Y'know, just because incremental developments are going on along different lines, doesn't mean that you get to point out an early point on one line, compare with a later point on another, and say that there's no link. It's not a matter of 'transportation' being some kind of technology category that gets increased every time someone develops the field; agriculture and chemistry and metallurgy and all other fields are bound together by innumerable tiny interdependencies. Science is not monolithic, and it's entirely normal to be incrementing multiple lines of research separately. It is also an incremental increase to take two things that already exist and combine them, since that combination is explicitly 'taking things that already exist'.

Specifically, of course, this means that the agricultural line (though advanced considerably by the development and later availability of internal combustion engines to power farm equipment) was not specifically responsible for the creation of fuel oil... but at the same time, that doesn't mean that the oil was a 'revolutionary' concept, since the refining of oil itself was a simple application of long-known techniques, stretching back through the work of alchemists all the way to the Byzantine Empire (re: 'Greek Fire').

That said, the whole 'incremental vs revolutionary' thing is a silly distinction. People like to apply the 'revolutionary' tag to inventions that are impressive... but really, these developments never spring full-formed out of the minds of their creators. The very nature of human society is that everyone has a lot of common framework to draw on, starting at stuff like language and working on up. You did not develop your own language before you began to think about the relations between concepts; therefore, any progress you make can never be entirely decoupled from that of the society in which you live.

Ok, so you're one of those 'information wants to be free' types, and you don't think access to any sort of information should be restricted at all. That's not necessarily wrong, but do note that just because you don't think a thing SHOULD be illegal, that doesn't actually affect whether or not that thing IS illegal. In this case, the guys in question absolutely knew that what they were doing was illegal (hence their attempts at obfuscation), and got caught out anyways. Post-scarcity ideals about free access to information aside, I really can't bring myself to shed any tears about rich and corrupt corporate types who knowingly break the law and then get caught.

There will always be idiots out to make a quick buck, without much concern for legality. Nice when it actually catches up with them.

I'm on that same 250 GB plan with Comcast, and generally find the service acceptable. I'm comfortably below that cap basically all the time, but not so far below it that I can confidently say I'll 'never' go over. That's 'just right' so far as a cap goes, I think; low enough to discourage me from wasting bandwidth (eg: continuous seeding of torrents), but high enough so as not to be actually inconvenient.

To provide an example of Galileo's "evidence-free assertions": in an earlier work of his, he asserted that comets were simply optical illusions, without much evidence to back up his claim, largely to score some points off a rival, and attempt to curry favor with the Pope (the same Pope which he later insulted, notably). His rival actually had a mathematical argument in favor of his position on comets, which (beyond the fact that the guy was, y'know, actually correct) did kind of mean he was doing better science than Galileo.

Evil? Really?

That's a fairly absurd position. There is, in fact, a difference between a radiation dose you get all at once, and one that happens gradually over time... but Sieverts are specifically a measurement of dosage, and as such, are more generally useful when making quick estimates. True, the chart isn't perfect, but in terms of 'what you, the average guy, should know about radiation', as opposed to 'what a radiation worker or medical doctor needs to know about radiation' is a fairly wide gap. As noted by Randall himself, the comic is only a general education piece; if you, personally, happen to live in Japan, or are maybe considering a visit in the near future, by all means, do your own homework.

That said, as noted by another AC, Sieverts are used in general parlance specifically because of that issue you mentioned. There are other, more technical measurements out there that factor radiation in different ways... but the Sievert is a more useful measurement, because it tells you what you need to know (how dangerous is this leak) right away, if you know how to read the figures. That's all the chart is for, to give you some context to let you read the figures, which gives you a sense of what a figure like '100 mSv/hour' actually means.

True, but the timeframe presented is worse than useless. A better figure would be that, if you spent all day bathing unprotected in the radioactive pool, you could die; if you spend two days there, you would probably die; if you spent four, you would certainly die. This is perhaps relevant to local fish over the extremely short term, but nothing you the consumer need to worry about; the legal freakouts associated with this will certainly keep any fish that happen to be right there where the waste's still concentrated enough to be hazardous off plates.

Obligatory: http://xkcd.com/radiation/

So yeah, if you decided, against all common sense, to bathe unprotected in the water leaking out of the reactor for an hour, then you would experience a statistically noticeable increase in cancer risk. Given that everyone knows there's radiation over there, nobody is doing this. That doesn't quite mean that it's 'safe' or 'trivial'... but it also doesn't mean you need to freak out and stop eating fish or anything.

Eh, I don't see it as 'targeting' the Chinese, per se. Personally, I think that it boils down to a combination of population and enforcement. More people, plus access to tech, means more potential hackers. Of course, the big issue is that would-be hackers in China face rather more significant risks in using their skills domestically than do similar individuals in the US. At the same time, I don't imagine the Chinese government would be extensively concerned about tracking down individual hackers within their borders who are infiltrating the critical systems of other nations... unless, perhaps, it's to offer them employment. Accordingly, I don't at all find it surprising that there'd be lots of Chinese hackers attacking sites elsewhere in the world. No nefarious plots, just script kiddies flexing their code.

