I actually heard some stuffed shirt in the government who decided to sit in on a project meeting (I think he'd been invited as he was new to the department) state that our having completed a project ahead of schedule and under budget indicated poor project planning. Apparently, for some government bureaucrats, you should not build in any time to deal with problems that are likely to crop up. A schedule and/or budget overrun seems to be preferable because more meetings! (To justify, I guess, Mr. Stuffedshirt's existence on the government payroll.) Anyway... the actual government project manager gave him a look that -- if looks could kill -- would have gotten him twenty-to-life.

Found the link to the article I referenced (not sure why I couldn't find it in my browser history before):

Shale Oil & Gas: Not a Revolution But a Retirement Party

(It's a rather depressing read, actually.)

Recently read an article a few days ago (can't find the link... sorry) that was an interview with a former NG industry insider -- former geologist, if memory serves -- who described how NG reserves are nowhere nearly as plentiful as is being touted (at least not in the U.S.). The "vast reserves" stories are out there merely to entice investors. There are some people saying that we've hit peak oil. Maybe we've actually hit "peak gas", too.

Thumbs up to that idea. (Though I wonder how much dirt the NSA might already have on the CA judge -- heck, on all judges -- to hold against him should something like that come about?)

``Article is ignorant of how the coal industry works.''

I suspect the authors are totally aware of how the coal industry works. That's what they're trying to fix. Like you, I didn't take the time to read the whole article (maybe later) but I was appalled when I had to fly over West Virgina years ago and saw the damage to the forests (take the trip in a small plane so you can see the effects close up) that acid rain and the beginnings of mountaintop removal was causing. It makes you sick to see it and it's only gotten worse. I have to wonder if the metallurgical need for coal couldn't be satisfied by some of the extraction methods that are less destructive to the environment. Mining will always be messy but is something like mountaintop removal really necessary? If we think it's okay to take a huge area and render it uninhabitable by human beings -- like what's happening to parts of Appalachia -- then I guess we'll all get what we deserve. All in the name of cheap power. (And I don't know about you but my electric power rates go up -- never down -- every year regardless of the amount of coal that we're clawing out of the ground.) Then do we use the $50B to relocate all the people in Appalachia to other parts of the country where they won't be poisoned? That won't work either.

Personally, I'd like to see coal powered plants disappear as fast as humanly possible. Unfortunately, until we can create a critical mass of renewable power that can be intelligently shuffled around to meet local demands, we're kind of stuck with it. Unless we can work up the political will to take the first (and second) steps. The coal industry would like that to never happen.

.. and had me wondering why this fellow isn't more widely known. Then you remember that he came up these ideas in the days when going public with them would likely get you burned at the stake (or worse).

With 2TB and even 3TB spindles being pretty commonplace these days, why not fill up an external drive cabinet, make the entire thing into a RAID5 device and backup using rsync? May be a little pricey but how much time and effort went into creating a 20TB collection of data? I have a friend who did something like that (but using smaller Buffalo devices) for his small business by having several systems shuffle files around using rsync. In the event of one computer's storage failing there'd still be 2-3 others on the network with a copy of the data. And, if memory serves, he had one system that had a couple of arrays that would be rotated in/out and one of them kept offsite just in case.

I'm still trying to figure out how much time it would take ripping CDs and converting from WAV to wind up with 20TB of MP3 files. Based on what Amarok is telling me about my music collection, a quick calculation tells me that that 20TB would amount to about 30 years worth of continuous music playback. I'd better get that ripping and converting started now if I want to have that much music for my great grandkids to listen to; it's probably already too late to get that done for my kids or even grandkids to enjoy.

Can't remember who said it but it went something like:

"Yes, there is a club. No, you(*) are not a member."

Something to keep in mind.

(*) - Meaning: folks like us.

