It's not necessarily as bad as you make it out to be. Let's say that you have a hemispherical dome covering 4.3 square miles, which I think is what the summary is trying to say. That's a diameter of 3766 meters and an interior volume of about 14 billion m^3, which is something like 17.15 billion kg of air. It's around 1000 joules per degree celcius for each kilogram. So, if you start with a very nasty 45 degrees celcius and get it down to a comfortable 20 degrees celcius, that's 428 terajoules. Obviously Air conditioning is not perfectly efficient. We'll assume an EER rating of 13 for the air conditioning, which may actually be a bit low for a huge commercial system. That's about 38%, so it would take 1.121 Petajoules. Let's say we're powering by gasoline. There's around 120 megajoules per gallon of gas, which translates to around 24 megajoules of electricity per gallon at 20% efficiency. So, that's around 46.7 million gallons of gasoline. Gas is around $2 a gallon in Dubai, so that's around $93.5 million. That's not very much compared to the initial construction costs of such a structure.
That's just the initial cooling, of course, there's still the matter of keeping it cool afterwards. With such a large structure, heat transfer from the outside is almost negligible with proper design. It's a huge number compared to a regular home, but it's very small relative the the massive volume. Then there's the heat generated inside. A typical human puts out around 100 watts of heat just by being alive, then there's all the lighting, cooking, and every other use of power. Guessing a kilowatt of heat generated per person wouldn't be too far off. From the numbers I've found, I'm estimating that they're expecting an upper limit of about 4 million people continuously (180 million visitors per year, guessing they will stay for a week, plus some permanent residents), so that's 4 gigawatts of cooling, or 126 petajoules per year. Going by our previous figures, that's around $10.5 billion dollars per year. That seems like a huge sum of money, but that's only $58 per visitor if they have 180 million per year (and it obviously scales down somewhat if they have fewer visitors).
These numbers are all rough, of course, and use naive assumptions about the shape of the dome, energy consumption, design efficiency, source of power etc. Obviously powering by gasoline would be crazy from an ecological standpoint, but there's an abundance of solar power available there, and the gasoline cost is just a stand-in. The numbers I gave are skewed towards the worst-case scenario, and they're still reasonable. There's nothing impossible going on there. There may be plenty that can go wrong with such a project, but making out the air conditioning in to a near-apocalyptic problem is a bit hyperbolic.

It all depends on exactly which definition of "dinosaur" you use. Many, if not most, modern palaeontologists consider birds to be dinosaurs. Even if you use the traditional definition of dinosaur that restricts them to the Mesozoic, there were birds during the Jurassic and Cretaceous, so you would be saying that birds who didn't survive the era were dinosaurs, but those that did aren't. Which would make it weird for any bird species that survived unchanged well past the extinction. Would that single species be a dinosaur species up to the end of the Mesozoic, but cease to be right at the boundary? Would they just retroactively not be dinosaurs?

That's not really just an idea from xkcd. Modern taxonomists group birds within the clade Dinosauria. Also, birds have tails, even if they're short. The tomia of a number of birds are also very toothlike. A number of dinosaurs, such as T. Rex had all kinds of adaptations to make their skulls lighter relative to their bodies.

So chess is not a sport, but speed chess is?

Deemed by me?

I went back and read the (score:-1 Troll) post again. It still says:

Sorry still sounds like it's deriding the "fodder" (I'm going to assume that he doesn't actually mean for them to be eaten) and glorifying the cowards hiding behind them.

You really seem to attributing to me a lot of things I didn't actually say. I makes it hard to even understand what you're talking about.

You seem to be all for the utter and total betrayal of the "beta" soldiers, for the betterment of the "alpha" soldiers. There doesn't seem to be much else to say.

I'm trying to understand this... Are you glorifying cowards who use other people as human shields? Maybe I'm misunderstanding.

If you're going to complain about immigrants working on advanced aerospace technology and the Apollo project in essentially the same breath, it might be worth noting all of the German immigrants who worked on the Apollo project.

Remember when we had a Debian system on the biosciences mission? They scrubbed the whole mission after they were already in space due to a fuel-cell issue that I think turned out to be a faulty sensor, and flew the entire mission a second time.

Good point. That would almost be reasonable, if the proceeds weren't going to the police doing the seizing. If the system were set up so that the proceeds went, for example, into paying back social security, or to pay for services or toys or whatever for orphans... For that matter, if there were just some laws preventing police officers from profiting directly from seized property (no more bonuses to officers, no more first pick of auctioned property, etc.), the situation might be improved. The fact is, found, unclaimed and unowned property shouldn't belong to the police, collectively or individually. If anyone, it should belong to the public. The entire history of laws allowing bounty and spoils for public officials is nothing but a history of corruption. From firefighters burning down houses to judges sentencing innocent people to death for witchcraft. This sort of thing shows that, whatever illusions we may have of living in a more civilized age, we really don't.

So... a few tens of thousands of dollars worth? Hardly seems worth worrying about one way or another if that's actually the case. :)

Am I the only one who gets disturbed every time it's blithely mentioned that this or that police agency gets to take spoils for themselves? It seems a little... inherently corrupt.

Can you explain to me why anyone ever "buys" a house somewhere with a homeowners association? Seriously, what were you thinking?

Might be that we haven't defined if phone calls are private in the digital age because they were legally affirmed as private way back in the analog age. Re-reading your post, I'm not sure you understand what the stingray is for.