The headline makes it sound like the police searched his car, but the article doesn't say that.

Assuming there was no search and the officer simply asked him why the car was radioactive and was satisfied with the explanation, this sounds like an example of the system working.

I'm actually very impressed that these detectors are widely deployed and sensitive enough to pick this up.

I find your claim a somewhat incredible. How did they know when these companies were coming? And then how did they cause traffic disruptions? Did the residents take turns parking on the road for hours on end? Did they fake car accidents? That seems like an awful lot of trouble to go through, with considerable risk of police intervention, just to reduce tourist traffic on a nearby highway. What is your source for this information?

Wind turbines, even under favorable circumstances, don't produce even enough power to manufacture wind turbines. [citation needed]

I'll second that endorsement. PDAnet is pretty slick. Tethers through USB or Bluetooth (although bluetooth is much harder to configure).

Well, sending a person is dramatically more expensive. So maybe compare to 50 rovers?

Well what the heck does the human have to do with that, then? Why not put the rover on the golf cart? The rovers have the best drive system possible with the power and weight constraints of the mission.

Maybe? If you send them the spares and a clean room to work in?

Yes, if you give humans better equipment than the robots, plus the additional costs of a life support system and a ride home, they can do a better job. How is that surprising?

There is only one fundamental limitation with the robots -- the latency of the speed of light making tele-operation inconvenient. But that's not such a huge deal. The robots just have to be a little smarter about navigating on their own. And they already are.

The text is warped and obfuscated. Look at example captchas -- do you really think the geometric swirls were in the source documents?

Oh get off it. You're just being a contrary to the point of hyperbole. And you're completely wrong.
Go read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_cyclone
"This rate of energy release is equivalent to 70 times the world energy consumption of humans and 200 times the worldwide electrical generating capacity, or to exploding a 10-megaton nuclear bomb every 20 minutes."

Wikipedia also says that all nuclear testing amounted to 510 megatons of energy released.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapon_yield
I don't know how that related to all "all explosives ever detonated", but assuming that is the total, then it would take a hurricane ~1,000 minutes to match the energy. You were off by a factor of at minimum 1,000 with your hyperbole.

Now, disregarding that, you're simply wrong that we can't influence hurricanes. It's simple math. If the water 100m below the surface if 5 degrees cooler, and we clearly understand how every change in water surface temperature influences hurricane strength, you can easily calculate how much energy we need to expand to pump that water up and how long it will stay there before convecting back down, etc... You can come up with a straightforward figure for how many joules our fleet needs to expend, and judging by this patent, it's not an astronomical figure.

Stop spouting this whole "noble nature" myth. Humans got to be a successful, spacefaring civilization by engineering the hell out of our environment. Our water system, the land, etc. This is just the next step.

Indeed, the original article has been updated with an editor's note now to indicate that it does not apply to US citizens. The summary needs to be clarified.

This is an excellent suggestion. If you can pull the curtain aside and take the magic out of the world, it can help the person put things into perspective.

This is clearly a transitional measure, and not a concerted effort to hide communications from mandated records keeping procedures as Bush and Palin are accused of.

It shouldn't have just been denied an oral presentation, it should have been caught by the program committee and never reviewed. You can't read 3 sentences of that abstract without knowing that it's garbage.

Presumably someone DID review this and deny it an oral, but didn't follow up with the program committee to make sure it was pulled entirely.

I've never been to a conference which pity accepts papers. CVPR, a IEEE conference on computer vision, has a 25% acceptance rate for posters. I think this paper is quite an embarrassment to IEEE.