Almost eradicated on 4 November 2009 as the result of community action to disrupt the botnet, spam from Mega-D fell to approximately 1% of all spam. Mega-D returned on 13 November using a different collection of bots, sending between 4-5% of spam."
So now there can be coordinated effort against the new botnet, he'll come back with new bots, community response to kill that one off...
Fighting spammers is like fighting against a guerilla army. Constant vigilance, swift response times, and, eventually, wholesale destruction of the people supporting the guerillas will be necessary to win the war. Impact of spammers can be reduced by constant counter-attacks, but the only way to eliminate spam networks hosted on compromised machines is to remove compromised machines from the network (and as many compromisable machines as possible).
The cost of this may be too high to be worth it... but if you take away someone's internet access for a while when they get hosed, then maybe they'll stop getting hosed.
I understand there are expensive problems to overcome. But we can bite the bullet now, we can do it later at a much higher cost, or we can live with substandard transportation... I know which one I prefer.
The other reason we'll never see good mass transit in the US is the presence of NIMBYs. They've shot down mass transit initiatives in NJ, Idaho, California, NY, and many other states. There are some cases where it sure would be nice to have dictatorial powers:)
Now, what country does NOT have ANY major dealings with these criminal nations? America. There are a few companies still in involved with Iran, but only on very small scale.
That's a crock. Those nations are "criminal" nations because we do not do business with them. It's intellectually easy to paint those nations as criminals and enemies, when we have contributed to their situation. You think they'd view America as an enemy if we weren't busy fucking around with their governments over the past 50-60+ years?
If you want to fucking grip about a nation, at least have your GD facts right.
If you want to gripe about a nation, at least have your GD definitions right. What you consider a "criminal" nation is not fact, it is your opinion (that lacks substantiation). What laws are those nations violating that make them criminals? What crime have they committed and been convicted of? By many countries' standards, the US is a "criminal" nation... hell, we imprison far more of our citizens than anyone else, for something that is not a crime in some countries.
as for long distance rail, Amtrak is already unreliable. there is no reason to think that a new high speed train will be reliable and there is no benefit over flying. airports already have the infrastructure like rent a cars and public transportation that will have to be duplicated at a new high speed rail station.
Let's subsidize rail transport at the same rate we subsidize road and air transport, and then we can compare reliability figures.
NJ is probably a poor example, since we have the highest road density in the country, but we spend BILLIONS annually on road transport, and less than 1% of that on rail transport (though the building of the new tunnel across the Hudson will bridge some of the funding gap, pardon the pun).
And as for rental cars, public transportation at airports... that is easily solvable. You can run light rail from the high-speed rail stations to the airports (which would make a lot of sense anyway, to connect all your transport systems). You can even place your high-speed rail station adjacent to your airports.
i also know someone that used to take the Acela from NYC to Boston for work years ago and it took like 3 hours each way. The Delta Shuttle was 1 hour. 90 minutes if you count getting to the airport early. back when we bought a competitor we used to fly to Boston in the morning and come back for dinner. if we took the train it would mean extra expenses in staying at a hotel
Poor example. The Acela is not a high-speed train (maybe in comparison to regular commuter rail service -- but nothing like what is possible if we were willing to build the infrastructure -- a real high-speed train from NY to Boston would be about 60 minutes tops). And NY-to-Boston is not a 90-min trip time via plane (how long to get to the airport instead of getting to Penn Station via mass transit? Do you still plan on arriving only 30 mins before departure time? Good luck in today's airports... 30 mins is almost never enough time when flying out of any of NYC's three major airports.
I don't know why you use old examples for flight times, and examples of existing rail (instead of the high-speed rail being discussed) to make your anecdotal analysis. But I think your blanket negativity on rail transport needs a good looking-over... you might be surprised.
Sigh. Try going from London to Paris by air and by train, and see which one takes longer. Why was that? Oh, yeah...
This is the US, not GB/Europe. Cultural phenomena like security theater are not the same in every region or country.
Keep in mind that Boeing and the other aircraft manufacturers employ a lot of people here, and have a lot of cash that would like to ensure the primacy of air for long-distance travel (plus the long-standing bias against rail transport as a holdover from the robber baron era).
Averaging 217 mph over a distance of 663 miles, supposedly connecting 20 cities... according to TFA, a trip of under three hours...
