I can't offer any insight into the efficiency of power plants versus car engines, but I think there's a more important factor that nobody has brought up.
This is definitely a step in the right direction, even if it's only shifting the source of the pollution from the cars to the power plants for now. It's centralizing the problem into a single place, where it will be easier to deal with later. Due to the inherently limited availability of fossil fules, power plants can't run on them forever. When the world inevitably converts to a cleaner solution (hopefully we won't wait until we've exhausted the last piece of coal on Earth and the sky has adopted a permanent fog), the extra pollution caused by automobiles will no longer be a concern.
It's like a good object-oriented program. You want to centralize the dirty stuff in one object rather than replicating it all over your code. Then, when you come back to clean it up, you only have to change it once and *POOF* it automatically propagates down the line. It's just good practice.
You can decompile any program. A compiled program is just your high-level program translated into machine language. There is no sort of magical encryption or similar transformation that it undergoes once you compile it.
All you need to do is read in the bytes of any binary program, interpret the bytes as their machine language equivalents for whatever platform you are using, and then convert your MOV statements to assignment operators, JMP statemets to higher level loop structures, etc..
Of course, you won't retain the names of identifiers, which are referred to only by memory locations in a compiled program; and some control structures might be rearranged due to compiler optimization and the lack of machine language equivalents, but the meat and potatoes of it is all right there.
It's by no means easy to accomplish, especially with higher and higher level programming languages, but impossible? humbug! =)
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I can't offer any insight into the efficiency of power plants versus car engines, but I think there's a more important factor that nobody has brought up.
This is definitely a step in the right direction, even if it's only shifting the source of the pollution from the cars to the power plants for now. It's centralizing the problem into a single place, where it will be easier to deal with later. Due to the inherently limited availability of fossil fules, power plants can't run on them forever. When the world inevitably converts to a cleaner solution (hopefully we won't wait until we've exhausted the last piece of coal on Earth and the sky has adopted a permanent fog), the extra pollution caused by automobiles will no longer be a concern.
It's like a good object-oriented program. You want to centralize the dirty stuff in one object rather than replicating it all over your code. Then, when you come back to clean it up, you only have to change it once and *POOF* it automatically propagates down the line. It's just good practice.
You can decompile any program. A compiled program is just your high-level program translated into machine language. There is no sort of magical encryption or similar transformation that it undergoes once you compile it.
All you need to do is read in the bytes of any binary program, interpret the bytes as their machine language equivalents for whatever platform you are using, and then convert your MOV statements to assignment operators, JMP statemets to higher level loop structures, etc..
Of course, you won't retain the names of identifiers, which are referred to only by memory locations in a compiled program; and some control structures might be rearranged due to compiler optimization and the lack of machine language equivalents, but the meat and potatoes of it is all right there.
It's by no means easy to accomplish, especially with higher and higher level programming languages, but impossible? humbug! =)