dike

But if so, then you don't want to be the kid with his finger in the dike.

You're not plugging a few leaks in a dike; you're trying to splash the ocean back with teacups.

Plugging a couple of obvious holes in the dike does no good when the dike is fundamentally unsound.

Just build dikes like the Dutch, and the problem is solved. But I guess the people in Miami would protest against those dikes, when their houses are no longer water front, but behind a dike.

In the north of course there is the sea dike of Camperduin and reclaimed land, and Wieringen is no longer an island. The Waddenzee is quite unnatural.

Even if the oceans were going up 10m in a week it seems counterproductive to panic -- it might be better to buy a boat or build a dike.

You imagine a wall but it'll be a dike. Very tall, probably very gently sloped inland to allow for fancy housing projects with height difference!

Like the story of the Dutch boy and the dike, it will get larger and larger until it collapses. Amazon no doubt figures that they can plug the hole early enough, and reports like this are part of that detection system.

And you don't slap it just on top, you have to widen the entire dike to make it stronger. No, we won't be the first place to go; that'll be the Maldives. And we probably can afford the extreme expenditure necessary to increase those dikes.

From what I remember it was more like a 4 sigma vs 5 sigma issue; if they had built a dike 1-2 meters higher they would have been fine. So essentially it was a cost issue, and I fail to see how a 20 meter dike can be deemed too expensive around a cash cow like this.

Google then storing the session keys would be a little like the Dutch building an expensive dike and then knocking a big hole in it. If you want to store data like "user X searched for Porsche 911 GTS 0-60 statistics, so let's show him some 991 Cabriolet ads the next time we can," you don't need to store the session keys.

If we can just pry a few more spectrum slices from their grasp, including those better suited to slightly longer ranges, that's the hole in the dike that will eventually create a market in telecom.

I work for a major telecom company doing field support, mostly patching holes in the dike, and because of this, I can only rarely point to something and say "I did that" and feel good about completion or a job well done. It comes down to fighting the fire and moving on, which when combined with no feedback from management is a great way to leave work dissatisfied every day, and dreading the next.