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Photos Stream Back From China's Lunar Lander
After the successful soft landing of its carrier vessel on the surface of the moon, China's Jade Rabbit lunar rover has begun beaming back photos of the lunar surface. From the BBC's article, with links to video as well as several photos, comes this description: "Chang'e-3 is the third unmanned rover mission to touch down on the lunar surface, and the first to go there in more than 40 years. The last was an 840kg (1,900lb) Soviet vehicle known as Lunokhod-2, which was kept warm by polonium-210. But the six-wheeled Chinese vehicle carries a more sophisticated payload, including ground-penetrating radar which will gather measurements of the lunar soil and crust. The 120kg (260lb) Jade Rabbit rover can reportedly climb slopes of up to 30 degrees and travel at 200m (660ft) per hour. ... The rover and lander are powered by solar panels but some sources suggest they also carry radioisotope heating units (RHUs), containing plutonium-238 to keep them warm during the cold lunar night. According to Chinese space scientists, the mission is designed to test new technologies, gather scientific data and build intellectual expertise. It will also scout valuable mineral resources that could one day be mined."
Guys, something is seriously wrong with my Slashdot. It's showing some "Beta" banner by the logo and now the site is basically unusable. It took me a good 10 minutes to even find where this comment box is located!
The text looks really fucking bad now. Almost all of the text is really small, the fonts render very poorly, and a lot of the text is gray on slightly darker gray. It is extraordinarily hard to read. Even the text in this comment box is very small, and its in italics and it's just so hard to read.
There's a lot of wasted space now, too. I've got a 28" monitor and probably 80% of the screen is empty gray areas. The rest is tiny, tiny text that's goddamn unreadable.
When I look at the main story list I can't tell where one story ends and another begins. Some of them have huge images, but others have huge blank gray areas. And I have to scroll so much now just to see all of the stories! I used to be able to read like 6 at a time on my screen. Now I can barely fit in even just two!
The comment threads are even worse. The whole lack of contrast means it's so hard now to figure out what is a comment and what isn't. For crying out loud, everything here is now gray-on-gray-on-gray-on-gray, with some teal on the buttons just to make them very distracting.
I thought that the last design was horrible compared to the one before it, but my god, this new "Beta" Slashdot is virtually unusable. I literally won't be able to continue using this. I can't even read the fucking story or comment text here any longer, and now it's nearly impossible to post comments. There's no reason for me to stay if I can't even just read the content here passively!