Greg In The Desert

• Eclipse furloughs 800 employees – New Mexico Business Weekly: – Eclipse Aviation Corp. furloughed 800 of its remaining employees today because negotiations over the company’s sale are taking longer than expected.McConnell said he expects the new company to remain in Albuquerque after the sale is finalized, but he could not guarantee that all the furloughed employees will be brought back because EclipseJet has not yet made any decisions on future jet production.
• Al Jazeera English – Americas – US court rejects Uighur freedom – The three-judge panel said that a federal judge in an earlier hearing did not have the authority to decide who can legally enter the US, and that such decisions could only be made by the US executive branch under the president.
• Intel Wants Court to Ban Nvidia from Making Chipsets for Latest Processors – X-bit labs – Bounce rate is insightful because from the perspective of a website visitor, it measures this phenomenon: “I came; I puked; I left.” (OK, technically it also means the number of sessions with just one pageview.) While metrics like visitors show the number of people who came to your site, bounce rate will tell you how many of those people were unimpressed and left your site without taking any action (not even dignifying the site with a single click!).
• Official Google Blog: Stop bouncing: tips for website success – Bounce rate is insightful because from the perspective of a website visitor, it measures this phenomenon: “I came; I puked; I left.” (OK, technically it also means the number of sessions with just one pageview.) While metrics like visitors show the number of people who came to your site, bounce rate will tell you how many of those people were unimpressed and left your site without taking any action (not even dignifying the site with a single click!).
• BofA makes $402M payment to feds – New Mexico Business Weekly: – Bank of America Corp. has made a $402 million dividend payment to the U.S. government as part of the bank’s participation in the Troubled Asset Relief Program.The payment represents the dividend on the preferred stock BofA issued to the government. Charlotte, N.C.-based BofA received a total of $45 billion from the federal bailout program, which is designed to thaw the credit markets and boost the economy.

  BofA said total cash dividend payments to the government this year will reach $2.8 billion.

• DreamWorks taps state’s computer center – New Mexico Business Weekly: – Gov. Bill Richardson was at the Intel plant in Rio Rancho on Tuesday to announce the first commercial partnerships with the New Mexico Computing Applications Center and its supercomputer, Encanto. The new ventures initially are expected to create about 100 high-tech jobs. The partnerships are with firms in the media world and in health care.DreamWorks Animation SKG Inc. is teaming up with Cerelink Digital Media Group of New Mexico to use the resources of the Computing Applications Center so DreamWorks can render its three-dimensional films in New Mexico.
• News : Intel to follow recommendations to help public health – Rio Rancho Observer – However, Marcy Branden-burg, the spokesperson for Corrales Residents for Clean Air and Water, said she and others have suffered from migraines and nausea from chemicals emitted from the computer-chip giant.It’s apparently a difficult theory to prove as the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) concluded that for most of the chemicals measured in the outdoor air, the available air monitoring data are not adequate to evaluate fully the potential public health consequences of Intel’s air emissions.

  The ATSDR has determined that Intel emits chemicals capable of resulting in unpleasant odors in the community, but the measured air pollution levels of these chemicals were below levels for health concerns. Therefore, they are unlikely to pose a public health risk. Officials from ATSDR, at a public meeting on Tuesday, said that Intel is emitting odors and that those odors can trigger different responses in different people.

• Could ‘liquid wood’ replace plastic? | csmonitor.com – Sensing a hazard, researchers started hunting for a substitute for plastic’s main ingredient, petroleum. They wanted something renewable, biodegradable, and abundant enough to be inexpensive.Though they stumbled upon a great candidate early on, many US chemists had given up on it by the end of the 1990s. The failed wonder material: lignin, the natural compound that lends strength to trees. A waste product from paper production, much of the lignin supply is simply burned as fuel.

  But while many scientists turned to other green options, a German company, Tecnaro, says it found the magic formula. Its “liquid wood” can be molded like plastic, yet biodegrades over time.

• Visiting the Sultan Ahmed Mosque – Blue Mosque in Istanbul, Turkey — Ms. Adventures in Italy – If you remember my post about Turkish coffee, I was lucky enough to start the morning looking at the Blue Mosque during breakfast. Of course, there were only a few tables that were fortunate to face the Blue Mosque and after you secured one (by piling as many personal articles as possible on chairs, tabletop, unfurling the napkins and licking the juice glass if necessary) you had a great view.
• Help for homeowners – And President Obama is there today, in Phoenix, to unveil his “Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan,” which will help bring relief to homeowners and bring some order to the housing market.The President will talk more about his plan a little later today. In the meantime, we’re sure you have a lot of questions, like, Am I eligible for assistance? Might I be able to modify my loan? When do I apply? We’ve put together an example sheet that will show you what options might be available to you, depending on the circumstances of your mortgage, as well as answers to some common questions (below).

Glenn Piller, an auto-racing enthusiast, has stamped the back of more than $40,000 worth of U.S. currency, from $1 to $100 bills, with simple red-ink promos for his new Web site, www.ArizonaAuto Racing.com.

I’m sure he’s not the first one to think of this. Thankfully It’s not legal but it’s not clear to the feds if it’s advertising or not.

Kim Bruce, spokeswoman with the U.S. Secret Service, which enforces laws against misuse of currency, said federal law forbids the use of money for advertising or any changes to currency that makes it “unfit to be reissued.” At issue is whether his stamps constitute advertising, because no product is being sold.

azcentral article

I couldn’t agree more with Alton Brown when he says (June 10th, BTW).

“I?m just saying that people with authority should have to play by a set of rules…published rules. If as a nation we?re going to have to tolerate being probed, scanned, profiled and frisked before we can get on an airplane, so be it. But it seems to me that we deserve a little consistency. Otherwise we open ourselves up to a whole new brand of bully…bullies with badges…not to mention really nice omelet pans.”

(TSA = Transportation Security Administration)

In the year before September 11th, 2001 I was working away from home in California. I flew back and forth for 9 months and got quite familiar with the airport system. I was luck that my assignment was over just before those planes crashed into the towers. At the time I thought it a good idea to turn over security to the feds. I mean, they should be doing for the safety of the citizens instead of for the money (not that “for the money” is a bad thing). Having been through security since then I can think that it is nothing more than a joke. They have random searches of peoples shoes? Give me a break.