Our troops sat back in the green zone while the Iraqi civilian population tore each other to shreds in pretty much uncontested sectarian violence.
My tin foil hat might be a little tight tonight, but I wouldn't be too surprised if that was the point. Islamic jihad kills more Islamics than anything else under ordinary circumstances. Saddam Hussein was too good at his job of dominating the country and preventing the sectarian violence. Destablizing the region by killing Saddam Hussein lifts the lid and lets them back at each other's throats, instead of seeking to take out their aggression on the West. Sounds like some thinktank's idea.
And now more feasible than ever. Drones typically accept control signals at 2.4 GHz, which means the directed energy weapon in question would be a maser. The best way to shoot down an aircraft with directed energy is to hit a receiving antenna, frying the on board electronics. Conveniently enough, work out of Imperial College London, published in March 2018, documents the creation of the highest energy maser ever created, more than 100 million times more energy than previous masers, which output in the nanowatts. And it operates at room temperature, instead of the supercooled version previous masers required. A kilowatt array of those should wreck havoc with any drone flying.
The good news is that in the lists of Tumblr alternatives, I did see some people seriously considering Plume, which is a federated blogging platform that can connect to other Fediverse federated blogs.
In practice, the vast majority of people are not technical and aren't going to figure out how to run their own servers. That doesn't mean they'll never run their own servers; it means people with technical skills have to make running your own server user-friendly before they will. FreedomBox is one project working on that; the current state doesn't look super-user-friendly, but I think the goal is to be able to sell a box that you plug into your home internet that already has the software installed and can be configured over an easy web interface.
FreedomBox has been around since freaking 2010. And it has Eben freaking Moglen behind it. And it's STILL too difficult.
The last 20% of usability is 80% of the work. Open source is notorious for never exerting itself past the 80% mark. The difference between Linux on the Desktop and the Microsoft OSs is Microsoft spent the money to hammer away at that last 20%. It isn't much in functionality but it is a gulf of usability. Without it, FreedomBox and projects like it simply won't gain traction.
Plex and FreeNAS are some of the pinnacles of achievement in self-hosted open source services today, and they both still require the care and feeding of a technical user or they don't work, or stop working in short order. Federated social media is harder than either of those things.
Looming over all of this is security. Every set-it-and-forget-it device in the world today is a big fat lumbering target. Botnets are voraciously trying to vacuum up every last iota of unprotected equipment on the entire planet, and they have infinite machine patience. They're also increasingly sophisticated. I installed fail2ban at home, finally, and the goddamned things adjusted their behavior to compensate. It took less than a week.
This is the environment in which FreedomBox and any similar project has to operate. On the user/owner side, enormous pressure to make things easy, which is nearly always inimical to security, and on the network side, enormous pressure from botnets attempting to pwn the device. That pressure is keeping the installed base down to a tiny sliver of what it would need to be before it puts a dent in any centralized service.
But... this isn't inevitable, and there's no reason that the next big thing in social networking can't be designed as an open protocol, with no central point of control -- a system where people may choose to provide the infrastructure required to power their Facegram or Instabook or whatever themselves, or (more likely) hire someone replaceable to do it for them. Open protocols can't be sold out and can't be owned.
Hardware capability is through the roof now. My smartphone has more storage, more processing power, and more bandwidth than the machines hosting IRC servers not that many years ago. There are no technical barriers to crowd-hosted social media.
There's one huge technical barrier, which an anonymous coward two levels down touched on before disappearing down a Tor rabbit hole.
Home connections are asymmetrical. Massively asymmetrical. An order of magnitude or TWO asymmetrical. Your home bandwidth can't handle serving up the data to support even your immediate family in hits, let alone your several hundred Facebook "friends". Not when you're posting high resolution images and video footage. It could eventually transmit everything to everybody the algorithms show it to, but by the time it could finish, most of them have hit the Back button and moved on. They don't have the patience to wait for it to load. Meanwhile on the centralized services, they can click and get a new page in 0.37 seconds, complete with a metric fuckton of "you might also like" thumbnails, advertising animated crap, and a streaming video in the corner that follows them down the page. Yes, a decentralized system can dispense with a lot of the bullshit, but it's an inescapable fact that the web today is rich media. It's not just text anymore. Your phone does have a ton of storage and a ton of processing power. It also has minuscule bandwidth compared to any datacenter anywhere.
