"Whatever we find, we're going to tell you," Nelson added

Thank goodness! See, someone takes use pleb taxpayers serious. We can let them do their work in peace, diligently going after our own duty, knowing we will find out as and when something happens.

</sarcasm>

For the next experiment, maybe they should give some crow-sized guitars and drum sets to these counting crows and see if they make rock music.

Why not just say that it's about the amount a person breaths in two hours?

With people, there's room for all sorts of distracting (but true nevertheless) tropes involving slurs like mouthbreathers, oxygen thieves, etc.

Dogs get much better PR, and if they are small (and cute) in addition, they have practically free marketing reign.

anyone can access the web versions of Word for free if needed

I'm going to say it: "Sign up for free" is not to be compared to downloading some freeware program (like Abiword, Notepad++ etc.) without questions asked and your online movements being tracked ad infinitum. That is not "free" (as in freedom).

I used to use the default installed 365 on my new mobile (I have spreadsheets to record business trips and do a souped-up shopping lists, go figure). Then the "register to continue to use" notifications popped up after what I presume was a trial period, that was the quickest I uninstalled it and installed a freeware app.

I use 365 on my Windows work computer because the employer pays licensing, on my private Linux machine it is LibreOffice. For day-to-day note taking Notepad++ is sufficient, even for Markdown, although the biggest IDEs now also do MD (with a preview pane, which makes it even better). Sadly, the days of drawing up good-looking and well-organized documentation (or ANY documentation for that matter) in software development seem to be over now.

We don't have autonomous vehicles in my country (for various reasons that would not always be a smart idea at the moment). So I don't know a lot about them. It seems at a stage such vehicles had a "safety driver", but these are now pulled from such vehicles. I also read that the involved vehicles were operating as taxis, i.e. belonging to a firm and not some private individual.

We also have a lot of warfare conducted these day via remotely piloted drones. Why can't these robotaxis in an emergency switched over to manual remote control? Saves a lot of driver salary, but still gives a fallback in case of emergency (which seems to be a common enough occurrence). It seems as getting the emergency services/first responders happy can be also a pretty important task, if you are keen to avoid bad press.

straws it seems are a luxury that comes at a price both for ourselves and the environment. So why keep using them? I believe we can take the lifestyle hit and stop using them.

Yet your chosen drink contains:
* milk, presumably from some dairy farm, which we are constantly told is so bad for the environment, global warming due to methane emission, and unethical to animals,
* coffee, grown in some exotic locale because of the plant's specialized climate needs, and transported long distance with further carbon emissions to where you are,
* cinnamon and/or cocoa with similar logistics to coffee,
* probably sugar, which the reader can expand upon as an exercise,
* machinery with energy inputs to manufacture, then each time to freeze, boil and express coffee...

And yet no one is proposing to forgo the luxury of that drink or take the lifestyle hit and to just drink tap or rain water instead.

The problem with radicalism is of course that you can always find someone that is more radical and ideologically 'pure' than you, that will show up your version as conscience assuaging virtue signaling.

Is that all done with the same X and Y chromosome?

No.

is perfectly safe as long as you don't overdo it (stick to no more than 24-hour).

Interestingly, I lent my ears to a doctor (general practitioner) at an in-person talk over the past weekend. While intermittent fasting has become more mainstream/fashionable recently and DOES confer benefits, this doc explained how more regenerative mechanisms kick in at around day 4 of a fast. So he enthused about a 5-day fast, which might be extended to no more than 7 days. That said, some of his patients have seen remarkable results after 14 days of fasting (under medical supervision and with supplementation of vitamins, minerals etc). He also advocates a program of intermittent fasting with progressively larger ratios of fasting/eating for around a year before undertaking such a fast, and some ramp-up/ramp-down protocols before and after a 5-day fast.

Interesting, because he fasts himself and has some patients that fast (not only for diabetes), and will probably look at literature more knowledgeable than us muggles - and talking on a layman's level obviously causes some dumbing down and skipping scientific references, so I'll need to double-check. Or try it on myself...

The past 5 years I've written a lot of code in Java, TypeScript, JavaScript and Clojure (and incidentally some SQL). I would say it is more important to have a type than the position it is written in (It is quite useful to provide extra information when the oh-so-well-chosen variable name still leaves you wondering. Position is just a matter of what you are used to.) But, one can get away without types if you really need to and are prepared to spend the extra time tracking down bugs ( : any has become a pet peeve lately).

Reading the last couple of /. article headlines, it seems that cancer has been cured, fusion has been achieved and cheap concrete and carbon-base supercapacitors have been built, and that the US Air Force has conquered climate problems, so I can understand that this suddenly has become a hot topic.

Well, TECHNICALLY Orwell warned us in 1984 too, like "in the book 1984", which was published only in 1949.

Which is not about AI (directly). But how would Big Brother keep track of all the proles if not through AI? But we liked our newspeak and our doubleplusgood gadgets, so hating Orwell is love, and being ignorant of what he says is knowledge. Has always been.

A few /.ers have chimed in with a "Supply and Demand" explanation.

Well, from where I stand as a non-USAian where domestic air routes are typically one-leg, it sure looks to me there is a not-inconsiderable demand for air tickets where either A or B (separately, on their own) cost less than A + B. But the airlines decline to supply that. So the "lifehack" supplies it.

but the seat on the tossed leg could have been sold to someone else.

Well, here's a novel idea: discount the multi-leg ticket with the amount of the unused leg, perhaps only if and when it is sold to "someone else". If I where the traveler I would in return for the discount be willing to notify the air carrier well in advance that I intend to skip the leg, so they have ample time to find "someone else" to take the leg. It would even be reasonable to me if they discounted me pro-rated e.g. by air miles, and thus keep the remainder of the inflated one-leg ticket's price for their own profit.

I'm against (intensive) industrialized livestock production, predominantly because of its effects on the consumer's health.

That said, there's been some study in recent years that shows that extensive livestock production seems to improve the ecosystem's carbon capturing capacity, by providing biomass as well as microorganisms to the soil, which move the biomass underground (in addition to the hoove action of the livestock), where soil microorganisms now proliferating due to the food abundance, thus creating even more (carbon-sequestering) individuals (and as a side effect increasing soil fertility and water retention, which allows more vegetation, and so forth).

Suggested websearch terms: herbivore soil improvement carbon study