Greg In The Desert

• Slaying fuels debate over speed cameras in Arizona – Doug Georgianni, 51, was killed on April 19, as he operated a speed-enforcement van on a Phoenix freeway. Thomas Patrick Destories, a 68-year-old Phoenix man, is being held in Maricopa County jail on a first-degree murder charge in the death. He has declined to comment.

  Authorities haven't said what they believe the motive might be, but said the two men had never met. Many simply assume the killing was the latest and most extreme backlash against Arizona's photo-enforcement program.

• Chandler Motorola site has new buyer – The prime 153-acre Motorola site on Price Road once again has a buyer.

  A contract has been signed by an out-of-town investor, said Christine Mackay, Chandler's director of economic development.

• Demand for Intel Atom processors slowing – Demand for Intel's Atom netbook processors has begun to slow down as the netbook market faces price-cut competition from low-end notebooks as well as the launch of CULV-based notebooks, according to market sources.
• Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu (Eng. /ˈmɒntəˌskju:/; 18 January 1689 in Bordeaux – 10 February 1755), was a French social commentator and political thinker who lived during the Era of the Enlightenment. He is famous for his articulation of the theory of separation of powers, taken for granted in modern discussions of government and implemented in many constitutions throughout the world. He was largely responsible for the popularization of the terms feudalism and Byzantine Empire.
• Southwest adds jobs as most airlines cut – New Mexico Business Weekly: – Dallas-based Southwest Airlines (NYSE: LUV) was one of the few major carriers to add employees in the latest period. Southwest grew its work force by 1,473 workers in the year-to-year February period and has more than 35,543 workers total.
• English Russia » Russian Pilot Making Photos 9/11 Flying Above NYC – Here is a shocking story of Russian pilot, now living in the USA who was on the air 9th September 2001 and have made photos right from the air when planes crashed the WTC.
• Geosmin – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – Geosmin, which literally translates to "earth smell", is an organic compound with a distinct earthy flavour and aroma, and is responsible for the earthy taste of beets and a contributor to the strong scent that occurs in the air when rain falls after a dry spell of weather (petrichor). The human nose is extremely sensitive to geosmin and is able to detect it at concentrations as low as 5 parts per trillion.
• Apartment Therapy The Kitchn | Weeknight Recipe: Easy Homemade Macaroni and Cheese – This is the mac n' cheese that we grew up on – creamy sauce, chewy pasta, and don't spare the cheese! This was way before "fat" was a dirty word, but we still can't think of anything else we'd rather have at the end of a long day. Just call it an occasional indulgence and grab yourself a bowl!
• ReelzChannel premiers ABQ headquarters – New Mexico Business Weekly: – Maltin just taped the first episode of his show, “Secret’s Out,” in New Mexico, and there will be many more to follow. The network that created his show, ReelzChannel, opened its new headquarters Thursday at Albuquerque Studios. Maltin’s first show will feature an interview with Gov. Bill Richardson about the film industry and will discuss a film made in New Mexico in 2003, “Off the Map.”
• EDITORIAL: MADD about regulation – Washington Times – President Obama's pick to head the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration raises a few red flags. If confirmed by the Senate, Chuck Hurley, CEO of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, will drive motorists over the cliff with regulation.

• Big Music Will Surrender, But Not Until At Least 2011 – His response: It’s all part of a master plan. The labels fully understand that recorded music, streamed or downloaded, is going to be free in the future (we’ve argued this relentlessly). CD sales continue to decline by 20% per year, and the only thing that’ll stop that trend is when those sales reach zero. Nothing will replace those revenues.They also understand that recorded music will largely be little more than marketing collateral, meaning that the Internet services being sued today for copyright infringement will be embraced in the future as ways to get the word out on hot new music. These services pay for the privilege today (either through high streaming rates or in court), but in the future they’ll be the ones getting paid by labels. Think radio payola at a whole new level, and there won’t be any more talk about social networks giving stock to labels and artists. Money will flow the other way, as it should.
• Other states eclipse Arizona’s efforts to lure solar industry – But most solar panels, mirrors, frames and other equipment are made elsewhere. In case after case, the state has fallen short of the competition. At least 10 companies have looked at Arizona in the past two years but decided to move their factories and about 4,500 workers to other Western states.And just next door to Arizona, New Mexico is looking to set itself apart.

