Facebook did NOT test it's systems

None of my examples related to testing systems; they all related to testing how users reacted. Literally the only thing that seems different about this to the thousands of other experiments Facebook and other companies are running constantly is that it had an explicit intention to measure the users state rather than just behaviour. I'm not sure that makes any real difference to the ethics.

Websites are conducting research constantly. When Google moves a letter a pixel in their logo it isn't for shits and giggles; it's because testing showed them that it changed something for their benefit. That testing was an experiment and involved users who will have had no idea that an experiment is going on. When a company tries putting something new in high visibility spots in some of its stores, then uses that data to decide how to place products they are performing an experiment on people who haven't given 'informed consent'.

Literally millions of experiments like this are happening all the time. It isn't viable to inform users of all of them, especially as many people performing them may not even realise they are doing it and it isn't beneficial to stop them all. Read what Facebook actually did, it may be that it crosses a line for you even though it didn't for me, and that's fine; so let's try and come up with a line we can all accept rather than a kneejerk reaction of claiming that any experiment is bad, no matter how trivial, without informed consent.

By that point people had already been rendered and were already being tortured. It's well documented. There are lawsuits against EU governments for helping the US do it in progress right now.

Can you explain why the Swedish prosecutors would not come to the UK to talk to him? They didn't want to arrest him at the time, just talk. He invited them over, there is precedent for such visits, and yet they declined.

The UK court rulings were based on their decision that the danger of being grabbed by the US was minimal. You can argue that it was or it wasn't, but Assange was in an impossible situation where he believed there was a strong possibility of being rendered and yet was unable to provide evidence of it for obvious reasons. His choice was risk that or run, so he ran.

You obviously didn't look very hard. The VERY FIRST link from a google of "snowden girlfriend" turns up:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...

Abandoned his girlfriend, left her to fend for herself with the authorities and media, the bastard.

Do you know anything at all about the German climate?

I think your mistake was trying to do regexes on a device that isn't designed for anything more than email and web browsing. Maybe a Surface would be more suitable?

This isn't an intelligence crime. Assange is accused of terrorism and actively harming US security and interests. What you are suggesting is that he takes a huge risk, and the result of losing will be rotting in gitmo forever.

LOL, okay, yeah. It's also illegal to render people from the EU to other countries, torture them, throw them in a prison camp without trial and keep them there for years. Still happened though, even with help from some European governments.

Framing him was part of their attempt to discredit Wikileaks. They did the same thing to Snowden in the early days, making all sorts of claims about his girlfriend. Considering how dodgy the case in Sweden looks it's hard to see how any rational person in Assange's position would risk going back there.

The new coal plants are just to replace older ones. The old ones are becoming uneconomical and reaching the end of their designed lives anyway. The new ones are cleaner (so less pollution tax) and better able to ramp up/down in response to demand, so they fit in better with Germany's new renewable energy sources.

Once the new plants are up and running the old ones will be decommissioned. Even so, there are doubts as to whether the new plants will ever be profitable due to the increasing use of renewable energy.

You should try using a swipe keyboard. Once you get used to it you won't miss physical keyboards any more. The standard Google keyboard is pretty good and supports swiping.

Where do you draw the line? If Facebook realised that showing more negative stories (by monitoring what people already see) makes people more likely to click adverts is that really any better/worse than them artificially increasing/decreasing the amount of positive stories a user sees?

If Google was having a hard time deciding if a page was junk or not, would it be unethical to put it in the results for some users and see how they react? Clearly that's an experiment without user knowledge, but it certainly doesn't sound like it's unethical to me and stopping that kind of experimentation or flooding sites with notices about them would make things better for users.

Obviously there are experiments they could run that would be unethical if users weren't informed and monitored; discussing where the lines are and agreeing some best practices would therefore make sense.

Actually smaller screens are easier to produce. Larger screens need to be perfect over a much larger area. A defect will write off a much larger chunk of silicon and glass. There is more to go wrong too, since you need more track to wire up all those widely spaced pixels. Things like propagation delay start to become a major problem too, so you end up with multiple controllers for different parts of the screen.

The same logic applies to all electricity sources because none of them can run un-interupted at full output for their entire lives. Even coal and nuclear plants need regular down time for maintenance, as well as unexpected events.

The grid is a pool, with many generation sources contributing to it. If you only had one turbine they might have a point, but when you have hundreds or thousands you can rely on them for a certain amount of "base load" power. In fact they are more reliable that traditional forms of generation, because a single failure at a coal/gas/nuclear plant can knock out hundreds or even thousands of megawatts, but a single turbine failure is insignificant.

Wind is actually pretty reliable over the short term. A bit of smoothing helps, and Japan has already deployed 50MWh batteries for that purpose. Even without smoothing with a number of turbines distributed geographically the output doesn't vary much over an hour, and is quite easy to predict a few hours in advance. That gives other sources plenty of notice to ramp up.

Home owners can't really lose with solar PV, unless they somehow get screwed on workmanship or installation costs. The panels with always pay for themselves in a few years and it's shear madness that new houses are being built without it.

I'm sure it will be an excellent reproduction. The UK now has quite a few reconstructed classic machines, including various Babbage Engines and Colossus, the first computer. We really should make more of our computing history.