I've seen different maps define it differently, but most maps of Reykjanes include all the way up to Mosfellsbær (to go any further is to be on Kjalarnes). But then again, when most people want to talk about closer to Reykjavík they talk about either Reykjavík or Höfuðborgarsvæði... so I'm not sure if technically it's part. Either way, it's close. There are known magma chambers that are considered a threat to Reykjavík if they went off.

These eruptions aren't little point effects. As the fact that they've poured out hundreds of square kilometers of lava fields should be pointed out. ;) Hafnarfjörður and parts of Reykjavík are on top of relatively young lava fields. Hraunbær (Lava Town) is just to my south. And thats just about flooding with lava, let alone ash and gas consequences. So yeah, it's a serious matter - it's just one unlikely to be affected for the worse by drilling.

Snæfellsjökull's melting should make it easier to find the entrance!

Energy from magma chambers only works... wait for it... in places with magma chambers.

Any more easy questions?

If you want a "works everywhere" tech to watch, watch EGS. My favorite variety is a no-fracking variety where they branch off the well in the hot zone and use a conductive grout, turning the well into a giant heat exchanger. Totally closed, so it's non-corrosive and strata-indifferent - needs only heat. But of course, in the end it's going to be whatever's most economic that will take off.

So you think cooling down the magma (boiling water) increases the likelihood of an eruption? Do you think water will go through the pipe with enough pressure to break the pipe and rupture the surrounding rock, when they're controlling how much water they send down the pipe in the first place? You think dissolved gasses will come out faster somehow when they're doing nothing to reduce the pressure on the magma?

There's no logical reason why such a borehole should trigger an eruption. It should overall decrease the risk by taking heat out of it, making the magma more viscous if not outright solidifying it.

RTFA. The "deadly chemicals" used were precisely one chemical: that deadly dihydrogen monoxide stuff.

Fracking is not all a single process. At its most basic level, it's simply water injection. You *can* inject all sorts of other stuff in for various reasons (most of them oil-specific and totally unrelated to geothermal power prouction), but they're not fundamentally required for all fracking.

Haha, actually it was accidental. When they broke through into a magma chamber, that wasn't the goal - they didn't realize they were that close, they were just trying to tap the hot rock near it. But after magma filled up the borehole a couple dozen meters, they decided to try to turn lemons into lemonade and produce steam... and it actually worked.

But yeah, I think a lot of people have a gross misunderstanding how drilling works. You're not creating some big open hole that magma can just shoot up. If you tried that, the hole would collapse before you got very deep at all. Your hole is full of "mud" that is at least as high pressure as the surrounding rock. The gas isn't going to suddenly come out of solution and trigger an eruption when you drill into magma, you're not reducing the pressure on it.

And I'm sure it's mentioned somewhere below, but whoever wrote this article is an idiot. The mantle isn't full of magma, it's solid. The crust is where magma is found They did not drill to the mantle, they drilled into a magma chamber.

The only thing I learned from the article was that they plan to try the same thing in Reykjanes. I fully expect people to freak out, given that's where three quarters of our population lives ;) Also, I didn't know the stats on the sort of power they were getting out of that well... 36MWe of 450C steam from a single geothermal well is bloody insane. Hopefully this will prove to be economical and thus an incentive to stop destroying all of our rivers one after the next for hydroelectric power. : Oh, and I'm not surprised to learn that Alcoa was helping. There's three aluminum smelters here, and even the smallest of them uses more power than all of the homes and businesses combined. They built the largest hydroelectric plant in Europe (in the middle of the formerly-largest-undeveloped-wilderness in Europe) just to power a single smelter.

Except that even that isn't largely true. Yes, it's true that the US heavily relied on German rocket scientists to build up its space program. What's *not* true is the concept that the Soviets did the same. The US actively sought out and brought to the US almost all high-level German rocket scientists after the war during Operation Paperclip, as well as over 100 V2s. The Soviets got almost nobody of significance (Helmut Gröttrup being the only noteworthy exception), and mainly only got line technicians and captured papers/drawings. What's more, for the most part, they didn't actively involve them in their programs - they interrogated them heavily, and once they were satisfied that they knew everything that they knew, they sent them back. Most were dismissed within a year, and by 1951, there were no longer any Germans at all within Soviet rocketry program (although the remaining ones were held for a few years after that to avoid intelligence transfer).

