Hrm.
The Maldives at least should be fine. They are coral atolls which always lie at sea level, regardless of what height the ocean has been in the past (coral grows).

Wikipedia says satellites show a rate of 3.3mm per year. There's no evidence at present of an accelerating trend. So, 33cm in a century.

NOAA says:
"growth rates of 0.3 to 2 centimeters per year for massive corals, and up to 10 centimeters per year for branching corals"

Maldives should be fine.
Louisiana could have trouble, especially since it has already been losing land. Loss of sediment from upstream, destruction of the delta.

Although delta systems themselves, assuming nothing else is screwing with them, also tend to lie at sea level. The problem ofc is if massive immovable structures are built on them. I guess that's similar to people who build on barrier islands made of sand.

I suppose New Orleans could just a bit higher levees, since they have them in place anyway.

It was more a response to the simplicity of text rendering parent post...

FWIW, you don't *have* to use Java for coding on Android, just like you don't have to use objc for coding on iOS.

Our game has a Java frontend (that's needed) but the game library and the libraries it bundles with (sdl, physfs, netlib), are C (or in the case of the game engine, pascal).

And ofc most of Android itself is absolutely not Java.

For UIs, you can use pretty much anything, even Javascript. They aren't really that demanding...

Did you know that TTF fonts are turing complete?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Type_Font#Hinting_language

"It really worries me that the FreeType font library is now being made to accept untrusted content from the web.

The library probably wasnâ(TM)t written under the assumption that it would be fed much more than local fonts from trusted vendors who are already installing arbitrary executable on a computer, and itâ(TM)s already had a handful of vulnerabilities found in it shortly after it first saw use in Firefox.

It is a very large library that actually includes a virtual machine that has been rewritten from pascal to single-threaded non-reentrant C to reentrant C⦠The code is extremely hairy and hard to review, especially for the VM."

http://hackademix.net/2010/03/24/why-noscript-blocks-web-fonts/

er. trying *Unity* - I guess my brain was thinking on Mint, which was a great solution.
Love the mint menu for MATE.

Hm. I haven't used Unity in ages (switched back to MATE after trying it for a few months) but I seem to recall you can shrink the icon size quite a bit, and pin/unpin to customise what apps you want.

The requirement to make a launcher using a text editor is seriously annoying tho.

When I was trying mint, I found it more convenient to create a .desktop file to add to the sidebar by booting into Gnome2/MATE.

Well, I'll agree his font isn't probably very useful, I'm sure he's just doing it for the heck of it, or for some ridiculously constrained circumstances, but, apart from making a recognisable B in a 3x3 space, seems distinguishing B and E is pretty easy.

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I guess I should say, didn't even feel like a...

Anyway. Sandy was definitely spread over a large area, which helped diffuse it further.
You can talk about total energy, but if the storm is spread over the entire continent, it isn't very interesting.

Most places make clear the storm surge was the worst damage, and that would certainly have been helped by having been spread out, while, the results inland would have been significantly less.

The need for storm surge protection for New York City had been known for years prior.

http://m8y.org/tmp/temp.jpeg

A rough approximation of shapes, as near as I can make out from landmarks.
Sandy is larger, but, doesn't seem to be that much larger to me.

And, as noted in comment to AC, my experience of Sandy in maryland was *very* different from that of people in NJ and NY (as in, barely felt like a tropical storm in the impact on our counties in terms of power loss and damage).

So I measured the two pics in google maps for an approximate estimate of what to my eyeball looked like two pretty big storms, only Irene with a more definite central eye.

From the bottom of Sandy to the top (where, admittedly there's clearly a bit of weak storm cropped, but Irene is clearly a lot wider and more of a spiral, so would win on width)
versus
From the bottom of Irene to the top of the pic.

Both were (very approximately) ~915 miles from top to bottom in those pics.

From the far left of the storm sweep of Sandy to the eye (which is out on its lonesome in the ocean), measured horizontally.
~740

The width of Irene in the shot is massive, and hard to work out due to the coastline being obscured, and similar to the case of Sandy, goes off frame to the right.
But I got, approximately:
~845

Soo. On those pics, again very approximately, ~900x~750 for Sandy and ~900x~850 for Irene. I think they are comparable.

I can tell you that in our part of Maryland, Sandy was mostly a dud. The derecho did more damage to the house and trees - the winds didn't really feel like much at all. I don't think we got any gusts that came close to tropical storm strength.
Not to minimise what happened to New York and New Jersey, just because Sandy clearly covers all of Maryland, to mention that it didn't really feel like much of a storm to us experiencing it in eastern Maryland. The power went out for maybe... 5 minutes. I checked the outtage map along the shore from BGE. There were a number of outtages, but again, not as bad as the derecho.

Erm. Right. Point of pic, really, was that as hurricanes fall apart into tropical storms, they are almost always huge things that cover like most of the east coast.

Compared to pics of hurricanes falling apart into a tropical storm as they track up the coast that I recall and could find of the past, Sandy seems pretty typical.

The dramatic part was the high tide and pushing that storm surge up against New York City which was woefully unprepared despite warnings in the past (shades of Katrina).

As I recall Sandy was a tropical storm when it hit.

Found a pic of Sandy
http://en.es-static.us/upl/2012/10/Hurricane-Sandy-on-October-29-2012.jpg
Compared to...

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/81/Tropical_storm_irene_aug_27_2011_at_1059_est.jpg/932px-Tropical_storm_irene_aug_27_2011_at_1059_est.jpg

The size doesn't seem that dramatic.

So. Not sure what the monster part was. Apart from, ofc, the fact that it hit at an unusually high tide.

I believe most of the damage was storm surge, not due to land covered, or rain fall.

The entire US is overdue for a Category 3, not just New York.

A quick google search...
http://images.google.com/search?site=&tbm=isch&q=category+3+landfall+USA

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-bJhUmJyxrQs/ULy7NL1QbAI/AAAAAAAACQw/RlSJLqrsz5Y/s1600/hurrdrou0613.jpg

looks promising.

Anyway. Pretty obv been awfully lucky recently.

Eh. Anon, your sarcasm seems misfounded.

You'll notice maybe that article has chart of chrome vs firefox for cache latency, w/ Firefox cache behaviour levelling off at 30ms navigation latency while Chrome's keeps climbing - 90+ms latency after 30 days and no apparent limit.

Soo, sounds like maybe he has a legit complaint, not that I use Chrome enough to know if this behaviour still exists.

Your mention of caching reminded me of this:
http://www.pclinuxos.com/forum/index.php?topic=113754.0

"In a majority of web browsers, the size of the browser history and document cache is capped in one way or another: for example, if you have not visited facebook.com for a couple of weeks, any record of this will eventually disappear down the memory hole.

This is not the case for Chrome: the browser keeps all the cached information indefinitely; perhaps this is driven by some hypothetical assumptions about browsing performance, and perhaps it simply is driven by the desire to collect more information to provide you with more relevant ads. Whatever the reason, the outcome is simple: over time, cache lookups get progressively more expensive; some of this is unavoidable, and some may be made worse by a faulty hash map implementation in infinite_cache.cc."

That sounds Chrome specific to me.

Certainly I haven't noticed any cache oddities in Firefox, which I tend to leave running for weeks at a time.