Intelligent city design isn't a solution, unless your name is Captain Hindsight. You can't design a city that's already been built.
Almost no one has ever, in all of history, designed a brand new city of 3 million plus people. Cities aren't designed; they evolve. They start out as small settlements or towns, and then grow from there. No one planned for LA to become a giant sprawling metropolis. Hong Kong isn't just a city, it's an island: the city is dense because the water limited the growth. Paris was (re-designed) by Napoleon, a dictatorial emperor. And Paris has suburbs, it's not all highly dense.
The US has places with more trains and more walking too. They're nice, but they're also absurdly expensive, so not that many people live there, and they frequently move out to the suburbs when they have kids. Personally, as an engineer and not a millionaire, I can't afford $1-2M for a townhouse, or $5000/month for rent in a small apartment, so I can't live in such places, I can only walk around them sometimes as a weekend excursion (the nearest place like that to me is Alexandria's Old Town; I have to drive there and try to find street parking).
Not true. You're assuming everyone wants to travel along a line. If a city is spread out equally in a grid in both axes, you'll need a lot of train lines. Trains work well when a city is long and narrow, like Manhattan. Not so much when it isn't, like Queens.
Trains are great when you need to move a lot of people from one point to another point all at once. They don't work very well when people are moving between all different points, all going to all different endpoints. They also don't work so well if the city isn't very dense.
It's not quite the same. "Strip malls" are called that because they're linear: a line of stores, with parking in front. What he's describing is more like a circle or square, with parking in the middle and stores all around. So "strip mall" doesn't really fit. I guess you could call it a "circle mall"...
Their website (skytran.net) says they got a new CEO recently, with Jerry Sanders staying on the board, and last I heard they were building a demo track in Tel Aviv but that was supposed to be done at least a year or two ago and apparently isn't yet. The WIkipedia page says Israel Aerospace Industries contracted with them (Unimodal) to build a 4-500 meter test track, and if successful IAI will build a commercial SkyTran network in Tel Aviv, Herzliya, and Netanya.
It also has an absurdly high cost of living. The public transit doesn't make up for that, and (not being a Londoner or UKer I'm speculating) many people who work there probably don't live near a public transit station. There's also the time cost: even if you're riding a train, sitting on it for hours and hours every day to go back and forth to work is a massive waste of your time and your life. This isn't much different from some places here in the US, such as NYC.
The US trains only work for shorter distances. Even going from DC to Boston is just too far: it's cheaper, and MUCH faster to go by plane (1.5 hours vs. 8 hours). So yeah, going from DC to Baltimore by train is OK (if you don't need a car on either end), or even DC to NYC, but that's about it, unless you have a lot of time. And Amtrak prices aren't cheap either.
Musk's scheme makes little sense because of the high cost of tunneling. It would make far more sense to embrace SkyTran PRT: it's cheap to build, it uses utility towers and suspends rails from it (instead of tunneling), the rails can be built alongside existing roads, using existing rights-of-way, and you're only moving people and lightweight little pod-cars, not thousands of pounds of metal.
Ok, so you get in a train that drops you off in the middle of LA. Now, how do you get to where you're going from there? LA is hundreds of square miles of urban area, all spread out so there's no way any train will take you to all parts of it. You'll need a car to drive yourself to your destination. Now you're looking at spending a bunch of time and money dealing with a rental car agency, instead of just using your own car to get you there.
Trains are just like planes, only a lot slower. Planes are great for getting a medium number of people between two points all at once, in a short amount of time (except for TSA groping). But they don't help you much in getting from the airport to your final destination. Trains are worse because they're so slow, it ends up not being sensible to use them too much because if the distance is short, you might as well drive, and if it's longer, you're better off flying. If you happen to live in an urban downtown and want to travel to another urban downtown not too far away, trains make a lot of sense. That's about it though.
What would make a lot more sense is if they'd build SkyTran, but no one believes that'll possibly work so we can't have it.
Personally, I feel mistreated at my current job, and at many of my previous ones too. But the "mistreatment" wasn't (and still isn't) people saying mean things to me, but rather the horrible office environment, which I consider a form of mistreatment. It's within the employer's power to provide a comfortable, quiet office environment that is conducive to knowledge work. So when an employer refuses to do that (citing whatever bullshit excuses), that is tantamount to mistreatment. It's little different from having poor safety standards for factory workers, except the consequences aren't as short-term or severe, but the mentality is the same.
