A friend and his wife moved to a town outside of Austin, in part because of the lower cost and because they were told by locals that the town had a liberal population, important since they were coming from San Francisco. Several friends and I (including some people who live in Texas) tried to explain that a Texas liberal and a California liberal (particularly a Bay Area liberal) were not even remotely the same thing. They moved back a year later after deciding that Texas wasn't for them.
Wow... I just can't imagine having to deal with a wall of water that high. I've been trying here and there to find the rationale for the 5.7m protection, and learned that no evidence of a larger tsunami in that area in the last several centuries could be found. I believe I also heard this morning on NPR that seismologists believed that the maximum earthquake possibility along the fault that was responsible for the main quake was 7.8, some 60 times smaller than what actually hit.
Ever seen what a landscape looks like after a major earthquake like that? It's really hard to get around. Drag in mud and debris from a tsunami, and it makes it even harder. Add in frigid temperatures that have been below freezing for at least parts of the day, and you have stagnant water and ice. That cable had to be brought in by truck, and the path for that truck had to be cleared by heavy equipment, and the fuel for that heavy equipment had to be brought on-site as well. It's a more complex job than it looks.
And all of that was before factoring in the radiation.
It's just a statement of fact. Any structure will be built with shortfalls. For whatever reasons, Japanese regulators figured that the highest tsunami within a given probability range was 5.7m or less. The odds of a tsunami of a given depth decrease markedly as that depth goes up. For sake of argument, let's say that the odds were given as 1% that a tsunami larger than that would hit. A 6m wall of water would fit that, but so would the 10m tsunami that actually hit. The difference is that the latter was even less likely. But sometimes luck isn't just against you, it comes backed by artillery.
Living near a desert that is often mentioned for solar power (the Mojave Desert in California), it's not always easy to get them built there. The problem of distance from significant population bases means that construction costs soar as the materials have to be sent by truck out to some remote places. Contractors generally require more money for the workers who are driving longer distances (often because of union requirements) to the job sites. And environmentalists worry about the impact to endangered species such as the Joshua tree and the desert tortoise.
The Sahara may be an easier, less-expensive place to build a solar farm than US deserts.
Just to follow up your post, they designed the plant to withstand a 5.7m tsunami. But the tsunami that actually hit was 10m. I don't know how difficult it is to engineer against a 10m wall of water, but I imagine that it's very difficult.
Fukushima Daiichi was built to withstand a 5.7m tsunami, as required by Japanese regulators. It was hit with a 10m tsunami, though, which is why the generators were knocked offline.
The de Gaulle regularly embarks on both training, patrol, goodwill, and combat missions, spending a considerable amount of time in the Indian Ocean in recent years, supporting both operations in Afghanistan and antipiracy operations off Somalia. You don't build a ship for a few billion euros (or thr equivalent) and then let it sit in port unused.
They were random leftovers that had been lost by the Iraqi military, and in most cases were worthless, though a few insurgents tried to make use of them. Even in the rare instance that they did go off, they didn't mix properly and resulted in only a few injuries, most or all not serious.
Most (not all) of the nations that you mention are far cries from what Libya is doing. Cuba is opening up; it may be at a creakingly slow pace for most, but it is happening. Zimbabwe has seemed to be on the tipping point of reform for a few years now, though it never quite seems to happen. Ivory Coast looked like it might be on the right path until the recent election, the results of which were deemed to be free and fair by international observers, was contested by the incumbent president, who refuses to step down. UN boots are on the ground in DR Congo, totaling some 18,000 uniformed personnel. Over time, the group has gone from a monitoring and observation mission to one taking a more active role in the protection of civilians.
In some of the other cases, you have to pick your fights. The world is, in general, not in a shape to launch an attack on either Iran or North Korea. Opposition elements can be supported, but the costs of a full-scale war in either case is beyond what we can reasonably sustain on an optional basis. Iran, at least, has a chance of getting a reform in place; it may look unthinkable, but the chances of an overthrow in Tunisia and Egypt were generally deemed zero just a year ago. There are horrible situations happening in many countries, but you do what you can, where you can. It may not make many people--or even the majority--happy, but even combined, the world does not have the resources to topple all of the dictators at once.
I read Harry Turtledove's Colonization series (aliens invade in the midst of World War II but weren't expecting to face much more than knights on horseback), and thought the premise was pretty good. It got rather tired toward the end and had a predictable finale, but the first three books and the culture clashes were good enough that they'd make a decent movie series.
