The temperature of space is 2.725K. That's quite cold. Now, there are some particles in space that are at much higher temperatures. Obviously the particles streaming from the Sun are quite hot, for example. But their very low density means that they don't have all that much impact on the temperatures of objects in our solar system. For most objects in our solar system, that's set just by the thermal radiation from the Sun, and what the objects in question do with said radiation (how much they absorb and how much they emit).

There's also the point to be made that high-efficient power transmission over long distances requires high voltage, and there is always some loss in converting to/from the high voltage power for transmission. I'm reasonably sure that there would be far less required in terms of voltage/frequency conversion with superconducting lines. At any rate, we could still reduce long-distance power transmission costs by improving the grid with current technologies, even without room temperature superconductors.

In practice, you can cool satellites pretty darned far. WMAP is cooled to 90K passively. Planck is cooled to 50K passively. So yes, it is very possible to cool satellites to within the superconductivity range of modern high-temperature superconductors.

The problem actually has nothing to do with the Post Office's business model. The USPS makes quite significant profits. The problem, instead, has to do with Republican legislation put into law in 2006 built with the very purpose of killing the USPS: the USPS has to forward-pay the benefits of its employees *for 75 years into the future*. See here:
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/09/28/330524/postal-non-crisis-post-office-save-itself/

So basically, we shouldn't have to deal with this. But the Republicans want to kill the post office.

These days, it seems to me that the place to read a large variety of in-depth, thought-provoking writing for general audiences lies in the blogosphere. Of course, the blogosphere varies tremendously in content and in quality, and I really have no clue how much this compares in terms of volume with previous ideas. But I strongly suspect the author is concerned only with the popular news media, and ignoring new media (well, it looks like new media is mentioned and dismissed in a single sentence). But I don't think there is any real problem with a lack of good, in-depth, well thought out ideas.

Another point to be made is that you can't dumbly compare fractions of media content over time and expect them to compare. The difficulty here is that you might be reaching different groups of people entirely. For instance, the places where you saw thought-provoking essays in the past were generally magazines, many of which were read primarily by people in the middle class and higher, not by poorer people. But these days, even poorer people have no difficulty getting online, so even if the previous magazine readers have moved online for their reading, so have the people who never read magazines in the first place. So even if the number of thought-provoking essays goes down as a fraction of total web content, it may still be reaching no smaller a readership than it did before.

So, in the end, I guess I'll just leave it that I am skeptical.

The problem here is that this idea is only a modification of the way in which gravity falls off with distance. Our current observations completely eliminate that as a possible explanation for our observations of dark matter. Basically, we have observed some systems where the physics of the situation has separated dark matter from normal matter (because normal matter experiences friction, while dark matter does not), and found that the mass surrounds the dark matter, not the normal matter. This kind of observation simply cannot be explained by a simple modification of how gravity falls off with distance. Here is a blog post by a cosmologist detailing the most striking example of this kind of observation:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2006/08/21/dark-matter-exists/

In fact, our observations of dark matter to date are so varied that it is incredibly difficult to come up with any alternative models that are able to explain them all. As Sean Carroll noted, the evidence is now quite strong that dark matter really exists.

So where's the beating? I haven't yet seen a refutation of the data in the study.

Give it more than a few hours. Sometimes it takes a little bit of time. And yes, the author of this study is a well-known denialist who has, in the past, put out quite a bit of just plain wrong stuff. For example:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2011/04/review-of-spencers-great-global-warming-blunder/

So I would recommend a little bit of patience. Given past experience, my bet is that this study will be thoroughly taken apart by scientists who actually know what they are doing.

Well, PZ Myers at Pharyngula does do biology-related science periodically. But yes, he doesn't post about science nearly as often as he does about things like creationism and really loony religious behavior.

One of the primary problems with the popular media, is that it tends to be overly-sensationalistic. Every time I read a popular news article, I am extremely skeptical. This is largely because when it is an article about something which I already know quite a lot about, very often I find it is overblown at best, completely wrong at worst.

As a result, these days I try as much as I can to get my science information directly from scientists and science writers whom I trust. And that means blogs. There are three good science blogs sites I know of:
scientopia.org
blogs.discovermagazine.com
scienceblogs.com

Basically, I'd suggest browsing them a bit, finding some particular authors you like, and follow them. I'd particularly suggest Ed Yong at Not Exactly Rocket Science for frequent information about general science. I follow Scicurious at Neurotopia for neuroscience and just generally weird stuff. I follow Cosmic Variance mostly for their coverage of high energy physics, as well as the occasional cosmology post. Pharyngula is fun for biology (esp. cephalapod biology) as well as general ranting about the anti-science crowd. MarkCC at Good Math, Bad Math is good for math and programming-related stuff. And there are many, many more.

The really nice thing about blogs is that they form a conversation, so even if there is a mistake in one post, very often it is followed up on later, either by other bloggers or by the same blogger. This fact allows you to trust the information on these blogs much much more strongly than you can ever trust the popular news media. But, of course, this does require that you carefully select which blogs you follow, and are discerning in reading their arguments. If you're able to do that then blogs are by far the most reliable place for news about science for the popular audience.

Meh, in reality you just develop some sufficient tests to ensure that the code behaves properly, and publish the nature and results of those tests in a manner that is sufficient to convince others that the code is working properly. Then, in the event a problem still remains in the code, well, this is why science in general relies upon independent verification of results, so that even if there is an error in the end, others will find it.

Now, for larger projects it is always better to make the code public, and therefore to enforce a degree of readability/maintainability. But for most applications people just aren't that interested in the code: it's more important to get it done than it is to worry about sharing it, because it is highly unlikely that anybody else will want to use it.