How do you make silicon? On earth, we reduce silicon dioxide at high temperatures in the presence of carbon and produce more or less pure silicon and carbon monoxide. Additional processes are required to purify the silicon enough to make PV cells.
So you need quite a bit of carbon to make pure silicon metal from silicon dioxide. Very little carbon is available on the moon. So you either need to import a lot of carbon to the moon (there go your cost savings on launch costs) or you need to invent a new process for refining silicon from silica.
Well, there are obviously computer systems on the old Voyager probes, which I believe are still in communications with NASA. The earlier Pioneer probes might still be too.
Although my bet is there is an old PDP-8 somewhere that is still in use.
(6) You could torture people with such a device without leaving any (or at least very much) physical evidence. (7) Someone will figure out how to directly stimulate the pleasure centers of the brain with such a device. That will make meth look like high school kids drinking bad beer on Saturday night.
Hate to break it to you guys, but the GPS will more reliably find you an optimum route than you can find yourself. That is because the GPS "knows" more than you do: current traffic conditions, road closures, etc. I know people pooh pooh GPS directions and say "I know a faster way" but they really don't 90% of the time.
Except when it doesn't. Try using a TomTom to go from Portland, ME to Boston-Logan Airport. I just ignored the damned thing and went down I-95 to I-90 and headed east on 90. If I would have listened to the damned thing I would have been on a death crawl along highway 1.
I've also had a few hilarious incidents in France where navigation directed me into fields and onto private roads that were locked and gated.
You have several masses. They are on *very* tight pieces of piano wire so they only can move along one dimension -- imagine that the piano wire goes through the center of the mass and the mass can slide freely along the wire. If you wiggle one mass up and down along the piano wire, the others masses will wiggle along their piano wires as well. That "wiggling" is caused by gravitational radiation.
You can do the same thing with electrically charged objects to demonstrate electromagnetic radiation. Although given that electromagnetism is so much stronger than gravity, it is much easier to have a classroom demo of this phenomenon.
Like the article said, this could well be a symptom of poor or clueless project management. Duplicate issue reports and low-priority nice-to-have items may be overwhelming actual problems. On the other hand, this could also be a case of software "maturity" where it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to fix any bugs without introducing new ones.
The least bad "solution", as a technical lead or developer, is to abandon the problem tracking system. To politically sell this idea it describe it as a "critical bug tracking system" and make it a simple command-line or email interface that only the lowly code grunts and technical leads will be comfortable with.
Another "solution" is to start closing problems and declaring they cannot be fixed without a redesign of the product.
One thing to remember is that substituting product management with a bug tracking system is seriously lame. We all use software, from web browsers to compilers to editors to source control systems to databases, that has bugs. Each new release of said software will fix some bugs and introduce new ones. Most of the time, for most users, if we had a choice between fixing those bugs and making the product in question ten times as fast or use 10% the memory we'd take one of the latter over the bug fixes. What I'm trying to communicate is that an "issue tracking" system can't usually communicate what customers want or need perfectly.
In most of the USA the amortized cost of rooftop solar is cheaper than grid power, even without the tax break. The problem is that you have to pay for all of that up front, and most people don't have the dinero handy to pull that off. I switched over (or rather switched back, having lived off-grid about 15 years ago) largely because I was pricing a generator system for power backup. A decent propane generator (that could power a well pump, refrigerator, the in-floor heating system, and a few outlets) plus a shack to put it in plus the electronics to seamlessly start the generator were easily twice as expensive as an equivalent setup with solar panels. That isn't even counting the cost of propane and maintenance on the generator.
You might argue that the generator would work at night. I'd point out that no one in their right mind would run a generator 24 hours per day if they had any choice about it.
... in Silicon Valley is that there is an axis amongst venture capitalists and M&A people. A surprising number of senior M&A people are also investors or even partners of VC firms. So when a company turns out to be a dog the VC people have a way to get their money back, the founders get themselves a new job at the acquiring company, and everyone else gets screwed.
To me it is shocking that a hedge fund guy is just figuring it out. It probably has been going on in one form or another for over forty years. And no, as far as I know it isn't even illegal.
That's great except that about eighty percent of the energy from the deuterium-tritium reaction is kinetic energy of the resulting neutron, and MHD won't let you gather energy from a neutron. Capturing the neutron's energy is further complicated by the fact that the neutron is produced isotropically, and that you need to breed more tritium with that neutron before or after you heat water or some other working fluid.
