Specifically: the demand curve half of the equation. The other half is the supply curve. A platform can have *no steam whatsoever*, but so few programmers that the salaries are reasonably high.

Consider Delphi programming. I see Delphi positions come up once in a blue moon -- it's not used much any longer. But those salaries run from $80K to $110K plus. Sometimes you see a Delphi position come up in the mid 40s, but I suspect they're government positions.

I've seen listings for COBOL or PoweBuilder programmers both in the $60K to $110K plus range. You can bet when a company offers $110K for a PowerBuilder programmer it's because it's having a hard time finding one.

I am wondering why you think the energy density is low? I think it is huge, a lot more kinetic energy per square meter than faster moving, but lighter, air.(wind)

That's the problem - you can't really tap into the kinetic energy of the wave from the surface. The up-down motion of the wave is just a boundary layer height change due to a transient lateral pressure differential in the water. i.e. The water pressure is higher at this point than at a point 1 meter away, while the air pressure is the same in both spots. So the water is higher at this point, creating the height differential we call a wave. The vast majority of the energy is transmitted under the surface - even if you covered the ocean surface with a solid 100% energy-absorbing material, the wave would still propagate. The amount that'd be lost to the surface (due to harvesting) is just the difference in cross sectional area of the wave front from one end of the harvesting device to the other if the wavefront were allowed to expand upwards. Unless you're in very shallow water, the vast majority of the energy simply passes underneath your device.

So a floating structure is a terribly inefficient way to extract energy from the wave. It'd be like trying to extract wind energy using balloons which flop around in the wind. A turbine is a much more efficient way to harvest the kinetic energy, except underwater turbines tend not to last very long due to corrosion, biological fouling, and experience higher wear due to the incompressibility of water.

If you don't believe me, ask yourself why sailing ships were designed to use wind energy instead of wave energy. Waves are more consistent than wind - even when there is no wind there are frequently ocean swells which could've provided energy to propel ships. It's because average wind energy is denser than the fraction of wave energy you can extract from something bobbing on the surface.

That's a good point. If the crime you're charged with carries a maximum month sentence, you should be out on bail after the month automatically.

I'm also glad to hear that you've turned your life around. Well done, sir.

When will you learn to use the internets, including important features like a search engine? But frankly, I believe that your obtuseness is entirely disingenuous. You cannot have an interest in this subject and not be familiar with that phrase.

Of course they would. They'd make a profit, too. They might not be able to make the kind of fuck-you profits they make now, not least through that aforementioned creative accounting.

It's not about prevention. It's about not being able to compete with someone who is successfully gaming the system.

The radio is not a radio any more, it's a control unit (in many cases) and it changes powertrain and suspension settings. it legitimately needs to be able to communicate with stuff that's on that bus. But it should be doing it through a gateway which only permits the necessary signals...

I want remote features, but nobody should be able to drive away with the vehicle without actually having the key, and nobody should be able to reflash the vehicle without actually physically accessing it. Once they are in, though, there's very little you can do to prevent them. For cars which cost multiple thousands of dollars, it's not difficult to imagine someone spending a few hundred on a PCM and a couple hundred per model they want to steal making up a harness ahead of time which will operate any vehicle but the very fanciest without discussing starting the engine with the immobilizer at all. Preventing them from accessing it is also preventing a tech from doing so...

Bullshit. The far left is still here in the US, it's just been equated with terrists by loudmouths in red states living off tax money from blue states.

The sad part is that preventing this is really easy by following some basic principles of networking and security like properly sanitizing your inputs. But they're just not used to even having to think about that at all at the companies which build the PCMs. Some vehicles are clever enough to have a communications gateway in between systems but who trusts the gateways?

July 20, 1969 was, possibly justifiably, the biggest national ego-validation event in human history. The problem was after that when it came to national achievement, our eyes were firmly pointed back in time. We no longer do things "because they are hard". We're more focused on cashing in on the achievements of past generations.

When you tell Americans we have a backward mobile telephone system, a technologically primitive electric grid and distribution system, and Internet connectivity that lags behind the rest of the developed world, the reaction is usually disbelief. How can that be? We put a man on the Moon -- although by now it should be "grandpa put a man on the Moon."

