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My prophecy:
Self driving cars will be better than humans in 99,99% of the situations within 3 years. Sadly it will take another 5 to wide scale adoption and yet another 10 years for human driven cars to be banned to racetracks.

Your calculation implies that everyone replaces their car within a 5 year period.

That may be true in Beverly Hills, but it's certainly not true in the rest of the US.

The average age of cars on U.S. roads is 11.4 years, IHS Automotive reports. The average age of vehicles on U.S. roads has hit a plateau of about 11.4 years, according to an annual study by IHS Automotive, an auto industry research firm. Jun 9, 2014

In any case, I find your optimism unjustified.

In the Bay Area for instance, we could already make BART trains fully automated, and it's been studied they would become safer to boot, but attempting to change that system to get rid of the operators would be absolute political suicide.

Is it natural for a cigarette to be thrown from a passing cars window? I don't think mother earth had expected that. Here's an interesting article about how Sierra club has lost sight of reality http://www.pushback.com/Wattenburg/articles/NowThe yHaveBurnedLosAlamos.html

Various organizations like PushBack.com have called on a nationwide boycott of Chinese products. So, too, have the Western network of Tibetan organizations.

The best way to fight piracy and copyright violations is to join the boycott (of products made in China, which includes Taiwan province and Hong Kong) started by Dr. Wattenburg in the West Coast of the USA. Hurt the Chinese in the pocket book, and they will learn to respect intellectual property.

Nonetheless, we can do 2 things to protect ourselves. First, download and install FireFox. Use it for all secure transactions (i.e. "https") on the web. Set the security on your Internet Explorer to "HIGH", disabling Java, JavaScript, ActiveX, etc. Use Internet Explorer only for casual browsing.

On my computer, Internet Explorer is slightly faster for casual browsing than FireFox because Explorer is more tightly integrated into the operating system.

Anyhow, the second thing that you can do to protect yourself and the rest of Western society is to join the boycott of products that are "Made in China". It is having an effect on the West Coast. The boycott includes products made in Hong Kong and Taiwan province. Hurt the Chinese economy, and you will slap the Chinese to attention, forcing the brutes to fix the problem with spammers, etc.

Nonetheless, we can do 2 things to protect ourselves. First, download and install FireFox. Use it for all secure transactions (i.e. "https") on the web. Set the security on your Internet Explorer to "HIGH", disabling Java, JavaScript, ActiveX, etc. Use Internet Explorer only for casual browsing.

On my computer, Internet Explorer is slightly faster for casual browsing than FireFox because Explorer is more tightly integrated into the operating system.

Anyhow, the second thing that you can do to protect yourself and the rest of Western society is to join the boycott of products that are "Made in China". It is having an effect on the West Coast. The boycott includes products made in Hong Kong and Taiwan province. Hurt the Chinese economy, and you will slap the Chinese to attention, forcing the brutes to fix the problem with spammers, etc.

Despite all the hoopla, the USA is not the greatest danger to the environment. We Americans are making steady progress. Note that Honda is technically an American automobile company since Honda does more than 50% of its manufacturing in the USA.

The greatest threat to the environment is China. The Chinese have been overwhelmingly burning coal. Coal horribly pollutes the environment and unloads tons of radioactive material into the air.

Given the current rate of pollution in China, once it reaches Singapore's level of economic development, the level of pollution in China will exceed that in the USA. India is equally horrible.

Despite all the hoopla, the USA is not the greatest danger to the environment. We Americans are making steady progress. Note that Honda is technically an American automobile company since Honda does more than 50% of its manufacturing in the USA.

The greatest threat to the environment is China. The Chinese have been overwhelmingly burning coal. Coal horribly pollutes the environment and unloads tons of radioactive material into the air.

Given the current rate of pollution in China, once it reaches Singapore's level of economic development, the level of pollution in China will exceed that in the USA. India is equally horrible.

As for offshoring, it damages worker's rights and environment in the USA. Chinese companies do not pay the cost of worker's rights and privileges (e.g. disability insurance) and the cost of protecting the environment. Hence, Chinese companies can undercut American companies.

If you see a product that is "Made in China" or "Made in India", simply do not buy it. As investments in Eastern Europe increase, you can find alternative products that are made there. Unlike the Chinese, Eastern Europeans are committed to Western values (e.g. worker's rights and environmental protection). Buy "Made in Poland" or "Made in Slovakia" (like the tail lights on my car).

As for offshoring, it damages worker's rights and environment in the USA. Chinese companies do not pay the cost of worker's rights and privileges (e.g. disability insurance) and the cost of protecting the environment. Hence, Chinese companies can undercut American companies.

