AnandTech is pretty much the only tech site I trust implicitly anymore. They don't do bullshit stories, they don't rush things out just because everyone else is, and they aren't afraid to criticize their own sponsor's products. More to the point, they know their stuff, and they have brought a lot more science to testing. They don't even test cases with actual computers in them anymore, they use strictly-controlled thermal loads and lab-grade probes because it wasn't repeatable enough. Hopefully Anand's spirit of accurate, thorough reporting will live on at Anandtech for years to come, because if they fail I don't know of anyone that could replace them.

Ah, but did they remember to reverse the polarity on the power couplings? It doesn't do anything unless you reverse the polarity.

Okay, but what are the odds of randomly drilling and finding water? Or consulting a geologist instead of a wizard? As others have noted, Ireland isn't exactly the Sahara, it wouldn't be too unusual to find water.

Are you reading the same Slate I read? Slate got my eyes by hiring Dr. Phil Plait, who is basically a full-time anti-science debunker, one who is specifically against anti-vaxxers, astrologers and conspiracy theorists. And although I don't often read many of their other authors, I've never seen an anti-vax or anti-GMO article there either. They've got their share of inanity (the advice blogger is almost hilariously bad), and they link to bullshit sites like Buzzfeed, but "science illiterate" isn't one of the complaints I'd voice about them.

Which emulators are you using? For NES/SNES/GBC/GBA, I've been using higan, and I've yet to find a single emulation error. Checking the forums, the kind of emulation bugs still getting reported are literally "on the Super Game Boy player for the SNES, an obscure series of cross-system memory writes with multiple joypads enabled ends up writing the wrong value to a register, which breaks this contrived test case". So it seems to be exceptionally solid. For more recent systems, yeah, I haven't found any truly good low-level emulators, but those are also not the ones you'd be breaking out the CRT display for.

You're asking for a simple answer to a very complex question. I already simplified it as much as possible while still having any meaning.

Current estimates are that we are dumping 40 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere per year, for a total of about 550 billion tons since 1870.

The current upswing seems to have begun sometime in the 19th century, although the dramatic increase only began in the 1920s or so, and it really took off in the '70s.

a) What hiatus? The hiatus only appears when you use incomplete data. citation
b) Uh, what? I don't even know what you're talking about there.
c) Plant (and algae) growth is a negative feedback loop on CO2, but it doesn't work on the same timescales. We're dumping centuries worth of CO2 into the atmosphere every year. And we're combining that with deforestation. By the time plants have grown to stabilize the temperature, we'll be stabilized several degrees over our current temperature, and that's assuming any positive feedback loops don't override it (look at the "clathrate gun hypothesis" for an example of what could happen).

Stop arguing with strawmen. I really hope you got upvoted by shills, because the alternative is that some people have actually bought into the propaganda, which sickens me to consider.

The science that is settled is:
a) The average global temperature is rising
b) Increased CO2 levels cause increased temperatures
c) Humans are releasing far more CO2 than can naturally be absorbed

Those are the settled science - or as most people call them, facts. You will see GW defenders trot out the "settled science" line because people still try to deny those fundamental facts.

Those three facts lead to a settled conclusion:
d) Human activity is causing increases in global temperature.

Again, if you're arguing that, you are either grievously misinformed, or do not understand how logic works, or have decided that you want to argue for a point you know to be wrong.

That humans are contributing is settled science. The extent to which we are contributing is mostly-settled - we know we are the largest factor, but we don't have a complete and clear picture as to how secondary effects (ie. global-warming-caused global warming) or natural effects (solar variance) affect things.

The precise models of "given conditions A, B, C and D, what temperatures can we expect in the next X years at places Y and Z?" are not settled. Further, the data we give those models is not entirely precise, because getting absolute perfect knowledge of the entire planet is basically impossible.

But this does not invalidate the entire argument. You can say "physicists don't know how gravity works for supermassive singularities at nuclear scales", and say that physics is not "settled science". You would be correct. However, if you try to use that to argue that scientists don't know why the Earth orbits the Sun, you're committing serious errors of logic.

And if you then try to argue that you can build a giant but rickety skyscraper over the city, because it can't fall over because gravity isn't a settled science, well, you're just using broken logic to try to make a quick profit despite the fact that you will inevitably kill people when it falls over because hey, science may not be able to figure out the exact second it's going to collapse but we know it's not gonna stay up forever. I hope you managed to understand that metaphor there.