  When Gov. Bill Richardson formed the state’s economic recruitment team in 2003, renewable energy was one of its primary targets.

• Who got AIG’s bailout billions? | U.S. | Reuters – Where, oh where, did AIG’s bailout billions go? That question may reverberate even louder through the halls of government in the week ahead now that a partial list of beneficiaries has been published.The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that about $50 billion of more than $173 billion that the U.S. government has poured into American International Group Inc since last fall has been paid to at least two dozen U.S. and foreign financial institutions.
• HP CEO: Tech demand will not improve this year – New Mexico Business Weekly: – Hewlett Packard Co. chief executive Mark Hurd said the company does not expect demand for technology will improve in 2009, Bloomberg reports.
• Minnesota Bank Asks Why It Pays for Wall Street Greed – “I’m kind of bitter,” said William Cooper, chief executive officer of the 448-branch bank, adding that over the years TCF has invested about $1 billion in the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.’s fund that guarantees bank deposits. “We pay for the excesses of our competitor over and over again.”
• Armed and Dangerous » Blog Archive » Why GPSes suck, and what to do about it – Away back in the dark and backward abysm of time when GPS technology was first being made generally available (e.g., 1993), only military-grade receivers were sensitive enough to use it where there were things like buildings and trees partly blocking the sky view. The first civilian customers to actually find a use for it were people messing about in boats. Thus it came to pass that the manufacturers of marine navigation systems were the first civilians to grapple with the question of how a GPS receiver should report TPV information over a wire to a navigational computer.
• Why the Survival Car died an early death – tech – 20 February 2009 – New Scientist – American car firms were still not interested. A safe vehicle like the Survival Car was “completely unrealistic”, proclaimed John Gordon, president of General Motors. “This company is run by salesmen not engineers,” an engineer at Ford observed later. “The priority is styling, not safety.”What happened next has become all too familiar. Spurning the opportunity presented to them, American car makers watched as others forged ahead. The first car on American roads to embody the Survival Car ideal was not from Detroit but from Solihull in the English midlands. It was the Rover P6 2000 of 1963, whose seat belts, thick padding, safer steering wheel and crumple zones moved consumer campaigner Ralph Nader to declare it “probably the safest car now available for general sale”.
• Why do women store fat differently from men? | Science Blog – It’s a paradox that has flummoxed women for generations – their apparent ability to store fat more efficiently than men, despite eating proportionally fewer calories.While it has long been suspected that female sex hormones are responsible, a University of New South Wales (UNSW) research review has for the first time drawn a link between one hormone – oestrogen – and its impact on fat storage for childbearing.
• FT.com / Weekend / Reportage – The travails of Detroit – Detroit may be the archetypal down-and-out rust-belt city, but to call it “dying” masks a more complex reality. Greater Detroit still has three to four million residents, a world-class university next door in Ann Arbor and the bone structure of a great city, as a car-industry consultant with the ear of a poet put it over lunch one day. Why, then, the relentless focus on its failings? Nearly everyone you meet is either weary or angry at seeing their home town made the butt of jokes on late-night television and the subject of anguished political commentary. But no one denies that the region’s property market is abysmal, its finances a mess and its industrial base shrinking at an alarming rate.
• Talking Business – Looking Behind the Curtain at General Electric – News Analysis – NYTimes.com – ng viewed as one of the world’s greatest companies —prodigious builder of jet engines and light bulbs, globalized to a fare-thee-well, with management depth other companies can only dream about, and an unassailable AAA rating — G.E. spent the week fending off rumors that it was the second coming of Citigroup. G.E. has billions of dollars of unacknowledged losses in GE Capital, its huge finance unit, the bears claimed. G.E. is about to lose its prized AAA. Its debt is immense. GE Capital is going to need to shore up its capital base. And on, and on.

