The headline is quite inaccurate. The processors are doing what they're designed to do; approximate the results of certain operations to a "good enough" value to achieve an optimal result:work ratio. Sort of like how the NFL measures first-downs with a stick, a chain, and some eyeballs rather than bringing in a research team armed with scanning electron microscopes to tell us how many Planck lengths short of the first down they were.

This is a documentation failure. They're fixing the documentation. For anyone who would actually care about perfect accuracy in these kinds of operations, there are any number of different solutions to achieve the desired, more accurate result. The headline and the summary make it seem as though there's a problem with the processor which is simply incorrect.

Financing can be cheaper than cash depending on the rate and the rate of inflation.

So.... the problem is still in the pipeline? If suddenly, tomorrow, there were twice as many women as men in the tech pipeline and that continued for a decade, which of the things these 716 women identified as problems in the industry would continue? Being the only woman? Rarely. Being treated poorly because you're a woman? Unlikely when more of them are working there. Your sister is actually the counter-example to the Forbes article: put more women into play and suddenly the culture is no longer an issue.

Granted, but it's twice he's taken on a "there's no way, guy's a joke for even trying!" kind of challenge and succeeded really beyond anyone's wildest expectations.

It may turn out that this endeavor is simply beyond the ability of humanity in its present state of development, but that's a far cry from Musk being a snake oil salesman. Again, you can accuse him of having a reach exceeding his grasp, but he's demonstrably capable of accomplishing far more than anyone imagined when he first made his ambitious claims. There are a lot of steps between where we are today and a human being stepping onto the Martian surface and Musk appears to be taking some very practical approaches to taking each of those steps. He may not make it all the way there, but he obviously isn't insincere in his efforts.

You left out privately building space ships delivering stuff to the International Space Station with more reliability and for a fraction of the cost of anything NASA's done.

So there's that.

Sounds like we need a Dyson Sphere.

When Musk claimed he was going to start a new and successful American car manufacturing company when nobody else has managed to do so in the past half century or so and American manufacturing was considered a sick and dying animal, it was easy to label him a snake oil salesman. When Musk claimed he was going to start building rocket ships and launch stuff into space and make deliveries to the ISS at a fraction of the cost of anything done by NASA, it was easy to label him a snake oil salesman. But he just went ahead and did those things, successfully, at great personal risk because he's both driven and incredibly capable.

If there's one lesson we should all have learned by now, it's not to bet against Elon Musk. He's a risk taker with dreams greater than just about anyone alive, but I think the worst you can claim about him at this point is that his reach exceeds his grasp. Calling him a snake oil salesman is demonstrably unfair. All the other crazy things he's set about doing are happening before our eyes. Creating a self-sustaining colony on another planet may seem beyond our will our even beyond our capability at this point, but Musk's view that it must be done for the survival of humanity is a view shared by Stephen Hawking and many others. If there's anyone alive today who can make it happen, it's Musk.

I think you'll find that your first argument is a misunderstanding of the term "universe" and actually only applies to the observable universe. Otherwise, one gets into quite interesting arguments about what the universe is expanding into and whether that is infinite and what its laws are. As for matter following the laws of thermodynamics, you'll quickly find that quantum mechanics strongly disagrees with that. The reality is that at small scales, matter (being just one form of energy) follows the laws of chance, and merely has a weighted average toward thermodynamics at larger scales.

The universe is not so simple.

In other words, if you're Brian Williams and you'd like to film a news story there, you have every right to do so. If you're Michael Bay and you want to film a movie there, somebody probably needs to step in and put a stop to it before the forest is obliterated by a multi-kiloton series of non-nuclear explosions and scantily clad women running around between them.

The US Constitution was an open declaration of treason against the Crown, which at the time controlled the most powerful military the world had ever seen. It was signed by farmers, lawyers, and doctors who had little in the way of protection against that army and little chance of surviving the fight. To say it was anything less than a suicide pact is absurd. The fact that few alive in this country today have their intestinal fortitude speaks volumes to why we're in decline. They had balls. Somewhere along the way, we lost them.

And if you don't think voting leads to people dying, you aren't paying attention.

As opposed to voting rights absolutists? Fifth Amendment absolutists? Rights aren't rights when you're only allowed to exercise them in a place and manner dictated by the government.

According to the CDC, defensive gun uses number about 1 - 2 million per year.

So several times more crimes prevented with guns than committed with them.

http://www.kcet.org/news/redef...

Or, alternately, the resources to railroad members of the public into prison cells at the behest of politically connected corporate leaders.

The district attorney doesn't advocate for victims of crime. The district attorney is an advocate for the state prosecuting people accused of committing crimes. That's a critical distinction when you consider that the victims often have little or no say in whether or how the accused is charged and tried.

Nobody stole the movie. The studio still has it. What someone did was copy the movie without the permission of the copyright holder, thereby committing copyright infringement, which is a civil matter. Or at least it would be if our government weren't the enforcement wing of its benevolent corporate benefactors.