If it conducts electricity, it will show up on a metal detector.

"A better Windows than Windows" was a main selling point of OS/2 2.0. It is argued that few developed for OS/2 because the Windows compatibility was so good that there was little point in doing native applications.

Is there a risk that the same thing can happen to Meego?

There are more than 5000 secret patents in the US today. See Invention Secrecy Act.

a) Aggregate is not true today. One day it may be true, but the Western world today still emits more than India and China combined.
b) Per capita is really ridiculously far from being true.

It is the selfish Americans and Danes that are the problem. That is also where a lot of the goods that cause the pollution in China and India end up. The Chinese and the Indians do not get to enjoy them, they just get the pollution. Shifting blame to those who have little and can do nothing about the problems is immoral at best.

It is always a pleasure to see such well reasoned arguments, particularly from an Anonymous Coward.

If your AC is 400% efficient, your PUE is 1.25, which is nice but not ground-breaking. And that is just for the AC, on top of that you waste power on transmission losses and UPS (if you run double-conversion, that is another 10% loss) and everything else a datacenter needs.

Also, 400% is mostly a marketing number. The efficiency depends on the temperature difference. If the outside air is cooler than the temperature you need, you can get infinitely high efficiency -- in theory you can even get electricity back out by using a Stirling engine (in practice that is not possible, the temperature differences are too small). On the other hand, if you are trying to deliver air to the servers at 22C and it is 40C and humid outside, you have a problem. Your AC will not deliver 400% efficiency in those conditions.

I have the perfect solution then: Split China into 100 separate countries, then none of them will be doing a significant amount of harm on its own.

If we then split USA and Australia and Canada into states, CO2 levels must surely drop, as no country single country emits anything worth worrying about. We're all saved!

I would expect rising energy costs to be a temporary blip. Once solar hits price parity, energy costs will only go down. Until we run out of desert and have to switch to energy satellites at least.

It is not a chip, it is just firmware and/or drivers. As for definite information, try scanning money sometime, or copy it if you have a combination scanner/printer. There is a specific yellow dot pattern on currency to avoid having to teach scanners/printers about all currencies in the world. Have a look, it is not hard to see once you know it is there. If you remove the dot pattern, the counterfeit money is not detected as money by machines (not that most people could make money that even the cheapest machines would accept, dot pattern or otherwise).

If you manage to get a scan, you can print it if you enlarge or shrink the notes, then the pattern will not be recognized -- but people get suspicious when they receive double-size currency.

It would be a lot more difficult to tell the firmware not to scan/print guns. A gun does not depend on yellow dots to function.

Disposing of humans through disasters, man-made or otherwise, has historically been unsuccessful. When you lower the number of humans that way, birth rates go up dramatically.

It is possible that the increased killing efficiency of a robot-human war would be able to change that pattern.

If Microsoft is at all clever, the request headers are identical to the ones sent by the default WP8 browser. That is not technically faking anything (they probably even use the same code to do the requests) and it would be bad PR for Google to block that.

The main complaint about Firefox, right from the start, has been memory leaks. You are rewriting history, Firefox was never lean and mean.

If anything Firefox is like Emacs in that the median power of computers is increasing faster than the resource consumption.

So you are saying in Europe young people are only allowed to drive scooters/small motorcycles which rarely kill anyone except possibly the driver, and that means that when they get their car driving license they are less likely to kill someone in their first years of driving? How is that an argument AGAINST doing it like Europe?

Making a car follow a line is fairly simple though. You can add sides to the lanes if you are worried that the cars will try to do their own thing. It has the major advantage of allowing autonomous turns. With steel-on-steel, you have to let the track do the switching, and that is a fairly slow process. It can work for street cars because they at least switch something with a capacity of 50+ passengers; waiting for the switch for almost every passenger sounds unworkable.

The system stops working. So what?