I'm glad at least a couple of other people liked it. I wasn't sure what to make of it when I saw the 30-second commercial on it, but I saw the ambush scene on The Daily Show and thought it might be good. I was impressed by what I saw, and while there were some weak spots to it, it held up well in my eyes. One of my colleagues called it "Independence Day on the ground" when in reality it followed proper military strategy, which I'll not mention here to save the spoiler.
Your characterization of Nantz is off, though. He wasn't disgraced; that he was awarded a Silver Star said quite the opposite. He was, however, mistrusted by his fellow Marines because of what they had heard about his decision under fire.
But if you have IR LEDs, you need a power source for them. The use of this creates an electromagnetic signature that could be identifiable through the unique interference pattern of your body and possibly radiated by the foil hat, thus enabling easier tracking from EM sensors monitoring passing objects.
I'm not so sure about how much is kept where. I recently had to undergo a background check for work due to my access to the district attorney's networks. I don't regularly go into the sensitive areas (actually, I've never been in them), but because there's a possibility that my job would require me to look at traffic that could contain sensitive information, I had to undergo the check.
Anyway, part of it involved getting fingerprinted. I had to go to the county crime lab where a fingerprint technician used a special scanner to take finger and palm prints from both hands so that they could be compared to various databases including CODIS and the like. She explained that they would know in a few days whether there was a match, but also told me that if I had to undergo another background check beyond the six-month point (such as for another agency), I should expect to have to return for another scan. When I asked why, she said that they don't have the storage space to hold all of the data in the comparison systems (in part because upgrades are years behind schedule), and that anything not matched to a crime is deleted after six months. I wasn't sure whether to be happy that it's not there or irritated that I might have to go back because of some bureaucratic nonsense, but came down somewhat on the happier side of things.
AFAICT, alterative voting methods are by far the exception. Instant runoff is used by only a handful of municipalities and no states. I'd love to see both single-day primaries and alternative voting methods.
The abstract for the paper says that the researchers "have demonstrated the first isobutanol production to approximately 660 mg/L from crystalline cellulose using this microorganism." Based on that density, it may be easy to essentially skim it from the top of the production container.
I've been looking around to understand the context of that. The best I can come up with is that it's producing 660mg of isobutanol per liter of solution, which I judge to be about 0.82mL. Unfortunately, that doesn't tell us the time it took to produce that, how much cellulose went in, how much external energy was required to either create the cellulosic mass used or heat the reaction, or how much bacteria was required.
Hold them all on the same day. Then you get it out of the way immediately without all the stupidity of a state with less than 1% of the population weeding out candidates before others get to vote on them. This makes it the perfect time to get in alternate voting methods as well to bring about a likelihood that someone will get a majority vote.
Chapura writes sync software for WebOS, and just released an update for WebOS 2.0. The Palm Classic ROM was dropped by HP from the 2.x line, but the homebrew community has managed to figure out how to wedge it back in, so your old apps still have a chance of working (it's not perfectly backward-compatible).
The main reason that there's no longer sync software is that so many people are not using local mail clients for their primary mail. Whether it's Yahoo, Gmail, or Exchange, contacts are routinely kept on the server. There's less of a perceived need for it. With Palm, your profile includes contacts from a variety of sources, and they're backed up to your Palm Profile by default so that if you have to replace your existing device, all of that comes down automatically.
I'm also a happy Pre user, and looking forward to the Pre3/Touchpad combination. I'll be happier if WebOS for the desktop will be available for installation on other vendor hardware, as a lot of people like or are locked into Dell, Lenovo, or Toshiba, or build their own.
Those who question the installation of WebOS on HP systems in large part haven't seen what HP is trying to do with it. The concept is closer to consumer cloud computing than anything else that I've seen. While certain services will allow you wide access to one type of data (Box.net for files, webmail for e-mail, etc.), HP is going for total data availability from any device (at least if it's running WebOS). You can have local copies if you wish, but the data will be synchronized across a wide variety of devices. In the future, if it pans out, then I'm sure we'll see WebOS TVs, tables, walls, or refrigerators (or maybe even toasters) to make it so we never have to do much more than turn around to access our data.
Personally, I'd love to have the option of synchronizing it with my choice of hosts, or with my systems at home if I choose to keep things out of someone else's hands. The options are important, and if it means paying a few bucks for it, I'm OK with that.
I don't know if WebOS will be the platform to make this happen the way that it needs to. It may be that Apple will come up with something similar by utilizing their new data center. Google, of course, has been pushing to become the world's data repository. Some other party could come up with something that does it better. Everyone is pushing everyone else, and it makes it an interesting time to watch it all unfold.
