> ... There's no similar sense of urgency here in the US. ... I disagree. Amtrak (U.S. passenger rail) is very good on timeliness -- you can just about set your watch at their departure. And when there are expected or potential delays, they are very good about notifying customers. My experience has been in the "north east corridor" - travelling between NYC and WDC.

... we're in The Matrix.

You're implying that the major cost driver -- the reason that the US can't compete -- is because of the cost of the touch-labor in assembling the panels. I would have thought that would be largely automated. What is the cost build-up for solar panel manufacturing? Like other posters, I would have thought the installation labor would far outweigh the manufacturing labor.

The first article linked says that the Swedish Transportation Agency allowed IBM to proceed without background checks and security clearances. Some of the IBM personnel were located in other countries. It does not say that anyone outside of IBM had any inappropriate access. The second article linked, from which the summary paragraph above is drawn, seems a bit sensational in extrapolating this as having been a huge data leak -- "...emailed the entire database...".

Using 400 km and 406 km for altitudes yields a delta-velocity of ~3.4 m/s using this online calculator (no affiliation) - http://keisan.casio.com/exec/system/1224665242

Why is that an, "of course"? The article describes a woman crushed in an assembly line. If a self driving car can recognize a human and apply the brakes, I think a similar algorithm could have put the assembly line robots into a safe mode.

> dozens of cunning linguists and digital signal processing experts working on DEATHSTAR

Yes, you might be able to deduce the general nature of the program. But specific capabilities are what is important.

Conversely, would you rather have a sign in your front yard which says, "Attention Criminals - The people in this house have guns." or a sign which says, "Attention Criminals - Nobody in this house has a gun." ?

> pulsars, for example, are often observed around the 1-1.5 GHz range. (There's a hydrogen emission line at 1.5 GHz,...

Yes, but as you look at objects farther away, they are also moving away from us at higher speeds causing red shift in all their emissions. So the 7 meter (40MHz) signals originated at a much higher frequency.