Ford Fiesta: 3918 mm - 12'10"
Toyota Prius: 4450 mm - 14'7"

The most fuel-efficient car sold in America is a mid-size. That does not make sense! (Chewbacca defense)

* "Warming of the climate system is unequivocal."
* "Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations."

Footnotes on page 4 of the summary indicate very likely and likely mean "the assessed likelihood, using expert judgment", are over 90% and 66% respectively.

I'm sure your "no solid evidence" arises from garbled criticisms of AGW that echo around the internet. But there is NO other comprehensive theory that accounts for temperature rise and predicts the effects of ever-increasing greenhouse gases.

Imagine a world in which California Air Resources Board hadn't caved on its ZEV requirements. We'd be cursing prick BMW drivers in their buzzing vibro-mobiles.

Fantastic concrete work. The 13 (one for each family member) skylights flush in the roof that light up at night are awesome. That's the most beautiful rooftop I've ever seen on a modern building.

The balcony and stairs would not pass U.S. building codes ;-)

Here's a sentence-by-sentence refutation of John Coleman's paper. Not peer-reviewed either: we could do this all week, but the scientific consensus will remain.

Global surface temperature has increased {approx}0.2°C per decade in the past 30 years, similar to the warming rate predicted in the 1980s in initial global climate model simulations with transient greenhouse gas changes. Warming is larger in the Western Equatorial Pacific than in the Eastern Equatorial Pacific over the past century, and we suggest that the increased West-East temperature gradient may have increased the likelihood of strong El Niños, such as those of 1983 and 1998. Comparison of measured sea surface temperatures in the Western Pacific with paleoclimate data suggests that this critical ocean region, and probably the planet as a whole, is approximately as warm now as at the Holocene maximum and within {approx}1°C of the maximum temperature of the past million years. We conclude that global warming of more than {approx}1°C, relative to 2000, will constitute "dangerous" climate change as judged from likely effects on sea level and extermination of species.

I have zero faith in the computer models that many of the environmentalists use.
And I have even less faith in the non-existent models that denialists lack. The two questions won't go away: What has caused the recent warming? and What will be the effects of ever-increasing levels of greenhouse gases? People who deny anthropogenic global warming have no legitimate response to those two because they can't find any scientific theory to back them up.

Anyway, "faith" and hoping is not a strategy. It was tenable 20 years ago, but we're observing predicted effects: ice caps melt, species move, etc. (Plus non-climate effects like acidification of the oceans from increased CO2.)

This is science, people. Stick to the facts and leave emotion at the door
Nice appeal. But there's a difference between people getting freaked out at the consensus projections of climate change (waters rising, drought, hurricanes, ecosystem collapse) and people who reflexively bring up Al Gore and childish name-calling (hippies, loony left, etc.) whenever they hear "Global Warming".

Those are important for smartphones, but how many people install applications on their phones? I bet most current cellphone users have no idea that they can install Opera Mini or Google Maps on their cellphones.

At least your argument is different from the "I just want a phone to make calls!" Luddites. Most people are in the middle: they need a reason to buy one new phone over another, and nifty colors and a checklist of features on the box seem to convince them, not SDKs and third-party developers.

virtually ubiquitous platform that anyone can develop for
Was true, but Microsoft then used its monopoly and inside information to crush anyone competing with Microsoft's own software for the platform, which doesn't do much for innovation.

The completely ubiquitous platform is now the Web, and with free open source tools truly anyone can develop.

credits Microsoft for creating the common UI concept
Complete and utter bullshit. Xerox Star, then Apple Lisa, then Mac.

Microsoft is basically responsible for the two-button mouse
Note the weasel word "basically". Xerox and Sun had a three-button mouse with consistent usage (select, extend selection, and context menu) years before Microsoft. Several CAD and graphics programs for DOS came with a two-button mouse but there was no consistency in their usage. VisiOn had a two-button mouse a few years before Microsoft, but I can't remember its usage.

Microsoft's intimidation leads to innovation
Orwellian doublespeak. Competition leads to innovation. Intimidation leads to dead competitors, which reduces innovation.

