All the climate models show that temperatures should rise faster closer to the arctic, here in Norway we have measured the same rise as in Canada, i.e. about twice the global average.
Norway starts at 58N, North Cape is 71 degrees North. Except for the Gulf Stream Norway would not be habitable at all.
I have been a member of the NTP Hackers team for 25+ years: As many of you probably know most reference clocks on the Internet are based on GPS timing receivers. The last time we had a week rollover a small percentage of Stratum 1 servers went temporarily offline, or they were marked as "falsetickers" due to announcing a date which was nearly 20 years wrong. Most servers were either unaffected or got back online shortly after.
The key here is that 1024 weeks is a short enough time span that most competent developers will realize that their (embedded or otherwise) product might still be in operation during the next rollover so they have to handle this, while a 13-bit week counter is so long (8192 weeks or 157.5 years) that it is likely that many will simply forget about the issue until it comes back to bite everyone in 2137.:-(
BTW, there are _many_ ways to handle rollovers like this, the easiest is probably to compile in the build date in your firmware and then simply make sure that the date calculated from the week number is greater than this, adding blocks of 1024 (or 8192) weeks if needed. Another option, if you have any kind of non-volatile memory, is to write the current date to permanent storage regularly, like once a month or once a year.
Here in Norway we have learned to depend upon https://yr.no/ which provides both short-term (2+ days) and long-term forecasts:
When the short-term forecast states that it will be 0.5 to 0.8 mm rain (or snow equivalent) between 10:00 and 11:00 tomorrow, and that it will clear up starting at 13:00, this is very likely to be correct. If it isn't exactly right it is usually because the changes happen a little bit before or after the maximum likelihood prediction.
The presentation of the weather data is so good that many people in our neighboring countries have started to use YR instead of their local weather service.
Elon Musk have been extremely clear, from the very beginning, that Tesla was a private bet almost sure to fail, but still worthwhile in order to speed up the transition away from ICE cars. The fact that they now seem to be able to actually make this a sustainable business is great!
Full disclosure: I'm a Norwegian electrical engineer who waited close to 25 years before the first 4x4 long range EV, i.e. a Tesla Model S70D was announced, we have used that as our only car for 3 years now.
Tesla is of course one of the best-selling car brands in Norway due to our extreme EV incentives, which include no toll road fees, mostly free parking, very low road tax, all on top of zero import duties or sales tax. With 98%++ of our electricity coming from hydro, this is a very nice situation indeed. Currently well over half of all new cars here are pure EVs (a majority) or plug-in hybrids, with ICE cars making up the remaining third or so.
My very first job after graduating in 1981 was in acoustic emission, using ultrasound detectors (piezo-electric transducers) working in the 100 kHz to 2 MHz region to detect cracking in steel structures, at this point this technology was in regular NDT use, i.e. to verify lifting platforms, and people were starting to use them on rotating machinery.
It must be the use of machine learning to try to recognize the failure patterns which is the only thing new here.
This morning they announced a two year prison sentence for rape, against the husband of one of the Swedish Academy members, that scandal is the reason there will be no Literature price this year.
The company I used to work for here in Norway was bought by a UK "equity firm", i.e. corporate raiders who got famous for netting UKP 2B by (in a totally legal manner) stealing the pension funds from about 6000 workers. When they bought us the writing was on the wall, but it was only after I had to take over the job of being the union representative for our typically very senior MSEE people that I realized how bad it was:
Pretty much everyone over the age of 58 were told they were redundant, supposedly for cause (i.e. did not know enough about the currently most relevant technologies), but that was in most cases clearly bogus. In the end most of them gave up anyway and accepted as many or few months of severance pay I could negotiate for them.
At the end of this process I accepted an offer to become the CTO of another company.
Now that I have read the actual article, several crucial simplification stand out:
a) All calculations are done assuming a perfectly spherical Earth.
b) The ETOPO1 data set has quite limited resolution, using data from (say) Google Earth or OpenStreetMap would probably give significantly better positioning of the actual coast lines. Having looked at both of them for the starting point in Pakistan it seems like you can at least get to a sub-5 m resolution for that coast.
