And there are people with the ideological opposition to anything human, that we bipedal oxygen breathers are a blight on the earth that is must be stopped.

It's not bloody obvious to me that the weather is out of whack. Warm summer, cold winter...some summers are warmer, some winters are colder. How is this out of whack? There's a big difference between a science that is hotly debated because there's no actual proof (only evidence that can point many directions) and there being an actual asteroid on a collision course for earth. If the evidence of the asteroid wasn't based on observation of an asteroid but assumptions drawn from a small timeframe of data that suggests an asteroid is likely on a collision course with earth, then you'd have people hotly debating it like global warming.

The problem is there are scientists and worse, politicians asking us to have FAITH in them that what they're saying is true. No offense to them, but faith is not something I put in either of those people. Politicians don't deserve it and scientists shouldn't need it. Maybe if meteorologists could predict the LOCAL weather more than 30 minutes in advance without blowing it 75% of the time then we might lend more credence to people who presume to predict global climate decades in advance. MIGHT...not saying that they would, or even should. Global warming is not prove to be either a human generated phenomenon NOR a phenomenon that human-kind can have any impact on.

It is generally accepted to try to use the prefix that will best keep the number of units between 1-999. More people might still speak parts of Latin if people used the correct terms. Also Slashdot is a technical crowd and I would bet that less than 1% doesn't know what a Tera means.

I'm sure there's some cultural conditioning, but in the "nurture vs. nature" debate, many P.C. people try desperately to remove "nature." It's much worse than global warming politics.

The fact is, more young boys than girls will treat any kind of toy or stick or whatever they can find as a weapon, and more young girls than boys will treat any kind of toy or stick or whatever they can find as a doll, and I think most people who are parents and truly think about it realize that this happened at an extremely young age for their kids. If there is a "nurture" side to how this works, it is exerted very early and in a round-about way.

Javascript "increasingly more appropriate for more intense tasks."

Yeah, right. I'm getting really tired of web sites that use 100% of the CPU while doing essentially nothing. It's bad enough on a desktop machine. On a phone, that eats the battery.

Please, no one on this site thinks twitter is a good news source, don't link to twitter, but the link located at the twitter blog; http://securityevaluators.com/content/blog/?page=2009-12-17_Gmail_activity_log

Its 1024 ^ n. Everyone knows that!

Its not really a "camera", it does have a CCD, but apparently it uses diffraction grating and a mirror rotating along a single plane to make images. My guess is that this allows super-accurate mapping of light frequencies, but hurts the resolution. Also at this kind of distance the slightest imperfections in the lens would have much bigger impact, as would uneven gravitation fields. I just kind of expect clearer images from NASA by this point (especially after the upgrades to Hubble). Dually so for "proof".

Actually I might place more trust any of those. They have the sound of a extremely quirky scientist (1/2 NASA still uses miles, remember). Especially with decimal places.

A billion kilometers sounds like it went through a news source and was dumbed down for someone who doesn't understand powers of 10 (eg That's a one followed by 12 zeros!).

The picture, even in "full resolution" is fuzzy. It reminds me of the original Quake logo. Considering that our atmosphere has strange phenomena causing glowing orbs that can be seen from space, I would see this "proof" as suspect.

Its called a terameter. What is the point of the metric system if you don't use the other scales?

We're talking about geeks here. Having an extra button to push is awesome no matter what it does!

Well I'm personally waiting for an EPIC win!