This is just silly. Thor isn't someone Marvel made up, he's a loaner from a well established mythology, in which he is male. Why not come up with a new, female, superhero? It really comes across as pandering to me.

As a non-American, on whom it is apparently OK to spy as much as you want, may I just say: fuck you. Fuck you very much.

The headline is up to Slashdot's usual standards I see. They are talking about quality-of-service, which is a common and uncontroversial measure to prioritise traffic which needs low latencies over traffic for which that is less important. They aren't talking about prioritising Comcast's video streams over Netflix' video streams! This has nothing to do with "opposing net neutrality", it's just bad, sensationalistic reporting.

Remember that "lines of magnetic flux" don't actually exist. Field lines are just an aid for visualising the direction of the field, in reality the field is smooth and continuously variable. It's unclear what's actually going on here, but perhaps they are measuring the direction of the magnetic field very accurately or something like that.

Is that why traffic deaths have consistently gone down since 20 or 30 years ago? - Killed_on_British_Roads.png

[citation needed]

The article is very unclear about how exactly these supercooled atomic particles tell them where they are on the globe. The impression I get is that it's just a more accurate form of inertial navigation. Or perhaps it compares the local magnetic and gravitational fields against some map of the Earth? I don't see how that would be immune to interference though, especially the magnetic part. And it would rely on an extremely accurate magnetic/gravitational map of the entire planet, which would have to be kept up to date as well as both those fields are constantly changing. Sounds very unpractical.

I'll be very interested to see if something comes of this or if it will just turn out to be hot air and/or inaccurate reporting...

No, I admit that I was wrong. Just leave the EU, I don't really give a fuck what you do next. But stop trying to get all of the benefits and none of the burdens by carving out exception after exception for yourself, and pushing your prudish morals on all of Europe by sabotaging a crucial Internet freedom law just so you can stop citizens from looking at titties.

I'm getting sick and tired of shit like this. Just leave the EU already and become the 51st State, UK! Good riddance!

Whereas currently there is no indiscriminate killing with drones going on without any accountability whatsoever? What's the current body count for innocent civilians murdered by the US and its allies in Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, etc.? A few tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands?

I doubt it would make much difference in practice...

I'm genuinely baffled why a) this has not already happened and b) that it's generating so many comments and so much negativity. My ten year old car (a Renault Mégane CC) has keyless entry and start. It's awesome; I just walk up to the car and grip the handle: it unlocks. I get in and press the start button: it starts. It's very convenient and works perfectly. It's much better in every respect than the old fashioned mechanical lock and switch. To lock the doors I just press a button on the handle. All of this obviously only works if I have the keycard on me. It's even clever enough not to let me lock the doors from the outside if the keycard is still inside the car.

It does have a backup system in case it ever should fail, which I agree should always exist. For unlocking the door the driver's side door actually has a mechanical lock hidden behind a cover in the handle which you can pop off with the emergency key, which is hidden inside in the keycard. And for starting the car you can insert the keycard in a slot in the dashboard. There's no old fashioned ignition switch.

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 capital of the Netherlands is Amsterdam, not The Hague. The Hague is the seat of government though, and the location of most of the international institutions like the International Court of Justice.