I have the Insteon "starter kit" installed. It consists of the computer interface, wireless/wired signal bridge units, several lamp modules, 2 wall switches and a table-top controller. It has the ability to be backward compatible with X-10 addressing and the new Insteon protocol is actually a 2-way protocol that uses each node in the net as a repeater to ensure commands are delivered and acknowledged.
Bottom line is that it works. It works in places where old X-10 modules didn't. And it is MUCH faster than X-10 when respondng to Insteon commands from the controllers.
My biggest problem is that the current switch units REQUIRE a neutral wire in the switch box to work. Without it, the units cannot communicate between themselves. As my house is over 100 years old, the presence of neutral wires is problematic. Sometimes an outlet is close enough to a switch that I can snake a neutral wire through the wall, but generally my switches are wired as old-style switch legs with the switch in-line on the hot wire.
Other than that, the system works great and I'd happily change all of my wall switches over to Insteon in a heartbeat if not for the neutral wire problem. Rumor has it that they are coming out with units that install at the fixture, rather than the switch, making the neutral wire problem moot.
Upgrade if you can afford it. It is better technology than X-10 by far.
Apple has been rewarding the open source and shareware community for a long time. In September of 1994, I was one of the recipients of Apple's first "Cool Tools" award. They identified all of the open source, public domain, and shareware authors that were making the Mac one of the best Internet-capable computers of the time. Here's a link to an old TidBITS article about the award. All the winners got PowerMac 7100s which helped get most of the Cool Tools ported to PowerPC. Maybe a bit self-serving of Apple, but they were setting the standard for recognizing good work in their third party developer community over 12 years ago. And I got MacHTTP ported to PPC in about 2 days because of it!
And you were wrong. Someone found the actual statistics and it was about 120 out of 180,000+ patents per year. Yeah, that's "all the time", 0.0667% of patents.
Fun with statistics. Well, consider this. There are approximately 240 business work days a year. (5 days a week, 48 weeks to account for holidays, etc.) With 120 examples of patent taking a year, that means that the US government takes a patent every other business day. This entire thread exists because Taiwan decided to "take" a single patent once. But statistics show that the US government does it 2 or 3 times a week.
That sounds like "all the time" to me, which certainly coincides with my professional experience.
What makes you think it happens often? You have a sample size of 2.
Your participation in this discussion has devolved to trolling. I said I have direct personal experience with 2 projects where I was personally responsible for the IP in question. I can't guess the number of times I have seen this happen in companies I have been involved with, either as senior management, board member, or employee where I wasn't the principal investigator or listed as inventor on the patent application.
You asked if I had evidence, and I responded. You choose to assume that since only one person responded to your troll, even though there are millions of other people in the industry, that there must only be 2 cases of the US government seizing IP in the national interest. That is tantamount to saying that because you only find 2 red jellybeans in your candy jar that there must only be 2 red jellybeans on the planet. Perhaps it is just that most people have better things to do on a Saturday night than respond to trolls on SlashDot in a vain attempt to enlighten the uneducable?
Since we all can't be omniscient, I feel little obligation to rise to your bait and cite references to projects I am not directly involved with. But 25 years of experience in the defense/aerospace industry has generated a large network of friends and colleagues, and many share my experiences. So I feel quite comfortable in asserting that the taking of IP when necessary does in fact happen. I have no idea what your background is, nor is it really relevant to this discussion other than as an explanation as to why you continue to flaunt your ignorance in public.
Suffice it to say that when the US government needs something and it cannot obtain it by traditional means (i.e., IP licensing or purchase), it will and quite often does simply take it as required. Perhaps a little time spent looking through the US Code on your part could lend some enlightenment? Otherwise, this thread is at an end.
I'm sorry, but I'm under no obligation to make up for your lack of experience and feel no obligation to violate confidentiality agreements just to prove something to you that is common knowledge in the defense and aerospace industry. You always run the risk/likelihood of marketable/patentable technologies being signed over to the government rather than being allowed to patent and pursue them on the open market. It is also part of the normal course of doing business with the federal government for the government to declare a patent or other piece of proprietary information to be in the national interest and require it to be disclosed, licensed, or otherwise made available to the necessary government agencies and/or contractors. This usually only happens if a fair and equitable license or assignment of rights cannot be reached with the party holding the IP but the bottom line is that if the government thinks there is a compelling national interest in a technology, it can take it as it sees fit.
