Here, our country was founded on the idea that the government gains it authority from the people, and the government should fear us, not the other way around.
A laudable theory. But I'd be very careful of the hundreds of thousands of professional soldiers that your government has, well armed, well organised, and most importantly, deeply inculcated with the theory that they obey orders first, and leave worrying about the "rightness" of what they are doing to their "superiors" (in a legal sense, not in any moral sense).
BTW, where do you live that you have to have a license to own and operate a car? That's just... odd. In the US, you only need license, registration, and insurance for a vehicle if you're driving it on public roads.
Same here - if you want to own and use a lethal deathtrap of a vehicle, you're free to do so, on private ground. Which is damned all use to man nor beast (OK - that implies that Formula-X racers are neither man nor beast. Trivial case.) as there are very few places where you can actually make productive use of such a machine. If you want to use one for getting from point A to point B, de facto you have to use the public roads. And at that point, you have the choice between getting yourself licensed as a trained driver, your vehicle inspected and certified as being safe for use on the road (an inspection that is only valid at that point in time - it is the driver's personal responsibility to re-check the vehicle before every leg of a journey ; it is perfectly possible for the police to pull a vehicle over and require a re-inspection to the same standards at any time), then you get to pay the vehicle's insurance, and finally the "Road Fund Tax" for actually using it on the highway (you present certificates for vehicle's roadworthiness and insurance status, or you don't get to pay your tax, and the vehicle is not allowed onto the road).
In theory, none of that is necessary if you're only going to drive your vehicle on private ground, but you'd better be certain that you're not going to drive on or intersect a bridleway (public right of way for people on foot or on horse), a public right of way (for foot), or one of a number of other obstacles such as publicly-owned bridges or tunnels over or under canals or railways (where the same rules apply as on the highway, even if they're disconnected from the highway system), because if you encounter a member of the public and injure them (through crash, or through poor bodywork) then you're not insured and you're in deep shit. Oh, be doubly careful in Scotland (yes, it matters which side of the border you're on ; I don't know which system is followed in Ulster), since there is no such concept as trespass and so anywhere you may meet a member of the public who is there legally. In fact, it'd probably be best if you could document your efforts to fence your private road off, and to post stewards to prevent members of the public from getting onto the road. (Hmmm, that makes me think - exactly what does the KnockHill rally training circuit do about this? Ach, someone else's problem.)
Following your car analogy, I'd be perfectly happy if a permit or license was required to use a firearm on public property. Just stay off my land and my body, and we're in good shape.
That'd be fine with me, as long as there was some assurance that your unlicensed weapon, on private land, would remain on private land, and not be pointed off private land (I've forgotten the cases names, but there have been "shooters" who targeted members of the general public from high buildings which may or may not have been on private land. Can't allow that to happen.). A few tenth-kilos of gelignite coupled to a suitably programmed GPS device should do it. Oh, better ensure that if the GPS device loses power, it fails safe by destroying the dangerous device - otherwise it would be trivial to defeat the safety system. (I assume that you're familiar with the concept of "security theatre" - provisions for "security" which are actually ineffectual ; there's no point in designing a system with glaring loopholes in it.)
Clippy IS dead. It's been abandoned in all recent MS products, it's only Slashdot that seems to have trouble understanding this
Then the eye-searing paperclip-like monstrosity that I routinely see bouncing around my work's laptops screens, like a demented... well... paperclip is a figment of my imagination?
Or is it that the image that gets Ghosted back onto each machine after each job still has Clippy un-strangled (as well as abortions like US-English as the default language and inches as the default measure ; at least putting PDF-printing into the ghost images has got us onto the right size of paper for this 90% of the world).
Clippy will be haunting people for years to come, if not decades. As such, it'll be a valid target for ridicule for a long time too. Hell, BlueScreenOfDeath became a lot, lot less common when people went from Win95 to Win98, but it still appears often enough to be a remembered meme!
question if yellowstone blew her top what are the chances of a chain reaction lets say in long valley california ?
Google Maps is blocked at my present location, so I have to rely on memory : Long Valley California is that little chunk of California that is East of the Sierra Nevada and tucked into the corner between Nevada and (ummm) Oregon(?) ; ISTR there being releatively recent volcanism there, and minor earthquake activity (minor compared to the rest of California) ? That where we're talking about?
Earthquake-wise - non-trivial chance of some secondarily-spawned activity, but it's unlikely to be severe. You're a good distance in from the big transcurrent faults near the coast.
Ash fall would be a much more severe problem - you're near the margins of the Hucklebury tuff in pre-historic times.
Direct blast or eruption effects? Negligible ; barely different from the baseline hazard of living on Earth, in the cosmic bowling alley that is the inner Solar System.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by a "chain reaction" ; unless there's a connected set of highly-stressed faults, plugged caldera etc from Jellystone to your locale, then there's not a chain per se ; there's a theoretical prospect that the shaking from one major quake can loosen faults that are in the area and are ready to pop, but in practice that needs all the faults to be so close to going already that they do go spontaneously. People have been looking through the records for evidence of such correlations for at least a decade (that I've been paying attention to the subject), and the published claims for such a correlation are at best weak and certainly don't convince all seismologists. I'm not a seismologist, so I'll wait until the experts are convinced one way or the other that such an effect has been demonstrated. But it's certain that any such effect is weak and inconsistent at it's strongest. Most likely, it's too weak to be reliably measured, so you're as well off estimating your risk from a random variation model as from trying to apply a sophisticated model that accounts for the likelihood of an eruption at Jellystone.
Short version : living anywhere in California puts you at elevated risk of earthquake, and therefore at elevated insurance premiums. In the NE corner of the state, you'll have a small additional risk (or premium) from ashfall damage.
I sympathise, but... new laptop? Good luck with the drivers.
