When the U.S. Air Force upgraded the electronics in its B-52 fleet several years ago, they removed a ton, literally, of old cabling in each aircraft. These were left over from previous upgrades and most were not even connected at either end. The civilian workforce at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma probably still includes some old-timers who remember how that was done. Having them advise the CERN workforce will definitely be cheaper than hiring Boeing, etc., to do this job.
Shuttles launch from NASA Kennedy Space Center Launch Complexes 39A and 39B, and not from Cape Canaveral, a geographical feature separated from KSC on Merritt Island (mostly) by the Banana River lagoon. The launch complxes on Cape Canaveral and the "Skid Strip" there are part of the Cape Canaveral Air Forse Station. Let's get it right. NASA can use the credit for what it has and does at KSC. - I used to work at KSC and still live nearby on Merritt Island.
Palladium is indeed toxic. The fuel balls will be small enough and therefore light enough to blow around freely at the gas station and after any accident or upset to a fuel tank or can containing this stuff. It accumulates in the body over time, too, just as Lead does. It affects DNA, causes allergic reactions like contact dermatitis, and is generally bad stuff to ingest or handle. There's plenty of information on this for anyone who wants to search "Palladium toxicity" on the 'web. Good catch!
"Er liegt hier - irgendwo" - Inscription on Dr. Werner Heisenberg's headstone
My pa-in-law used to get 100 $2 bills from the bank and have them made up into four or five pads like check pads. Then he could rip one off to give to a waitress as a tip. Nice joke. I can also remember _many_ years ago, when the local merchants and toughs around Anchorage, AK let things get a bit too rough, the nearby Air Force Base would pay out in cash in $2 bills. When they began to show up in numbers in people's cah registers, that reminded the locals where their income was coming from and they knew that the Base Commander could put the whole town "Off Limits" if he had to. (The Montana Club on Fourth Avenue has been "Off Limits" since 1940. Oh, well.)
It's an older idea than you may think, The Luftwaffe used alcohol-soluble camouflage materials during WW II. They were applied on top of the factory paint jobs on their aircraft for tactical and seasonal use and then washed off when something else was needed.
Give it a rest, Davies! The British invented the present system of passports, visas, and all that back when Brittania Rule(d) the Waves. You are reaping what you sowed.
Shame isn't the half of it. HST was designed to be lofted to orbit, lifted when its orbit has decayed, and brought home when its mission is over by the Shuttle. It was designed to be serviced, upgraded, and maintained by astronauts. It was assumed that the Shuttle would bring the astronaut/wrench-benders to the job site with their tools and parts.
OK, I'll buy the idea that robots could bring the HST to a safe re-entry and destruction. I won't buy the idea that what we have available today and what we can get completed, checked out, and space-rated by December 2007 can do the gyro, battery, and two telescope change-outs. Sorry, geeks, it isn't going to happen any more than nine women are going to make one baby in one month. OTOH, if a robot could crash HST by slowing it down along its present track, couldn't one push it the other way and raise its orbit? Where does this leave us?
How to get astronauts to Low Earth Orbit (LOE) at about a 23 degree inclination...can't do it with a Soyuz-TMA on a Soyuz-U or -M launch vehicle ("Carrier rocket" if you're Russian) out of Baikonur because the lattitude of the launch site makes their Equator-crossing-angle too steep (in case you wondered why the International Space Station has such a high inclination, now you know.) Will they be able to launch a manned mission out of Kourou by December 2007? Unlikely. Could the do it out of Canaveral by then? Probably. There's infrastructure here that doesn't exist in French Guyana and there's even an operating spaceport here with launch pads to spare. Facilities would have to be built, but have you noticed what they are? Butler buildings and steel trestles, railroad lines, and lots of space. Not much of a problem at the Canaveral Spaceport. NASA already owns all of the stuff they were going to put into the HST and has the training facilities already built for the mission.
Hm. U.S. astronauts aboard a Soyuz-TMA. Radical idea or common practice today? You know the answer to that.
OK, let's say we do it. We get away from the present program, which looks to me like a cross between the Credit Mobiliere and the Revenge of the Nerds, and get a commercial contract - just like you buy IT hardware, software, and services - and let U.S. and Russian companies do this job with minimal NASA and other Government involvement: no success, no pay. Now, does that sound like what Congress is telling NASA to start doing anyway? OK, why not start here?