The real quote should be, "Our German rocket scientists are better than your Soviet scientists whose non-domestic contribution is largely limited to data from old documents and lower-level Germans involved in rocketry."

Couldn't one use super-resolution techniques from a video or series of images to increase the effective resolution?

The issue is, you deal with the system you're with, not the situation you wish you had.

We can't change a transmission protocol or route data over arbitrary connections. This is a collection of everything from very old hardware to brand new, protocols from very old to brand new, in every country in the world, and you can't just arbitrarily rework them. It's the same in the air, too. And when new protocols are made, they're generally in addition to existing ones, not replacing them. I'm not aware of any with error correcting codes or the like (there could be, I just haven't worked with them), but some of them (not all) use checksums (though that's a whole 'nother story... the documentation on how one common type of checksum, that used in datalink messages, is a big fat lie, caused by a screwup in whoever implmented the code the first time that everyone else now has to imitate... but it works, so...).

In the long run, the goal is to move as much traffic as possible to the more automated, more reliable newer protocols. But this is something that's invariably going to happen at a snail's pace.

As I've never messed with them directly, I can't decribe to you the protocols used for physical data transmission at every point over the FARICE and DANICE links - just the message layer on top of them, which is plaintext except for the header marker characters. I've never worked at anything more than the endpoints. But I can tell you this, there's no way we could just go in and replace all of the hardware along the way (you should see the graph of all of the hardware that exists just between Iceland and Britain). It would be an expensive long-term international effort with major potential for disruption in its own right. And it would only help for that particular link anyway. What you really want is how all of air traffic control messages are transmitted - aircraft, atc, tower, etc - everywhere in the world to be switched over to a single, reliable mechanism and a standardized set of international routing hardware. Well, great, join the club, I'd love that too! But it's just not going to happen any time soon without a massive funding surge.

You work with the systems that you have, not the systems you wish you had. Yes, we're working to modernize everything, just like everyone else. For example, in the past year I've spent a good bit of time working on adding in capabilities to one system to help take a sort of "middleman" server that it talks to out of the loop to improve reliability and error logging. But these things don't happen fast. And how many programmers / hardware engineers do you think we have, really? We're no Microsoft here.

Oh, and I forgot to mention the voice communication systems problem. That one didn't affect me directly but I did get a memo about it.

It's just an unfortunate incident.

British Telecom has had an issue (which has happened a number of times) which led to a minor timing glitch in one of their systems. When this happens, the data reliability on the FARICE line to Iceland drops and you start getting corrupted flight messages. Shanwick was alerted to the problem and both sides consulted and decided that the best solution in the interrim would be something that had been done previously, disconnecting FARICE and thus forcing all connections through the backup line, DANICE, which appeared to be operating normally.

Unfortunately, the problem was even worse on DANICE. What appeared to be normal operation was only normal up to the data logger. Once it actually got to the flight tracking software, the messages were being refused, and corrupted messages being sent in the other direction. So while BT was working on getting their system fixed, flight control managers were being forced to basically manually dig up ATC messages and copy-paste them off to the air traffic controllers (as much was handled through voice as possible as well).

But it got even worse. A totally unrelated communications network, Datalink, decided to misbehave during all of this, which may or may not have been due to the Shanwick problems. On the Iceland side, the general solution is to force a switchover to the backup system. Which was done... except a critical component on the backup system immediately crashed. Repeated attempts to switch and ultimately switch back caused even more problems for the air traffic controllers.

Eventually the fixed FARICE line was brought back up, Datalink back online (with the switchover-crash problem postponed to be investigated during a low-traffic timeperiod)

It's terrible that there were so many delays, but these are extremely complicated systems with a challenging task, built up over decades with tons of computer components, protocols, lines, routers, radar systems, transmitters, and on and on, scattered all over the world. On a weekend. Everyone was scrambling and doing their damndest to fix it as soon as possible. It should also be noted that it was never a safety issue - even in the absolute worst case, air traffic control could go all the way back to the old paper-and-pencil method. What the systems give is, primarily, speed, and thus when there's big problems, there's delays.

And that was my weekend, how was yours? ;)

1) Straus-Khan was not prosecuted, but nor was his accuser

2) In what world is does one case falling apart in the US invalidate every rape case everywhere in the world?

