There a many corporate-sponsored contests like this photography, mostly geared at amateurs. Back in the 80s I learned to look at the terms carefully, and if anywhere in them was a clause giving up rights to the photographs entered to the contest-holder, to run far away. Prestigious contests always make it clear that all rights remain with the photographer, although they may legitimately request a time-limited right to display entries for promotional purposes only, not for resale ever.

Stock agencies used to use these contests to pick up vast swaths of decent, if unremarkable, photographs for almost nothing, and with no pesky trouble like having to keep track of who took the photo for credit and payment. I imagine now with Flickr and the flood of digital images, they don't really have work even that hard.

All this remains true for programming contests, and really any contest where the creative work of an individual is made available to another party.

Yes but what you linked isn't ready for prime time yet. Good specs to be shooting for, though.

How about 50kW?

The article starts from a false assumption: that the postal service must be profitable, or at least break even.

Framing the issue this way has nothing to do with what the USPS should or should not carry, or how much they should charge.

Why is that so for the postal service but not for the military, department of transportation, or most any other government agency that provides a service? Universal free mail delivery is something that the citizens of the US want -- or at least did at one time. As a government service, it's something taxpayers agree to pay for.

Now clearly the two authors of this article, management consultants, have a different view of that need. Perhaps they are ideologically inclined to expect that government services should break even or better, in which case, they ought to take on a real challenge and explain to the Pentagon how they can "save" the armed forces. Or perhaps they have a financial interest in private delivery services like FedEX and UPS, who knows? It's clear from early in the article, "Should the federal government continue to compete against the private sector?" that the authors have a sense that somehow there's money to made for UPS, FedEx, and other private delivery services if the postal service was forced to compete on the same level as them. I'm sure they wouldn't advocate for reforming USPS if they thought it would take money away from the private sector.

In any case, before people go trying to reform USPS, let's first decide if we want to continue to support the current expectation of free (for the recipient) door-to-door mail service for everyone in the country everywhere. If citizens clearly want that, then budget (and tax) for it, and shut up about billion dollar "losses" that pale compared to the "losses" racked up by other services we expect as a modern nation. On the other hand, if the country decides that hey, we don't need to deliver everywhere any more, then go ahead, revamp the postal service to be just another profit-motivated competitor.

You mean toeing the line.

If I were SpaceX founder Elon Musk, I'd be hopping mad right now. After developing Falcon9 and Dragon on the basis of a truly competitive commercial space program, the porkbarrel senators for aerospace/defense contractor states wrote a new NASA budget to basically hand money over to Boeing and the rest of the usual cast of trough-feeders to continue but with changes and more delays the Ares/Orion program. This craft will see about as much reality as the Orion did before Boeing is behind schedule and over budget and requests yet more money.

The whole goal is to crowd out the smaller guys while maintaining the jobs programs in states like Washington, Utah, and Florida.

Did anyone notice that they don't say where they are going in this capsule? Where are the senators who called Obama's proposed budget a mission to nowhere? This new NASA program doesn't have a destination, either, but at least the dollars keep flowing to the same interests.

I haven't looked at the guts of any of Apple's NS* classes, but I don't doubt there's some places where it's a mess -- it's ancient code, those, where the Android code is new. But just because the feature is part of the SpringBoard application doesn't mean it's badly coded. What classes in the NS SDK specifically?

You're right about one thing: You've reminded once again that I made the right choice in quitting the industry after holding a variety of lucrative sysadmin, software development, IT, and technical lead positions from 1983 to 2009. Too many projects where getting it done mattered more than getting it right, ending up in the software equivalent of a Deepwater Horizon rig explosion. I'm so glad to be done with that.