Yes, Children need housing, food, water, medical care, parenting, etc.
Nobody has ever argued against this.
But children also need an education.
They need it, their communities need for them to be educated, as a global society we need them to be educated.
Furthermore, not all developing nation children are starving refugees in camps. Many are rural children living in stable housing, going to school part of the time. Or urban children in comparable circumstances, with water & food but facing little upward mobility.
The OLPC projct is a way of getting these children tools. Electronic texts. Texts that they can download for free. Text in their native languages. Reference texts, ones they can use to apply to their, and their families, lives. It's about providing them with spreadsheets and a basic mathematics curriculum. The latest news in their communities, in their languages. It's about them communicating with their peers. It's about browsing the web and learning about the world beyond their immediate view.
The budget for educating these children is typically small, often less then US$20/year.
The OLPC project is a way of stretching that money, by delivering a tool that can read many things, updated, freely, throughout a community. It will focus attention on children and education in their communities. The children will have, for the first time, a tool they can use to make their own materials, to share with their peers & parents & teachers, and to pass on to the children after them.
I'd have thought the/. community would understand the importance of access to tools one can learn with, build with, get into and interact with, finding other folks passionate about the same areas of interest. What has driven/.'ers also drives developing world children.
It's an experiment. But it's an experiment based on solid research that has gone on before it. The goal is not usurping funds for other priorities but building on local and international resources to provide the children with a multiple use tool that can they & their communities can use to directly address their educational needs.
I know it is asking a lot of some/. posters, but before mindlessly posting with complaints about what you think the OLPC is about how about investing 5 minutes into going their websites and learning about the research that has gone before it and the thinking that has gone into it.
Oh, and this isn't only for developing world children, also the children of Massachusetts.
First off the ability to 'track' a phone, either intrinsic to the phone or extrinsically by triangulating off of the cell towers the phone transmissions are reaching, is not new nor news.
And the ability to 'track' such phones has been a boon to some, a harassment to others.
The Massachusetts State Highway Dept. had a showdown with snow plow contractors several years ago, requiring they carry such 'tattle tale' phones. One obvious application was near real-time tracking of road clearing and coordinating this with traffic reports, state police reports, and the development of snowfall patterns.
However concerns over oversight led to many of the plow operators rebelling, with some significant percentage refusing to take contracts. Other drivers were more amenable, or at least needed the work, and so took to carrying the phones. The immediate result was a large number of infractions were discovered/confirmed. Issues like plows sitting idle for entire shifts, reporting having serviced stretches of roadway they never covered, or taking the state-supplied salt & sand and using it on others contracts like mall parking lots instead of the state roads they were supposed to be clearing.
Location reporting phones can also be a help to their bearers.
I've a friend who is an ambulance dispatcher. Currently the ambulances must call in to him at multiple steps of a transport, always at least 5 times. That is a huge overhead for him and for the crews. As they're already carrying cellphones turning on tracking would be a no-brainer. Better yet as dispatcher he is often called upon to look up directions for crews out on a call, determine optimum routes, or just decide if a particular call is appropriate for his service or to pass it on to another agency - having a real-time map would be invaluable.
There are of course also the more trivial, though probably more generally satisfying, uses for these geolocation technologies.
Proximity alerting is one. Coincidentally within a few hundred feet of a friend in one's address book, who has agreed to share vicinity information and is currently 'visible', then get an alert. Another might be instant local-lookup. Nearest ATM, chinese take-away, public transit stop - send off your location to a lookup engine and find out. Or, from more specialized services look up local history, comments left by others, even pull up local web-cam shots.
My dreamed of feature is micro-navigation, specifically in retail environments.
My ex has an amazing talent for disappearing into the bowels of a big box hardware stores, maga-marts, malls, wherever. Instead of playing the call-and-quiz "Are you by the front wall or the back wall? Aisle 20 or 40? Mile one of pet food or mile two?" a getting-warmer/colder readout would be hugely appreciated and not difficult to implement.
Finally, there is my mother. She is getting lost more & more often. It started out with where-did-I-leave-the-car issues, now we've had a how-do-I-get-there scare or two. Leaving a spare phone in the car would at least get her close to the correct mall garage, even to which side of the garage if not which floor. Enabling her to send a location tag to my father would enable him to relay directions usable to her, not "Go... East... On... Highway... 274... One... Point... Two... Miles" but "Keep going, you'll soon pass the store you bought the white couch at, then turn by the new library".
First, wow, not to be rude but "Is uranium naturally radioactive" is a grade 6 science fact. You might want to look into brushing up a bit on your Science 101, if only so you can be more confident of choices you make based on science (and recognizing when things aren't based on such.)
Next, there are, well really were, natural reactors. Wikipidia has a short entry on this, a great webpage on it from the US Dept. of Energy, here's also a picture from Astronomy Picture of the Day showing what it looks like in a mine today. The article that first brought this to wide attention is "A Natural Fission Reactor" by George A. Cowan in Scientific American, July 1976. (Pages 36 - 47) (apparently not available online, visit your local library to read this fascinating article for free.)
Uranium ores are found all over the planet. Australia has 40% of known Uranium ores and is the largest exporter, the US West has 7 active mines, and Canada has 3 very large mines for both domestic use and export. Uranium ores are not always deep in the ground, surface mines are common, indeed there are places, including in the US, where rocks & soil sufficiently "hot" (in terms of emitted radiation, they're generally not warm enough to discern by touch) to harm folks in long term exposure can be found laying around on the surface.
However rocks are a rare, purely local danger, radioactively contaminated water is much more common & dangerous, and also Radon gas. Indeed there are parts of the US, for example Massachusetts, where radon gas detectors are routinely recommended for residential basements.
Finally, the University of Manchester has been doing research* on using bacteria to bioremediate radioactive materials, in short to use biological processes to convert dangerous radioactive compounds into less dangerous (but still radioactive) ones. These biochemical processes can't convert elements, no lead-to-gold, but they can "lock up" materials into less chemically active, or insoluble, forms. Doubtless discovery of bacteria already evolved to take advantage of highly radioactive environments will be of great advantage to their research.
* This is to an archived version of the University of Manchester website, the current website doesn't seem to have as widely informative a page.
For comparison several tons of meteoric material enters the Earth's atmosphere every day. If you've roof gutters try running a magnet over the accumulated sediment in the bottom of them, much of the metallic material collected thus is likely recently extraterrestrial in origin. This dust is considered an important part of the hydrologic cycle, providing upper-atmosphere nuclii for water to condense around and form raindrops.
