Because at the time, the NASA site didn't have the latest photos, and the Johns Hopkins site did.

Could be. It'll be fun to find out though, if we can.

I had thought the same thing the first time I saw them, but the more recent photos show them to be quite irregular in shape. More interesting to me are the hexagonally-shaped areas above the equator.

Replying to myself - it's Johns Hopkins, not JPL.

Especially when JPL has photos available from yesterday morning.

Compare to an average property area of 6000 sq. ft or so for a family home. With a holodeck, your virtual living area and property size could be as big as you wanted while taking up a relatively small amount of real estate.

Unless your ideal world is one where the party bosses and their pals get to live in big estates and everyone else gets put in a small cell in an undesired location that is deemed perfectly adequate for them

A 50'x50x20' holodeck would make a perfectly serviceable family home practically anywhere, although that presupposes that power won't cost an arm and a leg, and also that a holodeck was a real thing.

I love a high-quality ribeye. But if you give me a good-quality smoker and sufficient time, I'd choose brisket over any steak any day.

Can't we have both?

My personal best was when I was writing the firmware for a customer's laser marker system. It was a big industrial machine that moved the laser head on a very expensive gantry using 15-pound servos that could generate ungodly amounts of torque. I had a bug in the code that drove the servos, and I issued a command to home the gantry, after which the X-axis went zipping across as fast as it would go. Wouldn't have been a problem except there was a faulty limit switch on that end of the axis, so the 25-pound laser head got slammed into the stops at what we estimated was about 100 inches per second. Totally destroyed the laser head (there's nothing more disheartening to hear than the tinkling of broken steering mirrors and seeing a cracked flat field lens as a bonus), and caused some severe mechanical damage to the rest of the assembly. Fortunately the motors shut down automatically when the temperature sensor tripped, but it wasn't fun explaining to the boss that we had to replace about $30,000 of hardware.

My favorites are those I thankfully had nothing at all to do with - where I am now, we write and maintain the warehouse management software for a very, very large snack food vendor, and we have a VPN link to all of the plants to maintain and monitor what's going on. It's happened before where co-workers haven't paid close enough attention and have connected to live plants instead of the test systems, and accidentally shut down the warehouse, which means production gets shut down too since there's nowhere to put those thousands and thousands of bags of chips until the warehouse system comes back up, and it takes them hours to get stuff restarted and settled once that happens. I don't know how much it costs, but it can't be cheap. I'm also not sure why we don't have some kind of two-factor system with a unique key for each plant to keep that from happening. [shrug]

After making a few tweaks to the circuitry in an attempt to reduce noise, I powered on the Commodore and immediately fried the motherboard.

Don't be too hard on yourself. At least the noise was no longer a problem, so I'd call it a success!

Plus, if it's only a double-sided board, vias can be repaired fairly easily in a variety of ways. Anyone that's done enough playing around with electronics has screwed up a via now and again.

And what gives him the authority to dictate to NASA how to run their space program?

Mostly the fact that he was one of the most prominent and well-rounded planetary astronomers and astrobiologists in the world, and the fact that he had a pretty good batting average in predicting conditions on Venus, Europa, and other bodies that were later confirmed. Sagan didn't dictate the Voyagers' itineraries, but NASA sure as hell wanted to know what he had to say.

Whichever one has a Steak'n'Shake.

$4.99 double steakburger combo and a kickass chocolate milk shake? I'm in.

I believe Voyager 1 still hasn't passed pluto if projected back down onto its orbital plane.

Voyager 1 is almost 20 billion miles away from us now, and is traveling about 35 degrees out of the ecliptic. Some really rough trigonometry shows that if you project that down onto the ecliptic, it's still about 16 billion miles away from the Sun, which is almost three times the length of the long axis of Pluto's entire orbit.

Hard to concentrate when you can smell your neighbor didn't shower this week.

Fortunately everyone in my office bathes regularly, but we do have an office manager that believes too much perfume is merely a starting point. Seriously, I'm four cubes down from where she works and I can tell when she's arrived to within five minutes.