"simply stealing BRG's intellectual property"

There's your problem right there. There's no such thing.

It's just people wanting to be paid for the same job multiple times.

Are they hiring a new racist then?

" That said, a 250-mile long, 4-story "anything", that's going to be hard to make look nice."

As long as you can see it from the moon, it will be a tourist magnet.

"Most of Japan is very beautiful... but their beaches, usually not so much."

Yea, all that whale and dolphin blood stinks to heaven.

At least Sarah Palin would not only see Russia from her house but be able to drive there for the family vodka.

OTOH, the Crimea was a gift while Alaska was just a cheap sell, but nonetheless, one should be careful with infrastructure supporting tanks.

Who would pay for that? The US and Russia can't even maintain the existing roads they have.

"The people in the area would typically just come by with a jug and fill it up with fresh oil as needed. But that is being made illegal."

That's just because a lot of them gave the people oil from the year before last, or mixed that one with fresh oil.
It's their own fault this had to come.

Not to mention the unsanitary oil bottles on the restaurant tables that got filled with the same crap. Also the bottles were never cleaned in years!

That's why those practices got illegal. You can still put bottles on the tables, but they have to be labeled with the date and provenance and must be un-refillable.

Good-bye 12.49 Meter tsunamis, welcome 13 meter tsunamis.

Does that mean, nobody can distinguish him from a real human?

Can't be.
I just ran a dBASE III test with my first harddisk I ever got, a full height 20MB Seagate and memory always won.

Ignore, despise and loathe your fellow robots.

"For instance, during a meeting with an Oakland city council member, Ars was able to accurately guess the block where the council member lives after less than a minute of research using his license plate data"

Couldn't they just get the address from the same place they got his license plate data?

'Junk Science is us' is the motto of the TSA, so why so surprised?

"They are using a novel technique to achieve something unexpected"

Infrared data exchange is decades old. hardly a 'novel technique'.

But machines with microphones, cameras, wireless mice and keyboards are vulnerable, everything can be used, the nut before the keyboard included.

I'll wait for RenderWoman.