If we all had low latency, symmetrical gigabit connections, we could decentralize it all. The open source community could bash together the handful of missing pieces in a matter of months, and have a turnkey solution ready to plug in to any old random desktop in less than a year. Something to do with all that money the Mozilla Foundation is wasting on random bullshit changes to Firefox. But we don't.
We can't build the decentralized web because we don't have the bandwidth for it. And the big national ISPs know this. They will work very hard to keep everything centralized because there's money on the line. There's lot of activities that can't be monetized when they're diffuse, but centralize them and suddenly you can milk millions, even billions of dollars out of them. The incumbents now have their hands on that money. They won't relinquish it easily. If ever.
However, what you or I assert, is not what holds authority.
If enough of us assert it, it does. Either the laws are explicitly changed, or the courts "interpret" them to suit the current zeitgeist. I would argue that the "no permission needed to access any public website" convention is already firmly established in people's expectations, and IP range blocking does not constitute access control. When literally any other member of the public can access the site, an IP range block is the equivalent of "No Negros" on a public bathroom door.
I am choosing that analogy with precision, not for the fact it triggers a percentage of the population. I consider the position of the copyright maximalist lobby to be precisely equivalent to the position of racists in 1960s America. They are that far diverged from the general population and they are that morally wrong. Media is culture. Attempting to own all media in perpetuity is attempting to own a culture, which is a hop, skip, and a jump away from owning people. Owning all media forever is an attempt to own minds, and from a certain angle, that looks an awful lot like slavery. Now I'm being slightly hyperbolic, but I'm also quite serious.
George Orwell didn't make control of all media a central aspect of 1984 on a whim. He well understood the power it confers. I'm saying this is that. Between net neutrality being abolished and the CFAA being interpreted as a hammer to smash the likes of Aaron Swartz, we're well down that slippery slope, and accelerating. Archive.org pushing back is absolutely essential, and every last one of us needs to add our voices to theirs.
So instead of a "politician", you place a "criminal" at the top.
We've had criminals at the top before. We're accustomed to a certain panache in our criminals. And a certain competence. We like criminals smart enough not to get caught at most of what they do.
This guy.... he involved himself with the highest law of the land while knowing nothing of law, while knowing so little about law that he was unable to hire a lawyer who could stand up to him and tell him what he can and can not do on the way to accomplishing his goals. There's often a weasel path to get what you want, whatever it might be. Trump never takes the weasel path. He bulls straight through. It's going to cost him. A lot. Fox News is so very fond of reciting the catch phrase "We're a nation of laws." They're going to profoundly regret it.
He's 72 years old. He's presbyopic. And he's too vain to wear his glasses in public. That's the whole of his problem.
He can't read the teleprompter because the font is too small to read without glasses[1] and he can't read from papers in front of him because he absolutely needs reading glasses and he will never be seen wearing them as long as he lives. He comes from an era when only nerds wore glasses, and he was part of the crowd that persecuted the ever-living-fuck out of nerds. He will never wear glasses, even if his physical inability to focus on the words on the page makes him sound like a moron on national TV, over and over again.
You'll notice especially in briefings that all of his mistakes are easily explained by him reading blurry words he can't quite make out, then making a stab at what the word might be, and his stab in the dark is frequently wrong because he has stated publicly (on Twitter, naturally) that he doesn't prepare for meetings. So he's winging it every time he sits down with people, and he's quite literally doing it blind.
[1] Except when they push up the font size on the prompter for his major speeches, and then he just reads really really slowly because it takes so long to scroll the sentences up the prompter when the font size is that large.
So you are saying compartmentalization works? I have a feeling one or two TLAs know exactly what is going on.