That gives me an idea. If you build this in a way that looks cool (obviously make it functional first and foremost, but style it whenever you get a chance), you could rent it out to Hollywood studios needing a set.

Make a control room with lots of blinkenlights, put in a window to something that glows (it can be the capacitors or whatever, if putting a window into a tokemak is a bad idea, which it probably is), have lots of big cables running around, and so on. And make every room spacious enough that you can fit a camera crew inside it. Charge them $50K/day to use it as a set, only conditions being that they can't alter or break the functional parts, and any new parts they add have to be removed once they stop using the set.

This doesn't have to fund the entire project, it just has to pay off the cost of the cosmetics and the downtime, and after that it's free money. If you spent a quarter-million dollars making it look like something out of Star Trek, you could pay that off with a week of filming Star Trek XII or whatever number they're up to now.

Plus - the public outreach. The general public are, unfortunately, idiots. You could be doing some amazing research, be the top lab in the world in your field, and they would just complain about "their" tax money being spent on it. But making something "mad bitchin'"? They can get behind that.

I think I'm sufficiently prepared for any likely disaster.

I'm not really at threat from earthquakes - the biggest one in recent history was only 5.8. Hurricanes are more common, but more to country folk (with the trees and lengthy loss of power - now that I live downtown, I'm not worried about that). Floods are a risk, but I live fairly high up on the hills so I should be decently protected from that. Any tsunami that can make it 100km inland is going to kill me no matter what, so no use prepping for that. There's always the unpredictable disasters - fire, asteroids, and whatnot - but my preparations should be sufficient for the stuff most likely to affect me.

I have a week's supply of clean water (plus whatever is in the fridge at any given time), as well as a good amount of non-perishable food. I have a flashlight and numerous spare batteries. I have a cell phone that can last two days without recharging, if I conserve. In my car, I have more emergency supplies (more food, first aid, and blankets in case I'm trapped in snow). I always keep at least a quarter tank in it, in case I need to evac. I'm well situated for the recovery - I'm within walking distance of a major rail line, an interstate highway, and a small dock, so once the pieces start getting put back together, I can be there. The only thing I'm really lacking is an emergency radio.

Most importantly, I've found that I tend to react well in disasters. I freeze for about five seconds while my brain dumps adrenaline into everything, but then I act both quickly, and mostly correctly. Fire alarm goes off at 1AM? I'm the first one out, and I still checked every door along the way to avoid flashovers. Earthquake? I went for the door frame - an incorrect response once I did the research, but a) that was what I had been taught, b) it was still better than the people who left the building, but stayed almost directly under the large glass windows, and c) it was *something* - a lot of people didn't do anything until someone started telling them to. So yeah, I'm mentally prepared in that I know what to do, and seem to have lucked into being one of the ones who actually does it when the time comes.

I read TFA. They're not using them as "storage" in the sense of active, accessible storage. It's a backup system.

What they're trying is, instead of storing redundant copies of everything on multiple drives (for resilience and geolocality), they're keeping one copy live and keeping backups on blu-ray.

So there's never a latency of minutes while it loads data from Blu-Ray, you just might be routed to Siberia or something to get the one active copy. If that copy's bad, error (restore from backup during next nightly batch or something).

Mr. Steele is my porn name. Am I exempt?

Why does everyone seem to think that the only way to store electricity is in a battery?

Flywheels are a thing. They might not scale up as effectively but they're definitely an option. But really, anything that stores electrical energy as potential energy will work.

But there's a better solution - hydropower storage.

Near where I live, there's a nice artificial lake made by a hydroelectric dam. Not too far away is a big nuclear power plant. During the night, power demand is very low, but nuclear reactors don't throttle down very well so there's an excess. You know what they do with that?

They pump water upstream, back into the reservoir, thus storing that electricity for when the demand is high the next day and they let it drop back down. That artificial lake basically gets artificial tides - every day the water level drops, and every night it rises back up.

Guess what? Most renewables are also at their highest output during the day. Why not use clean, renewable storage for this clean, renewable energy? Why does everyone seem to assume the choices are "nasty expensive chemical batteries" or "zero storage requiring demand-side hacks to keep things from falling apart"?