From Quantcast, first you can see that total page views are down.
Next you can see that visits are down.
But! Page views per person are way up.
If they hadn’t driven everyone away with the terrible bugs, non-working comments and notifications and pages that don’t load right, they would have the same number of people all clicking on more pages. The idea worked but they lost the people. The self imposed deadline to roll out a non-functional site killed a perfectly good plan to increase page views per person.
Where are all these nuclear power plants that have been the cause of so much speculation? Maybe in your back yard. A full list is available at Wikipedia.
The first map is courtesy of Argonne National Laboratory. It show the location of all plants active and inactive, well except the ones that government doesn’t want us to know about. Closed plants are still not the kinds of places you want to build playgrounds and swimming pools.
Click image to enlarge
Next we have a nice map from world-nuclear.org. This one shows only plants that are up and running.
Click image to enlarge
Many of the older reactors have been shut down as they become too expensive to maintain, obsolete or go past their permit date without an extension. The cluster of dots on many locations are to show the multiple reactors per location.
From world-nuclear.org:
The USA has 104 nuclear power reactors in 31 states, operated by 30 different power companies. In 2008, the country generated 4,119 billion kWh net of electricity, 49% of it from coal-fired plants, 22% from gas and 6% from hydro. Nuclear achieved a capacity factor of 91.1%, generating 805 billion kWh and accounting for almost 20% of total electricity generated in 2008. Total capacity is 1088 GWe, less than one-tenth of which is nuclear.
The recent tragedy in Japan has many people in earthquake prone areas of the US wondering if they should purchase earthquake insurance. Let’s look at the likelihoods, costs and benefits. We’ll look at California because data is readily available and Cthulhu’s wrath has been predicted to be focused on the San Francisco Bay Area.
Source conservation.ca.gov
How Likely Is an Earthquake?
“Probabilistic seismic hazard maps… are typically expressed in terms of probability of exceeding a certain ground motion. For example, the 10% probability of exceedance in 50 years maps depict an annual probability of 1 in 475 of being exceeded each year. The maps for 10% probability of exceedance in 50 years show ground motions that we do not think will be exceeded in the next 50 years. In fact, there is a 90% chance that these ground motions will NOT be exceeded.”
But, a smaller amount of ground movement is more likely and is almost certain to happen at some point in the next 30 years.
The red ares of this map are the highest level of ground movement and line up with large population areas. The conclusion is that shaking will occur, we don’t know when and we don’t know how bad it will be.
That gives rise to the need to mitigate the risk of property loss when an earthquake does happen. But what exactly does earthquake insurance cover and how much does it cost? Those factors are driven by coverage levels, structure replacement value and location.
What Does Earthquake Insurance Cover?
Repair, or in the event of a total loss, replacement cost, of an insured home when damage exceeds the policy’s deductible, up to the policy limit.
If you cannot live in your home after an earthquake, you may be eligible for additional living expenses up to your policy limit.
After the deductible has been met by covered damage to your home, the policy will replace personal property such as furniture and household items, up to your policy limit.
Your policy will pay up to $10,000 (as part of the dwelling limit of insurance), including engineering costs, to replace, stabilize or restore the land that supports your home.
What Does Earthquake Insurance Not Cover?
Detached garages and most other structures that are not part of the dwelling itself
Land damage, other than $10,000 in coverage for land stabilization
Swimming pools and spas
Awnings and patio coverings
Fences
Certain decorative or artistic items such as mirrors, chandeliers, stained glass, or mosaics
Landscaping and irrigation systems
Antennas and satellite dishes
Patios, decks, walkways, and driveways not needed for pedestrian or disabled access to your home
Plaster, to the extent that the repair cost exceeds the value of drywall
Exterior masonry veneer (with the exception of stucco, which is covered)
Damage caused in whole or in part by causes other than earthquakes, such as fire during or following an earthquake (in most cases, fire damage is covered by your homeowners insurance policy); water damage resulting from floods or surface water; power failures; explosions; or non-seismic land sliding
Certain categories of personal property, including glassware, crystal, porcelain, artwork, motor vehicles, boats, and trailers
How Much Does Earthquake Insurance Cost?
The cost depends on many factors but a rough estimate is that it is going to be in the same annual premium range as the existing homeowner’s policy.
