MondayMarch 10, 2008 17:59

Son-in-law now works for Silicon Labs.

MCUs Double Battery Life Employing a unique eight-bit architecture and integrating high-efficiency dc/dc boost converters, the C8051F9xx family of microcontrollers (MCUs) is described as the industry's first MCUs capable of operating down to 0.9V, enabling portable devices to derive power from a single-cell battery. The devices specify a typical sleep-mode current of less than 50 nA and can wake-up from sleep mode with the CPU operating at 25 MIPS and ready to make an a/d converter measurement within 2 ms. Active-mode current ranges as low as 170 µA/MHz. The family includes devices with 32 KB and 64 KB of flash and all include 4 KB of RAM. Available in 32-pin, 7 mm x 7 mm LQFP, 24-pin, 4 mm x 4 mm QFN, and 32-pin, 5 mm x 5 mm QFN packages, pricing starts at $1.99 each/10,000. SILICON LABORATORIES INC., Austin, TX. (877) 444-3032. .

Tuesday February 7, 2006 17:21

Or you were a United Airlines Pilot, who flew for 35 years, and contributed heavily to the pension plan, so you could live in comfort after the mandatory age 60 retirement. United is trying to default as you read this. They are saying, "So what? You lose Buckwheat, because we ain't going to pay any more. We're bankrupt, all your contributions are gone, and we're turning the whole thing over to the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. You'll get 40% of what you were promised if you're lucky, and the PBGC doesn't go broke." Unions protest and threaten to strike? Fine, then no one will have a job. The PBGC was created in 1974, and its own balance sheet shows a $23.3 billion deficit. It has $39 billion in assets (probably stocks and bonds) and is obligated to pay $62.3 billion in 'guaranteed' pension benefits, to more than a million workers…at 40%? And this does not include United's four pension plans, which are underfunded by many millions. It isn't just United Airlines, but a whole host of other corporations, who have neglected to pay their contractual obligations. Hundreds of pension plans are on the verge of being insolvent.

Monday May 2, 2005 11:17

The number of U.S. technical workers fell 221,000 in six major engineering and computer job classifications from 2000 to 2004, says the U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

Meanwhile, the IEEE reports the first drop in median income for U.S. IEEE members in 31 years. Industries reporting the largest income drop also reported the highest percentage of unemployment because of offshoring. And, the IEEE data shows a 2.5% drop in income in electrical/electronics manufacturing versus a 16.2% increase in offshore manufacturing in 2004. The report is based on the results of the 2004 IEEE-USA Salary & Fringe Benefits Survey.

Wednesday April 20, 2005 12:20

Cibola Internet Services denied us access to nmol files on about April 12, 2005.

We're fixing some links.

Thursday April 14, 2005 16:07

--The company has already said increased pension costs will add $1 billion to its spending this year.

Thursday February 24, 2005 06:45

Our projects move ahead

Blue star shows old technology Sears paint sprayer.

Red check show new technology Harbor Freight technology

Here's the start of the grey rabbit paint job.

Only a pint of new paint was bought. Too little so about a pint of old paint was used. Mistake!

Also some locations were missed. So we have to wait 45 days to fix since hardner was not used.

Joseph Shatz, senior government bond strategist at Merrill Lynch, said many pension funds had “over-invested” in equities because current rules accounted for the investments in terms of long-term expected returns, not realised gains.

Friday February 18, 2005 08:42

We on hold on our legal project which until February 28, 2005 so bill is focusing on maintaining a 1972 Ford F 250 4x4, repairing a 1982 VW rabbit, trying to convince some of the necessity of digitizing at the sensor to say in busines, as well as coordinating getting a 1950s era table refinished.

Bill made the statement that white ford would last as long as the oil supply.

A 15-year decline in oil reserves is spurring companies such as Royal Dutch/Shell Group, Exxon Mobil Corp. and ChevronTexaco Corp. to spend $76 billion in the next decade to boost supplies of oil from tar sands and diesel fuel from Qatari natural gas. Oil executives say they have no choice but to try alternatives to drilling because there is not much more crude to be found in their current fields.

``Oil won't last forever,'' said Manouchehr Takin, a senior analyst at the Centre for Global Energy Studies in London, a consulting company founded by former Saudi oil minister Sheikh Zaki Yamani

Thursday February 17, 2005 09:11

We've been teriibly busy with our legal project which appears to be progressing well. We hope to return to the 8051 family forth USB 2.0 project soon.

The 8051 Marches On

by Jon Titus, Senior Technical Editor -- ECN, 2/1/2005

Its birth in 1977 and its continuing popularity put the 8051 microcontroller on the short list of long-lived CPU architectures. If you have not looked at microcontrollers (MCUs) in a while, it may come as a surprise that semiconductor vendors continue to develop sophisticated 8051-based MCUs. What explains the devotion of designers to such an "old" architecture, and why do they continue to use it in new designs? The answer comes in several parts: Increased performance, more memory, enhanced I/O ports, lots of tools and a plethora of useful code.

Not every developer wants to program in C or assembly language, though. Tim Hinchey at R2 Controls hears from industrial developers who do not want to become C programmers. "They can understand and work with the BASIC language, though," explained Hinchey. "So we will provide a BASIC compiler with our 8051-based core module and developers can program in C or in BASIC."

Thursday January 27, 2005 07:39

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSMC), the world’s largest contract chipmaker, has warned of a contraction in the world’s semiconductor market this year. “We have slightly downward revised my earlier comments that it would be flat [this year]. My forecast now is about minus 2 per cent,” said Morris Chang, chairman.

Friday January 21, 2005 08:23

The new growth area of the U.S. municipal market is going to be pension obligation bonds.

These are the bonds that states and municipalities sell to cure, or help to cure, the ``unfunded liabilities'' in their public pension funds.

States and localities sell pension obligation bonds in the taxable market, because they are prohibited by tax law from selling debt at tax-exempt yields and investing the proceeds in higher-yielding investments.

Tuesday December 21, 2004 07:54

As President Bush prepares to disclose the details of his plan to funnel hundreds of billions of dollars of future Social Security funds into privately held investment accounts, Wall Street has begun a muted lobbying campaign, chastened by bolder forays that failed in years past.

Privatizing Social Security should scare you The idea assumes anyone can invest successfully -- and threatens to destroy the safety net for which Social Security was originally created. Yet privatization is being spuriously packaged as 'reform.'

Privatizing Social Security is one of the bulls' new reasons for being bullish, as they envision mountains of money moving into the stock market.

Having said all that, there are lots of people in this country who, for one reason or another, desperately need what Social Security offers. I'm not a big-government fan, but if we as a country would still like to provide that for them, then going down the path of pretending Social Security is an individual retirement account is complete lunacy. As I said before, those folks are probably the exact same ones who will wind up unable to successfully invest their "Social Security IRA." So, let's call a spade a spade. Under the guise of fixing Social Security, this "reform" is just a subterfuge to end the government's liability and let down the people it was supposed to help.

Monday January 3, 20064 06:28

The US pension insurance fund faces a possible tax payer-financed bail-out similar to that of the savings and loans industry in the late 1980s unless Congress changes the rules that govern its funding, prominent economists have warned.

Some private estimates of the deficit put it at $100bn. Last week, the PBGC took control of the $5.7bn in liabilities for United Airlines' pension scheme over the objections of the company and its members, saying it needed to act quickly to prevent yet more debts falling into it. In taking over the scheme, Bradley Belt, executive director, said: “I hope the plight of participants in airline pension plans puts an exclamation point on the need for Congress to strengthen the funding rules for defined benefit plans.”

Wednesday December 15, 2004 16:57

Monday December 13, 2004 07:07

"A lot more savings." That's the sobering reality dawning on a growing number of current and future retirees as they confront the changing landscape of retirement. Longer life spans, combined with rising healthcare costs and declines in traditional pensions, are creating a gap between dreams and reality.

Saturday December 11, 2004 19:53

Fooled by randomness is fun two evening read.

Here's the author.

Friday December 10, 2004 08:24

The National Association of Securities Dealers," The Wall Street Journal reports, "is investigating whether some brokerage houses are inappropriately pushing individuals to borrow large sums on their houses to invest in the stock market." Can we persuade the association to investigate would-be privatizers of Social Security?

Privatization would begin by diverting payroll taxes, which pay for current Social Security benefits, into personal investment accounts. The government, already deep in deficit, would have to borrow to make up the shortfall.

This would sharply increase the government's debt. Never mind, privatization advocates say: in the long run, they claim, people would make so much on personal accounts that the government could save money by cutting retirees' benefits. Financial markets won't believe this claim, as I'll explain in a minute, but let's temporarily grant the point.

Wednesday December 8, 2004 15:14

Bill just went to the Cherry Hills library in Albuquerque and checked out Fooled by Randomness.

We like random numbers is some applications. In other applications, we absolutely hate random numbers.

The Daily Reckoning PRESENTS: In life, people generally don't want to think that their success has anything to do with luck...but they are more than willing to blame their failures to a random act of misfortunes. Read on...

Luck Be a Trader...
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I have often been faced with questions of the sort: "Who do you think you are to tell me that I might have been plain lucky in my life?" Well, nobody really believes that he or she was lucky. My approach is that, with our Monte Carlo engine, we can manufacture purely random situations. We can do the exact opposite of conventional methods; in place of analyzing real people hunting for attributes, we can create artificial ones with precisely known attributes. Thus, we can manufacture situations that depend on pure, unadulterated luck, without the shadow of skills or whatever we have called non-luck. In other words, we can man-make pure nobodies to laugh at; they will be by design stripped of any shadow of ability.

Saturday December 4, 2004 19:01

SINGAPORE: Asian oil traders fear China Aviation’s $550 million trading loss will stunt derivatives trade and force a credit clampdown, particularly for Chinese firms feeding their energy-hungry economy.

China Aviation Singapore Corp. Ltd. (CAO), a former standard bearer for overseas Chinese firms, racked up the losses from derivatives trading during an oil price surge in October. The firm, which supplies nearly all of China’s jet fuel imports, is seeking court protection from creditors.

Tuesday November 30, 2004 18:13

Unlike the aging baby boomers of the United States, China does not have to worry about providing health care to the elderly or pay pension funds, such as Social Security.

Monday November 29, 2004 09:00

To be sure, both DBs and DCs performed poorly during the three-year period. In fact, neither of them made money. In 2002, the DB plans’ median return was flat, while 401(k)s recorded a 4.28 percent decline. In 2001, DBs fell 3.82 percent, compared with a decline of 7.3 percent for the DC plans. In 2002 DB plans lost 3.83 percentage points less than the DC plans.

Saturday November 27, 2004 12:53

Bill replaced the two AA batteries and swapped the touch screen with 91% ISOPROPYL alcohol using a Q tip.

So far the 8030 clock seems to be keeping accurate time.

November 5, 2003 we bought a ritetemp 8030 computerized home thermostat to replace an about 20 year old failing Sears computerized thermostat.

The 8030 is much more sophisticated in that it has a touch screen display for setting rather than keypad used in the Sears.

However, last week the 8030 clock started to change time sua sponte, legally speaking.

So bill phone the help line at 888-515-2585 to explain the problem to Renee [male].

Renee suggested 1 change the two AA batteries 2 clean off the display with alcohol 3 try resetting unit 4 remove plastic id from inside unit.

Renee said that touching the display with fingers, instead of using the stylus, does bad things to the display and micro.

Renee said if non of these fixes work, return the 8030 to Home Depot and we will get a new unit, a 8030C. Revision C, undoubtedly.

Renee said that 8030 has a five year warranty.

The 8030 cost $59.98. It is manufactured, of course, in China.

Renee asked about if our furnace is new. New furnaces use piezo igniters rather than a pilot light.

Renee said that wire running from the furnace to a ritetemp act like an antenna and cause a ritetemp to go bananas.

Renee said that the fix is to use ferrite beads on the wires going to a ritetemp.

Several points can be gleaned from the above real world experience:

1 Optoislation really works well.
2 Physical double-wall shielding is very valuable for making a microcontroller run reliably.
2 On-board power regulation really works well too.
3 Use reliable software technology, like 8051 Forth, of course.
4 Be reputable, like Ritetemp. Fix problems rather than denying them, or ignoring or trying to hide them.

bill is anxious to successfully complete our legal project to return to our technical and maybe even a mathematical problem.

How to properly implement Young's modulus of elasticity measurement and computations properly. And digitize at the sensor, of course.

We've detected some problems in the Northwest that need fixing.

Tuesday November 23, 2004 06:35

If you expect a nice, secure retirement thanks to the pension plan offered by your company, watch out. If stocks fall, you'll discover how much these plans are underfunded.

Beneath the surface of today’s financial environment, there is a huge, smoldering retirement problem, in addition to the fact that Social Security will in essence be unable to satisfy its promises.

Monday November 22, 2004 06:32

The study comes at a critical juncture for hedge funds. In early 2006, they will be required to register with regulators. Hedge funds, which utilize leverage and can profit from falling prices by "shorting" stocks, have also seen their popularity skyrocket. Assets have grown fivefold since 1994 to roughly $1 trillion. Pension funds, endowments and other institutions looking to diversify are flocking to hedge funds, as are individual investors who are buying shares in funds that invest in a basket of other hedge funds. This investment, referred to as a fund of funds, requires smaller initial investments.

Friday November 19, 2004 07:02

The Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation, a government-sponsored safety net, will require a $78bn cash injection next year unless Congress changes the way companies run their pension schemes, according to a new analysis.

The Center on Federal Financial Institutions, a Washington think-tank which studies US government guarantee programmes, has concluded that the hole could be as big as $100bn, if all “legacy” airlines become insolvent and collapse their pension liabilities into the PBGC.

Tuesday November 16, 2004 10:12

The U.S. is spending at all levels like there is no tomorrow. The trade deficit is hitting new records. The budget deficit is growing and will grow faster while Iraq bleeds American money. Meanwhile, a demographic time bomb is ticking as aging baby boomers reach retirement age. The number of Americans aged 65 and above will rise from 12.4 percent of the total population to 18.2 percent over the next 25 years, though that's well after Bush leaves the White House.

Monday November 15, 2004 19:18

The $120 billion spent so far on the Iraq war, along with borrowing to finance highways and Social Security, is prompting experts including former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin to wonder if foreigners may lose confidence in U.S. investments. Losing the $2 billion the U.S. attracts daily from central banks and overseas investors might create a ``debt maelstrom,'' Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said in September.

The US government-sponsored safety net for pension funds unveiled a record $23.3bn deficit for the fiscal year ended September 30, more than twice the deficit reported last year.

"We are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy. Allah willing, and nothing is too great for Allah," bin Laden said in the transcript.

You could be confident that he is right - if you had confidence that the whole apple cart would not be upset over the next several years by a further upward leap in the U.S. budget deficit.

Friday November 12, 2004 11:06

WE live in an age when a lot of promises regarding retirement are going to be broken. Just how they are broken, and what replaces them, will have profound effects on the future of the industrial nations that have dominated the world economy in the last century.

Tuesday November 9, 2004 07:34

Oil demand - Why so strong?

End of the Oil is Coming, Prof Warns

o Speaker at UNM points to decline in production in Saudi Arabia, says it's inevitable

By JOHN FLECK
Journal Staff Writer

The end of civilization as we know it may have begun last Feb. 24, a California Institute of Technology professor told a rapt audience of several hundred at the University of New Mexico on Monday afternoon.

That is the day New York Times reporter Jeff Gerth told the world about what looks very much like the beginning of a decline in oil production in Saudi Arabia.

It is inevitable, said David Goodstein, that petroleum production around the world will decline with dramatic consequences.

The decline will begin when known cheap and easy petroleum reserves are pumped out. Oil at that point becomes more scarce and more expensive - something that happened in the lower 48 states more than 30 years ago.

Because of uncertainty over Middle East oil reserves, and the potential for new technology to help squeeze more oil out. of existing fields, no one knows exactly when the peak will come, said Goodstein, author of the book "Out of Gas."

But the peak will inevitably come, perhaps later this decade, perhaps now. The signs Gerth wrote about Feb. 24 may be the first signal that it is starting. "We simply don't know," Goodstein said.

This is a problem New Mexico oil and gas producers have thought about a lot. Here, production peaked in 1969 and has been generally declining ever since, according to data from the American Petroleum Institute.

New technologies can push back the inevitable by making it cost- effective to pump more oil from existing fields, said Roswell oil entrepreneur James Manatt in a telephone interview Monday.

But Manatt agreed with Goodstein's contention that it is inevitable that we will run out of fuel.

