I haven't seen the actual agreement, but it sounds like the company is going against the spirit of the agreement. They were supposed to get a television series produced, probably which would have made a portion of the generated funds go back to the estate. They had seven years to do it, then the rights would revert back to the estate so they could find someone that could get it done. In trying to keep the rights despite that clause in the contract, they paid for a "pilot" episode to be created themselves, then paid the network to broadcast the episode in a infomercial time-slot. It seems to be to be a weak attempt to hold onto the rights and deprive the estate of the opportunity to actually produce a TV series, something the plaintiffs seem incapable of.

The article makes it sound like it doesn't matter what size or mass.

Parameters: Radius 650m, Circumference 4084m, Period 7560s, Speed 0.5157m/s, Mass 2.1e12kg

Calculating Surface Gravity = 0.0003315m/s/s.

Centrifugal Force = 0.00040915m/s/s

While that relates to the orbital speed calculated for the mass and radius of 0.4642m/s, it is far less than the escape velocity of 0.6565m/s. So how far out would it go?

The numbers are so small that if you take the speed they are moving of 0.5157m/s tangental to the surface and point it straight upwards and accelerate it with the gravity of 0.0003315m/s/s then it would come to a stand-still in somewhere over 1600seconds at a height somewhere over 800m and fall back towards the asteroid.

I don't know the maths to figure out the exact values since they vary so greatly with distance, but the difference in centrifugal and gravitational force is only 0.00007765m/s/s. That means that something weighing 100 TONS on earth would have a net upward force of about 1.6 pounds. Of course you can't treat the asteroid as discrete frictionless atoms. What holds a dirt clod together overcoming the full force of earth's gravity to maintain it's shape?

So if you were attached to the surface and dropped a rock it seems to me that it should continue upwards and orbit the asteroid at some altitude. It doesn't surprise me though that since dust can stick to my ceiling and ceiling fan blades even when they're whirring around that this asteroid can stick together.

Ok, I've looked at it more and it is more like 1/3 - 1/2 what looks blue than 'nearly all', but still...

Please read the "skeptical" article with a skeptical eye. The poor guy goes through all the work to get the specs and highlights the minimum wind speed rate of 4m/s for the turbines to work. He also links to an excellent page showing wind patters and letting you see wind speed across the country.

But then, he goes off the rails. He can "tell from his own experience" that the wind doesn't always blow that fast and "look at all the blue, which means low wind speed". The big problem is that he didn't go one extra step and actually click on the map to check wind speeds. Almost all of the blue is above the required 4m/s for the turbines. The green is actually too fast. The maximum wind speeds for the turbines are 25m/s and the green areas are over 30.

Poor guy, how embarassing for him. That could have been avoided with a few clicks.

Go to any programming conference and check the ratio of men to women. Only about 1 in 5 software engineers are women. It's an incentive to get more girls interested in programming. Nowhere are boys barred from the classes or are there penalties for male students. If preference was given to the group that already enjoyed an overwhelming majority then it would certainly be discrimination, but offering an incentive to overcome whatever discrimination must already be occurring to create the gap is not.

This seems completely wrong, how did it get rated 5-Informative? One of the primary purposes is to use less bandwidth. Responsive images just tells the browser to load a different image based on screen size or pixel density, there's no extra request to the server.

When are they launching the mission to check the other side of mars for a rock shaped like 'merica?

Cognitive dissonance at its finest. Oppressing people is fine as long as they're the ones you think should be oppressed or because oppressing them is traditional?

All you have to do is put yourself in their shoes. If 90% of the country was gay and forbade you from marrying a person of the opposite gender because marriage had always been for same-sex couples, would you feel oppressed? If a gay person's spouse could visit them in the hospital, could claim tax write-offs and could inherit easily from their spouse and make medical decisions for them, but you were denied those things because your marriage was considered nontraditional, would you feel oppressed?

He did say the Klan of the 21st century, if there have been tons of lynchings since 2000 on they are keeping it very quiet.

I got my 27" 2560x1440 monitor on ebay for under $280 (shipped) a few months ago, prices seem to be a little higher now but not that bad. The ~109dpi gives a slightly smoother image also (24" 1080p is ~92 and 30" 2560x1600 is ~100). I hadn't noticed pixelation on my other monitors before but side-by-side it's easy. 4k@28" is overkill dpi-wise unless you're putting your face 6" from the monitor to get that surround feel :)

You have 1120 bits, which is usually used for 160 7-bit characters. Some countries use 16-bit characters and get only 70. GSM handsets can be set to use 8-bit characters and are limited to 140. That's why I always thought the limit was 140.

Yes it's the closest approach, but it's still going to be 3.2 million km away. If the Earth were the size of a basketball, the asteroid would be 560 feet away and only 1/5 the size of a pixel in an iPhone retina display. The 0.017 arcsecond angular resolution requires a 6.6 meter telescope to see more than just a point of light.. And as for "hurtling past Earth" as some reports say, if it were heading straight for earth at 27,000 miles per hour it would take 73.5 hours or more than 3 days to get here. In our scaled example it would be travelling at a whopping 0.00255 km/h, under 1/10th the speed of a garden snail. The asteroid should have close to the same visibility for many hours around the time of closest approach. Right now (5 hours before) it could at most be 2% smaller through a telescope..

I think it's cool, I just wish the articles wouldn't hype so much and would include more context.

Of course the real loss there is Nickelodeon.

Of all these channels, the only one I really care about is Comedy Central, but I might watch something on Spike every once in a while. Do you think Viacom would be doing this if we could buy individual channels? They make money from ads which they bombard us with more and more every year. I think Viacom would be happy that their ads are getting to more households. I find it ridiculous that I have to pay for BET Gospel and CMT Pure Country when all I want to watch is South Park.

You need to file form 1099-B to report bartering income.. Enjoy paying tax to the government for that old cutlery you don't even want...

If 57% of people break a law, is it the people's fault, or the law's fault?