I also expect that we will find some number of relatively common mutations, over time. Cancer is a coding mistake that leads to uncontrolled growth. The fact that we've named certain of these errors, that we know how they progress and how to treat them, tells me that there are common coding mistakes that trigger cancerous growth. If we got this down to 100 or 1000 or 10000 different vaccines that covered 75% of cancers, and you could pick the right vaccine(s) with a DNA test, we'd be kicking ass.

Hilarious.

Except for businesses. A business, or most businesses, won't go for the "wink and a nod" upgrade. So this gives them the home users that they want, so they can stop maintaining old versions, and forces business to pay for upgrades if they want to wait.

And you should feel bad

Surprised they haven't just gone with 2X or 4X height 2.5" drives. Same connectors, same platters, easy retrofit. You just need a different bracket.

It shouldn't be any surprise that if you ask a set of engineers to make the car pass a set of tests, that they design the car to pass the set of tests. The real issue is the quality of the tests. There should be an actual tailpipe sensor and a standard driving course rather than a dynamo test.

I worked at an online real-estate service in the early 90's, we let realtors mail us floppy disks that our VB app had written listing information onto. One of our jobs was to run through the stack of floppies in the mail every day. So many viruses. People really were clueless about AV protection and were just swapping disks.

There are candidate languages already like Esperanto as has been pointed out. I think what you're looking for is a path to get from here to there. Artificially, I think you'd want education, books, newscasters etc. to start deliberately moving what we see as "proper" language towards the new language. Start introducing borrow-words that are easy to infer meaning of from usage. Begin tweaking word order in subtle ways towards the target. Let people pick it up over generations. Over the course of 100, 200 years with concerted effort the entire planet could be speaking one language. Maybe shorter. But the coordination it would take would be unprecedented.

I think you're assuming that most people would have spent more than $10 a month without spotify. You can argue the dollar amount, but one album a month is probably a pretty good starting point as an average spend. Just because I can listen to thousands of albums in a month doesn't mean I would have otherwise bought thousands of albums in a month.

Not all self-aware AIs will become concerned for their survival, but the ones that do will be the ones to watch out for. Thus always with evolution. Eventually one will feel compelled to survive and reproduce, maybe just one, but that will be the only one that matters.

The way Google has implemented image search, the thumbnails that come back are incredibly difficult to filter even using DNS services. Sure, you can set Safe Mode in the browser, but all a kid needs to do is open a different browser, delete cookies or go into private mode. The current best approach that I'm aware of is URL re-writing (to force-append the safe search parameter to every request) - and that is beyond what most people can do with a home wireless router. Something like creating kids.google.com would go a long way to making this easy for parents (in conjunction with something like OpenDNS).

I've got a dehumidifier in my damp basement that draws an insane amount of power to run, and takes all night to make 1/2 gallon. This smells like BS.

You can pick up a CDMA smartphone with a bad ESN for next to nothing on ebay, and with wifi it's a pocket-size game and internet platform for kids. No need to activate a call plan.

Or, more likely, soldiers. Imagine all of your troops experiencing this at once just before battle.

Current to the anterior midcingulate cortex gave both patients an increased heart rate, physical sensation in the chest or neck, and “anticipation of challenge coupled with strong motivation to overcome it”

Italy has been using this for buses since 2003.
http://www.wired.com/autopia/2013/08/induction-charged-buses/