At a certain level you have grid stability issues with highly variable and unpredictable loads; this necessitates system designs that can be fast response-- effectively batteries at the generation level. The traditional approach to grid stability was called "Spinning Reserve;" the grid would have about 10% excess capacity online and running such that load pickup could be quick. With things like solid state voltage regulators and more precise engine control-- and due to economics-- spinning reserve today is down closer to 4-5%.

Wind power is very hard on the grid. For an off-grid solution, you need to have a "load dump" resistor to burn up excess energy; with grid-connected systems you just assume the grid can buffer it.

For solar to work effectively as a high percentage of base load, you need to be able to have local energy storage. This energy storage can handle shifting load towards periods of peak consumption. Batteries tend to not be cost-effective for 100% offset. In addition to that, you need to have means to reduce your building demand when capacity is low. The cheapest way to do this is to cause discomfort-- turn off the air conditioning, reduce lighting levels to minimums, etc.

I use Atomic Browser for ad-heavy sites. It has some nice features and could do several things Safari couldn't. You can also download pages if you are going to fly or want a ready reference.

You might want to google "adaptive comfort."

Comfort is a function of temperature, humidity, air movement, radiant temperatures, clothing, and metabolism. There are a fair number of variables to play with, enthalpy is just the easiest to look at.

The other interesting thing about deserts is monsoons. Swamp coolers don't do much good then.

Logically they would go for something around 4%O2/96%N2. SF6 is ozone depleting and controlled by epa even for medium voltage switches.

You can survive with low exertion levels down to around 2.5%; with a non sealed mask an oxygen or even compressed air bottle would be plenty to get you to a comfortable PPO2 at 8,000 feet.

2002. They saw what we preached and acted on it. They did it with fiber because of the nature of their governments rather than the utilities.

10-100Mb wasn't uncommon in Sweden then in the cities, although rural may have taken longer.

Technically SCBA like the fire department uses, unless they use rebreathers.

The cash is in cassettes inside the vault, so the ink needs to be in the cassette. I don't think the cassettes are physically large enough to do that, but if they are due packs are already integrated.

But, other factors are going to limit how successful the attack is in a modern bank in the US. There are a number of defense in depth features that should get people caught. Surprised it works in Europe.

I think you have that wrong. They will connect via an encrypted tunnel over port 443 to an AWS cloud instance to log all your activity and provide an "interface" for you to use anywhere you want. Should you decide not to use that interface, your Thing is a Paperweight. But they might still be able to display advertising on it...

Part of it is where you use the device rather than how. This morning, I was quite happy to be able to use my phone to VPN to the office and SSH to a server to check out why someone else was having problems on the VPN... while still lying down in bed. Right now, I am happy to be able to type this on my tablet while taking a dump. Had the tablet been bedside this morning, it would have been much easier and faster to use it to check server logs. But, the laptop would be less useful lying in bed.

I have a few great apps that make fantastic use of the tablet, and I am always happy to have access to them. I much prefer going to meetings with a man-purse than a laptop bag, so I take a little performance hit on taking notes. The cellular access makes up for it though, as I can access the samba server and bring up documents remotely to display in the meeting.

At home, I only reach for my laptop if I need word, excel, or sketchup. My wife in contrast usually "works" from her desk, so she is more comfortable with the laptop, even when on the couch.

You can make a group of 10-15 40,000 square foot floor plates operate with a substantial amount of recirculated utilities-- bring up just natural gas and you have a source of electricity, heat, and water; just send down black water or even sludge from sewage. It starts to get cost effective today at about 1MM square feet, but when you factor in the cost of risers and pumping it might start to scale down. The linear motor elevator concept, with multiple independent cabs in directional hoistways (up/down) reduces that impact, and currently ultra tall buildings do not plan on evacuating everyone to the ground via stairs, so that isn't an impediment.

Structurally, much over 800 floors would be quite difficult as the concrete to support the gravity load of the building would start to take up half the floor area at the base, but stepped buildings can assist with that-- 10x floor area at base might give you a reasonable useable area. Wind or seismic loads would need to be dealt with by active systems... Not sure how well that would go over though.

Agree, but a hybrid approach is likely the most efficient. Get 50% of the power/braking from the rope and 50% from a cab-mounted motor. Batteries aren't needed; just regenerate into the rails.

The other interesting challenge is water. Every 200m you need a pressure break because the welds in the pipe reach pressure limits. An extremely tall building needs to deal with these issues cost effectively, and efficiently-- think water treatment every 40 stories to recover grey water, treat potable water, recover condensate, etc.

Hell, from an IT perspective you reach the limits of multimode fiber risers pretty quickly.

I actually did. Granted, it was once, and 10 years ago, and I price checked when I got home. It was actually something useful that was difficult to find elsewhere at the time-- a curved shower rod.

I will miss sky mall. It's goofy stuff helped inspire a bit of creativity or at least make me smile on a flight. Just can't see how it would be possible for them to have an attachment rate of even 0.02%, two orders of magnitude than conventional advertising.

Apple seems to be crippled by GPL3 on a few things, which pisses me off as a Mac user. Samba is the obvious issue, but there are plenty of others. Yosemite was a bad upgrade. I do love the concept of integrating the various devices seamlessly, but it isn't quite there yet.

I'm proud of my SnapBack-esque pull backups set on a NAS drive. The NAS has backup priveledges on the laptops, and pulls data via rsync. The laptops have no access to the NAS drive except for ssh. Provides linked snapshots hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly. Just need to get a second drive running in a few months.

Only challenge is that since the laptops are OSX I don't copy the resource forks, but that could be addressed if I really cared...

Backup>Snapshot>Redundancy for disaster recovery. It is the reverse for operating issues.