Sunday, February 7, 2010
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Snow in Tucson
While it's 70degrees during the daytime in Tucson, it's nice to see snow on the mountains.
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
Two solar updraft towers in AZ
EnviroMission Ltd’s new initiative is not a small project by any means. The towers will each have 2,400 foot chimneys over a greenhouse measuring four square miles. For some perspective, that’s nearly as tall as the recently-completed Burj Dubai structure.
There’s still plenty of work to be done before the $750 million, 200 megawatt project can begin. The Southern California Public Power Authority recently approved EnviroMission as a provider, but solar updraft hasn’t yet been proven to be commercially viable. That means EnviroMission might have trouble raising enough cash to get started. Still, we’re excited at the prospect of a new tool in our alternative energy arsenal — the more options we have, the better. source
Friday, January 1, 2010
NYT: 36 Hours in Tucson, AZ
Saturday, December 26, 2009
Popular military air show returns to Tucson
Thursday, December 24, 2009
Sunday, December 20, 2009
AZ 5th Happiest State
1. Louisiana
2. Hawaii
3. Florida
4. Tennessee
5. Arizona
6. Mississippi
7. Montana
8. South Carolina
9. Alabama
10. Maine
11. Alaska
12. North Carolina
13. Wyoming
14. Idaho
15. South Dakota
16. Texas
17. Arkansas
18. Vermont
19. Georgia
20. Oklahoma
21. Colorado
22. Delaware
23. Utah
24. New Mexico
25. North Dakota
26. Minnesota
27. New Hampshire
28. Virginia
29. Wisconsin
30. Oregon
31. Iowa
32. Kansas
33. Nebraska
34. West Virginia
35. Kentucky
36. Washington
37. District of Columbia
38. Missouri
39. Nevada
40. Maryland
41. Pennsylvania
42. Rhode Island
43. Massachusetts
44. Ohio
45. Illinois
46. California
47. Indiana
48. Michigan
49. New Jersey
50. Connecticut
51. New York
read more
Wondrous winter walks
Friday, December 11, 2009
Tucson Sonoran Hotdog
Oracle Rd. wildlife paths OK'd
Saturday, December 5, 2009
Meandering along the Rattlesnake Trail

Meandering along the Rattlesnake Trail
Trek the trail
Saturday, November 21, 2009
All-electric sedan in Tucson Jan. 4

Thursday, November 5, 2009
Comcast Internet throttling is up and running
COMCAST, the second-largest US cable television and Internet communications service provider, has a new broadband traffic throttling scheme installed and operating in all of its markets.
The ISP's new regime for restricting its customers' bandwidth utilisation replaces its former stealthy practice of arbitrarily blocking subscribers' peer-to-peer (P2P) upload traffic, which was criticised by the FCC last year after it was exposed by the Associated Press and others.
Comcast's filing with FCC (PDF) says it has put in new hardware and software technology at its Regional Network Routers locations to effect this cunning traffic management plan.
Its network throttling implements a two-tier packet queueing system at the routers, driven by two trigger conditions.
Comcast's first traffic throttling trigger is tripped by using more than 70 per cent of your maximum downstream or upstream bandwidth for more than 15 minutes.
Its second traffic throttling trigger is tripped when the Cable Modem Termination System you're hooked-up to – along with up to 15,000 other Comcast subscribers – gets congested, and your traffic is somehow identified as being responsible.
Tripping either of Comcast's high bandwidth usage rate triggers results in throttling for at least 15 minutes, or until your average bandwidth utilisation rate drops below 50 per cent for 15 minutes.
The Comcast two-tier traffic throttling system enforces different quality-of-service levels. Internet packets to and from a specific subscriber are assigned 'Priority Best Effort' (PBE) queueing by default, and the traffic rate is throttled by switching packets to lower priority 'Best Effort' (BE) queueing.
Comcast uses a bus analogy to explain how its two-tier traffic throttling system works:
"If there is no congestion, packets from a user in a BE state should have little trouble getting on the bus when they arrive at the bus stop. If, on the other hand, there is congestion in a particular instance, the bus may become filled by packets in a PBE state before any BE packets can get on. In that situation, the BE packets would have to wait for the next bus that is not filled by PBE packets."
According to the company, upstream and downstream traffic is managed separately, and its router packet queueing increments - the waiting time between each 'bus' in its analogy - are two milliseconds, or 1/500th of a second.
Comcast says that a throttled subscriber's connection that is forced into the lower BE quality of service queue "may or may not result in the user's traffic being delayed or, in extreme cases, dropped before PBE traffic is dropped."
Thus, Comcast's latest traffic throttling method can lead to transfers being blocked, too. But only in 'extreme cases' it says, so that's alright then.
Comcast has also imposed a monthly 250GB bandwidth usage cap on all of its customers, and it will, after one warning, terminate service for one year to those who exceed that cap twice within a six-month period.
So you punters who signed up with Comcast as your ISP can be assured that the company will deliver only about half of the maximum bandwidth it advertises, on a consistent basis. sourceSaturday, October 24, 2009
Tucson to get new Leaf
Saturday, October 3, 2009
Smokey on the Windowsill
Friday, September 25, 2009
65% Want a Public Health Care Option
Monday, September 21, 2009
Canadian Health Care, Even With Queues, Bests U.S.
The allegations are wrong by almost every measure, according to research by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and other independent studies published during the past five years. While delays do occur for non-emergency procedures, data indicate that Canada’s system of universal health coverage provides care as good as in the U.S., at a cost 47 percent less for each person. read more
Sunday, September 20, 2009
In Phoenix, Weekend Users Make Light Rail a Success
The light rail here, which opened in December, has been a greater success than its proponents thought it would be, but not quite the way they envisioned. Unlike the rest of the country’s public transportation systems, which are used principally by commuters, the 20 miles of light rail here stretching from central Phoenix to Mesa and Tempe is used largely by people going to restaurants, bars, ball games and cultural events downtown.
The rail was projected to attract 26,000 riders per day, but the number is closer to 33,000, boosted in large part by weekend riders. Only 27 percent use the train for work, according to its operator, compared with 60 percent of other public transit users on average nationwide.
In some part thanks to the new system, downtown Phoenix appears to be one of the few bright spots in an otherwise economically pummeled city, which like the rest of Arizona has suffered under the crushing slide of the state’s economy. The state, for years almost totally dependent on growth, has one of the deepest budget deficits in the country. read more














