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Fireworks in Michigan: What's Legal and What's Safe?

The fireworks are to the Fourth of July what evergreen trees are to Christmas: an absolute must – but also a safety hazard if not used properly.

The Michigan Bureau of Fire Services warns that though beautiful, fireworks can be dangerous.

"Fireworks can quickly turn a Fourth of July celebration into a tragedy when children and adults are injured while using fireworks,” said Michigan State Fire Marshal Ronald R. Farr. “For all the fun and excitement of fireworks, they account for an increasingly large number of injuries and fires that are preventable when proper and strict safety measures are taken.”

Farr recommends attending professional fireworks displays, rather than trying to create them at home. But if you must, here’s a sampling of some important safety tips to remember when you make sparks fly:

Do not allow unsupervised children to use or play with fireworks–even sparklers. Once purchased, store fireworks in a cool, dry place and check each package for special storage instructions. Only light fireworks outdoors on a flat, smooth surface at least 15 feet away from houses and highly flammable materials such as dry grass or mulch.  Be sure other people and pets are out of range before lighting fireworks. Keep unused fireworks away from firing areas. Wear eye protection when handling fireworks and never carry them in your pocket. Have a garden hose, bucket of water and wet towels ready to use immediately in case of a malfunction or fire.  Dispose of fireworks properly by soaking them in water before putting them in a garbage can. Remember that cylinder fountains and cone fountains can still be burning on the inside after the shower of sparks have stopped and should be soaked in water before throwing away to prevent a fire.

Wondering what kinds of fireworks are legal in Michigan without a permit?

Outdoor displays must comply with National Fire Protection Association standards according to NFPA 1123: Code for Fireworks Display, which can be found at www.nfpa.org . But as a general reference, if you can't buy it in Michigan, you probably can't use it in Michigan.

To find out more information regarding fireworks safety and the permit process, visit the Bureau of Fire Services website at: website at www.michigan.gov/bfs or contact the Bureau of Fire Safety at 517-241-8847.

Google: 'At scale, everything breaks' | Cloud | ZDNet UK

Google operates technology that is expected to be reliable in the face of major traffic demands.

To scale its services, the company has developed many systems, such as MapReduce and Google File System, that have since been made open source by Yahoo and worked into the popular Hadoop data-analytics framework .

However, behind the scenes, the company is fighting a constant battle against the twin demons of cascading failovers and the increasingly challenging levels of complexity that massively scaled services bring.

Urs Hölzle was Google's first vice president of engineering. Before joining Google he worked on high-performance implementations of object-orientated languages, contributed to Darpa's national compiler infrastructure project, and developed compilers for Smalltalk and Java.

According to Hölzle, "at scale, everything breaks", and Google must walk a tightrope between increasing the scaling of its systems while avoiding cascading failovers, such as the outage that affected Gmail in March this year .

Q: Apart from focusing on physical infrastructure, such as datacentres , are there efficiencies that Google gains from running software at massive scale?
A: I think there absolutely is a very large benefit there, probably more so than you can get from the physical efficiency. It's because when you have an on-premise server it's almost impossible to size the server to the load, because most servers are actually too powerful and most companies [using them] are relatively small.

[But] if you have a large-scale email service where millions of accounts are in one place, it's much easier to size the pool of servers to that load. If you aggregate the load, it's intrinsically much easier to keep your servers well utilised.

What are Google's plans for the evolution of its internal software tools?
There's obviously an evolution. For example, most applications don't use [Google File System (GFS)] today. In fact, we're phasing out GFS in favour of the next-generation file system that is very similar, but it's not GFS anymore. It scales better and has better latency properties as well. I think three years from now we'll try to retire that because flash memory is coming and faster networks and faster CPUs are on the way and that will change how we want to do things.

One of the nice things is that if everyone today is using the  Bigtable compressed database , suppose we have a better Bigtable down the line that does the right thing with flash — then it's relatively easy to migrate all these applications as long as the API stays stable.

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