These termination fees don't apply just to the whole contract. If you add a family member in for the $9.99/mo, they get their own phone number (duh), which is effectively another contract. If that family member leaves before the end of the contract, they own the remaining balance on the termination fee. The primary holder on the account can also be hit for the remaining balance of the termination fee if they cancel early too.

So, if you subscribe your wife and/or girlfriend on to the plan 18 months into a 24 month plan, they charge you $9.99 a month. I don't remember if they charge a fee to set up the phone, but the cynical side of me says that they probably do. If your significant other dumps you in the 23rd month of the contract, they can prorate the termination fee any way they want. They may take their $175 prorated to remove (23-18=) 5 months and you owe the rest. Then, when that is done making you mad and you decide to leave a month early, they'll hit your side of the contract with the prorated termination fee too.

Oh. Did I forget to mention this: when your significant other left you in month 23 and you canceled her phone, you automatically signed yourself up for a different plan. So, if you go to leave at the end of month 24, they find a way to prorate the termination fee because you are leaving the new plan early.

This is insane, you say? Then go to a pay-as-you-go plan where the profits are really juicy. Go ahead. I dare you.

I'm just glad none of these fuzzballs got bailout money. Or at least I'm hoping they didn't.

There is a museum in Dayton, OH which is just about Dayton's only attraction. This is the National Museum of the United States Air Force. Some of their exhibits include:

• Rockets from satellites with cameras that used to drop their film back to Earth once fully exposed.
• The new (and now discontinued) F-22 Raptor
• A full-size B-2 bomber (engineering model with no engines, but everything else)
• Many planes formerly known as "Air Force One"
• Lots of experimental aircraft, including those from the famous Skunkworks project
• Frames from real atomic bombs

Admittedly, this may not be as electronics or computer nerd like we all assume you are, but if you are into any level of mechanical engineering or have been a pilot at any level, then you will surely appreciate this place, even if you only visit it once in your lifetime.

There are no parking or admission fees and they're open just about every day of the year, except for three major holidays.

We use ZenOSS exclusively at work and have enjoyed every minute of it. Pro's include:

• 2D map with status of all nodes or submaps, organized by network
• Application monitoring, with more advanced maps available for purchase (Oracle, JBoss, Cisco) for those things you already paid a lot of money for
• Performance monitoring via SNMP or other data sources using RRDtool internally which includes graphs linked to each other during zoom in/out or panning
• Nagios plugins already do some of the heavy lifting
• Built-in support for watching Windows servers (any metric accessible via WMI)
• Access control using at least LDAP and Active Directory
• Secondary data collectors for those networks which are too big for just one central source
• Highly customizable through Python
• It has so, so much more than pathetic commercial solutions like OpenView

Cons:

• You have to keep your eye on the back end database
• It still takes a long, long time to tune it to remove noise events
• If you don't know Python, it can be tough in a few places
• Proper support is not cheap

Everybody keeps neglecting his use of derms to deliver drugs. Yet, the first "patch" I saw widely in use was the anti-smoking patches in the mid-90's. I'd bet he didn't invent them, but he did envision they would be widely used. Derms even got mentioned in a recent computer-animated flick where a lady peels her sleeve up and shows us about 15 "coffee derms."

For those of you not using Firefox and NoScript, InfoWorld's website pops an error with Firefox that claims InfoWorld would like to run Javascript marked as UNSAFE. That is, it will have access to all windows and panes, which is plain evil. Tread carefully please, especially if you are using Internet Explorer. This, of course, assumes that you will RTFA.

Opticks is developed in the U.S. and is also open source, uses the QT library and C++ and is certified for use under Windows and Solaris. It could be compiled for Linux and/or OSX by anyone determined enough to get it compiled. When I last examined the source code, it's build system was focused around Visual C++.

Opticks lists compatibility for reading SAR data and it would be interesting to see what it took to read from the mentioned sensors. It is fully capable of dealing with multiple image or motion typed analysis techniques and formats.

Opticks is available at https://opticks.ballforge.net/ and is released under the LGPL 2.1.