What do the Russians say about this? It amounts to: "Sure, let's do it. Cash up front."
It gets worse. Lauren described CBS' "60 Minutes" staff as 'News people.' This is literally true, but "60 Minutes" itself is no more a news program than is Jon Stewart's show or "Crossballs."
I don't want to se another penny of public money poured into "Developing" this "Already-proven technology." A quick look at the history of railroad-building shows that non-public railroads were and are built to haul freight and that passengers are a secondary consideration, if they are considered at all. In Europe, where railroads quickly became a state monopoly, passenger service was promoted because it gave the legislators something they could brag about and whose cost their constituents would presumably support. Or, they were built for military purposes like the Prussian State Railways in the 1850s-1860s.
Maglev has no discernible future as a commercial proposition if conventional rail can go as fast. No one seems to know how to interline freight on to or off of maglev from conventional rail. Changing from another mode and then back again eats up the profit earned from speed (if any, this is freight we are talking about, after all.) Further, if a railroad train loses power, the train stops, almost always upright on its rails. If a maglev train loses power, the train will not "Coast" to a stop! The heirs and assigns of the purple jelly that used to be its passengers will sue that line out of business and no insuror will want to take the risk of insuring maglev. It seems they have come to this conclusion already. Private maglev companies won't exist or if they do they won't survive the first failure of a train or a track segment.
Bottom line: everyone likes tech and wants a chance to play with the toys. Many want to see this technology pursued, but no one seems to want to invest substantial private money in it. Suggest the maglev enthusiasts turn their energies to finding out what free-market forces are at work and why, and address the issues that that investigation turns up. I suggest that that is the best way to save maglev. It may be the only way.
I believe you have this bass-ackward. I think we work harder until we reach the point at which one or more symptoms of what we call stress tells us to back off, slow down. Technology just moves that point upwards in terms of how much we can get done before we reach that point. Technology is linked to productivity, but I don't see how it connects to stress...excpet when describing the effort it takes to make the technology do useful work. Then technology has become the work we have to do. So your thesis may have limited usefulness....
Iceland takes your drivers license for life if they find you with.008 ml alcohol per liter blood. There are no exceptions and the police are very aggressive about enforcement. They can get a blood test if they want itand you don't have an option. I saw them take blood through a guy's lip on one occasion. OTOH, auto insurance is relatively cheap and they have few accidents involving alcohol. It was necessary to make a cultural change as well, and this has been done. One sees four guys sititng at a table in Cluberrin or one of the other clubs and three are pouring the booze down their necks as fast as they can, while the fourth is drinking coffee. I never heard any of that macho b.s. about being able to old one's liquor, either. For us to do away with DUI here, we need to make both the legal and the cultural changes.
OK for Helium. Now, can we do this with Hydrogen and if we can, how do we make practical use of it for fuel cells and other power generation applications? Presumably as a stored energy source that is warehoused, shipped and sold in this form and converted by the user in their car or home or factory?
I read the article and it is clear only that the writer and his editor are ignorant of the technology. Jamming any radio signal is still a power game first and a matter of hacking the signal second. The first technical issue is being able to generate enough power at the correct frequencies and then of directing it at the receivers. The present generation of GPS is ridiculously easy to jam because of the low power of the transmitters on the satellites, a fact that Galileo's European designers are well aware of. The anti-jam features that can be added to the transmitters and receivers have been described in open literature for years. Just toying with the frequency range of the system accomplishes nothing that the newspaper article claims. I agree that the article is flamebait. The real question for European governments to answer is why they will waste millions of the taxpayers' Euros to build a competitor to two free systems, GPS and Uragan, that already serve Europe and whose owners have pledged to upgrade and maintain? Who owns the companies that will benefit from this piece of indoor welfare? What scientist or engineer wants to brag: "We're Number Four!" (after GPS, Uragan, and Beidou)?
Interesting points you raised. Navy's been working on some things that will be quite useful for several years now; one is a condition sensor based on accelerometers. The devices reside on a chip and use a neural network to determine when a piece of machinery needs serious attention. A different device senses oil quality and calls for an oil change when chips or burnt oil are detected. These are being designed for installation in Ship Service Diesel Generators, so you know they are being designed for very rough vibration environments. How about fire trucks and locomotives, highway trucks, cars, etc., next? One key point about them is that they only report when something is wrong - or about to go wrong - so the power requirements are very small compared to SCADA or similar systems' sensors that report status frequently.
