Since they always let the terrorist stuff through, so as not to tip their hand, when will the spammers start disguising their messages as jihadist cal to arms?

I would find such statements more convincing if I hadn't heard Marvin Minsky say almost exactly the same thing in 1975. And, yes, he was talking about all of this happening in the 1980's.

The problem isn't the machines, it's the people running the machines (and the people controlling those people). Journalists, willfully ignorant or otherwise, are so far down on the list they don't really matter.

So, Bitcoin wil be subject to volatility, like every other currency and precious metal in history, and that will cause troubles for the people who actually extract the stuff. Who (aside from anyone in the mining business) knew?

Maybe, in cases like this, the notion of a "jury of your peers" should be extended to include technical competence. In other words, instead of asking the prospective jurors about their views on the death penalty, they could ask about their knowledge of DNS or BGP.

Anyone who is surprised by this is an idiot.

I would assume both that 100% of it is in the cloud, and that to Google, that is a feature, not a bug.

Unless and until Google starts to hire actual translators and pay them actual money, this is value subtracting and will suck income out of the very translators it depends on. If we are really unlucky, it will be an unsustainable parasitism, driving translators out of work and actually reducing the ability of the world to deal with multiple languages.

Sounds like a good idea. Now, let's get the NSA and FBI to fill one of these out.

The actual experience shows that the lower the turnout, the more likely the electorate is to do something stupid.

If we are discussing it on Slashdot, it's not secret.

That weight would have gone to Pluto anyway; the ashes (plus the coin) were used as counterweights, for trim.

It would be more than slight :)

On the other hand, if there are any unknown tiny moons of Pluto, he might get interred on one of those.

New Horizons will start imaging (and optical navigation) this month, but it won't be better than Hubble until mid-May. That's when the fun will really start.

Lunar Prospector carried Gene Shoemaker's ashes to the Moon, and was "deliberately targeted to impact in a permanently shadowed area of the Shoemaker crater near the lunar south pole." Now, they did that for science reasons, but it was still a very fitting end (they could have chosen another crater, of course).