The curious thing about this is that the US leads the world in high technology companies in many areas.

Perhaps average adult scores don't matter that much. The distributions might be more important. Perhaps in the US there are enough really smart people to create Unix, C, SQL and many other things.

Also, for the record, I'm a non-American who has lived in the US and Europe. It's fascinating that to an outsider the US doesn't appear to have a surplus of intelligence and yet dominates in IT and many other scientific fields.

Gordon's Paper has been thoroughly investigated by Roger Pielke Jnr at the Breakthrough Institute.

Gordon's smoothing of growth fails to show the variability and creates a picture of trends that are not really there. A quote from the article linked above:

In short, there is no evidence of a stair step reduction in the growth rate of US per capita GDP in either dataset. The US BEA and Census data shows essentially no change (a linear trend, blue line, shows a statistically insignificant downward tick) whereas the Maddison data shows a bit of an increase (red line). The data is sensitive to the time period chosen – for instance, from 1970 the BEA/Census data shows an increase in the annual rate of per capita GDP growth. I can find no evidence of a post-1950 secular decline in per capita economic growth in the United States, and in fact, there is evidence that growth rates have accelerated a bit from 1970.

Ironically the troll at the top of the comment tree is correct.

The growth in renewable is actually primarily in biofuels, the majority of which is corn ethanol, which is produced, as Paul Gigot pointed out, by combining corn and taxpayer dollars.

This is far from the first electric bus setup.

Around 100 years ago something similar was tried in London. The service collapsed in 1909.

With a bus fleet BTW you can do as they did 100 years ago and just swap out battery packs alleviating the need for long recharging times.

Here is what climate scientist Edward Cook wrote regarding the accuracy of dendroclimatology:

From the climategate emails

Here is what Phil Jones said in his BBC interview regarding the Medieval Warm Period:

So Phil Jones is unsure if the MWP was global in extent and Edward Cook thinks we have very little idea at all. Perhaps the certainty in wikipedia is overstated.

The US cap and trade on sulphur dioxide emissions was passed in 1990.

Overall, the Program's cap and trade program has been successful in achieving its goals. Since the 1990s, SO2 emissions have dropped 40%, and according to the Pacific Research Institute, acid rain levels have dropped 65% since 1976.[15][16] However, this was significantly less successful than conventional regulation in the European Union, which saw a decrease of over 70% in SO2 emissions during the same time period.[17]

S02 emissions were also falling from a peak in the late 1970s toward the 1990s, in other words the US S02 trading scheme was on an already declining path and was less successful than more direct European approaches.

S02 emissions trading was also local and not between countries which is another area where the proposed Green House Gas emissions trading schemes fall down. A corrupt county can just 'create' permits and then sell them. This has already happened with European and other schemes.

A tax would be a much more honest, much more transparent scheme than an Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). ETS type solutions are attractive largely because politicians don't have to say they are a new tax, they can be easily gamed by giving out free permits and Enron style firms (including Enron itself before it went bankrupt) see a potential bonanza.

You're right about controls. The current smart phones have poor controls. Buttons are heaps better. The on screen joysticks for smartphones don't cut it.

With blue tooth you can have dedicated controls as an add on. The n900 can use the wiimote.