Well, it is a HP, and they're still apparently offering most of their machines that are sold for business with an XP upgrade. I didn't have any great difficulty finding a set of drivers described as being for Win2K/ XP/ Vista on HP's website. The big difficulty has been in finding a legal copy of XP to install on it. When I first got the machine and created the restore discs, I did a test install of Win2K (of which I have a legal OEM copy) and everything I used worked, apart from the fingerprint reader. So that seems settled.
I can't say that I'd be bothered if some esoterica didn't work - USB mass storage, SVGA graphics, keyboard, mouse ; anything else is pretty much luxury rather than necessity. I don't do games (that matter) ; I don't do high-end graphics ; I don't do video ; and pretty much any machine on the market today is overpowered for real-world uses.
That said, I've just finished re-building the wife's desktop (the normal home of the legit Win2K) onto a new motherboard, so if I buy a SATA drive, I might be able to see if there's a noticeable speed difference between the two ; I doubt it ("noticeable" of course means a real-world difference of more than about 2x ; lesser tweaks are rarely seen ; we didn't see much change from changing to a dual-core processor, but we saw a big difference from going from 1/4GB to 1GB of main memory).
Doesn't time fly - I just realised that the "new" laptop is nearly a year old now. Well, it's got another 3 years of working lifetime in front of it.
In a COUNTRY (damn CapsLock) where the ownership and/ or use of machines which can easily be lethal to other people is controlled, on the assumption that such machines are too dangerous for most people to possess or use. Examples of such machines include motor cars and machine guns. Why chain-saws are not similarly controlled escapes me - perhaps there haven't been too many fatalities resulting from misuse of chainsaws compared to the other example machines.
Odd that, in this post-Doom world. you'd expect there to be people running through the corridors of Forestry colleges everywhere, chainsawing to death their fellow students.
I find my Vista laptop with SP2 pre-beta generally a lot more stable. May be worth a shot..?
Well, I'd have to scale up my half-drawn plans for a desktop trebuchet (to be made from UniStrut and other debris from the Instrumentation Workshop). Or maybe I'd need to make up a couple of kilos of a fertilizer-gunpowder, and get hold of a pup joint of 9_5/8" casing. Both of those would be capable of giving it a decent shot. Much harder to make it to orbit, but you don't need to get to orbit to achieve a sufficiently destructive return to Earth.
(New laptop ; Vista pre-installed ; can I get hold of an install disc for XP from a dead machine in the office? 'nuff said?)
The last 10 pages are just full of browser, Flash, PDF and Javascript exploits....
But I think the 50/60 page difference could easily be because one version was printed on A4 with margins suitable for US-Letter size paper. Which would imply that GoogleHQ are using the US-size paper, and paying the 20% extra because of it.
I've recently been having to work in a mixed US and european environment (US-configured software, installed on a Hebrew-US defaulted OS on machines locally-sourced, and printing to locally-sourced printers which use the normal A4 paper. What a fucking mess.
Being a physicist I will assume the entirety of the lava dome is a sphere of radius 12 km;
Being a geologist, your assumptions may be adequate for a back-of-the-envelope right-order-of-magnitude estimate... actually, I'd suspect that they're not even adequate for that.
First assumption is embedded in "the lava" : you're assuming that it's a single entity of more-or-less uniform composition, properties and age. Almost all of these assumptions are likely to be somewhere between significantly wrong and so wrong they're not even wrong.
For small magma bodies, "dykes", "plugs" and "sills", you can get a reasonably simple, one-punch history, of one magma composition from one source rock injected in one event at one time. For anything more than a few tens of metres in any dimension... there are variations.
As an example, there is at least one sill in IIRC Oregon which records a changing direction of the magnetic field between it's upper and lower margins compared to it's centre. That means that the different parts of this several-metre thick rock body passed through it's Curie temperature at times separated by (the order of) a thousand years. So, your volumetrics and heat release figures need to take that distribution of the heat energy and spread it around over at least a thousand years. Which changes your implied power-extraction values considerably.
[ Wife has plans to drag me to the movies ; gotta go now. There's nothing wrong with your physical theory, but geological reality is much dirtier than physical theory. Old joke : "In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice while in practice, there is." Old joke reflects real reality. ]
the seismologists studying this earthquake activity all mysteriously resigned and moved to Africa.
What would be in the least bit mysterious about that? That would be as mysterious as a geologist living at 80-several metres above sea level (around 10 m above the approximate wash level of the Haltenbanke Tsunami) on a 1:7 slope (meaning that rainfall runs away and floods some other poor schmuck), in an area that has never been subject to mining (and hence has no mining-related subsidence) and hasn't got enough slope to generate its own solifluction movements. That's as mysterious as the stable boy making a nice profit by betting on the horses that he's training. That's as mysterious as a not very mysterious thing.
If I were a seismologist, I'd be keeping a weather eye on this little lot. I don't see any particular advantage to moving to Africa though - too many people. I've already declined to post my destination, if this gets more "interesting".
mind you, one of my class mates from University did his PhD in seismology ; I might try to find an email address for him, check out where he's living these days. Worth knowing that.
Has tapping this as an energy source ever been considered ?
Short answer OK for you?
Yes.
i am not a geologist
I am, and I've written enough pages on this topic already to not want to write much more unless you're seriously interested.
but I am thinking if there is so much geothermal energy right beneath our feet (probably very deep) of such enormous magnitude there could be a way to tap into this.
Yes, there are ways to do it, both on the drawing board and under active development. But there are also significant hazards to doing it precisely here. Read my other replies in this thread (filtering out the ones where I was being funny), and you'll be better informed and could probably work out some of the issues yourself. Bear in mind the old joke that "if we knew what we were doing, we couldn't call it research".
The bottom line is that the geological sciences (esp. seismology, vulcanology) are notoriously inept at accurate useful-time-frame predictions.
The geological sciences make perfectly good predictions. It's just that you bloody humans have too short a lifetime hang around for a reasonable period of time and get a decent statistical sample.
Get your lifetime out to a millennium or so and you'll see a lot more regularity to earthquakes etc, in the same way that most people see regular patterns in the weather each year and even over several-year-long periods.
