Doesn't Windows come with one of these built in? I might be remembering from the Server version, as it's quite a few years since I last ran Windows, but in Windows 2000 it was something you could enable in the services management interface.

It's quite difficult to argue that something that is a transparent cache and will always provide the requested data, just sometimes from a local copy, is equivalent to something that either requests or does not request the remote data and instead substitutes something else based on some external policy are equivalent.

One of the big supermarkets in the UK used to have warnings on the backs of peanut packets saying 'Warning: may contain nuts'. I was confused by this until I found a packet that had been filled entirely with air due to an error at the factory. Then I understood the warning.

Although on further reflection, it's still a bit confusing as peanuts are peas, not nuts.

Every single article in the ECHR looks like that. They're all basically of the form 'Governments may not do X, unless they really want to'.

If you think moving to China gets you away from greedy capitalism, then I can only imagine that the last time you saw any news from China was some time around 1960.

Depends. It's only snooping if they do it for recursive DNS lookups or DNS cache queries to third parties. If you set your DNS to 8.8.8.8 (Google's public DNS server) or OpenDNS or similar, then modifying this requires inspecting (and hijacking) traffic intended for a third party. Most of the time, however, users will have their DNS config set to whatever DHCP provides, which means that queries will go to an ISP's server. This doesn't require any interception or inspection of traffic, it just requires sending responses that don't match. If more places would roll out DNSSEC then this would be much easier to spot.

Cars and planes also have software. The reason these engineers are allowed the time to do it right is the relative cost of doing it wrong vs doing it late. Having a web site a month late can have a big impact on a business. Having a web site with bugs or a security vulnerability is much less of a problem for a lot of places.

The simplest place to draw the line: Does it have conditional flow control? If so, it's a programming language, if not then it isn't. If you can't write some equivalent of an if statement, then it's not a programming language. There are some languages (e.g. BPF bytecodes) that are intentionally not Turing Complete, because having finite and deterministic run time is a design goal, so they omit loops, but they do have conditionals (but only forward branches).

You mean declarative, not functional. HTML does not have functions, which is a big clue that it isn't a functional language. Your other examples are just plain wrong (SQL is definitely not a functional language and isn't even a declarative language, PostScript is imperative language and is a functional language if you squint a bit).

If you don't need dynamic content, Jekyll is a very nice way to go. The template system is easy to use and it generates static HTML pages so you only need to worry about the security of the web server (which is comparatively easy). Even if you do need dynamic content, you might only need it for some parts of a page (e.g. comments) and so it's easy to embed an iframe that just provides comments for a page in a template and separate out the dynamic and static parts. This also has the nice effect of meaning that you can easily keep the content working if the comment system is compromised.

Nothing in that article disputes the confidence that the past decade was hottest. It simply disputes which year in that decade was the worst. Nor does it dispute that the trend is increasing temperature per year.

Well, we have perfectly good reasons to stop releasing sequestered carbon (by burning oil for fuel) even if we are to ignore the atmospheric output of the process. We have to work progressively harder to get a given energy input. Technological advances that allow us to extract additional sequestered carbon, like fracking, are not infinite in nature. Eventually we must reach an energy balance between the energy required for extraction and the source of energy extracted. So changes in the direction of reducing release of sequestered carbon and finding other energy inputs to society, or reducing the need for those inputs, are called for regardless of whether it is going to get too warm.

Decreasing doesn't mean reversing. And we have physical observation of ice melting, and releases of previously-sequestered gases on sea bottoms, underground, etc. These things all take a heat input. What happens when those buffers are spent and there is nothing to sink the heat input?

Had we depended solely on experiment for everything, we would know much less about the world today. When direct experiment is not possible we still have observation and modeling, and certainly that is science. And of course most of our models do scale, simply because of long observation at all scales. Were this not the case, we would still be arguing about the heliocentric theory, because we can not move planets and suns in order to prove it from first principles, and the orbits of planets would not necessarily scale to suns, etc.

Sure, the earth has large processes that regulate each other, but there is nothing purposeful in their existence and positive feedback is as likely as negative. The Earth is as likely to be naturally fragile as naturally robust. So you can not place faith in unseen processes that will tend to mediate insults to the environment.

If there is some unknown non-anthropocentric cause for climate change, we are still in the position of having to resolve the issue through some modification in society's behavior, rather than consign the victims.

It's not surprising that fitting a model to something so complicated takes more work. But it's irrelevant when the thing actually modeled gets progressively hotter.