Good question. I think roofs don't work so well for concentrating solar power. And we're not at a point where someone can make money convincing roof owners to put solar PV up there. I keep hoping for the day when every warehouse owner has two salespeople knocking on the door:

"You can make good money by installing ACME solar on your roof!"
"Why pay for ACME's system? RoofTopSolarCo would like to lease your roof for the next 20 years!"

Thanks for being honest. But then don't pretend your armchair opinions on scientific matters have ANY RELEVANCE WHATSOEVER. Climate scientists have an overwhelming consensus (that the unprecedented entirely human-caused increase in greenhouse gases is the most likely cause of the recent temperature increase and will have increasingly bad effects). That conclusion has been reviewed by national academies of science, codified to the satisfaction of every country in the UN by the IPCC, and even this oil-soaked White House has had to concede its validity.

Yet a large number of Americans think they can brush this off with your "It's a myth" attitude, just because they hear right-wing NON-scientists spouting lies and misinformation and amplifying every slight disagreement and counter-evidence mostly coming from people who aren't climatologists and don't have computer models.

Eventually denialists fall back on "Well, scientists have been wrong before." But theories are incorporated into new understanding, not replaced. Any new theory of climate that makes global warming go away would have to encompass the basic high-school physics of the greenhouse effect, and would have to answer "What happens as we keep pumping more greenhouse gases into the air?"

The way to real energy efficiency is to move away from putting your 200 pound fat ass in a 3000 pound vehicle every time you go for some groceries or tote your laptop to work.

I know it's a stretch, but try changing your thinking to: "New lightweight vehicle far less dangerous to pedestrians and other vehicles. Safety goes UP!"

@SilenceisGolden: Air car is inefficient: losses in compression, losses in energy storage as it cools, losses in the expansion phase powering the car. @ArielZusya: Splitting hydrogen then recombining in a fuel cell is inefficient: losses in making H2, losses in compression, losses in the fuel cell turning it back into electricity. Both are technologies from when people cared about zero emissions, before today's focus on CO2. Batteries are 3x more efficient than either at turning electricity into motion, read this efficiency analysis. It all leads back to batteries. If only they weighed less!

I think he wants you to feel elemental stuff — water, air, colors, cold, etc. Eliasson's a nice generous artist, but it's rarely beautiful. (Christo who did "The Gates" wants to make beautiful art out of the landscape, go rent "Running Fence"!) That's a really unflattering picture of one waterfall.

If you can't get to NYC, make your own art, e.g. open your bath taps, wear goggles, lie in the bath, look up at the shower head or spout, and experience the water. "Sometimes there's so much beauty in the world I feel like I can't take it" (American Beauty)

Unless they're monopolies. "Did you read that thing I sent you? What do you mean you can't open it, everyone else did! What are you on about, I've never seen a ''save in Excel 95 format'' command. I don't know how to save as HTML, isn't that the big blue 'e' icon's job? No, I don't have a ''PDF writer''. Nobody else gave me grief, what the hell is wrong with you? I dunno, Office came with my new computer, isn't it part of your PC?"

At least now renegades can upload that crap to Google Docs or Zoho.

Researchers want to be published, so the cost of research papers is tending to zero, see [arxiv.org] ). School authorities have the clout to buy out a textbook and offer the electronic version for free forever, they just need to exercise it. MIT's Open CourseWare offers free lectures, lecture notes, and course materials. People are writing entire textbooks online at [en.wikibooks.org] Hundreds more free resources at [www.librarianchick.com]

Students, join [www.maketextbooksaffordable.org] and sign the petition.

Institutions, make your school more attractive by stating "It is our policy that all textbooks for all our courses be freely available in open electronic formats. Come study at our school and save $$$."

(I'm not forced to use Windows, it hasn't yet broken badly enough to make me install Gentoo or Ubuntu on my spare partition. I run Kubuntu and OLPC images under qemu occasionally.)

Not that I don't misunderstand your double negative, but electricity tends to cost more than gasoline. Here's the math, corrections welcome:
A gallon of gasoline is 3.79 liters, with energy of 130 MegaJoules, which is 36 kiloWatt hours. At 15¢ a kWh, the same amount of energy from the electric company would cost you $5.40. So it's easy to compare the energy cost of gasoline and electricity.