I doubt it. The US TLAs are notorious for the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. They should be connected, at least at the highest levels, but there's so much going on that by the time it filters up to a level where the agencies are comfortable with there being some sort of cross connect, it's too late. They're never comfortable until it hits the Director level, and there's too much going on for any one person to keep up with, even if that's all they did, and it isn't all they do.
Even within a TLA they have this problem. They carry compartmentalization to such paranoid extremes that once again, everything is supposed to filter through one individual. By the time the Director sees it, it's all over and the Director's nominal "oversight" is nothing more than a rubber stamp. One of two stamps: APPROVE or DISAVOW.
Because of excessive compartmentalization, in real time, no one knows what's going on.
Wall mount package drop boxes are a thing. According to reviews, couriers can be convinced to use them if you put a sticker of their logo on the door. Obviously they only accept packages of limited dimensions, but some of the smallest packages tend to be the most valuable, so it should be quite useful. They're expensive, so there probably won't be a lot of retrofits, but I would expect new development housing to start including such things. There's little reason to believe this delivery-everything trend won't continue, so I would expect them to become bullet points on real estate listings before the end of the next decade.
That specific model has some design issues, and doesn't seem to have much in the way of direct competition. There are lots of stand alone porch drop boxes, but much fewer in-wall permanent installations. I expect that to improve too, though slowly.
Unless and until Amazon succeeds with drone delivery. Then all bets are off, and instead of this sort of thing, everybody will want a roof level delivery pad with integrated automated dumbwaiter.
In some states it is legal for him to shoot and kill the theif.
Only if he does it in person. Deadly mantraps are illegal in all 50 states. Nominally not deadly mantraps may not be criminal, but anyone injured by one can sue and win civilly. Katko v. Briney.
How exactly does concrete produce CO2? Is it an essential part of production - or merely a result of heating in furnaces traditionally powered with coal?
It is an essential part of production of Portland cement, the most common cement in use worldwide. The CO2 is cooked out of limestone, resulting in calcium silicate, the constituent molecules of clinker.
Ancient Roman cement does not seem to be primarily calcium silicate, though studies are ongoing. The manufacturing process has been lost to history, and there was quite a bit of variance in the formula over the centuries it was made.
Now we can enjoy the same Balkanization that video content has been descending into.
Someday, somehow, some way, someone needs to design a federated distribution system for digital media. So all the vendors can have their own little stores with their own little terms and conditions and their own individual rates and exclusives and what-have-you, and the buyers can have one friendly interface.
Won't happen, because someone's precious branding. But a boy can dream.
Florida wouldn't even try, and that particular sand bar can't wash away quickly enough.
The British Isles would be rendered effectively uninhabitable if it did. The Gulf Stream carries gigajoules of solar energy north every second. Without that sand bar, it shrinks, maybe even stops entirely.
It's interesting that Japan and California actually plan for major earthquakes whereas planning for a repetition of the 1811 New Madrid earthquakes in SouthEast Missouri seems to be virtually nonexistent.
It isn't. You're just not paying attention. Missouri has been replacing hundreds of highway bridges. The new ones are earthquake resistant. When the I-70 bridge over the Missouri River was replaced, the new one has earthquake resistance features. The adjacent span was retrofitted with some such features. MODOT is definitely paying attention, and taking steps.
Plenty of older concrete buildings are deadly traps waiting to pancake though.
Just measure energy in MHU. It's surprisingly easy. Mad Hulk Units are the future of energy measurement.
Awkward. Mad Hulk Units scale exponentially depending on how mad he is. Humans have difficulties with exponential scales. Nobody really gets the Richter scale, to be topical. People think the difference between a 6 and a 7 is "a little bit".
Oh, there will be shortages, you can be sure of that.
I'm quite sure there will be. I expect four or five in the intervening years, at least one of which will be artificially induced by Goldman Sachs for profit. The rest will be artificially induced by environmentalist lunatics protesting the opening of new mines.
Multiple studies have shown that 100% of energy needs can be met by renewables.
Then how come we aren't?
Because of rich guys in top hats smoking cigars, cackling with glee as the planet burns?
