I believe you've just taken what was intended as reductio ad absurdam seriously.

No, as you would have seen if you'd read the article. By their numbers, about 60% of the energy cost of streaming is in the data center.

Whoosh

How about a detachable luggage compartment (boot/trunk)? You don't own the car, but you have your own luggage compartment in which you keep your miscellaneous crud. Call a car, attach your compartment, drive to the mall, detach compartment, shop and fill compartment, call another car, go home, detach, unpack at your leisure while the car goes on its next mission.

Me too - as soon as it is affordable, convenient and drives better than I do. They've got one out of three already.

If you drive on the same streets that I do, you trust me with your safety. As my driving skills are below median, this should be a lot more worrying to you then the prospect of being in a computer-driven car. (Fortunately for you, surveys show that below-median drivers are rare.)

You seem to be under the impression that Eratosthenes measured the size of the Earth more accurately than the 18th century scientists on whose work the metre was based. If so, you are wrong.

We don't know for sure how accurate Eratosthenes measurement was, because we don't know for sure how big the 'stadia' he measured in were, but probably he was out by 16%. His method had systematic errors in it which would prevent a highly accurate measurement.

By contrast, scientists had been able to measure the non-sphericity of the Earth prior to the definition of the metre, which is a 0.5% effect.

From Wikipedia: "The circumference of the Earth through the poles is therefore slightly more than forty million metres (40,007,863 m)"
which indicates a 0.02% error in the original definition of the metre.

If you're in the right part of the world, the word also means "traffic light".

If your interface allows DMA, does that not mean that a malicious device can own your computer as soon as it gets plugged in?

Also, I thought I'd read that USB had DMA and hence this security problem.

Could someone who actually knows what they're talking about comment on this please?

Guns don't kill people. Gun-obsessed people kill people.

(I suspect the high velocity lumps of lead may play a part too.)

TFA was points to a 2012 press release, but it contains not much more information. They must need to supply energy to this reaction, but whether this energy is as heat, electricity or something else is unclear.

I see two uses from the point of view of the U.S. navy. One is to put one of these chemical plants in an aircraft carrier, power it with the carrier's reactor, and generate fuel for the aircraft on board. The other is to put the chemical plant on a nuclear powered supply ship, which will then transfer the fuel to non-nuclear surface ships.

From a world energy point of view, this is a way to turn non-fossil fuel power (nuclear, hydro, wind) into hydrocarbon fuel, with the overall process being carbon neutral. Burning fossil fuels to provide the energy for this process would certainly be counter productive in terms of CO2 emission and very likely economically counter productive as you'd be better chemically processing your fossil fuel instead.

By the time you're going to all of this trouble to turn electricity into fuel, it is unlikely that you'd want to run a car on it - you'd rather just have an electric car. For aircraft we really have no good alternative to hydrocarbon fuels, so it could be used here. However, on the road to a low-carbon future, we have decades worth of lower hanging fruit (notably coal power stations) before we really need to care about whether our aircraft fuels are carbon neutral.

Conspicuously missing from the articles is the energy efficiency of this process. Given the $3-$6 per gallon projected jet fuel cost, presumably the efficiency is not too bad. (I notice this number hasn't changed since 2012 which makes me suspicious that it is more guesswork than calculation.)

If you're interested in the German side of world war cryptanalysis, an excellent book is War Secrets in the Ether, by Wilhelm Flicke. The author was a German cryptanalyst during the two world wars, and it was written shortly after the end of the second world war. (It is out of print, so I suggest looking in libraries.)

It has been a decade or more since I read it, so I may have misremembered details, but here are a few points of note:

Pre-war, he'd been analysing Russian radio usage. They had a complicated system where the same station would use different call signs depending who they were talking to. This made their intercepts more chaotic and harder to do traffic analysis on. He and all his colleagues were shifted to the western front with the outbreak of war. When the war with Russia started, in the initial shock their complicated system failed and they fell back on a more standard system. Once they started to get over the initial attack and reorganize, they returned to the complicated system. The German cryptanalysts who were present had no experience with this (the experienced ones having been moved) so they interpreted the chaoticness of the signals as showing the Russians were in complete disarray, when the exact opposite was true.

He thought that the course of Battle of Crete indicated that the allies had broken the German codes at that time. (Which was correct, but he missed that they'd broken most of the German codes for almost the entire war.)

They knew that the allies had very good intelligence, but thought that it was supplied by spies. As a result, he spend the second half of the war on a whack-a-mole mission to shut down spy radio transmitters.

He complained about the multitude of German intelligence agencies and their lack of cooperation due to infighting.

I really enjoyed this commentary. An extract:

"Eighteen months ago, after the slap-stick bumbling and embarrassing forelock pulling by New Zealand authorities to their United States counterparts was revealed, I was moved to wonder if Dotcom was in fact a computer virus, slowly infecting our senior politicians and agencies of state, and transforming them into figures of fun.

Whether he is a virus, or a puckish imp, sent by the gods to mock those who would rule over us, Dotcom continues his uncanny facility to bring out the ridiculous in them."

Wherever you stand on his legal issues, business ventures and politics, he is great entertainment.

In the above book, a Martian space elevator fails (more specifically, is induced to fail by the deliberate application of high explosives.) The result is highly destructive. The Martian equator is no longer an imaginary line, but rather a prominent physical feature.

There are plenty of scientists out there who poach free online data sets and mine them for additional findings.

And this is a good thing, despite your word "poach". Analyses which would not have occurred to the original experimenters get done, and we get more science for our money. For many big data projects (e.g. the human genome project, astronomical sky surveys), giving 'poaching' opportunities is the primary purpose of the project.

A former boss of mine once, when reviewing a paper, sent a response which was something like this:

"This paper should absolutely be published. The analysis is completely wrong, but it is a wonderful data set, and somebody will quickly publish a correct analysis once the data is available."

Now I need to stop wasting time on /. and return to my work in hand, which, as it happens, is 'poaching' data from
Ingman, M., H. Kaessmann, S. Paabo, and U. Gyllenstern. 2000.
Mitochondrial genome variation and the origin of modern humans. Nature 408:708--713.