Monday, October 14, 2013
Half-a-million people have fled their homes in and around the Indian state of Orissa after Cyclone Phailin made landfall.
Wikinews interviewed specialists in meteorology about the devastation the cyclone has caused.
Saturday, March 1, 2008
While nearly all coverage of the 2008 Presidential election has focused on the Democratic and Republican candidates, the race for the White House also includes independents and third party candidates. These parties represent a variety of views that may not be acknowledged by the major party platforms.
Wikinews has impartially reached out to these candidates, throughout the campaign. We now interview independent Presidential candidate Frank Moore, a performance artist.
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Daylight Saving Time will end on November 4, 2007 at 2:00 a.m. local time for most of the United States and Canada.
This change is different from previous years due to a U.S. mandated daylight saving time change, which was caused by the Energy Policy Act of 2005.
The next change to regular Daylight Saving Time will be in 2038.
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byadmin
Your eyes are one of the most important parts of your body. Without your eyes, many daily tasks in life would be significantly more difficult and troublesome. However, not everybody’s eyes work the way they should. Millions of people are born with conditions such as farsightedness, nearsightedness, and astigmatisms. These conditions can alter your eyesight in a way that you need corrections to fix them. Some of these corrections include glasses and contacts. Wearing and caring for contacts and glasses every single day can get extremely annoying and tedious after decades. Thankfully, there is a more permanent solution to these conditions. Laser surgery can quite literally reshape your vision.
What Is Laser Surgery?
As the name might suggest, laser surgery in West Point, NE involves the use of medical lasers. The most common type of surgery involves reshaping the cornea. The laser will physically cut a flap into your cornea. Once the flap is there, the surgeon will then fold back the flap and then remove some corneal tissue from underneath the cornea. The flap is then replaced. The reshaped cornea can now reflect light into your eyes properly, which can lessen or completely fix vision problems. There are other forms of laser surgery that are designed to help with different, more specific eye problems. You can consult your regular eye doctor to determine which type of laser surgery is most suitable for you and your eyes.
Why Get Surgery?
While glasses and contacts can correct some visual problems, wearing them every day can become rather annoying. Not only do you have to wear them but you often have to take special care to ensure that they are rarely if ever, damaged. These types of corrective devices can be extremely expensive, depending on your vision problems. That being said, vision also changes over time, meaning that you have to go back to the eye doctor to change the strength of those corrective devices repeatedly. This is a costly, time-consuming, and tedious process. With laser surgery, you will be able to do that less or maybe not even at all anymore. For more information on what laser surgery can do for you, click here to learn more.
Friday, September 9, 2005
New Orleans, Louisiana —After Category 4 storm Hurricane Katrina slammed into New Orleans, on the night before August 29, 2005, several flood control constructions failed. Much of the city flooded through the openings. One of these was the flood wall forming one side of the 17th Street Canal, near Lake Pontchartrain. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) is the primary agency for engineering support during such emergencies. A USACE team was assessing the situation in New Orleans on the 29th, water flow was stopped September 2nd, and the breach was closed on September 5th.
| This article mentions the Wikimedia Foundation, one of its projects, or people related to it. Wikinews is a project of the Wikimedia Foundation. |
Wednesday, February 23, 2005
On Monday, at 10.14 pm UTC, the Wikimedia server cluster experienced a total power failure, taking down Wikipedia, Wikinews, and all other Wikimedia websites.
The servers are housed in a colocation facility (colo) in Tampa, Florida, USA. They occupy two racks, with each rack receiving electricity from two independent supplies. However, both supplies have circuit-breakers in them, and both opened at the same time, leading to a total power failure. All computers immediately went down. It’s normal for fire safety regulations to prohibit uninterruptible power supplies in colos, with the colo providing its own UPS and generator instead. The circuit breakers were on the computer side of this emergency power system, so none of the computers continued to receive power to survive the breaker trip or shut down safely.
The actual reason why the circuit breakers tripped is currently unknown.
When power was restored, it was discovered that most of the MySQL databases that store the data which makes up Wikipedia et al had been corrupted. The main database and the four slaves had all damaged the data on their hard disk drives beyond the ability of the auto-correction to repair. Only one copy survived safely, on a machine that is used for report generation and maintenance tasks, which remained 31 hours backlogged while catching up after an unusually heavy update load during the previous week.
