Or we build storage.

You don't HAVE to generate it within a fraction of a second of when it's used - that's just been convenient so far. So it's not with renewables? Fine! Store that juice!

When Bill Gates says:

"There's no battery technology that's even close to allowing us to take all of our energy from renewables and be able to use battery storage in order to deal not only with the 24-hour cycle but also with long periods of time where it's cloudy and you don't have sun or you don't have wind."

he's totally wrong.

For starters, there's Vanadium Redox. A flow battery (pumped electrolyte): Power limited by the size of the reaction device's electrode and membrane assembly. Energy storage limited by the size of the tanks. It's mainly used for utility-level energy storage down under (Oz or Nz, I think), because the patents are still fresh and the little startup doesn't want to license it to others. Vanadium is some substantial percentage of the Earth's crust so there's no shortage. Using the same element (in different sets of oxidation states - vanadium has (at least) 6 of 'em) for BOTH electrodes means leakage of small amounts of the element through the dilectric membrane doesn't poison the battery.

Lithum cells are already good enough to run laptops, cars, and houses, and are improving at a Moore's Law like rate. The elements are also not rare and the use of several nanotech techniques on the electrodes have drastically increased the lifetime and other useful properties. (We just had reports of yet another breakthrough within the last day or so, doubling the capacity and extending the life.) The fast-charge/discharge cells are also extremely efficient. (They have to be, because every horsepower is 3/4 kW, so even a few percent of loss would translate to enormous heat in an automotive application.) The main problem is to get companies to "pull the trigger" on deploying them - and risk their new production line being rendered obsolete before the product hits the market by NEXT month's breakthroughs.

Lead-acids need to be replaced once or twice per decade. But they have been the workhorses for off-grid since Edison's and Nikola Tesla's days, and still are today (though not for long, if Elon Musk and the five billion dollars of investments in his lithium battery plant have anything to say about it).

Nickel-Iron wet cells are a technology developed by Edison. They have more loss than lead-acids. But they literally last for centuries. If you have a moderately steady renewable source (like some combination of enough wind and a big enough windmill, enough sun and a big enough solar array, or a stream and a big enough hydro system) you'll have enough more power than you need to keep them topped off. They're just fine for covering days, or even a couple weeks, of bad generation weather, or down-for-maintenance situations. That IS what they were in at least one hydro plant I know of. (The problem is finding them: They last so long you only need to buy them ONCE, so there aren't many plants.)

That's just four FAMILIES of entirely adequate solutions. There ARE more.

So Bill is either uninformed, talking through his hat, or starting on the "embrace" stage of yet another:
  - Embrace
  - Extend
  - Extinguish
  - PROFIT!

I live in a subdivision with relatively spacious yards, but the fireworks are illegal around here. In fact, they are illegal even in the smaller towns. The only place they aren't illegal is in unincorporated areas which can be found here and there, usually with several large fireworks stands on them. Unfortunately, it is also illegal to transport fireworks through town, so you can't take them from the unincorporated place you bought them to the unincorporated place you live in. Police can and sometimes do just watch people buy them from the booth and then pull them over as soon as they cross the line into town.
Some of the fireworks stands have huge fields behind them so you can light them off there, but they are not open at night, so you don't get the full effect, and they are definitely not open at night on July 4th.
Effectively, you just can't legally fire off fireworks here on the 4th of July night. You had to have done something illegal, unless you happen to live in the same unincorporated area as the fireworks stands. In general, nobody lives in the unincorporated areas around here. They are just trees and fireworks stands.

Well, since fireworks came from China in the first place, it's not like it is a big loss. Not like IT jobs, cars, electronics, etc.

It was an illegal act at the time. However, after lots of people died, the U.K. accepted and legitimized the independence of the United States.

we have a way to turn electricity directly into heat. But there is no direct way to turn heat into electricity. It has to go thru a second step of mechanical energy to spin a magnet to create electricity.

You can go from electricity directly to heat because that increases entropy. You can't go from heat to anything useful because that decreases entropy, and entropy of a closed system only increases. The best you can do is a heat engine, working off a temperature DIFFERENCE. (Some of them also work backward as heat pumps, to go from electricity to heat more effectively, by also grabbing some heat from elsewhere to include in the hot end output.)

