Which is an obstacle trivially removed by a bit of well understood government regulation. And if the 60's economy had kept going through today, we would probably have that already.

But a funny thing happened on the way to a worker utopia: Foreign competition became a real threat, for the first time since WWII. Instead of a clamoring to reduce working hours, there was a clamoring to free businesses from regulation so they could compete more effectively with whatever nation seemed ready to eat or lunch.

Without government controls businesses do whatever they think is more profitable and it just cheaper to pay fewer people to work 40 hour weeks than it is to pay more people to work less. Benefits and infrastructure costs scale with employees, not the number of hours they work. It's even better if you can scare them into working more than 40 hour weeks while still only paying them for 40 hour weeks.

The exception is low paid hourly workers, where it is cheapest to limit hours to part time so you can dispense with paying any benefits at all. Now since these positions are almost always service roles with no foreign competition, you might think that something could be done with such travesties. But no such luck. Government controls would ruin us all. After all, if we paid pizza delivery guys more then the Chinese would take over the pizza business. Or maybe it is because other businesses would become uncompetitive if the cost of pizza went up.

Almost everything I use is open source except for some electronic design tools. However, these tools are kind of important since electronic design is how I make a living. They have no remotely viable open source alternatives and in some cases, no open source alternatives at all.

He didn't do that either. Al Gore was involved in the creation of NREN, the successor to Arpanet and NSFnet and the immediate predecessor to the commercialized Internet we have today. But the Internet already existed and had for several years, dating no later than 1983, with the creation of a gateway between Arpanet and CSnet.

Not necessarily useless, just the answer to a different question. You are focused on "how safe are the roads?" but this chart is about "how safe are the people?".
Driving less is as valid a means of reducing risk of road fatality as making safer roads. Maybe if the US had better public transportation and less urban sprawl there would be fewer traffic fatalities.

From TFA:

So they created some broken mice and then treated them with a drug that reversed what they broke. And, what do you know? The effects were reversed too.

I'd like to see a followup on unmodified mice to see if they also benefit. If Rev-ErbA is already present and active at normal levels, the drug may not do anything.

Yes, actually. It's a combination of limited cell division and selection.

Men produce huge numbers of sperm. Sperm with damaged dna tend not to win the race to the egg.

Women produce far fewer eggs but they do it early in life before much damage can accumulate.

If the zygote does end up with damaged DNA, it usually aborts spontaneous. In fact, about 70% of conceptions abort spontaneously.

So any fetus that survives these trials is generally in good shape at birth. If that baby is female, eggs are then quickly produced for the next generation before much new genetic rot can take place.

Perhaps not.

However, there does appear to be at least one fly in the ointment - material stability. It seems that if you have more than one strand of Carbyne that contacts another one, cross-links will form and will degrade the material’s strength. Money quote from the article; “This barrier suggests the viability of carbyne in condensed phase at room temperature on the order of days”

Bingo! Consciousness is defined in terms of itself.

Actually. No. We think we have conscious experience. We believe this. We don't know it. We don't even really know what it means to say that we do.

Consciousness is nothing more than a place holder for a reason to believe that we are special. It is that something that we are supposed to have that makes us different from everything else. As our machines gain more and more similar behavior, the definition of consciousness will be tightened more and more to exclude them.

These part time residents compete with full time residents for housing. Rents go up and sales go down because people who would live and work in the City and spend more money there are forced out. Maybe they don't even work in SF, collectively nudging jobs and business elsewhere because working in San Francisco isn't nearly as desirable if you can't live there.

It seems to me that if you need two consecutive quarters of negative growth to call it recession, you should also need two consecutive quarters of positive growth to call it an expansion or recovery

One quarter of weak growth doesn't really tell you anything.

I think the problem is the word "require". Require means what is needed to do what I am already doing. Anything that needs more than I can currently get is something I don't do. Hence, it can't "required". When I can get more bandwidth, I'm sure I will find a use for it and I won't want to go back to what I have now. For many people "how much bandwidth do you require?" is really just "how much bandwidth do you currently have?"

The exceptions would be
1) Those who, for whatever reason, can no longer get the bandwidth they once had.
2) Those in the process of upgrading because a new and important application is not fitting into what they have.
3) A few people with money to burn and access to high bandwidth who only use the Internet for Facebook and cat pictures.

An ambiguous but common scenario is where people's expectations are set by the bandwidth they get on their phones. Even though their wired Internet has higher bandwidth, they don't really use it.

The helicopter needs a lot more room to land. Now this isn't terribly important until the "jetpack" is cleared for flying in populated areas but if/when it is the ability to land in a very small space will be a big deal.

In populated areas, the residents will look at the fence as an eyesore and file endless lawsuits to stop it. If you elevate, they will still file endless lawsuits. The only way to satisfy the nimbys is to build it underground. This costs a fortune but it would be exact same for Hyperloop.

Hyperloop doesn't solve any of the land use issues. It just removes the option to lay simple track on bare ground. Going down the unpopulated parts of the I5 corridor is the easy part for both Hyperloop and High Speed Rail. It just ignores the difficulties of getting in and out of cities. For instance, I5 doesn't even go to San Francisco and finding an acceptable connection from the the Central Valley to the Bay Area has been probably *the* biggest land use problem for High Speed Rail.

It wouldn't help anyway. The exception is only for navigation systems built into the car. An add-on gps, even if dedicated to the task is still illegal to use while driving in California.

Don't be ridiculous. We're all about automation. Instead of providing a working but rather inflexible rail system, we will provide you with a fantastic machine that will quickly build any kind of train you can imagine as long as you can describe it accurately using our custom variant of lisp.