Ideally, when electric cars are 'everywhere' you'll be able to pull into your restaurant of choice and start charging up.

Intriguing theory you have about where you're likely to find 5KV electrical connections. Note that since wiring would have to be added to wherever these charging stations are, the infrastructure investment is going to be non-trivial, and so is not nearly so likely to be just everywhere as you might suspect. Much more likely that that sort of connection will be made to specialized places, sort of like a gas station.

If this math holds up, the next interstellar island is further away than we thought... and we are likely going to be a very lonely species.

This math says pretty much nothing about our neighborhood. Remember, one in ten can just as easily be 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0 as 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1.

Even more importantly, this say nothing about our galaxy's likelihood of having life (basically, 100% right now)....

though the details are classified, I believe most bombs on ICBMs are somewhere in the megatonish range.

Try MIRV's in the 50-100 kt range.

The only MT range bombs we've ever put on ICBMs were the 5MT (reportedly) bombs on the Titans, which were decommissioned decades ago.

No comments about Soviet/Russian or Chinese or British or French weapons.

But really, who cares which is faster, which do you think about first when deciding what car to buy;
Fuel economy, price, style, carrying capacity, cost of maintenance, or speed of fill up?

I don't think about speed of fillup at all, because the time required is pretty much inconsequential for any "normal" car.

On the other hand, if the choice i were making included a car that could fill up in five minutes and a car that took a minimum of half an hour, then yes it would make a difference. And not in favour of the half hour fillup....

If you look at the worst ongoing conflicts [wikipedia.org] the biggest and worst are always about religion

Alas, WW2 doesn't seem to have been about religion, and it's still the largest war in human history (and if it were split into two separate wars, they'd be the two largest wars in history).

A healthy hunter-gatherer lifestyle seems preferable to dying from lack of clean water.

What makes you think hunter/gatherers historically had access to clean water? What makes you think that water that the rest of the animal kingdom has been crapping and pissing in is "clean water"?

I said hunter-gatherer, not living all by myself. They had things called tribes and families, you know. See Dances with Wolves sometime.

Feel free to take family and friends with you on your great experiment in living the hunter/gatherer lifestyle. If you can convince them that living in the woods scrounging for food is better than sitting in their comfortable house watching the interwebs....

Again, you seem to equate hunting/gathering with lawless anarchy where it's every man for himself. Ice Age hunters formed groups and undoubtedly worked well with each other.

Hmm, we've found physical evidence of murders among Ice Age hunters, so they "worked well with each other" no better than we do now. And "anarchy" is a lack of government. Which pretty much defines the Ice Age hunters. Or did you consider your Grandfather to be "government" when you were growing up?

By the by, I am by no means trying to suggest that "hunter/gatherer" is synonymous with solitude or anarchy. I AM trying to suggest that the lifestyle looks a lot better from the easy chair at home than it does when you're actually living it. And that romanticizing the hunter/gatherer lifestyle from your computer desk is, at best, silly.

I am from China, and when I was in China, China was hit by the double whammy from Chairman Mao - in the form of great famine and cultural upheaval

Hey, you people decided you'd rather have Chairman Mao than the kleptocrats you had before. On balance, I'm not sure you made the right choice, but on the other hand, I'm not sure you didn't (the previous "government" was about as bad as any in history, when you come right down to it).

Tens of millions of people perished

From what I've read, closer to 100 million than to ten million. Mao easily displaced Hitler as the cause of the greatest number of human deaths in history (thought the Black Death still beats them both).

Why then the West wants to give out money to help those "poor" countries? I mean, what the West is thinking?

Depending on whether you're talking government aid or private aid, the logic is that you get a better trading partner if those people over there aren't starving OR that it's the Christian thing to do (and don't waste my time going on about "christian hypocrisy" - the only people I actually know who go over to places like Liberia to help out (medical missions, in this case, every year, not just because ebola) are doing so because they consider it their Christian Duty).

They think without the "foreign aid" those poor countries will die?

Based on past evidence, a lot of them will. Note ebola, consider its effects sans Western medical people/equipment being sent to Africa.