Of meteoric material that reaches the Earth's surface structurally intact (roughly 1cc or larger) there are only about 500 or so objects a year, of which around 1% are recovered for study. The rest are finds of older falls.
These finds are easiest in plains where they stand out in the soft soil with little other stony material. Another good source is permanent ice & snow fields. In both wind erosion & frost heaving can leave these sitting out on the surface for the collecting. "Dust bowls", when local vegetation dries in a drought up and winds scour the soil away, and the many retreating glacers due to global warming, both yield rich harvests. There are also places where a larger meteor broke up at low altitude and showered the area with a rich concentration of smaller bits.
Lastly there is an active market in meteorites, for both hobbyist collectors and those who ascribe religious or spiritual aspects to these stones. Unfortunately their collection is typically undocumented, so any possibility of determining their age or circumstance in situ is lost. That they go directly into private hands means that they are generally unavailable for research. Not all meteorites are of great scientific interest, but several rare types do contain important clues to the nature of the early solar system and the current makeup of asteroids & other like objects.
I can see a market for this, as part of a package deal.
Keep in mind Sun is probably not going into the business of selling just any ole data center, they're gonna be selling you a "Sun Certified & Supported Data Center To-Go". Arrange for delivery, plug the color coded cables into the color coded sockets, flip the switch, and for US$50,000 down & US$10,000 a month you've got yourself a fully managed outsourced onsite data center.
Need redundancy? Stick one over in the parking garage, should something happen to the primary it's twin is a few hundred yards away with everything duplicated. Have a backup site in case of catastrophe? There's a discount, just sign here, the minute your primary site goes offline Sun will see to it your hot spare is up before the skeleton staff knows what happened. Need an additional data center? As part of the introductory package Sun will guarantee delivery, complete with data, within 24 hours anywhere in the 48 contiguous states.
Heck turn these into complete turnkey blackboxes and simply sign service level guarantees with Sun. Pay US$10,000 month for so many cycles, so much storage, all managed and backed up, completely overseen by Sun. All you do is supply the footings, power, ventilation, and 24 hour access for their technicians. The savings in support staff alone would cover it all.
Now all of these numbers are joke ones, but turning data centers into toasters, why not? Sun has been pushing pay-for-the-cycles-not-the-boxes for years, but folks want things onsite. So here it is. Standard. Efficient. Low-investment. Just sign the lease and pay the monthly bill and everything will be taken care of.
Preview can open a PDF file an order of magnitude faster.
Of course Apple's Quartz rendering layer being based on PDF makes this unsurprising...
No argument that Acrobat, or even Acrobat Reader, is a big pig, but it is a cross-platform application trying to reproduce internally what the MacOS X rendering layer does natively, along with a gazillion other Acrobat features that you're probably not aware are missing (encryption, signing, forms, JavaScript, etc.)
The history is that Steve Jobs wanted a unified display & printing environment when he started NeXT.
This had been a huge problem on Apple's MacOS 7 due to the differing, (& only somewhat compatible) technologies used for display & printing on MacOS. So after Jobs left Apple he hired Adobe to create "Display Postscript" for NeXT. They did, and it was used both on the NeXT GUI and also as an OS-based rasterizer for the companion NeXT printers.
Adobe licensed it also to Sun for NeWS, then took what they learned from developing Display Postcript and used it to great advantage when creating PostScript Level 2, and then somewhat when developing PDF.
Along the way NeXT was bought by Apple (for -400 million) and retooled it into MacOS X, whereupon it was decided the cost of relicensing Display Postscript from Adobe was too great. Instead Apple went with the publicly documented Postscript-based successor PDF as their basis, building their own compatible variant (subset in some parts, superset in others.)
So Preview opening a PDF file it is no great feat, indeed it is one of the simplest operations it can do as PDF is what everything gets turned into anyhow.
naturally, i had no idea there was such a thing as a computer commercial snob.
The Apple "1984" commercial is considered to be one of the greatest advertisements of all time, in any product category. Indeed it is standard curriculum in marketing classes at colleges & universities around the world.
Please, in the future, before posting an explanation kindly know what in the hell you're babbling on about.
PostScript and PCL are most certainly used for nearly the same purposes: A Page Description Language, aka PDL. Indeed PCL was explicitly created by HP as a simpler, faster and unlicensed alternative to PostScript.
Postscript & PDF are related in that PDF is based on Postscript (a well written brief history of PDF). PDF simply builds upon PS to include meta information, JavaScript, hyperlinking (internally & externally), forms & tag structures, extended colorspaces, etc. And yes, many Postscript level 3 printers can directly print PDF. (That you're unfamiliar with this feature is likely due to your apparent near complete ignorance of high end or prepress printing.)
Oh, and most self-respecting printers don't support PCL, just those from HP or licensing PCL or it's clones (yes, the PostScript workalike has its own clone market!) Further confusing things HP now uses a PostScript clone called Phoenix in their laser printers so they can offer ps support without paying Adobe licensing fees.
Of course, PostScript & PDF are now publiclydocumented and it is possible to recreate them, with Ghostscript being the best known example (Phoenix is probably the most widely distributed)
Lastly, XPS is just a document format as is ODF, PDF,, NO. Nothing about that is right, indeed it pretty much completes every statement in your posting being flat out wrong or wildly inaccurate.
Go away and don't post again until you have something at least marginally correct or interesting to "News for Nerds". You're drooling in public and it is ugly, annoying, and counter-productive.
XPS support is being built into new models from all major printer manufacturers.
Really?
Name them.
Seriously, I've been looking. I can't find a reference from any printer maker regarding a model with XPS driver support built in.
You'd think someone other then Microsoft would be at least mentioning this, unless it were just MS blowing hot air, which we know Waggener Edstrom (MS's PR agency) would never do...
I title the posting "Reading for Comprehension" and you still don't actually bother to read & think through it.
Instead you apparently skimmed it, picked up a few phrases, and then went off into irrelevant-land with essays based on assumptions explicitly contradicted in my postings.
You're just not competent to hold a discussion with.
That's not a troll, it's the sad simple truth, blatently apparent after your two incoherent postings.
Seriously. Go back and read this thread. Either you're a nut job, someone who confuses random emotionial diatribes for communication, or are completely lacking in any sort of expository or logical thinking.
Good luck, 'cause I'm thinking someone as unable to connect A to B as you apparently are is the sort who really needs luck in this life.
