Singular nouns that refer to groups of people often take plural verb agreement in English (admittedly this is more common in British than US English, but it does happen in both). Compare "My family is big" with "My family are big"...

Yep, exactly - the "they" clearly indicates the company is being thought of as a group in this example.

Of course, the whole thing just goes to show how poorly written the original title was in the first place :-)

Really? I'm not sure that's an improvement...

You are assuming that the medication under test actually works. If it doesn't (and we don't know whether it does or not, or else we wouldn't be testing it), then those taking the placebo are no worse off, and indeed may be better off if the medication has side-effects.

No - that was one of the points of the article.

Increasingly the source of phishing URLs is social media rather than email. In tweets (and to a lesser extent on other social media) it's common to send a shortened URL (tinyurl, bit.ly, goo.gl etc) that redirects to the actual URL, and consequently users won't be surprised to receive such a short URL, and will probably click on it - whereas if they received a massively long "data:" URL with lots of base64 data after it, their suspicions would be more likely to be raised...

What have eels got to do with it?

Of course you can—that's why you have to be careful sailing near Somalia, in case you get boarded and forced at gunpoint to hand over the source to the latest version of Emacs...

You're right, that would be stupid—and, despite what the summary tries to tell us, that's not actually what the article's suggesting.

The ampere is currently (no pun intended) defined as the amount of current that must flow in two parallel wires a specific distance apart, in order to get a certain amount of (magnetic) force between them. (The Coulomb is then defined as the amount of charge that flows past a point in one second when the current is one Ampere.) That definition is good enough for most purposes today, but there are limits to the precision that can be achieved in an experiment that measures current using mechanical forces. If it's now practical to create a stream of precisely counted electrons, then we can define the Coulomb and Ampere directly in terms of numbers of electrons, which then has the potential of being much more precise.

So the value of the Ampere and Coulomb won't change (or at least, not significantly), because any new definition will be chosen to be consistent with the old one—but the way we pin down their meaning may do.

Umm... are you sure about that?

So what? All you need is a couple of 5-minute periods when major appliances don't change their power consumption significantly. If everyone in the household is sitting watching television, then that's not too unlikely - you might find that the AC or fridge motor turns on or off, but those have a fairly long on-off period so could be handled; lighting and idle computer/hi-fi equipment will have a fairly constant power usage pattern. Of course, this will depend on the equipment in your house and the people using it, but it's not as implausible as it might at first seem.

Are you sure? Modern LCD TVs adjust the backlight brightness according to the image displayed, in order to improve the contrast, and this does appear to be measurable.

No, but this one does.

Basically, the meters read (or at t least, can read) the power consumption to a very fine degree of accuracy every 2 seconds. That's enough to figure out what TV channel you're watching (by watching power fluctuations caused by varying brightness levels of the TV). And with that level of detail it would also be fairly easy to make good guesses at: what time you leave for / get home from work (lights/kettle/coffee machine/cooker); when you're in the shower; how many people are in your house; whether you're on holiday... it all starts to get creepy pretty quickly...

Ummm... China does have a veto.

Yes. I call it "indentation" ;-)

"Undecidable in general" != "unprovable for any program". Or rather, just because it's not possible to write a general purpose algorithm that will tell you whether any given computer program {terminates, crashes, is secure against a particular threat} doesn't mean that, for any program I'm ever likely to write, there doesn't exist a proof. Or in other words - there exist billions of programs where it's difficult to know for certain whether they terminate - but those programs aren't relevant to determining whether my program terminates - and if I've got any sense I'll write my program in such a way that I can prove that it terminates (if that's the behaviour I want).

Your original comment said:

... which implies that you consider branch prediction to be a form of mitigation against errors, similar to error correction — i.e. that the reason branch prediction exists is to improve security.

A Branch Prediction Analysis attack makes use of branch prediction to break security, but that's irrelevant — it doesn't change the reasons why branch prediction existed in the first place, and it certainly doesn't turn branch prediction into a security feature.