Air conditioning is pretty efficient. A 3kW (electric) unit can provide about 6kW (thermal) of cooling power which should be enough for most houses in most of the US during the night. And during the day you can use the nice friendly Sun to power your air conditioner directly.

I just listed it for comparison purposes.

They were not reduced to ashes, but rather oxidized. And no, that was a one-off event and all the security measures have failed to prevent any similar attack.

What sort of confabulation are you living in? Deficit in Bush years: 2000 $325.17 Billion Surplus
2001 $170.19 Billion Surplus
2002 $207.63 Billion Deficit
2003 $485.97 Billion Deficit
2004 $517.54 Billion Deficit
2005 $385.45 Billion Deficit
2006 $291.42 Billion Deficit
2007 $183.79 Billion Deficit
2008 $504.95 Billion Deficit

Basically, 2007 was a blip on the radar - the economy was fueled by the skyrocketing home prices.

Nope. There's NO SHORTAGE OF LITHIUM AND NEVER WILL BE. It's pretty much unlimited - all you need is sea salt. Its purification is also straightforward and fairly clean, just as aluminum production. Have you lived near aluminum smelter? I did.

Eventual consistency in the console is bad, but in practice the inconsistency window is usually less than a couple of seconds. It can get up to several minutes in the worst case but never above that.

It's another story for Amazon S3...

Starcluster is a piece of garbage. It should not even work on t1.micros - they simply don't have enough RAM or storage to run anything decent.

The rest of your message also makes no sense - even if Starcluster nodes can't be shutdown using Starcluster's own management, then simply go to the Amazon console and shutdown them.

That's pretty much true. Amazon handles billing for millions of customers without any problems. It's overwhelmingly likely that the poster made an error somewhere in configuration or left a service running. We've had such an experience (somebody started a huge instance for a test and forgot to turn it off), Amazon's tech support was extremely considerate and refunded us most of the price.

And if you want to run large clusters on Amazon - feel free to try our software: https://clusterk.com/ We can utilize Amazon's spot market with the resulting computation prices only slightly more expensive than electricity needed to run them.

Yes, there are companies that do just that. They predict the shading events about 5-10 minutes in advance by literally watching the clouds.

Yes, that's EXACTLY what I want. If you are so concerned about your business then you should use your PERSONAL funds to support the other candidate.

Perhaps you don't understand how HUGE is the ocean. A typical storm evaporates more water (thus increasing the salt content of the surface water) than all desalination plants in California could ever hope to do. With zero effects on the wild life. Moreover, natural salt content varies quite a lot completely naturally.

Plus, there's a strong current along the Californian coast, so dispersing the little bit of brine which is going to be produced is extremely easy.

I've lost 15kg (from 95-97kg down to 80-82kg) in about 8 months by doing treadmill + mild diet.

It turned out that my basal rate was about 1900kcal (measured in a lab by exhaled CO2 concentration) and getting food intake down to 1200-1300kcal to get a decent 500kcal caloric deficit for noticeable weight loss was not trivial. I tried it and it's discouraging.

However, by walking 3-4 hours a day on a treadmill I gradually increased my basal rate to about 2100kcal (more muscle mass, yay!) and it burns around 500kcal directly. So I get a 700kcal deficit without following a strenuous diet.

And don't forget other perks - it's easy to get a cardio workout (just increase treadmill speed), you feel much healthier and can easily walk large distances when doing 'touristy' things on holidays/vacations.

Of course, if you're used to eating 4000kcal then nothing is going to help you until you decrease your caloric intake.

Check your numbers. The western part of the country had a historically hot winter. California has broken pretty much all the records - the hottest winter, the lowest snow amount and so on. It's crazy, we've had a real heat wave in SFBA. In freaking March!

As for your 'gas prices' anecdote - the actual statistics show that the gas consumption in the US had not changed this winter (quite the opposite): http://www.rtcc.org/2015/01/21...

You absolutely do NOT want them to be expressed. In fact, your genome tries really hard to suppress them - all they do is replicating themselves. That's the reason so much of your genome consists of them.

Dependency on statistical properties is doubtful - organisms have more than 100x natural variance in genome sizes within fairly closely related species (just look at plants) without much outward difference. Even in animals, some species have a small and compact genomes (pufferfish) without much junk.

Most of the junk DNA is still... junk. Basically it's:

1) 60% of the DNA is _definitely_ junk, as they consist of known repeated elements (LINEs, SINEs and others) and defunct genes. This is not an 'absence of evidence', we know exactly how this DNA has happened.

2) Around 10% of DNA is structural. While this is technically not 'junk', this DNA does not encode anything useful.

3) Around 5% are coding sections and regulatory elements.

4) Another 5% of DNA appear to be stable under mutation pressure. So it might have some function.

4) And finally we have around 20% of DNA whose purpose is not known, but we know that random mutations in it do not visibly affect the phenotype.