There have been cases of volcanic activity triggered by drilling.
There have have there? Please give your references to the peer-reviewed published papers detailing these events. as a professional in drilling, I'd like to know. It's quite important, because there is an Indonesian drilling company trying to get out of law suits concerning demolishing a large part of a town after having an underground blowout, and one of the tactics they're trying is to astroturf a theory blaming the blowout on an earthquake 2 days before the eruption started.
My fellow drilling professionals consider this claim (and the documentation that has been published to try to back it up) to be somewhere between total bollocks and pretty implausible (yes, there genuinely is debate!). We'd like to see what you know about it.
(Hint - the people I've discussed this with add up to several centuries of drilling experience and millions of feet drilled. Be prepared to defend your analysis.)
So I'm guessing from your posts that you are a gun owner. Is running a food slave plantation your plan, then?
It's an obligation you undertake when you fill out the license application. Or if you get someone who can read and write to fill out the application for you, and just affix your mark to it.
Well one problem is that sometimes hydrothermal explosions can occur like the one that did 13,000 years ago that blow a 5km diameter hole in the Earth.
[/self : puts my "I'm a professional geologist" hat on]
What the fubarite are you referring to?
(Fubarite is a rock type first described in the Antarctic Peninsula.)
Why shouldn't I believe it? Less than 200 years ago a volcano only 1/1000 of that size caused the "year without a summer", which disrupted crops worldwide. If that were to happen again today, there would be widespread starvation.
Where do you get your idea that an event several orders of magnitude greater would be no big deal?
Observation of the mass extinction at 700,000 years ago.
Which mass extinction?
Exactly.
The last major eruption at Jellystone (and therefore the best guess as to what's going to happen next time) didn't produce a mass extinction, so the odds aRE THAN THE NEXT ONE WON'T (Damned CapsLock) either.
OK, it's quite credible that, say, 99.9% of the human population of the planet will die. That's not particularly important. With the potential to double population each generation (which isn't really working hard at it, that's around 450 years to return to current populations, 400 or so years to return to a globally significant population. A lot of the buildings will still be usable, and with a year or two for the great die-off to really get going, one would hope that significant preservation of technology would happen.
Me - I think that island nations with relatively small populations would have a pretty good chance of surviving almost unscathed.
I was going to write what I thought was the most likely country to survive, in the event. But why would I make myself trouble? Just get there first and then encourage them to shoot down incoming air planes - there aren't enough big passenger boats to worry about, and they'll have as much trouble getting food as anyone else once people start to cotton on.
from this end of the telescope, losing 99.9% of the population looks pretty bad ; from the other end of the century, it will hardly seem important.
Yellowstone will erupt in this dramatic fashion. AGREED
The Siberian Traps will too. Nope
The 1.5km-diameter (or much more) space rock will definitely strike earth in the future. AGREED
A comet will too. AGREED
These aren't tinfoil hat ideas - everybody in the related sciences agrees that these events will occur.AGREED
4 out of 5, not too bad.
Something like the Siberian Traps is a near certainty, in the future of the Earth, but the Siberian Traps eruption itself (in the sense of, on that side of the Siberian Craton, or in the sense of the north-central part of the Asian continent, while that's still recognisable)... well you're too specific to possibly be correct.
Yes, these things are going to happen, probably repeatedly, in the future of the Earth. But probably not in the next week.
If you switch to a diet of long pig then you'll be more efficient and won't have to kill as many people.
And you won't have too long to wait until the long pig's parasites get you.
Eating your own species is not the best of ideas, partly because you may well be eating other instances of parts of your own genome, but mostly because anything that is capable of living in the dinner is going to be capable of living in you. Enough people still suffer from food poisoning from non-human adapted parasites that you can bet that some people will start acting as breeding grounds for better parasites once you get a long pig diet spreading.
Why? Really, I'm curious why we can't trigger smaller eruptions if we know a bigger one will eventually happen. I'm sure there are reasons it wouldn't work today, but are there reasons it couldn't ever?
Quality of information is the fundamental problem, coupled with the variability of real rocks.
[/self : puts on my formal "geologist" hat ; it is my job, though not this particular aspect of geology]
The area around Jellystone (and all volcanos) has a long and complex history ; particular rock units vary on a scale of centimetres to metres and larger, through bedding and faulting, to say nothing of the more subtle variations resulting from hydrothermal alteration. These variations in constitution and physical organisation of the materials lead to considerable (several orders of magnitude) variations in rock strength on quite small scales - metres, if not finer.
So, to accurately characterise the rock volume where you're intending to set off a small, controlled eruption, you need that scale of knowledge of the rock units in order to work out where you can safely set off that "small, controlled eruption", and indeed, how to set off that "small, controlled eruption".
Which is well and good - it gives us a goal of the approximate level of information that we need to plan and execute the "small, controlled eruption" plan. We'd need to characterise most of the immediate vicinity of the volcano that we're planning to "defuse" - for the Jellystone hotspot hmmm, on the order of 100km of land area to a depth of several km, say 300km^3 of rock with data at (say) 10cm spacing, and with density, triaxial strength and stiffness data, temperature, pressure, stress field (triaxial again), and a few other bytes of data. Lets say 20 bytes of data per station and around 300 x 10^9(km^3->m^3) x 1000 (data points per m^3) = 3 * 10^14 stations. So we're looking at on the order of 10^16 bytes of data for the core area, and I'd guess the same for surrounding areas at progressively decreasing data density to control for "edge effects" (I'm getting a bit hand-wavy here ; it shows!). Say 10^17 bytes of raw data and working / intermediate results. That's around 100 petabytes, or approximately 10 years worth of LHC data.
That's a serious chunk of computing power, but not incredible. It also allows us to put some sort of cost on the project - the LHC is costing on the order of 5 billion USD, so we're looking into the same sort of region of cost for working out what to do and how to do it. GIVEN that we've got the data to analyse. And that's where the problem lies.
