johno215

Not yet. Only 20 or so of the full frames of the descent have been downloaded so far. Will probably be a day or more before they are all down.

You can see the frames that are down here: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw/?s=0

Interesting.

I wonder if instead of dedicated hardware controllers, the touch screens on phones could be used as a substitute.

It certainly seems to be the focus of their long term R&D spending. The ML part, of course, has always been a central part of their business due to its importance for search and ad targeting.

Except the nicest feature of Mosh is it makes the remote session feel more responsive. Is there anything out there (not just local echo) that does this?

Chrome's dominance over Firefox (~65% vs ~30%) surprised me a little. I figured they would have a more equal standing.

Same here. Although I liked your post enough that I spent a couple minutes and signed up using a temporary email address. Sign-ups like that irk me.

Living Under a Rock Question:

What is up with all the startups using .ly domain or "ly" in their name? I can understand using a foreign top level domain in order to find available domain names, but that does not explain why we don't see ones from all the other international TLDs.

The sheer amount of obvious non-innovations that the patent office accepts is staggering.

Anecdotal personal experience being part of patent applications has showed me that almost any idea, as long as there are no mainstream examples of prior art, can be patented given time (will take 4-5 years these days) and money. Most decently smart people will come up with patentable ideas all the time, just doing their job, but won't file because they don't have the desire or resources (and don't understand why their only somewhat-novel obvious-to-them idea is patentable).

"The idea that I can be presented with a problem, set out to logically solve it with the tools at hand, and wind up with a program that could not be legally used because someone else followed the same logical steps some years ago and filed for a patent on it is horrifying." - John Carmack

Note that two out of eight (25%) cars saw a decrease in mpg when using premium gasoline. Not a statistically strong correlation for using premium gas. Probably a combination of varying driving styles and that octane is not supposed to affect mileage for modern cars.[1]

[1] http://dsc.discovery.com/cars/top-10/car-myths/08.html

Very impressive! The only issue I've run into is it having trouble discerning lower-case and upper-case letters. Training with my own writing style should be able to correct this however.

Is there a plan to offer this as a non-web-browser service? I would love to be able to write math out on paper, or a resistive screen tablet, and then import it into a LaTeX document.

I am faster writing equations by hand than typing LaTeX (and definitely faster compared to using a WYSIWYG equation program).

Edit: By the way, this is the perfect example of a problem I've always wished a start-up would come along and solve for me.

You are correct that radiation exposure does statically increase the risk for cancer. A handful of emergency workers did receive exposures above the level where the increased risk could be statistically detected compared to regular cancer risk rates.

So it is possible several people may face an earlier death than they would have if Fukoshima did not occur. But when talking deaths we are still short by 3 to 4 orders of magnitudes to the direct deaths from the earthquake.

[1] http://www.slideshare.net/iaea/radiological-briefing-11-0505 [2] http://xkcd.com/radiation/

I completely agree.

Fifteen thousand people died in the Japan earthquakes with not a single death due to the Fukushima meltdown. Yet when one asks the average American about it, all he remembers is how horrible Fukushima was. (It's mind boggling to me.)

It is interesting that so much fear is focused at nuclear power. There must be a combination of the association with nuclear weapons, fear of hard to understand things, and possibility for rare but severe accidents.

Maybe we just visit different sub-reddits. I tend to stay away from the front page ones because they remind me to much of the culture Digg used to have when it was popular. But there are plenty of smaller yet highly active subreddits that don't.

I will admit that for the ones I use, the proportion of Americans are at least 90%.

The killer feature that reddit has is subreddits.

I disagree with the article; there is no one reddit culture. One can go to r/politics, r/gardening, r/fitness, or r/askscience for example, and they all feature their own cultures and own biases. For example r/fitness has a culture focusing on weight lifting for fitness. But for people who are into fitness through running, there is r/running. The same thing goes for politics: r/politics tends to be left leaning, but you can find right leaning people in order subreddits.

There are thousands of vibrant community subreddits were people with similar interests (and sometimes opinions) participate. All with their own cultures and moderation rules for what are acceptable posts.

Subreddits combined with voting and good moderation make reddit way better than usenet, Digg in its heyday, or 4chan.

Many people have a very (and I mean very) poor track record at achieving their new years resolutions.

If you know your goals will fail, isn't it better to try to overachieve some other way that may actually work.

Ubuntu 11.04 is not affected either

Agree.

