Why would you pump water up into a reservoir? How about just closing off the penstocks?

Jetta TDI Cup Edition would be the one to get. But you should probably try to "undo" the fix to get the performance back. Make one heck of a good track day car. When I was shopping for a TDI they were selling for more than new 2012/13 Jettas. If I had bought one I would have probably just kept it, unmolested (there's no requirement to do anything to the vehicle if you don't live in a smog check area, just a recommendation).

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I owned a 2013 A3 TDI. The only thing I didn't like about it was that I couldn't get it with Quattro. I sold it mainly because my needs had changed and because it was too good a deal to pass up (basically I got to drive a vehicle for about $1000 per year and miles didn't matter). It was plenty quick for my use, but I'm not trying to get a suspended license either.

Why aren't they doing anything to actively go after ransomware? All the FBI does is advise victims to pay them off.

Try it sometime. Death is the ultimate unknown, and usually the only people who truly wish to end it all are in great pain. Nearly all cases of failed suicide the person who tired say they immediately regretted the attempt.

Most people who are living long lives today are wearing out their bodies and minds. The whole goal is to keep yourself living well, longer. Of course there are a lot of people who want you to live longer and healthier so you can work longer too.

People have been grousing about Winlink from the beginning, mostly because a few people on ocean going yachts use it for email instead of using a commercial band service.

We don't know what those displaced workers will do. I'm certain a sizable percentage will go on the public dole, forever lamenting their misfortune. I remember this happening in my hometown in the 1980s contraction of the US steel industry. Some of my friend's parents were basically useless. Some would do odd jobs around the neighborhood for the retired to supplement their unemployment and welfare. Divorce, substance abuse and other social problems were rampant. But I also remember lots of people leaving to better pastures. When I left the area for school I was amazed at the activity and growth where I landed. People said times were tough there, but they had no idea.

A few years ago I saw one of those "how it's made" videos visiting a steel mill. What at one time required 50 or more men to charge and monitor the furnace was one man in an air conditioned room watching monitors and conveyor belts. Probably a few that weren't on camera unloading the train cars and unclogging the hoppers, but no where near the number needed when the primary way to load the furnace was shovels and wheelbarrows. The United States still produces about 90 million metric tons of steel per year, but with a small fraction of the workers needed 50 years ago.

The thing that I expect will happen is that politicians and planners will obsess on the people who are going to resist the change, and ignore the real tangible benefits of increasing human productivity. So even while we'll see dramatically reduced costs for producing goods and creative solutions that will make services more affordable than ever before, the focus will be on those unwilling (or unable) to make the transition. No one is interested in positive news, so gloom and doom will continue in the press (another field where automation has led to an explosion of production and net gains in employment), while we all sit around happy we're doing OK, but what about everyone else?

They'll stay pretty high, cruising at 400' until they're ready to land.

14 CFR part 107.51, Operating limitations for small unmanned aircraft.

(d) The minimum distance of the small unmanned aircraft from clouds must be no less than:
(1) 500 feet below the cloud; and
(2) 2,000 feet horizontally from the cloud.

I suppose I was wrong about precipitation, but fog for sure is right out.

The FAA requires commercial UAVs to have a remote pilot in command. This is someone who is watching the aircraft at all times and either controlling or ready to take manual control at any time. None of these schemes are addressing the elephant in the room of the 14 CFR part 107 requirements. They just think they're going to get waivers to cover their delivery area. But as it is today a drone cannot fly in fog or precipitation. Never mind that most aren't powerful enough to handle a decent headwind either. Seems to me the desire for drone delivered dinner would skyrocket when there's a snowstorm.

I took a quick practice flight yesterday evening, hoping to get some pictures of the high water in the river. The swallows were out in force, and they didn't like my drone "invading" their turf at all. How many deliveries will never make it because the drone happened to fly over a nesting pair? Bird strikes are going to happen often. Even with the few drones in the air now they are pretty common, and for sure every remote pilot has a story about birds.

Windows NT 3.51 service pack 5.

RS-232 serial was a standard from 1960 and lasted up until the late 1990s. Not a bad run.

Moore's Law made USB possible. The parallel printer bus wasn't much more than a few buffer transistors on the system bus for most computers. And RS-232 UART chips were pretty basic too. USB chips probably had more transistors on the die than an 8008 chip.

I used to own a Digital PDP-8e, built in 1971. It was based on the DEC Omnibus. There were two serial options, an RS-232 card and a current loop card. These cards were about 8X10 inches and covered with transistors.

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But we keep hearing how renewables are "just around the corner" to being a fantastic and net cheaper way to generate electricity, yet the ongoing German experiment with switching their grid over to renewables show that it's not at all cheap and since they've scaled back nuclear, led to net increases in fossil fuel use and CO2 emissions.

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People love to point out that "the wind in (choose your favorite windy location) contains enough power to run the (choose your favorite country)." That might be true in a theoretical perspective, but in reality that potential (kinetic actually, just unused) energy is incredibly diffuse and extremely difficult to harvest. Same with solar power. Yes there's been progress on solar power capture, but there's just not that much there to capture, at least in comparison to other more dense sources.

And remember, the siting of Fukushima was pretty poor, there was no containment dome and company culture was too dependent on top-down management. And for largely political reasons the acceptable cleanup standards are much higher than necessary. We'll never really know what an acceptable response should be, but for certain the larger problems in Fukushima prefecture were more about destruction from a tsunami than the release of radioactive isotopes.

Oh, and despite the disasters of Fukushima and Chernobyl nuclear power is still the safest way to generate electricity. More people are killed or injured by falling off roofs than are exposed to radiation (including uranium miners).

Harry Reid made sure that would never happen. Sheldon Adelson said Yucca Mountain would be bad for business, so that was the end of that. Too bad, since Las Vegas Sands uses a lot of electricity to run their AC at 62 year around.

But the larger problem is one of water. Large commercial scale reactors depend on a lot of water, which is hard to come by in the west. One of the benefits of the Nevada test site (and Yucca Mountain) is that there's not much water in the area.

Technically, the Fukushima station's reactors all shut down prior to the tsunami as per procedure. But even SCRAMing a reactor isn't going to eliminate heat immediately, so cooling pumps needed to be run for days after shutdown. When the diesel generators were submerged and unable to operate that's when the problem started. In any other situation TEPCO would have delivered more generators, but because of the larger catastrophe it wasn't possible to get them from the unaffected area to the disaster zone.

You're correct though that modern reactors like the AP-1000 are "walk away safe" in that the cooling loop requires no external power.