While we're still a net importer of oil, it's not by much. I think the US and Canada taken together are self-sufficient for oil.

Yes, but, guess what - oil, particularly, is a (mostly) fungible, globally traded commodity. If a vast amount of US demand goes away, the oil price will go down. In response, highest-cost producers will shut down, and all the other producers will get less money. From my understanding of the oil market, the highest-cost producers are the North American shale oil producers and fracking operations, which are politically contentious and have very high process emissions, so if they go away that's a win for the world. The low-cost producers in the Middle East will have a lot less money, a lot less ability to manipulate the global economy, and in consequence a lot less geopolitical influence.

Sounds good to me.

While it's fair to say that the dangers of radiation are often exaggerated, nuclear reactors have worst-case failure modes a lot worse than, say, a solar panel, or even a gas turbine. Nor can you tweak and modify said prototypes in the same way you could, say, a new smartphone design.

As such, a lot more design work needs to go into building a nuclear reactor than most other large power generators or other industrial-scale engineering systems, and that design work needs to be approved by regulators.

Doing that design and engineering work for a novel reactor type and building up sufficient regulatory expertise to approve said design and building the first grid-connected version in six years? All in the face of likely protests and court challenges throwing sand in the gears? Not going to happen.

For anyone who has any doubt at all of the need for the book to be thrown at the individuals using this site, read the damn indictment. I defy your blood not to boil.

Aside from anything else, some of the acts in the videos described in the indictment are likely to have caused serious physical injury, not to mention extreme psychological distress.

I dislike resorting to the term, but if this stuff isn't evil, I don't know what is.

The only way that thing could be more insane is if they made it rocket-powered.

Conventional mopeds with 10-inch wheels are scary enough in a pothole. I defy anyone to stay on one of those scooters as 46MPH if you hit a decent pothole.

Nothing, as far as I understand it.

Other replies have mentioned Shor's Algorithm, which if implemented effectively would allow a quantum computer to crack RSA. Thus far, the report of a number factored by Shor's algorithm on a quantum computer is 21.

Aside from Shor's algorithm, the thing that I'd be doing with a quantum computer if a sufficiently powerful one existed is running Grover's algorithm - termed "quantum database search", but in practice it's a way of doing brute-force search in time proportional to the square root of the number of items you're searching over. This has (limited) applications in cryptanalysis (essentially, it doubles the key length you can brute force, so if 64-bit keys for a symmetric cypher can be brute forced using a classical computer, 128-bit keys might be within range for a quantum computer) but there's lots of other applications where you might want to do brute force searches faster.

But my understanding is that only similarly trivial examples of using Grover's algorithm have been demonstrated to date.

Hell, I've ridden a motorcycle that could probably smoke both of these vehicles w/o breaking a sweat.

Above 100 mph in a straight line, sure. Around the Nurburgring? Only if you're both very skilled and brave - and can persuade Nurburgring management to let you try.

This guy apparently has the fastest recorded "bridge-to-gantry" time of 7:10. That's on a production Yamaha YZF-R1 - a road-registerable sports bike that anyone can buy. But the circuit management won't allow closed-road record attempts on motorcycles because of the unacceptably high risk of dying in the process. There are multiple deaths and many more serious injuries at the Nurburgring every year, and the majority are motorcyclists.

Do you have any thoughts on addressing domestic violence?

Yes. Gun control. The right kind reduces the overall murder rate, not just mass shootings (that said, the biggest effect of taking guns out of circulation is reductions in the suicide rate).

But given that the level of restrictions required to make a serious dent in the domestic violence homicide rate are unlikely in the United States in the near future, there are a bunch of other things that can be done, including in the tech community. Are you a developer? Have you considered about if and how your software could be used as a tool of domestic violence? If you haven't, you should.

Hmmm...conversation over breakfast in Nuuk this morning

A: "Hey, Trump wants to buy Greenland for the United States"

B: "What? Seriously?"

A: "Apparently"

A&B look at each other

A & B simultaneously: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

It ain't that simple.

People in the sector (generally) know about all these measures. They are useful, but what they can't do is help find how how the perp was doing their cyberstalking in the first place. Without some clear evidence of what they're up to, cops can't/won't press charges.

I'd also note that the economics of solar power varies greatly according to your location, due to the cost of grid electricity, amount of sun available, and government incentives. In sunny places with expensive power (Australia, for instance) solar is a no-brainer even taking into account cost of money.

Figuring out whether this makes sense strictly in economic terms would require:

• How much it costs California to borrow money - which I gather is around 2-3%, but the details matter
• The difference in service life between an electric and diesel bus, if any
• The difference in maintenance cost
• The difference in fuel cost (which is subject to considerable variability given the volatile nature of oil prices
• Whether you are prepared to put an economic value on the non-greenhouse pollutants emitted by a school bus (hint: you should)
• Whether you are prepared to put an economic value on the greenhouse emissions

However, this misses the larger point that the goal of these small-scale purchases is to develop an electric school bus industry so that in future California, and other states, will be able to buy them in much larger quantities at much cheaper prices.

In the unlikely event that a commercial entity wanted a long-term presence in Earth orbit, it would be cheaper to design and build something from scratch rather than dealing with the ISS.

It's 20-year-old (and more) technology, the management structure is horrendously complicated, and it has a bunch of infrastructure that is most likely unnecessary for whatever a commercial company would do with it.

But, before we even get there, what the hell would a commercial enterprise want to put humans in low-Earth orbit for months on end? What is the point? We know it's a terrible environment for people, and there's nothing useful that they can do there that can't be done by robots equally well.

But then, high school physics, as far as I can tell, isn't really science either.

That is, while high school physics might teach, often badly, some of the great discoveries that scientists have made, and how to apply them in a very few carefully controlled circumstances, it very rarely teaches anything useful about how scientists actually tackle novel problems.

Traveling in the Australian outback is not like traveling in the continental United States, or Europe. The distances between any facilities, including sources of drinking water, are often vast, the traffic is minimal, cell phone reception is nonexistent outside major towns, and the roads are often unsealed or impassible without a four-wheel-drive vehicle, and the heat will kill you fairly quickly if you run out of water.

Anyone planning to travel in Australia off the major highways needs to do more research than just putting a route into Google Maps.

The US government can surveil me and the other 7.4 billion-odd people who aren't US citizens whenever it damn well pleases, no warrant required.