Just how much time are they allowing for deceleration and acceleration between stops? Or is it pretty much end-to-end with multiple stops near the origin and destination?
Anyway, there's little doubt in my mind that this is overkill, more a demonstration of technical capability and will to spend than anything else. But damn, I'd like to have a network of these in the US to replace our aging and slow rail passenger rail system. At the very least, they are much more energy efficient than air travel.
One picky point with TFA... it suggests that the fast travel times of a high-speed rail network would not come with the security overhead of air travel. I'm not so sure about that.
And decrying the fanboi orgy is turning into an anti-fanboi-orgy orgy. And some people are sure to step in to say there's no problem with idle speculation, and they'll have their anti-anti-fanboi-orgy-orgy orgy. It's recursive!
You know it's a slow news day when blog sites are navel-gazing about the blogger coverage of an unannounced device that may or may not be in pre-production phases.
All I have to say about it is... Meh. When (if) a product gets released, I'll consider how it might meet my needs.
Hand-egg: In American Hand-egg, the majority of the time one is playing, one is holding an egg shaped object.
I still prefer Armored Wankball (and I'm a HUGE American football fan)
No-Hands-Ball: In European No-Hands-Ball, for the majority of the game, you can pretty much make contact with the ball using any part of you that doesn't have fingers. I.e. hands.
I prefer the moniker "Handless Grassdiving". Even though I'm a footie fan.
Spectrolab's cells are nowhere close to cost-effective for consumer (or even business) use on earth. They are a niche product to be used for satellites, other spacecraft, etc. The goal of Spectrolab's cells is to maximize power as a function of mass and volume.
The goal of consumer-grade systems is to maximize power as a function of cost (including maintenance, etc).
Johnson's system (the super-soaker guy) is simply a cell that harnesses a temperature gradient to generate electricity. He claims up to 60% efficiency, but the system requires an operating temp on the high-temp electrode stack of the cell of about 600 degrees C to hit this efficiency, which would require the use of a parabolic mirror setup -- hardly fit for consumer use. In truth, his cell isn't solar at all -- it's more like a special kind of fuel cell.
The problem with using "glitter" as a new standard non-standard measurement is that there is probably already a NSSU for particles of that size. Duplicate functionality. This is in addition to the fact that glitter is of an uncertan size -- I've seen glitter particles nearly a cm square, and I've seen glitter particles in the sub-mm range.
If we are measuring in only one plane (since solar cells are pretty much flat), then the correct unit would be a nanoacre (about 2 mm square).
Having dated and then married a gamer girl, I can say from experience that a non-gamer girl will never...
Oblig. nitpick: if you dated and married a gamer girl, then you CANNOT say from experience what a non-gamer girl will or won't ever do. You'd have to have dated and married a non-gamer girl (actually, all of them) in order to make that blanket statement.
Now that I got that out of my system... my wife (a non-gamer) will wake me at 6 AM for a variety of reasons, occasionally for a very nice reason:). I normally get up at 7 on the weekends, she's up by 5:30. Sometimes I ask her to wake me up at 6 so I can get an hour of gaming in, and she has no problem doing that.
Honestly, I think it's healthy for me that my wife is a non-gamer... because otherwise I'd game far too much. I think it'd be too easy to fall into a routine of hours of gaming nightly if she was going to game along with me (with kids and studying and other hobbies, 2-3 hours a week is my limit).
Although I did have a point -- namely, that without knowing the nature of the emails, there may have been extenuating circumstances involved.
OP was correct, of course, that it was inconsiderate of the emailer to do so in a dark theater.
However, the appropriate response would have been to tap the guy on the shoulder and ask if he wouldn't mind doing his emails in the lobby. It's quite possible he wasn't even aware that he was causing a distraction. The emailer's douchebaggery was no excuse for the OP's douchebaggery in response. The OP's throwing of a soda in response to a minor distraction was way overboard.
The Austrian School of Economics in determining the value of products actually discounts the idea that the value of the end product is somehow connected to the labor expended in producing the product.
Don't attribute that to the Austrian School. That's fundamental to economics of any modern school (Keynesian, Chicago, etc).
The value of a good is simply what people will pay for that good -- no more, no less.
I don't know why you think the Austrian school is special in any way in this regard. Perhaps because you have no exposure to other economic schools of thought? Or never had any kind of formal economic education (like Micro or Macro 101?)
