Except it's apparently only more transparent on the English-speaking Internet (actually more specific: English-speaking and not Australian-focused), not on sites in other languages.

Have you ever talked to a little girl? Saying that having to Frozen characters involved might interest more little girls is not sexism, it's the most common of sense.

People like you say you want more women in coding but don't want to do anything real to make it happen, at the level it needs to happen - early education.

...they'll all be owned by Uber.

There's a network effect for shared vehicles. Availablility is best if you have one big pool of cars rather than lots of little ones. So there will be a single winner in that space for each city.

Imagine Uber having the power of GM and Google combined. Run by the current team of assholes.

It would be easier to get everyone to agree to switch to nuclear energy than to agree to meaningful limits on CO2 emissions

Even though going nuclear is the only practical solution, I don't think it's any easier - you have decades of people devoted to scaring people about anything nuclear, and those groups are still around piping that tune - even to the clear detriment of the earth and environment. They just are too afraid to do anything else.

even in countries that actually want to do something about CO2 (like Germany) are switching away from nuclear, so that tells you how hard the problem is.

Exactly my point, if even GERMANS can't be rational about this there is no hope for anyone.

OK, a square monitor. Now maybe Apple will announce a round monitor. They already make a round PC, after all. All the Apple fanboys will then insist that round monitors are great.

Yes, and there's a Cray I at the Computer Museum here in Silicon Valley, upholstered base and all. You can sit on it if you like. It's not useful for much else.

All modern supercomputers are composed of a large number of microprocessors. The interconnects are faster than with ordinary hosting/cloud operations, but the CPUs are the same. The biggest supercomputer in the world, in China, is 3,120,000 cores of Intel Xeons, running at 2.2GHz each.

The question is whether the problem you're solving needs tight interconnection. If not, you can run it on a large number of ordinary computers. Weather may not be that tightly coupled; propagation time in air is kind of slow.

Yes, browsers have indeed become so complicated. It's not just Mozilla, Google's putting even more resources on Chrome than what Mozilla can afford. A browser is now essentially an operating system (see FirefoxOS) that can do pretty much everything *and* needs to do it in a way that's secure against untrusted code (JS). On top of that, Mozilla is involved in projects that reach beyond just the web, like the Opus audio codec and the Daala video codec that I'm personally involved in (there's many more of course).

We've been conducting a geo-engineering experiment by increasing the CO2 content of the atmosphere and, so far, it isn't going well.

You're right. As an experiment to show CO2 causes warming it totally has sucked, because it shows in fact the opposite - over a decade without warming even as CO2 emissions continue to increase.

It's quite obvious at this point temperature changes have very little correlation to CO2 added to the atmosphere. Which was only logical one you realized what a tiny part of the atmosphere CO2 really is... so our percentage increases of it add little in terms of absolute amounts.

You are assuming that a warming climate is more helpful, but you could have a warm dry desert

Wrong. A warmer climate releases more moisture into the atmosphere from the oceans, which winds up on land. You always have a net positive effect on moisture...

This has also been noted in explanations of why snowfall amounts are up in some areas.

Deserts are the result of specific weather patterns not allowing moisture to flow to a region, but it always goes somewhere...

We also have proof of this simple fact, the medieval warm period was a fair amount warmer than we are now, and it was in fact a great time for agriculture.

Lastly, you are again ignoring jungles which are as hot as deserts... you seem to think that a great amount of heat automatically means desert which is very far from the truth.

But the most rise we are predicted to see anyway is about 2-3C.

If the climate were generally cooling, I'd agree with the thought we need to figure out how to stop or slow it.

But a warming climate? That has far more helpful benefits than downsides for life in general and biodiversity across the planet. You have only to look at the jungle compared to that arctic to realize that...

So please do NOT screw up whatever warming process is underway and move us to a cooling phase.

It's only "warming" in the sense of a global average

Which also has not been warming either for the past decade or so. :-)

For which, there are a lot of excuses but not much warming... all that time CO2 has continue to increase so obviously what temperature changes there are, is disconnected from CO2.