I strongly recommend trying this in Google Earth, since that model will allow you to tilt and rotate the Earth so that the given path actually becomes a straight line and you can roll the Earth on your screen all the way from start to finish!
However, the algorithm they chose to use is still quite reasonable, i.e. relaxing the coast lines to get a fast way to discard most possible paths very easily, and then doing more exact calculations on the remaining possibilities. Since the errors caused by using a spherical model are well within the coastline relaxation offsets, you should be able to use their approach to get candidate paths and then micro-adjust them using a more accurate geodetic model. At this point you could also use Google Earth to trace a much more accurate coast line for the most important locations, i.e. around the end points and the tangential touches along the African and South American coast.
Pretty much all serious attempts at modelling global weather/climate points to one important correlation:
More heat (= more energy) in the atmosphere means that we get more extreme weather.
I think 2017 in particular but most years since 2000 have had a lot more (Carribean/US) hurricanes than what used to be normal.
Here in Norway we have had a bunch of warmer winters but also winters with far more precipitation which (when the weather is still cold enough) gives us more snow. At the main meteorological office here in Oslo the snow cover is within 2cm of the highest ever measured.
First obvious reference would be the UTM map coordinate system which also works off 100x100 km squares, here we use 6, 8, 10 or even more digits to designate any spot on the globe, to any desired accuracy/precision. (6 digits typically give you 100x100m squares, 8 digits 10x10m and with 10 digits you have a single square meter.) This system have been used in the military for a _long_ time now.
Next we have the What3Words idea which have already been mentioned, giving approximately 3x3m resolution using 3 english-language words which makes it much easier to memorize or send to someone else.
This is comparable to international Fast Charge networks:
Norway has of course been one of the largest Tesla markets since day one, China passed us recently to move into the second spot.
About 99% of all electricity here is hydro-electric since we're blessed with a lot of mountains, lakes and waterfalls (less than 3% is even potentially arable according to the CIA). My electricity bill at home is normally just over USD 0.10 per kWh, half of this is for the power and half is the transmission cost, so that second half varies quite a bit depending upon your location. I.e. our mountain cabin which is located in a community with local power generation get much lower transmission bills.
As a Tesla owner I use the SC network every time I make a longer trip, like the 550 km each way to a 60-year celebration in Trondheim 10 days ago, that is extremely convenient, but I also carry a ChaDeMo adapter which allows me to use any of the commercial fast charge networks if I'm in danger of running out of battery juice.
Those fast chargers typically cost around $0.30/kWh, but with our gasoline/diesel prices this is still only 1/3 the cost of driving the same distance in an ICE car.
(a) The first example of this (decades before Gustafsson's unums) is interval arithmetic.
(b) A trivial counter-example is any kind of Newton-Rapson iteration to calculate the value of a given function: Even though the NR iteration for sqrt(x) or sqrt(1/x) both have quadratic convergence, i.e. the number of correct digits double on each iteration, any kind of interval arithmetic will tell you that the error instead grows to infinite levels.
I.e. the claimed benefits are totally bogus except for really trivial calculations, and for those the error bounds are equally trivial.
Full disclosure: I am currently a member of the 2018 ieee754 floating point revision working group, so you could claim that I am biased here due to having spent a year or two working in the subject area.
Perfectly located if we need a charge while driving down to the Hvaler archipelago.
This evening we needed to do some shopping on the way to Rauland in the Telemark mountains, so we naturally did so in Hokksund where Tesla recently opened a 20-stall charger by the Eiker Mall. Total time off/on the E134 highway was about 25 minutes and the additional charge meant that we didn't have to worry about the bad driving conditions west of Rjukan where we had to follow a snowplow across the mountain.
What's becoming very obvious after 1.5 years/48K km in a S70D is that Tesla simply gets it right, and that none of the (ICE) incumbents are even close at this point in time.
The EU seems perfectly willing to fine these nice big US companies when they break EU regulations, and they tend to make the fines a nice percentage of their gross income:
You could claim that I've gone into management since I'm the CTO of Open iT, a multinational sw development corporation, but as long as I still get to do as much interesting programming as I want to, I will consider myself a programmer.
