Now show this with the truck moving vertically 6-10 feet every few seconds, with 15-30 knot winds that change 10-30 degrees every minute, and hundreds/thousands of pounds of sea spray hitting the side of the helo. Was in a bird that landed in these conditions. Another time, we aborted in worse conditions and had to find a bigger deck.

So what exactly does the X-47B have to do with Afghanistan? After all these years of conflict, CNN still does not understand the basics of the US Military.

My family ran small rural stations for many years. You have no idea what you are talking about. It is a damn hard market, but we survived and were able to feel very good about the value we provided to the community and the close, very, very close relationships we had. If an NPR station can't make it in the free market, it deserves to die. If they can adapt, all the more power to them. The fact that they can't make it expressly defines the "quality" of the programming. This guy is only whining for a public sector jobs program.

You are way low. Figure more like $70-90 per hour for labor (fully loaded) by time you add in the normal government overhead for contracting. If, assuming the native agency that manages the connectivity to the office agrees, you need to budget for a firewall. And a good 40 hours of security configuration and documentation (something in govt called "C&A") at $100+ an hour. Then there are quarterly scans, and re-certification of the security documents (at least every two years). Most the local agencies won't be interested in allowing anonymous users on their network, even if it is in a firewall zone, or risk their bandwidth being consumed by some free loader, so most of these installs will require dedicated connectivity. And then figure O&M. Who is going to fix this when the hardware breaks, is unplugged, or turned off? Either the locals or your contractors who will need to travel? Who patching the firewalls, the routers? Where is the funding for hardware replacement in 3-5 years?

Not only is this a waste and doesn't make sense, but $15m won't be enough. There isn't a govt network admin who will want this traffic on their network and there isn't a govt security group that will allow it. That means each of these will be a new ISP connection. So does GSA get to do this, or the IT group who in the building at the time?

The "point" forecasts on the National Weather Service website are created by a robot off digital - gridded - data. Here A little clunky at times, but there are forecasts for either 5x5km or 2.5x-2.5km grids across the US, more than a million forecast areas updated anywhere from hourly to a few times a day. The human forecasters create the gridded data, so they focus on the data, not the words.

This week I needed to get a package to a friend from one coast to the other in two days with the delivery end being a pretty remote location in the western US. Experience in the past had suggested USPS would say two days, but it would really take three to four. Last year, their "tracking" system showed the package had been dropped off and offered no updates until it was delivered... and that wasn't updated for several hours after delivery.

This year, Fedex was really two days and tracking was updated at least every 8 hours right down to it was out on the truck for local delivery.

I fully expect any "reform" of USPS will be nothing more than restrictions on the private sector who completes against it.

Rarely considered is the relationship between the armed Iraqi civilians and the photogs. Did the photogs embed themselves into an insurgent unit moving into position, or did these armed men decide to follow the photogs towards the sound of gun fire just for fun? IMHO, I think the photogs had good sources in the insurgency that allowed them to get close the action in order to get good photos and were caught in the middle, IMHO, a risk of the job.

Nothing at all scientific about it, just observations from my backyard in the mid-Atlantic region of the US, while I haven't seen a honey bee since mid-last summer, the native bumble and carpenter bees are all over the place, with my strawberries, raspberries and apple trees having no pollination problems this spring. While I had noticed this, it hadn't registered until I was talking to a naturalist this weekend at a local park who had also noticed and is guessing the collapse of the European honey bees had allowed the natives to expand.

Steam Locomotive