Sure, but I patented the process of suing patent trolls. Pay up.

> The price is about to crash as the new ASIC miners come out

The mining rate is self stabilising. Throwing more CPU at mining simply changes the distribution of who gets the newly mined coins, not how many coins are mined. (There's a threshold in the hash space that gets lowered to make mining coins more difficult).

Should we be concerned about eliminating pathogens that we have co-evolved with and that help build our immune systems (for those of us that aren't killed by them)? Is there an unintended consequence building up here?

Or in other words - what could possibly go wrong?

The total amount of solar power incident on the earth is about 130,000 TW.

Pretty close - it's approximately 1.74 × 10^17 W

Terra being 10^12 would make that 1.74 * 10^5 TW or 174,000 TW.

Sunlight

So it's not efficient then? I mean, efficient with respect to what?

For the record there are other Tokamak's, I believe the most advanced to date is KSTAR, which uses superconducting electromagnets, which are a critical part of ITERs design.

Clearly the statistical analyses' are wrong for at least two of those companies. The prior probability of risk for a given disease is 'average', and if you don't test enough polymorphisms or if the correlations are weak then it remains average. Trouble is you can't make a business case on selling such weak information, so there's an incentive to spice up the summary info they provide.

In short, 5 to 10 years.

How ironic then that while these quants were specifying the need for high accuracy calculations, that the maths turned out to be fundametally wrong in a spectacular fashion. They would have done far better if they'd simply spent an evening or two reading Mandelbrot or Taleb. Ho hum.

True, and you're also one software/hardware bug away from creating the infamous grey goo - or at the very least killing everyone on the planet without creating a grey goo. I'm not sure if Kurzweil has ever addressed this specific issue, I guess he would say that biological life would be defunct at that point and we'd all hav either uploaded our minds to an artificial substrate or will have been wiped out and replaced by some machine intelligence. Happy new year!

OK but what if you want to put them inside nanobots designed to target and kill cancer cells or a zillion other applications that are made possible by smaller and less power hungry computation? Smaller also means more powerful computers at the 'classic' scale, for which we know there is demand for right now by way of the very existence of supercomputers.