Ignoring your attempt to drag religion into an otherwise insightful comment, it's an interesting question.

I guess the truth is that there's a pretty large amount of uncertainty about the effects of global warming. Such uncertainty would make the deliberate warming of the globe ill advised. But that same uncertainty tends to gut arguments that we should take drastic action, such as the misanthropic neo-luddite position that we need a strong central world government that is largely socialist in order to control the actions of multinational corporations, and/or individual government actions to reduce us back to a "low energy" society world-wide (i.e. back to third world standards of living).

If you object to my characterization of socialist, realize that it would necessarily involve the governmental power to dictate the utilization (or disuse) of capital resources, the very definition of socialism.

Ultimately, taking a "wait and see" position is taking a position of optimism in humanity, and having faith that the people of today and tomorrow will have the intelligence and problem solving ability to develop technology in response to actual problems that arise.

The irony is that to take the pessimistic position that humanity will blindly run things into the ground and not do anything about it requires faith in technology as well, faith in the computer simulations of a chaotic system (actually two, climate and economic), designed primarily by people with a leftist political bias, and fed only 40 years of reliable detailed data in combination with historical data extrapolated from ice cores with a significant margin for error.

Which position is the smallest leap of faith? That humanity will be able to find solutions to any pressing problems that arise, or faith that a computer simulation of a very chaotic system based on limited data and designed by those with a political bias is correct? And to go further, that we should spend trillions of dollars of resources to address these problems that haven't happened yet?

To me the latter position is untenable. It's not a question of politics when examined in these terms, it's a question of healthy scientific skepticism and an application of taking the position that requires the smallest leap of faith.

Good to see I'm not the only one who realizes this. The peak oil types seem to imagine a world that is incapable of developing new technology or adapting to alternatives as the prices of something slowly increase over a period of 100 or more years, which is a ridiculous assumption.

It's nice of you to actually admit that the ulterior motive is a powerful global socialist government. Most climate change people stop short of actually admitting that.

That's a funny definition of hybrid. Since when does regen braking define hybrid?

You are wrong anyway, a lot of trains do use regenerative braking, either for prime energy, or to supplement head end power (aux loads).

If a small series hybrid is so great and easy, why aren't they out there? The only full series hybrids I've heard of are prototypes and large busses.

So, if it's so easy, go build it and get very rich.

Very pure water is very aggressive. For example spray nozzles that spray RO or distilled water get eaten up very quickly.

Industrially, you have to often add controlled salts back into distilled water to keep it from destroying your machines by dissolving them.

So it's entirely plausible that distilled water had a negative effect on her teeth.

It's not as if distilled water falls from the sky for free or anything.

Series hybrids are really inefficient in small sizes. I've built one. It mostly sucked.

They have to do all the convoluted series-parallel shit because it's the only thing that even gets you a slight edge over straight gasoline in those sizes.

I think someone once said the first rule of engineering is that nothing scales. That's true for scaling down as well. The things that work well in a 4400HP train engine that rarely varies its output aren't going to necessarily work in a 150HP car that has to go zero to 60 in less than 8 seconds with constant stopping and starting.

Why would you think that? Al + O to Aluminum Oxide isn't easily reversible... at least not back into anything that's a useful anode, water or no water.

You could move out to the country. But then you wouldn't be around all the other hipsters.

It's a poor assumption to think that because I believe taxation is fundamentally theft, that I am fully supportive of the sleazeball shit that went on with these bankers. They were mostly taking advantage of situations the government created, but they still knew exactly what they were doing, laying the excess risk on the government and the implicit bailout they knew would come.

NASA existed so we could prove that we could blow the shit out of Russia from the comfort of home. That was the entire reason we ever went to space at all, just to prove that we could plant a nuke on Moscow from a missile silo in Nebraska, and vice versa.

It was never about "science" or "innovation", it was about military and diplomatic saber rattling.

In case you didn't notice, innovation in the US space program pretty much ended with the cold war. We had obsolete space shuttles with woven core memory operating in the 2000s. It was an extension of a military program, pure and simple.

It's interesting you pick space for this. A couple years ago people like you would probably tell me that no private enterprise would ever invest the massive amount of money necessary for space travel. And yet, in the last few years, private companies have developed technology to get into orbit and it won't be long before they can go further.

It was the realization that NASA was a massive, obsolete, waste of money, combined with the quasi-deregulation of space launches that lead to real innovation for the first time in 30 years, once the government got out of the way.

I don't think strongly worded comments on Slashdot would have worked in 1776 either.

If you don't host the server yourself they could always go to your hosting provider, but I assume this is more about gmail/comcast/etc.

Why would they need to trace the money? The fed was the one writing the checks to people and foreign governments to buy the worthless junk MBS. They know where it went.

Email isn't private because it can be relayed through any server on the Internet, in plain text.

Complicated email routing these days isn't as common as it used to be (though, with third party spam services, it's getting a little more complicated once again), but it used to be common for a server operator to handle a large volume of email that wasn't intended for them as the final destination.

The protocol is inherently insecure by design, and there should be no expectation of privacy. Any mail server admin on the Internet could read your email in theory.