The electronics package is 200 mill put it in another plane. So saying its a total loss is bs. The plane is basicly a kc-135 they have plenty of spares including whole wings.

Oh, and ya, we get all kinds of support from OUR government like this:

Quite frankly, our government want's it to be this way. We can not buck this trend, as so much of our country's debt is owned by China, there is no longer any recourse available. 30 years ago their would be tariff's to make this bs more equal between countries, not anymore.

One of my customers provides a chip used several of apple's products as well as other phones and products. They were a spin off of TI engineers and products that TI did not want anymore. They designed the chip had the chip manufactured overseas and tested them here.

We built 3 testers for them to final test and package the chips, which we build in less than 3 months the first one. Then we not only built it but ran the production on that machine for 6 months 24 hours a day seven days a week. While we built two additional machines. There are only two of us in our company. I think Americans can step up, in fact I know they can.

After our customer was firmly entrenched with apple due to our support, they needed to start shipping millions of chips per month. They also had a new management team, who did not care if we helped get them off the ground, and did not even let us bid on the equipment and they intended to do the testing in Korea due to being closer to the final product. They also said the new vendor could build the machines for 1/3 the price. I told them bull shit. I have spend quite a bit of time in asia and while it could be made cheaper if they would be buying in larger volume something was wrong with what they were quoted.

Well after about a year we found out it cost just as much for each machine as we had been quoting, but they were buying 20 of them at a time. We would have loved and been able to hire at least 10 people if we had been able to compete. Then we found out not only were they building the machines, they were running the machines and getting paid per part for the testing. Wow, we could have had at least 20 more jobs there, and I would have matched the Korean price too.

What It real truth is, that companies like Apple, and my customer supplying parts to apple like, is they don't have to directly supervise people. It is so much easier for them just to be a engineering and marketing company and not worry at all about any "Production" at all. They feel that they are supporting "Talented Engineers" here.

The other problem is for companies like our small company cant compete with Asian companies as they have a better infrastructure for expansion. Here we have venture capitalist who are looking for the quick buck. Just try and go out and get say 10 million to expand your operation even if you have a contract in your hand for 20 million per year. Just the blood suckers who want it all back within two years AND own half your company will be interested. Pretty darn sad it really is that way.

The frickin laser beam..

Just kidding, really a great piece of work.

My question is:
Did you mix the solid fuel yourself or was that made for you.

Read today apple has 23% of the desktop market. Looks like Microsoft playing right into their hands.

I been watching the decent on a app on my phone, currently it shows it a altitude of 135 km. I was watching it since Friday when it was at 180 km. Was going to try and watch if when it hits 100 to 120 and see how fast it decelerated. Guess its not a real time app. (Satellite Tracker 1.5) I tried to see it last night when it was passing within view between 8:17 and 8:24 pm. But alas was not able to see it.

I used to stop at Radio Shack at least 3 times a week for parts. But in large metroplex's they got their lunch ate by people who were just smarter. Here in Dallas / Fort-worth there are a few places with over 10,000 sqft of parts ( http://www.tannerelectronics.com/ ), with prices that are right. Radio shack made probably 1/3 their money selling antenna's and poles for broadcast tv's. 1/3 from DYI parts, and the balance from selling remote control toys at Christmas. Tanner has no less than 8 customers in it any time I am in there.

So how can they turn this to reclaim some of their old customers who are actually aware of them, and gain the new younger generation who doesn't?

1. Carry a few of the kits, blinking led's, crystal radio's, maybe a programmable remote control for TV's? For the kids who might DYI?
        or crazy grandpa who would like to give a kid a gift that will make them think for themselves.

2. In some area's focus on selling the HDTV antenna's, and pitch it as get off the 50$ a month cable or satellite bill?

3. Christmas was always big with remote control vehicles, maybe a few more robotic style toys (programmable from pc)?

4. Increase digital selection, maybe since ttl is coming in smaller packages, offer those, and some soic to dil adapters.

5. Bring back some wire wrap, sockets, better selection of transistors, more resistors values etc. (Still small space usage)

6. Higher quality home stereo and surround sound systems (works in every market) and advertise this!

7.Become the goto for car stereo equipment with good brands, and speakers.

8. Make a online sales course for the fricking sales staff to watch while their waiting around for somebody to come in.

9. Better selection of power supplies, maybe some test equipment would be nice, (good meters, pc based digital scope or something!)

10. Become the king of batteries for cell phones probably a good idea, and carry a larger variety of cell phone accessories.

This will not work in every store. They are going to have to figure this out by location.

If you really need two, I have some. want much and if it would like them pm me. I have them on Craigslist in Dallas. I would rather help a fellow slashdotter. They were always calibrated, but the cal sticker ran out last year. Just pm me.

I also wanted to mention, its cheaper to colo than to get a fixed ip from Verizon.

We have Verizon business and they block it. Fortunately we host our own server in a colo, but still have to use a off port to access it.

You can have your own server hosted almost anywhere for 50$ a month. Second, use this to be able to do both port 25 (which is blocked) and reroute port 26 to port 25 in your ip chains pre-route rules. Then set your people in the office to use port 26 instead of 25. (I am using APF) you did say linux server right?

# place your custom routing rules below
$IPT -t mangle -A PREROUTING -p tcp --sport 443 -j TOS --set-tos 8
$IPT -t nat -I PREROUTING -p tcp --dport 26 \-j REDIRECT --to-port 25

Reading the comments where it does not get ummm erased is some what more informative at:
http://www.investorvillage.com/smbd.asp?mb=1911&clear=1&pt=m

Comments there are not scrutinized as much and therefore more interesting.

I was recently working in Korea for a few weeks, staying south of Seoul, in Kumi. In the hotel I was staying at I did a speed test, and was really shocked, on a wired connection at the hotel I got the following speeds 82.67 down and 18.87 up on my laptop. Also received speeds like that everywhere there. So doing a bit of investigation, I could see they were using wireless to back haul to a mountain point. I dont know what frequency they were using, it would not show up in anything I had to scan with.