For thousands of years the people of those "poor countries" were there before the "West" is known as the "West ... and they never got any "Western aid" at all, and still, they survived, right?

For values of "survive" that include average lifespans of 40 years or so, starvation a year or two every decade, a great deal of what civilized people consider to be serious crimes (rape, murder, that sort of thing), etc.

than today?

No.

I kinda like the hunter-gatherer lifestyle myself. Agriculture is overrated.

Says a guy typing on a computer that couldn't exist along with a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

For the record, agriculture was the first development that freed up labor from the "hunter/gatherer" mode to allow enough surplus to develop things like, oh, computers (along with the rest of civilization).

And no I'm not being racist, a noteworthy scholar had commented once that a hunter-gatherer from 100,000 BC lived better than the average man in 19th century London.

And another one decribed that lifetyle as "nasty, brutish, and short".

Just curious, have you ever tried a "hunter/gatherer" lifestyle? Gone to a wilderness area, ditched the trappings of civilization (clothes, cellphone, computer, canteen, all that stuff), and tried living on what you could hunt down or gather (and no, I'm not referring to what you can gather at the local Mcdonald's...)...

a police officer should have the same rights as any ordinary citizen, except when they see a crime being committed.

Your sentence should have ended right after the word "citizen" if you really were talking about "rights".

Note that if you're talking about "powers" (something governments have instead of "rights"), I'm curious what "powers" you think a police officer should have when they see a crime being committed that you don't think an ordinary citizen should have.

The Great Depression was already a generation gone by the time World War II rolled around.

Interesting theory you have there, Butch...

Black Friday (widely acknowledged as marking the start of the Great Depression) was in 1929.

WW2 started in 1939.

I've never heard of a human society with ten year generations. we generally CAN'T have children much less than 14 years after birth, and generally don't for 20+ years. Hence the notion that a "generation" is 20-25 years....

And even that ten years assumes the Great Depression was over in a few months. As opposed to dragging on and on, as it actually did.

It should also be note that WW2 is generally credited by people with a clue with ending the Great Depression (though some argue that it didn't end it so much as hide it with a high fever - war production got people working, while the war lasted. And post-war production (it's no coincidence that America's most prosperous period was followed after much of the industry of the rest of the world was bombed into rubble) hid the continuing issues with the need to make things for most of the civilized world....

If the globe isn't warming, that must mean the oceans aren't warming because they're part of the globe. Is that the case, Jane?

If the house is getting warmer, that must mean that the refrigerator is getting warmer, since the 'frig is part of they house, right?

That's an example of an elementary fallacy that we call the "Does Not Follow" (that's a (semi-)literary reference - anyone remember from what?).

Do note that PART of the Earth warming in no way implies that ALL of the Earth is warming.

Likewise, PART of the Earth NOT warming in no way implies that ALL of the Earth is NOT warming.

but there are indeed a couple of very fishy things about this case, all pointing to an organised effort to get Assange extradited or otherwise transported to the US.

Oh, nonsense!

If the USA had really wanted Assange, the easy way to have gotten him would have been to extradite him from the UK while he was living there freely.

The whole notion that while he was living in the UK, the USA worked to convince Sweden to extradite him to Sweden so we could then extradite him to the USA is ridiculous.

It's not like Sweden is MORE friendly to the USA than the UK is....

- the nuclear plants require a lot of sweet water for cooling, 24/7, and the world is running out

Ignoring the rest of your points...

No, they don't.

1) It's quite possible to build a nuclear power plant that has a closed-loop coolant system. The navies of the world have been doing it for better than half a century.

2) You don't want pure H2O in the coolant loop in a reactor. Hot water is quite corrosive, so you add chemicals to lessen the corrosive effects of the water. The navies of the world have been doing this for better than half a century too.

3) Depending on design, you can use a secondary cooling system (that cools the water in the primary cooling system) that uses cooling towers, or that just uses sea-water. The navies of the world have been doing the latter for the last half century also.

Note that there are arguments against using sea-water, but the alternative (using fresh water) is, as you say, biting into a rather more limited resource.

P.S. Oh, by the way, it's quite possible to design a reactor that can respond to transient power demands. Navies of the world have been doing that for half a century or so also....