MRA stands for Men's Rights Advocates. Be warned that as reasonable as that might sound, often the actual examples of these people, particularly online, are not so reasonable.

One doesn't have to see the value in stuff that isn't immediately applicable R&D(and I'm not here to debate the point, do as you will); but if you are OK with the concept of such research this actually seems like a pretty good idea:

The question of how and why ideas, 'culture', religions, new scientific hypotheses, etc. are transmitted and compete with one another is really a very long standing one. A lot of the historical study emphasizes 'elite' culture and theory(mostly because everything else was oral record only, and that doesn't keep well; but written works sometimes survive) or religious(high frequency of literacy, and proselytizing is a technology of considerable interest to contemporary religions); but there is also study of popular culture, folk mythologies, what the middle and lower classes were reading and watching(once that became common), and so on.

Cultural transmission is a very solid social science topic, and internet memes have the dual virtues of both potentially being novel(they might actually follow some traditional propagation pattern, might be something new, either way would be interesting to know) and being amenable to large-scale analysis because the internet is just so conveniently searchable and heavily cached in various places. You don't have to like the entire field; but this research project seems like a perfectly reasonable exercise.

You wouldn't even need to be having production issues. As with most vendors, Nvidia has a bunch of options for sale and the nicer ones cost more. Even if you have the capability to stuff boards with the nicer chips just as easily as the cheap ones, a bit of fraud will do wonders for your BoM costs.

It would be interesting for an intermediary to be involved since producing/obtaining correctly faked GPUs is a comparatively specialized task. Not rocket science, pick the cheapest Nvidia silicon that is close enough to not react horribly to drivers expecting the real thing, tamper with the identifying portions of the firmware, replace any packaging, stickers, or other labels; but it's hardly the old 'purchase thing from best buy, return brick in the box' scam.

This doesn't mean that it isn't one of the intermediaries; but if it is they are working with considerably more sophistication than the 'fell off the truck' level of supply chain skimming.

"Ve...haf vays... of making you valk...'

All Red Dwarf proves -- again -- is that the English have really low standards when it comes to comedy. Ok, you did produce Python, admittedly some of the best comedy ever, but it appears that was a fluke. You're responsible for Dr. Who, and I'll never, ever forgive you for that.

You *do* realize that the equatorial zone is generally tropical, wet as heck, and quite a bit warmer than everywhere else, yes? And that plants thrive on CO2?

Doesn't follow that making it warmer will make it drier. That doesn't seem to be how it works. Drier happens when water sources go away. There's no reasonable postulate for that which would apply to most equatorial regions.

Nah, it's almost certain to be big cats. Perfect apex predators. They can deal with heat, cold, wind; they can kill anything, climb like crazy, swim, they're fast as hell, stronger than just about anything, they instinctively use available terrain features for cover and shelter, they come equipped with deadly weapons, and they're very smart and wily. Common mutations already include thumbs and other extra digits, and they have a short enough breeding and maturation cycle that populations can recover in a very short time span, given only that mankind isn't around to defeat them using already developed technology.

Is it sane, given foreknowledge of your own demise and the power to avert it, to charge full-steam-ahead toward that demise

It's not my demise; it is the demise of others, sometime in the future. I fully expect to live out the rest of my life comfortably. I rather suspect that's the same set of conditions you face when you describe these worst case scenarios to others. Some of us are sensitive to the woes of future persons, some of us are not. But it's always at least one step removed from today's reality.

In the USA, just look at the number of people who would let the financially low performing suffer the slings and arrows of disease and injury without any particular concern or guilt; you can measure that directly by the resistance to the ACA, which remains substantial, even though it's working out pretty well if you actually take the time to look at the numbers. When people don't concern themselves with the other people in town, who are there and suffering right now, isn't it a bit optimistic to expect them to concern themselves with some abstract, unknown set of people who will exist after most of them have died anyway?

You're better off looking to technology to solve this than compassionate outlooks among the citizenry.

I'm going to go back to watching the news now, where I can learn more about us shooting up Afghanistan for no particular reason other than to prop up our MI complex, as we've kind of worn out Iraq now. You know, because we care. We'd be in Africa "helping" them too, you know, if we needed more income. I'm sure their day will come, though. Both Africa and South America are deep future market resources for our weapons manufacturers. Caring. It's what we do!

I'd expect massive droughts in the equatorial zones

Why? Equatorial zones have a great deal of ocean water, which certainly isn't going to change. That water will evaporate faster, the atmosphere will contain more humidity, and therefore there will be more precipitation, if the average temperature is up a few degrees C. How does that constitute the precursors for anticipating equatorial droughts?

I can see marginal areas (US midwest, for instance) baking off the little bit of moisture they have and not reaching any threshold of precipitation, followed by dustbowls and so on, but at the equator? Why would droughts happen there?

Proposed by those the people of OHIO voted for.

Which may be sufficient to see them ousted next time around, Ohio not being a particularly ignorant state as our states go. Here in the US, politicians think that they have to be religious to be elected (and they may still be right about that) but generally speaking, they aren't controlled by this when in office (look to corporations and the money stream for that.)

In the interim, it's worth keeping in mind the degree of scientific and technological progress that's come out of the USA.

We're not all superstitious wankers, though I can see why it might seem that way sometimes.

This doesn't apply to four post gear or anything that gets too toasty; but the fact that a lot of music related hardware is rackmount and has to survive roadies and touring makes rack hardware surprisingly attractive for mobile use. If the job is too big for a laptop and small enough for half depth hardware, just check out the local music supply place and pick out a nice portable rack. Quite sturdy and shock resistant, usually at least offers a front door that clips on well enough that you can ship it, available in a variety of heights(and typically stackable unless you go for a wheeled one). A very convenient overlap.

I doubt it would be trivial: you can sacrifice capacity for some speed by reducing the amount of platter area you use(and thus how far back and forth the read/write head assembly needs to move); but RPM is still a serious constraint, and bumping that tends to get rather costly. 15k RPM has been the effective ceiling for years, and while increases in data density improve best-case read and write speeds they have no effect on how long you have to wait for a given chunk of disk to finish its rotation and come back under the read head.

It also doesn't help that SSDs are aggressively moving into the high speed area. If you applied the engineering tricks used in ultracentrifuges you could probably build a damn fast HDD; but doing so for less than the price of a really nice SSD would be a great deal more challenging.

New Hampshire runs a very similar operation. I've never quite understood why a state whose motto is "Live Free or Die" lets The Man control their booze supply; but I imagine that the indirect tax of a state liquor monopoly is more popular than some direct tax levied elsewhere.

Between manufacturer avarice and customer stupidity I hold out very little hope; but it would warm my cold, black, shriveled, heart if somebody would standardize a key-fill interface (like the DS-101/DS-102 devices that the DoD has for connection to U-229 ports on communications gear and other things that need crypto keys; but actually remotely suitable for end users, unlike those systems) for dealing with this class of problems...

Right now, it seems like everything is either "Oh, totally wide open, maybe papered over with some pitiful little obfuscation attempt" or "So damn much asymmetric key crypto that you'll need to beg the vendor for permission to do anything"; but options are very, very, thin on the ground if you want something as secure as a mothership-bound lockdown device; but obedient to your crypto keys, not the ones burned in at the factory.

It's like the 'secure boot' controversy that erupted a while back. "Well, you can have Microsoft's keys and protection against certain types of OS tampering, or you can turn it off entirely(x86 only other restrictions may apply); but set your own root of trust? Ha!"