Bio-fuel is this stuff that comes from plants, where we use the plant oil as fuel for our vehicles. Bio-fuel has less pollutants than actual fuel, and the actual growth of the plant will filter more pollutants from the air than the fuel will give out. Woah! A fuel that makes the air cleaner?!? Now that's something I'd like to see in action.

I could go on for days about the way taxes should be set up. I don't understand how people can go on thinking that oil executives deserve to be as rich as they are. I can't believe people don't demand from their government that these people be heavily taxed, that they really don't need to have all their money. If executives had to give that money back to the people imagine what we could achieve. People say that we can't use alternative fuel solutions like hydrogen because there's no infrastructure for it. No infrastructure? Why don't we spend 10 billion dollars and fix that problem, in the process creating new construction jobs. Better yet, you know that food we have farmers burning every single year? Why don't we pay those farmers to grow plants which are a good source of bio-fuel. Spend 10 billion dollars on creating refineries that process bio-fuel rather than using fuel that comes from under the grounds of other countries. We won't even have to replace the infrastructure; everything can continue just as before. The only difference will be that we are growing our fuel with plants that help filter the air (and improve the soil) as they grow. Rather than growing plants and burning them, then burning extra fuel that comes from deep inside the earth, we could cut out the whole extra fuel thing entirely. I'm sure if we spent the 600 billion dollars we've spent on Iraq that we could manage to literally cut our emissions out of existence. We could spend most of our scientific time trying to get rid of the few remaining pollutants in bio-fuel, and with such a limited task science will soon provide a better answer. Imagine it: clean gasoline!

By why isn't our country doing it? Why aren't we spending $600 billion domestically on research and development funds with a plan to actually help make the world a better place? I guarantee you that spending $600 billion domestically would result in domestically made products that could seriously decrease our trade deficit. In fact, if we had spent the $600 billion that we've spent on Iraq from the very beginning, we would have probably invented enough new technologies that would put us at a high surplus. Most fuel would be manufactured here, in America, giving the United States energy security. Rather than spending $600 billion destroying someone else's country, we would've instead secured energy self-sufficancy resulting in a stronger American economy.

Take that terrorists.

But our government doesn't do things like that. Instead they choose to spend their money going to war with countries that only mildly relate to what happened at September 11. Really, Afghanistan was where Osama Bin Laden lived, that was the only reason we were attacking it. Because one man lived there, the entire country became our enemy. Iraq, and Sudam Hussein, and the whole WMD threat, is all so cold-war that its ridiculous. Then claiming that the war in Iraq will help fight against terrorism? We're causing more terrorism just by being there.

Did you know that during the cold war our government would supply radical racial and religious groups in Middle Eastern countries with weapons? These sides, in their war with each other, basically wiped out the centrist groups. Similar problems are arising in Africa. We fueled these wars with weapons and now claim that we are going in to try to solve things? People living over there are way worse off since we've entered their country. Rather than attacking Iraq for a reason we should've been able to see through just by looking at history in general, couldn't we have better protected ourselves from terrorists and attacking countries by ensuring energy self-sufficancy. By securing our energy supply internally, wouldn't we be fortifying ourselves far more successfully?

Not only that, we would be giving something back to the world by cutting down on our emissions. We would be able to work with the rest of the world on cutting down global emissions with the ultimate goal of ending them altogether. In Montreal this week the world has made very clear that they want us to join them in this endeavor, unfortunately our government has declined the offer.

The thing is, creating bio-fuel wouldn't even be that hard. We already have the extra farms, all they really need to be doing is growing a different crop. You want to know one crop that is a really great source of bio-fuel? Cannabis. Of course, the country has laws restricting the growth of that as well, so we wouldn't even have to use cannabis. We could use something else high in protein. Whatever it is, rather than having farmers grow extra crops that they burn, have them grow these crops instead. In the end, you'll ultimately still be burning the crops. But as a grow-able resource, plants take just as much from the planet as they give back.

And let's talk about drug laws for a second. We really need to lower the drinking age to 18 and make cannabis legal. Then, we need to tax cannabis (and regulate it to age 18 like we do cigarettes and should alcohol) and alcohol, and spend all the tax money on public transportation and law enforcement. Rather than having our police officers spending their time arresting people for smoking pot, we'd have them doing what they really should be doing: making sure everyone is alright. We could take a serious bite out of crime if we stopped spending $20 billion a year enforcing marijuana laws, and started spending all that money, plus money from taxes, making sure buses are safe to ride at night. Spending the tax money on public transportation and law enforcement, making sure the public transportation is always safe, would help cut down on driving under the influence. Lowering the drinking age and eliminating anti-marijuana laws would make people trust public transportation as being a viable and safe option.

