ats:
James Oberg summarises (and speculates about) the NASA documents released so far on the recent Soyuz ballistic entry.
The conclusion: something went wrong, but the craft had been designed to handle it, hence the unusual but safe landing.
It always amazes me that current space technology works at all, given its enormous complexity; this is a nice example of something simple helping to fix a complex problem.
ats:
"The judgement is one of the largest fines ever handed down for copyright theft."
RARRGGGH ATS SMASH
(And yes, I've sent feedback.)
ats:
"Tomorrow at 10:30am at the Oberlandesgericht Muenchen (higher regional court of Munich) there will be an oral hearing in the "Welte vs. Skype Technologies SA" case. [...]"
"Interestingly, Skype is arguing against the validity of the GPL as a whole, asserting that it is violating anti-trust regulation and similarly strange claims."
Just in case you needed another reason not to use or promote Skype...
David:
Oh for Pete's sake. Not the anti-trust argument again?
Linux doesn't have a monopoly in the embedded OS market, nor does it have anything that comes close to being one.
Since there is lots of competition, it can't be an anti-trust issue. Skype could have just used one of Linux's rivals instead.
This might have resulted in them having to pay licensing fees to do so, but they could have got a license other then the GPL by doing that.
I get really annoyed at this argument, it keeps coming up, and it is utterly insane.
Hint to Skype - it didn't work for SCO, it won't work for you.
David: And in other news, Queen Victoria is dead.
ats:
"Last month we made BBC iPlayer available on Apple?s iPhone and iPod Touch devices, the first of many mobile platforms that we hope to support."
That's nice. How about supporting a standard desktop platform before wasting yet more of my money on supporting proprietary, short-lived faddish platforms?
"The video quality is usually even better when iPlayer programmes are played back on a TV than on your computer screen."
No, it isn't. The video quality is much, much worse, particularly if you're using S-Video rather than RGB, which is why you can't see the compression artefacts.
"If you have an LCD or plasma TV, chances are that it will have a Video Graphics Array input"
I'm not sure expanding that acronym is really helping anyone. Besides which, if you have an analogue TV made in the last fifteen years, it almost certainly has an RGB SCART input.
David: Because you can't have too many incarnations of the same Time Lord running around a disaster zone.
ats: """I want to encourage people of faith to regard those without faith with deep esteem because the hidden God is active in their lives as well as in the lives of those who believe.""
So, in fact, when he says "respect", he means "snidely insult in the national media". Interesting.
Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor, I respect you too.