It's a question of how government contracts are awarded. They typically will have at least two things for each contract: the amount of money on the contract and the contract ceiling. The amount on the contract is the amount the company actually has in their accounts to spend. the ceiling is more like a "credit limit" which says the maximum amount of money the AF *can* ever put on the contract.
Hope that explanation helps some.
Of course, it isn't only external threats that are a concern. BIA is so incompetent or malicious that they are reported to have deleted their backup tapes.
So that's where the White House got their IT people...
As a current DOI employee, I actually wasn't even aware of this (probably because I can access the great and powerful Internet where I work). Does anyone know how many employees were even affected by this? The DOI isn't exactly the largest Department in the US government (just ~71,000 employees) so the fraction of that which deals with Indian records can't be that large.
Currently the GPS system is being upgraded to offer increased accuracy and additional features. This is known as GPS III and is scheduled to be fully operational by 2011 to 2013 (or roughly the same time as Galileo is supposed to be). According to some sources, it will enable accuracies down to 1m un-augmented.
According to the blog Read Write Web, they received an e-mail from Jason Fried, the 37Signals founder, claiming that it was basically a "feature for feature, layout for layout" copy. That's the closest I've found to them officially whining so far.
It should be noted that the agreement specifically EXCLUDES the transfer of the Novell and IBM litigation to York. The actual motion can be read on Groklaw (as usual) with more info than the LinuxWorld article.
Oddly enough, my first job was as a custodian for a local school district (not my own though). Their minimum requirement was a high school diploma and I know for a fact that they were almost always hiring because they could never get enough help. My starting pay in June 2004 was $12.14/hour (with a yearly raise to account for inflation) and they include health insurance for one person in that (doctor, hospital, optometry, dental). The work wasn't easy, but we got a 15 minute break every 2 hours, a 30 minute lunch, and ample opportunities for over-time (at 1.5x normal). And every building in the district was air conditioned.
All of that and all you needed was a high school diploma. Never even checked my grades. They were too desperate for help. It's not impossible to find a decent paying job even without doing great in high school.
There are more ways to remove the satellites from orbit than to wait for their orbit to degrade. I can't speak for other small satellite developers, but our (non-CubeSat) LEO mission has a designed end-of-life mode which will deorbit it after our mission is completed. However, I have heard that not all design teams choose to do this as it does require a little more effort to add that.
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It's a question of how government contracts are awarded. They typically will have at least two things for each contract: the amount of money on the contract and the contract ceiling. The amount on the contract is the amount the company actually has in their accounts to spend. the ceiling is more like a "credit limit" which says the maximum amount of money the AF *can* ever put on the contract. Hope that explanation helps some.
Of course, it isn't only external threats that are a concern. BIA is so incompetent or malicious that they are reported to have deleted their backup tapes.
So that's where the White House got their IT people...As a current DOI employee, I actually wasn't even aware of this (probably because I can access the great and powerful Internet where I work). Does anyone know how many employees were even affected by this? The DOI isn't exactly the largest Department in the US government (just ~71,000 employees) so the fraction of that which deals with Indian records can't be that large.
Currently the GPS system is being upgraded to offer increased accuracy and additional features. This is known as GPS III and is scheduled to be fully operational by 2011 to 2013 (or roughly the same time as Galileo is supposed to be). According to some sources, it will enable accuracies down to 1m un-augmented.
According to the blog Read Write Web, they received an e-mail from Jason Fried, the 37Signals founder, claiming that it was basically a "feature for feature, layout for layout" copy. That's the closest I've found to them officially whining so far.
It should be noted that the agreement specifically EXCLUDES the transfer of the Novell and IBM litigation to York. The actual motion can be read on Groklaw (as usual) with more info than the LinuxWorld article.
Oddly enough, my first job was as a custodian for a local school district (not my own though). Their minimum requirement was a high school diploma and I know for a fact that they were almost always hiring because they could never get enough help. My starting pay in June 2004 was $12.14/hour (with a yearly raise to account for inflation) and they include health insurance for one person in that (doctor, hospital, optometry, dental). The work wasn't easy, but we got a 15 minute break every 2 hours, a 30 minute lunch, and ample opportunities for over-time (at 1.5x normal). And every building in the district was air conditioned.
All of that and all you needed was a high school diploma. Never even checked my grades. They were too desperate for help. It's not impossible to find a decent paying job even without doing great in high school.
Just my $0.02.
There are more ways to remove the satellites from orbit than to wait for their orbit to degrade. I can't speak for other small satellite developers, but our (non-CubeSat) LEO mission has a designed end-of-life mode which will deorbit it after our mission is completed. However, I have heard that not all design teams choose to do this as it does require a little more effort to add that.