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Sam Machkovech

It's a ReachNow BMW i3! There's no name branding on this model of car, however.

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SEATTLE—Between world-class transit cities like New York and sprawling, highway-filled metropolises like Houston sits a mobility middle-ground. Sometimes, a dense city quickly grows beyond its means and you end up with a population explosion—with a glut of road-rage issues to match.

What's a person to do if they want to ditch their car in a city full of traffic and parking issues—particularly my hometown of Seattle, which is going through transit nightmares thanks to a tech-hiring boom—but can't depend on lagging buses and trains? For roughly six years, Car2Go (owned by Daimler AG) has offered its car-sharing service in Seattle and other cities around the world as an in-between option. Now, German rival BMW apparently wants in on this action in North America. After a beta trial in San Francisco throughout 2015, BMW's ReachNow service officially launched in Seattle on Friday, and I proceeded to take it for a weekend-long spin.

While the service's weirdest and most intriguing offerings are still a ways off, the basic idea—pay by the minute to cruise in a BMW—has already accelerated smoothly from 0 to 60 MPH. Well, that's except for the time I almost got a moving violation ticket.

The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) recently handed down one of the strictest penalties it has ever levied on Donnie Tyndall, the head coach of the University of Southern Mississippi (USM) men’s basketball team. The athletic group says Tyndall organized a cheating ring to help recruits satisfy academic standards, even flying graduate student assistants to the recruits’ homes to complete their online coursework.

The NCAA slapped Tyndall with a 10-year show-cause order, which effectively prevents him from working in the NCAA for that time period, according to the Washington Post. That's the longest show-cause order the NCAA has ever handed out and its length is likely due to the fact that Tyndall and several of his colleagues denied their involvement to the NCAA until the organization's enforcement staff discovered oddities in the metadata from the online coursework, tipping them off to a coverup.

In a Public Infractions Decision (PDF) released on Friday, the NCAA said that Tyndall began finding ways to help students cheat only six weeks after starting as head coach at USM. Ultimately, Tyndall, two assistant coaches, and two graduate student assistant managers helped seven prospective players cheat on online classes. "A majority of the prospects used the credits to attain immediate eligibility for competition upon their transfer to the institution,” the decision stated.

NASA's Kirk Shireman, left, was content to watch as Elon Musk handled all the questions after the dramatic Falcon 9 rocket landing. (credit: NASA)

One almost had to feel sorry for Kirk Shireman on Friday night. The affable, able manager of the International Space Station sat next to Elon Musk during a news conference after a Falcon 9 rocket had just delivered a cargo-supply ship to orbit and then made a stunning landing back on a robotic barge. For most of an hour he waited, patient and silent. Only at the very end of the briefing did a single, solitary question come Shireman's way.

A three-decade veteran of NASA who played pivotal roles in both the shuttle and space station programs, Shireman might have been thinking this: Hey, what about us? NASA is the one with the $100-billion orbiting laboratory where humans have now lived in space for 15 years. While no one anticipated it when NASA and Russia began building the space station 20 years ago, one of its most important functions has become enabling commercial activity in space. With the station, NASA created a market for companies like SpaceX to deliver supplies and, as early as next year, astronauts into space.

Friday afternoon's launch offered a spectacular display of this commercial aspect. As its largest payload, the SpaceX Dragon delivered Bigelow Aerospace's expandable habitat to the station. By connecting this inflatable room to the station later this month, Bigelow can gain invaluable testing experience, including in situ monitoring by astronauts next door. They may also prove to NASA that the technology is safe and perhaps lead to larger habitats for use near the Moon or deeper into space.

Back in 2005, the fate of Harry Potter was important enough that GCHQ reportedly stepped in to stop a potential leak of the sixth book in the series, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

In a radio interview last week, Nigel Newton of Bloomsbury Publishing spoke about how the publisher had employed strong security measures to prevent possible leaks, including guard dogs and a constant security presence at the printing press. Seemingly, the company also had the support of GCHQ, the UK's primary signals intelligence and surveillance agency.

"We fortunately had many allies," Newton said. "GCHQ rang me up and said, 'We've detected an early copy of this book on the Internet.'"