It seems like this is more in the gee-whiz category than anything practical and they seem to have the class more because it is cool than because they expect this to happen anytime soon. A few parts of the article stand out:

But much of the rest of the world outside the US has much smaller houses already. People here have massive houses not because they need to but because they apparently want to. This is especially true in the suburbs where the rooms are often much larger than they need to accomplish their goals. Large houses are status symbols and the size of American houses has little connection to what is practically necessary. Maybe this might work better in Europe or if it were restricted in the US to urban centers? The article also acknowledges problems with other ideas, such as how they discuss modular bathrooms but then acknowledge that getting all the pipes and the like to fit would be difficult. And nothing here even begins to touch on the many issues there would be with building codes.

I've never played Eve Online and have no intention of doing so. But I'm continually fascinated by how cool the space battles look. Essentially we have a computer game today where the unchoreographed battles look better than the space battles made using special effects from the late 1980s. That's an amazing testament to how far the technology has come.

The actual paper can be found here: http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.5761. People have suggested informally ideas somewhat similar to this one before, but Hawking proposal seems to actually have the math behind it. Possibly most importantly, he can show that his predictions are a consequence of gauge/gravity duality http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdS/CFT_correspondence. This suggests that this may be a testale consequence of certain string theories if one could observe a black hole under the right conditions and see that it only was pretending to be a black hole.

Yeah, I was surprised by that. When I was on OKCupid my rate of getting a second date if I got a first one was greater than 50%. It may indicate that he's picky in ways that aren't easily described in the OKCupid system, but your point is well-taken. That particular statistic is evidence of systemic failure (although the 91 v. 99 is not).

As long as we're doing anecdotes, my own height is close to 5'2'', I never lied about that and didn't have much trouble at all. Height probably can help, but it isn't everything.

No, more a function of noise in the system. The difference between a 91% and a 99% in the OKCupid system isn't that large, especially since less compatibility can also result simply from someone answering fewer questions.

Please read the actual article. His entire approach was optimizing his profile for other people's searches not the other way around.

Yes, but it wasn't clear if that was because you actually understood that the individual had a decent relationship going on or was just further snark. More seriously, As far as I can tell from the article the main problem with his method was a poor signal to noise ratio which was made worse by the large number of candidates. The signal to noise ratio on online dating is always terrible, but it would be more noticeable when one has a larger pool. In fact people optimize profiles all the time (which hobbies they emphasize, which pictures of themselves they present, etc.). But somehow when one optimizes more effectively relying not on vague intuitions but actual data, then people have reactions like yours. (Possibly relevant disclaimer: I met my girlfriend on OkCupid. I did not do what this guy did.)

Did you read the whole article? He ended up with his now fiance this way and they are doing well.

It is approximately one millionth of the surface area of all the pages in the Library of Congress.

So, you have a testable set of hypotheses. Those hypotheses have non-testable consequences also. Calling those consequences "faith" seems off. For example, consider the following hypothesis "Every state is majority hydrogen." Now, there are stars which are in the process of disappearing from our future light cone due to the expansion of space. This hypothesis which we can get a lot of evidence for also implies that those stars are majority hydrogen. We will never be able to test that. Does that make that conclusion "faith"?

There are tests for inflation. Depending on the version of inflation in question one can get different predictions, but one major issue is how close to flat the universe is. Another major aspect is the exact behavior of the cosmic microwave background. Study of these issues are both ongoing.

From TFA:

They don't discuss any of the ideas about differing constants although others have done so.

Note that this isn't talking about the quantum mechanical multiverse where whenever a decoherence occurs you get branching of different copies. This is talking about a more concrete notion of multiverse where the early inflation spreads out so much that there are lots of little regions of observable space time which cannot observe each other.

This is ok. For many purposes, software improvements in terms of new algorithms that are faster and use less memory have done more for heavy-dute computation than hardware improvement has. Between 1988 and 2003, linear programmng on a standard benchmark improved by a factor of about 40 million. Out of that improvement, about 40,000 was from improvements in software and only about 1000 in hardware improvements (these numbers are partially not well-defined because there's some interaction between how one optimizes software for hardware and the reverse). See this report http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/pcast-nitrd-report-2010.pdf. Similar remarks apply to integer factorization and a variety of other important problems.

The other important issue related to this, is that improvements in algorithms provide ever-growing returns because they can actually improve on the asymptotics, whereas any hardware improvement is a single event. And for many practical algorithms, asymptotic improvements are occurring still. Just a few days ago a new algorithm was published that was much more efficient for approximating max cut on undirected graphs. See http://arxiv.org/abs/1304.2338.

If all forms of hardware improvement stopped today, there would still be massive improvement in the next few years on what we can do with computers simply from the algorithms and software improvements.