There's a good reason people are looking so hard at LEDs rather than CFLs; LEDs are simply better technology. The best LEDs have much higher luminous efficacy than any fluorescent. For example, Cree is selling LED fixtures that put out around 125 lumen/watt vs. just under 100 lumen/watt for the best fluorescent lights. It's actually more lopsided than that sounds, because the LED figure includes all the losses, while the fluorescent is for light coming out of the tube, not the entire device, and it ignores the power consumption from the ballast.

LEDs also have a lot more potential because of their form factor and light distribution pattern. Individual LEDs are tiny so it's possible to use them in places that would be too small to put a similarly powerful incandescent or fluorescent light. They are also moderately directional, which is great when you want directional light (e.g. recessed or ceiling mounted lights) and can be worked around by using arrays shining in all directions when you want non-directional light. LEDs are really going to take off when they're used in purpose-designed fixtures that take full advantage of their unique characteristics rather than being made into awkward designs intended to be direct replacement for incandescent bulbs.

Also, to be even more nit picky, most home stoves and ovens are on 120/240V power rather than straight 240V. That is to say that they have both hot legs and the neutral of the power distribution, so they can support both 240V loads leg to leg and 120V loads leg to ground. The lights in the oven are probably running at 120V rather than 240V.

Actually, a lot of serious/professional cooks are buying exactly the kind of extremely fancy cooking gear Myhrvold likes talking about. This stuff got started because there are things that are much easier to prepare with the right technology, and high-end restaurants thrive on providing things that other places can't. Professionals have been the driving force behind sous vide cooking, for instance.

I don't honestly know, because it lasted long enough that I don't remember exactly where and when I bought it. I assume it was more than 4 years, because I moved about 4 years ago and I hadn't replaced that bulb since moving. I've replaced a lot more energy saving lights because I wanted to adopt new technology- I've recently been replacing my compact fluorescent bulbs with LEDs- than because they failed.

That said, compact fluorescent bulbs can have problems. Some of the cheaper designs only work properly when the base is down and can have a drastically reduced life otherwise. They can be damaged by dirty power. And I had a lot of problems with mine when I had them in a fixture with a ceiling fan; running the fan seemed to greatly reduce their lifespan, probably because of mechanical stress. There certainly seems to be a big advantage to paying a bit more for high quality ones.

They do already host this on their own, but putting it on Wikimedia Commons makes it easily accessible to people who want to use it for articles in any of the Wikimedia sites (e.g. Wikipedia, Wikiquote, etc.). Also, by doing an official upload, they reduce the chance of somebody claiming the files are illegitimate. This is basically a courtesy to Wikimedia.

I expect it would depend on the details. People have experimented with at least two classes of blood substitutes: hemoglobin based and fluorocarbon based. I assume people with religious scruples would be OK with fluorocarbon-based substitutes. Hemoglobin-based substitutes would probably be classified as processed blood still be off limits, unless the hemoglobin were actually recombinant and not extracted from blood.

Then donate to the red cross.

Or directly to a hospital that collects its own donations. Even non-profits like the Red Cross add extra layers of bureaucracy.

All of the examples you're talking about are single-purpose systems designed to solve problems within a fairly narrow domain. The idea of the test as Turing originally proposed it was that it was intended to be a test of general-purpose intelligence. The questioners were not supposed to be limited to a single domain of knowledge or topic of conversation but were allowed and encouraged to ask anything they felt like as a way of probing the mind they were interacting with. If we come up with a program that can do a decent job of all the problems you're describing and be able to learn new areas without explicit intervention from a programmer, then we'll be getting somewhere at producing general purpose AI. That's what Turing was getting at.

It isn't so much that the Turing test was a thought experiment as that it was intended to be a much more stringent test. It was supposed to involve skeptical inquirers who were given as much time as they needed and were allowed to ask open ended questions. He certainly didn't mention any 5 minute time limit; it's a lot easier to fool people with simple tricks like pretending to be an ignorant youngster if you're given a time limit.

Show me a machine that listens to me say "make a payment" and then says "sorry I didn't hear that right, can you repeat it?"

My phone does something like that with its voice command stuff. If it can't make out what you say, it will say "Sorry, I didn't get that. Could you repeat it?" On some kinds of ambiguous input it will say "I think you asked for X. Is that correct?"

Frequently because management forces them to include a minimum percentage of comment in their code. It would be much better to find a piece of really well documented code and a piece of really badly documented code and force them to read both so they can see what the difference is.

Bad comments tell what the code is doing when that's obvious from the code itself. Good comments explain why, especially when they're fixes for non-obvious bugs. If you spent a lot of time figuring out the solution to a tough problem, you owe the next guy to see your code an explanation.

Sweat. Air is actually a pretty bad conductor of heat, so you don't heat up that fast. Meanwhile, you're sweating profusely, and evaporating sweat carries away a lot of heat. You can't sustain it for that long before you get dehydrated, but dehydration is the main limiting factor on how long you can stand it.

Living in an environment where it gets to 40C with low humidity in the summer- it's actually expected to get there tomorrow- I can assure you that it's still bad. It's better than 35C with some humidity or 30C and high humidity, but it is dangerously hot and can kill you much faster than you'd expect if you aren't careful to stay well hydrated.

It's also worth noting that well designed air conditioning functions to change the humidity as well as the temperature. Typical AC will chill the air until it's colder than the desired temperature to dehumidify it and then warm it back up. The development of humidity control was the essential element of modern air conditioning.

I think that would classify as "immutable powers" or possibly "laws of physics and bad engineering".

Right now, Sol has more influence on my AC than anything. We can turn on the air full blast, but that doesn't get the temperature to where it's supposed to be. It's a big hassle when the set temperature is needed for temperature sensitive equipment rather than human comfort.