NASA JPL video.

And meanwhile, states are pushing voter-ID laws to combat a problem of which there are only a handful of incidents in the past 12 years.

I think people may be confusing hybrid seeds with terminator seeds.

Most modern seeds are a cross between two parent lines. They are not stable and the next generation of seeds will not have the same carefully selected properties. This is not done on purpose to prevent them from being reused - it's just a property of the most effective method of generating seeds with targeted properties.

High quality open source seeds will most likely be hybrids, too. You will not be able to reuse their seeds. But the parent lines will not be kept as a guarded secret and multiple seed producers will be able to make generic versions at reasonable prices.

It's not a terribly serious setback in the history of space flight, but it could be a serious blow to Orbital.

Their whole program is built around the idea of using old surplus Soviet-era rocket engines, originally designed for the ill-fated N1 program. (The N1 program, as a sidenote, is responsible for one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in human history when one of its launch vehicles had a failure shortly after takeoff. On top of a zero-for-four launch record, it's not the program I'd pick to emulate.)

My understanding of the Soviet engines is that they have some design features that make them lightweight for their output, but represent tradeoffs not typically taken on Western engines, due to the risk of "burn through". But some people--perhaps including Orbital--thought that the designers had solved the problem and the risks were overstated.

Too early to tell right now, but if the engines turn out to have a fatal flaw, that would be bad for Orbital. It'd probably be good for SpaceX, since they're the obvious alternative, but it'd leave NASA down one contractor for the commercial launch program.

Rules may prohibit cheating and possibly reduce it. They definitely can't prevent it.

Crazy. You can go to the website and add features on Verizon, which includes tethering. However you get a data bucket for the tethered data, while your phone gets to use the unlimited bucket.

In 1988 Korean pigeons had a different unpleasant experience at the Seoul olympic games opening ceremony.

A blu-ray M-Disc is now available. Put them in a fire safe (e.g. this one.

Even with just a single copy, I think this has a better chance of surviving the next 25 years than assuming that you will never fail to copy the data to the next hard disks before the old ones die over that entire period. Or that the cloud storage provider you choose will not go out of business.

And you should be able to find readers for this. For some applications there is good reason to have some kind of storage medium that is completely passive and has no electronics as part of it. And unless something changes in the laws of physics it will probably be optical. While they may shrink is size over time, for archival use a 12cm disc seems like a convenient form factor, doesn't it? So I think these holographic nanodispersion dense wavelength multiplexing diffraction-limit beating wonders will still be be backward compatible with the ancient "blue ray" format.

Shaving some of the *predictable* daily peaks is nice. It brings you closer to the base load demand and saves a bit at the margin.

Responding to a sudden and *unpredictable* loss of a good fraction of your power generation capacity is no longer about shaving. I think the right term would be "amputation". The cost at which a large fraction of consumers would plan and respond by reducing their power demand is about the same as their losses from a blackout. This is no longer about optimization of resource use - it's about spreading the inevitable damage to those for whom it is slightly less painful (or those who simply have no choice because they cannot pay).

This is way past the point of diminishing returns on overall benefit to society - unless you ascribe some value approaching infinity to your religious devotion to "renewable" energy and make everyone share this valuation by force.

Large business consumers make very effective use of these incentives right now.

The "incentives" required to produce such extreme changes in demand as required to meet the fluctuations in renewable energy production would have to be very harsh. Yes, you would probably turn off your air conditioner if it cost you $20 per hour. And some might consider it an effective use of incentives to manipulate demand. I'm not so sure how you would feel about such manipulations, though.

This is about as valid as the claim that "the wind always blows somewhere". Actual power generation data shows that weather is a very large scale phenomenon and the wind most definitely slows to a tiny fraction of its average power over an entire continent.

Yes, that would do it!

Where are you that 20/90 is legally blind? That's nothing.

In my state it's 20/200. You need glasses past 20/40 if you want to drive, though.

JPEGmini is a proprietary implementation of the same concept : fully compatible implementation of a JPEG compressor that does better than libjpeg at the cost of much higher CPU use.