This is pretty elaborate for an April Fool's joke, having previously planted all that stuff all over the net.

Let's go ahead and make using this while driving illegal before it becomes popular.

Elegance.

The real underlying problem is the energy source. There's no economic source now nor on the 20 year horizon for H2. Techies like to tinker with it, just like anything else, and I can certainly understand that. But it's really serves oil companies in two ways: 1) the most economic source is fossil fuels, and 2) it's not going to displace much fossil fuel anytime in the foreseeable future, so it serves to distract from technologies that might.

How do you expect to provide extended range (for long trips, for battery-only electric cars)? Very quick recharge? Battery swap? Something else?

Do you expect the largest market share by type to be battery-only electric, or will some sort of series hybrid (electric with onboard generator, whatever you wish to call it) become the most popular?

Ideally a Windows / Ubuntu dual-boot (or maybe VM) with at least 1 TB and 8 GB. There's a significant amount of physics-related free/cheap applications written only for Windows. Don't spend more than necessary unless there's just a glut of money.

I suppose it depends on how you define "failed". In my book, no way was Google Glass a failure. If you think they meant to make megabucks by selling a product, sure... but I can't imagine that that's what they expected to occur. It was a big experiment, and a lot of data was collected from it.

...that pushes cryptocurrencies into truly anonymous exchanges. Up to now, most that demanded anonymous exchanges were trying to hide something. A few were Libertarians who just wanted privacy on principle. The rest just wanted to try it or to use it for convenience. But if the state tries to control all usage of it, that will drive most uses to demand anonymity, and solid means of achieving that will appear.

Good point. But they've spent billions on brands and convincing the public that everything in their liquids is good and necessary. However, I'm betting it's more the distributors and retailers that don't want it. They're comfortable with what they have. There probably won't be a big increase in overall alcohol sales, so anything that sells instead of traditional spirits might not go through their channels. Why take a chance? Just get the buddies in the legislature to nip it in the bud, as Barney would say. There's not yet an big organized resistance to the powder by parties worried about health or social consequences, so there's got to be some reason for legislators to move on it. Follow the money.

If the use of all antibiotics were subject to rules from under the same roof (FDA), I seriously doubt we'd have such outrageous misuse of them on livestock. Get control out of the hands of the Ag Dept. Developing new antibiotics is a must, but the rate at which they become ineffective has got to be slowed.

It's not that typical users don't understand how anything works and aren't willing to find out (though that annoys many of us). It's that they're busy salivating over the latest hyped product ("can't way for 6!") instead of demanding decent security and demanding that things be done right. When did parents stop teaching their kids to not take candy from a stranger? Everyone's eating apples with razor blades and only complaining when they nearly bleed to death.

TFA lists short run arguments against autonomous robot killers, but a long run argument is that with them, the arms race will get so out-of-control that it will entirely consume the worlds' economies. Once both "sides" have them, they'll just fight amongst themselves, and both sides will have to deploy better and more numerous bots. Since no humans will be dying, there'll be much less pressure to restrict the scale of the wars. With R/C killers, there's still some limit on how many killers can operate per human (necessary to make the kill decision). Even if they do everything autonomously except kill, that still imposes some kind of limit. What happens when all the world is destitute? Chaos, unrestricted warfare, etc. So banning these things isn't a bad idea. The biggest problem I see with enforcing a ban is discerning between R/C killers and fully autonomous killers. R/Cs will become so sophisticated that they'll do everything themselves up to the point of pulling the trigger. From an outside observer, would it be clear whether a human ordered it to execute or an additional single line of code did it? "Today there are no victims of fully autonomous weapons..." Really? How do you know? Author should have said "...as far as I know."

8 years, this year. But when the people whose 401ks are worth 1/2 what they were 8 years ago still don't recover this year, you're going to have to start saying "9 years". There was a permanent loss of wealth, or at least the value on paper of it, and it's not coming back. Gains since then are gains since then, not restoration of what was lost. 401ks and the current "retirement system" are deeply flawed, because they were designed to supplant pensions, not to sufficiently support the retirees.

Exactly. And after the cabin's warm, for most of us within 10 minutes, most of that heat is again wasted because we don't really want the interior to stay above 80F.