Core Dump

In this hypothetical storm scenario, it is estimated that it would take nine weeks to pump the water out of the city, and only then could assessments begin to determine what buildings were habitable or salvageable. Sewer, water, and the extensive forced drainage pumping systems would be damaged. National authorities would be scrambling to build tent cities to house the hundreds of thousands of refugees unable to return to their homes and without other relocation options. In the aftermath of such a disaster, New Orleans would be dramatically different, and likely extremely diminished, from what it is today. Unlike the posthurricane development surges that have occurred in coastal beach communities, the cost of rebuilding the city of New Orleans’ dramatically damaged infrastructure would reduce the likelihood of a similar economic recovery. And, the unique culture of this American original that contributed jazz and so much more to the American culture would be lost.

still can change my car's oil without a license, permit, or certification. I can still build a potato cannon and fix my air conditioner. I can still copy my CDs to my MP3 player and use my TiVo to watch Friday's Battlestar Galactica again.

But as technology marches on, our laws don't always march with it. They're written by men with agendas that are different than ours — men who don't understand (or have the incentive to understand) what they're trying to legislate.

So chances are there will come a day when there won't be room for men to meddle with technology. The sad thing is that we'll think what they do is against the law in the first place.

In 2002, Laurence W. Britt's Fascism Anyone? analyzed seven fascist
regimes in order to find the common threads that mark them as fascist:

Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Franco's Spain, Salazar's Portugal,
Papadopoulos's Greece, Pinochet's Chile, and Suharto's Indonesia.

He found 14 common characteristics:

"Does any of this ring alarm bells? Of course not. After all, this is
America, officially a democracy with the rule of law, a constitution,
a free press, honest elections, and a well-informed public constantly
being put on guard against evils. Historical comparisons like these
are just exercises in verbal gymnastics. Maybe, maybe not."

Good documentation will generally have certain basic characteristics or attributes that ensures its effectiveness as a means of communicating information to the reader. In this article we list various criteria that you can use to appraise the effectiveness or quality of documentation. While ultimately it is the degree to which a particular document matches the requirements of its targeted audience that determines its effectiveness, this set of criteria at least provides an objective means of measurement.

You might use the criteria, for instance, to judge the merits of an existing document or set for documents, or as a checklist against documentation being written, or as a means of comparing two sets of documentation.

All told, anyway, America now ranks sixth in the world in the percentage of its wealth it spends on R&D. Yet the downward trend isn't solely the result of the parsimony of "the hick in the White House", as one motor mouth put it.

It is largely a reflection of rising educational standards around the world, so it's a comparative decline. In real terms, no single country can even come close to matching the US in the total scientific investment by government, corporations and foundations.

So what is there to worry about? Well, there are some facts Americans find hard to swallow after decades of striding the frontiers of science. Fewer of the Nobel prizes go to American scientists, down to about half from a peak in the 90s. Papers from Americans occupied 61% of published research in 1983, now the total is just under 29%.

The moonwalkers said that future lunar mission design philosophy should include the complete system, achieving a seamless integration of the crew into the facilities and the equipment, with the equipment designed to fit the tasks that the crew is assigned, rather than the opposite. They emphasized that simplicity and reliability were important, with routine tasks and simple emergencies driving the design, not worst-case scenarios. The crew should also be “essentially autonomous” and take a more active role in planning the mission than they had during Apollo.

University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) nanotechnologists and an Australian colleague have produced transparent carbon nanotube sheets that are stronger than the same-weight steel sheets and have demonstrated applicability for organic light-emitting displays, low-noise electronic sensors, artificial muscles, conducting appliqués and broad-band polarized light sources that can be switched in one ten-thousandths of a second.

Strangelets - sometimes also called strange-quark nuggets - are predicted to have many unusual properties, including a density about ten million million times greater than lead. Just a single pollen-size fragment is believed to weigh several tons.

The scientists looked for events producing two sharp signals, one as it entered Earth, the other as it emerged again. They found two such events, both in 1993. The first was on the morning of October 22. Seismometers in Turkey and Bolivia recorded a violent event in Antarctica that packed the punch of several thousand tons of TNT. The disturbance then ripped through Earth on a route that ended with it exiting through the floor of the Indian Ocean off Sri Lanka just 26 seconds later - implying a speed of 900,000 mph.

The second event took place on November 24, when sensors in Australia and Bolivia picked up an explosion starting in the Pacific south of the Pitcairn Islands and travelling through Earth to appear in Antarctica 19 seconds later.

Infants have been stopped from boarding planes at airports throughout the U.S. because their names are the same as or similar to those of possible terrorists on the government's "no-fly list." It sounds like a joke, but it's not funny to parents who miss flights while scrambling to have babies' passports and other documents faxed. Ingrid Sanden's 1-year-old daughter was stopped in Phoenix before boarding a flight home to Washington at Thanksgiving.

Overall, the largest problem our participants had in using the help system wasn't in processing the procedural information in the help, but rather finding the correct help topic, a topic generally unaddressed in the literature on how to write a help system. Specifically, participants had difficulty in searching for topics because their terminology differed from the terminology used by the help system, and they became lost in the unclear structure of the system.

One of the icons of modern American culture now resides in a nondescript warehouse about 30 miles north of here, in a windowless, climate-controlled, heavily-alarmed room built like a bomb shelter that is called simply the Vault.

There, in towering rows of 13,000 audiotapes, 3,000 videotapes and about 250,000 feet of traditional 16-millimeter film lives the recorded history of the Grateful Dead, one of the seminal American rock bands. The Grateful Dead ceased to exist on Aug. 9, 1995, when the band's lead guitarist and most recognizable figure, Jerry Garcia, died at age 53 of a heart attack at a drug treatment center. Yet 10 years later, the man and the band remain alive for millions of fans, and the once notoriously ad hoc Grateful Dead business operation has become a model for a music industry struggling with the Internet and digital democracy.

• Best Novel: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke

• Best Novella: "The Concrete Jungle" by Charles Stross

• Best Novelette: "The Faery Handbag" by Kelly Link

• Best Short Story: "Travels with My Cats" by Mike Resnick