The Saffir–Simpson Hurricane Scale only measures a hurricane's maximum wind speed. While this is reasonably correlated with the damage a hurricane inflicts, it is far from a complete picture. Notably, it disregards: Storm size - Sandy was a very wide hurricane, and so the damage was more widespread Storm surge - Sandy had a very large storm surge, and hit an area that is poorly protected from flooding Rainfall - Hurricanes that drop enough water quickly enough can cause flash floods Storm speed - SSHS only measures the wind speed relative to the storm. If the storm itself advances rapidly, it can cause significantly more damage than it would otherwise
This study used an alternative measurement - the total kinetic energy of the storm. This is a relatively good measure of the power of a hurricane season.
PS: We've had "mild" seasons since Katrina? News to me, considering 2007 had multiple Category 5s, 2010 is the third-most active season on record, and most of the other years were at best "average". 2006 was actually the only one to be below average.
Solar? What is the sun but a giant thermonuclear reactor in the sky?
Wind? That's just tapping into the energy flow caused by the sun unevenly heating the Earth, and solar is nuclear. Same for hydroelectric - the sun drives the water cycle they exploit.
So are biofuel, oil, coal, gas, anything coming from dead plants or animals, no matter how long they've been dead. Plants get energy from the GTNRITS, and we get energy from them. Hell, it doesn't even have to be dead - the proverbial "hamster-wheel power" is itself powered by the GTNRITS.
Geothermal is just using the heat of the Earth's core, and it got that from natural nuclear decay. And I really shouldn't have to explain why nuclear power is nuclear.
So what's the one non-nuclear power I can think of? Tidal.
I have an old Athlon beige box I use as whatever I need. It's my backup desktop (in case both my laptop and primary desktop fail), so it's got a light WM (WindowMaker), OpenOffice (plus Abiword for *most* word processing), and so on. It's a Samba file share, storing backups of my more important files (and my porn). It's a retrogaming system, with ZSNES and a metric fuckton of ROMs.
Most importantly, it's a disposable server for whatever I feel like messing around with. I want to learn how to use PostgreSQL? Install it. Mess with it. Learn it. Repeat for pretty much whatever I want - there are surprisingly few server applications that haven't been ported to BSD.
Yeah, there's nothing it does that Linux doesn't, or couldn't. But I've taken a liking to OpenBSD, for some reason.
I think it's because the default installation has NOTHING. If you install from CD and pick every module, you get ksh, X11 with FVWM, and gcc. That's really it. Having to pick nearly every user-level program you install may be a bit tedious, but it gives me a feeling of more control.
I'm writing code. It's not so much the width of the actual line (although I do write some long lines), but the levels of indent. I quite often have to indent my code quite severely. I think 90% of my code is at least three levels of indent or greater, but relatively few of my lines contain more than 80 printing characters. And that one multi-thousand-character line DOESN'T COUNT. It doesn't.
I have used all of the three common aspect ratios. I strongly prefer 16:10. 4:3 is only really good for one program on the monitor - maybe, with a stupid high resolution, you could do four, a 2x2 grid, but I don't think so. 16:10 and 16:9 let you treat it as two side-by-side 8:10 or 8:9 monitors (think 5:4 or 9:8 monitors in portrait). Trust me, I am not advocating this solely because it "looks good", but because it's highly functional.
I haven't checked in a while because I usually don't use firefox (nothing against it, though), but the last time I used it, it was a configurable option whether or not the images scaled when you scaled the page.
Just checked, that is indeed an option.
I've decided to meet you halfway, though. I think you're right about the UI scaling, in fact, I think that the UI scaling is the only appropriate thing for a browser to do in response to an OS-level scaling setting. The pages themselves should be fully under the control of the browser, with the initial setting being one where raster elements are not scaled.
Halfway is better than most people meet me. Your point about the browser only scaling UI depending on the OS setting makes sense, but I would take it a bit further and let the browser use the OS zoom setting as the *default* page zoom (or rather, the default default page zoom - when deciding what the default zoom should be, it should default to the OS setting). Purely as a convenience, though. It's logical to assume that if the OS is set to 125% scaling, the browser should start with that.
And while I would prefer the initial setting being *to* scale raster elements, as long as it's selectable I really don't care. And it definitely should be a setting - maybe even a per-page setting, since some pages might need image scaling, while others wouldn't.
But web page designers should also not get off the hook for designing their pages so that they won't work if you scale the text and not the images, or in slashdot's case, so that they don't work so well if you scale it at all, images or not. A web page isn't a brochure or a magazine page.
