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Space

Submission + - Mars may have been 1/3 ocean? (networkworld.com)

coondoggie writes: It’s possible that a huge ocean covered one-third of the surface of Mars some 3.5 billion years ago, a finding likely to reignite an old argument about that amount of water on the red planet, according to a new report. The study by the University of Colorado at Boulder is the first to integrate multiple data sets of river deltas, valley networks and topography from a cadre of NASA and European Space Agency orbiting missions of Mars dating back to 2001, the researchers claim.
Idle

Submission + - Monster Robot Chess Set Made from 100,000 LEGOS (inhabitat.com)

greenrainbow writes: A team of four LEGO enthusiasts just put the finishing touches on their Monster Chess set. It took them an entire year to build this life sized robotic set. Made from 100,000 LEGO blocks it spans 156 square feet and has pieces that move on their own. It can be played by two people, by two computers or by a person versus a computer. It is also programmed to reenact historical chess matches. The set is pretty impressive in action and you can watch a video of it at this link!

Comment Not really 120 Million Miles (Score 1) 125

It was falling most of the time. It's like me pushing a car over the edge of the Grand Canyon and claiming that the extra kilometer is wear on the vehicle. Considering the peak for low earth orbit is around 350 km, so actual travel done by the shuttle would be about 700 km per trip. At roughly one launch per year, that's still less than 20,000 km. I drive more than that in a year.

Comment Re:Two Satans (Score 5, Funny) 248

Can you convert that into a more familiar unit, like Library of Congresses?

You know the Library of Congresses is a pretty reliable machine. Does anybody know what its downtime is?

The downtime for the Library of Congress is 4:30 pm - 8:30 am, Monday - Friday, and all day Sunday. That translates into an uptime of about 28.6%. If you take the Secret Service 68% as uptime, then it would be 2.4 Library of Congresses.

Comment Re:This has its perks (Score 2, Insightful) 374

There are other galaxies closer than Andromeda. The Small Magellanic Cloud is a dwarf galaxy, located only 200,000 light years away. The Large Magellanic Cloud is 160,000 ly, and there are two others even closer (also dwarf galaxies), with the closest only 25,000 ly (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canis_Major_Dwarf_Galaxy) from Earth.
Image

Tower Switch-Off Embarrasses Electrosensitives 292

Sockatume writes "Residents in Craigavon, South Africa complained of '[h]eadaches, nausea, tinnitus, dry burning itchy skins, gastric imbalances and totally disrupted sleep patterns' after an iBurst communications tower was put up in a local park. Symptoms subsided when the residents left the area, often to stay with family and thus evade their suffering. At a public meeting with the afflicted locals, the tower's owners pledged to switch off the mast immediately to assess whether it was responsible for their ailments. One problem: the mast had already been switched off for six weeks. Lawyers representing the locals say their case against iBurst will continue on other grounds."
Image

Mexico Wants Payment For Aztec Images 325

innocent_white_lamb writes "Starbucks brought out a line of cups with prehistoric Aztec images on them. Now the government of Mexico wants them to pay for the use of the images. Does the copyright on an image last hundreds of years?"
Microsoft

Submission + - Cygwin 1.7 Released 1

jensend writes: The 1.7 branch of Cygwin, the Unix-like environment for Windows, has reached stable status after about 3 1/2 years of effort. Among many other changes, this release drops support for Windows 9x. Since the NT API and NT-based versions of Windows are more capable and somewhat less of a mismatch with POSIX (for instance, they include a security model), this has allowed for code path simplifications, better performance (particularly noticeable with pipe I/O), better security, and better POSIX compatibility.

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