Booth? I've never seen a company, big or small, bother with this. They're already too cheap to provide a proper amount of regular bathroom space for everyone, or any kind of decent break room space.
I can certainly see why any woman who can afford it would want to just stay at home. I'd rather stay at home too! I absolutely *hate* going to work. It's not the work, or even the coworkers, it's the environment: the shitty, smelly, and overcrowded bathrooms (probably not so much of a problem for women since there's so few women in tech); the horrible, inhumane, noisy, distracting open-plan office setups; the shitty HVAC units that are noisy and always have the temperature wrong no matter the time of year; the lousy parking; etc.
I don't have any of these problems at home, and even with today's inflated residential real estate values it's not hard to have a decent work setup at home, with 1) a reasonably clean, private bathroom (and if it gets smelly you can either turn on a bathroom fan or open the window, since bathrooms in houses frequently have windows), 2) a private office space without people walking by and talking loudly, 3) a fully-stocked kitchen nearby in case you want to make a snack or meal, 4) an internet connection that has good speed and doesn't have random failures as often (even if you're using something shitty like Comcast, it's not nearly as bad as a corporate IT department), 5) a computer that isn't hobbled by all kinds of bullshit security software, and can be running Linux too instead of shitty Windows 8/10, 6) the company of your pets.
The only thing that sucks about working at home is the lack of socialization can get to you after a while, but that's so much better than being forced into a noisy open-office environment where you eventually grow to absolutely hate all of humanity.
The problem here is that you can't expect much rational and intelligent discourse on Slashdot these days, so that comment calling you paranoid is no surprise at all. Remember, this site is chock-full of far right-wing nationalists and objectivist libertarians, like much of the tech industry only much more concentrated here.
What in hell are you talking about? Have you never been inside a modern HVAC-climate-controlled building? This is the most idiotic thing I've read all day.
I happen to like cold water, at least in the summertime.
However, I really don't like icemakers in freezers. 1) They take up a lot of space, and 2) they use tap water, which is nasty. There doesn't seem to be a way to easily plumb them to use the RO water I buy, so the icemaker in my freezer just sits unused, wasting space. And no, those crappy filters they put in fridges these days are not a proper substitute. 1) They're not reverse osmosis, they're just shitty charcoal filters, and 2) they're horribly expensive to replace.
They should make icemakers easily removable. I'm perfectly capable of making ice myself with trays, which lets me use the water I prefer and not the nasty tap crap.
Um, I don't know about you, but while I do admittedly charge my phone on the bedside table, the phone is sitting usually face-up. That means the main camera is pointed at the table surface directly below it so it's useless, and the front-view camera is pointed at the ceiling. The only thing that front-view camera is ever going to see in that position is the belly of one of my cats when they decide to walk over it. (Sometimes the phone is face-down, but this isn't really any different, except that hackers will now have a higher-resolution view of my cat's underside.) The mic is definitely an issue though.
The devices that come to mind immediately as a real danger in this way are these new "smart TVs", since on these any camera is pointing directly at the users in their normal TV-viewing positions. If the TV is in a bedroom, that means it's probably pointed at the bed and has an excellent view of whatever activity happens there. And why a TV could possibly need a camera and microphone, I have no idea. If we ever get to the point where we're Skyping people over TV screens, I can see the use, but we've had Skype-like technology for ages now and it's only rarely used for video chat it seems, and never on a TV that I've ever seen or heard of.
WTF is a "radiator"? You mean like those things we used to have in houses a century ago that were fed by hot water and took up a ton of space? No one here has those any more; they're horribly obsolete.
>That's every company's job, but notice how plenty of them manage to do that without taking actions that are "just barely legal" or non-monopolist in nature.
Sure, but that's because their customers will actually leave them if they become too dickish.
But there's LOTS of companies that are just as bad as MS, and people still flock to buy their products. John Deere is one that's come up a lot lately in the tech news. Oracle is another. And there's various other "enterprise" software makers that are generally regarded as making horribly overpriced crap.
>Also, none of the OSes you describe are "ancient" or "obsolete". Both of them are supported right now.
The older Windows versions are nearing EOL. You can go buy a 20-year-old used car and it's still "supported" by the manufacturer, but that doesn't mean they're doing new development on them, or that they're going to help you retrofit a new lane-keeping feature in them from their newest model.
>There's no apologizing for Microsoft here. This is a dick move, and just on the edge of what is allowed.