For example, using nice round numbers, if a home is completely destroyed and costs $200,000 to replace the structure then the out of pocket expenses would be $30,000 plus the cost of all the items that the earthquake insurance does not cover.
If an earthquake strikes 10 years from now and a homeowner pays $1,500 per year then they’ve put in $15,000 in premiums, $30,000 in deductibles and several thousand more for uncovered items. The 10 year cost is close to $50,000 in this scenario with total property destruction. If your property damage is less than $30,000 then the policy pays nothing.
All of this does not apply if your home is destroyed by a tsunami resulting from and earthquake. For that you’re going to need flood insurance, but that’s a different article.
What If You Don’t Have Coverage?
Then you’re out of luck. You now own a pile of rubble with a mortgage. In some cases the government will provided federal disaster grants but those are usually less than $15,000. At this point you should just turn the useless keys over to the mortgage holder and rent an apartment.
Obviously if you’re lucky enough not to own a home then you can ignore this whole thing and just get renter’s insurance which is far less expensive.
Important Note: Crasstalk is not an insurance professional and should not be used as a replacement for one.
The long awaited Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 will be available for download starting tonight at 9PM Pacific. If you’re on a Mac then the answer is no because Microsoft gave up after IE 6. But if you’re on Windows and you don’t use your computer for work related tasks that might be incompatible, then the short answer is yes, eventually you should upgrade. This is true even if you don’t use IE that often since the most of the new security work will go into IE 9, it follows standards more closely and it’s faster.
Tonight after 9 Pacific you can go to beautyoftheweb.com to download the installer. Eventually Microsoft will push IE 9 through Windows Update but that will be many months. Other than speed improvements, there are some interesting new integration features with the Windows 7 task bar, a cleaner look (it looks like Firefox 4) and support for HTML 5. A full list of new features is here.
The speed numbers below are always changing, but the important thing is that IE 9 is on par with the other major browsers.
The address bar also gets an overhaul and now gives inline search as you type results.
Also coming soon is Firefox 4 which has recently hit release candidate and will be finalized in the coming months. As you can see from the graph above, Firefox 3 is really slow.
The more cautious out there might want to wait a few weeks to update so that any major early bugs and site incompatibilities can be worked out. And before you tell me that you don’t care because you use Chrome or Safari, that’s cool, but you should upgrade anyway there are some sites that still refuse to work with those browsers.
The bearded and bespectacled Engadget editor Joshua Topolsky has announced he’s leaving the fourth most popular blog in the country. He gives no reason and says he has a few fantasy projects he might work on. That translates to I have been fired and have no new job.
Engadget has been owned by AOL since 2005 when the founders sold the blog group Weblogs, Inc. for a reported $25M. In that time they have had steady growth and are well regarded. So, what changed? AOL purchased HuffPo and put Arianna Huffington in charge of the AOL blog empire which also includes the Techcrunch group of blogs. It seems strange timing for the editor to “leave” unless Arianna wants to put one of her own in charge or Topolsky didn’t want to go along with the AOL Way. This comes in the same week that AOL laid off 200 people.
Voice over internet protocol (VOIP) is how you make phone calls through your internet connection and is a common way of ditching traditional land line service. If you’re in the market for a VOIP solution or want to look at alternatives to your existing VOIP provider then this may be one option.
When I was looking for a VOIP solution I considered Ooma, Vonage, MagicJack and Comcast Voice. I wanted a low cost, high quality, reliable connection and did not have any need for international calling. I quickly ruled out MagicJack because it requires a computer be on at all times and that’s not very friendly to my power bill or the environment.
Vonage and Comcast offer a similar service for comparable prices. Comcast offers their Triple Play service which combines cable television, internet and phone service in one package, but for me the package includes a slower internet speed than I have with them now and I the package deal is only really attractive for the first year. Vonage seemed reasonable, but the monthly cost wasn’t better than Comcast.
The Ooma Telo on the other hand is a one time fee and has no recurring costs. The device itself is relatively small and unobtrusive. It’s a matte black finish and can be placed anywhere that you have a wired internet connection. I keep mine in the living room and plug a cordless phone base station directly into it. Ooma offers a handset but I uses a Panasonic cordless phone instead. I opted to have my original land line number ported over by Ooma and they assigned a temporary number to my device while the port was happening. Once the port was done the temporary number seamlessly transitioned to my original number.
The voice quality sounds like a traditional land line and I only rarely hear digital artifacts on the line.