Inertia. The aforementioned rich guys in top hats, wearing monocles and smoking cigars, spent a ton of capital on coal plants. They want a return on their investment, and they're in a position to see to it that they get one.
You can expect 30 to 40 years of heavy resistance while they do everything in their considerable power to protect their investments. As the existing fleet of coal plants rust out and fail, resistance will decline. Also a good many of those rich guys are old. Resistance will decline as they literally die off. When their rich children take over the family business, they'll be building wind turbines, because it's cheaper and faster than building new coal plants to replace the old ones. Those rich children won't resist, since they won't need to.
Never underestimate the power of vast amounts of money. A fault these researchers indulged in as well, as others have pointed out.
LOL. Uh, no. You'll have to provide some pretty hefty citations and facts to back up that ludicrous bunch of baloney.
Really? You're that lazy? And also ignorant? So... you're stupid. From fucking Wikipedia:
The bare wire conductors on the line are generally made of aluminum (either plain or reinforced with steel, or composite materials such as carbon and glass fiber)..
Dear Americans, we love you. But please, once and for all, Canadians do not say "oot."
Yeah, you do. You really do. The extent to which the pronunciation of "out" approaches "oot" is regional in Canada. It's considerably closer in people from Winnipeg than it is from people in Calgary, for example. At least among the Canadians I've known. Canadian expats who have the regional accent are quite good at suppressing it, but when you get excited or otherwise start talking fast, it comes out, and suddenly you're saying "aboot" and "oot".
We must always remember that Canada is Really Big.
Slashdot Mirror
Our troops sat back in the green zone while the Iraqi civilian population tore each other to shreds in pretty much uncontested sectarian violence.
My tin foil hat might be a little tight tonight, but I wouldn't be too surprised if that was the point. Islamic jihad kills more Islamics than anything else under ordinary circumstances. Saddam Hussein was too good at his job of dominating the country and preventing the sectarian violence. Destablizing the region by killing Saddam Hussein lifts the lid and lets them back at each other's throats, instead of seeking to take out their aggression on the West. Sounds like some thinktank's idea.
JFC.....really?
I guess this is new from the "Are You Fucking Kidding Me Department".....?
We're really busy these days.
Sounds great!
Scam advertisements for devil's ivy on Facebook in 3... 2.... 1....
...but always seem to have time for pandering to narrow constituencies with a lot of money.
FTFY.
Directed energy is probably the best option.
And now more feasible than ever. Drones typically accept control signals at 2.4 GHz, which means the directed energy weapon in question would be a maser. The best way to shoot down an aircraft with directed energy is to hit a receiving antenna, frying the on board electronics. Conveniently enough, work out of Imperial College London, published in March 2018, documents the creation of the highest energy maser ever created, more than 100 million times more energy than previous masers, which output in the nanowatts. And it operates at room temperature, instead of the supercooled version previous masers required. A kilowatt array of those should wreck havoc with any drone flying.
You'd have been less wrong if you'd said, "sounds like the Sussex Police force needs an AA battery".
Especially since this is a thing.
The good news is that in the lists of Tumblr alternatives, I did see some people seriously considering Plume, which is a federated blogging platform that can connect to other Fediverse federated blogs.
In practice, the vast majority of people are not technical and aren't going to figure out how to run their own servers. That doesn't mean they'll never run their own servers; it means people with technical skills have to make running your own server user-friendly before they will. FreedomBox is one project working on that; the current state doesn't look super-user-friendly, but I think the goal is to be able to sell a box that you plug into your home internet that already has the software installed and can be configured over an easy web interface.
FreedomBox has been around since freaking 2010. And it has Eben freaking Moglen behind it. And it's STILL too difficult.
The last 20% of usability is 80% of the work. Open source is notorious for never exerting itself past the 80% mark. The difference between Linux on the Desktop and the Microsoft OSs is Microsoft spent the money to hammer away at that last 20%. It isn't much in functionality but it is a gulf of usability. Without it, FreedomBox and projects like it simply won't gain traction.