So far, the engineering and economics have been gone over reasonably well, but there remains a major issue to address. Bringing energy to the planet's surface for people to use will create additional heat inside Earth's atmosphere. The electrical machines we use are not 100% efficient at turning electricity into motion or products and the difference is usually waste heat. For that matter, driving a car with electricity isn't too bad in this respect until you put on the brakes. Then all the energy of the car's motion becomes heat that has to go somewhere. I believe we need to consider how to make processes and machines more efficient; i.e., waste less energy as heat, as much as we need to find additional cheap energy. We can do both.
Most countries we trade with and outsource to have comparable laws concerning _contracts_ but not privacy. A contract can transfer responsibility for compliance with law. If the fool who did that outsourcing contract didn't demand compliance with our laws affecting privacy for personal and medical information, then the error lies with him or her. The problem isn't new and contractors who don't work with their subs on this get what they deserve.
This ought to be a snap. 120 countries have already agreed to an eight-digit system for identifying everything. It's called the Harmonized Tariff Schedule. The U.S. adds two more digits. The U.S. edition stretches 2100 pages. Take a peek at it at www.usitc.gov/taffairs.htm.
There's actually a good place to see this for yourself. Many companies have GSA IT Schedules, or Federal Supply Service Schedule 70 as such basic ordering agreements are called. Look for them on www.gsa.gov and on various company websites as "Contract Vehicles." These often have position descriptions that will help you figure out what degrees may be wanted, what experience can substitute for them, and what each position generally entails. When you look at the price per mahour for these, don't be too shocked. Figure out a 2000-hour year's total and divide it by half for companies you've never heard of and by 2.25 for those you know to be hot. That will give you a SWAG at the upper end of the annual salary range for the position description (you've stripped out burden rate, general and administrative costs and fee or profit.) I hire engineers, programmers, and designers. I agree with the contributors who've said that a PhD in this field kinda points one at research and sales rather than at "Real" work, but here's where your practical experience and the papers you wrote while a student could help you. Bonne chance!
Had one of these here in Florida. We used a law firm to write what they call a "Firm letter" (from law firm, we were told) which could have been named a "Rottweiler letter" from its tone. By prior agreement we were charged one hour's service for this, or $150. It worked and I am told that it does 50% of the time. So, you would risk $150 against a probable return of $700, all things considered. Most of the other advice you've gotten seems like it would work, but this is a cheaper first step and does show the judge later on, if you have to go to court, that you have been businesslike in your actions to get your money. Good luck!
This is phytoremediation and it has been underway on a commercial scale for the past six years in the Ukraine downwind of Chernobyl. No special varieties of plants have been bred to pick up tranuranics, Cesium, etc., as ordinary sunflowers do a good job. In water, some cresses are used in a hydroponics arrangement. The point many have made concerning what to do to keep the peasants from eating the seeds, pressing them for oil, or feeding them to cattle are well taken! The actual method for removing the metals from the biomass is simple and can be seen at any big sugarcane mill in the South, where cane residue called bagasse is burned to help run the plant. The precipitators used in the smokestacks are extremely efficient and the flyash they collect is carefully disposed of.
Sorry, but Brazil is far from being Third World when CS is concerned. Might as well say India is Third World in this context. NopeNopeNope. Our Filipina/o colleague should work on real stuff for a real developer because the work experience you can get while doing this is so useful. Coming to the U.S. to intern can be tricky because of the labor and export laws. There's a lot of lead time required to get an H-1B (foreign expert) visa and most times, an F-1 (student) visa does not entitle one to work for hire. There are some no-wage internships at NASA and a few other government agencies, but these are scarce and hard to find. I'd recommend the following: seek a contract situation with a U.S. developer who works on consumer applications; i.e., strictly non-military, non-space, stuff to develop a specific product for them. Work remotely and keep up with your colleagues by e-mail. Arrange to come meet your colleagues, and then do the work from home. My experience with this tells me that the face-to-face meeting is important to making a telecommuting relationship work. Good luck and press on.
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When the U.S. Air Force upgraded the electronics in its B-52 fleet several years ago, they removed a ton, literally, of old cabling in each aircraft. These were left over from previous upgrades and most were not even connected at either end. The civilian workforce at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma probably still includes some old-timers who remember how that was done. Having them advise the CERN workforce will definitely be cheaper than hiring Boeing, etc., to do this job.
