Kind of scary how shallow they could go. With a sub height of about 21 feet, that's about 15 feet of water above and below which doesn't leave a lot of margin for error.

"The barchan will probably continue on its journey past the city site, which in due course will re-emerge from the sand, but it is anticipated that it will not remain unscathed." Another interesting tidbit: "persons ~ 1.6 m tall atop the dune (~ 35 pixels) act as a scale bar to estimate the dune height (135 pixels) as ~ 6.5 m high". That's a lot of sand.

Given that US politics is controlled by corporations to a large degree, I'd be asking what corporations have a vested interest in making sure they^Wthe USA retains control of the Internet.

It sounds ridiculous, but answering this question, or confirming or denying the very existence of a vacuum cleaner design, a Swiffer design, or even a design for a better hand towel would apparently expose the U.S. government and its citizens to exceptionally grave danger

This kind of hyperbole is what makes people ignore warnings.

Taking that to its logical conclusion, you could assemble the entire rocket upside down. At some point there has to be a base to reference everything else from.

How do novels do it? There must be plenty of Star Wars novels out there.

From http://science.howstuffworks.com/life/human-biology/two-lungs-one-heart1.htm:

Interestingly, when we are in the embryonic stage of development, we actually do have two hearts. The heart primordia (which describes the stage of the heart's development) in the embryonic stage is actually two hearts, which eventually fuse together into one heart with four chambers. Embryologists in the 1920s and '30s kept the heart primordia from fusing in embryonic frogs, and the frogs that grew up developed two hearts. The same also goes for our eyes. We begin with one primordia of the eye, which eventually separates to form two. If the primordia is kept from splitting, one central eye develops, like a cyclops, says Dr. Neff.

A quick web search reveals people who actually do (or did) have two hearts. Here's one about a guy who was born with 3 legs and two hearts!

In the summer of 1906 George Lippert died of tuberculosis at the age 62. The autopsy revealed his two hearts and also showed that one heart died two to three weeks before his eventual death. Doctors declared that if Lippert had not had tuberculosis he could have easy lived on for many years. He would have been sustained by his secondary heart.

An alternative to a super reliable pump is an array of less reliable pumps (like a RAID in hard disk terminology). If one pump fails, you can switch it out while the other pumps keep the blood flowing. Might want to have them mounted outside the body to make replacement easy.

Results are just as good, and they respect your privacy.

What all the big 3 gaming consoles seem to be lacking is the ability to make menu selections with either the motion controller or the regular controller. Too time consuming when you have to home-in on a menu selection for each of several levels of menus. Let me use the regular controller for that stuff and keep the dedicated motion selection for the gameplay itself.

Suppose an asteroid's path is changed during mining, putting it on a collision course with Earth (not necessarily on the first pass).

Rep. Alan Grayson on the NSA: American As Apple Spy

Seems to me that wifi-enabling the light switch would be more useful and cost-effective (for most people) than doing the same to the bulb.

Hopefully he doesn't fall into the "been here, done that" groove that so many older action hero actors seem to fall into (I'm looking at you, Bruce Willis). It's not exciting to watch. Make it a fresh challenge and put your soul into it.

If the NSA don't tell people what they're capable of or their algorithms, the problem space for criminals becomes much larger than if they know they have to avoid doing X, Y, and Z in order to avoid getting caught. I'm not trying to defend this huge spying dragnet, but perhaps that's part of the thinking behind keeping it so secret. The IRS doesn't publish its algorithms to find tax cheats, either, otherwise it would be much easier to get away with it. You could call that security through obscurity, I suppose, so maybe there's a way to improve security by allowing wider scrutiny, identifying loopholes and closing them.