The other evening I was at the movies and got an emergency email from my sister that my dad had a heart attack and was in the hospital (I had turned the ringer off, as I always do when I'm at the movies). THere were a few emails back and forth between her, me, my mother, and my brother coordinating flights, airport pickups, etc, so we could all be there at his side by Christmas.
All of a sudden, some fat stinking asshole douchebag threw a soda at me!
Heaven forbid there is some minor inconvenience to his enjoyment of a movie. I suppose it's fair, since living vicariously through movies is probably his chief joy in life.
Using cold water slows down the brewing process, since the coffee maker heats a small portion of the water at a time. This leads to stronger, slightly more bitter coffee, which I prefer.
To answer your curiosity, it is because existing prior art is not involved with the granting of a patent.
In other words, it doesn't matter if prior art exists or not, in order to get a patent approved.
What? The USPTO would beg to differ. You need to declare any prior art you are aware of [duty of disclosure] or the patent can be invalidated for inequitable conduct.
Furthermore, the patent examiner is *required* to make a search for prior art during the review process.
Please, if you're going to be a slashdot lawyer (IANAL but I play one on Slashdot), do some quick googling before posting absolutely false tripe like that.
Sorry for the much-late response... in case you're still following the conversation:
Intent implies that the motivation for action is the result caused by the action. Willful merely implies that the actor knew of the effect, and processed anyway.
Say I have an argument with you, so I swing a hammer at your head. My intent is to cause damage to you.
Say there is black widow spider on your hair, and it looks like it is going to bite you. I swing the hammer at the spider, and hit you in the head. My intent is to kill the spider, but I willfully caused damage to you as a byproduct, since I knew that would be part of the likely outcome.
Not that I want to bash in your head or anything, it was just the first example that came to mind... please take no offense.
(There are dioxins in the river the mill was built on, but that is from activity that took place 40 and 50 years ago)
Are you sure about that timeframe? Dioxins are still present in paper mill effluent in minor amounts. It was only in the early-to-mid 90s that the EPA even began regulating dioxins from paper mills.
Never mind the methanol, turpenes, and mercaptans (among other toxins).
When I did use paper filters, I used unbleached ones (it's the chlorinated organics that are the biggest toxin from paper mills). But the energy cost, etc, still makes wire mesh filters a better deal.
Full disclosure: I worked on paper mill effluent remediation in the late 90s. My father has worked in the paper industry for his entire career, in the specialty chemical field (for processing, pulp treatments, and specialty coatings).
Except no western companies got any of the oil contracts from Iraq, not even BHP.
What? A consortium led by BP gained the Rumaila oilfield contract in June of this year (CNPC was the other major oil company in that contract). Many of the other oilfields have not yet been offered.
Shell (Dutch) just won the largest contract so far, but American oil companies have been in the mix of bidding.
But your argument is a bit of a red herring anyway... the fact that the US has failed to win major oil money for the American oil companies does not mean that access to the Iraqi oilfields was not a major consideration in the decision to invade Iraq.
and then worrying about the minuscule amount of sustainable wood fiber in the accessory is pretty inane.
It's not the wood fiber that's the issue. It's the chemicals and energy used to produce it. Ever been near/inside a paper mill?
There's an issue of balancing wants with environmental concerns... and if we can easily and cheaply mitigate some of those environmental concerns, then great. Especially for coffee filters -- it's cheaper in the long run to use the wire mesh filter anyway. Yes, the impact of the change by each person is small... but in the aggregrate, huge.
Just when we lost Duke Nukem Forever as the epitome of vaporware, TFA gives us the following:
Yet the GNU Hurd kernel, the ultimate free re-write of the Unix kernel, has languished. Yes, something like it can be used inside of the Linux Debian-Hurd construct, but almost no one does this. The pure kernel, it seems, may never see the light of day. It's the ultimate in free vaporware.
So we can finally put GNU/Hurd up there with the Phantom console* and DNF?
*Note to venture capitalists: if the product name tells you you're being ripped off, maybe you should think twice about investing. If that doesn't make sense to you, perhaps I can send you a prospectus on my new product, Illusion -- it's the Flim-Flam for Web 3.0 Social Networking. We need about 30 million and two years to get the product out. Illusion is going to revolutionize direct revenue streams for social networking sites. Call me!
That which man builds he can build again, and reconstruction is a great economic stimulus.
Broken window fallacy.
