It is also the same day that the Xbox 360 launched in 2005.

It's also the 50th anniversary of the assassination of JFK... coincidence? Actually, yes, I'm pretty sure it's just a coincidence.

A lot of the retaliation by his, er, subjects is physical and likely an illegal escalation. I think a simpler response is to produce a mirror or better yet a camera-disabling laser pointer. But then, he holds the power of edit, so any truly effective responses won't make it into the videos. There's a lot of creative people in Seattle, and I'd like to see those "outtakes" which didn't produce the effect he was going for.

When a number comes out of that lock box, it's just a phone number ... If they think that's relevant to their counterterrorism investigation, they give that to the FBI. ... the FBI has to go out and meet all the legal standards to even get whose phone number that is...

I do not understand how he can tout the uselessness of the number that pops out of the "lock box" and then gloss over how its relevance can be determined before the FBI seeks to learn anything more about it.

It would be most interesting if the tweeting team managed to dig deep enough into the historical documents to recreate the fog of war that blankets all such events, announcing and then retracting as reports arrived at HQ (or whatever).

Full realism would be uninteresting since no real HQ would tweet everything it thought it knew at the moment it knew it. But then, perhaps using declassified documents, we could recreate what it would be like to work at the top levels of a Twitter-based government with Top Secret initial and revised reports and guesses bouncing around, seeing how little time people really had to make decisions that put thousands or millions of lives at risk.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but precision and accuracy are not the same thing. They are complementary ideas, to be sure, but they should not be confused: <pedantic probable-correctness="75%">precision indicates how close the measurement is to other measurements of the same phenomenon by the same instrument, while accuracy indicates how close the measurement is to the actual value</pedantic>.

Absent international treaty or a national law (assuming their competition can be assailed in the court system), anyone with a plan like this will be forced to defend their claims the old fashioned way: by force. Will the beacons have probe-disabling lasers on board? The article doesn't say. But my guess is that the cost of getting a defense system on the rock is the same as the cost of getting mining equipment on it.

A better defense plan is to scan 10 times as many rocks as you normally would and leave beacons on all of them. Then develop either stealthy or very fast mining tech for phase 2.

And here I was thinking the crossword clues would be as normal, but the answers in the grid would themselves be regular expressions.

I sure hope they're doing something obvious like fuzzing the feed over those classified channels. I'd hate to see an opponent get an opportunity to attack the crypto when there's a 4 hour-long known plaintext transmission.

My favorite part of the practical applications they present is the security camera pointed at the billboard. Presumably the tech is expensive enough that someone might just scale the tower and steal it.

The most common interpretation of "this month" and "this year" would have them meaning the same thing. Perhaps if this was the New Year's Day poll, we could get the first four answers all meaning the same thing!

So many jokes, so little time...

• Can a soldier with 4 arms be more devastating on the modern battlefield? How about 6?
• Perhaps the submitter meant to suggest that arms will replace legs as a means of racing across the battlefield?

You can't just put "[sic]" next to any random string of characters and expect the reader to understand. What the hell is "whiel boosting creativity" supposed to mean, anyway? Maybe I'm slow this morning, but it took me 5 minutes to see the "while". Brackets can help readers stay engaged [and] informed [while] improving understanding, but this time they failed us.

The headline is misleading. The actual pass/fail line for each student is unchanged. The state is changing what it considers an acceptable aggregate rate of passing for groups of students, choosing race as the criterion for grouping. The stated rationale is that students of different races have different starting points, so it makes sense to seek different final achievement levels. But even if you accept that approach, it seems lazy to use race as a surrogate for academic starting point.

Airlines need to be extremely flexible and solar powered operations could only be conducted during daylight hours. In addition, unless there was a lot of excess capacity in the generated power, they likely could not operate near dawn or dusk or in cloudy conditions.

On closer inspection? More like "The person with an enormous mascot mask - which, on closer inspection, vaguely resembled a gnu."