I'm not sure it will really matter in the end.

Why wouldn't the company, if it saw itself getting close to losing, simply withdraw and sell it's "assets" (patents) to some other shell company and simply start the game all over again under a different entity?

I read through the IPCC report, and here's what I got..

Not only is the anecdotal evidence pretty strong, but now we have scientific evidence: we've burned so much gas in so many combustion engines over the past century we can now measure the effect or "leftover" from that at every corner of the globe. The science tying climate change to anthropomorphic means however, is far from bulletproof and the report itself cannot say it is anything more than "likely".

I think it's obvious humanity now plays a significant role in the carbon cycle. Plant life has been robbing the atmosphere of carbon for millions of years, and for all I know humans are just another counterbalancing act of this earth intended to dig up what plants buried and start it all over again.

In terms of it's effects, I, and most of those around me, could not give a rat's ass. I live in a cold climate - we just had one of the most mild, warm, enjoyable Septembers I can remember in my life. If we're going to chalk up all the weather incidents as anecdotal evidence of climate change, I'm going to start touting the positive aspects. For those folk living on coastlines, too fucking bad. You should have known damn well that rising or lowering sea level was a risk, and you should probably be thankful you haven't had one of those instantaneous sea-rise events (aka a tsunami) wash your ass away already. The nice places to live on this planet are shifting, and the miserable long winters most places on this earth have to endure are disappearing - deal with it. The only people I hear complaining are those with the most in terms of $$$ of real estate value to lose.

I find the predictions of more severe weather events disingenuous. We've always had severe weather events, and making sure those don't kill us all is what we should be planning for. To those shouting doom and catastrophe over small rises in global temperatures, you just sound silly.

While in most of Canada you can use your bank card (Interac/Debit) for nearly everything, I still prefer good old anonymous and physical bank notes.

I chose plastic because our new bills are made of a plastic polymer, and I've found it's far superior to the old paper notes. I think most countries have found this as well.

But didn't you know, crotches kill?

One of them is more commonly referred to as a "pharmacist".

This will be ready to go far sooner than 2030.

There are already carbon sequestration projects underway in Alberta that expect results within the next two years.

Sure, but with this article we should admit there is still a lot of climate phenomena we do not understand, and therefore cannot accurately predict what will happen in the future

BS!

You claim there is some impending or inevitable catastrophe - what is it? You don't know anything, and all we know is the global temperature is increasing.

I realized something this weekend, out enjoying a beautiful mid-September day, that ultimately even knowing global warming to be true, a large amount of people simply will not care.

We will continue to get weather disasters, but you know what, they're really no more frequent than before. People have short memories. And know what? This is where people as a community adapt. We move communities further from flood zones, or we build office towers that can withstand earthquakes. We know how bad hurricanes can get and learn immensely from each disaster. We've been adapting to catastrophe for centuries.

The other, perhaps less talked about reason, is the net effect for a large amount of people will be more positive. In my area, rarely have we had such beautiful weather into September. We have to deal with a lot of long and harsh winters, so a longer summer or more mild winters would be fully welcomed. Sure, this really sucks for people living in some areas, probably along the oceans. Oh well, you've been living a lot of nice mild days while we toughed out winters inland. Sucks to be you, as with most things on this planet. You'll move when shit happens, even if just slightly inland, as people have been doing for our entire history.

Typical Slashdot whining in this thread! Dismissive at first glance of anything that doesn't immediately fit what you know is best.

I was excited to read about this, and I'll cheer on Seagate for advancing this technology. I've owned an old 4th or 5th generation iPod for about 6 years, it has one of the 80gb small disks in it. It's been through everything and I've dropped it probably a dozen times (a couple really bad). Haven't had a single hardware issue with it (don't get me started on Apple's problematic software), and in general all "mobile" hard disks I've owned have shown exceptional resiliency. No doubt that aspect of it was improved as well by their engineers.

Maybe they found a way on this small scale to eliminate most shock damage. As we have seen, cheaply made solid states are not shock resistant either. Maybe this drive is even more resistant that average. Anyway, to be immediately dismissive is childish.

I still jostle my electronics, and wouldn't even consider myself to take above average care of them. To me the order of magnitude more storage and lower cost is more important (in most applications) than an increase in access speed. Either way, I definitely appreciate the advance that will keep both great technologies pushing for new extremes.

It's not that surprising really. The US government holds command over a lot of wealth and power, and so over centuries it's not surprising it was slowly overtaken by a clique of people who want to hold onto that power.

The US government has now evolved into something a bit separate from the people within it or their desires. It thinks for itself, makes it's own decisions, and really is only one group of elite men wearing one of two badges. It is too big to control, too entrenched to change.

I'd wager many European countries had to learn lessons about government getting that out of control the hard way over thousands of years.

Why are we talking about artificial brains and 3D printers? The greatest breakthroughs will not simply be perfecting things we know about today, but things we are not even contemplating yet.

We're talking objects built on already advanced science knowledge, but there's still an entire realm of science with very little understanding. There's an entire fundamental force we know very, very little about. Think of the types of machines, and how magical they would look to us today, we could have if we could manipulate gravity?

Just as things from today would appear magic to those from 1863, so would things 150 years from now.

If I had to wager my guess, I would say the big breakthrough in science in the next 150 years would be mastering and manipulating the force of gravity. Once we figure that out, there will be many gadgets and machines which would appear magical skipping past 150 years of advancement in the technology.

It has struck me as odd, that now we know how the NSA operates, no one has started using this against them. Why not have programs which send random, encrypted, suspicious content to other random points overseas?

I'm sure a few people working together could get enough servers in enough various countries and have them generate enough of what they would have found suspicious, to effectively drown out any useful data from their system?

Nonsense - these are digital files we're talking here. They are not physical goods with manufacture and shipping costs. How they accounted for it, allocate cost, and spend that revenue is a different story, but any business selling millions of copies of files for $10 apiece is raking it in.

It appears they have successfully convinced a lot of people they're not making enough money.

Cash flow is where depreciation helps, and that itself is typically most important for a company at the end of the day.

You spend a lot of capital, but your expenses are classified differently. A bitcoin farmer would spend a lot of money on his computer gear in the first year, but his balance sheet wouldn't change. If he buys $10k in equipment, he now has $10k less cash but a $10k "asset".

The expenses to run the gear (power, etc) are different - they are true operating expenses, paid with cash and show up on an income statement as an expense.

Depreciation shows up the same as those expenses, but the beauty is that it's a non-cash expense. The point is to match costs with revenue, so that the reported profit is correct. Otherwise he would spend $10k this year, then next year could report great profit because he basically used "free" gear - from an accounting perspective.

And the real beauty of a non-cash expense, to put it bluntly, is you get to report less profit that you have to pay tax on, and thus get to keep more of your cash.