen.) They'll set an arificially inflated (no pun intended) price on it and while it may potentially be better for the environment, unless you're using solar to create your hydrogen,..you're still burning power somewhere in the mix.

Solar is free, safe, and easy. Efficiency on solar panels grows daily (and as mentioned in another article) the US has no shortage of space to put solar panels/farms/arrays

The only way to change to ANY different fuel source though is to be able to fix the price of oil and obtain it from non-foreign sources.
If oil was at a set price (even a high set price that could only go down) that would allow enough stability politically to be able to truly invest in infrastructure. (if you're paying $3.00/gal today and prices drop back down under a dollar US citizens aren't going to be falling over themselves to invest in alternate fuel.

Go with something like changingworldtechnologies, (Someone explain to me the US government is roadblocking them at every turn again??) get our mass gas and oil from recycling (killing two birds with one stone) fix the prices and wean ourselves off slowly (domestic production would insure price and political stability and maybe get us out of the Middle East)
After we've developled and implemented solar/nuclear infrastructure we then sell off our excess to the rest of the world at a profit as well as insure dirt cheap oil for the things that still need it. It would take about 15 years or so to get "in full gear" but it would be 100% beneficial. The only people who would lose out would be big oil and those who have their bread and butter based on ties with the middle east.

Unfortuately they alone weild enough power to topple governments so.... cest la vie.

That's the best plan I could come up with and while it's a LONG TERM solution, I think it's about the only one that could actually work in the real world.

Actually if it were attached to a system that could determine which source was better at the time, then switch I think just putting a strip of this down the emergency lanes/inside lanes of all the major roadways in the US would probably provide some insane power. During the day gather sunlight and then in the hours and hours after that the roads maintain heat, gather ambient heat then.

If you could actually "pave" the roads with a photovoltaic material THEN you're talking serious energy. Major Highways see sunlight through most of the day and have a combined 4,042,778 miles of interstate highways,...that's a really good place to start.

Of course there are new and proven building materials for highways right now that won't get approved because their repair cycle is so long it puts people out of work on a massive scale, so whoever builds this new energy tapping roadway better plan some obsolescence into it or it will never fly. (Yay for government efficiency!)

I've always thought that every satellite/ship/station should be deigned with some kind of slow drive system and/or quick "death release" system that would cause them to fire out and land on or near the same spot on the moon. Then when/if moon bases/operations were a go you would have a huge stockpile of recycle materials to get you going. I'm sure the logistics are insane, but it seems even some kind of "bag it and sling it" system to shift orbital debris into a usable stockpile of stuff would make sense.

Of course I'm also for railgunning all our nuclear waste into the sun so,...practical isn't my middle name.

I looked at the contest and at the time I was considering entering there was just too much of a lack of information. I found it insane that a company that huge running a "contest" with large sums of money involved had a rules/regs sheet that looked like "Dave in shipping" had typed it up. I had several good ideas (vetted by industry professionals) that I finally didn't enter because the "For additional questions send mail here" people never responded to any of my mails asking basic rule/regulation questions (most of the information a serious "inventor" would need was lacking in the 1 page rules sheet they offered. They may have updated by now but I got a bad vibe from this at the start. If you can't even set up the contest right, the followthrough is suspect from the start.

They had no information at all concerning simple questions such as:

"Winnings":
How are the prize winnings distributed (are they administered by google or payed out as services or cash or ? (it never said)

Intellectual property:
Is this (they typical)internet VC front where they dole out some prize and in exchange you get all rights to IP and any revenues/future development etc that come from it? The HP "Design our next computer" contest comes to mind. They outsourced years of R&D time to tens of thousands of people on the internet and gave away 1 laptop to 1 person for the privilege of working for them.

I mean,..at least the Tribecca film "Pitch a movie" contest has the decency to tell you in the rules and regulations that by "winning" you're signing your life away to them.

It's all about making sure they get you into the sales channel.

Sure back in the day Blizzard's main goal was to make a great game, THAT was the top priority (the thought was great game = success = more gamers = gamer loyalty = better games etc..) but when WOW hit there was no way they could maintain that.
There are way too many people in the mix who simply don't care about games, and the people that were there from the start are so far removed, and are too busy dealing with their wads of cash to care if this kind of thing happens.

The teams of people making the great games report up through 300 layers of bureaucracy now, they have funding cutbacks, forced "programming to the LCD", and TPS reports to worry about.

Now the goal is to make quarterly earnings go up as the first priority (and the thought is that eyeballs + adverts + upselling = $$) I'm sure delivering a great game gets mentioned in there somewhere but for now, it's no longer essential to the mix. It's like the owner of clearchannel "I don't care what we do as long as we make money" same ungrateful "No one got us here but us!" attitude.

We all KNOW that at some point someone will either hack it, or Blizzard will be forced to make it available, Blizzard knows this too..the thing that gets me is why bother being a douche, getting customer ire and having to deal with the hassles of bnet not being able to manage the load for the first 3 months in the first place?

Is it so they can swoop in later and say "Here we give you LAN support,..SEE we listen to the people, we take what they say to heart?" or ??

Don't shit where you eat is a survival 101 tactic that even animals are born with, it doesn't matter if you're a mouse or a elephant, so when did Blizzard forget that?

I love Starcraft, I liked Warcraft, and I enjoyed WOW, but I personally hope Stardock continues with their RTS trend of providing better and better games. THAT is an organization who actually cares about their customers (and oddly enough they manage to show it despite corporate growth.)

All they need to do is go to all the warehouses that have the battery/capacitor prototypes from the companies and individuals that they boughtout and shut down in an effort to keep all the $$'s rolling in from big oil. They can dust off all that research and already be ahead by 5 or 10 years.

There are too many "companies" involved in the infrastructure associated with all the potential fuel issues.
There won't be mass produced inexpensive fast/easy/cheap to charge cars for 20 years or more.

You idiot,...our GOAL in the US is to get the middle east involved in a war that will cause some sort of nuclear event in the area, this way we can thin the global population of it's overcrowding uncivilized poor and re-distribute the resources between the powerfull and civilized. *sheesh* Learn to read between the lines for crying out loud. That's why we spread AIDS in Africa,..(Granted it WAS supposed to mutate into a fast acting form, but hey the human immune system is a wacky thing.)

Also in the US we developed ways to make oil out of just about anything at this point (see changingworldtechnologies) so really it's all about power, population and power now.

Also the lizard people are behind it all. (just google them and you'll see!)

I asked the same question about Broadband in Iraq for a friend who is stationed there who is all but 100% cutoff from the world (you have to be at a NICE base to get decent acess) if your in the a lot of the support units you get next to nothing.

You'd have thought I was asking who wanted free herpes.

Maybe I should have said it was me who was going to get greenlit.