Does NORAD have Santa's permission to track his movements? Or is this yet another unsanctioned invasion of personal privacy by a government body?

Better to be generally stupid than stupidly general :-)

Brick and mortar colleges are pricing themselves out of the market. Computer aided instruction can be delivered as an individualised program to students in their homes. A lot of testing can be done through multiple answer questionnaires, and computers could grade those. It would cost a tiny fraction of the current product.

Great advice. The average native language speaker uses a vocabulary of about 20,000 words. There are 8,000,000,000,000 possible three-word phrases taken from a vocabulary of 20,000 words. If you draw the words from more than language, assuming you know some words from another language, the combinations go through the roof. The old rules on what constitutes a "good" password were devised by robots to torment humans. They lead to unreadable, unrecallable monstrosities. l33tsp34k is easier for computers than humans. Requiring users to change passwords regularly just compounds the problem, and the rule is there only because the servers that validate logins get compromised. If these servers stored only the hashed version of each password then even if they are cracked, the cracker would not be able to use the information thus gained to log in. Don't force users to jump through hoops to compensate for the slack practices of system admins, and then complain that their hoops are set too low.

Websites should not store users' passwords. It's completely unnecessary. Instead, the registration and login web pages offered by the website should compute a hash of the user's chosen password using JavaScript embedded in the page. This hash should be sent to the web server, which must then store it. If the web server is subsequently hacked, the hackers get hashes of passwords rather than the original passwords. There's no way to recover the original password from its hash. So even if each website user chooses to use the same user id and password across many different sites, hacking one won't allow hackers to log into any of the others using the hacked credentials. An SHA-3 hashing algorithm in JavaScript can be as small as 1624 bytes of code - see blake32.min.js at https://github.com/drostie/sha...

The referenced paper says that to meet our energy needs through solar power alone we would need an area 92% of Nevada covered in solar cells. Nevada is 286,367 square kilometers in area. 92% of that is about 286,000 square kilometers. There are an estimated 1.7 billion buildings on planer Earth (see https://github.com/svendvn/sam...). If their combined area is less than the area needed for solar cells to power Earth then their average floor space area is less than 168 square metres each (about 1,700 square feet each). A 13 metre (43 foot) square building beats that. Sure, our power needs keep climbing as our population increases. So does the number of buildings required to house and service the extra people. Solar cells are too expensive to put on every roof today, but Moore's law applies. Standard roof tiles will one day come with some level of photovoltaic capability baked in.

Finding malware benefits most computer users. Could this search be spread over large numbers of computers across the Internet? Computer owners could volunteer spare machines cycles to aid the search.

Your post reveals a logical inconsistency in modern cosmology. Inflation theory was developed to explain the large-scale structure that we observe in the early Universe, but which (it is claimed) was not present at the start of the Universe. As you point out, if inflation did take place then it would have obliterated all evidence of whatever structure, or lack thereof, came before it. That would make it impossible for anyone, now or ever, to validate (or invalidate) the inflation theory's assumptions about the initial condition of the Universe.

The rules of science hold that if a theory cannot be proven or disproven then it isn't a scientific theory, it's speculation. There's nothing wrong with speculation, it necessarily comes before all serious theories. But if the speculation is based on assumptions that will forever prevent us from ever testing it then it is never going to amount to anything more than speculation.

There is an alternative explanation for the large-scale structure that we observe in the early Universe - it was present from the very beginning.

Occam's Razor would suggest that the second, simpler explanation should be preferred, unless and until some supporting evidence can be found in favour of the first. And if the first explanation is true then this supporting evidence can never be found. It is hoisted on its own petard.

That's right, there are more String Theories than their are subatomic particles in the Universe. If you divide the money invested into String Theory research by the number of theories that it has produced you will find that it has yielded far more bangs per buck than any other other form of research ever undertaken. And if it isn't strictly science, it can surely pass muster as mathematical recreation.

It's easy to improve emissions standards. Improving actual performance is the hard part. Hence the VW work-around. The regulators can specify any standard they like, someone with develop a software hack that shows them what they want to see.

The felon was a 15 year old. When the police start arresting 5-year-olds for hacking, we have to ask what is it that's broken? The kids? Or companies that dash online without the first clue of how to protect their assets?

Turing test triumphs. Twaddle trumps testosterone.

Uber are micro travel agents. They use new tech to help people who want to travel to make arrangements with providers of travel services. Because the new tech makes it really quick, easy and cheap to book a voyage, it is economically viable to include short-distance car journeys in the range of products that they offer. Declare the Uber business model illegal today, and you will find yourself on a course that eliminates the entire travel agency business tomorrow.

If we really want retro services we should ban phone bookings of taxicabs. That makes the process too easy. Cabbies should do it the way they used to do in the good old days, cruise around all day waiting for someone to hail them from the curb. Cab companies that accept phone bookings compete unfairly with the cruising cab model. If you're concerned that this would result in more fuel being burned and more CO2 pollution we could always pass laws requiring cabbies to operate horse-drawn carriages instead of motorized vehicles.

Ah, the good old days.

Maybe Uber should announce themselves to be a micro travel agent. They don't own vehicles, they don't hire drivers. They just help clients to make travel arrangements with third party transport providers.

Now there's a turnaround for the books. Flooding the Chinese market with a cheap artificial knock-off of a valued product. Anyone remember plastic RAM?