An idea I had a while back was an open-plan ground level with sliding/folding partitions (reasonably heat-proof) that allow you to close down the open area into smaller, more cozy sections. e.g. you can have the lovely big open-plan, light, spacious area in summer (maybe even with a water feature beneath a glass floor or something fun like that), but then can easily close up to have separate rooms that are easily heated in the winter (or when you want some privacy from noisy children).

Wireless lighting a la Tesla isn't that hard - you just have to fire up a Tesla coil and then use fluorescent tubes sufficiently close to it (higher power = more range, but you still suffer inverse square law losses).

Of course, this is definitely not efficient in any way, and you (and your neighbours) are going to be getting mighty annoyed by the lack of TV reception and funky things that go on will all the sensitive electronics we use now...

On the plus side though, you do have a mighty great Tesla coil sparking away somewhere that could be used as a feature item! I'd go with the middle of the roof - would probably keep birds off too, and would certainly be a talking point in the neighbourhood (well, up until the authorities arrive and tell you to shut it down).

Another option, if Steampunk isn't your thing (who?), would be false ceilings or false floors. A TV station building I know of has all the floors made with square sections that can be easily lifted out (I believe it's steel frame with legs in the corners), with a few hundred mm of space beneath. They obviously have more cabling requirements than most of us (100-cable looms etc), but I've always thought it was a useful idea. Many commercial buildings do the false ceiling thing. If you wanted to go the other temporal direction with your theme, you could do the removable wall panels typical of sci-fi corridors (although exposed ducting is common there too). Creative use of an architrave could give you a nice place to put cabling too (and is great for hiding LED rope for some really nice ambient lighting).

The high-amp electrical feed is going to be very useful if the (likely) electric vehicle trend pans out: EVs want a really high current draw if you want them to charge in less than a day. Being set up to install your own fast-charge unit would be a smart move. Also though, the same goes for installing electrical outlets - older houses with a single power socket in each room are annoying to live in; and I've never had a house where I've said there are too many sockets.

Of course, the power setup is quite different if you want to go solar or other onsite renewables...

Look at the wheelbase length and wheelbase-length-to-cabin-length ratio. Our perceptions of "cool" with cars is long, low, and sleek. Considering that most electric cars are aiming at inner-city driving, a short wheelbase and overall reduction in size would be key design metrics. Also, the long front we have got used to with internal combustion engines is totally unnecessary in an electric car really (except that you do need to put the batteries somewhere, and to provide a crumple zone in the event of a crash). Bring all that together, and the ideal vehicle shape (from a purely engineering standpoint) is short, squat, and kind of boxy (to maximise interior space while minimising overall spatial footprint). Also, for inner-city driving, aerodynamics is kind of a moot point - considering that drag is a function of the square of speed, at low speeds it makes no difference.

So, the reality is probably that they look kind of ugly because the design is being dictated by the engineers not the marketers, which surely the /. crowd could applaud? (Too many things are designed with form ahead of function - including a lot of parts of cars).

The exceptions (long, sleek, "cool") like Tesla's offering are because that's designed to be a performance car, so the aerodynamic (and form) components of the design become more important.

One thing I have found interesting is that electric cars haven't gone for anything (yet) which is dramatically different to "normal" car designs, considering other forms become quite possible with the dramatically smaller drivetrain and quite alternative energy storage shapes (batteries don't need to be shaped like a fuel tank). Most likely this comes down to compliance with safety and other regulations - and the fact that probably no one would buy it if it looked too different - but it could be interesting to see what variation we see in future vehicle forms.

It's interesting the implications of this: we think of mountains as these giant, immovable things, culturally and linguistically used as a reference point of something solid and immutable. And yet, the reality is that they are comparably the soft fluffy marshmallows floating on top of a dense, thick liquid. I don't think it detracts from their majestic nature any, but I won't look at mountains the same, knowing they are in fact the "lighter" parts of the Earth - and the reminder that they float!

Science is fun, especially when it comes up with things that to the casual, uninformed observer are so counter-intuitive. This paints a beautiful picture.

Also, it goes to show that mountain-climbing is a great way to lose weight!