Volunteer Wikimedia engineers worked through the night rebuilding the databases from the sole good copy onto the other servers. The Wikipedia database is over 180Gb in size, making the copying process last 1.5 – 2 hours for every server it was performed upon.
Regular back-ups of the database of Wikipedia projects are maintained – the encyclopedia in its entirety was not at risk. The last database download was made on February 9; all edits since then could only have been laboriously rebuilt from logs and recovered from the damaged database requiring much more time and effort.
Limited read-only service was established late Tuesday afternoon, with editing becoming possible 24 hours after the power failure. Final repairs continue now, as well as upgrades to prevent similar issues in the future. Server-intensive features, such as categories and ‘watchlists’ that display recent changes to selected articles to registered users, remain disabled to ease the load on the recovering systems.
The process which led to the damage originated with the operating system, disk controllers, or hard drives failing to flush the data correctly.
If the power to a database server is cut mid-write, the database may be corrupted and unreadable, however the operating system, hardware, and software are designed to make this very unlikely. In a previous incident in 2004 power was also lost to a server but the database was undamaged.
To avoid such damage, each database server saves a copy of an edit to be applied to the database on a separate storage system before making the actual update to the database itself. This so-called ‘write-ahead logging’ should ensure that in the event of a system crash, the database can be rebuilt from a ‘last-good’ state by replaying the edits saved in the log.
Earlier this year popular blogging site LiveJournal suffered a similar power failure when another customer at their colocation facility pressed an Emergency Power Off button, intended for use only by firefighters. The company suffered database corruption similar to that seen at Wikimedia.
LiveJournal are now fitting UPS to their servers to ensure that they have time to shut down safely in the event of a power failure. Wikimedia was said to be investigating the possibility of fitting similar equipment at the time of this failure.
Several pundits have suggested that the use of another database, such as the proprietary database Oracle or the free PostgreSQL, would have avoided the database corruption seen at the server cluster. A post-mortem of the incident show the failure was in the operating system, or the hardware, or some combination of the two. LiveJournal, which also uses MySQL, reported similar database corruption after their power cut.
The Wikimedia foundation only allows the use of free software on its systems, and future versions of the Mediawiki software will support the PostgreSQL database.
Users are reminded that during times of system failure or excessive demand, they can still search Wikipedia using Google. The articles may be viewed using Google’s cache.
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byAlma Abell
Fracking, also referred to as hydraulic fracking is the process of drilling into subterranean shale and blasting it open to release gas that is found underneath. The biggest problem that has actually been facing fracking is the disposal of millions of gallons of water that have been contaminated with frac chemicals, salts and other leached minerals. The effects of these chemicals to the environment are a greater concern to the environment and now many organizations are pushing for the closure of companies that are responsible for frac water disposal in the US.
The most commonly used method in frac water disposal, which is basically pumping the water underground, has been associated with earthquakes. This is so because when the water is pumped, there is a rise in the sub-surface pressure thereby leading to an earthquake.
The frac water has been associated with pollution of the environment with many cases being reported where the waste water has flown to rivers, cities and lakes and caused contamination as well as other hazardous effects.
The use of water for hydraulic fracturing also leads to the diversion of water from water supplies, stream, flows, and municipalities. The frac waste water also contains oils spills and methane gas which have a severe effect on the marine environment. Surface runoffs end up in ground water systems, and in some cases, tracks involved in the transportation and disposal of the millions of gallons of water frac water cause spillages.
The treatment and disposal of frac water has been taken by sewage treatment plants that do not have enough equipment to treat the millions of gallons of frac water. Therefore the disposal of frac water has been a great problem to the environment.
Many companies prefer shifting frac waste disposal role to specialized treatment plants, which leads to spillages on the way and it`s also expensive for the company. The process of diluting the contaminated also consumes billions of gallons of water which at times end up leaking in to the soil and in to rivers. A new technology has been improvised that does not require the use of water to dilute the waste water.
It is based on desalinization technology known as membrane distillation. The procedure combines heat and gallons of water per day, which cuts cost of frac water treatment in half.
