Paleo: all meats in america are processed to some level, and red meat has been directly correlated with an increased risk of prostate and colon cancer. various additives like nitrites and processing methods such as using carbon monoxide to improve meat color, actually involve carcinogens or cancer suspect agents in their execution. Factory farming and the prolific use of sterroids and hormones in all american meat have virtually guaranteed an increased risk of cancer. enjoy significantly elevated levels of cholesterol, and supporting a fundamentally unsustainable concept of factory farming that contributes to everything from climate change to aggressively resistant bacteria and viruses.

This is a specious argument, a man of such extreme wealth will have zero problems acquiring whatever form of meat his heart desires. Should he want only American Bison filet every day then he can afford an immense herd where one individual is killed to provide him his daily cut of meat.

Life expectancy didn't exceed much above 30 until the upper paleolithic, around 30,000 years ago there was a steep rise in the number of teeth from individuals older than 30. There were of course those who managed to make it to what we would in modern times consider old age, but from all the evidence we have they were extreme outliers until around that period.

> First, there is no reason to believe that we can built robots that can reproduce themselves.

What? This is exactly the technology humans are trying to reach! We're already a significant way down this path!!

> Second, there is no evidence that we or anyone else can build intelligent machines, as the original story seems to presuppose.

Nature did it. We can do it.

> Third, biological organisms are so many orders of magnitude more efficient and flexible than machines that it barely makes sense to put them into the same qualitative category "form of life".

This whole conversation is about extrapolating on the cosmic scale. If you look at the path robotics has taken in the last century it does, as pointed out, actually support the premise of this article.

> Hint: A human consumes only about 2.9 kilowatt hours per day, the equivalent of 1-2 light bulbs ...

Not relevant. Once machines are replicating and repairing themselves they'll do exactly what we do and find other sources of energy.

Frankly I agree with you that it's hard to picture Transformers inhabiting the universe, but OP did make a really good point that extrapolation isn't even in the ballpark of refuting this clown. Honestly I'm shocked he didn't come back with that XKCD cartoon.

Uh, with a court injunction you can force ISPs to route a given IP or IP block anywhere you wish.

The I,K, and M root servers are outside the US and are controlled by entities which the US can't directly bully into doing their bidding.

That's too high, most estimates are ~80-100 gallons per person per day, average houshold size is 2.6 so that puts you closer to 100,000 gallons per household per year. I also question how those estimates are so high, my family of 4 averages closer to 50 gallons per day at home based on our water bill and we don't do anything extreme, we take regular baths, wash our clothes by machine wash, run the dishwasher every other day on average, brush our teeth twice a day, etc. The only "conservation" effort we put into water is not watering our lawn, in fact I drilled out the restrictor in my shower head because I HATE low flow showers and I believe I've got an old school high GPF toilet since my house is from 1963 and most things have not been updated in it.

Clearly you have never been to the UCLA campus because, if you had, you would have known this isn't true in the least. You can walk all over that place.

The problem in LA is the culture. People believe they are to be seen in their automobiles and they buy or lease expensive cars and drive them ridiculously short distances for that sole reason (if there is another reason, please do share but nothing really makes sense).

I worked for a company based out of LA for 2.5 years and we were there often. One guy lived a 10 minute walk from the office but chose to drive each and every day. He didn't buy an M3 to have it sit in his garage, after all. Nope, it sat in the company's garage instead.

SMH.

I doubt it was new then, either. Businesses don't like to spend money, and IT gets classified as a cost center.

Then your IT department needs to become a business partner and enabler. That's the tact we've taken, the vast majority of our costs are in projects, and we let the business drive those with us helping to steer them, if someone complains about IT spending we ask them which of their projects they want us to defund. We recently completed an acquisition equal to about 40% of the size of the company, without adding any significant headcount, all because our IT systems have gotten to the point where the business can absorb that many extra units without adding significantly to their workload and the work around the new assets is mostly loading the data into the system which we do for them. Since we've taken this approach our budget issues have become almost non-existent and our interaction with the business have become much less adversarial.

So stupid, it's not hard to achieve damn near 100% uptime on power, get feeds from two substations A and B, put each one through two UPS's and use two different sets of generators with different fuel sources as backup so you have A, A', B, and B', use a transfer switch to feed your equipment's A side supply from A with A' in reserve, and the B side supply from B' and have B in reserve (that way one of your power sources stays up without a transfer switchover even if you have a fuel problem). If you want to further reduce the chances of an outage at the cost of some increased complexity use different UPS vendors and different transfer switch vendors so you don't have a possible common design flaw in both paths. The whole setup would probably cost as much as shutting down Heathrow for around 10 minutes. I've got this setup minus the redundant generators and I'm just running a midsized enterprise, not a freaking critical piece of national (and international) infrastructure.

but replacement costs are still lower that energy costs long term.

I'm not buying it, my VMWare hosts are pretty large boxes and they've used 630kWhrs since June when they were installed, that comes out to $128/year or so, and that's for primary usage, DX CRAC units have a PUE of ~1.28 which means it costs around $36/year to cool. Even with really cheap servers you'd have to have a LOT of them and have very little effect on AFR to justify it. I'm sure at some scale it makes sense or everyone wouldn't be researching it so hard and doing so many pilot datacenters, but if you don't have thousands and thousands of identical servers (99.999+% of installations) it's just not worth it.

Huh? There's no way a missile can outmaneuver the optical targeting system on these things, the biggest threat will be surface skimming that will reduce the targeting systems reaction time, but the newest class of ships have pretty good synthetic aperture radar and the computer aided target discrimination is getting better all the time.

Not perfectly, and the energy absorbed from a 30kw laser will quickly darken the surface accelerating the rate of energy absorption. Here's a video of a 500W laser cutting into a mirrored surface.

One can either massively over produce in summer or rely on grid power in the winter. If one is relying on winter grid power then the equipment generating that power will only be used a fraction of the year.
My average power draw during the summer is ~4x my winter draw since I use natural gas heat but air conditioning, and I'm fairly typical. So you design your solar system to produce ~75% of summer demand and your grid demand remains relatively constant yet significantly lower than today which should actually reduce the utilities costs significantly since they will need fewer plants and less grid infrastructure and fewer grid upgrades.

Do you watch use your computer after dark? There is 400 watts.
LOL, on slashdot that's funny. My VMWare hosts which are dual 10 core Xeon's with 384GB of ram, multiple network cards and fiber channel HBA's peak just over 300W:
Last Week-
average 183 W | 625 BTU/hr
peak 301 W | 1027 BTU/hr

Unless you're running dual GPU with a 60" display there's no way you're using 400W.

The problem is off-grid systems are a LOT more than 2x wholesale grid prices, and storage tech isn't moving anywhere near the pace of panel production (it turns out storing electricity chemically in an efficient and reversible process is really, really tough to do economically)