But how does my German Shepherd compare to me? I certainly emit more than two Toyota SUVs with my CO2 spewing diesel truck, my heated house, my heated office, my lawn mower, my motorcycle... the list goes on. As big as my German Shepherd is, he breathes less than I do and he only eats dog food which is more CO2 friendly than all of the methane-producing-cow products that I eat. Perhaps I should teach him to hunt, that way he can start killing ducks. Or do like the police do and use him to start putting minorities in environmentally friendly prisons. He'll get carbon neutral damn quick.

Animals, including our pets, have as much right to our environment as we do. Their track record for the environment is far better than ours.

While there have been a huge number of advances in radar technology, the radar detector technology keeps up with it well. The two are made by the same company, after all. LIDAR is definitely not ideal for so many situations. To use LIDAR, a police officer must be stationary and actually outside of his cruiser. LIDAR is also defeatable because laser jammers are legal in most states. Finally, there are entire states that do not use LIDAR. This is why radar is still much more common. I do know that radar detectors are still very useful because I have and use one myself and it has saved me from a ticket in a number of situations. It would be my guess that the radar in use by the Ford Taurus is very different and distinguishable from that in use by the police.

I think we're finally seeing some of the safety features that consumers actually want, rather than safety features that the government mandates. Radar guided cruise control and braking will save a lot of lives and a lot of money by almost eliminating rear end collisions.

Another feature I can't wait to see in the average car is brake lights that flash during emergency braking. The biggest nuisance for me in my 30 mile urban freeway commute is people who get in front of me and use their brakes simply to control their speed. It means I have to concentrate really hard on to figure out how hard someone is braking. A car with flashing brake lights (you're already seeing this on many Mercedes and European cars) will flash its brake lights rapidly under heavy braking so that the driver in the car behind knows to do the same.

It's good ideas like these that save a lot of lives and earn revenue for the auto companies that implement them, like Ford has here.

There's nothing idiotic about it. Cell phones make our lives better. My cell phone has replaced the following tasks that I used to use my computer for:

• Displaying the weather forecast
• Alarm clock
• Looking up restaurants, stores, and directions on a map
• Tracking my car's mileage
• Displaying stock quotes
• Occasional emergency SSH sessions (when I'm out and I need to restart a system service immediately)
• Some communication with friends
• MP3 player in the car (yes, I used to use a computer for this)

The cell phone consolidates your digital camera, camcorder, GPS, MP3 player, handheld gaming device, compass, bubble level, notepad, rolodex, photo album, and hell there's even an app to use your Android phone as a metal detector now. Better yet your phone will replace your dvd player before the end of this year.

My point is that there is no idiocy behind using your cell phone more and your computer less because your cell phone does many things much more efficiently than your desktop can. So there's nothing stupid about using your phone instead of your computer when it saves you time.

This is entirely why Android was developed and is so fundamentally important to the future of our communications. Today, without Android, what we're seeing is the case for network neutrality in the form of ringtone racketeering. Carriers are locking down your cell phone and forcing you to buy music from them. With every passing day we're using our computers less and our cell phones more. The difference between the two is that your carrier has total control over your cell phone while your ISP has no control over your computer. Suppose five years down the road you're still buying phones subsidized by a contract with software loaded onto them by Verizon. These phones end up replacing your desktop because they are now just as powerful. Now every time you want to listen to music, you are forced to suffer through a store worse than iTunes.. and let's even say Verizon forces you to use Bing instead of Google. This is bad for you as a consumer, and this is bad for Google as a content provider.

Enter Android, where the operating system is open and available at no cost for any number of phones and presumably on any number of carriers. Now we see a future where everyone can run the same software on their phone regardless of carrier. Any time one carrier decides to lock down their phone people will quit buying it. It's not viable. Since we're talking about wireless data, it's easy enough to simply switch to another carrier. Now we've forced the telco's into companies that treat you fairly and compete for your business because they will become insolvent if they don't. We end up with network neutrality and control over our own hardware, and we did it organically without the use of government.

Android is not the be-all, end-all phone operating system. However, if successful it will force all other cell phone platforms to provide the same level of freedom through market controls.

So how come we haven't heard anything about this more recently than 2004? There hasn't been any news about 'nano-nickel' beyond that one press release. I haven't found any journal articles on it, either.

I wouldn't say 'about a zillion to go.' I would say one big problem to go. That problem is platinum. We simply have not been able to eliminate the need for platinum in fuel cells to extract the electricity from the reaction of hydrogen and oxygen. Platinum is a huge factor in the cost of the fuel cell and the larger problem is that we simply don't have the amount of it necessary to convert all of the vehicles of the world. I spent a few weeks at Los Alamos with a research group that had been given a hefty grant for finding a solution and all they were doing was shrugging their shoulders at it. It seems nearly hopeless.

The day we find a solution to this problem is, I believe, the day that fuel cells become viable for everyday transportation. I'll be the first in line to swap my motorcycle for a fuel cell powered version because the only problem with fuel cells is their cost per kilowatt. Currently it costs roughly $73 per kilowatt for a fuel cell (source). This is down from $1,000 in 2002. This means that we've come incredibly far, and we only have one problem to overcome.

Bravo. Now we have a worthy rebuttal to ViennaSt's original reply. Yes it's fairly common knowledge in the medical research community that fMRI's are useless for this, but I wanted to see you cite some evidence unlike the ggggp (who, by the way, should also have noted that the slope of a forehead is in direct correlation with human intelligence, making the Anglo-Saxon race the most intelligent.)

The GP makes two claims. First that women having fewer neurons than men isn't likely true. They suggest an fMRI scan to verify this, which you dispute the accuracy of with zero citation. I'm not doubting your claim, but if we're going to be this scientific about it then you absolutely must cite a source. Second is that even if it were true, it wouldn't matter because that's not what improves one's ability to solve spatial patterns which is evidence by the article that they cited.

Sorry slashdot. This isn't computers, this is science. Any and all claims must be cited.