If someone is standing outside my door kicking it in there's a good chance one of the neighbors will call the cops, and if they see a broken window it's the same story. If someone walks up to the door and just walks in the neighbors will assume that they belong there. Some guy in a different country might be very interested in unlocking doors for his cousin/friend/business partner, or opening the garage door so that the moving van can back right in, especially if they have verified on your cameras that you're not home, your guard dog is a chihuahua, and the thermostat is set low enough that it's certain you won't be home for a number of hours.

What percentage of the population will be competent to take the thermostat off the wall and cross the wires? My wife would be afraid that she would be electrocuted, even if I were on the phone reassuring her that she wouldn't. A lot of people don't even have a screwdriver in the house. Really sad, but true.

I broke the rules and RTFA, this is the first time that they have managed to combine an Earth-based observation and a space-based one separated by far enough from each other to give a reasonably accurate baseline for an accurate measurement of both distance and mass. From the article:

Calculations estimated it to be 10,200 (+/- 1,300) light-years away. . . These observations also allowed the mass of the object to be measured — around 0.23 solar masses

Well, I know that 2/3 of the drivers in my neighborhood are idiots on the road (they may be great software engineers, but utter morons behind the wheel) I'm not terribly frightened by this technology. An autonomous vehicle that makes the wrong decision in 10% of situations will still be an improvement. I once saw one of my neighbor's kids BACKING UP on the freeway in rush hour traffic because he had missed his exit. I can pretty much guarantee that Hyundai's car won't do that.

Or with the turn signal on . . .

I wish they still made the Toyota HiLux pickup, the Toyota mini-van and the VW Rabbit (and Rabbit Pickup) in their original no-frills configurations. There's a lot to be said about a vehicle that you can beat the crap out of for a decade and fix with hand tools.

People already read books, watch movies and browse the net while driving, or haven't you driven in the Puget Sound area?

Try DIR at the command prompt. I pretty much never use the GUI search, I've always found it to be slow and cumbersome.

I think "privatized" is the actual idea, as in selling off taxpayer-built assets for pennies on the dollar to wealthy cronies.

Actually binary systems seem to be fairly common, about 16% of all asteroids have a moon. The advantage of attacking the moonlet is that they can get very exact measurements of the effect of the collision fairly quickly by measuring the change in its orbit.

BTW, "shooting stars" are generally about the size of a grain of sand. Good luck getting rid of all of those.

Wish they would just give the Navy's R&D budget to NASA. We already know how to kill massive numbers of people and destroy an entire region's infrastructure, and neither of those process need to get any more efficient.

A 40 kt headwind is 50% of the speed of an 80 kt airship, but only 10% of the speed of a 400 kt airliner. That's the difference between taking twice as long to arrive at your destination, or only an extra 1/10th of the time.

Just start a fusion power plant! It should produce plenty of helium! Fusion power is only 20 years away . . .

This might be interesting for use in the Andes and Himalayas, where much of the terrain is too high for helicopters to operate reliably and too rough for long airstrips.

Sears makes a lot of money off its contractor "referrals". My dad was a remodeler for many years. He got a couple of jobs through Sears during a slow spell and was kind of pleased. Then he ran into a friend at the lumber yard who had lost his business and was working for someone else. He explained that Sears gave him plenty of business and life was good. Eventually he was working exclusively for Sears, and didn't have time for any of his outside customers.

Then Sears started to squeeze him. They started taking more and more of his profits, to the point where the only way that he could even break even was to do rushed, slipshod work and pay peanuts for unqualified employees. Finally he decided it wasn't worth the trouble and closed up shop, going to work for a former competitor.

My dad never worked for Sears again.