I wonder if the advent of modern LED lighting will allow a programmed shift toward red lights in the evening and a shift from red to blue bias in the morning to allow gradual shutdown and awakening, rather than the shock of an alarm clock or bright lights.
Let the Fed switch to IPv6, thus encouraging others to follow along. The President could issue an executive order to the Executive Branch mandating IPv6 support without getting approval from Congress.
The government is ahead of you. The Defense Department started a move to IPv6 a few years ago, and required that all contractors be IPv6-capable by a certain date, and said that certain communications would be IPv6-only by a somewhat later date. Agencies that work with the DoD were required to be IPv6-capable, too (though they didn't have to implement it widely), which meant that a huge number of them were dragged along. The deadlines were missed in many cases, but it has put them much further along than it might otherwise be.
NetGear's business line is pretty good. I picked up an 8-port managed gigabit switch for about $90 and while the management interface is total crap, it really is manageable and handles a decent set of traffic through it (much better than $40 Linksys switches).
But the SOHO routers... No, I won't buy them anymore. I just gave away my old one as a holdover for some other dead router with a warning that it shouldn't be expected to last long.
I work in network security. My boss trained me in much of the basics, but in the few years since, I have surpassed him. Part of the reason is that, being a manager, he's stuck in meetings, often more than four hours a day, and sometimes the entire day. He now asks me questions that I used to ask him.
In a recent performance review, he asked me if I would be interested in management. It means a significant increase in pay, people reporting to me, elevation of status, and all the other things that go along with it -- including a lack of hands-on time with the infrastructure. I've watched his skill set shrink over time. He used to handle big projects, and now he just grabs a few things here and there to keep a minimum skill set alive.
I've had a taste of management many years ago. It was great telling people that they now had a job, but it seriously sucked firing people. Over the last year or so, I've been in more strategic meetings, helping to decide directions for our infrastructure, but the endless meetings suck the joy from my career. A recent project to research mobile computing solutions reminded me just why I like my career choice so much. I'd love the pay increase of management, but six minutes of happiness checking the bank every couple of weeks does not make up for the 40+ hours of mourning the old days of hands-on experience with the latest hacks and tools as I sit stuck in meetings debating points endlessly.
Take the career that makes you happy. It may not make you rich, but it's the better path in the long run.
Slashdot Mirror
A friend and his wife moved to a town outside of Austin, in part because of the lower cost and because they were told by locals that the town had a liberal population, important since they were coming from San Francisco. Several friends and I (including some people who live in Texas) tried to explain that a Texas liberal and a California liberal (particularly a Bay Area liberal) were not even remotely the same thing. They moved back a year later after deciding that Texas wasn't for them.
Wow... I just can't imagine having to deal with a wall of water that high. I've been trying here and there to find the rationale for the 5.7m protection, and learned that no evidence of a larger tsunami in that area in the last several centuries could be found. I believe I also heard this morning on NPR that seismologists believed that the maximum earthquake possibility along the fault that was responsible for the main quake was 7.8, some 60 times smaller than what actually hit.
That was mentioned in TFA, about ten paragraphs down.
Ever seen what a landscape looks like after a major earthquake like that? It's really hard to get around. Drag in mud and debris from a tsunami, and it makes it even harder. Add in frigid temperatures that have been below freezing for at least parts of the day, and you have stagnant water and ice. That cable had to be brought in by truck, and the path for that truck had to be cleared by heavy equipment, and the fuel for that heavy equipment had to be brought on-site as well. It's a more complex job than it looks.
And all of that was before factoring in the radiation.
It's just a statement of fact. Any structure will be built with shortfalls. For whatever reasons, Japanese regulators figured that the highest tsunami within a given probability range was 5.7m or less. The odds of a tsunami of a given depth decrease markedly as that depth goes up. For sake of argument, let's say that the odds were given as 1% that a tsunami larger than that would hit. A 6m wall of water would fit that, but so would the 10m tsunami that actually hit. The difference is that the latter was even less likely. But sometimes luck isn't just against you, it comes backed by artillery.
And the odds of a 12m tsunami hitting are...?
Living near a desert that is often mentioned for solar power (the Mojave Desert in California), it's not always easy to get them built there. The problem of distance from significant population bases means that construction costs soar as the materials have to be sent by truck out to some remote places. Contractors generally require more money for the workers who are driving longer distances (often because of union requirements) to the job sites. And environmentalists worry about the impact to endangered species such as the Joshua tree and the desert tortoise.
The Sahara may be an easier, less-expensive place to build a solar farm than US deserts.
