We don't need proxies for the last hundred and some thousand years, as we have air samples trapped in ice from that entire stretch of time. At no point does it show such a high rate of increase, even when Krakatoa blew up.

Really? What brand did you get? We have a Samsung, and use half the amount of soap we normally would, and adjust the amount of washing time down ~40% from the default. We don't work in restaurants or dig ditches, but even with all the gardening and remodeling we do we never have any problem with clothes not getting clean. And almost any low-flow toilet manufactured in the last 15 years, including the cheapest Home Despot brand, will work better than the old 4-gallon flushers. My brother and brother-in-law are remodelers, they put a lot of them in, and haven't had a complaint about them for a decade.

So the answer is to just continue increasing CO2 emissions and population at an exponential rate because it's inconvenient to do otherwise? Large scale agricultural failure is going to be a lot more inconvenient and a lot more expensive. Third World peoples aren't going to be mired in poverty as much as they're going to die in droves when food gets priced out of their reach.

Actually there were no "new ice age scientists", there were a couple of journalists on a slow news week at Time Magazine who had learned about Milankovich Cycles and found that we should be well into the next glaciation cycle.

Did something like this deliberately once on an internal network, because the person needing access to the files was too inept to follow even the most basic instructions but too highly ranked to ignore. It was supposed to be temporary, but I then **forgot** to turn the security back on in the morning. A month later one of my bosses noticed she could get into HR data that she wasn't supposed to access and raised a red flag. Oops. Thank all the gods that our network didn't have remote access yet.

So you're saying there needs to be an Identification level of Internet of Things, an ID-IoT.

Much of (if not most of) the medical equipment was never intended to be put on the larger corporate network. For example MRI devices were supposed to write to a DVD and be sneaker-netted to wherever the images were to be analyzed because transferring that much data over a 10 megabit network was unreasonable. Gigabit networks changed the scenery, and manufacturers just slapped a network interface on them and foisted the security issue on hospital IT staff.

Kiddie porn sites have been found on Internet-connected multi-function printers, and at least one has been used as an entrance into a corporate network. An HVAC system was the point of entry for the Target attack. IoT junk will be used, probably sooner rather than later.

If someone is standing outside my door kicking it in there's a good chance one of the neighbors will call the cops, and if they see a broken window it's the same story. If someone walks up to the door and just walks in the neighbors will assume that they belong there. Some guy in a different country might be very interested in unlocking doors for his cousin/friend/business partner, or opening the garage door so that the moving van can back right in, especially if they have verified on your cameras that you're not home, your guard dog is a chihuahua, and the thermostat is set low enough that it's certain you won't be home for a number of hours.

What percentage of the population will be competent to take the thermostat off the wall and cross the wires? My wife would be afraid that she would be electrocuted, even if I were on the phone reassuring her that she wouldn't. A lot of people don't even have a screwdriver in the house. Really sad, but true.

I broke the rules and RTFA, this is the first time that they have managed to combine an Earth-based observation and a space-based one separated by far enough from each other to give a reasonably accurate baseline for an accurate measurement of both distance and mass. From the article:

Calculations estimated it to be 10,200 (+/- 1,300) light-years away. . . These observations also allowed the mass of the object to be measured — around 0.23 solar masses

Well, I know that 2/3 of the drivers in my neighborhood are idiots on the road (they may be great software engineers, but utter morons behind the wheel) I'm not terribly frightened by this technology. An autonomous vehicle that makes the wrong decision in 10% of situations will still be an improvement. I once saw one of my neighbor's kids BACKING UP on the freeway in rush hour traffic because he had missed his exit. I can pretty much guarantee that Hyundai's car won't do that.

Or with the turn signal on . . .

I wish they still made the Toyota HiLux pickup, the Toyota mini-van and the VW Rabbit (and Rabbit Pickup) in their original no-frills configurations. There's a lot to be said about a vehicle that you can beat the crap out of for a decade and fix with hand tools.

People already read books, watch movies and browse the net while driving, or haven't you driven in the Puget Sound area?