If you see a product that is "Made in China" or "Made in India", simply do not buy it. As investments in Eastern Europe increase, you can find alternative products that are made there. Unlike the Chinese, Eastern Europeans are committed to Western values (e.g. worker's rights and environmental protection). Buy "Made in Poland" or "Made in Slovakia" (like the tail lights on my car).

If you protest the Chinese occupation of Tibet, the Chinese black market for organs (which are forcibly cut from unwilling patients), etc., then just send your AOL CD to the Chinese ambassador to the USA, Japan, Canada, or any other country in which you live. Simply mailing the CD's does not violate the law, and you are not hurting anyone.

Nonetheless, when a million CDs appear on the ambassador's doorstep, they serve as a useful reminder, to the Chinese, that wherever they go in your nation, millions of your fellow citizens condemn what the Chinese are doing. If you are in the USA, then visit the PushBack Website to get a list of Chinese addresses.

Thank you from the millions of Tibetans and others whom the Chinese have butchered.

If you protest the Chinese occupation of Tibet, the Chinese black market for organs (which are forcibly cut from unwilling patients), etc., then just send your AOL CD to the Chinese ambassador to the USA, Japan, Canada, or any other country in which you live. Simply mailing the CD's does not violate the law, and you are not hurting anyone.

Nonetheless, when a million CDs appear on the ambassador's doorstep, they serve as a useful reminder, to the Chinese, that wherever they go in your nation, millions of your fellow citizens condemn what the Chinese are doing. If you are in the USA, then visit the PushBack Website to get a list of Chinese addresses.

Thank you from the millions of Tibetans and others whom the Chinese have butchered.

Taiwan is little better than a thug . The majority of spies for Beijing do not come from the mainland Chinese immigrant community. The spies come from the Taiwanese community.

The Taiwanese also admire Nazis and are the major customers for human organs culled from unwilling prisoners in mainland China.

The Taiwanese have no sense of corporate responsibility and are the worst exploiters of children in sweatshop factories.

Earlier in the year, I proposed that we include Taiwan in the ongoing boycott of products made in China, and the radio host agreed with me.

God damn the Taiwanese.

Taiwan is little better than a "thug". The majority of spies for Beijing do not come from the mainland Chinese immigrant community. The spies come from the Taiwanese community.

The Taiwanese also admire Nazis and are the major customers for human organs culled from unwilling prisoners in mainland China.

The Taiwanese have no sense of corporate responsibility and are the worst exploiters of children in sweatshop factories.

Early this year, I had proposed on a major radio program, that we include Taiwan in the ongoing boycott of products made in China, and the radio host agreed with me.

God damn the Taiwanese.

The only possible reason for keeping the ISS afloat is to provide an excuse for funding Russia's once stellar space program. Here funding means Americans funding the Russian space program.

Yet, there is no need for this nonsense. We can and should help the Russians in a much more substantial way. We should divide all our investments of money and technology away from China and into Eastern Europe and Russia. Both the Eastern Europeans and the Russians are committed to Westernization, and we have an interest in helping them.

By constrast, the Chinese (including the Taiwanese and the Hong Kongers) oppose Westernization.

So, this new way of processing nuclear waste will benefit all other Western nations besides the USA.

The USA is a great nation, and it is built by kind-hearted people with good values even though they have only an average intellect in areas of science. This average intellect is being manipulated by science frauds who claim that nuclear enery is a disaster waiting to happen. Most of Japan's electricity is generate by nuclear power plants.

That's because many environmentalists chose to have the forrest burn "naturally". With a little bit of preventative maintenance, those wild fires could have been prevented.
http://pushback.com/
http://greenspirit.com/

Bill Wattenburg's Helicopter-pulled Chain Matrix. Check out: his site (requires RealVideo) and a letter he wrote to the SF Chronicle

This maybe way too simple and cheap for the US government to consider and not nearly as cool as jeeps mounted with "laserbeams", but I don't see any reason why it wouldn't be effective.

This stupid laser is an idiotic idea meant to fatten some stupid colonel's budget. A much cheaper solution has been designed by Dr. Bill Wattenburg and can be seen by going to this page.
The army doesn't care about its soldiers, only its budget.

Consider that this storage facility has to store materials with half-lives of 20,000 years or more and is supposedly designed for the task.

Radioactive materials with such long half-lives aren't very radioactive. Nuclear waste drops to the radioactivity levels of uranium ore in 500 years!!! Uranium ore has so little radioactivity that they make fiestaware plates out of it.


