I work with commercial grade drones (M210, XBee) in California in remote forested wildlife areas. It usually takes a day to travel to a site over rough roads. Once there, it takes an hour of prep time. We get 30 minutes flight time per battery pack on a still air day, 10 minutes in high wind. Then the drone has to fly back and we swap batteries. In the US, FAA requires operator line of sight with the drones, so most of the area we can't actually fly. There is no way current technology drones are going to be useful in detecting wildfires here.

I agree. Time is supposed to match our diurnal cycle. Noon is the middle of the day. Keeping as few time zones as possible (striping the earth vertically) makes sense to keep the original purpose, so you are not stuck with thousands of time-zones or just one as in China. Daylight Savings serves no purpose but to make people's lives miserable. I work in environmental monitoring. We hates the DST. It is banned from our dataloggers. Two timestamps bad! However, we keep loggers on local timezones. When the data is ingested, we convert to UTC, but record the originating timezone. UTC isn't very useful when observing light measurements across a continent, for example. We want to see solar noon across the continent and how the soil moisture, humidity, etc. responds.

So Texas is the new third world now?

I'm pretty sure it would respond, "$2.99 a slice. Would you like lemon meringue or apple?"

CEO's don't have a good track record in political offices. The good ones learn the differences between running a business and being a politician, but it takes time. Someone should tell her that the Presidency is not a good 'starter' office to hold.

I'm a scientist at UC Berkeley and I have been using a Kindle DX for the last 2 years for papers. I spend hours in front of a computer screen and sometimes really need something to read that doesn't glow. However, the DX is still not great. It is 9.5 inches diagonal in the readable screen area. A normal piece of paper is almost 14 inches diagonal. Text is either too small (and my aging eyes have a hard time with that), or I have to place it sideways and shift back-and forth 4 times to read 1 page. I'm disappointed with the move towards smaller devices like the galaxy or the ipad mini and active screens like the kindle fire. For me, a 8x11" e-ink screen would be ideal.

I'm typing this with my old SGI Indy keyboard. Sadly, the rest of the system died years ago. None of the newer keyboards have the nice metal spring action as this keyboard does. I'm holding on until no one makes adapters anymore!

Anyone know why Facebook removed the default https security setting? Logging on is now insecure by default. You have to dig into your configuration options to reactivate it. Whats up with that?

Science Museum of Minnesota is a remarkable place, esp if you want to learn about the earth's surface. They have teamed up with the National Center for Earth-surface Dynamics to create some pretty amazing exhibits, including the Big Back Yard (mini-golf that teaches you about rivers) and Science on a Sphere (just go see it to see what I mean). California Academy of Science in the Golden Gate Park of San Francisco has just reopened in a remarkable new building. Its a green design with an entire tropical ecosystem contained in a 3 story tall glass sphere.

Matlab is my favorite for bizaar version numbers. I have for example Maltab Version 7.0.1.24704 (R14) Service Pack 1.

Not only does it have the standard Major.minor.bugfix numeric structure, but it has a marketed Release number (R14) AND it has a Microsoft style Service Pack number AND it has an automated build number!?!

Makes you wonder how they all relate to one another.