So there is a sophisticated ecosystem of criminals and undercover cops that exists because credit card transactions are insecure. Make credit card transactions secure using cryptography available in 1980 and it all goes away.
Nearly all cryptography in use in 1980 would be trivially breakable from even a brute-force attack today.
We humans are very poor at building secure systems. We don't really have any theoretical basis for building cryptographic algorithms. The methodology used is basically propose some idea and if enough people look at it and can't compromise it generally after a few years we figure it is good to go. In practice what happens with most public-key systems is that some special cases are discovered where the system is easily breakable. This translates into an ever-growing stop list of mathematical properties to search at key generation time. Note that won't help you if you generated your key thee years ago and you are unlucky.
The fun really begins when we implement systems using cryptography. Think about the guy in the cubicle down the hall. The one you'd never trust with sharp objects. The one who can't debug his way out of a paper bag. That's the guy who will implement the major security holes in your product. And you only need one. Given some of the boneheaded stuff I have seen (e.g. cleartext left laying around where it is easily located, "key generators" for 128-bit session keys that only have around 16 bits of entropy, &c) I really don't believe we humans are smart enough for this.
And that is just the stupid and incompetent. What about the smart and lazy person on deadline? What about someone genuinely malicious implementing something "secure" that you depend on?
I'd recommend buying a tinfoil hat and hoping for the best.
One common element I've seen is that the newly settled worlds are an expanding frontier of plentiful resources where most people live in luxury - but Earth itsself has become an overpopulated resource-deprived pollution-stricken hell. Mined-out and over-exploited.
That sort of makes sense.
My point is that if you compare the energy costs of sending million-ton cargos through interstellar space, even a tiny fraction of said energy would let you efficiently mine most of the elements you could possibly need from seawater, much less from beach sand or asteroids. Unless you postulate some vanishingly rare material that is essential to your interstellar economy (e.g. Spice in Dune, DiLithium in the Star Trek universe) it is hard to imagine interstellar mining ever making sense.
One is any sci-fi story set more than a few centuries in the future that doesn't have strong AI without a damned good political or technical explanation of why not.
Another is any interstellar economy where it makes sense to ship raw materials between stars. It is hard to imagine how you'd get a habitable planet without iron. In general, if you have enough heavy elements to make a decent planet in the first place nearly all of the useful ones would likely be more or less available. Unless your story line postulates that interstellar travel is insanely cheap or that mining equipment is insanely expensive, and tells me why, this one is always an eye-roller.
Another is also economic. Even the poorest people in halfway decent societies today have access to far better health care, diet, and fancy toys than even the richest and most powerful people of a century ago. It is hard to imagine a bright shiny future with interstellar spacecraft, compact fusion reactors, and strong AI where that would not be even more true. So again if that is not the case in your story you need to give me a convincing explanation as to why that is so.
Fusion could produce power 24/365 while most renewables only produce power when the sun shines or the wind blows.
But yeah, aside from that they're basically the same.
Of course, we don't know how to build a commercial fusion plant. So there is no way of knowing how reliable they will be.
We do know that commercial fission plants do not achieve 100 percent reliability. In all probability a fusion plant will be a much more complex beast, so it is exceedingly unlikely that a hypothetical fusion plant would be more reliable than an existing fission plant.
One thing about renewables, while it is true that they do not produce power one hundred percent of the time, due to more or less accurate weather forecasting we can do a very good job knowing how much power they will produce in the next 24 hours, and (for different reasons) both solar and wind are much less likely to suffer the catastrophic mechanical failures that can take an entire fission plant off-line with very little notice. Given how much more complex a hypothetical fusion plant is likely to be, it is reasonable to assume that they will be less reliable than an existing fission plant.
Well it is always going to be 30 years away at the current level of funding.
Right now US funding for fusion power (mostly our share of ITER and NIF) is an order of magnitude higher than our funding for battery research. Given that even in the most widely optimistic case, the ITER or NIF paths to commercial fusion won't produce commercial power before 2050, one has to wonder if taking away a little bit from fusion research and giving it to research for batteries and renewables might be a better use of limited resources.