Plex and FreeNAS are some of the pinnacles of achievement in self-hosted open source services today, and they both still require the care and feeding of a technical user or they don't work, or stop working in short order. Federated social media is harder than either of those things.
Looming over all of this is security. Every set-it-and-forget-it device in the world today is a big fat lumbering target. Botnets are voraciously trying to vacuum up every last iota of unprotected equipment on the entire planet, and they have infinite machine patience. They're also increasingly sophisticated. I installed fail2ban at home, finally, and the goddamned things adjusted their behavior to compensate. It took less than a week.
This is the environment in which FreedomBox and any similar project has to operate. On the user/owner side, enormous pressure to make things easy, which is nearly always inimical to security, and on the network side, enormous pressure from botnets attempting to pwn the device. That pressure is keeping the installed base down to a tiny sliver of what it would need to be before it puts a dent in any centralized service.
But ... this isn't inevitable, and there's no reason that the next big thing in social networking can't be designed as an open protocol, with no central point of control -- a system where people may choose to provide the infrastructure required to power their Facegram or Instabook or whatever themselves, or (more likely) hire someone replaceable to do it for them. Open protocols can't be sold out and can't be owned.
Hardware capability is through the roof now. My smartphone has more storage, more processing power, and more bandwidth than the machines hosting IRC servers not that many years ago. There are no technical barriers to crowd-hosted social media.
There's one huge technical barrier, which an anonymous coward two levels down touched on before disappearing down a Tor rabbit hole.
Home connections are asymmetrical. Massively asymmetrical. An order of magnitude or TWO asymmetrical. Your home bandwidth can't handle serving up the data to support even your immediate family in hits, let alone your several hundred Facebook "friends". Not when you're posting high resolution images and video footage. It could eventually transmit everything to everybody the algorithms show it to, but by the time it could finish, most of them have hit the Back button and moved on. They don't have the patience to wait for it to load. Meanwhile on the centralized services, they can click and get a new page in 0.37 seconds, complete with a metric fuckton of "you might also like" thumbnails, advertising animated crap, and a streaming video in the corner that follows them down the page. Yes, a decentralized system can dispense with a lot of the bullshit, but it's an inescapable fact that the web today is rich media. It's not just text anymore. Your phone does have a ton of storage and a ton of processing power. It also has minuscule bandwidth compared to any datacenter anywhere.
If we all had low latency, symmetrical gigabit connections, we could decentralize it all. The open source community could bash together the handful of missing pieces in a matter of months, and have a turnkey solution ready to plug in to any old random desktop in less than a year. Something to do with all that money the Mozilla Foundation is wasting on random bullshit changes to Firefox. But we don't.
We can't build the decentralized web because we don't have the bandwidth for it. And the big national ISPs know this. They will work very hard to keep everything centralized because there's money on the line. There's lot of activities that can't be monetized when they're diffuse, but centralize them and suddenly you can milk millions, even billions of dollars out of them. The incumbents now have their hands on that money. They won't relinquish it easily. If ever.
For what it is worth, I agree with you.
However, what you or I assert, is not what holds authority.
If enough of us assert it, it does. Either the laws are explicitly changed, or the courts "interpret" them to suit the current zeitgeist. I would argue that the "no permission needed to access any public website" convention is already firmly established in people's expectations, and IP range blocking does not constitute access control. When literally any other member of the public can access the site, an IP range block is the equivalent of "No Negros" on a public bathroom door.
I am choosing that analogy with precision, not for the fact it triggers a percentage of the population. I consider the position of the copyright maximalist lobby to be precisely equivalent to the position of racists in 1960s America. They are that far diverged from the general population and they are that morally wrong. Media is culture. Attempting to own all media in perpetuity is attempting to own a culture, which is a hop, skip, and a jump away from owning people. Owning all media forever is an attempt to own minds, and from a certain angle, that looks an awful lot like slavery. Now I'm being slightly hyperbolic, but I'm also quite serious.