There ARE at least two major forms of electronic heat engines - direct from temperature differences to electricity, with only charge carriers as the moving parts: Thermoelectrics (thermocouples, peltier junctions, and thermopiles of them) and thermionics (both heat-driven vacuum diode generators and a FET-like semiconductor analog of them). Both are discussed in other responses to the parent post.

TEs are ridiculously inefficient and aren't looking to be much better anytime soon

Because thermoelectric effect devices leak heat big time.

However there's also thermionics. The vacuum-tube version is currently inefficient - about as inefficient as slightly behind-the-curve solar cells - due to space charge accumulation discouraging current, but I've seen reports of a semiconductor close analog of it (as an FET is a semiconductor close analog of a vacuum triode) that IS efficient, encouraging the space charge to propagate through the drift region by doping tricks (that I don't recall offhand). The semiconductor version beats the problems that plague thermoelectrics because the only charge carriers crossing the temperature gradient are the ones doing so in an efficient manner, so the bulk of the thermal leakage is mechanical rather than electrical, and the drift region can be long enough to keep that fraction down.

Because insurance is not healthcare. All Obamacare did is require everybody to pay money to the insurance company. It didn't do anythign at all about healthcare. If anything, healthcare will suffer because now people who previously could at least afford to go to the doctor now have to pay for insurance instead and can't also afford to go to the doctor.

They have more lobbyists than Wal-Mart because Wal-Mart obeys the law. Uber is operating illegally and so they must use lobbyists to try to get the laws changed so that Uber will be legal.
They are trying to protect themselves from the government, but only because they started out being on the wrong side of the law. I don't see any social justice here.
Why refer to taxi companies as cartels? It wasn't their idea to institute medallions. It was the governments, due to overpopulation of taxis. The only thing that the taxi companies are trying to protect is that they had to pay cash up front and operate within the law in order to provide services, but Uber is getting away with operating illegally and not paying for the proper authority needed for them to operate.

Here is a helpful hint for google's algorithm to determine if the click was accidental:
If I clicked it, it was accidental.
If I did not click it, that was intentional.
The only time I ever click on an ad is when I got suckered in by a deceitful company trying to appear to be a legitimate news article. For example, I got suckered in by "New Law has Insurance Customers Fuming" headline...once. A company that has to fool people into clicking on it's links does not deserve to be in business and should have their IP blacklisted so that no one else will ever accidentally visit their site.

I got the impression from the (sketchy) article that repeater AMPLIFIERS were still needed but repeater REGENERATORS were not.

Then again - another part of the article makes it look like an additional result was that they could boost this less-subject-to-degradation-by-nonlinear-distortions signal at the start until the fibre itself was acting non-linearly, in order to get a signal strong enough to survive a much longer hop.

So it's not clear to me whether the distance was achieved by:
  - long hops enabled by strong signals, and NO amplifiers
  - longer propagation without regenaration using JUST amplifers
  - a combination of the two: Both getting long total length without regeneration AND being able to use stronger signals and thus use larger space between the amplifier-type repeaters.

Since the diameter of the earth is 7 926.3352 miles, this could conceivably remove any need for repeaters.

I got the impression from the (sketchy) article that repeater AMPLIFIERS were still needed but repeater REGENERATORS were not.

I.e. you still needed to boost the strength of the signal to make up for the losses. But the progressive degradation of the quality of the signal - with data from different frequency bands bleeding into other bands (especially in the amplifiers themselves) due to nonlinear "mixing" processes - had been headed off, by synchronizing the frequencies of all the carriers to exact multiples of a common basic difference-between-the-carriers frequency.

This apparently sets up a situation where the distortion products of each carrier's interaction with nonlinear processes cancel out with respect to trying to recover the signals on another carrier - much the way the modulation products do in OFDM modulation schemes. In OFDM it allows you to make essentially total use of the bandwidth. In this system it lets you use simple, cheap, amplifiers to get your signal boost, rather than ending the fibre before things get too intertwingled, demodulating all the signals back to data streams and recovered clocking, then generating a fresh set of modulated light streams for the next hop - MUCH more expensive and power hungry.

They don't want or need to outlaw Uber. Uber is already illegal. All the taxis want is for the competition to have obey the same laws, which legally they do. In practice, Uber chooses not to obey the law.

In other words, it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, waddles like a duck, quacks like a duck, and none seem to be around during duck season. Sure seems like what we have here is duck.

They won't, for the simple reason that this 100% likelihood has 0% chance of happening.