I say if "None of the above" wins, then every candidate on the ballot is disqualified and the election is held again. That should make things a bit more interesting.

Still, it's the wrong solution to the problem. If the car companies were using unfair business practices to undercut dealers, why not address that problem instead of instituting a blanket ban on car companies selling directly to the public?

Yeah, I don't get all the "fully autonomous cars will be here soon" posts. Sure, I can see cars that can handle themselves on the freeway, given clear weather and no construction. We're almost there anyway with the adaptive cruise control and lane keeping systems on cars you can buy today. But we're a long way from cars that can handle construction zones, two lane highways and rural roads, poorly maintained roads, gravel roads, bad weather, and the like. If I was a professional driver I wouldn't be worried quite yet. Once you can give an autonomous vehicle any random destination in the US and it can get there on its own without any human assistance then maybe they should be worried.

Actually, I'm a bit surprised that we don't already have something like this, as there really isn't any reason why such a system couldn't be used by human-operated trucks too.

Because the stuff we were looking forward to 10-20 years ago is now mundane. Hi-def Flat screen TVs? multi-core CPU? smartphones? LED light bulbs? Meh!

The key with Venus is to not land, but build could cities about 50km up. At that altitude, you have an atmospheric pressure of about 1 atm, temperatures are a bit above freezing, you still have the Earth-like gravity, and due to the atmosphere being mostly CO2 (a heavy gas), a balloon filled with breathable air will float. You've also got plenty of solar energy (during the day, at least). It's about as close as earth-like as you're going to get without actually being on Earth. On the downside, you have the 200 MPH+ winds to deal with, the lack of a strong magnetic field, as well as the long day/night cycle.

Because of the fracking boom, we've got so much natural gas that we don't know what to do with it all, causing the price to crash, and given that you can convert coal plants to natural gas without too much difficulty that's what a lot of utilities have been doing.

Well, you could increase CO2 levels by lighting a bunch of stuff on fire. But that would actually have a cost. It's just easier to print money and pump it into the system.

However, you have enough information (the amount of fuel burned) to know how much CO2 the car emitted. They do the reverse to determine the mileage a car gets - they measure the amount of CO2 the car emits and use that to determine the amount of fuel the car burned.

Even if it was, Earth is still closer to Sol than it is to Jupiter.

Those tubes are seriously bright. They don't just drop right in as you do have to rewire the fixture to bypass the ballast. The only disadvantage I have found is that they don't come on instantly but rather take a good portion of a second to do so, which is certainly odd. Once they come on they're at full brightness though.

The first generation were fine, if you forked over the money for the $50+ bulbs. I bought one as an experiment and I still have it. It's a good light and still works fine, but at that cost I bought only one. The problem bulbs were the cheap ones that were essentially a bunch of LEDs that you might find in a flashlight, sometimes just wired in series with the line voltage like a cheap strand of LED Christmas lights.

Around here, that's called "snow".

That was the whole idea behind Microsoft's Readyboost, which allowed you to plug in a USB (!) thumbdrive, and if Windows deemed it fast enough, it would use it as swap space rather than (or in addition to) the hard drive. My experience is that actually worked somewhat well, given a laptop with a 5400RPM drive and a hardware limitation of 3GB of ram. Though I eventually ditched it when I replaced the HDD with a SSD, which made a tremendous difference.

Interestingly, Readyboost won't let you use a SSD hooked up over SATA (I tried just to see if it would). Though it will let you use a card reader so long as it deems the card fast enough.

Because it was using parity ... in a computer!

Though surely those patents have expired by now. Time for parity ram to make a comeback?