I'm not sure if you noticed, but fresh drinking water is becoming a worldwide problem. We have heated the planet up beyond the point where you can argue that it's a cycle. It will get worse and you will need more water and people will kill to get it. So build the damned plants and you will become the Republic of California in less than a hundred years.

Yes. radiation hardened and MIL spec is used in a lot more places than just space. A lot of medical equipment or even just stuff that needs to last uses those specifications. If you're building something and you want to make sure it works when purchased and lasts for 20 years after that, that's what you buy.

There are a lot smaller designs around. The NR-1 sub had one, the soviets built several and currently there is a resurgence in the design of self-contained miniature reactors with several companies promising 50kW designs that could be easily installed underground (like a pool).

Coal, wind and nuclear are also a bunch more expensive and less accessible. If anyone would sell me a small reactor (e.g. from a sub or whatever), I'd be more than happy to install it in my back yard. But for now, the only thing you can do yourself is solar unless you have a plot of land somewhere outside a city.

Your utility company is still charging you the same amount, regardless whether or not he puts stuff back in the grid.

While I don't know whether you're peddling for said hosting provider or not, you cannot get a good VPS under $50/mo. I've tried lots and lots of them, once you start using your capacity (try to demand ~500MB RAM, a CPU and 100IOPS in a process for a few minutes), performance will tank. At that point you're better off with a good shared hosting.

It costs money to put a machine in a datacenter and you can only share said machine so much. Once you get >50VPS on a single host, you're screwed. And yes, it costs ~$1000/mo to put in a beefy system that can maintain 50 VPS's comfortably. So 1000/50 = $20/mo without any overhead or profit attached. I've seen these el-cheapo VPS servers handle 1000 systems at once and I've been on the customer end with timeouts and lost packets.

The same way you avoid vulnerabilities in other programs - you write good code and/or become a better developer.

I can concatenate SQL strings in pretty much any language and a language that prevents me from doing so is hopelessly overcomplicated. I don't mind a library forcing me to use safer methods but if the language prevents me from sending a custom SQL or LDAP query, it's broken.

It is a cultural thing. Chinese are educated by copying others and have done so for centuries. They are awesome at testing with high scores in any schooling system and field (math, physics etc) because testing is simply copying the answer. But having them apply what they've learned is (generally) not feasible.

It is culturally engrained and encouraged from birth, to them it is not immoral to do so which is reflected in their legal system (lack of copyright and patents enforcement).

Copyright and patenting is really a westerner construct and inherently unnatural, even immoral.

You really have no idea how complex the software is that runs on some embedded devices? A simple hard drive has an OS in and of itself just to maintain your high speed caches. Firmware is generally not the problem though, and it isn't here either. Reprogramming the firmware to do anything useful (streaming data out of a network port it doesn't have) is nigh impossible.

Or they're just incompetent. There is to date not a single virus in the wild that uses boot processor code or device firmware (plenty of proof of concepts). The problem being is that if you target a firmware, you a) have to know very well what you're doing and b) any platform differences across devices render your exploit unusable and c) it generally doesn't have a method of spreading itself. Works well if you're targeting an embedded platform and you know they're all the same (eg. PLC's for uranium centrifuges) but doesn't work very well for 10-years worth of every model Dell, HP, Acer and Gateway computer out there.

It's simple incompetence solved by a boot disk that wipes the hard drive without interacting with it. But 'oh noes, save my documents because we haven't made backups for the last 2 decades' and the virus is right back the minute the user logs in.

But only Windows and it's software requires you to run as root, autoruns everything that you ever plug in and has a particular browser (plug in) that allow full control over the computer.

I think you misunderstood. There is no hardware infection, they're just having problems getting their machines (a certain software, created by Microsoft) under control so they're just throwing everything out and starting from scratch. They could also go along each machine with a Linux disk and wipe the thing.

In an ideal world the state should require schools to educate a curriculum based around scientific facts (such as mathematics, geography, astronomy, biology which includes evolution), critical thinking and satisfying curiosity and parents should not be allowed to abuse their children by hamstringing this natural curiosity by teaching them that no-questions-allowed-gawd-did-it.

Sadly we do not live in a perfect world and the state barely requires any scientific education but the state should definitely not be allowed to teach religious nonsense to the children. Any teacher that teaches creationism should be fired, any parent that requests creationism thought in classes should be ignored.

In the strict definition, it is a theory which means it's a "hypothesis supported by facts and evidence which leads us to conclude it's the best explanation for what we experience". We do see "speciation" occur in the lab, we see evolution occur even within our own species. The macro/micro evolution debate was invented by ID'ers to 'prove' evolution is false, there is no such thing as macro evolution (species do not jump up/down the evolutionary ladder), there is only small changes that eventually (measured in geological times) lead to different 'species'. But from a genetic viewpoint, all species are very similar and even some species we previously classified as separate species because of how they look are genetically identical (eg. dogs and wolves, certain birds, insects)

You do know what schizophrenia is right? One of his persona's may be racist, doesn't mean his 'regular' (or most frequently available) persona is.