Having spent several thousand dollars in co-pay for dental work in my lifetime, this is why I don't drink sodas anymore--the carbonation in the soda actually accentuates the highly corrosive quality of the sugar in the carbonated drink. That's why I drink mostly iced tea nowadays on hot summer days.

....Because none of them had the type of test pilot experience necessary for the Mercury program in the USA or the Vostok program in the Soviet Union..

We forget that at the time of the start of manned flights in 1961, it was an extreme unknown on how well an astronaut would handle a spacecraft in Earth orbit. As such, both the Americans and Russians chose trained test pilots, who had the ability to calmly handle any dangerous situation during a test flight. And in those days, only men met that qualification. It wasn't until the middle 1970's that both the Americans and Russians--based on their spaceflight experience--finally figured out how to choose females to become astronauts/cosmonauts on something besides a publicity stunt.

I think areas highly suited for solar power generation--southwestern USA, around the Mediterranean Sea, much of the Middle East, and much of Australia--will be the areas where rooftop solar panels and large-scale solar power plants start to dominate in terms of power generation. Mind you, they may be competing against future forms of nuclear power, especially if the technology for molten-salt nuclear reactors fueled by thorium-232 dissolved in molten fluoride salts become practical.

Sendai--because it has littler precipitation in winter--is one of the better locations for a solar power plant. But any further north--such as from Morioka north to Aomori--you start getting in a lot of winter snow, and that is a huge impediment to efficient solar power operations. The Sea of Japan side from Kanazawa to the Tsugaru region is not that great, either, given you can get huge snowfalls in winter.

In short, the complex geography of Japan makes solar power not so great, especially with areas of intense winter snows. But western Honshu, Shikoku, and Kyushu are perfect for solar power on a truly large scale.

The only thing is that we may start to see a trend of going away from burning coal to generate electricity--the air pollution problems from coal burning will end this practice in the next 50-70 years. What will likely happen is in the short to medium term, we'll see a switch to burning natural gas (which has a tiny fraction of the air pollution and is cheap to install emission controls) and in the longer term eventually switch to a new generation of nuclear power plants that are extremely safe to run and use commonly-found thorium-232 as nuclear fuel (India and China are building test reactors to see if they can scale up what physicist Alvin Weinberg achieved in the 1960's at Oak Ridge National Laboratory; if it works, we could have enough electric power generation to last _tens_ of thousands of years).

There will be a place for solar power, but only in areas of the world where there are enough sunny days to justify its use; the southwestern USA (including California) is one such place.

I agree that's true--if you live in the part of the world where there is enough sunny days to justify its initial expense. The southwestern USA--including California--belongs in this category, along with areas around the Mediterranean Sea, much of the Middle East, and several other places.

In other parts of the world, long, cold winters and/or long rainy seasons could cut down on its usefulness. Indeed, in Japan, only the western half of Honshu, Shikoku and Kyushu have enough sunny days to justify large-scale rooftop solar installations.

You mean "used to be cheap dirty coal." Ever since the EPA required the use of extensive exhaust emission controls to cut soot and sulfur emissions, you no longer get the infamous "acid rain" cause by sulfur dioxide gas blown downwind of the coal-fired power plant here in the USA and there are very little soot issues from burning coal. Of course, it does help that many utilities switched to vastly cleaner-burning coal from Wyoming's Powder River region in the last 40 years.

Despite what some supporters think, solar power in order to be really viable have to be located in parts of the world where there are a lot of sunny days. For example, the southwestern USA has some of the best daylight conditions in the world for solar power--and the same can be said for southern Europe. Indeed, the country of Greece should have rooftop solar power everywhere, given the number of sunny days in that part of the world.

Here in California, rooftop solar power has really taken off because there are enough sunny days to justify the cost of installation. Imagine generating 15 to 30 kW of power during daytime--more than enough to run a single-family home, including air conditioning.

The basic rules of Go is actually quite simple. Expanding that to a 19 x 19 board is really, really hard to do--some say Go requires more intelligence to play than chess.

However, Microsoft recently showed a screenshot of a future version of Windows where the desktop UI is emphasized more again on desktop and most laptop computers. That could be a preview of Windows 9, likely coming fall 2015--a total redesign of Windows that corrects most of the UI deficiencies of Windows 8.x versions.

Actually, the technology is just about there for no-driver subway and commuter rail trains. Japan could probably start implementing this on their subway systems probably within a decade (they're already doing this on monorails and automated guideway transit systems).

Well, the Russians during the 1962 "Project K" nuclear tests studied what kind of protection necessary to mitigate the effects of an EMP, the closest thing man-made to a large-scale CME strike on the Earth's atmosphere.

The results were not promising: a 300 kT nuclear warhead detonated at an altitude of 290 km (180 miles) generated an EMP that blew out all the protection systems and even started a fire at a power-generating station along with shutting down a 1,000 km (621 mile) long underground power line. In short, what could have happened in 2012--even if the power transmission lines were disconnected just before the CME hit--would have serious damaged the electrical grid worldwide anyway.

After reading Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle," the innumerable health problems with "bathtub gin" during the Prohibition era, and that kind of scary situation with Paraquat spraying of cannabis plants in Mexico in the early 1980's, that's why I made the comment originally. Indeed, the level of alcohol in an alcoholic beverage is pretty tightly controlled--usually around 5% for beer and around 75% in hard liquor for sale in all 50 states.

Besides, with USDA and FDA standards, it means that cannabis you can buy (eventually) legally won't cause health problems for all the wrong reasons.

I would except the recreational drugs have to meet the same USDA and FDA standards for purity and safety for foodstuffs, legal drugs, and alcoholic beverages. In short, the cannabis you can buy legally must NOT have any potentially dangerous additives and THC levels per gram of cannabis have to be standardized. In short, welcome to the real world if you want to grow legal cannabis.

I think the FCC may end up postponing the change in net neutrality because it could have a tremendous effect on the upcoming 2014 Congressional elections if they go against the overwhelming wishes of the people commenting on its proposal.