Goodstein offered a gloomy picture of the alternatives. It would take 10,000 nuclear power plants to generate the energy to replace what we get from petroleum, he said, but then we would quickly run out of uranium.

The societal implications are enormous, according to Goodstein "Historically, whenever the price of oil goes up, the economy of the world goes in the tank," Goodstein said. That is what happened in 1973 and 1979.

"There will be a crisis," Good stein said. "It will be painful It will happen."

Albuquerque Journal Tuesday November 9, 2004

Wednesday November 3, 2004 17:39

That would be additional money for guards, security devices and procedures that might otherwise be invested in production-boosting technology and workers who generate salable goods and services. `

"It's a dead-weight loss as far as the economy is concerned,'' said Vernon Smith, a George Mason University professor who won the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics.

But America's coming bust is likely to be in line with the primary trend...a bust, not on the way up, but on the way down. It is a slump leading towards a lower standard of living, not a higher one. Why a lower standard of living? Because Americans did not save money...they did not build factories...they did not invest in the skills and enterprises that will help them increase real earnings. Instead, they spent more than they could afford on trinkets, geegaws, and luxurious McMansions. Few people in the world can afford to live in the manner to which Americans have become accustomed. Sadly, not even Americans themselves.

Tuesday October 26, 2004 15:05

The real and first impacts of higher oil prices in the oil-intensive, oil-wasteful economies of the OECD, in the current economic structure context of the Northern economies, are not inflationary, but deflationary. This will soon become very clear.

Wedneday October 20, 2004 06:53

Litigation is going extremely well.

The disastrous decline in Marsh & McLennan's stock that has followed Eliot Spitzer's lawsuit of last week has injured a broad array of institutional and individual investors. But the pain of losing almost 50 percent in share value is perhaps most excruciating to the thousands of Marsh & McLennan employees who have bought Marsh stock in the company's employee stock purchase plan or in their retirement plans.

Now, of course, the risk in those holdings is all too apparent. But employee-benefit experts say that Marsh may be putting its 60,000 employees at additional risk, even as it enriches itself, by limiting the alternative investments to mutual funds that are for the most part managed by its Putnam Investments subsidiary

Friday October 15, 2004 08:18

Last year, GM sold $13.5 billion in debt to fund its pension plans, almost doubling its long-term debt to $29.1 billion. Ford planned to put $1.5 billion into its retirement funds in the third quarter.

Thursday October 14, 2004 18:37

Syncrude Awakening
John Myers

America is a nation of privilege - most of us don't worry about where our next glass of water will come from, where our next meal will come from or where our next gallon of gasoline will come from. We roll out of bed every morning, comfortable that sufficient supplies of water, food and fuel await our personal demand

More than likely, our complacent comfort is secure with respect to food and water, both of which are "homegrown." But our supplies of crude oil are less reliable. Since homegrown sources of hydrocarbons are satisfying less and less of our domestic energy needs, we must rely more and more on foreign sources. All else being equal, domestic is better.

By contrast, much of the "already found and consumed" oil came out of the ground right here in the US. More exploratory holes have been drilled in the continental United States than in the rest of the world combined. The United States (48 states) oil discovery rate hit its maximum in 1957 and has since decreased. United States (48 states) proven oil reserves peaked five years later in 1962 and have been diminishing ever since. The United States oil production rate reached its peak in 1970 and has also been declining ever since. For this reason, the United States now relies on foreign sources for more than half of the oil it consumes. This is a number that will continue to grow.

Between fly fishing in Yellowstone and litigation we haven't been following the real news that closely.

Litigation is going very well. The lawyers keep screwing up.

Today, what the workers find most distressing is that a law that is supposed to protect pensions has failed them.

"On a professional basis, I became quite depressed about this whole thing," said Gene Moore, the former general counsel of the Halliburton unit that was affected, a joint venture known as Dresser-Rand. Mr. Moore, 56, resigned shortly before the pension controversy and was therefore not part of the group that lost benefits involuntarily. But he was concerned enough to spend months seeking possible legal remedies. Ultimately, he decided he was wasting his time.

" Built into the statutes now are clearly wrongs for which there is no punishment," said Mr. Moore, who now practices law in Houston.

A commercial airline pilot, the 52-year-old would not be worrying "about guys behind me with box cutters," he said. Just as important, his $66,000-a-year pension would leave him and his wife, Jeane, free to travel from their home in Gig Harbor, Wash., to visit the grandchild in Crystal Lake, Ill., who is due in January.

But last month, in a Chicago bankruptcy court, United Airlines almost certainly changed the rest of the Derebeys' life, warning that it will likely dump its pension plan onto the federal government. Under the rules of the federal Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., Derebey would be left with $22,000 a year, a third of his expected benefit. Now, he and his wife are hastily planning a second career.

So keep up your technical and litigation skills. Both may be required to survive.

We hope to get back to the USB 2.0/8051 forth project soon. But there is potentially a lot of money involved with out legal project.

Wednesday September 29, 2004 20:00

We continue to deny that we are having too much fun.

News Release: Teacher Arrested!

At New York's Kennedy airport today, an individual later discovered to be a public school teacher was arrested trying to board a flight while in possession of a ruler, a protractor, a set square, a slide rule, and a calculator. At a morning press conference, Attorney general John Ashcroft said he believes the man is a member of the notorious al-gebra movement. He is being charged by the FBI with carrying weapons of math instruction. "Al-gebra is a fearsome cult," Ashcroft said. "They desire average solutions by means and extremes, and sometimes go off on tangents in a search of absolute value. They use secret code names like 'x'and 'y' and refer to themselves as 'unknowns', but we have determined they belong to a common denominator of the axis of medieval with coordinates in every country. As the Greek philanderer Isosceles used to say, 'there are 3 sides to every triangle'."

When asked to comment on the arrest, President Bush said, "If God had wanted us to have better weapons of math instruction, He would have given us more fingers and toes."

---

Mathematics has a recorded history of just over five millennia. For the first four of those millennia southern Iraq was a key location for the development and transmission of mathematical ideas and techniques. At the end of the fourth millennium BCE the temple accountants of the city of Uruk (already significantly larger than many early modern European cities) closely managed its internal economy by means of simple mathematical models to record and predict the flow of human and material assets. Around a thousand years later their administrative successors, running Iraq's first empires, developed the sexagesimal place-value system -- still in worldwide use for time and angle measurement -- for increased calculating efficiency. By the beginning of the second millennium BCE the new number system had initiated a sophisticated scholastic mathematics that went far beyond the needs of accountants, administrators, and notaries. (This is the 'Babylonian' mathematics of the general history books.) Another thousand years on, several centuries of sustained astronomical observation and consistent recording habits in the temples of Uruk and Babylon enabled the development of predictive mathematical astronomy in the last few centuries BCE. This data, reworked by Ptolemy of Alexandria in his Almagest, formed the basis of Old World astronomy until the advent of the telescope. And in ninth-century Baghdad, centre of the Islamic world, the Abbasid dynasty of caliphs founded and sponsored the Bayt al-Hikma ('House of Wisdom'). Here scholars of Arabic produced excellent translations of ancient Greek and Sanskrit scientific works -- the Arabic sources for Euclid's Elements, for instance, are nowadays considered much more reliable than the Byzantine ones. Equally importantly, they reacted to those ancient works. For instance Al-Khwarizmi's Hisab al-jabr wa'l-muqabala ('Calculation by completion and reduction') brought Euclidean structure to ancient Babylonian style algebra, while his influential treatise on the Sanskrit decimal place-value system was popularised across Europe in Latin translation from the twelfth century CE.

Tuesday September 28, 2004 07:57

Industry terminations threaten the financial stability of the PBGC, which assumes responsibility for paying pensions when a plan terminates. When the agency took over retirement benefits for former employees and retirees of Bethlehem and National Steel, its deficit nearly doubled to $9.7 billion currently. If US Airways, United, or Delta follow suit, the deficit could double or triple.

The agency does not guarantee an employee's entire pension. The maximum pension paid by PBGC is $44,386 a year for a 65-year-old. For those who retire younger, it is less

Monday September 27, 2004 06:57

It's a good idea to keep technical ... and legal ... skills honed.

``America's Finest City'' is in a fine mess. Its unfunded pension liability - the gap between the value of its pension assets and its obligation to retirees - stood at $1.17 billion at the end of January. It also faces a shortfall of $545 million for retiree medical benefits.

Sunday September 26, 2004 07:26

Sensors magazine published Measurement Services: More Than Just a Driver in its September issue.

Bill has a fair amount of experience, some unpleasant, writing drivers for digitizing cards which are in a PC. Dll, vxd, and wdm drivers.

Digitizing away from the sensor doesn't work very well or at all if the signal to noise ratio is small.

Bill attended a Analog Device digitizing seminar in June 2004.

One of the instructors made the point that if a digitizer is measuring DC, such as in a weight scale, then perhaps digitizing away from the sensor might work.

But if an AC measurement is being made then cable characteristics creates a filter. And if there is electrical noise, then an cable acts as an antenna.

So think REDESIGN if your product digitizes using National or similar card.

You can email author Craig Anderson to try to solicit his comments on digitizing inside a PC as opposed to digitizing at the sensor.

Wednesday September 22, 2004 10:49

Every retiring pilot takes a haircut: A senior pilot at Delta gets a one-time payment of about $300,000, only half of what he or she would receive in monthly pension checks over the lifetime of the pension. But the Delta pilots know that pilots at US Airways stand to receive only about 25 cents on each dollar of their promised retirement benefits as a result of that company's repeated bankruptcy filings.

Welcome to the bankruptcy economy, where companies and governments walk away from long-standing promises to workers, and where workers scramble to collect as much as they can now in fear that even less will be available tomorrow.

Sure, management incompetence and shortsightedness have contributed to the creation of the bankruptcy economy. But the underlying causes are demographics -- a rapidly aging population as the baby boom generation gets set to retire -- and global competition. U.S. companies are struggling to cut costs so they can compete with overseas companies with younger workforces that receive few benefits, such as pensions or health care, in retirement.

Monday September 20, 2004 08:30

LONDON (CBS.MW) - Growth in global chip sales is likely to halve in 2005, Samsung Electronics said on Monday, according to reports.

TAIPEI - Last September Morris Chang alarmed the semiconductor industry when he said there would be an industrywide recession in 2005 and that the Chinese chip makers would cause it. "I stand by that statement. China's capacity in 2005 will have a big impact," the chairman of the world's largest made-to-order integrated-circuit and computer-chip manufacturer, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC), has told Asia Times Online.

It is most important to realize this extreme divergence in the U.S. economy's profit performance because it is symptomatic of the marked, structural distortion that has been going on in the U.S. economy. Most remarkable, certainly, is the persistent savage profit deflation of the producers of high-tech equipment, unquestionably due to fierce competition. It is needless to say that persistent losses are prone to choke new investment.

Yet most conspicuous from a macro perspective is the flagrant diversion in the development of profits between manufacturing and retail trade. We looked back into the mid-1980s and noted that manufacturing profits were then about four times those of the retailers. Today, they are equal.

Thursday September 16, 2004 17:36

Since the Atlanta airline warned a few months ago it may face bankruptcy, pilots have been taking early retirement at higher rates than usual. That's because retired pilots may take half of their pensions in a lump-sum payment right away, thus ensuring they don't lose their entire pensions if the airline enters Chapter 11.

For 13 years this group has been fighting the Pension Benefits Guaranty Corp. (PBGC), the insurer of corporate pension plans, trying to get more money for their members, many of whom had worked for the airline for 20 or 30 years. Assets they thought would protect their pensions -- hotels, air terminals, even the famous Pan Am building in midtown Manhattan -- had disappeared, leaving their pensions a fraction of what they had planned on.

Now the group had finally run out of money and could no longer keep paying the lawyers who had been fighting for them in court, so their hopes for anything more vanished. "I hate it," said Beaumont, as he fought back tears.

BAILING OUT. The airlines, along with steel companies, auto makers, and a number of other Rust Belt manufacturers, have been struggling with these costs for years. Now other problems, including high fuel costs and a hypercompetitive marketplace, have made coming up with the cash for these payments that much harder

Monday September 13, 2004 10:06

Finally, there's the impending retirement of the baby boomers, scheduled to begin in 2008, but casting an increasing shadow over the financial markets as we approach that date. Bush has promised a reform of the social security system, but such a reform would have been much more easily implemented when he last promised it, four years ago. If he tries to do it now, it is unclear where the $1 trillion that it is estimated to cost would come from. In any case, much more fiscally important than reforming social security is reforming Medicare, a problem that the Bush administration has significantly worsened.

Sunday September 12, 2004 22:20

US institutional investors, mostly pension funds, could pour $250bn into hedge funds in the next four years, and by 2008 could account for half of all hedge fund inflows in a trend that would transform the fledgling industry.

Friday September 10, 2004 08:59

"for instance, C code is generally at least an order of magnitude buggier than code written in Ada"

The 8051 forth operating system is super reliable in the field. Apps written in forth are also super reliable.

And partially as a result of reliability, money makers! Not having to pay for the operating system, compiler, assembler, and super fast edit run incremental compile/assemble steps also contribute to making money.

Everyone should keep in mind the words of the silicon valley forthians; C is an American disease.

While we're anxious to get back to the USB 2.0/8051 forth project, our litigation project must be brought to a successful end before we return to the techie stuff.

And, of course, we must pursue the really important activities in life ... while cheap oil is still available.

Here's about a mile off Sekiu looking at Vancouver Island on Monday afternoon August 20, 2004. The weather was beautiful. On Tuesday and Wednesday it rained cats and dogs. Here's John cleaning a salmon at Van Riper's dock in Sekiu in his rain suit with seagull waiting for the guts. We rented orange boat # 32 from Van Riper. It's very exciting, if not foolish, to be in a 16 foot boat in the Pacific ocean ... especially when fogged in! Here's John [holding salmon] and bill posing with their about $50 per pound, maybe more, salmon in Kenmore, WA Thursday evening August 23, 2004. But it sure was fun! Bill is 67 years old - exactly 45 days younger than Saddam Hussein! John is 65 years old. John pointed out on this trip: When you catch fish, that's skill. When you don't catch fish, that's bad luck. We stayed at Herb's Motel in Sekiu. Herb gave us some of his delicious smoked salmon ... and recipe. 2 1/2 cups of non-iodinized salt per gallon of water. Brine fish chunks for only 20 minutes. Rinse. Let air dry. Smoke until done with alder. Sobolewski's father was a lawyer. And advised Sobolewski and his brother not to go into law! We get legal advice from Sobolewski. Sobolewski got thesis advice from Payne. which worked! Here's an example page from part 1 of the article.

Sunday September 5, 2004 11:35

But over several 15- and 20-year periods in the past century (not to mention many shorter periods, such as now), stocks underperformed. When that happens, prudent companies should step up their contributions, to keep plans whole. But—here's the crazy part—they don't always have to. By law, pension plans are allowed to "assume" that stock prices are rising even when they fall! (Don't ask me; I just write about this stuff.) So even when stocks dive, companies don't have to beef their plans up. As a result, some of them never recover.

Wednesday September 1, 2004 09:51

No, San Diego's financial problem is largely of its own making. By underfunding its public employee pension program, the city is now so deeply in the red, critics assert, that without drastic action, pension payments will virtually suck the treasury dry.

Still, the city's own pension reform committee has warned that only a "miracle" in the stock market will bail out the city unless drastic and politically combustible action is taken, including capping benefits for current retirees and reducing them for future pensioners.

Sunday August 29, 21:16

``If we have promised more than our economy has the ability to deliver to retirees without unduly diminishing real income gains of workers, as I fear we may have, we must recalibrate our public programs so that pending retirees have time to adjust through other channels,'' Greenspan told a central bank conference in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. ``If we delay, the adjustments could be abrupt and painful.''

The federal insurer behind 31,000 US pension plans has warned of “multi-faceted and profound challenges”, amid clear signs that concern about retirement costs is moving rapidly up the agenda in Washington.

With the threat of bankruptcies looming in the airline industry, senior White House officials are keeping a close eye on developments. The National Economic Council, headed by Stephen Friedman, is working with the Treasury, where a pensions task force is said to have been created. President George W. Bush is also understood to have raised the issue with Andrew Card, his chief of staff.

NEW YORK -- The corporate pension crisis seems to be going from bad to worse. First, companies struggled to come up with the money to cover their benefit obligations, and now they want to ditch their plans altogether.

Wednesday August 18, 20:55

The sage awakes to light in the night of all creatures. That which the world calls day is the night of ignorance to the wise. Bhagavad Gita c. BC 400-, Sanskrit Poem Incorporated Into the Mahabharata.

