Word: speeding
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There's no such thing as breaking news when it comes to us from space. It's not enough for an event to occur; word of it must then travel to Earth across the vast ocean of the cosmos. The dispatch may move at the speed of light, but the journey can still take hours, years, epochs--turning current events into history long before we ever learn of them. Signals from the Cassini spacecraft, currently studying Saturn's moons, take 84 min. to reach us; the supernova whose cataclysmic birth astronomers observed earlier this year was already fading millions...
...Phoenix had to cap its sleepy 10-month journey with a fiery 7-min. plunge through the atmosphere, during which it opened its parachutes, jettisoned its heat shield, fired its engines and decelerated from a blistering 12,700 m.p.h. (20,400 km/h) to a toe-in-the-dust touchdown speed of a few feet per second. With Mars and Earth currently 171 million miles (275 million km) apart, however, signals from the ship need a full 15 min. 20 sec. to get here, meaning NASA did not confirm the 7-min. plunge until 8 min. after it ended...
Indy films usually begin with a bang and end in scenes of gross-out mysticism, but the coolest thing here comes in the middle: a high-speed two-vehicle battle between Indy's team and Irina's goons that's up there with the Raiders Jeep sequence; it's certainly more complex and audacious in its engineering of physical action. In his press conference at Cannes, Spielberg said, "I believe in practical magic, not digital magic," and in "real stunts with real people." These stunts are real good...
...have a few quibbles. On two occasions, movies paused for a few seconds to buffer. That's a buzz kill. The Roku folks say that can happen when your broadband speed drops below 1 megabit per second. (My standard Comcast connection is usually above 2 megabits per second, but congestion happens.) On the Netflix front, it suffers from two limitations. Netflix doesn't yet offer high-definition movies on demand, while its competitors (Apple, Vudu) do. And 10,000 titles is still a relatively modest selection. Indeed, a head-to-head comparison with, say, Apple's online store shows iTunes...
...most widely praised aspects of the relief operation was the speed and scale with which the government responded. And to Chinese and foreigners alike, the man primarily responsible for that was the country's Premier, Wen Jiabao, 65. Within two hours of the earthquake, Wen was on a plane to the disaster area, and for the next four days, Chinese TV was flooded with images of the increasingly exhausted-looking leader as he rallied the relief forces, offered succor to survivors and even choked...