It is worse than that. "Zero-knowledge proofs" is a specific term of art in the encryption field that has a specific meaning. It doesn't have anything to do with encrypting Android or IOS phones, as far as I know.
So you're going to build things made of gold in space? Good luck with that.
Seriously, mining for gold in space is probably going to be a lot less cost-effective than mining for gold in your front yard. Asteroids and the moon are too small to have the geological processes that formed ores on Earth and Mars. While mining asteroids or the moon for water and possibly iron and silicon might well make sense, it doesn't seem likely that it would ever be a particularly efficient way to acquire precious metals or rare earth elements.
It isn't always necessarily tedious and mind-numbing work that can be easily automated.
I can think of two obvious examples of high-skill jobs that are being automated as we speak. One is document discovery in the law profession, formerly done by lawyers and paralegals and now much more often done by software. Another is interpretation of X-rays and other medical images done by doctors.
On the other side, it will be a very long time before we have a robot who can clean an occupied hotel room.
The challenge is that the increasing automation is likely to happen so damned fast that it is unlikely new jobs and new classes of jobs are going to appear quickly enough to make sure people can still pay their mortgages.
Think about requirements. The requirements for a bridge or an airplane or a retaining wall are much, much, much simpler than even the simplest pieces of software. Until the things you build have well-defined parts that interact with other things in well-defined ways you can't be engineering them.
Most of the time, with software, we are doing something else. Not engineering. When I am developing software I usually end up debugging requirements ninety percent of the time.
There are some exceptions. If you are writing a compiler, an operating system, or a database most of what you are building is pretty well defined. You know it would be crazy to add a system that printed greeting cards to your compiler. You also know what the basic parts are of your compiler (pretty much independent of language) and how they interact. Since your compiler is implementing a specific programming language that doesn't change that rapidly you can probably find a well-defined test suite that will verify that your compiler more or less works correctly.
Ummm, I want to mod the parent up for "straw man".
I never said the earth was a sphere. Also, I wonder since you consider the germ theory of disease invalid, do you subscribe to bloodletting to release malignant humors or to exorcism of evil spirits when you are sick?
All of those assertions I made, to a certain level of approximation, are correct. Science is really the stepwise refinement of our model(s) of the universe.
From the standpoint of AGW, the assertion that atmospheric CO2 warms the planet is true (ref: Arrhenius, Venus). The assertion that the observed increase in CO2 over the last 150 years ago due to the burning of fossil fuels is held up by observations of C-14 concentrations in the atmosphere. The assertion that the planet has warmed during that timeframe comes from several observations, but I think the most reliable ones are when trees green up in Spring and when the fall colors turn in Fall -- Spring is springing earlier and Fall is falling later. Also nearly 99 percent of temperate and tropical glaciers are receding. Both of those observations are better proxies for "climate" than annual mean temperature. This is all very basic chemistry and physics and should be reasonably familiar to anyone who took freshman-level science classes at university. So I (and a lot of climate scientists, apparently) think that fossil fuel combustion and some other industrial activities are increasing the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, which is warming the planet.
Where there is quite a bit of room for debate is over how much warming we are likely to experience, how rapidly, and how quickly CO2 concentrations will fall when we eventually stop burning fossil fuels.
So while there may be some hysteria, I damned well would be hysteric if my drinking water suddenly became flammable.
In fairness, it isn't the fracking process that is directly causing the earthquake problem here -- it is disposing of the wastewater in certain deep wells that is causing the earthquake activity. I read somewhere that ninety percent of the earthquake activity is associated with less than ten percent of the wells, which tells me that if we are able to choose which wells we use for wastewater injection we can substantially solve this problem.
Slashdot Mirror
It is actually worse.
How do you make silicon? On earth, we reduce silicon dioxide at high temperatures in the presence of carbon and produce more or less pure silicon and carbon monoxide. Additional processes are required to purify the silicon enough to make PV cells.
Ref: http://www.madehow.com/Volume-...
So you need quite a bit of carbon to make pure silicon metal from silicon dioxide. Very little carbon is available on the moon. So you either need to import a lot of carbon to the moon (there go your cost savings on launch costs) or you need to invent a new process for refining silicon from silica.
So no, it won't work.
Well, there are obviously computer systems on the old Voyager probes, which I believe are still in communications with NASA. The earlier Pioneer probes might still be too.