Other Reiser issues aside, the SuSE folks at Novell are looking to leave the nearly unsupported reiserfs3 (in maintenance support, which isn't enough for them) and move to ext3 as their default FS. Why? They feel ext3 is a lot more mature & better/wider supported then reiserfs4, is an easier migration, and appreciate that there is a solid roadmap from ext3 to ext4.
Of course this would also be the week that (coincidentally) Andrew Morton gives reiserfs4 the green light for eventual mainline kernel inclusion.
Still, they're not 'artists'. They're entertainers.
Artists do it for the love. The second they start doing it for the money, it's a job. Once it's a job, they're no longer artists; they're entertainers (ie: they get paid to entertain you).
So artists can't get paid to do what they love?
Lucille Ball wasn't an artist because she had a weekly show?
Maria Calias wasn't an artist because she had an opera schedule?
Frank Sinatra wasn't an artist because he deigned to sing at The Sands?
Leonard Bernstein wasn't an artist because he collaborated with others?
Matisse wasn't an artist because he did shows in galleries, booked months in advance?
No, your definitions of "artist" & "entertainer" aren't about "art". They may be anti-populist, anti-success, even possibly elitist, but not about the art.
Apparently reading for comprehension isn't some folks strong point, so I'll spell it out: "the band" does not define all art.
Wow. Take a moment. Absorb that.
That pop/rock/rap music artists (and yes, that includes your favorite soi disant "indie artist") are getting a raw deal does not justify screwing over all musical artists.
Big big big clue stick: There are other forms of art then "the band".
Even musical art.
Most towns of any size are home to a number of non-rock-act artists. We call them classical musicians, jazz musicians, studio musicians, folk musicians, choral singers, barbershop quartets, harpists, pianists, chanteuses, etc. And those are just in music, there are legions more in other performing arts, including ones with audio recordings (ever hear of a showtune? An opera? A bell performance?)
Some of these folks, and the organizations that they work through, depend on recording royalties. For some no recording royalties would likely mean shutting down.
For a concrete example that was the subject at dinner tonight let's take the world famous Boston Pops. They're made up of Boston-area musicians, including some from the Boston Symphony Orchestra, performing when the BSO isn't in season. They perform for hire, they perform in ticketed performances, they also perform free concerts. Much of their funding comes from, you guessed it, a large recording catalogue. Yes, all of those copies of "The Boston Pops Sing Your Holiday Favorites, Yet Again" add up, and give them a reliable revenue stream to build from.
Guess what? Some of us like their music. The Boston Pops do try lots of interesting things. Sometimes it is gimmicky, sometimes it is inspired. The same is true for classic and popular classical groups in many, many cities & towns. They are contributing mightily to the musical culture and just because they're not performing in grotty clubs to an audience terrified their musical heros-du-jure have somehow 'sold out', become less 'real', less 'street' (or whatever today's legitimacy criteria are) doesn't make them any less worthy of support.
(Oh hey, my house sytem just popped up the Boston Gay Men's Chorus performing Howard Arlen - great voices, great performance, fantastic material! Gonna argue that is any less art then Nirvana?)
This is true for many acts. They can't tour all the time, indeed their touring may be impossible or economically improbable but they can make great recordings and get them out there, use those funds to stage further performances, and continue the cycle.
For these folks the cliche pop/rock/rap-act-narcissistic answer of "tour" doesn't work. All it says is that the advocate for such has a tragically limited understanding of art and music and is unable, or unwilling, to see beyond their justifications.
So next time, before parroting again how musical artists et al are getting a raw deal, stop for a moment and consider that the artists you are referring to don't necessarily represent the entirety of musical arts. And so when actively or tacitly supporting minor acts of "fighting the man" consider that you may well be also hurting other musical artists, ones who have worked just as hard and just as long in their fields, and with their own families and rents and medical bills to pay.
As soon as contract negotiations over royalty payments and distribution expenses come into play, I feel they lose their "artist" status and are "entertainers."
Artists to me are people that attempt to share a unique, creative and inspired vision through sound and vision (or the combination of the two.)
Yes, because it is crass and unseemly when hardworking artists try and look out for their own interests, pay for a decent roof over their family's head, food on the table, have medical and dental costs, perhaps, gasp, a bit of money put aside for when they're older or incapacitated or just want to take some time off from the daly grind.
No, it's all the tired 'n trite MTV bullshit of "we're only in it for the music" crap when any artist will tell you that while they do it for the love of their art they have lives and bills and obligations and aspirations beyond a life flogging their wares every night.
Furthermore there is more to art & performance then a guitar and drum kit and a whiny skinny 20-something pretending to be world weary. There is orchestra and dance and theater and film and sculpture, and those involve specialized venues and contracts and grants and workshops and all the rest, they're not just "Hey let's get the scooby gang in the van and do a 12 city roadtrip! We'll pay for it out of T-shirt sales, screw the recording rights!".
No, some art is not going to be out on the road every night, some art is ephemerial or specialized. But hey, if you think that pulling the revenue from recordings out from under artists is ok then go right ahead. Of course it means that it'll be that much more difficult to mount stage productions, bring in performers from other cultures, pay the lighting bill at the local venue but then apparently the penultimate art form is the indie rocker, right?
Oh, and lastly, being entertaining is not demeaning. Yes, it not every artist's goal, but many an artist does want to reach their audience through entertainment and to disdain such as merely populist and somehow lesser is nothing more then a profoundly ignorant (pathetic, really) attempt at snobbishness. Obscurity doesn't define a great artist, nor does notoriety, nor does public adulation, great art is the only criteria. And that includes great entertainment.
No other country came in and built the Roosevelt Interstate System.
Neither did the US.
It's the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways.
Oh, and the US Interstate Highway System was inspired by the German's Autobahn. And of course a national roadway system is famously an invention of the Romans.
No other country invented the assembly line, the microprocessor, and the airplane.
Neither did the US.
Look up the history of the assembly line and airplanes. As to the microprocessor, it was indeed a US invention but like the other examples it was also product of an international community of research & development in microelectronics.
There's nothing wrong with nationalistic pride, but let's not imagine these achievements occured ab novo or uniquely in the US.
First off its pretty clear this is an RPV (Remotely Piloted Vehicle), so no need to worry about anyone yakking up dizzy in the cockpit. Next it wont be invisible, itll be blurry to the eye. Thats still a good thing, itll make it harder to track, shoot, and be sure of what it has been up to.
