Correct.

The idea that somehow we need to develop a new decentralized repository tool ignores that git is already intrinsically decentralized. Itâ(TM)s only by treating some copies of the repository as the single source of truth, such as GitHub, that we land in the predicament illustrated here.

The phrase "just a warning" reflects a deep and dangerous misunderstanding on the part of the dispatcher that must be fixed. In the NWS terminology, a "watch" means conditions are such that a tornado is possible, and a "warning" is the most dangerous condition, that there IS one and that you should seek shelter immediately. No one should ever respond to a weather "warning" condition by saying it's "just" a warning; that's the opposite of what it means!

You are correct and the statistic, although numerically insignificant as a percentage of global carbon emissions, is only reasonable as an estimate if (as it says buried in he article) "indirect emissions are takne into account." This presumably means the emissions related to producing the components of the rocket itself, and possibly of transporting all components to an assembly point and the resulting rocket to the launch pad. Once launched, most liquid oxygen plus liquid hydrogen rockets do produce only water vapor, which looks impressively billowy but does not add to carbon emissions. I say this not to defend useless vanity trips to space, but to focus the conversation properly on the probable source of the emisions cited, a calculation I haven't attempted to repeat. The whole thing was made for sensationalist point-making. While that may have some value, it doesn't help compared to pursuing practical ways to reduce carbon emissions made in industrialized countries at much greater scale than this that are, in fact, the problem.

There are standards. See other comments below.

The Data Format Description Language (DFDL) from the Open Grid Forum is the most comprehensive standard for describing the format of arbitrary fixed data presentations. Multiple implementations exist including the open source Apache Daffodil code and other commercial and open implementations. There is an active community of developers of DFDL description schemas on GitHub and implementations in the European Space Agency for example for satellite data. The published full recommendation is available at http://www.ogf.org/documents/G... and a wide variety of publicly maintained schemas is at https://github.com/DFDLSchemas covering applications from point of sale systems to scientific and health care records. You can write a DFDL description from scratch without much effort. You can also convert between formats by using or creating DFDL descriptions of the source and target formats using tools like Apache Daffodil (https://daffodil.apache.org/).

I can't count the number of 3-sigma effects, and even larger ones, that I've seen come and go in nearly 45 years of being a professional scientist. 3-sigma sounds like a lot, but it's nothing in the grand scheme of things and there's a reason that the standard for discovery is set so high.

Please, folks - social media sites like Twitter and Facebook should be discussed on those terms and with those labels. "Tech" should not be confused with social platforms. The term "tech" is getting co-opted by stories that have nothing to do with physical engineering, science advances, or other forms of technology. C'mon!

At the risk of my karma points, I have to point out that Forbes commentary on tech topics is almost always wrong and anti-predictive. Sorry and have a nice day!

Our organization switched to using Dell's Command | Update and off of SupportAssist some time ago. I believe the latter is a legacy tool, so you may want to choose to stop using it also. Command | Update handles BIOS and other driver updates more seamlessly thatn SupportAssist did, is faster and easier to use, and seems like a more modern tool.

Power9 is a great chip. The PowerPC line was specifically *not* a "dead end" but had fallen out of fashion and the perception was that Apple could gain market share by not being uniue in its choice of processor. The Power series of chips continued development and have powered (no pun intended) a lot of very large supercomputers with better-than-Intel performance per watt and excellent vectorization capabilities, probably overall also better than Intel. Modern compilers can abstract away most of the processor dependency, so what's left is supply, overall performance, power efficiency, and economics. All of those favor the Arm processor line now (except for ultimate core count and performance for large-scale supercomputers, which probably now favor AMD). Don't confuse fashion and crowd perception with reality -- I'm sure Apple doesn't!

We need an open, publicly available, suitably licensed set of text that can be selected for inclusion into all contracts that explicitly disavows, rejects, and excludes any other clause that may allow for binding arbitration. Can some friendly lawyer or knowledgeable person rise to the task, please?

I still use my little rectangular clip-on original iPod shuffle, even with an iPhone of 100,000x the computing power nearby. It sits in the case with my noise-canceling headphones, is ready when I take them out, does exactly the job I need and doesn't use up the battery of the phone. There's something to be said for exactly the right amount of technology at just the right place for what is needed - and it's always in "airplane mode"!

My wife loves it.

A Chromebit or Chromebox as described here: http://www.androidcentral.com/... coupled with a portable Bluetooth or USB dongle-connected keyboard and mouse should work. We've been playing with these for signage but trying them out at home or at hotel rooms. They plug into HDMI TVs or monitors, and you can even install Ubuntu on them for a full stand-alone experience. (See https://www.reddit.com/r/chrom... for example.) Yes, you can find Windows alternatives, but what's the point?