"People complain about the security procedures but if someone was able to hijack or blowup a plane the very same complainers would be howling about not having enough security"

People aren't complaining about security, they're complaining about things that don't improve security, but which do make travel an absurd hassle. Taking our shoes off, not carrying liquids, etc., don't prevent any significant threats. Both measures would detect attempted attacks that were both detected and stopped other ways when they were attempted, and both of which would have failed even if they'd not been stopped - the "liquid explosives" take hours to process during which time the attacker would have to be locked in the bathroom doing chemistry with the liquids, and the shoe bomb and the underwear bomb would have badly injured the attacker but not destroyed the plane.

Things that really improve security are measures that countries that take air travel security seriously take, with Israel the obvious example. A good start would be actually putting an Air Marshall on every flight, and to actually understand who the fliers are and interrogate anyone suspicious, which require real effort - they'd have to train tens of thousands of agents to put one on each flight daily. They likely have under 5,000 now, to cover 87K flights a day, so odds are there's no Air Marshal on any given flight. And there aren't trained detectives talking to fliers to pick out suspicious people - there are checklists given to "lowest cost bid" contractors. But they'd rather talk about security than do anything difficult or expensive, so Air Marshals are out. And, amazingly enough, they've been _cutting_ the number of Air Marshals.

So instead they funnel money into expensive equipment of marginal value (but profits for vendors, and lowest-cost-bid "agents" can operate them). So we get no security, but we get hassles.

The most absurd part is that the people working in "security" are all following orders, and appear to think that what they're doing improves security somehow.

The United States was formed specifically not to be just another country, but to hold itself to a higher standard. And it did so. When the US was just an idea, and our soldiers were fighting the most powerful country on the planet, we didn't justify torture.

“Should any American soldier be so base and infamous as to injure any [prisoner]. . . I do most earnestly enjoin you to bring him to such severe and exemplary punishment as the enormity of the crime may require. Should it extend to death itself, it will not be disproportional to its guilt at such a time and in such a cause for by such conduct they bring shame, disgrace and ruin to themselves and their country.” - George Washington, charge to the Northern Expeditionary Force, Sept. 14, 1775

If our current leadership has lost sight of the point of forming the United States, they need to be held to a higher standard, and replaced by leaders who respect the principles of the country.

... and in Britain, there are perfectly synchronised, nation-wide power surges when everyone puts the kettle on...

I think most people would agree PHP is a four-letter word.

The SNAP-9A used in the Transit 5B-2 navigation satellite launched in 1963 weighed 12.3 kg and produced 25 watts of power. That looks about like a perfect fit for Philae, and I'm sure more efficient thermocouplers are available today that could further reduce the weight.

They could also have made Rosetta much larger, and possibly have got to its destination much faster, by launching on a Saturn V rather than an Ariane 5.

(Unfortunately, the jumbo-sized booster was unavailable - as was the RTG.)

Like the GP, I was also surprised to hear that a probe so far from Earth was solar powered, I wouldn't have thought there was enough light that far out even without the shadows. Sure it's an assumption but it's not baseless, previous deep space probes such as Cassini, pioneer, and voyager are all nuclear powered.

NASA's Juno probe, currently en route to Jupiter, is also solar powered.

RTGs are great, but availability is limited.

The fundamental problem is that they're over-billing, the problem is that they've got a monopoly on a utility, generally with extremely weak oversight. So, as happens for hundreds of years, they use their control to extract money from everyone else. That's why it's a terrible idea to run utilities as unregulated, for-profit corporations. That's why whenever monopoly utilities are deregulated the prices go up while quality of service goes down. Competition only works if there is real competition.

Competition doesn't magically solve everything - that's why there should be both competition and legally defined minimum standards.

Compare it to food safety. Back before there was an FDA, food companies would often sell unsafe and even deadly food, because it was profitable to do so. And competition didn't stop them. What was effective is laws making it illegal to use unsafe practices in food production, combined with audits and penalties. And competition serves to improve things above that level, so that some food companies do better than the legally mandated minimum for food safety. Of course, it's not perfect, but it's far, far better than the horrors of the pre-FDA food supply. So now people have a right to know what's in the food they eat, and that there's basic minimum level of safety in food production. And those had to be made laws because food manufacturers didn't do either of those things, even with the magic of competition.

Similarly, the Net Neutrality is a law that says that when you buy an internet connection you can get to the whole internet and your ISP won't corrupt your network connection to increase their profits. That seems pretty obviously a good thing, which I suspect is why pretty much every major technology company supports it.

Sorry, you're right. Ivee was $149 on Kickstarter, which is less than the $199 Echo. But now it's retailing for $199, same as Echo, My bad.

Funny, but not true - they actually shipped the units, and they work well.

By the time "the launch window" comes around you could easily have them (and hell, us as well, the viewing public) convinced that they are onboard a genuine Mars mission rocket heading into space... much easier to achieve - and cheaper and safer - if it's all in a studio.

Been done already (albeit with a flight to a peculiarly non-weightless 'low Earth orbit' rather than a mission to Mars) with the 2005 television series Space Cadets.

For my own use, I was thinking of turning mine into an airplay-compatible receiver (I found that there is software for for that) and built it together with (wifi dongle and a little amp) into a very old radio cabinet. Nice to put in the kitchen.

If your radio is still in semi-working condition, it might be possible to inject the audio signal from the Pi into the radio's existing amplifier. I almost certainly broke all kinds of audio design rules, but in my instance it sounds brilliant. I (briefly) got it working as an Airplay receiver, but for nearly two years it's been doing sterling stuff as a time-delayed BBC Radio 4 device.

(I would definitely recommend against blindly doing this with stuff that's directly mains-powered - I know that a lot of old radios, especially in the USA, did scary things with mains voltages. For a battery-powered transistor radio? Certainly worth a try.)

It looks a lot like Ivee (http://www.helloivee.com) which was Kickstarted a while back. Ivee costs much less, and integrates with home automation gear (Hue, Nest, etc.), which is useful. It doesn't stream internet audio, though. So it'll be interesting to see how they compete.

The white house had hundreds of meetings with Republicans, spent a year negotiating with them, and hundreds of Republican amendments were adopted during the committee mark-up process that was passed. They were negotiating with Republicans right up until the actual vote, because the whole time there were Republicans saying that they might vote for the ACA if only they added X or Y to it. Remember the "The Cornhusker Kickback" that Nelson negotiated for?

Yes, since they threw a tantrum and walked out at the last minute, so in theory Democrats could have ripped all of that cost and complexity out, but then that would have been a reset to the whole process, and might have resulted in nothing getting done. And because they needed every single Democratic vote, they could only pass what the worst of the Senate (Lieberman) would vote for. And since he was owned by the insurance companies, he made sure that the ACA was great for the insurance companies.