Do you think there is much powerline networking going on in Nepal right now?

All well and good, but doesn't exactly solve the problem of greenhouse gas emissions.

That depends entirely on the source of CO2

I don't think sociopathic is the word you are looking for there. Although I can't find the right word to replace it.

Well, a mixture of all of the above, plus desalination and perhaps even a supply pipe from the northern states - after all, if they've a surplus of water and California has a surplus of money, well sell 'em some water!

If the desalination is solar powered, well there's certainly some synergies being leveraged there!

They'll spin round, walk out and go to the outfit down the street - or on the other side of the world.

...and talk to your competition who are now exposed to exactly the same risk you feared you were taking on yourself. If anything, I'd say that was a good thing, because you are able to lose a competitor.

You only need a tiny amount of moisture from the air in the box to ruin your drive by causing a short somewhere on the controller board.

That's why I'd go with optical storage in the safety deposit box, well defined standards that any optical drive in the world can read later on.

customer expectation management, that tends to be a good thing for the real techies.

Those good negotiators you are hoping will be promoted out of harms way are exactly the sort of person who tells the customer anything is possible and then leaving the small details like actually implementing the feature up to the techies.

That's not a good thing for real techies.

All Ellen Pao is doing here is guaranteeing overpayment for mediocre workers. Think about it. To get the best talent she'll have to pay top dollar. But that doesn't guarantee everyone hired is top talent.

If you read the summary carefully, they are not stating a salary value for a job in advance of making a offer to someone.

They are interviewing and then making an offer they feel is appropriate for that interviewee, that means that they can still adjust the offer based on the person in front of them (and who is to say the hiring managers don't offer less to women?). All thats changed is that the offer is set in stone, the interviewee either takes it or leaves it.

This scheme will live or die on how well they predict the job market for the roles they are hiring for but I don't see how it really addresses the stated goal of equalizing pay ranges between genders.

For eg., what was his reason for serving cold food?

Top Gear had hired most of a small hotel for a filming shoot. The shoot went on longer than expected and when they got back to the hotel they found the kitchen was closed. Not exactly unexpectedly since the kitchen open hours were stated.

So the idea that this was somehow a conspiracy by the producer to get Clarkson fired seems like a stretch unless you think he deliberately delayed the shoot so they would get back after the kitchen was closed.

You sell any daytime excess back to the grid during the day, and draw back at night (see also Tesla's new home battery pack stuff?). Then California is generating a bunch of power during the day and maybe it could sell some of that to neighbouring states? Store some itself maybe (there are various technologies that could allow that)?

It's odd how it seems like most posters are trying to find problems rather than trying to find solutions. It's almost like you don't want solar power, when 'solar' is one of the things California has so much of.

literary mafia who wouldn't know a decent book if it was tattooed onto their backsides.

To be fair, assuming the decent book had to be read with a mirror, then the entire tattoo would have to be written backwards which is very error prone and curves and saggy skin will make it likely that sentences will be unreadable so identifying a decent book under those circumstances is really hard.

My understanding of those robot turrets is that they can identify human shaped targets and lock on, but they can't tell friend or foe so their default operating mode is to wait for an operator to give a fire order by feeding the video stream back to a console

They can be left in full auto mode in case of all out attack but in that mode they a just an area denial weapon, more technology than a land mine but no less indiscriminate.

So although they are a robotic weapon system with the ability to decide whether or not to fire by itself, it's not what most people think about when they talk about a fully autonomous weapon system in which a system can make strategic decisions about how to complete an arbitrary objective.

You don't always get to choose where you get attacked. As someone pointed out further up the threads, imagine someone got even a few 10s of these drones into a US city, each one carrying 1 hand grenade and the waypoint at which to drop it and then to return to collect more grenades - especially if the pick up is automated as well so you don't have to be there when they find that pickup location.

Only looking for the most destructive defense possible limits the locations where the defense can be deployed. Basically, you are trying to defend in active warzones, while the most obvious place for a mass of drones would be high density population centers well away from active warzones because that's where they would be more affective.

So I'm inclined to be brutal because brutal works

You would use a massed drone attack because you don't control the land you are attacking, you'd get within drone range, hit the attack button then retreat.

That means from a defense point of view, you are going to be facing a massed drone attack at low altitude over Forward Operating Bases, Friendly Populations etc. Is that where you want to be firing frag shells into the air? You'd cause more damage than the drones would have.

It's been mentioned above, but shot would seem the obvious answer, limited range but that range limit is what you'd want to avoid as much collateral damage as possible.

You don't have someone come look for you.

Radar tracks the trajectory of the mortar round, calculates it's original (since it's only a ballistic flight arc, that is trivial) and can feed that co-ordinate back to friendly units instantly

With automated fire control system, the return fire is normally in the air before you fire the second round.