Maybe he was transporting one of these.

Ukraine claims that any hardware that was left behind was non-functional. It was supposedly later claimed by the rebels that they "fixed" one of the BUKs. Maybe the fixing didn't enable the safety lock (or it wasn't working as intended)?

I think a big issue is that the longer this goes on, the less reliable "evidence" there will be. From all the reports, the scene of the crash is chaotic. Bodies aren't being tended to (or refrigerated) properly, pieces of the plane have been removed. At first it was "we're sending the black box to Russia for investigation" and then "we haven't found the black box yet", etc etc.

It's going to be pretty hard to sort things out if the "evidence" is being mishandled this badly, whether intentionally or otherwise.

I've found the opposite. My local Chapters is good at stocking mostly big names. However, since I picked up a Kindle a few years ago, I've found tons of good authors I'd not heard of before. Yes, there is some formulaic drivel, but the biggest problem for the most part is a few typos here and there.
How often do you review a book before buying it at a bookstore? At least online, I see a bunch of reviews and can read what people have to say before I buy. The worst book I got was actually from a bookstore. Perhaps it might have come up with a good plot, but the terrible repetition and generally poor editing made it unreadable

In terms of monentary cost, many useful things are. Free software also used to be less of a crapshoot (is it *really* safe, a virus/trojan, adware, or nagware)?

Apache: Free
OpenOffice/LibreOffice: Free
Java: Free

There were/are also a lot of free utilities that - while not pretty - were basically in the realm of "hey I made this to solve X for myself and thought somebody else might find it useful."

There may be some learning involved to *use* the product, and certainly many FOSS solutions involve community-provided updates, but in terms of personal cost it's free for me.

It's like where I used to work. We had certain users that were bad on the network (running torrents, whatever). They were important enough that they couldn't really be penalized and kept finding ways around the blocks. Instead, they just put the "bad" users' internet connection through a old switch (or was it a hub) that got like 10MBps

Basically, Verizon is doing the equivalent to sticking a 10MBps switch on the connections where Netflix routes through...

Too well-bribed to regulate....

This has a couple of connotations in science (that have also existed in sci-fi previously)

The obvious one would be antigravity. What gravity attracts, it would repel. So there's your Marty McFly hoverboard. There are further connotations for other things though, such as achieving orbit or space-travel (getting too close to a gravity well at the wrong angle=not good in most cases). Depending on whether such anti-mass would be created/harvested in quantity, it could be used to cancel out mass of vehicles being sent to space, or used in propulsion.

Similarly, anti-inertia has a lot of interesting using. The old trek "inertial dampers" come to mind.

Also, missiles and military tech are still tech, and of some interest to nerds. I'd imagine there are some people here that know enough about such to rule out stuff like shoulder-mounted rockets etc. History and politics are also "news for nerds"

Indeed. They're getting better at it too.
Canada's CBC.ca has lots of posts saying "oh, the Ukranians recently moved some AA into the area. It was them" and various other similar posts.

Honestly, so what if they were? People change positions and come/go a lot, and the bigger the company the more the churn. Could have been a retirement, a job offer elsewhere, somebody died, or a firing. I doubt that somebody's primary job was watching domain expirations, so likely this got lost in a transition among a bunch of other job functions. IMHO, the best way to take care of this would be to have checks for primary domains in the central monitoring/alerting system, and flag them yellow 15-30 days from expiration (and red a few days before).

Actually, I'd like to see stats on that
For every lawsuit like this that gets bad publicity, whose to say there aren't tens or hundreds more that go through without notice. Beyond that, while the base of potential "customers" who may read about the lawsuit and skip dining is somewhat limited, I'd imagine this is getting more notice amongst those that would do restaurant reviews, and possibly chilling speech amongst those that don't wish to be sued.

Would this work with snow? Sounds useful for Canada and other places that have snowy winters that aren't so solar-friendly. Won't help on an overcast-but-not-wet day though.

Are we counting the ones I've destroyed and had to do careful cleanup of? Initally all of my bulbs were CFL's. However, in some areas (the shop, areas where renos are happening) the bulbs were in positions where they often got damaged/broken, so those have gone back to incandescent. I also wouldn't recommend a CFL for things like trouble-lights etc where they're often dropped.

Unity