What's amazing is that this 1996-era hack for extending the functionality of the Netscape browser, in a rather kludgy and unsafe way, still exists at all in 2014. I took a class at the Netscape office in Mountain View in 1997 to learn how to write NPAPI plugins and thought then that it was an ugly hack that deserved to go way soon, though I was glad it existed to solve my immediate problems. Not only did it not go away (though MS removed NPAPI support for IE a long time ago), nearly all major browsers today still support it.

Good for Google for deprecating this crap. Firefox (which is to some degree a descendant of Netscape) has also been reducing its support, per the WP article.

More like 34.

FWIW, I don't worry over much about carbon. My EV purchase was based on purely economic analysis. Having driven an EV for a while, what I really dislike about gas burners is the noise and the smell. This isn't an environmental concern, or not a global environmental concern, anyway. It's about the environment of my garage.

I don't think the number needs to be anywhere near that high. Not remotely.

Don't make the mistake of thinking of supercharger stations as analogous to your average neighborhood gas station. They're nothing like that. Supercharger stations are only needed for long-distance travel. They're analogous to the big travel centers you find along the interstates and other highways which carry significant amounts of long-distance traffic, and the numbers required are similar to those of travel centers. If there's one every hundred miles or so along every long-distance travel corridor (which in the US is mostly just the interstates, though there are a few areas with long-distance highways) then coverage will be complete.

With electric vehicles, 95+% of charging is done at places where vehicles spend lots of time parked, primarily homes and workplaces. Such charging doesn't need to be particularly fast. Fast charging only matters when you're driving distances beyond the range of your battery.

You mention North Dakota, for example. Move the slider on that map to 2015 and you'll see they plan to put three superchargers there. That will cover the long-distance travel across ND, and most long-distance travel within ND. Add another supercharger on highway 2, midway between Grand Forks and Minot and you'll have covered nearly all of the rest. Add four of five more and you'll be able to get to any destination in the state without worry.

Randomly-driven evolution, no. But we aren't very far from being able to deliberately evolve ourselves, to achieve specific purposes.

There's a good argument, though, that deliberate, directed evolution is also evolution by variation and selection... it's just that the variation and selection is carried out in brains and in computers rather than in genotypes and phenotypes. In fact, there's a good argument that all knowledge creation is via variation and selection, including all knowledge created by humans, though there we call the process speculation and criticism and much of it happens internally so that truly bad ideas never get uttered or written.

So, no need to abandon the theory of evolution.

Yes and no. What you say is true, and further it appears we've already reached and passed the maximum number of children born per year, in absolute terms. But the population is still growing because the world population is youth-heavy. Assuming we stay on the current trend of gradually declining births and assuming we don't start living longer than 100 years in large numbers, this means the world population will stop growing at about 10B, then start a very slow decline, but that will be far above the levels Spy Hunter thinks we should reach.

I don't think I'd want to live in Spy Hunter's world, though. I certainly wouldn't want to live the "hunter-gatherer lifestyle", which was fully Hobbesian (nasty, brutish and short). In some senses perhaps those people were "healthier" than we are today, but they experienced a lot more pain and died a lot sooner. I suppose Spy Hunter is theorizing some world in which we eat like hunter-gatherers but live in a technological civilization, but that seems like a silly approach when we can, instead, continue our research into human biochemistry to understand exactly what humans need (with much more precision than "eat like hunter-gatherers", who almost certainly never got an ideal diet) and into food production, until we can create food that is healthy (ideally so), safe and flavorful.

At least, compressed hydrogen gas is really questionable.

Besides the well-known problems associated with containing hydrogen, I'm skeptical that it makes sense to build out a whole new distribution system. We have an extensive network in place for distributing gasoline and smaller ones for distributing compressed natural gas (CNG) and liquid propane (LP), but hydrogen gas is very different from any of those three. We also have a network in place for distributing electricity. Granted that it will have to be beefed up in many ways to support a society of all electric vehicles, that still seems like a much easier task. Particularly since with the increasing deployment of home PV generation, the electric grid might not need to be beefed up as much as we think.