But again, just because you have no direct experience in this area doesn't mean it doesn't happen. I'd simply ask you why you think this DOESN'T happen? You are quite naive if you think it doesn't, and doesn't happen quite often.
The US government spends about $200 billion a year on procuring technology just for the DoD alone. That dwarfs the R&D budgets of all the major US commercial technology providers combined by an order of magnitude at least. It's funny that people think companies like Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, etc. are the technology innovators in our economy. The vast, vast amount of technology R&D happens in the context of defense contracts, not the open commercial market. Rest assured that non-trivial amounts of the IP created in those efforts never sees the light of day in the commercial market until long after the technology is no longer state of the art in the defense space.
"All the time?" Do you have the slightest bit of evidence to back that up?
Yes.
I've been involved personally on 2 projects that resulted in patents being assigned to the US Government and not placed in the public record. One was for software-defined radio technology and the other was for a parallel processing system for intelligence message traffic.
Just because you have no knowledge of these sorts of arrangements doesn't mean it doesn't happen. In both cases I was involved with, the companies were compensated quite well for the patents and you can be certain that the strings attached to that compensation have some serious penalties that are invoked if the terms of the agreements are broken.
Patents are "nationalized" all the time in the defense/intelligence world. If you invent something that gives the US (for example) a technological edge (say a new rocket engine, a directed energy weapon, or some such), it is very likely that the US Government will exempt itself from any protections patent law may afford you. In fact, they may classify your patent and "disappear" it from the public record. This happens all the time.
It just happens that in this case, Taiwan's national interests are being served by a anti-viral compound instead of a piece of military technology. The precedents are the same and I'd expect you'd see similar rationale used in the US if it ever became necessary to do so.
Yeah, this Fortune article is definitely revisionist history, drawn up by some of the people that capitalized on a lot of hard work by others. I know, I was there. I spent a LOT of time in late '91 and most of 1992 corresponding with Robert Cailliau, who was responsible for much of the work on the CERN server/browser combo that predated anything done at NCSA. We at Univ. of Texas were interested in getting scientific papers on-line and had found Gopher to be a train wreck when it came to managing scientific notations, footnotes, and bibliographic references. The guys at CERN had solved the problem for text with the work Tim Berners-Lee had done with HTML and the networking code others at CERN had created for HTTP.
I originally contacted Robert and TB-L about writing a browser for the Mac. They said they'd rather see a server, which is how MacHTTP was born. Once the Mac server was running, I started working with Aleks Totic at NCSA to get the early versions of Mosaic on the Mac to work with the same server. Another prominent figure at NCSA at the time was Tom Redman, who if I recall correctly, was leading the Mosaic effort. At the time, Andressen was just another programmer on the Mosaic effort who had some glory because he hacked up the first working image tag in HTML. Until that time, everything had been text and hyperlinks
Long story short, everyone knew that Andressen snuck out of town with the Mosaic source code, and a few weeks later lured several of the developers like Aleks to go with him. There was a lot of ill-will engendered by that move and it wasn't all sweetness and light as the Fortune article would have you believe.
I remember speaking to the NCSA team (and then the SpyGlass team) many times afterwards, and no one ever really got over the fact that a junior programmer walked out the door with the IP created by dozens of other people and got filthy rich out of it while many of the people who built the original World Wide Web labored on in obscurity. At the time, the Internet culture wasn't about getting rich. It was about creating cool technology and sharing it with others, and almost all of the innovative stuff was still coming out of academia.
If anything, Netscape was the prototypical example of how to swipe someone elses' good ideas, rebrand them, and get rich. That was the company's real legacy to the Internet and the subsequent DotCom lunacy.