Shuttles launch from NASA Kennedy Space Center Launch Complexes 39A and 39B, and not from Cape Canaveral, a geographical feature separated from KSC on Merritt Island (mostly) by the Banana River lagoon. The launch complxes on Cape Canaveral and the "Skid Strip" there are part of the Cape Canaveral Air Forse Station. Let's get it right. NASA can use the credit for what it has and does at KSC. - I used to work at KSC and still live nearby on Merritt Island.
Palladium is indeed toxic. The fuel balls will be small enough and therefore light enough to blow around freely at the gas station and after any accident or upset to a fuel tank or can containing this stuff. It accumulates in the body over time, too, just as Lead does. It affects DNA, causes allergic reactions like contact dermatitis, and is generally bad stuff to ingest or handle. There's plenty of information on this for anyone who wants to search "Palladium toxicity" on the 'web. Good catch!
"Er liegt hier - irgendwo" - Inscription on Dr. Werner Heisenberg's headstone
My pa-in-law used to get 100 $2 bills from the bank and have them made up into four or five pads like check pads. Then he could rip one off to give to a waitress as a tip. Nice joke. I can also remember _many_ years ago, when the local merchants and toughs around Anchorage, AK let things get a bit too rough, the nearby Air Force Base would pay out in cash in $2 bills. When they began to show up in numbers in people's cah registers, that reminded the locals where their income was coming from and they knew that the Base Commander could put the whole town "Off Limits" if he had to. (The Montana Club on Fourth Avenue has been "Off Limits" since 1940. Oh, well.)
"Not cut and dried...." Read "Black Boomerang," Sefton Delmer, 1962, about "Black" communications operations. Entertaining and informative.
It's an older idea than you may think, The Luftwaffe used alcohol-soluble camouflage materials during WW II. They were applied on top of the factory paint jobs on their aircraft for tactical and seasonal use and then washed off when something else was needed.
Give it a rest, Davies! The British invented the present system of passports, visas, and all that back when Brittania Rule(d) the Waves. You are reaping what you sowed.
Shame isn't the half of it. HST was designed to be lofted to orbit, lifted when its orbit has decayed, and brought home when its mission is over by the Shuttle. It was designed to be serviced, upgraded, and maintained by astronauts. It was assumed that the Shuttle would bring the astronaut/wrench-benders to the job site with their tools and parts.
OK, I'll buy the idea that robots could bring the HST to a safe re-entry and destruction. I won't buy the idea that what we have available today and what we can get completed, checked out, and space-rated by December 2007 can do the gyro, battery, and two telescope change-outs. Sorry, geeks, it isn't going to happen any more than nine women are going to make one baby in one month. OTOH, if a robot could crash HST by slowing it down along its present track, couldn't one push it the other way and raise its orbit? Where does this leave us?
How to get astronauts to Low Earth Orbit (LOE) at about a 23 degree inclination...can't do it with a Soyuz-TMA on a Soyuz-U or -M launch vehicle ("Carrier rocket" if you're Russian) out of Baikonur because the lattitude of the launch site makes their Equator-crossing-angle too steep (in case you wondered why the International Space Station has such a high inclination, now you know.) Will they be able to launch a manned mission out of Kourou by December 2007? Unlikely. Could the do it out of Canaveral by then? Probably. There's infrastructure here that doesn't exist in French Guyana and there's even an operating spaceport here with launch pads to spare. Facilities would have to be built, but have you noticed what they are? Butler buildings and steel trestles, railroad lines, and lots of space. Not much of a problem at the Canaveral Spaceport. NASA already owns all of the stuff they were going to put into the HST and has the training facilities already built for the mission.
Hm. U.S. astronauts aboard a Soyuz-TMA. Radical idea or common practice today? You know the answer to that.
OK, let's say we do it. We get away from the present program, which looks to me like a cross between the Credit Mobiliere and the Revenge of the Nerds, and get a commercial contract - just like you buy IT hardware, software, and services - and let U.S. and Russian companies do this job with minimal NASA and other Government involvement: no success, no pay. Now, does that sound like what Congress is telling NASA to start doing anyway? OK, why not start here?
What do the Russians say about this? It amounts to: "Sure, let's do it. Cash up front."
