And that is called piercing the corporate vail.

I am sorry to hear that in your city they were not as interested in learning about the technologies in so much as buying it.

I am 21, so I am much younger than you, I got into HAM radio because of a project (http://nearspace.0x58.com) I did at school, having a license helped communicate between the teams while on the ground looking for the device, and helped us keep track of the APRS as it was being sent from the balloon.

HAM radio has been really interesting, I have met really great people at various different companies, and recently a hacker space (http://heatsynclabs.org/) has been starting up in Phoenix and there were quite a few HAM radio people there! You just need to find the group that is still willing to learn and find new innovative projects to work on.

For $15 to take the test, and then $200 or so for a decent radio you can have a hobby that is a blast. I regularly talk to people on radio nets (basically where a group of people get together at a desired time, and all talk about random subjects).

I am 21, and I am considered one of the young ones, even so it is interesting to see how much HAM radio in general is used in various situations to get information from one location to another quickly. HAM radio groups also tend to be available at all kinds of different events to help manage the crowd, do reporting of incidents. Just recently there was a biking event and we were present along the course to give status updates, get emergency help all by using our radio's.

Generally the HAM radio guys are older, and they can talk for hours on end, and some of it is boring, but I have met many people that have skill sets that I only wish I could have, I have talked to people in the industry (Moto, Intel, Microchip, and others) and it has been awesome to get contacts or leads for new projects and ideas as well as possible jobs coming out of college.

I was just pointing out the differences between the two educational systems, and while I agree that a chef does not need more than the US math, the fact that it was required was something I wanted point out as interesting.

I was just comparing and contrasting the two and providing examples as to how the two differ, not using it as an excuse. Most if not all of the math I know and use I have taught myself, mainly because I have difficulty understanding math like most other students and I had to learn it my own way for it to stick.

I actually went to two different high schools. I switched the summer before my Junior year in school. This was because the high school I had been attending was having major issues with minorities fighting (the african americans and hispanics were bringing weapons to school), we had several knife stabbings at the school, and it caused many issues in general because of the way the school was run and where it was going. My dad figured it was easier to move, both closer to work, and into a new town than to have to worry about his kids going to a high school where fights were the daily norm and where no attention was being given to the rampant issues with drug use, alcohol abuse and fighting.

The second high school I went to was a higher class, more expensive town, and while the education there was generally better in terms of people wanting to be there it was not that much better. There were different levels of classes offered, but in those classes they were still catered to the lowest common denominator. This was a mostly chinese and white school compared to my previous school. The issue at hand was that the school and the school board were more willing to put money into sports and the sports programs and buying new football fields and tracks rather than improving the class rooms, providing new books, new computers and new equipment.

The first school was 1500 students in size, the second one was 1200 students in size, small? Not really. Not as large as some of the bigger US public high schools.

I myself have gone through the US school system starting at grade 7 (lived in Switzerland and The Netherlands before then), I am currently in uni for a software engineering degree. While I have read only part of the article (the blog post) I wanted to post my experience compared to that of my cousin who went through school in The Netherlands.

Math at the schools I went to was catered to the lowest common denominator, the slowest person in the class, the person who would just not get it got the most attention and the rest of the class was stuck at that level until that person tagged along and finally got moving. Whereas in Europe and other places they place those students in various levels of math dependent on their skill level so that those that don't need the extra time are able to get to the higher level maths faster. This creates a gap between the math that is considered required at age 18 in the US and The Netherlands. My cousin was going for a degree in hotel management and food preparation (chef). He at the age of 18 had a better understanding of math, and had more knowledge of high level math (Linear Algebra, Calculus and others) than I did when I graduated High School, and the classes he were in were considered the slower less demanding classes since it was not as much of a requirement for the degree he was going to be pursuing.

This is the same with a lot of the classes though, history, english, and science classes. Especially for English, you don't get to think for yourself anymore, you have to follow exactly what the teacher told you. If the teacher says this is important for this reason, and you attempt to argue it differently in a paper you fail, everyone coming out of high school has been passed through a cookie cutter, there is no innovation left, there is no real thinking for oneself anymore.

It is sad, and the state the US educational system is currently in will not allow it to compete in the global market, it will not allow it to be innovate and provide new ideas, but what it will provide is people who are like sheep and are more than willing to follow the crowd and just do it because everyone does. These people will be easy to govern and control since they won't ask questions and least of all will they rebel and fight for their beliefs. In other words, the US education system as it currently stands is making zombies.

When someone calls and they record the phone call Google Voice will automatically say the phone call is being recorded, see the faq: http://www.google.com/support/voice/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=115037

At night all balloons are required to have a flashing light that is visible for up to 2 or 5 miles.

So yes, at night as well.

