With high humidity the human body cannot take effective advantage of evaporation cooling. It's not just that you're soaked in sweat which will not evaporate (a rather unpleasant feeling), but you dehydrate fast as well because the body is desperately trying to sweat more in order to effect the much-needed cooling (but which keeps failing). If you can't stay cool (preferably immobile in the shade), and hydrated under such extreme conditions (which are a normal for summer on the US East Coast), you can get heat-related deaths rather quickly.

Power out for a couple of hours a day is one thing, but take out the power for two, five, or fifteen days at a time and you see an entirely different class of problems. Funny thing is that this kind of outage is almost completely avoidable, if power lines were underground. As far as I am concerned that is the real issue here.

More like .99 reliability, actually, and for a number of people it's even worse than that (nearly as bad as .9). If the outages were spread across the year as one hour here, and two hours there, it would be highly annoying but would not result in all your food rotted in the fridge twice a year, requiring you to compete with tens of thousands of other people for hotel rooms to escape the boiling heat, spend a extra money eating out every meal of the day, and go to work all moist and stinky.

See, if this were a backwater republic in the steppes of Africa (no offense intended, Africa!) then sure, what can you expect? But the US is supposed to be an advanced and modern nation (we have super computers, fighter jets, nuclear bombs, and we send probes across the freaking solar system, yo!), but our basic utilities are so shaky that people pay small fortunes to install backup generators on their houses... What's wrong with that picture?

Good for you, but the key is that your power lines are under ground, and there are probably no above-ground lines between you and the nearest distribution center that were taken down to cut you off. There are plenty of areas in Maryland, too, where that happens to be the case, but I think Virginia as a whole got hammered just as hard as Maryland, and had at least as many customers in the dark. Above-ground lines need to go, or this kind of fustercluck is going to repeat.

Precisely. The number of trees that Pepco chopped down, and how that uglified (fuglified!) the neighborhoods is quite astounding, but it did not seem to have much of any effect on the resilience of the power infrastructure. That's because trees are not the only force that can damage the lines. There is wind, too, and ice/snow in the winter, for example. And those poles get snapped in two by storms even without the help of trees. It seems to me that cutting all the trees down to the roots didn't do nearly as much as Pepco had hoped it would.

No, they're not magic bullets, but it ought to be possible to install on the buried lines RF sensors (or something comparable) that can be triggered from above ground (with a strong signal directed at the line) to perform a fast and simple search for the section of wire that has a problem.

Even during normal summer storms tens or even hundreds of thousands of people in our area lose power, and not just for a few minutes, but for hours, even days at a time. If the lines were under ground these kinds of vast and extreme outages would be history. Sure, people would get upset over shorter outages, instead, but not suffer the kinds of extreme hardships that plague us to the point where we paid for a whole-house generator hooked up to our gas line. Talk about expensive, but we got fed up with those multi-day outages all the time.

As much as I like to rant about the fact that the utility lines in huge, and relatively densely populated areas of the US remain exposed to the fickle and violent elements, there are some factors to be considered:

To lay utility lines under ground is said to cost 10x more than hanging them off a pole, but I suspect that their vulnerability would be reduced by about the same factor. Although most (all?) new dwelling clusters ("neighborhoods") are built with utility lines under ground (I seem to have a date of 1985 in my head when this became the norm?), a report on NPR today said that it would require decades and billions (10^9) of dollars to bring the existing sprawl up to modern standards. I use the word "sprawl" here as an indicator that the overall population density in the affected areas is probably much less than in other areas of the world where a kilometer of utility lines serves a lot more people. Google Maps can probably give some insights for those who are curious about this sprawl thing.

As to the repeated smashing of the fragile infrastructure by Mother Nature, I'm curious if anyone has done (or knows of) studies about the diminishing returns of having to fix things over and over again, including the cost to human lives, lost productivity, and the sheer pain and inconvenience of it all. Is it really cheaper to incur repeated damage and pain, than pay the up-front cost of fixing things so they stop getting smashed all the time?

You are right about the cause of delays if this were an isolated instance, but storms are not freak events, they happen all the time. Without even mentioning the smaller outages, we often lose power for extended periods of time (35 hours this time, 48 hours the year before, etc.) Each time this happens there are plenty of people who are looking at longer (week-long) outages.

In other words, this is not the first time this happened, but the next time it does and hundreds of thousands are without power for days on end, they will again blame the severity of the storm and the logistics of repairs, rather than the fact that they left their laundry flapping in the wind for the Nth time in a row.

It's because we never bother to maintain our infrastructure. We build bridges and let 'em fall down. We hang power lines off wooden poles, and never bother burying them. We sort of fix it when it breaks, but then it breaks again, but we don't really learn from it.

Cronyism will be the downfall of democracy. It's all become a game of the powerful, and whether votes are actually counted or conveniently discarded or even flipped is anybody's guess.

The solution is a real democracy, based on truly secure voting: secure, reliable, trustworthy, and verifiable votes. Expert law makers would be in the business of crafting laws and discussing their merit, and would put up the laws for a vote when ready. The votes would be cast by the people and nobody else. All the special interest groups would have to come out from behind the scenes and lobby everyone in the open. No more sly little contributions to line the pockets of a few law makers in order to serve those with the most money.

Open Democracy, wouldn't it be nice? Of course they're not going to allow it, those in power never want to give up that power...

Yes, Java was made Free (GPL2) by Sun before Oracle bought Sun, but Google wrote the Dalvik VM completely from scratch. Once Oracle's case was unraveling pre-trial, they were basically down to screaming that Google copied the package organization and method signatures. Basically, Oracle claimed that they owned the copyright on "int min(int,int)" and "int max(int,int)" and a bunch of other methods, i.e. they claimed that the Java APIs were copyrighted, implying that all APIs are copyrighted.

If there hadn't been so much at stake, it would have been a knee slapper from the start. It's turned into a face slapper, instead.

And here I thought that religious kooks are a poorly evolved subspecies found only in North America

Of course he will be held accountable. I'm sure he'll take it well: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2005-06-30/

Considering that the majority of people will be decent enough to break their backs to pay back these loans, it stands to reason that the financial institutions have a vested interest in keeping these programs going and funding everybody who wants a loan. Of course, they will be happy to grab at every possible method that reduces the default rate.

It seems to me that students themselves need to take some responsibility for their future (perhaps with input from their parents) to evaluate carefully what they choose to study, what their future job prospects are, how much it will actually cost them, and how much of that borrowed money gets spent frivolously (and shouldn't be wasted like that).

Bottom line, it's a money game: Banksters vs. Students. Careless students pay more.

Yeah, screw IT knowledge, we need more universities that teach how to manage vendor relationships!