It got modded up because the readers on Slashdot do not want to hear that porn and or video games have any downside.

Of course they forget that free access to addictive substances has been shown in study after study to cause problems.

I mostly agree. The question I have where the accidents that the car was in control over easily avoidable by a human but not by a program. The end result may be more fender benders but fewer lives lost. Still a good trade off.
In the end the sample is too small to jump for joy or shriek in horror.

that is pretty much what I said.

Had the Cuban missile crisis gotten out of hand it could have caused a full on nuclear exchange between the US and the USSR.
Yea that would have beat the Nazis.
It is my mistake in not limiting this to the area of ComInt/SigInt/PhotoInt which what the discussion is all about.
The whole turn in the odd guy the street thing is a far different kind of "spying". Frankly one that is really looked down on by the Intelligence community at large.

" Russians to be sent to Gulags, countless Jews to be sent to concentration camps, countless people from the DPRK to be killed because they disagreed with the "dear leader". In fact go back further in history and see how many lives spying cost throughout history."
The Jews did not really involve spying or communication intercepts.
And I counter with D-Day, Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Yom Kippur war.

Actually you can prove that he did.
"The agents were not difficult to spot - a task made still easier by the cracking of the German's Enigma encryption. "

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...

sure he was. Any "spy" in the UK that transmitted anything would be intercepted and decrypted...
In fact.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...

"The agents were not difficult to spot - a task made still easier by the cracking of the German's Enigma encryption. "
So yes they did spy on British citizens. I will also bet you really good money that anybody in the UK sending a telegram to Germany in 1938 had that telegram stored at Mi5

" the entire world needs to be watched"
It is perfectly legal to spy on the entire world outside of the US as far as the US is concerned.
Do you think the US is going take Russia or China to court for using SIGINT systems?

But you do have conversion losses at each stage.
The big benefit is that electric cars use less power over all because they have no idle along with charging over night when you are using surplus power.

You left out nuclear. A good bit of US power still comes from Nuclear which is low carbon "No power source including Solar is carbon free".

No the you will just have tin foil hat/hipsters beating the daylights out of you for having a camera...
See every discussion of GoogleGlass on Slashdot for proof.

The biggest help is Nuclear power. But the Greens are fighting it.
Germany is a prime example. Sure they have built out a lot of Solar and Wind but they are replacing Nuclear with COAL!
The say in 20 or so years ago they can replace coal with "renewables" which is just pushing it off and pumping out carbon.
Solar will not work because of storage.
And no Tesla has not solved that problem. Vermont Yankee which was a small nuclear plant produced on average 4703 GWh per year. It would take 1,287,612 Tesla power walls to provide a 24 hour reserve. The cost would be 4,506,642,000 and that is just for a 24 hour storage system. In the winter you could have many areas where solar output is close to zero for more than a day but if you want cut that in half and put it at 12 hours. And that is JUST the battery costs. Add in solar and wind turbines to match the 4703 GWhs and the math gets super ugly very quickly.
And Vermont Yankee was a small plant. BTW it is has been replaced with carbon producing fracked natural gas... Yea... Yell the greens!
BTW the Saint Lucie Nuclear power plant in Florida which is far from the largest produces just under 3 times as much power. So figure about 3 million power walls.

"Ah, the old "the system will never be perfect, so we might as well not try to improve it" argument."
Sure but this is not an improvement. I am all for increasing taxes for school and frankly even for more federal aid for areas that have low incomes but a centralized system for all funds will have a negative impact and is unworkable.

But for all practical purposes Tokyo is about 70 years old.

"As opposed to London, Paris, and Tokyo, which were designed and built during the last 50 years, and thus are more efficient."
Paris and London are both very old and they were not "leveled" during WWII.