I thought the article had a fairly succinct criticism of D-Wave's computer:

They have the right to tell people who are using the equipment they don't like on their premises to turn it off or leave. But they don't have the right to use illegal means to disrupt that equipment. It's sort of like you have the right to tell people walking across your property to leave or face trespass charges, but you don't have the right to viciously murder them for it... Ok, bad example, you might live in Texas. How about if you own a movie theater and you don't want people talking. You have the right to tell them to shut up or leave or face trespass charges. Walking up to them and spraying chloroform mist into their face to shut them up is beyond your rights.

That's a very good point. If it's somehow legal for the hotel to do that to other people's network, it's also legal for other people to do it to the hotel's network.

It it's not outside the FCC's powers, then it sounds like it's a violation of the computer fraud and abuse act.

I will assume you are being sarcastic here. Warming the core is pure science fiction IMHO.

By comparison, warming Mars would be relatively easy. Just manufacture large amounts of CFC's and emit them into the atmosphere. They are very strong greenhouse gasses and are relatively persistent, though they won't last forever. Emit enough of these and you may warm Mars up enough to release the frozen CO2 in the ground, which will lead to even more warming. Eventually you may be able to melt the frozen water, which will make life possible.

That isn't to say that this would be easy. You would have to mine fluorine and chlorine and then use a factory to make the gas. But it isn't that difficult. And even with Mars' lack of magnetic field, any atmospheric densification will likely last for millions of years. The MAVEN satellite will give us more reliable information on this.

The ridiculousness of some of the fictional materials you mention aside, it's looking more and more as if the majority of the mass of the universe is made up of non-baryonic matter that we can't identify. There also may be stable super-heavy elements we might discover some day, as well as non-standard arrangements of baryons that might also be stable. Maybe we'll also be able to make hybrid forms of baryonic/non-baryonic matter or novel arrangements of all sorts of other particle types. Then there's an entire theoretical periodic table of antimatter as well. We've only gotten as far as making anti-helium so far.
So, there are a lot of potential "real, actual" materials we may be able to play with some day, not to mention all kinds of chemical and nuclear tricks we still may have to learn with the materials we already have.
Once, the alchemists were crazy to think that elements could be transmuted. Then we learned more about the nature of matter and about atoms and chemical and nuclear bonds and it became even more obvious that the alchemists were crazy. Then we figured out that you actually can transmute elements. Your attitude that, essentially, everything has been discovered is just as bad as the attitude that anything is possible.

Hydrogen is known, to the best that the last 300 years of science can tell us, to be the most common element in the universe and oxygen is the third most common. Oxygen and hydrogen combine through a simple chemical reaction to form water. Hydrogen is hurled energetically outward from stars. For water to _not_ be common in most systems would require extra weirdness. It is true though that various processes might sequester it all in an oort-cloud-like region, but there's no good reason to think that wouldn't be highly unusual.

I addessed this issue in this post. Short answer: even if the electricity is produced by coal, the large efficiency of electric motors, thermal power plants, and the electricity transmission system will ensure less emissions caused by an electric car than from a gasoline powered car. And my calculations didn't even take into account the emissions from processing oil into gasoline, which are especially high if the source is from tar sands. My calculations are referenced and I believe them to be reasonable.

You can have your fingerprint stolen, although that's unlikely for school lunches. You can also lose your fingerprint from simple mechanical wear or chemicals. You can also simply not have fingerprints to start with.

Which has always struck me as a bit illogical since the embryos actually used are already slated for destruction. What do people think is going to happen to leftover human embryos that aren't slated to be implanted?

I think that was exactly the point.

It's sort of like how, when North Korea attempted a satellite launch not too long ago, the news was full of stories about how incredibly irresponsible it was since a satellite breaking up in orbit could turn into a chain reaction that would scour all orbits of all satellites. These stories were coming, of course, from the propaganda machines of countries which have, on more than one occasion, intentionally blown up satellites in orbit to demonstrate military power.

1. Swappable electric car batteries are the sane solution for fast-charging electric cars. Good to know it's actually on someone's radar. As for the cost, a city bus costs on the order of half a million dollars with operating costs around a quarter of a million dollars a year. With numbers like that, the batteries don't sound all that expensive. How many batteries you would need per bus depends on a number of factors. Charge time is a big one.

2. The trailer would be for mostly highway driving on fixed routes. Not a lot of tight twists and turns. The trailer also wouldn't have to be very long, and it's not as if segmented buses don't already exist. Aside from trailers, there's the possibility of roof mounting, or having some removable seats at the back and putting the extended battery storage inside the bus.

How about the tested choice. Space X has a built capsule, whose first version has returned from the space station several times. They are quite close to flying...they just need to test the launch abort system and the capsule will be almost ready to fly. From what I understand, Boeing hasn't built a capsule yet. They only have a paper/electronic design and a few "mock ups". Given the capsules are supposed to fly in 2016, I think the capsule that has actually been tested is the "safe choice". The article seems to me to be Boeing propaganda.