Besides my daytime work I'm involved with Network Time Protocol and I'm also part of Mill Computing which is a team of mostly very mature people trying to develop a _really_ interesting cpu architecture, please take a look. That team is lead by our own real-life wizard and Gandalf lookalike, Ivan Godard (do an image search...). As part of my Mill work I am also active in the ieee754 2018 revision, i.e. the update to the international floating point standard.
In my spare time I'm the leader of the Mapping Commission of the Norwegian Orienteering Federation, a job I got mostly due to my interest in developing sw to create much better base maps based on LiDAR point clouds.
Previously in my career I've worked on video and audio coding/optimization, including DVD, BluRay and Ogg Vorbis, as well as helping optimize the Quake assembly code. I've also worked on one of the AES candidates and at one point I doubled the speed of a research Computational Fluid Chemistry code. My Warhol moment might have been when I by accident made the first public disclosure of the FDIV bug (on usenet:comp.sys.intel) and then wrote most of the (compiler) SW workaround for that.
I have no intention to retire until I'm much closer to 70! (If I did that my wife who's a mechanical engineer and responsible for making the trains in Norway run on time, would expect me to make dinner for her every day, as well as doing all the cleaning and laundry.:-) )
Currently EVs sell more than plug-in hybrids and both of them outsell diesel or gasoline ICE cars.
We are definitely on target for the planned 2025 date when all new vehicles should be either pure EVs or plug-in hybrids with some serious range in battery-only modus.
The reasons are not to hard to explain: Due to Norway's extremely high vehicle taxes which are waived for EVs, a low-end Tesla like my S70D cost far less than any car, of any make, that is capable of similar acceleration. At the high end a Model S P100DL costs just 50% of the starting price (before options) of an Audi R8 Coupe, and that Audi is a second slower from 0 to 100 km/hr.
We also get a reduced road tax, no toll road fees, access to bus lanes, free parking and free public charging. I save 59 NOK (almost USD 8) in toll fees every day just on the morning drive to my office, so my monthly cost (inlcuding appreciation) is actually lower than for my previous car, a Skoda Octavia 4x4 diesel.
I have currently bought 450+ books from Baen due to three simple factors:
1) They publish several of my favorite authors 2) The Baen Free Library with full "sample" books from most authors got me hooked 3) The DRM is simply NOT THERE, instead they publish all their books in pretty much every format you could conceivably want, including plain html text.
Of those 450+ I have read at least 440, the remainder is mainly this and next month's bundle of mostly new books. ($18 for 7-8 books, 4 of them guaranteed brand new.:-) )
I still read paper books as well, but with at least 4K behind me I have filled up way too many book shelves in too many houses.:-)
Here in Norway we just had a general election last night:
Just 2-3 weeks ago Jan T Sanner, the minister with responsibility for elections, decided that every single vote had to be counted manually, including all early voting ballots. Previously those votes had been counted using optical scanners but with the news about how hackable most voting machines have turned out to be, he decided that we won't trust them.
Voting booths closed at 21:00 and the trend (our current prime minister will almost certainly get another 4 years) was immediately clear even though many of the details were less settled. This is mainly due to our voting setup with 169 representatives from 19 counties, where each party is supposed to get a total number which corresponds as closely as possible to the total vote counts, but with a cutoff of 4.0%: If a party gets less than that they will not get any of the final 19 slots which goes to the parties which have gotten too few direct representatives.
This morning at 07:00 we had passed 95% of total votes counted and a couple of the smaller parties had just managed to lift safely above the 4.0% cutoff point, so now the result is for all practical purposes final.
The key idea is that in all countries with "one person - one vote" the effort needed to do a full manual count (which is actually a dual count and verification) is exactly proportional to the size of the country, so it should be just as easy to do this in the US as in Norway!
Looking at the map (select "Ballangen" and then "Harstad/Narvik Airport, Evenes") it is very obvious that any urgent air freight or express service visit will fly to Evenes and then get a fast boat ride across the fjord, the distance is just ~15 km (i.e. less than 10 miles) or just 4 km across the fjord to the closest road.