So who says innovations per billion people is a legitimate measure of the rate? Innovations per year seems to be the only measure that matters. And maybe the rate appears to be slowing because all of the totally common sense innovations have already been done. The stuff that is left requires a huge knowledge base and a large effort on the part of hundreds to achieve. Maybe innovation rates should be correlated to complexity of the innovation. Bet it's increasing if you do it that way.
Statistics can always say whatever your thesis needs em to say. Bah!
I'll add a totally gratuitous "me, too!" here. This card game takes most of a table top once you get into it, and it is a lot of fun. Takes a little while to get all the rules down, but it's a great game to keep in your pocket.
I strongly recommend Pirates of the Spanish Main. This is one of the coolest table-top games to come along in a long time, mostly because all it requires is a table top to play. Basically, it is a table top pirate-themed sea battle with little 3-D ships you construct and then fight with.
Each baseball card-sized pack comes with everything needed to play the simple game (my 7 year old loves this version) and lots of on-line expansions are available to add new scenarios, rules, etc. to make more complicated grown-up games. You can keep everything needed to play in a shirt pocket. Quite cool!
There was a widely blogged press release several weeks ago announcing the public availability of all of the weather data made available to commercial services. This is in the form of XML feeds containing the same packaged info sent to the commercial sites. Check out http://www.nws.noaa.gov/data/current_obs/ for details.
Saying that outsourcing is the cause of US job losses in the tech industry ignores a very crucial point about the DotCom bubble and subsequent crash. As someone who hired many engineers during the late 90's through 2001, I saw an interesting trend in the US labor pool, due mainly to the shortage of qualified tech workers. Specifically, many, many people who were not formally trained in computer science, information science, or engineering were representing themselves as programmers, software engineers, and other technology workers. I cannot tell you the number of English, History, and Communications majors whose resumes crossed my desk, all claiming that because they could author some HTML and knew Visual Basic, they were entitled to the "programmer" job title.
What has happened is now that all of the failed companies and wacky business models are out of the market, these marginal tech workers are returning to the industries they were trained for. Yes, lots of good, highly trained programmers and analysts got caught up in the crash, because even the lamest of DotComs had to have someone to do the real work. But I would be willing to bet that the vast majority of technology jobs "lost" to outsourcing simply represents a shift of these cross-industry workers back to the areas they are trained in and a decision by US industries to pick a lower cost (and therefore, lower risk) alternative for staffing these lower end tech positions. Why pay $75k and full benefits for an informally trained web developer in the US when you can get the same skills (likely formally trained) offshore?
I'm not defending the trend, but I think that it IS fair to point out that a lot of people were working in the tech industry, far outside their areas of expertise and far ahead of their skill levels and that imbalance has simply been corrected. To call it a loss and to blame that loss on outsourcing is to ignore the incredibly rapid gains that preceeded it.
not at all. the common thread has been GEORGE BUSH. the shuttle burn up in re-entry, the mars lander failures, and now this latest debacle are all proof that bush is wasting dollars on a space program that could instead be given to better causes.
Your ignorance is showing. You clearly have no clue about how long it takes for these projects to come to fruition. The actual fact is that most of the projects you cite were started under Clinton's administration. Why don't you just crawl back under your left-wing rock and come out after you've found a clue?
The problem is that the US Government is far and away the largest consumer of satellite imagery from private sources. So it probably wouldn't be a viable business model to shut off your largest customer. In fact, the government probably loves this proposal because it'll allow them to set requirements on private space ventures if the businesses want the government as a customer. Since it seems to be an all or nothing proposition (i.e., you either sell everything to the US Gov't, or you try to make your way in the commercial marketplace), it's likely that US businesses will opt for the former. The alternative is to try and shop the imagery data to foreign governments and there are already all sorts of limitations on exporting that data abroad.
The humor in all this is that there is a direct parallel to the whole RIAA/MPAA fiasco. Here is the government trying to regulate access to data that wants to be free and creating an artificial economy and business model that preserves the status quo and stifles innovation. Anyone see a trend here?
All this means is that the market for domestically produced satellite imagery will evaporate overnight and the owner/operators of foreign imagery services will profit enormously as US customers procure data from an open, unfettered market abroad. Another nail in the coffin of privatize space ventures. Go Congress!!!
