No, Musk should not refocus on batteries. Here's the thing. The cars he is building are battery-agnostic. If someone produces a breakthrough in battery durability, power density, etc., he doesn't have to change his vehicle designs. With a little engineering, he can plop the new, better batteries right into his cars and keep on producing them. Whereas battery tech is risky. Musk is on top of lithium-ion batteries, but if (or rather, when) someone patents something better and brings it to market, he'll be out of luck if his business is built around lithium-ion batteries. If Musk hopes to keep Tesla going as a long-term proposition, he's much safer sticking with well-engineered cars, and keeping batteries as a sideline that he can jettison later on.

I can't comment on the other games, but as an old-time Neverwinter Nights 1 player, I can say with certainty that players can still directly connect to a player-run server if they know the IP address. What we're losing is just the ability to connect randomly to people on a service. Random players hooking up for communal play doesn't really work out that well, if the truth be told. There are a lot of play styles, tons of different ideas about how to extract fun out of a game, varying levels of maturity. Not all are compatible. Best thing to do is to look for like-minded people on forums, or try one of the persistent servers who also announce their existence on forums.

The assumption that memory suffers from no losses is just about the worst possible assumption you could make. There is plenty of evidence to the contrary: human memory is lossy. Any conclusions arising from an assumption like that one is not going to get us closer to an understanding of human consciousness.

I wish. Seriously, I wish I could agree with your statement that continuous acceleration of 1 gravity for the duration of a trip to a nearby star was within our technical grasp. It is not. If you call for continuous acceleration for the entire trip, our options are various extremely low-acceleration reaction mass drives (electric, ion, etc.) or light sails. Either will take multiple generations to reach even the nearest star. And if you *don't* insist on continuous acceleration, but instead call for a boost, drift and deceleration phases, it will also take generations. The Alcubierre Drive sounds very nice, but it's not within our technological grasp. It's not even certain that the physics behind the idea are sound. As for maintaining 1G for years, as opposed to minutes, we have no technology that can do that. None whatsoever. Further, it's by no means certain that we will ever develop that technology. It's a very, very speculative proposition.

This is not a new idea. http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/...