Electric traction motors are far more efficient than ICEs. That's why diesel locomotives don't actually connect the diesel engine to the wheels.

You are high. The diesel engine turns fuel into mechanical energy. If you change that mechanical energy into electricity and then back into mechanical energy, there is no way that could give you more efficiency than a simple mechanical transmission (which is typically well over 90% efficient). The reason for the electric transmission is flexibility. It does away with a big honking clutch and a multi-speed gearbox and gives you very smooth transition from standstill to forward motion.

Newton is a unit of force. BTU is a unit of energy. You should be using megajoules.

1 BTU = 0.001055055853 MJ, or 1000 BTU = 1.055055853 MJ
1000 BTU per person mile = 0.6555813132 MJ/passenger-km

Any combustion engine running at surface conditions can do maybe 20 - 30% efficiency tops.

Better than that. There are internal combustion engines which reach 50% at sea level. The Wartsila-Sulzer RTA96-C 108,920 hp marine diesel exceeds 50%. Heck, even the TDI diesel engine in my 1999 Golf tops out at very close to 40%. The LM-2500+ gas turbine, a derivative of the CF6 which powers some 747s, adapted for shaft output, is over 39%.

Seagoing cargo ships are manned. Cargo planes are manned.

You are a fucking nincompoop. Peltier cooling works by pumping heat from the cold side to the hot side. You have to COOL the hot side, not heat it, idiot.

Bullshit. They are HIDDEN. A menu bar that says "File", "Edit", and "View" in plain English or $LOCALIZED_LANGUAGE_OF_CHOICE is not hidden. Something that can only be accessed by knowing a secret location, or by finding a cryptic symbol and determining its purpose, is hidden.

SAA/CUA did not happen, and take over everywhere that mattered, because it was the product of a bunch of masturbating monkeys. It was the end product of research and insight of genuine experts in human interface, including Apple's HIG, and ultimately the innovators behind Xerox Star.

CO2 + H2O doesn't only make methanol. It makes hydrocarbon. Via various chemical processes, you can end up with whatever form(s) of hydrocarbon you want. Diesel fuel is good because (1) it is a very efficient and convenient energy storage medium and (2) a vast infrastructure of vehicles already use it. Methanol is an inefficient energy storage medium - quite apart from its toxicity.

Since burning the fuel returns it back into CO2 and H2O, the amount of energy in the various bonds is irrelevant. All the energy you put in will come out again.

No; far from all of it; not in a useful form. A major part of it comes back, but neither the breakdown processes and the synthesis processes nor the engines consuming the end product are any where near 100% efficient.

The atmosphere has a mass of 5.15×10^18 kg. The concentration of CO2 is about 400 parts per million. That means there is 2.06x10^15 kg[*], or 2.06 trillion tonnes, of CO2 in the atmosphere. That works out to about 294 tonnes for every man, woman, and child in the world. There are also vast amounts dissolved in the oceans.

About 2.4 kg of CO2 is produced per litre of motor fuel burned; hence synthesizing motor fuel from CO2 requires about 2.4 kg of CO2 per litre. That means that the 2.06x10^15 kg of CO2 present in the atmosphere could generate over 8x10^14 litres of motor fuel, or more than ten thousand litres for every man, woman, and child in the world.

So around now, if you are a US driver, you are probably thinking that you do consume on the order of 500 gallons, or 2000 litres, of motor fuel per year, and you will note that there are other vehicles besides personal motor cars to be considered - trucks, planes, ships, etc.

But it seems to me you are utterly ignoring the overriding point. It is a giant closed system! Every kilogram of CO2 you process into fuel gets burned, and every single kg of CO2 you release from burning the fuel goes back into the atmosphere. And the overall loop is very nearly lossless. Sure, some very small fraction of the carbon liberated by combustion gets turned into CO or C particulates instead of CO2, but with modern pollution controls that fraction is very slight.

There are enormous logistical challenges to using the technique at full scale (including where to get the staggering amount of energy to run the synthesis), but running the atmosphere short of CO2 is not one of them.

[*] I spent a fair amount of time researching and could not readily determine whether the oft-quoted figure of 400 ppm is by volume or by mass. My math assumes that it is by mass. That actually leads to lower figures (pessimistic to my point) than if it is by volume, as it probably is. This is because CO2 is substantially higher density than air.

