THIS is so true... (I'm from Buffalo) Good tires makes all the difference along with learning how to drive. And yes its been in the single-digits here too, with caked snow and ice.
November 21, 2000 newspaper article titled "Buffalo Snowstorm strands workers, students"
What excuses do you guys still left in Buffalo use when the same thing happens to you?
That wasn't the worst of it. The worst was that some kids were trapped on school buses overnight. The National Guard had to go out Wednesday to rescue multiple busloads of kid who had spent the night stuck on the highways...
It was even worse than that. The bus drivers were not allowed to let kids off their buses for safety reasons, so they ended up having to use the back row of seats as toilets.
Two updates:
(1) The storm did not seem to effect the US Postal Service. My mail was delivered yesterday and today, at its normal time.
(2) The local TV Meteorologists are all defending the National Weather Service. The on-air TV personalities have created fabulous graphics showing what the NWS announced prior to the storm and how accurate it was. They are going out of their way to defend the NWS. A meteorologist on the local FOX affiliate even said he is dependent on the NWS -- the NWS does the forecasting that the broadcasters use. He then said that what he does as a broadcaster is to explain to the public how weather conditions are changing; he does not do forecasts himself. (In his first press conference, Georgia Governor Deal claimed that local meteorologists he had talked to had done a better job forecasting the storm than the National Weather Service.)
I think it is AWESOME that the popular on-air TV personalities are all standing up and defending the NWS geeks. (I presume the term 'geek' is appropriate given how much data collection and computer modeling the NWS does.)
There are actually two Atlantas: (1) The City of Atlanta and (2) The Atlanta Metropolitan Area.
The City of Atlanta has a population of 432,000 and its mayor is Kasim Reed. Reed is an up-and-coming politician in the Democratic Party; he has been on "Meet the Press" and other Sunday morning talk shows a lot. Reed looked very bad during the 2011 Snowstorm, so since then the City has purchased approximately 70 snowplows & salt trucks. It has also trained its crews to operate that equipment. City crews were out and about on Tuesday and City-owned arterial streets were pretty passable.
The City of Atlanta also owns the Atlanta airport, so the City actually has weather forecasters on its payroll.
The Atlanta metropolitian region that surrounds the City of Atlanta has a population of 4.5 million spread over 20 suburban counties and a couple dozen small cities. The majority of these suburbs are very Republican and are the base of voters that elected Governor Deal. For example, Cobb County, where the Atlanta Braves professional baseball team are planning to move to, is the home of former Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. The Suburban counties and cities have not invested in snowplows and instead rely of the statewide Georgia Department of Transportation (GDOT). GDOT does a really good job given what they have to work with -- they only have something like 120 snowplows for the *entire* state of Georgia. It never snows all over Georgia at once, so GDOT just moves its plows to where they are needed.
The other complicating factor is that about 1.2 million of the 4.5 million suburbanites commute into the City of Atlanta every day.
What happened Tuesday was the perfect clusterf---. About noon, all of the 1.2 million commuters all attempted to leave Atlanta at about the same time.... this was actually documented by the Georgia Navigator traffic system (http://www.511ga.org). These commuters managed to leave the City of Atlanta because the City had treated its roads, but then they hit the Interstate highways and expressways that are plowed and sanded by the GDOT.
That is where the similarities —
Also the sentence.
That was my fault; the word was missing in my Submission
A 12 year old that didn't know better sure enjoyed his PCJr
My parents bought a PC/AT when I was 14 or 15. It had a 1.2 meg floppy and a 20 meg harddrive. I learned a lot on that machine and was very happy with it because I just didn't know better. I lost my innocence in 1988 or 1989, when I saw the (discontinued by then) Amiga 1000 in person for the first time.
It is still hard for me to believe that the first Amiga came out only 18 months after the PC Jr.
All the government needs to do to make it worthless is to ask the NSA to mine with their resources for a while. That would quickly make the government the richest in terms of Bitcoin, and therefore gain even more power!
What makes you sure that Satoshi Nakamoto was *not* actually the NSA?