Eliminating Marijuana laws would also make it viable to grow Cannabis as bio-fuel and also as things like paper, clothing, and food products. Cannabis, being a quick-growing (about 3 months until maturity) high-protein plant is a great bio-fuel option. Growing Cannabis domestically would also open up an entirely new Cannabis industry, likely creating even more jobs.

Is anyone seeing a trend here?

We really need to give our government a reality check. We the people are going to be royally screwed if we continue to let our government run the country the way it is. We could all be so much more intelligent about this, and if we were we could actually make the world a better place. Creating self-sufficency within a nation is an important economic asset, and yet we continue to make government policies which hinder just that.

Disagree with me? Got any other ideas of things that could improve the world? I'd like to hear your thoughts, so share them with me.

So here's the thing, I bought a wireless internet router a few years ago that transfers data at 11mbps (802.11b). Since then there's been the development of 802.11g, which increases my transfer rates up to 54mbps. Now the IEEE is touting even faster technology which they are calling "wireless firewire" that will meet with their new 802.11n standards. And yet, here I sit, still using 802.11b, because I see absolutely no reason to upgrade!

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for the speeding up of our computers, allowing them to crunch more data per second, getting closer to that point where we can analyze viruses vs. human blood vs. anti-viruses (all of this refers to physical disease) ect...The only problem with increasing the speed of internet access points is we haven't increased the speed of the internet! I know, we have broadband and DSL and T3 and blah blah blah, but honestly, internet technology and business strategy isn't where it should be.

I should be able, for example, to pay for and download a fully HD uncompressed (or compressed, so long as the compression is lossless) video to my computer hard-drive, store it, and transfer it over my wireless network to my television. Now, there's hundreds of problems with doing all of this, but here are the two main ones: the first problem is, we live in a world where standards are mute, meaning nothing works with anything else (my computer isn't compatible with my TV without my getting a proprietary box like TiVo, which I don't have); the second problem is that the internet, the first step in that whole process, isn't fast enough.

Yes, I know all about limited hard-drive space, but at least people are trying to fix that with parallel hard-drives and such. What's more, if my TV worked with my computer I'd have no problem with having a second hard-drive dedicated to just my TV (no, I don't have TiVo, although I would like to get it if I can save enough money to make it financially viable). And I'm talking about dedicating a 250GB hard-drive, or maybe even more (as hard-drive costs have been going down drastically), just to my Television. Also, with Blu-Ray (which I support over HD-DVD, thank you very much) burners coming out sometime in the next two years (I wish the burners would come out with the players, but alas, that's not how it's working), I could just burn a disk with a movie or two (or more, depending on how compression technology goes) and store it in a rack next to my TV! That gets rid of the hard-drive problem (as well as the problem that I don't have TiVo, which DOES have software to talk to your computer), so the main problem still remains the internet...

And what is the problem with the internet? Well, at current downloading rates, say 300Kbps for a broadband/DSL connection (even though broadband and DSL rarely ever work that fast; they're usually down around or below 100Kbps during peek hours) how long would it take me to download, say, an 8GB movie (with special features and stuff, most movies easily get that large)? Well, at 300Kbps I can do 1.2 megabytes every four second, correct? Well, that's only around 1.2 gigabytes per hour, meaning it will take me just a smidgen over 7 hours to finish that whole download. Now, I don't know about you, but I'm not going to pay for a movie and then wait 7 hours for my computer to download it, instead I'd rather just go to the store and rip it myself; with most computers it would take me about 30 minutes to get the whole thing on there. Let's calculate another 30 minutes for the trip to the store, and you get 1 full hour. Now, it really wouldn't take that long to get to the store and back, but I'm just using round numbers for the sake of comparison.

Let's see, would I like to watch my movie using my computer after 1 hour or 7? Now, here's the other thing. Since I can't download movies to my computer from the internet, and I would be burning them onto Blu-Ray disc if I could (meaning I don't rip my DVDs onto my computer, because there isn't a reason to), why oh why would I ever need to communicate with any other computer at over 54Mbps. I mean, what files am I sharing that are that big? All files that large that I would like to have my internet is too slow to meet.

And did you know that it would be quite easy for the broadband and DSL companies to boost our connections up to 1Mbps? That cuts the time to download nearly by a fourth! Until the day when my internet connection is actually fast enough to need it, I see no real point in getting any type of Wi-Fi access point that's faster than the one I've already got, which is a shame, because I'd really like to be able to do all that movie downloading stuff and a whole lot more on the internet, but can't because it's still extremely slow. Imagine if I could download a movie in a few minutes using an even faster connection? That would be completely worth it.

So, what I'm saying is basically summed up in the title: why would you buy a faster wireless access point when your internet access definitely isn't fast enough to make a difference anyway? We, as consumers, need to demand faster internet access, only then will I buy into the faster wireless access!

Until next time fair travelers!!!