I noticed that. They needed a multi-stage rocket to leave Earth, but the crafts alone could land on then leave the water planet (130% Earth gravity) and the ice planet (80% Earth gravity), and the main vessel could pull away from orbiting a black hole.

A couple other things also bothered me.

1) If the water planet was that close to the black hole I am pretty sure it would be ripped apart by tidal forces. Also, if it is so close to the hole, where is the star that it is getting light from? And as someone else mentioned, shouldn't the radio transmissions have been Doppler frequency shifted and dramatically slowed? And since they are reading the radio transmissions from the probe, wouldn't they have known that it had only seen a few minutes of ground time since that is all it would have (Doppler shifted) reported? The only other explanation is they chose to go to a planet that they had lost all contact from which is contrary to what the plot is.

2) And for going into the black hole, if we buy his statement about how not to get torn apart, I didn't get how they were planning on sending info out from the black hole. Once you are in, you are in, and they said they needed data from inside it, not from just outside it.

3) And how did he get out of the black hole at the end? No explanation. Just boom, there he is, along with his robot.

4) Why did the wormhole suddenly become unable to communicate back? They already had info from the first people so it was working then, and they spoke about being able to see things in the wormhole as they approached, so why the change?

5) His statement that the wormhole and the inside-the-black-hole constructs were made by far future humans is a theory, but isn't based on any evidence what so ever. Maybe it was, or maybe it is some other species. I guess it keeps them out of hot water with those who insist man is alone in the universe. But if it was future humans, why all the roundabout maneuvers? If they wanted to send a message, and they can manipulate gravity like is stated, then just send it. Big document inscribed in the desert sands. No need for subtleties. Yeah, yeah, I know, then no movie plot. ;)

I know you need to suspend some beliefs when watching movies, especially science fiction, but there has to be a limit to the amount you need to suspend. OK, feel better now.

Failure to thoroughly read a contract, in and of itself, is no defense.

Really? So if I put a line buried in the middle of a contract that says by signing you are conveying to me as consideration any and all rights to all real and personal property you own, then that clause is enforceable? Unreasonable conditions in a contract are not enforceable, and having a long, wordy, and legaleze rich contract HAS been held by the courts to potentially be a form of manipulation by sellers to deceive buyers. If a reasonable person would be shocked by something in a contract, then as a general rule it would probably not be enforceable unless the seller (the creator of the contract I might point out), explicitly singles it out to make clear the buyer knew about it and was OK with it. Hence, my original post's buried in a contract versus contained in its own form.

I also normally, though not always, read contracts that many people just sign. I spent about 15 minutes reading the sales contract for a car I recently bought, which the salesman was fine with. When I bought my last house, I also read through all the documents before signing, which pissed them off, mostly because they scheduled the signing for 4:30PM on a Friday and they couldn't leave until I finished, which took till almost 8PM.

It is wise to read anything you are signing, but failure to read it doesn't mean you are SOL if something bad was slipped in. IANAL.

That used to be a trick that stores used for mattresses, maybe they still do. The major companies like Serta, Sealy, and Simmons, would make a different model name for various major stores. Each store offered to beat any other store selling the same , IDENTICAL, item. Since they each sold their own "unique" mattress model they never had to actually match anyone. The fact that Sears' Foo and Wards' Bar were the same mattress, just with a different label and SKU, was of no help to the consumer.

I have seen things like that at Walmart too, like special version of a DVD that contains an extra trailer, or a drill that doesn't come with the carrying case like it does from Home Depot, all differences that cause it to have a different SKU.

There was a story a few years ago about Best Buy rigging their in-store computers to show a higher price than their website to the public. It was a shadow system that looked like the external site, but gave different prices. Its purpose was to trick people who look something up online, see the price, go to the store, find it at a different price, and complain. The salesman would pull it up on their "website" like the customer says they did, show the customer that they were mistaken, the marked price is the price it shows, and the customer was faced with either walking out or accepting the higher price. Smartphones were the fall of this practice since customers no longer had to use the Best Buy systems to look things up. They could whip out their iPhone/Android/BlackBerry/(cringe)Windows and look it up for themselves. When some of these people questioned the sales person's answer and independently verified the info on the spot, which didn't match, all hell broke loose.

It depends on how prominent the disclosure was. Was it in 8 point font in the middle of paragraph 37 on page 7 of the 12 pages the buyer had to sign? Or was it in 14 point font on its own form that dealt with nothing but the presence of a tracking device? Unfortunately saying the buyer signed an "acknowledgement" doesn't prove the device's presence was known, and courts interpret these things in how a "reasonable" person would find it. Also, the way that was written could mean the device's installation was acknowledged somewhere in a document, but since it was in a new sentence, the point about alerting if removed may be a comment about how it works rather than what the form contained.

