Today, the US military fields equipment which can tell where a gunshot occurred, and what kind of firearm was responsible, and what kind of ammunition it uses. Granted, it must require training, but since cops have to qualify with their sidearm that's an ideal time. Let's get some of those into the field rather than MRAPs.

It Cuba had had oil, the embargo would have been over really fast. Today, if Cuba had oil, TERRISTS! TERRISTS ALL OVER CUBA! WE MUST BLOW THEM UP!

Okay, smart guy, tell us what the problem is. Gevo doesn't see a problem.

We already have bacteria which can, given any organic matter, split it into butanol (a 1:1 replacement for gasoline) as well as acetone (an industrial solvent, which burns clean and can be used to alter the octane ratio of the gasoline replacement) and ethanol ('nuff said.) Practical commercial exploitation was worked out at a public university and therefore partially with public funds, but the patents are owned by Butamax, a shell company owned by GE and DuPont. They have sued Gevo to actually prevent them from producing and selling fuel to the public, something in which Butamax apparently has no interest. They've been sitting on the technology for years.

The truth is that if someone did come up with such a bacteria, a patent would be assigned to a corporation by hook or by crook, and it would either be exploited or be buried to preserve profits for other industries until such a time as those profits become harder to come by. But the already-inconceivably-wealthy seem determined to ride this pale horse until they run it down... Right down our throats, until we choke.

time to do some hacking. you can diddle your uh, shit, this post would be a lot cooler if I could remember what the file was called... [googling] ah yes, /system/build.prop. There are various build.prop editors, and you can actually change your phone model there.

There might even be an Xposed module which will let you lie to apps about what kind of device they're running on, but I haven't looked into that at all. Just musing.

And that's why this government will fail, regardless of what We The People actually do. It will become too paranoid to function effectively. You don't think the most creative minds go to work for government, do you?

Nope. As it turns out, gasoline-burning engines emit more soot than previously believed, as the measuring technique formerly used was incapable of detecting the finest soot particles. The particular irony of this is that the smaller the particulate matter, generally the more hazardous to one's health. PM2.5 (particulates below 2.5 microns in size) are considered to be the most hazardous, largely because they're smaller than cilia. This means that it's difficult for you to expel them from your lungs. Gasoline engines produce more PM2.5 than diesels do! They produce about the same amount of soot, but the soot they do produce is more dangerous.

Supposedly, a great deal of the pollution involved is actually in shipping, much of which goes away when the gigafactory gets built.

The last one I used was minetest, which had just added mobs.

It's massively extensible and had a mod with CPUs which ran code before mc did

If nothing has changed, then EVs are still cleaner than gasoline cars by some 40%, so that's still a win.

If we used technology proven by the USDoE at Sandia NREL in the 1980s, we could be capturing CO2 emissions from those plants and using them to grow algae as a biodiesel feedstock — improving yields by as much as 80%. So while EVs are only part of a comprehensive attempt to improve transportation efficiency, they're a completely valid part, provided that we do the other things that we need to do — which we know how to do already. We're simply not doing them, because money.

Oh, you mean fracking? On with the water wars!

You'd better not.

The problem becomes that you don't want it anywhere near a port in case it goes wrong. Sure, the USN claims they've never lost one of their reactors, let's say that's true for just a moment. Russia has lost some. It's not outside the realm of possibility. And while a computer can in theory substitute for a highly trained crew, in practice uh no, and also no. Not in this case. So basically, it's a useless idea.

We need future-technology electric power storage to really solve this problem, or future-tech materials technology so that we could for example build submerged tube trains, or a chain that would pull container ships along, etc etc. Barring that, we could be producing biodiesel from algae and using that to run ships. NOx goes up a bit, CO2 goes way down, so does soot — as compared to #2 diesel, let alone marine diesel, double extra let alone bunker fuel.

Let's put accelerometer watches on cops to track when they fire shots. Then we can correlate that data (given a useful timecode) with the footage from the cameras that we also need to make them wear if we're going to ensure that they operate in the public interest. They've been telling us all along that if we have nothing to hide, we should not fear scrutiny. Well, them first.

I think these reasons are pretty damned right, actually. The reason is the ol' invisible hand of the free market finally doing the right thing for a change. Microsoft has no choice but to demand what their customers are demanding, which is pretty much what a corporation should actually do, rather than trying to fuck them over at every turn with the normal Microsoft EEE strategy.

I have a feeling we'll have to go full retard to forcibly stop drivers from texting while driving. Like, putting a microcell in the car. That would be a good way to handle vehicle-to-vehicle communications, though, which is probably coming whether we like it or not. If the microcells built a mesh it would also solve the last mile problem pretty conclusively.