An Air force pilot? really ? no history ? nothing anywhere on the web including the seclists
AC's allegation about Raj Shah being a charlatan really intrigued me, so I just wasted two hours doing a little digging... and I now suspect Raj Shah is lying about having been a USAF F-16 pilot. Here are a few different versions of Raj Shah's CV:
Khabar: Georgian Raj Shah Wins Soros Fellowship for New Americans (April 2007)
Raj Shah is among 31 finalists in the 10th annual competition for the Paul & Diasy Soros Fellowships for New Americans (immigrants and children of immigrants). They were selected from over 800 applicants representing 141 nationalities and 360 colleges and universities. Shah is currently the Special Assistant to the Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for International Technology Security in the US Department of Defense. He plans to attend Wharton in the fall to study business. Shah holds an AB from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University. Upon graduating from Princeton, he took a job at McKinsey and Company but left 4 months after 9/11 to join the United States Air Force. Shah flew eighteen combat missions in Iraq as a captain and F-16 pilot. After four years of active duty, he transitioned to the reserves and rejoined McKinsey & Co.; from there he embarked on his present work.
Times of India: Business honcho bombed Iraq for US Air Force
He flew US Air force F-16 over Iraqi air space in 2006 and as recently as in March to May in 2010 for nearly 200 hours in 38 combat missions at a speed of Mac 2 (twice the speed of sound). Thirty-three-year-old Gujarati American Raj Shah, then a combat pilot, said, "The biggest fear in a pilot's mind is the fear of making a mistake. If we err, innocent people die." This Wharton School MBA, now vice-president of a defence focused investment firm, is a battle hardened soldier turned business executive.
"From 500 feet above the sea level to 50,000 feet, I flew as per the requirement. The altitude depended on the targets and in Iraq we flew very low for precision target hitting," said Raj, who joined the US Air Force in 2000 and took his first flight school in December, 2001.
He flew every third day on missions in Iraq and volunteered himself at Airport Theatre Hospital at Bagdad to help out the medical teams.
"In January 2006, it was 3 am in Bagdad when the US Air Force base sirens went off. I was sleeping in my flight suit. I ran to the jet and and in five minutes was flying 500 feet over Bagdad where a number of people were trying to block the path of US-Iraqi troops, who were on rescue mission," he said.
Those quotes about his missions are really strange.... and the the timeline in the 1st article (joined USAF 4 months after 9/1) contradicts the timeline in the 2nd (joined USAF in 2000). Also, in the first article (from 2007), he is described as having flow 18 combat missions, but in the next piece, posted four years later, he claims he flew 38 combat missions:
NetIP: Vote for Raj Shah (August 2011)
A reserve F-16 Pilot in the US Air Force, Raj is also is the Vice President of Federal Systems, a defense-focused investment firm. Now in its 6th year, Nanubhai impacts 8,000 students in rural India and has sent over 25 American teachers to India. In the USAF, Raj served two tours of duty in Iraq flying 38 combat missions. Raj has also worked as a Special Assistant in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Previously Raj worked at McKinsey & Co. serving both private and public sector clients. Raj has had a life-long passion for adventure – he has led a 4,000-mile flying safari through Africa, completed a marathon, and motorcycled through the Himalaya. Raj holds an AB from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School and an MBA from The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, where he was a Soros Fellow.
The Soros Fellow part is confirmed by the Soros website:
The Paul and Daisy Soroso Fellowships for New Americans - Spring 2007 Fellowships
RAJ SHAH is the Co-Founder and CEP of Morta Security, a stealth mode start-up developing a new paradigm to counter advanced network threats.
Raj is the son of naturalized US citizens of Indian origin. They currently reside in Bonaire, Georgia.
Raj received an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in May. He holds an AB from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University.
Previously, Raj served as the Special Assistant to the Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for International Technology Security in the US Department of Defense. Upon graduating from Princeton University, he took a job at McKinsey and Company but left 4 months after 9/11 to join the United States Air Force. A distinguished graduate of both United States Air Force pilot training and Officer Training School, Raj flew eighteen combat missions in Iraq as a captain and F-16 pilot. After four years of active duty, he transitioned to the reserves and rejoined McKinsey and Co., followed by his stint in government.
Raj also has started a nonprofit foundation dedicated to improving education in his father's village in India; as a result of his fundraising efforts, the village now has a 30-unit computer lab, scholarship programs, and English tutoring programs - and the graduation rate of the village high school has tripled.