Just to follow up your post, they designed the plant to withstand a 5.7m tsunami. But the tsunami that actually hit was 10m. I don't know how difficult it is to engineer against a 10m wall of water, but I imagine that it's very difficult.
Fukushima Daiichi was built to withstand a 5.7m tsunami, as required by Japanese regulators. It was hit with a 10m tsunami, though, which is why the generators were knocked offline.
The de Gaulle regularly embarks on both training, patrol, goodwill, and combat missions, spending a considerable amount of time in the Indian Ocean in recent years, supporting both operations in Afghanistan and antipiracy operations off Somalia. You don't build a ship for a few billion euros (or thr equivalent) and then let it sit in port unused.
They were random leftovers that had been lost by the Iraqi military, and in most cases were worthless, though a few insurgents tried to make use of them. Even in the rare instance that they did go off, they didn't mix properly and resulted in only a few injuries, most or all not serious.
Most (not all) of the nations that you mention are far cries from what Libya is doing. Cuba is opening up; it may be at a creakingly slow pace for most, but it is happening. Zimbabwe has seemed to be on the tipping point of reform for a few years now, though it never quite seems to happen. Ivory Coast looked like it might be on the right path until the recent election, the results of which were deemed to be free and fair by international observers, was contested by the incumbent president, who refuses to step down. UN boots are on the ground in DR Congo, totaling some 18,000 uniformed personnel. Over time, the group has gone from a monitoring and observation mission to one taking a more active role in the protection of civilians.
In some of the other cases, you have to pick your fights. The world is, in general, not in a shape to launch an attack on either Iran or North Korea. Opposition elements can be supported, but the costs of a full-scale war in either case is beyond what we can reasonably sustain on an optional basis. Iran, at least, has a chance of getting a reform in place; it may look unthinkable, but the chances of an overthrow in Tunisia and Egypt were generally deemed zero just a year ago. There are horrible situations happening in many countries, but you do what you can, where you can. It may not make many people--or even the majority--happy, but even combined, the world does not have the resources to topple all of the dictators at once.
I read Harry Turtledove's Colonization series (aliens invade in the midst of World War II but weren't expecting to face much more than knights on horseback), and thought the premise was pretty good. It got rather tired toward the end and had a predictable finale, but the first three books and the culture clashes were good enough that they'd make a decent movie series.
I'm glad at least a couple of other people liked it. I wasn't sure what to make of it when I saw the 30-second commercial on it, but I saw the ambush scene on The Daily Show and thought it might be good. I was impressed by what I saw, and while there were some weak spots to it, it held up well in my eyes. One of my colleagues called it "Independence Day on the ground" when in reality it followed proper military strategy, which I'll not mention here to save the spoiler.
Your characterization of Nantz is off, though. He wasn't disgraced; that he was awarded a Silver Star said quite the opposite. He was, however, mistrusted by his fellow Marines because of what they had heard about his decision under fire.
But if you have IR LEDs, you need a power source for them. The use of this creates an electromagnetic signature that could be identifiable through the unique interference pattern of your body and possibly radiated by the foil hat, thus enabling easier tracking from EM sensors monitoring passing objects.
I'm not so sure about how much is kept where. I recently had to undergo a background check for work due to my access to the district attorney's networks. I don't regularly go into the sensitive areas (actually, I've never been in them), but because there's a possibility that my job would require me to look at traffic that could contain sensitive information, I had to undergo the check.
Anyway, part of it involved getting fingerprinted. I had to go to the county crime lab where a fingerprint technician used a special scanner to take finger and palm prints from both hands so that they could be compared to various databases including CODIS and the like. She explained that they would know in a few days whether there was a match, but also told me that if I had to undergo another background check beyond the six-month point (such as for another agency), I should expect to have to return for another scan. When I asked why, she said that they don't have the storage space to hold all of the data in the comparison systems (in part because upgrades are years behind schedule), and that anything not matched to a crime is deleted after six months. I wasn't sure whether to be happy that it's not there or irritated that I might have to go back because of some bureaucratic nonsense, but came down somewhat on the happier side of things.
AFAICT, alterative voting methods are by far the exception. Instant runoff is used by only a handful of municipalities and no states. I'd love to see both single-day primaries and alternative voting methods.
The abstract for the paper says that the researchers "have demonstrated the first isobutanol production to approximately 660 mg/L from crystalline cellulose using this microorganism." Based on that density, it may be easy to essentially skim it from the top of the production container.