It should behave when a user wants to change things about it, whether that be the width of the canvas or the size of the text or images. The user is changing those things because they want to see the damn page better, don't fight them!
An excellent point. Actually, tomorrow at work I'll do some quick testing with our own websites, to make sure it works reasonably well at common zoom settings, both scaling images and not scaling images. If it breaks horribly, I'll yell at the designer until he fixes it.
Perhaps, by your definition of "correct". However, I found many web *pages* were unable to cope with that, particularly those with more elaborate layouts. I would prefer the behavior of Firefox's zoom functionality, where all elements are scaled (although that doesn't scale the browser UI, which might also be desirable).
My 1080p 17" laptop shipped with scaling set to 125%.
Most things worked. Chrome didn't listen to it - it actually broke antialiasing, it looked like. Firefox scaled text but not images. A few programs had weirdness with the toolbars - they scaled up the text, but not graphics, so things kind of looked ugly. But everything else worked fine.
I still ended up disabling it, because I regularly plug in to a 22" 1080p monitor and a similar-DPI 1280x1024 monitor (or something like that). And 1080p on a 17" isn't that cramped, although it would be much worse on a 15" 2560x1600 monitor.
Overall, Windows does a pretty decent job at scaling. If they could make it so you could exempt applications from the scaling rules, and get browsers to better merge OS-level scaling settings with their own zoom settings, it would be pretty close to perfect.
I prefer 16:10 monitors to 4:3 (old-school) or 16:9 ("widescreen HD modern crap").
4:3 works fine for a single-window app, but it's hard to do two side-by-side windows. Even some fullscreen apps don't work well with it. I prefer my text editors to have a lot of horizontal space for text - I threw the 80 columns rule out a decade ago.
Meanwhile, 16:9 is a bit condensed for productivity stuff. For movies and games, 16:9 works fine. But so does 16:10. Movies you can just blackbar, and games look fine on 16:10.
So I find 16:10 to be a good compromise for aspect ratio. It's wide enough to do widescreen movies and side-by-side windows, but not so wide that a fullscreen editor feels stretched. I currently put up with 16:9, since 1920x1080 is about half the cost of 1920x1200, but my ideal setup would be 16:10.
Also, for the mathematically inclined, 16:10 is a close approximation of the golden ratio.
All power is either solar, nuclear, or in one case gravitational.
Photovoltaic is obviously solar. Any hydrocarbon (oil, gas, peat, even garbage incinerators) is just solar energy gathered by long-dead plants, or just plants in the case of biofuels. Wind is just solar energy heating one area, and we run a dynamo off it. Hydro is like wind, only we're running it off water, not air, being moved around by the sun's energy. Even having a hamster run in a wheel uses solar, as the hamster is powered by plants, which are powered by the sun.
Nuclear power is obviously nuclear. Geothermal is tapping energy from natural nuclear decay in the Earth's interior.
The only exception is tidal - pulling the energy of the Moon's orbit. Try as I may, I cannot justify it as nuclear-powered.
If you want to get technical, you can merge solar and nuclear as well, as the sun is just a Big Thermonuclear Fusion Reactor In The Sky. Or if you want to get technical in a different way, you can rename solar to "fusion" and "nuclear" to "fission", so when we finally get fusion working we can file it properly.
Bad phrasing on my part. I know for sure that a blimp could never replace one of those massive behemoths. While I've never seen one of them in person, I've been on a supercarrier, and those things are *smaller* than the biggest container ships. The scale of those things is just unbelievable.
I should have phrased it as either "replacement for SOME cargo ship uses" or "complement for cargo ships". Because it will really never be economical to replace ships completely - even if solar power takes off, we'll just have solar-powered ships as well as solar-powered dirigibles.
But, as I said in another post, it might have a good niche. Use them for things that are either too time-sensitive to wait 2-4 weeks, or for things that don't take well to being near ocean water. So it might be more of a replacement for cargo aircraft, then, at least for the non-overnight-shipping rush stuff.
According to this page, I can get a cargo container from Shanghai to San Francisco in 18-30 days. That's a distance of roughly 10,000km,
The Hindenburg could reach air speeds of 135km/h. While modern airships could doubtless reach higher speeds, we're also running off solar power here. So let's just run with that 135km/h figure. That gives us about three days to cross the same distance.
For further comparison, a Boeing 747 can make the trip in roughly 11 hours.
