Cheap and easy to fly drones are a new phenomena that have an obvious potential to endanger airplanes. Reports like this indicate that this is more than a theoretical danger. Surely there is a risk-management angle then? It seems to me you are denying the obvious. What is your agenda?

We were talking about this particular communication of the CDC. I see just facts and reasonable-sounding suggestions to doctors, and no ranting anywhere. So why is this 'yet another alarmist virus scare', as you claim it is? Quotes please.

Issuing reports like this is just the CDC doing their job. You do not complain about the weather service issuing reports about tornados, do you? Or CERT issuing their reports? NHTSA?

It seems to me you are the alarmist here.

Grow up.

And give us a report of at least 20 pages about the legal and societal differences between these two cases before Monday, or you'll go to bed without desert for two weeks.

Although not everything is a slippery slope, the invasion of privacy by the state is a classical area where there is a very delicate balance, and the analogy is relevant. This is well known, and the discussions about this balance go back millennia. Just dropping the word 'fallacy' in the discussion contributes exactly zero bits to the discussion.

Well, he has the power to veto laws he doesn't like, so things are a little more complicated.

Still, the complaint is not that he doesn't do anything with the laws that the Congress passes, the complaint is that Congress doesn't pass any laws that address important issues.

Funnily enough, President Obama addressed that very issue in his speech: he said that if Congress doesn't like what he's doing, they should come up with a law themselves. So in the President's considered opinion the issue is so urgent it trumps this principle you mention.

Sound like a legitimate argument to me, that needs a serious refutation if you disagree with him.

He was mocking the astroturfed memes that blame Obama for every perceived wrong in the world, even if the supposed wrong or its justification makes you spin-dizzy. But you knew that.

Obama is not responsible for this law initiative or this down vote. That does not mean Obama is the good guy in the NSA-powers scandal, it only means that Obama is not responsible for this law initiative or this down vote.

Similarly, the Republicans are responsible for this down vote. That does not mean they are solely to blame for the NSA-powers scandal, or that everything should be explained in terms of Democrats versus Republicans, it only means that in this case the Republicans are responsible for this down vote.

Forget Ebola, forget IS, forget running out of IPv4 addresses, finally a real reason to panic.

So go ahead, make the most of it!

With tens of millions of nodes data logistics pretty much always is a problem, even for supposedly embarrassingly parallel problems. Either the nodes communicate with only a few neighbours, in which case you have to carefully design the layout of the computations to make sure every node can communicate efficiently with its neighbours, and there probably is also some kind of global clock that has to be maintained. Alternatively you have some kind of farmer-worker setup where each worker node is happily chomping on an problem on its own. Even then you have to have farmer nodes that keep all those millions of little chompers busy. That is usually a headache on its own, because they will need some data to get started, they'll report back some data, and that's a lot of data if you deal with so many nodes.

If all those millions of nodes need to consult some kind of global data, even if it is rarely, that's another data logistics headache. And those are the best-case scenarios, and that's ignoring any fault-tolerance issues, which with tens of millions of nodes is already far into the `happy fool' area.

So yes, it is extremely hard to program for such an architecture. The only alternative is to use a middleware such as Hadoop where you try to fit your problem into a certain computation pattern (`skeleton' was a popular term for this for a while), and let the authors of the middleware worry about all the headaches I mention above. That doesn't mean the problems aren't there any more, it is just that the middleware authors are trying to hide the issues from you as well as they can.

They were the lucky winners of a lottery, with odds of less than 1%. See http://ajw.asahi.com/article/b...

Since polls of their users indicate that both Obamacare and the related websites are nowadays an overwhelming success, I would say: absolutely not.

They would be able to get a functioning system up and running (after a few false starts). I think it is far better to let the usual UK IT contractors set it up; that way you're guaranteed the system will never be operational.

Are you trying to imply it is not a flaw of the capitalist system?

I can think of a couple of pretty convincing capitalist examples of said corruption, and don't see why socialism is more susceptible to it than the capitalist system.

Wind energy is not a `very expensive' technology, it is comparable in cost to conventional energy, and so is solar. Yes, for now conventional energy sources are used for baseload power in many countries, but energy storage is a solvable problem. There are many ideas for this, from using worn-out battery packs of electric cars to pumping back water into water reservoirs, and some of them are already used in practice.

No country is planning to decommission conventional power generators just to be green, although in some countries decommissioning for economical reasons is being considered.

Reducing CO2 emissions can also be accomplished by reduced energy consumption. Most European countries are well aware of that, and have worked hard to stimulate this, but I strongly suspect that in the USA with its enormous per-capita consumption a lot can be gained here. And no, that does not mean that you have to sit shivering in the dark under the light of a single LED lamp, it just means that by investing a bit in better isolation of buildings, more efficient light sources, and more efficient heating and cooling, you reduce your energy bill. And these investments usually pay themselves off, although it may take a decade or so.

For the statement you ascribe to Freeman Dyson I think a citation is in order. I'm very sceptical that he said what you claim he said.

Why do you think that changing to renewable energy will have such a bad impact on the (presumably US) economy? Sure, some sectors will be reduced, but others will be stimulated. That's how it goes in a flexible economy. There is no reason to assume that there will be the disasters you are sketching.

I'm not going to dissect that `there has been no global warming for about 18 years' myth for the twenty-zillionth time; it has been debunked so often that it's almost a /. meme.

And if a country (again I'm assuming you're talking about the USA here) has so many people living in such precarious circumstances, perhaps it is wise to think about giving them more social support? Higher minimum wages? More affordable healthcare? Perhaps even a more inclusive foodstamp program? Such poverty is not healthy for a society.