Probably contract with Tesla to put a hydrogen station next door to their electric station, since there's already an all-electric network from coast to coast. The "green infrastructure" is already there, now Toyota can leverage off of that

Octopus are basically water going aliens that crash landed on earth, they have separate brains for each eyeball and almost as many neurons in the tentacles as the brain, plus their motor cortex is doughnut-shaped and encircles their throat. Yet they're smart enough to unscrew the lid of a peanut butter jar if they're trapped inside one, and more often than not can pick the winner in a soccer match. The fact that we have any idea of how to do anything with something as weird as an octopus is pretty damn impressive. This is hard core nerd biology/medicine, cutting edge right here.
 
Look, just be glad they didn't post pictures of ktitens, ok?

There was a HUGE pushback against the Dallas DART light rail in the mid-90's when it was announced, however initial turnout was 50% higher than even the best expectations and they accelerated plans for the subway portion through uptown to the suburbs. Nowadays there's 4 or 5 lines, one even connects with the major international DFW airport. The station by my office has a train leaving every 1-2 minutes during peak rush hour, completely packed for the suburbs. I am the only person in my office that doesn't take the train (because I bicycle in).
 
People fucking hate riding the bus, but they love the train, for whatever reason. Maybe because they're bigger inside and you can walk around. And the route/stops never change. Now DFW boasts 96+ miles of commuter focused light rail, with another 20+ miles coming over the next decade (compare to 650 miles for NYC). That does take quite a few cars off the road. I would guesstimate our office takes about 800 cars off the road every day using rail.

Parked my car a year ago and I ride my bike to work most days. There's a bus stop less than 200 feet from my house. If it rains or gets below 40F (it's Texas, only gets that cold maybe 3 weeks a year) I take an Uber. Since I live 3.2 miles from downtown it costs between $6.43 and as much as $8. A single bus ticket costs $2.50, drops me off six blocks from my office, and runs on their schedule, and is frequently late. For $3 more I get dropped off in front of my office, they pick me up on my schedule, I get a real seat belt, appropriate heating/A/C, listen to NPR, nobody asking for money or sitting next to someone not having showered for a week etc etc. I usually take the bus home for $2.50 as I have more time in the afternoons to wait for a bus.
 
Parking downtown costs $5 for the bad lot four blocks from my office, $7 for a semi private parking garage. That's $100-$150/mo to rent an 8x10' piece of ground.
 
There's a very slight premium for using uber, but compared to paying for car insurance, maintenance, gas + the hassle of driving myself around, Uber is a fucking deal. In my very very corner case. That $1.50 a day premium is a really nice premium that really improves my morning, for those days that I need a car to get to work.

France operates a number of breeder reactors that could be repurposed possibly. Since the Regan administration (in fact, Regan himself) we've lost the capability to manufacture Plutonium in abundance. Not that there's a lot of use for the stuff but the supply is running low as is it's half life.

Especially near that smoke detector

Re: Cable Cutting
 
The Amazon FireTV (the full size square, not the HDMI dongle) is a fantastic device for $99 and XBMC has native support for it now. Once you bump the buffer from 20MB to 500MB and remove the bandwidth cap XBMC + Amazon Fire TV is a fantastic device for streaming the largest uncompressed 1080p video. It also handles your standard 100MB-4GB video files without cache modification as well. Also it does stuff like Netflix, Amazon Prime (aka HBO), most Android apps (like BombSquad, a Smash Brothers clone), you can side-load APKs without rooting it etc etc Amazon did a great job with the device and I use it daily instead of owning a cable box.
 
Absolutely zero interest in an Amazon branded phone though. I heard their Fire Tablet or whatever was pretty fantastic for the time but the market has moved on and even the $79 chinese branded tablets are competitive these days for most users.

Of note, high efficiency station-keeping engine technology has exploded in recent years, there's at least six cubesat kickstarter projects, mostly in the 2U-3U size which can at least partially get out of LEO on just a tiny, tiny amount of "fuel". Ion/electron propulsion has made huge advances in the last 15 years and is expected to bring the cost and size of communications satellites way, way down.
 
Right now fuel + engines + station keeping makes up 50% or more of a communication's launch mass. With electric propulsion, station keeping will make up less than 10% of the satellite, which in turn means less fuel required to push that mass around.

Not sure if it's the fact that you can host PHP on Godaddy's lowest tier(s) or what, but PHP seems to be the lowest hanging fruit and a lot of "babby's first project"s are written in PHP. I know a few people who avoid PHP projects based on that principle. The average PHP project seems to be dramatically lower in quality compared to similar ones written in Python, Ruby, heck even C#/ASP.

As of about 2010 we already had clocks so accurate you could demonstrate relativistic effects by separating them by just a few feet. It sounds like the vibration from walking in the same room as these is enough to knock them out of sync.

China, Iran, North Korea, occasionally Turkey, Libya, Egypt, perhaps Russia, Ukrane, Hong Kong. Something like 25% of the internet either can't or potentially can't access Facebook right now. But with TOR you can.

We're already assigning resources to see how we can leverage this next year at our office/windows shop.

Win8 and WS2012 run on the same kernel, the only difference is Win8/8.1 has the "desktop" role enabled rather than the server roles. It's not uncommon to see people hack in server roles to their desktop machine as an exercise

If you want more control, stop using the GUI and start using Powershell. Windows Server is designed to be used with Powershell. There's a lot of storage options that are only available from the command line that you wouldn't even know existed if you tried setting it up via the GUI. And you can do this remotely.

I think the problem is that "good accuracy" is not yet to the point where the driverless car is less likely to run over a pedestrian at an intersection than a car piloted by a human. Until that threshold is met it's just a science experiment.