However, you extract the 35 kWh of energy out of gasoline by burning it. How hard is it for petrolheads to understand this simple idea: recharging batteries to spin an electric motor is far more efficient than blowing up fuel to make heat and a little forward motion. That's why electric cars are cheap to run.

Recharging batteries to spin an electric motor is far more efficient than blowing up fuel to make heat and a little forward motion.
(repeat x 5, fade to green)

Wrong. In California, Toyota advertised the Prius last winter and spring as the most fuel-efficient car in America and the car more owners would buy again. The first is a fact and the second seems plausible. No wonder they sold like hotcakes until they ran out. 48 city /45 highway MPG in a mid-size appliance, I mean car, for (theoretically) $21,000. Nothing else new comes close. I don't own one, but I'm surprised Toyota doesn't sell a million-plus a year.

Other car makers' hybrid version of an existing car model is more about polluting less (a reasonable way for 46% to spend their dollars) than saving money. I'm no economist, but obviously if the hybrid premium was so low that it quickly paid for itself, few would buy the regular version.

like it's always staring you down
Correct, a contraction of "it is".
... with a dragon on it's back
Not a contraction of "it is" or "it has", so no apostrophe. "Its" is already a possessive pronoun like "his".
I'm just trying to keep the dragon from your door. You can do it!

Samsung should have put the robot on a dekotora truck.

Another environmentally green element of the Dynamic Tower is the photovoltaic cells that will be placed on the roof of each rotating floor to produce solar energy, approximately 20% of each roof will be exposed to the sun So every time your upstairs neighbor rotates and blocks your panels, you'll have to rotate your own floor or energy generation goes to zero.

Each villa includes "demotic control systems". ??!

Right now it's an armchair epistemological argument for philosophers whether this approach will deliver consciousness. But we already have supercomputers modeling substantial groups of neurons like the IBM/EPFL Blue Brain project (10,000 neurons, with about 30 million synaptic connections between them), so we should get some evidence.

"Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren 7:22am Stirling Moss GTR RennTech PKG2 Signature"

across the trunk lid of my SLR? (I will reward your PayPal account.)

* "solar panels mounted on the vehicle's roof"
He'll be lucky to generate 1 kW peak from a car roof, which is a mighty 1.3 horsepower. There's a reason solar cars look like huge flat trays with a blister where the driver's head pokes out... physics!

* "The motor on the proposed Dyson car would be based on those used in the company's vacuum cleaners and hand dryers."
Electric motors for cars are already 90% efficient, that's not where BEV breakthroughs are needed.

Every other designer wrestles with battery technology, and weight (mostly due to batteries).

Several people have suggested standardizing batteries so a "Volt76" station could swap out your depleted battery packs for charged ones. Slinging 50 pound packs would give meatheads a job! Plus, if you knew you were only driving 5 miles, you could leave 4 packs at home charging and just put one in the car, avoiding the weight penalty.

For a while the future will be unevenly distributed.

the average vehicle buyer doesn't know or care what makes the car go
That's a silly statement. Everyone's intrigued by the differences. Most people love a car shutting off at a standstill, plugging it in instead of filling it up, etc.; some will miss the revving engine throb.

the THOUSANDS of times more energy per kilogram that petrol has over any battery
Definitely, but that's just one comparison. Burning fuel to make heat and a little forward motion is far more inefficient than a battery powering an electric motor. At the end of your trip the few pounds of gasoline are gone, turned to pollution, while you still have the heavy batteries. Recharging a battery is much cheaper than filling up with gas.

Obviously increasing the energy density of batteries so that powering a car for long distances doesn't take a 500 pound battery pack would be a huge win. That's why the government and big 3 automakers have been sponsoring battery research as part of the US Automotive Battery Consortium for years; in 2007 alone the Department of Energy announced $14 M for PHEV battery reseach and $17 M in project funding. I'm not a battery expert so I don't know if they're getting results for the money.

"I've noticed some counter-intuitive physical processes, therefore a car that runs on water and air is possible" is not a strong argument.

Just stare hard at that spindly incomplete computer rendering and envision it generating 250 kW (335 horsepower).

Broadstar, call us when you have a working unit, mmmkay?

