You can't tell us these things!

No, seriously, you can't. Term 7 of the KDP terms and conditions is:

Note that section (3) indicates that all sales data is confidential and therefore you are not allowed to disclose it. You don't even seem to be allowed to say anything about Amazon, including 'I spoke to Amazon today about the misprint in my latest book.' Luckily, as the T&Cs themselves are publically available without having signed the T&Cs --- naturally enough --- it's possible to discuss them (see (A)).

I was intending to sign up for this, but the above clause seems unusually draconian to me.

It appears that Amazon have recently changed their DRM so that each book is encrypted with its own key --- certainly, I've been unable to decrypt the last (and only) book I've bought. (Neal Stephenson's Anathem. If there's ever a case for ebooks, it's Neal Stephenson; because now I can lift one of his books in one hand.)

This is with a Kindle 3 using the latest firmware.

2000m below 'Lunar standard sea level', i.e. what people generally consider to be altitude 0, which is a sphere 1737.4 km in radius. Take a look at the settings if you're interested. (I think it's all up-to-date in hg.) 2000m was picked arbitrarily to give a decent balance of land and sea.

However, the moon is actually hideously lopsided, due to tidal effects caused by Earth; the near side is noticeably bigger than the far side. This makes the lunar gravitational field uneven. Therefore the surface at which water will actually settle to (which is known as a geoid) is not a sphere. Luckily, Lunar prospector mapped this shape too, so I can compensate for it. That's relatively small, a mere 100kB PNG file.

I have a slow-going project to render the moon using Povray. Except, because I'm awkward, I've terraformed it. There are some very slightly better (but still very poor) videos here and here.

I'm using a monster dataset from the Kaguya spaceprobe for the terrain data, which, at maximum resolution, ends up as a 270MB 16-bit greyscale PNG file. Even so, it's only about 4 pixels per degree and, as you can tell from the videos above, the terrain is way too smooth to be interesting. I've experimented with adding algorithmic complexity with some pretty good results, and need to render the videos, but it's cripplingly slow and is, of course, cheating. [*]

So a higher-resolution dataset is great news for me. Now I just need to figure out how to get a global DEM at the highest possible resolution, which is not easy (I can see DEMs at 64 pixels/degree, but the 256 pixels/degree data appears to be available only in tiles with odd projections).

[*] Also, procedural code in Povray is very slow. I have been looking into rewriting the whole thing in Renderman but my model is too pathologically weird for most Renderman implementations --- I'm viewing a very, very large sphere with huge displacement shaders from very, very close up, and the open source Rendermans I've tried so far just curl up and die. Any suggestions gratefully appreciated.

I reckon they're salt pans, partially filled with water. I can see distribution channels, a feed canal coming from the north, and the telltale fractal structure of evaporating salt.

Incidentally, all these sites have (or claim to have) Panoramio pictures nearby, although it's impossible to tell how accurate the positioning is.

...you followed that last link, expecting it to lead to an opera version of the adventures of the famous Stainless Steel Rat, James Bolivar diGriz...

Confusingly, the director's name is Harrison, too. Wayne Harrison.

I would like Google to actually search for the terms I asked for, and not what it thinks I should be asking for --- I fight that bloody autocorrect feature daily. Search for any programming term and chances are you'll get a tiny message saying 'Searching for FOO instead (unless you really meant BAR)', and then irrelevant search results.

If you go look at their forums, they're full of complaints about this. Including people saying that their company name can't be found at all, because it gets autocorrected to something else if people try to search for it!

I understand why this feature's there, but please, please, provide a way to turn it off...

One byte is about 0.000000000000045 Libraries of Congress, which means that Turbo Pascal is a whole 0.0000000014 LOCs.

Hope this helps. Have a nice day!

Yes, that is a neat trick --- the most obvious way I can think of of doing that is to do all the ssh processing on the client, and make the daemon a simply proxy; but a quick look at the source code shows you don't appear to be doing that. Or at least, I couldn't find it.

Unfortunately the platform I'd really like this to work on, my Kindle, doesn't support WebSockets (of any kind)...

I have, in fact, been vaguely thinking about trying to recompile a Java ssh client library under GWT and trying to make this work, but finding such a library that uses message-passing only and not threads is quite hard. Java likes threads.

You need a daemon to proxy between the WebSocket connection (which, remember, isn't a straight TCP stream) and the ssh server proper. Although it appears this doesn't need to be on the machine that the ssh server is running on, so it doesn't look like too much of a hardship. Also, I can't find any reference of which of the umpteen different WebSocket variants it supports.

There's actually a number of these things out already, such as ConsoleFish or ShellInABox. There's also an HTML5 VNC client, which looks very interesting.

Does it?

Don't forget, those Merlin engines are restartable (something NASA never went in for much). So the first two stages land on the engines they took off with. And now they're empty, so they're very light. The second stage needs an heat shield, but other than that the only extra mass you need are the landing gear, avionics and attitude control, and the fuel. And even some of the fuel comes for free too, as there's a hefty safety margin in both stages, which you can eat into when landing.

So yeah, you are going to need more mass to do this, which will eat into the payload, but not as much as you might think. If the cost advantages of being able to recycle the stages outweighs the decrease in payload, then it'll be worth it. (Which, of course, for the shuttle it wasn't.)

9. Built-in PDF reader --- no crappy plugins, it just works.

10. Does not have a panic attack when it sees a self-signed SSL certificate. This was what made me finally jump ship away from Firefox: I spend a lot of time browsing mailing list archives trying to dig up obscure information, and there's a common software package people use for this that prefers to use https via a self-signed certificate. Trying to read these via Firefox was horrible. Yes, I do want to be told when the certificate is invalid, but Firefox's behaviour is way over the top. Plus, it actively encourages the user to add the certificate to their trusted list (facepalm).

Surely you mean 3: the warm Earth-like world we're currently standing on (well, in my case, sitting), plus Mars, plus Venus. Both of which are pretty easy to get at using current technology. Some of the gas giant moons probably count too, but they're a special case as they're not in Sol's habitable zone.

Just because the planet's the right mass and about the right distance from its primary doesn't necessarily mean we'd find it habitable...

Been there, tried that --- this was on an old CATS ARM box. Turns out that there's a lot of ia32 code in ROM on the graphics card which, of course, ARMs and Alphas are totally unable to run.

The CATS box managed to at least initialise the card into text mode by running the graphics card ROM via the world's slowest ia32 emulator; the keyboard lights would flash for ten seconds on bootup and then you'd get the graphics card's POST message. I don't know what Alpha boxes do.

I have tried to make PCI graphics cards work on an embedded system that didn't have such an emulator, and discovered that xorg relies heavily on the BIOS having initialised the card to a sane state on startup. Without that initialisation you're pretty much out of luck (particularly since it's all undocumented). That said, if you're already using an ATI card on the Alpha then there must be some mechanism to make it work, so... good luck!

(Come back, Open Firmware. All is forgiven...)