I wish my grandfather was still alive to see Voyager 1 still in operation. He worked on the batteries and electrical system on the Voyager probes, spending most of his adult life working at JPL. He would be thrilled to know that they were both still operating, exploring, and sending data back to earth. Impressive!

...employers will just ask potential employees to accept their HR staff's friend request, as the article yesterday stated. But one could easily get around that by making sure the HR staff is in a Facebook list that has no access to a user's wall/timeline and other info. Still, seems like the employer wouldn't like that and they would find some way to get the employee to let HR in. :(

A google account is not private, whereas an AppleID is. If you have to create a google account for an android phone, that means you have to have an account with some of your information made public [eg: your name]. An AppleID is private - it is used solely for billing purposes though you can expand it to include iCloud [a private-that-can-be-public service], and it can also be used for GameCenter, a public service. But by default an AppleID is private and no online profile of you is made, unlike what happens when you create a google account.

Actually, that is/was one of the nice things about Facebook - it didn't allow the horrible customizations to one's profile like MySpace did. But it *did* used to offer more customizations [none of them as bad as MySpace]. They have removed most of the ability to make profiles look non-standard, much to the frustration of some users [but not me!]. While their new ticker is not good, I do think that the FB devs are very aware that they don't want FB profiles to look as bad as MySpace ones have.

There are lots of GPL apps on the AppStore - the most well known is the Wordpress app. If source code is available on the developer's site, than things are good to go. Anyone can download, for free, the iPhone SDK. It costs nothing to download/install the SDK. It only costs $99/year if one wants to publish an app into the AppStore or run it on a physical iPhone rather than the software-based iPhone simulator.

The developers are doing the right thing, IMO. /vjl/

Airbust QA sucks, sadly. They differ highly with how Boeing does things; they rely on computers *way* too much, which is why I will never fly on an Airbus a/c. The pilot is not given #1 priority in the cockpit.

Boeing a/c do have a lot of computer controls, but they can all be easily overwritten by the CO/FO flying the a/c. Not quite as easy on an Airbust. When their A320 debuted at the French airshow, the computer got very confused at take off and simply refused to allow the pilot to pull up more than 20-30 feet off the ground, causing the a/c to crash into the forest at the end of the runway.

Technology is good when it is used to supplement human experience and knowledge. It is not meant to replace it.

/vjl/