This may come as a shock to you, but most large companies have a big R&D division that follow the scientific method while rarely or never publishing their work. Intel knows a lot about making CPUs. Boeing knows a lot about making planes. Ford knows a lot about making cars. They're going to use that to make money, not to blab away the details to their competitors. Sure, Intel's processors are based on physics... but good look making a 14nm processor from their PR slides.

Under the right conditions snow will stick to the signs looking like these signs even though it's otherwise clear. It doesn't happen often, but when it does I think the self-driving car is pretty much screwed. Humans seem to get by on a combination of routine and heuristics.

That they need to eat 10,000 calories a day to sustain them doesn't mean they could eat 2000 kcal and net a -8000 loss. The most strenuous one day event I've done burns 5-6000 kcal, anything less than 3-4000 kcal in and you're likely to run into a proverbial brick wall. It's common to try overdoing it on exercise while cutting the intake and the result is a body with no power at all, that engine needs fuel to work and pure body fat won't do.

But over to the obese people, when I started out I could do maybe 350-400 kcal/hour and I'd probably not last the full hour. And the body feels like total shit afterwards, it's real easy to end up with excessive strain due to weight on muscles and joints that aren't used to it. It's almost like a U-curve, if you're fat and don't strain your body you're pretty comfy. If you're healthy and exercise you're comfy. But in the middle is a rather ugly place. So you come home, feel bloody miserable but hey you exercised and did good so you can give yourself a little bonus right? Turns out the kind of bonus you need on your high-sugar, high-fat diet pretty much negates any calorie benefit.

If you don't start with your intake you'll never get anywhere. Exercise is a nice accelerator, but it's really, really hard to counteract a +500 kcal intake with exercise. And that's not particularly much soda, snacks, sweets and junk food.

The thing is, you don't really need to all OCD on the calories, just get it ballpark right.

Veggies and fruit? Mostly <50 kcal/100g
Lean food? 100 kcal/100g.
Average food? 200 kcal/100g.
Fatty food? 300 kcal/100g
Sweets? 400 kcal/100g
Snacks? 500 kcal/100g

Oh and beer 200kcal/0.5L... partying is hard on your weight :/ particularly since it makes me hungry for late night supersized junk food too, which is as stupid as it gets. Volume is also a big thing, when I wanted to binge I could make myself 300 grams of pasta, add 400 grams of sausage and pour a glass of 500 ml sauce over it. That's a 3*350 (uncooked, ~100 cooked)+4*200+5*40 = 2000 kcal dish. I knew it was too much, but I guess I just didn't want to know how much. These days I make about 40% of that and it's still a slightly oversized dinner. So I'd say weighing it is the main thing, you can mostly ballpark how healthy it is.

Why do you think almost every sci-fi dystopia has robot guards/goons? Today being rich is a lot about being able to pay poorer people to work for you, tomorrow it's about being able to buy the robots instead. Sure there'll be jobs, routed around by global mega-corporations depending on where labor is the best value for money and most politically and socially stable but the rich will have to deal less and less with the riffraff. The few trusted people you need and the highly skilled workers to keep the automation society going will be well rewarded, keeping the middle class from joining the rest.

I'm not sure how worried I am about an AI, since it could also develop a conscience. I'm more worried about highly sophisticated tools that has no objections to their programming, no matter what you tell them to do. How many Nazis would it take to run a death camp using robots? How many agents do you need if you revive the DDR and feed it all the location, communication, money transfers, social media, facial recognition information and data mine it? All with an unwavering loyalty, massive control span, immense attention to detail and no conscious objectors.

If someone asked people as little as 30 years ago if we'd all be walking around with location tracking devices, nobody would believe you. But we do, because it's practical. I pay most my bills electronically and not in cash, because it's practical. Where and when I drive a toll road is recorded, there's no cash option either you have a chip or they just take your photo and send the bill, most find it practical. I'm guessing any self-driving car will constantly tell where it is so it can get updated road and traffic data, like what Tesla does only a lot less voluntary. Convenience is how privacy will die, why force surveillance down our throats when you can just sugarcoat it a little?

I suppose, a bit. But mostly because you need a lot of rainfall and a lot of height difference to make sense. Compared to wind or solar, there's a lot less room for expansion and to power the needs of the future. And putting small waterfalls in tubes is not very visually appealing either, here in Norway the ones we have left we mostly like to keep for tourism and preserving som of the natural environment. Sure you could put Niagara Falls in a dam, but it wouldn't be pretty.

Sorry, but I've met quite a few intellectually sound people who deal too much with evidence and proof and far too little with reality to be easily manipulated by anyone with a little street smarts as long as it happens to be an area they don't know much about. They simply don't use their EQ do consider questions like who is this guy? What is it that he wants? What's his goals here? Why would he tell me that? They read things too much like a scientific paper with objective informasjon, where a more street wise person realizes he's being hustled.

I think you're confusing cause and effect, people ask why you don't use Windows and the answer is because you want to use something other than Windows. Particularly when the person you're talking to doesn't feel the same things chafing, maybe even though it works for you it doesn't work for me and it's not just about "being different" but that we have different needs or priorities. Just like every graphics tool discussion usually ends up with why you don't use Photoshop. It's the way of things when one tool has ~90% market share.