To get the data that's necessary to do this modelling, we're going to need to measure those 20-odd bytes of data for those points, at something approaching that data density. Which we don't have techniques for. We can get some data points - for example I can measure the porosity, permeability and fluid pressure at centimetric scale in a borehole. The tools used are the MDT (if I'm working with Schlumberger equipment) or RCI (from Baker Atlas), but there are others. For measuring rock strengths... well, I could conceive of relevant tools, and I could conceive of using them at the same time as doing the pressure measurements. Getting the triaxial stress field is a deal more involved (since drilling the borehole induces a change in the stress field, by drilling out the rock), but I can envisage doing it. So let's say that we can get our data using currently conceivable direct measurements for essentially the cost of drilling the borehole.
A 3km hole in hard rock. That would be in the region of a million USD, if you're doing it wholesale. To characterise the whole rock volume, you're going to need to drill in the order of one every 10 metre to make even a faint approach at getting the areal data density (your surface borehole is going to be nearly a metre across, so you can't go to any better data density than 1/
I understand the economic necessities and economy of scale in production. But 15 years ago, left-handed mice were relatively easy to find ; now I have to spend weeks searching to find one, and eventually have to go to bloody Amazon. Not that I've got any particular problem with Amazon, but for a personal thing like a mouse, buying without trying is a really dumb idea. Things have gone backwards, definitely.
As something between 10 and 30% of the population, why should we lefties settle for second best i.e symmetrical mice?
Incidentally, the proportion of lefties varies considerably with profession - in my work it's something like 1/4 or 1/3 - something to do with the 3-d thought patterns we have to become comfortable with in our work, which lefties seem to manage noticeably more easily than righties. It's not a 100% thing, but it's enough for my boss to notice over a workforce of dozens.
As a left-handed PC gamer, it seems impossible for me to find a high-quality mouse that comfortably fits my hand. Especially mice with 5+ buttons.
I wouldn't call myself a gamer at all ; part of the reason I suspect is that I've never found a mouse that was even reasonably comfortable with. I have to make do generally with some shitty ambidextrous symmetrical thing. A full half-kilo of my luggage weight is taken up with the thing from Amazon, which is OK, but not great. Actually, no it's only about 250g, but by the time I've added in the radio dongle, charging cable etc... well it's hardly an ideal solution. Plus, to use the additional buttons on it, I have to carry yet another CD of software to install onto the works machine, which requires admin rights, which means either another row with the administrators in the office, or just breaking security on the machines (again). All this palaver over an input device that's an essential tool.
The last super volcano was 75,000 years ago. [...] Mankind was almost extinguished, cut back to only a few thousand. This one...could be *ten times bigger*.
The big eruption in question was Toba, in Indonesia, not Yellowstone.
It's more likely to be nothing much than something big. Which does not mean that the probability of it being something big is *zero*, just that it's fairly low. In the event that it is something big - well so what? It's not going to affect anywhere particularly important, just America, Canada, and possibly the Carribean ; there'll be knock-on effects on the rest of the world, but nothing that'll be too drastic. It might put things back by a couple of decades, but that'll only take a couple of decades to fix.
Hey, we could always have another Laki, just to spread the misery around a little. But what I'd really like to see would be a new kimberlite eruption ; there are so many things about the kimberlite process that we still don't understand.
(Yes, I do have a "friggin' idea" what I'm talking about ; probably a better "masturbatory concept" than you do.)
Water pipe heaters are fairly cheap and don't draw that many watts, but if you shut off the water at the main just as it comes into your house, you can drain the water from most of the pipes by opening all the taps.
I don't know the figures, but the junction boxes that feed the "trace heating" on the fire water pipes at work are pretty chunky JBs, suggesting that they draw quite a current. That's pipes which are clad in 50mm thickness of rock-wool insulation topped off with tin pipework.
All households in the UK have a "drain point" in the plumbing system at it's lowest point, which is almost always also the entry point of the water from the utility pipe. That's designed to drain-down the system for repairs, but it's also what you need to drain to protect the water piping from freezing. If you use a hot water radiator system, that should also have a drain point, and you use that if you're mothballing the house. (When I installed radiators into the bedrooms, rather than drilling through a joist I out a u-bend round a joist ; that created a new lowest point, so I had to put in a secondary drain there.)
I would assume that intelligent plumbers everywhere would put the same sort of system in, because it makes their job much easier when they come back to do maintenance or additions.
Are widely recognized as a good idea. I think electricity and heat backups should be the same. A generator and woodstove are not *that* expensive, and sure come in handy sometimes.....
The expense is not particularly in the capital outlay, but in the logistics of ensuring that you always have fuel laid in, and that your system is always ready to go at a suitably short notice.
At work, we have to have a separate emergency power system, housed in the opposite corner of the vessel to the main engines, on a separate fuel system, and hooked up to the distribution boards to re-power the vessel's communications, accommodation lighting, control room and certain critical subsystems (principally, the derrick's electrical braking system, and the fuel pump to the cement unit, the hydraulics for the anchoring and/ or DP system), but most importantly it also powers the back-up fire pump. (This is, naturally, housed distant to the main fire pump ; what would you do if you had a fire in the engineering space that housed the main fire pump? Die?) All of which adds considerably to the overall complexity of the system. We normally do a test run of the emergency generator system along with personnel muster drill, abandon vessel drills etc about once a week ; these system are utterly useless if their use is not routinely drilled until every person using the system knows that the system works, and what their roles in the system are.
Oh, am I making it sound a bit more complex than you'd wanted? well, that's the difference between playing at having a backup system and really having a backup system.
(Minor sideline : Like everyone else, I'm not best pleased when the alarms go for emergency drills in the middle of my sleep period. But I accept it as necessary, and routinely object to the scheduling of drills at fixed times in the calendar ; I think that they should be at random times, or at routine times plus as many random times. This makes me unpopular. So what?)
