Absent international treaty or a national law (assuming their competition can be assailed in the court system), anyone with a plan like this will be forced to defend their claims the old fashioned way: by force. Will the beacons have probe-disabling lasers on board? The article doesn't say. But my guess is that the cost of getting a defense system on the rock is the same as the cost of getting mining equipment on it.

A better defense plan is to scan 10 times as many rocks as you normally would and leave beacons on all of them. Then develop either stealthy or very fast mining tech for phase 2.

And here I was thinking the crossword clues would be as normal, but the answers in the grid would themselves be regular expressions.

I sure hope they're doing something obvious like fuzzing the feed over those classified channels. I'd hate to see an opponent get an opportunity to attack the crypto when there's a 4 hour-long known plaintext transmission.

My favorite part of the practical applications they present is the security camera pointed at the billboard. Presumably the tech is expensive enough that someone might just scale the tower and steal it.

The most common interpretation of "this month" and "this year" would have them meaning the same thing. Perhaps if this was the New Year's Day poll, we could get the first four answers all meaning the same thing!

So many jokes, so little time...

• Can a soldier with 4 arms be more devastating on the modern battlefield? How about 6?
• Perhaps the submitter meant to suggest that arms will replace legs as a means of racing across the battlefield?

You can't just put "[sic]" next to any random string of characters and expect the reader to understand. What the hell is "whiel boosting creativity" supposed to mean, anyway? Maybe I'm slow this morning, but it took me 5 minutes to see the "while". Brackets can help readers stay engaged [and] informed [while] improving understanding, but this time they failed us.

The headline is misleading. The actual pass/fail line for each student is unchanged. The state is changing what it considers an acceptable aggregate rate of passing for groups of students, choosing race as the criterion for grouping. The stated rationale is that students of different races have different starting points, so it makes sense to seek different final achievement levels. But even if you accept that approach, it seems lazy to use race as a surrogate for academic starting point.

Airlines need to be extremely flexible and solar powered operations could only be conducted during daylight hours. In addition, unless there was a lot of excess capacity in the generated power, they likely could not operate near dawn or dusk or in cloudy conditions.

On closer inspection? More like "The person with an enormous mascot mask - which, on closer inspection, vaguely resembled a gnu."

I think you're close. You need a secondary access method that requires direct skin contact near the device in order to bypass the front-line wireless security. Same concept as how most people will protect wireless access to their home network, but rely on physical security to prevent someone replacing their router: if someone can get close enough to get physical access, you'll know it and know to stop it before it's too late.

Sure, we can have international blasphemy laws... just as soon as someone figures out how to live in a way that never offends anyone anywhere in the world. Everyone that pushes for this sort of thing always seems to think it's perfectly natural for everyone to think they way they do and so criminalization would be easy to enforce. Nevermind that that their very way of life may be blasphemous to others in the international community. You want to criminalize blasphemy in your own nation? Have at it. Bash your own populace until they're a homogeneous mass. Don't expect the rest of the globe to fall in line so easily.

I for one welcome our new earthworm, uh erm, underlords.

Do RepRap machines, as open as they are, suffer from Ken Thompson's Trusting Trust problem? I suppose once the integration is sophisticated enough to incorporate the controller software in the replication process that it could, for example, recognize any tumbler-style lock device being printed and surreptitiously modify the design during printing to include support for a special master key. Is there a lower-level analog to the compiler problem that involves only subtle changes to the hardware elements?

I suspect this policy creates a liability problem for FaceBook. If I am the victim of a crime and discover that part of its planning was done via FaceBook but they failed to notice or report it, I could perhaps sue them for failing to stop it.