Oppenheimer was reminded of the quotation from his favorite Sanskrit text, the Bhagavadgita, "I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds." To his brother, Frank, who had helped construct the site, he said only, "It worked.

Welcome to the age of "dead money" on Wall Street, a frustrating period in which the major indexes are treading water and turning a profit in the stock market is about as tough as getting ahead without a high school diploma.

The inability of the stock market to generate the types of double-digit gains investors were conditioned to expect in the boom years has many wondering what's the use of tying money up in stocks if the prospects for gains are not as great as Wall Street advertises.

At the New York Mercantile Exchange, crude futures set for September delivery climbed to a new all-time high of $46.95 a barrel before settling at $46.75, up 70 cents on the day.

Everest's book OIL, POWER & EMPIRE Iraq and the U.S. Global agenda [relevant parts serialized] and the National Geographic June 2004 End of Cheap Oil are highly recommended reading to understand the US oil predicament, War in Iraq and Morales and Payne's systematic concerted legal effort starting with the NSA lawsuit. Monday July 26, 2004 20:11

Tuesday August 17, 10:38

WASHINGTON, Aug. 16 (UPI) -- If you're thinking of studying computer science in college, don't waste your time. The great tech boom of 1965-2004 is coming to an end, and it's not going to return. On a 40-year view, or the average length of a professional career, there will be better opportunities elsewhere.

The rebound came despite most funds creeping into the red in the final three months, according to the Russell/Mellon Master Trust fund, which includes $1,000bn of assets held by more than 500 corporate and public pension funds and foundations.

Pension funds mostly showed losses in 2001 and 2002, and were flat in 2003, raising concerns about whether they would be able to meet their obligations. Their actuarial assumptions were based on investment returns of about 9 per cent.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has estimated that 20 per cent of pension funds were investing in hedge funds in 2002, compared with 15 per cent the previous year.

Long/short funds attempt to make money by buying attractive stocks while "shorting" others that the fund manager believes are primed to decline. The strategy often is pitched as a way to generate market-beating returns with lower-than-average volatility.

Monday August 16, 19:02

Here is an alarming statement: In the biggest companies (such as GM, Ford, and so on with large pension and health care obligations) the real owners may be their workers and retirees and not their shareholders. "The only alternative is a massive restructuring of liabilities." We may see the average retirement age rise because it will cost more to retire.

Friday August 13, 16:59

An alarming picture was drawn on Friday by Bradley Belt, the PBGC's executive director. “Over the past two decades, the number of defined benefit plans has fallen by 75 per cent, to just over 31,000 plans today,” he said in a speech. “Moreover, just one in five workers participate in private-sector defined benefit plans.”

Saturday August 14, 09:47

An alarming picture was drawn on Friday by Bradley Belt, the PBGC's executive director. “Over the past two decades, the number of defined benefit plans has fallen by 75 per cent, to just over 31,000 plans today,” he said in a speech. “Moreover, just one in five workers participate in private-sector defined benefit plans.”

Friday August 13, 16:59

Bill got a nice email from Robert Blumen.

This, of course, deserves a link!

Warburton calls the recent period "an excursion into the realm of financial fantasy." The fantasy is that central bankers have found a way to inflate without any negative consequences. While the effects of money supply growth can be confined to stocks and bonds, inflation is hidden in plain sight. The adjustment of relative prices between financial assets and consumption goods cannot be postponed indefinitely. The unwinding will not be easy or painless. Surely central bank follies now threaten economic disaster.

Wednesday August 11, 08:19

That makes the nation's debt triple its gross domestic product. In 1933, debt was about 2 1/2 times GDP, according to a study by the Gabelli Mathers mutual fund.

Tuesday August 10, 20:59

At some point - probably soon - we will see stories of fund of funds that have hit the rocks. That may come as a surprise to those conservative pension funds that have only recently moved into hedge funds.

Monday August 9, 12:55

July flows were like those in June," says Carl Wittnebert, TrimTabs' director of research. "It's retirement money on autopilot."

One day we shall know whether Alan Greenspan was history's greatest central banker or whether the last dozen years have represented the greatest mismanagement of the world economy since the roaring '20s.

Today there are huge swathes of society who believe that their jobs are permanent, that interest rates will never rise above 5pc and are happy to spend at a rate higher than their earnings. The last property crash only a little over a decade ago is forgotten. There are businesses which in all probability should not survive. A recession would have purged these businesses and released personnel into good enterprises.

Sunday August 8, 21:01

Federal Pension Agency May Have Money Belonging to You

AccountingWEB.com - Aug-9-2004 - If you know someone who is retired from the airline, steel, transportation, machinery, retail trade, apparel and financial services industries and lives in New York, California, Texas, New Jersey or Pennsylvania, there's a possibility that pension money belonging to them is being held by the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, Reuters reported.

While most of the $75 million in unclaimed benefits due to 26,000 people the agency can't find comes from those industries and belongs to people living in the above states, the benefits aren't confined to these areas. The agency is urging everyone to visit the Pension Search directory located at www.pbgc.gov/search.

The unclaimed benefits range from $1 to $264,548, the agency said. The money fell into the hands of PBGC when pension plans went under and were taken over by the federal agency. The agency pays benefits up to certain limits for failed "defined benefit" pension plans, the traditional sort that pay a fixed payout at retirement, Reuters reported.

"We urge everyone to check the Pension Search directory on PBGC's Web site to see if they, a friend or a relative are missing any pension dollars earned during their working years," said PBGC Executive Director Bradley D. Belt.

"We want people to get the retirement money they worked so hard to earn."

It's no secret that pensions have become a nightmare for businesses and workers alike. Declining stock prices that support the payment pools are partly to blame. Also, as the airline slims to increase efficiency, fewer workers are paying in while more retirees are drawing out their money. This math has led companies to cancel or cut expected retirement checks for thousands.

Saturday August 7, 17:14

¦ China’s economy is growing by leaps and bounds, an astonishing 8% a year.
¦ China is now the world’s largest market for TVs.
¦ The Chinese bought nearly 1.9 million new cars last year, up 61%.
¦ China is the largest exporter to the U.S. of refrigerators, TVs and bicycles.
¦ The U.S. trade deficit with China hit a record $124 billion last year.
¦ Last year China consumed 40% of the world’s cement and 27% of its steel.
¦ China is buying so much aluminum that the Western bicycling industry is facing a serious shortage.
¦ In the past decade China has gone from being a net exporter of oil to being the second largest importer, after the U.S.
¦ The middle class is the fastest growing market segment in the country.
¦ In the next 25 years, some 350 million people are expected to migrate from the country to take jobs making shoes, TVs, cars and bicycles.

China’s near-term demands COULD POSE TREMENDOUS SHORTAGES elsewhere for raw materials.

[a]nd 70 million regular Internet users.”

DAN BEAULIEU is a founding partner in D.B. Management Group (dbmpcb.com). He can be reached at 207-873-0793; danbbeaulieu@aol.com. His recently published book, Printed Circuit Board Basics, is available from UP Media Group.

PRINTED CIRCUIT DESIGN & MANUFACTURE August 2004

Motorola and its spinoff, Freescale, have terminated pension benefits for their employees Patty heard today.

The first step? Given the extremely low cash-to-assets ratio of mutual funds and presumably pension funds as well, we can infer that the most facile way of dealing with a substantial decline in prices will be for institutions to short ETFs,

Morales and Payne could have invested our $2,179 in the stock market. And lost most of it.

So we decided to invest our money is jury trial filing fees for prima facie cases. All evidence of guilt of defendants is in writing, nearly all in court records.

Let's get back to the USB 2.0, 8051 forth project as soon as we collect some settlement money.

Friday August 6, 17:28

“Plus add to that the baby boomer factor,…This demographic group is getting closer to retirement, and many probably haven’t met their goals. So what are they to do? It’s kind of hard to go short when virtually every talking head, planner, and newspaper continues their vested bullish stance.

An investor in Japan from 1989 to 2003 would have been far better off receiving the low returns from fixed income than in suffering a massive loss of capital in the Japanese stock market. If you want to make the case that the average investor is not really that rational we would tend to agree. That’s what makes financial markets of all kinds go to extremes on both on the upside and downside. History tells us that when stock market bubbles burst they invariably go to extremely low valuations. They always think that “this time is different”, but we would not make that bet. In our view the market has been topping after a year-long counter-trend rally, and is on the verge of breaking down.

Wednesday August 4, 12:43

Engineer Nathan, who you can find on these pages, recommened that patty and bill visit the mineshaft saloon in Madrid, NM and have a Rolling Rock beer. So we did on Sunday July 18, 2004. Interesting.

The Daily Reckoning
Santa Fe, New Mexico
Wednesday, August 4, 2004

But when we got to the little town of Madrid, New Mexico, only one word seemed to work: funky. Without it, the town couldn't exist

Nothing is quite straight in Madrid. The houses lean. The floors sink. The people drift.

The Madrilenos seemed to be a bit rotten too.

The Mine Shaft Saloon is a local hangout. It is a friendly place with a broad bar and dollar bills pasted up on the wall...each one with someone's name on it. Country music plays loudly.

But what caught our attention was the woman who moved between them. Flirting with the first man...and then, when he ignored her...she moved onto the second. If it was a paramour she was seeking, she seemed to be in the wrong place. Then again, she seemed to be the wrong woman, too. She had tattoos up and down her arm...and wore a dress that took all the form out of her. This left the viewer's eye with nothing to focus upon but the hideous tattoos...and the face.

The poor woman was no beauty. She was no young filly either. Not that she was old; she simply looked as though she had been ridden too hard. She had long dark hair...which framed a bad complexion and a missing tooth.

Tuesday August 3, 21:08

The Financial Services Authority has rebuffed a call for it to help compensate more than 65,000 people who have lost all or part of their pensions as a result of their employers becoming insolvent.

In a meeting on Friday between Ros Altman, a specialist in pension economics who has advised the government on retirement policy, and John Tiner, FSA chief executive, the government regulatory body made clear it did not believe it had any responsibility for occupational scheme losses.

GIVE ME LIBERTY, OR GIVE ME PEPPERONI
by Bill Bonner

One of the wonders of modern politics is this frequently posed question: how is it possible that in a nation of 293,845,317 people, the best we can do for an election is a contest between George W. Bush and John Kerry? Among the multitudes of able-bodied, native-born citizens there must be many thousands of reasonable intelligence and standard morals. Some must even be above average in both qualities. And a few are surely exceptional. Even if you exclude the lawyers and career politicians as unfit on moral grounds you still have millions to choose from.

Bill and Patty were forced to sell their AT&T stock at about $48 per share after bill got fired from Sandia labs. It went up to about $60.

AT&T, once considered one of the US's most credit-worthy companies, sank into the mire of the junk bond market on Tuesday after Standard & Poor's stripped away the telecommunications company's last remaining investment-grade credit rating.

The downgrade had been expected by the bond markets, which have watched Moody's Investors Service and Fitch Ratings also cut their ratings on AT&T to junk in recent weeks amid concern about the company's ability to compete in the market for business and broadband communications.

Let's move the nmol fast counter to these pages to see how we are doing!

A new way to look at retirement...and it ain't bifocals.

Of course, no baby boomer will ever truly get...old.

But of course we WILL shake up retirement. We won't have Grandpa's gold watch and pension -- let alone his Social Security. That's OK. We're healthier than any earlier generation. We're likely to live longer. Plus we had the best bands.

On the other hand, unless we get our boogie together, we may live longer than our money does. Total bummer.

Be wary of the above please.

Do not fear the enemy, for your enemy can only take your life. It is far better that you fear the media, for they will steal your HONOR. That awful power, the public opinion of a nation, is created in America by a horde of ignorant, self-complacent simpletons who failed at ditching and shoemaking and fetched up in journalism on their way to the poorhouse.

Mark Twain

*** "There's so much to see in New Mexico," Elizabeth commented.

The evolving pensions crisis is not limited to Britain:

In the United States, corporate pension funds have seriously underprovided for their liabilities - airline funds alone are $280 billion in deficit. To try to make up the shortfalls, employers are having to contribute more - the "legacy costs" of past retirement promises (pensions and medical care insurance) have become a major burden for industries such as steel, airlines and automobiles. For example, they account for $1,900 of the costs of every car sold by General Motors.

The federal bailout fund is already in the red, yet there's worse to come as companies seek to dump their pension obligations on the fund. Retirees suffer, too. When the fund took over U.S. Airways' liabilities recently, its pensioners faced cuts of up to 50 per cent in benefits. [Ed. Note: The pensions crisis is but one spoke in the wheel of this rapidly approaching Federal disaster. We urge you to learn more:

Government-sponsored Catastrophe

In Europe, where retirees depend on state pensions rather than company funds, experts warn that benefits may have to be cut by up to a third to keep the system solvent.

In Japan, pension fund assets of the 100 largest companies cover less than half the amount of their promises to retirees. In the year to March 2003, pensions-related write-offs were equivalent to a massive 72% of their pre- tax corporate profits." .

Sunday August 1, 12:20

Stock and bond markets currently are not generating the returns most people expected. As a result, the contributions you or your employer make to your retirement nest egg probably are too low at the moment.

WASHINGTON -- Looming insolvency at pension plans run by bankrupt United Airlines and other struggling companies could overwhelm the U.S. agency that insures plans and force it to seek a taxpayer bailout, the agency's former head says.

Saturday July 31, 19:54

Meanwhile, the symbiotic relationship between pension funds and the equity market has been laid bare. Some observers are concerned that a prolonged shift out of UK equities by pension funds will act as a dead weight on the market’s performance. In the US, profits have been boosted by some artificially high assumptions on pension fund returns.

In a sense, the crisis has a simple solution; we shall all have to work longer and save more. But getting from here to there will not be easy, in part because of the cost of existing pension promises, in part because of political resistance and in part because employers have been unwilling to take on older workers.

Depending on negotiations in the days ahead, their pension fund could be wound up with a shortfall of close to £875m resulting in their losing a good half of their retirement income. A further existing 20,000 pensioners of T&N, Federal Mogul’s British subsidiary, would have their benefits frozen.

The pension crisis at the UK arm of Federal Mogul is complicated by the fact that the US parent company has been under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection since October 2001 following a series of asbestos-related claims. In the short term, however, it lays bare the vulnerability of British employees of insolvent companies when the government’s plans for an occupational pension safety net are still incomplete. Looking ahead, the plight of the 40,000 pensioners and contributors to the group’s pension fund underlines how urgently the UK needs a coherent strategy to solve its pension crisis.

Thursday July 29, 19:58

anita

I, of course, posted your message.

Morales and I need to think this over.

Us senior citizens minds work slower so we might not be such good subjects for an interview.

Yes, my work and Michael's did cross paths.

You can read about this here.

http://downloads.members.tripod.com/bill_3_2/Riconosciuto.html

bill

----- Original Message -----
From: mindgame
"To: bill payne
Sent: Thursday, July 29, 2004 9:47 AM
Subject: enjoy

I just read your lawsuit, that's quite a battle you've got going on. Have you and Michael crossed paths through your work? It seems like a reasonable possibility.

How would you like to be interviewed by Len Osanic and me? You can check us out at www.blackopradio.com, we broadcast on Thursdays.

We, of course, continue to deny we are having too much senior citizen fun.

The bear market dismantled a lot of retirement dreams. Portfolios fattened in the bubble years crash dieted when the market went bust. But could your portfolio have lasted until really "advanced age?" What if you live to age 90 or 95? Could your portfolio survive 35 or 40 years?

The bear market dismantled a lot of retirement dreams. Portfolios fattened in the bubble years crash dieted when the market went bust. But could your portfolio have lasted until really "advanced age?" What if you live to age 90 or 95? Could your portfolio survive 35 or 40 years?

Those "legacy costs" dated back to a wealthier industry era, when there were few retirees and lots of active workers. But by the 1990s that situation was reversed, and retirees greatly outnumbered workers.

In addition, it seems that many companies had been happy enough to promise their workers pensions but never got around to putting enough money aside to cover those promises.

NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Americans' overall income shrank for two consecutive years after stocks plunged in 2000, the first time that has effectively happened in the since the current tax system was put in place during World War II, according to a published report Thursday.

The New York Times, reporting data from the Internal Revenue Service, said gross income reported to the agency fell 5.1 percent to $6.0 trillion in 2002, the most recent year for which data is available, down from $6.35 trillion in 2000. Because of population growth, average income fell even more, by 5.7 percent, and adjusted for inflation the decline was 9.2 percent.

Lester Thurow again. Global economy, global wages, then the horrible grin.

For all the others who think they are providing a service, we have proven and of course others have followed thereafter, that no investigative research goes into news stories. Instead, they either all rely on some pool agency like Reuters or AP to supply to them the substance with they then embellish.