Your generator needs a fuel supply always laid-in sufficient for your anticipated outage ; you need to know where you're going to get additional fuel, and how long that is going to take ; you need to know how you're going to transfer fuel from your bowser (transfer container) to the generator's fuel system without the generator running (and hence, no electrical power ; or, do you select generator hardware which can be re-fuelled while running? P.P.P.P.P.P! [Loath though I am to cite the Torygraph, they come to the top of the list).
What to do about the exhaust fumes is left as an exercise for the student. Will you have power available for a ventilation blower? And have you double-checked on the symptoms of carbon monoxide poisoning? Static engines are very different beasts to the mobile engines that you're more likely to be familiar with.
Your wood-burning stove raises fewer issues. But elsewhere on today's Slashdot is a thread about someone who was off-power for 4 days, so do you have stacking space for (say) a week of wood? Fire-starting equipment? Really, fire-starting equipment that you can use in the dark. Oh, you forgot to put the candles in the same drawer as the matches? And the matches are wet. Aren't you glad that you practiced this in early autumn?
People have got lost navigating back from the woodshed to the main house. It may sound surprising, but it does happen.
So, yeah, based on the risks of a US based company exporting to a country that the US government has sanctions against, there is absolutely no way at all that HP management knowingly shipped to Iran.
As opposed to... HP sell goods to merchants ; [STEP01] merchants sell to other merchants who (loop to previous step as often as seems appropriate) ; somewhere in the chain is a merchant who is unwilling, or unable. to comply with a US ban. That merchant sells on to a company whose other business has nothing to do with the US.
No grounds for secrecy.
Slashdot Mirror
A laudable theory. But I'd be very careful of the hundreds of thousands of professional soldiers that your government has, well armed, well organised, and most importantly, deeply inculcated with the theory that they obey orders first, and leave worrying about the "rightness" of what they are doing to their "superiors" (in a legal sense, not in any moral sense).
Same here - if you want to own and use a lethal deathtrap of a vehicle, you're free to do so, on private ground. Which is damned all use to man nor beast (OK - that implies that Formula-X racers are neither man nor beast. Trivial case.) as there are very few places where you can actually make productive use of such a machine. If you want to use one for getting from point A to point B, de facto you have to use the public roads. And at that point, you have the choice between getting yourself licensed as a trained driver, your vehicle inspected and certified as being safe for use on the road (an inspection that is only valid at that point in time - it is the driver's personal responsibility to re-check the vehicle before every leg of a journey ; it is perfectly possible for the police to pull a vehicle over and require a re-inspection to the same standards at any time), then you get to pay the vehicle's insurance, and finally the "Road Fund Tax" for actually using it on the highway (you present certificates for vehicle's roadworthiness and insurance status, or you don't get to pay your tax, and the vehicle is not allowed onto the road).
In theory, none of that is necessary if you're only going to drive your vehicle on private ground, but you'd better be certain that you're not going to drive on or intersect a bridleway (public right of way for people on foot or on horse), a public right of way (for foot), or one of a number of other obstacles such as publicly-owned bridges or tunnels over or under canals or railways (where the same rules apply as on the highway, even if they're disconnected from the highway system), because if you encounter a member of the public and injure them (through crash, or through poor bodywork) then you're not insured and you're in deep shit. Oh, be doubly careful in Scotland (yes, it matters which side of the border you're on ; I don't know which system is followed in Ulster), since there is no such concept as trespass and so anywhere you may meet a member of the public who is there legally. In fact, it'd probably be best if you could document your efforts to fence your private road off, and to post stewards to prevent members of the public from getting onto the road. (Hmmm, that makes me think - exactly what does the KnockHill rally training circuit do about this? Ach, someone else's problem.)
That'd be fine with me, as long as there was some assurance that your unlicensed weapon, on private land, would remain on private land, and not be pointed off private land (I've forgotten the cases names, but there have been "shooters" who targeted members of the general public from high buildings which may or may not have been on private land. Can't allow that to happen.). A few tenth-kilos of gelignite coupled to a suitably programmed GPS device should do it. Oh, better ensure that if the GPS device loses power, it fails safe by destroying the dangerous device - otherwise it would be trivial to defeat the safety system. (I assume that you're familiar with the concept of "security theatre" - provisions for "security" which are actually ineffectual ; there's no point in designing a system with glaring loopholes in it.)
Then the eye-searing paperclip-like monstrosity that I routinely see bouncing around my work's laptops screens, like a demented ... well ... paperclip is a figment of my imagination?
Or is it that the image that gets Ghosted back onto each machine after each job still has Clippy un-strangled (as well as abortions like US-English as the default language and inches as the default measure ; at least putting PDF-printing into the ghost images has got us onto the right size of paper for this 90% of the world).
Clippy will be haunting people for years to come, if not decades. As such, it'll be a valid target for ridicule for a long time too. Hell, BlueScreenOfDeath became a lot, lot less common when people went from Win95 to Win98, but it still appears often enough to be a remembered meme!
Google Maps is blocked at my present location, so I have to rely on memory : Long Valley California is that little chunk of California that is East of the Sierra Nevada and tucked into the corner between Nevada and (ummm) Oregon(?) ; ISTR there being releatively recent volcanism there, and minor earthquake activity (minor compared to the rest of California) ? That where we're talking about?
Earthquake-wise - non-trivial chance of some secondarily-spawned activity, but it's unlikely to be severe. You're a good distance in from the big transcurrent faults near the coast.
Ash fall would be a much more severe problem - you're near the margins of the Hucklebury tuff in pre-historic times.
Direct blast or eruption effects? Negligible ; barely different from the baseline hazard of living on Earth, in the cosmic bowling alley that is the inner Solar System.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by a "chain reaction" ; unless there's a connected set of highly-stressed faults, plugged caldera etc from Jellystone to your locale, then there's not a chain per se ; there's a theoretical prospect that the shaking from one major quake can loosen faults that are in the area and are ready to pop, but in practice that needs all the faults to be so close to going already that they do go spontaneously. People have been looking through the records for evidence of such correlations for at least a decade (that I've been paying attention to the subject), and the published claims for such a correlation are at best weak and certainly don't convince all seismologists. I'm not a seismologist, so I'll wait until the experts are convinced one way or the other that such an effect has been demonstrated. But it's certain that any such effect is weak and inconsistent at it's strongest. Most likely, it's too weak to be reliably measured, so you're as well off estimating your risk from a random variation model as from trying to apply a sophisticated model that accounts for the likelihood of an eruption at Jellystone.