It gets worse. Lauren described CBS' "60 Minutes" staff as 'News people.' This is literally true, but "60 Minutes" itself is no more a news program than is Jon Stewart's show or "Crossballs."
You have just described the USAAF WW II Yehudi Project and some of Jasper Mascaline's work in the Western Desert in that same war. Good analysis!
I don't want to se another penny of public money poured into "Developing" this "Already-proven technology." A quick look at the history of railroad-building shows that non-public railroads were and are built to haul freight and that passengers are a secondary consideration, if they are considered at all. In Europe, where railroads quickly became a state monopoly, passenger service was promoted because it gave the legislators something they could brag about and whose cost their constituents would presumably support. Or, they were built for military purposes like the Prussian State Railways in the 1850s-1860s.
Maglev has no discernible future as a commercial proposition if conventional rail can go as fast. No one seems to know how to interline freight on to or off of maglev from conventional rail. Changing from another mode and then back again eats up the profit earned from speed (if any, this is freight we are talking about, after all.) Further, if a railroad train loses power, the train stops, almost always upright on its rails. If a maglev train loses power, the train will not "Coast" to a stop! The heirs and assigns of the purple jelly that used to be its passengers will sue that line out of business and no insuror will want to take the risk of insuring maglev. It seems they have come to this conclusion already. Private maglev companies won't exist or if they do they won't survive the first failure of a train or a track segment.
Bottom line: everyone likes tech and wants a chance to play with the toys. Many want to see this technology pursued, but no one seems to want to invest substantial private money in it. Suggest the maglev enthusiasts turn their energies to finding out what free-market forces are at work and why, and address the issues that that investigation turns up. I suggest that that is the best way to save maglev. It may be the only way.
More to the point, I wonder what Saddam Hussein did with the ones he bought...and where they are now.
I believe you have this bass-ackward. I think we work harder until we reach the point at which one or more symptoms of what we call stress tells us to back off, slow down. Technology just moves that point upwards in terms of how much we can get done before we reach that point. Technology is linked to productivity, but I don't see how it connects to stress...excpet when describing the effort it takes to make the technology do useful work. Then technology has become the work we have to do. So your thesis may have limited usefulness....
Iceland takes your drivers license for life if they find you with .008 ml alcohol per liter blood. There are no exceptions and the police are very aggressive about enforcement. They can get a blood test if they want itand you don't have an option. I saw them take blood through a guy's lip on one occasion. OTOH, auto insurance is relatively cheap and they have few accidents involving alcohol. It was necessary to make a cultural change as well, and this has been done. One sees four guys sititng at a table in Cluberrin or one of the other clubs and three are pouring the booze down their necks as fast as they can, while the fourth is drinking coffee. I never heard any of that macho b.s. about being able to old one's liquor, either. For us to do away with DUI here, we need to make both the legal and the cultural changes.
OK for Helium. Now, can we do this with Hydrogen and if we can, how do we make practical use of it for fuel cells and other power generation applications? Presumably as a stored energy source that is warehoused, shipped and sold in this form and converted by the user in their car or home or factory?
I read the article and it is clear only that the writer and his editor are ignorant of the technology. Jamming any radio signal is still a power game first and a matter of hacking the signal second. The first technical issue is being able to generate enough power at the correct frequencies and then of directing it at the receivers. The present generation of GPS is ridiculously easy to jam because of the low power of the transmitters on the satellites, a fact that Galileo's European designers are well aware of. The anti-jam features that can be added to the transmitters and receivers have been described in open literature for years. Just toying with the frequency range of the system accomplishes nothing that the newspaper article claims. I agree that the article is flamebait. The real question for European governments to answer is why they will waste millions of the taxpayers' Euros to build a competitor to two free systems, GPS and Uragan, that already serve Europe and whose owners have pledged to upgrade and maintain? Who owns the companies that will benefit from this piece of indoor welfare? What scientist or engineer wants to brag: "We're Number Four!" (after GPS, Uragan, and Beidou)?
Interesting points you raised. Navy's been working on some things that will be quite useful for several years now; one is a condition sensor based on accelerometers. The devices reside on a chip and use a neural network to determine when a piece of machinery needs serious attention. A different device senses oil quality and calls for an oil change when chips or burnt oil are detected. These are being designed for installation in Ship Service Diesel Generators, so you know they are being designed for very rough vibration environments. How about fire trucks and locomotives, highway trucks, cars, etc., next? One key point about them is that they only report when something is wrong - or about to go wrong - so the power requirements are very small compared to SCADA or similar systems' sensors that report status frequently.
