Last time we segfaulted, we took three days to replay the transaction log against the backup and we missed a couple of important deaths. Took us 40 days to discover that problem and the knock-on effects are still here.

In all seriousness though, it depends on how the sim runs, Schlock Mercenary has been playing with a universe-scale sim engine recently and they have dedicated processors per person. So a segfault there might just kill the person. Maybe that's what happens when someone dies suddenly, personality processor segfaulted, hardware simulation (body) is disconnected from the controller and death happens.

The Gambian team was also denied entry, and they're also not an at-risk country. More than 160 countries are taking part and only two were rejected, agreed that it is most likely a local consulate thing.

Nope, it is an admission that a company that found a market for selling vegan mayonnaise has also discovered that there is a potential market for meat that doesn't involve slaughtering Ferdinand the Bull.

The market may be that segment of vegans that don't eat meat because of animal slaughter and butchery as well as a segment of current meat-eaters whose conscience is tweaked a bit, but not enough to quit eating it.

Beans and lettuce bunny huggers won't change, neither will proper carnivores. But enough may will do so if the price and taste is right.

Now please excuse me while I go and tuck into a prime rack of pork ribs with sticky sauce.

And no charges were laid, the police investigated and found nothing worthwhile. http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-hampshire-13218522

In politics I think it might, you rinse out the government by voting in a new one, they get you into a lather while in office and then you repeat. :)

The core idea behind the Westminster parliament and the Prime Minister is that the parliament can vote on their confidence or lack thereof in the PM. This is a binding vote and results in the resignation of the PM if there is no confidence.

In the current environment, there is no clear majority, so to gain the majority, either a coalition must be formed or the party needs to rely on the goodwill of the other parties. A coalition is a formal agreement between the parties that guarantees the vote of confidence, whereas the goodwill option is potentially unreliable and is a true minority government.

As the holder of the most seats, the Tories have the traditional right to try and form a government first. However she will face a confidence vote and will only survive if the Tories can muster enough support. If that fails, then the next largest party can try.

Now as the confidence vote requires an absolute majority, it should be technically impossible for two coalitions to have enough votes for a tie. If the Tories fail and Corbyn forms a government successfully, then the Tories would have the right to call a no-confidence vote in Parliament later. For that to succeed though, they need to be certain of sufficient backing from other parties to reach the majority, parties who backed the other guy in the first place. That would only be the case if Corbyn stuffs up completely. Brit MPs tend not to be malicious enough to toy with the system for shits and giggles.

Hope that clears it up a bit.

They didn't give May the boot, she won her own constituency. However her party now hold less seats than the majority required for them to form their own government (executive branch for the US), but with help from other like-minded parties, they can gain that majority. Of course that help comes with promises and agreements and favours to be called in later.

IF the Tories can't find enough friends, then the other parties can try and club together to get the majority required and put their own chaps in. If that doesn't work, then new elections. Rinse, lather, repeat.

Your last assumption is out, you don't need enough panels to charge all 156 vehicles, you need enough to power the 6-20 stalls at the same time while there are vehicles present. When there are stalls open, the same panels can recharge the local battery banks for when there is no sun.

I can't find a decent voltage/current breakdown of the Tesla Supercharger, only 130kW at maybe 248VDC, you can't vary the voltage, so it looks like each charger pulls 525A at 248VDC. Taking a 325W Renewsys panel, it can supply 37.2VDC at 8.61A at full power, so you need 7 panels in series to push 248VDC out and then 61 sets of 7 panels to hit the 525A current load to provide the 130kW charge capacity. Being a DC charge system, you don't need inverters, just a suitably sized voltage regulator.

That panel is 2m x 1m, so you'll end up with 855m^2 of panels per charger bay, plus sundry space for cables, mounts etc. Still a lot of space, but certainly feasible if your solar panels are forming covered parking areas at the mall where the Supercharger is.

They do, but some surge protection devices have a limited number of surges they can absorb before they have to be replaced. If there were a number of surges, it's certainly feasible for the protection chain to fail at some point.

An anecdote from a few weeks ago with a data center I help manage. It has a backup generator, automatic switch gear and a Schneider Electric Galaxy double conversion UPS. Yes we don't have two, but we ain't an airline. We do have another data center on another site to take over if needed though.

