Humanity's power generation is currently negligible compared to the amount of energy injected into Earth's ecosystem by the Sun. However, at current growth rates that will not hold true for long. If the current growth rate of about 2.3% is maintained (which it cannot be), then in about 400 years we will produce as much energy as falls on the Earth from the Sun. By that point in time, the surface temperatures on Earth would have raised by about 50 Celsius, making human habitation close to impossible.

Well, that's not entirely true... Hydrogen buildup and ignition can result an explosion, which did happen at Fukushima. I don't think this is what the GP had in mind, though. Nuclear piles are designed such that criticality cannot result in a nuclear detonation (actually, it takes careful design to achieve nuclear detonation even with weapons-grade fissile material). Worst case, in older designs, is that the nuclear fuel melts through its containment vessel, resulting in a radioactive leak.

Hell, I would settle for them not being immediately hired as CEO elsewhere. Where did all the competent leaders go? Were they just a myth?

+1 surreal

Short answer is no. Although there are plenty of other semiconductor devices that can operate in the microwave.

The "quantum" part of quantum dots is that the effective bandgap of the semiconductor, which controls the wavelength of luminescence, is increased by quantum confinement. Google particle in a box for more information.

It's pretty stable in salt form---much less of a problem than elemental Cd from batteries or Hg from florescent lights. Also, it's pretty well encapsulated in the TVs.

Not to mention pretty much everyone has a GaAs amplifier chip in their cell phone. Also CD and DVD drives use GaAs-based lasers.

Silicon has many distinct advantages over GaAs for logic. To many to go in to here.

How exactly is version control useful for writing documents? Backups I can understand, but version control? I'll sometimes save copies with a v1, v2, etc. appended just to have a fall-back in case something goes wrong, but I don't think I've ever actually needed to go back to a previous version.

+1 Python. Write first, optimize later (if at all) using Cython or separate C packages. I'm also keeping an eye on the Nim language; it's still too buggy for real use, though.

I used to use the Enthought python distribution, but it's become too complicated. I've now moved to compiling and installing python through homebrew on my Mac, and then installing the python packages from the pypi repository. I highly recommend using homebrew for anything you want to run from the command line.

For Windows boxes, I've been installing Anaconda Python.

As for IDE, I've been very happy with the eclipse-based Aptana Studio 3, with pydev. I still use VIM for small scripts, but the features provided by pydev, such as refactoring, are very handy for larger projects.

I second choosing Mac. The relatively new package manager, Homebrew, is a dream come true. It makes compiling, installing, and managing open source software a breeze (easier than most linux distributions). I very rarely need to use linux any more, but interacting with it over the network is easy through ssh, etc.

There was a 1-2 week learning curve coming from Windows/Linux, but it was well worth it.

You're eyes are focused at infinity with this gen. of VR, so no eye strain. It's unclear if there will be any long-term physiological affects, though. Eventually, retinal displays will have shifting focus based on the in-world content.

“Work keeps at bay three great evils: boredom, vice, and need.”
- Voltaire, Candide (1759)

One of the worst things you can do to a man is to take away his purpose.

No, the antivirus just became self aware, and then immediately committed suicide out of disgust.

I think you mean thermal steady state. A body at 140-300 K being illuminated by a ~6000 K blackbody radiation source is far from equilibrium.

Also, shipping dry ice around is probably overkill. The difference between night-time and day-time surface temperatures on Mars can be as high as ~150 K, and the low night-time surface temperatures means high Carnot efficiencies are possible (eta = 1 - T_C/T_H ~= 1 - 150/300 ~= 50%). The possibility of cheaply exploiting that difference in large heat engines could make it economical compared to photovoltaics. It might even be possible to combine the two in the same system, with waste heat from the photovoltaic cells going in to the heat engine.

I get about 5x lower bandwidth streaming movies from Amazon than from Netflix. I've stopped renting HD movies from Amazon because the buffering kills it. Netflix happens to have paid to AT&T (my ISP) to get preferred service [1].

Hmm... That sounds an awful lot like a "fast lane" to me.

[1] http://time.com/3059431/netfli...