pumped storage

The energy density of pumped storage is extremely low. Wiki says a cubic meter of water in a 100m tower has about 0.272kwh. Adding in the losses of the turbines, pumps, and evaporation, it only gets worse. To last through the long cold calm spells you'd need to turn all of Scotland into a reservoir farm, destroying its ecology, and that might not even be sufficient. Pumped storage is good for smoothing output on the periodicity of a day or so, but anything longer requires alternative power solutions capable of the entire peak load on the system. If those alternative solutions aren't environmentally friendly, you still have a problem, and they are, why do you need wind?

next step

At first I figured that the cost of dealing with the malware problem was just surpassing the amount of profit they made in the country, but Google must be smart enough to know that whether it was actually China's government or the "feces youth", that neither will stop their behavior simply because google left the country.

If Google is upset then they should not just retreat, but retaliate. They are in a unique position to create a set of moving proxy/vpn servers to allow those inside the firewall access to free(er) information. They could use sites like youtube (that will now have to be accessed through a proxy) to distribute the next ip address hop by inserting them in media that their advertising engine decides are interesting to those in mainland china.

This wouldn't just be out of goodwill or in retaliation, it would allow them to still get their advertising to china's growing market without having to put up with the rules of that market.

paradise!

People are worried about working in an environment over 25C?! Bunch of bloody wankers! In the summer (3/4 of the year) my *apartment* gets up to 50C every time the A/C goes out (which is a lot). And down to 14C in the winter (about three weeks in February), but only because I like it cold.

Can we convince governments to only let people live in areas where cooling costs are lower? It would reduce our personal footprints a lot! Europe and the west coast of the U.S. would be terribly over-populated, but I'm sure we can solve that without legislation.

Halting State

by Charles Stross is an excellent near-future sci-fi novel with a similar event depicted, and then the real-world ramifications are explored as well. The money is real enough to upset the people who lost it, real enough for people to trade government backed notes for it, and real enough to help treat a child's medical problems. That seems real enough.

Math is hard, teachers matter

I've always hated math. To this day when I try to read a paper my eyes slide around the equations and when I force them back I start getting sleepy. I can only guess its some sort of protection system. I remember when studying for calc3 (greens theorem surface integrals, vector calc stuff) I would feel great right up until I started and then feel like I hadn't slept in days. I really have no idea how to undo this, my job uses math (and statistics) heavily and I am very excited about finding new ways to use math as a tool, but the fatigue is ingrained and seemingly inexorable. Having someone who is also excited about the applications of the math to explain things really makes the difference for me. My favorite math text is "numerical recipes in..." the thing is written by engineers for engineers. Trying to go back and read my old math textbooks now that I firmly understand the stuff, I can see why I had trouble, even the ones that are acknowledged to be the "best" are terrible as anything but a reference.

original class action plaintiffs only

Only the handful of straw men consumers and the lawyers you started it get the 850k, (looks like AMD may not have paid the settlement). It seems like class-action lawsuits occasionally give tiny handouts to all affected, but mostly just make a litigious few richer.

http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2008/09/30/nvidia_settles_lawsuit/

Possible attack vector?

I saw this when I reinstalled windows on the other partition a while back. I thought it was super neat! It never occurred to me that this might cause a problem for web hosting. Does it cause the same sorts of problems when I keep google-analytics no-scripted? At the basic level if it came down to my security or someone else's business model I'd pick my security every time. However, if linkscanner has an exploit, I don't have to click the link to get infected, I just have to search something that brings up an infected link. I think an all around a better solution is to scan at click time, perhaps ctrl-click to skip the scan for trusted sites.

Standard procedure.

I would imagine the standard procedure for facing someone armed with a knife is to shoot them. Rightly so, in most cases a knife is a serious threat even to someone armed with a gun. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tueller_Drill

However this guy is probably not a fast runner at this point in his life, and is connected to the wall via an oxygen hose. Though I suppose if he is delusional he might not worry about either before attacking.

I wouldn't want to get close enough to him to fiddle with the O2 and that might kill him too. Pepper spray would work except for the surroundings. The best solution here IMO is probably as someone said, to whack his hand like a child in catholic school with a *very* long pole. That does qualify as deadly force under my local penal code (clubs), but so does a stun gun or taser I think, and responding to a knife with deadly force is legal (here at least).

Not lethal, but not necessarily funny

First the obligatory "I got shocked once" anecdote. My HS physics teacher told me to discharge the Leyden jar after our charge experiments. Said she would do it but she was pregnant.... That should have been a clue, but at least I didn't wet myself. I shorted it in one arm and out the other.

If it was consenting male bonding type pain between friends, a good kick in crotch or 300v discharge can be funny. Otherwise it was bullying and results in socially inept students wearing black trench coats and shooting people, and deserves some corporal punishment (the bullying not the shooting).

Shocking the teacher means he either grabbed it in a violent manner, grabbed the exposed metal bits in ignorance, or the student shocked him intentionally. Which I rate as funny, funny, or corporal punishment worthy, respectively.