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

This isn't surprising at all and was completely predictable. Even during Apollo, post modern liberalism has always been lukewarm-cold towards space exploration, a fact I always found interesting since many NASA supporters at the grass root level are Democrats. The whole global warming thing has pushed not only the liberals against NASA, but brought along the environmental movement as well. "How can we afford to rape another world when we can't take care of..." and "How can we afford to provide jobs to highly paid engineers when there are poor..."

That NASA screwed up the engineering of some of new hardware didn't help. That NASA could only look at and award to the normal fat-cat defense contractors didn't help either.

The combination of the two and NASA's own problems are all quite deadly when it comes to this administration.

Amazingly hope for American humans in space will now rely on Republicans and the US private sector, assuming we just don't try to contract it out to other countries (and lose yet another technology base).

Just as amazing is a lack of understanding by the liberals and environmentalists that the destruction of human space flight dooms the long term prospects for robotic exploration; which is a key tool to understanding the environment and natural resources on Earth. When the over all size of NASA is reduced, it's ability to innovate across programs is gone and the technology stales over time.

Finally, you could assume that even the environmentalists could start to see the only viable long term solution to maintaining Earth's ecosystem is expansion to other worlds, but clearly they don't have that kind of vision.

If AGW was proven wrong tomorrow, wouldn't make a hill of beans difference. The Pols have discovered AGW is great cover for stealing hundreds of billions of dollars and gaining massive amounts of control. Modern industrialists will make millions/billions off this.

Recently heard someone describe Gore as a industrialist. This struck me odd, but come to think about it, he is little different then the robber baron industrialists of the 19th century. He is positioned to make tens of millions off the backs of the poor and middle class.

Besides, AGW is everywhere. My kid's elementary text books, the Disney Channel, the movies... everywhere. It will take a decade to remove all this stuff and a generation to de-learn it.