In my country court proceedings are secret, as their disclosure can harm ongoing investigations, or simply violate someone's constitutional right to privacy.
Accusations are not convictions. And even if you were convicted of something that's no one else's business. You pay your debt to society, you have the right to a clean slate. Never hear of the Right to be Forgotten laws?
If the US does not protect its I'm sure that one day it will get finally get rid of the media circus bullshit and let people have their dignity.
You're the record holders for bible-thumping, how about "Judge not lest ye be judged" etc.

NASA has been able to make rockets that don't blow up since the 1960's.

Why can't the Australians do it? Was that knowledge filed away in a locked cabinet somewhere, or has rocket science made no strides in the past half century? Why isn't rocket design a "trivial" problem in engineering?

If they took the same approach to computer science, the Australians would still be trying to refine silicon from sand.

Growing up in the Midwest, we were very much aware that nuclear war could end humanity's existence with scarcely more than a half hour of warning. Climate change is positively tame by comparison.

What these researchers misunderstand is that most people are not so privileged that climate change even makes the list of their concerns. It's not that they don't care, but that they just don't have the time or money to do anything effective.

The average person cannot afford an electric car.

The average person doesn't own a home, but if they did would still be unable to afford solar panels.

The average person can't work from home, because their employer insists they come into the office.

The average person can't live without a car, because America was designed and zoned for car traffic. If every American decided to use public transportation tomorrow, there wouldn't be enough trains or busses for everyone.

The average person can't grow their own food, because they don't own (enough) land. Even if they did, modern agriculture - from fertilizers to harvesting and transportation - depends on diesel fuel.

Given that most governments are owned by the fossil fuel companies, it is rather naive to expect governments to do anything more than token measures to address climate change.

It strikes me as a bit odd that people who are rather astute at predicting climate 50 to 100 years into the future can't predict that, in spite of their polemics, nothing meaningful will be done about climate change. Individuals lack the power, and governments lack the incentive. It seems to me that the old joke about consulting rings true for climate science: if you're not part of the solution, there's money to be made in prolonging the problem.

What happened? Necromancy? I haven't heard of it in like 20 years.

They're throwing shit at us because they're bored and their AI is so inbred after several generations of consuming its ancestors' slop that it hallucinates frequently and so the asteroids miss Earth.

I think you just described humans. WE are the danger to this world, and provide no value to it :)

No one eats viruses but quite a lot of species depend on mosquitoes to survive, or eat the mosquito-eaters to survive.
You don't have to kill any mosquitoes, just replace them with a genetically modified version that is resistant to parasites?

Quite a lot of animals feed on insects, and then some carnivores might feed on them.
If you overfish sardines, anything bigger than a sardine may also suffer a population decline, as it is a staple food for lots of yummy fish and also marine mammals..

In fact, the best thing to do is to use the gaps between cars to absorb speed differences so as to allow ALL traffic to flow more smoothly

I agree with you, and I find that this is easier to do in a manual because the acceleration is instantaneous. I have found that I don't have to accelerate as hard if the response is immediate, versus delayed. I don't have to brake as hard because I start slowing as soon as I back off the gas.

With most automatics, the off-pedal cruising speed is 20 to 25 mph, which means that driving any slower than that requires riding the brake. From behind, a slow, steadily moving automatic appears the same as one which is stopping, or stopped. So they create a situation in which drivers behind a steady 15mph automatic vehicle have a harder time estimating traffic speed - which leads to the inevitable traffic accordion.

Many years ago, when Motorola was in buyout talks with Google, they used Google docs extensively. One can only wonder if Google got a better deal because they were able to read Motorola's internal discussions. I don't know if they used Google docs for the discussions, but I do know there were quite a few people at the company who expressed no concern for the possibility that Google docs could leak proprietary information.

One of my vehicles has an automatic transmission, and the other, a manual. The car with the automatic transmission has about twice the horsepower of the manual, but drives as if it's twice as heavy.

What I've noticed is that when driving the manual in heavy traffic, I use the brakes much less than with the automatic; one pedal both brakes and accelerates. Because I can keep the engine in its power band when crawling along in traffic, I get instant acceleration when traffic speeds up again. But with the automatic, the "delay, downshift, overaccelerate" conniption fit of the automatic transmission often allows other drivers the space to cut in front of me.

So instead of teaching people to write concise, to-the-point emails, we instead let them ramble on and use AI to communicate what they really intended to say.

This doesn't solve the TLDR problem, it only makes it worse by encouraging people to waste time writing emails that others simply won't read.

In other words, information known to most graduates of the physical sciences, but somehow illegal to disseminate outside of the collegiate environment...

I find it rather curious that Britain has not only made certain knowledge illegal, but has managed to convince the press that merely knowing certain things can threaten their very safety.

If a model produces better answers when it is given more time to think, one can presume that it doesn't understand when it has actually found the answer to a problem, but is instead weighing incomplete options against the time remaining.

A truly thinking agent would recognize when it has the solution to a problem, and would be able to signal that it needed more time to complete the answer if it hasn't found the answer and has options yet unexplored. And it would also be able to understand if it had not reached a correct answer after trying all of its possible options. It seems that what passes for deep thinking here is nothing more than tuning time constraints so that the agent gets most of the answers correct, rather than actually building an agent which can recognize when it is right, when it is wrong, and when it needs more time.

A new shiny thing after cryptocurrency wound up as a commodity traded like so many others, and not the civilization-changing invention envisioned.

AI looks like it'll be hampered by power generation and delivery (or rather the lack thereof).

On the upside, there'll be ungodly amounts of money spent upgrading and expanding the power grid.