More profits for US companies, hooray!

What? No emoticons here, oh, well.

We of the Spanish Inquisition rely on one thing: surprise, fear and surprise.

"'spreading the message that if you're prepared for a zombie attack, you're prepared for just about anything.'"

"No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!"

Graham Chapman
Monty Python's Flying Circus

If this really works and is widely deployed then governments need to figure out how to clothe, feed, educate, and find jobs for the the increased population. If not the increase of disadvantaged persons will probably breed civil unrest and war.

re: 42

Yes, I think so, someone must.

I thought that SNL covered it pretty well some years ago.

I hope if this is implemented that redundancy is built in along with fail safe operation if power or communications are cut.

Along with single point of failure many opportunities of hacking would need to be addressed.

Yes, the *ignition* was not spontaneous but the resultant *combustion* was spontaneous.

... if a case of spontaneous human ignition were to be found. That would move my reaction from "ignorant Irish" court to "really, how could that happen?". BTW I cooked my oatmeal this morning using the spontaneous combustion of natural gas.

No thanks, I'm not into self mutilation.

"The intercepted correspondence included employee usernames and passwords, sensitive security information about the configuration of corporate network architecture that would be useful to hackers, affidavits and other documents related to litigation in which the companies were embroiled, and trade secrets, such as contracts for business transactions."

I wondered how they could pay for their research in this era of vastly reduced funding - it's self funding!

In southern California it's when the first big Sana Ana wind arrives and blows leaves from the trees, puts dust in the air, sometimes blows trees down, and blows wildfires into houses.

I'll bet they are not tested on how to use the computers or the software they are supposed to be using. If they do that the test scores will go up, especially if they include IM, chat, YouTube, and Facebook. :-)

"While determining supersonic speed requires not being in a vacuum, once you know what speed supersonic-speed is, can it not be used as a measuring stick for comparison?"

Supersonic means faster than the speed of sound referenced to a specific medium at specific conditions, and that varies wildly depending on the medium, say air or steel, and on the temperature, pressure, and state of the medium. Perhaps astro-physicists use "supersonic" in some specialized sense, but it looks to me as if the author used it as a synonym for "very fast" much as "healthy" is used in place of "large" or "big".