The time for this would be under 30 min for the total transfer, and if that isn't fast enough then you'd use one of the helicopters at the airport, stationed there for the oil industry.
I was an architect for the largest (at the time) data center in Norway, located in Fet relatively close to the main Oslo airport. I would be far more worried about some other issues here:
a) Latency: "Bandwidth is cheap but latency is forever." There are effectively no customers/end users of this data center who would be located within say 1000 km. OTOH the situation is almost as bad for the Luleå data center over in Sweden, so not an absolute show stopper.
b) Redundancy. As the article stated, pretty much _all_ the fiber runs go along the iron ore railway line from Narvik to Kiruna in Sweden, so a single backhoe accident would cut all of them. For our Fet data center we had totally independent fiber and power runs entering the site from opposite sides, and we had to make sure that they had no common routing anywhere until reaching a large exchange point. (During planning we found that the two separate fiber vendors selected had their main routes sharing a single culvert at one point on the way to Oslo, so this had to be fixed.)
That's actually a good idea, or it would have been if Norwegians hadn't been both trusting and trustworthy.
I.e. there have been several international comparisons where Norway end up with very high productivity, supposedly because the fact that we can (at least mostly) trust people.
My favorite story is the time when I lost my wallet on the bus and someone who did the cleaning for the bus company found it and phoned me three weeks later (it had gotten stuck between the seat cushions.)
As the article stated, it used to be that everything was completely open and searchable on the internet for a few years, before that point you had to visit city hall (or the post office) and manually search through huge books.
The current setup is actually very nice, in that the transparency goes both ways:
In order to be allowed to access any tax records you first have to use the same two-factor authentication you would use to deliver your own tax return, and if you then look at any tax return except your own, the person you looked up will be notified that you did so.
I.e. if I think my neighbors are spending too much money and want to check what they have declared, they will immediately be told that I did so.
"Norsk" literally means "Norwegian" in Norwegian, so calling the company "Norsk" is just like calling "USA Today" just "USA".
There are literally hundreds (if not thousands?) of companies named "Norsk ", I used to work for Norsk Hydro which is by far the largest example of the type. Even though the DNS name was hydro.com, lots and lots of English articles insisted on calling the company "Norsk".(It got started as "The Norwegian Hydro-Electric Fertilizer Company" (literal translation of the original name) over 100 years ago.
You have to include Alaska to make the US that large, and then you cannot drive from one part to the other without spending a day or three in Canada.
The lower 48 which would be your normal driving range is much easier to drive across than all of Europe since the latter includes all the former East Block countries and a substantial part of Russia. If you want to go north-south Norway alone is much longer than the west coast of the US!
The shortest possible route in Norway (mostly following Euro Highway 6) from Lindesnes in the south to Grense Jakobselv on the Russia border in the north is 2891 km according to Google Maps, you can compare that to the 1380 miles (2221 km) from Mexico to Canada along I5 through California, Oregon and Washington.
The standard Tesla app allows you just to turn charging or AC on/off, as well as honk the horn (to find the car in a big underground garage with no GPS coverage), flash the lights etc.
What it sorely misses is the capability to program in the time for charging to finish (so that the battery will be full & warm in wintertime), the car is already able to adjust the charging speed with single-digit Amp steps. As it is now I have to do a quick mental calculation and then adjust the Amp rate and/or the starting time.
Since the API is somewhat documented you can also use VisibleTesla from your laptop/home PC and control pretty much everything.
Slashdot Mirror
All the climate models show that temperatures should rise faster closer to the arctic, here in Norway we have measured the same rise as in Canada, i.e. about twice the global average.
Norway starts at 58N, North Cape is 71 degrees North. Except for the Gulf Stream Norway would not be habitable at all.
Terje
I have been a member of the NTP Hackers team for 25+ years: As many of you probably know most reference clocks on the Internet are based on GPS timing receivers. The last time we had a week rollover a small percentage of Stratum 1 servers went temporarily offline, or they were marked as "falsetickers" due to announcing a date which was nearly 20 years wrong. Most servers were either unaffected or got back online shortly after.
