This is like looking at obscurity and declaring it a soul

That's the undergraduate view of AI that gets repeated at times in this place.

The measure of intelligence is that we can't understand it?

Not just yet, so instead of waiting until years of work is done understanding the physical basis of thought the impatient want some sort of measure now.

Any display big enough for development will draw more power than the CPU. (Although I suppose you could kludge some non-backlit e-reader into being a dev system.)

It's also hard to explain how the increasing challenge of getting enough oil and gas is a result of a "false" scarcity

Here's the trick, the people who say there is plenty of stuff are throwing coal, shale, tar and anything else they can think of into the mix and pretend it's the same as easy to extract liquid oil. Another common trick is to pretend that all that unsurveyed land in Iran, the arctic, wherever has huge oil basins when we do not know one way or another. There's plenty of fossil fuels. Oil we can get out of the ground - not so much. The only reason I have the job I have is that the more computing power you have the easier it is to find the stuff from survey data.

Sorry you feel that way. But if you look at my account I've been active since 2009, rather dedicated for an astroturfing account

That's about when PR companies decided to put money into "social media" and this place started to get astroturfed, but it does appear that your comment was wrongly labelled by Exitar.
Let's consider what is now a very old example of this sort of contraversy. The F111 also had a variety of early problems, as mentioned by others here, yet despite all those problems decades ago they were useful enough in some roles that there were retained in service long enough that I saw one flying the year before last. There are none flying now but nearly 40 years of service is enough for a jet fighter isn't it?

I'm sorry, I just read through that paper, and nowhere in it does it say that a decline in Antarctic ice is a forecast of AGW. That's one of the worst examples of "proof by ghost reference" I've ever seen. Not to mention that the paper is mainly focused on the Antarctic Peninsula, the one place that actually gets melt on more than super-rare occasions and juts into a different climate zone.

This problem should solve itself as downloading and cloud-based games take over and game stores disappear. GameStop is closing 120 more locations. Game retailers are going the way of record stores and video rental outlets.

None of your links are to peer reviewed research articles. Three of your statements refer to changes in trends BY THE END OF THIS CENTURY. Your fourth statement amount Britain never seeing snow again is just made up BS. That has never been stated in any research paper on climate.

Developing anything other than a trivial web application requires in depth knowledge of several different technologies, along with a couple different languages, knowledge of browser quirks (no those big libraries don't always get them all), etc. Compared to traditional application development, web development is a bloated and complex mess, or as the original author wrote:

"The web is just an enormous stack of kluges upon hacks upon misbegotten designs".

This statement is absolutely true. The web was never intended for "applications". That happened later. And instead of going back and making the web more conducive for applications, we basically got the equivalent of bad case of technological diarrhea smeared across the web hoping that somehow it would just make everything stick together and work.

Well, it works somewhat. But it certainly isn't pretty.

Go right ahead and point me to where a decline in Antarctic ice was a forecast of AGW.

You do know that - below freezing - there's an inverse correlation between temperature and snowfall, don't you? And I really hope you know that it's very rare that temperatures rise above freezing in the vast majority of Antarctica, whether you add a couple degrees to the temperature or not, right? Or did you not know / ever consider that?

Just because you didn't realize something that should have been really bloody obvious to you doesn't mean it was a scientific prediction by your straw-man scientists.

AEI, for one. $10k for any paper that attacks the IPCC reports. There's other public offers out there, too. And I'm sure they're outnumbered 100 times over by not-so-public ones.

There's nothing mysterious about this. The problem is that if someone gets control of circuit breakers for large rotating equipment, they may be able to disconnect it, let it get out of sync, and reconnect it. This causes huge stresses on motor and generator windings and may damage larger equipment. This is a classic problem in AC electrical systems. A more technical analysis of the Aurora vulnerability is here.

The attack involves taking over control of a power breaker in the transmission system, one that isn't protected by a device that checks for an in-phase condition. Breakers that are intended to be used during synchronization (such as the ones nearest generators) have such protections, but not all breakers do.

Protective relaying in power systems is complicated, because big transient events occur now and then. A lightning strike is a normal event in transmission systems. The system can tolerate many disruptive events, and you don't want to shut everything down and go to full blackout because the fault detection is overly sensitive. A big inductive load joining the grid looks much like an Aurora attack for the first few cycle or two.

There's a problem with someone reprogramming the setpoints on protective relays. This is the classic "let's make it remotely updatable" problem. It's so much easier today to make things remotely updatable than to send someone to adjust a setting. The Aurora attack requires some of this. There's a lot to be said for hard-wired limits that can't be updated remotely, such as "reclosing beyond 20 degrees of phase error is not allowed, no matter what parameters are downloaded."

Ignoring the racist whining, he has a point. Web programming really sucks. Even web design sucks.

HTML started as a straightforward declarative layout language. Remember Dreamweaver? Macromedia's WYSIWYG editor for web pages. It was like using a word processor. You laid out a page, and it generated the page in HTML. It understood HTML, and you could read the page back in and edit it. Very straightforward. You didn't even have to look at the HTML. Back then, Netscape Navigator came with an HTML editor, too.

Then came CSS. DIV with float and clear as a primary formatting tool (a 1D concept and a huge step backwards from 2D tables), Javascript to patch the formatting problems of CSS, absolute positioning, Javascript to manage absolute positioning... The reaction to this mess was to layer "content management systems" on top of HTML, introducing another level of complexity and security holes. (Wordpress template attacks...)

It's as bad, if not worse, on the back end. No need to go into the details.

All this is being dumped on programmers, with the demand for "full-stack developers" who understand all the layers. Cheap full-stack developers. Usually for rather banal web sites.

Not only is this stuff unreasonably hard, it's boring. It's a turn-off for anyone with a life.

Corr: That should read "doesn't lose much IR transmission as a consequence of neutron bombardment like happens in higher frequency bands" - accidentally lost that middle part. Fused silica and fused quartz (especially the latter, but also the former) blacken under neutron exposure, losing transparency; it's even done intentionally to make jewelry. But the papers I ran into when researching the topic showed that this effect isn't very pronounced in the IR band.