Airlines need to be extremely flexible and solar powered operations could only be conducted during daylight hours. In addition, unless there was a lot of excess capacity in the generated power, they likely could not operate near dawn or dusk or in cloudy conditions.

On closer inspection? More like "The person with an enormous mascot mask - which, on closer inspection, vaguely resembled a gnu."

I think you're close. You need a secondary access method that requires direct skin contact near the device in order to bypass the front-line wireless security. Same concept as how most people will protect wireless access to their home network, but rely on physical security to prevent someone replacing their router: if someone can get close enough to get physical access, you'll know it and know to stop it before it's too late.

Sure, we can have international blasphemy laws... just as soon as someone figures out how to live in a way that never offends anyone anywhere in the world. Everyone that pushes for this sort of thing always seems to think it's perfectly natural for everyone to think they way they do and so criminalization would be easy to enforce. Nevermind that that their very way of life may be blasphemous to others in the international community. You want to criminalize blasphemy in your own nation? Have at it. Bash your own populace until they're a homogeneous mass. Don't expect the rest of the globe to fall in line so easily.

I for one welcome our new earthworm, uh erm, underlords.

Do RepRap machines, as open as they are, suffer from Ken Thompson's Trusting Trust problem? I suppose once the integration is sophisticated enough to incorporate the controller software in the replication process that it could, for example, recognize any tumbler-style lock device being printed and surreptitiously modify the design during printing to include support for a special master key. Is there a lower-level analog to the compiler problem that involves only subtle changes to the hardware elements?

I suspect this policy creates a liability problem for FaceBook. If I am the victim of a crime and discover that part of its planning was done via FaceBook but they failed to notice or report it, I could perhaps sue them for failing to stop it.

Have we learned nothing from the evil corporate empires that feed us our culture in click-wrapped agreements? Don't sell your personal data... license it! And sue the bastards to death if they share it with anyone else!

It'll probably just make me a target for making fun of them, but... IAFIRF? Really? And as long as we're picking, isn't "Informal" superfluous? What would a "Formal" Anarchist federation look like, anyway?

I'm usually one to let this kind of thing slide (so to speak), but if this topic is meant to be at all serious, SlashBI is hardly a serious name. B.I. will only last so long before it withers under the ridicule. I strongly suggest something like "BusInt".

I always liked George Carlin's advice:

They tell you put 'em at ten o'clock and two o'clock. Never mind that. I put mine at 9:45 and 2:17. Gives me an extra half hour to get where I'm goin'.

Another factor that appears to be ignored in this report on the study is the perceived multiplier of the transaction delta from repeat business. If I'm going to save 65 cents on every book Amazon sells me in exchange for surrendering my (same) email address every time, that's very different from a one-time only discount or a unique purchase from a vendor I'm unlikely to revisit. As it happens, the full report does mention two models, one with and one without multiple transactions, but without reading all 76 pages, it's not clear how the 65 cent figure relates to those more complicated situations.

Incredibly, the investigators somehow concluded the brakes were not a contributing factor:

However, the brake problems didn't cause or contribute to the severity of the accident, investigators said.

For my part, I can't see how the driver of a bus as large as that in the accompanying photo could fail to see the need to slow down even if the driver immediately in front of him was driving too fast.

Mirrors.

I heard the announcement cut in the middle of the top-of-the-hour news on NPR (but there'd been plenty of discussion about it up to that point). After a few seconds I heard what sounded like random comms chatter in the background, but as it got closer to the end I could make it out and realized it was the same message playing on top of itself 3 or 4 times with a half second or so delay between them. The distribution network must have allowed some subtle feedback. Fine for a 15 second test message, but if there were serious instructions being passed on, it could get annoying real quick.