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Comment How many people will actually use this? (Score 1) 169

How many qualifying Starbucks employees already have undergrad degrees?
How much is Starbucks playing ASU per pupil (if anything)?
What's the value (if any) of an ASU online degree (better than Phoenix, but...)?
What percentage and raw number of Starbucks employees, will choose an ASU online degree over a more traditional degree?

I'd love if the answers to those questions made this program look great, but I doubt they will, or that the cost of the program is more than its marketing value as calculated by the beancounters in Starbucks' corporate offices.

Submission + - CIA rendition jet was waiting in Europe to kidnap Snowden 5

Frosty Piss writes: As Edward Snowden made his dramatic escape to Russia a year ago, a secret US government jet previously employed in CIA 'rendition' flights on which terror suspects disappeared into 'black' imprisonment flew into Europe in a bid to spirit him back to the United States. On the evening of 24 June 2013, an unmarked Gulfstream V business jet took off from a quiet commercial airport 30 miles from a Washington DC. regional airport discreetly offers its clients 'the personal accommodations and amenities you can't find at commercial airports'. On its best-known mission, the jet flew a U.S. marshals into the UK on to collect radical cleric Abu Hamza after the United States won an extradition order against him. Only Vladimir Putin's intransigence saved Snowden from a similar travel package. The jet's activities can be followed on many flight tracking websites such as FlightAware

Comment Lower Court decision that applies NOWHERE (Score 1) 519

Y'all realize, perhaps, that this is an unpublished "tenative" decision by the lowest Court available in California and, likely, even if it were binding, would be immediately lifted on appeal?

Then go read the decision. The judge accepts bunk, such as, that one student in one class with one "underperforming" teacher, looses $1.2 MILLION in income over a lifetime (try to calculate that over 12 years of education!). It is accepted that 5% of teachers are underperforming, by being in the bottom 5%!

Oh, the Court of Appeals is going to just LOVE this one...

Comment Sunset Story: First Sun 1 to XOC (Score 5, Interesting) 166

Roger Gregory tells a good story of making the first private (non-government entity) order from Sun as COO of Project Xanadu (XOC).

In Palo Alto, Roger hears of the Sun 1 via word-of-mouth and trade journals, raises the cash, fills out the form and sends in his order. And invoice comes back, with instructions to pay via bank (wire) transfer and an estimated delivery date.

About a month after the date, Roger and others are eagerly awaiting the machine, which has not arrived.

Roger gets on the phone and calls the number for Sun in Berkeley. Bill Joy answers the phone and, after some back-and-forth, says he will need to transfer Roger to the “accounting department.”

Bill sets down the phone and it becomes clear to Roger, who can hear the background noise, that Sun likely only has *one* phone line at this point. Shortly, Vinod Khosla picks up the phone with a "Hey, Roger!"

After about three minutes of chat, Vinod explains “Oh! We were wondering where that $40,000 in our account came from!” and promises to get the machine to XOC ASAP.

The Sun 1 shows up at XOC’s offices about two weeks later, as I remember. The machine is still in Roger’s basement last I knew.

We attached it to the Internet and ran a simple webserver for a short period in mid-’99 or so. Around that time, Bill stopped by for breakfast and offered a six-figure sum to buy the machine back, which Roger declined.

Submission + - Swift detection of a bright X-ray source in M31 (facebook.com)

theNAM666 writes: "At 21:24:27 UT, the Swift Burst Alert Telescope (BAT) triggered and
located a source in M31 (NGC224) (trigger=600114). Swift slewed immediately
to the target. The BAT on-board calculated location is
RA, Dec 10.402, +41.556, which is
RA(J2000) = 00h 41m 37s
Dec(J2000) = +41d 33' 23"
with an uncertainty of 3 arcmin (radius, 90% containment, including
systematic uncertainty). This is an image trigger of 64 second duration,
with significance 6.18 sigma, which is lower than typical blind detection
significance. The BAT light curve does not show obvious structure, which
is typical for image triggers.
[...]
This luminosity is clearly super-Eddington for a ~solar mass compact object,
so either the object is of ULX class, or it is significantly beamed."

I expect the reader to interpret what we have here :) !

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