The Joint Unmanned Combat Aerial System (J-UCAS) has nothing to do with air-to-air and cruise missile targeting. It also is not aimed at air-to-air combat of any form. It is designed to do suppression of enemy air defenses (SEAD) and in the Navy's case, certain low level strike missions as well. Both the Air Force-derived X-45 series (built by Boeing) and the Navy's X-47 series (Northrop Grumman) have flown as part of this program.
Check out the DARPA site for more details.
...why you are stressed. In general, the answer is somehow related to time deadlines or lack of some other critical resource. The biggest reason IT professionals are stressed is because they are over-extended and doing a job with insufficient resources. Ultimately, this is a failure of your management to properly budget time, money, and manpower. But there is one thing you can do to reduce stress and regain some control of your job and life.
Learn to use the word "no".
Computer professionals are too quick to adopt a culture of "yes", and it leads to overpromised, understaffed, late, stressful projects. Simply saying "no" to a project that would put you over the top in terms of work load or stress is the single biggest favor you can do for yourself. And if saying "no" to your boss doesn't seem appropriate, then telling them you need help or you cannot get the job done is the next best answer. Saying "yes" all the time just turns the screw another turn, letting your boss assume the current work load is fine and allowing them to pile on more.
I suspect in this picture, there was large pieces of the sky missing, that they'd decided not to capture, to save time, so the sky was just filled in later.
Wasn't this the image that also showed a piece of one of the cables of the lander.. which was supposed to be orange in the image and wasn't, causing them to color correct the image until it was orange, thus making the sky pink? Or maybe that was some other Mars lander image.
I vaguely recall something like that. But it always seemed odd because it seemed like the camera would have been calibrated before launch. Obvously floating in a vacuum for many months could affect that, but still, going from blue to pink is a pretty extreme switch.
The suspended dust argument also seems a bit bothersome. If there is enough dust suspended in the atmosphere to cause a pink tint to the sky, doesn't it seem like the quality of images taken from orbit through this dust would be significantly degraded? Think about how much dust in the atmosphere it takes here to change the sky color. E.g., Iraqi dust storms last April
Ever since the first Viking lander beamed back an image of a blue sky on Mars which was "adjusted" to show a pink sky in subsequent photos, I've wondered what the real sky color is. I am not a conspiracy theorist by any stretch, but the large, full color image of the Spirit Landing site at http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/press/spiri t/20040112a/mspan_2X_final-A10R1.jpg has pretty obviously been photoshopped to remove the sky and replace it with a solid peach color. Look at the horizon line in this photo and notice the jagged pixels along the hilltops. This doesn't appear in any of the monochrome images that are composited to produce the color images. So what other explanation is there other than the sky was edited out and replaced with peach?
What color was it before the picture was edited and if it wasn't "peach", why does NASA think we need to see a pink Martian sky? What happened to the blue sky that Viking showed us? Just wondering if anyone else has noticed this.
I'm sorry, but not being the sort to trust companies that are admittedly in league with the RIAA...
This bit of demogoguery is over the top. To say that a company who goes to the trouble to create the first practical, usable on-line music store for digital content, and does so completely in the context of the current laws and business climate we find ourselves stuck with, is "in league with RIAA" is like saying devlopers of WINE are in league with Microsoft or developers of a x86 Linux kernel are in league with Intel. Apple took all the tools they had to work with and made a solution that seems to work for all parties involved. Unless you can propose a more appropriate, successful, and LEGAL alternative, you should go peddle your conspiracies and new world orders elsewhere.
consumer of American-manufactured electronic products
Either your electronics are really old or you are.
Lesson #1. When writing to politicians, you have to give them some reason(s) to care about your viewpoint. Indicating to them that American technology, workers, and markets may be in jeopardy is the number one way to make them pay attention. Having the US lead in HDTV is very important to the politicians and identifying yourself as someone who supports the industry in their home district gives them a reason to care. Showing that same interest to someone who receives their entire budget from those politicians and serves as a result of their confirmation (i.e., the FCC and Powell) gives that person a reason to care, too. In truth, the only US consumer electronics I own are a couple of Macs, a Tivo, and a Proscan TV. Everything else has a Sony logo on it. But the politicos don't have to know that. I just want them to pay attention to my letter.
