An individual should not have the right to decide which of his government's secrets should be revealed.

A government should not have the right to decide which of its policies & laws should be kept secret from its' citizens.

I've had the misfortune of needing to use an Oracle system with a web interface to deal with a large client for construction management & billing. If that experience is any indication of how Oracle will fix the problem, the Feds would be better off keeping the very crappy existing system. (seriously)

Moore's law is an observation, assumed to be true until observations contradict it, which is exactly what a scientific law is.
Also, correct me if if I'm wrong, but wasn't Moore's law about the number of transistors in an integrated circuit, rather than the (closely related) size of features?

And they don't care whether your car gets its energy from gas at the pump or natural gas at the generator.

Actually, most of them would probably rather sell more natural gas to the electric companies: Fracking has created a huge glut in natural gas supply in the US, which can't be easily shipped out of the country, so its' price has dropped dramatically in the US. On the other hand, the oil extracted by fracking can easily be sold on the world market at world market rates, even if we don't consume here.

1/2 " and 1" sizes are hardly 'the same everywhere in the world'
The world is metric.

Call it 1"NPS or DIN 25, steel pipe dimensions and threads are the same almost everywhere. (Note that the Nominal Pipe Sizes of common small steel pipes are not all that close to the actual ID or OD, anyway.)

One other thing.
You can improve dehumidification somewhat just by reducing the air flow of the A/C unit. You get a little less cooling, requiring the A/C to run longer, and reduce the temperature of the air significantly further below the dewpoint, ringing more moisture out. Of course, you can only go so far before running into problems so like freezing the coil or shutting down on safeties (if they're there), so YMMV.

Any AC/Climate Control people know how the energy costs of modifying humidity compare to those of modifying temperature?

Depends on how you do it, of course.

The typical pre-energy codes way was to cool the air below the dewpoint with a regular A/C cycle then reheat using electric heat (or another heat source, if readily available). That is very cheap to install but very energy-intensive.

The "weedy little freestanding units" do essentially the same thing, but use the hot gas from the compressor to reheat the air. This doesn't cost much more to install (the refrigeration controls used to be the tricky part) and uses a little less energy than regular air conditioning that rejects the heat to outdoors because of the lower condensing temperatures. Larger packaged A/C systems can usually provide this as an option, but the extra cost is not often spent. (Most of the hours needing dehumidification need cooling too, so why add reheat for those few hours a year when it's 75F and raining?)

More sophisticated systems use dessicants to dry the air, which is regenerated by passing exhaust air across the dessicant and/or heating it. This uses very little energy, but is pretty pricy to install. Still, it's a popular choice as part of a "energy recovery" systems for those wishing to score energy efficiency points.

The problem with contracting to the government is that any company looks at government contracts as a license to print money.

On the contrary, most companies I have worked with consider government contracts to have a high probability of losing money for them, which combined with open bidding means the government gets higher costs and/or lower quality contractors.

YMMV. I work on a lot of government projects, as a consulting engineer in construction. Granted, they are mostly state & local projects, though they often have federal $ and the consequent federal requirements.

While I agree that a curved building will be more expensive (I've worked on a plumbing re-design on a round building, e.g.), it won't double or triple costs, and a long, gradually curved building won't be more inefficient in space utilization than most attempts at architectural aesthetics are.

Why "both wrong" when you agree with one?

I first encountered Word when it came bundled with a new computer (MS used their OS monopoly to influence the PC manufacturers to do that.) Didn't use it much, though, until the place I worked decided they had to switch from WordPerfect because most offices (especially clients) had moved to Word.

. . . the 'rain' would be liquid carbon.

Yes, the diamond precipitation would be more properly called a hailstorm.

Actually, I work with piping diagrams more complicated than that quite often. The diagram is easy, figuring out which pipe in the field matches which pipe in the diagram is the hard part. But it's done correctly by workers all the time, and in the case of really seriously hazardous fluids, mistakes are exceedingly rare (and never repeated;).

They would have been screwed even if the generators were fine, because the pumps, and the motors/turbines which drive the pumps, were also located in the basement and were ruined. This placement is almost unavoidable because you generally need to put the pump below the lowest possible water level of the supply tank.

If that's the case, then next time it should be remembered that it is possible to use submersible pumps.

CO is about the same density as air, which is mostly N2. If it's coming from a fire, CO just might be significantly hotter & lighter tahnair