Although my bet is there is an old PDP-8 somewhere that is still in use.
(6) You could torture people with such a device without leaving any (or at least very much) physical evidence.
(7) Someone will figure out how to directly stimulate the pleasure centers of the brain with such a device. That will make meth look like high school kids drinking bad beer on Saturday night.
Hate to break it to you guys, but the GPS will more reliably find you an optimum route than you can find yourself. That is because the GPS "knows" more than you do: current traffic conditions, road closures, etc. I know people pooh pooh GPS directions and say "I know a faster way" but they really don't 90% of the time.
Except when it doesn't. Try using a TomTom to go from Portland, ME to Boston-Logan Airport. I just ignored the damned thing and went down I-95 to I-90 and headed east on 90. If I would have listened to the damned thing I would have been on a death crawl along highway 1.
I've also had a few hilarious incidents in France where navigation directed me into fields and onto private roads that were locked and gated.
Here's an easy though experiment.
You have several masses. They are on *very* tight pieces of piano wire so they only can move along one dimension -- imagine that the piano wire goes through the center of the mass and the mass can slide freely along the wire. If you wiggle one mass up and down along the piano wire, the others masses will wiggle along their piano wires as well. That "wiggling" is caused by gravitational radiation.
You can do the same thing with electrically charged objects to demonstrate electromagnetic radiation. Although given that electromagnetism is so much stronger than gravity, it is much easier to have a classroom demo of this phenomenon.
Like the article said, this could well be a symptom of poor or clueless project management. Duplicate issue reports and low-priority nice-to-have items may be overwhelming actual problems. On the other hand, this could also be a case of software "maturity" where it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to fix any bugs without introducing new ones.
The least bad "solution", as a technical lead or developer, is to abandon the problem tracking system. To politically sell this idea it describe it as a "critical bug tracking system" and make it a simple command-line or email interface that only the lowly code grunts and technical leads will be comfortable with.
Another "solution" is to start closing problems and declaring they cannot be fixed without a redesign of the product.
One thing to remember is that substituting product management with a bug tracking system is seriously lame. We all use software, from web browsers to compilers to editors to source control systems to databases, that has bugs. Each new release of said software will fix some bugs and introduce new ones. Most of the time, for most users, if we had a choice between fixing those bugs and making the product in question ten times as fast or use 10% the memory we'd take one of the latter over the bug fixes. What I'm trying to communicate is that an "issue tracking" system can't usually communicate what customers want or need perfectly.
This.
In most of the USA the amortized cost of rooftop solar is cheaper than grid power, even without the tax break. The problem is that you have to pay for all of that up front, and most people don't have the dinero handy to pull that off. I switched over (or rather switched back, having lived off-grid about 15 years ago) largely because I was pricing a generator system for power backup. A decent propane generator (that could power a well pump, refrigerator, the in-floor heating system, and a few outlets) plus a shack to put it in plus the electronics to seamlessly start the generator were easily twice as expensive as an equivalent setup with solar panels. That isn't even counting the cost of propane and maintenance on the generator.
You might argue that the generator would work at night. I'd point out that no one in their right mind would run a generator 24 hours per day if they had any choice about it.
... in Silicon Valley is that there is an axis amongst venture capitalists and M&A people. A surprising number of senior M&A people are also investors or even partners of VC firms. So when a company turns out to be a dog the VC people have a way to get their money back, the founders get themselves a new job at the acquiring company, and everyone else gets screwed.
To me it is shocking that a hedge fund guy is just figuring it out. It probably has been going on in one form or another for over forty years. And no, as far as I know it isn't even illegal.
That's great except that about eighty percent of the energy from the deuterium-tritium reaction is kinetic energy of the resulting neutron, and MHD won't let you gather energy from a neutron. Capturing the neutron's energy is further complicated by the fact that the neutron is produced isotropically, and that you need to breed more tritium with that neutron before or after you heat water or some other working fluid.
So there is a sophisticated ecosystem of criminals and undercover cops that exists because credit card transactions are insecure. Make credit card transactions secure using cryptography available in 1980 and it all goes away.
Nearly all cryptography in use in 1980 would be trivially breakable from even a brute-force attack today.
