Since having this nightmare, I've exported my phone's VCF file to an online repo, made online notes of all my bank account numbers and passport ID, I keep ICE numbers with me at all times (separate from phone/wallet), and I've hidden a spare mobile phone and house key in a box in a nearby field. But there must be more to do!

I think the only thing left to do is buying loads of a aluminium foil.

It is about time that the FTC steps in and allows SpaceX to sell their rockets directly to the Air Force. Blame the rich local rocket dealerships, we corrupted their local politicians to create laws that are only designed to maintain their business model of selling old fashioned rockets. What people in the street want is to buy a next generation rocket, directly from the Internet, without having to talk to one of those sleazy rocket salesman. I am getting confused, you were saying Elon?

Data charges would be much less than that, $20 extra per ticket would be unacceptably high. Some spokesman for Inmarsat (who obviously has a big interest in making permanent data connections mandatory) said that data costs for such a flight would be on the order of 1$/hour for the whole aircraft. Data rates should also be pretty low, 1 GPS coordinate per minute would have helped enormously for both the AirFrance and MalaysiaAirlines crashes, the detailed high-bandwidth data you can always get from the black box if you can find it.

True story: The lecturer that taught us general relativity at university was a fantastic guy that was also pretty good at drawing cartoons. For one of the questions on the final exam, he drew a scene of a guy being stopped by a policeman: "I am stopping you for crossing the red light." "I saw it as green, I swear officer." "Fine, then I will write you a ticket for speeding." The question was to calculate the speed of the car, given the wavelengths of green and red light and the velocity of light.

That is a bad argument: People making money with organized crime spend money on employees, family and goods too, but that does not make it a good thing. If the HFT people would not be skimming billions of dollars from the market, millions of people might have received 100$ more since their pension fund would have done slightly better, and they would have spent it the same. What did the HFT contribute to society to rip off all those people?

The question is if it is not too late to introduce regulations. These leeches probably made enough money to corrupt Congress for the next 100 years.

HFT should be banned, there is nothing these robo-traders contribute to society except for profit for themselves. The argument that they provide for liquidity of the market, or whatever, would not change if everyone would be trading at second scale instead of microsecond scale. My proposal (as someone how knows nothing about stock markets): make it a level playing field and only allow trading at say exact 30 second intervals or so, which should be synced world-wide. In this way, the big firms would only have an advantage over the small guy when new information becomes available in the last half second before the deadline, instead of on every instance of new information. After everyone has placed their orders for the current round, the stock market then takes a few seconds to update all stock prizes, after which everyone has 'infinite time' to compute his action for the next round.

Scientist are still analyzing the data of ESA's Planck satellite, with first results expected in October this year. This instrument is supposedly sensitive enough to confirm or reject BICEP's results. I guess Planck's team must feel pretty depressed that the potential big discovery of their 700 MEuro instrument is scooped by the relatively small-scale BICEP experiment.

Note that this the second indirect evidence for the existence of gravitational waves, the first one was the orbital decay of a binary system that included a pulsar, discovered by Hulse and Taylor (Nobel Prize 1993). Today's result, if confirmed, seems pretty spectacular, and might be rewarded with a second Nobel Prize. For a first direct detection of gravitational waves, we have to wait for first detections by LIGO, Virgo and eLISA.

The LISA project has a long history, with several iterations of down-sizing its costs, and at some point the Americans pulled out of the project completely. The latest version of the project is called ELISA, which was recently approved as ESA's L3 mission in 2034. A bit late, but better than nothing ...

Exactly. I like the global menu in general, but almost once a day I close some underlaying window by accident, since it still has focus.

Last year, I visited the Palazzo Valentini in Rome, which is just a few steps away from Piazza Venezia and within falling distance of Trajan's column. They dug up some Roman remains of houses and temples in the basement of a more modern building. They did quite some effort to make it into a multimedia show, with beamers projecting accurately aligned overlays of all kind of things that had disappeared. One cool effect was for example to extend a mosaic, of which only a small piece was left, over an entire room. I was observing how the tour-guide started the shows, he was just launching a VLC player or so on a linux box sitting in a rack in the corner. From the looks of the icons, it was probably an older version of Ubuntu (8.04 or 10.04).

There are two reasons you have to switch of your electronic devices during takeoff/landing: first, the electronic interference, which is not considered a problem anymore these days. The second, more unknown, reason is that they do not want you to listen to music so that you can hear the safety announcements. I am not talking about the usual 'live-vest is stored under your seat' story that everyone has heard 100 times, but instructions to evacuate in case of real emergencies. Since these emergencies happen mostly during the first and last few minutes of a flight, they want you to pay full attention. Source: close friend is instructor for flight crews.

With $3B at stake, that would be pretty risky poker play for Facebook. If Facebook knows it is a boondoggle, it is likely that SnapChat's owners know it too, so their best action would be to take the money and run.