When oil prices have doubled to $80 and a second Great Depression threatens global political stability, our president will assemble a 9/11-style commission to explain the intelligence and policy failures that led to the crisis. The verdict will be familiar: The stunning blow to the world economy brought about by the sudden, unexpected depletion of fossil fuel should have been anticipated and prevented.

Wednesday July 28, 15:18

Bill was told last summer in Florida by a mutual funds CEO that the PBGC may have to file for bankruptcy.

The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation expressed alarm this week after United, a unit of UAL Corp. (UALAQ.OB Quote, Profile, Research) , said it would stop contributing to its pension plans while under bankruptcy protection, raising the specter of default.

"The PBGC wasn't designed to withstand the level of underfunding that we are now witnessing in the system," former PBGC executive director Steve Kandarian, who stepped down in February, said in a telephone interview with Reuters.

We continue to deny that we are having too much fun. Something has to be done with the US lawyer problem.

We are nearly certain that lawyers were involved the the UAL decision to stop contributing to its pension plan.

But we are very anxious to get back to the USB 2.0/8051 forth project.

Tuesday July 27, 07:48

We're anxious to get back to the USB 2.0/8051/forth project but we need to bring some type of resolution to our about 12 legal project. There might be some real money here.

Monday July 26, 21:16

We're posting lot of hopefully interesting, but maybe not true, articles on economics and high tech.

But keep in mind Mark Twain's advice about those who write these articles.

Do not fear the enemy, for your enemy can only take your life. It is far better that you fear the media, for they will steal your HONOR. That awful power, the public opinion of a nation, is created in America by a horde of ignorant, self-complacent simpletons who failed at ditching and shoemaking and fetched up in journalism on their way to the poorhouse.

Mark Twain

Keep in mind too that Morales and Payne are up against two classes of BS artists: lawyers and journalists. Neither can be trusted. Most notably Larry Spohn of the Albuquerque Tribune who kept the Japan spy report for about 7 years rather then report on it.

HOWLING WOLF
by The Mogambo Guru

But it is this next nugget that ought to curdle the blood of equity investors. "The May inflow of foreign funds into the U.S. economy was also announced Friday; at $54.8 billion, down from $81.2 billion in April, it dropped for the fourth successive month."

And since foreigners are the only ones with money these days, attested to by the $540 billion trade deficit, it's pretty scary when they chop their U.S. investments month after month. There is a disaster afoot if stocks deflate from "insanely overpriced" to merely "overpriced," and the Fed knows it.

There's just no room to cut rates any lower and besides, they need to be fighting inflation. It just goes to show, the forces of nature can be delayed for a while, but they can't be reversed. What's coming is coming, whether the Fed likes it or not.

Bad things are going to happen. Ugh.

Finally, with ageing populations, the number of people wanting to hold risky growth assets like equities will tend to fall relative to those that want to hold safe, income-earning, assets. "Safety first" will be the new mantra associated with the ageing of the baby boomers, and that means a lower outright level of demand for equities and other risky investments.

All in all, I would treat last year's impressive equity gains as a typical bear market rally. Investors will continue to struggle for returns. A "buy to hold" strategy is not likely to make much headway. And we're going to have to wait a very long time to get back to the heady days of the 1990s.

We're following the SigmaTel STIR4210 USB 2.0 IrDA bridge controller since it too would be easy to interface to an 8051 family microcontroller running embedded controller forth for the 8051 family.

Sigmatel stock declined from about 25 to 14 recently with a crash on July 21.

"Unless action is taken soon to strengthen Social Security, in just 14 years we will begin paying more in benefits than we collect in taxes. Without changes, by 2042 the Social Security trust fund will be exhausted. By then, the number of Americans 65 or older is expected to have doubled. There won't be enough younger people working to pay all of the benefits owed to those who are retiring. At that point, there will be enough money to pay only about 73 cents for each dollar of scheduled benefits," she writes.

Friday July 23, 15:40

We didn't quite get into to tech stuff today ... but we're thinking about this. Transition time, Morales calls it.

The No. 2 U.S. airline told a bankruptcy court judge that plans to hold off on a $404 million contribution in September and a $91 million contribution in October will give it more flexibility to manage its overall assets.

"It's a step to reduce our costs and attract the financing we're going to need to exit bankruptcy," Chief Financial Officer Jake Brace told reporters.

The company did not say when the payments would be made, but demoralized workers fear they will never get that money.

Thursday July 22, 19:02

bill will return to tech stuff tomorrow.

We're now at the last court step in our legal project.

There may be other steps.

Everest's book OIL, POWER & EMPIRE Iraq and the U.S. Global agenda [relevant parts serialized] and the National Geographic June 2004 End of Cheap Oil are highly recommended reading to understand the US oil predicament, War in Iraq and Morales and Payne's systematic concerted legal effort starting with the NSA lawsuit. Thursday July 22, 2004 08:33

"The overall reduction in the pension defict from £66bn pre-tax to £60bn pre-tax was down to improving equity markets - which, so far, have not being repeated for 2004 - not to higher contributions," Mr Ralfe writes. "Surely the days of whistling in the dark, hoping that the financial markets will plug pension deficits are gone?".

Wednesday July 21, 19:15

As our long-term viewers are aware, we are not giving up on the secular deflationary bear market we envision and continue to monitor the money supply since, as Mr. Greenspan articulates, inflation in the long-run is a monetary phenomenon. We are attaching a chart at the end of this comment which was taken from the St. Louis Federal Reserve web-site which, if the trend of MZM, M2, and M3 continues, does not look like “deflation can now be safely set aside”.

The very worst mistake we could make at this juncture is to treat inflation as public enemy No. 1. Lurking behind this camouflage of higher prices is a worse danger, and that is a deflationary collapse of credit. All of these economic states are morphing into each other quickly, and it is understandable how advocating reflation to avoid deflation while risking inflation could be a little confusing. But the reward is avoiding a repeat of the 1930s or Japan in the 1990s, and that is worth a little time and effort.

Tuesday July 20, 20:38

Workers More Productive, But Shareholders Profit BY JAY HANCOCK The Baltimore Sun You're not crazy. I checked with the government. Everything really is going up - gas prices, corporate profits, soda pop prices, gross domestic product, medical prices, household debt, milk prices - except your salary. Bad job growth wasn't the only thing weird about this economic recovery. The drag was double. It was unusual enough that employers churned out more and more products the last two years without hiring extra help. But they also withheld raises from the workers they already had. We're fixing the first problem. The economy added 1.3 ~million jobs in 2004's first half. But the wage and salary graph still looks like Interstate 70 leaving Denver and heading toward Topeka. "Five out of the last six months the real hourly wage has declined, and probably six out of the last seven months," says Jared Bernstein, senior economist at the Economic -Policy Institute in Washington. "The pie is getting larger" in the economy. "But where are the slices going?" Not into wage and salary increases, so far. But more-expensive health care doesn't put money in your pocket, unless you're a doctor referring patients to his own MRI clinic. Often it removes money from your pocket if an employer increases your deductibles and premium contributions. What you see in your paycheck is the wage and salary part of compensation, and that's gone nowhere. This has happened before. Wages have taken a breather at various times in the country's history, especially when held up against inflation, or overall rising prices. What's bizarre now is that wages and salaries are stagnant even as the overall economy goes great guns. In the last two years economic output has grown faster than at any time since the late 1990s, and normally such acceleration has boosted demand for workers and driven up take-home pay. But not now. If you account for inflation, hourly wages and salaries are more than 1 percent lower than they were late last year. And pay isn't doing well even in face-value terms. It's up 2 percent over the past year. Treat yourself to a round of mini-golf. (Even though we talk about "hourly" wages, we're referring to most non- supervisory employees, about 80 percent of U.S. workers - not just people who punch a timecard.) "We believe there's more slack than there appears to be in the labor market," sags Scott Hoyt, an analyst with Economy.com in West Chester, Pa. "Wage growth is still a drag on overall personal income growth." How come? One factor is that, for various reasons, Hoyt believes the official unemployment rate of 5.6 per- cent understates the number of people who want work but can't find it. With' relatively more available workers, employers don't have to bid so high for their services. But why are there so many idle workers in the first place? Why haven't companies hired at a pace to match their growing revenue? The answer, of course, is productivity, the major U.S. economic story of the past decade. Thanks to computers, robots, division of labor and, yes, layoffs and downsizing, the United States is churning out many more products and services per worker than it once did. In the long run productivity is a wonderful thing; it boosts employee pay, corporate profits, public health and other key standards. But so far, in this cycle, it has mainly boosted corporate profits. Almost all of the gains of productivity have gone to shareho1ders hardly any have gone to workers. Economists expect wages and salaries to start perking up - but they were expecting it a year ago, too. "I think they'll come back. I think they're coming back now," says Mark Vitner, an economist with Wachovia Corp., in Charlotte, N.C., who has been1 more bullish on the economy this year than most of his peers. "The quality of jobs being added actually doesn't look that bad." But the longer employee-pay increases delay their overdue entrance, the louder Democratic presidential hopeful John F. Kerry's message about the "abandoned" midd1e class will sound this fall. Albuquerque Journal Monday July 19,2004

On the other hand, Asian economies continue to export deflation in the form of ever lower prices for consumer electronics, clothes and manufactured items; and there is no doubt that the flow of manufacturing investment continues to go into China, for example.

Also while short-term US interest rates rose by 25 basis points last month, at the same time the cost of long-term money fell by 130 basis points. What does this tell us? It says capital markets are pricing in deflation and not inflation.

Why should this happen? Well, the US economic recovery has only just started after a three-year slowdown, unemployment is high, and personal, corporate and government debt is at a record high. Stocks are overvalued and it is not difficult to see higher short-term interest rates due to high oil prices causing a stock market crash. October is the traditional month.

LONDON, July 20 (Reuters) - Oil prices eased slightly on Tuesday, but held above $41 a barrel, supported by concerns robust world demand is stretching supplies to the limit.

Monday July 19, 20:31

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Oil prices climbed near $42 a barrel on Monday as new sabotage attacks in Iraq helped rekindle worries over the reliability of Middle East crude shipments.

U.S. light crude settled up 39 cents at $41.64 a barrel, after hitting a high of $41.90, adding to last week's rally and approaching the all-time futures contract high of $42.45 struck in June. Brent crude , traded in London, eased 10 cents to $37.90 a barrel.

"Oil prices are still strong because demand is strong, capacity utilization is high, and we've still got concerns over security of supply," said Commerzbank analyst Steve Turner.

A suicide bomber in Iraq blew up a fuel truck near a Baghdad police station on Monday, killing at least nine people, wounding 62 and destroying cars and buildings. It was the latest in a series of attacks that have also targeted the oil-rich nation's energy infrastructure and hindered oil shipments.

Our guess is that it is not inflation that worries the Fed; it's deflation. Businesses are not borrowing. Which means, in order to get money into the economy, the Fed has to rely on the government and the consumer. The government has already done all it can. And the consumer? Unlike business, which borrows to increase capital investment and employment, nearly every penny a consumer borrows is thrown away; he buys a hot tub for his back yard and ends up poorer and more vulnerable than before. Like it or not, sooner or later, he is forced to stop borrowing. That moment may not be close. But it is certainly closer.

Celsius 9/11
starring The Mogambo Guru

Or as Bob Moriarty explains in an essay entitled "Battle of the Titans" on 321gold.com, "The cause is simple. In a fractional reserve system, even a gold fractional reserve system, all money is created by loaning money into existence. And the more loans you make, the more profit you can make. It is a perpetual motion machine. Just as long as you keep expanding the money supply (inflation) everything works. Or until people borrow far more money than they can afford to pay back. At that point the system implodes and deflation sets in as the money supply collapses."

All that money, all that glorious, fabulous money, turns into, first, debt to finance economic expansion, and then, only later, the decline and deflation. The eventual and inevitable decline is caused by prices going up, pushed up by all the money. And then people stop buying as much stuff, and economic decline sets in.

Saturday July 17, 2004 18:51

Saturday July 10, 2004 bill drove to Chama, NM to ride the Toltec and Cumbres 3 foot narrow gauge railroad. In grey rabbit, of course.

Grey rabbit just got new front and rear struts and realigned.

Here's the right going in.

Bill was accused of being dyslexic by about 76 year told bill goldrick 1.

The kiddie life preserver is for senior citizen knees.

The Harbor Freight electric impact wrench is a new addition which saves lots of time and contributes to the US trade imbalance.

Here's the rear struts jpg.

That, of course, is a 3 ton Harbor Freight floor jack. And a log from a Tamark bill sawed in Idaho.

Safety first! Hydraulic jacks can fail!

Life preserver again.

Struts at age 67 requires caution!

Patty was in Florida visiting her 91 year old father, his girl friend, and three sisters.

Steam locomotives are about mechanical engineering's greatest achievement. They, at the time, were very fuel efficient!

A Durango and Silverton engineer told bill the engine operates at 480 psi.

Scary being close to these old locomotives!!!

Here's some jpgs from the trip

Here's going toward Osier, Colorado.

A docent told us that about 1 scoop of coal per 30 seconds is added to the firebox going uphill.

After a good lunch a Osier and the way back to Chama bill asked the conductor,

bill: How many derailments do you have?
conductor: This is a sensitive question.
None are life-threatening.
I've worked here for 11 years.
We've had 54 derailments.
Most only take an hour to two to rerail but if an engine is involved this can take two days.

This information, of course, makes crossing a trestle lots more exciting!

After leaving at 10AM it was good to get off the train at 4PM, go to the motel for several cold ones, then have dinner and live music across the street at High Country.

Short time here, long time gone. So let's all enjoy it while we can.

There is only one thing worse than growing old. Not growing older!

Friday July 16, 2004 18:19

Techies of all countries. You have to guard yourselves against lawyers.

Do not think dishonestly
The Way is in training
Become acquainted with every art
Know the ways of all professions
Distinguish between gain and loss in worldly matters
Develop intuitive judgment and understanding for everything
Perceive those things which cannot be seen
Pay attention even to trifles
Do nothing which is of no use

Miyamoto Mushashi

Have you ever had so much fun?

Keep upwind while having all of this fun, of course.

Everest's book OIL, POWER & EMPIRE Iraq and the U.S. Global agenda [parts serialized] and the National Geographic June 2004 End of Cheap Oil are highly recommended reading to understand the the US oil predicament, War in Iraq and Morales and Payne's systematic concerted legal effort starting with the NSA lawsuit. Tuesday July 13, 2004 10:03

1 http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=15&ItemID=2292
2 http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Congress/8327/buehlerpayne.html
3 http://www.jya.com/nsasuit.txt
4 http://www.aci.net/kalliste/speccoll.htm
5 http://biphome.spray.se/laszlob/cryptoag/buehler-tape.htm
6 ?

Thursday July 15, 2004 08:29

On the front of engineering and the pipeline of talent, undergraduate degrees in engineering granted annually in Japan, China, India and Russia are rounded up to 103,000, 195,000, 129,000 and 82,000, respectively, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Yet the U.S. graduates about 60,900 engineering students per year, with less than 10 percent of U.S. college students pursuing science and engineering degrees. In comparison, more than 60 percent of college students in China are enrolled in a science and engineering curriculum. This is a stunning contrast. What are the revelations and ramifications to this technology- driven economy? Job loss is painful, and the pipeline of new engineers coming from colleges and universities is a legitimate concern. How to reconcile these two fronts?

But the US has lots of lawyers!

Wednesday July 14, 2004 12:50

What gives? Few fault Koizumi for his handling of the economy, but he's taking the heat for two unpopular policies: pension reform and support for the U.S. in Iraq. In an effort to shore up Japan's nearly insolvent pension system, the LDP-led coalition in June hiked premiums and cut benefits, alienating millions of retirees. And in the spring, Koizumi dispatched 550 soldiers to Iraq despite massive public opposition.

One of the best things you can do for you and your kids is to make sure you are financially secure when you reach retirement age. Given that the monthly mortgage payment is the biggest financial burden for most of us, I think one of the wisest moves is to get your mortgage paid off before you retire.

But like thousands of other Boeing workers, Burks lost his job in December of 2001. And like thousands of others, he returned to school, got retrained and found a job that pays a fraction of what he used to earn.

In the two-plus years since he lost his Boeing job, Burks has eaten through his $10,000 savings and $7,000 retirement fund just to make ends meet.

Sunday July 11, 2004 20:04

Now, that latter period, especially the years from about 1975 to 2000, is beginning to look like the golden age of retirement in America. In other words, those were the good old days, and if you're still working, there's a good chance you've missed out.