@FandZ wonders why someone doesn't put a small solar panel in front of one of these mirror dishes.
As @da5id4vz notes, that's what Energy Innovations planned in 2005 with the Sunflower. Use cheap mirrors to focus sunlight on an expensive high-efficiency solar cell.
But the moment you concentrate, you have to motorize to keep the sun focused on the right point, which increases cost and decreases reliability. And you're concentrating heat, so you have to manage it. The latest Sunflower design replaces the 25 mirrors with 12 boxed Fresnel lenses each focusing the sun on its own solar cell, still requiring tracking motors.
@JacquesAss suggests doing something useful with the focused heat, but that adds more complexity and cost. Tracking the sun is incompatible with pumping hot water through plumbing tubes. It's currently not cost effective to cover your entire roof with solar thermal or solar PV, so most dual installations are two separate systems.

Solar is great, innovations help, but it's hard engineering.

The moment you type F a tooltip appears underneath with
"= 86 degrees Fahrenheit". Sweet.

Also useful when you read fantasies about solar cells on cars, e.g. "5 kW in hp".

For more complicated conversions, I use the GNU units command-line.

Toby Keith is "country", not cowboy, as much as "country" music wants to suck in cowboys along with the stars and stripes, patriotism, wilderness, and anything else that makes you feel good about America (f yeah!). The attitude "Country music owns those things, therefore everyone else is unpatriotic" is sickeningly divisive.

Elwood: What kind of music do you usually have here?
Claire: Oh, we got both kinds. We got country *and* western.

"6.0 L Cadillac V8, 145 hp". Ouch.

@jrghoull: Yes, software engineering is hard, and implications of "One Laptop Per Child" are so vast that they can never live up to that potential. But meanwhile it already "really works": innovative hardware, O.S. and UI focused on shared educational activities, that's all open source so people can contribute at any level. There are already lots of activities in development, it looks like Peru and Uruguay will choose their own sets for deployment.

@VakeroRokero: There are hundreds of millions of poor children who have food but limited opportunities. OLPC has inspired content projects to provide free information comparable to Encarta. The rest of your incoherent post makes no sense.

Honda isn't talking about their Home Energy Station that reformulates natural gas to make hydrogen while also making electricity and heating your house (and slices! and dices!). If you need everything it does in the right combination that might be a win over separately heating your house, powering your house, and powering your car.

Here's a simple picture of hydrogen vehicle's efficiency problem compared with batteries:

You're very wrong. First Microsoft used proprietary ActiveX technology to force improvements to the Web experience to be Windows-only binary code. When that turned out to be a gaping miserable security hole Microsoft used MSIE's market share and lack of compatibility with later CSS and XHTML standards to freeze improvements to the Web experience (except for XMLHttpRequest for Outlook Web Access, a fine genuine advance).

Even now there's still no SVG support or canvas tag in MSIE, and JScript is very incompatible with standard JavaScript. Microsoft is stalling ECMAscript 4 and HTML 5 Web standards work, while Firefox/Opera/Safari browsers are busy implementing really cool new features. Microsoft's attitude these days: you want cool graphics and more advanced application scripting? Go download proprietary mostly/only-on-Windows Silverlight or CLR/DLR/.NET whatever, which don't come from the IE group.

Meanwhile if 90% of your computing takes place in the browser and Firefox runs just the same on Linux, why pay the Microsoft tax?

I'm confident you are mistaken. Executable file formats like Mach-O do nothing to help or hinder parallelism.

An O.S. like Mac OS X can't take a sequence of CPU instructions in an executable and distribute them across multiple cores. How does it know which parts can be split? answer: it can't unless the code explicitly asks the O.S. to create processes and threads. (Which everyone agrees is difficult programming.) However, an O.S. can run multiple processes on multiple cores, and some O.S.s do better at this than others, thus what Mr. Buchanan wrote: making all of Mac OS X multicore aware and optimizing it for allocating tasks across multiple cores and processors".

A Virtual Machine like Java's might be able to inspect virtual machine instructions at runtime and split them out to multiple cores, but I think even HotSpot in Java 6 doesn't attempt that rocket science.

(tearfully) LEAVE DALTON ALOOONNNNE!!!