The key here is that 1024 weeks is a short enough time span that most competent developers will realize that their (embedded or otherwise) product might still be in operation during the next rollover so they have to handle this, while a 13-bit week counter is so long (8192 weeks or 157.5 years) that it is likely that many will simply forget about the issue until it comes back to bite everyone in 2137. :-(
BTW, there are _many_ ways to handle rollovers like this, the easiest is probably to compile in the build date in your firmware and then simply make sure that the date calculated from the week number is greater than this, adding blocks of 1024 (or 8192) weeks if needed. Another option, if you have any kind of non-volatile memory, is to write the current date to permanent storage regularly, like once a month or once a year.
Terje
Here in Norway we have learned to depend upon https://yr.no/ which provides both short-term (2+ days) and long-term forecasts:
When the short-term forecast states that it will be 0.5 to 0.8 mm rain (or snow equivalent) between 10:00 and 11:00 tomorrow, and that it will clear up starting at 13:00, this is very likely to be correct. If it isn't exactly right it is usually because the changes happen a little bit before or after the maximum likelihood prediction.
The presentation of the weather data is so good that many people in our neighboring countries have started to use YR instead of their local weather service.
Terje
Elon Musk have been extremely clear, from the very beginning, that Tesla was a private bet almost sure to fail, but still worthwhile in order to speed up the transition away from ICE cars. The fact that they now seem to be able to actually make this a sustainable business is great!
Full disclosure: I'm a Norwegian electrical engineer who waited close to 25 years before the first 4x4 long range EV, i.e. a Tesla Model S70D was announced, we have used that as our only car for 3 years now.
Tesla is of course one of the best-selling car brands in Norway due to our extreme EV incentives, which include no toll road fees, mostly free parking, very low road tax, all on top of zero import duties or sales tax. With 98%++ of our electricity coming from hydro, this is a very nice situation indeed. Currently well over half of all new cars here are pure EVs (a majority) or plug-in hybrids, with ICE cars making up the remaining third or so.
Terje Mathisen
My very first job after graduating in 1981 was in acoustic emission, using ultrasound detectors (piezo-electric transducers) working in the 100 kHz to 2 MHz region to detect cracking in steel structures, at this point this technology was in regular NDT use, i.e. to verify lifting platforms, and people were starting to use them on rotating machinery.
It must be the use of machine learning to try to recognize the failure patterns which is the only thing new here.
Terje
This morning they announced a two year prison sentence for rape, against the husband of one of the Swedish Academy members, that scandal is the reason there will be no Literature price this year.
Terje
The company I used to work for here in Norway was bought by a UK "equity firm", i.e. corporate raiders who got famous for netting UKP 2B by (in a totally legal manner) stealing the pension funds from about 6000 workers. When they bought us the writing was on the wall, but it was only after I had to take over the job of being the union representative for our typically very senior MSEE people that I realized how bad it was:
Pretty much everyone over the age of 58 were told they were redundant, supposedly for cause (i.e. did not know enough about the currently most relevant technologies), but that was in most cases clearly bogus. In the end most of them gave up anyway and accepted as many or few months of severance pay I could negotiate for them.
At the end of this process I accepted an offer to become the CTO of another company.
Terje
Now that I have read the actual article, several crucial simplification stand out:
a) All calculations are done assuming a perfectly spherical Earth.
b) The ETOPO1 data set has quite limited resolution, using data from (say) Google Earth or OpenStreetMap would probably give significantly better positioning of the actual coast lines. Having looked at both of them for the starting point in Pakistan it seems like you can at least get to a sub-5 m resolution for that coast.
I strongly recommend trying this in Google Earth, since that model will allow you to tilt and rotate the Earth so that the given path actually becomes a straight line and you can roll the Earth on your screen all the way from start to finish!