Actually got to play the board game "Pandemic" recently. It's a great game, but one relevant learning from it was that we had to lose three times before we worked out how to actually contain diseases. I am hoping that our society has had enough experience with disease outbreak control that we actually handle such an event successfully. The recent Ebola situation seems to suggest that we're not bad (though could be better). But, if we had something start in a big city in a Western, developed country, and it was multiple-drug-resistant, we could be in for some serious trouble, and I don't think we as a populace are quite smart enough to do the right thing (report early, self-quarantine, shut down transport systems etc early enough, and so on). We could be, but the reality is the only way we are going to know is by seeing how we do when one actually happens - and unlike the board game, we only really get one attempt.

Just because it wasn't really a problem in the USA doesn't mean it wasn't a problem. It is one nasty disease (death rate of upwards of 50%? No thanks!) Similar to the Y2K bug, Ebola was contained exactly because people reacted.

Also, seriously, go to Africa sometime. Just because it didn't happen in your home town doesn't make it any less devastating.

Yep, real smart. "Oh no, people are discovering new music for free, let's stop them."

Users: "Oh, my free streaming service went away. You suck! How do I get music now?" Googles for 'free music download', or asks friends, eventually ends up at the Pirate Bay or something. "Cool, all this stuff is free and I can even keep it without some service disappearing from underneath me!"

When will these people realise that they cannot support their old business model because technology has made it redundant. The longer they try and abuse their customer base, the more of their customer base they are going to lose. Eventually technology will steamroll them into obsolescence, but it's mainly because they never thought to give people want they want soon enough (if, back in the Napster days, they had provided an easy way to purchase any MP3 online, DRM-free, for a low price, everyone would have done that instead of finding more and more ways to avoid paying at all. Now, it's too late and the market has left them behind).

It's the horse-feed sellers complaining that everyone is using jet aircraft - and then trying to force them not to by suing? I have for quite some time been saying that they need to wake up and adapt to the technology, but I honestly think it's too late for that. The recording agencies have dug their own grave by being so backward. P2P tech and other options have left them irrelevant, and their trying to beat people up with legislation changes just makes the rational people who don't mind paying a fair price angry.

Sorry, but if I'm looking for new music, I'm still going to look at places like YouTube. If the big businesses are too stupid to put their stuff there, then it won't be their content I'm seeing - it'll be indy artists, and I'm more than happy to pay an artist directly if I think their stuff is good enough, and if I can get it without DRM (or other vendor lock-in like iTunes).

Of course, most of the big-label stuff is rubbish anyway, so I guess I'm not losing much. Perhaps YouTube will stop suggesting crap pop songs now - yay!

Why use a fusion reactor to power a laser, when the reactor itself would be plenty to cook the... oh, never mind. :-) Also: overkill!

There are different types of personality, some who welcome change, and some who resist it. Apparently the "keep things the same" (stable) types make up around 80% of the population... which is probably a good thing. Too many of us "let's go change everything, and make it better, and keep altering things, and change it because we can", and your society would break itself (of course, too few, and nothing would change, which would be as bad or worse). Some people don't want variety and don't mind repetition. Although, your last two points (work for others, live a fulfilling life outside of the rat race) are still valid for everyone, I think.

I think the world does need people happy to stay the same - it gives our society stability. Of course, the reality of modern life is that "staying the same" is becoming less and less of an option for anyone, and not just because of outsourcing.

Firefox still remains my browser of choice: it has it's problems, yes, but for me, configurability is king. (Chrome, what do you mean I can't - even with an extension - mousewheel to change tabs or set up a mouse gesture to minimise the window?) And IE is a total non-starter on that front: it's rubbish defaults are pretty much all you are going to get. Things like Adblock (and now, Noscript) are essentials as far as I'm concerned, and (since Opera, see below), so is the ability to configure tabs and set up mouse gestures - it's just so much faster having proper control and the ability to configure things. This is also why Safari will never be an option: a while back, when we had a weird proxy issue, Safari was the only browser that didn't let you into the proxy config enough to fix it - the stock answer for Mac users then was "You'll have to use Firefox".

Over time, it has been something like: Netscape (for the tiny bit of my internet-accessing days where that was relevant), then Internet Explorer (because there was no choice when Netscape imploded), then Opera (this was a good decade ahead of the others in terms of features for quite some time), then Firefox (when I finally gave up on having to keep switching to IE for all those sites that didn't support Opera - at the time, Firefox was more supported in more places). And Firefox it has stayed, for a long time. Chrome has never sat well with me: too much memory hogging, not enough ability to configure it (and not as good on the extensions front); minimalism is fine for some, but I want to be able to put exactly what I want, where I want (and yes, this means I have no less than 6 buttons on my toolbar for extensions - and I use all of them).