Thursday July 8, 2004 12:27

I got caught with little cash left. I was along for the roller coaster ride. As Mr. Greenspan dropped short term interest rates to 1%, a "cyclical bull market" in US equities began in October 2002. There was a cause and effect, not a coincidence. While the Great Recession overpowers any one institution or man, one man can (and did) tweak the timeline. And timing is everything. Cyclical markets--lasting a few months or a few years--are one magnitude shorter than secular ones. Whether a misguided attempt at reflation, an "echo bubble", or a cyclical bull market given steroids, a label on the current stock market run is irrelevant to me. After a cyclical bear market that lasted two and a half years to October 2002, my retirement portfolio recovered nicely into 2003 and 2004. I have used this opportunity to sell mutual funds: technology, growth, index, international, and selected industry sectors. My 70/30 stock/fixed income asset allocation in early 2000 reversed. The cash portion has soared. I will sell more on rallies. Now being aware about the current secular bear, I can bide my time and pick my spots to buy treasury bond funds, inflation protected securities, oil funds, international bond funds, gold funds, or just sit on cash. I plan to reduce my principal risk in this way for another 5 to 15 years. After all, the previous two secular bear markets lasted 16 and 13 years. If I can endure all that time even with the same constant dollar value that I have now, I will be well positioned to take advantage of the secular bull market that will inevitably follow.

We're going to be resuming the USB 2.0 projectS next week. Our legal project is progressing.

Be sure to read the relevant selections from OIL, POWER & EMPIRE. And, of course, keep upwind.

We're going to work on both the Cypress EZ-USB-FX and NetChip2270 now that we have a former Cypress employee helper.

Pensions are changing

In 1986, 172,642 companies offered traditional pension plans, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute. By 1998, the number of companies sponsoring defined-benefit plans had shrunk to 56,405, a 67% drop in just 12 years. The number of plans insured by Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. (PBGC), which is supposed to protect the benefits of private pension participants (more on that later), dropped from 39,882 in 1999 to 32,321 in 2002, a 19% decline.

The trend is clear: Fewer Americas will be covered by defined-benefit plans.

Even if you have a pension, there's no guarantee it'll be around when you retire. Just ask the former employees of Weirton Steel, US Airways, Polaroid, or Archibald Candy, the bankrupt manufacturer of Fannie May, Fannie Farmer, and Laura Secord chocolates. (There's something sad about a candy company going bankrupt, especially when Fannies are involved.) After these companies went belly-up, they could no longer pay pension benefits. Their plans -- along with the plans of more than 150 other companies, including, of course, Frosty Morn Meats -- were taken over by the PBGC, a federally chartered agency that essentially insures pensions.

While that sounds reassuring, benefit payments from the PBGC are often lower than what a retiree would have received had the company remained solvent. A Washington Post article told the story of Melvin Schmeizer, a Bethlehem Steel employee for more than 35 years whose monthly pension dropped from $2,850 to $1,700 after the PBGC assumed control of the plan. Furthermore, the PBGC itself isn't on solid ground. Its fund backing single-employer plans went from a $7.7 billion surplus in 2001 to an $11.2 billion deficit in 2003. The reason: The agency is taking over more plans. Last year, the PBGC assumed control of 152 pension plans (up 5.5% from 2002) covering 206,000 people (up 10.2%). That's the largest annual increase in the total number of people covered by the PBGC. The agency paid a record $2.5 billion in benefits, almost $1 billion more than in the previous year.

Sunday July 5, 2004 20:11

Do not think dishonestly
The Way is in training
Become acquainted with every art
Know the ways of all professions
Distinguish between gain and loss in worldly matters
Develop intuitive judgment and understanding for everything

Miyamoto Mushashi

Thursday February 23, 1995 bill received a single sheet with several additions from a Japanese businessman titled

"Martial Arts Secrets of the Japanese Businessman".

Perceive those things which cannot be seen
Pay attention even to trifles
Do nothing which is of no use

The Japanese added these words at the end of his talk.

" ... the carpenter sharpens his own tools. He carries his equipment in his tool box, and works under the direction of his foreman. When the carpenter become skilled and understands measures he can become a foreman."

Bill recorded the note "A book of five rings." on the single sheet of paper distributed by the Japanese businessman.

Friday July 2, 2004 22:07

United Airlines prepares to ask workers for a new round of cutbacks, its pension plans look increasingly vulnerable. The airline has four big plans, and shedding any one could lop off more than $1 billion in debt.

Such a drastic step could nudge other airlines to trim their pension plans as well, to keep their labor costs competitive. The long-term prospect could be a series of failed pension plans and lost benefits reminiscent of those in the steel industry, a costly outcome for the government.

Everest's book OIL, POWER & EMPIRE Iraq and the U.S. Global agenda [see Visibility links] should be required reading for Morales and Payne's systematic concerted legal effort starting with the NSA lawsuit.

We are serializing portions of Everest's book dealing between the mid '70 to about 1992 so you can see what the creeps we are up against were up to. To keep your interest!

Visibility is everything in litigation.

Once you lose visibility, then it is

"4QU idiot.

We're going to do anything to you irrespective of the law because we know that no one is looking and you can't do anything about it.

Look at Derringer above.

Our link to visibility is a zero/one and hardware link to what happened.

In the end, neither Iran nor Iraq would win a clear victory, but the suffering was enormous on both sides. Conservative estimates place the death toll at 367,000-262,000 Iranians and 105,000 Iraqis. An estimated 700,000 were injured or wounded on both sides, bringing the total casualty figure to over one million.43

The Stockholm International Peace Institute estimates that Iran spent between $74 and $91 billion on the war, including $11.3 billion on weapons imports. Iraq, meanwhile, spent $94 to $112 billion.44 Others put the direct and indirect cost of the war for both countries at $1.19 trillion-$627 billion for Iran and $561 billion for Iraq.45 Is it any wonder that in 2003-following two more devastating wars on Iraqi soil-the U.S. would find a country in ruins?

But be careful next year: The roof may fall in, provoking a long, agonizing period of deflation.

If we are wrong, a stronger economy will cause more inflation and a far higher increase in rates than anyone now envisions. In this case the rate increase would not be “measured”. In sum, we would give a two-thirds chance to deflation and a one-third chance to inflation, with deflation still following as the massive record debt implodes. Either way, the stock market cannot win.

Thursday July 1, 2004 07:29

Sandia satellite division technician Jim Daniels told bill in 1992 that the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory bought the entire production run of Harris RTX 2000 chips for satellite projects.

The RTX forth chips are apparently naturally rad hard as a partial result of their simplicity, bill was told. Rad hard may be a requirement for space applications.

Forth's reliability and memory efficiency, in comparison to C - an American disease according to some silicon valley forthians, also make forth a good choice where high reliability is required.

The electronic brain of Cassini, a sophisticated computer directing its movements, is now a standard feature on spacecraft. It uses a relatively new family of integrated circuits -- the first civilian application of this technology -- that is 10 times more efficient than previous spacecraft at just a fraction of the size.

These computer chips, along with the radio transponders from Cassini, were pulled from the spacecraft's production line for use on NASA's Mars Pathfinder and the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous, or NEAR, missions

JHU/APL Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) Command & Telemetry Processor, Multi-Spectral Imaging System, Infrared Spectrograph and Magnetometer, X-ray/Gamma-ray Spectrometer, and Laser Rangefinder, all using the Harris RTX 2010RH Forth microprocessor

Over the next four years, if all goes as planned, Cassini will circle Saturn 76 times, taking pictures, measuring the temperature and magnetic field of Saturn, and looking for clues to explain how its rings formed. On Christmas Eve, it is to release a smaller probe, called Huygens, to try to land on Saturn's largest moon, Titan.

PASADENA, Calif. (Reuters) - NASA's Cassini probe neared Saturn on Wednesday, preparing for its pass through the planet's signature rings in a maneuver that will park it in orbit after a 2.2 billion-mile trip.

Space-Related Applications of Forth

JHU/APL CASSINI spacecraft Magnetospheric Imager (MIMI) using Harris RTX 2010 Forth microprocessor

NASA/GSFC CRAF/CASSINI MASSACQ Flight Instrument Test/Calibration System

Wednesday June 30, 2004 18:50

To point out the obvious: The asset and credit bubbles that have been inflating consumer spending — bonds, stocks, mortgage refinancing — are plainly deflating. The property bubble will soon follow for lack of funding. In short, we see savage deflation for the asset markets, but stagflation for the economy – and it is so obvious that no one can see it. This will soon change.

Friday June 18, 2004 06:25

A former Cypress employee is going to help port Embedded Controller Forth for the 8051 family port to the Cypress EZ-USB-FX boards.

Bill will devote his major effort to the NetChip products. This way we will be more effective.

Red means comment out. Green means add. Yellow means modify for the internal 8051 UART. Blue mean study.

After cold forth jumps to ABORT, then you should see the logo appear Control is transferred to QUIT in abort. That's when you see one of the two " ok"s. Note the space at the start of one of them. Once you get image.com built, then you have to load it on the cypress board. I don't know how to do this yet. If you need to make room for USB buffers in low ram for the cypress parts, then you need to stick ALLOT in the right part of the nucleus. We're takiing off to the Olympic peninsula for a holiday in a few minute, but we don't want to keep a former cypress employee from his port work to the cypress ez-usb-fx boards.

Thursday June 17, 2004 21:12

Fahrenheit 451

This is an engrossing futuristic tale of a society where all printed material is banned. In this country of the future, officials believe that people who read and are able to think for themselves are a threat to the nation where individualism is strongly discouraged. The inhabitants of this society all seem to be suffering from sensory deprivation and their only link to news and entertainment is a large television screen on the wall where broadcasts are continually transmitted to the "family". All of the people are members of The Family. Even though they aren't forced to watch the telecasts, they all do.

It is also a society where drugs are dispensed by the government in order to further pacify the citizens. Mop up squads roam the streets, shaving the heads of individuals whose hair they consider to be too long and to be the trait of a non-conformist.

It is the job of firemen to hunt down subversives and burn the caches of books they've secreted away. This movie was made long before political correctness raised its ugly head and demanded they be referred to as firefighters. If you think about it, the excesses of political correctness is one of the things this movie may be warning us about. Oskar Werner plays Montag, a devoted fireman, who meets a young woman (Clarisse) who reminds him of a thinking version of his wife Linda. When Montag is asked by Clarisse what his wife is like, he answers, "Very much like you." This isn't surprising since the parts of Linda and Clarisse are both played by Julie Christie.

Glenn Roberts apparently was laid off at Cypress in May 2004, it has been reported.

Roberts had a position at Cypress similar to that of Russell Anderson at TI/BB.

We think this is going to be super simple now that we know that the DOS window running under Windows 2000 was the problem and not the forth terminal emulator.

We will post what we think needs to be done for the port and debug.

But as bad as the latest numbers look, the underfunding data may not tell the whole story about the state of U.S. pensions

If underfunding in all insured pension plans is included, PBGC estimates that the total shortfall in the defined-benefit pension system would be "significantly higher" than $278.6 billion.

Wednesday June 16, 2004 06:39

Ronald Reagan plays a central part in our legal project.

Our legal project has taken a major step forward now that the US Supreme Court's office goofed.

Jones writes

If you intend to pay the $300 docket fee, the petition must be in booklet format and on paper that measures 6 1/8 by 9 1/4 inches. Rule 33.1(a).

appears to be a false statement.

Rule 33.1(a) states

(a) Except for a document expressly permitted by these Rules to be submitted on 8½- by 11-inch paper, see, e. g., Rules 21, 22, and 39,…

We submitted a Rule 22 writ petition which can, in fact, be submitted on 8½- by 11-inch paper.

The first sentence of our Thursday May 27, 2004 letter to General Suter is quite clear:

An original and two copies of a Rule 22 writ application, along with proof or service, for Justice Scalia is enclosed.

And now, from today's International Herald Tribune, comes more evidence that America's great boom was a scam.

"More than two-thirds of older households - those headed by people 47 to 64 - had someone earning a pension in 1983," says the article. "By 2001, fewer than half did... "

"New evidence suggests that the waning of the pension has, imperceptibly but surely, stripped older workers of an immense store of wealth - much more than they probably guessed... "

Then, along came Ronald Reagan with a message of hope, optimism and something-for-nothing. The supply side, the Laffer Curve - suddenly it seemed possible to spend more... and still have more! Government could cut taxes - and get more revenue, said Laffer. Forget the deficit; it will take care of itself. Somehow. The average man figured he could do the same: borrow more... and he would get rich.

Pensions were out. Free people could look out for themselves. They could set up their own 401k plans... and make money in common stocks. All you had to do was buy the companies you liked, said Peter Lynch.

Our answer: We still believe that the Cycle of Deflation will play out, but may be delayed by a temporary rise in interest rates. As a result of massive stimulation by the Fed and the Administration that created a huge wealth effect in houses and stocks, the onset of deflation has been pushed forward for a while. This doesn’t mean we have escaped it for long. We expect that as interest rates rise and the economy slows down the debt problem will emerge with greater force and come back to haunt us.

Even now, the deflationary potential is reflected by the debt bubble, the real estate bubble, the China slowdown, the diminishing spending power of the U.S. consumer in the absence of adequate wage and employment growth, and the emergence of global overproduction once the Chinese and other economies experience slower growth. This is already evident in the fact that we have now seen peaks and downturns in copper, silver, gold, aluminum, nickel, lumber, corn and soybeans as well as in the Baltic Freight index. This is the so-called “canary in a coal mine”, and would not be happening in a truly inflationary world.

Monday June 14, 2004 07:38

We ares still super busy with legal matters.

Even though the U.S. Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. stepped in to protect workers' pensions, Stish's monthly payment was cut almost in half to $1,350. And the buyer of the mine, U.S. Steel, never made good on the old promise to provide retiree health insurance.

That left Stish in the same predicament as countless retirees caught in an unaffordable health insurance trap they never expected. Company-paid health insurance for retirees is becoming extinct as companies try to slash costs and increase profits.

Sunday June 13, 2004 20:02

And although longer life spans mean more time to enjoy retirement, shrinking pension accounts demand that many boomers keep working.

The average worker placed in jobs at government agencies by the National Older Worker Career Center, a nonprofit organization based in Arlington, Virginia, is 68.

Most experienced employees, including economists and chemists, who get jobs through that program make a fraction of their market-based salaries. But their $16.87 maximum hourly pay comes with full health benefits, important for those who have retired but are not yet eligible for Medicare, said Joel Reaser, senior vice president of NOWCC.

Joanna Gibson, who taught English to junior high students in Washington for 30 years, applied to the program because her $20,000 annual pension was not enough to support her retirement. The 68-year-old has worked for the EPA's Superfund documents program for 13 years and has no plans to leave.

Friday June 11, 2004 11:53

The Analog Device conversion semiar was great. We'll post later.

By just about any measure, 2003 was one of the worst years for venture capital investing. The amount of money committed by investors to VC funds was the lowest since 1995. The amount invested in all financing stages was the lowest since 1998, and the number of deals the lowest since 1996 (see the charts relating to fund-raising, investment and trends, below). The number of initial public offerings was at an historic low, and M&A activity was nothing to crow about either.

Monday May 31, 2004 06:29

We're off to Austin to attend the Analog Devices a/d converter seminar on June 2.

The Fed's mandate is to make monetary policy for the US economy. It has adhered to a highly stimulative policy because, until recently, US employment growth was subdued and the core inflation rate had collapsed. The central bank has not seen much risk of a liquidity bubble in the US because margin debt - money borrowed from brokers to buy shares - has remained below 2 per cent of GDP, compared with 18 per cent on the eve of the 1929 stock market crash. US banks also behaved far more prudently in the bubble economy of the late 1990s than during previous booms. They securitised their potentially bad loans and sold them to pension funds, mutual funds and insurance companies rather than keep them on their own books. As a result, America has had only 21 US bank failures since 2000, compared with nearly 500 during the early 1990s, when banks experienced large losses on property lending.

Spurred by stock market declines, poor investment decisions,aging populations and underfunding of defined-benefit pension plans, the beast is beginning to inflame the political process.

Tuesday May 25, 2004 19:26

"As noted, all this might logically be expected. It may not come to pass. This is not because the instinct for self-preservation in Wall Street is poorly developed. On the contrary, it is probably normally and may be above. But now, as throughout history, financial capacity and political perspicacity are inversely correlated. Long-run salvation by men of business has never been highly regarded if it means disturbance of orderly life and convenience in the present. So inaction will be advocated in the present even though it means deep trouble in the future. Here, at least equally with communism, lies the threat to capitalism. It is what causes men who know that things are going quite wrong to say that things are fundamentally sound."

