So Ford evidently got injured on the Falcon set.

Tie fighter over water was just them playing with special effects. Very gratuitous.

Guards on the light saber was definitely the silliest addition.

And how do you achieve this? You need to block land borders, plus control a coast along which piracy is growing. There is no navy big enough to blockade that coast, and putting the army in to block the land exposes them to the disease.

In my area we use a paper, marked, optical-scan ballot. I've seen a couple different variations over the years, but they all have some characteristics in common: They're simple, can be audited by a human, and read by a machine. Our ballots are not counted at the precinct but at the county level due to the population of most of our precincts (we only have a million or so people in our entire very large state).

To handle people with disabilities, we have machines which mark an identical ballot using a special voting-machine like device. This allows those who can't mark a paper ballot to vote, yet still results in an auditable, paper, ballot.

Personally, I think we need to abolish electronic voting in any form which doesn't result in an auditable, verifyable, paper, ballot for each voter.

Got it in two.

And how will such a Roomba avoid the problem described in TFA, the grimy bits in the corner?

Which, as detailed in TFA, is exactly what has been tried. And those rotating thingies leave grimy patches in the corner. That idea doesn't work: a better one is needed - and not yet available.

I don't get overexcited by this. It is just observing stuff in a public place. We don't get upset by policemen looking at the faces of all passers by, when searching for a miscreant. If you want to use the cellphone system you are going to broadcast and anybody, good or bad, can pick up your transmissions. It is a downside of a technology we didn't have thirty years ago, and a technology with a lot of advantages.You similarly "broadcast" your car's registration number all the time.

My problem, so far as it goes, is with the various authorities secrecy about it. I think the police should be "keeping an eye" on the neighbourhood - and they should be open about it. If what they are doing it, they should be open about it. If it needs to be hidden, they shouldn't be doing it - in broad principle, if not the details. The police should not have dirty secrets (applies less to counter-intelligence agencies). If they are ashamed of this program, they should not be doing it. If they are not ashamed, tell us what it does.

Absolutely agree. I remember when I was helping put papers together how painful Word was to get to work, and how nice it was when I finally learned LaTex. I recently had to put a piece of research together, and now of course everyone uses MS Word and one has to use it. For collaboration.

That said the error might not have been prevented with LaTex. If it was a conversion error from different versions of word, in which a comment was exposed, that might have been prevented. If it was a human error, a comment accidently exposed in the editing process, that is easier to do with LaTex.

In any case this likely has little to do with the process, and much to do with the technology. A typesetter would never copy marginal notes left in the draft, or would check. Also, things like twitter makes it easy and cheap for such trivial mistakes to be amplified to 15 minutes of fame.

So why are you not complaining about Google Maps, the self driving cars, attempting to digitise all books ever etc.? They do a lot of things that are about wild new ideas, or just raising the brand identity. You sound very confident of your own knowledge - if you cant thing of a good use for it, there cannot be one, Nice to be omniscient.

It may seem clear cut to you, but it does not seem so to me nor several other contributors.

A Trademark does not provide a universal protection for the word, only within a limited, named, commercial field. Sun Oil and Sun Computers co-existed using the name Sun. Gnome has trademarked the word for software and seoftware related services. Groupon's tablet is not software. No overlap.

Amazon directly or indirectly employes around 100,000 people. The have revenue to pay those people, as well as revenue to develop other products, which are somewhat successful. The Fire line of tablets, for example, provided much more compelling competition to the iPad than the MS Surface. Bezos himself has made a lot of money. There is the question of profit, however. As a public company who wants stock value to go up, profit is important. OTOH large profits are not critical to a company that consistently has cash flow and sales. In most cases profits can manipulated to make then look larges or smaller, depending on the fiduciary priorities. This is not ta say that Amazon is not making a bunch of crappy products, only to say that many people take an extremely simplistic and gullible view of statements such as these.

Because the foldable tail puts into a very stable configuration, removing the need for attitudinal jets, because reasonable sized flaps would not work in the very thin atmosphere.

The alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short circuit destroying the mind. - Ayn Rand

It called the ability to learn. Many people do not have it. There is no issue with making a bold statement, or trying something at which one is not skilled. I find the issue develops when one is confronted with factual content, or alternative perspectives on more squishy subjects, and one still believes that one's own opinion is the only reasonable opinion. A person who can learn and grow is at least able to acknowledge that they might be wrong. For some people it is just maturity, as in the case of college students. For others it is that they apparently genuinely lack what many would call advanced cognitive skills.

The layout of webpages is more complex. Unlike the Mac, there is no easy way to block animated content. My old iPad hangs on many web pages. For this reason alone, we need a fast processor. Apple is also trying to put the iPad into the laptop space. It is the affordable Apple device, at $1000 fully loaded, often cheaper than the MS Surface.