What it wont be is unobtrusive. Its gonna be noisy, have a RADAR/LIDAR signature, and be putting out a fair bit of heat. So unless it is pretty high up folks will be aware it is around, unaided have a general sense of where, and with equipment (including IR goggles) probably be able pinpoint it fairly quickly.
As for images, yeah, crazy-spinning-photo-pans will probably be able to be reconstructed into something recognizable, but thatll require some significent processing power & are as likely to miss points of interest as they are to pan over them a few times.
However there are other missions where other sensors would be useful, ones not dependant on a specific field of view. Audio mapping. Radio mapping. Radiation sensing. Specific chemical tracing (mmm... smells like high explosives by that warehouse!)
Also dropping off small payloads could solve much of the in-motion issues, and if the craft is hard to see itll also be hard to figure out exactly where it has dropped off a suitable minituraized payload. Imagine what dropping your cellphone transmitting live audio & video into the middle of an armed camp would tell you. Next imagine if it was a device built to just do that, resembles a rock, and nobody is sure just where the drone was... Could it be found? Sure, eventually, after much disruption.
The device may be being heavily hyped, but it is a clever hack nonetheless and could have some real applications. And the next time I hear the annoying musquito-on-steroids whine of a model helicopter nearby I wont be so confident if I cant see it/it cant see me.
GIF was designed, for logos: it is lossless, has a very limited color palette, and allows for some amount of transparency.
No.
GIF was created for the cutting edge graphics of its time, the IBM Color Card, that went into the more-power-then-youll-ever-need IBM XT. It also worked well on the Commodore 64, the Apple IIc, the TI994a, the Tandy Coco, and the venerable Amiga.
There was no great for logos on the web; back then the web was downloading a cheesecake photo in GIF, from Comp$erve or Fidonet, or if you were really clever FTPing a coupla pictures from simtel20 or the like.
However everyone was well aware of the visual limitations of GIF and so JPEG was soon developed, ratified and supported. Critical to the success of JPEG was the early developent of a free, portable, library that could be trivially implemented into all sorts of products.
One of those was an obscure internet client in the spirit of Gopher that used a stripped down SGML to layout pages with links in em. That went on to spark the great browser explosion, which begat numerous competing file formats/plugins all vying to be the next big thing, all with restrictive & expensive licenses.
Of the still image formats only the late-developed PNG, which was intentionionally free & extendable, has enjoyed sucess. All of the other clever ones went away, rendered irrelevant by increasing transmission speeds, network effect standardization, and an unwillingness by everyone to pay for what nearly-good-enough could do for free.
Today? VRML is dead. SVG a stillborn promise (though if Apples Safari supports it we might see renewed interest.) JPEG2000 going nowhere fast. PS/PDF a niche application. Flash stereotyped as dumb annoying animation. PNG slowly being adopted, waiting for IE7 to really step up to bat.
From California, where lots of fresh veggies come from
Is a great feel-good product that everyone will love
Has their tres fabu in-house chefs (don't they get 20% own project time?)
With their marketing skills Google could totally dominate the salad spinner market in no time!
Could recoup expenses by printing targetted ads on the salad spinners. Or... e-ink controlled by WiFi showing Flash ads!
Hey, it is reasonable as many of the other I-wish-Google-would foolishness (also I-wish-Apple-would-buy-with-thier-4-billion-cash-a nd-design-sense, I-think-Sony-should-ship-a-uber-whatever etc.)
Let me guess: Long US weekend = slow news day at/., gotta pump those pageviews?
The problem isn't what Comcast does, it's what they don't do: Provide humans.
Every try reaching someone with any authority at Comcast? It's impossible.
Not difficult: Impossible.
I'm beginning to suspect Comcast some sort of outsourced Vogon corporation and their offices are full of large green lumbering creatures, and anyone human is simply a hired shill, I mean, lobbyist.
Want to test? Try calling and asking a support monkey for the address of their ntp server(s). Not "nntp" (they have that in their keyword scripts), not usenet news, rather ntp as in time. It's a whose-on-first comedy routine trying to convince them that ntp != nntp and when you do, they escalate it, say someone will call you back, and nobody does. Ever.
That's a trivial geeky example but emblematic.
Every aspect of Comcast: Front line without power, whose only recourse is to ditch and run, and no second level. Nobody accountable, nobody responsable, just useless monkeys.
Heck, for two years after Comcast bought out ATT BI my net address from Comcast resolved to "maggard.ne.attbi.net". Who to call to get this updated? Nobody knew. Ever. Utter clulessness, absolute uselessness. Eventually my vanity setting went away entirely with nobody to talk to about reinstating it under comcast.net (so much for an easy VPN address!)
Email routing problems: Nobody to report to. False spam blocking: No recourse. Wonky DNS servers: Tough luck.
If anyone ever does get a phone number of a bipedal hominid at Comcast, with some degree of authority, please post it!
In the meantime the next time Comcasts license comes up in this town I'll be there recounting my stories with them, the outtages, blocked ports, the service people who never show up, the email problems, their own spam, etc. Oh, and 2 weeks ago Verizon ran fiber to my property line. At least I'll have a choice of scoundrels now - who it worse, the cable company or the phone company?
Airlines love to advertise services like this or phones on planes when they first came out and then you discover that it's only slightly less expensive than a heroin habit. This is why airlines are winding down in flight phones - not because of cell phones or security but instead after the first few years of some yahoo calling "Woo Hoo guess what Cleetus I'm callin ya from tha plane!!!!!" the charm of a $40 phone call wears off.
Yeah, BillyJoeBob was annoying, as is "I'M UP HIGH SO I MUST SHOUT" but as you noted they don't make all that many calls.
However for others of us airphones are vital. I've had to participate in meetings, diagnose problems, once even fire a person, all at 30,000'.
I had to be in transit that day, and the meeting had to happen, and short of cerebral anurism I had to be actively involved in it. The network was misrouting, I had to fix it, and yes I was the only one with the current knowledge of that site to fix it in a reasonable time-frame. The employee had to be fired and I was her supervisor, and the one who had discovered the need for getting her out the door ASAP.
All made possible by airphones, and all worth every penny they cost.
Heck, I've been on a flight, had an emergency come up, been booked for another flight while in the air, walked over to that one's gate & taken off, solved that problem en-route, then pulled to another crisis in yet a different destination and arranged for what I'd need, all from onboard aircraft. Boston > LA > Dallas > Atlanta that day, a serious phone bill, and even at US$5/minute easily, trivially, justified.
