It appears that none of the major cards are requiring signatures any more:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.creditcards.com%2Fcr...

So instead of Chip+Signature, it's just Chip vs. Chip+PIN.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nbc.com%2Fsaturday-n...

Other sources, like this article
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fnews.nationalgeographi...
have more images.

You're off by a few decades. Per Wikipedia, Def Con started in 1993. The San Diego Comic Con goes back to 1970, but didn't use "Con" initially.

Dictionary.com indicates that using "con" for convention dates to 1940-45.
Possibly Phillycon (1940), a science fiction convention.

We want no muffins, no toast, no tea cakes, no buns, baps, baguettes, or bagels, no croissants, no crumpets, no pancakes, no potato cakes, and no hot cross buns, and definetely, no smeggin' flapjacks!

The cited article is a little ambiguous. The author refers to a "DHS officer". At no point is "TSA" mentioned.
The DHS includes both the TSA and US Customs, so it may very well have been a customs agent doing the searching.
The photo in the article is of a US Customs document and refers to "CBP officers" (Customs & Border Protection).

It's possible to create an AppleID without a credit card.
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fsupport.apple.com%2Fen-u...

So actually, they have to do more than just cut a check. FCC Press release
In its consent decree with the Enforcement Bureau, Verizon has agreed to:

• Pay a fine of $2 million to the U.S. Treasury;
• Commit an additional $3 million over the next three years to address the problem of rural call completion on a company and industry-wide basis;
• Appoint a Rural Call Completion Ombudsman within Verizon to centralize analysis of rural call completion problems;
• Develop a system to automatically identify customer complaints that may be related to rural call completion issues;
• Limit its use of intermediate providers, i.e., telecommunications providers between the Verizon network and the local rural provider, that are often the source of call completion problems;
• Monitor its call answer rates to individual rural areas and conduct an investigation when rates to an area fall below a set threshold in any month;
• Host industry workshops and sponsor an academic study on methods to detect and resolve rural call completion problems;
• Provide quarterly summaries of its investigations to the FCC and meet periodically with Commission staff to identify lessons learned; and
• Prepare a report to be publicly filed with the Commission at the end of the three-year compliance period.

personal opinion of the status of the various ideas labelled "multiverse", inappropriately presented as fact. There is certainly not a consensus view that these opinions are correct, as you might mistakenly infer. In fact, "..., with different Big Bangs but very likely with the same fundamental laws and constants" -- it seems to me the weight of professional opinion is actually more on the other side here. His views on Everett's many-worlds interpretation are also counter to those of most people who accept it as valid in the first place. Perhaps most egregiously, if he is going to borrow (linking to) Tegmark's categorization of the different levels of multiverse, he should at least get them right. But he refers to Tegmark's level 1 as level 0, level 2 as level 1, and is a little confused about the distinction between 1 and 2. If you want a much more thorough, and objective, discussion of the various multiverse ideas, you want to read Brian Greene's The Hidden Reality. And of course Tegmark's Our Mathematical Universe is the latest entry into this field, a manifesto of sorts.

Agreed. It's sort of like saying "The water in NYC tatested about average for West Virginia"

About 0.0000000000002 Pacific Oceans.
Hope that helps.

Generalized (NxN) sudoku is NP-complete. That's the only sense in which any puzzle is computationally intractable.

This is very fascinating work, but I am skeptical. I design puzzles like this, with computer assistance, and automatically gauging how difficult a puzzle is seems to be basically impossible. The fundamental problem is that the logical structure of a puzzle is not in itself sufficient to gauge difficulty. A huge amount of it is in the presentation, and how the player conceptualizes the puzzle, and how much of the problem can be handled automatically by visual processes. There are puzzles with trivial game trees that I have watched players get totally lost in, because the game tree is not apparent in the puzzle manifestation.

If this research addresses this problem, I will be very impressed.

I probably wouldn't renew at $119. And without free shipping, I would order less stuff from Amazon. That doesn't sound too good for the shareholders.