Two problems.

First, the problem that every evaporative cooler has: water is scarce in the hot dry places where evaporative cooling works well.

Second, water always has some minerals dissolved in it that crystallize out when you remove the water. A traditional swamp cooler has an active flow and a reservoir that you have to empty to keep these from building up, but with these "smart bricks", the pores in the bricks are going to fill up with lime and gypsum, and pretty soon they'll be "dumb bricks".

I've got a couple TrendNet TV-IP862IC. They support 720p H.264 video, and speak FTP and (crucially for my application) Samba.

Caught me a burglar with 'em: he came in, poked around, noticed the camera and ripped it out of the wall, but not before the camera sent his picture to the SMB fileserver hidden in a closet. Police recognized him, picked him up, and he confessed to a string of burglaries to support his heroin habit.

I saw that before I posted here, and it proves my point: FLIR can't see through walls, but it can see the warmth of the outside of the walls. So if the bad guy stands perfectly still for a minute or two with his back up against an uninsulated metal wall... not exactly useful, eh?

I have no problem with this, provided the cops obtain a warrant through established judicial process.

FLIR can't see through walls.

By "the last temperature change of this rapidity", I assumed the commenter was referring to the end of the Younger Dryas at the end of the last ice age, which is more or less synchronous with a mass extinction in the Americas. The PETM was a remarkable event and a useful example, but as you point out, it was a lot earlier and wasn't as rapid as what we're seeing now.

That's both a bad example and a good one. Many scientists believe those didn't die off due to climate change, but because humans killed them all and ate them. Which means it can't be used as an example of effects of climate change on ecosystems, but it is a good example of how even primitive humans can cause global ecosystem damage.

Look at the Sahara. Look at the Canadian Rockies. Oh shit what happened to your argument?

You are right though, that diversity is higher overall in warmer climates. But *change* in climate is pretty much always bad for diversity, everywhere, as is reducing the number of distinct climate regions.

Ah hah! Denying climate change causes local climate to cool! So if we all wish real hard, and the problem will go away. It's the Tinkerbell Protocol!

They're both pretty full of themselves, but Musk is a pompous engineer at heart whose projects mostly work. Branson is a pompous frat boy at heart whose projects kill people.

WhiteKnightTwo is just an airplane. We've already got plenty of those. Virgin so-called-Galactic has nothing capable of getting anywhere near low earth orbit: even their failed rocket was only suborbital. This "plan" is like planning a trip to Japan, when you've bought a taxi to the airport but no plane ticket.

Hell, your average cell phone user thinks they *are* sat phones.

I'd love to see more competition at the 4 MBps level, but I'm not sure why I need 25 MBps of bandwidth. At 4 MBps, I can stream a couple of 1080p videos simultaneously or download almost any triple-A game in an hour or two.

If I were trying to serve a popular website off my home computer, back up my terabyte hard disk nightly, I might need more, but that would be stupid. If I wanted to stream 5k video, I'd need more, but 5k video is also stupid. For consumer use, there's no way the human eyeball can actually consume data at more than 4 MBps; what am I missing out on by not having what TFA calls "baseline for the full benefits of internet access"?

If you don't want to bother going into space, you can achieve precisely the same effect by staring at a light bulb for a moment.

I said "how computers work *and* how to fix them" because I realize those are two different skills. Most of the kids I work with have neither. No you don't have to know how to build an adder out of NAND gates to be good at computers, but my students are pretty vague on the difference between a file, a program, and a web page.