One can draw an analogy between this and supermarket club cards, where you *can* buy groceries without one, but, it is 25% more expensive.

Yes, an I'm sure that Oliver Clozoff of 1060 W Addison St, Chicago appreciates all of the junk mail from Kroger and Safeway.

I'm glad that my cars are pre-OBD-II.

But really, it comes down to that they can raise your rates when they want to for any or no reason. The only thing stopping them is competition from others that want the same revenue source.

When I had heard that the Russians were calling this kidnapping, I was doubtful -- but now, not so sure. We really do exact our justice anywhere we want to, don't we?

What happened to extradition treaties and such? When did it become "stuff them in a van and drive!"?

i expect that the United States already had notified Maldives and gotten approval for extradition, long before he was arrested. After all, they indicted him in 2011, so they had plenty of time to determine his whereabouts and travel patterns. They might have anticipated that he would go through Maldives, so they arranged a hearing with their government to seek his extradition on his arrival on their soil. When he landed they intercepted him, arrested him, and the US government took custody.

Had this been, "stuff him in a van and drive," I doubt that it would have even been reported, or that it would have been reported so quickly, or that they'd have said something while he's only as far as Guam as opposed to back to the mainland US.

What kind of bizarro world are you living in?

Yes, and I don't think that its choice of name or acronym is terribly good either.

Cumbersome. Zeus is short. Ares is short. Cronus is short. Even Posiedon is only three syllables, but Aphrodite at four is getting a little long and doesn't roll off the tongue the same way.

Well, there can be an argument for 'futurists' to attempt to come up with better ways to do things without a definitive need or even much of a want, but there still needs to be an actual benefit to the change. This windowless cockpit idea has few positives compared to the current status quo, and as airline accidents have demonstrated, has plenty of negatives.

If they want some fancy augmented reality system for pilots, then perhaps the motion-tracked helmet idea that the military is working on for fighter pilots makes more sense. Something that can be worn that can give the pilot the outside-the-visible-light-spectrum data that a pilot could benefit from, but could be removed when the thing stops working to go back to VFR.

I think they should name them something besides GPS. Maybe Ares Positioning System so that it could just be called Ares.

Though such a Roman->Greek naming scheme might not work so well for Venus...

First, this isn't NASA or the United States at all. Second, there well could be applications for differing landing systems for different applications, both for from-orbit landings and for terrain-to-terrain hops to traverse large amounts of territory or to bypass obstructions or other impassable terrain.

If the ESA will pay for it then I don't really care that much. The idea sounds a little silly given the atmospheric density on Mars, but if they can make something work or can learn and use this knowledge to work on something else that works well, all the better.

Or the Make-a-Wish Foundation felt that what they were doing was fair-use. Remember, while they dressed the kid in an off-the-shelf costume, they called him "Batkid", not "Batman", and had DC tried to kibosh the whole thing they'd have looked like monsters.

Media companies struggle with this. There have been fanclubs that have received glowing endorsements from marketing departments while simultaneously receiving cease-and-desist letters from those same companies' legal departments. On the one hand letting the fans run wild with sanctioned merchandise and games and other enthusiasm brings value, but they have to be careful with derivative works and other uses, but if they step too hard then they'll be seen as douchebags and will alienate the very people that make them all their money. The best thing that they can do is to offer enough things with their IP on them for legal sale (look at Thinkgeek as an example of what's available) and the fans will probably be sated without resorting to IP violations en-masse.

I suspect that some read it as,

"In their defense, if they don't work to protect their trademark, then everyone will be getting their murdered children DC's logos on their headstones..."

instead how I wrote it. Dropping two short words and swapping two others takes the black humor completely out of it...

Can we have a tech-person-rejecting-tech pissing contest?

I tell the time with a stick.

In all seriousness though, if you're salaried (so no punching a time clock), don't watch much television, and don't need to take scheduled mass-transit, then you probably don't need to know the time better than quarters of an hour, which can be guesstimated with decent precision based on the position of the sun.

You know what I'd want a smart-watch to do? Be a waterproof cell phone transceiver with basic 'dumb phone' functionality (SMS/MMS, contacts list, dialer) and with rudimentary notification capability, such as the ability to notify of calendar events, and to be a bluetooth hub for the headset, tablet, car connection, etc. That way I can still do basic communication when I don't feel like carrying around a two and a half inch by five inch block. I don't need it to be an e-reader, a map viewer, a shopping list editor (though it might be cool to view a list like a dumb phone can), or any of a whole host of functions that people expect their phone to do. Let the small tablet (or large tablet even) handle that, if I want.

With that kind of size and that slow of flight, it's no wonder it fell to ancient flak guns. Too easy to hit!

What is this...I don't even!

In their defense, if they don't work to protect their trademark, then everyone will be getting their children murdered to put DC's logos on their headstones...