Part of the reason that happens is you're both aware of the consequences of things getting out of hand.

This kind of speculation is a balance, talking about nuclear war too much is just fearmongering and people won't take you seriously.

On the other hand part of the reason it's probably not going to happen is people are aware of it. One of the reasons the West isn't taking a stronger response to Russia in Ukraine is the possibility that things will escalate and you'll end up in a war that could go nuclear.

The issue with geoengineering is you've added a dial on the planet that many people will want to control, that's very likely to increase international tensions among big powers. The more tensions you have the more likely a war is going to break out.

Geoengineering probably isn't going to lead to a nuclear war, but that's partially because we sometimes remind ourselves that it's a possible outcome.

Huh? Why are you comparing their margin to Google's? There are sub-Google levels of profitability.

The thing with a massive amount of revenue is a proportionally small amount growth in revenues or drop in costs can make them extremely profitable.

Twitter is still a very young and growing company, the future has a a lot of potential profit.

This doesn't quite make sense to me. Assuming the bots are smart enough to parse the earnings reports (highly plausible) wouldn't they react the same as if it were a proper release?

Why is the early release difference? Would this same drop have happened when the bots saw the news overnight and reacted the next morning, or would the human investors have done something that would have changed the bots behaviour?

By making 100's of millions in revenue every quarter.

It's one of the biggest sites on the Internet and is used by people constantly, it's hard to imagine how it wouldn't be worth more than $8bn.

The article is kind of vague on the dropoff but it seems to be the real benefit isn't in the speed, it's the dropoff location.

As someone who lives in an apartment getting a parcel looks like me checking the main entrance (which I don't use) for delivery notices of parcels they tried to deliver while I was at work then heading to the parcel depot during the 6 hours window on Saturday when I'm not at work and they're open.

But Uber can get the current GPS location of its customers, so could do the dropoff directly to the person and skip the game of depot tag.

The traditional delivery companies might have a real hard time responding to that.

Personally I'm a Kubuntu man and indeed running this shiny KDE5.3 :)

It's just not ready for prime-time.

The entire class fell so far short of expectations that they should be failed?

I think the Professor probably just needs to take some management classes. Once he gets a better handle on leading groups this shouldn't happen again.

Look at the summary: affordable solutions for clean drinking water, inventing medical diagnostic equipment for neglected tropical diseases and enabling local manufacturing in poor and remote regions.

I think both lists are societally meaningful. Yes there's more money in your list, but that's also because big showy things like dams and satellites appeal to men, so some of the money is because when all the engineers are men they're going to go out and work on those male-appealing things and that's where the money and innovation will go.

For instance I think a lot of construction engineers might find a sports stadium to be "societally meaningful" and they'd make a ton of money building them. But I suspect those have worse economics than any of the more female appealing projects mentioned in the summary.

You're acting as if the current engineering curriculum is a canonical implementation of some ideal definition of engineering and any alteration means it's further from true engineering.

But those old courses were designed with the same objective of every other course, to attract students. And the people who designed them were male instructors who naturally designed them for the audience they understood best, male students. The difference here is they're redesigning them to expand the population to which they appeal.

They are just as valid an expression of engineering, they're just an expression that's designed to also reach the other half of the population.