The "average person" also used Internet Explorer when it had 95% market share and was really slow at seeking alternatives. Because IE6 worked because sites had to work in IE6, the mainstream only follows once a significant portion of early adopters have led the way. Not that Linux has too many trendsetters, we're "experts" but soccer moms don't take car advice from race car drivers. They want to know what works for a soccer mom.

Market share is a battle won one step at the time. Either you double 1% to 2% and get a few more to care or you halve to 0.5% and a few less care. That the 90%+ didn't care and still don't care is something that might change if you get the pebble rolling into a landslide, but if the pebble's stuck you're stuck. It's not about making Linux a killer gaming platform, it's about making gaming not be a Linux-killer. If that makes it viable for another 1%, you're making progress.

Still not much, I must admit I thought Linux would be different after playing with it for 15+ years. On the other hand, it hasn't faded away into obscurity. It does get significantly easier and better to use, but so does the competition. And times change, it almost had it once when we had wired desktops plugged in the wall. Then mobile came and sleep modes and power management matters. Wired went Wireless and Bluetooth and so on. And now recently touch is the new hype. I think when it's more like a car, where a car from ten years ago is very much the same that Linux will catch up. It's morphing too much.

A doctor can look at the medical records of anyone for the purpose of providing medical treatment, it doesn't mean he can snoop on the records of husbands/wives/exes/your daughter/celebrities/etc. so I don't see how military intelligence is different in that respect. A lot of people technically have access to acquire privileged information, it doesn't mean they can snoop on whoever they like or do whatever they want with it. You could have picked many good arguments against this, that was not one of them.

I think UEFI has two different tasks confused. One is to boot my OS, which should just involve pointing it to the right storage device and loading X bytes into memory. The other is to provide a system configuration environment where I can boot and other hardware settings and there I want a rich environment. I want to be able to use my USB mouse and Bluetooth keyboard in a GUI, wired and wireless drivers for PXE boot, storage and RAID drivers, you name it. Basically it is a little OS in itself, running off motherboard firmware.

Now I have the impressions it's doing all this loading of a micro-OS with complex drivers only to finally hand over control to the real OS. Why? Maybe the OS wants to run a newer and better Bluetooth driver and now it can't because UEFI is running an old version. And if you do update the UEFI driver and break shit, you also broke your boot configuration. Just do the minimum requires to get the boot image, load it into memory and hand over control to the OS then get out of the way. If the boot fails, then you can launch the full configuration environment.

Not that I really want to defend Mars One, but... the huge event would be the actual Mars landing, which would have the whole world watching. The first trip and the first establishment of a base would keep people interested for many months all the way from launch until they're settled, for no other reason than it's the first time ever like the first moon landing. The second biggest thing is the selection process, who gets to go. Who will be the next Neil Armstrong, the competition for first man on Mars would be rather epic. The runner-up years would be about who would join them, using clips from the Mars colony as filler and publicity bait.

The base itself has very little news value, it will be a bunker stuck in the same barren landscape and the activity consisting mainly of the same routine maintenance. Alone it would be roughly as popular as NASA TV, which isn't exactly pulling in the crowds. It's not an entirely implausible concept which is why they've got so many people's attention, but the figures don't add up. My guess is you'd be raising 1% of your expenses. It's like a game show "Who wants to be a billionaire?", it sounds good except that that you need a billion dollars in prize money and it won't draw 1000x as many as "Who wants to be a millionaire?".

Cheaters cheat at every opportunity, they're also the ones who become notorious shysters and con men of every variety, both inside and outside the law. But most people aren't naturally born cheaters. What really brings out the widespread cheating is the perception that the system is rigged. That's why it is so hard to turn a country full of tax fraud, corruption, bribes and so on around, why should I make an honest effort when everybody else isn't?

At least when it comes to certain crimes I think the culture among your friends and family are far more important than what the law says. If your dad is an old Woodstock hippie and your buddies would say "Sure, who hasn't smoked a little pot in college" it's different than if they'd disown you and your bible study group would expel you. Of course they wouldn't support your cheating but if they cheated too and got away with it they won't take the moral high ground, just the practical advice that the first rule of cheating is to not get caught.

You'll probably be waiting a very long time. Reality doesn't make the math easy, for example if you want to describe water flowing down a stream good luck on all the non-linearity in the eddies and currents. Or the way turbulence acts in air resistance, it's messy. There's no real reason to think it'll get easier on the particle/wave level, in fact it ends up working in even more messed up ways you wouldn't imagine on the macro scale. But hey you can hope, I'd advise against holding your breath while you wait though.

I'll agree that the media through sensationalism is running high on hyperbole. But just because the media is crying wolf doesn't mean there won't one day really be a wolf. And that could end up pretty bad for us when we don't believe it.

Heck, I don't mind things that fail and fail hard. The most annoying thing is things that go bad but don't fail. Like the PSU that killed any motherboards attached. Or the RAM than silently corrupted bits sometimes. Or the flaky HDD that kinda kept it running in degraded most but failed spectacularly on the rebuild when another drive died. Or the CPU where the fan came loose and would BSOD under load. That's hardware but software is actually the same, if it fails 100% of the time that's easy to fix. If it works 99% of the time with no real obvious clue as to why you're fucked. When I finally get my group of friends together it's actually quite hard to put a price on failure, our time is scarce and when we finally get together I'd pay a lot to have it just work. An unreliable system is just not worth much at all.