So far, the engineering and economics have been gone over reasonably well, but there remains a major issue to address. Bringing energy to the planet's surface for people to use will create additional heat inside Earth's atmosphere. The electrical machines we use are not 100% efficient at turning electricity into motion or products and the difference is usually waste heat. For that matter, driving a car with electricity isn't too bad in this respect until you put on the brakes. Then all the energy of the car's motion becomes heat that has to go somewhere. I believe we need to consider how to make processes and machines more efficient; i.e., waste less energy as heat, as much as we need to find additional cheap energy. We can do both.
Most countries we trade with and outsource to have comparable laws concerning _contracts_ but not privacy. A contract can transfer responsibility for compliance with law. If the fool who did that outsourcing contract didn't demand compliance with our laws affecting privacy for personal and medical information, then the error lies with him or her. The problem isn't new and contractors who don't work with their subs on this get what they deserve.
This ought to be a snap. 120 countries have already agreed to an eight-digit system for identifying everything. It's called the Harmonized Tariff Schedule. The U.S. adds two more digits. The U.S. edition stretches 2100 pages. Take a peek at it at www.usitc.gov/taffairs.htm.
There's actually a good place to see this for yourself. Many companies have GSA IT Schedules, or Federal Supply Service Schedule 70 as such basic ordering agreements are called. Look for them on www.gsa.gov and on various company websites as "Contract Vehicles." These often have position descriptions that will help you figure out what degrees may be wanted, what experience can substitute for them, and what each position generally entails. When you look at the price per mahour for these, don't be too shocked. Figure out a 2000-hour year's total and divide it by half for companies you've never heard of and by 2.25 for those you know to be hot. That will give you a SWAG at the upper end of the annual salary range for the position description (you've stripped out burden rate, general and administrative costs and fee or profit.) I hire engineers, programmers, and designers. I agree with the contributors who've said that a PhD in this field kinda points one at research and sales rather than at "Real" work, but here's where your practical experience and the papers you wrote while a student could help you. Bonne chance!
Had one of these here in Florida. We used a law firm to write what they call a "Firm letter" (from law firm, we were told) which could have been named a "Rottweiler letter" from its tone. By prior agreement we were charged one hour's service for this, or $150. It worked and I am told that it does 50% of the time. So, you would risk $150 against a probable return of $700, all things considered. Most of the other advice you've gotten seems like it would work, but this is a cheaper first step and does show the judge later on, if you have to go to court, that you have been businesslike in your actions to get your money. Good luck!
Don't forget that Swiss who don't vote are fined 50 SFr and the Swiss are known to be stingy. That potential fine skews the data.
This is phytoremediation and it has been underway on a commercial scale for the past six years in the Ukraine downwind of Chernobyl. No special varieties of plants have been bred to pick up tranuranics, Cesium, etc., as ordinary sunflowers do a good job. In water, some cresses are used in a hydroponics arrangement. The point many have made concerning what to do to keep the peasants from eating the seeds, pressing them for oil, or feeding them to cattle are well taken! The actual method for removing the metals from the biomass is simple and can be seen at any big sugarcane mill in the South, where cane residue called bagasse is burned to help run the plant. The precipitators used in the smokestacks are extremely efficient and the flyash they collect is carefully disposed of.
Sorry, but Brazil is far from being Third World when CS is concerned. Might as well say India is Third World in this context. NopeNopeNope. Our Filipina/o colleague should work on real stuff for a real developer because the work experience you can get while doing this is so useful. Coming to the U.S. to intern can be tricky because of the labor and export laws. There's a lot of lead time required to get an H-1B (foreign expert) visa and most times, an F-1 (student) visa does not entitle one to work for hire. There are some no-wage internships at NASA and a few other government agencies, but these are scarce and hard to find. I'd recommend the following: seek a contract situation with a U.S. developer who works on consumer applications; i.e., strictly non-military, non-space, stuff to develop a specific product for them. Work remotely and keep up with your colleagues by e-mail. Arrange to come meet your colleagues, and then do the work from home. My experience with this tells me that the face-to-face meeting is important to making a telecommuting relationship work. Good luck and press on.