As a consumer of American-manufactured electronic products and an owner of
many, many copyrighted songs, movies, and other digital media, I strongly object
to the proposal that implementation of "broadcast flag" support be mandatory in
consumer video equipment supporting the HDTV standard. It is an inappropriate
regulatory restriction on fair use rights granted to me by U.S. copyright law and will
unnecessarily limit my choices, rights, and ability to enjoy copyrighted media that I
legitimately own or have access to view.
The FCC should not implement rule making to satisfy the special interests of media
conglomerates against the best public interest of the citizens whose
communications infrastructure it is tasked with protecting for their benefit. Do NOT
mandate compulsory compliance with the broadcast flag for HDTV transmissions.
This is anti-consumer and an infringement on rights granted to US citizens under
existing copyright law.
Seems to be? Uhhh. Like WAV, AIFF is uncompressed, so the quality should be identical to the raw data from a CD.
I think you are mistaken. WAV and AIFF are both compressed data formats. I think the point you are trying to make is that AIFF is "lossless", as opposed to a lossy format like MP3 or Apple's own MACE encoding formats. And if that is the point you are trying to make, you are still wrong. AIFF can be lossless or lossy, depending on the compression method used. I cannot speak to WAV's support for multiple compression schemes, but Microsoft has done such a good job of copying Apple technology that I'd imagine it has similar features.
Slashdot Mirror
I have the Insteon "starter kit" installed. It consists of the computer interface, wireless/wired signal bridge units, several lamp modules, 2 wall switches and a table-top controller. It has the ability to be backward compatible with X-10 addressing and the new Insteon protocol is actually a 2-way protocol that uses each node in the net as a repeater to ensure commands are delivered and acknowledged.
Bottom line is that it works. It works in places where old X-10 modules didn't. And it is MUCH faster than X-10 when respondng to Insteon commands from the controllers.
My biggest problem is that the current switch units REQUIRE a neutral wire in the switch box to work. Without it, the units cannot communicate between themselves. As my house is over 100 years old, the presence of neutral wires is problematic. Sometimes an outlet is close enough to a switch that I can snake a neutral wire through the wall, but generally my switches are wired as old-style switch legs with the switch in-line on the hot wire.
Other than that, the system works great and I'd happily change all of my wall switches over to Insteon in a heartbeat if not for the neutral wire problem. Rumor has it that they are coming out with units that install at the fixture, rather than the switch, making the neutral wire problem moot.
Upgrade if you can afford it. It is better technology than X-10 by far.
Apple has been rewarding the open source and shareware community for a long time. In September of 1994, I was one of the recipients of Apple's first "Cool Tools" award. They identified all of the open source, public domain, and shareware authors that were making the Mac one of the best Internet-capable computers of the time. Here's a link to an old TidBITS article about the award. All the winners got PowerMac 7100s which helped get most of the Cool Tools ported to PowerPC. Maybe a bit self-serving of Apple, but they were setting the standard for recognizing good work in their third party developer community over 12 years ago. And I got MacHTTP ported to PPC in about 2 days because of it!
Fun with statistics. Well, consider this. There are approximately 240 business work days a year. (5 days a week, 48 weeks to account for holidays, etc.) With 120 examples of patent taking a year, that means that the US government takes a patent every other business day. This entire thread exists because Taiwan decided to "take" a single patent once. But statistics show that the US government does it 2 or 3 times a week.
That sounds like "all the time" to me, which certainly coincides with my professional experience.
Your participation in this discussion has devolved to trolling. I said I have direct personal experience with 2 projects where I was personally responsible for the IP in question. I can't guess the number of times I have seen this happen in companies I have been involved with, either as senior management, board member, or employee where I wasn't the principal investigator or listed as inventor on the patent application.
