Feel free to prove me wrong, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that they can't (and don't). CDs are mass produced from glass masters. How could they have "hidden signals"?

Once ripped and compressed, sure, you're going to see differences between files of the same track (unless the same software was used with the same settings, and the rip was error free).

Not sure how practical any "tracking" would be, either - at best, finding the same rip on two computers tells you... well, it tells you that it's the same rip. It doesn't really tell you anything about how it got there, and it certainly doesn't tell you that it came from computer A to computer B.

Mr Rabbit, of course.

I assumed you meant that it was contaminated or something, and wasn't safe just to vent from the car, but it seems that...

Is this really not something they could automate?

Compared to the galaxy as a whole, the solar system is very dense. That would (or so something I read said) made it harder to detect because the gravity of all the regular matter in the immediate neighbourhood swamps the signal.

And yet it seems like most physicists - of whom I am not one - seem to think it is the simplest explanation for what we see.

The quote in the summary sums up, for me, the somewhat churlish attitude some people adopt when faced with dark matter:

Of course they have never panned out - so far. If one of them had panned out, we would have stopped looking. Your keys are always in the last place you look.

Photons started out their theoretical life as a kludge factor to solve the ultraviolet catastrophe (great band), and people were appalled by the idea.

Dark matter isn't a buzz word, at least not to the people who are actually trying to discover if it exists, and what it is. It's a hypothesis, or a class of hypotheses.

You could say that about anything that was hypothesised before it was confirmed - the atomic nucleus, photons, quantum mechanics.

And then see if the new model is a better match for observations, work out if there are any other consequences of the new variable, search for experimental evidence of those consequences... AKA science.

That the model needs tuning is already given, because we've got observations that the model can't explain, so there's no "or" about it. The "magic unobservable substance" seems to be the best explanation anyone's been able to come up with so far.

Since when did "nerd" only cover people who understand BGP? I don't remember that on the entrance exam...

Heaven forbid anyone should be allowed to come away from reading a story on Slashdot more informed. Can't be having that!

A simple, painless expansion of an acronym would at least give every reader a fighting chance at a rough guess of what it does, or at least what it relates to.

It's probably because they're better qualified in physics than you are.

Go on then, what's the simpler explanation?

Because it's a fairly thin veneer and the LEDs beneath are extremely bright. Same way my PVR makes text appear on what otherwise looks like an opaque brushed metal surface (though why they have to be brighter than my TV is beyond me - I ended taking the thing apart and putting some ND filter in it).

I can barely see anything in that 360p overly compressed YouTube video.

No I haven't. I'm using it just how I like it, thanks.

Condescending headline, much?

There must be better ones. It's washed out with hardly any green or blue.

That's what I said, but she was having none of it.

Well, if you can't be bothered to help me understand your point...

Incidentally, the question "does flying a drone inside restricted airspace increase the probability of an incident of any kind?" was rhetorical, and not just because flying a drone into restricted airspace probably counts as an "incident" in itself.

You seem to think it's basically no problem at all to have drones flying around in restricted airspace, based solely on the instinct of the pilots to safeguard their toys. There are plenty of good reasons why this wouldn't be a good idea, even if you could trust a drone pilot to try to keep a "safe" distance.

No, they do mean Super Resolution, because that's the basically meaningless but cool-sounding name they've decided to give it. What you mean is super resolution.