I'm not so sure. I know that the Boeing design philosophy differs from the Airbus design philosophy in that it gives more autonomy to the pilots and has fewer automatic protections. In the case where there are no pilots that might backfire (although I guess ultimately it wouldn't make much difference). In addition I wouldn't expect that a modern autopilot has a reaction built in for a complete engine failure, since it's never supposed to happen.

My guess is that it would just try to maintain altitude, pitching up further and further as the plane slows down, possibly until it stalled and dropped like a brick, or possibly pitching down at some point to avoid stalling, which would still cause it to fly into the ocean at high speed and a steep angle. At some point the autopilot would probably disengage, since most autopilots are programmed to do so automatically when the plane's attitude becomes too erratic, after which there's no telling what the plane would do but it seems very unlikely that it would calmly glide towards the water (and hit it so evenly that it wouldn't break up).

I'm not convinced about the scientific integrity of this company. What they claim to be able to do sounds very vague, shady and too good to be true and there's a telling lack of concrete facts about how their technique works. The "learn more about GeoResonance technology" page is conveniently "under construction". The brief summary states they use:

• Earth Remote Sensing.
• Multispectral imaging.
• Gamma irradiation.
• Radiation chemistry.
• NMR spectroscopy.
• Proprietary know-how.

Sounds a lot like pseudoscientific technobabble to me, absent more details. I'm getting a hint of Steorn here...

That is close to the northernmost one of the two arcs that Inmarsat deduced the last ping must have come from, so I guess it's not entirely implausible.

It doesn't seem likely to me that the plane would still be completely intact though, which seems to be implicit in this article. If it fell out of the sky due to lack of fuel, which currently seems the most likely scenario, it would have impacted the water at high speed and would surely have broken up.

The notion that because an individual is a member of a group which has been or is being disadvantaged compared to other groups, that individual deserves to be favoured above members of other groups, is ridiculous. It's dangerous, unfair and unjust nonsense. It's discrimination, pure and simple. There's no such thing as "positive discrimination".

Every individual deserves to have the same chance as everybody else, and should be judged on their merits alone.

An excellent illustration of the downfalls of security through obscurity. The NSA could have known that would happen and that their secrecy might decrease the average security situation due to people not using the actually more secure crypto. They should have been transparent about why they tweaked the S-box values. People shouldn't have to assume anything, best or worst.

And now of course the NSA have demonstrated that they cannot be trusted at all and nobody should ever accept magic numbers from them ever again...

Yes, it actually says "a view days" instead of "a few days". A typo is one thing, but that is spectacular... Did they dictate it to their computer or something?

I don't understand why, in cases like this, so much attention is given to the question whether it's lawful or not.

Who cares?! Of course it's lawful, the governments of the world have made sure to have enough overly broad "war on terror", "won't somebody think of the children", "national security" laws on the books to make it possible to find a legal loophole justifying anything. Fuck the law.

Surely the question should be whether it's moral or not?

It's been explained to me that this is standard MO for the USPTO. They never check patents before a cursory glance, and only when it is challenged do they actually look into the merits of it. Apparently this is because they just don't have (anywhere near) the amount of manpower they would need to keep up with the vast number of incoming patent applications.

Anyone know how true this is?

Well there's your problem...