It *is* a dick move. What I don't understand is why this is some kind of revelation. MS has been doing dickish stuff for as long as I can remember, and really all the way back to their founding 40+ years ago. Don't you remember "DOS ain't done 'til Lotus won't run"? But people keep flocking to buy their stuff. So why shouldn't they be dicks?
>At the end of the day, a lot more people need to be punishing Microsoft instead of feebly trying to apologize for them.
I'm not apologizing for them, I'm explaining how their behavior is perfectly rational and sensible. Very few people seem to grasp this. It's like people not understanding why wild tigers and Grizzly bears aren't nice, friendly, cuddly creatures, and instead will viciously kill you if you get too close to them.
>Sadly, Windows users appear to be willing to put up with anything
That's exactly the problem.
>because the cost of switching to anything else can be so unreasonable.
No, for many it's because they're lazy and refuse to investigate alternatives. Most home users are in this boat. But the same goes for many large companies; they could adopt a custom Linux build if they really wanted, the way some city governments in Europe did, but they just don't want to bother.
Yes, as someone else pointed out with real data. However, the thing to understand is that not all boomers were hippies, in fact very very few were. The hippies were a tiny, but vocal minority in the Boomer generation. That's why the overall actions of that generation seem so contrary to hippie values. They never had any political power.
Citation needed. The Millennials I know have Android phones (and may run alternative firmwares), and all the people I know with iPhones are Xers and up.
I'm sorry, but as an Xer myself, I have much more respect for the Millennials than my own generation. My generation seems to be chock-full of people who absolutely refuse to manage their finances properly, and feel entitled to living like kings even when they don't earn enough money to afford all the luxuries they crave. Then they get mad and blame the "Mexicans" and vote for Trump when the problem is really their own stupid life choices.
It's "end of life" according to the manufacturer. You know, the company that really wants you to buy a new car from them after 3-5 years. So those "EOL" terms are always on the short side.
Unfortunately, green brains tend to disengage before considering the big picture, and "hydrogen" will be pushed forward as an ideology, ignoring where it comes from.
Citation needed on the "green brains" bit. I don't think this push is coming from the environmentalists, it's coming from entrenched industry players who don't want to switch to electric vehicles. The smart environmentalists know that EVs are the real future, not hydrogen. Hydrogen is a stupid fuel; it's expensive to generate (and can't be mined), it's hard to handle, it's very hard to store, it embrittles metal, it has to be stored at incredibly high pressures to get useful energy density, and even then you still have a fraction of the range you get with gasoline/diesel. It's just a terrible idea all around. If you can't switch to all-electric, the next best thing is to switch to CNG or LNG, which are very clean-burning and can use existing engine technology (and even be retrofitted pretty easily on existing vehicles).
The path for "greening" vehicles is pretty simple IMO: hybrid-electric, alternative fuels (LNG/CNG), then all-electric as battery technology improves or quick-swap batteries are standardized on. LNG probably makes more sense for replacing diesel for large engines (esp. for shorter routes), and can then be coupled with hybrid-electric tech for even better efficiency, to get diesel pollution problems way down. Cars should probably just stick with gasoline, adopting hybrid tech. Eventually both can just move to all-EV as batteries improve and costs come down. Hydrogen is an awful distraction that makes no sense.
That'd make a hell of a lot more sense than hydrogen too. LNG and CNG have both been used successfully in vehicles as an alternative fuel for a long time (I remember a big push to retrofit vehicles in Arizona with them back in ~2000, with hefty tax breaks). The main problem is the range isn't as good as gas/diesel, but it's still going to be better than stupid hydrogen, plus you can run it in existing engines with minimal modifications, and the storage tanks are a lot easier to construct and are safer.
Hydrogen is an incredibly stupid and impractical fuel; it's mind-boggling that Toyota is wasting their time with this crap.
Fission is stellar, as you said, but definitely not solar, since solar implies it comes from Sol, our current star. The heavy elements came from other stars that are long-since gone.
Also, tidal power is not solar: it comes from the motion of the Moon around the Earth, which is basically just potential energy created by whatever particular process caused the Earth and Moon to come to their current state.
Also, you could make the case that fossil fuels are not entirely solar in nature, and are also "stellar": carbon, like uranium, was created in long-dead stars.
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Outsourced contractors?
Intelligent city design isn't a solution, unless your name is Captain Hindsight. You can't design a city that's already been built.
