One of my favorites!

You practically read my mind. Really, anything Banks is good, as would something from Alastair Reynolds.

It says incident light - light that strikes the surface and is not reflected. So that means 44% of the light striking the absorption surface (the black portion of the chip) is converted into electricity. Percent is percent, regardless of the amount of incoming light.

It always bothers me when people make the argument against immortality that it won't happen within 'the next generation', and that that means they won't live long enough to see it. It treats immortality as a boolean value, when it is most certainly not.

Cop-out - and an erroneous one, at that.

*sigh* It is knee-jerk reactions without considering the practical effects, that got us into such a lawyer-happy environment in the first place. You believe that Google's actions are okay? Let us look at some of the consequences of such a viewpoint as applied to more common real-world instances.

I agree with your sentiment, but it doesn't make stealing their logo morally okay.

I'll just say this:

My uncle was 6'6", and my younger brother is around 6'5". I'm lucky to be quite a bit shorter.

Stephen Baxter's Manifold series. A favorite of mine, in fact.

You are correct in that depending on the situation this may not permanently remove carbon from the atmosphere - but that is not absolutely correct. You have the right idea, but you make several oversights in your post, which causes you to falter slightly.

I can see why you might disagree on that specific point. It is something that perhaps does not come naturally, or at all without some effort.

Remember, being unable to do something is different from being unable to learn to do something.

I did not say that it was an innate understanding - it is something you most definitely must learn. However, numbers like these are only difficult to grasp if you approach them linearly. A better way is through volume.

In the grand scheme of things, a billion isn't that large really. It is merely a thousand million, or a thousand thousand thousand. Considering that a thousand years is well within human terms, a billion is a perfectly graspable number if you know how to apply scale. Our universe is young - star formation isn't…

What is the most viscerally satisfying part of using the typewriter? Is it the satisfying click of the keys, the ker-CHING when you go to a new line? Or perhaps it is something else entirely...

I've read that book! I can't for the life of me remember the title though.

The heat transfer efficiency is 4000 times better - however, it is offset by the higher cost of moving the water around (it is quite a bit more dense than air) . In the end, the net monetary savings are $1.25 million

And here I was thinking that water boiled at 212°F!