Of course, I've also called a buddy who lived on my approach path and gotten him to wave as I descended. He lived on the coast, near an obvious landmark, so it was pretty easy. I was able to spot his jeep, him, and confirm it by telling hom on the phone where his jeep was parked and where he was standing in relation to it. I don't recall if I expensed that call or not;p
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Yes, Children need housing, food, water, medical care, parenting, etc.
Nobody has ever argued against this.
But children also need an education.
They need it, their communities need for them to be educated, as a global society we need them to be educated.
Furthermore, not all developing nation children are starving refugees in camps. Many are rural children living in stable housing, going to school part of the time. Or urban children in comparable circumstances, with water & food but facing little upward mobility.
The OLPC projct is a way of getting these children tools. Electronic texts. Texts that they can download for free. Text in their native languages. Reference texts, ones they can use to apply to their, and their families, lives. It's about providing them with spreadsheets and a basic mathematics curriculum. The latest news in their communities, in their languages. It's about them communicating with their peers. It's about browsing the web and learning about the world beyond their immediate view.
The budget for educating these children is typically small, often less then US$20/year.
The OLPC project is a way of stretching that money, by delivering a tool that can read many things, updated, freely, throughout a community. It will focus attention on children and education in their communities. The children will have, for the first time, a tool they can use to make their own materials, to share with their peers & parents & teachers, and to pass on to the children after them.
I'd have thought the /. community would understand the importance of access to tools one can learn with, build with, get into and interact with, finding other folks passionate about the same areas of interest. What has driven /.'ers also drives developing world children.
It's an experiment. But it's an experiment based on solid research that has gone on before it. The goal is not usurping funds for other priorities but building on local and international resources to provide the children with a multiple use tool that can they & their communities can use to directly address their educational needs.
I know it is asking a lot of some /. posters, but before mindlessly posting with complaints about what you think the OLPC is about how about investing 5 minutes into going their websites and learning about the research that has gone before it and the thinking that has gone into it.
Oh, and this isn't only for developing world children, also the children of Massachusetts.
First off the ability to 'track' a phone, either intrinsic to the phone or extrinsically by triangulating off of the cell towers the phone transmissions are reaching, is not new nor news.
And the ability to 'track' such phones has been a boon to some, a harassment to others.
The Massachusetts State Highway Dept. had a showdown with snow plow contractors several years ago, requiring they carry such 'tattle tale' phones. One obvious application was near real-time tracking of road clearing and coordinating this with traffic reports, state police reports, and the development of snowfall patterns.
However concerns over oversight led to many of the plow operators rebelling, with some significant percentage refusing to take contracts. Other drivers were more amenable, or at least needed the work, and so took to carrying the phones. The immediate result was a large number of infractions were discovered/confirmed. Issues like plows sitting idle for entire shifts, reporting having serviced stretches of roadway they never covered, or taking the state-supplied salt & sand and using it on others contracts like mall parking lots instead of the state roads they were supposed to be clearing.
Location reporting phones can also be a help to their bearers.
I've a friend who is an ambulance dispatcher. Currently the ambulances must call in to him at multiple steps of a transport, always at least 5 times. That is a huge overhead for him and for the crews. As they're already carrying cellphones turning on tracking would be a no-brainer. Better yet as dispatcher he is often called upon to look up directions for crews out on a call, determine optimum routes, or just decide if a particular call is appropriate for his service or to pass it on to another agency - having a real-time map would be invaluable.
There are of course also the more trivial, though probably more generally satisfying, uses for these geolocation technologies.
Proximity alerting is one. Coincidentally within a few hundred feet of a friend in one's address book, who has agreed to share vicinity information and is currently 'visible', then get an alert. Another might be instant local-lookup. Nearest ATM, chinese take-away, public transit stop - send off your location to a lookup engine and find out. Or, from more specialized services look up local history, comments left by others, even pull up local web-cam shots.
My dreamed of feature is micro-navigation, specifically in retail environments.
My ex has an amazing talent for disappearing into the bowels of a big box hardware stores, maga-marts, malls, wherever. Instead of playing the call-and-quiz "Are you by the front wall or the back wall? Aisle 20 or 40? Mile one of pet food or mile two?" a getting-warmer/colder readout would be hugely appreciated and not difficult to implement.
Finally, there is my mother. She is getting lost more & more often. It started out with where-did-I-leave-the-car issues, now we've had a how-do-I-get-there scare or two. Leaving a spare phone in the car would at least get her close to the correct mall garage, even to which side of the garage if not which floor. Enabling her to send a location tag to my father would enable him to relay directions usable to her, not "Go ... East ... On ... Highway ... 274 ... One ... Point ... Two ... Miles" but "Keep going, you'll soon pass the store you bought the white couch at, then turn by the new library".
First, wow, not to be rude but "Is uranium naturally radioactive" is a grade 6 science fact. You might want to look into brushing up a bit on your Science 101, if only so you can be more confident of choices you make based on science (and recognizing when things aren't based on such.)
Next, there are, well really were, natural reactors. Wikipidia has a short entry on this, a great webpage on it from the US Dept. of Energy, here's also a picture from Astronomy Picture of the Day showing what it looks like in a mine today. The article that first brought this to wide attention is "A Natural Fission Reactor" by George A. Cowan in Scientific American, July 1976. (Pages 36 - 47) (apparently not available online, visit your local library to read this fascinating article for free.)
Uranium ores are found all over the planet. Australia has 40% of known Uranium ores and is the largest exporter, the US West has 7 active mines, and Canada has 3 very large mines for both domestic use and export. Uranium ores are not always deep in the ground, surface mines are common, indeed there are places, including in the US, where rocks & soil sufficiently "hot" (in terms of emitted radiation, they're generally not warm enough to discern by touch) to harm folks in long term exposure can be found laying around on the surface.
However rocks are a rare, purely local danger, radioactively contaminated water is much more common & dangerous, and also Radon gas. Indeed there are parts of the US, for example Massachusetts, where radon gas detectors are routinely recommended for residential basements.
Finally, the University of Manchester has been doing research* on using bacteria to bioremediate radioactive materials, in short to use biological processes to convert dangerous radioactive compounds into less dangerous (but still radioactive) ones. These biochemical processes can't convert elements, no lead-to-gold, but they can "lock up" materials into less chemically active, or insoluble, forms. Doubtless discovery of bacteria already evolved to take advantage of highly radioactive environments will be of great advantage to their research.
