Such breakdowns often can be prevented with sufficient redundancy, or enough different computers and communication channels to handle the same workload in an emergency.
Redundancy is so critical for power and water utilities that they can be fined hundreds of thousands of dollars a day if they're found insufficiently prepared — and $1 million per day if they're found to be willfully negligent.
"In the industries I work in, if you have something that critical, you generally build more redundancy," said Jason Larsen, a security researcher with consultancy IOActive Inc. who previously spent five years at Idaho National Laboratory examining electrical plants' control systems. "If this (FAA outage) happened at a power plant, I'd be telling them to open up their checkbook and expect to be fined."
FAA spokeswoman Tammy Jones stressed that these types of problems "don't happen on a mass scale or a regular basis," and noted that the FAA handles 50,000 to 60,000 fights a day. And flying on U.S. airlines has never been safer.
"The system is working," she said. "We are making sure people are getting from one place to another."
While the Gulf Coast waits and watches the skies and radar screens, Gustav continues churning along at its own pace and has brought death and devastation. It's a category 3 storm now, with winds of up to 115 mph, and hurricane force winds extend out from the eye up to 60 miles away. Central pressure is at 965mb, which is an indicator of storm intensity. 71 people have been killed so far by the storm throughout the Caribbean. Preparations along the Gulf Coast include a Presidential disaster declaration and even Whiplash Nagin has noted that an evacuation order is likely, though not before today. President Bush declared an emergency in Louisiana, a move that allows the federal government to coordinate disaster relief and provide assistance in storm-affected areas.It's expected to strengthen into a category 4 storm a day before landfall, which means that the storm surge and winds could be quite devastating.
New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said an evacuation order was likely, though not before Saturday, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency said it expects a "huge number" of Gulf Coast residents will be told to leave the region this weekend.
The order includes Grand Isle, Jean Lafitte, Crown Point, Barataria and other areas outside of the levee protection system.. New Orleans has activated its evacuation plans for those who can't self-evacuate.
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and the region's leader, Eduard Kokoity, discussed the future of South Ossetia earlier this week in Moscow, South Ossetian parliamentary speaker Znaur Gassiyev said.Russia used the separatists in South Ossetia and no longer need them. They did what they had to do - create a pretext to get Georgia to crack down on the separatists in order for the Russians to storm in claiming that they're protecting the South Ossetians from Georgian aggression.
Russia will absorb South Ossetia "in several years" or earlier, a position was "firmly stated by both leaders," Mr. Gassiyev said.
In Moscow, a Kremlin spokeswoman said today there was "no official information" on the talks.
The vice speaker of Georgia's parliament, Gigi Tsereteli, said the statement cannot be taken seriously.
"The separatist regimes of Abkhazia and South Ossetia and the Russian authorities are cut off from reality," he said in Tbilisi. "The world has already become different and Russia will not long be able to occupy sovereign Georgian territory."
"The regimes of Abkhazia and South Ossetia should think about the fact that if they become part of Russia, they will be assimilated and in this way they will disappear," he added.
“WGN radio is giving right-wing hatchet man Stanley Kurtz a forum to air his baseless, fear-mongering terrorist smears,” Obama’s campaign wrote in an e-mail to supporters. “He’s currently scheduled to spend a solid two-hour block from 9:00 to 11:00 p.m. pushing lies, distortions, and manipulations about Barack and University of Illinois professor William Ayers.”Ayers is currently a professor, but his statements and actions show him to be unrepentant about his terror past. Ayers wishes his past terrorist efforts would have been more successful and that he figures that history will prove his terror tactics and motivations to be correct.
Apparently, Gustav might force the GOP to postpone their convention in Minneapolis because of the threat to the Gulf Coast states. Brendan Loy points out that the situation isn't going to improve once Gustav eventually makes landfall since this is the most active part of the hurricane season - September is traditionally the month when the Tropics are most active.
Venezuela's state-run oil company would control all fuel distribution but would not nationalize gas stations, under a bill that received initial approval in the National Assembly on Wednesday.This is what the socialists and leftists in the US would love to do - get private companies out of the energy business.
Final approval is expected later this week.
The law gives distributors 60 days to negotiate the sale of their businesses to the government or face expropriation. It also forces distributors to sell storage tanks and gasoline pumps to PDVSA, and to relinquish their brand names.Chavez will not be satisfied until all industry is nationalized and firmly within his iron grip.
A PDVSA subsidiary controls 49 percent of fuel distribution in Venezuela, with the rest controlled by private companies, according to industry representatives.
Under Chavez, the government has nationalized Venezuela's largest telephone, electricity, steel and cement companies and has assumed majority control over four major oil projects.
Also Wednesday, the president said in talks with the Mexican ambassador, the government negotiated a deal that will let Venezuelan authorities take full control of Mexican cement company Cemex SAB's local plants.
