When electricity is cheap, it is because the marginal cost of producing it is low. The marginal cost is low because it does not take very much extra fuel to produce it. In other words, when electricity is cheap, its production is also less environmentally harmful. (This only holds as long as the power stations are unchanged of course.)

The Economist regularly gets this wrong by saying that electric cars are polluting more if they charge at night rather than during the day. They base this on the average pollution per kWh being higher at night. However, the average pollution does not matter. It is the marginal pollution which matters, and that is very low at night. This is really the kind of thing that economists should be specializing in getting right; I do not understand how you can be an economist and get it wrong.

Another problem is that if they do accept your CA certificate, you can issue a certificate for irs.gov and they will believe that.

The trust system in TLS is really lousy.

Spring-And-Loop Theory predicts that its version of "virtual particle pairs" -- dubbed springs -- cause electrons to move at one-tenth of the speed of light.

100 years ago, those "virtual particle pairs" were called the ether. The ether doesn't go away, just because SR said it wasn't there and the M-M expt couldn't detect it.

"e/m", in Spring-And-Loop Theory, is "spring bumps". In the NASA expt., they are firing microwave energy (i.e. spring bumps) at "space" (i.e. springs). The springs have nowhere to go, since every Planck-unit of the Universe is full of them. So they have no choice but to push back. Immovable spring objects vs irresistable bump force.

Mod stalkers: this would be where you down-mod this comment, typically with the non-meta-moderatable "overrated" mod, usually doing this several days after the thread's start so that few will notice or have a chance to reverse your handiwork.

For the "many eyes" to work, there are quite few requirement.

Yes, being opensource is a requirement, but is not the single only requirement.

The code need to be actually readable and to attract users motivated to check it.
That wasn't the case. OpenSSL's code is known to be really crappy, with lots of bad decisions inside. Any coder trying to review it will have their eyes starting to bleed.
It doesn't attract people who might review it. It only attracts the kind of people who just want to quickly hack a new feature and slap it on the top, without having a look at what's running underneath.

The code need also to be reasonably accessible to code review tools.
Lots of reviewers don't painfully check every single last line of code by hand. Some use tools to do controls. OpenSSL has had such a series of bad decision in the past, that the resulting piece of neightmare is resistant to some types of analysis.

The problem is that some of the design decision behind openssl are so aweful that some of the code review tools just don't work well to detect bug.

Hearthbleed has specifically resisted to valgrind, because the geniuses behind openssl had implemented they own memory management replacement functions in a way that is resistant to memory analysis.
The memory porblem went undetected.

Yep. There are plenty of banks to choose from that - whatever their other flaws - at least take security seriously. If your bank can't or won't lock down their website, then you already know that they're negligent in at least one area. What else are they neglecting?

I don't think it's extreme at all. I think we're past the point that's it's socially reasonable or responsible not to encrypt all traffic by default.

Even if you're 100% OK with visitors to your site being snooped on, consider that adding to the amount of crypto in use worldwide makes it hard for repressive governments to tell what their citizens are doing online. Maybe your site would be the straw that broke the Great Firewall's back and lets some kid read uncensored news.

The modest carbon tax in British Columbia has cut emissions in that province by 16% while emissions grew in the rest of Canada by 3% (a rate that likely would have grown higher still if Ontario and Quebec weren't also working to reduce emissions). A carbon tax, by itself, might not reach a 50% reduction, but it could spur changes in consumer behavior. For instance, now that gas prices have fallen again, sales of SUVs are increasing again after declining during our last period of high prices. That's probably a missed opportunity to reduce emissions.

Without a carbon tax, the United States is aiming at (and currently looks like it will hit) a target of 20% below 2005 levels. If a carbon tax had been added to the policy, the United States might have been able to hit 40% below 2005 levels, which is not that far from 50%.

It's almost like they even consider 11% too much... It's like they forgot why they forked to Firefox in the first place.

I'll miss "Password Maker" but I think it's really time for me to ditch it completely.

Does Chrome have anything like Firebug?

Frankly, I doubt you understand politics. Despite your claims the parties are different entities although with very similar goals (power and control). In some areas, the policies of the parties are indistinguishable because they are appealing to same people for funding and trying to get same people to vote for them. Both parties need a majority of votes to win so they are by necessity fighting over the same people in the American center.

Frankly, in the current American system, large differences are not sustainable because if the difference loses votes, it will be abandoned and if it gains votes it will be copied or mirrored by the other party. The American system, whether by design or by accident, generates nearly identical parties.

It's not that the parties are the same organization, because they clearly are not, it's that the American political system is so poorly designed that serving the people brings few benefits when compared to playing internal politics for advantages and begging money from sponsors to fund election campagins.

They did, but only 39/100 of them found anything out of whack.

Deorbit is what happened... If you mean actually escape from Mercury gravity, that would have shortened the mission due to the need to save fuel for a last burn. What would be the point?

Get off my lawn, sonny.

(Thinks tattoos can be ugly or beautiful, just like the people wearing them.)

Coal plants are certainly capable of throttling their output and using less coal. But if what you say was true, my point would only be reinforced: Marginal CO2 emissions by using an extra kWh at night would be zero, because the grid would otherwise have to stabilize by dumping electricity in resistors.

That is why there are two areas of study micro-economics and macro-economics. On the micro-scale, it usually is better to fire 10% of your staff. After all the people who are working hard and doing good work usually know it. If you give them a 10% pay cut they will be butt hurt about it, they won't work as hard, or do as good a work. You will most likely see a greater than 10% loss in productivity.

On the other hand hand if you fire 10% of workforce, those that "survive" will feel threatened and if anything the need to continually show how valuable they are. You probably see less than a 10% decrease in productivity, over the short term; inside the limited scope of your organization.

Now on the macro scale all the other firms out there do essentially the same thing. When hiring starts up again its done at the new wage level the market has valued the skill at. So the prevailing wage ends up just at the value supply and demand expect. Economics works you just have to be careful not to zoom in to much when applying maco-principles or zoom out to much when you try and use micro-principles.