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Mars

4-Billion-Pixel Panorama View From Curiosity Rover 101

A reader points out that there is a great new panorama made from shots from the Curiosity Rover. "Sweep your gaze around Gale Crater on Mars, where NASA's Curiosity rover is currently exploring, with this 4-billion-pixel panorama stitched together from 295 images. ...The entire image stretches 90,000 by 45,000 pixels and uses pictures taken by the rover's two MastCams. The best way to enjoy it is to go into fullscreen mode and slowly soak up the scenery — from the distant high edges of the crater to the enormous and looming Mount Sharp, the rover's eventual destination."
Firefox

Emscripten and New Javascript Engine Bring Unreal Engine To Firefox 124

MojoKid writes "There's no doubt that gaming on the Web has improved dramatically in recent years, but Mozilla believes it has developed new technology that will deliver a big leap in what browser-based gaming can become. The company developed a highly-optimized version of Javascript that's designed to 'supercharge' a game's code to deliver near-native performance. And now that innovation has enabled Mozilla to bring Epic's Unreal Engine 3 to the browser. As a sort of proof of concept, Mozilla debuted this BananaBread game demo that was built using WebGL, Emscripten, and the new JavaScript version called 'asm.js.' Mozilla says that it's working with the likes of EA, Disney, and ZeptoLab to optimize games for the mobile Web, as well." Emscripten was previously used to port Doom to the browser.

Comment Re:And NASA has made mistakes with this before... (Score 1) 228

That, and I also imagine there are separate systems for the rovers main controls and for the "work"-tasks it has to do over there.
Since they issue about a 1000 commands *each day!* it seems to me that those commands go to a sort of sandboxed environment on the rover to ensure that a relatively "simple" command like "focus camera C on that rock to the right" can never cause major malfunctions to the main system on the rover itself.

Comment High security and encryption? I doubt it. (Score 1) 718

One report I read about the data seizure spoke of hundreds of dvds, cds, usb-sticks, memorycards and harddrives that were captured during the raid.

While I am sure OBL and his organization took security *very* seriously I however doubt that such a pile of data is all encrypted in equal thorough fashion.
As some posters already mentioned, it takes only one good fuck-up to compromise everything. I'm willing to bet that in such an a huge volume of data/media there is a fuck-up somewhere.

Also, while I'm also sure his organization had some good it-experts on it's payroll the majority of the people surrounding him, including OBL himself, were probably not very skilled in the use of computers and other modern media/information techniques.
A 54 year old man who spent the better part of his life fighting and hiding in hills and caves.. I wouldn't be surprised at all if he actually *did* write down his password(s) somewhere. Especially considering the fact he lived in the same compound for several years and must have felt relatively safe.

His form of security came in physical form, guns blazing, relocating often (though he fucked up on that one) and trust in the people surrounding him. He understood guns and bullets, not bits and bytes.

Comment Re:"Journal of Cosmology"? never heard of it. (Score 1) 103

Considering that this would be the most important discovery in the last 500 years, it's a little worrying that it's not in Nature, or any science journal I've ever heard of. A few mintes looking at their site and other's opinions shows it to be remarkably "open minded" in the articles it publishes: "Sex on Mars"; "Cosmological foundations of consciousness".

Excuses in advance for my ignorance but as far as I understand this guy claims to have found evidence of bacteria that did not originate from earth.
As a layman I interpreted that as extraterrestrial life.

Life that has started and evolved somewhere else in the Universe instead of earth. Wouldn't that make it by far the most important discovery ever?
Of course I could have understand it completely wrong and got exited about nothing ;-)

Comment Re:The universe is infinite (Score 1) 185

This is the part that always gets me..... the "nothing"

I understand that "nothing" is a concept that is very hard to grasp for a human being, but still...

As far as I understand the big bang is a series of events that led to the creation of our current universe. The part I can't get my head around is how "nothing" can turn into "something".
It seems to me that an event like the big bang had to be triggered by at least ''something". And that that "something" must have had some form of physic laws in order to trigger the event.

Easy, before the Big Bang there was nothing, when there is nothing there are no laws of physics, when there are no laws of physics there is nothing to prevent anything from happening.

This is kinda what I mean.
In my (surely overly simplified) logic for "anything" to happen there must be "something" to begin with in the first place. But all I keep reading is that that is not the case.. And *that* boggles my mind almost to explosive levels ;)

Disclaimer: I'm just a layman who tries to get his head around theories like this purely out of interested (and is failing horribly most of the time)

Comment Re:Color me nonplussed (Score 1) 109

Agree, iDeal may not be the end all, be all, solution for online transactions but it's pretty solid, safe and simple.

Currently I only do payments via iDeal or paypall only. My paypall accounts is empty most of the times. If I want to buy something via paypall I transfer the amount of money needed first and then make the transaction.

Comment Re:Horrid ending (Score 1) 577

Agree, the first 75% (orso) of the book is a very decent "King". The ending however...

I read that he had the story in his mind for 15 years but never written and published it because he felt it wasn't good enough yet. He should have waited a few more years in that case... (purely my personal opinion)

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