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This is all funny, so funny it makes me laugh. Since if you open up a business account in a different state than you are incorporated in, apparently nothing is required at all! About 1 1/2 years ago I received a bill for several hundred dollars for 3 handsets bought in my company's name in Indiana, and the person who opened up the account claimed his name was Chris [insert the name of my company here]. Funny, I didn't name the company after myself... I think they had an inside man at that Sprint store though too. Needless to say, they did drop the account and rescinded the bill for it as it was obviously fraudulent. I already had a personal Sprint account for a few years...

I still hate how all these companies still use such easy-to-obtain information as a method to verify a person's identity... Mother's maiden name? Probably not as hard as they think it is to find out. And last four digits of your social? Well it certainly wasn't hard if you were a student of College of DuPage when they initially rolled out student e-mail accounts in August of 2005. Somebody ever-so-wisely thought it was a great idea to use this convention for the e-mail addresses: familyname.firstname.XXXX@dupage.net, where XXXX was... lo and behold... the last 4 digits of your SSN... As soon as I received word of this (I was a student at the time), I contacted the business and computing department, who stepped in, pitched up a fit on my behalf (and on the behalf of all that is sane in the world), and fixed the situation with the department responsible for this.

I hate to Slashdot them, but there are some really good collections of radar and other products here and here

The WSR-88D is actually able to discern 15 different elevation angles in it's scanning strategies. However, these change depending on whether or not the radar is in Clear Air or Precipitation mode, where Clear Air mode is more sensitive that Precipitation mode. This site contains a bunch of information about the WSR-88D radar. WSR-88D Radar Information (weather.cod.edu) Unlike the radar displays from tv stations that you see, the NWS radars do not allow even the meteorologists to see a "live update" instead the returns are every 5-10 min depending on the operating mode of the radar at the time. As well, the various products are all calculated from the base data (reflectivity, velocity, spectral width, etc.) on each scan.

force 4 wind speed.
http://weather.cod.edu/notes/stnmodel.html

The service that you ask for already exists -- and it's free, put out by a public University. Here's a high res image that interlaces the radars for all of NoCal.

NoCal

SoCal is available, as well.

SoCal Can't say I've ever seen anything even remotely as useful from Slackuweather.

The service that you ask for already exists -- and it's free, put out by a public University. Here's a high res image that interlaces the radars for all of NoCal.

NoCal

SoCal is available, as well.

SoCal Can't say I've ever seen anything even remotely as useful from Slackuweather.

The nineteeth century debate between two camps of biologists, "Vitalists" and "Mechanists," is very similar to the debate between those who think machines can eventually have intelligence and those who think only biological systems can possess intelligence.
Vitalists believed that living beings had something more than their physical and chemical composition which differentiated them from non-living matter. This difference was a "vital spark" or elan vital which made them innately different from ordinary or "dead matter." Their opponents, the "Mechanists" believed that living things were essentially no different than non-living things, at least in terms of what they were composed of. That there was no "vital spark" which separated living and non-living things but rather only a difference in their physical and chemical compositions.

Obviously the "mechanists" won since no modern biologist believes in the elan vital.

In a very, very similar fashion, Minsky and his supporters seem to be making the same type of argument. They seem to want humans to still have a "soul," called intelligence, something that "dumb" matter can never have. Whether they argue for a mysterious quality that only biology systems seem to possess or for mystical "quantum processes" that seem to only take place in brains and not in machines I still call this vitalism and I don't think its scientific at all. It's more like an intellectual retreat to defend some deep seated emotions about humanity's place in the Universe.