I prefer sending them to an exclusive gated community with lots of large males so they can learn how to make friends. You know, opening new doors and all that.

Your flawed logic is premised on the assumption that the ability to penetrate an adversary's computer isn't at times necessary in order to protect Americans. It is also premised on the assumption that they do not monitor for adversaries using the withheld flaws.

Never attribute to malice what can easily be explained by greed. I think the publicity made a lot of people who hadn't previously known about MerchantC, some of which are crooks, say "Hey, there's a new payment system? Let's see if it can be hacked." Seems that during round one they only got non-financial data, but let's wait for rounds two through 100,000.

If by "split" you mean the banks take 99.985% and Apple takes 0.015%. While the term is probably technically accurate, its use here is misleading, especially after mentioning the 30% figure. It's more like Apple takes their very small cut, and even that makes it sound a lot bigger than it is.

Yes, the detector system detects that the police radio is transmitting, and when it does the metadata of the transmission can still be read (it's packetized transmissions), only the data contents of the transmission are encrypted. This lets the system know that kind of radio transmitted and how strong the signal was, but can not allow the person to listen to what was said. It's like with a VPN, if you snoop the wire you can still tell that two systems are talking, and what the endpoint addresses are, even if you can't read the data being sent.

While anything like this can always devolve into a cat and mouse game, any of the approaches like tracking IP addresses also comes with problems for the vendors. What about businesses, schools, Starbucks, airports, hotels, etc, that use NAT and so everyone that is behind it have the same IP as far as the website is concerned? Do they see all 10000 Google employees that use the same NAT device as one person so they all get treated badly? Or just because someone in the same hotel searched for a flight (a common event) all the other guests are labeled with that person's characteristics? Some would say the businesses could learn the addresses of such NATs, assuming they aren't dynamic and therefore occasionally change, but there are A LOT of them, so at best only the large ones might get into such a database. And so the cycle of beat the other guy continues.

I think what they are trying to do is the same way many companies use a low first-time rate to try to entice people to try their product so they get to know it with the hope that they will then become a loyal customer (and paying full price). This company is assuming that if you got there from a Google search, then you are shopping and they want to introduce themselves. The problem here is twofold. First, they don't let you know that you are getting a special first-time deal so you get massive sticker shock when you come back. Second, if you figure it out and come back through Google you get the same half-off discount again so it negates the "first time is discounted" philosophy, namely they did the implementation badly, and it make it seem like they are trying to gouge their repeat customers (which maybe they are).

Either way, when people find out that the price is higher if they use their cell phone versus their computer, or use Safari versus IE, or use a Mac versus Windows, or search for a more expensive version then search for a cheaper one versus the other way, it makes people feel victimized and cheated. The reality is people have always been pawns to be used and manipulated by businesses, it is just that when you catch them doing it it makes you angry.

The article talks about this. They say use a private window, and thereby no cookies, to see what a generic visitor would see, then also look in you regular browser window, and compare the two. Sometimes your cookies may help you get a lower price, in which case use them, and sometimes they may hurt, in which case use the private window that isn't sharing them.

It is more like a food chain charging a higher price for food in an airport or across from the sports stadium than they do at their general locations. They are using market information to adjust prices in order to maximize profit - exactly what a business is expected to do. In this case, they are using information they have about the consumer, such as previous buying decisions to gauge desire, and adjusting the offered price in an attempt to maximize the sale price. Legally, as long as they do not knowingly use information regarding a protected class as a criteria then they aren't breaking any laws (using where the person/connection is coming from, say a rich area versus a poor area, is still debatable if it is legal - some precedent says yes and some says no). Many or most people still feel these practices are shady.

An example of this price-adjusting practice is when we needed to order an advertising banner for my wife's business. I did a little Google searching and found halfpricebanners.com had what we wanted at a good price so we used them. A couple months latter we needed another banner so I went to their website and was surprised by the price it quoted for exactly the same kind of banner - about double as before. Being the Internet nerd I am, I surmised something was going on so I went back to Google and did the same kind of search I had done before which again produced their link. Sure enough, if I go to their site from Google (not just from their ad, even the organic listing) then their prices are half of what is offered to people who go straight to their website. From then on we always used Google first to get the "Google discount".

Sorry to follow up on my own post, but 64 million light years would be many galaxies away, not just across the Milky Way. My bad.