Now, I'm not normally one to trot out a canard often (mis)used by the armchair Austrian economists, but it definitely applies here.
We're far better off spending cash as a "stimulus" on building new infrastructure, extending capabilities, than in replacing destroyed infrastructure. I use the term "infrastructure" broadly here -- pollution-prevention or remediation efforts should be included as infrastructure, IMO, since they are required for sustainable economic activity.
Besides which I'd just like to note that rebuilding a coastal city is probably a little more expensive, and time-consuming, than you might imagine. You have to remember that the economic activity in the city has practically stopped, and will only grow slowly, post-cataclysmic event, until the infrastructure is rebuilt. Who'll pay for the rebuilding? How much will that hamper their own economic activity?
Slashdot Mirror
So now there can be coordinated effort against the new botnet, he'll come back with new bots, community response to kill that one off...
Fighting spammers is like fighting against a guerilla army. Constant vigilance, swift response times, and, eventually, wholesale destruction of the people supporting the guerillas will be necessary to win the war. Impact of spammers can be reduced by constant counter-attacks, but the only way to eliminate spam networks hosted on compromised machines is to remove compromised machines from the network (and as many compromisable machines as possible).
The cost of this may be too high to be worth it... but if you take away someone's internet access for a while when they get hosed, then maybe they'll stop getting hosed.
I understand there are expensive problems to overcome. But we can bite the bullet now, we can do it later at a much higher cost, or we can live with substandard transportation... I know which one I prefer.
:)
The other reason we'll never see good mass transit in the US is the presence of NIMBYs. They've shot down mass transit initiatives in NJ, Idaho, California, NY, and many other states. There are some cases where it sure would be nice to have dictatorial powers
That's a crock. Those nations are "criminal" nations because we do not do business with them. It's intellectually easy to paint those nations as criminals and enemies, when we have contributed to their situation. You think they'd view America as an enemy if we weren't busy fucking around with their governments over the past 50-60+ years?
If you want to gripe about a nation, at least have your GD definitions right. What you consider a "criminal" nation is not fact, it is your opinion (that lacks substantiation). What laws are those nations violating that make them criminals? What crime have they committed and been convicted of? By many countries' standards, the US is a "criminal" nation... hell, we imprison far more of our citizens than anyone else, for something that is not a crime in some countries.
Let's subsidize rail transport at the same rate we subsidize road and air transport, and then we can compare reliability figures.
NJ is probably a poor example, since we have the highest road density in the country, but we spend BILLIONS annually on road transport, and less than 1% of that on rail transport (though the building of the new tunnel across the Hudson will bridge some of the funding gap, pardon the pun).
And as for rental cars, public transportation at airports... that is easily solvable. You can run light rail from the high-speed rail stations to the airports (which would make a lot of sense anyway, to connect all your transport systems). You can even place your high-speed rail station adjacent to your airports.
Poor example. The Acela is not a high-speed train (maybe in comparison to regular commuter rail service -- but nothing like what is possible if we were willing to build the infrastructure -- a real high-speed train from NY to Boston would be about 60 minutes tops). And NY-to-Boston is not a 90-min trip time via plane (how long to get to the airport instead of getting to Penn Station via mass transit? Do you still plan on arriving only 30 mins before departure time? Good luck in today's airports... 30 mins is almost never enough time when flying out of any of NYC's three major airports.
I don't know why you use old examples for flight times, and examples of existing rail (instead of the high-speed rail being discussed) to make your anecdotal analysis. But I think your blanket negativity on rail transport needs a good looking-over... you might be surprised.
This is the US, not GB/Europe. Cultural phenomena like security theater are not the same in every region or country.
Keep in mind that Boeing and the other aircraft manufacturers employ a lot of people here, and have a lot of cash that would like to ensure the primacy of air for long-distance travel (plus the long-standing bias against rail transport as a holdover from the robber baron era).
Averaging 217 mph over a distance of 663 miles, supposedly connecting 20 cities... according to TFA, a trip of under three hours...
Just how much time are they allowing for deceleration and acceleration between stops? Or is it pretty much end-to-end with multiple stops near the origin and destination?
Anyway, there's little doubt in my mind that this is overkill, more a demonstration of technical capability and will to spend than anything else. But damn, I'd like to have a network of these in the US to replace our aging and slow rail passenger rail system. At the very least, they are much more energy efficient than air travel.
