Ok, since we're being pedantic: technically, "America" refers to the entire landmass (made up of the continents of North and South America and associated islands). Still includes Canada, though.

Relevant SMBC.

It's a fundamentally flawed hypothesis, because by definition we don't know what we haven't discovered yet. I might even go so far as to say the knowledge we haven't acquired is greater than the knowledge we have. This has been true historically, it is probably true now, and it might well remain true for... well, actually, forever, though it's impossible to know.

Sure, except that in every reported case of battery fires in a Tesla, the user has walked away from the crash (even when the crash took place at 100 mph or so). The cars already have the highest safety rating possible in tests. Expecting a safety margin is one thing, and Tesla has shown they more than fulfill that. Expecting to be invincible is quite another, and that's what a lot of people (or, at least the media) seem to be expecting, and that's incredibly stupid.

This battery shield is a PR move, quite simply. Not a bad one, and it might marginally improve safety, but I suspect only extremely marginally so, and it's certainly not worth it as a safety measure alone.

Yes there is. There are considerably more women in college than men. Has been for decades, now. Higher graduation rates, too (roughly 5% higher for women). I suspect that is the exact opposite inequality from what you meant, but there definitely is an inequality there.

It should be noted I'm not complaining about that inequality. I don't know for sure why it exists, but I suspect it has to do with boys being encouraged during high school (and to some extent college as well) to pursue sports and "manly" activities rather than their studies, which leaves them less prepared for higher education. I could be wrong, though.

Yes, but it also has a greater chance than homeopathy of tapping into side effects (not that I'm defending homeopathy in any way). It also has a greater chance of tapping into real effects than the placebo effect: that is, in fact, most of the point of double-blind studies (you give half the group the placebo, half the group the proposed treatment, don't tell them or the doctors who observe the results which is which, and see if the medicine is more effective than the placebo).

Honest question: how would you build a consumer system that doesn't rely on air cooling eventually? Even if you use phase change, you still need to dump that heat somewhere, so unless you use evaporative cooling or have access to a practically infinite heat sink such as a river or geothermal exchange system (both of which are completely impractical for consumer level equipment), air cooling is literally the only option. Hell, even most (and by most I mean practically all) air conditioning systems use air cooling, ultimately. Probably 99% of all cooling systems everywhere end up using air.

Nah, light isn't matter at all (a particle, yes, but not matter). More precisely: every particle has an equivalent antiparticle with exactly opposite charge (or other properties). For example, electrons are charged leptons with lepton number +1 and electric charge -1 (in units of electron-charge). The antielectron (positron) has lepton number -1, and electric charge +1. Conservation laws require that lepton number and charge be conserved, so the positron and electron can annihilate each other. The proton and the positron, however, cannot (as the proton is a baryon, not a lepton, and both have charge +1, so such an annihilation would violate 3 conservation laws). However, photons have no charge or lepton number, and thus conservation dictates that they cannot annihilate with electrons. Interestingly enough, they can annihilate with each other (photons are their own antiparticle).

This conservation is the entire reason matter-antimatter asymmetry is a problem in physics: every process we know of that produces electrons should also produce antielectrons. It's worth noting that the universe as a whole is not conservative (the expansion of space violates energy conservation, for example), so it isn't necessarily surprising to find an asymmetry, we'd just like to know by what process this comes about (of course, this is hard to do, as every process we can initiate does obey conservation laws: asymmetry may well only happen in some universe-level process, so we may not be able to study it directly).

According to TFA, neither (well, not that they're announcing, anyways). They're supposedly looking into advanced prosthetics, biological manufacturing techniques, disease tracking, stopping harmful genetic engineering, stuff like that. I'd imagine a defense against bio/chemical weapons would also be of interest. Although, given it's DARPA, I wouldn't be at all surprised if they did look into bioengineered super-soldiers, just to see if it's possible.

Really? Because I'm pretty fucking sure they did, in fact, do exactly that. Samsung vs Apple involved patent USD504899, which claims "the ornamental design for an electronic device, substantially as shown and described", to wit a rectangular cuboid with rounded corners. So, yes, Apple did sue Samsung over rounded corners (although the jury did find Samsung did not infringe, that does not change the fact that Apple did in fact sue Samsung over a thin rectangular design with rounded corners.)

But the meaning of the word "toilet" does not (generally) depend on the whole sentence nor on the context of the sentence. "You're such a Samantha", however, does, especially since Samantha doesn't literally mean anything besides the name itself. Samantha does not mean "bitch/slut/etc., except in this context (toilet, on the other hand, retains its meaning even entirely outside any other context). As another example, one could easily translate the phrase "a New York minute" to another language, but conveying what it actually means would require using completely different words (in fact, the literal translation would be entirely different from the idiomatic meaning). A computer which tried to translate the phrase would have zero concept that it's an idiom (unless explicitly told so), and would simply translate the sentence as it was, which would create an intelligible translation, but would not convey the desired concept at all.

You could argue that single-word (such as "Samantha") could intelligently be translated by the universal translator successfully, even when used in such an idiomatic construct. But a sentence which depends entirely on the context ("Darmok at Blahblah" might well refer to an entirely different Darmok, or not even to a person at all) is vastly harder, if not impossible, to translate.

Notch has already canceled his plans to bring Minecraft to the Rift. Given that the entire success of the Rift so far has been from the community (literally: the Rift was crowd-funded and would not exist today if it wasn't for the community), and I have yet to see a single person in the community comments on a number of sites who doesn't dislike this move, I'm guessing the blowback is going to be pretty massive.

I myself have already gone from debating whether I should pick up the dev kit version 2 to play around with or wait for the consumer version, to not planning on buying it ever, and I'm not the only one.

It's customary in science to present your findings exactly as they are, with the statistical certainty associated with the findings. They never said their results were confirmed or "concrete", they said their findings confirmed several other theories and that they were highly certain of the results given the known sources of error and the model they were using. You can always come up with other theories that would also fit the observational data: heck, half the point of publishing your data is so the scientific community can look at it and see if you did something wrong, or if there are other interpretations that fit the data better.

Decidedly not relevant. The NCIS (which is what actually collects said data, not the Navy proper) is a civilian organization (according to their website, 98% of their agents are civilians, and 90% of the agency overall is civilian) which is specifically authorized by Congress to engage in law enforcement. Law enforcement is, in fact, it's whole reason for existence. Posse Commitus does not apply.

I'm neither a lawyer nor intimately familiar with the details of this particular case, but I'm a bit confused how EU law would apply to a US based company running a US-based service (such as an outlook.com email address), regardless of the nationality of the person who signed up for said service.