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Comment All or Nothing? (Score 1) 190

Since when is everybody entitled to a 4 lane highway to your front door? Yes, most everybody and their dog wants fast, faster, fastest internet, the provider has to pay the bill according to customer receipts and good standing with the banks to get money for more gear and laying cable. Once upon a time, telephone systems used party lines to get their customers wired, and they gradually migrated up to individual POTS as the systems and business environment improved. To have the government wave a legal wand proclaiming all or nothing most often results in nothing. Case in point -- a school that wanted to issue Tablet Computers for it's students, but DOE shot them down because they weren't usable by the blind. So much for reasonable accommodation -- why can't they still use what they were using before the tablets. Be very careful when demanding government solutions to market problems.

Comment Re:B-2 Spirit unit price - $3b? Said who? (Score 4, Interesting) 403

By comparison, a unit cost for a Boeing 747-8 is around $330 Million, vs the around $1,000 Million for a full production run B-2. Just remember the 747 cost does not include the R&D costs of the decade it took to develop the design and build the factory, etc, whereas the full R&D cost is part of the B-2 cost. If you strip out the development costs, a B-2 airframe runs around $600 M, roughly twice the 747 costs for an aircraft with much, much more, very specialized capability. Overall, not a bad price for what it can do - haul 20+ tons of weapons 8,000+ miles unrefuled, invisibly, and hit a 3 foot circle. Many of them.

Comment Training and Visualization (Score 5, Interesting) 104

As a retired weather guy with over 25 years working with and training weathermen, this is one of the best tools I've seen. Applause!

Understanding fluid flow and visualizing it is not easy, but it crucial to meteorology because that dynamic drives and reveals the mechanisms that create the weather systems we track, such as fronts, storms, and so on. Given the tools seen are usually something like this (from ADDS) or this (from CoolWx), the WindMap does a much more intuitive job of showing the strength and patterns in merging flow.

So, well done! The only improvement I can think of for better use operationally would be an hourly looper of, say, the past six hours with a 3-4 second pause for each hour. This would let you track specific features as the day goes on.

Submission + - How to Undelete Camera Phone Images? (abc24.com)

AtomicSnarl writes: "What tools are out there to recover deleted camera phone and other similar video or imagery? Consider this case, for example, where a Memphis News photographer had his images deleted by police, but was not charged or otherwise detained. I know Hard Drive file undelete is a simple process — how do you do it with memory cards and phone camera? Lawsuits are much more fun with recovered evidence!"
NASA

Submission + - NASA's 16 top tech challenges for the next 5 years (networkworld.com)

coondoggie writes: "Drastically reduce the costs of safely and reliably getting into space; more effectively mitigate the impact of space radiation on humans; develop more robust mobile robotics and build a new generation of space telescopes to more effectively study space are just a few of the 16 high-priority technologies NASA should be working on in the next five years. The high-priority technology directions come from a NASA-commissioned National Research Council space technology roadmap report entitled "NASA Space Technology Roadmaps and Priorities: Restoring NASA's Technological Edge and Paving the Way for a New Era in Space," issued today"
Your Rights Online

Submission + - 'No Immediate Plans' to Delete Megaupload Data (datacenterknowledge.com)

1sockchuck writes: Carpathia Hosting said today that it has “no immediate plans” to delete data stored on servers operated by Megaupload, and will provide advance notice before any deletions take place. The company, which hosted Megaupload's servers, is directing inquirers to MegaRetrieval.com, where they can connect with the Electronic Frontier Foundation to investigate their options.
Games

Submission + - Steam proves we don't own the games we buy (geek.com) 1

An anonymous reader writes: A recent decision to ban a user account has reminded us all we don’t technically own the games bought through the service. If your account is banned, you can’t login and play your games. All that money you spent on tens, or even hundreds of titles doesn’t count for anything.

The example that proves this is the story of a Russian gamer who goes by the name of gimperial. He has a Steam account with over 250 games stored on it that he paid for legitimately, spending over $1,500 purchasing them. However, Steam decided to ban his account for a terms of service violation. The problem is, they wouldn’t tell him what rule had been broken, and Steam’s support service refused to respond to his tickets after initially confirming the ban.

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