According to the EPA, an aquifer runs approximately 1000ft under the storage area at Yucca (which is 1000ft below the surface). That sounds like alot of room, but consider that many home water wells run over 500ft deep.

What do home wells have to do with it?? 1000 feet is quite a bit of space. Anyway, explain to me how solid metal leaks out of a thick metal container, and leaches through sealed concrete, and the 1000 feet of solid rock to get into the water supply.


Putting such a facility in a place where an earthquake could trigger a radiation leak that could poison an entire regions water 20 years or 2,000 years from now is irresponsible and must be stopped.

Every place on the planet has earthquakes! The yucca moutain quakes are very weak. Just look at the facts. An earlier poster put up a seismic map of the Yucca mountain area. Anyway, how is a 2.0 earthquake going to break thick concrete, and the somehow puncture steel casks?

Here is a good site.

Side note: How come your HTML tags look like this [i]? You use carrots for HTML tags.

Strypey, actually it is very safe. It has a very good safety track record. A chernobyl-scale meltdown cannot occur in the U.S.

Just visit Pushback for excellent nuclear power info, with lots of great links.

So nearly every government in the world (except for the USA, naturally, with corrupt Bush) has signed up to the Kyoto treaty because most scientists think we have no effect on global warming? Aren't you a little divorced from reality?

Actually, no. Go to Pushback.com. The vast majority of scientists think global warming fears are unfounded. You should be able to find a link to the Heidelberg Appeal. This was a petition that global warming fears were unfounded signed by several times the amound of scientists that signed the Kyoto Petition.

Why shift our whole infrastructure to a resource that will run out such as natural gas? There are a multitude of ways of extracting the hydrogen for our fuel cells, these scientists are working out a way for the medium-term to prop up production and not a be-all and end-all solution.

Natural gas will run out in about 30 years. But my point is that biogas is not a viable replacement. Nuclear power has a proven safety record in all countries except the USSR (Their crappy Chernobyl RBMK reactor was just asking for trouble).

Nuclear power can provide us with cheap hydrogen and electrical power. The waste fears are not as bad as Greenpeace has lead people to believe. Waste decays to the radioactivity levels of uranium ore in 500 years due to the simple fact that the most radioactive transuranic elements such as Cesium decay first. Uranium ore is not dangerously radioactive.

1)Liberally pepper your post with oversimplified pseudoscientific pablum such as "...And, according to the World Health Org, only 31 people were killed in Chernobyl" thereby craftily distracting your audience's attention away from any actual facts about the true magnitude of the disaster. For instance that annoying little statistic of Thyroid cancer(yes I did specifically pick a site from the WHO as a jab at your laughably out of context quote) incidence increasing by oh, 10 times or so. Or maybe the statement by the Board on Effects of Ionizing Radiation and the International Commission on Radiation Protection that the collective dose of 600,000 person-Sieverts released from Chernobyl to the population of the USSR would correspond to 24,000 additional deaths(from the Federation of American Scientists) in that area?

2)Proclaim your unquestioned infinite knowledge on all things related to the topic at hand: "In Yucca mountain, the waste is stored inside these metal casks, which are in turn inside an ultra-thick concrete subterrainean room. Also, the storage place is 2,000 feet above the water table, so you're OK there." Phew good thing we have people like you to tell us such important things lest we waste millions paying doctors of geology to try to figure out such things.

3)Regurgitate amateurish propaganda supporting your cause which contains self-parodying scare tactics aimed at any opposing viewpoints: "Coal naturally contains some thorium and uranium. When you burn coal, this is realesed into the air. We burn so much fscking coal that we realease around 150 thousand tons of uranium and 350 thousand tons of thorium!!!". It's important to remember that while using this shoe-in of a tactic to attain your +5 that you should ignore all obvious holes in your strawman theory such as the fact that coal has BACKGROUND levels of radiation, and burning it has negligible effect on concentrating this radiation. By Spike hay's logic I could argue that the millions of human bodies incinerated every year in cremation ceremonies increases the radioactive pollution of the atmosphere and soil because of all that Carbon-14 and Potassium-40 released when your body burns. Why it must be thousands of tones total every year!!

4)Finally if all else fails, just make a link like he does to to the nearest nut job you can find whose home page should have the latest instructions on "How to Find Osama bin Laden with guaranteed anonymity" apparently using some whacked out pin number conspiracy theory or some such scheme.

That's all! Your're on your way to karma whore heaven! (p.s. i'm already at 50 so I don't really give a crap about what happens to this post)

We can use nuclear power until cheap solar, and hydrogen from solar power, becomes a reality. We can build lotsa nuclear plants to make hydrogen to power pollutant-free hydrogen fuel cell cars.

