After all, the first stage could land safely in the uninhabited steppe to the east.

Yeah, if you just replace the back seat occupant with an equivalent mass of batteries, you could get twice the range.

Hm. Failed to enable. Is this a new feature? Indeed, you can have iMessage send as SMS -- I didn't have that set up. It's in Settings->Messages->Send_as_SMS

Just not true, or at least it wasn't a few months ago. My daughter switched to Android and I couldn't text her until she finally remembered her Apple ID and we could log into their servers and disable her account. We used the Samsung page for guidance, and it worked just fine. But by itself, my phone kept silently failing to send her messages.

Actually, yours is by far the most insightful comment. Please mod up!

In fact, it's pretty clear that 4. is incorrect. There was a fascinating recent study.

There is a drug that you can give somebody (or in this experiment, a rat) that will prevent it from creating new memories. They trained the rat to solve a maze, and it did it just fine. They gave the rat the drug, and it solved the maze perfectly. Once. After that, it couldn't do it again.

Implying that when you remember something, that very process of remembering removes the original memory,and it has to be created again. It will be different the second time; colored by your current experience. The more times you remember something, the more you are remembering the previous memory, not the original event.

A reference is

The FA says that Blu-ray disc sales are increasing, but overall disk sales are slowing because DVDs are contracting so quickly.

Quoting the article. "Last year, about 124 million Blu-ray discs were sold in the U.S., a 4.2% increase over 2012, according to IHS Technology. Even so, because of reduced pricing for the format, revenue only increased 2.6%. DVD sales, which have been plummeting for years, dropped 13.6% last year."

Blu-ray data rates are far higher than anything you can stream today, and people who care about that (not many of the commenters apparently :) ) apparently are still buying discs.

I do come from the movie business, so I surely have a different perspective; but to filmmakers quality is paramount.

For a three-body slingshot to work, the object would have to get pretty close to one or both of the black holes -- considerably closer than the size of a globular cluster. At that distance, the tidal forces around the black holes would rip the cluster apart. I just can't see this happening.

I suppose it's time to do some simulations :)

The antenna array is a beautiful piece of marketing by Aereo. Who could object to renting an antenna?

And, in fact, if the output of that antenna -- that is, the radio-frequency signal -- was transmitted to the home (as CableVision was doing back in the day) I think that Aereo would have an slam dunk. But that's not what they are doing.

They are converting the microwatt signal coming out of these antennas a few times. First, they are separating out just the channel that the user wants to watch, then they are digitizing that signal and encoding it onto the internet. That's what I don't think they are allowed to do, and that's why I believe they'll be shut down.

For still photography, focus isn't a terribly hard problem to solve. Autofocus works, and DSLRs let you compose, focus, and shoot manually as well. Easy peasy.

On the other hand, for movies shot using large-format sensors, focus is a huge issue. The amount of work spent following focus on a movie is significant, and it fails more often than you might think. Modern lenses are incredibly sharp, but they have such a tiny range that is in perfect focus that they are hard to use. Admittedly, the people who use these cameras and lenses are professionals with years or decades of experience, and they do well... ...But -- if we could focus our shots after the fact, it would be a true game changer for movie making. We could chose just what part of the scene should be in focus, and change that throughout the shot easily. Yes, this moves yet another part of the movie making process into post, but that's not a bad thing. As other people have suggested at other fora, editing/coloring/framing and visual effects are all done in post, and it helps make better movies. This would help too. Having the depth maps automatically generated would make visual effects easier and better as well.

I recognize that the amount of processing that goes on to make these images makes a motion picture camera a challenge, and the number of high-end motion picture cameras is probably a tenth of a percent of the DSLRs that are made, at most. Still, we could just capture the 40 MRays and do the processing later; storage and networks are getting faster and larger all the time.

Come on, Lytro! Make it happen!

At the time, one of the most popular magazines was "Reader's Digest", which edited long articles into short three-page summaries. They did a pretty good job of it. They would often have a "condensed book" as well.

After reading the Reader's Digest versions of articles, though, it was difficult to go back to long-form reading. There's really nothing new here!

It would be cool if we could track the trackers, and post their location on maps in real time; showing where they troll for cars, where they park at night, what donut stores they frequent. After all, the license plate trackers are plainly visible, anybody could see them and remember where and and when they did.

So, I checked slashdot on my phone today over lunch, and I saw the big "We hear you!" post discussing beta. Then, I got home tonight and was redirected to the new beta interface. So, clearly, slashdot the corporate group doesn't hear what slashdot the community is saying. If people are still being involuntarily redirected to something that has put the community at the edge of open rebellion, slashdot is clearly plunging in relevance even faster than a post Gox bitcoin. It's been a good run. I had over a decade of fun here on slashdot. I had excellent karma. But, clearly it's time for me to walk away. It's a shame that that ./ is so hell bent on shooting themselves in the face with this redesign. If they don't completely abandon it, this will probably the last post from this account. Weird. If you want to improve ./, add utf8 support and math rendering. Stuff people are actually asking for. Trying to refine the redesign is the wrong path. It's the wrong direction. Trying to dial in the details of shooting yourself in the face doesn't really matter. It doesn't matter if you trade the shotgun for a pistol, or whether you aim for the nose or the roof of your mouth. That's all "Beta isn't ready" means. It's a shame when a good community dissolves, but good night.

I count that as wise. If you put a real IP address, it would likely get a lot of traffic.

Which is why I've always been confused by the fact that they use fictituous IP's, rather than a production company website with trailers for upcoming projects...

It is a lot of work to raise your arm and point at an exact location on the screen (and slow too). After a short time you will be feeling the fatigue building up in your arm, which starts feeling very heavy. Then you will hate your touch screen and go back to using a mouse, touchpad, or keyboard, none of which require you to make large arm movements, or hold up the weight of your arm in front of you.

Why is touch on the desktop always assumed to be something that would have to replace using other inputs? I mean, if touch added $5 to my monitor, and I used it once every few weeks, I'd consider that a win. And, if it were widely deployed, economies of scale would mean that it really would be very cheap to add. (Like audio on the motherboard.) Having things like pinch to zoom could be handy on the desktop.