So we're beating the container ship by a factor of 6-10, but the jet is beating us by a factor of 6. So we just have to have a price halfway between the two. Unfortunately, that's hard to figure out, because the container ship charges by volume, while the aircraft rates I can find charge by weight. Ultimately, though, it's a moot point, as any figure I can come up with for the costs of running a solar-powered airship will cite work by a certain Dr. M. Y. Ass.
But hey, it might be a good niche to fit into. Faster and safer* than a container ship, but slower than a jet. Someone might be able to find a good use for that.
* Assuming, of course, no Sky Pirates are encountered. Then all bets are off.
Actually, that's not a bad idea. Might work better as a replacement for cargo ships, not trucks, though.
With Hydrogen/Helium providing the lift, the engines only have to provide thrust. And cargo rarely needs to go as quickly as people - it currently takes what, weeks, to cross the Pacific? So you can get by with much less power demands.
And you also get much more power to work with. Dirigibles are pretty bulky, lots of surface area, so you have nice big expanses to cover in photovoltaics.
And you even have less potential damage from wave motion or humidity compared to container ships. That might be enough of an advantage for getting electronics from the factory in China to the stores in US/Europe.
Someone get Apple on this - it makes a good stunt, at the very least. "iPhone 7 - now delivered by dirigible".
As an owner of a computer with 12GB of RAM (plus 2GB VRAM, but that doesn't count), I think 2GB is more than enough for a phone.
As I type this, I have Firefox (two tabs), Chrome (nine tabs), Komodo (two open files), PuTTY, MySQL Workbench (two connections, fifteen tabs total), Google Talk, Windows Media Player, Notepad++ (six open files), Windows Explorer, and LibreOffice Writer open, plus Steam and a desktop background image cycler running in the background (probably plus some stupid DRM shit). This is covering three screens (two 1080p plus one smaller one). And this is on Windows 7, not exactly the most memory-lean OS there is.
I am using precisely 4.40 GB of memory. Plus a bit more for the OS to cache things, since it's there. Let's liberally round that up to 6GB.
So with merely three times the memory in his phone, I can run a *very* heavy desktop load without any memory issues. And if I close Firefox, my entire load can fit inside 4GB, so maybe twice the memory in his phone is more accurate. Since I've yet to want to run more than two programs at once on my phone, I can't exactly see 2GB being excessive for a phone.
The issue they're trying to solve isn't "how do we make more powerful phones?", it's "how can we lower power usage without sacrificing power?".
If you try to improve performance the same way desktops did (higher clocks, great gobs of cache, and more execution units inside the core), you'd raise performance, but you'd also massively increase your power draw without giving you an easy way to lower it when it's not in use. Underclocking only gets you so far - ideally, you'd need to be able to shut down execution units, or even some of your cache.
With this number of cores, you can shut down entire cores while you idle, which is much simpler to manage. Sitting in your pocket, this thing would only be running on a core or two.
I can see what Intel is thinking. It's a solid hardware idea, but it requires a massive shift in software that doesn't seem likely. Much like Itanium, in retrospect.
Every x86 chip on the market is some secret, internal RISC design with an x86 translator in front of it. I do not believe it would be terribly difficult to redesign the translator unit to accept ARM code as well, although getting it to perform as well as x86 does may be challenging. With a decent design and some clever firmware, you could probably make it boot as either ARM or x86 depending only on a BIOS setting, and change cores on the fly.
I've been in VA for about two decades now (central VA - Chesterfield and Richmond). Pretty much every year or two, there's a hurricane that knocks out power for a few days.
The worst was Hurricane Isabel. After that, I didn't have mains power for a month (thank god for generators). Schools were closed for weeks. Four different trees - big trees, three stories high - fell over just in my yard, and that got off pretty light compared to some of my neighbors. Last year, Irene knocked out power for five days.
So yeah, right now Sandy doesn't seem to be doing much to Virginia (just some light rain), but the forecasts weren't really putting it towards Virginia anyways - it was expected to hit further north, up by New Jersey. But one can hardly say that Virginia never gets hit hard by hurricanes.
Slashdot Mirror
It's all the anti-climate-change shills, either paid or just fanatically blind.
I don't know why they bother. Most of /. can look at the data and see the conclusion just fine.
