Given the numbers above, the average transaction cost is about $22 at $0.10/kWh. And it's only increasing with time. With costs like that, Bitcoin no longer makes sense for normal, everyday purchases. Why does Bitcoin have this amazing staying power? Why can't another cryptocurrency with cheaper transactions supplant it?

The Pixel XL 128 GB is now listed at $769.00 on the Google store. It was at least $100 more a week ago. I'm not considering third party sellers.

Does it make sense to buy the Pixel 1 XL 128GB now that it has come down in price? It still comes with the headphone jack and Google's OS updates. The Pixel 2's lack of headphone jack is a no-go for me. The USB-C headphone adapter is too fragile. Hunting for good sounding Bluetooth earbuds is unappealing to me (plus expensive, plus the battery charging and relatively quick failure..).

It may be groundbreaking, but not for the reason advertised in the paper/article/summary. From a quick look at this paper, ADC power dissipation is proportional to f * 2^(2*n), where f is the sampling rate and n is the number of bits per sample. High performance ADCs are constrained by power dissipation, which limits either sampling rate or resolution. What these guys are probably trying to do is constrain n. By allowing signals larger than the ADC input range, and then unwrapping them in software, they increase the effective number of bits. Even if they gain only 2 bits by doing this, this is a factor of 16 advantage in power dissipation (but how does the self-resetting ADC compare to normal ADCs in terms of power?). In any case, the article seems to be hyping a non-existent advantage (sampling signals exceeding the nominal ADC range - why not just attenuate the signal and use a higher resolution ADC?), but does not mention the real advantage (power dissipation).

I'm an EE. This concept is interesting to me, but then I'm left wondering how they really tackle the problem of signal limits. It's not just that ADC that limits the signal. The amplifiers in the chain also do it. Maybe I should just read about it. The whole self-resetting ADC concept just strikes me as odd. I have a feeling it was invented to improve the dynamic range or sampling rate or reduce the power usage of ADCs, but not to magically sample arbitrarily large signals.

The congresscritters also heavily criticized the Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM):

From the looks of it, this mission will probably not receive funding. It's a bit of a shame. It would have been a good opportunity to start developing asteroid mining technology. Perhaps no one is ready for that yet.

The +5 cap is good, but the "karma bonus" is not great. It basically makes +1 and +2 the same. I know that I can disable the karma bonus, but then many +5 comments will appear as +4, which is not great either. I'd like the ability to quickly spot the top modded comments and also see all comments with just one positive mod on them.

I'd like to add that if any changes are made to the moderation system at all, the ability to make controversial comments visible should be a priority. Just an observation: controversial comments (even if modded into oblivion) tend to generate a lot of replies that themselves are highly modded. So there are two criteria to detect these: the total number of mods (in either direction) and the number (and score) of the replies. To allow users some control over display of such comments, maybe promote them one level: from not shown to abbreviated, or from abbreviated to full.

This long article is worth a read to the end. The author acknowledges the possibility that his anecdotes are just the results of coincidences or him networking, like you suggested. The article is actually humorous and designed to make people think about the direction our society is heading. His anecdotes about the visit to the NSA data center, the gun show, the tire shop, the hot springs are all well written. This article is by no means a list of complaints, like you suggest. He makes fun of people that are truly paranoid (seemingly to the point of insanity), while raising some unsettling thoughts as a side-effect.

I've also been eyeing this project, but haven't tried it on any of my machines yet. In the reddit /r/sysadmin thread people seem quite critical of this script. There is credible opinion that these updates will be required for windows to continue updating in the future, so it's dangerous to remove them; and that privacy cannot be achieved anymore while running Microsoft operating systems.

I'm looking for a reliable, verified way to remove all this telemetry. Can anyone confirm if this project delivers what it promises? It supposedly works on windows versions 7-10.

Why is this modded +5 Informative? Youtube HTML5 video still autoplays even with this option set to false. Apparently they get around this by loading the video from a script. I basically had to disable HTML5 on Youtube to get it to stop autoplaying. Flash, thankfully, can be blocked until user permission.

Check out "Pathological Science" for some cautionary tales. It's kind of sad how enthusiasm for EM Drive seems to be rising just like for all those past examples, while full scientific rigor has not yet been achieved in the experiments (the experimenters themselves admit this... a sign of progress). I wonder if we will eventually see an experimental satellite propelled by this drive... Part of me thinks that is a waste of money. But another part thinks that all the debate on this topic is an even bigger economic drain through time wasting. So maybe launching an EM drive into space is worth it, just to end this pointless debate.

But this is not just another exoplanet. It's the Kepler spacecraft being back in business. I think that's news-worthy. By looking at many different patches of sky they will detect many more exoplanets. The only downside is that they won't be able to observe each patch very long, so only short period planets would be discovered. That's still lots of valuable scientific data. The way they precision-point this telescope now is also interesting.