I've been looking around to understand the context of that. The best I can come up with is that it's producing 660mg of isobutanol per liter of solution, which I judge to be about 0.82mL. Unfortunately, that doesn't tell us the time it took to produce that, how much cellulose went in, how much external energy was required to either create the cellulosic mass used or heat the reaction, or how much bacteria was required.
Anyone have full access to the paper?
Hold them all on the same day. Then you get it out of the way immediately without all the stupidity of a state with less than 1% of the population weeding out candidates before others get to vote on them. This makes it the perfect time to get in alternate voting methods as well to bring about a likelihood that someone will get a majority vote.
Chapura writes sync software for WebOS, and just released an update for WebOS 2.0. The Palm Classic ROM was dropped by HP from the 2.x line, but the homebrew community has managed to figure out how to wedge it back in, so your old apps still have a chance of working (it's not perfectly backward-compatible).
The main reason that there's no longer sync software is that so many people are not using local mail clients for their primary mail. Whether it's Yahoo, Gmail, or Exchange, contacts are routinely kept on the server. There's less of a perceived need for it. With Palm, your profile includes contacts from a variety of sources, and they're backed up to your Palm Profile by default so that if you have to replace your existing device, all of that comes down automatically.
I'm also a happy Pre user, and looking forward to the Pre3/Touchpad combination. I'll be happier if WebOS for the desktop will be available for installation on other vendor hardware, as a lot of people like or are locked into Dell, Lenovo, or Toshiba, or build their own.
Those who question the installation of WebOS on HP systems in large part haven't seen what HP is trying to do with it. The concept is closer to consumer cloud computing than anything else that I've seen. While certain services will allow you wide access to one type of data (Box.net for files, webmail for e-mail, etc.), HP is going for total data availability from any device (at least if it's running WebOS). You can have local copies if you wish, but the data will be synchronized across a wide variety of devices. In the future, if it pans out, then I'm sure we'll see WebOS TVs, tables, walls, or refrigerators (or maybe even toasters) to make it so we never have to do much more than turn around to access our data.
Personally, I'd love to have the option of synchronizing it with my choice of hosts, or with my systems at home if I choose to keep things out of someone else's hands. The options are important, and if it means paying a few bucks for it, I'm OK with that.
I don't know if WebOS will be the platform to make this happen the way that it needs to. It may be that Apple will come up with something similar by utilizing their new data center. Google, of course, has been pushing to become the world's data repository. Some other party could come up with something that does it better. Everyone is pushing everyone else, and it makes it an interesting time to watch it all unfold.
I wonder if the advent of modern LED lighting will allow a programmed shift toward red lights in the evening and a shift from red to blue bias in the morning to allow gradual shutdown and awakening, rather than the shock of an alarm clock or bright lights.
The government is ahead of you. The Defense Department started a move to IPv6 a few years ago, and required that all contractors be IPv6-capable by a certain date, and said that certain communications would be IPv6-only by a somewhat later date. Agencies that work with the DoD were required to be IPv6-capable, too (though they didn't have to implement it widely), which meant that a huge number of them were dragged along. The deadlines were missed in many cases, but it has put them much further along than it might otherwise be.
NetGear's business line is pretty good. I picked up an 8-port managed gigabit switch for about $90 and while the management interface is total crap, it really is manageable and handles a decent set of traffic through it (much better than $40 Linksys switches).
But the SOHO routers... No, I won't buy them anymore. I just gave away my old one as a holdover for some other dead router with a warning that it shouldn't be expected to last long.
I work in network security. My boss trained me in much of the basics, but in the few years since, I have surpassed him. Part of the reason is that, being a manager, he's stuck in meetings, often more than four hours a day, and sometimes the entire day. He now asks me questions that I used to ask him.
In a recent performance review, he asked me if I would be interested in management. It means a significant increase in pay, people reporting to me, elevation of status, and all the other things that go along with it -- including a lack of hands-on time with the infrastructure. I've watched his skill set shrink over time. He used to handle big projects, and now he just grabs a few things here and there to keep a minimum skill set alive.
I've had a taste of management many years ago. It was great telling people that they now had a job, but it seriously sucked firing people. Over the last year or so, I've been in more strategic meetings, helping to decide directions for our infrastructure, but the endless meetings suck the joy from my career. A recent project to research mobile computing solutions reminded me just why I like my career choice so much. I'd love the pay increase of management, but six minutes of happiness checking the bank every couple of weeks does not make up for the 40+ hours of mourning the old days of hands-on experience with the latest hacks and tools as I sit stuck in meetings debating points endlessly.
Take the career that makes you happy. It may not make you rich, but it's the better path in the long run.