We humans are very poor at building secure systems. We don't really have any theoretical basis for building cryptographic algorithms. The methodology used is basically propose some idea and if enough people look at it and can't compromise it generally after a few years we figure it is good to go. In practice what happens with most public-key systems is that some special cases are discovered where the system is easily breakable. This translates into an ever-growing stop list of mathematical properties to search at key generation time. Note that won't help you if you generated your key thee years ago and you are unlucky.
The fun really begins when we implement systems using cryptography. Think about the guy in the cubicle down the hall. The one you'd never trust with sharp objects. The one who can't debug his way out of a paper bag. That's the guy who will implement the major security holes in your product. And you only need one. Given some of the boneheaded stuff I have seen (e.g. cleartext left laying around where it is easily located, "key generators" for 128-bit session keys that only have around 16 bits of entropy, &c) I really don't believe we humans are smart enough for this.
And that is just the stupid and incompetent. What about the smart and lazy person on deadline? What about someone genuinely malicious implementing something "secure" that you depend on?
I'd recommend buying a tinfoil hat and hoping for the best.
I don't see how this is different from the past where most programmers "coded" in RPG, or in Delphi, or in Powerbuilder, or in MS Access.
One common element I've seen is that the newly settled worlds are an expanding frontier of plentiful resources where most people live in luxury - but Earth itsself has become an overpopulated resource-deprived pollution-stricken hell. Mined-out and over-exploited.
That sort of makes sense.
My point is that if you compare the energy costs of sending million-ton cargos through interstellar space, even a tiny fraction of said energy would let you efficiently mine most of the elements you could possibly need from seawater, much less from beach sand or asteroids. Unless you postulate some vanishingly rare material that is essential to your interstellar economy (e.g. Spice in Dune, DiLithium in the Star Trek universe) it is hard to imagine interstellar mining ever making sense.
One is any sci-fi story set more than a few centuries in the future that doesn't have strong AI without a damned good political or technical explanation of why not.
Another is any interstellar economy where it makes sense to ship raw materials between stars. It is hard to imagine how you'd get a habitable planet without iron. In general, if you have enough heavy elements to make a decent planet in the first place nearly all of the useful ones would likely be more or less available. Unless your story line postulates that interstellar travel is insanely cheap or that mining equipment is insanely expensive, and tells me why, this one is always an eye-roller.
Another is also economic. Even the poorest people in halfway decent societies today have access to far better health care, diet, and fancy toys than even the richest and most powerful people of a century ago. It is hard to imagine a bright shiny future with interstellar spacecraft, compact fusion reactors, and strong AI where that would not be even more true. So again if that is not the case in your story you need to give me a convincing explanation as to why that is so.
When you RTFA it says the proposal has been referred to the City Attorney.
So the City Attorney will write back that this is a Stupid Idea. Said idea is circular filed and life goes on.
Fusion could produce power 24/365 while most renewables only produce power when the sun shines or the wind blows.
But yeah, aside from that they're basically the same.
Of course, we don't know how to build a commercial fusion plant. So there is no way of knowing how reliable they will be.
We do know that commercial fission plants do not achieve 100 percent reliability. In all probability a fusion plant will be a much more complex beast, so it is exceedingly unlikely that a hypothetical fusion plant would be more reliable than an existing fission plant.
One thing about renewables, while it is true that they do not produce power one hundred percent of the time, due to more or less accurate weather forecasting we can do a very good job knowing how much power they will produce in the next 24 hours, and (for different reasons) both solar and wind are much less likely to suffer the catastrophic mechanical failures that can take an entire fission plant off-line with very little notice. Given how much more complex a hypothetical fusion plant is likely to be, it is reasonable to assume that they will be less reliable than an existing fission plant.
Well it is always going to be 30 years away at the current level of funding.
Right now US funding for fusion power (mostly our share of ITER and NIF) is an order of magnitude higher than our funding for battery research. Given that even in the most widely optimistic case, the ITER or NIF paths to commercial fusion won't produce commercial power before 2050, one has to wonder if taking away a little bit from fusion research and giving it to research for batteries and renewables might be a better use of limited resources.
I stand corrected, it turns out that marketroids have already polluted this term.
It is worse than that. "Zero-knowledge proofs" is a specific term of art in the encryption field that has a specific meaning. It doesn't have anything to do with encrypting Android or IOS phones, as far as I know.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Someone had too many buzzwords with their coffee, I think.
So you're going to build things made of gold in space? Good luck with that.
