DoD, DHS, CIA, NSA, etc will all require that you keep your research secret. They do fund cryptographers, but they are all in-house and not part of the academic community.

Drone attacks?

There is no doubt that *eventually* natural carbon sequestration will remove the excess carbon we are pumping into the atmosphere. The problem though is that the natural rate of fossil fuel formation is roughly 10 barrel of oil per day. The amount of oil we are burning is about 10 million barrels of oil per day. So yes, in a few million years it will all change back into oil, and the amount of CO2 will be back to where it is today. I'm glad that is a comfort to you, I'm sure your children will take comfort in it too.

And yes, the ocean pH has decreased by about 0.1 since pre-industrial times. That is becoming *more acidic*.

That's a load of nonsense - the problem is that 10-15 years is too short a time-scale to make a reliable judgment. Since 1975, global average surface air temperature has increased at a rate of 0.17 deg.C/decade. But it isn't a steady increase. If you look at the 15-year period up to 2006, the warming trend was almost twice as high as normal (namely 0.3 C per decade) but nobody cared much (except climate scientists and environmentalists). The 15-year period from 1998 to now has been slower than the trend, and that's got hugely more attention. The reason is that interest groups strongly push the latter, and want to ignore anything that doesn't fit their agenda. See here for details

No, the rate at which it's removed doesn't increase with increasing CO2, at least not enough to make a difference. Some additional carbon is stored in the oceans, possibly some increased biomass (but probably outweighed by deforestation?), but its pretty small in comparison to the amount of carbon stored in fossil fuels. And the amount is limited - the oceans are already turning slightly acidic.

The OS included priority inheritance mutexes, but IIRC the developers decided not to use them for reasons of 'efficiency'. Presumably it takes an extra cycle or two to lock a priority-inheriting mutex...

All of those were proved wrong by evidence, and once the evidence was there and presented to people, people believed it. That isn't the case with global warming. There is plenty of evidence, and it all points in one direction. There isn't any "smoking gun" that can be used to disprove global warming, and there almost certainly never will be.

Also, it isn't true that "99% of scientist used to say that "the Earth was flat"". Even the ancient Greeks knew that the earth was round.

The comparison to the geocentric / heliocentric models of the solar system isn't fair either. Science as a discipline really only developed in the 17th and 18th centuries, so at the time that the Church taught everyone that the Earth was the center of the universe there wasn't really such a thing as a "scientist". No one had any real reason to disbelieve the geocentric model because there wasn't any convincing evidence to refute it. Not until Galileo observed the moons of Jupiter, and Kepler's equations for orbits, and later Netwon derived Kepler's equations from the inverse-square law of gravitation, that finally the heliocentric model was on a firm footing. it Indeed, the events that led to the heliocentric model in many ways represents the birth of what we regard nowdays as "science". There is nothing "scientific" about climate change denial, it is pure politics and greed.

The ancient greeks knew that the earth was round. They even had a pretty good estimate of its radius, and the distance to the sun.

That isn't very accurate. At some point 97% of geologists had never heard of plate techtonics. Once the theory was proposed there was, of course, some opposition because it was so different to what was previously believed. But once geologists properly evaluated the evidence, almost every geologist took it on board.

Similarly, once the idea that birds evolved from dinosaurs became widely known, it didn't take all that long for scientists to take a good objective look at the evidence and rewrite the textbooks.

There is no comparison to climate change because the "for" and "against" theories have been known for 30+ years by now. So far no one has managed to find any convincing evidence against global warming, and at this point the basic theory is so well established it is inconceivable that anyone ever will. You might argue about the magnitude of the problem, and whether some other effect might mask the warming (which is true anyway, eg I don't think anyone really knows why the deep ocean has been warming faster than expected, and somewhat masking surface warming). But there isn't going to be a "smoking gun" that disproves the basic notions, not any more than there will ever be a "smoking gun" that disproves Newton's theory of gravity. That doesn't mean that the theories won't get refined (eg, general relativity can be seen as a refinement of Newtonian gravity).

Merchants can charge additional for using a CC in Australia, since a few years ago. I think it cannot be more than the fees associated with the CC purchase. Its quite common now to pay a "credit card fee" with purchases, both online and in stores.

I don't think so - even after an extinction-level event on the Earth, it would still be an easier place for a habitation than the Moon. For a start, the Earth would still have an atmosphere, and even if it was toxic or otherwise not breathable it still makes the task of maintaining a habitat much easer (ie only need to seal it, rather than build a pressure container). Similar story for water (maybe need to go to great lengths to decontaminate water from a post-apocolyptic Earth, but that is still fairly simple compared with extracting water from the Moon), soil, plant life etc.

I was referring to the dichotomy of using windows on the desktop but a mac laptop.

Most of the people in the physics department here use windows desktops, but pretty much all of the numerics people use linux desktops. Naturally, all of the computing clusters are linux. It seems that virtually all laptops are macs though, which is curious. Possibly people would like to use macs on the desktop but there is some barrier (eg, purchasing or IT administration policies) ? I'll have to find out!

Contracts, basically. You've probably never had a job before, but when/if you do, you'll find out that people always have some kind of contract. Once you have a permanent position or a fixed term position, the employer can't simply say "you don't have a job anymore, I'm not paying you past Monday". Any termination clause in the contract is going to specify some period of salary that still needs to be paid. For programs that are currently part-way though, even shutting them down requires money. Eg, putting equipment into storage or transfering it elsewhere, paying off orders that have already been put in. So sure yes there are always ways to cut money, but a very large fraction of costs simply cannot be cut, at least not overnight. NASA has had a tight budget for many years now - they do an awful lot with it, but they've been stretching it very thin and wide for a long time.