It all really comes down to the cost of batteries. The only saving grace of compressed hydrogen vs batteries is that big batteries are expensive. And somewhat heavy, but probably not much heavier than the tanks needed to contain hydrogen. So is it cheaper to build lots of batteries and improve the electric grid where needed, or to build out an entirely new distribution infrastructure?

My money is on electric vehicles. Battery prices are falling just due to small incremental improvements plus scaling, and there are a number of technologies on the horizon that promise to significantly increase the kWh/$ ratio. Yes, yes, many of them have been "on the horizon" for a while, but there are so many promising technologies that it seems very probable that at least one will work out. Note that I'm not talking about recharge times, because Tesla has already solved that problem... given ~300 miles range and a one-hour recharge time, you're good even for cross-country trips.

Another option that might make a lot of sense is fuel cells that run on gasoline or CNG. Those would have many of the benefits of an EV (quiet, powerful electric drive; very simple, low-maintenance drive train), but could use existing fueling infrastructure. They still emit some CO2, but less than ICEs.

(Disclaimer: I own an electric vehicle.)

Apart from all of the problems storing, transporting, and obtaining hydrogen (both in terms of the often fossil-based source and the difficulty of finding some to put in your car), it's about as expensive as gasoline per mile. And the cars are no cheaper either.

This is the problem - there is subset of individual policemen and entire departments that AREN'T courteous or reasonable. They start out hostile and alienating. The interaction also starts out at an a very unequal power level. When you are placed in this sort of situation, it is much harder (and much more important) to finesse it exactly right.

It can be done, such individuals and departments often aren't the sharpest pencils and with a bit of training and fore thought, you can work around them but it's harder. And also recall that not every alleged perp is all that sharp / sober or even interested in defusing the situation.

So play acting these types of confrontation can be extremely effective. Unfortunate, but effective.

'These are not the perps you are looking for .... '

No, for two reasons.

First stop and frisk is based on the "broken windows" theory, which in general is sound: people take behavioral cues from what they perceive as social norms. If they look around and see people breaking windows and jumping turnstyles they'll figure everyuone does it. But stop and frisk plus being "proactive" is a case of two ideas getting together and having a bastard child. Instead of signalling what the social norms are by keeping the streets orderly, the cops are singling out individuals upon whom they will impose those norms. It's a crude exercise in behavior control, and inherenly alienating.

The second reason is Campbell's Law, roughly stated: the more you rely on a single measure to control social processes, the more that measure and the processes it controls will be corrupted. In 1995 the NYPD adopted CompStat -- a process improvement strategy based on measuring performance and holding police units like precincts accountable for their numbers. It's not a bad idea, depending on the measures chosen and if you have a critical attitude toward those measures, but the number of stops made is an inherently terrible metric. It's not a measure of success, it's a measure of activity, and is an easy number to control; if your numbers look bad you can always head out and start stopping peoiple.

There's a lot of debate over whether NYPD cops have "quotas", but it's quibbling. There doesn't have to be a quota if everyone knows bad things happen to the precinct when the numbers are low and good things happen when the numbers are high.

Scratch an environmentalist, find a malthusian.

It's OK if some people like different things than you.

French people liking to discuss politics online doesn't make them snobs. It just makes them people who like discussing politics online. And I know some very smart and politically involved Americans who are suckers for a cute dog video. Perhaps they'd be up for more poliltical discussion if every two years they were deluged with sly, dishonest, soul-suckingly stupid political advertisements. In France, with a population oif 63 million, presidential candidate spending is limited to 30 million dollars. My state has 1/10 the population of france, and the two leading candidates inthe last Senatorial election spent 85 billion -- and that's in an off year. So we Americans get exposed to a lot more unsolicited political communication than the French do.

But let's suppose that all things being equal, the French enjoy a good political argument online more than Americans do. So what?

I think resentment -- or even excessive concern -- over people who like different things than you is a sign of insecurity. When someone gets to the point where they insiste everyone join their side or be branded a fool or a snob, that's defeinitely someone who's seeking the safety of the herd.

Either by investing in new companies in region xyz, or by making your own start-up contractors and then selling them off as "unprofitable" that has happened in China quite a bit.