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Mars

Submission + - Meet the Very First Rover to Land on Mars (ieee.org)

toygeek writes: Before Curiosity, before Opportunity, before Spirit, and before Sojourner, the very first robot to land on Mars was this little guy, way back in December of 1971. Called PrOP-M, the rover was part of the Soviet Union's Mars-3 mission, which had the potential to deploy the first ever mobile scientific instruments onto the Martian surface. Article also contains Russian video on early rovers.

Comment Re:So? (Score 1) 75

I ordered a Pi from Newark/element14 (a Farnell company) about 1.5 months ago and it finally got delivered yesterday. I would check them out if you are still looking for one. I am located in US, so I'm not sure if that will make a difference or not but I believe they ship internationally as well.

Comment my method (Score 1) 332

If I buy a PC game that has prohibitive DRM (i.e. from Ubisoft), I will always download the pirated version of the game to make sure I dont have any ridiculous issues like we see here. I dont care about the legality of it as I purchased the game, own a license, and therefore I will play it whenever I want, will upgrade my PC as much as I please, etc.

Comment Re:Carrier Subsidy (Score 0) 291

Obviously. That's where the marketing and advertising teams demonstrate their worth. They make people believe that's what the phone is worth and that they are getting an incredible deal by locking in with a two year contract when in fact all they are doing is subsidizing the cost of phone and spreading the cost back to the consumer over the term of the deal.

The price will always be what the consumer is willing to pay and the fact that people are willing to pay $600 for a cell phone, either upfront or over the course of their contract, means the market price will never be much lower.

Comment Re:Wow (Score 1) 291

The biggest problem with the majority of the population is their infatuation with credit and paying for good later. A good amount of people live well above their means and buy luxury items they have no business owning. By spreading the payments over a long (2 year) term, people believe as if they can afford more than they could if they were pay the $400 upfront. We see this every day and the large corporations know exactly how to exploit this mentality and take advantage of the ignorance some people. We saw an extreme measure of this mentality bring this country basically down to its knees with the sub-prime lending disaster.

Comment Re:$500 billion? Reality check! (Score 0) 260

How would you expect their story to be captivating and awe-inspiring if they used realistic numbers? Seems a bit impracticable if you ask me. For instance, if they used the following:

"a declassified estimate of the value of the blueprints, chemical formulas and other material stolen from U.S. corporate computers in the last year reached $11,654.17"

...no one would be living in fear nor would they be rushing out to buy the newest and latest protection from the Chinese hackers. How do you expect people to make a living? Talk about insensitive.

Comment Re:As much by region as by ISP (Score 0) 228

Wow, I guess I need to switch to Boost. I live about 15 miles west of NYC and with the regular Optimum service I have never seen anything higher than 1.3 down, it's terrible. Like you said, the up with Optimum has never really been an issue but the download speeds are atrocious. I actually get full 4G\WiMax coverage in my house from Sprint, so I've been tethering with that and seeing much better speeds.

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