Here's the problem: thanks to favorable tax laws, people in Europe are buying diesel-powered automobiles in huge numbers--in fact probably over 60% of new cars sold in Europe in recent years are diesel powered.

Problem: until very recently, diesel-powered vehicles did not have to meet the same very strict emission requirements required for diesel car sales in the USA--namely, meeting the EPA Tier 2 Bin 5 (or California Air Reources Board ULEV Level II) certification. The Euro4 and Euro5 emissions requirements result in much higher NOx emissions and diesel particulates than the US standard, and as such with so many fairly polluting diesel auitomobiles, European cities in the very recent past started to run into problems with higher NOx and particulate levels in cities.

Today, new European cars have to meet the new Euro6 emissions standard, which is almost identical to EPA Tier 2 Bin 5. This is why the likes of Audi, BMW and Mercedes-Benz can now sell a lot more diesel-powered cars in the USA--the diesel engines only need very little change to meet EPA standards.

This is why I wonder London did not switch their famous double-decker buses and London taxis to compressed natural gas a LONG time ago. Such a change could have dramatically cleaned up the air of London, another city that has experienced NOx and particulate air pollution problems in recent years.

Too bad CENELEC wasn't able to get everyone to agree to a modified "Europlug" connector with grounding plug--that would have resolved a LOT of issues with electrical connections. At least North America has pretty much standardized with the NEMA 5-15 (type 5 15 amp) three-prong connector.

The EU should just standardize on two USB port charger designs, one smaller one for cellphones and one larger one (up to 12 W capacity) for tablet computers. And make sure the "universal" charger will actually charge all Apple iOS devices (there's been an issue where many USB chargers won't charge an iPhone, iPod or iPad).

....When a 20 MB Seagate ST-225 hard drive at US$499 including controller was considered a good deal--and this was way back in 1984! Today, I can get _three_ 3 TB hard drives and still have US$50 left from that same US$499.

I think within the next 100 years, coal will be replaced by something else: thorium-232. Why? Because thorium-232--which is as common as lead in the Earth's crust and likely have huge deposits on the Moon itself--is the primary fuel for the molten-salt reactor, a nuclear reactor that is extremely safe to run and generally produces a tiny amount of the radioactive waste of uranium-fueled pressurized vessel light water nuclear reactors. And there is enough thorium on Earth and the Moon to run these reactors for potentially tens of thousands of years.

The only viable option (maybe!) is the liquid fluoride thorium reactor, but that could be at least a decade or more before that technology is finally perfected.

Also, unlike China, American-based coal-fired power plants cleaned up their act decades ago with the EPA-required installation of devices to remove the sulfur compounds and heavy metals that cause the most environmental damage. This something that should be required in China, where uncontrolled emissions from coal-fired power plants are causing a huge fraction of the extremely unhealthy air pollution not only in the country, but also spreading to the Korean peninsula and Japan.

I wonder is this device being installed on new-build airliners? A large, well-funded airline like Emirates would certainly want it installed on their large A380 and 777 fleet, especially given the distance of many flights out of Dubai.

The most obvious use is to store Ultra HD video. By using HEVC or Google's VP9 codecs, they could probably fit a two-hour Ultra HD movie onto a single-sided 150 GB disc, which means we can watch 3840 x 2160 resolution movies played back from an optical disc.

This is going to make me buy an Aerobie AeroPress plus 350 filters for under US$30 online instead.

Or just as good, a Chemex coffeemaker, which has been "rediscovered" by serious coffee fans in recent years. Best of all, with a little practice you can make coffee in a Chemex that is WAY better than any Keurig machine out there.

Except for one thing though: you need much more uranium-233 to build a fission-style nuclear weapon than uranium-235. Needing more fissile material means a much heavier nuclear bomb, and makes it not very practical for ballistic missiles and you don't want a heavier bomb on today's jet combat planes.

There are too many examples of what happens when uranium-fueled reactors fail: Windscale in the UK in 1957, Three Mile Island in 1979, Chernobyl in 1986, and Fukushima Daiichi in 2011, not to mention several reactor failures on board Soviet era-submarines--the results are pretty scary.

Meanwhile, molten-salt reactor experiment at Oak Ridge showed such a reactor can be run very safely, and unlike pressurized water reactors if there is a coolant cutoff the reactor can be safely shut down without running the risk of a reactor vessel explosion that could spew out a lot of radioactive materials like what happened at the Fukushima Daiichi plant.

However, I do want nuclear power advocates to get away from pressurized light water reactors (PWR's). There are so many disadvantages to using PWR's, especially with the use of expensive uranium-235 as fuel and the dangers of using a pressurized reactor vessel.

Meanwhile, China and DARPA are working on a joint experiment to test scaling up the molten-salt reactor (MSR) design that was successfully tested for nearly a decade at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. If they can scale it up, that means we'll have a nuclear reactor that is extremely safe to run (even in earthquake-prone areas) and uses commonly-available thorium-232 dissolved in molten fluoride salts as fuel, which means the potential for _thousands_ of years of fuel supply. And that could be a gigantic game-changer in terms of power generation, enough to do things like electrifying long-distance railroads around the world and do large-scale seawater desalinization to turn former deserts into arable farmland.

The answer is simple: the age of the "robber baron," as noted by the powerful trusts that dominated the US economy in the last three decades of the 19th Century. That was why they passed the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890 and the Clayton Antitrust Act in 1914 to stop these excesses.