That is a shame, it's got to be a priority. Don't these people watch Hollywood blockbusters?!! Surely Don't Look Up was popular viewing among NASA and planetary defense staff.. lol.

Hopefully the budget won't get deleted by a future U.S. administration or Congress that decides to deprioritize science.

How do you know this -is it hunch, or does it come from awareness of the data?

As I understand it, many of the images coming from observatories today are run through an image processing pipeline that identifies objects and adds them to an inverted index: supply the x, y coordinates within an indexed image, and the framework returns the identity of any known object(s) at that pixel point.

With that, I would think that there's a good chance that a transiting object having been recorded would become tracked, even as an unknown. But I don't know either! I'm interested in learning more.

Has to be, right? Since when did Slashdot start covering the mundane non-crashy details about Microsoft product releases?

It's okay, we'll just borrow-and-spend, print more money. Business as usual!

The ONLY reason git gained popularity is Linus Torvalds. If an unknown engineer released a VCS with similarly confusing, incoherent command-line semantics? It would NEVER have taken off. git survived because Linus Torvalds. That's it.

But git is the lingua franca. It has a learning curve, but because of that there is a virtually unlimited selection of learning materials out there. There is NO EXCUSE for not having some expertise in git, as engineers. Why rebase? How to cherry-pick? Only stubborn engineers don't know these things, and it's odd because they're smart enough to grasp the concepts, do the katas and gain proficiency.

I work with a bunch of engineers that refuse to branch in git! They're terrified of it! Because, once they branched, worked out of that branch for three months, then had a disastrous merge to master (of course). So now master is the development branch! master is the release branch! THAT is terrifying. Although they do tag releases, but still.

With any luck, internet retailers will kill the Toys R Us model anyway - its about efficiency (for me

Yes, and you'll definitely be supporting the offshore model. You'll be purchasing toys from a distribution company that sources its products outside the USA.

With any luck, there may have been an American designer behind that toy's first incarnation, but then the manufacture was shipped overseas.

"Office employees worked naked for a month as social experiment"

http://www.deccanchronicle.com... ;-)

I read the linked article, nothing on power. RPi is a power-hungry little beast. Sure, A+ reduces it a bit, and you can turn off various onboard devces.

But it still sucks down a lot of power. I wonder what ISS's power budget is.

I have never, ever seen this happen. I run mounted read-write, read-only, multiple partitions.

I run RPis off batteries, UPSes and dirty apartment building power with cheap Chinese power adapters. I've seen every combination of power loss during reads, writes, to primary or temporary fs.

Never ever seen corruption. I smell PEBKAC, as in your choice of sd card.

I get your comparison of Uber to gypsy cabs, but they were not really a problem for most people -- so much as for medallion owners.

For a really long time (the 70s thru the 90s), they were about the only way to get a ride to Harlem, South Bronx and other locales cabbies were afraid of. Car services the exception.

The most frequent kind of gypsy cab I notice are towncar and limo drivers cruising for illegal street pickups during nightclub hours in Manhattan.

I only use Flywheel, the equivalent app for taxis. I can get a cab at 3:00 AM in the middle of nowhere in minutes. Much preferred, plus I support the idea of a livable wage for people that drive 12 hours a day, instead of Uber's race to the bottommost wage.

I have friends that drive for Uber and Lyft - occasionally I'll hire them, for airport runs typically. Taxis for everything else, even though they're more expensive.

Milk manufacturers- it's a label change, that's all, like all other packaged goods. Plus, it'll provide fresh material for whiners- "I remember when it was just one gallon, not this 3.785 crapola!"

Kph vs mph: the higher numerical value of kph sounds so much more exciting than miles: "Hello hon, I got arrested for going 200 on the freeway - can you come bail me out?" >click<

Tooling: there are a handful or more national tooling measures (e.g. Whitworth, UTS, shakkan-ho) that produce fasteners unobtainable in metric ISO fastener measures. At the very least, their production would continue to provide replacements for existing equipment. Conversion to metric equivalents would produce metric-seeming fastener measures all their own, easily confused for the standard ISO sets. I don't know what it would take to completely move off the old standards.

I learned metric as a schoolkid. It was fuckin' awesome! Completely made sense. Not confusing like English measures.

They even promised us the U.S. would be all-metric by the time I was in college.

That was thirty years ago.

I'm a traditionalist.

one side ready for peaceful coexistence

Yes, it is universally considered *very* peaceful to *steal land* and *build settlements* on the land of the people you're negotiating with.

I suppose that running a years-long economic blockade could be considered "peaceful coexistence" if ghettoizing your declared enemy is part of your world view. (Oh, we know, we know... it's all to prevent rocket-making materiel from entering Gaza. It's just so, so convenient that choking the flow *all* materials but the most basic stops missile-building (which it doesn't).

People believe whatever they want to believe and call it "truth."

Netscape Navigator was effectively free. I never paid for it, and consumer endusers rarely paid for Netscape. There was never a requirement, you could just download and install. I don't know anybody non-corporate users who actually opened their wallet for it.

Netscape *was* sold in computer and software shops, online and by mailorder, for a brief time.

Corporations bought Netscape Enterprise Server (for which I wrote code), and paid for desktop licenses - sometimes. I guess you could say the free browser was a loss leader, to stimulate enterprise sales.

Trivia: Netscape Enterprise Server ran a server-side Javascript implementation that was pretty good. Database access, shared objects... it was kind of like early server Java.

NYT Digital (the website) was a separate but wholly-owned company from 1996 until around 2007, merging with the newspaper as the new building opened. Pageviews in the mid 2000s were half a billion per month, with approximately half that going to the homepage alone.

IIRC, annual revenues for website advertising were $150 million in the late 2000s, damned good for a newspaper site. This was before NYT jumped onto the mobile and paid-digital-subscription bandwagons, which accounts for the $37 million revs. Adverts are still king, even on the website, and that combined with the homepage being half the pageviews is why you see the most expensive placements there.

While the rest of the newspaper biz has been slow to adopt, NYTD were actively educating the old-school news staff about FB, Twitter, RSS and other common or up-and-coming technologies. They have programmers assigned to the news floor, collaborating with reporters, to build topical databases, perform big data analyses, produce dynamic reporting and graphics and so forth. NYT are doing about as well as can be expected -they're a news organization, yes, but they've converted themselves into a technology firm from the inside-out.

NYT offers developers REST APIs for fetching newsfeeds and the aforementioned databases. Semantic Web is an area of research, and they're on a level with Thomson-Reuters, and to a limited extent Bloomberg. NYT's R&D department (originally attached to the newspaper, not NYTD) produces tools for latent semantic analysis of news, comments, etc.

When Twitter hit its initial growth spurt there were many predictions it would eat the newspaper business. It hasn't, in fact the news business relies on Twitter for distributing headlines and links. 140 characters and photo links hasn't eliminated the need for in-depth writing, analysis and professional photography.

Sure, the transition to an all-digital revenue model is their Achilles Heel. Most of the rev comes from the newspaper, and the demographic average is male, 40s and makes > $70K per year. Getting the younger generations to pay for news is the challenge.

I'm a former NYTDer. I still admire what they've done to adapt. I don't know how they'll survive the next decade, honestly. It'll take a revolution in paid subscriptions to get the younger crowd as part of the paid demographic. HuffPo was being eyed as the primary competition, for awhile, as an advert-only web operation.