Seriously, mining for gold in space is probably going to be a lot less cost-effective than mining for gold in your front yard. Asteroids and the moon are too small to have the geological processes that formed ores on Earth and Mars. While mining asteroids or the moon for water and possibly iron and silicon might well make sense, it doesn't seem likely that it would ever be a particularly efficient way to acquire precious metals or rare earth elements.
It isn't always necessarily tedious and mind-numbing work that can be easily automated.
I can think of two obvious examples of high-skill jobs that are being automated as we speak. One is document discovery in the law profession, formerly done by lawyers and paralegals and now much more often done by software. Another is interpretation of X-rays and other medical images done by doctors.
On the other side, it will be a very long time before we have a robot who can clean an occupied hotel room.
The challenge is that the increasing automation is likely to happen so damned fast that it is unlikely new jobs and new classes of jobs are going to appear quickly enough to make sure people can still pay their mortgages.
Think about requirements. The requirements for a bridge or an airplane or a retaining wall are much, much, much simpler than even the simplest pieces of software. Until the things you build have well-defined parts that interact with other things in well-defined ways you can't be engineering them.
Most of the time, with software, we are doing something else. Not engineering. When I am developing software I usually end up debugging requirements ninety percent of the time.
There are some exceptions. If you are writing a compiler, an operating system, or a database most of what you are building is pretty well defined. You know it would be crazy to add a system that printed greeting cards to your compiler. You also know what the basic parts are of your compiler (pretty much independent of language) and how they interact. Since your compiler is implementing a specific programming language that doesn't change that rapidly you can probably find a well-defined test suite that will verify that your compiler more or less works correctly.
Ummm, I want to mod the parent up for "straw man".
I never said the earth was a sphere. Also, I wonder since you consider the germ theory of disease invalid, do you subscribe to bloodletting to release malignant humors or to exorcism of evil spirits when you are sick?
All of those assertions I made, to a certain level of approximation, are correct. Science is really the stepwise refinement of our model(s) of the universe.
From the standpoint of AGW, the assertion that atmospheric CO2 warms the planet is true (ref: Arrhenius, Venus). The assertion that the observed increase in CO2 over the last 150 years ago due to the burning of fossil fuels is held up by observations of C-14 concentrations in the atmosphere. The assertion that the planet has warmed during that timeframe comes from several observations, but I think the most reliable ones are when trees green up in Spring and when the fall colors turn in Fall -- Spring is springing earlier and Fall is falling later. Also nearly 99 percent of temperate and tropical glaciers are receding. Both of those observations are better proxies for "climate" than annual mean temperature. This is all very basic chemistry and physics and should be reasonably familiar to anyone who took freshman-level science classes at university. So I (and a lot of climate scientists, apparently) think that fossil fuel combustion and some other industrial activities are increasing the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, which is warming the planet.
Where there is quite a bit of room for debate is over how much warming we are likely to experience, how rapidly, and how quickly CO2 concentrations will fall when we eventually stop burning fossil fuels.
In science, the only things that are "settled" are things that have been unequivocally disproven.
Okay, so things like:
Smoking tobacco increases your risk of lung cancer.
The HIV virus causes AIDS.
Many diseases are caused by microorganisms.
The Earth is round.
Most plants produce sugars via photosynthesis.
Are not "settled"?
SSL isn't a good example of a protocol done right by amateurs.
The fact that SSL didn't generate a barrage of FUD from certain three-letter agencies is the surest sign that SSL sucks butt.
Ref: https://weakdh.org/imperfect-f...
(oh, and I find it hilarious that the above is in an https link).
Except if you live near oil producing areas using fracking and suddenly your well water becomes flammable:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...
http://ecowatch.com/2013/11/07...
So while there may be some hysteria, I damned well would be hysteric if my drinking water suddenly became flammable.
In fairness, it isn't the fracking process that is directly causing the earthquake problem here -- it is disposing of the wastewater in certain deep wells that is causing the earthquake activity. I read somewhere that ninety percent of the earthquake activity is associated with less than ten percent of the wells, which tells me that if we are able to choose which wells we use for wastewater injection we can substantially solve this problem.
Ohio has had a similar, if less serious, problem:
http://www.livescience.com/493...
For all that, this whole story sounds like we are watching a classic disaster movie unfold.