They probably didn't have 38 staff for the whole time.

Battery technology should be making a leap pretty soon. But I'm not familiar with the time scales of these sorts of advancements: https://www.futurity.org/ceram...

Hopefully the technology will become available in consumer devices at a point when it still has the power to impress us with a charge that can last a few days.

Don't the situations referenced in the article suggest that you're dead wrong? ITER is the alternative and it's not happening fast *enough*. It took billionaires to move things along more quickly.

If there's no economic advantage to recycling over dumping, maybe recycling isn't worth it. Ideally you'd be able to tell that recycling is actually happening because it'd be cheaper than dumping. Of course I'm ignoring the environmental impact. If that's the only benefit of recycling, I fear we're doing something wrong.

Has anyone accounted for new battery technology developed with the help of the inventor of the original lithium-ion battery technology? https://news.utexas.edu/2017/0...

These seem to be predictions of our reality being a simulation, which is not really the same as alien life having integrated itself into reality. One prediction that the article suggests is that dark matter turns out to be much more complex than simply hidden matter.

If someone could make a service that is an umbrella for all of these, I bet it would be popular. "MetaPlay"... although it would be nice to have something similar for social networking too, not just games. Combine my Facebook, Google and LinkedIn networks... maybe under the same umbrella as Steam and UPlay. I imagine it could turn out really crappy, but if they did a really good job, maybe even linking contacts across networks if they were the same person, I'd be interested. Of course then I'd want more control over my circles so I'm not trying to play MMOs with my professional contacts.

That would probably violate patent and copyright law left and right, though.

Some games are only available on UPlay; that's the only reason I use it. I think I got some Humble Bundle games that required UPlay. Also, they gave away something like 7 games in 7 months last year. I now have the following games for free (guess there were some I didn't even bother claiming):

• Assassins Creed III
• Beyond Good & Evil
• Rayman Origins
• The Crew

I actually haven't played any of them since getting them on UPlay, but I intend to play some of them.

If you love some of their series, the lack of updates, extra information and features shouldn't stop you from using UPlay since, before we had gaming services like this, all we had were discs, which lacked the same things, although I'm not sure exactly what "extra information" you're referring to. Obviously information is not hard to come by any more; there are plenty of links from UPlay to game-related info.

I don't know if UPlay points-based features were missing when you last used UPlay, but there are extra features in at least some games now. For example, Heroes of Might and Magic VI will let you collect U points in the game. I think these are shared across all games, but I have only been playing this game, so I used them for the same game. With them I buy in-game portraits and power ups in the UPlay UI, and you can also accessorize your system with other point-based purchases like wallpapers.

Given what we just found (or rather, probably found a while back, but just decided was interesting)? Yeah, iron and nickel. In fact, it's already round-ish, so maybe we just make one giant one out of the core of that. :)

It's not *complete* nonsense. The only phrase they neglected to include was, "at the current market price." I don't think this measurement is as useful in an economic context as in an order of magnitude context. If you told people that there was an asteroid out there with about a billion megatons of iron and nickel (if I did my math right), they might not be able to put it in context as well as if you told them how much that is worth at the current market rate -- more than all the economies on the planet. It is a little sensational and misleading because obviously you can't extract anywhere near that much value from it, but it does help understand the order of magnitude a little. Also, maybe the space program deserves a little benefit of the doubt these days having been cut so much due to irrational psychological issues screwing their budget over. Maybe people who can't put money in a proper context deserve to be misled a little in the other direction with a story that shows what kind of value the space program can offer if you give it a chance.

Self-parking cars came before self-driving cars. What do you see is holding this back? Is it the lack of accurate maps? Is it the understanding unusual road signs or detours? Is it the ability to respond to unpredictable road conditions and obstructions? Is it all of the above? I take it you're not a believer in an imminent technological singularity. Neural networks have shown some remarkable abilities to learn new information without having to be specifically programmed for every outcome. Couldn't they be applied to the problems above to solve them the same way humans solve them? Do you think that will take many decades? I think if we even get close, they will have a huge advantage in that, as soon as one car learns, every car can learn the same thing because it's easier to copy and transmit technology than biology.

It will.

I suspect that, as soon as the accident rate for automated drivers is lower than that of human drivers, insurance companies will not only be open to insuring automated vehicles, but promoting it. Furthermore, I think we've already passed that point.

The bus service in my area has a monthly pass option. I suspect Lyft would offer multiple or alternate pricing plans with a similar idea that can make the service more cost effective for people depending how they use the service.

I fixed some bugs relating to the player getting stuck in the top left corner and other behaviors when playing an edited level loaded from the URL. Hopefully that resolves the problems mentioned in your most recent post.