HED Environmental System is dedicated to ensuring that frac water is disposed in the most effective way. Please visit the company`s website www.hedenvironmentalsystems.com for more information on how it`s done.
HED-Environmental-System
Tuesday, October 9, 2007
Miriam Stucky’ is running for the Green Party of Ontario in the Ontario provincial election, in the Peterborough riding. Wikinews’ Nick Moreau interviewed her regarding her values, her experience, and her campaign.
Stay tuned for further interviews; every candidate from every party is eligible, and will be contacted. Expect interviews from Liberals, Progressive Conservatives, New Democratic Party members, Ontario Greens, as well as members from the Family Coalition, Freedom, Communist, Libertarian, and Confederation of Regions parties, as well as independents.
Sunday, January 10, 2010
Chinese officials have said that their country’s exports surged last December to edge out Germany as the world’s biggest exporter.
The official Xinhua news agency reported today that figures from the General Administration for Customs showed that exports jumped 17.7% in December from a year earlier. Over the whole of 2009 total Chinese exports reached US$1.2 trillion, above Germany’s forecast $1.17 trillion.
Huang Guohua, a statistics official with the customs administration, said the December exports rebound was an important turning point for China’s export sector. He commented that the jump was an indication that exporters have emerged from their downslide.
“We can say that China’s export enterprises have completely emerged from their all-time low in exports,” he said.
However, although China overtook Germany in exports, China’s total foreign trade — both exports and imports — fell 13.9% last year.
Sunday, May 18, 2008
An HIV-positive man was sentenced to 35 years in prison Wednesday, one day after being convicted of harassment of a public servant for spitting into the eye and open mouth of a Dallas, Texas police officer in May 2006. The United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that no one has ever contracted HIV from saliva, and a gay-rights and AIDS advocacy group called the sentence excessive.
A Dallas County jury concluded that Willie Campbell’s act of spitting on policeman Dan Waller in 2006 constituted the use of his saliva as a deadly weapon. The incident occurred while Campbell, 42, was resisting arrest while being taken into custody for public intoxication.
“He turns and spits. He hits me in the eye and mouth. Then he told me he has AIDS. I immediately began looking for something to flush my eyes with,” said Waller to The Dallas Morning News.
Officer Waller responded after a bystander reported seeing an unconscious male lying outside a building. Dallas County prosecutors stated that Campbell attempted to fight paramedics and kicked the police officer who arrested him for public intoxication.
| It’s been 25 years since the virus was identified, but there are still lots of fears. | ||
Prosecutors said that Campbell yelled that he was innocent during the trial, and claimed a police officer was lying. Campbell’s lawyer Russell Heinrichs said that because he had a history of convictions including similarly attacking two other police officers, biting inmates, and other offenses, he was indicted under a habitual offender statute. The statute increased his minimum sentence to 25 years in prison. Because the jury ruled that Campbell’s saliva was used as a deadly weapon, he will not be eligible for parole until completing at least half his sentence.
| If you look at the facts of this case, it was clear that the defendant intended to cause serious bodily injury. | ||
The organization Lambda Legal (Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund), which advocates for individuals living with HIV, says that saliva should not be considered a deadly weapon. Bebe Anderson, the HIV projects director at Lambda Legal, spoke with The Dallas Morning News about the sentence. “It’s been 25 years since the virus was identified, but there are still lots of fears,” said Anderson.
The Dallas County prosecutor who handled the trial, Jenni Morse, said that the deadly weapon finding was justified. “No matter how minuscule, there is some risk. That means there is the possibility of causing serious bodily injury or death,” said Morse. Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins stated: “If you look at the facts of this case, it was clear that the defendant intended to cause serious bodily injury.”
| Contact with saliva, tears, or sweat has never been shown to result in transmission of HIV. | ||
A page at the CDC’s website, HIV and Its Transmission, states: “HIV has been found in saliva and tears in very low quantities from some AIDS patients.” The subsection “Saliva, Tears, and Sweat” concludes that: “Contact with saliva, tears, or sweat has never been shown to result in transmission of HIV.” On Friday the Dallas County Health Department released a statement explaining that HIV is most commonly spread through sexual contact, sharing needles, or transfusion from an infected blood product.