Here you go, some random pictures that I find the most amazing. They are full quality, hence the long download times.

http://nearspace.0x58.com/launches/CONNERY-2/pictures/Payload_Camera/DSC01327.JPG
http://nearspace.0x58.com/launches/CONNERY-2/pictures/Payload_Camera/DSC01345.JPG
http://nearspace.0x58.com/launches/CONNERY-2/pictures/Payload_Camera/DSC01349.JPG
http://nearspace.0x58.com/launches/CONNERY-2/pictures/Payload_Camera/DSC01421.JPG
http://nearspace.0x58.com/launches/CONNERY-2/pictures/Payload_Camera/DSC01441.JPG
http://nearspace.0x58.com/launches/CONNERY-2/pictures/Payload_Camera/DSC01463.JPG
http://nearspace.0x58.com/launches/CONNERY-2/pictures/Payload_Camera/DSC01491.JPG
http://nearspace.0x58.com/launches/CONNERY-2/pictures/Payload_Camera/DSC01592.JPG
http://nearspace.0x58.com/launches/CONNERY-2/pictures/Payload_Camera/DSC01658.JPG

The winds even at really high altitudes can be very unstable. The flight path for our first balloon was absolutely amazing, the second balloon was launched from the same location and ended up on the other side of Phoenix.

Speaking from personal experience with the near space launches I have completed with a team (http://nearspace.0x58.com) located in Arizona, I hope they don't make the mistake of putting the GPS on the outside of the box. During our second balloon launch we launched closer to night so that we could attempt to get photo's of the sun setting (and boy did we succeed: http://nearspace.0x58.com/launches/CONNERY-2/pictures/Payload_Camera/).

However what we had not counted on was the fact that the temperature would drop so low that the GPS would literally freeze and stop responding and completely shut off, until it got low enough, and warm enough again to turn on. We thought we had lost our package payload.

Other than that, since the balloons are going to follow whatever winds they can find, how are they going to make sure that the area they want to service has a balloon above it at all times? What if the wind is going in the wrong direction? As for recovering the devices, will they be water proof? What if it lands in a lake, or body of water? What about high up on the mountain side somewhere?

Definitely interesting and something to watch in the near future, if this is cheaper than launching a satellite and can be done in a sustainable method and still provide adequate phone service or other services using near space technology!

As I am not familiar with African law, just with FAA flight regulations here in the United States.

Having been on a near space team (http://nearspace.0x58.com), and having launched two near space balloons, 92,999 ft, and 83,000 ft I can tell you that they pose no problems for jet liners. The balloons are big enough to be spotted by any pilot worth his salt, and they only stick around the altitude where jets fly in the first place for just a minute or so because they ascend so fast.

Also, depending on the weight in the United States you have to file a NOTAM (Notice to Airmen) which gets distributed to all of the flight control towers, air traffic controllers and will also be distributed to pilots flying in the area you are planning on launching. Anything under 6 pounds you don't have to notify, but it is generally nice to do so as a courtesy. 12 pounds is the limit for amateur near space balloon launches. I have no experience with bigger near space payloads.

Or you can replace every disk in your RAIDZ set so that you begin with 5 disks and end with 5 disks. You can also extend your zpool, but in that case you start with 5 disks and end up with 5+n disks.

I was just pointing out that on a RAIDZ it is very simple to go from smaller disks to bigger disks by allowing ZFS to do what it does best.

Okay, first and foremost it is well known that if you are running a database engine on top of ZFS you have to tune it to that specific database engine. This is well documented, and well described in the ZFS manuals, including steps to be taken to resolve these issues.

As for the performance degradation when the disks are close to full are being worked on, while this can cause issues (especially if you have a lot of snapshots) any IT worth their salt would not have let the disk get that close to full that it causes issues (I've seen this error once on my production servers, when the disk was at 95% capacity, I was brought in as a contractor). Replacing and upgrading disk capacity is as simple as pulling one drive from the RAID Z, placing a new one in, and letting it resilver, then pull the next one, until you have pulled all of them, after which you will get the full space the new disks can provide, so going from 1 TB drives to 1.5 TB drives will at the end of replacing all of them (so that they are now all 1.5 TB or bigger) give you the extra space.

As for 1, ZFS is extremely simple to use. gvinum from FreeBSD, or Linux's LVM are complicated, unnecessarily so, and 2, ZFS has so far proven far more reliable. It has been extremely fast, and has already saved a whole lot of trouble when a disk started failing by giving us a warning that ZFS reads were failing and letting us replace the disk before disaster strikes. Since we started using it in the last year we have had not yet had to resort to finding the backup tapes for a server because a disk went bad in Linux's LVM and bad data was written to other disks and files were lost.

I don't believe the issue is that ZFS is not ready yet, I don't think that Apple has had the time to make sure that everything fits in with their way everything has to work, certain features that HFS+ can offer are not possible on ZFS yet. Certain tools are relying on very specific HFS+ mechanics and workings (Time machine for example) which would complicate work to replicate that on ZFS.

While I was looking forward to seeing ZFS in Mac OS X, I doubted that it would be anytime soon, especially since it is a large undertaking making sure that the various parts of the system are all tuned for ZFS, this includes the way the OS caches, the amount of memory it can use for ZFS arc cache, and things along those lines. FreeBSD has slowly been working through those exact issues.