* This is to an archived version of the University of Manchester website, the current website doesn't seem to have as widely informative a page.
For comparison several tons of meteoric material enters the Earth's atmosphere every day. If you've roof gutters try running a magnet over the accumulated sediment in the bottom of them, much of the metallic material collected thus is likely recently extraterrestrial in origin. This dust is considered an important part of the hydrologic cycle, providing upper-atmosphere nuclii for water to condense around and form raindrops.
Of meteoric material that reaches the Earth's surface structurally intact (roughly 1cc or larger) there are only about 500 or so objects a year, of which around 1% are recovered for study. The rest are finds of older falls.
These finds are easiest in plains where they stand out in the soft soil with little other stony material. Another good source is permanent ice & snow fields. In both wind erosion & frost heaving can leave these sitting out on the surface for the collecting. "Dust bowls", when local vegetation dries in a drought up and winds scour the soil away, and the many retreating glacers due to global warming, both yield rich harvests. There are also places where a larger meteor broke up at low altitude and showered the area with a rich concentration of smaller bits.
Lastly there is an active market in meteorites, for both hobbyist collectors and those who ascribe religious or spiritual aspects to these stones. Unfortunately their collection is typically undocumented, so any possibility of determining their age or circumstance in situ is lost. That they go directly into private hands means that they are generally unavailable for research. Not all meteorites are of great scientific interest, but several rare types do contain important clues to the nature of the early solar system and the current makeup of asteroids & other like objects.
I can see a market for this, as part of a package deal.
Keep in mind Sun is probably not going into the business of selling just any ole data center, they're gonna be selling you a "Sun Certified & Supported Data Center To-Go". Arrange for delivery, plug the color coded cables into the color coded sockets, flip the switch, and for US$50,000 down & US$10,000 a month you've got yourself a fully managed outsourced onsite data center.
Need redundancy? Stick one over in the parking garage, should something happen to the primary it's twin is a few hundred yards away with everything duplicated. Have a backup site in case of catastrophe? There's a discount, just sign here, the minute your primary site goes offline Sun will see to it your hot spare is up before the skeleton staff knows what happened. Need an additional data center? As part of the introductory package Sun will guarantee delivery, complete with data, within 24 hours anywhere in the 48 contiguous states.
Heck turn these into complete turnkey blackboxes and simply sign service level guarantees with Sun. Pay US$10,000 month for so many cycles, so much storage, all managed and backed up, completely overseen by Sun. All you do is supply the footings, power, ventilation, and 24 hour access for their technicians. The savings in support staff alone would cover it all.
Now all of these numbers are joke ones, but turning data centers into toasters, why not? Sun has been pushing pay-for-the-cycles-not-the-boxes for years, but folks want things onsite. So here it is. Standard. Efficient. Low-investment. Just sign the lease and pay the monthly bill and everything will be taken care of.
Of course Apple's Quartz rendering layer being based on PDF makes this unsurprising...
No argument that Acrobat, or even Acrobat Reader, is a big pig, but it is a cross-platform application trying to reproduce internally what the MacOS X rendering layer does natively, along with a gazillion other Acrobat features that you're probably not aware are missing (encryption, signing, forms, JavaScript, etc.)
The history is that Steve Jobs wanted a unified display & printing environment when he started NeXT.
This had been a huge problem on Apple's MacOS 7 due to the differing, (& only somewhat compatible) technologies used for display & printing on MacOS. So after Jobs left Apple he hired Adobe to create "Display Postscript" for NeXT. They did, and it was used both on the NeXT GUI and also as an OS-based rasterizer for the companion NeXT printers.
Adobe licensed it also to Sun for NeWS, then took what they learned from developing Display Postcript and used it to great advantage when creating PostScript Level 2, and then somewhat when developing PDF.
Along the way NeXT was bought by Apple (for -400 million) and retooled it into MacOS X, whereupon it was decided the cost of relicensing Display Postscript from Adobe was too great. Instead Apple went with the publicly documented Postscript-based successor PDF as their basis, building their own compatible variant (subset in some parts, superset in others.)
So Preview opening a PDF file it is no great feat, indeed it is one of the simplest operations it can do as PDF is what everything gets turned into anyhow.
The Apple "1984" commercial is considered to be one of the greatest advertisements of all time, in any product category. Indeed it is standard curriculum in marketing classes at colleges & universities around the world.
In case anybody missed it:
In short, it was indeed nothing but Microsoft propaganda being parroted, and I'll believe it when Cairo ships...
Please, in the future, before posting an explanation kindly know what in the hell you're babbling on about.
PostScript and PCL are most certainly used for nearly the same purposes: A Page Description Language, aka PDL. Indeed PCL was explicitly created by HP as a simpler, faster and unlicensed alternative to PostScript.
Postscript & PDF are related in that PDF is based on Postscript (a well written brief history of PDF). PDF simply builds upon PS to include meta information, JavaScript, hyperlinking (internally & externally), forms & tag structures, extended colorspaces, etc. And yes, many Postscript level 3 printers can directly print PDF. (That you're unfamiliar with this feature is likely due to your apparent near complete ignorance of high end or prepress printing.)
Oh, and most self-respecting printers don't support PCL, just those from HP or licensing PCL or it's clones (yes, the PostScript workalike has its own clone market!) Further confusing things HP now uses a PostScript clone called Phoenix in their laser printers so they can offer ps support without paying Adobe licensing fees.
Of course, PostScript & PDF are now publicly documented and it is possible to recreate them, with Ghostscript being the best known example (Phoenix is probably the most widely distributed)
Lastly, XPS is just a document format as is ODF, PDF,, NO. Nothing about that is right, indeed it pretty much completes every statement in your posting being flat out wrong or wildly inaccurate.
Go away and don't post again until you have something at least marginally correct or interesting to "News for Nerds". You're drooling in public and it is ugly, annoying, and counter-productive.
Really?
Name them.
Seriously, I've been looking. I can't find a reference from any printer maker regarding a model with XPS driver support built in.
You'd think someone other then Microsoft would be at least mentioning this, unless it were just MS blowing hot air, which we know Waggener Edstrom (MS's PR agency) would never do...
Wow.
I title the posting "Reading for Comprehension" and you still don't actually bother to read & think through it.
Instead you apparently skimmed it, picked up a few phrases, and then went off into irrelevant-land with essays based on assumptions explicitly contradicted in my postings.
