that wasn't so much meant for you as for the clueless mob of readers who might follow.

False. NOAA satellites primarily support real-time weather prediction, not climatological analysis. Weather is not climate.

False.

Pentagon Pegs New Cost Estimate For NPOESS At $11.5 Billion
"The Pentagon's latest cost estimate for the scaled-back National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS) program is $11.5 billion through 2020"

Lockheed Martin Lands $1 Billion Weather Satellite Contract
"The GOES-R system — whose total estimate life-cycle cost is $7.7 billion — will replace the GOES-N satellite series"

These are the two major NOAA weather satellite programs under current development. For comparison, check out Comcast's current market cap: $65B. No way in hell they'd undertake a risky $7-10B investment for a single cable channel requiring expertise in satellite design, construction, launch & operations that they don't have.

There are plenty of joint ventures for weather satellite projects (JASON 3 being the current most visible project underway) as well as data sharing from foreign satellite programs to the US (MetOp for example), but basically it all comes down to money. We can afford to build them. NOAA has a long history of operating these polar orbiting satellites. The program under discussion here was called NPOESS. It was a joint project with DoD and it was more or less a complete disaster - after a decade and $11B spent, no satellite was ever launched, and the ground systems have been sitting idle for so long they're due for a technology refresh. So the White House blew up the program and NOAA took the valuable pieces and it became JPSS. So the budget cuts are a sort of "punishment" for mismanagement - basically Congress wants them to get the damn birds up already.

This right here is why many geeks will remain dateless. Good job, samzenpus.

So rather than spend money on lawyers to defend their intellectual property, they'd spend money on R&D to obfuscate their engineered products. In either case, it's not "productive".

Amazon will eventually drop the price to $99 or less, and at that price point buyers will be willing to accept a cheaper, ad-subsidized device.

I've worn out watching DVR'd reruns of ST:TNG and I've been annoyed that DS9 hasn't been on streaming or syndicated re-air or anything other than a DVD somewhere. I'm looking forward to seeing that series again.

I think you're wrong, and more importantly, Facebook thinks you're wrong. Read between the lines on last week's Facebook SIM story. They want users to be interacting with Facebook everywhere they go, which includes going to Home Depot, eating at restaurants, buying cars, etc. That's what location services do for Facebook. Mobile growth is the future of Facebook, and they're already halfway there.

Note that I'm not attaching any value judgments to this strategy or its intended outcome for society. I'm just making business observations.

Maybe this is why black currants are outlawed in parts of the US :)

and if this machine needs to connect to another machine beyond its LAN, how would you address it?

Agreed. I speculate that it somehow made the game either too easy or too difficult, at least with the style of level design they are using.

Did you translate this post into English with Google Translate?

I wish I had known about this book three years ago. Built that system, went through four releases, and moved on. God bless whoever has to maintain it now. But my biggest performance issues were from underdocumented 3rd party vendor APIs - black box JARs that did whatever the hell they wanted to, and a bunch of headscratching from the vendor when the damn things locked up.

"They" are working very hard to assassinate Assange's character... which might be good enough in this day and age.