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Comment: Location is not protected (Score 1) 302

by jcronen (#40386533) Attached to: Chuck Schumer Tells Apple and Google To "Curb Your Spy Planes"

Location is specifically not protected as Critical Energy Infrastructure Information (CEII).

This does not mean that location is necessarily public information to be provided by the government, but FERC specifically sought to keep the location of particular bits of infrastructure out of that data which is considered confidential.

If Schumer has a beef, he should bring it up with FERC.

Comment: US Eastern Time, but Permanent Double DST (Score 1) 359

by jcronen (#37357294) Attached to: Regarding timezones: I would rather live ...

I currently am within the United States' Eastern (Standard|Daylight) Time and think it's fine. Central always seemed like a redheaded stepchild to Eastern, and since we have NYC and Washington pretty much everything's arranged around us. But there's one minor issue: I hate mornings. And I love dusky late summer evenings.

So, a novel concept. I'd like to stay within Eastern Time, but move to permanent double daylight-saving time -- a permanent UTC-3. On June 21 that puts sunset about 9:40pm where I am, and sunrise about 6:20am. On December 21, sunrise is 9:25am and sunset 6:25pm. It certainly means darker mornings, but who's really awake then anyway?

Because the change is permanent, no changing of clocks ever.

Yes, I may be crazy, but this is my ideal world here.

Comment: This number is meaningless (Score 4, Insightful) 245

by jcronen (#30378586) Attached to: Each American Consumed 34 Gigabytes Per Day In '08

This number is entirely meaningless.

Is a phone conversation "consumed" as its transcript (a few hundred bytes) or as an audio file (a few hundred kb) or a really well sampled audio file that conveys nuance perfectly (a few Mb)?

A tweet is 140 characters, but if I were to take a screenshot of a screen with Twitter (and about 20 tweets) that could be a couple of Mb.

And much of that "data" could be compressed in a meaningful way. I spend most of my day in my cubicle staring at my monitor. Does all of the visual data that my eyes are receiving (about eight hours' worth of grey walls and a small computer monitor's contents) count?

Comment: Re:contractor position? (Score 2, Informative) 675

by jcronen (#26984231) Attached to: How To Handle Corporate Blackmail?

As long as his contracting period is less than 60 days, he can elect not to take COBRA and then retroactively take it and get full benefits if he needs it.

So if he falls down the stairs and breaks both legs on the 57th day after his benefits are terminated, he can notify his plan administrator on the 58th day that he wants COBRA, submit a check for the premium difference, and his bills from the previous day's fall will be covered.

Comment: Focus on teachers (Score 2, Insightful) 378

by jcronen (#25848809) Attached to: How To Help Our Public Schools With Technology?


It's the whole "teach a man to fish" thing. Having a single teacher on staff that is technically savvy breeds dependence on that one teacher and continued naïveté. If all teachers on staff except for a handful are clueful, the others feel obligated to catch up out of peer pressure.

The fact that you're installing Edubuntu is great, but teachers will go to the one technological in-service they get per year and wonder where the "Start" menu is when they get back to their school and sit down in front of one of your machines.

I'm a former high school teacher. Teachers are under exceptional amounts of stress in a classroom. You're performing in front of an audience for several hours every day. Anything that they're even slightly uncomfortable with will be left behind in favor of the familiar. You can either give up or you can work to breed familiarity.

I'd say keep up building machines, but also volunteer to offer in-service or after-hours training. You might not have to do it alone — you could probably get one of the clueful teachers at the school to teach sessions during the day or after school. But I promise, if you build machines and don't provide any kind of support for how to use them, they'll only gather dust.


+ - NASA to Release Landsat 7 Data on the Web

Submitted by UAVThumper
UAVThumper (941428) writes "On the USGS homepage there is a article about the up coming release on June 4th of select Landsat 7 Image data at glovis.usgs.gov or earthexplorer.usgs.gov. This is to be the precursor of a project called the Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM) where the end result looks like version of "google earth" with Landsat data. More on Landsat can be found here on Wikipeda or here at the official NASA Page."