3) The Straus-Khan case was in a very preliminary stage - he was only arrested because he was considered an immediate flight risk. In the Assange case, there have been *five different courts of law in two different countries* which have considered the case, including two supreme courts. There is a standing court finding of probable cause against Assange after a review of all of the evidence collected on a months long investigation (including testimony from Assange's attorneys).

4) The simple reality is, famous people do rape. And their fans invariably smear the victims and portray it as a giant conspiracy against them. Every bloody time.

It should also be added that *lots* of people rape, period. Roughly 10% of young men have raped at least once, and about 3% of young men are serial rapists. What, you thought that a quarter of women getting raped at least once in their lifespan was the work of just a couple bad apples?

And it should be added that Julian "Women's Brains Can't Do Math" Assange has a *long* history of this sort of stuff.

"concern surrounds the Swedish detention facility, where Mr Assange would be held incommunicado upon arrival. Similar treatment can be seen in the case of Gottfrid Svartholm, founder of The Pirate Bay, who was held in solitary confinement for months without being officially charged."

From the ruling of Stockholm's Tingsrätt: “Åklagaren får inte tillstånd att meddela beslut om restriktioner.” ("The prosecutor is not allowed to impose restrictions."). The prosecutor is legally *banned* from imposing restrictions on Assange while in custody. So this is a complete red herring excuse, and they know it. The prosecutor has elaborated in more detail, that he will have no restrictions on ability to mingle, use the phone, use the computer, etc.

Moving on...

see "Assange is willing to return to Sweden but prosecutors can also question him in the UK." [nicholasmead.com]

See my previous comment.

or dropping them as looks increasingly likely [firedoglake.com]

Assange and his followers have been making this claim since day one - yet one of the list of, well, essentially everything that Assange has said about his case and Manning's that's turned out to be flatly wrong (Manning will be convicted of aiding the enemy, it's all a show trial, they'll lock Manning up for life and throw away the key, there's a secret indictment against me, I'm going to win 15% of the Australian vote, become a senator, and then they'll have to drop the case.... etc). The line about Ny being forced out is also a lie that could have been debunked with a simple phone call. As is the no DNA line.

The reality is that the case is in a holding pattern. There's literally nothing being done with it, and nor will anything be done until he's in custody. The entire case against him has been built and they have an appeal-upheld probable cause finding against him by a full court hearing in which all evidence was reviewed and Assange's own attorney testified. There's literally nothing more they need except Assange.

PS as to the alleged victims you're fakely so concerned about, NEITHER OF THEM say they were raped.

There are two women in question here - AA and SW. AA did *not* say she was raped. She has on multiple occasions denied being raped. She *has* said she was the victim of sex crimes. Guess what? There are no rape charges concerning AA. The charges concerning AA are 1x unlawful sexual coersion and 2x molestation. The only rape charge concerns SW.

SW has *never* denied being raped, and *has* said she was raped. She told the police:

Friday 20 August 2010 I, inspector Linda Wassgren was temporarily on duty in the reception at Klara Närpo, normally I am on duty outside at the
same station. At around 14:00 same day two women came into the station and talk and get some advice on two earlier events and they were a little insecure on how to proceed. The crime rape was mentioned.

She told AA:

Then he told me that Julian hade been accused of raping that young woman, [SW]. And that [DB] had spoken with [AA], and that [SW] had spoken with [DB]. And that [AA] was furious about what [SW] had told her — that for one reason or another, she believed what [SW] had said and that they were going to meet.

She told her ex boyfriend:

[SB] related that he had a relationship with [SW] for two and a half years. They had lived together during the last year of the relationship. Seth related that it was very important for [SW] that they use a condom, partly to prevent infection but also to prevent unwanted pregnancy.

        [SB] said the issue of infection was crucial for [SW] and that, before they had sex the first time, they had both got tested for disease and shown each other the results. They did not have sex without a condom on a single occasion during their two and a half years together. That was completely unthinkable for [SW]. [SB] said that such was their agreement. He said that, as far as he knew, [SW] had never had sex with anyone without using a condom.

        [SB] related that he learned about what had happened when [SW] sent an SMS message to him, asking if she could telephone him. He was somewhat baffled, because they had not been in contact with each other for several months. When [SW] called, she immediately asked what [SB] thought of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange. He answered that WikiLeaks seemed positive.

