They made a bad call on Pluto, but they're trying to get it right with Vesta, they must be referee-like.

Planets orbit the sun, asteroids orbit something else. If a rock among other rocks is orbiting the sun, and it meets the other qualifications, it's a planet..

We need to find water on Mars in order to support manned missions, bringing it from Earth makes the cargo weight that much heavier.

Mars probes typically return this kind of water on Mars data every few years or so. The problem is, it's nowhere close to the water level found on Earth and therefore it's ability to support any form of life is quite low. I'm not sure how newsworthy this is. It doesn't make much sense to me.

One of the most distinctive features of Linux Format was a DVD edition sold around the turn of the millennium that saved modem-connected users from having to download the latest packages. It was cool.

Yep, my brother and I used to buy 2600 there and share it. B&N has always had a good supply of geeky materials.

I'M KING OF THE WORLD!?!

Your comment is about five years late. This was an Obama cut that got undone by the House.... it's all (D)s involved.

There are two ways to put Windows on a Mac, Boot Camp and virtual machines which both put the full capabilities of Windows in front of the user and programs and therefore malware. Windows on a Mac requires antivirus and antispyware solutions just like any other PC.

How quickly will teachers become completely automated? That's a bit of a scary concept. You can't just have "teachers" who do nothing but press "Play" on a video machine.

I don't think auto-graders are a good idea. Where is the information exchange between student and teachers? Teachers need to read student essays not just to assign the grade, but to exchange knowledge with their students Opinions and comments should be two-sided exchanges, if students are writing things that aren't going to be read, how does that work?

Yep, this is not the first time we've discussed this one... but it's nice to see a tradition like this still going on.

Black Boxes are typically things that scare Slashdot. We don't know how they work, as compared to a documented "white box" solution.

This definition of a "Black Box" is different. It's an event data recorder, meant to be like the orange devices found at airplane crash sites designed to let everybody know the status of the vehicle before it crashed. No big privacy change because most cars already have one, it's just a law change that requires there be standards,. rules, and such for these things in the future.

The more communication the US has with China

Who said this was communication? This was barely a "wargame" and not something worth our time.