This manifests most discernably in the relatively huge sea level differences between the pacific side the Panama canal and the Atlantic side.
There isn't a "huge" difference. It's a matter of a few inches (eight I think on average). It's mostly as a result of wind and current pushing the water up on the Pacific side as the prevailing winds there blow onshore on the Pacific side and offshore on the Atlantic side.
I just want to point out that many people learn at an early age that the Panama canal uses locks to raise and lower ships passing through, and that these are absolutely necessary because the sea levels on the two ends are different.
WTF? You make this statement in a post where you're trying to make someone else seem uneducated and unknowledgeable? The sea levels on the two ends are not different. They are the same. The locks are there because the water in the canal comes from rivers that feed into it and the canal is not at sea level the whole way across-- it rises to cross the terrain. Incoming river water fills the locks to raise the ships and it is released when the locks are drained to lower the ships.
Secondly, it does not cover any communication where the sender or receiver has an expectation of privacy. If he is emailing someone who is not being paid to work on that particular project, such as a graduate student or another person in his field or department, that information is not going to be covered by the FOIA as it violates the expectation of privacy of the person outside the project sending or receiving the email, unless the person is specifically informed that their email may be subject to public disclosure.
His lawyers did not make a privacy argument. The made a "proprietary information" argument.
IIUC, his lawyers requested that certain materials not be produced, and in doing so quoted a section of the state law which exhempted a particular category of material from being required to be produced. If you don't like the phrasing, talk to the people who wrote the law. His lawyers were just doing their job, and making it easy for the judge.
His lawyers cannot quote the part of the law dealing with a particular category of material that is allowed to be suppressed and use it to suppress a different category altogether that is not exempted from disclosure. The phrasing has nothing to do with it if they are ignoring the statutory language of the law to begin with.
So if he texts, "I'm sorry I am not going to be in for work today I am receiving medical treatment from my mental health provider," that should be public records?
If he emails, "I am sorry Mrs. Channing, but there is no work you can do in Physics 102 to avoid a failing grade," that should be public record?
Releasing the first email would be a violation of federal law (respecting medical confidentiality) and the second one would likely violate State law or university code on student confidentiality.
The Supreme Court has ruled that American citizens have a reasonable expectation that the contents of their email will be kept private, just like their phone conversations.
But he didn't make that argument -- the argument that some of the emails should be withheld because they have private information. He made the argument that emails discussing the data relating to climate models should be withheld because they contain proprietary information that could cause the university to be less competitive with other universities in obtaining funding. That's completely different. And if he made the argument you made I might agree with him, but he made a different argument that I disagree with.
When the power drops, and I need to get across X lanes of traffic to the breakdown lane, I'll be glad to have a mirror.
A driver certainly would want to be encased inside a protective shell if the windshield were replaced with a monitor blocking the view and bringing a whole new meaning to BSOD.
Of course once self-driving cars hit the successive generations/versions, all bets are off.
The Apollo space capsule didn't have a glass windshield up front and the astronauts managed to get all the way to the moon and back without a BSOD killing them. I think I can handle a trip to my local Piggly Wiggly without one.
What about ditching the windshield and replacing it with a 4k HD screen? Then you can embed the driver lower-down and deep inside a protective hardened shell. A no-glass car all around.
Then how about ditching the wheels, and just simulate movement on the 4K screen. You could drive as fast you want in perfect safety.
That's more or less what I already do with Amazon. I have ditched the car altogether for most shopping trips and replaced it with a virtual shopping center that has almost everything I need right there on my 24" computer monitor.
Does anyone get the impression that our civilization is doomed? Short of finding a way of making practical nuclear fusion reactors work, something that has been always "30 years from now" since the time I was in middle school forty years ago, there seems to be no solution to our future energy needs that don't do evil things to our planet's climate that eventually will doom our civilization.
You are 100% correct no matter what the source of energy. The course we are on is unsustainable at our current rate of energy consumption. Tom Murphy's excellent essay "Galactic-Scale Energy" made the case rather well (and it deserves its own Slashdot entry if it hasn't already had one -- I'm too lazy too look it up). About 1400 years from now (which is less time into the future than we are from the fall of the Roman Empire) we will be using more energy than is currently produced by the entirety of the sun if we don't back off on the growth of our energy consumption, which is showing no signs of easing up. It doesn't matter if the source of the energy is fossil fuels, nuclear fusion, or some future magic, the earth cannot host that amount of energy consumption. The planet will have reached its thermodynamic limit long before then.
So don't use your high-beams, just quickly turn the low beams on and off.
Then they would ticket you for driving at night without use of any forward beams at all.
The rule on staying alive as a program manager is to give 'em a number or give 'em a date, but never give 'em both at once.