• What The Stimulus Bill Has For Everyday Americans [Stimulus Bill] – Tax credit of up to $400 for individuals, $800 for couples for 2009 and 2010. Figure your individual credit by taking 6.2% of your earned income. Note that your employer can adjust your withholdings so that the credit is returned to you over the year instead of all at once. The Associated Press says most people will see this in the form of a $13 bump in weekly paychecks starting in June, and dropping to about $7.70 a week for the duration of 2010.
• Rear projection TV multitouch – [Dave] sent us these fantastic instructions on how to hack a rear projection tv to be a multitouch interface. They’ve converted a 67″ inch TV by adding a couple of PS3 eye cameras and an infrared laser plane. There’s lots of great information, like how to replace the lenses on the PS3 eye cameras and how to create the custom fittings needed to make it all fit nicely. You can download the code, but it is Mac only. They claim that this is the first conversion of a commercial rear projection TV to multitouch, but we know better. You can see a video of it in action after the break.
• New Mexico’s Political Wild West – WSJ.com – A cascade of recent corruption scandals in New Mexico has drawn fresh scrutiny to the state's unusual — and lightly regulated — political culture.

  New Mexico is the only state in the nation that doesn't pay its state legislators. It is one of just a handful with no campaign-contribution limits, so politicians — among them Gov. Bill Richardson — have collected tens of thousands of dollars from individual donors.

  Unlike most states, New Mexico lacks an independent ethics board. There is no statewide law governing ethical conduct for officeholders.

• Growth pattern crippled Phoenix – Phoenix grew into the nation's fifth-largest city through a reliable pattern: Build affordable homes on the metro area's edges, welcome waves of new buyers, and then roads, schools and retail centers follow.

  Home buyers relied on that pattern. Buy an affordable home on the edge, watch it quickly appreciate, then sell at a good profit and move again to a bigger home in an established area.

• Congress Limits CEO Bonuses – washingtonpost.com – The bill, which President Obama is expected to sign into law next week, limits bonuses for executives at all financial institutions receiving government funds to no more than a third of their annual compensation. The bonuses must be paid in company stock that can be redeemed only when the government investment has been repaid. With the measure, lawmakers seek to address public outrage over extravagant Wall Street paydays even as taxpayers bail out the industry.
• GM to Offer Two Choices: Bankruptcy or More Aid – WSJ.com – General Motors Corp., nearing a federally imposed deadline to present a restructuring plan, will offer the government two costly alternatives: commit billions more in bailout money to fund the company's operations, or provide financial backing as part of a bankruptcy filing, said people familiar with GM's thinking.
• Rep. Lujan Joins Intel CEO to Announce Investment in Rio Rancho Facility | Congressman Ben R. Luján, Representing the 3rd District of New Mexico – Washington, DC – Today, Rep. Ben Ray Luján joined Paul Otellini, the President and CEO of Intel, Senators Tom Udall and Jeff Bingaman, Senators Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley of Oregon, and Rep. David Wu of Oregon in Washington DC to announce a $2.5 billion investment in Intel’s Rio Rancho facility and a total investment of over $7 billion for facilities in Oregon, Arizona and New Mexico.
• iFart Mobile takes Pull My Finger to court – However, Air-O-Matic, the people that developed Pull My Finger, beg to differ. Since we did our first press release and linked the common phrase "pull my finger" to our app, they have been contacting us and asking us to stop.
• Expo Notes: Digitize your paper trail with NeatReceipts | MacUser | Macworld – The company demonstrated an earlier, pre-release version of this package at last year’s Expo. At the time, NeatReceipts was slated to ship within a few months, but that never happened. The company has used the intervening time to make the Mac version feature-equal with its Windows counterpart, and cleaned up the interface quite a bit. The final version is now shipping, and looks to have been worth the wait.
• Can we learn from ’80s crash? – Before the bottom fell out of the housing market last year, the most recent real-estate plunge in Phoenix was 20 years earlier, during the savings-and-loan collapse.

  Back then, in the late 1980s, property values fell, sales stalled, and it took several years before the real-estate market recovered.

  A year into the latest downturn, comparing what happened then to what is happening now reveals sharp contrasts, differences that could determine how long a recovery may take this time.