Also, Firefox is one of the only browsers that still separates the search and URL bars. If I want to search, I will use the search bar - I do not want you trying to hit up Google Search just because the slightly unusual URL I typed doesn't look like a URL to you.

Having said this, browser use in recent times has become more heterogeneous. There are times at work that I can't avoid IE (e.g. intranet; also, specifying that IE is the only browser we should be using is an utterly retarded decision on the part of our IT department - but thankfully Portable Apps exist). Chrome tends to get used for times when we don't want to reload a session of 10+ tabs for one thing, or for video streaming, when we don't need to be multitasking. At times, it's now "whichever browser is closest", although Firefox to me is still the best, as it's one of the few that actually still lets me make decisions for myself on how the browser should behave.

This idea of Chrome-only apps that's starting to emerge is horrid. Please do not do that. (I have an Android app that I would use on the desktop as well, if it had a version for anything other than a Chrome version - it's not worth another browser just for that).

Another reason I want to keep using Firefox is that it keeps a third rendering engine in the game (although I am getting concerned that this is starting to be lost): Firefox was a hero back when it finally managed to eke out just enough market share that "Designed for Internet Explorer" ceased to be valid, and we finally saw innovation return to the browser scene (arguably, this paved the way for things like Chrome to exist). The three-way Trident/Webkit/Gecko* scene we have had has seen more browser innovation than ever, but I worry that if we drop back to only two, we might see a duopoly that stifles innovation. Oddly enough, Microsoft's decision to revamp but not go Webkit was actually worth applause I think (not that I'm going to use it) - they apparently did this because they wanted to avoid a single-browser-engine world (though the irony of that shouldn't be lost on the audience here).

*Sorry Opera, you were great, but never quite big enough to make the difference you deserved; RIP Presto.

This is actually quite a good point. As someone with more than one Gmail account (personal, business, and one through my university), having tabs with different sessions would be a really, really useful feature (Gmail's built-in ability to link accounts and switch between them is fine - if you only want one open at a time; for those of us that want a different account in each tab, useable at the same time, it doesn't work well at all).

We also use persistent sessions as it's extremely useful, but sometimes when you just want to quickly check that one thing, you don't want to wait for a browser to load 10 - 20 tabs... As a consequence of all of this, we end up with 2 (or in my wife's case) 3 browsers open. An ability to say "this tab is to be an isolated session" (isolated, not private browsing, although that can be useful for this sort of thing as well), and an ability to have a "quick-load the browser without messing with my normal session and loading everything I had open" would be two excellent solutions - unless someone knows how to do either of these?

The issue is that high school grades are now skewing to see girls doing much better than guys, but those "most competent" students aren't taking up the STEM jobs (arguably the most useful ones for our high-tech society). So, the logical conclusion is to try and get skilled engineers by tapping into those skilled students - who just happen to be female. The whole point of this is to increase the number of skilled engineers.

Also, from what I have seen, the more diverse a team or industry is (and this goes far beyond gender), the better it is, especially when that discipline has to deal with high complexity - which is absolutely the case with the modern tech/engineering industries. We need a wider range of types of thinking in engineering.

As for the school teachers one, there is some evidence that a mixture of male and female teachers is good for students (in particular, boys need good male role models at that age), so gender diversity specifically does have benefit.

This is also a problem, although one that probably isn't quite as easy to solve, as it's more socially complex. The "females in STEM" one is generally based on two factors, (a) it hasn't been advertised/understood as something they would like (which TFA is addressing), and (b) a tendency for the industry to be a bit hostile to females once they graduate. The "less males are graduating high school" problem is one that I don't think we have as many answers to, although I do know of a bunch of candidate social reasons that could be causing it. A simple one is probably that young boys are more geared to want to go out and do something than sit and comply with academic requirements (which have only got more demanding), and we have pulled back on the old-school harsh discipline that forced them to learn that, but that's far from the only factor.

We need to address both, and I think you are right that our current focus is perhaps skewed more to one than the other. But, let's encourage both, not discourage either.