Which is exactly what they're going to do. (Although they do have a human on hand to operate the sample drill, I guess that instrument wasn't ready in time to go out to Chile)

Slight correction:

Trades were executed in Chicago at the same time as the change was announced in Washington D.C. in a classical physics sense.

The trades were made at 2:00pm on the dot in Chicago. Which implies that the trades were made with a 0s thinking/processing time. The graphs I saw were timed down to the millisecond, so assuming they got the information at 2:00.000 (which wasn't possible) they decided to execute the trade in less than 1 millisecond. It's probably theoretically possible, I assume that the information was at least guessable and I'm sure many traders were prepared for this eventuality.

Of course, it's possible someone anticipated the outcome of the decision, and scheduled the trades for 2:00, and was planning to reverse them in some way later if the information tuned out to not be what they had expected.

No, all you have to do is work out how to get the spiders to file reports!

Well, reading around, it seems that spiders of up to 100mg can be lifted by a mass of threads forming a fan about 1m long.

Assuming Spiderman is a skinny kid, he might weigh as little as 50kg, so he should be easily able to lift himself by producing a fan shaped mass of silk with a length of as little as 500km.

Pretty much every space launch company in the US does work for the DoD/NRO if they can. Military contracts are where the big money is.

You can try voting for a third party, but we tried that last election in the UK and look where that got us. (basically a worst-of-both worlds coalition). Mind you, we actually had a credible third party to vote for.

I'll admit, Christian Rock isn't a genre I know anything about*, but music often goes in cycles. Some new sound will get invented an picked up by a bunch of people, gradually get more popular until large companies start trying to jump on the band wagon, at which point it all starts to get a bit crap and commercial and kids start saying to each other, "$GENRE is crap, lets make something new" and the whole cycle begins again.

*I'm going to stick behind the saying, 'The devil has all the best tunes'.

It's more that in the UK we've just assumed that the government has the capability to intercept all of our communications for years, but we rely on their incompetence to keep us safe.

It works out ok generally.

If a major bank is caught laundering drug money they get a slap on the wrist and nobody involved even gets charged, much less prosecuted.

What were you expecting?

If you're a business, you can get ADSL from BT Enterprise, who, it turns out, are just re-selling Plusnet services.

Oh, and if you think that being called 'BT' means that they might have some extra pull when you have a problem with your line then you must be smoking something.

The privatization of BT/GPO has lead to a situation so tangled and messed up you couldn't really make it up.

Oh, and it also made a small number of people very rich, so mission accomplished there then.

I use LastPass, and it's really helpful. However, they're based in the US, so if the NSA (or other TLA) really wants your data, then they can just pop round with a court order or a National Security Letter or a gun and demand access to all of your passwords.

Now, I assume that the NSA isn't interested in me, but I couldn't recommend Lastpass to someone who was worried about the government.

That said, there are several OSS password managers, or you could even just keep a text list inside a Truecrypt volume. One of those would be the more secure choice.

I'm betting that there's been a increase in people checking both the source of their favourite OSS encryption (et al) software, and checking their compilers in the last week or so.

Congratulations! +1 internet to you. What gave it away?

(no really, you should feel proud, reading the other comments it seems that a whole lot of people can't spot a joke even when it rubs ROT13 in their faces)

It gave the rest of us a good chuckle when you failed to notice that the article was a joke :)

It really does. I live in the UK, this is basically how things work here.

It must work because I've never been shot :)