Almost no one has ever, in all of history, designed a brand new city of 3 million plus people. Cities aren't designed; they evolve. They start out as small settlements or towns, and then grow from there. No one planned for LA to become a giant sprawling metropolis. Hong Kong isn't just a city, it's an island: the city is dense because the water limited the growth. Paris was (re-designed) by Napoleon, a dictatorial emperor. And Paris has suburbs, it's not all highly dense.
The US has places with more trains and more walking too. They're nice, but they're also absurdly expensive, so not that many people live there, and they frequently move out to the suburbs when they have kids. Personally, as an engineer and not a millionaire, I can't afford $1-2M for a townhouse, or
$5000/month for rent in a small apartment, so I can't live in such places, I can only walk around them sometimes as a weekend excursion (the nearest place like that to me is Alexandria's Old Town; I have to drive there and try to find street parking).
Not true. You're assuming everyone wants to travel along a line. If a city is spread out equally in a grid in both axes, you'll need a lot of train lines. Trains work well when a city is long and narrow, like Manhattan. Not so much when it isn't, like Queens.
Trains are great when you need to move a lot of people from one point to another point all at once. They don't work very well when people are moving between all different points, all going to all different endpoints. They also don't work so well if the city isn't very dense.
It's not quite the same. "Strip malls" are called that because they're linear: a line of stores, with parking in front. What he's describing is more like a circle or square, with parking in the middle and stores all around. So "strip mall" doesn't really fit. I guess you could call it a "circle mall"...
Their website (skytran.net) says they got a new CEO recently, with Jerry Sanders staying on the board, and last I heard they were building a demo track in Tel Aviv but that was supposed to be done at least a year or two ago and apparently isn't yet. The WIkipedia page says Israel Aerospace Industries contracted with them (Unimodal) to build a 4-500 meter test track, and if successful IAI will build a commercial SkyTran network in Tel Aviv, Herzliya, and Netanya.
It also has an absurdly high cost of living. The public transit doesn't make up for that, and (not being a Londoner or UKer I'm speculating) many people who work there probably don't live near a public transit station. There's also the time cost: even if you're riding a train, sitting on it for hours and hours every day to go back and forth to work is a massive waste of your time and your life. This isn't much different from some places here in the US, such as NYC.
The US trains only work for shorter distances. Even going from DC to Boston is just too far: it's cheaper, and MUCH faster to go by plane (1.5 hours vs. 8 hours). So yeah, going from DC to Baltimore by train is OK (if you don't need a car on either end), or even DC to NYC, but that's about it, unless you have a lot of time. And Amtrak prices aren't cheap either.
Musk's scheme makes little sense because of the high cost of tunneling. It would make far more sense to embrace SkyTran PRT: it's cheap to build, it uses utility towers and suspends rails from it (instead of tunneling), the rails can be built alongside existing roads, using existing rights-of-way, and you're only moving people and lightweight little pod-cars, not thousands of pounds of metal.
Ok, so you get in a train that drops you off in the middle of LA. Now, how do you get to where you're going from there? LA is hundreds of square miles of urban area, all spread out so there's no way any train will take you to all parts of it. You'll need a car to drive yourself to your destination. Now you're looking at spending a bunch of time and money dealing with a rental car agency, instead of just using your own car to get you there.
Trains are just like planes, only a lot slower. Planes are great for getting a medium number of people between two points all at once, in a short amount of time (except for TSA groping). But they don't help you much in getting from the airport to your final destination. Trains are worse because they're so slow, it ends up not being sensible to use them too much because if the distance is short, you might as well drive, and if it's longer, you're better off flying. If you happen to live in an urban downtown and want to travel to another urban downtown not too far away, trains make a lot of sense. That's about it though.
What would make a lot more sense is if they'd build SkyTran, but no one believes that'll possibly work so we can't have it.
What kind of "mistreatment"?
Personally, I feel mistreated at my current job, and at many of my previous ones too. But the "mistreatment" wasn't (and still isn't) people saying mean things to me, but rather the horrible office environment, which I consider a form of mistreatment. It's within the employer's power to provide a comfortable, quiet office environment that is conducive to knowledge work. So when an employer refuses to do that (citing whatever bullshit excuses), that is tantamount to mistreatment. It's little different from having poor safety standards for factory workers, except the consequences aren't as short-term or severe, but the mentality is the same.
Booth? I've never seen a company, big or small, bother with this. They're already too cheap to provide a proper amount of regular bathroom space for everyone, or any kind of decent break room space.