However, the algorithm they chose to use is still quite reasonable, i.e. relaxing the coast lines to get a fast way to discard most possible paths very easily, and then doing more exact calculations on the remaining possibilities. Since the errors caused by using a spherical model are well within the coastline relaxation offsets, you should be able to use their approach to get candidate paths and then micro-adjust them using a more accurate geodetic model. At this point you could also use Google Earth to trace a much more accurate coast line for the most important locations, i.e. around the end points and the tangential touches along the African and South American coast.
Terje
Disclaimer: I am Norwegian, so when I grew up NRK was the one and only TV channel available.
Even so, I do believe it is one of the best public broadcasters in the world: Less resources than BBC but able to do a lot of very good stuff.
http://nrk.no/ is one of the news sites I visit every day, and I use their program streaming solution to view the few programs I still care about.
NRK came up with "Slow TV", watching a train ride that takes 12 hours is almost hypnotic, and the full Hurtigruten coastal express trip is amazing.
Terje
Pretty much all serious attempts at modelling global weather/climate points to one important correlation:
More heat (= more energy) in the atmosphere means that we get more extreme weather.
I think 2017 in particular but most years since 2000 have had a lot more (Carribean/US) hurricanes than what used to be normal.
Here in Norway we have had a bunch of warmer winters but also winters with far more precipitation which (when the weather is still cold enough) gives us more snow. At the main meteorological office here in Oslo the snow cover is within 2cm of the highest ever measured.
Terje
First obvious reference would be the UTM map coordinate system which also works off 100x100 km squares, here we use 6, 8, 10 or even more digits to designate any spot on the globe, to any desired accuracy/precision. (6 digits typically give you 100x100m squares, 8 digits 10x10m and with 10 digits you have a single square meter.) This system have been used in the military for a _long_ time now.
Next we have the What3Words idea which have already been mentioned, giving approximately 3x3m resolution using 3 english-language words which makes it much easier to memorize or send to someone else.
Terje
This is comparable to international Fast Charge networks:
Norway has of course been one of the largest Tesla markets since day one, China passed us recently to move into the second spot.
About 99% of all electricity here is hydro-electric since we're blessed with a lot of mountains, lakes and waterfalls (less than 3% is even potentially arable according to the CIA). My electricity bill at home is normally just over USD 0.10 per kWh, half of this is for the power and half is the transmission cost, so that second half varies quite a bit depending upon your location. I.e. our mountain cabin which is located in a community with local power generation get much lower transmission bills.
As a Tesla owner I use the SC network every time I make a longer trip, like the 550 km each way to a 60-year celebration in Trondheim 10 days ago, that is extremely convenient, but I also carry a ChaDeMo adapter which allows me to use any of the commercial fast charge networks if I'm in danger of running out of battery juice.
Those fast chargers typically cost around $0.30/kWh, but with our gasoline/diesel prices this is still only 1/3 the cost of driving the same distance in an ICE car.
Terje
(a) The first example of this (decades before Gustafsson's unums) is interval arithmetic.
(b) A trivial counter-example is any kind of Newton-Rapson iteration to calculate the value of a given function: Even though the NR iteration for sqrt(x) or sqrt(1/x) both have quadratic convergence, i.e. the number of correct digits double on each iteration, any kind of interval arithmetic will tell you that the error instead grows to infinite levels.
I.e. the claimed benefits are totally bogus except for really trivial calculations, and for those the error bounds are equally trivial.
Full disclosure: I am currently a member of the 2018 ieee754 floating point revision working group, so you could claim that I am biased here due to having spent a year or two working in the subject area.
Terje
This will be by the E6 highway, south of Oslo and near Rygge airport, construction has started and it is supposed to be ready in a month or so:
https://electrek.co/2017/10/28...
Perfectly located if we need a charge while driving down to the Hvaler archipelago.
This evening we needed to do some shopping on the way to Rauland in the Telemark mountains, so we naturally did so in Hokksund where Tesla recently opened a 20-stall charger by the Eiker Mall. Total time off/on the E134 highway was about 25 minutes and the additional charge meant that we didn't have to worry about the bad driving conditions west of Rjukan where we had to follow a snowplow across the mountain.
What's becoming very obvious after 1.5 years/48K km in a S70D is that Tesla simply gets it right, and that none of the (ICE) incumbents are even close at this point in time.
