Then perhaps they're not really a fan of racing as such, but a fan of noise and foul odors.

For those people, there's always going to be monster truck rallies.
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Is your car's engine 760HP?

And your car gets 22 km per liter (52MPG)?
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The battery is fully integrated into the vehicle and is part of the structure. It can't be easily removed. Not for lack of want, though. Swappable batteries are under development, but it will likely mean compromises in the chassis construction.

I'm more annoyed that there is a *minimum* pit time, meaning drivers have to wait and get penalized if they leave the pits too early.
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It's also important, as I understand it, that the cars all be the same so they can limit the number of unknowns when evaluating performance and engineering of the vehicles.

My only complaint, and it's a minor one, is they're too gimmicky with the "Fan boost" thing.
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No. For two reasons:

First, it's an IR telescope. The reason they're putting it in space is to get it away from Earth's atmosphere, which is opaque to the IR wavelengths it's designed to detect. Earth would look like a light bulb for all the IR it gives off and there is zero chance of seeing the surface.

Second, even if it could somehow be used to see through the opaque atmosphere, it couldn't make out anything. The James Webb telescope has a claimed resolution of 0.1 arc-seconds. It's going to be put into the Earth-Sun L2 Lagrangian point, about 1.5 million km from the Earth. At that distance and resolution, each pixel of the image would be ~730 meters square... just under half a mile. Useless for any kind of surveillance.
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That makes sense if you're building devices directly on the wafer, but wouldn't the three sacrificial layers interrupt that?

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Except that, with the exception of natural gas, you have a lot of other combustion products to deal with. CO2 emissions from cement production are the result of baking the carbon out of the calcium carbonate, and it's relatively pure and therefore easier to deal with.

There are also only ~100 cement plants in the US, versus thousands of fossil power plants.

-The US produces about 5,500 million metric tons per year of CO2.
-Cement production releases about 1.25 tons CO2 per ton.
-The US produces about 68 million tons (2011) of cement per year.

68*1.25 = 87.5 million tons CO2 per year for cement production. That's 1.5% of the total.

33-57% of that which is released during production.

Good job cherry picking the worst possible number instead of the one that actually applies. You even went out of your way to quote the article so carefully!

The part you quoted is for tropical zones and peatlands. So how much of the US is in a tropical climate zone, exactly? Hawaii and a little bit of Florida?
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The total US Hydro generation capacity is ~80GW. 12GW more would be an increase of 15%. I ball parked it at a conservative "at least 10%."

A relative handful of plants produce the majority of that power, but that doesn't change the numbers.
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CO2 generation isn't an impossible challenge. Since the concrete production is centralized, it can be sequestered on site, and concrete naturally re-absorbs that carbon over the decades. Even if you don't address the immediate emissions, since concrete production is a mere 1% or so of total CO2 output by the US and the entire lifecycle emissions (including construction, operation and decommissioning) for hydro is a tenth that of natural gas, you're still coming out way ahead.

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To US Energy Dept. estimated, in 2012, that there is ~12GW worth of power that could be tapped from existing, non-power-producing dams. That's handily 10% more hydro than what we've got now.

That same report estimates a potential for 65GW of new hydro power installations (85GW if you allow trampling of federal protected lands).

The reason hydro isn't talked about is because of uninformed people like you who think there's no additional capacity.
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I agree - and this technology will give more parents the peace of mind to hand over the keys to their kids. I only see good coming from this.

No. There's plenty of space to learn - and now there's recourse for abusing the freedom they've been given. The car doesn't shut off, the parents are required to remove driving privileges... if my kids want to drive my car, there are rules. I already told my son (months away from getting his license) that I will never buy him a car - I will by myself a car and let him use it as long as he's obeying the rules. He didn't complain... I don't owe him a car. It's a privilege. If he doesn't want to be monitored, he can pay for his own car and his own insurance... it's just that simple.

The context of my statement was presidential elections. Ideally, the president should matter very little. Unfortunately, after 240 years, the U.S. Constitution is essentially turned on it's head. In times of peace, the majority of governing is supposed to happen locally. If that still happened, we'd have much greater control over our local politics.

The other bad part about that is that by the time the primaries get to my state, the ones I liked have already been eliminated by the party establishment. I can vote in either primary (but not both) because we don't do party registration in my state, but by the time the primaries come around, anyone that would have made a significant difference is already eliminated.

Only nobody sold Obama as a constitutionalist... in fact, for liberals, "constitutionalist" is one of their many examples of "code words" for "racist." He was sold as a constitutional scholar... so he knows about it, he knows what it says, he just doesn't care.