IANAE but, transmitting power from cables has several drawbacks 1) Anything that adds weight to the cable is a very bad thing. 2) the power loss due to extreme length. 3) Redudancy directly affects 1 and 2. 4) 1 and 2 are mutually exclusive.
And as far as wireless power transmission goes, if its focused i think the powerloss is quite acceptable over those distance relatively to other means. The redudancy is exceptionnal too, you can have multiple beaming stations on the ground and/or in the air, ready to send their own beam in case the primary goes down.
The power of chaos (call it randomness or QM) and really, really long spans of time. Plus a lot of evolutionary stresses. Reusing simpler/earlier organisms as basis for interaction and possibly sustenance for more complex ones is only natural. Throw in a few well chosen mass population genetic bottlenecks and there ya go
Training is crucial. At the moment we have the tools to create a virtual environments in which we can breed populations of incremental complexity (genetic/coding-wise) through evolutionary pressure. As we learn to create these training and bottleneck methods for simpler "life" forms, the computing capacity needed for complex organisms will probably be there by the time we perfect such methods.
My guess is yes, about 10 years for an intelligent ANN. Also, when we do reproduce the brain it will have seemingly limitless potential for medicinal uses. It will also bring a terrifying potential for abuse. Such mastery of human intelligence could lead to disaster...
Those U3 enabled flash drives will STILL autorun. The second partition is made to appear to be a cdrom to windows, which means that windows will still autorun the crap they put on there.
The U3 mounts 2 devices on windows machines. One is your regular USB mass storage but the other is a *read-only* virtual CD drive. Autorun will run just fine.
Social penetration attacks are ridiculous with these. With a few hours, 100$ or so, one can change the firmware of a handful of U3 dongle, leave them lying on the ground in parkings, sidewalks... wait a few hours and you have a good % of those U3 trojans phoning home...
It's a naive, domestic operating system without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption.