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Cassini captured Dione against the globe of Saturn as it approached the icy moon for its close rendezvous on Dec. 14, 2004. This natural color view shows the moon has strong variations in brightness across its surface, but a remarkable lack of color, compared to the warm hues of Saturn’s atmosphere. Several oval-shaped storms are present in the planet’s atmosphere, along with ripples and waves in the cloud bands.

The images used to create this view were obtained with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera at a distance of approximately 603,000 kilometers (375,000 miles) from Dione through a filter sensitive to wavelengths of ultraviolet light centered at 338 nanometers. The Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle is 34 degrees. The image scale is about 32 kilometers (20 miles) per pixel.

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Apple Computer and Motorola could soon show us the mobile phone they are developing to play music purchased from Apple’s iTunes online music store.

“We’ve said we have something coming on this in the first half of 2005 and we’re definitely on schedule for that. Hopefully you’ll be able to see more about it soon,” says Eddy Cue, vice president in charge of applications at Apple.

If the phone is as far along as Cue suggests, then Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs would be likely to announce it during his annual keynote speech at MacWorld Expo, scheduled for Jan. 11, 2005 in San Francisco.

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De Nederlandse consumenten hebben met elkaar 180 miljard euro op spaarrekeningen staan en moeten meer gaan besteden om de economie een zet in de goede richting te geven. Om de uitgaven te stimuleren, moet het vertrouwen van de consument groter worden.

Dit heeft N. Wellink, president van De Nederlandsche bank, zondag gezegd in het tv-programma Buitenhof. Volgens hem kan het consumentenvertrouwen groter worden als bijvoorbeeld het perspectief voor de werkgelegenheid verbetert.

In 2001 was er sprake van een sterke inkomensverbetering van 6 � 8 procent. Een groot deel daarvan is op een spaarrekening beland. Dat geld kan nu worden besteed, ook al worden de lasten zwaarder.

Wellink, het feit dat je vier jaar terug moet om een jaar te vinden met een inkomensverbetering, zou wellicht ook een hint kunnen zijn dat het met het vertrouwen van de consument nog niet goed zit.

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Boeing is planning to add live television to its Connexion by Boeing service during 2005, a company executive says.

The television programs will be delivered across the Connexion network, which uses satellites to provide high-speed data connections between aircraft in-flight and ground stations linked to the Internet. The service entered commercial use earlier this year and provides a 5 megabits per second shared downstream and 1 mbps shared upstream connection to suitably equipped aircraft.

5 mbps downstream, 1 mbps upstream, and what do we get? TV.

Great.

Gaven Ward, 2, sprinted across the floor of the gymnasium at Fort Riley at the end of a deployment ceremony for troops headed overseas.
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Earlier this year, as Sgt. Alexander Garcia’s plane took off for home after his tense year of duty in Iraq, he remembered watching the receding desert sand and thinking, I will never see this place again.

Never lasted about 10 months for Sergeant Garcia, a cavalry scout with the First Armored Division who finished his first stint in Iraq in March and is now preparing to return.

He and the rest of his combat brigade at Fort Riley, the Army base a few miles from this town, have been working for weeks, late into the frigid prairie nights, cleaning and packing gear and vehicles for the trip back to Baghdad after the New Year.

“I figured that the Army was big enough that one unit would not have to go back again before this thing was over,” said Sergeant Garcia, 20. “It’s my job and it’s my country, and I don’t have any regrets. But I kind of feel like I did my part. Just as I was readjusting to life back home, just as I was starting to feel normal again, this kind of throws me back into the waves.”

No one is feeling normal anymore at Fort Riley and other bases across the country, where military life is undergoing a radical change. They are stoic here, and many point out, as Sergeant Garcia does, that they signed up for this.

Still, in decades past, troops had gotten used to a predictable rhythm to their deployments. Even during Desert Storm and Vietnam, most soldiers could expect to take just one trip into harm’s way.

But with the military stretched thin in Iraq and in Afghanistan, some soldiers and marines are being sent to war zones repeatedly, for longer stretches in some cases, and with far less time at home between deployments than they say they have ever experienced before.

Here in Kansas, the base and the small towns nearby have begun to resemble an enormous machine in an endless cycle: bringing soldiers home with late-night celebrations in gymnasiums and screaming roadside banners, and then sending them off again, with fresh uniforms, new DVD players and snapshots, and formal farewells.

The motion is constant, whirring along, even as the world beyond Fort Riley’s churning slows down for the holidays. Next month, a brigade of 3,500 Fort Riley soldiers will begin returning to Iraq for a second time; a few days ago, 3,500 others, many of whom arrived home to their quiet Midwestern post this fall, learned they would be headed back to Iraq as early as the middle of next year.

zal wel weer een dochtertje van Bernhard worden