One picky point with TFA... it suggests that the fast travel times of a high-speed rail network would not come with the security overhead of air travel. I'm not so sure about that.
And decrying the fanboi orgy is turning into an anti-fanboi-orgy orgy. And some people are sure to step in to say there's no problem with idle speculation, and they'll have their anti-anti-fanboi-orgy-orgy orgy. It's recursive!
You know it's a slow news day when blog sites are navel-gazing about the blogger coverage of an unannounced device that may or may not be in pre-production phases.
All I have to say about it is... Meh. When (if) a product gets released, I'll consider how it might meet my needs.
I still prefer Armored Wankball (and I'm a HUGE American football fan)
I prefer the moniker "Handless Grassdiving". Even though I'm a footie fan.
Spectrolab's cells are nowhere close to cost-effective for consumer (or even business) use on earth. They are a niche product to be used for satellites, other spacecraft, etc. The goal of Spectrolab's cells is to maximize power as a function of mass and volume.
The goal of consumer-grade systems is to maximize power as a function of cost (including maintenance, etc).
Johnson's system (the super-soaker guy) is simply a cell that harnesses a temperature gradient to generate electricity. He claims up to 60% efficiency, but the system requires an operating temp on the high-temp electrode stack of the cell of about 600 degrees C to hit this efficiency, which would require the use of a parabolic mirror setup -- hardly fit for consumer use. In truth, his cell isn't solar at all -- it's more like a special kind of fuel cell.
The problem with using "glitter" as a new standard non-standard measurement is that there is probably already a NSSU for particles of that size. Duplicate functionality. This is in addition to the fact that glitter is of an uncertan size -- I've seen glitter particles nearly a cm square, and I've seen glitter particles in the sub-mm range.
If we are measuring in only one plane (since solar cells are pretty much flat), then the correct unit would be a nanoacre (about 2 mm square).
While you're in there, can you say "hi" to Tom Cruise for us?
Up until now we have all known that trench-coat ninjas > glitter vampires > eye-liner pirates.
Does this invention change this? Will glitter vampires now be able to overpower both eye-liner pirates and trench-coat ninjas?
Or does the "solar" aspect of these tiny solar cells make them useless, even deadly, to glitter vampires?
Also, can someone please explain where heroin-chic werewolves fit into the hierarchy? I'm having trouble placing them.
These are the questions that wake me in the middle of the night, sweating and with racing heart.
Oblig. nitpick: if you dated and married a gamer girl, then you CANNOT say from experience what a non-gamer girl will or won't ever do. You'd have to have dated and married a non-gamer girl (actually, all of them) in order to make that blanket statement.
:). I normally get up at 7 on the weekends, she's up by 5:30. Sometimes I ask her to wake me up at 6 so I can get an hour of gaming in, and she has no problem doing that.
Now that I got that out of my system... my wife (a non-gamer) will wake me at 6 AM for a variety of reasons, occasionally for a very nice reason
Honestly, I think it's healthy for me that my wife is a non-gamer... because otherwise I'd game far too much. I think it'd be too easy to fall into a routine of hours of gaming nightly if she was going to game along with me (with kids and studying and other hobbies, 2-3 hours a week is my limit).
It was a joke (albeit poorly done).
Although I did have a point -- namely, that without knowing the nature of the emails, there may have been extenuating circumstances involved.
OP was correct, of course, that it was inconsiderate of the emailer to do so in a dark theater.
However, the appropriate response would have been to tap the guy on the shoulder and ask if he wouldn't mind doing his emails in the lobby. It's quite possible he wasn't even aware that he was causing a distraction. The emailer's douchebaggery was no excuse for the OP's douchebaggery in response. The OP's throwing of a soda in response to a minor distraction was way overboard.
Don't attribute that to the Austrian School. That's fundamental to economics of any modern school (Keynesian, Chicago, etc).
The value of a good is simply what people will pay for that good -- no more, no less.
I don't know why you think the Austrian school is special in any way in this regard. Perhaps because you have no exposure to other economic schools of thought? Or never had any kind of formal economic education (like Micro or Macro 101?)
That's nothing on the douchebaggery.
The other evening I was at the movies and got an emergency email from my sister that my dad had a heart attack and was in the hospital (I had turned the ringer off, as I always do when I'm at the movies). THere were a few emails back and forth between her, me, my mother, and my brother coordinating flights, airport pickups, etc, so we could all be there at his side by Christmas.