George Orwell didn't make control of all media a central aspect of 1984 on a whim. He well understood the power it confers. I'm saying this is that. Between net neutrality being abolished and the CFAA being interpreted as a hammer to smash the likes of Aaron Swartz, we're well down that slippery slope, and accelerating. Archive.org pushing back is absolutely essential, and every last one of us needs to add our voices to theirs.
So instead of a "politician", you place a "criminal" at the top.
We've had criminals at the top before. We're accustomed to a certain panache in our criminals. And a certain competence. We like criminals smart enough not to get caught at most of what they do.
This guy.... he involved himself with the highest law of the land while knowing nothing of law, while knowing so little about law that he was unable to hire a lawyer who could stand up to him and tell him what he can and can not do on the way to accomplishing his goals. There's often a weasel path to get what you want, whatever it might be. Trump never takes the weasel path. He bulls straight through. It's going to cost him. A lot. Fox News is so very fond of reciting the catch phrase "We're a nation of laws." They're going to profoundly regret it.
We can't even prove that Trump knows how to read.
Trump can read just fine.
He's 72 years old. He's presbyopic. And he's too vain to wear his glasses in public. That's the whole of his problem.
He can't read the teleprompter because the font is too small to read without glasses[1] and he can't read from papers in front of him because he absolutely needs reading glasses and he will never be seen wearing them as long as he lives. He comes from an era when only nerds wore glasses, and he was part of the crowd that persecuted the ever-living-fuck out of nerds. He will never wear glasses, even if his physical inability to focus on the words on the page makes him sound like a moron on national TV, over and over again.
You'll notice especially in briefings that all of his mistakes are easily explained by him reading blurry words he can't quite make out, then making a stab at what the word might be, and his stab in the dark is frequently wrong because he has stated publicly (on Twitter, naturally) that he doesn't prepare for meetings. So he's winging it every time he sits down with people, and he's quite literally doing it blind.
[1] Except when they push up the font size on the prompter for his major speeches, and then he just reads really really slowly because it takes so long to scroll the sentences up the prompter when the font size is that large.
So the best way to weaken the US is to not give them an enemy?
Precisely.
From the mouths of anonymous cowards may fall the most profound insights. But boy is shoveling through the muck to find them a lot of work...
So you are saying compartmentalization works? I have a feeling one or two TLAs know exactly what is going on.
I doubt it. The US TLAs are notorious for the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. They should be connected, at least at the highest levels, but there's so much going on that by the time it filters up to a level where the agencies are comfortable with there being some sort of cross connect, it's too late. They're never comfortable until it hits the Director level, and there's too much going on for any one person to keep up with, even if that's all they did, and it isn't all they do.
Even within a TLA they have this problem. They carry compartmentalization to such paranoid extremes that once again, everything is supposed to filter through one individual. By the time the Director sees it, it's all over and the Director's nominal "oversight" is nothing more than a rubber stamp. One of two stamps: APPROVE or DISAVOW.
Because of excessive compartmentalization, in real time, no one knows what's going on.
Wall mount package drop boxes are a thing. According to reviews, couriers can be convinced to use them if you put a sticker of their logo on the door. Obviously they only accept packages of limited dimensions, but some of the smallest packages tend to be the most valuable, so it should be quite useful. They're expensive, so there probably won't be a lot of retrofits, but I would expect new development housing to start including such things. There's little reason to believe this delivery-everything trend won't continue, so I would expect them to become bullet points on real estate listings before the end of the next decade.
That specific model has some design issues, and doesn't seem to have much in the way of direct competition. There are lots of stand alone porch drop boxes, but much fewer in-wall permanent installations. I expect that to improve too, though slowly.
Unless and until Amazon succeeds with drone delivery. Then all bets are off, and instead of this sort of thing, everybody will want a roof level delivery pad with integrated automated dumbwaiter.
In some states it is legal for him to shoot and kill the theif.
Only if he does it in person. Deadly mantraps are illegal in all 50 states. Nominally not deadly mantraps may not be criminal, but anyone injured by one can sue and win civilly. Katko v. Briney.
I dearly love when athiests pretend atheiesm is not a religion.
Atheism is a religion the way not collecting stamps is a hobby.
