A computer can perform those functions better than most humans, since it can track every single car nearby and their exact speed, trajectory, behavior patterns, etc

Especially if the other cars are designed to cooperate by broadcasting their speed, trajectory, etc. Then your car won't have to expend CPU cycles analyzing camera images to determine what the other cars are up to.

appearing sentient might as well be sentient

I disagree, and be very careful making assertions like this.

I hope you agree that sentient entities, like you and me, ought to have rights.

And it's entirely possible that next year someone will come out with an app that runs on my MacBook and very much appears to be sentient. And if appearing sentient might as well be sentient, then it could very well become a crime to power off my MacBook after I've launched said app.

So there should be a pretty high threshold for what is sentient. Every time a sentient entity is created -- which might be as easy as launching another instance of an app -- we taxpayers might find ourselves on the hook for maintaining the hardware and providing electrical power to keep these things alive.

Once you have a developed economy, it's hard to wring the same kind of growth out of it, because you're a lot closer to your potential.

No, it's easier for a developed economy to make productivity gains than it is for a subsistence economy, because by definition, the subsistence economy, after meeting the most basic needs of the population, has hardly anything left over to invest in R&D.

That is why human existence remained much the same for millennia -- a subsistence economy has little capacity to change itself -- but suddenly in the last 200 years there has been an explosion of technology and growth.

But the United States, we don't always make the best choices as to what to do with the fruits of our developed economy. Sometimes that's the fault of government (blowing money on lavish parties for GSA employees); sometimes it's the fault of individuals (blowing $150 on a ticket to watch grown men chase a ball around on a field).

According to http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/nyc_full_tidal_records.jpg, sea level today is rising at a rate of 280 mm per century. This rate has been unchanged since these records began to be kept in the 1850s. It seems wholly insensitive to the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
How do you explain that? Strange attractors again?

So you have created a universe with a better ratio of hospitable-to-inhospitable planets?
No?
Didn't think so.

You seem to be a little light on facts. Medicare's unfunded liability is $89 TRILLION. In other words, $89 trillion in future obligations, for which we currently have no idea where the money will come from. This figure was published in the 2009 Medicare Trustees Report. So it's not right-wing FUD, unless you consider the Medicare Trustees to be right-wing FUD slingers.

When Lyndon Johnson created Medicare, the projected costs of the program were orders of magnitude smaller than the actually turned out to be. (We are going down that same path with Obamacare. The projected costs are already far higher then they were when the program was sold to Congress.) If President Johnson had known the true extent of the monster that Medicare would eventually grow into, he wouldn't have touched it with a ten foot pole, because -- love him or hate him -- he didn't have a deathwish for America's economy.

I'm sick of having to download hundreds of needless apps whose functionality could have been performed in Safari.

It's getting ridiculous: "Honey, how many pages of apps do I have to scroll through until I get to the one that displays the tensile strength of Reebok shoelaces?"

I've always wondered, where does the increased mass manifest itself? Is it distributed amongst all the atoms in the object?

Say I have a lump of copper comprising 10^23 copper atoms. When I take it out of the freezer, does the mass of each one of those copper atoms increase? Taking the question down still one more level, do only the nucleons of those atoms gain mass, or do their electrons become more massive as well?

Hmm... you say there is no such thing as "Indian food," then you go on to use that exact phrase two more times.

Here's what Wikipedia says about the efficiency of conventional electrolysis:

The energy efficiency of water electrolysis is a measure of what fraction of electrical energy used is actually contained within the hydrogen. Some of the electrical energy is converted to heat, an almost useless byproduct. Some reports quote efficiencies between 50% and 70%.

How can you possibly get "20 times" more efficient than that?