The other features that Ooma offers are all accessed through their web based portal. The portal gives access to listen to voicemail, see call logs and change settings. I subscribed to a community black list of known telemarketers and have entered a few numbers into a personal blacklist of my own. You have the choice of sending blacklisted numbers to voicemail or just having them go into the void.
In case my network goes down (we are talking about Comcast here) I enabled is call forwarding on outage. When there are network problems and the Ooma device is unable to get online then all calls are forwarded to the number of your choice. In my case I send them to my cell phone.
For voicemails I have them sent to my email as a mp3 attachment and can listen to them on my computer, cell phone, on the portal or directly on the Telo device.
Overall it’s been great and has saved me a lot of money.
A reminder that tomorrow, or tonight depending on how late you’re up, is the time to spring forward an hour. Since the government won’t stay out of our lives and keeps messing with the date we can never predict when this will happen from year to year. Here is a list to help you get ready.
If you regularly apply updates to your computer then the electronic demons that live inside it will take care of this for you. If you don’t apply updates then you deserve the fate that is going to befall you.
Your iPhone may or may not wake you up at the correct time on Monday. History tells us that it won’t so you should plan accordingly. I’m not joking on this one.
If you still have a VCR then it’s best to just unplug it and let it go back to flashing 12:00.
Your watch will require that you pull that little knob out half way and then spin it backwards for a bit. Or if you still have that Casio then you have to hold down the left two buttons while pressing the right top button three times in a row, then release all the buttons and press Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A. Then you should be all set.
Your dog will be confused and will still want to eat at its regular time. Dogs don’t care about daylight saving time.
If you are in Arizona, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, U.S. Virgin Islands or American Samoa you can ignore all of this.
How would the 50 states measure up by GDP if they were individual countries? To give the readers a better idea the Crasstalk infographic team compared the states by GSP (gross state product) to the GDP (gross domestic product) of countries around the world and then mapped those countries onto the states. The data is for 2010 and comes from Wikipedia. The state GSP is mapped to the country with the closest GDP without being higher (Price Is Right rules). The map is courtesy of the US Government’s National Atlas Map Maker.
Hello, my name is Dogs of War and I’m an addict. I’ve been addicted to Angry Birds for what seems like a millennium and I’m powerless against those egg stealing pigs.
There is one thing I will not do though, and that is to play Angry Birds on Facebook. I have my phone with me at all times and that is about as much as I can handle. But tens of millions of you will be playing Angry Birds on Facebook and publisher Rovio hopes to make some serious scratch.
The mobile version is bird focused and has no social interaction outside of wanting to get a higher score than your friends. However, the Facebook version will give the pigs more time in the spotlight and like all successful Facebook games will feature social interaction. So, get ready to use that “hide” button to save yourself from constant updates about your mother and high school friends getting 3 stars and saving the eggs.
I know you are a group of crafty people so today we’re going to share those items of handiwork that you’re most proud of. It could be a sweater you knitted, a school project you “helped” your kids with, a barn you raised, a birdhouse you made, a wall you painted or just how you craftily arranged the twelve pieces of furniture to fit into your 400 square foot studio. Craftiness comes in all forms.
To put a picture into a comment you will need to host the image somewhere. Personally, Imgur has worked well for me, but you can get them from anywhere. A warning that photos hosted on Facebook should probably be saved elsewhere. Facebook’s new image viewer makes it very hard to get to the actual photo. Images you have on another site need to be the actual image file and not the page that contains them. The files in in .jpg, .png, .gif or something like that.
In the comment box tell us a little something about the picture and then include a link as follows.
But! Page views per person are way up.
If they hadn’t driven everyone away with the terrible bugs, non-working comments and notifications and pages that don’t load right, they would have the same number of people all clicking on more pages. The idea worked but they lost the people. The self imposed deadline to roll out a non-functional site killed a perfectly good plan to increase page views per person.
on the other hand is a one time fee and has no recurring costs. The device itself is relatively small and unobtrusive. It’s a matte black finish and can be placed anywhere that you have a wired internet connection. I keep mine in the living room and plug a cordless phone base station directly into it. Ooma offers a 
but I uses a Panasonic cordless phone instead. I opted to have my original land line number ported over by Ooma and they assigned a temporary number to my device while the port was happening. Once the port was done the temporary number seamlessly transitioned to my original number.