Short version : living anywhere in California puts you at elevated risk of earthquake, and therefore at elevated insurance premiums. In the NE corner of the state, you'll have a small additional risk (or premium) from ashfall damage.
Well, it is a HP, and they're still apparently offering most of their machines that are sold for business with an XP upgrade. I didn't have any great difficulty finding a set of drivers described as being for Win2K/ XP/ Vista on HP's website. The big difficulty has been in finding a legal copy of XP to install on it. When I first got the machine and created the restore discs, I did a test install of Win2K (of which I have a legal OEM copy) and everything I used worked, apart from the fingerprint reader. So that seems settled.
I can't say that I'd be bothered if some esoterica didn't work - USB mass storage, SVGA graphics, keyboard, mouse ; anything else is pretty much luxury rather than necessity. I don't do games (that matter) ; I don't do high-end graphics ; I don't do video ; and pretty much any machine on the market today is overpowered for real-world uses.
That said, I've just finished re-building the wife's desktop (the normal home of the legit Win2K) onto a new motherboard, so if I buy a SATA drive, I might be able to see if there's a noticeable speed difference between the two ; I doubt it ("noticeable" of course means a real-world difference of more than about 2x ; lesser tweaks are rarely seen ; we didn't see much change from changing to a dual-core processor, but we saw a big difference from going from 1/4GB to 1GB of main memory).
Doesn't time fly - I just realised that the "new" laptop is nearly a year old now. Well, it's got another 3 years of working lifetime in front of it.
There's a license?
Where do you live?
In a COUNTRY (damn CapsLock) where the ownership and/ or use of machines which can easily be lethal to other people is controlled, on the assumption that such machines are too dangerous for most people to possess or use. Examples of such machines include motor cars and machine guns. Why chain-saws are not similarly controlled escapes me - perhaps there haven't been too many fatalities resulting from misuse of chainsaws compared to the other example machines.
Odd that, in this post-Doom world. you'd expect there to be people running through the corridors of Forestry colleges everywhere, chainsawing to death their fellow students.
Well, I'd have to scale up my half-drawn plans for a desktop trebuchet (to be made from UniStrut and other debris from the Instrumentation Workshop). Or maybe I'd need to make up a couple of kilos of a fertilizer-gunpowder, and get hold of a pup joint of 9_5/8" casing. Both of those would be capable of giving it a decent shot. Much harder to make it to orbit, but you don't need to get to orbit to achieve a sufficiently destructive return to Earth. (New laptop ; Vista pre-installed ; can I get hold of an install disc for XP from a dead machine in the office? 'nuff said?)
But I think the 50/60 page difference could easily be because one version was printed on A4 with margins suitable for US-Letter size paper. Which would imply that GoogleHQ are using the US-size paper, and paying the 20% extra because of it. I've recently been having to work in a mixed US and european environment (US-configured software, installed on a Hebrew-US defaulted OS on machines locally-sourced, and printing to locally-sourced printers which use the normal A4 paper. What a fucking mess.
Being a geologist, your assumptions may be adequate for a back-of-the-envelope right-order-of-magnitude estimate ... actually, I'd suspect that they're not even adequate for that.
First assumption is embedded in "the lava" : you're assuming that it's a single entity of more-or-less uniform composition, properties and age. Almost all of these assumptions are likely to be somewhere between significantly wrong and so wrong they're not even wrong.
For small magma bodies, "dykes", "plugs" and "sills", you can get a reasonably simple, one-punch history, of one magma composition from one source rock injected in one event at one time. For anything more than a few tens of metres in any dimension ... there are variations.
As an example, there is at least one sill in IIRC Oregon which records a changing direction of the magnetic field between it's upper and lower margins compared to it's centre. That means that the different parts of this several-metre thick rock body passed through it's Curie temperature at times separated by (the order of) a thousand years. So, your volumetrics and heat release figures need to take that distribution of the heat energy and spread it around over at least a thousand years. Which changes your implied power-extraction values considerably.
[ Wife has plans to drag me to the movies ; gotta go now. There's nothing wrong with your physical theory, but geological reality is much dirtier than physical theory. Old joke : "In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice while in practice, there is." Old joke reflects real reality. ]
What would be in the least bit mysterious about that? That would be as mysterious as a geologist living at 80-several metres above sea level (around 10 m above the approximate wash level of the Haltenbanke Tsunami) on a 1:7 slope (meaning that rainfall runs away and floods some other poor schmuck), in an area that has never been subject to mining (and hence has no mining-related subsidence) and hasn't got enough slope to generate its own solifluction movements. That's as mysterious as the stable boy making a nice profit by betting on the horses that he's training. That's as mysterious as a not very mysterious thing.
If I were a seismologist, I'd be keeping a weather eye on this little lot. I don't see any particular advantage to moving to Africa though - too many people. I've already declined to post my destination, if this gets more "interesting".
mind you, one of my class mates from University did his PhD in seismology ; I might try to find an email address for him, check out where he's living these days. Worth knowing that.
Sorry frood, you've just failed your Hoopiness 1.0.1 Practical Exam.
Short answer OK for you?
Yes.
I am, and I've written enough pages on this topic already to not want to write much more unless you're seriously interested.
Yes, there are ways to do it, both on the drawing board and under active development. But there are also significant hazards to doing it precisely here. Read my other replies in this thread (filtering out the ones where I was being funny), and you'll be better informed and could probably work out some of the issues yourself. Bear in mind the old joke that "if we knew what we were doing, we couldn't call it research".