You're just not competent to hold a discussion with.
That's not a troll, it's the sad simple truth, blatently apparent after your two incoherent postings.
Seriously. Go back and read this thread. Either you're a nut job, someone who confuses random emotionial diatribes for communication, or are completely lacking in any sort of expository or logical thinking.
Good luck, 'cause I'm thinking someone as unable to connect A to B as you apparently are is the sort who really needs luck in this life.
What'll get you first; the rootkit, the battery fire, or the really awful music?/p?
No.
You can learn all about this incredibly common last name on wikipedia.
Other Reiser issues aside, the SuSE folks at Novell are looking to leave the nearly unsupported reiserfs3 (in maintenance support, which isn't enough for them) and move to ext3 as their default FS. Why? They feel ext3 is a lot more mature & better/wider supported then reiserfs4, is an easier migration, and appreciate that there is a solid roadmap from ext3 to ext4.
Of course this would also be the week that (coincidentally) Andrew Morton gives reiserfs4 the green light for eventual mainline kernel inclusion.
Still, they're not 'artists'. They're entertainers.
Artists do it for the love. The second they start doing it for the money, it's a job. Once it's a job, they're no longer artists; they're entertainers (ie: they get paid to entertain you).
So artists can't get paid to do what they love?
Lucille Ball wasn't an artist because she had a weekly show?
Maria Calias wasn't an artist because she had an opera schedule?
Frank Sinatra wasn't an artist because he deigned to sing at The Sands?
Leonard Bernstein wasn't an artist because he collaborated with others?
Matisse wasn't an artist because he did shows in galleries, booked months in advance?
No, your definitions of "artist" & "entertainer" aren't about "art". They may be anti-populist, anti-success, even possibly elitist, but not about the art.
It's about the art.
The rest is your own shit.
Apparently reading for comprehension isn't some folks strong point, so I'll spell it out: "the band" does not define all art.
Wow. Take a moment. Absorb that.
That pop/rock/rap music artists (and yes, that includes your favorite soi disant "indie artist") are getting a raw deal does not justify screwing over all musical artists.
Big big big clue stick: There are other forms of art then "the band".
Even musical art.
Most towns of any size are home to a number of non-rock-act artists. We call them classical musicians, jazz musicians, studio musicians, folk musicians, choral singers, barbershop quartets, harpists, pianists, chanteuses, etc. And those are just in music, there are legions more in other performing arts, including ones with audio recordings (ever hear of a showtune? An opera? A bell performance?)
Some of these folks, and the organizations that they work through, depend on recording royalties. For some no recording royalties would likely mean shutting down.
For a concrete example that was the subject at dinner tonight let's take the world famous Boston Pops. They're made up of Boston-area musicians, including some from the Boston Symphony Orchestra, performing when the BSO isn't in season. They perform for hire, they perform in ticketed performances, they also perform free concerts. Much of their funding comes from, you guessed it, a large recording catalogue. Yes, all of those copies of "The Boston Pops Sing Your Holiday Favorites, Yet Again" add up, and give them a reliable revenue stream to build from.
Guess what? Some of us like their music. The Boston Pops do try lots of interesting things. Sometimes it is gimmicky, sometimes it is inspired. The same is true for classic and popular classical groups in many, many cities & towns. They are contributing mightily to the musical culture and just because they're not performing in grotty clubs to an audience terrified their musical heros-du-jure have somehow 'sold out', become less 'real', less 'street' (or whatever today's legitimacy criteria are) doesn't make them any less worthy of support.
(Oh hey, my house sytem just popped up the Boston Gay Men's Chorus performing Howard Arlen - great voices, great performance, fantastic material! Gonna argue that is any less art then Nirvana?)
This is true for many acts. They can't tour all the time, indeed their touring may be impossible or economically improbable but they can make great recordings and get them out there, use those funds to stage further performances, and continue the cycle.
For these folks the cliche pop/rock/rap-act-narcissistic answer of "tour" doesn't work. All it says is that the advocate for such has a tragically limited understanding of art and music and is unable, or unwilling, to see beyond their justifications.
So next time, before parroting again how musical artists et al are getting a raw deal, stop for a moment and consider that the artists you are referring to don't necessarily represent the entirety of musical arts. And so when actively or tacitly supporting minor acts of "fighting the man" consider that you may well be also hurting other musical artists, ones who have worked just as hard and just as long in their fields, and with their own families and rents and medical bills to pay.
Yes, because it is crass and unseemly when hardworking artists try and look out for their own interests, pay for a decent roof over their family's head, food on the table, have medical and dental costs, perhaps, gasp, a bit of money put aside for when they're older or incapacitated or just want to take some time off from the daly grind.
No, it's all the tired 'n trite MTV bullshit of "we're only in it for the music" crap when any artist will tell you that while they do it for the love of their art they have lives and bills and obligations and aspirations beyond a life flogging their wares every night.
Furthermore there is more to art & performance then a guitar and drum kit and a whiny skinny 20-something pretending to be world weary. There is orchestra and dance and theater and film and sculpture, and those involve specialized venues and contracts and grants and workshops and all the rest, they're not just "Hey let's get the scooby gang in the van and do a 12 city roadtrip! We'll pay for it out of T-shirt sales, screw the recording rights!".
No, some art is not going to be out on the road every night, some art is ephemerial or specialized. But hey, if you think that pulling the revenue from recordings out from under artists is ok then go right ahead. Of course it means that it'll be that much more difficult to mount stage productions, bring in performers from other cultures, pay the lighting bill at the local venue but then apparently the penultimate art form is the indie rocker, right?
Oh, and lastly, being entertaining is not demeaning. Yes, it not every artist's goal, but many an artist does want to reach their audience through entertainment and to disdain such as merely populist and somehow lesser is nothing more then a profoundly ignorant (pathetic, really) attempt at snobbishness. Obscurity doesn't define a great artist, nor does notoriety, nor does public adulation, great art is the only criteria. And that includes great entertainment.
Oh, and the US Interstate Highway System was inspired by the German's Autobahn. And of course a national roadway system is famously an invention of the Romans.
Neither did the US.
It's the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways.
No other country invented the assembly line, the microprocessor, and the airplane.
Neither did the US.
Look up the history of the assembly line and airplanes. As to the microprocessor, it was indeed a US invention but like the other examples it was also product of an international community of research & development in microelectronics.
There's nothing wrong with nationalistic pride, but let's not imagine these achievements occured ab novo or uniquely in the US.