I can certainly see why any woman who can afford it would want to just stay at home. I'd rather stay at home too! I absolutely *hate* going to work. It's not the work, or even the coworkers, it's the environment: the shitty, smelly, and overcrowded bathrooms (probably not so much of a problem for women since there's so few women in tech); the horrible, inhumane, noisy, distracting open-plan office setups; the shitty HVAC units that are noisy and always have the temperature wrong no matter the time of year; the lousy parking; etc.
I don't have any of these problems at home, and even with today's inflated residential real estate values it's not hard to have a decent work setup at home, with 1) a reasonably clean, private bathroom (and if it gets smelly you can either turn on a bathroom fan or open the window, since bathrooms in houses frequently have windows), 2) a private office space without people walking by and talking loudly, 3) a fully-stocked kitchen nearby in case you want to make a snack or meal, 4) an internet connection that has good speed and doesn't have random failures as often (even if you're using something shitty like Comcast, it's not nearly as bad as a corporate IT department), 5) a computer that isn't hobbled by all kinds of bullshit security software, and can be running Linux too instead of shitty Windows 8/10, 6) the company of your pets.
The only thing that sucks about working at home is the lack of socialization can get to you after a while, but that's so much better than being forced into a noisy open-office environment where you eventually grow to absolutely hate all of humanity.
The problem with visible light is that it is easily blocked by clothes. This is unfortunate, in more way than one.
Not in America isn't not.
Yeah, I understand that hope, but people are actually getting dumber, especially on this site as so many of the smart people have abandoned it.
The problem here is that you can't expect much rational and intelligent discourse on Slashdot these days, so that comment calling you paranoid is no surprise at all. Remember, this site is chock-full of far right-wing nationalists and objectivist libertarians, like much of the tech industry only much more concentrated here.
What in hell are you talking about? Have you never been inside a modern HVAC-climate-controlled building? This is the most idiotic thing I've read all day.
I happen to like cold water, at least in the summertime.
However, I really don't like icemakers in freezers. 1) They take up a lot of space, and 2) they use tap water, which is nasty. There doesn't seem to be a way to easily plumb them to use the RO water I buy, so the icemaker in my freezer just sits unused, wasting space. And no, those crappy filters they put in fridges these days are not a proper substitute. 1) They're not reverse osmosis, they're just shitty charcoal filters, and 2) they're horribly expensive to replace.
They should make icemakers easily removable. I'm perfectly capable of making ice myself with trays, which lets me use the water I prefer and not the nasty tap crap.
Um, I don't know about you, but while I do admittedly charge my phone on the bedside table, the phone is sitting usually face-up. That means the main camera is pointed at the table surface directly below it so it's useless, and the front-view camera is pointed at the ceiling. The only thing that front-view camera is ever going to see in that position is the belly of one of my cats when they decide to walk over it. (Sometimes the phone is face-down, but this isn't really any different, except that hackers will now have a higher-resolution view of my cat's underside.) The mic is definitely an issue though.
The devices that come to mind immediately as a real danger in this way are these new "smart TVs", since on these any camera is pointing directly at the users in their normal TV-viewing positions. If the TV is in a bedroom, that means it's probably pointed at the bed and has an excellent view of whatever activity happens there. And why a TV could possibly need a camera and microphone, I have no idea. If we ever get to the point where we're Skyping people over TV screens, I can see the use, but we've had Skype-like technology for ages now and it's only rarely used for video chat it seems, and never on a TV that I've ever seen or heard of.
WTF is a "radiator"? You mean like those things we used to have in houses a century ago that were fed by hot water and took up a ton of space? No one here has those any more; they're horribly obsolete.
>That's every company's job, but notice how plenty of them manage to do that without taking actions that are "just barely legal" or non-monopolist in nature.
Sure, but that's because their customers will actually leave them if they become too dickish.
But there's LOTS of companies that are just as bad as MS, and people still flock to buy their products. John Deere is one that's come up a lot lately in the tech news. Oracle is another. And there's various other "enterprise" software makers that are generally regarded as making horribly overpriced crap.
>Also, none of the OSes you describe are "ancient" or "obsolete". Both of them are supported right now.
The older Windows versions are nearing EOL. You can go buy a 20-year-old used car and it's still "supported" by the manufacturer, but that doesn't mean they're doing new development on them, or that they're going to help you retrofit a new lane-keeping feature in them from their newest model.
>There's no apologizing for Microsoft here. This is a dick move, and just on the edge of what is allowed.