The geological sciences make perfectly good predictions. It's just that you bloody humans have too short a lifetime hang around for a reasonable period of time and get a decent statistical sample.
Get your lifetime out to a millennium or so and you'll see a lot more regularity to earthquakes etc, in the same way that most people see regular patterns in the weather each year and even over several-year-long periods.
They won't listen.
Sad statement, but backed up by considerable experimental evidence.
There have have there? Please give your references to the peer-reviewed published papers detailing these events. as a professional in drilling, I'd like to know. It's quite important, because there is an Indonesian drilling company trying to get out of law suits concerning demolishing a large part of a town after having an underground blowout, and one of the tactics they're trying is to astroturf a theory blaming the blowout on an earthquake 2 days before the eruption started.
My fellow drilling professionals consider this claim (and the documentation that has been published to try to back it up) to be somewhere between total bollocks and pretty implausible (yes, there genuinely is debate!). We'd like to see what you know about it.
(Hint - the people I've discussed this with add up to several centuries of drilling experience and millions of feet drilled. Be prepared to defend your analysis.)
It's an obligation you undertake when you fill out the license application. Or if you get someone who can read and write to fill out the application for you, and just affix your mark to it.
[/self : puts my "I'm a professional geologist" hat on]
What the fubarite are you referring to?
(Fubarite is a rock type first described in the Antarctic Peninsula.)
Observation of the mass extinction at 700,000 years ago.
Which mass extinction?
Exactly.
The last major eruption at Jellystone (and therefore the best guess as to what's going to happen next time) didn't produce a mass extinction, so the odds aRE THAN THE NEXT ONE WON'T (Damned CapsLock) either.
OK, it's quite credible that, say, 99.9% of the human population of the planet will die. That's not particularly important. With the potential to double population each generation (which isn't really working hard at it, that's around 450 years to return to current populations, 400 or so years to return to a globally significant population. A lot of the buildings will still be usable, and with a year or two for the great die-off to really get going, one would hope that significant preservation of technology would happen.
Me - I think that island nations with relatively small populations would have a pretty good chance of surviving almost unscathed.
I was going to write what I thought was the most likely country to survive, in the event. But why would I make myself trouble? Just get there first and then encourage them to shoot down incoming air planes - there aren't enough big passenger boats to worry about, and they'll have as much trouble getting food as anyone else once people start to cotton on.
from this end of the telescope, losing 99.9% of the population looks pretty bad ; from the other end of the century, it will hardly seem important.
4 out of 5, not too bad.
Something like the Siberian Traps is a near certainty, in the future of the Earth, but the Siberian Traps eruption itself (in the sense of, on that side of the Siberian Craton, or in the sense of the north-central part of the Asian continent, while that's still recognisable) ... well you're too specific to possibly be correct.
Yes, these things are going to happen, probably repeatedly, in the future of the Earth. But probably not in the next week.
And you won't have too long to wait until the long pig's parasites get you.
Eating your own species is not the best of ideas, partly because you may well be eating other instances of parts of your own genome, but mostly because anything that is capable of living in the dinner is going to be capable of living in you. Enough people still suffer from food poisoning from non-human adapted parasites that you can bet that some people will start acting as breeding grounds for better parasites once you get a long pig diet spreading.
Quality of information is the fundamental problem, coupled with the variability of real rocks.
[/self : puts on my formal "geologist" hat ; it is my job, though not this particular aspect of geology]
The area around Jellystone (and all volcanos) has a long and complex history ; particular rock units vary on a scale of centimetres to metres and larger, through bedding and faulting, to say nothing of the more subtle variations resulting from hydrothermal alteration. These variations in constitution and physical organisation of the materials lead to considerable (several orders of magnitude) variations in rock strength on quite small scales - metres, if not finer.
So, to accurately characterise the rock volume where you're intending to set off a small, controlled eruption, you need that scale of knowledge of the rock units in order to work out where you can safely set off that "small, controlled eruption", and indeed, how to set off that "small, controlled eruption".
Which is well and good - it gives us a goal of the approximate level of information that we need to plan and execute the "small, controlled eruption" plan. We'd need to characterise most of the immediate vicinity of the volcano that we're planning to "defuse" - for the Jellystone hotspot hmmm, on the order of 100km of land area to a depth of several km, say 300km^3 of rock with data at (say) 10cm spacing, and with density, triaxial strength and stiffness data, temperature, pressure, stress field (triaxial again), and a few other bytes of data. Lets say 20 bytes of data per station and around 300 x 10^9(km^3->m^3) x 1000 (data points per m^3) = 3 * 10^14 stations. So we're looking at on the order of 10^16 bytes of data for the core area, and I'd guess the same for surrounding areas at progressively decreasing data density to control for "edge effects" (I'm getting a bit hand-wavy here ; it shows!). Say 10^17 bytes of raw data and working / intermediate results. That's around 100 petabytes, or approximately 10 years worth of LHC data.
That's a serious chunk of computing power, but not incredible. It also allows us to put some sort of cost on the project - the LHC is costing on the order of 5 billion USD, so we're looking into the same sort of region of cost for working out what to do and how to do it. GIVEN that we've got the data to analyse. And that's where the problem lies.
To get the data that's necessary to do this modelling, we're going to need to measure those 20-odd bytes of data for those points, at something approaching that data density. Which we don't have techniques for. We can get some data points - for example I can measure the porosity, permeability and fluid pressure at centimetric scale in a borehole. The tools used are the MDT (if I'm working with Schlumberger equipment) or RCI (from Baker Atlas), but there are others. For measuring rock strengths ... well, I could conceive of relevant tools, and I could conceive of using them at the same time as doing the pressure measurements. Getting the triaxial stress field is a deal more involved (since drilling the borehole induces a change in the stress field, by drilling out the rock), but I can envisage doing it. So let's say that we can get our data using currently conceivable direct measurements for essentially the cost of drilling the borehole.
