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Comment Larger landing area (Score 4, Interesting) 342

It sure seems that if a larger landing area was available, so that the rocket didn't have to lean so far to adjust to a very small target and thus could prioritize staying vertical, it would be able to land successfully. What's it going to take for NASA or the FAA or whatever to give them permission to land on, um, land.

Comment Money (Score -1, Flamebait) 109

(bandwidth costs Google money, thus by using a more efficient codec to reduce the amount of data they have to transmit, they save money. But of course they'll spin it as if they're doing it for the poor disenfranchised bandwidth limited user. Just keep that fact on the down-low)

Comment Consummate politician (Score 2) 538

I would expect nothing less of a true politician. Whether it's the small town politician slapping down even more stop signs after an accident occurred, a school board politician enacting rule after rule that parents and students must jump through in order to protect the school board from litigation, or a senator talking about "removing" a 40+ year old book from the internet, they all have one thing in common: doing things for the sake of being seen doing things, as if they have solutions or actual control over things they do not. It's all about the image. Smoke and mirrors.

Comment Re:Interesting (Score 1) 53

I really enjoyed this movie as a kid. Quite frankly, Maximilian was, and is to me still, one of the scariest robots ever created. Given the era, it's very surprising DIsney produced a movie as dark as The Black Hole. In addition to Maximilian there were the zombie-like laser-lobotomized humans running the ship. And no, there was no happy ending for any of them - the best they got was to eventually die. Yeah, it tried to go right by the checklist of what made Star Wars a huge success (lasers, robots, and even a "force"-like ESP thing), but it was still quite original in a number of ways. They even had a fairly decent go of zero-gravity behavior in the space ship at the beginning.

Comment Re:No real mystery here (Score 1) 48

I'm sure it's doing more than that. It has a payload bay like the space shuttle. Certainly it is doing spying, but it's very likely that it is actively testing new technology that has to make up for the loss of capability that the Space Shuttle provided. More than likely it launches micro satellites, then locates and tracks them, and finally recaptures them. It could also be launching a larger payload of some kind, then manipulating the payload with a robotic arm, etc.

Comment Exiting (Score 4, Interesting) 308

According to a CNN article, they were leaving the secure area, not entering. A quote from an official said they failed to follow proper safe EXITING procedures. Another major news site said that a gun and cocaine were found in the vehicle. It's a large complex and a lot of people live in it. Sounds like drugs were being ferried in or out, and it didn't have anything to do with the NSA or secrets.

Comment Makes sense (Score 5, Insightful) 193

This makes sense for a number of reasons. First, it will keep scalpers from buying up so many devices and selling on eBay. Makes it much easier for Apple to keep track of these people. Second, it will reduce the number of impulse buys for people that don't really understand what the device can, and more importantly, can't do, thus reducing the number of returns and increasing overall customer satisfaction. Sure, it has downsides, but I think the upsides probably win out in this case.

Comment Re:Putin's getting desperate... (Score 2, Informative) 83

space exploration is probably one of their strongest points both historically and currently

Russia has heavy lift capability, and that's basically it. I tried to find the last time they actually did exploration (as in probes, rovers, etc) and didn't see much of anything since the Soviet Union. Right now NASA, ESA, Japan, China and even India are all ahead of Russia as far as exploration goes, as all those organizations have active probes in space doing science. Russia is basically just hauling stuff into orbit.

Comment HTML5 (Score 1) 97

For one brief moment I thought this was actually newsworthy - AKA it was implemented in Javascript using WebGL and Web Audio API - while in reality it runs in 3rd party plugin which is a native executable running directly on the system. Yawn.

Earth

Experts: Aim of 2 Degrees Climate Goal Insufficient 442

An anonymous reader points out that a long held goal of keeping the Earth's average temperature from rising above 2 degrees Celsius might not be good enough. "A long-held benchmark for limiting global warming is 'utterly inadequate,' a leading U.N. climate scientist declared. Keeping the Earth's average temperature from rising past 2 degrees Celsius – a cap established by studies in the early 1970s – is far too loose a goal, Petra Tschakert, a professor at Penn State University and a lead author of an assessment report for the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, said in a commentary published in the journal Climate Change Responses. Already, with an average increase of just 0.8 degrees Celsius, she wrote, 'negative impacts' are 'widespread across the globe.' Tschakert called for lowering the warming target to 1.5 degrees Celsius."

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