It *is* a dick move. What I don't understand is why this is some kind of revelation. MS has been doing dickish stuff for as long as I can remember, and really all the way back to their founding 40+ years ago. Don't you remember "DOS ain't done 'til Lotus won't run"? But people keep flocking to buy their stuff. So why shouldn't they be dicks?
>At the end of the day, a lot more people need to be punishing Microsoft instead of feebly trying to apologize for them.
I'm not apologizing for them, I'm explaining how their behavior is perfectly rational and sensible. Very few people seem to grasp this. It's like people not understanding why wild tigers and Grizzly bears aren't nice, friendly, cuddly creatures, and instead will viciously kill you if you get too close to them.
>Sadly, Windows users appear to be willing to put up with anything
That's exactly the problem.
>because the cost of switching to anything else can be so unreasonable.
No, for many it's because they're lazy and refuse to investigate alternatives. Most home users are in this boat. But the same goes for many large companies; they could adopt a custom Linux build if they really wanted, the way some city governments in Europe did, but they just don't want to bother.
Yes, as someone else pointed out with real data. However, the thing to understand is that not all boomers were hippies, in fact very very few were. The hippies were a tiny, but vocal minority in the Boomer generation. That's why the overall actions of that generation seem so contrary to hippie values. They never had any political power.
Citation needed. The Millennials I know have Android phones (and may run alternative firmwares), and all the people I know with iPhones are Xers and up.
I'm sorry, but as an Xer myself, I have much more respect for the Millennials than my own generation. My generation seems to be chock-full of people who absolutely refuse to manage their finances properly, and feel entitled to living like kings even when they don't earn enough money to afford all the luxuries they crave. Then they get mad and blame the "Mexicans" and vote for Trump when the problem is really their own stupid life choices.
It's not just rich people being ripped off, it's taxpayers who are paying for the tax breaks and other incentives to push this crap technology.
It's "end of life" according to the manufacturer. You know, the company that really wants you to buy a new car from them after 3-5 years. So those "EOL" terms are always on the short side.
Unfortunately, green brains tend to disengage before considering the big picture, and "hydrogen" will be pushed forward as an ideology, ignoring where it comes from.
Citation needed on the "green brains" bit. I don't think this push is coming from the environmentalists, it's coming from entrenched industry players who don't want to switch to electric vehicles. The smart environmentalists know that EVs are the real future, not hydrogen. Hydrogen is a stupid fuel; it's expensive to generate (and can't be mined), it's hard to handle, it's very hard to store, it embrittles metal, it has to be stored at incredibly high pressures to get useful energy density, and even then you still have a fraction of the range you get with gasoline/diesel. It's just a terrible idea all around. If you can't switch to all-electric, the next best thing is to switch to CNG or LNG, which are very clean-burning and can use existing engine technology (and even be retrofitted pretty easily on existing vehicles).
The path for "greening" vehicles is pretty simple IMO: hybrid-electric, alternative fuels (LNG/CNG), then all-electric as battery technology improves or quick-swap batteries are standardized on. LNG probably makes more sense for replacing diesel for large engines (esp. for shorter routes), and can then be coupled with hybrid-electric tech for even better efficiency, to get diesel pollution problems way down. Cars should probably just stick with gasoline, adopting hybrid tech. Eventually both can just move to all-EV as batteries improve and costs come down. Hydrogen is an awful distraction that makes no sense.
That'd make a hell of a lot more sense than hydrogen too. LNG and CNG have both been used successfully in vehicles as an alternative fuel for a long time (I remember a big push to retrofit vehicles in Arizona with them back in ~2000, with hefty tax breaks). The main problem is the range isn't as good as gas/diesel, but it's still going to be better than stupid hydrogen, plus you can run it in existing engines with minimal modifications, and the storage tanks are a lot easier to construct and are safer.
Hydrogen is an incredibly stupid and impractical fuel; it's mind-boggling that Toyota is wasting their time with this crap.
Not true.
Fission is stellar, as you said, but definitely not solar, since solar implies it comes from Sol, our current star. The heavy elements came from other stars that are long-since gone.
Also, tidal power is not solar: it comes from the motion of the Moon around the Earth, which is basically just potential energy created by whatever particular process caused the Earth and Moon to come to their current state.
Also, you could make the case that fossil fuels are not entirely solar in nature, and are also "stellar": carbon, like uranium, was created in long-dead stars.