Terje
The EU seems perfectly willing to fine these nice big US companies when they break EU regulations, and they tend to make the fines a nice percentage of their gross income:
http://www.eugdpr.org/
Terje
You could claim that I've gone into management since I'm the CTO of Open iT, a multinational sw development corporation, but as long as I still get to do as much interesting programming as I want to, I will consider myself a programmer.
Besides my daytime work I'm involved with Network Time Protocol and I'm also part of Mill Computing which is a team of mostly very mature people trying to develop a _really_ interesting cpu architecture, please take a look. That team is lead by our own real-life wizard and Gandalf lookalike, Ivan Godard (do an image search...). As part of my Mill work I am also active in the ieee754 2018 revision, i.e. the update to the international floating point standard.
In my spare time I'm the leader of the Mapping Commission of the Norwegian Orienteering Federation, a job I got mostly due to my interest in developing sw to create much better base maps based on LiDAR point clouds.
Previously in my career I've worked on video and audio coding/optimization, including DVD, BluRay and Ogg Vorbis, as well as helping optimize the Quake assembly code. I've also worked on one of the AES candidates and at one point I doubled the speed of a research Computational Fluid Chemistry code. My Warhol moment might have been when I by accident made the first public disclosure of the FDIV bug (on usenet:comp.sys.intel) and then wrote most of the (compiler) SW workaround for that.
I have no intention to retire until I'm much closer to 70! (If I did that my wife who's a mechanical engineer and responsible for making the trains in Norway run on time, would expect me to make dinner for her every day, as well as doing all the cleaning and laundry. :-) )
Terje
Last month both VW (e-Golf) and Tesla (S+X) sold more than 2000 EVs here:
https://electrek.co/2017/10/06...
Currently EVs sell more than plug-in hybrids and both of them outsell diesel or gasoline ICE cars.
We are definitely on target for the planned 2025 date when all new vehicles should be either pure EVs or plug-in hybrids with some serious range in battery-only modus.
The reasons are not to hard to explain: Due to Norway's extremely high vehicle taxes which are waived for EVs, a low-end Tesla like my S70D cost far less than any car, of any make, that is capable of similar acceleration. At the high end a Model S P100DL costs just 50% of the starting price (before options) of an Audi R8 Coupe, and that Audi is a second slower from 0 to 100 km/hr.
We also get a reduced road tax, no toll road fees, access to bus lanes, free parking and free public charging. I save 59 NOK (almost USD 8) in toll fees every day just on the morning drive to my office, so my monthly cost (inlcuding appreciation) is actually lower than for my previous car, a Skoda Octavia 4x4 diesel.
Terje
I have currently bought 450+ books from Baen due to three simple factors:
1) They publish several of my favorite authors
2) The Baen Free Library with full "sample" books from most authors got me hooked
3) The DRM is simply NOT THERE, instead they publish all their books in pretty much every format you could conceivably want, including plain html text.
Of those 450+ I have read at least 440, the remainder is mainly this and next month's bundle of mostly new books. ($18 for 7-8 books, 4 of them guaranteed brand new. :-) )
I still read paper books as well, but with at least 4K behind me I have filled up way too many book shelves in too many houses. :-)
Terje
Here in Norway we just had a general election last night:
Just 2-3 weeks ago Jan T Sanner, the minister with responsibility for elections, decided that every single vote had to be counted manually, including all early voting ballots. Previously those votes had been counted using optical scanners but with the news about how hackable most voting machines have turned out to be, he decided that we won't trust them.
Voting booths closed at 21:00 and the trend (our current prime minister will almost certainly get another 4 years) was immediately clear even though many of the details were less settled. This is mainly due to our voting setup with 169 representatives from 19 counties, where each party is supposed to get a total number which corresponds as closely as possible to the total vote counts, but with a cutoff of 4.0%: If a party gets less than that they will not get any of the final 19 slots which goes to the parties which have gotten too few direct representatives.
This morning at 07:00 we had passed 95% of total votes counted and a couple of the smaller parties had just managed to lift safely above the 4.0% cutoff point, so now the result is for all practical purposes final.