You asked if I had evidence, and I responded. You choose to assume that since only one person responded to your troll, even though there are millions of other people in the industry, that there must only be 2 cases of the US government seizing IP in the national interest. That is tantamount to saying that because you only find 2 red jellybeans in your candy jar that there must only be 2 red jellybeans on the planet. Perhaps it is just that most people have better things to do on a Saturday night than respond to trolls on SlashDot in a vain attempt to enlighten the uneducable?
Since we all can't be omniscient, I feel little obligation to rise to your bait and cite references to projects I am not directly involved with. But 25 years of experience in the defense/aerospace industry has generated a large network of friends and colleagues, and many share my experiences. So I feel quite comfortable in asserting that the taking of IP when necessary does in fact happen. I have no idea what your background is, nor is it really relevant to this discussion other than as an explanation as to why you continue to flaunt your ignorance in public.
Suffice it to say that when the US government needs something and it cannot obtain it by traditional means (i.e., IP licensing or purchase), it will and quite often does simply take it as required. Perhaps a little time spent looking through the US Code on your part could lend some enlightenment? Otherwise, this thread is at an end.
I'm sorry, but I'm under no obligation to make up for your lack of experience and feel no obligation to violate confidentiality agreements just to prove something to you that is common knowledge in the defense and aerospace industry. You always run the risk/likelihood of marketable/patentable technologies being signed over to the government rather than being allowed to patent and pursue them on the open market. It is also part of the normal course of doing business with the federal government for the government to declare a patent or other piece of proprietary information to be in the national interest and require it to be disclosed, licensed, or otherwise made available to the necessary government agencies and/or contractors. This usually only happens if a fair and equitable license or assignment of rights cannot be reached with the party holding the IP but the bottom line is that if the government thinks there is a compelling national interest in a technology, it can take it as it sees fit.
But again, just because you have no direct experience in this area doesn't mean it doesn't happen. I'd simply ask you why you think this DOESN'T happen? You are quite naive if you think it doesn't, and doesn't happen quite often.
The US government spends about $200 billion a year on procuring technology just for the DoD alone. That dwarfs the R&D budgets of all the major US commercial technology providers combined by an order of magnitude at least. It's funny that people think companies like Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, etc. are the technology innovators in our economy. The vast, vast amount of technology R&D happens in the context of defense contracts, not the open commercial market. Rest assured that non-trivial amounts of the IP created in those efforts never sees the light of day in the commercial market until long after the technology is no longer state of the art in the defense space.
Yes.
I've been involved personally on 2 projects that resulted in patents being assigned to the US Government and not placed in the public record. One was for software-defined radio technology and the other was for a parallel processing system for intelligence message traffic.
Just because you have no knowledge of these sorts of arrangements doesn't mean it doesn't happen. In both cases I was involved with, the companies were compensated quite well for the patents and you can be certain that the strings attached to that compensation have some serious penalties that are invoked if the terms of the agreements are broken.
Patents are "nationalized" all the time in the defense/intelligence world. If you invent something that gives the US (for example) a technological edge (say a new rocket engine, a directed energy weapon, or some such), it is very likely that the US Government will exempt itself from any protections patent law may afford you. In fact, they may classify your patent and "disappear" it from the public record. This happens all the time. It just happens that in this case, Taiwan's national interests are being served by a anti-viral compound instead of a piece of military technology. The precedents are the same and I'd expect you'd see similar rationale used in the US if it ever became necessary to do so.
I originally contacted Robert and TB-L about writing a browser for the Mac. They said they'd rather see a server, which is how MacHTTP was born. Once the Mac server was running, I started working with Aleks Totic at NCSA to get the early versions of Mosaic on the Mac to work with the same server. Another prominent figure at NCSA at the time was Tom Redman, who if I recall correctly, was leading the Mosaic effort. At the time, Andressen was just another programmer on the Mosaic effort who had some glory because he hacked up the first working image tag in HTML. Until that time, everything had been text and hyperlinks
Long story short, everyone knew that Andressen snuck out of town with the Mosaic source code, and a few weeks later lured several of the developers like Aleks to go with him. There was a lot of ill-will engendered by that move and it wasn't all sweetness and light as the Fortune article would have you believe.
