Forget about whether or not this is or isn't spying. Even if you take their claims at face value, this balloon would represent airspace incursion by an out-of-control unmanned aircraft. And airspace incursions are something the US military should handle, efficiently and promptly, as a matter of routine. This shouldn't be a giant diplomatic incident or require some great policy analysis to decide to take it down. The message should be plain and simple such as:

NORAD almost certainly knew about this balloon heading towards our airspace probably 5 days ago (late Monday or early Tuesday) when it was still many hundreds of miles away from the west coast, which means that authorization to shoot it down would have been requested at virtually the same time. There should have been plenty of time (hours) to take care of this safely and efficiently before it actually entered US territory, but my guess is that the authorization to shoot it down didn't come until much too late... possibly as late as Wednesday, after it had already crossed into inhabited US territory. Hence the reluctance to shoot it down, and hence the uproar.

One of the best parts about the FCC Broadband Map in my opinion was the idea that it was essentially "crowd-sourced" in that users could file challenges to the data and fix mistakes. But I was surprised to discover recently that there are huge limitations on the challenge process.

A month ago, I was interested in purchasing a property and one of my criteria was having fiber service available. The FCC Broadband Map showed fiber being available there, but before placing an offer, I called the broadband provider to confirm. The representative on the phone apologized and said that no service was available at that address, nor did the system show it becoming available soon. I mentioned that the info at the FCC Broadband Map was incorrect for this address and needed to be corrected, but she did not know what to do about that, but she would "make a note about it" and pass it along. I happened to check the map again about 30 days later, but it was still listed incorrectly. I decided to be helpful and file a challenge myself directly via the FCC website.

Unfortunately, before clicking on "submit" you are required to certify that you are either a current resident at the address or are the legal owner/manager of the property. No one else is permitted to file a challenge, based on the current website language. That's a significant hindrance in this case, because the current owner of the property obviously has no incentive to update the map to make the property look worse to prospective buyers, and obviously the provider here can't be bothered to fix it either. If interested 3rd parties are not allowed to file challenges on behalf of others when they have evidence, then the entire challenge process is sadly flawed and strongly designed to favor the status quo.

In fact, based on the OP, it sounds like this challenge which came from a competing ISP was actually against the FCC's own challenge policy, and I'm pleasantly surprised it went anywhere without simply being tossed/ignored.

As their paper points out, these pinhole systems really suffer from the fact the the imaging aperture is TINY. This produces a low resolution, high depth of field image like a camera with a very "high / slow" F/# .
High degrees of multiplexing also require high bit depth measurements and low noise, driving sensor cost up.

The way the NPR article describes this, it is no different from Uniformly Redundant Arrays, i.e. Coded Aperture Imaging: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... If you look at the 1998 paper, "Uniformly Redundant Arrays" by Busboom et al, the first sentence describes work from the 1960s:

So is the only innovation here using more pinholes, more pixels, and more processing than were around in the 1990s?

The title is pretty honest: this is early evidence of war. I agree that we likely cannot observe too many battlegrounds 10,000 years later. The annoying thing about these reporting on this article is that it makes it sound like humans invented war 10,000 years ago! A human 10,000 years ago is virtually identical to us today, so why would we expect them any less capable or motivated to commit mass murder than someone today?

I built a setup like this (50X LCDs) closer to 10 yrs ago with a rack of servers, and I think it was a mistake. I should have used small desktop PCs. I was somewhat budget limited, so it was a bit of a stretch to get all the monitors driven by the limited set of servers + multiple video cards. In the end I had an array of client machines network-booting from a single server. I could have used a rack of small desktops as the clients and had 2x more CPUs and higher performance graphics cards for the same price. I would have kept an extra ~10% desktop computers on hand to swap in if any failed. Since they were network booting, there was minimal setup to add a new client to the system.

It's not the "same treatment" at all. In the one case (outsourcing), unskilled jobs are moving overseas not due to government interference but due to global economic pressure. Leaving a country is a basic right, as long as someone else is willing to let you in.

In the other case (in-sourcing), government is actively bringing specific types of skilled people into the country, bypassing normal immigration law and targeting very specific industries thanks to lobbyists.

Are you serious? "Have them brought back"? Like this is some kind of two-bit dictatorship? People (and the jobs they create) are free to emigrate to any country that will let them in. Good luck trying to write a law which forces job creators to remain in the US. That is truly a dark path.

By contrast, immigration policy is supposed to be "fair". But programs like H1B are anything but.

The "rest of the country" certainly hasn't faced competition from H1B visa workers, more than 95% of which target the software and IT industry.

But regardless, your sentiment is clear. You are more interested in taking others down a notch because of envy, rather than being genuinely interested in public policy fairness.

Precisely. Very few successful and reasonably large projects are staffed by ad-hoc collections of international programmers located around the world. While it can be done, the efficiency and throughput of such projects is usually quite low. Communication overhead is usually the crippling factor there.

Offshoring an entire project is much costlier to do, and frequently management is unwilling to cede control and simultaneously unwilling to relocate. Furthermore, the same pressures in the new local market that made you leave the former local market start to creep in. Bangalore salaries for competent programmers have increased about six-fold in the last 12 years or so. The cost savings from your expensive move might suddenly evaporate.

So, companies would MUCH prefer increasing staffing levels at their current locations, especially if they can lobby politicians to make it happen without driving up salaries!

Not so. Most of us are just asking for the same supply and demand rules to apply to software jobs as to any other job in the US, rather than being targeted disproportionately by H1B visa policy. If demand really does exceed supply as the software barons claim when lobbying politicians, then prices for labor should be increasing, which is how the labor supply works in every other sector of the economy. But if prices are stagnant or even declining, then claims of a shortage ring hollow.

Of course no one owes anyone a job. But we're not talking about "global" software supply/demand and salaries here: we're talking very specifically about the situation inside the US, because we're evaluating a question of local public policy there only (i.e., the H1B visa quotas). Gaming the system via immigration policy to keep wages artificially low in a few specific categories should be revolting to any capitalist who claims to respect the market. If immigration limits are to be enforced, they should be enforced across the board, without special consideration to special interests.

I agree -- I read the first volume of the Baroque Cycle and couldn't find motivation to read any more. It had some great moments, but they were too few to make it a good book. I wonder if he did so well with Cryptonomicon that he decided to write the Baroque Cycle without an editor. Maybe if I was really bored or didn't have any other books to read I would pick it up again.

Translation: We want to hire coders but do not offer benefits that are as good as the competition. We need to import foreign workers who will work for less $$$!!! It's not our fault that employees can't afford a mortgage with our current benefits package -- that's just the cost of living in the area!

damn forgot the carriage returns in my haste

1. Bogus idea: They are going to build a UAV from scratch, fly it from CA to NK and back, all for $10K? They could barely afford the fuel they need for $10K! 2. Arbitrarily using the word "Tesla" -- might as well jump on the Tesla Meme Bandwagon promoted by The Oatmeal to get some popularity. 3. Going after a political hot topic, North Korea, to get some more press attention. 4. Yep, it's a bogus kick starter.

What's really funny is that you're stereotyping, and by your own logic, that must make you a conservative?

Printing on the surface of the moon would make for a really cool billboard.