Anyone interested in this might enjoy the novel "Termination Shock" by Stephenson.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0063...
Lots of interesting speculation on geoengineering, wrapped in a good story. A very plausible future.

That link sucks. Just brief news coverage.
Here are some better references:

http://www.paconsulting.com/events/the-pa-raspberry-pi-competition-winners-announced/

http://www.paconsulting.com/introducing-pas-media-site/releases/a-pill-dispenser-and-an-air-quality-monitor-all-from-a-25-raspberry-pi-21-march-2013/

Just think, once everyone is using these we can shrink an office building down to the size of an armoire. Everyone's bot can scurry around the small building being in each other's presence. It will save oodles of money. Of course, once we've done that, we'll realize that the office building is a logical concept that doesn't need a physical presence, and we'll create a virtual office, with virtual presence bots, where everyone roams the virtual halls. And we'll call it WOW or Minecraft, or something like that. World of MeetingCraft?

No, no, you missed the point of the whole story, which is: hey these machines are soooo cooooool!!!!
And it's true. They are.
Wait, were we supposed to be posting news?

Agreed. I'd also like to see this same analysis applied to actual presidential elections of the past, not just primaries. Especially a close one like 2000. It's great work that should be continued. Basically a Freakonomics approach to elections.

If only we were a little smarter we would be able to work out the ethics of this once and for all. Here, take this.

Exactly. We try to improve ourselves in countless other ways. Diet, exercise, sunscreen, makeup, plastic surgery, moisturizer, viagra, propecia, yoga, and on and on. To me that's not even a question. We can and should improve ourselves.

Now the questions that remain are
What are the benefits? What are the side effects, short and long term? What is the tradeoff?
Are there broad public health concerns, like addiction?
What is the cost - and is this going to deepen class inequality?

From my perspective, the government should have *very* *very* good reasons before they consider taking away my right to weigh my options and decide what substances I will put in my body.

And for what it's worth, when there are drugs that make us smarter, with minimal side effects, I'm all for taking them and getting them to as many people as possible. We need more smarts around here. Meaning everywhere on the planet.

Well, you're right that it's not a car. But it also not a golf cart.
No, it's an autorickshaw, and (if this is not vaporware) they will buy it because there are already probably a hundred million of them in India, home of Tata Motors.

My aunt was in Iraq with the army the first time around and had a good story. She described a US armor force who had detected a line of Iraqi tanks and decided to engage them. They took out the first one in the line, then the second one. The Iraqis couldn't see the US tanks, so they had no idea where the fire was coming from and therefore couldn't return fire. After tank 1 and tank 2 blew, the US forces could see the guys scrambling out of tank 3. They gave them a few seconds to get out and get away then blew the tank, and so on down the line.

The lesson is, the force with the better detection/sensors/eyes can engage an enemy before that enemy even knows there is a fight, provided their weapons have sufficient range. A slight edge in information becomes overwhelming superiority.

Applying this to space, if we have two opposing forces, and one has a Hubble telescope level optics capability where the other doesn't, those with the capability will be able to engage in the fight at a much greater distance, and pick off the adversary at will.

Of course they will need an advantage in weapons range, too. In space you can't afford to use up your limited mass to attack, because sooner or later you'll run out, and it will affect your trajectory. It will be all about energy weapons, including lasers. And making those effective at distance is also dependent on your optics.

So, optics for observation and optics for achieving high range with energy weapons leads to force superiority in space.

Yes. We need way more than 32 characters. Unless you want everyone yelling all the time. (I think without lower and caps people will default to all caps. ick)
And we need a decent amount of punctuation. Period, comma, apostrophe, question mark, and exclamation are all essential for basic communication. Quotes, hyphen, @ sign, etc are nice to have, and we're already over the 32 char limit. And we didn't even talk about numbers yet. 32 char won't work.