Butamax is a shell company of BP and DuPont. It is suing Gevo to prevent it from selling Butanol fuel based on an obvious patent developed at public university, partly with our tax money.

That depends. Top Gear reports when the cocks have shifted brand, I believe they've moved from BMWs to Audis just in time for me to buy one and remove all doubt. Otherwise, they seem to get rid of their cars (What's a $70k car? S-Class, A8, Jag...) about the same time all the electrical stuff takes a dump. I don't think they're worried about being current, only having the correct brand.

Holy shitballs, batman. Even on an Audi A8 the transmission lines are only four hundred bucks. They only list one part so apparently that's both of them and you buy them together.

On the other hand, the Chevy dealer wouldn't sell me door handles, they wanted to sell me door handle mechanisms. 2000 Astro, a thousand bucks in door handles. I got the handles on eBay for ten to twenty bucks a piece depending on placement. So I guess Chevy really is worse than Audi

The suspension is pretty much guaranteed to be ripe for a rebuild by or before that time, because they're still not using polyurethane bushings. That's spendy and it's no less (or more) spendy on the Leaf.

The CNC milled guns tend to have parts that go in without smithing. I'll take that over pedigree.

Per-home ROs are cheap as hell now. A system that was up to a grand (if you were being robbed) a decade ago is just over a hundred bucks now.

It's only a problem if you are taking too much of the plant away from the field. Growing corn isn't the problem, growing corn and carrying away the waste instead of turning it in is the problem. Corn still gets most of its carbon from the air like every other plant.

Telcos cannot function without the capability to run a telephone spying program, at least the listening-in part. And that's all they provide, besides basic records which they need for billing and for diagnostics. The federal government itself operates the facilities which actually centralize and process the data. You may (or may not) have seen some articles go by here on slashdot about massive federal data centers for use by certain three-letter agencies.

Virtually none of the carbon plants are made of comes from the soil. What most plants take from the soil is nitrogen and micronutrients. Some plants, however, actually put nitrogen into the soil. Sadly, instead of planting crops in guilds, we opted for gross machine cultivation which not only demands planting massive monocultures but which also requires using varieties bred for machine harvestability rather than optimal nutrition, flavor, or texture. It also attracts pests while failing to attract their natural counters, and in practical terms requires the use of pesticides. The pesticides kill the soil-dwelling organisms which make nitrogen "bioavailable" (packaging it in a form which the plants can use) which changes soil into dirt and basically reduces modern factory farming practices to hydroponics in a dirt medium.

Sadly, this is just as applicable to food as fuel. The only difference is that we need to eat food, but there are vastly better feedstocks for biofuel than corn.

Uh what? Biodiesel and green diesel remove varnish left behind by petrodiesel. Ethanol sucks because it attracts water and because you get poor output when you run it through an engine which also expects to run on gasoline. Running veg oil will certainly clog things up, though, or waste motor oil.

In any case, the cure for deposits from running one or the other kind of diesel (petro or bio) is to occasionally run a tank of the other. Problem solved.

That is bullshit. Biodiesel or green diesel from waste fats are pure benefit, as are biofuels from algae. Unfortunately, the best of them (Butanol) is being suppressed by BP and DuPont until such a time as they can control it completely. If that's never, so be it, to them.

'Best' how? Both of those are still soil-based crops. Algae is better because you can grow it on dirty water in most weather conditions above freezing, and it takes less processing than basically any other bio feedstock but shit.

That's intentional, because the design was given away. This is the future, and it's why 3d printing has corporations pissing themselves. If someone will give away a design for a product better than what they're selling, what chance do they have to continue to exist? Answer, none, and it's about damned time. Of course, this raises some serious questions about how we're going to distribute wealth when we don't need a bunch of slaves to stamp out widgets, and therefore we don't need slave-owners to crack whips over them. Instead of giving the wealth to the slave-owners, we might have to share it.

It costs about five to ten bucks more to get traffic with an old-school GPS, too — if you buy last year's refurb instead of this year's model. Get one with lifetime maps and you lose nothing, sometimes it's literally a styling change.

Where I live, cellular coverage is spotty. Traffic doesn't work there, but then online GPS doesn't work there at all.

The only purpose of the whole corn ethanol debacle is to transfer vast amounts of money from the taxpayers and the gasoline-buying public to Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland. Any other claimed purpose is, and always was, bullshit.

-jcr