I remember speaking to the NCSA team (and then the SpyGlass team) many times afterwards, and no one ever really got over the fact that a junior programmer walked out the door with the IP created by dozens of other people and got filthy rich out of it while many of the people who built the original World Wide Web labored on in obscurity. At the time, the Internet culture wasn't about getting rich. It was about creating cool technology and sharing it with others, and almost all of the innovative stuff was still coming out of academia.
If anything, Netscape was the prototypical example of how to swipe someone elses' good ideas, rebrand them, and get rich. That was the company's real legacy to the Internet and the subsequent DotCom lunacy.
So who says innovations per billion people is a legitimate measure of the rate? Innovations per year seems to be the only measure that matters. And maybe the rate appears to be slowing because all of the totally common sense innovations have already been done. The stuff that is left requires a huge knowledge base and a large effort on the part of hundreds to achieve. Maybe innovation rates should be correlated to complexity of the innovation. Bet it's increasing if you do it that way. Statistics can always say whatever your thesis needs em to say. Bah!
I'll add a totally gratuitous "me, too!" here. This card game takes most of a table top once you get into it, and it is a lot of fun. Takes a little while to get all the rules down, but it's a great game to keep in your pocket.
Each baseball card-sized pack comes with everything needed to play the simple game (my 7 year old loves this version) and lots of on-line expansions are available to add new scenarios, rules, etc. to make more complicated grown-up games. You can keep everything needed to play in a shirt pocket. Quite cool!
There was a widely blogged press release several weeks ago announcing the public availability of all of the weather data made available to commercial services. This is in the form of XML feeds containing the same packaged info sent to the commercial sites. Check out http://www.nws.noaa.gov/data/current_obs/ for details.
What has happened is now that all of the failed companies and wacky business models are out of the market, these marginal tech workers are returning to the industries they were trained for. Yes, lots of good, highly trained programmers and analysts got caught up in the crash, because even the lamest of DotComs had to have someone to do the real work. But I would be willing to bet that the vast majority of technology jobs "lost" to outsourcing simply represents a shift of these cross-industry workers back to the areas they are trained in and a decision by US industries to pick a lower cost (and therefore, lower risk) alternative for staffing these lower end tech positions. Why pay $75k and full benefits for an informally trained web developer in the US when you can get the same skills (likely formally trained) offshore?
I'm not defending the trend, but I think that it IS fair to point out that a lot of people were working in the tech industry, far outside their areas of expertise and far ahead of their skill levels and that imbalance has simply been corrected. To call it a loss and to blame that loss on outsourcing is to ignore the incredibly rapid gains that preceeded it.
Your ignorance is showing. You clearly have no clue about how long it takes for these projects to come to fruition. The actual fact is that most of the projects you cite were started under Clinton's administration. Why don't you just crawl back under your left-wing rock and come out after you've found a clue?
The problem is that the US Government is far and away the largest consumer of satellite imagery from private sources. So it probably wouldn't be a viable business model to shut off your largest customer. In fact, the government probably loves this proposal because it'll allow them to set requirements on private space ventures if the businesses want the government as a customer. Since it seems to be an all or nothing proposition (i.e., you either sell everything to the US Gov't, or you try to make your way in the commercial marketplace), it's likely that US businesses will opt for the former. The alternative is to try and shop the imagery data to foreign governments and there are already all sorts of limitations on exporting that data abroad. The humor in all this is that there is a direct parallel to the whole RIAA/MPAA fiasco. Here is the government trying to regulate access to data that wants to be free and creating an artificial economy and business model that preserves the status quo and stifles innovation. Anyone see a trend here?
All this means is that the market for domestically produced satellite imagery will evaporate overnight and the owner/operators of foreign imagery services will profit enormously as US customers procure data from an open, unfettered market abroad. Another nail in the coffin of privatize space ventures. Go Congress!!!
