Yostivanich

“The United States can­not afford to send humans any­where beyond the space sta­tion — espe­cially Mars — unless it wants to spend more money.”

“Astronomers have dis­cov­ered the first planet that orbits in the oppo­site direc­tion to the spin of its star. Plan­ets form out of the same swirling gas cloud that cre­ates a star, so they are expected to orbit in the same direc­tion that the star rotates. The new planet is thought to have been flung into its “ret­ro­grade” orbit by a close encounter with either another planet or with a pass­ing star.”

“Sudoku Grab is a col­lec­tion of some fairly basic image pro­cess­ing tech­niques that most engi­neer­ing stu­dents at Uni­ver­sity could prob­a­bly fig­ure out how to put together. All of the algo­rithms used are either com­monly avail­able and can be found on the inter­net or can be writ­ten pretty eas­ily. Obvi­ously tweak­ing them and get­ting them all run­ning together seam­lessly is the real trick…” Very cool programming.

“On Thurs­day, Sony Elec­tron­ics, which sells e-book devices under the Reader brand, plans to announce that by the end of the year it will sell dig­i­tal books only in the ePub for­mat, an open stan­dard cre­ated by a group includ­ing pub­lish­ers like Ran­dom House and Harper­Collins. Sony will also scrap its pro­pri­etary anti­copy­ing soft­ware in favor of tech­nol­ogy from the soft­ware maker Adobe that restricts how often e-books can be shared or copied. After the change, books bought from Sony’s online store will be read­able not just on its own device but on the grow­ing con­stel­la­tion of other read­ers that sup­port ePub. Those include the Plas­tic Logic eReader, a thin device that has been in devel­op­ment for nearly a decade and is expected to go on sale early next year.” Cool.

“Focus on the Fam­ily, founded by child psy­chol­o­gist James Dob­son, is on pace to fall $6 mil­lion short of a $138 mil­lion bud­get for the fis­cal year that began last Octo­ber, spokesman Gary Schnee­berger said. Schnee­berger said that one staff posi­tion will be elim­i­nated and that other finan­cial steps are under dis­cus­sion. Last fall, bud­get prob­lems prompted Focus on the Fam­ily to elim­i­nate more than 200 positions.”

First he’s for then he’s against.

“Most seemed to reflect the feel­ing that despite its short­com­ings, the British remain defi­antly pound of the health ser­vice in the face of transat­lantic criticism.”

“This week­end, while attend­ing the annual gath­er­ing of sci­ence fic­tion and fan­tasy fans in Mon­treal for World­con, I over­did it a bit.”

“Illi­nois Cir­cuit Judge Daniel Rozak sen­tenced Clifton Williams to 6 months in jail for yawn­ing in court.” Maybe there should be a limit on con­tempt charges.

“Joey Hess has taken a closer look at the code inside webOS that reports infor­ma­tion back to Palm and found some details on what the Pre is send­ing back to head­quar­ters.” Uploaded is Loca­tion, used apps and how long, app crash logs, installed apps.