But, I am not convinced college tuitions will fall.

Demand is increasing. Just in the last 10 years enrollment has increased 30% and is still increasing. Any ranked university/college does not have trouble filling their enrollment goals with their current tuition. Although there may be some delayed price pressure from higher prices causing lower caliber students to enroll, thus decreasing the ranking of the school, and thus reducing what they can charge.

In addition, most american try to achieve a middle class lifestyle at a minimum. And culturally a middle class lifestyle entails the children having a college experience (and its associated costs).

Lesser known fact. Most homes contain alpha radiation sources through their use in smoke detectors. http://www.epa.gov/radiation/sources/smoke_alarm.html

That being said, radiological material regulations are very strict these day. Back when I was working at a lab at school, I had to go through several days of safety courses before I could even be in the same room as some very weak alpha particle sources. The work I was doing did not utilize them, and the whole time the sources were locked in a cabinet.

It amazes me that this playset contained beta and gamma sources. Hopefully they were extremely weak; but still the radiation accumulates. (alpha particle sources are really only dangerous if ingested or inhaled, since outside the body, air shields against them)

Here is an accompanying segment from QuakeCon 2011 in August where static code analysis is discussed. This topic must really be on his mind.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zgYG-_ha28&feature=playe...

Forgot about the Energiya. To bad it only flew successfully once. Had the Soviet Union not crumbled around the same time things may have been different.

Edit: Never mind. wolf550e and cstross are right. If Falcon Heavy flies it will be the 3rd largest rocket (in terms of payload) that has ever flown behind the Saturn V and the Energia.

----

I think you're being a little nit-picky. "Largest" is not exactly a precise term but would generally apply to length and width; not exactly the best way to classify launch vehicles.

Payload capability is the important attribute of a launch vehicle and is generally how vehicles are ranked. Using the word "large" for payload capability may not be precise but it is not factually incorrect.

Payload capabilities:

Ares V: 160 metric tons (cancelled)

SLS (Smaller Ares V): 130 metric tons (in development)

Saturn V: 125 metric tons (retired)

Energia: 100 metric tons (retired - one successful flight)

Falcon Heavy: 54 metric tons (in development)

Space Shuttle: 24 metric tons (retired)

Delta IV Heavy: 22 metric tons (in operation)

Proton Rocket: 21 metric tons (in operation)

The Falcon Heavy may end up being the most capable launch vehicle in operations if the re-incarnated Ares V vehicle (SLS) NASA is developing gets canceled again.

(added Energia)

I don't think this destroys your argument, but the barycenter of the Earth-Moon system is located, according to wikipedia [1], 4670 km from the center of the Earth.

Interestingly, both the Pluto-Charon and the Sun-Jupiter systems have barycenters above the surface of the primary body.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barycentric_coordinates_(astron...

Good point.

Do you think Bing could be monetized at a similar rate to Google if their market shares were similar? Or are there other things Google are doing (e.g. better add targeting) that is making them more money per search?

If this was such a great money making deal for Google why did Microsoft not bid higher? They have similar monetization strategy for Bing and would have similar ROI for gaining searches. Plus, MS is flush with cash and have a great desire to compete with Google.

[edit grammar]

The trick is figuring out how many users would use the Firefox search box vs would just enter google.com into the URL the old fashioned way (or would change the search box back to Google). I have no doubt Google is measuring that number and used it to guide their bidding.

My hunch is that Google is only breaking close to even with this deal (i.e. making $300M for paying $300M) and bid high just to keep too many people from trying Bing.

Plus, Google tends to act at least a little altruistic when it comes to the web [1] and may mind less being generous to Firefox.

[1] http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Wikimedia...

"I would not be surprised to see Google make a change to its signal strength to bars mapping for LTE and placebo away an issue that never really existed to begin with."

As an engineer it grates on my sanity when people compare engineering measures (such as the number of bars) when the measures are computed with different assumptions. It happens all the time when the technical meets the non-technical.

I think the reluctance comes from being burned by Microsoft infusing their own technologies into the web browser in the past.

I realize that Python and Ruby would be standard and open but people still fear the possible fragmentation.

Still a horrible security design if that is the case.

Simply jamming something should not by-pass an authentication mechanism.

Sigh..

I hope it was not that insecure.

Hmm, the GPS signal the military uses is supposed to be encrypted and un-spoofable.

I wonder if Iran cracked it. If so, can the US reset the key easily?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPS_signals#Precision_code