Why are you digging a 8 feet deep trench for fiber?!? Laws in different states seem to vary, but between 2-4 feet is plenty. If you use a ditch witch style machine, the trench is only a couple of inches across on the surface. If you wanted to do it really well, you could cut a strip of sod out, but it to the side, and put it back when you were done.

This XM25 is just a derivative. Seems like the same as a product released by the Chinese in 1271 -- more than 700 years ago.

Its astonishing to me that anyone agreed to operate under such an NDA anyway. 17 hours is sufficiently long that you could aquire the game, play it for 2 hours to get a feel for it, 1 hour to record a video, edit for another 2 hours, and then post it with 10 hours left on the embargo.

Any game company having their embargo end long after the game is available is just begging for trouble. Or they know there is a very serious problem and they can't or won't delay the release.

Well, you joke, but fine sand is no fun at a beach. On Galveston's East Beach, for example, the sand is very fine. Up on the beach it is not bad, and the dry sand feels pretty good on the feet. If that same sand is wet though, it is no fun at all. It feels like ocean bottom ooze or muck. Fill up a bucket with this wet sand, and you can't pour it out no matter how hard you try. It has to be washed out of the bucket with large amounts of water, and even that isn't easy. It becomes almost like wet concrete in the bucket, but if you DO manage to get it out, it won't build a very good sandcastle, at least with my amateur sand-castling skills. It's no fun to play in if you are a child. My son got very frustrated with it.

A quality beach needs good sand and it seems like they like a quality beach in the middle east.

Or 3- that the steps required to be completely anonymous on the internet are so demanding, and must be done without a single mistakes at any time ever, that no real human can obtain complete anonymity.

This guy made some pretty serious mistakes. We can all get our heads together and develop a plan on what he should have been doing instead. But actually following such a plan, to the letter, without ever making a mistake, seems nearly impossible.

I believe the 1995 date refers to the date at which the GPS satellite constellation was completed, in other words when the full set of 24 satellites was operational. You need just 4 signals to get a cold location fix without making assumptions, but prior to 1995 it is probable that in some parts of the world, 4 satellites were not visible at certain times. Prior to 1995 the system wasn't complete.

I can't find any information in 1980s GPS units, but given the nature of the calculations required to obtain a locational fix, and the processing power available in that era, they must have been excitingly expensive.

Well, that depends on how you count. A single coal unit really maxes out at about 1200-1300MW, although these are pretty rare. More typical is a unit in the size range of 400-900MW. Note that the viability point is somewhere 150-300MW right now in the US for a coal plant. Anything smaller will have a hard time making money right now given economies of scale and the low low price of natural gas. Multiple small units still aren't cost-effective. You need the big machine to make money nowadays in the US. Many coal plants have multiple units on site.

As for gas power plants, they are at 1000MW now, and have been. Turkey Point uses 3 gas turbines and 1 steam turbine in one "block" to produce around 1150MW, and was completed in 2007. 2 on 1 (2 gas turbines, 1 steam turbine) blocks are more common in the industry. Recently gas turbines have increased in size to the point where this can also break 1000MW. The Mitsubishi G and J class turbines, Siemens H class turbine, and GE's 7HA.02, are all of the size to build 1000MW+ natural gas power blocks. Keep in mind that for a typical unit of this size, each gas turbine will put out around 300-350MW, and as a rule of thumb, the steam cycle can utilize the waste heat to recover about 50% of the MW of the gas turbines. So for a typical large gas turbine plant in the most-common 2 on 1 configuration, there are 330MW from each of the 2 gas turbines, plus another ~330MW from the steam turbine, for a total of around 1000MW. That's without additional duct firing (burning additional fuel in the waste heat recovery boiler), which most US gas plants utilize since gas is so cheap here.

I strongly doubt that. Even a little familiarity with the industry would cause you to conclude the exact opposite. Natural gas in the USA is CHEAP. Natural gas in Europe and Asia is roughly 4x more expensive. Even Russian natural gas, in Russia, costs about 3x more than US natural gas. The problem is that shipping natural gas long distances is expensive if no pipeline exists. Ocean shipping of natural gas relies on cryogenically cooling the gas into a liquid, which is energy-intensive (expensive). Then, on the ocean journey, the ship either must burn or discard all of the evaporating gas, or expend even more energy with an on-board liquification plant.

Natural gas in the USA will continue to be produced in North America and consumed in North America. Even if the Chinese can solve the transportation problem, they will sell to their domestic market first, Japan/Korea second, Europe third, South America and Africa fourth, and only then would it make any sense to try to undercut the staggeringly cheap USA natural gas. The only loser with China getting strong into fracking would be Russia, and the environment.

I had a couple time-lapse videos which I made from an in-car video camera. Obviously they were sped up from the source speed, because watching a 6 hour car ride in 3 minutes is a lot more entertaining than watching in real-time. They looked great at 60fps but were dreadful at 30 fps. So dreadful, in fact, that I removed them from Youtube long ago.

Must be nice. The fall and the spring are my busy seasons, and I do a lot of traveling in both. I have traveled the past 6 or so election days. I tried to get a Texas absentee/vote by mail ballot and it is incredibly difficult. Unless you are in the military or can prove that you're handicapped, you can't have one. A suspicion that "I won't be in town" isn't good enough.

Sure enough, my boss called me an hour ago and I am on flying tomorrow and won't be in town to vote. Maybe I can get lucky and find an early voting station but my schedule probably won't allow for that.

Broadcast to everyone at the same time? You mean like Multicast? How did they ever get that working right on all the myriad of different router models?

There are people who would want to live in such places, and there are people who would rather not. My company has 3 offices, head office/repair facility in rural Missouri, manufacturing facility in Houston, and a sattelite office in the country of Colombia. There was no way they could entice me to live in rural Missouri, but they were flexible enough to allow me to work in Houston. They got the person they wanted for the job, and I got a job.

There are lots of companies, though, who are not flexible. Stipulating that employees must live in a place they don't want to artificially limits their pool of potential labor. It also fosters resentment among employees who don't want to live there but really need a job. Companies are shooting themselves in the foot in the name of saving a few bucks. My company has millions of dollars of equipment including welding, machining, rigging, tooling, trucks to move the equipment around, etc. Yet most of the value of the company walks out the door every night. Our differentiator is in the quality of our people, and we attract quality people because we give them a lot of rope and look out for their needs.

With tech jobs there's no geographical need to pick a particular location other than space, power, bandwidth, and the happiness and loyalty of your workforce.

You just contradicted yourself. Western shipyards aren't limited on space. If you have the demand, you can always get more space / capabilities / labor / raw materials. They are limited by demand.