Do we really know that all of the earthquakes triggered by this process will be small and inconsequential?

We don't really understand why injecting lots of wastewater into deep wells is causing earthquakes. One hypothesis I have heard is that the compressed wastewater is lubricating faults and making them more likely to release. But that is just one hypothesis. Without understanding the precise mechanism causing these earthquakes we can't really be certain that they will always be small earthquakes.

Naturally caused earthquakes follow a power-law distribution. If the same distribution works for these kind of earthquakes we haven't had enough time pass under these new conditions to know if there is a probable upper limit to the size of earthquakes triggered by wastewater injection.

Actually "declined" is too polite a word.

This isn't a new idea. The drought just gives it currency. I'd point out that even in the best case it would take years to build, and if CA is going to go dry next year people there are going to have to live without water for years before such a hypothetical pipeline would be built.

Except when some whackjobs blow something up or kill someone and it turns out it was organized with prepaid phones then a lot of people are going to care a lot.

Yes, it does. However, most of the rainfall is more like a heavy mist than a serious downpour, and doesn't trash your wireless performance that much. My own experience is that snowfall and ice build-up on the antenna have been a bigger problem than rain.

... and this guy doesn't need to sell his house.

You can buy point-to-point wireless internet solutions which will give you up to 5km of range and around 50mb/s of bandwidth for $300 or so per end, so $600 total.

If that is his house, he has a bunch of trees around it which will block line of sight so he needs a tower-type antenna mount which he can buy for about $1000.

So all he needs to do is make arrangements with someone to be the other endpoint and he is in business. For less than $3000.

I'm not making this up. I managed to do this in a remote part of Washington state (where I still do not have a landline phone, the last time I checked CenturyLink wanted more than 25 grand to put in the phone service, even after I pointed out that I had put in extra copper wires they could use when I put in power to my home site) over sixteen years ago. My out-of-pocket costs were less than five grand.

What is going on is that companies are afraid of being sued for discrimination and so they write job descriptions that no one could possibly fill. That way they (theoretically) will be able to defend themselves when they hire whomever they want to and don't hire that other person because they "weren't qualified".

In practice this isn't really very effective, but lots of HR people believe it is.

My two favorite examples of this were a requirement of having a grad-level CS degree and being a graduate of the University of Hawaii ... ironically UH didn't have a CS program at the time, as the person writing the job description knew. The other one was requiring five years of experience in Java ... in 1995.

It doesn't seem that unreasonable to me, If the transponder is off (somehow) air traffic control can't see the airplane. Military radar can, but until an emergency is declared or until the plane does something really weird any military is unlikely to do anything (re: Pearl Harbor, 9/11, Mathias Rust, &c). By the time they figured out the plane was missing the plane was long gone.

Having said that, this whole thing stinks.

A 100-ton airplane doesn't crash, even in the ocean, without leaving a lot of debris. A lot of stuff in a plane floats and by now some of that debris would have washed up somewhere. No debris has washed up.

A lot of the information about the aircraft's course and altitude changes after it ceased most communications turned out to be incorrect. Whether someone is lying or just clueless is unclear.

How and why the satellite data unit was shut down and later restarted is also unclear. Given that the unanimous consensus is that you cannot even do that from the cockpit (you have to get into the electronics bay, accessed by a hatch from the galley in front of business class) either there was a major malfunction or something really bizarre happened.

I haven't yet heard a good theory that explains what happened, but the least bad theory is that the plane was somehow diverted and probably ended up near the Baikonur Cosmodrome. Why and exactly how that happened is at best poorly explained, but the lack of debris indicates that the plane did not crash.

ref: http://nymag.com/daily/intelli...

This strategy is going to work so well when you encounter the well-armed residents of small towns who are unlikely to welcome strangers who might be carrying a fatal disease and who are unlikely to have practical survival skills that said small town needs (strangers with survival skills, that is).

People have been holing up in the Flathead and Yaak River valleys (both to the West of the Park) for the last forty years or so waiting for the end.

... which is nice except for the fact that Montana has a higher rate of gun ownership than any state in the old confederacy, and the third-highest overall (after Wyoming and Alaska). http://usliberals.about.com/od...

Back when I was an undergrad in that program they limited themselves to 100 undergrads. EE was a separate program.

And the CS department was in a very dumpy building right across from the Student Union building that was a notorious firetrap.` That was a couple of buildings ago. If I remember they remodeled their current building (the old EE building) in 2003.

A couple of observations.

There is a hellacious difference between an estimate and a deadline. A lot of the problem is abusing estimates and quietly or unconsciously turning an estimate into a deadline. The process for producing the two is totally different, or at least should be.

One very good manager I had would never directly ask me for an estimate. He would ask me how long it would take to figure out how long it would take to code x. If you can make a reasonable estimate of the size and complexity of the problem you are trying to solve you can begin to make a reasonable estimate of how long it will take. Without that information you are pulling numbers out of your ass.

One other good manager I had emphasized to me that estimates were, well, estimates. It was as big a problem if I always overestimated as it would be if I always underestimates.

Some idiot is just going to do it.

It wouldn't surprise me if some consortium of obnoxious rich people (billionaires who own substantial amounts of Florida real estate are good candidates) and a low-lying country (my bet is on the Maldives) are just going to go distribute aerosols in the upper atmosphere.

The thing is, the actual volume of material you need to get into the stratosphere is not very large. A small jet flying eight or ten hours a week could do it. The problem is that most small business jets don't fly high enough to get effective distribution.

So you'd need to re-engine a gulfstream or two -- that's the big capital investment.

Someone could do this and not even need to ask permission.

There can be only one. Or, at least there should have been only one.

A highly recommended, if a bit dated, book is _Normal Accidents_ by Charles Perrow. The sections on nuclear power plants are hair-raising reading.

The NRC used to have a rather frightening periodical called _Nuclear Safety_ which was also such hair-raising reading that it has been discontinued.

My observation is that accidents at nuclear plants seem to follow a power law, like earthquakes, where more severe incidents a less frequent. To me that means the people who argue that we really haven't had a "bad" accident yet or make special-case explanations for Chernobyl or Fukushima are missing the point -- we haven't had enough time yet to determine if far more catastrophic accidents are possible or not. A study of less major accidents, and accounts of the major ones, leads me to believe that we have just been very lucky so far. A great many of the accidents at nuclear power plants fall under what Feynman called "failure of design" where the system is not behaving in the way the engineers who designed the thing expected it to. That means we shouldn't have very much confidence at all in our ability to predict the probability of a catastrophic accident.

Some of the accidents and screwups at nuclear plants described in Perrow's book are just plain loony. One of the reactors at San Onofre was installed 180 degrees out of alignment and it took Southern California Edison seven months to notice. To correct this mistake they reversed the wiring in the control room. And such mistakes are by no means unique. At another plant overpressure in the reactor coolant led operators to somehow redirect hot, radioactive water into the drinking-water system at the plant -- what is a mystery to me is how can the two systems (reactor coolant and drinking water) possibly be connected? What is even more alarming is that there are such a bewildering array of ways for things to go wrong that there is very little commonality that lets us figure out how to do things better (not connecting drinking water to reactor coolant wouldn't be a bad start, and making sure the people building the plant read the plans wouldn't hurt either).