One of the big culprits of smog is obviosly cars. We need to switch to hydrogen fuel cell cars. However, many people seem to think of hydrogen as an energy source. It isn't. You need electricity to make hydrogen.

Until we have cheap solar, you need to get the electricity from one of our old sources: coal, oil, nuclear, natural gas, etc.

Coal pollutes too much. We'd be overrun with smog if we built many more coal plants for hydrogen cars, much more so than if we used gasoline engines. We don't have enough oil to be energy independant. Natural gas is too expensive and we will run out of it in about 30 years. That leaves us with nuclear. Nuclear power is not as dangerous as people think. Also, Chernobyl-scale meltdowns in U.S. PWR are impossible. The Chernobyl reactor was a crappy commie RBMK reactor with no containment building. Of course we had the TMI reactor problem. However, that killed or injured no one. And, according to the World Health Org, only 31 people were killed in Chernobyl.

Fears of nuclear power are overblown. Radiation is just like any other pollutant. And you need a shyteload of radiation to really harm you. Nuclear power has killed a grand total of 35 people in it's entire exsistence. Coal power has killed somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 million people in this century, of emphysema, lung cancer, etc, etc.

Little known fact, but according to the Lawrence Livermore Nat'l lab, coal power realeases more radiation than nuclear power. Coal naturally contains some thorium and uranium. When you burn coal, this is realesed into the air. We burn so much fscking coal that we realease around 150 thousand tons of uranium and 350 thousand tons of thorium!!! The study is here. Nuclear power is also cheap. With some new tech, they have gotten the cost of some nuclear power plants below the cost of coal.

There is not mountains of nuclear waste made by our plants. Each plant only uses several tons of uranium a year. That would fit in an area just a few feet square. The total amount of waste ever created for a whole family for their whole lives would fit in a shoebox. If we reprocessed our fuel, it would fit in a pill bottle. Compare that to mountains of highly toxic coal waste with arsenic, cyanide, and other good stuff that just sits on the ground and leaches poisons into the groundwater.

Nuclear waste storage is very good. It's not like they are hauling it around in thin metal barrels like the environmentalists want you to think. No. The waste is transported in thick metal containers that have been tested by being thrown off cliffs, rammed into locomotives, and all sorts of crap. In Yucca mountain, the waste is stored inside these metal casks, which are in turn inside an ultra-thick concrete subterrainean room. Also, the storage place is 2,000 feet above the water table, so you're OK there.

Anyway, this plastic solar thing looks like it could be amazingly cheap and very clean. It would probably be easier for everyone to have these solar cells at their own homes. If Joe Smith put up 3,000 dollars worth of these solar cells, he could power his house for much cheaper than coal or nuclear.

However, you still have the energy storage problem. What happens to the power after dark or when it's cloudy? With this, you have an electrolyzer that takes some of your solar cell power during the daytime and splits it into hydrogen and oxygen. Then at night you recombine these components in a fuel cell to get power.

Home based solar plants are better than centralized ones for a few reasons:

1. Power loss over the lines. You lose over 10% of your electicity in the lines. Plus loss in transformers, etc.

2. Fuel cells are small devices. They are more suited for home use.

3. Independance from power companies (i.e. Enron)

Anyway, I don't think these solar cells will be ready for another 30 years or more. That is just my gut feeling. In the meantime:

1.Replace your incandescent bulbs with compact flourescent!!! The better brands put off a better, more natural light than even incandescent. They use so little electicity and last for so goddamn long that they are cheaper in the longrun.

2. Turn off the lights when you are not in the room!!!! There is no reason to have all the lights on. If you live in a house with you and your spouse, only one or two rooms should have the lights on. If you have your whole house lighted at night, you are really wasting energy.

3. During the daytime, set your hot water heater to "vacation." You don't need it to keep your water continously warm when you are at work. Turn it on when you get home. By dinnertime you will have plenty of hot water.

4. Buy "Energy Star" appliances. These will save you money in the long run.

For more info, go here.

It's pushback.com, San Francisco talk show host Dr. Bill Wattenburg's website. Lots of info on energy conservation and lots of other stuff, coming from someone with a doctorate, a masters, and a B.S., whos worked for Lockheed Missile and Space company, IBM, Lawrence Livermore, and other places. He is a rocket scientist. Listen to what he has to say.

...you could probably remove a lot more landmines in many areas with a chain grid towed from a helicopter. Sound crazy? Might be, but... this describes how to work around some of the more obvious engineering gotchas, and a video of a test of the system. I think it's pretty cool, at any rate.