The Saffir–Simpson Hurricane Scale only measures a hurricane's maximum wind speed. While this is reasonably correlated with the damage a hurricane inflicts, it is far from a complete picture. Notably, it disregards:
Storm size - Sandy was a very wide hurricane, and so the damage was more widespread
Storm surge - Sandy had a very large storm surge, and hit an area that is poorly protected from flooding
Rainfall - Hurricanes that drop enough water quickly enough can cause flash floods
Storm speed - SSHS only measures the wind speed relative to the storm. If the storm itself advances rapidly, it can cause significantly more damage than it would otherwise
This study used an alternative measurement - the total kinetic energy of the storm. This is a relatively good measure of the power of a hurricane season.
PS: We've had "mild" seasons since Katrina? News to me, considering 2007 had multiple Category 5s, 2010 is the third-most active season on record, and most of the other years were at best "average". 2006 was actually the only one to be below average.
It's ComputerWorld, did you really expect a *good* article?
All power except for one is nuclear.
Solar? What is the sun but a giant thermonuclear reactor in the sky?
Wind? That's just tapping into the energy flow caused by the sun unevenly heating the Earth, and solar is nuclear. Same for hydroelectric - the sun drives the water cycle they exploit.
So are biofuel, oil, coal, gas, anything coming from dead plants or animals, no matter how long they've been dead. Plants get energy from the GTNRITS, and we get energy from them. Hell, it doesn't even have to be dead - the proverbial "hamster-wheel power" is itself powered by the GTNRITS.
Geothermal is just using the heat of the Earth's core, and it got that from natural nuclear decay. And I really shouldn't have to explain why nuclear power is nuclear.
So what's the one non-nuclear power I can think of? Tidal.
Call me user #5 then.
I have an old Athlon beige box I use as whatever I need. It's my backup desktop (in case both my laptop and primary desktop fail), so it's got a light WM (WindowMaker), OpenOffice (plus Abiword for *most* word processing), and so on. It's a Samba file share, storing backups of my more important files (and my porn). It's a retrogaming system, with ZSNES and a metric fuckton of ROMs.
Most importantly, it's a disposable server for whatever I feel like messing around with. I want to learn how to use PostgreSQL? Install it. Mess with it. Learn it. Repeat for pretty much whatever I want - there are surprisingly few server applications that haven't been ported to BSD.
Yeah, there's nothing it does that Linux doesn't, or couldn't. But I've taken a liking to OpenBSD, for some reason.
I think it's because the default installation has NOTHING. If you install from CD and pick every module, you get ksh, X11 with FVWM, and gcc. That's really it. Having to pick nearly every user-level program you install may be a bit tedious, but it gives me a feeling of more control.
That *was* on Windows 7. Scaling didn't work perfectly right under either Firefox or Chrome.
I'm writing code. It's not so much the width of the actual line (although I do write some long lines), but the levels of indent. I quite often have to indent my code quite severely. I think 90% of my code is at least three levels of indent or greater, but relatively few of my lines contain more than 80 printing characters. And that one multi-thousand-character line DOESN'T COUNT. It doesn't.
I have used all of the three common aspect ratios. I strongly prefer 16:10. 4:3 is only really good for one program on the monitor - maybe, with a stupid high resolution, you could do four, a 2x2 grid, but I don't think so. 16:10 and 16:9 let you treat it as two side-by-side 8:10 or 8:9 monitors (think 5:4 or 9:8 monitors in portrait). Trust me, I am not advocating this solely because it "looks good", but because it's highly functional.
I haven't checked in a while because I usually don't use firefox (nothing against it, though), but the last time I used it, it was a configurable option whether or not the images scaled when you scaled the page.
Just checked, that is indeed an option.
I've decided to meet you halfway, though. I think you're right about the UI scaling, in fact, I think that the UI scaling is the only appropriate thing for a browser to do in response to an OS-level scaling setting. The pages themselves should be fully under the control of the browser, with the initial setting being one where raster elements are not scaled.
Halfway is better than most people meet me. Your point about the browser only scaling UI depending on the OS setting makes sense, but I would take it a bit further and let the browser use the OS zoom setting as the *default* page zoom (or rather, the default default page zoom - when deciding what the default zoom should be, it should default to the OS setting). Purely as a convenience, though. It's logical to assume that if the OS is set to 125% scaling, the browser should start with that.
And while I would prefer the initial setting being *to* scale raster elements, as long as it's selectable I really don't care. And it definitely should be a setting - maybe even a per-page setting, since some pages might need image scaling, while others wouldn't.
But web page designers should also not get off the hook for designing their pages so that they won't work if you scale the text and not the images, or in slashdot's case, so that they don't work so well if you scale it at all, images or not. A web page isn't a brochure or a magazine page.
