My gasoline is drilled and refined many more miles away than my local power station. So what's your point? How much is energy is lost shipping my gas to my local gas station? Including what I waste driving to the gas station in the first place?

And yes, I clearly expressed that pollution is a global problem. But if we're going to have smokestacks, I'd rather have big smokestacks well away from where people live rather than everybody driving around with their own little smokestack pumping out crap right on my street. Yes, I'd rather have no smokestacks, but that's not gonna happen any time soon.

No, you're right. It's clearly better for all if everybody's streets are choked with tailpipe emissions. Just because a solution isn't ideal for everybody doesn't mean it isn't better than the current situation. And for the record, I'd have no problems with a wind farm nearby.

I don't know what this "hydrogeb" is, but electrolysis of water to produce hydrogen is done today, although steam reforming of hydrocarbons is generally more common because electrolysis doesn't scale well.

While the amount of pollution produced by an electric car depends on how the electricity is produced, a couple of advantages of an electric car, even with coal-fired power stations, are worth mentioning. First is, I don't live next door to a coal-fired power station. So the pollution generated by an electric car is happening somewhere else, not in my neighborhood. While global warming is a global problem, not choking on exhaust fumes ever time I walk down my street is, I think, a bonus. Second, even with coal-fired plants, it'll be easier to upgrade and eventually replace a handful of coal-fired power stations than to replace potentially millions of cars. If the government mandated all new cars had to be electric (and I'm not suggesting they do), it would still take decades for all the old cars to be retired.

From the summary:

"The Associated Press is reporting that years before F-22 stealth fighter pilots began getting dizzy in the cockpit, before one struggled to breathe as he tried to pull out of a fatal crash"

Emphasis on the "fatal" part; i.e. he didn't eject.

Compared to the cost of training new pilots to replace the ones that died?

One think I've noticed so far, it seems that pretty much all the courses on offer are introductory. And when you think about the drop out rate, this kinda makes sense. If only 10% of people starting your course finishes it, what's the point of putting up a follow-up course? Already the market for that course is tiny in comparison to the introductory course. You can probably expect a lower drop-out rate on the follow-up course, but it'll be less than 100%. And not even all the students finishing your first course will take the second. So maybe 10% finish the first course, 75% of them take the second class, and maybe 50% of them finish it. Now what's the point of the third class in the series? You pretty rapidly go from MOOC to TOOC (tiny open online class) with a handful of students.

So my fear is, while this is a great way to get a broad introduction to a lot of different topics, you'll never see it really get into depth. For that, you will absolutely still need a traditional university.

BTW, I took the original AI class, the Udacity web engineering class, and I'm currently taking the gamification course of Coursera. I've also done the traditional university thing in the past for far too many years to get a Ph.D.

So why are politicians wasting valuable time on such trivial nonsense as the economy, jobs, healthcare and the Middle East, when there is a genuine, honest-to-goodness global crisis going on?

This should be one of those rare moments that bring politicians of all ilk together to solve this. We need a bacon Apollo project, or a bacon Manhattan project.

Agreed. I didn't use Vista until I got a freebie DVD (with SP2) from a Microsoft event (and even then it was months before I tried it while I was building a new computer). I ran it for a couple of years with really no problems at all. A lot of the launch problems where a) resistance to change, b) a new driver model which meant a lot of rushed crappy drivers (especially from a certain video card maker), c) UAC (which comes back to resistance to change - because it's a good change), d) a lot of older software that ignored Microsoft recommendations and stored their data in the programs folder instead of the users documents folder. If Vista hadn't been launched at all, then all those same problems would have hit Windows 7 instead and that would have been deemed a failure too. As many have already said, Windows 7 is more like Vista SP3.

Having said all that, it was shocking how much bad publicity killed Vista so fast, and Windows 8 is already getting as much, if not more bad publicity even before launch. It looking like it might be an even more spectacular failure that Vista.

Sure. Just bend over and grab your ankles. I hear they are testing the magnum extra large ones today.

Do you live in a mental institution?

And a 2% yearly bump is really (barely) treating water. Inflation is usually more than that.

...is where is my motherfucking flying car?

Ahhh...it's good for kids to learn about crushing disappointment early.