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The YAL-1 Airborne Laser platform showed lasers could blow up missiles during boost phase. But it was way too big, too expensive, and had to get too close to launch sites. Drones could solve all three problems, the Missile Defense Agency's chief believes.

The Missile Defense Agency is giving a second look at the idea of airborne lasers as a defense against ballistic missiles. But this time, instead of using giant chemical lasers carried by enormous crewed aircraft, the MDA is hoping that solid-state lasers will soon be up to the job—and that they will be able to be carried by drones.

Over a decade ago, the US Air Force mounted a megawatt laser on a 747 as part of an effort to develop a flying weapon to shoot down ballistic missiles as they launch. The Airborne Laser Laboratory (ABL) had several successful tests, but then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates cancelled the program in 2011 because of both its expense and impracticality.

"The reality is that you would need a laser something like 20 to 30 times more powerful than the chemical laser in the plane right now to be able to get any distance from the launch site to fire," Gates said in a House Appropriations committee hearing in 2009. To shoot down an Iranian ballistic missile, he argued, "the ABL would have to orbit inside the borders of Iran in order to be able to try and use its laser to shoot down that missile in the boost phase. And if you were to operationalize, this you would be looking at 10 to 20 747s, at a billion and a half dollars apiece, and $100 million a year to operate. And there's nobody in uniform that I know who believes that this is a workable concept."

Comcast could see some new set-top box competition. (credit: Comcast)

What if, instead of renting a set-top box from your cable company, you could get all your TV channels and online video services delivered to a single device that you only pay for once?

The Federal Communications Commission could make it happen, consumer advocacy groups say. "An open set-top box market is a key component of freeing consumers from unnecessary monthly rental fees, and it would enable them to more easily access online video content right alongside their subscription TV programming," the groups said in a letter to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler yesterday. The letter was written by Common Cause, Demand Progress, Free Press, Fight for the Future, the National Hispanic Media Coalition, New America’s Open Technology Institute, and Public Knowledge.

Replacing CableCard

The CableCard standard created nearly 20 years ago was supposed to make the set-top box industry competitive. And it has succeeded to an extent, letting cable subscribers use TiVo boxes and other devices. But the FCC long ago admitted that CableCard had only limited success. About 99 percent of customers still rent set-top boxes directly from their providers and pay an average of $231.82 a year in rental fees, US senators found in a survey of TV providers last year.

(credit: ACLU)

On Wednesday, the American Civil Liberties Union unveiled a new campaign to introduce a slew of pro-privacy bills in 16 states across America and the District of Columbia.

In what it has dubbed "#TakeCTRL," the ACLU has partnered with various lawmakers in states ranging from Hawaii to New Hampshire to propose new laws that, among other restrictions, would require a warrant for the use of cell-site simulators, impose "rapid deletion" of data collected by an automatic license plate reader, and limit educational institutions’ ability to access data about what students do on school-loaned computers.

"A bipartisan consensus on privacy rights is emerging, and now the states are taking collective action where Congress has been largely asleep at the switch," Anthony Romero, the head of the ACLU, said in a statement. "This movement is about seizing control over our lives. Everyone should be empowered to decide who has access to their personal information."

Rey is dismayed to find herself on a movie set, instead of on Jakku. (credit: Disney)

The eighth entry in the Star Wars saga was supposed to start filming this month, but production has been delayed so that director Rian Johnson can do last-minute script rewrites. That means the movie will hit theaters in December 2017 instead of May 2017 as originally planned.

Rumors are swirling about what has caused the delay, but it seems that it's mostly about reshuffling the movie's focus to give us more screen time with popular characters Rey, Finn, and Poe. Star Wars VIII will also introduce two new female characters, one of whom may be Asian, but their parts are going to become a bit smaller in the rewrite.

The Wrap reporter Jeff Snyder spilled the beans on the Meet the Movie Press podcast this week, explaining the whole kerfuffle over these two unnamed female characters:

Enlarge (credit: Caltech/R. Hurt (IPAC))

The demotion of Pluto to dwarf planet didn't come about because of any discovery about Pluto itself. Rather, it was triggered by the discovery that Pluto was one of what's likely to be a large number of bodies that orbit well beyond Neptune. These Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs), some of which are larger than Pluto, tend to have unusual orbits, passing outside of the plane of the Solar System, with their ellipses stretched out on one side, while passing closer to the Sun on the other.

But in recent years, scientists have been noting some odd patterns in the orbits of KBOs. For many of them, their closest approach to the Sun comes as they cross the orbital plane of the inner planets. Now, the researcher who helped identify some of the first KBOs has published a paper in which he identifies a possible cause of these patterns: a distant, Neptune-sized body that would restore our Solar System's planetary total to nine.

Undiscovered planets have a long history, dating back to the prediction of Neptune's existence based on oddities in Uranus' orbit. That success, however, led to a couple of fruitless searches, one for an inner planet that could get Mercury's orbit to behave, and a second for something beyond Neptune. While the latter search turned up Pluto, it was too small to influence Neptune's orbit, which further observations indicated was just fine without any additional fixes.

Facebook credits for sale in Target. (credit: Wikipedia user Pmsyyz)

Facebook has agreed to change some of its procedures around refunds to minors who made purchases without their parents' consent.

The changes are part of a proposed settlement (PDF) in Bohannon v. Facebook, a class-action lawsuit originally filed in 2012. The original complaint described how Glynnis Bohannon gave her child, identified as I.B., permission to spend $20 on his Facebook account using her Wells Fargo MasterCard.

But I.B. continued to play "Ninja Saga" and make in-game purchases, thinking he was spending "virtual, in-game currency." In fact, he had made "several hundred dollars" worth of real-money purchases, which were charged to his mother's MasterCard. The complaint says that Bohannon found a phone number to contact Facebook "after several hours of searching" and left a message describing her situation but received no reply. (Bohannon was later granted a "courtesy refund" after the class-action suit was filed.)