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Mars

4-Billion-Pixel Panorama View From Curiosity Rover 101

A reader points out that there is a great new panorama made from shots from the Curiosity Rover. "Sweep your gaze around Gale Crater on Mars, where NASA's Curiosity rover is currently exploring, with this 4-billion-pixel panorama stitched together from 295 images. ...The entire image stretches 90,000 by 45,000 pixels and uses pictures taken by the rover's two MastCams. The best way to enjoy it is to go into fullscreen mode and slowly soak up the scenery — from the distant high edges of the crater to the enormous and looming Mount Sharp, the rover's eventual destination."

Submission + - New Whitehouse petition to limit copyrights to 56 (whitehouse.gov)

TheDawgLives writes: "Perhaps taking inspiration from two recent petitions a new petition has been created at the White House We The People site to limit copyright to 56 years. That may still be too long, but at least it's a start.
Did the RIAA and MPAA finally stir up a hornets' nest that they weren't ready for, or will the be able to bribe their way out of this one?"

Science

Submission + - Crowdsourced Map of Earthquake Damage in Annals of (tomnod.com)

Tomnod writes: "On February 22 2011, a 6.3-magnitude quake centered just 10km from downtown Christchurch caused widespread damage and resulted in the loss of 181 lives. In an effort to assess the damage done, we created the Tomnod Disaster Mapper. In case you haven’t tried it out, the site shows before/after imagery from Christchurch and asks users on the web to identify damaged areas. We worked with the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute and the World Bank to match this information to on-the-ground surveys and validate the crowd's work. It turns out that they’re pretty darn good!"
Google

Submission + - Google researchers propose TCP performance tweaks (infoworld.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Some portions of TCP could be tweaked to
improve web performance in today's world of relatively plentiful bandwidth and broadband connections, according to Google researchers studying web performance. In a blog post, a team member outlines four proposals for modifying TCP to reduce web latency. These proposals include increasing the initial congestion window from 3 to 10 segments (or 4.5KB to 15KB using the Ethernet MTU), and lowering the initial timeout from 3 seconds to 1 second.

Submission + - Netflix abandons plans to separate services (yahoo.com)

s.d. writes: Abandoning a break-up plan it announced last month, Netflix said Monday morning that it had decided to keep its DVD-by-mail and online streaming services together under one name and one Web site. "We underestimated the appeal of the single web site and a single service," Steve Swasey, a Netflix spokesman, said in a telephone interview. He quickly added: "We greatly underestimated it." Mr. Swasey said that the Netflix chief executive Reed Hastings declined an interview request. But in a statement, Mr. Hastings said, "Consumers value the simplicity Netflix has always offered and we respect that. There is a difference between moving quickly — which Netflix has done very well for years — and moving too fast, which is what we did in this case."

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