First off its pretty clear this is an RPV (Remotely Piloted Vehicle), so no need to worry about anyone yakking up dizzy in the cockpit. Next it wont be invisible, itll be blurry to the eye. Thats still a good thing, itll make it harder to track, shoot, and be sure of what it has been up to.
What it wont be is unobtrusive. Its gonna be noisy, have a RADAR/LIDAR signature, and be putting out a fair bit of heat. So unless it is pretty high up folks will be aware it is around, unaided have a general sense of where, and with equipment (including IR goggles) probably be able pinpoint it fairly quickly.
As for images, yeah, crazy-spinning-photo-pans will probably be able to be reconstructed into something recognizable, but thatll require some significent processing power & are as likely to miss points of interest as they are to pan over them a few times.
However there are other missions where other sensors would be useful, ones not dependant on a specific field of view. Audio mapping. Radio mapping. Radiation sensing. Specific chemical tracing (mmm... smells like high explosives by that warehouse!)
Also dropping off small payloads could solve much of the in-motion issues, and if the craft is hard to see itll also be hard to figure out exactly where it has dropped off a suitable minituraized payload. Imagine what dropping your cellphone transmitting live audio & video into the middle of an armed camp would tell you. Next imagine if it was a device built to just do that, resembles a rock, and nobody is sure just where the drone was... Could it be found? Sure, eventually, after much disruption.
The device may be being heavily hyped, but it is a clever hack nonetheless and could have some real applications. And the next time I hear the annoying musquito-on-steroids whine of a model helicopter nearby I wont be so confident if I cant see it/it cant see me.
No.
GIF was created for the cutting edge graphics of its time, the IBM Color Card, that went into the more-power-then-youll-ever-need IBM XT. It also worked well on the Commodore 64, the Apple IIc, the TI994a, the Tandy Coco, and the venerable Amiga.
There was no great for logos on the web; back then the web was downloading a cheesecake photo in GIF, from Comp$erve or Fidonet, or if you were really clever FTPing a coupla pictures from simtel20 or the like.
However everyone was well aware of the visual limitations of GIF and so JPEG was soon developed, ratified and supported. Critical to the success of JPEG was the early developent of a free, portable, library that could be trivially implemented into all sorts of products.
One of those was an obscure internet client in the spirit of Gopher that used a stripped down SGML to layout pages with links in em. That went on to spark the great browser explosion, which begat numerous competing file formats/plugins all vying to be the next big thing, all with restrictive & expensive licenses.
Of the still image formats only the late-developed PNG, which was intentionionally free & extendable, has enjoyed sucess. All of the other clever ones went away, rendered irrelevant by increasing transmission speeds, network effect standardization, and an unwillingness by everyone to pay for what nearly-good-enough could do for free.
Today? VRML is dead. SVG a stillborn promise (though if Apples Safari supports it we might see renewed interest.) JPEG2000 going nowhere fast. PS/PDF a niche application. Flash stereotyped as dumb annoying animation. PNG slowly being adopted, waiting for IE7 to really step up to bat.
But GIF? Going strong.
Why not?
Hey, it is reasonable as many of the other I-wish-Google-would foolishness (also I-wish-Apple-would-buy-with-thier-4-billion-cash-a nd-design-sense, I-think-Sony-should-ship-a-uber-whatever etc.)
Let me guess: Long US weekend = slow news day at /., gotta pump those pageviews?
The problem isn't what Comcast does, it's what they don't do: Provide humans.
Every try reaching someone with any authority at Comcast? It's impossible.
Not difficult: Impossible.
I'm beginning to suspect Comcast some sort of outsourced Vogon corporation and their offices are full of large green lumbering creatures, and anyone human is simply a hired shill, I mean, lobbyist.
Want to test? Try calling and asking a support monkey for the address of their ntp server(s). Not "nntp" (they have that in their keyword scripts), not usenet news, rather ntp as in time. It's a whose-on-first comedy routine trying to convince them that ntp != nntp and when you do, they escalate it, say someone will call you back, and nobody does. Ever.
That's a trivial geeky example but emblematic.
Every aspect of Comcast: Front line without power, whose only recourse is to ditch and run, and no second level. Nobody accountable, nobody responsable, just useless monkeys.
Heck, for two years after Comcast bought out ATT BI my net address from Comcast resolved to "maggard.ne.attbi.net". Who to call to get this updated? Nobody knew. Ever. Utter clulessness, absolute uselessness. Eventually my vanity setting went away entirely with nobody to talk to about reinstating it under comcast.net (so much for an easy VPN address!)
Email routing problems: Nobody to report to. False spam blocking: No recourse. Wonky DNS servers: Tough luck.
If anyone ever does get a phone number of a bipedal hominid at Comcast, with some degree of authority, please post it!
In the meantime the next time Comcasts license comes up in this town I'll be there recounting my stories with them, the outtages, blocked ports, the service people who never show up, the email problems, their own spam, etc. Oh, and 2 weeks ago Verizon ran fiber to my property line. At least I'll have a choice of scoundrels now - who it worse, the cable company or the phone company?
My posting began with:
so yes, national usually does mean domestic.Yeah, BillyJoeBob was annoying, as is "I'M UP HIGH SO I MUST SHOUT" but as you noted they don't make all that many calls.
However for others of us airphones are vital. I've had to participate in meetings, diagnose problems, once even fire a person, all at 30,000'.
I had to be in transit that day, and the meeting had to happen, and short of cerebral anurism I had to be actively involved in it.
The network was misrouting, I had to fix it, and yes I was the only one with the current knowledge of that site to fix it in a reasonable time-frame.
The employee had to be fired and I was her supervisor, and the one who had discovered the need for getting her out the door ASAP.
All made possible by airphones, and all worth every penny they cost.
Heck, I've been on a flight, had an emergency come up, been booked for another flight while in the air, walked over to that one's gate & taken off, solved that problem en-route, then pulled to another crisis in yet a different destination and arranged for what I'd need, all from onboard aircraft. Boston > LA > Dallas > Atlanta that day, a serious phone bill, and even at US$5/minute easily, trivially, justified.
Of course, I've also called a buddy who lived on my approach path and gotten him to wave as I descended. He lived on the coast, near an obvious landmark, so it was pretty easy. I was able to spot his jeep, him, and confirm it by telling hom on the phone where his jeep was parked and where he was standing in relation to it. I don't recall if I expensed that call or not ;p