Wasps and hornets can definitely be pests when they start nesting near a house or sidewalk or especially near something like a car or a boat; they tend to be much more aggressive than bees, for example; I don't know any way to deal with that other than exterminating the offending nest. But if they're nesting someplace away from normal traffic they're usually not a problem.

The main problem with the Asian hornets is that they're a significant threat to the native bee population, or secondarily if they're near human habitation.

I don't think that there's a "one size fits all" way to deal with hornets.

The problem is that if you like some of the less popular channels (which are usually not included in the "skinny bundles" from the likes of Hulu and DirecTV Now), you are currently out of luck. Some of these even still explicitly target cable plans (or satellite, its moral equivalent) rather than TV-over-Internet providers.

A perfect example of what I'm talking about is Hallmark, which does not appear to be available at all on Hulu and Sling, and while the main Hallmark channel is available on DirecTV Now, Hallmark Movies and Mysteries is not. Personally I don't care, but I'm married to someone who cares very much, and that missing channel alone is why we didn't ditch Spectrum in favor of DirecTV Now.

In the long run I don't think the business model of such channels will continue to work as more and more people cut the cable cord, but for now the market is still in a rather awkward place.

While it's true that traditional cable TV is a relatively trailing-edge business that's been losing customers for some time, it's still a pretty big business. Not offering some equivalent is leaving money on the table, which doesn't make sense if Google wants to remain in the residential space.

While not everybody wants a traditional cable bundle, for some people the offerings on services like DirecTV Now and Hulu are just a bit too "skinny". If they really wanted to compete with the likes of the big cable companies, I don't see how you can omit traditional cable bundles, especially since the cable companies typically make their combo packages (Internet+TV) more attractive price-wise than buying the services from two different providers.

If Google Fiber persists in this policy, they're either planning to go to an all-business model (marketing only to businesses with no residential marketing, though they might put a line through to your house if you live in an area that already has Google Fiber), or they're planning to wind down the operation entirely. My bet would be on the latter, because an all-business model likely won't be as profitable.

It's sad, but Big Cable has won.

Easily - in fact the very fact that call data would be available to law enforcement is reason enough to discourage contacting them over the phone unless it was an emergency (and probably in the middle of an 'operation'). You can also use various sorts of social media to connect with co-conspirators, which are not subject to the same kinds of logs as phone calls, and the data are generally encrypted so although you might already know that he used a particular platform, you don't necessarily know who he contacted or what information was exchanged. You can also use apps like Skype, which doesn't go through the normal phone system.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think that they're likely to find much more than they already have even if they manage to decrypt the phone, although they might get lucky if the terrorist had taken better-than-average precautions - but they're desperately looking anything to make sure that they've neutralized as many of the threats as possible. That's certainly a legitimate concern, but sometimes there's no good answer, and this is one of them; installing a backdoor creates a virtual certainty that it will be misused for less benign purposes.

It is not reasonable to say that that they should shoot to disable rather than to kill the shooter when that might mean that more people might lose their lives. It's actually much harder to shoot to disable rather than to shoot to kill, because merely hitting somebody in a limb won't disable them sufficiently, and shooting them in their core body is fairly likely to be fatal (even if not immediately) - yet another situation where there are no good answers.

No, it can't. His call history and IP connections can certainly be extremely helpful, but they won't tell you if he had a phone number for a co-conspirator whom he never happened to call, or the name (or at least the nom de guerre) of a co-conspirator for whom he had the phone number of a burner phone. And while it can tell you that he accessed some social media site, it doesn't tell you to whom he might have sent any emails on that site, since the connection was almost certainly encrypted (as most are nowadays by default). Nor does it even tell you his username on that site, for the same reason.

While these are legitimate reasons for the Government to want to get a backdoor key to the phone, creating such backdoor keys is itself a gigantic security risk. Even Barr ought to be able to understand that, but he probably doesn't care; he'll probably be long gone by the time that gets exploited by one of the bad guys. His view does not extend past the end of his time in office, which is certainly less than 5 years and maybe significantly shorter. ;)

Actually in this case the perpetrator is already dead. Obviously they don't want the data for any kind of a trial, but to see if he was in contact with anyone else who might also be a danger.

You are quite right about the threats from foreign intelligence services getting hold of backdoor keys; the US Government has a very poor record of managing to keep- things secret from our adversaries.

I have never seen or heard of an iPhone or any other Apple device updating itself while the user was logged off - which is what would be required in this case. Usually it won't even update itself "automatically" even if you are logged on, you have to request the update or give the OS permission to update in the background. Some provision for this would need to have been done in advance, and we have no reason to believe that Apple has done so.

Unfortunately all of that is true of virtually every member of Congress and in fact of politicians generally. Mark Twain said it best: "Let us first assume that you are a member of Congress, and let us secondly assume that you are an idiot. But I repeat myself."

,,,, Which is probably exactly the point. In all probability the Mayor is receiving significant support from the traditional Taxi and limousine companies.

The red shift in Hubbleâ(TM)s Law refers to galaxies, not stars. Yes, you usually wouldnâ(TM)t use color plates, but even if they used color filters thereâ(TM)s probably no way to recover spectral data; unless they were trying to measure that star in particular, color film is probably the only hope of recovering it. Even that would be difficult, because color film does not preserve the entire spectrum but only certain wavelength bands. The necessary information is very likely not recoverable, and not very relevant in any case if the object is a planet, which is more likely anyway for an object with such a large apparent motion.

Yes, that may be true, at least if the object has significant velocity towards or away from the Sun - which it would not if it were a planetary object orbiting our Sun rather than a distant star. In addition, if the original plates do not have any spectral data - which they would not have if they were in black and white, which is likely given their age and the fact that black and white film has better resolution than color - then the point is moot.

My guess for now is that we are not looking at either aliens or new physics, but something much simpler like one of these or simple defects in the plates.

Constructing one Dyson sphere in only 100 years would be fantastic enough, but constructing 100 Dyson spheres in 100 years means about 1 per year. That wouldnâ(TM)t necessarily mean that it takes these civilizations only one year to build one, simply that they have enough construction in progress to average substantial completion of one sphere per year. This is still an implausible rate of construction; it implies that there are either a very great number of K2 civilizations in our galaxy, or a single such civilization that is starting to approach K3 status, or a combination of these, none of which seems likely. Some other posters have mentioned infrared imaging of the supposed Dyson spheres, and if this has been done it should be possible to see the objects in the infrared. So my guess would be that these are NOT Dyson spheres.

If artifacts on the original plates have been eliminated as a likely cause, the obvious answer (but very possibly the wrong one, this would require further investigation) is that the objects have moved out of the field of view - ie, they have a very high apparent velocity relative to our Sun, and are perhaps even distant planetary bodies rather than stars in their own right, or even alien spacecraft (which I would believe long before I believed that weâ(TM)re seeing an emerging K3 civilization in our galaxy). If this is the case, evidence of that motion should be evident in plates taken a few years after the originals.

Considering that they're withdrawing from some markets altogether (eg, Louisville, KY) and that their pace of installation has slowed way down essentially everywhere else (they're theoretically still in my area, but haven't been installing new fiber now for about 2 years), this is just further evidence that they're in the process of winding down the entire Google Fiber enterprise.

The subject wasn't the reason(s) for climate change, but what might happen to corals because of climate change. They are entirely separate issues.