How about if we include emissions employees are forced into by commuting to work instead of working from home? That's one area where many big tech companies are effectively spewing with no regard for the environment.

Nick, you rock! Congratulations!

And yet...Lancet, New England Journal retract Covid-19 studies, including one that raised safety concerns about malaria drugs (https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.statnews.com%2F2020%2F06%2F04%2Flancet-retracts-major-covid-19-paper-that-raised-safety-concerns-about-malaria-drugs%2F). I have ZERO trust in any "scientists" or "journalists" when it comes to any topic that either side has decided is political.

The companies should offer insurance against damage caused by space junk and use part of the money to clean up the junk (thus reducing the likelihood that they'll need to payout for damages).

The outage started at 12:38 ET.

But can it seek out raw materials and make copies of itself? THAT would be cool! Welcome to our new nanosize robotic overlords!

Most browsers still have a warning that cannot be bypassed whenever unencrypted content is linked on an encrypted page. The existence of this warning assumes that the end-users understand the basic HTML security model (laughable in the vast majority of cases) and that the server code is buggy and might allow secure data to be sent insecurely. This prevents caching of items on encrypted pages that really should be cacheable (most css, most images, most flash, most javascript). Using SSL despite the lack of caching reduces website performance and increases hosting costs (so that's not likely to happen except when the added security is worth the added cost and wait). IMHO there should be some kind of explicit unsecure-data-within-a-secure-page protocol (httpu://? httpp://) that prevents the browser warning but allows unsecured css/images/javascript/flash/etc. within secure HTML. This way, all those items could be cached at any point along the way (proxy servers, browser, etc.), and we could still provide warnings for buggy websites that unintentionally included content with http://./ A one-time warning similar to the "switching to secure!" warnings could be included for security-paranoid users, and a different icon for pages with this type of content could be used. Ideally, for those same paranoid users, there'd also be a way to quickly asses WHICH items on the page were insecure, like a button that turns on/off the display of either the secure or the insecure parts of the page.

Ultrasonic...sounds like a good way to have your dog pee all over your laptop. No thanks!

Boy, for such a "convenient" measurement system, you sure seem to be confused. A cubic meter of water is NOT a liter and does NOT weigh 1 Kilogram. I'm an AMERICAN and I know THAT!

http://www.metric-conversions.org/volume/cubic-meters-to-liters.htm

In addition to what's already been pointed out about formal vs. informal specifications,

1. Running Linux on top of this is no more safe than running Linux directly on the hardware--it's Linux that crashes (though not very often!)

2. Running this on a CPU that has not been formally proven is nearly useless because only part of the system has been proven, which results in an overall system that is unproven.

I totally agree with your point, but your numbers leave something to be desired...a watt is a measure of energy per unit of time (which is why your electricity bill is in watt-hours). In terms of water, watts is equivalent to something like gallons per minute. So, 4500 terawatts per minute makes about as much sense as 4500 gallons per minute per minute, which only makes sense if you are talking about a CHANGE in the rate of energy output.

Being a scientist, I agree with you for the most part. It's just that there's just so much piss-poor science out there that jumps to wild conclusions with only evidence that the conclusion COULD BE correct instead rather than evidence that the conclusion IS correct. There are equally many silly religions that believe in things that can be scientifically shown to be false. These two facts lead each of those camps to attack the other with personal attacks rather than facts. You are correct that you don't have to believe that one of those is true, it's just that science has no other theories about the origin of a universe that supports life as we know it, so choosing not to believe one of those leaves you with either a belief in God, or NO belief about the origin of life. Are you suggesting another possibility that hasn't been mentioned, or just saying that we shouldn't believe anything until it's proven? Any investigation of truth has to begin with a belief in something (ie. form a hypothesis), right?

My religion happens to believe that spiritual beliefs should NOT be the result of blind belief in anyone else, in heresay, or in anything that cannot be experienced personally. It's not quite scientific, but it's very similar, and it more closely follows the scientific method than most "scientists" seem to these days, because they will blindly accept anything published without trying it out for themselves.

Many people believe that what you say is exactly true of their own religion as well. Science is merely God's way of allowing us to discover what he already knows. Science can never prove why anything happens either--it only comes up with new questions. So "evolution" created man? What or who created the conditions necessary for that evolution to occur? And what created that? And so on. Science has never answered why the universe is the way it is (ie. why life is possible, and why we are here) any better than religion has. It has only discovered a few of the mechanics. In order to truly believe that God does not exist, you must (according to current science) accept that one of the following is true:

1. There are multiple universes each with different values for physical constants
2. Every physical constant's value must differ in different regions of space
3. We just got incredibly, incredibly lucky

There are theories and math for each of these, but just like there is no evidence for God's existence, there is NO OBSERVABLE EVIDENCE for any of these conditions, making a belief in no god just as faith-based as a belief in God. It's just faith in something else.

This whole argument is the problem with education being run by the state. If the state doesn't like what you teach, you're not allowed to teach it. Whatever the state wants to be taught is fact and whatever they don't want taught is not. All you anti-religionists just wait--the state will eventually choose something you believe in to attack next. American History perhaps? The government doesn't care about what's true, only about what's good for them politically. To think otherwise is naive. To have them in control of education is lunacy.

Actually, depending on what you do to "combat global warming," the consequences may be enormous. If human-released carbon isn't an issue, spending money on carbon-fixing and carbon reduction ends up being a complete waste of resources that could have been used doing other more useful things (improving education, sanitation, food production, health care, etc.). The effect of this cannot be minimized because, although nobody talks about it, the cost will certainly be a significant percentage of the world's economy, and would disproportionately affect the poor (because they spend more of their money on energy than the rich). As a result of this fact, much of the proposed changes to combat global warming include redistributing wealth to the poor, which seems to be a popular idea these days, but which, as history has shown, always results in increased government control (ie. loss of freedom) and has never actually resulted in improving the lot of the poor, because giving them a handout without giving them skills to be productive only keeps them poor (and under government control). That particular issue is negated by the fact that we would be giving them money to compensate for artificially high energy prices, but the change in the nature of government that will result from such policies will be disastrous to society. Have you ever thought about how hypocritical it is of Mr. Gore to fly all over the world, spewing millions of tons of CO2 from his private jet, to speak to people about how bad CO2 is? If you believe it's all human-caused, by all means, STOP EMITTING CO2 YOURSELF! If you don't practice what you preach, I for one will not listen to anything you say.