That number is wrong, because it calculates the energy in the gas that goes into gasoline cars. 80 kWh/100 km is 1,287 watt*hours/mile, five times higher than the average EV highway energy rate of 250 watt*hours/mile - electric cars are 5 times more efficient at using energy than gas cars. At low speed (city driving), a EV consumes around 150-160 watt*hours/mile, similar to the Japanese rail system, which gets 150 watt*hours/passenger-mile.

You get all that (except maybe tech support) for $0 with Ubuntu.

It also cost $100 or so a year to be in the app store.

You don't need to. I'm gonna anger a lot of people by saying this, but physical fitness is not really important. In a world where one can buy a $600 dollar part that can convert bioenergy into mechanical power at a 10X the power to weight ratio of a human being, it's not really all that important.

Oh, and mindless junk is important. Video games are the reason my first job was coding, not washing dishes. I was allowed unlimited game time assuming I finished all my school work. Guess what? I got bored of the games. So I wanted to write my own. I did. Then I discovered my coding skills worked for robotics and web dev. Then I found out that I could write applications for doing "business" stuff. So, one of the reasons I am where I am today is because of mindless junk.

Really, I can't wait for the first DIY experimenters to hit the highways in their homemade robocars. Slogan: DIY Robocars - making safety dangerous - your car, your code, our road.

Actually, users won't have to. People think that robocars = no human drivers, but I don't think this is really true. All they need to do is have the same algorithms, but give the human drivers say 1 foot of play back and forth in the lane and say 2 seconds ahead and behind. Then people will still feel like they're in control, driving will still be fun for those of us who enjoy it, and those of us who would get sick to our stomachs in a robocar would feel better.

Under normal driving conditions, a human is not really better than a robot. It's the extreme conditions, where the driver is not paying attention to the road, or a sudden even, or ice and snow or a mechanical problem that gets you. If you build a few avoidance systems, you could make driving a ton safer without going through all that work of building a full robocar where you get in, click on a map, and sit back. You don't need to go through and figure out how to drive every weird unmarked intersection in the country, "just" look at some laser scans and hit the brakes if something gets in the way. You also get superhuman vision, like infared cameras, laser arrays, sonar, DHS xrays, as well as road information such as traffic cameras and CCTV's.

You have the following:
1. Fully human-controlled (1980's and before)
2. Computer controlled emissions equipment (1990's)
3. Computer controlled stability and traction (2000's)
4. Computer assisted accident avoidance (2010's)
5. Optional full computer control? (2020's)

Notice that there is no mandatory full computer control. That's because I don't think you really need it. Sure, some economy cars will come without steering wheels or stuff, but many luxury and performance vehicles will. I think what will happen is that you average sports vehicle, be it and offroader or a sports car or a road-going rally car will have three settings: no assistance, computer assistance, and completely autonomous. Eventually, "no assistance" will not be a good idea on public roads. Not like it is going to negatively impact the driving experience anyway.

Now, many people discuss scenarios where "road trains" and other modes of driving that would not be possible with human drivers with no spacing between the cars. I don't see that as a viable scenario. While many accidents are caused by people's mistakes, some are caused, or at least helped along by mechanical failure, such as tire blow out or brake problems. These automated cars may be better at reacting to the problems, but I don't want to be in a road train inches in front of a semi when its tire calls it quits.

If robocar technology can save 40,000 lives a year, why should we care about letting people drive them? Because it will allow the systems to make a significant impact much earlier, and it will cause a who group of people (people who like driving) who would be otherwise opposed to robocars to be supporters of robocars. They're actually a surprisingly useful group of people, being car mechanics (who will fix the things and install assistance systems on pre-built cars), race car drivers (who will promote the things to the general public), and not to mention people who work for automakers who build the cars in the first place.

I got an idea to prevent crime. Let's make it illegal to do something illegal. That would prevent most if not all types of crime!

Solar systems have been detected with up to 7 stars (3 is not all that uncommon), like this one: Nu Scorpii. Depending on how the stars run around, you could have a lot of planets in the habitable zone or closer. There are also globular clusters with tons of stars in them, however, planets would likely be unstable there.

In 30 years, wind will be the sole source of energy in the united states at current growth rates. This will scale up. Solar is falling in cost at 9% per year and still growing. Both together will scale up. EV's are shipping, and are going to be charged by the wind.

It happened with wood, it happened with whale oil, it happened with metals, and it happened with food. But we're still here. I know that those are past events, but they are events where similar lines of thinking occurred. In all cases, technologies that were denounced as fantasies that could not exist, be economical or scale up fast enough saved us. Today, those fantasy technologies are all around us, improving every day. We don't see much of the growth, but it's happening, and those who search for it can see it.

Notice how you said that none of the alternatives could scale up fast enough? A few years ago, you would have said that none of the alternatives were economical. Years before that, you would have said that the alternatives were technologically infeasible.

Seriously, this is just not cool.

Given that civilization was supposed to crash by now for lack of food, and that fact that we are still alive, that is unlikely to be true. Those who look beyond the predictions based on linear extrapolations using current technology are already synthesizing oil from renewable energy sources, and are likely to create an unlimited amount of such oil in the future.

Even spam from the aliens might be very valuable. We might get a copy of Wikipedia Galaxy Edition included in the transmission to throw off spam filters.

Upon seeing your nickname, alienzed, I hope you can reveal this mystery to us.

Three points.

Point 1 is that FTL is looking possible but hard. There are valid solutions to general relativity where Star-Trek like FTL happens.

Point 2 is that FTL is unnecessary for interstellar travel. Project Orion showed that interstellar travel might likely be possible without FTL. Even if biological beings can't live forever (which I think they can), robots can. If we advance, say 50-100 years from now, our economic productivity will be such that an individual, or small group of individuals, could launch a self-replicating interstellar probe that would send back information. If we've scoured the Earth and made surveys, but we haven't found any probes or remnants.

Point 3 is that neighbouring supernova events appear survivable even without travel. Life would suck, but we could predict if say Sirius was going nova and take precautions such as living under lead shields. Supernova of the current solar system would be survivable because of point 2.

In sum, I see two scenarios for why aliens aren't here yet:

1. They are, but they don't want, can't or otherwise do not interact with us. Why I don't know, but it could be true. If the aliens were human, some alien idiot would have broken the rules and contacted us for some reason.
2. They for some reason do not exist or are not developed yet. This I doubt. I believe that the Dinosaurs were on the way to sapience before the asteroid hit, and if it hadn't have happened, we would be Velociraptors. We would have achieved our technology level many years earlier.
Notice that there is no no-FTL scenario. This is because of self-replication.

The solution is plain text. While it is possible to insert malware in word, excel, html and maybe even opendocument files via scripting, it is not possible to insert viruses into plain text and CSV files. It just can't be done. Do not accept files that are not plain text and the problem of "unsanitary data" goes away.

Please point to one with a low subsidy. This is not because I am trying to dodge, but because whenever I post that this country or that county's rail system sucks, I get "that's not a real one, look at this one." So, I did it real quick for the UK. A search for rail subsides UK reveals that the UK pays 5 billion pounds in rail subsides (I'm not sure if that includes freight rail). The UK data shows that trains carried 55 billion passenger-km of travel. Do the math, and you get 0.234964224 U.S. dollars / mile - similar to the USA. If you have a particular country you are interested in, please let me know.