Friday May 21, 2004 19:56

We, of couse, have a hardware, software, and legal home office.

It is hardly impossible to find in homes built 20 years ago, offices are now standard fare in new homes and many remodeled ones. In fact, one office is no longer enough; homes will often include a formal office space on the first floor, an auxiliary workspace within the master suite, separate computer stations for the kids in their wing and another family office somewhere within the kitchen complex.

In one sense, the home-office trend only provides a formalized space for an activity that many owners of smaller homes routinely manage by throwing the work they brought home from the regular office onto the dining room table. But in a broader way, the need for these work-at-home areas shows just how much the nature of work itself is changing.

Wednesday May 19, 2004 06:29

A gigantic credit bust is about to happen in America. The prospect of that, not political or international events, is what's driving the stock market down.

As stocks plunge from their recent highs, pundits have been quick to look for catalysts. But few experts are giving enough weight to the massive debt mountain that is about to collapse with serious consequences for the U.S. economy.

Keeping the economy afloat by inflating a credit bubble is the stupidest thing any central bank could do, but they do it again and again. The Fed under Greenspan took that stupidity to a new high. And America is about to pay with the greatest credit bust of the last 50 years.

In summary, whatever the core CPI was at the time, we believe the sustained low funds rate (along with the tax cuts) was absolutely necessary, and was the main factor in at least postponing the inevitable deflation we still envision.

Saturday May 15, 2004 18:34

In our legal project we are about to business with general William K Suter - a JAG officier like Steve Aarons.

Steve Aarons writes

1 Whether by inadvertence, the press of federal caseloads, or design, the court suggested at a pretrial conference in May 1993, that both parties suspend further discovery until it ruled on defendants' summary judgment motion. Discovery has ceased ever since.

2 Nearly one year ago, on August 19, 1993, the court issued its amended protective order, effectively sealing all substantive pleadings in this case.

3 Before issuing that order, the court considered plaintiff's written response against sealing. Judge Conway informed all counsel in open court that James R. Gosler would be permitted to deliver unknown documents to Judge Conway at time and place certain.

4 Judge Conway apparently reviewed those documents in camera without counsel for plaintiff.

5 The communication with Gosler constitutes an improper, ex parte communication with the one defendant who has been charged in plaintiff's amended complaint with the most outrageous and culpable acts.

6 Given the nature of this lawsuit, where defendants allege some sort of security infraction by plaintiff as justification for his firing, such communication under the guise of national security violated plaintiff's due process rights. Plaintiff has been prejudiced by this improper communication coupled with protracted delays. ...

WHEREFORE Plaintiff William H. Payne requests that:

A Judge Conway recuse himself from further participation in these proceeding, based on improper communication with defendant Gosler,

B The newly designated judge reconsider the standing protective order without recourse to ex parte communications with a named defendant, or in the alternative, allow counsel for plaintiff to review and respond to such communications, and,

C The court deny defendants' long-standing motion for summary judgment, set new discovery deadlines under the circumstances, and grant such further relief as justice requires.

Aarons Law Firm
Counsel for Plaintiff

This cost Payne about $6,000 which was a waste of money. We are learning.

And William K Suter is about to business with Morales and Payne. So let's see what happens.

While we hope Suter is honest, we aren't counting on this.

Payne's father was a Reserve Army officer starting in WWI



who along with other reserve Army officers sued the feds for money they were promised and did not get.

So we have some practical experience from the reserve Army officer ligitiants for our legal project.

Friday May 14, 2004 19:20

Our legal project is very important to all of us.

We do projects and try not to accumulate useless information.

In projects you have to think how you are going to pull it off and learn material or skills you may not currently possess.

In some ways our legal project is a horrifying experience since we are learning things about the Iraq/War we really didn't want to know and you may not want to know too.

But it happened.

1 http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=15&ItemID=2292
2 http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Congress/8327/buehlerpayne.html
3 http://www.jya.com/nsasuit.txt
4 http://www.aci.net/kalliste/speccoll.htm
5 http://biphome.spray.se/laszlob/cryptoag/buehler-tape.htm
6 ?

And they [their successors, of course] may do something about this!

Zeyolabedine Zarhardi is apparently the nephew of Hashimi Rafsanjani.

Zarhadi was acquitted. The real world again.

Dr. Shapour Bakhtiar

Subsequently, Bakhtiar fled to France and lived in a suburb of Paris where he formed and led the National Resistance Movement of Iran, opposed to the Islamic Republic Government. On August 7, 1991, Bakhtiar was assassinated in his home.

Ayatollah Khomeini therefore concentrated during the years of Ayatollah Boroujerdi's leadership in Qom on giving instruction in fiqh (Islamic science) and gathering round him students who later became his associates in the movement that led to the overthrow of the Pahlavi Dynasty, not only Ayatollah Mutahhari and Ayatollah Muntaziri, but younger men such as Hojatolislam Muhammad Javad Bahonar and Hojatolislam Ali Akbar Hashimi-Rafsanjani.

We think we learned this from Switzerland's Neue Zurcher Zeitung.

Next, this leak was compounded by the U.S. demonstration that it was also reading secret Iranian communications. As reported in Switzerland's Neue Zurcher Zeitung, the U.S. provided the contents of encrypted Iranian messages to France to assist in the conviction of Ali Vakili Rad and Massoud Hendi for the stabbing death in the Paris suburb of Suresnes of the former Iranian prime minister Shahpour Bakhtiar and his personal secretary Katibeh Fallouch. [2]

This is why we continue to recommend keeping upwind.

So let's think about returning to the USB 2.0 8051 forth project next week!

Thursday May 13, 2004 19:42

We're into surface mount CMOS.

But the odds seem overwhelming that none of this will happen in time to head off an energy crisis that will dwarf anything we have ever experienced.

Our legal project is progressing.

Tuesday May 11, 2004 20:26

...there are many real risks right here and now, both global and company specific, that are being given short shrift these days by the "there will be no hurricane tomorrow" crowd:

A major terrorist attack
A collapse of the dollar
Stagflation
A derivates-based financial accident
A real estate bust
New corporate scandals
A debt-induced recession

We believe that the renewed downtrend is fully justified by the fundamental picture. The rally was based on a fragile economic recovery engineered by massive governmental action to prevent a deflationary economic downturn. This included two major tax cuts, hundreds of billions of dollars raised through REFI cash-outs, and a reduction of the fed funds rate to 1 percent with a promise to keep it there for a very long time. The actions worked in keeping the recession relatively shallow, but left some major structural imbalances such as record consumer debt, an extremely low consumer savings rate, a massive trade deficit, and a significant budget deficit. The huge easing in both monetary and fiscal policy also resulted in soaring asset values (read stocks and houses) that supported consumer spending in the absence of significant gains in employment and wages.

The legal project is little different, other than technical material, than the USB project. You gather the resources required to do the project, then you pull it off.

Longtime subscribers will know that I’ve been sounding a deflation theme for years, not only in my newsletter, but in essays I’ve written for Barron’s, the San Francisco Examiner and other financial publications. At the outset, I was inclined to think that a deflation-bound economy – particularly a global one – would create the most challenging investment environment imaginable And so it has. I have always believed that deflation would bring, not money-making opportunities, but rather a prolonged period of economic adversity during which even the savviest investors would be challenged to hold onto 30%-40% of their original net worth.

Monday May 10, 2004 16:56

We're anxious to get back to USB 2.0 and 8051 forth, but litigation calls.

ATLANTA, United States (AFP) - Delta Airlines warned it may file for bankruptcy unless it can cut costs, turn a profit and borrow money on the financial markets.

"We do not expect significant improvement in the revenue environment in 2004 and expect significant cost pressures related to aircraft fuel, pension and interest expenses to continue," it said.

Saturday May 8, 2004 20:56

Dien Bien Phu, Stalingrad, ... and

VIEWPOINT

Would you recommend an EE degree to your child?

Recently I had the opportunity to volunteer as a judge in a science and technology fair for middle-school students. I was so thrilled to be chosen and to use my engineering training to contribute to the education of these students. I was impressed with their creative minds and developing scientific thought.

As I went from booth to booth, rating the projects, I began to wonder how many of these students would choose an engineering career. Will the little girl who presented her "Fruity Electricity" project with such passion-demonstrating the voltage measurement between two potatoes-be a future electrical engineer? Or will she choose a nontechnical degree?

I have a friend with an engineering degree who took exactly two years to find an- other job with a salary two-thirds of what he was making before he was laid off. Another recently laid-off friend decided to go into landscaping because he didn't want to waste any time looking for electrical engineering jobs that won't even exist in the near future. What a waste of an engineering degree!

It is a fact today that the number of Americans pursuing an FE degree has declined. An career used to be highly valued, not to mention high paying as well. What happened?

Global outsourcing of EE jobs is at least partly to blame. Apparently, chip design can easily be done offshore. Intel and TI are already doing it.

About six years ago, I tried to encourage my nephew to pursue electrical engineering. He didn't listen, and he is now graduating from chiropractic school. I am relieved now with his decision. He will work four days a week and won't have to worry about his job going overseas.

It is too early to see the full implications of the outsourcing of electrical engineering jobs. In the meantime, until I see that globalization will make us better off, I will put on hold encouraging anyone to become an electrical engineer. Would you encourage your child to become an EE?

Christina Nickolas, Editor
chrisn@electronicproducts.com
ELECTRONIC PRODUCTS, MAY 2004

Tuesday May 4, 2004 18:53

Despite their skill in writing statements we think the Fed is out of room. With no further stimulation, a 75 percent plunge in REFIs, and potential rising interest rates, the economic recovery is not likely to be sustained. Stocks appear to be topping out, and the ensuing downleg can be severe. In our view the secular bear market that started in early 2000 is resuming. The factors that engendered the sub-par recovery and bear market rally have now reversed, and the monetary and fiscal authorities just do not have the ammunition to turn it around.

Social Security is going broke for a truly wonderful reason. We have been wildly successful at extending human life. Our life expectancies have been advancing for well over a century. There is no evidence the advances will stop.

Whether the unfunded liabilities are $23.3 trillion or $55.4 trillion, that is what is rolling toward our children and grandchildren. They will experience it as tax increases, benefit cuts or some combination of both. You can read more about it in the Generational Storm reader on my Web site (www.scottburns.com), or by reading The Coming Generational Storm: What You Need to Know About America's Economic Future (co-authored with Laurence J. Kotlikoff, MIT Press, $28).

Monday May 3, 2004 12:01

"The rest of the world is catching up," said John E. Jankowski, a senior analyst at the National Science Foundation, the federal agency that tracks science trends. "Science excellence is no longer the domain of just the U.S."

The Hans Buehler Iran court document translated from German to English using Babel Fish.

We're curious to see if an Iran court got it right.

BASIC opened a new world By J.M. HIRSCH The Associated Press 10 PRINT "In 1963 two Dartmouth College math professors had a radical" 20 PRINT "idea --create a computer language muscular enough to harness" 30 PRINT "the power of the period's computers, yet simple enough that even" 40 PRINT "the school's janitors could use it." 50 END A year later on May 1, 1964, the BASIC computer programming language (as demonstrated above) was born and for the first time computers were taken out of the lab and brought into the community. Forty years later pure BASIC - Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code - has all but disappeared, but it changed the world. "This is the birth of personal computing," said Arthur Luehrmann, a former Dartmouth physics professor who is writing a book about BASIC's development at the university. "It was personal computing before people knew what personal computing was." Paul Vick, a senior developer at Microsoft, said his company owes much to BASIC, the software giant's first product. Microsoft's Windows operating system and Office suite still use a descendent called Visual Basic. BASIC was born when computers were large, expensive and the exclusive province of scientists, many of whom bought research time on the nation's handful of machines. Dartmouth math professors Thomas Kurtz and John Kemeny envisioned something better, an unprecedented system that would give their entire school - from the faculty to the cafeteria staff - simultaneous access. Using existing technology called time sharing, they created a primitive network to allow users to share a single computer through terminals scattered around campus. With the help of students, Kurtz and Kemeny developed commonsense language to run the system, relying on basic equations and commands, such as PRINT, LIST and SAVE. John McGeachie, then a student, was there at 4 a.m. May 1, 1964, when BASIC came to life in the basement of Dartmouth's College Hall. Two terminals hooked up to a single computer ran two programs. "I don't think anybody knew how it would end up catching on," said McGeachie, now 61 and a software designer. "It was just enormously exciting for us as students to be working on something so many people said couldn't be done." Albuquerque Journal Sunday May 2, 2004

Albuquerque Journal Sunday May 2, 2004

After the corporate scandals of Enron and WorldCom, after the investigations into mutual funds that gave clients favored treatment, hedge funds are looming large on William Donaldson's horizon.

"Hedge funds are an accident waiting to happen," Donaldson, the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, said Sunday.

"There's not a pension fund in the country that's not using hedge funds," he said.

Friday April 30, 2004 17:34

We do projects, which require reason and learning new things, and try not to accumulate information, especially useless information.

We hope to return to the 8051 USB 2.0 project next week.

But we have to complete our 12 year legal project.

No one could ever complete our legal project if you had to pay lawyers.

Most could never complete a USB 2.0 project if they had to pay what others want them to pay.

So both projects are similar in the sense most of us have limited financial resources. But need to complete projects.

In the USB 2.0 forth project let's have some real fun too, like in the legal project, building on the ideas of some very brillant [but a bit wierd] people aka forthians.

While at Sandia labs bill never hired "forthians" for the reason that they get off only into forth.

We hired those who knew forth, appreciated forth's power, and did other things too. Like Jerry Boutelle, Henry Neugass, ...

And we continue to follow economic news.

Returning to Big Mother Bubble, she started to look grossly outsized in 2000 and fell inexplicably sick, thought to be due to increasingly excessive eating habits developed since 1992. In late April 2002, after a tough pregnancy, having lost some 30% of her humungous weight, she gave birth to her son, "Baby Al". "Baby Al" grew at a fantastic rate, that had the crowds cooing with delight! No surprise, "Baby Al" was fed with the financial steroid equivalent of JET A1 fuel, courtesy of his older namesake in the Fed. In an all out effort to stop what would have developed into a full blown market correction, taking the DOW back to 4,000 points and S&P back to 400 points, as shown on the chart above, Al savagely cut interest rates to a 45-year low of just 1%. Credit became ever easier, if that were possible. "Baby Al" responded wonderfully, feasting on the Mortgage Refinanced US consumer spending money as if there were no tomorrow. Debts were serviced by taking on more debt from second and third tier syndicated banks.

Tuesday April 27, 2004 20:16

Greenspan is thus in a similar but significantly worse position than was Federal Reserve chairman Arthur Burns in 1972. The Federal budget deficit has spiraled out of control, and is most unlikely to decline significantly, so fiscal policy can give him no help. Therefore, if he wants to reduce inflation, he must increase the federal funds rate from 1 percent to around 6 percent, and watch the 10 year Treasury bond rate rise from 4.5 percent to close to 7 percent. Needless to say, if he did any such thing, the collapse in the bond, stock and housing markets would be very severe, and the economic side-effects of that collapse would be catastrophic. For example, given the minute capital base and devil-may-care lending policies of the U.S. housing agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, any such move in interest rates, combined with a sharp decline in housing activity that decimated their fee income, would almost certainly wipe out both entities' capital and cause a crisis in the housing market that would dwarf the savings and loan collapse of 1989-91.

Since Greenspan is most unlikely to choose career and reputation suicide in this way, it is likely that any increase in interest rates will be too little and too late, with the Federal Funds rate probably remaining below 2 percent for the rest of 2004 and into 2005. Inevitably, this continuation for a further substantial period of negative short term and even long term real interest rates, together with the inflationary momentum already built in, will cause the current stirrings of inflation to surge into prominence, with prices rising at a steady 6 to 8 percent per annum by the early part of next year. Just as Burns' reputation was ruined by the inflation of 1973-74, and the deep and prolonged period of economic anomie that followed, so too will Greenspan's reputation be forever tarnished, in the last years of his tenure, by a resurgence of the inflationary dragon that all had thought slain by Paul Volcker in the 1980s. This has allowed Americans to consume much more than they produce -- to the tune of more than $600 billion per year, to be exact

This means that the United States borrows about $1.5 billion per day from abroad to maintain its lavish lifestyle.

