There would be few things in life worse than being stuck sitting next to some dipstick talking on their phone with no hope of reprieve or escape. I would vote for continued ban on phone calls and noisy electronics (MP3/Game/DVD player, etc) for the sheer nuisance factor. Use your phone menus, apps, camera, text messaging, fine. But no calls. Everything else is fair game... except I suppose electric shavers, that's just wrong.

... and if you had watched the video, you would have seen the dual mode device actually park itself using computer vision... autonomously... like a robot.

The color was derived from multiple passes using red and blue filters over the same photo sensor. Green was derived from red and blue and hence we get the RGB color representation. Some info describing that is on this page - not a primary source, but matches what I recall.

Also, I don't believe we're talking about "bits" here at all - this was all analog technology. My college instructor is in the Monterey, CA area.

Any journalist worth their salt would not use the words, "so-and-so says [insert something they did not actually say here]". I'm going to give benefit of the doubt on the side of journalistic integrity here.

Sounds pretty plausible - thanks for that!

Yea - I'm sure it has nothing to do with recent weather satellite failures.

OK rocket scientists or astrophysicists, what does "6,000 x 12,000 km orbit" mean for us lowly Earth-bound folk?

Actually...

The man who wrote the software for the image processing to handle the raw data that came out of that "camera" works in the Computer Science department at the local community college here now. I have spoken to him at length on this topic. He clarified that it is not a camera at all, but simply a "light sensor" (think sensitive photoresistor). The only thing that makes it able to render an image at all is the rotation of the spacecraft. He also explained that the rotating motion coupled with the linear direction of the craft resulted in really interesting and strange swooping distortions of the "image" produced which was why they needed him to write something special to correct the curvature of the images. All pretty fascinating stuff.

As to the GP however, I am sure that the light sensor is no longer in service for imaging. It needed to be near to a large physical body to have the FOV necessary to form a composite image. Simply spinning in space and looking at the stars, all it would do is register average and ambient light levels of the surrounding star field and would not form a cohesive rasterization of any kind.

The one anecdotal piece I have to complement the above is that I was recently doing some work on an application in C to improve the performance of some legacy Fast Fourier Transform code compiled with GCC. The original code was doing a bunch of heavy lifting with double precision floats. I optimized the algorithm as far as I could without changing any data types and, as a last step I changed the doubles to pure 32bit integer arithmetic expecting at least twice the execution speed compared to the doubles on this Core i7 3Ghz processor. The end result: exactly the same performance for ints as for doubles, down to the microsecond. The new Intel chips have stunning FPU capabilities that I was definitely not expecting and, unless you plan for it as they clearly did, there will be a clear performance difference between int or even single vs. double precision on the GFlop counter...

It's all over the fricken Internet. It was in the NPR report and it looks like the report has since been edited to remove the comment, perhaps out of embarrassment. The transcript from the same report however still includes the quote...

"PALCA: Put a sample of Martian soil or rock or even air inside SAM and it will tell you what the sample's made of. Right now, SAM is working on a Mars soil sample, and [John] Grotzinger says the results are earth-shaking."

From NPR Transcript

Grotzinger is the "principal investigator for the rover mission".

" But to teach anything as 'scientific fact" is bastardization of science."

I second this motion. It was my immediate, and only reaction to the headline.

My only other comment is in reaction to something posted way above about wanting both creationism and evolution to be taught in school. I have heard this quite a bit in that past few years and must say I'm freakin tired of it: religion is taught at home and at Church, not at school with taxpayer dollars. Parents need to stop pawning off their responsibilities onto the public school system. The school instills knowledge; parents instill character. School is academia. Church is not academia. If they want to offer theology at school, then that would be a valuable academic survey of the world's religions, but not an indoctrination of creationism. For context, I say this as a believer in science AND a person of faith. The two ARE compatible, and even the Pope is on board, but I have zero desire to have schools trying to teach my child where to place their faith and how to be a good person.

If the Earth is laughing, it may be because she doesn't give two spits about us or any other "dominant species" and would be more than happy to mass-extinct us all. While we may have only been here and conscious of our environment for a small percentage of Earth's total time here, keep in mind that we can still make pretty good observations about that past. The fact that we know the Earth to be more than 4 Billion years old is a good example. Were it not for core samples, carbon testing, etc. we might never have known that. The same types of observations, by the way, are made against core samples from antarctic ice, and they reveal a lot more information than just what our passive observations have noted in the past few decades...

As for me, I'm interested in this whole premise of "compensatory snow" in the Antarctic - do we get one of those fun sliding Earth's crust events once the spinning mass down there becomes lopsided enough to make Antarctica the new equatorial topical paradise?

... is a duplicate

That is a fair point that I would concede to readily. My main issue with the summary/video is that it implies that MySQL is not appropriate for any use due to the OP's perception of flaws. Perhaps MySQL is not appropriate for his use in his highly strict operating environment for banking/science/medicine, etc.... but it's fine for government work! :-)
... oh and consumer-facing websites as you mentioned.

I find myself at a loss for words regarding you being stoned and bewildered. How about try smoking less dope so that you can think more normal? Allow me to hold your hand through this...specifically...

Someone entering a date of February 31st is a "strange situation", and is one that should have been caught by at least one level of data validation prior to attempting to store it in the database. That is but one of numerous examples of "strange situations" presented in the video, which I did in fact attentively watch in its entirety. If there is a solid case to be made for a switch to Postgres from MySQL then I want to see it and I was hoping to see it in this video, but alas I did not.

"Obscure error codes" are when you are searching for something of interest with your favorite search engine and you see a result that looks very promising and click on it only to be greeted with the likes of "Server 500 Error - System administrators have been notified". To the average end user, that is an obscure result and entirely worthless, and may have been the result of some operational condition breaking as a result of unforgivingly strict database server such as PostGres.

And by the way, it is absolutely necessary for MySQL to accept strings as integers and perform an atol() operation on them because the MySQL syntax allows you to quote all data values in the statement. Thus '0' and 0 are equivalent when directed to a numeric field. A value like 'A' going to the same numeric field would naturally translate to a 0. That's just common sense when you understand how the database works. If you're on board with forcing a user to input a number when a number is expected through input sanitizing/validation, then you should be equally OK with blocking February 31st at the same level.

Clear as mud, or what?