And we have underground wiring. Areas with above ground wiring sees more outages.

This is also what annoys me whenever I have been visiting the US - the air is filled with wires high and low, which definitely destroys the scenery of the otherwise picturesque towns that are common in New England among other places.

It boils down to average population density and cost. It's worth paying to put wires underground if they're going to be servicing a thousand homes on one block. But it's not worth it if you're going to be servicing just a few dozen homes spread out over a square mile. That's why the cities tend to have underground wiring, and suburban and rural areas tend to have above ground wiring. Europe tends to have more of the former, the U.S. more of the latter.

As for home building materials, that again boils down to cost. The U.S. and Canada had (still have) vast tracts of forests and lumber is relatively cheap. Europeans cut down most of their forests centuries ago, so brick and stone tend to be cheaper.

This brings me to my curiosity over why Americans keep building houses out of wood in these regions? In California for example much of the earthquake damage seems to be wooden houses although they have noticeably strengthened building codes Californians are still stuck with a whole lot of vulnerable older houses

Structural engineer here. Wooden structures survive earthquakes best because they flex. Contrary to the story of the three little pigs, stone masonry is the worst because it has no lateral strength. They're fine in static loading when all the forces are pointing straight down; but the moment the force vector tilts a bit sideways they collapse. The huge death tolls you hear about from earthquakes in developing countries is almost always from collapsed masonry or concrete structures. Mud huts simply don't have the mass to kill residents, and wood homes survive most earthquakes relatively intact. In the 1933 Long Beach earthquake most of the brick schoolbuildings collapsed. Fortunately the earthquake happened in the evening when the kids were home from school, or it could've been a disaster rivaling the 1906 San Francisco quake. But that's the quake which made California realize brick buildings in earthquake country were just plain stupid. If you drive around Los Angeles or San Francisco and look at the older brick buildings, you'll often see a regular pattern of square metal plates on the outside. These are the end ties for steel rods which retrofitted to masonry buildings. They run through the entire length of the building and connect all four sides together into a rigid box. Without them the walls simply fall over in an earthquake.

Metal would be better, but is much more expensive. And its strength is not needed for static loads in smaller structures. Static loading is the reason skyscrapers are made of metal, not because it's more resistant to earthquakes. Skyscrapers are naturally resistant to earthquakes because their height gives them a much lower natural resonance frequency than most earthquakes, and they just kind of shimmy in place during a quake. The highest-risk structures are about 3 stories tall - that's where your resonance frequency matches that of a typical earthquake. If you look at the buildings which collapsed in the Loma Prieta quake and the Northridge quake, the vast majority were 3 stories. Both were relatively moderate quakes so give you an idea which buildings are the first to collapse, unlike larger quakes which destroy a larger variety of buildings.

In earthquake country like California, the two places I would never live in are masonry buildings, and 3 story tall buildings.

He was also a conspiracy theorist who had the money to indulge his paranoid fantasies.

He had the phones of his own employees tapped. He hired private investigators to spy on his friends and family, and to dig up dirt on friends of his children he didn't approve of. He went beserk when he found out the designer of the Vietnam Memorial was an Asian American, calling her racial slurs and hiring lawyers to harass the veterans who supported her.

This is a man who thinks that both the Carter and Reagan administrations conspired to hide the presence of hundreds of POW in Southeast Asia.

I often tell my kids "there's no kind of dumb like a smart person's dumb." It's a warning against arrogance. Smart people can get too used to being right when other people around them are wrong. But in truth there is a worse kind of dumb: rich person's dumb. That's because money can give ideas instant credibility with people in a way arguments cannot. There's a strong inclination in this country to idolize rich guys.

No, it's just a problem in a fire zone, which in the USA tend to correspond closely with earthquake zones. Building flammable houses on a grassland or in woods is daft.

Yes I do, when he is making money off of my work, I get paid. Let me guess you are one of those complete scumbags that expect friends are your slaves?

Short lived for lead acid? last time I had a solar setup my lead acid batteries lasted 10 years.

And this was 15 years ago, today the newer lead acid tech is even better.

Grid intertie systems are available that failover to local battery storage.