It should behave when a user wants to change things about it, whether that be the width of the canvas or the size of the text or images. The user is changing those things because they want to see the damn page better, don't fight them!
An excellent point. Actually, tomorrow at work I'll do some quick testing with our own websites, to make sure it works reasonably well at common zoom settings, both scaling images and not scaling images. If it breaks horribly, I'll yell at the designer until he fixes it.
Sorry it's all public domain.
And since when has that stopped Disney from claiming "ownership" of something?
Perhaps, by your definition of "correct". However, I found many web *pages* were unable to cope with that, particularly those with more elaborate layouts. I would prefer the behavior of Firefox's zoom functionality, where all elements are scaled (although that doesn't scale the browser UI, which might also be desirable).
My 1080p 17" laptop shipped with scaling set to 125%.
Most things worked. Chrome didn't listen to it - it actually broke antialiasing, it looked like. Firefox scaled text but not images. A few programs had weirdness with the toolbars - they scaled up the text, but not graphics, so things kind of looked ugly. But everything else worked fine.
I still ended up disabling it, because I regularly plug in to a 22" 1080p monitor and a similar-DPI 1280x1024 monitor (or something like that). And 1080p on a 17" isn't that cramped, although it would be much worse on a 15" 2560x1600 monitor.
Overall, Windows does a pretty decent job at scaling. If they could make it so you could exempt applications from the scaling rules, and get browsers to better merge OS-level scaling settings with their own zoom settings, it would be pretty close to perfect.
I prefer 16:10 monitors to 4:3 (old-school) or 16:9 ("widescreen HD modern crap").
4:3 works fine for a single-window app, but it's hard to do two side-by-side windows. Even some fullscreen apps don't work well with it. I prefer my text editors to have a lot of horizontal space for text - I threw the 80 columns rule out a decade ago.
Meanwhile, 16:9 is a bit condensed for productivity stuff. For movies and games, 16:9 works fine. But so does 16:10. Movies you can just blackbar, and games look fine on 16:10.
So I find 16:10 to be a good compromise for aspect ratio. It's wide enough to do widescreen movies and side-by-side windows, but not so wide that a fullscreen editor feels stretched. I currently put up with 16:9, since 1920x1080 is about half the cost of 1920x1200, but my ideal setup would be 16:10.
Also, for the mathematically inclined, 16:10 is a close approximation of the golden ratio.
All power is either solar, nuclear, or in one case gravitational.
Photovoltaic is obviously solar. Any hydrocarbon (oil, gas, peat, even garbage incinerators) is just solar energy gathered by long-dead plants, or just plants in the case of biofuels. Wind is just solar energy heating one area, and we run a dynamo off it. Hydro is like wind, only we're running it off water, not air, being moved around by the sun's energy. Even having a hamster run in a wheel uses solar, as the hamster is powered by plants, which are powered by the sun.
Nuclear power is obviously nuclear. Geothermal is tapping energy from natural nuclear decay in the Earth's interior.
The only exception is tidal - pulling the energy of the Moon's orbit. Try as I may, I cannot justify it as nuclear-powered.
If you want to get technical, you can merge solar and nuclear as well, as the sun is just a Big Thermonuclear Fusion Reactor In The Sky. Or if you want to get technical in a different way, you can rename solar to "fusion" and "nuclear" to "fission", so when we finally get fusion working we can file it properly.
Bad phrasing on my part. I know for sure that a blimp could never replace one of those massive behemoths. While I've never seen one of them in person, I've been on a supercarrier, and those things are *smaller* than the biggest container ships. The scale of those things is just unbelievable.
I should have phrased it as either "replacement for SOME cargo ship uses" or "complement for cargo ships". Because it will really never be economical to replace ships completely - even if solar power takes off, we'll just have solar-powered ships as well as solar-powered dirigibles.
But, as I said in another post, it might have a good niche. Use them for things that are either too time-sensitive to wait 2-4 weeks, or for things that don't take well to being near ocean water. So it might be more of a replacement for cargo aircraft, then, at least for the non-overnight-shipping rush stuff.
Let's bring some numbers into this.
According to this page, I can get a cargo container from Shanghai to San Francisco in 18-30 days. That's a distance of roughly 10,000km,
The Hindenburg could reach air speeds of 135km/h. While modern airships could doubtless reach higher speeds, we're also running off solar power here. So let's just run with that 135km/h figure. That gives us about three days to cross the same distance.
For further comparison, a Boeing 747 can make the trip in roughly 11 hours.