        Then [SW] said that she had been raped by Julian Assange, in that he had initiated unprotected sex with her while she lay sleeping. [SW] said that she had asked Assange if he was wearing anything and that Assange had replied, “Yes, you.”

        The interviewer asked [SB] how [SW] had reacted to that. [SB] said that [SW] had related that she was shocked and did not know what to do. [SB] said that, given [SW]’s definite views on the use of condoms during sex, he could imagine that she was very shocked and afraid. He knows how important it is to [SW] that a condom is used when she has sex.

        [SW] has told [SB] that she could not understand how a representative for WikiLeaks, which does so much good, could be so lacking in respect for another human being.

I could keep going if you' like.

Moreover, they have withdrawn their complaints when the prosecutor told them to sign a declaration of an accusation of rape.

First off, you're distorting the distortion of the distortion. The "statement" only concerns SW. It wasn't a "statement of rape"; it was concerning a police report representing that her words were accurately represented in the report (which isn't even a legal requirement in Sweden). Third, it wasn't even about signing. But, most critically, here's what it actually says:

In the course of the interview, [SW] and I were informed that Julian Assange had been arrested in absentia. After that, [SW] had difficulty concentrating, as a result of which I made the judgement that it was best to terminate the interview. But [SW] did mention that Assange was angry at her. There was not enough time to obtain any further information about why he was angry at her or how this was expressed. Nor did we have time to discuss what had happened afterwards. The interview was neither read back to [SW] nor read by her for approval; but [SW] was informed that she could do so at a later date.

Is that what you call "refusal to sign"? It says nothing of the sort. First off, the standard - which is not even required - is "read and approved". Secondly, the *officer* decided to terminate the interview. SW never objected to any content. Third, it would be quite difficult to "sign" a report which hadn't even been typed up yet.

Oh, well, I'm sure that SW didn't want to cooperate further, right? Like it's not like she'd hire an attorney to push the case forward for her, or that she then consented to a forensic medical report, or anything like that, right? Oh wait, yes she did:

[SW] gives her consent to the acquisition of a forensic medical report.

and...

[SW] wishes to be represented by an attorney whom she will name at a later time.

The women had a legal defender, and his name is Claes Borgström. He is the man who got the case re-opened (more on that later) and who has relentlessly pushed forward the case ever since. Or are we to assume that the women don't know what their own representative is doing? Poor damsels!

Nah, sorry. What the heck am I doing here? Clearly you already know without a trial that the two women are lying sluts and Assange is innocent because People We Like never rape. They're too important after all, and any accusations are just an attempt to take them down - the women don't deserve their day, they deserve a massive smear campaign against them for being lying sluts! Just like what happened with those poor innocent football players in Steubenville!

Nobody has ever or will ever in the history of Sweden been "charged" for anything, for the simple reason that the Swedish judicial system doesn't use English terms. This may sound semantics, but it's actually the key point. There are two terms of relevance in the swedish system: "anklagad" and "åtalad". Look them up in a handful of Swedish dictionaries (there's dozens out there); you'll find that both can be translated "accused, charged, or indicted".

In a legal process, being anklagad comes first. The prosecutor raises this stage and must have grounds for probable cause. At this point warrants can be issued for the person's arrest. The person also has the right to appeal being anklagad and have a full court hearing reviewing the evidence (and even to appeal that court ruling).

The only thing that being anklagad doesn't do is lead to a trial. This is what being åtalad does. In fact, once åtalad, you *must* be tried within a fixed period of time. As a standard, there is a questioning immediately before being åtalad.

So while people can play word games, probably the most analagous terms would be "charged" for anklagad and "indicted" for åtalad.

Assange has been anklagad but not åtalad. Nor can he be åtalad, because he refuses to hand himself over and he cannot be tried in absentia. So to use "he hasn't been charged!" as a defense of him is simply deceptive.

And, FYI, here's the sworn-in-court written statement of the Swedish prosecutor:

Subject to any matters said by him, which undermine my present view that he should be indicted, an indictment will be launched with the court thereafter. It can therefore be seen that Assange is sought for the purpose of conducting criminal proceedings and that he is not sought merely to assist with our enquiries.

Don't be surprised that Assange pulls stuff like this, the guy is a BS artist about almost everything in his life. Check out the 10 different stories he's told about why his hair is white, for example. My favorite is that it's due to gamma radiation from a nuclear reactor he built as a child.