In a news conference in Baton Rouge, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal said he could declare a state of emergency by Thursday and warned residents to be prepared.That means that oil rigs in the Gulf may have to shut down to avoid damage and to evacuate the rigs in advance of the storm. It also means that energy prices will increase as the market takes into account lower supply.
"Be ready, now's the time to review your plans," Jindal said. "This is a serious storm."
Gustav triggered flooding and landslides that killed at least 11 people before weakening to a tropical storm, but forecasters said Wednesday it's still a major threat to the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico.
It cannot be emphasized enough that these evaluations speak directly to the only real world executive experience of a gifted rhetorician with incredibly light political experience, hardly any of it at the national level. That he suddenly somehow fancies himself ready and able to become the chief executive of the United States is a bad joke. Based on these evaluations, it's doubtful he is qualified for a mid-level administrative position within a school district in a mid-sized town.The CAC was a failure, and with Obama as the chairman of the board from 1995 through 1999, it makes you wonder exactly how that experience makes Obama qualified to lead any organization, let alone the United States of America.
All this hype is nothing new. It's been going on for years. If you go back and look at the many Iranian announcements of newly developed, high tech, weapons, all you find is a photo op for a prototype, if that. Production versions of these weapons rarely show up. Iranians know that, while the clerics and politicians talk a tough game, they rarely do anything. Even Iranian support of Islamic terrorism has been far less effective than the rhetoric. The Iranians have always been cautious, which is one reason Arabs fear them. When the Iranians do make their move, it tends to be decisive. But at the moment, the Iranians have no means to make a decisive move. Their military is mostly myth, having been run down by decades of sanctions, and the disruptions of the 1980s war with Iraq. Their most effective weapon is bluster, and, so far, it appears to be working.While the analysis is good, Strategy Page doesn't take into account the distinct possibility that the Iranian regime, led by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, would initiate a war with Israel with WMD (whether chemical or nuclear weapons) so as to fulfill religious visions and prophesies.
But the Iranians know that nuclear weapons would make their bluff and bluster even more muscular. Even the suspicion that they had nukes would be beneficial. And that appears to be the current plan. One new weapon the Iranians do put a lot of money and effort into are ballistic missiles. They are building an extended range (from 1,300 to 1,800 kilometer) version of their Shahab 3 ballistic missile. The new version puts all of Israel within range, even if fired from deep inside Iran. Chemical warheads (with nerve gas) are thought to be available for these missiles. But Israel has threatened to reply with nuclear weapons if the Iranians attack this way. Iran would probably get the worst of such an exchange, and the Iranians are aware of it.
Not all of the clerics that run the country are eager to go to war with Israel, or even threaten it. But because the clerical factions do not want to appear at odds with each other in public, the more radical leaders are allowed to rant away about attacking Israel. That's also the thinking behind the many IRGC press conferences announcing imaginary new weapons. The clerics are not going spend billions on mass production of second rate systems that are most notable for being designed in Iran, and not much else.
Virtually everyone is wrong. Georgia didn’t start it on August 7, nor on any other date. The South Ossetian militia started it on August 6 when its fighters fired on Georgian peacekeepers and Georgian villages with weapons banned by the agreement hammered out between the two sides in 1994. At the same time, the Russian military sent its invasion force bearing down on Georgia from the north side of the Caucasus Mountains on the Russian side of the border through the Roki tunnel and into Georgia. This happened before Saakashvili sent additional troops to South Ossetia and allegedly started the war.As I've been noting all along, the Russians provoked a conflict, so as to thwart the Georgian relationship with the US and to send a message to other former Soviet Republics to either stand with Russia or else be warned that the Russians will treat them as enemies.
Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor said Obama supporters have inundated stations that are airing the ad, many of them owned by Sinclair Communications, with 93,000 e-mails. He called the ad false, despicable and outrageous.Just how close is Ayers to Obama, and why exactly did Obama seek out those ties to Ayers? It's not exactly unknown that Ayers was a member of the Weather Underground, and that terrorist group carried out multiple terrorist attacks, and plotted to overthrow the government.
"Other stations that follow Sinclair's lead should expect a similar response from people who don't want the political discourse cheapened with these false, negative attacks," Vietor said.
Sinclair offices were closed late Monday and officials there could not be immediately contacted.
"It seems they protest a bit too much," American Issues Project spokesman Christian Pinkston said. "They're going all of these routes—through threats, intimation—to try to thwart the First Amendment here because they don't have an argument on merit."
Ayers is now a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He and Obama live in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood and served together on the board of the Woods Fund, a Chicago-based charity that develops community groups to help the poor. Obama left the board in December 2002.