In our view the current trading range is part of a topping out process that is setting up the next big downward move in stocks that will end only when the economic structural imbalances are corrected and stocks return to normal or sub-normal values. Our case is further supported by the fact that first quarter cash flows into equity mutual funds are the highest since the first quarter of 2000, when the 18-year secular stock market peaked

Sunday April 25, 2004 11:00

While Morales and Payne are preparing the supreme court writ final, bill is studying 1MI [one machine instruction] in embedded controller forth for the 8051 family trying to relearn how <BUILD DOES> work ... along with ;CODE, which is related, too.

Turning to the subject of deflation, I myself am a little tired of hearing that we're about to endure deflation every time there's a hiccup in the precious-metals market. To regard the cascade in the metals as a sign of deflation is preposterous, in my opinion. With the Dow at 10,000 and home prices at record highs, that's a "signal" about 15 moves in advance. Dare I say that perhaps someday (remembering that the Fed is totally out of bullets), after stocks have collapsed, after the dollar has collapsed, and after real estate has collapsed, then perhaps we'll experience some deflation, and we can worry about it as those events loom closer.

Finally, for folks who believe you can't lose money in real estate, since "they're not making any more of it," or "there's not enough of it to go around," I would direct their attention to that little country known as Japan. While only about the size of California, it's got roughly half as many people as the United States. Even though Japan has less land to fight over, that hasn't stopped the price of its real estate from declining for 13 consecutive years. Since 1991, residential land prices have declined about 43%, and commercial prices about 67% -- the lowest levels since the government started tracking land prices in 1974. (I am indebted to Dennis Gartman of The Gartman Letter for those statistics, which come from Japan's Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport.)

Given the debt supporting America's housing market, just imagine the consequences of a Japan-like decline happening here. The fear of a collapse in real estate, and of the equity bubble unwinding, is what led the Fed to do what it has done.

Sunday April 25, 2004 10:54

Strange things are happening with some of the jpgs.

Maybe this is related to our legal website?

We're thinking more about a/d converters partially in preparation for the June 2 Analog Device seminar in Austin.

Some digital multimeters are advertised as 4 and 1/2 digit meters.

Let's speculate on how this may computed.

2^ y = 10.

y * log 2 = 1

log 2 = .30102999566398

using a web scientific calculator.

So y = 3.32192809488736.

And 4.5 * y = 14.948 or 15 bits.

But the last bit in a perfect a/d converter may be random so 4 1/2 digit multimeters may be using a 16 bit a/d converter?

This leads to an interesting question. A what point in trailing bits do the bits become essentially random?

Let's try to think of it this way for a 24 bit sigma delta a/d converter.

b₂₃b₂₂b₂₁b .... b_i ... b₂ b₁ b₀

where i is between 0 and 23 with 23 being the msb.

What is the smallest value i for which b_i which is reproducible?

This likely is is a function of what is being measured.

Some may wonder how to do designs to get the best performance out of an a/d. Hopefully we will learn more about about this at the AD seminar in Austin.

We, of course, know: don't even try to digitze at the end of a long analog cable! This doesn't work very well or at all if the signal to noise ratio is small.

Friday April 23, 2004 17:37

We are building on the good ideas of others at this site.

We didn't invent the 8051.

We didn't invent forth.

We didn't invent solder. We didn't invent ... most things.

We hopefully expand good ideas.

Like pro se litgation.

So we hope to return to the 8051 forth, 80C32, USB 2.0 project soon. Allah willing, of course.

Thursday April 22, 2004 09:13

Internet sure is a good way to attract attention!

Getting the right answer, especially when measuring strength of materials can be important.

Friday April 16, 2004 in the evening bill leaned back on a OFFICE MAX SKU 0112-7104 Vogel Peterson Model 51565 system 11 task chair while studying our supreme court writ document.

The bolt holding the back rest broke.

Bill landed on his back. And now has a magnificent about 9 inch in diameter bruise.

Bill took digital picture of the bruise and chair ... just in case these may be needed later!

Digitizing at the sensor can be important, especially when measuring the strength of materials.

Wednesday April 21, 2004 20:23

Learn more than you want to know about the Iraq/Iran war.

Csd somewhat disagrees with Baker's below article.

Reason is that micros can fail in more ways than diagnostics writers can anticipate.

Our thesis is that any peripheral microcontroller should be accessible over Internet for diagnosis. At very low cost, using Netmeeting and a very reliable interactive operating system. Like 8051 forth, of course!

Our legal project is coming along just fantastic. Look how many crooked judges and lawyers we caught in writing.

Along with those involved in genocide too, of course.

http://www.aci.net/kalliste/speccoll.htm
http://biphome.spray.se/laszlob/cryptoag/buehler-tape.htm

The U.S. also supplied Iraq In fact, “American intelligence agencies provided Iran and Iraq with deliberately distorted or inaccurate intelligence data in recent years,” the Times reported (January 12, 1987). The motive was captured in the Times headline: “Keeping Either Side From Winning.”

As Henry Kissinger coldly put it, “too bad they can’t both lose.”

Iran-Iraq War

APRIL GLASPIE TRANSCRIPT

The Russians have a contrarian view on the current conflict. What was it Kissinger said about the Iran-Iraq war - "Ideally we'd like both sides to lose"? That's what the Kremlin thinks about Operation Free Iraq.

We, of course, want to get these matter settled so we can move on to USB 2.0. 80c32 SOCS, and 8051 forth.

Embedded controller forth for the 8051 family needs to updated to USB 2.0 ... in html, of course.

Distributed over internet with a neat senior citizen tutorial on 8051 forth, of course!

Similar to the tutorial on public key cryptography. But lots more postive.

With maybe a Farsi translation?

Please be simply sick about what happened.

Too much spy stuff for us senior citizens.

Lewis was a VP for Daimler-Chrysler.

Lewis told bill that they [he] proposed to Daimler-Chrysler that flash upgrades be done over wireless at gas stations.

Flash upgrades apparently cost Daimler-Chrysler about $1/3 million per year.

Bill think's Lewis' idea sucks for the reason you don't know what the code you are uploading to your vechicle is really doing!

The Iranians and Libyans both learned a brutal microcontroller lesson.

It's tough to tell what a microcontroller is really doing.

We didn't like the wetting characteristics of the Kester N#951 LOW-SOL NO-CLEAN as well as the Kester #2331-ZX pH NEUTRAL WATER SOLUBLE, REWORK FLUX.

Looks like surface mount is the way to go.

Click picture to read Advanced Packaging April 2004 article.

Developing surface mount technician skills is essential for this project.

But everyone needs to develop legal skills too because of the lawyer glut.

On the legal project we got the opposition not following federal rule 28 USC Sec. 1746. - Unsworn declarations under penalty of perjury clearly which is supreme court is supposed to enforce.

We are anxious to get back to the USB 2.0 80C32 SOC project soon. But we have to complete our legal project too.

Tuesday April 20, 2004 19:38

In this case deflation can still become a concern. If we are wrong on this, a stronger economy will cause more inflation and a far higher increase in rates than anyone now envisions. Either way, the stock market cannot win.

ExpressPCB.

TAIPEI - Last September Morris Chang alarmed the semiconductor industry when he said there would be an industrywide recession in 2005 and that the Chinese chip makers would cause it. "I stand by that statement. China's capacity in 2005 will have a big impact," the chairman of the world's largest made-to-order integrated-circuit and computer-chip manufacturer, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC), has told Asia Times Online.

It's an odd world where you can have debt deflation (falling prices for assets bought on credit) and inflation in natural resources and raw materials (as central banks print more money to devalue the nominal value of the debt) - AT THE SAME TIME.

Bill is tring to figure out the 8051 syntax checking assembler he wrote about 18 years ago.

It even contains a transient module!

What is that?

Let's hope bill can figure out what he wrote!

Holy Jesus!

http://www.aci.net/kalliste/speccoll.htm
http://biphome.spray.se/laszlob/cryptoag/buehler-tape.htm

There is really on[ly] one source of reliable information on this war - and it's coming from Russian spies.

What was it Kissinger said about the Iran-Iraq war - "Ideally we'd like both sides to lose"? That's what the Kremlin thinks about Operation Free Iraq.

But why waste money when the Russians are giving away the best stuff free? Invest intelligently and get rich.

THE GREAT DELUDER
By Kurt Richebächer

Lawyers and judges didn't follow the federal rules for removing state cases to federal court.

We are having a blast pointing this out.

In the background bill is trying to relearn forth.

One of bill's tasks, assigned by Jerry Boutelle, was to write the 8051 forth assembler.

Most forth assemblers are not syntax checking and, as a result, can produce garbage code.

The 8051 forth assembler checks syntax. It uses <BUILDS DOES>.

So we're trying to relearn <BUILDS DOES> by studying how 1MI [one machine instruction, if memory is correct] works on page 327 of embedded controller forth for the 8051 family.

Monday April 19, 2004 12:29

Let's try return to USB 2.0 after filing with the supreme court ... hopefully this week.

Litigation is growing even more interesting.

Sunday April 18, 2004 21:04

The article explores the question why the foreclosure auction took place at all. The original debt of the Radcliffs' was only $120. At the time of the auction, it had risen to $2,047.40. That was the minimum bid. As the house was worth approximately $289,000, there were many bidders. It sold for $70,000.

The article asks why didn't the Radcliffs did not pay off the alleged debt and then sue, or at worst, declare bankruptcy. The article then quotes Grant Nelson, a UCLA law professor specializing in real estate finance who declares that such foreclosures only happen "where people don't act rationally." Michael Kolber concurs: "A touch of irrational behavior."

Today, the Huffs are far from millionaires. In fact, they are worse off than they were when they met Mr. Dobbins. By April 2003, their retirement account had lost 65 percent of its value. Even though Mr. Huff and his wife said they had emphasized that keeping their principal safe was paramount, Mr. Dobbins invested their money in shares of technology, health care and financial services companies, and in equity mutual funds that carried sales charges, or loads.

Saturday April 17, 2004 17:29

Some of us in high tech may believe what Morris Chang writes.

TAIPEI - Last September Morris Chang alarmed the semiconductor industry when he said there would be an industrywide recession in 2005 and that the Chinese chip makers would cause it. "I stand by that statement. China's capacity in 2005 will have a big impact," the chairman of the world's largest made-to-order integrated-circuit and computer-chip manufacturer, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC), has told Asia Times Online.

But this may be good.

Maybe we can buy surface mount semiconductors from Harbor Freight!

That the world has crossed or nearing the crossing to the downside of conventional sources of energy particularly oil is not in dispute. Numerous studies have demonstrated with global demand increasing by at least 2-3% per year and depletion of current oil fields at an average of 3-5% per year that we will reach a point of crisis at some point in the future (known by some as the Hubbert Peak named after studies by M. King Hubbert in 1956). With no new major discoveries in years that point is estimated to come sometime after 2010. For natural gas that point is somewhat later between 2020 and 2030.

There are two alternatives. Either overall inflation does begin to pick up, in which case interest rates must rise substantially and Treasuries, stocks and house prices fall -- sending the U.S. economy back towards recession, it would seem. Or growth peters out later this year because neither Greenspan nor Bush has more stimulus to offer. That would mean interest rates would stay low and the Treasury market would have less to worry about -- other than the U.S. government's ability to pay -- while stocks and house prices would again be vulnerable because their rise reflects cheap money and speculation, not a sound economy.

Our expectation is that the second of the two alternatives will occur, the fading of growth and of inflation later this year and into 2005 and the resumption of still more marked deflationary pressures.

Friday April 16, 2004 19:40

The 19.6 percent return on assets yielded $69.9 billion more than the expected average return of 8.55 percent — which in turn was significantly higher than the average annual return of just 1.3 percent since 1999, noted the consultancy. On the other hand, said Milliman's John Ehrhardt, "We have only regained 12 percent of the surplus assets lost over the past three years, so plan sponsors will have to continue to focus on their asset allocation and funding strategies."

Thursday April 15, 2004 19:41

All of the above is consistent with our view that we are in a post-bubble period with major structural imbalances that have yet to be corrected. Stocks are in a secular bear market that started in early 2000 when the 18-year secular bull market came to an end. The stock market rise of the past year can be seen as a bear market rally or as a cyclical bull market in a secular bear market. Whatever we call it, we believe that the rise is over and that the major downtrend is now resuming. The fact that the vast majority thinks this is only a harmless correction only adds to our conviction.

THE GREAT DELUDER
By Kurt Richebächer

For us, Mr. Greenspan is the great deluder of the American public, flatly deceiving it about the economy's true situation and prospects. His speeches always convey the impression of extraordinary sophistication, but the reality is that elementary knowledge of macroeconomic aggregates or processes, such as saving or wealth creation, obviously eludes him. It keeps amazing us how little critical response he finds.

In between litigation, rabbit driving ... and fixing, and walking we continue to be simply grossed out that the 89C430 running forth is working on the 1.6 xp on windows 98 se.

Bill wrote the about 20 year old 8051 side communications code so there's a good chance he can get the PC side disk i/o working ... once we file with the supreme court, of course.

We have to relearn forth after so many years doing masm and windows 3.11 dll drivers, windows 95 and 98 vxd drivers, and windows 2000 wdm drivers.

So we stare at a VLIST and think how many of the word definitions we remember.

while doing other retirement stuff, of course. Then look up the definitions to see if we still understand them.

You see VOCABULARY.

Forth may have some problems trying FORGET through multiple vocabularies.

Writing a supreme court writ is almost as fun as this high tech stuff.

Just as airlines, automakers and steel companies nationwide have had to struggle to keep up their minimum funding payments, nonprofits like the United Way are dealing with years of accumulated stock market losses and extraordinarily low interest rates that have hammered their pension plans.

Here's trying a third 5-1/4 inch diskette to copy the contents to a 3.5 inch diskette.

Windows 2000 reported target disk, BONUS, was not formatted.

So we tried reading the diskette, ARMENTA, next to it. It worked fine.

However, when we put the BONUS disk in after removing the ARMENTA disk, the ARMENTA directory continued to be displayed.

Going back to the c drive didn't help.

So Windows 2000 appears to have another bug - in addition to its DOS window apparently not working properly.

Had it not been for trying to copy the BONUS disk, we may not have discovered that the 8051 forth terminal emulator, minus disk i/o, work just fine under Windows 98se running on an Athlon XP 1.6 processor.

That's the ATMEL 89C55 forth machine just to the right of the mouse. We're using the Windows 2000 [plus 95 and 98 - you see the hard drives] to supply usb power.

But now we can try the NetChip 2270 board in the Dallas/Maxim 89C430 too!

And we guess that we can get disk i/o working under 98se.

But we have to complete our supreme court writ application first!

Wednesday April 14, 2004 12:20

Analog Devices has a one-cycle instruction 8051 with integral a/d converter and several other 8051 offerings which we have samples of.

So we're thinking of attending ADI's 2004 Data Converter Seminar in Austin.

Registration Code: CBD3
Name: Dr. william payne

We learned from an AD salesperson at ElectronicaUSA that AD very likely uses the Mentor 8051 one cycle per instruction IP core. And we were told information about how 8051 noise problems were handled when the a/d converter was sampling.

Back to our litigation project.

You might be interested in a very novel application of an 82C55A as opposed to being driven by a microproceesor or microcontroller bus. Unbuffered at the end of a parallel cable!

Tuesday April 13, 2004 08:54

If you look at the Dallas.Maxim

89C430 machine below you see any empty eprom slot on the 8051 forth motherboard.

The big chip next to the eprom is a 32k x 8 ram.

Lack of space, and not wanting to make the motherboard larger, prevented shadowing the eprom with ram.

Today we have as standard 128K x 8 ram in surface mount parts so this is no problem.

Let's calculated how much wasted memory space in in the 32k x 8 8051 forth eprom.

So we have an additional 15,348 bytes of memory we can reclaim from wasted eprom if we shadow the eprom, which we will do, with a static ram.

We currently have 32 K - about 2 k for two forth screen file buffers - about 50 bytes for rom variables just above 8000 hex so roughly we will have about 45.5 k byes for applications code and maybe some data.

This should be more than enough memory.

Being hopefully connected to a gighertz PC over USB 2.0 we had store data on the PC ... as well as do computations on the PC using such packages as MatLab, LabView, NAG, ... .

We have to finish our writ to the supreme court, but it's tough to resist the fun of running 8051 forth on a 89C430 out of a dos window using windows 98se.

That's the Cypress PSoC windows window behind the 8051 forth DOS window. We, of course, must upgrade from the DOS window to a windows window, after we get our writ written and filed, of course.

Monday April 12, 2004 19:30

This is ted lewis and bill on Wednesday March 31, 2004 shot by Molly Lewis in Salinas, CA.

Ted is 62 and bill, Allah willing of course, will be 67 on June 11.

Let's tell an interesting story.

Bill was Lewis's ms and phd thesis advisor at Washington State University.