Raj's career goal is to create a global technology company focused on aerospace and to eventually serve in a leadership capacity in the government
Nanubhai Educational Foundation - Our Team, EXECUTIVE TEAM
Raj Shah, Founder & Chairman
Raj is the Founder of the Nanubhai Education Foundation. Previously, he was a Special Assistant in the US Department of Defense. Raj serves as a reserve F-16 pilot in the United States Air Force where he completed a tour in Iraq. He has also worked as consultant at McKinsey & Co., assisting clients in both the public and private sectors. Raj holds degrees from from Princeton University and The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, where he was a Soros Fellow. On a lighter note, Raj loves traveling through India – on his last visit he survived a motorcycle trip from Delhi to Leh on an Enfield Bullet.
Another contradiction - on his foundation's website, he says he completed a single tour of Iraq, but in the NetIP biography above, he claimed to have had two Iraq tours. That is a big red flag in my eyes -- I've worked with several real combat veterans and on the rare opportunities that they open up and talk about their service, they do not contradict themselves about when and where they served.
He also shows up in this piece on the Time Magazine website, writen by an Army platoon leader: Time Magazine: What To Thank a Vet For: Compassion - Veterans Day can be awkward when civilians don't really know what they're thanking soldiers for/ (Veteran's Day, November 11, 2011)
My good friend, Maj. Raj Shah is an F-16 fighter pilot in the U.S. Air Force who, in his free time during his first Iraq tour, donned scrubs to help in the trauma station at Balad Air Base. One night he was assisting in the operating room when the tell-tale thumps of a landing Blackhawk helicopter signaled the arrival of an emergency casualty. Two injured men were quickly wheeled into the tent-covered operating room. One was an American Marine, the other an Iraqi. Raj was asked to assist with the Iraqi, who was being treated for gunshot wound. As he handed scalpels and bags of saline to the surgeons, Raj watched as the doctors across the room frantically worked to save the Marine’s life. Much of the Marine’s leg had been decimated by a roadside bomb. Several hours into the effort, one of the surgeons called out to Raj, “Take a look at this bullet.” He handed Raj an M-16 round he had extracted from the Iraqi and then dropped a bombshell — the Iraqi they were working on was the trigger-man for the bomb that had blown off the Marine’s leg! While the Marine was eventually sent to Walter Reed for recuperation and the Iraqi to the penal system, during their time in the hospital, both equally received the finest medical care our nation could muster. No other fighting force in history has provided such a level of care for its enemies. I shudder to think of the outcome had the roles of fighter and captor been reversed.
This also strikes me as really strange -- a USAF combat pilot in a warzone had time to volunteer in a ER? Really? Plus the parable he tells about his ER volunteering is too good to be true.
Also notice how the author, his "good friend", in August 2011, used the current tense when describing him as a USAF pilot, when multiple other sources indicated he was out of the reserves by then.
It would be great if other slashdotters could check with the USAF or VA to see if he really served or not. If you could show he was fraud you would easily have a front-page slashdot story.
An important sentence was left out of the summary, which explained that customs mistook the instruments for pieces of bamboo.
Actually, US Customs does allow bamboo to be imported, per this page: Importing Bamboo into the US It says:
Is bamboo allowed to be imported to the US?
In general, bamboo that is not thoroughly dried and is therefore still capable of propagation is prohibited entry into the United States.
Bamboo that is thoroughly dried and split or cut lengthwise (rendering it incapable of propagation) will be inspected upon entry and released.
Unsplit dried bamboo canes/stakes/poles also are allowed entry into the United States after inspection: however, if the bamboo canes/stakes/poles are intended for garden or nursery use, the shipment must be fumigated (T404-d treatment extended to 24 hours) upon arrival at the U.S. port of entry.
Bamboo furniture, bamboo cloth, and other manufactured products made of bamboo do not require fumigation and will be released upon inspection.
For more information on Bamboo products, see Table 3-22 in the APHIS Miscellaneous and Processed Products Manual.
If you have further questions regarding requirements for importing agricultural products, please contact the USDA/APHIS Customer Support Center at (301) 851-2046.
His flutes should have been allowed as "unsplit dried bamboo canes".
"The one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception a neccessity." - Oscar Wilde