Yeah... Iridium. (Does it not suck now?) Yeah, the FAA says it can be used for aircraft communications though I'd bet they were thinking about voice communications. I rather doubt it'll be all that useful for emergencies unless the planes manage to keep the satellites in view while they're crashing. Doable, I suppose, if you had antennas on multiple points on the plane and a means of figuring out which one is "up" and can reach an Iridium satellite. (Maybe that's why the cost is $100K/plane.) A coworker was required to take an Iridium phone with him once while on travel to N. Canada -- where coverage is supposed to be great. For whatever reason, calls were limited to a window of availability and got dropped more than once. So aircraft dynamics and maybe the Iridium system itself could cause the data to be lost. A brief outage that would minimally affect voice communications would be a disaster if it occurred in the middle of the data stream containing all the crap that's going on while a plane is going down. Whoops! There's probably not going to be a second chance when the plane's in trouble so "poof" there goes that emergency data. Better not rip out all those black boxes just yet.

BTW, it looks like my mistake was to take the OP literally: that the data was going to be transmitted to the ground. (Note to self: don't submit a reply to a post and hit Return while you're still reading the crappy article linked to; over-caffeinated ACs will totally lose it.)

How many of the ground stations that are supposed to be receiving this data will be reachable while flying over the open seas? Has the global network of receiving stations already been installed and merely awaiting the airlines to get off the dime and install the transmitters in the planes? Oh, maybe the airliners simply just switch to transmitting to satellites when they're over an ocean. Are those SVs in place yet? I don't think this system has been very well thought out yet. This proposal is a major, major overhaul to worldwide air travel and is going to cost a heck of a lot more than just $100K/commercial airliner.

$27.16 for a Firefox install is a nice cash cow. After the initial download (the slowest part, at least it is for me) installing a new version of Firefox might take me two minutes to copy the tar archive onto a system, uncompress it, untar, and clean up. That comes to about $815/hour for that "service". Most lawyers don't charge that much. Dell ought to be a little ashamed of themselves.

Hear, hear. Every switch I've ever bought at Radio Trash has had the plated connectors corrode in no time making them useless. Their other components are too expensive to even consider unless it's an emergency (though it's been a long, long time since I've had an emergency that required me running out for resistors, capacitors, etc.). To be fair to RS, they do, or at least did, sell audio/video cabling that were priced far less than the ridiculous prices that the local Best Buy was charging for the Monster brand -- the only kind they were selling at the time. (If memory serves, BB once wanted to charge me $10/foot or more for Monster cables.) On the other hand, I walked out of the local Radio Trash in disgust while looking for a replacement USB cable for my daughter's MP3 player. For the price they were asking I could have very nearly bought her a brand new player which, of course, would have included the cable.

``Is it more likely that the people running these things have failed at security and actually been ripped off?''

What if the people running these things haven't failed at security but have been using security tools that have been compromised (by you know who) and that have been bypassed by the ``thieves''? As to who might want these operations to fail? Some would say ``governments'' but I'm thinking more along the lines of major banks (working in conjunction with governments). Now we might just have the makings of a nifty conspiracy theory.

Brew the pot of coffee, fill up your travel mug, and put the rest in a thermos. You can take it to work to share with a co-worker or have a second or third cup yourself. I found that the coffee I brewed myself and took to the office always tasted better than the drek they sold for an extortionate price down in the cafeteria. Even worse, they switched to Starbucks. [gag]

Sorry, Keurig... I've tried your coffee and didn't like it. Didn't care for the non-biodegradable waste, either.

... when I kept an emergency DOS boot floppy I would have included a smallish text editor like 'edlin' and a hex editor (for editing binaries, screwed up wordperfect files, etc.). Later on I replaced 'edlin' with 'point', a nifty editor that came with Logitech's mice that could edit files of any size that would fit in memory. Probably not exactly what the OP was asking about but those were my go-to tools back in those days.

Nowadays, I try and install Emacs (yes, vi is everywhere but I started out with the Perfect suite on DOS and then microemacs on Coherent so Emacs key bindings are permanently burned into my brain and if I'm going to be working on something all day, I find Emacs to be more useful), PostgreSQL, a slew of Perl modules, rcs, make, and R. Yeah, yeah... a C compiler is required for the Perl modules so I'll want that on at least one system. If I have the space I'll toss TeX (and a couple of closely related -- for me at least -- tools like ps2pdf, etc.) on my primary system so I can pound out documentation, especially for things that change fairly often (MS Office and LibreOffice drive me crazy). I use rcs for tracking changes in those .tex files; don't need anything heavier than that. Even if I'm stuck on a Windows system, I'll be downloading Cygwin and including those tools.

Now let the flames begin!