I was part of the CubeSAT program at my university. We were designing a 1 foot x 1 foot x 1 foot satellite to be launched. To track the satellite, we needed a GPS module on board. However, due to the ITAR components on the module, the student in charge of software couldn't touch the GPS code or schematics, because he was not a US citizen.

Actually, I'm on the fence about this one. As a frequent visitor of many hobby forums, I've noticed the amount of trolling has increased exponentially over the years. It has progressed very badly for some online communities. If all you visit is Slashdot, be thankful of the civility that occurs here.

I don't buy into the doom and gloom of government oppression that goes along with real name registration, nor do I buy into "the net needs anonymity". Seriously, look at 4chan, our glaring symbol of internet anonymity and see what happens when the masses come together under the cloak of anonymity.

However, I do see potential of abuse with using your real name everyone on the net. Therefore, I would like someone else to try it first (on a mass scale) and see if it's an utter failure, before trying to implement it ourselves.

The rolling traffic jam can be thought of as a queue. Cars are can enter the queue at any rate. However, cars can only leave the queue every 2 seconds. The reason is that if you were stopped behind another car, you wouldn't jam your gas pedal at the exact second the car in front of you does. You would wait until that car moves 20-30 feet before moving your own car. This delay adds up for every car in the queue (let's approximate 2 seconds). So if there were 100 cars in the queue you would need 200 seconds before the last car in the queue moves and essentially eliminating the traffic jam. However, if cars are entering the queue at a rate faster than every 2 seconds, then the queue is growing in size and the traffic jam will never end.

Further details and illustrations:
http://www.smartmotorist.com/traffic-and-safety-guideline/traffic-jams.html

South Korea, which has already blocked access to the North Korean Twitter account for containing 'illegal information' under its security laws...and says the Facebook page could suffer the same fate."

Illegal information? What pray, may I ask is "illegal information"?

It's a rhetorical question Farley!!

S. Korea, meet the kettle. If you're going off about N. Korea censoring their media, you need stop pulling the same type of crap they do.

I see a lot of knee jerk responses about charging EVERYONE for using emergency services or making it some type of crime to be calling emergency services.
We all pay for the park service to be alert in case something goes wrong. It's their job to provide help. Just, because some people abuse the service, doesn't mean you should mess it up for everyone.

It doesn't matter what technology you provide or don't provide, stupid people will do stupid things and end up being a cost to society. If we didn't have SPOT, someone idiot will bring flares and "accidentally" set a forest fire while signaling for help. You simply have to allocate for stupidity. If you try to make the world idiot proof, then we'll all be living in misery.

My favorite sort. Randomly arrange items until they are in order. Would the appropriate music be some type of carnival melody?

This comes at no surprise. Most people draw simple shapes on the graphical pattern lock. Would you be surprised if your computer was hacked if you set the password to "1234"?

For example, how many of you have drawn a triangle as your pattern? I know I did the first time I used my android phone. Then a few weeks later, when I was on an airplane, I watched a senior gentleman pull out his smart phone and draw the exact same pattern lock as me.

I then sat down and pondered the complexity of passwords using a graphical pattern lock. There's only 9 buttons to use and for most people they tend to only use adjacent buttons when drawing. If one were confined to this set of rules, the passwords would all be linear and simple geometric shapes. However, I figured out through trial and error, that you can actually double back on buttons you've activated and activate buttons that are non-adjacent to active ones by drawing in the blank space in between buttons. This should be a criteria for a strong graphical pattern lock, just like how there's requirements for strong alpha-numerical password locks. You should always have at least one double back button and one non-adjacent button as part of the pattern lock. This way the smudges left on your phone are non-linear.

Maybe it's just their name, but anytime I see the "Christian Science Monitor" publish anything relating to science, I have to find a second source to verify they're not making it up.

Yes you are. That's what this article is about. They are no longer giving credit for Ds. Thereby removing Ds from the grading system. If Ds don't give credit, then a D = F.

Logically, you would remove F and give failing student Ds so you have A, B, C and D, but whatever floats your boat.

Have stuff nobody wants.

and he's giving crap to the office secretary? Time to get off his average sized pony and re-evaluate his relative importance.

But you can't go up to Dick Cheney and say "Fuck you, Mr. Cheney"

Apparently people have completely missed the point of this article. Space junk, yes it's a problem, but did no one grasp the importance that one nation is capable of SHOOTING DOWN SATELLITES?!?

It's obviously aimed at countering US ballistic missile technology that we're selling to Taiwan. Perhaps not to intercept the missiles, but to destroy US GPS satellites so the US missiles won't track. This is just as important as ballistic missile interception program. There's going to be another arms race to have satellites that can "counter" incoming missiles and missiles that can counter the counter on the satellite.

Lastly, can we please stop arming other countries. It always backfires and we end up getting shot by the same bullets we gave out.

419eater.com have been doing it for years. They have one case where they had a scammer pay literally several thousand dollars on a broken washing machine, thinking it was a case of laptops.

We also have DAMM. (Drunks against Mad Mothers)