So we're beating the container ship by a factor of 6-10, but the jet is beating us by a factor of 6. So we just have to have a price halfway between the two. Unfortunately, that's hard to figure out, because the container ship charges by volume, while the aircraft rates I can find charge by weight. Ultimately, though, it's a moot point, as any figure I can come up with for the costs of running a solar-powered airship will cite work by a certain Dr. M. Y. Ass.
But hey, it might be a good niche to fit into. Faster and safer* than a container ship, but slower than a jet. Someone might be able to find a good use for that.
* Assuming, of course, no Sky Pirates are encountered. Then all bets are off.
Weird, it works just fine for me.
Actually, that's not a bad idea. Might work better as a replacement for cargo ships, not trucks, though.
With Hydrogen/Helium providing the lift, the engines only have to provide thrust. And cargo rarely needs to go as quickly as people - it currently takes what, weeks, to cross the Pacific? So you can get by with much less power demands.
And you also get much more power to work with. Dirigibles are pretty bulky, lots of surface area, so you have nice big expanses to cover in photovoltaics.
And you even have less potential damage from wave motion or humidity compared to container ships. That might be enough of an advantage for getting electronics from the factory in China to the stores in US/Europe.
Someone get Apple on this - it makes a good stunt, at the very least. "iPhone 7 - now delivered by dirigible".
Thank you for that fascinating satire of modern consumerist culture.
You know, when you phrase it like that, you make it sound like Nintendo could release a best-selling smartphone...
As an owner of a computer with 12GB of RAM (plus 2GB VRAM, but that doesn't count), I think 2GB is more than enough for a phone.
As I type this, I have Firefox (two tabs), Chrome (nine tabs), Komodo (two open files), PuTTY, MySQL Workbench (two connections, fifteen tabs total), Google Talk, Windows Media Player, Notepad++ (six open files), Windows Explorer, and LibreOffice Writer open, plus Steam and a desktop background image cycler running in the background (probably plus some stupid DRM shit). This is covering three screens (two 1080p plus one smaller one). And this is on Windows 7, not exactly the most memory-lean OS there is.
I am using precisely 4.40 GB of memory. Plus a bit more for the OS to cache things, since it's there. Let's liberally round that up to 6GB.
So with merely three times the memory in his phone, I can run a *very* heavy desktop load without any memory issues. And if I close Firefox, my entire load can fit inside 4GB, so maybe twice the memory in his phone is more accurate. Since I've yet to want to run more than two programs at once on my phone, I can't exactly see 2GB being excessive for a phone.
The issue they're trying to solve isn't "how do we make more powerful phones?", it's "how can we lower power usage without sacrificing power?".
If you try to improve performance the same way desktops did (higher clocks, great gobs of cache, and more execution units inside the core), you'd raise performance, but you'd also massively increase your power draw without giving you an easy way to lower it when it's not in use. Underclocking only gets you so far - ideally, you'd need to be able to shut down execution units, or even some of your cache.
With this number of cores, you can shut down entire cores while you idle, which is much simpler to manage. Sitting in your pocket, this thing would only be running on a core or two.
I can see what Intel is thinking. It's a solid hardware idea, but it requires a massive shift in software that doesn't seem likely. Much like Itanium, in retrospect.
If people can get all they want out of a headline and a paragraph, maybe you should focus on making the article have more *content* and less fluff.
Why not x86-64 and ARMv8 on the same *core*?
Every x86 chip on the market is some secret, internal RISC design with an x86 translator in front of it. I do not believe it would be terribly difficult to redesign the translator unit to accept ARM code as well, although getting it to perform as well as x86 does may be challenging. With a decent design and some clever firmware, you could probably make it boot as either ARM or x86 depending only on a BIOS setting, and change cores on the fly.
I've been in VA for about two decades now (central VA - Chesterfield and Richmond). Pretty much every year or two, there's a hurricane that knocks out power for a few days.
The worst was Hurricane Isabel. After that, I didn't have mains power for a month (thank god for generators). Schools were closed for weeks. Four different trees - big trees, three stories high - fell over just in my yard, and that got off pretty light compared to some of my neighbors. Last year, Irene knocked out power for five days.
So yeah, right now Sandy doesn't seem to be doing much to Virginia (just some light rain), but the forecasts weren't really putting it towards Virginia anyways - it was expected to hit further north, up by New Jersey. But one can hardly say that Virginia never gets hit hard by hurricanes.
You missed the joke.
Pro-tip: It's spelled "Pakistan", not "Pakastan".