"Separated from the source of heat" by being sprayed all over the engine?

I don't have any documentation of transmission oil fires, though I can give personal anecdote of a vehicle with a faulty transmission oil hose that sprayed the stuff up into the engine compartment. Quite a mess and, honestly, lucky it didn't cause a fire. It happened in a driveway and was caught almost immediately (fluid even got up onto the windshield)... if that happened on the highway with everything nice and hot there would've been a fire no doubt.

However, I DO have documentation of a coolant leak leading to a fire (PDF) Coolant line failed, sprayed coolant everywhere. Engine overheated, evaporating water from coolant allowing the ethylene glycol to ignite. Fire spread and destroyed the entire (fortunately empty) bus.
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Well that's just false. Oil, transmission fluid and even engine coolant are all flammable liquids, and the increased heat from poor lubrication makes a fire more likely even from non-liquids like wiring harnesses, plastic cowlings and rubber tubing.

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Any debris impact severe enough to pierce the quarter-inch armor plate on the underside of the battery pack is more than enough to pierce an oil pan, transmission, fuel tank or floorboard of any other vehicle. That is a debilitating debris strike in any vehicle, not a "little tap." In any other vehicle this guy could have ended up with that trailer hitch piercing his leg instead.

That said, this is the second debris strike in as many months... maybe Tesla owners just aren't paying attention to the road?
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Problem is, it wouldn't be a "stop-gap" measure. Unless you have a different definition of "stop-gap" from mine.

Given the costs if construction and maintenance, whatever you built will be used until the cost of maintaining it outstrips the cost of building something else, just like with the nuclear plant now. Better to just transition straight to something that already IS better, even if it costs more now, and be done with it.
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They are paid to research the climate. The climate exists and needs to be studied regardless of what it's actually doing, so as long as their research is based on actual data they would be getting paid to do their job no matter what... so there is no logic in asserting that funding grants are biased toward researchers who advocate AGW. Such bias would be pretty easy to show, since there seems to be a complete lack of angry climatologists whose grant applications have been repeatedly denied.

So the idea that researchers are crying AGW because that's what gets them funded seems to be a total non-starter. Got any others?
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Are you sure you know what those terms mean?

Burning biomass and having carbon left over means it's carbon negative. The carbon emitted as CO2 minus the carbon absorbed from growing the biomass is a negative number.
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No.

Plus, I've been doing it on Slashdot much longer than on Fark. Neener neener.
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Not ALL the chemical energy of the original fuel, though.

It's a gassifier and engine/gen pair. You heat the fuel in an oxygen-poor environment (the heat comes from burning a part of the fuel itself using what little oxygen is present) which releases volatile compounds and produces carbon monoxide. This syngas is then fed into an internal combustion engine where it's burned to completion to produce power.

Not groundbreaking technology... but proven to work and be a viable means of getting power, especially if you happen to have a lot of biowaste you can throw in there.

Sure, you CAN burn the charcoal leftovers. Might be useful as a cooking fuel, for example. Even if you did that, you're still only carbon neutral. It can also be used to improve soil quality to help grow food or cash crops... which seems like a better use IMHO.
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Without a stronger central/federal government, we wouldn't have:

-The 13th, 14th, 15th, 19th, and 24th amendments. Local governments are effectively prevented from discriminating based on race and gender.

-Won WWII. Being geologically isolated means we probably would not have been successfully invaded, but without the ability to conscript resources from the entire nation we probably would not have had the ability to project sufficient military power overseas.

-A space program of any sort. Again, the ability to pool resources for an undertaking no local government could possibly afford or would even consider. You can pretty much include any "Big Science" item; The Internet, The Manhattan Project, anything and everything the network of National Labs had a hand in really. You don't get big science without big funding.

-The national highway / railroad system. Imagine how costly and inefficient commerce would be with only a patchwork of locally built and owned roads and railroads, most of which would probably be toll roads to boot.

I'm sure if I review US history I could find a few more examples. I'm not trying to denigrate local governments - local governments are best suited for local issues and local actions. However when you are concerned about the nation and the rights and welfare of the citizens as a whole, you cannot rely on local politics to be consistent, fair or adequate.
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I use the best encryption ever for everything I need to keep secret. The algorithm is a simple bitwise XOR applied to every byte in the file, using the data itself as a one-time pad. Completely uncrackable unless you know the data that was used for the pad.

The output also compresses really well!
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A chunk of unidentified debris that has been described as "A curved section that fell off a semi-trailer."

Could be anything, but it is currently believed that the curved nature allowed it to be lifted up and driven into the underside of the car by being wedged between the car and the road. This was apparently enough to puncture the 1/4" steel plate that forms the bottom of the battery casing and destroy some of the battery cells within, causing the fire.

Debris strikes like this are fairly common, usually destroying tires but also puncturing engine oil pans and such. The Model S battery pack is essentially the entire bottom of the vehicle so it's a nice big target.
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No kidding - in a conventional vehicle that object would have ended up inside the passenger compartment, and possibly in the driver's leg.

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Good luck having a condition where you have spilled liquid gasoline but no gasoline vapor, which is QUITE flammable.

Gasoline was chosen as a vehicle fuel because once upon a time it was a waste product of kerosene production, so it was cheap and plentiful. The advantage it had was being VERY VOLATILE - easily evaporating into the air to form an explosive mixture. A carburetor does not need to "condition" it at all, just deliver a carefully controlled dose. Because of this you could produce an internal combustion engine without the need for a fuel injection system like diesel engines required, and with a lower compression ratio, so the engines would be simpler, lighter and faster. Less efficient, too, but who really cared when the fuel was so cheap?
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Every ~2 minutes, a fire department somewhere in the US responds to another call of a vehicle fire.

Statistically, on a per-car basis, they are safe... but there are so many vehicles that vehicle fires are actually quite common.
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Woe betide you should you ever find yourself on a Windows machine without a mouse, then. Can't say I use it often but when I do I'm glad it exists.
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