Drug use, alcohol use, smoking is in decline, not just in the USA but in most developed nations. Violent crime of many kinds is also on the decline in developed nations too. In some categories these stats are quite dramatic (homicide and drug use in particular have halved since all time highs in 80s/90s, wow).

In fact I am very genuinely concerned that kids these days don't party as hard as we did. In fact it's been years since I've had to tell any to get off my lawn!

Automotive software engineers working on developing, testing and homologation of power-trains refer to humans as random input generators.So yes, real-world conditions, lead footed drivers, people who carry a lot of heavy cargo, tow trailers, or granny drivers who don't put enough load on the engine or spend a lot of time at lower speed are inevitably outside the limited testing parameters.

Ted Danson the actor is an "expert"? Unless there is an actively researching and publishing climatologist or oceanographer that has the same name. We do have flying cars by the way. Technology has been there for a while. It was just the failure mode is unforgiving for a population that can't turn signals most the time. Experts tend to be right about predictable things such as technological progress and modelling of the natural world. Humanity though, not so much.

We've reccently radically extended human life span 2.5x what it was for all human history and the result has actually been population decline due to falling birth rate in the parts of the world that people live longer. Countries like Japan and Germany were first to having aging and shrinking populations and the rest of the world is playing catch up. So I think we need to see evidence this is going to cause a population problem because so far the outcome has been counter intuitive. If we can eventually stall and reverse aging, we may have the problem of not enough babies and declining human population. Immortality will be upon us before we know it and before we've had a chance to debate the ethical issues. Like a lot of technological achievement it is a long chain of small advances that pass quietly until we are at that level. Quite simply when the pace of progress out paces the rate at which we age, we can live long enough to receive the next ever better treatment. Long term the politics of immortality self-reinfocing because people who aren't supportive of it will tend to die out. It'll be the best thing to happen to humanity. But we'll sure miss children.

A tip: When you get a new smartphone these days, buy one or two spare batteries while they are widely available, and well before the device is deprecated and hard to find a good battery for, let alone an official one. Store your spare li-ion batteries with a half charge, and/or just alternate use of the batteries. Spare accessories are also a nice selling point if you upgrade and want to sell your old phone on ebay, or to a friend.

Li-ion batteries lose about 20% of their lifespan every year, I've had plenty that die faster, perhaps due to much more intense cycling and usage. Having spares you rotate means you'd still have most of your battery range after a year of ownership.

At 27km up your above 98% of the atmosphere if you go by density. It's not sensationalizing at all.

The Fermi paradox baffles me because it is quite easy to solve. The simplest explanation in my mind, is that faster than light travel is either just not possible or if possible requires astronomical amounts of energy that it just isn't worth it for the scientific gain (because you are not going to do battles or trade over that distance the only reason to travel is curiousity).

Thus no matter how full of life the universe is, it just almost never gets to meet up for a party.

On point 3. is this not how pretty much any volatile memory in any computer biological or artificial works? Our brains are not exempt and seemingly have to re-inforce/re-write memories as accessing them probably does indeed cause them to degrade.

Personally my guess is consciousness is an inevitable emergent property of any sufficiently complex information system that is highly integrated in a certain and special way. It's an advantageous property so evolution naturally selects for it. Ergo it pops up in multiple places in the evolutionary tree.

This research merely seems to be setting some bounds. You can't reduce human experience in to something convenient to compute, at least not without losing a lot of fidelity to be useful, you still need to build an equivalently complex brain.

Yes anyone thinking clearly sees it isn't ruled out computer hardware cannot achieve the same feat. It's just shortcuts have started to have been ruled out. It seems some people are interpreting this research as evidence against machine awareness, which I don't think as supportable, it stems from the faulty as assumption the human brain is somehow special and privileged with physical law that don't apply elsewhere in the universe.

I predict you will die eventually.

Cooking itself can be a fun and rewarding task itself. I find it quite relaxing way to de-stress after a hard days work behind a glowing screen, to be able to throw stuff around a 3-dimensional space and engage senses of taste, feel and smell. I can crank out a tasty meal from fresh produce quite quickly. It's cheaper than anything out of packet, is going to extend mine and my families live and prevent debilitating disease suffering and death, and I feel pretty ace when I've nailed a new technique.

The major problem is people have become too accustomed to reward for no or little effort. Open a packet, push buttons microwave, ding ding and your done. I ponder if, partly, we over eat portion wise where the food is too accessible, simply because the reward factor of acquiring and preparing the food is missing.

Food just tastes better when you've put some effort and flare in your self. The whole process needn't be a chore at all.

(This perhaps explains why some useless cooks seem to think their own food tastes good to them, despite others not quite agreeing.)

I humbly present the solution: gamification of food.

And revenue. As minor speeding isn't really much danger at all, but a lucrative cash cow authorities have become accustomed to suckling the milky teats of.

You'll find speed cameras and cops hitting motorists hard in places where people are likely to speed, and there for generate maximum revenue. But conspicuously absent at notorious deadly accident blackspots where there isn't a high volume of traffic.

If the primary goal was to save lives by slowing people down. Using first principals, where would you decide to put a speed camera?

Speed doesn't kill it's suddenly becoming stationery that's the problem.

Indeed. The massive environmental impact of the battery pack was part of that criticism, but this is also where electric cars win, if one is being honest about the numbers and don't have a anti-electric car axe to grind: The NiMH battery pack of early hybrids is pretty much 100% recyclable. Li-ion and Li-po etc isn't properly 100% recycled at the moment but that's a infrastructure problem - theoretically 100% recyclable. (I would imagine some years down the track used battery packs would be quite valuable scrap). You just cannot say as much for the hydrocarbon fuel going through the tank of a regular automobile.

Why hovercraft never caught on:

Expectation: http://www.google.com/search?q=concept+hovercraft

Reality: http://images.google.com/search?q=hovercraft

Perform this search experiment with Hoverbike/Concept Hoverbike as your search term and the disparity is worse - the real world things, even the expensive ones always look like they've been made in some back yard.