Totally like to be the one to initiate.

I would add: high percentage of regulars who can spell TOR, sympathize with Snowden, and are familiar with the Bitcoin and Silk Road.

Question is, just how low will they set the bar?

Posted sarcastically on Slashdot = one demerit. Brother-in-law waited on a table of Americans of Arabian descent at the Steakhouse = one water-boarding.

The only logical explanation is the Presidents are assured a statistically more likely term of service without an assassination attempt.

Surely, McCain didn't pick Palin for the Alaskan electoral college.

The brother-in-law waited tables for four years to get his two-year degree.

Now he's maybe the third best waiter at the local Steak House and they take most of his tax refund each year as his annual student loan payment.

But before you find yourself right in the middle of an empathy-fueled moment, remember how good four years at Microsoft looks on a resume in one's home country.

That's correct... right to the head of the line at the Call Center.

Our first encounter with an alien civilization will be the EPA trying to fine them millions of dollars.

That's not what everything I've read about the disaster has said. The mountain has gone through cycles - whenever it collapses, the river gets moved away, and the slides stop for a time, but eventually it wears away the footings enough that it falls again. They'd even tried to prevent landslides there by manually shoring up the base back in the 1960s, but it just flowed over their reinforcements.

The waterlogging of the soil is also a necessary factor too, mind you - not saying otherwise. :)

I had paperbark birch seeds, which are also pretty water tolerant (though not as much as river birch), but none sprouted - ironically I think the seeds were too wet when I stratified them (same with my maples). Isn't river birch (B. nigra) a warm-weather birch species? I've got some cuttings of random local birches from a neighbor but I have no clue whether any of them are water tolerant enough to take swampy ground. Also birches don't usually get that tall so I don't know how expansive of a root system they'll put down. The abundant local species B. nana (dwarf birch) grows (nay, volunteers) readily here almost anywhere that sheep don't graze, but it's just a shrub, I doubt it'd do the trick (though it's probably better than just grass). It can take wet soil, although not totally swampy conditions.

For the wetter areas I also have about a dozen or so western redcedar seedlings - they're not as swamp-tolerant as dawn redwood and western recedar, but they're still reportedly quite tolerant of wet or even waterlogged soils, and they should be more cold/wind hardy than those two (wind is actually the big issue, it doesn't really get that cold here). I've also got a number of other pacific northwest trees with varying degrees of standing water tolerance. Oh, and a species or two of tasmanian mountain eucalyptus (don't remember which ones) that tolerate fairly swampy ground and should at least stand a fighting chance against our winds.

Basically, I'm just going to plant a ton of stuff and see what survives. ;)

One plus is that where the ground is persistently wet and at landslide risk, it is slowly flowing water, it's not standing. It's constantly replaced by fresh, cold ground-filtered water, so there's probably not as much risk of root rot as might be common otherwise. But there's still the oxygen issue. That and the damned sheep, but I'm working to fix that issue once and for all...

If you could get a mechanical inverter to work for a max of 100 hrs using new electrode technologies... you should be able to make it small enough.I'm talking spin switched.

In short, My question is, electrodes are getting extremely good maximizing conduction and minimizing wear, but are they good enough to make mechanical switching a possibility?

Say funnel a MAX of say 20 amps @ 12vDC to a spin a high efficiency brushless DC motor nice and fast. The DC motor would be attached to a plate that would have a Rotating I (maybe an X?) of High tech carbon nanotube ended graphene electrodes spining in a circle. Spinning at the right frequency, it should convert the DC to square AC. Round it out, and then a computerized Vmeter + tied back to an ESC could regulate the motor's speed keeping the phase locked good n tight, minimizing fluctuations.

I'm not an EE though, I feel like there's something wrong w/ this, that the loss might be too high, or maybe that kind of electrode technology isn't there yet?
Just curious..

Are trees supposed to eliminate the river at the bottom that's been eating away at the foundation of the slope?

The 'pedia says that it's an ancient delta of glacial sand that was subsequently exposed to a lot of water flow, washing out the silt and clay, leaving just the loose sand and gravel with nothing to cement it together.

To be fair, if you look at the scale of that thing, what fell is far deeper than tree roots are going to go.

There was a landslide on my land a few years ago... actually just 50-100 meters from where I'm getting ready to build my house (but the terrain is different, that's a groundwater-infiltrated glacial till-underlain marsh while my house site is basalt bedrock). It's weird looking at pictures of this giant slide, how much it looks like a 20x bigger version of my little one, from the smooth, rimmed conchoidal scarp to the river-damming piles of debris at the bottom. In my case, there were no trees, but there was grass. The grass managed to hold it for a while... but not forever. The roots just don't run deep enough. In my case, the solution (in progress) is surely just to plant water-tolerant trees (here's to hoping that dawn redwood and swamp cypress can survive in Iceland...). But what sort of trees could anchor such a massive slope as the Oso one? I know a lot of desert trees like mesquite can have super-deep root systems, but they wouldn't grow in Washington.