Space Shuttle Update (51)

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Space Shuttle Discovery Arrives at Udvar-Hazy
NASA – Space shuttles Enterprise, left, and Discovery meet nose-to-nose at the beginning of a transfer ceremony at the Smithsonian’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, Thursday, April 19, 2012, in Chantilly, Va. Space shuttle Discovery–the first orbiter retired from NASA’s shuttle fleet, completed 39 missions, spent 365 days in space, orbited the Earth 5,830 times, and traveled 148,221,675 miles–will take the place of Enterprise at the center to commemorate past achievements in space and to educate and inspire future generations of explorers at the center. image Credit: NASA/Smithsonian Institution/Carolyn Russo

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Romney suits up for November battle with President Obama

Romney (Photo credit: Talk Radio News Service)

By Niall Stanage – Mitt Romney’s campaign has shaken the Etch A Sketch, left behind the Republican primary and moved onto a general-election footing.

“In the past couple of weeks, he has been going more and more directly after Barack Obama,” said Dan Judy, vice president of the Republican firm North Star Opinion Research. “He has transitioned smoothly into a general election, and it will be like that from now until November.”

No single change has marked Romney’s shift in recent weeks. Instead, a series of readjustments have, in aggregate, solidified the sense that he is now fully engaged in the contest against the incumbent chief executive. more> http://tinyurl.com/82aet5m

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Euro crisis: of morality and bankers

London Book Fair
(Photo credit: FlickrDelusions)

Editorial – Speaking during this week’s London Book Fair, the Toulouse-based economist Paul Seabright deftly summed up why such huge, painful efforts simply aren’t paying off. Politicians, he said, remain hellbent on painting the euro crisis as a morality tale – a saga of profligate southern Europeans and virtuous northern Europeans – when it is anything but. Until the eve of the banking crisis, Spain had sounder public finances than Germany. Similarly, the idea that Athens was covering up the level of its debt only gets you so far. Anyone who cared to inspect the figures could see that by 2008 Greece had become the fifth-largest importer of arms in the world – behind China, India, the United Arab Emirates and South Korea, despite having a far smaller economy than any of those countries. As Mr Seabright put it, such information, denoting just how wildly Greece was spending on the wrong things, was “in plain view” of any supposedly cautious German banker who cared to look.

The implication is clear: rather than devote efforts to ruining the lives of southern Europeans, a far more effective way to deal with the continent’s crisis would be to restructure the banks, then rein them in for good. The alternative is to trust in austerity for the public and generously allow the banks to “deleverage” and shrink their balance sheets at their own pace. more> http://tinyurl.com/6u838w3

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Don’t Throttle Me: Other Ways To Manage Wireless Traffic

By Jeffrey Glueck – Choking users’ download speeds to a trickle, around the clock, for two weeks or more a month, regardless of whether the local network is congested at that moment, is an example of a “solution” developed with rudimentary network management tools and gives the appearance of not having customer experience in mind. In essence, this kind of policy punishes users merely using a service they pay for.

Throttling a customer 24×7 might free up bandwidth for other users, but only by rendering a heavy user’s phone unworkable. Consider an alternative, where heavy users can watch videos while the effective capacity of the tower is instantly expanded based on demand loads. more> http://tinyurl.com/6u4qrsy

Internet service customers paying for inefficiency

Brock Barrow Broadband service, I think.
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By David Lazarus – Public officials in Europe and Asia were quick to realize the economic and social opportunities that broadband afforded. So they adopted policies designed to ensure highly competitive markets that would foster innovation and lower prices

One key element of these policies is requiring that broadband capacity — the actual pipes and wires — be shared among competing service providers, thus doing away with the necessity for every company to dig its own trenches and string its own cables.

This runs contrary to the American approach, which was based on the notion that telecom companies wouldn’t invest in new technologies unless they could keep their networks to themselves. more> http://tinyurl.com/d7zoq5t