I'm glad they can increase Hawking's speech rate by an order of magnitude, but that's a lot of work to accommodate people like Hawking: those with ALS that live more than 10 years. I think only 1% of ALS patients live past 10 years. Hawking has lived 50+ years with ALS, which makes him an incredibly rare case.

My libertarian side wants to agree with you but my pragmatic side keeps kicking it in the balls.

The reason people say that alternative energy sources couldn't support base load is because it would cost an insane amount of money to remake our power grid enough to meet the demand. Look at the examples you gave. A 1 megawatt geothermal plant costs up to $5 million ($5,000/kw). An average coal power plant generates 667 megawatts. A geothermal plant that size could cost up to $3.3 billion dollars!! I couldn't even find an example of molten salt reactors. I think that wave energy could be promising, but it hasn't been explored much yet and people who don't live close to an ocean wouldn't see a single watt of it.

That's exactly what I'm talking about. Until we invent some way to supply over 50% of maximum energy generation (i.e. base load) with inexpensive fuel, like coal, everything you're talking about is a pipe dream. You are talking some fantasy world where we have billions, probably trillions of dollars to spend building out and maintaining a brand new decentralized power grid.

That seems like a lot of words to describe the economy that we DO have, one that responds to incentives. How could you possible incentivize spending a ton of money just to get the same thing we have now? You sound like a guy I once talked to that truly believed that the Star Trek universe, one where a monetized economy no longer exists and people do things just because it's altruistic, could actually exist.

So you're saying you don't mind lowing power on windless days or when the sun goes down? and you don't mind having giant wind turbines in your yard or paying $15k for solar panels on your roof? Mega-sources? You mean 'power plants'? This isn't organic farming for christ's sake. Power plants ARE local sources. You probably have one within 30 miles of where you live. I guarantee that your power is more local than the food you eat.

Solar and wind and every other new-wave energy source is just a way to supplement base load. If you know anything about electricity generation, you should know that the world depends on base load energy: energy generated from reliable sources that accounts for like 70% of all energy usage, i.e. coal, gas and nuclear. Until we find a solution for base load energy like fusion or invent god-like batteries or power lines made of superconductors that cost $100 per mile, everything else is a pipe dream.

If it seems too good to be true... then its probably food made into fuel. Or at least I think that's what they say.

Everyone had been thinking it, but when international standards had to be changed to accommodate the weight gain, Kilo decided to cut out the daily Big Gulps

and the idea is genius. This could never happen without some company pioneering the idea in the private industry. Even if you had the drones flying over major highways, people would get freaked out at flying packages without some kind of massive marketing campaign.

What the hell are CDs? and why would you rip them?

Yes, I completely agree with this post. You aren't allowed to have done drugs in the past 7 years, but that's when people do their drugs if they're just out of college. The lie detector test for the TS/SCI is a big turnoff to a lot of geeks. Relax the rules a bit and get more smart people.

The real problem is that security-related government jobs require security clearances and lie detector tests that exclude a large portion of geeks, in my opinion. They want to make sure you haven't done a bunch of drugs in the past 7 years, but for most smart geeks, that's the time they usually did their drugs. They need to relax the rules on some drugs if they want more talent.

The post seems to say there is more to intelligence than abstract reasoning. How else do you differentiate Man and beast other than the ability for abstraction (aside from the ability to communicate it, I guess). Every other aspect of the human mind is exhibited in other animals, but we are the only ones able to understand our world as a set of abstract concepts. Abstraction is vital in our ability to teach our offspring, to create new tools, to find new strategies. Behaviors that take evolution millenia to develop can be conceptualized and executed in mere seconds by a capable human.

How do you go through an ordeal like that and then spend your time writing that much about it? You can never get the time back you spent rambling about some bug fixes.

You are making that number up because the studies show that medication is the only effective treatment for ADHD. Cognitive and Behavioral Therapy has been shown to have virtually no effect when compared to drugs. Furthermore, there is virtually no additional alleviation of symptoms when medication is combined with CBT. You can dream all you want, but you're just wrong.