The key idea is that in all countries with "one person - one vote" the effort needed to do a full manual count (which is actually a dual count and verification) is exactly proportional to the size of the country, so it should be just as easy to do this in the US as in Norway!
Terje
Looking at the map (select "Ballangen" and then "Harstad/Narvik Airport, Evenes") it is very obvious that any urgent air freight or express service visit will fly to Evenes and then get a fast boat ride across the fjord, the distance is just ~15 km (i.e. less than 10 miles) or just 4 km across the fjord to the closest road.
The time for this would be under 30 min for the total transfer, and if that isn't fast enough then you'd use one of the helicopters at the airport, stationed there for the oil industry.
I was an architect for the largest (at the time) data center in Norway, located in Fet relatively close to the main Oslo airport. I would be far more worried about some other issues here:
a) Latency: "Bandwidth is cheap but latency is forever." There are effectively no customers/end users of this data center who would be located within say 1000 km. OTOH the situation is almost as bad for the Luleå data center over in Sweden, so not an absolute show stopper.
b) Redundancy. As the article stated, pretty much _all_ the fiber runs go along the iron ore railway line from Narvik to Kiruna in Sweden, so a single backhoe accident would cut all of them. For our Fet data center we had totally independent fiber and power runs entering the site from opposite sides, and we had to make sure that they had no common routing anywhere until reaching a large exchange point. (During planning we found that the two separate fiber vendors selected had their main routes sharing a single culvert at one point on the way to Oslo, so this had to be fixed.)
Terje
That's actually a good idea, or it would have been if Norwegians hadn't been both trusting and trustworthy.
I.e. there have been several international comparisons where Norway end up with very high productivity, supposedly because the fact that we can (at least mostly) trust people.
My favorite story is the time when I lost my wallet on the bus and someone who did the cleaning for the bus company found it and phoned me three weeks later (it had gotten stuck between the seat cushions.)
As the article stated, it used to be that everything was completely open and searchable on the internet for a few years, before that point you had to visit city hall (or the post office) and manually search through huge books.
The current setup is actually very nice, in that the transparency goes both ways:
In order to be allowed to access any tax records you first have to use the same two-factor authentication you would use to deliver your own tax return, and if you then look at any tax return except your own, the person you looked up will be notified that you did so.
I.e. if I think my neighbors are spending too much money and want to check what they have declared, they will immediately be told that I did so.
Terje
"Norsk" literally means "Norwegian" in Norwegian, so calling the company "Norsk" is just like calling "USA Today" just "USA".
There are literally hundreds (if not thousands?) of companies named "Norsk ", I used to work for Norsk Hydro which is by far the largest example of the type. Even though the DNS name was hydro.com, lots and lots of English articles insisted on calling the company "Norsk".(It got started as "The Norwegian Hydro-Electric Fertilizer Company" (literal translation of the original name) over 100 years ago.
Terje
You have to include Alaska to make the US that large, and then you cannot drive from one part to the other without spending a day or three in Canada.
The lower 48 which would be your normal driving range is much easier to drive across than all of Europe since the latter includes all the former East Block countries and a substantial part of Russia. If you want to go north-south Norway alone is much longer than the west coast of the US!
The shortest possible route in Norway (mostly following Euro Highway 6) from Lindesnes in the south to Grense Jakobselv on the Russia border in the north is 2891 km according to Google Maps, you can compare that to the 1380 miles (2221 km) from Mexico to Canada along I5 through California, Oregon and Washington.
Terje
The standard Tesla app allows you just to turn charging or AC on/off, as well as honk the horn (to find the car in a big underground garage with no GPS coverage), flash the lights etc.
What it sorely misses is the capability to program in the time for charging to finish (so that the battery will be full & warm in wintertime), the car is already able to adjust the charging speed with single-digit Amp steps. As it is now I have to do a quick mental calculation and then adjust the Amp rate and/or the starting time.
Since the API is somewhat documented you can also use VisibleTesla from your laptop/home PC and control pretty much everything.
Terje