Gov. Bill Richardson chimed in Friday on the fight for red light camera revenue between the city of Albuquerque and the state. Comparing the program to “big-brother,” Richardson said he is leaning toward signing a bill that would claim camera revenue for the state.

What? If he doesn’t like them then introduce a bill to ban them.

I wonder if this is going to be housed in what used to be Fab7

A California company will build a supercomputer here that will be housed at Intel Corp. in Rio Rancho. SGI of California has been awarded an $11 million state contract to build the computer. Businesses, governments and schools will be able to use the facility, to be called the New Mexico Computing Applications Center, to model complex problems, according to Gov. Bill Richardson’s office. These range from creating new products to modeling scenarios for New Mexico’s future water supply.

New Mexico Govenor Bill Richardson, who is running for president, has a kinda humorus ad for people in Iowa.

I hate wired phone companies, which is why I don’t have a wired phone line. I’m very happy to hear that Qwest will have to pay up the money they were suppose to spend in the first place.

Gov. Bill Richardson, Attorney General Patricia Madrid and Qwest officials announced Wednesday that they have reached a settlement that would require the company to spend $265 million on New Mexico’s telecommunications system over a 42-month period.The settlement is the result of a long dispute between Qwest and the state Public Regulation Commission over a 2001 agreement that required the company to spend $788 million on the telecommunications system over five years.But the company’s spending came up about $220 million short, and the commission ordered it to spend the full amount by March 2006 or refund the money to its customers. The company sued, saying the commission did not have the authority to make the order, but the state Supreme Court sided with the PRC last month.

Good news for New Mexico’s space port. Virgin Atlantic has agreed to set up shop there being known as Virgin Galactic.

The first customer has been secured for the planned $225 million spaceport in southern New Mexico and state officials plan to announce Wednesday that construction of the facility will now move forward.

State officials, including Gov. Bill Richardson, also will announce tomorrow that London-based Virgin Galactic, a subsidiary of Britain’s Virgin Atlantic Airways Ltd., will be the facility’s first lease holder and plans to pay $1 million a year for the first five years of its 20-year lease.

I’m getting excited about this. I’ve always wanted to be a astronaut but I never had the “right stuff” (namely not being a Air Force pilot). This may provide me an opportunity to participate in the space race.

I drove by the New Mexico Space Port a few years ago, it was a sign with a dirt field behind it. Apparently they are going to launch their first rocket into space next year. I will have to check it out again.

The first launch from New Mexico’s Southwest Regional Spaceport is on — and set for March 27, according to Gov. Bill Richardson. Richardson’s office announced Tuesday that UP Aerospace, of Connecticut, will launch its SpaceLoft rocket on a sub-orbital flight from the New Mexico Spaceport on that date. The flight will carry seven experimental and commercial payloads for a variety of scholastic and business entities and, after traveling into space, the rocket and its payloads will land in the downrange area of the Spaceport, Richardson’s office announced.

Gov. Bill Richardson and New Mexico Attorney General Patricia Madrid said Friday they will work to draft legislation to investigate and punish companies that engage in gas price gouging after natural disasters.

Richardson said in a news release about the proposal that most people will accept temporary gasoline price hikes in the aftermath of a natural disaster like Hurricane Katrina. But, he added, “it’s getting more and more difficult to justify 20-cent, 30-cent, and in some cases, 40-cent increases practically over night.

I’m all for anti-price gouging, which should be illegal, but trying to prevent the free market forces from working is quite another thing.

The way the free market works, is if there is high demand for a product, then the seller can charge more because people are willing to pay more. Sometimes it works to our advantage, sometimes it does not. If we try to artificially keep gas prices down, we will become fat, lazy and complacent with our cheap gas. Then one day it will be gone.

The other thing a free market does is when something gets high in price, it gives alternatives a chance to compete. Hydrogen, fuel cells, vegetable oil-powered diesel hybrids all have a better chance at competing in this sort of market. Alternatives are always good, and competition keeps prices down overall.

I’m no economist, but I believe this to be basically how things work. I’m willing to take some pain now knowing that it’s not the end of the world. It will require some adjustments but in the end we will be better for it.