So a few weeks back our phones go wild with texts fired off by the UPS tossing SNMP traps around. One sprint later, the UPS console is showing no input power and our in-house electricians lay rubber from one end of the campus to the other to get to the sub in time. As we wait for the UPS to hit that magic 5 minutes when it triggers the auto-shutdown sequences on the servers, the sparkies discover the sub's output is fine and the generator isn't running.

Then all shit breaks loose, ten power cycles on the UPS input, some lasting long enough to switch from battery to mains, some not. With ten minutes left on the batteries, the UPS gives up, shuts the inverter and charger down and switches the load to static bypass. Room goes silent except for the UPS alarms, and then the eleventh return cycle comes and goes in about three seconds. We hear PSU fans starting and then winding down. I dropped the master breaker on the DB and isolated the room from the UPS. Down until the sparkies figure it out. There goes three hours of our lives.

Turns out that the automatic switch gear had some arc damage on the utility-side contactor feeding the control boards, probably caused by the eight months of load-shedding (read utility driven power cuts to ration power) we had experienced two years ago. That was enough to drop the voltage in one sensor to below the trigger threshold and caused that contactor and the main load contractor to open. Before it could start the generator up, the control board then decided the utility had returned, so it closed the contractors again. And open again, and close again. The sound of a 3-phase 480V 500A contactor switching twice a second is enough to make the sparkies use words a sailor would be proud of.

We had to lock out the sensors, rig a temporary bypass on the contactors to power the room from the generator feed side and replace the damaged contactors before we were fully safe again. We lost 2 PSUs out of 90 and no data. We were lucky.

I relate this to show that no matter how good the power protection architecture is, multiple UPSes, twin feeds etc, shit can and does happen. We were lucky we had people on the site who knew what trouble sounds like and were willing to isolate the room.

So I'm willing to accept that BA lost a data center to power problems. But I'm not willing to accept that the loss of a single data center can shut down global operations. BA must have multiple redundant data centers with a seamless failover mechanism. And that is a failure of IT pure and simple.

Oh boo-hoo Salesforce, MS has had a CRM for decades, just not a particularly good one. Now it has a somewhat better one, all of a sudden you can't compete in an open market with what you've got? Build a better one then.

And while you're at it, can anyone build a CRM that doesn't require signing off souls to all three Hells to make it work? I've only got one and Satan, Cthulhu and Kali all require exclusive rights to it.

http://www.progonos.com/furuti/MapProj/Normal/ProjInt/projInt.html has some examples of this, looks odd and tends to split countries into pieces when flattened out.

Anything looks distorted when flattened out from a globe, and a globe would be the best thing to use, but having one for each desk for kids to measure and plot on is infeasible. A single flat projection like Gall-Peters is more useful, but the level of distortion is more jarring than some others.

And what about companies that hold profits in a corporate purse against future. Not all of that profit goes to shareholders and can be taxed as income/capital gains.

And on the EU Apple issue, Ireland helped create a situation where Apple could avoid paying taxes in other EU countries that did need that tax income and the other EU countries were pissed at that. If it was just Ireland's share of Apple's business that went untaxed, it would have been less of an issue, but Apples (EU!Ireland)'s profits went there as well.

What kind of barbarian cuts their pizza with a circular blade? It's a meat cleaver from above the shoulder or nothing. How else are you expected to get the proper ratio of pizza to shattered pizza stone right?

Still there, called AppLocker and can be set to lock down whatever you want. Whitelist, blacklist etc.

Having watched the National Geographic documentary on the expeditions into the caves, the chances of external contamination for the samples looked acceptably low. The samples were taken from an inch or more inside the crystals, from liquid inclusions accessed by drilling with sterilized drill bits and sterile transfer. The sample sites were in deeper areas of the cave to further reduce the risk.

Combine that with the lack of a close genetic match to modern samples, and the level of confidence in the samples been uncontaminated should be satisfactory high. To contaminate the inclusion, you'd have to breach it, contaminate it and the crystal would have to regrow (something it doesn't do when out of water) all deep inside a cave so hot that it can kill in a couple of minutes without protection.