Here in Michigan, where the law says utilities must produce 10% of electricity from renewable sources by 2015 (a low standard compared to other states) I am constantly offered an opportunity to pay extra for my energy to be renewable. Since the utilities are ramping up to the 10% minimum anyway they'll produce no more renewable energy if I pay the premium and no less if I don't. They produced about 4% from renewable sources in 2013. Hence, all the surcharges are is a marketing gimmick and all subscribing does is allow them to sell me the same power at a higher profit margin.

I wonder if this has applications in solar power. If you have 100% of light absorbed, the energy has to go somewhere - presumably it heats up.

Given the fact that the OP says "She can't breathe on her own," I assume that she is still in the hospital and they are not asking for a home based solution. Researchers are attempting to replicate the fMRI results using EEG, but for now it is still hospital based. http://www.nature.com/news/neu...

fMRI looks at what regions of the brain are active (by looking at which the rate at which different regions consume oxygen) and has been used to communicate with patients that can not otherwise communicate. First the patient is told to imagine two different activities (one at a time) like walking through a house and playing tennis. The pattern of brain activation is different for each thing but consistent between trials. Then, you can ask questions like "imagine playing tennis if X or walking through the house if not X" The results have been widely replicated. It has been widely used in MCS (minimally conscious state) but no reason it should not work in locked in patients. You can google it and find lots of article. Here are a couple. http://www.medscape.com/viewar... http://www.safar.pitt.edu/arch...

You surely realize that all of his suggestions were sarcastic, don't you?

In fact, there have been problems with Muslim opposition to vaccination, including opposition from the Taliban since long before the U.S. killed Bin Laden.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poliomyelitis_eradication

In fact Muslim suspicion of vaccines has been a problem for over a decade, causing vaccinations programs to be suspended repeatedly.

However, even if the U.S. disguising an intelligence worker was the cause of the suspicion, would you excuse the killing of firemen by AQ if the U.S. had disguised somebody as a fireman or do people have an obligation to support society and civilization?

even if the problem was not oversimplified. The problem is less that productivity increased but more that political power is more concentrated. I get micropayments for some of my content now, using Google's adsense. It's not enough to buy a cup of coffee a day and I've worked at it. Fundamentally, the problem is how society is structured and the balance between the power of labor and capital. We've seen other great revolutions in productivity from the agricultural to the industrial revolutions. When society distributes those gains more equitably, civilization flourishes and standards of living go up.

because I can't imagine the scenario in which they uncovered that plot by looking at the metadata from American cellphones.

You take a young researcher who has put 7 years into a PhD and 3 into a postdoc, have them write grants that on average grant 20% of applicants funding, and give them a mandate to publish or kiss their career goodbye. They can't take a chance on looking at a hypothesis that has a small chance of revolutionizing their field, because if it doesn't pan out they are screwed. So, the researcher chooses a hypothesis that is safe. They spend a year or two gathering data at great expense. Now, if that data comes back and is ambiguous there is a strong incentive to use the data set to test other hypotheses. The problem with that is eventually you find a hypothesis that gives significant results just by chance. Some of the solutions are to:

1. 1. Evaluate based on more than just publications. Look at what the scientist did, why they did it, and how they did it.
2. 2. Get journals to publish negative results. That way if you test a theory and find it is wrong, it still counts as successful research.
3. 3. Set aside 20% of research funds to fund replication of published studies. Right now there is no downside to publishing a result that is likely spurious because nobody is likely to figure it out for decades. If a researcher knows that there is a 20% chance his study will be replicated the following year it will make him very careful to do things right. Make reproducing experiments count toward career progression.
4. 4. Include grant applications with the papers that they produce. That way readers can see if the hypothesis tested in the paper is actually the one that the scientist set out to test. If not, there should be information on why and on how many alternate hypotheses were tested.

Actually, a lot of that delay was to try to accommodate Republican state legislatures and Governors in the hopes that they would step up to the plate and create state run exchanges. In my state (Michigan) the Republican Governor fought the Republican Legislature to be able to build our own exchange but lost.

So you are advocating that journalists keep all their data on computer because we all know that if data is encrypted that computers are impregnable fortresses of data security -NOT. When data brokerage services, hundreds of U.S. companies, the Iranian nuclear program, and banks are hacked, botnets run wild, not to mention the NSA spying I would argue that even if you had an IT security department you might be safer keeping only paper records.

E-mail is fundamentally insecure. SMTP is easily spoofed because it has no authentication mechanism. By default every message travels unencrypted and nobody bothers to correct that. I can not remember the last time I got an e-mail that was encrypted. Sure gmail may provide me with an ssl connection to read my mail but any message in my inbox could have bounced all over the net in the clear. Every large e-mail provider has been repeatedly hacked. If you have are using a set of insecure protocols with no encryption adding another possibly insecure service doesn't change things much.