Bill plays dirty as a result of lessons given bill by Edward Silverman a Ph.D. thesis committee member at Purdue bill's Ph.D. thesis committee.

In math you simply can't remember all of the theorems, names etc. So a math creep can ask you a question you are sure not be be able to answer.

So Edward Silverman told bill in advance to know lots about linear programming.

Bill answered Silverman's question perfectly.

So bill advised Lewis to know lots about quick sort.

Lewis answered bill's question perfectly.

But not one of other the questions at Lewis's Ph.D. oral examination.

When bill went out of the room to tell Lewis he passed.

NO LEWIS.

Lewis walked home figuring he failed.

Bill had to drive to Lewis's apartment to tell Lewis he passed his Ph.D. oral examination.

So let's get 8051 forth working over usb 2.0. And have some fun.

The Cypress PSoC interface to a PC is the wave of the future. But using USB 2.0, of course.

We have to do something similar with 8051 forth.

When you click Read a small red read usb activity led blinks.

The forth LITERAL example was changed slightly so show more of forth in the interpret mode within the compiler.

Here's a dump of the code.

Forth is one of the most memory efficient software technologies known.

TASK is in eprom. All eprom from 440C to 7FFF is unused!

But we're going to make this memory space available on the ExpressPCB surface mount 8051 forth machine. And it will be ram, not eprom!

8051 forth stores rom variable starting at 8000 hex. That's why Y0 starts at hex 8053

Using data going back to 1871, Shiller found that the highest trailing p/e for any period prior to the Internet bubble was 32.9 in September 1929. One month later, the stock market crashed and the Depression began. At the height of the Internet frenzy, the trailing p/e reached 43. In Shiller’s view, the aftermath of the Internet bubble would be similar to the aftermath of the three previous episodes of extreme valuation: 1901, 1929 and 1966. The returns following these peaks are shown in the table. As a point of reference, the S&P has had a compounded inflation-adjusted return of more than 7 percent per year for the period 1926 to 2003.

Inflation-adjusted return over the next:
Trailing P/E 5 Years 10 Years 15 Years 20 Years
June 1901 25.2 3.4% 4.45 3.15 -0/2%
September 1929 32.6 -13.1% -1.4% -0.5% 0.4%
January 1966 24.1 -2.6% -1.8% -0.5% 1.9%
March 2000 43.2 ? ? ? ?
January 2004 27.7 ? ? ? ?

The last line in the table shows the current status of Shiller’s indicator. At 27.7, the recent trailing p/e of the S&P is higher than any period except 1929 and 1999-2000. Even though the S&P 500 is down 26 percent from its March 2000 peak, this indicator does not bode well for S&P returns during the next two decades.

When 8051 forth detects an error, the terminal emulator locks up. The DOS window must be closed, reset on the 8051 machine pressed, then the DOS window invoked, and the forth terminal emulator compiled.

We are having a blast relearning the intricacies of forth using the Dallas/Maxim 89C430 and the terminal emulator running on the athlon xp 1.6 under windows 98 se.

IMMEDIATE words execute during compilation.

LITERAL is an immediate word.

Here's the definition

: LITERAL STATE @ IF COMPILE LIT , THEN ; IMMEDIATE

[ switches forth from compile to interpret state. ] does the reverse.

Both Y0 and Y1 produce the same compiled code.

IMMEDIATE words give forth the same power as constructors in C++. Actually forth is much more powerful than C++ because it is a real time operating system and you can do can do anything to want usually in a few lines of high level code.

The _asm in-line assembler is C/C++ 6.0 is very similar to a forth interactive assembler. But forth is more powerful because the assembler is incremental and interactive.

Forth, unlike C/C++ and Visual BASIC, has a horrible downside.

It is nearly impossible to construct a binary subroutine which can be linked like dll or static modules.

Forth is merely a tool, which if use in the right enviroment on the right problem - like the 8051 USB 2.0 project - can be enormously effective.

8051 forth is 8085 fig forth ported to the 8051. For this reason the book FORTH Encyclopia by Mich Derick & Linda Baker still applies.

There is an ANSI version of forth which is not very good for the reasons that state smart words were eliminated plus documentation, like FORTH Encyclopedia, is not available.

Let's fix this emulator side, then think about writing a Visual Basic 6.0 terminal emulator to replace the DOS version. After we try to get the NetChip 2270 working, of course.

But this week, Morales and Payne must finished a 1651(a) writ for the supreme court and prepare summons. We caught a bunch of crooked lawyers and judges committed crimes in writing. In court records, actually!

Sunday April 11, 2004 17:30

We were taking a jpg of the 89C430 commercial maintenance support, forth machine and a static discharge between body and lamp occurred!

The INS82C50 went bananas [the internal registers got messed up] with weird characters sent to the screen.

But we've always known the 82C50 is electrostatically sensitive.

The important point is the forth and java are super reliable.

So let's move on, have some fun, and make some honest money.

Even if you dismiss the industry's penchant for pessimism, it's likely that many retirement budgets will be strained, and many retirees will be taken by surprise by the reality of their situations. The EBRI survey reported that 32 percent of people over the age of 55 think they will work until they are at least 66, or possibly never retire at all. But in every generation, employers have a way of dumping some 50-somethings overboard, and a substantial number of them never do find other jobs.

We installed a second wall transformer with the ATMEL 89C55 machine. It is working with the 40 MHz Windows 3.11/DOS machine.

We we in a bad way with 8051 forth terminal emulator or disk i/o not working with windows 2000. We may have gotten USB 2.0 working but it would be difficult.

Now with the terminal emulator working well under windows 98se on an athlon xp 1.6 gigahertz, the amount of work required for the usb 2.0 forth project is diminishing! And associated, the amount of fun is increasing!

In 2001, 82,207 people 65 and older filed for bankruptcy. That's 244 percent higher than the total for 1991. A number of factors are involved, but it's basically a matter of easy credit and hard times.

Both windows 89 se and the 89C430 for program TT are still running.

We'll stop the program this afternoon and print the stack so that you can see a program bug.

We forgot a final DROP.

Video would would let you see the speed.

Saturday April 10, 2004 18:00

Video would be far better than this still.

This is the web page you see with the dos window on top.

The numbers are scrolling down the screen, but are stopped by printscreen.

We just looked. The index passed 65535 and restarted at 0.

The code for each number you see printed is very complicated.

Trace U. code in embedded controller forth for the 8051 family.

You too will simply be grossed out.

We continue to be totally grossed-out that 8051 is working on the athlon xp 1.6 running windows 98se.

We're trying to tell you that Charles Moore is a software Newton.

Several orders brighter than the C people, in our opinion.

But a bit weird too.

Jerry Boutelle related a story that Moore did a dental office application in forth.

When done, the dentist was reported by Boutelle to ask Moore, "Where's the documentation."

Boutelle reported that Moore responded, "I don't do documentation."

Not only didn't we expect 8051 forth working on an athlon 1.6 under windows 98 se, we didn't prepare for this.

Several weeks ago in preparation to try to find out what was wrong with the 8051 terminal emulator running under windows 2000 we bought a 25 to 8 pin adapter.

We had to return the first adapter because we got the gender wrong. The real world again.

The 8051 forth televideo emulator working under windows 98 se is going to make the usb 2.0 forth project lots easier.

If the terminal emulator works reliably, then we can use this to debug disk i/o.

As we are posting, the 89c430 is running in a dos window

which, when frozen in time, prints

TT is running like gangbusters are you read this.

We, of course, continue to deny we are having so much fun.

Businesses lobbied hard for the bill, which would provide about $80 billion in pension accounting relief through the end of 2005 for some 31,000 companies with traditional "defined benefit" pension plans. Those cover about 35 million workers and promise a specific payout based on salary and service.

Many traditional pension plans are underfunded because of the weak stock market the last few years and current low interest rates, and companies are struggling to keep up with the payments as profits have shrunk in part because of the struggling economy.

Another real world experience.

We thought the problem with the APC ups was the charging circuit.

It looks like we bought an unnecessary cyberpower usb ... which, on sale, was about as expensive as the replacement battery.

After letting the battery charge overnight and today, the voltmeter finally read 13.84 volts which appeared to be about as high as it was going to go.

However, we're making good use of the apc ups.

We had the white power strip plugged into the wall. The light was plugged into this.

A huge cotter pin is plugged into the earth ground which is attached to the anti-static TOUCH ME FIRST strip - you can identify this buy the yellow connector.

So we plugged the 8051 white power strip into the surge protection side of the apc ups along with the lamp and cotter pin.

We are not chicken to daisy chain power strips so we plugged it into the ups as well.

The 8051 forth wall wart [which must go!] is plugged into this.

You see the one cycle per instruction [and sometimes more] forth machine on top of the printer.

You see 8051 forth running in a dos window on the athlon xp 1.6 running windows 98se.

We can now cycle 8051 power easily, without buying any more strip, without turning out the lamp!

And you see the cypress PSoC with its red power led [it also has a smaller usb activity red led] to the left.

We're going to try to get rs 232 forth disk i/o working with the Dallas/Maxim 89C430!

But we must file at the supreme court first.

You must read to believe how stupid and incompetent the New Mexico lawyers and judges are.

Then there are those who don't digitize at the sensor.

Friday April 9, 2004 20:25

As a 1951 high school freshman at San Mateo, CA high school we heard buddy holly for the first time on the radio.

Us high tech senior citizens are warming up for video, of course!

And the supreme court.

Some time ago we thought that an apc back-ups battery went bad.

So we replaced the battery. And the problem returned.

We thought the charging circuit failed. Speculation, of course.

So today we did some testing.

The charging circuit looks fine.

The "wall wart" to the right of the battery powers the 89C430.

That's the Soar 8050 monitoring the voltage at the battery.

We are following high tech and senior citizen matters.

There is a question: are pension fund managers involved in speculating or investing?

We don't know. But we'll continue to post.

There are speculators like Jesse Livermore and investors.

Jesse Livermore, though he died over forty years ago, is still known today as one of the most colorful, flamboyant and respected market speculators of all time. Known by such epithets such as Boy Plunger, the Great Bear, The Wall Street Wonder and the Cotton King, Livermore both made, and subsequently lost, four multi-million dollar fortunes during his career as a speculator, which spanned three decades.

We hope we are investing in a supreme court 1651(a) writ and usb 2.0, not speculating.

Projects require investments, which may be recouped or not.

You can see the financial investments Morales and Payne have made in our legal project.

Had we not made the financial investments, then we would not be players.

But these investment are now going to be used to make our points.

We've been cheated out of our money by the legal industry in violation of both state and federal constitutions.

We are players at the supreme court because of these investments.

We are investing in surface mount technician technology to complete our usb 2.0 8051 forth project.

So let's hope this works as well as our legal project.

Our surface mount technician training may prove to be every bit, we think, as fun as investment in our legal skills.

Which many of you may need as well as technical skills.

If you are not investing in surface mount technology technican skills, then you may not be players.

You may not be a player, but a victim, if you are not also investing your time in legal skills.

The crooks are after money. The pension fund money and the taxpayer money.

Like the taxpayer money which is sent to Sandia National Laboratories and Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Technician Lowell Jones in John Holovka's division at Sandia labs pointed out that about 90% of all projects at Sandia Labs fail.

But as long as the money continues to roll in, who, at Sandia Labs, cares.

Us insiders are giving you information.

Thursday April 8, 2004 19:02

Seniors who live on fixed incomes may be the most susceptible to rate changes.

Sybil Marchant, 84, said she uses four credit cards to pay for her monthly necessities.

"I don't have the cash," said Marchant, who tries to live on $736 from Social Security each month.

Many seniors are in the same predicament. A recent study by Demos, a nonprofit public policy organization, found that one in five middle- to low-income seniors spent more than 40 percent of their fixed incomes on debt payments. They will all have to figure out ways to come up with the extra money to for the payments if rates rise.

"As interest rates rise, we're going to see more and more people succumb to financial ruin," said Tamara Draut, director of the economic opportunity program at Demos.

The laws of economics likewise never cease. These debts must be dealt with. They cannot grow indefinitely at their current rates. History tells us that these debts are not usually repaid as agreed. In a world of fiat currency, debt relief takes a subtler path than the overt aggression of a Roosevelt. Inflation (an expansion of the money supply) or legalized counterfeiting, is the modern spin on an old idea. The forces that led to these earlier swindles are converging now on a debt-laden America. From Solon, to Roosevelt, to Nixon's closing of the gold window, the tradition of fraud is evident. In today's world, all you need is a printing press. My guess is that Bernanke's printing press will be busy.

"It's not good what I see," Binikowski said. "For lack of a better word, it's depressing. Each time you pull money out of the home and spend it on depreciating items like cars, it can come back to haunt you. It's not free money."

"I read an article that said Boulder has the second-highest concentration of programmers in the U.S. and that was presented as good news," said Jim Wills, Boulder County public trustee. "But you can hire a programmer in New Delhi who can send the code over the Internet, and you get the brightest talent, and you do not have to pay them $75,000 or $100,000. It's a no-brainer."

On the contrary, a combination of strong credit growth, low inflation and asset price inflation has in the past presaged economic catastrophe.

THE UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES OF GLOBALIZATION
By Dan Denning

Globalization has already begun to redistribute relative economic advantages from West to East. Asia, especially Japan and China, enjoys a competitive advantage in manufacturing because of abundant labor and high-tech know- how...in fact, it has become the world's factory for durable and mass-produced goods. Meanwhile, India, with the world's largest educated English-speaking population, is capable of providing professional services to the world at comparatively low prices.

The economic position of America appears to be untenable. The culprit, of course, is debt. Enormous, overwhelming, totally out-of-control debt. Government debt. Mortgage debt. Credit card debt. Debt, debt, debt.

It's an odd world where you can have debt deflation (falling prices for assets bought on credit) and inflation in natural resources and raw materials (as central banks print more money to devalue the nominal value of the debt) - AT THE SAME TIME.

Although the USA's largest pensions earned an average return of 19.6% on assets last year, low interest rates have hampered their recovery, says a study by pension consultants Milliman USA.

Wednesday April 7, 2004 19:09

Have you ever done USB or 2.0? We haven't.

Have you ever done a 28 USC 1651(a) at the supreme court? But we're going to try.

Have you ever done 8051 forth? We did.

Have you ever done vxd and wdm drivers? We did this too.

So let's spend a bit of time on our legal project, then resume the usb 2.0 project.

The most fun is trying to do something we all have not done before.

Not one of us can do it all by ourselves.

We must share information.

Like the forthians did to make this project possible.

And ExpressPCB. Digkey. Jameco. NetChip. Advanced analogic tech. ...

Tuesday April 6, 2004 20:20

Ted Lewis, wednesday March 31, 2004 Salinas, CA.

Lewis is one of bill's ms and phd students in computer science.

Getting ms and phd degrees should be a fun experience.

If done right! Which we did.

Morales and Payne are thinking out our legal arguments.

We continue to be shocked that 8051 is working on the athlon XP 1.6 running windows 98.

We looked a bit more carefully at the 8051 forth the 89C430 is running.

The entire 8051 forth operating system which includes and interactive incremental assembler and full screen editor running on the 8051 occupies on 17,420 bytes of memory. In this case in eprom.

After reading the instructions in the terminal emulator, Ctrl+A, not Ctrl+Break, is the proper way to return control to the terminal emulator. Maybe windows 98 won't crash if the proper exit procedure is followed.

Our general policy is to write and test drivers on a separate machine with backup hard disks for the reason that mistakes can clobber disks.

But because 8051 forth appears to work fairly well in a DOS window on Windows 98SE we loaded Visual Basic and C++ 6.0 on our Internet computer.

We learned that HotMetal 6.0 is written in Visual Basic as a result of Visual Basic asking us to terminate a running visual basic program.

When we tried to load Compuware/Numega DriverWorks 2.0 and 2.01 both crashed windows 98se so badly that we to enter the safe mode to do an uninstall.

But DriverWorks 2.01 works just fine on Windows 2000.

DriverWorks is apparently at revision 2.7 so we may have to do something about getting the most current version.

In this USB 2.0, 8051 forth project we are building on the good works of others ... while rejecting the bad ideas - like C and Keil for the 8051 software development.

DriverWorks includes the Cypress USB temperature sensor code in it. We will be using code from Hyde's and Axelson's books - translated into 8051 forth, of course!

But this week we must focus on our legal project. We've been cheated out of our money by criminal lawyers [a redundancy] and judges.

But we have all of the evidence in writing which should make things very interesting.

csd archive2 Saturday December 11, 2004 08:56

csd archive1 Friday February 20, 2003 19:20

Real world
perspectives on
high tech
for project success