I got a Lenovo laptop awhile back and it noticed that I keep it plugged in most of the time. It sets itself to keep the battery between 70-80% charged in this state. I thought it was a really cool feature, although it does take a little getting used to. "Why is my battery low? Oh right, battery saving mode."

That undercuts the existing deals in the Movie division, which is why it won't happen. People spend a lot of movie to get media a few weeks before other competitors, you can't just have the company create a competitor and then give them preferential access. There is a huge complex web of relationships with every release. If this were an easy problem every studio would already have their own version of Netflix for their own releases, but such a service would necessarily be slower, more expensive, and more DRM encumbered than the existing channels to avoid undercutting their existing partners. The middlemen demand their cut.

Only if the Rosetta spacecraft has a camera tuned to that frequency. Lower frequencies add more uncertainty to the measurements too.

The article read like "The window washing robots we tried sucked, the problem must be impossible!"

Have you seen Netflix lately? They've got more TV shows on there than movies. Their original content is all episodic series too.

The big problem is that Sony has a built-in conflict of interest from its Movie division, and will never be able to offer a service as good as Netflix. There will always be internal pressure to not have other studios in there or to put onerous DRM in place.

That was my thought. This just seems like poor coding to me. Batch up more of the draw calls so you're not pounding the crap out of the API and taking a zillion context switches every second.

Part of the problem is that some of the systems intended to help the probe land properly aren't working, like the thruster on top.

Some of it seems like just poor planning though. How hard would it have been to install a bright LED on the top that Rosetta could see from a few km away? LEDs don't weigh much and you only have to run it while Rosetta is taking the picture so the power budget would be nominal. It seems better than not being able to find the lander because it is in shadow.

Anybody think the Senate is going to entertain environmental legislation anytime in the next two years? And I don't mean deregulation. This was an easy deal for Obama to make because the Congress will just defund anything he tries to do via executive order. It's basically a non-legislation.

Do you have some reason to believe that you're going to be accused of cheating? Going so far as to already retain a lawyer seems to be jumping the gun a bit. Is there some sort of witch hunt going on there or something?

That makes it impossible to fly over large parts of the Middle East, Africa, Balkans, etc... It's really depressing how much of the world is at war at any given time. Flying over Crimea should have been reasonably safe too--the rebels didn't have access to the kind of SAMs that can shoot down an airliner at cruising altitude, and only a madman would give it to them.

What the hell are you talking about?

More importantly, using one form of navigation does not preclude you from using other forms as well. In fact knowing how to use multiple forms of navigation is great for doing sanity checks and for having backup in case something unexpected happens. Buying a GPS unit doesn't mean you have to throw away your compass and maps.

The stock market is really its own thing. Its connection to the economy as a whole has gotten pretty tenuous over the years. Now it's just a big game people play with your money to see how much they can pretend to make while skimming off the real value.

Being the most productive in history doesn't change the fact that they were a do-nothing congress full of people who want to ruin the country. And that's the truth(iness).