People need to calm down about those "dirty bombs."

A kilogram of plutonium (huge amount by transuranic standards) could irradiate a small area. If you took a largish TNT bomb, you could spread the plutonium around a several-block wide area. According to Dr. Bill Watenberg, a prominint nuclear scientist with 2 PHD's, the people in this area would get about as much radiation as they would get from a chest X-ray. The real danger would be from the bomb blast and the resulting panic.

Plutonium is actualy heavier than lead, so plutonium particulates settle to the ground fast. And you don't have to worry about drinking contaminated water. You can orally take a couple of grams of plutonium with no ill effect. A 747 ramming into a reactor building probably wouldn't break through, so you don't need to really worry about terrorists ramming nuclear reactors.
Nuclear power has a suberb safety record, (chernobly killed i think 32) with no deaths in the US. Coal power kills around ~50,000 people a year. Read this report by Oak Ridge National Laboratory on coal radioactivity compared to nuclear power radioactivty. Coal plants are dumping more radioactivity (and other crap) into our atmosphere than we'd get if we just spread our nuke waste on the ground somewhere. And you can thank the non-logical retards at the Sierra Club and Greenpeace for our continued dependance on coal. Solar and wind are expensive and unreliable. Nuclear power, and ultimately fusion, is the answer to our energy problems.
Also, visit this site. Sorry, I just had to blow off some steam there.

What the hell makes you think that?!?!

What makes you think not? I have listened to experts on the subject who tell me that electric cars are less efficient than internal combustion cars. Power plants might be more efficient in raw numbers, perhaps (I don't know), but that efficiency is greatly lessened by the fact that you have to transmit that power to where the end user is recharging his car. Sometimes over very great distances. The greater the distance, the more energy is lost along the way. Then you've got the loss of efficiency due to the storage technology, be it the currently used battery technology, or some type of fuel cell technology like that being discussed here. Batteries etc. are not 100% efficient, though people seem to want to believe that. For every watt of energy you pump into a battery when charging, you get back less than what you put into it. Batteries are very inefficient because of that. Also the longer a battery stores a charge, the less energy you get back, but that's digression from the point. You then have to account for the efficiency of the electric motors in pushing the car along. You lose energy there too, though efficiency is sometimes increased by recovering energy through regenerative braking, etc.

The net result of transmission, storage and electric motor inefficiency bring down the total efficiency of electric cars below that of an internal combustion automobile. You don't believe it? Why not read some actual facts? If you can't find it there, you can always call in and talk to Bill Wattenburg. He's a nuclear physicist who specializes in debunking scientific myths, and this particular issue seems to be one of his hot buttons.

http://www.pushback.com/terror/DroppingPhones.html

This idea would show the terrorists a bit of the reality that they're working so hard against. It's the nature of people to want to be free and prosperous, and despots and dictators are working against that nature. The useful information we could get from anonymous "squealers" and the terror instilled in the terrorists' hearts would be two very potent weapons.

There's no need for the US to limit itself to expensive, marginally effective military technology. There are probably more solutions like this one that take advantage of the cheap technology our free market has produced.

----------- (Excerpt from the web site) -----------

Freedom Phones and PINs--How to Find Osama bin Laden and Other Terrorists with Methods that Guarantee Anonymity for Informants

Immediately after the WTC attack on September 11, many top scientists and Middle East experts in the U.S. suggested and recommended the anonymous reward scheme described below to encourage those with information on the identity and whereabouts of terrorists to provide this information to U.S authorities such as the FBI.

Dr. Bill Wattenburg gave the first public descripton of this clever scheme on his talk show over KGO Radio AM810, San Francisco, on September 25, 2001, from 7pm to 10pm. The response from listeners on the west coast was overwhelming understanding and approval.

Terrorists Leaders Will Know the Fear That They Can be Betrayed at Any Time by Captive Citizens Who Formally had no Secure Communication--or by Their Own Henchmen Who Can Safely Collect Large Rewards Here on Earth Instead of Only in Suicide Heaven.

...

The highly intelligent and semi-famous Dr. Bill Wattenburg, former Los Alamos scientist and part-time radio talk show host at KGO-AM San Francisco, had this to say last month.

Basically he is saying deregulation, the sale of existing public plants to private companies, and politically-driven denial of the need for new power plants over the past decade have combined to create the existing situation.

Another interesting thing he has said in the past (no link, sorry) is that if a small fraction of the EPA's money spent on dubious programs were put into insulating people's homes, California could clean its air faster, and lower its energy demands much more dramatically and quickly. But it's just not popular politically.