Or I can use okular, and I don't have to GUESS how to do things. It's all discoverable, un-hidden menus, just like the days when people used to believe in standards.

Any TDI owner who is not at the very least well-informed enough, and acquires a VAG-COM and some of the special tools, is in deep doo-doo. Even if you are on the good side of a very competent mechanic who will let you watch over his shoulder and check up progress, you still need to prime them on the fundamentals and ins-and-outs, because it would be totally prohibitive for them to do the learning themselves. Dealer repair shops are absolutely out of the question. Even if the cost were not prohibitive, there isn't a single one with TDI competence or who gives a single shit about your car.

Replacing the timing belt is a major, major operation involving dismounting the engine and supporting it, lining things up with special jigs and tools, and replacing every part in the path of the belt, including water pump, tensioner, and all rollers. Then you have to set the tension very precisely, not rotating the tensioner the wrong direction because it's opposite to that in a gas model, and finally nudging the heavy injection pump by thousandths of an inch to get the injection timing in spec, using the VAG-COM to check it. And if you're off the scale advanced or retarded when you begin the adjustment, it's a special adventure to find your way into the window so you can see anything at all on the VAG-COM. Or get it running at all.

If the timing belt ever strips teeth or skips more than a single tooth, you are in dire danger of doing several thousand dollars of damage to the engine, or totaling it.

Then there are the special cute things that can go wrong, like an injector that sticks open instead of pulsing properly. That will turn it into a blowtorch that will burn right through the top of the piston.

Entirely right about nitrogen asphyxia. There is nothing magic about nitrogen; you could as well use any other colorless, odorless inert gas, but nitrogen is the cheapest.

One correction, though. "Stopping the heart" per se is most definitely not painful. Ask anyone who has undergone true sudden complete cardiac arrest. You immediately feel a surreal calm as all that commotion in your chest you never really noticed until that moment, and the rush of blood through your head, stops. Within single digit seconds you feel crazy high. In 10-20 seconds you are out like a light. It may take 10 minutes for clinical irreversible death to eventuate, but after 10-20 seconds you are a sack of meat. We know from those whose heart spontaneously restarts, or are resuscitated before complete death or brain damage, that the experience after 10-20 seconds is nothing more than unconsciousness.

It's not so much that CO2, or cardiac arrest, "turns off" pain. It entirely sidesteps the strangling sensation caused by buildup of CO2. As others have noted, there is no physiologic sensation from lack of oxygen, but there is an almighty agony from CO2 buildup.

Batteries need to come down in cost before it makes sense to switch to an off-grid solution. I have a 1kW battery/solar system (not grid-tied) as an emergency power source and I have to replace the lead acid AGM batteries aver 5-7 years at a cost of $500 to $1000.

I guess your battery guys have a license to print money as it stands. Compare your putrid 1 kw battery to a Tesla >100 kw battery. The latter certainly doesn't cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

What would be more interesting would be to find what the kwh rating of your battery is.

KDE has officially gone to hell. Nice knowin' ya, see ya later. I say this as a former aficionado. IMO KDE3 was the pinnacle; KDE4 was barely acceptable; KDE5 is junk. Lumina looks like the only DE with hope for the future. For now I'm pretty happy with Mate because it is identical to Gnome2.

Earth to nutjob. A bureaucracy is the way ALL GOVERNMENTS work. There is no other conceivable way to do it. The legislative process paints the broad strokes. It also creates and authorizes bureaucratic structures to tend to the details and the day-to-day operations. Congress CREATED the FCC, goddammit. Where do you think the FCC came from? Some boogeyman? Look up Communications Act of 1934 and Telecommunications Act of 1996. They created the FCC and amended the rules, respectively. They gave it exactly the powers they wanted it to have, and they told it exactly what its duties were.

The FCC used the powers given to it to do something that falls within its duties.

It's not as if the bureaucracy can just do any crazy thing. If you think the enabling legislation was fucked up, or has been overtaken by events and conditions, then all you have to do is introduce new legislation. This particular new legislation is an unimaginative reactive tantrum which says "you did something naughty, and we didn't really mean that you should have been able to do that". If there really is a problem to address, one would hope for legislation more constructive and coherent, but be that as it may, you can see that the system works as intended. Congress (if it can get all the bickering members plus the president to cooperate) can goddam well control the bureaucracy.