Where are these websites that Google is supposedly creating? Can someone link to an example?

Chrome saves addresses you enter for shipping destinations, so it can autofill them on other websites. Maybe the OP entered his grandparent's addresses one some website when ordering something online to be shipped to them?

You can commit as much assholery and dumfukery on your personal social media as you want to. But if you can't leave it behind when you are developing software and act as though you are a civil adult human, you need to take some time off and learn interpersonal skills.

I don't care how great your coding skills are, you can do far more damage to a project with assholery than buggery.

Unfortunately account hijacking due to password re-use is so common that Google has to detect what look like suspicious logins (ie. from a different device, or in a different country, or at an unusual time) and ask additional challenge questions. However, in this case you can enter ANY phone number - it doesn't have to be your own.

If every miner stopped today, they network would adjust the difficulty down, down, down, to the point where a single miner on a desktop PC could quickly process the low volume of transactions for the whole network and start farming up BTC.

If every miner stopped today, Bitcoin would die. Difficulty isn't adjusted based on time, but on blocks mined. Specifically, after every 2016 blocks, the difficulty is adjusted up or down by no more than a factor of 4. With nobody mining, the difficulty is never adjusted, and the required computing power to re-start the network is the same as it was when the shutdown happened.

Bitcoin can survive gradual changes in available computing power, but not rapid shifts.

It's not even remotely practical. An airplane's wings and fuselage are made out of a combination of high strength-to-weight materials and clever geometry. Batteries have pretty much zero structural strength, and seriously restrict what sort of geometry you can use.

A human can't maintain the level of vigilance needed to take over in an emergency for more than a few minutes. It's better to lift the "human driver" requirement explicitly than it is to pretend that the passenger sitting in the front-left seat is a safety measure.

None of the N-1 explosions killed anybody. Maybe you're thinking of the Nedelin disaster, where the pad explosion of an R-16 killed about a hundred people. The Soviet Union didn't have just one space program, it had three, and the N-1 and R-16 were from different programs.

And although it would turn up a lot of false positives, it would also catch a lot of cancers very, very early, making survival rates higher and costs lower.

It's not something people like to talk about, but early detection doesn't correspond to improved survival (see, for example, Screening for prostate cancer: systematic review and meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials ).

Forty years ago, prostate cancer was considered a fast-moving, highly lethal cancer. PSA screening was introduced, with a heavy push for annual screening of men over the age of 50. Large number of men tested positive, and a metric shitload of tumors were found and treated. And the death rate didn't go down.

For the past several decades, there's been a heavy push for frequent breast examinations and mammograms for women, the idea being that if breast cancer is detected in the early stages, it's easy to treat and many lives will be saved. The detection rate has certainly gone up, as has the number of tumors treated. The death rate? Hardly budged.

It's something of an article of faith among anti-cancer activists that screening and early treatment save lives. In practice, the vast majority of improvement in cancer survival has come from improved treatments, not improved detection. Most people with early-stage cancer either have something so slow-growing that it can be safely treated at a later date (or not at all), or something so fast-growing that they'll die despite treatment. The percent of cancers where early treatment will improve the outcome is believed to be in the low single digits.

Power 7 and later, yes, Power 6 and earlier, no, and I don't know about System/Z.

Skip the fix. It doesn't help you.

There are three threat situations involved here: one process attacking another process, one process attacking the kernel, and sandboxed code (think: Javascript) attacking parts of the process outside the sandbox.

Intel's fix is a partial fix for the first two situations (cache contamination is not the only way for information to leak, it's just the easiest and most reliable one to exploit), and is important for cloud and shared-hosting providers. It does absolutely nothing to mitigate the third situation, where sandboxed code is trying to read memory outside the sandbox, yet that situation is the one that desktop users are most vulnerable to.

All Intel CPUs that support speculative execution are vulnerable. That means the Pentium Pro and newer, all Celeron and Xeon CPUs, all Core CPUs, and all Atom CPUs except the early "Bonnell" architecture. If you've got an original-flavor Pentium or earlier, you're fine. If you've got a first-generation Atom CPU, you're fine. If you're one of those suckers who bet on Itanium, you're fine. Anything else, you need an update.

Does anyone know how this is going to affect the embedded world?

ARM is largely immune to Meltdown and Spectre. Both attacks require out-of-order execution; most ARM CPUs are strictly in-order devices.

Any documents you have stored in google cloud / docs / drive are already being scanned by their software - how else could those docs be displayed and indexed?

Further scanning for malware or whatever isn't done by humans - it's fully automated, implemented by software that in the recent case happened to be buggy.