A 3km hole in hard rock. That would be in the region of a million USD, if you're doing it wholesale. To characterise the whole rock volume, you're going to need to drill in the order of one every 10 metre to make even a faint approach at getting the areal data density (your surface borehole is going to be nearly a metre across, so you can't go to any better data density than 1/
Yes.
I understand the economic necessities and economy of scale in production. But 15 years ago, left-handed mice were relatively easy to find ; now I have to spend weeks searching to find one, and eventually have to go to bloody Amazon. Not that I've got any particular problem with Amazon, but for a personal thing like a mouse, buying without trying is a really dumb idea. Things have gone backwards, definitely.
As something between 10 and 30% of the population, why should we lefties settle for second best i.e symmetrical mice?
Incidentally, the proportion of lefties varies considerably with profession - in my work it's something like 1/4 or 1/3 - something to do with the 3-d thought patterns we have to become comfortable with in our work, which lefties seem to manage noticeably more easily than righties. It's not a 100% thing, but it's enough for my boss to notice over a workforce of dozens.
I wouldn't call myself a gamer at all ; part of the reason I suspect is that I've never found a mouse that was even reasonably comfortable with. I have to make do generally with some shitty ambidextrous symmetrical thing. A full half-kilo of my luggage weight is taken up with the thing from Amazon, which is OK, but not great. Actually, no it's only about 250g, but by the time I've added in the radio dongle, charging cable etc ... well it's hardly an ideal solution. Plus, to use the additional buttons on it, I have to carry yet another CD of software to install onto the works machine, which requires admin rights, which means either another row with the administrators in the office, or just breaking security on the machines (again). All this palaver over an input device that's an essential tool.
The big eruption in question was Toba, in Indonesia, not Yellowstone.
It's more likely to be nothing much than something big. Which does not mean that the probability of it being something big is *zero*, just that it's fairly low. In the event that it is something big - well so what? It's not going to affect anywhere particularly important, just America, Canada, and possibly the Carribean ; there'll be knock-on effects on the rest of the world, but nothing that'll be too drastic. It might put things back by a couple of decades, but that'll only take a couple of decades to fix.
Hey, we could always have another Laki, just to spread the misery around a little. But what I'd really like to see would be a new kimberlite eruption ; there are so many things about the kimberlite process that we still don't understand.
(Yes, I do have a "friggin' idea" what I'm talking about ; probably a better "masturbatory concept" than you do.)
I don't know the figures, but the junction boxes that feed the "trace heating" on the fire water pipes at work are pretty chunky JBs, suggesting that they draw quite a current. That's pipes which are clad in 50mm thickness of rock-wool insulation topped off with tin pipework.
All households in the UK have a "drain point" in the plumbing system at it's lowest point, which is almost always also the entry point of the water from the utility pipe. That's designed to drain-down the system for repairs, but it's also what you need to drain to protect the water piping from freezing. If you use a hot water radiator system, that should also have a drain point, and you use that if you're mothballing the house. (When I installed radiators into the bedrooms, rather than drilling through a joist I out a u-bend round a joist ; that created a new lowest point, so I had to put in a secondary drain there.)
I would assume that intelligent plumbers everywhere would put the same sort of system in, because it makes their job much easier when they come back to do maintenance or additions.
The expense is not particularly in the capital outlay, but in the logistics of ensuring that you always have fuel laid in, and that your system is always ready to go at a suitably short notice.
At work, we have to have a separate emergency power system, housed in the opposite corner of the vessel to the main engines, on a separate fuel system, and hooked up to the distribution boards to re-power the vessel's communications, accommodation lighting, control room and certain critical subsystems (principally, the derrick's electrical braking system, and the fuel pump to the cement unit, the hydraulics for the anchoring and/ or DP system), but most importantly it also powers the back-up fire pump. (This is, naturally, housed distant to the main fire pump ; what would you do if you had a fire in the engineering space that housed the main fire pump? Die?) All of which adds considerably to the overall complexity of the system. We normally do a test run of the emergency generator system along with personnel muster drill, abandon vessel drills etc about once a week ; these system are utterly useless if their use is not routinely drilled until every person using the system knows that the system works, and what their roles in the system are.
Oh, am I making it sound a bit more complex than you'd wanted? well, that's the difference between playing at having a backup system and really having a backup system.
(Minor sideline : Like everyone else, I'm not best pleased when the alarms go for emergency drills in the middle of my sleep period. But I accept it as necessary, and routinely object to the scheduling of drills at fixed times in the calendar ; I think that they should be at random times, or at routine times plus as many random times. This makes me unpopular. So what?)
Your generator needs a fuel supply always laid-in sufficient for your anticipated outage ; you need to know where you're going to get additional fuel, and how long that is going to take ; you need to know how you're going to transfer fuel from your bowser (transfer container) to the generator's fuel system without the generator running (and hence, no electrical power ; or, do you select generator hardware which can be re-fuelled while running? P.P.P.P.P.P! [Loath though I am to cite the Torygraph, they come to the top of the list).
What to do about the exhaust fumes is left as an exercise for the student. Will you have power available for a ventilation blower? And have you double-checked on the symptoms of carbon monoxide poisoning? Static engines are very different beasts to the mobile engines that you're more likely to be familiar with.
Your wood-burning stove raises fewer issues. But elsewhere on today's Slashdot is a thread about someone who was off-power for 4 days, so do you have stacking space for (say) a week of wood? Fire-starting equipment? Really, fire-starting equipment that you can use in the dark. Oh, you forgot to put the candles in the same drawer as the matches? And the matches are wet. Aren't you glad that you practiced this in early autumn?
People have got lost navigating back from the woodshed to the main house. It may sound surprising, but it does happen.
As opposed to ... HP sell goods to merchants ; [STEP01] merchants sell to other merchants who (loop to previous step as often as seems appropriate) ; somewhere in the chain is a merchant who is unwilling, or unable. to comply with a US ban. That merchant sells on to a company whose other business has nothing to do with the US.
No grounds for secrecy.