How exactly does concrete produce CO2? Is it an essential part of production - or merely a result of heating in furnaces traditionally powered with coal?
It is an essential part of production of Portland cement, the most common cement in use worldwide. The CO2 is cooked out of limestone, resulting in calcium silicate, the constituent molecules of clinker.
Ancient Roman cement does not seem to be primarily calcium silicate, though studies are ongoing. The manufacturing process has been lost to history, and there was quite a bit of variance in the formula over the centuries it was made.
Begun the digital distribution wars have.
Now we can enjoy the same Balkanization that video content has been descending into.
Someday, somehow, some way, someone needs to design a federated distribution system for digital media. So all the vendors can have their own little stores with their own little terms and conditions and their own individual rates and exclusives and what-have-you, and the buyers can have one friendly interface.
Won't happen, because someone's precious branding. But a boy can dream.
Florida wouldn't even try, and that particular sand bar can't wash away quickly enough.
The British Isles would be rendered effectively uninhabitable if it did. The Gulf Stream carries gigajoules of solar energy north every second. Without that sand bar, it shrinks, maybe even stops entirely.
It's interesting that Japan and California actually plan for major earthquakes whereas planning for a repetition of the 1811 New Madrid earthquakes in SouthEast Missouri seems to be virtually nonexistent.
It isn't. You're just not paying attention. Missouri has been replacing hundreds of highway bridges. The new ones are earthquake resistant. When the I-70 bridge over the Missouri River was replaced, the new one has earthquake resistance features. The adjacent span was retrofitted with some such features. MODOT is definitely paying attention, and taking steps.
Plenty of older concrete buildings are deadly traps waiting to pancake though.
Just measure energy in MHU. It's surprisingly easy. Mad Hulk Units are the future of energy measurement.
Awkward. Mad Hulk Units scale exponentially depending on how mad he is. Humans have difficulties with exponential scales. Nobody really gets the Richter scale, to be topical. People think the difference between a 6 and a 7 is "a little bit".
Oh, there will be shortages, you can be sure of that.
I'm quite sure there will be. I expect four or five in the intervening years, at least one of which will be artificially induced by Goldman Sachs for profit. The rest will be artificially induced by environmentalist lunatics protesting the opening of new mines.
Multiple studies have shown that 100% of energy needs can be met by renewables.
Then how come we aren't?
Because of rich guys in top hats smoking cigars, cackling with glee as the planet burns?
Inertia. The aforementioned rich guys in top hats, wearing monocles and smoking cigars, spent a ton of capital on coal plants. They want a return on their investment, and they're in a position to see to it that they get one.
You can expect 30 to 40 years of heavy resistance while they do everything in their considerable power to protect their investments. As the existing fleet of coal plants rust out and fail, resistance will decline. Also a good many of those rich guys are old. Resistance will decline as they literally die off. When their rich children take over the family business, they'll be building wind turbines, because it's cheaper and faster than building new coal plants to replace the old ones. Those rich children won't resist, since they won't need to.
Never underestimate the power of vast amounts of money. A fault these researchers indulged in as well, as others have pointed out.
LOL. Uh, no. You'll have to provide some pretty hefty citations and facts to back up that ludicrous bunch of baloney.
Really? You're that lazy? And also ignorant? So... you're stupid. From fucking Wikipedia:
The bare wire conductors on the line are generally made of aluminum (either plain or reinforced with steel, or composite materials such as carbon and glass fiber)..
Or you could just look at the fucking pictures, since you're too stupid to read:Sample cross section Carbon Core.
Idiot.
Canadian expat here.
Dear Americans, we love you. But please, once and for all, Canadians do not say "oot."
Yeah, you do. You really do. The extent to which the pronunciation of "out" approaches "oot" is regional in Canada. It's considerably closer in people from Winnipeg than it is from people in Calgary, for example. At least among the Canadians I've known. Canadian expats who have the regional accent are quite good at suppressing it, but when you get excited or otherwise start talking fast, it comes out, and suddenly you're saying "aboot" and "oot".
We must always remember that Canada is Really Big.