All of a sudden, some fat stinking asshole douchebag threw a soda at me!
Heaven forbid there is some minor inconvenience to his enjoyment of a movie. I suppose it's fair, since living vicariously through movies is probably his chief joy in life.
Using cold water slows down the brewing process, since the coffee maker heats a small portion of the water at a time. This leads to stronger, slightly more bitter coffee, which I prefer.
HOWEVER, the patent examiner is required to search for prior art. Whether or not they do so assiduously is a different story...
Are you sure about that? Really, really sure? Are are you stating some wishful thinking as truth?
Several patents have been invalidated via demonstration of prior art after the patent was issued. See In re Peterson (2003) for an example.
What? The USPTO would beg to differ. You need to declare any prior art you are aware of [duty of disclosure] or the patent can be invalidated for inequitable conduct.
Furthermore, the patent examiner is *required* to make a search for prior art during the review process.
Please, if you're going to be a slashdot lawyer (IANAL but I play one on Slashdot), do some quick googling before posting absolutely false tripe like that.
Sorry for the much-late response... in case you're still following the conversation:
Intent implies that the motivation for action is the result caused by the action. Willful merely implies that the actor knew of the effect, and processed anyway.
Say I have an argument with you, so I swing a hammer at your head. My intent is to cause damage to you.
Say there is black widow spider on your hair, and it looks like it is going to bite you. I swing the hammer at the spider, and hit you in the head. My intent is to kill the spider, but I willfully caused damage to you as a byproduct, since I knew that would be part of the likely outcome.
Not that I want to bash in your head or anything, it was just the first example that came to mind... please take no offense.
Are you sure about that timeframe? Dioxins are still present in paper mill effluent in minor amounts. It was only in the early-to-mid 90s that the EPA even began regulating dioxins from paper mills.
Never mind the methanol, turpenes, and mercaptans (among other toxins).
When I did use paper filters, I used unbleached ones (it's the chlorinated organics that are the biggest toxin from paper mills). But the energy cost, etc, still makes wire mesh filters a better deal.
Full disclosure: I worked on paper mill effluent remediation in the late 90s. My father has worked in the paper industry for his entire career, in the specialty chemical field (for processing, pulp treatments, and specialty coatings).
What? A consortium led by BP gained the Rumaila oilfield contract in June of this year (CNPC was the other major oil company in that contract). Many of the other oilfields have not yet been offered.
Shell (Dutch) just won the largest contract so far, but American oil companies have been in the mix of bidding.
But your argument is a bit of a red herring anyway... the fact that the US has failed to win major oil money for the American oil companies does not mean that access to the Iraqi oilfields was not a major consideration in the decision to invade Iraq.
Here's some reading for you.
It's not the wood fiber that's the issue. It's the chemicals and energy used to produce it. Ever been near/inside a paper mill?
There's an issue of balancing wants with environmental concerns... and if we can easily and cheaply mitigate some of those environmental concerns, then great. Especially for coffee filters -- it's cheaper in the long run to use the wire mesh filter anyway. Yes, the impact of the change by each person is small... but in the aggregrate, huge.
So we can finally put GNU/Hurd up there with the Phantom console* and DNF?
*Note to venture capitalists: if the product name tells you you're being ripped off, maybe you should think twice about investing. If that doesn't make sense to you, perhaps I can send you a prospectus on my new product, Illusion -- it's the Flim-Flam for Web 3.0 Social Networking. We need about 30 million and two years to get the product out. Illusion is going to revolutionize direct revenue streams for social networking sites. Call me!
Broken window fallacy.
Now, I'm not normally one to trot out a canard often (mis)used by the armchair Austrian economists, but it definitely applies here.
We're far better off spending cash as a "stimulus" on building new infrastructure, extending capabilities, than in replacing destroyed infrastructure. I use the term "infrastructure" broadly here -- pollution-prevention or remediation efforts should be included as infrastructure, IMO, since they are required for sustainable economic activity.
Besides which I'd just like to note that rebuilding a coastal city is probably a little more expensive, and time-consuming, than you might imagine. You have to remember that the economic activity in the city has practically stopped, and will only grow slowly, post-cataclysmic event, until the infrastructure is rebuilt. Who'll pay for the rebuilding? How much will that hamper their own economic activity?