Taekwondo officials want Matos and his coach banned for life from the sport. But Castro expressed “our total solidarity” for both Matos and his coach Leudis Gonzalez.Escorted out? He should have been arrested for that behavior as he assaulted the referee. You could disagree with him, yell at him, and make a complete ass out of yourself, but the moment he attacked him, Matos went so far over the line so as to be criminal.
Matos was winning 3-2 in the second round when he fell to the mat after being hit by his opponent, Kazakhstan’s Arman Chilmanov, and was disqualified for taking more than his one minute of injury time.
Matos angrily questioned the call, pushed a judge and then pushed and kicked referee Chakir Chelbat of Sweden, who needed stiches to repair his lip. Matos then spat on the floor and was escorted out.
Taekwondo officials called Matos’ behavior an insult to the Olympic vision. Matos’ coach countered that the match was fixed and accused the Kazakhs of offering him money.
After collecting samples from four restaurants and 10 grocery stores, spending about $300, the teens sent them to the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, where the Barcode of Life project began and where a graduate student had agreed to conduct the genetic analysis.
The girls' samples were compared with the global library of 30,562 bar codes representing nearly 5,500 fish species.
According to Mark Stoeckle, DNA is extracted chemically. The bar code gene, a chemical code, is amplified in a process called Polymerase Chain Reaction.
A machine examines the DNA sequences called bases, which are a series of letters, A, G, C and T, and then digitally matches them with a library of DNA bar codes or other series of letters. The bar code itself is very long, with 648 letters.
The results showed that 25 percent of the girls' samples were mislabeled: half of the restaurant samples and six out of 10 grocery store samples.
In every case, less desirable or cheaper fish was substituted for its more expensive counterpart, Stoeckle said. She and her father would not divulge the names of vendors, citing a fear of lawsuits.
"It's not the fishermen, and it might not even be the restaurants," she said. "Most likely, the mislabeling is occurring somewhere at the distribution level."
The small box on the map is blown up to show four sections of the Baltimore Trough that were leased for oil and gas exploration and the names of the wells that were drilled.He noted back on Friday that the group the Governor put together didn't even know about those five test wells, or their findings that there might be a significant natural gas deposit offshore. Yet, Menendez is doing all he can to thwart any and all offshore drilling, which could bring natural gas to market in addition to petroleum, which also happened to have been found in the same area. It would also likely spur the state to impose severance taxes, which could help raise state revenues as well as spur industrial development jobs to support the offshore energy industry.
Five of the wells found natural gas in these amounts:
- Texaco 642-1 -- 18.9 million cubic feet of gas per day)
- Tenneco 642-2 -- 18.5 mmcfgpd -- (also found oil at 630 barrels/day at shallower depth)
- Texaco 598-1 -- 9.4 mmcfgpd
- Exxon 599-1 -- 7.9 mmcfgpd
- Tenneco 642-3 -- 5.9 mmcfgpd
The exit by Mr. Sharif’s party, the Pakistan Muslim League-N, had been expected in the last few days, and was finally spurred by the decision of Mr. Zardari to run for president, in an electoral college vote set for Sept. 6. President Pervez Musharraf resigned last week under threat of impeachment.Sharif has claimed that Zardari's party broke promises to share power. The coalition government lasted all of a week. Again, all this goes back to long standing grudges and Sharif probably thinks that he should be in the driver's seat given that he was in power when Musharraf overthrew his government in 1999. The breakup occurred because Zardari refused to give a timeline to reinstate judges that were tossed out of power by Musharraf, while Sharif wanted to see them reinstated immediately.
The departure of Mr. Sharif, whose party sat uneasily with Mr. Zardari’s Pakistan Peoples Party, is unlikely to result in immediate elections. Mr. Sharif said his members would sit in the opposition in the Parliament and try to play a “constructive” role.
The Pakistan Peoples Party holds the most seats in the Parliament, but not a majority. Political analysts said they expected it would be able to cobble together a new parliamentary coalition with smaller parties.
Still, Pakistan faces continued political instability that may distract from serious governance and serious efforts to turn back the growing strength of the Taliban in the northwestern parts of the nation.
Nearly 100 people were killed in suicide bombings last week. Pakistani Taliban say the attacks were carried out in response to a military campaign against them -- and have threatened more were to come.
The government said Monday it had banned the main Taliban militant umbrella group Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan and frozen its bank accounts and assets in Pakistan.
The militants in the Bajaur region offered a unilateral ceasefire on Sunday, which the government rejected.
State television said the submarine, named "Ghaem," was the realization of the government's huge investments in the country's defense capabilities. Iran wants to achieve self-sufficiency in the defense area and equip its armed forces with modern weapons.Is Ghdair the class of submarine, or did they simply name multiple ships with the same name?
The report adds that the Iranian Navy earlier received two submarines named "Ghdair."
Production of Ghdair began in 2005.