The Joint Unmanned Combat Aerial System (J-UCAS) has nothing to do with air-to-air and cruise missile targeting. It also is not aimed at air-to-air combat of any form. It is designed to do suppression of enemy air defenses (SEAD) and in the Navy's case, certain low level strike missions as well. Both the Air Force-derived X-45 series (built by Boeing) and the Navy's X-47 series (Northrop Grumman) have flown as part of this program. Check out the DARPA site for more details.
Learn to use the word "no".
Computer professionals are too quick to adopt a culture of "yes", and it leads to overpromised, understaffed, late, stressful projects. Simply saying "no" to a project that would put you over the top in terms of work load or stress is the single biggest favor you can do for yourself. And if saying "no" to your boss doesn't seem appropriate, then telling them you need help or you cannot get the job done is the next best answer. Saying "yes" all the time just turns the screw another turn, letting your boss assume the current work load is fine and allowing them to pile on more.
Nancy Reagan had it right -- just say "No!"
Yep, this was all I could come up with, too.
I vaguely recall something like that. But it always seemed odd because it seemed like the camera would have been calibrated before launch. Obvously floating in a vacuum for many months could affect that, but still, going from blue to pink is a pretty extreme switch.
The suspended dust argument also seems a bit bothersome. If there is enough dust suspended in the atmosphere to cause a pink tint to the sky, doesn't it seem like the quality of images taken from orbit through this dust would be significantly degraded? Think about how much dust in the atmosphere it takes here to change the sky color. E.g., Iraqi dust storms last April
What color was it before the picture was edited and if it wasn't "peach", why does NASA think we need to see a pink Martian sky? What happened to the blue sky that Viking showed us? Just wondering if anyone else has noticed this.
This bit of demogoguery is over the top. To say that a company who goes to the trouble to create the first practical, usable on-line music store for digital content, and does so completely in the context of the current laws and business climate we find ourselves stuck with, is "in league with RIAA" is like saying devlopers of WINE are in league with Microsoft or developers of a x86 Linux kernel are in league with Intel. Apple took all the tools they had to work with and made a solution that seems to work for all parties involved. Unless you can propose a more appropriate, successful, and LEGAL alternative, you should go peddle your conspiracies and new world orders elsewhere.
Either your electronics are really old or you are.
Lesson #1. When writing to politicians, you have to give them some reason(s) to care about your viewpoint. Indicating to them that American technology, workers, and markets may be in jeopardy is the number one way to make them pay attention. Having the US lead in HDTV is very important to the politicians and identifying yourself as someone who supports the industry in their home district gives them a reason to care. Showing that same interest to someone who receives their entire budget from those politicians and serves as a result of their confirmation (i.e., the FCC and Powell) gives that person a reason to care, too. In truth, the only US consumer electronics I own are a couple of Macs, a Tivo, and a Proscan TV. Everything else has a Sony logo on it. But the politicos don't have to know that. I just want them to pay attention to my letter.
As a consumer of American-manufactured electronic products and an owner of many, many copyrighted songs, movies, and other digital media, I strongly object to the proposal that implementation of "broadcast flag" support be mandatory in consumer video equipment supporting the HDTV standard. It is an inappropriate regulatory restriction on fair use rights granted to me by U.S. copyright law and will unnecessarily limit my choices, rights, and ability to enjoy copyrighted media that I legitimately own or have access to view.
The FCC should not implement rule making to satisfy the special interests of media conglomerates against the best public interest of the citizens whose communications infrastructure it is tasked with protecting for their benefit. Do NOT mandate compulsory compliance with the broadcast flag for HDTV transmissions. This is anti-consumer and an infringement on rights granted to US citizens under existing copyright law.
Thanks for your consideration,
Chuck Shotton
I think you are mistaken. WAV and AIFF are both compressed data formats. I think the point you are trying to make is that AIFF is "lossless", as opposed to a lossy format like MP3 or Apple's own MACE encoding formats. And if that is the point you are trying to make, you are still wrong. AIFF can be lossless or lossy, depending on the compression method used. I cannot speak to WAV's support for multiple compression schemes, but Microsoft has done such a good job of copying Apple technology that I'd imagine it has similar features.