“About a year from now, if all goes well, a box about the size of a loaf of bread will pop out of a rocket some 500 miles above the Earth. There in the vacuum it will unfurl four triangular sails as shiny as moonlight and only barely more substantial. Then it will slowly rise on a sunbeam and move across the stars.”
“Sailing on light is the only technology that can someday take us to the stars,” said Louis Friedman, director of the Planetary Society, the worldwide organization of space enthusiasts.”
Integrated regular expressions for form input validation.
Support for Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG).
A blank canvas object for drawing what you want, using Javascript. An example would be a real-time chart.
Integrated video support, which could break dependance on Flash and Silverlight for web video presentation. If it will, remains to be seen.
It looks like early support can be expected with FireFox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera. Google, interestingly, is squarely behind the standard. IE support is lagging, which is a huge problem for adoption. I imagine that at some point, Microsoft may be forced to adopt, given the competition. We can likely expect another round of browser incompatibility.
Development tools seem lagging, and currently a good text editor or IDE seems the best bet. Not sure yet of the level of commitment from Adobe / Dreamweaver given the potential for impacting Flash.
A Russian kimberlite pipe, mined for diamond. 1720 feet deep and 3900 feet across. Closed April 30, 2004. Filling with some real toxic water, similar to the mine in Butte, Montana. Interesting to look at on Google Earth too.
“They are literally stealing a hundred million dollars a day. Goldman Sachs is stealing every day on the floor of the exchange. They should be in the Hague, they should be taken on financial terrorism charges. They should all be thrown in jail” – Max Keiser: “Goldman Sachs Are Scum” | zero hedge.
“…strategy is to ask for a discount in exchange for immediate payment by cash or by credit card. Providers want to collect payments and close out accounts as fast as possible so many will make a deal for quick payment. If you owe the hospital $7,000 tell them that you’ll settle the bill on the spot for $3,500. They may counter at $4,500 or $5,000, but whatever figure you settle on will be a significant discount. The key here is immediate payment – have your cash or credit card ready because it’s the only enticement you have to get a reduction in your balance. “
“…Be very suspicious of insurance plans that are connected to some sort of official-sounding “association” or “union” for the self-employed. I’ve rarely seen a plan like this that provided good coverage. Some of these plans don’t even have a real insurance company behind them - the association or union is just a front for the sales guys who sell cheap insurance, collect a pile of money from the premium payments, and then close the plan down and skip town, leaving all their customers with no coverage.”
“…Whatever plan you choose and whatever the monthly rate, your premium will go up every year. Yep, every year. By how much? That depends on your location but in our state it’s averaged 10% per year. Some years were higher than that, some lower, but 10% is the long-term average we’ve seen and we thing that will continue.”
“…The one offset to these increases is to raise your deductible from time to time. A $5,000 deductible was unheard of a few years ago and now is common. In a few years we’ll start to see deductibles of $10,000 or more. “
