And civil unrest becomes vastly more likely in a future with runaway global warming and the climatic changes, floods, draughts, food shortages, rising sea levels, mass extinctions, habitat destruction, economic upheavals and the like it will bring. Nuclear power, wind, solar, hydro and geothermal are ALL essential to combat it.

CO2's atmospheric lifetime is something like 1,000 years. How come those who fret about the longevity of nuclear waste never seem to talk about this? With fast reactors that burn the actinides (including plutonium) as fuel, the remaining fission products decay to the level of the original uranium ore (while being considerably more compact) in only a few hundred years, much less than the atmospheric lifetime of CO2.

The hype about "carbon capture" is just that -- hype. But it serves one useful purpose: its utter impracticality shows just how minor the nuclear waste "problem" is by comparison.

Not far from Yucca Mountain you will find hundreds if not thousands of craters under which are buried the fission and activation products of decades of US nuclear testing. They're not reprocessed and contained in silica glass, they were simply mixed (quite violently) with the soil and rock. And yet they don't seem to go anywhere. There is no need for Yucca Mountain to contain reactor waste for even a hundred years because it will surely be removed and burned as fuel in fast reactors. Once people wake up to the fact that global warming is a vastly greater threat than nuclear power, and that nuclear power is just as essential as wind, solar, geothermal and hydro in combating it, people will realize that "spent" fuel from light water reactors is far too valuable to just throw away.

Even with cheap solar and wind we will still need nuclear, at least until somebody perfects a cheap, reliable and long-lived utility scale battery. Otherwise we'll never be able to retire all the CO2-belching fossil-fuel plants to match the varying supply with the varying demand.

I agree that waste in casks at nuclear power plants is reasonably safe but it would still be better to move it to Yucca Mountain. If nothing else, security would be a lot cheaper. It's utterly ridiculous that all that money was spent on a waste repository that, thanks to NIMBYism on the part of Nevada politicians, doesn't look like it'll be used any time soon. At least nuclear waste is the one form of toxic waste that will eventually go away on its own. Arsenic, mercury, lead, thallium and other chemical poisons remain toxic forever.

I don't see it as wrong. This is how all technology gets developed. Early adopters pay for the tech and those that wait get the benefits. You can get the latest phone for several hundred dollars or get one 4 years old for a tiny fraction of that. Same with car tech. Every little standard feature on an econobox started as optional equipment on luxury models.

I disagree. If we don't have Net Neutrality, then the current advertising is deceptive and fraudulent. If we do have Net Neutrality and a real best effort to address network congestion rather than use network congestion as a payola scheme then there would be no need for the Federal Trade Commission to step in and put a stop to fraudulent advertising.

This mechanism makes me wonder whether another mechanism, involving the solar wind / magnetic field and a planetary magnetic field or ionosphere, might also produce a detectable radio signature.

And I thought my wife and I fighting over the thermostat was bad.

Not a false dilemma, a false assumption. How do you demonstrate the proposition that a car without manual override controls (beyond just a big red stop button) is both individually and systemically safer than one without?

And what driver is going to wait and see if the car is capable of avoiding an accident if they are going to be the ones liable for that accident and told they must take control of the vehicle if they think the car is about to collide with something? Basically you are talking about taking a sophisticated collision avoidance system and short circuiting that by telling the driver they must take control of the vehicle if they think there is a problem. That could demonstrate that autonomous cars are less safe because people will be turning off the collision avoidance system at exactly the wrong times, but yet they will be reacting more slowly than people without autonomous cars because manual drivers are already actively driving.

What California is doing is starting from the assumption that not having a manual override is less safe, which I believe is a false assumption and actually undermines safety efforts. And it could also undermine efforts to roll out these cars.

I am all for the option of manual controls and would probably choose to have manual controls for a car that I owned, but I think that the more compelling case and safer option will be to remove the manual controls and I think the only way you prove that is by allowing the cars to demonstrate the capability.

Many of the most potentially beneficial things that could happen as a result of autonomous cars are those use cases where a driver isn't always at the wheel ready to take immediate control of the vehicle. Car sharing, taxi services, elimination of drunk driving, transportation for the disabled, highway driving at closer spacing which might make a human operator uncomfortable and prone to take control, congested city driving where vehicles could be routed and dispatched more efficiently or just told to "go park and come pick me up in twenty minutes" are all use cases where you don't want to require that someone is 'at the wheel' at all times.

With the real potential for saving lives and helping improve quality of life robot cars should be allowed to prove themselves with and without old school manual controls and all the legal requirements, increased costs and liability that retaining those controls imply.

First you have to allow the new technology. Requiring a licensed driver be at the wheel ready to take control of the vehicle at all times is not allowing the new technology it is hobbling it and potentially undermining the most compelling use cases that will save and improve lives. Simply require that the manufacturer demonstrate the ability of the car to drive like any taxi driver would be required to demonstrate an ability to drive to receive a license.

I think California is playing it wrong and unsafe. I agree there needs to be a big red button on cars which brings the vehicle to a safe stop much like there is on passenger trains, but this move by California seems more like something pushed for by entrenched vested interests and not driven by safety considerations. Lives will be saved when we allow cars to go pick up people that can't drive, don't have licenses or don't want to drive themselves. The implication of this move is that a human driver is going to be responsible for the operation of the vehicle at all times. Rather it should be the manufacturer of the vehicle which is liable for any defects of the autonomous system when it is driving autonomously. And it should be an option moving forward, even a safety feature, to allow cars without manual driving options except for the big red button.

Compared with the track record for human drivers which is proven to be completely unsafe?

Too late. Net Neutrality is a response to the reality of local monopolies. It is a direct result of the fact that many places have local monopolies or non-competitive (probably colluding) duopolies. If we had healthy competitive markets with five or six providers available to each household, then it would not be necessary to have net neutrality because who would buy service from a provider which had poor connections to the people and services you wanted to communicate with? All we would need would be transparency and truth in advertising... which we don't have either since companies are secretive about the business decisions they are making in order to throttle some communications.

To me the bare minimum short of Net Neutrality would be requirements, like those imposed on Tobacco advertising, that Verizon FiOS and Comcast really suck for sites they choose to black ball. Something like making them display their connection speeds to other networks and which content is on those other networks on every single advertisement. Then people could really know what they were getting. Because right now I pay for something like 25M/25M and sometimes I get that and sometimes I don't. It depends on the site. So what I really want to know as a customer is what are the differences between Verizon FiOS and Comcast in their actual delivery times, not just what they say they are selling me.

If I can't rely on these companies to do their best not to screw me over depending on with whom I want to communicate, then I want to know exactly how they are screwing me over and not delivering on their promised speeds.

Most ISPs exist because they negotiated monopolies with local governments. Get rid of these monopolies and let the market work. It's illogical to complain about publicly financed ISPs when the current ones exist because of another form of public subsidy.