The summary says it will be "bathing the cosmos with infrared light". What is this supposed to mean? The spacecraft will be detecting light, but will not be emitting it in any substantial quantity. In fact, WISE will be emitting very little infrared light at all (even for a spacecraft), as it is being kept cool for the next 10 months or so with an onboard supply of solid hydrogen.

No, he is right. The reason you can't always get close to 100% is because of something called Carnot efficiency.

Carnot Cycle

However, in this situation, that doesn't apply. There is no reason you cannot collect very close to 100% of the energy from braking using your regenerative braking system. There will of course be some loss due to efficiency in the air resistance and rolling resistance. Also, current regenerative braking technology doesn't apply enough force at slow speeds to stop the car in a reasonable manner, and so is quite inefficient at slow speeds. There is nothing fundamental preventing it from being much more efficient, however.

The article claims Ramji has improved relations between Microsoft and open source people? Since when have relations between Microsoft and open source been anything but negative? We read stories on here almost every day about some new point of conflict.

I do agree with you to some extent. However, a lot of the time you spent "bored out of your mind" was probably still production, whether you realize it or not. Sitting down to memorize multiplication tables is not in any way fun and does require quite a bit of discipline for the vast majority of children. It is still a very important thing to learn and it sounds like this "unschooling" would not deliver this sort of learning. If you actually sit down and think about it there are a great many things you learned at a young age which are like multiplication tables in this respect.

Sorry, I can see how one could easily read what I wrote to mean something other than what I meant.

We have certainly not found all exoplanets within a few hundred light years. However, this technique is useless for distances that short. So, it will not help us in finding any additional planets within that distance.

The reason this is important is because within that distance is where we are going to detect our first Earth like exo planet.

It is pretty unlikely to be used in the way (I think) you are thinking. The technique relies upon the use of gravitational lensing (specifically microlensing from a star). This requires that a closer star is very close to the line of sight of a more distant star. Also, the microlensing effect bends the angle of the light, and so the angular displacement depends on how far away the star doing the bending is. (If a star is very close and bending light, the light will not have gone very far from where it would be otherwise by the time it reaches us). I hope that made sense

Anyway, because of these reasons, this technique is unlikely to be useful in analyzing stars within our own galaxy, and certainly is useless for stars within a few hundred light years, where all the other exoplanets have been found.

Yes; in principle the same sorts of tests that have been done for quantum mechanics could be done to test string theory. The example I gave above is a good one; string theory would predict slightly different energy levels for the hydrogen atom.

However, there is a slight practical problem. While we can measure these things to phenomenal accuracy (10 or 12 digits) the predictions of string theory would only become different from the predictions of quantum theory at somewhere in the range of 25 to 35 digits, depending on the theory. These differences are so far beyond our current ability to measure that there is very little hope for any sort of confirmation of string theory in the foreseeable future.

Because of this fact and the fact that there is no clear mathematical reason to favor one string theory in particular (there are infinite possible variations), string theory has in the end contributed essentially nothing to modern physics.

You make a mistake in lumping quantum theory in with String Theory.

There is at present no evidence whatsoever that quantum mechanics, quantum electrodynamics, and so on are wrong. These theories are the best tested theories in human history (certain predictions about energy levels such as those in the hydrogen atom have been verified to 12 or so digits of accuracy.) Quantum mechanics is at this point the best tested and thus most probably correct theory in physics by far. This does not mean that there isn't another underlying theory that will make somewhat different predictions, but the differences would have to be fantastically small.

String theory, on the other hand, has basically no evidence against it, but also virtually no supporting evidence. This is mostly because it hasn't really come up with much in the way of testable claims.

In fact there is a fabric of sorts, see Casimir Effect for an experimental result of that "fabric".

It is not at all like the aether that people were thinking of in the 19th century, but it does exist. One way of looking at it is that the vacuum is filled with particles that are constantly popping in and out of existence. Another way is to look as the vacuum as having a "zero point" energy. Either way, it is not truly "empty".