Naturally, 'no nefarious plots' is the naive view. There are probably a few actual nefarious plots somewhere out there. My point is that not everything is a nefarious plot, and in fact the majority of things are not.

RTFA. Yes, IP addresses are easily spoofed, and provide essentially no information on the target. That is, in fact, why more information than that was gathered, using the nature of the honeypot in question to gather additional data from the attacking machines. I suspect that it would be possible to configure your system and network in such a way as to spoof the nature of your own local network configuration so that a counterattack of this nature would reveal misleading information about your locality... but the nature of the attacks, and the response to them, make this exceedingly unlikely. tldr; yeah, it was people in China and Russia, and there's proof. Still doesn't mean that their governments were involved, of course.

Counterpoint. What indications are there that the teachers are doing their jobs well? It's not necessarily the case that the technology is better, and the whole mess certainly reeks of a pork-filled lobbyist scheme... but really, how would that be different from the other public school offerings in play? It's not really possible to evaluate how effective the technology will be until it's out in the field, after all, so we may as well let the experiment run its course, now that the bills are paid.

Untrue. It's totally possible for something to break up and be carried off by the currents without reaching the bottom. It takes craftsmanship to make a sub sturdy enough to sink properly.

Historically, investment in renewables has been been token, since all of it's been overshadowed by continual increases in the use of fossil fuels. That's not even 'slowing down' that's just 'accelerating less quickly'. Some individual countries have been retooling, sure, but all that's been doing is taking a bit of price demand off the coal, making it more attractive an option to emerging economies. A giant solar plant in the Sahara would be a step in the right direction, for sure, but people have been talking about that kind of thing for years... it remains to be seen whether they can actually make good on their promises. Since the default option is 'all the governments in the region are essentially broke, and thus decide to build a few more coal plants instead', I remain skeptical.

Yeah... that's exactly what I was getting at, only you seem to have missed the point.

You just mentioned a 10000 year period, followed by an 800000 year period. That's a lot of time, and our accuracy of monitoring the data over that sort of scale decreases the further into the past we go. This blurs our analysis down to the big picture; we know we are dealing with a system that operates on geological time, changing slowly over hundreds of thousands of years as it moves between ice ages and warm periods. Naturally, the atmospheric composition changes with it... indeed, the changes of atmospheric composition are one of the only things that we can be sure of... hence statements like your own 'levels not experienced in the past 800 000 years'. Well... those levels did exist back then. And there is a natural process that swings the earth between those extremes.

Bear in mind, again, that this is NOT good news. 'Oh, it's natural warming, so we don't have to do anything about it.' Bzzzt, wrong. Dead wrong. The portion of the warming that is not caused by humans is the scarier part, because it's a lot harder for us to do anything about. Just how much is our fault, and how much isn't is more tricky of a question than you seem to assume... there's more to climate than atmospheric composition, after all. Even so, that's not a [i]useful[/i] question. The useful questions, again, are 'so, how much are temperatures going to be changing, and how fast?' and 'what can we do about it?'

This.

People are finally starting to get over the 'climate may be changing' thing, a process which has long been delayed by the heavily politicized 'why' question. It's more accurate to think of it in terms of climate changing due to a number of factors, some of which humans are responsible for, than to entirely assign blame one way or another. For one thing, it's not remotely accurate to say that climate change is something humans are totally responsible for; to do so is to ignore natural cyclical fluctuations of that climate.

Of course, causation aside, it remains a fact that the climate is changing. 'How much' remains a useful question. So does 'how can we affect the rate of change'. That's always been the root of the political problem, of course. Half-measures like alternative energy and emissions reduction are essentially a token gesture, of little real effect; slowing the train down a little doesn't change its direction. Ultimately, since human population continues to increase, human energy consumption will do the same... and trying to stop or even slow that means trying to reduce population or increase poverty, which is grim as hell. There's certainly a little wiggle room there... but the problem is so vast that a really serious solution would look like 'replace all coal plants everywhere with nuclear'. Yes, nuclear; wind and solar just won't cut it, you need a serious power source to solve serious problems, unless you're trying a 'solve the problem by killing a bunch of people and impoverishing the rest' solution.

Even so, there's another side to the 'rate of change' issue. Even if we developed a magical solution that completely eliminated all human contribution to global warming starting tomorrow, the fact remains that there are still natural factors out there that are changing the climate in ways incompatible with our needs as a species. That's a long-term problem, but one that will eventually need solving. Ultimately, it'll mean stuff like geoengineering. Even if the seas are 'scheduled' to rise 20 metres, it's certainly possible to hold back the tide... but it'll take a hell of a lot of work to make that happen.