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Apple and proprietary developers have generally gotten along well with the BSD and gcc people as far as license issues go.

What?

Recently, maybe, but take a look at this link to a copy of the 1993 g++ FAQ:

Because the legal policies of Apple threaten the long-term goals of FSF, as well as the concept of free software, no support will be lent to efforts to port GNU software to Macintosh or other Apple hardware.

The FSF didn't end the boycott of Apple until 1995, and even then, they pretty much said that unless supporting MacOS was ridiculously easy, they wouldn't bother accepting patches because that might impact their effort to produce the "GNU operating system".

If you want a quick summary of the boycott, the reasons, and how the FSF eventually "forgave" Apple the same way he "forgave" KDE, you can check out this link. Frankly, I'm surprised that the FSF and Apple are managing to get along as well as they are; it speaks volumes about Apple's commitment, and about the way the FSF has matured over the years, as well.

You're right it is innapropriate. Lava, at 1,000 to 1,500 degrees kelvin, is only three to five times hotter than my bathwater, which I like to keep between 300 and 310 degrees kelvin. It doesn't seem particularly ridiculous to suggest that concentrated Uranium 238 could be three to five times as radioactive as my monitor. Of course, comparing the electromagnetic radiation of a computer monitor to the nuclear radiation from uranium is comparing apples to oranges anyway.

Let's try, oh, mercury concentrations in your drinking water instead of this temperature bullshit. Multiplying the amount of mercury in your drinking water by ten isn't going to result in any premature death.

I wasn't talking about the electromagnetic radiation from your monitor, I was talking about the natural radioactivity as a result of trace radioactive elements in the monitor's structure.

As for using U238 for radiation shielding... I'm sure you could. It would make about as much sense as using acetic acid to wash hydrochloric acid out of your eyes instead of water or, better yet, saline solution. In other words, sure you could, but non-radioctive lead would more sense. The only reason you would want to is if you wanted to deal with something extremely radiactive and the U238 was the only sheilding available.

More like using tap water to wash out your eyes instead of distilled water.

According to http://www.ieer.org/fctsheet/pu-props.html, the radioactivity of Plutonium is 17.3 curies/gram. http://www.physics.isu.edu/radinf/natural.htm puts the radioactivity of Uranium at 0.7pCi/g, around twenty million times less. And lastly, http://www.pu.org/main/facts/pu.html has a picture of a guy handling a big lump of plutonium just wrapped in plastic, wearing nothing but some rubber gloves.

Actually, yes. I worry about radon too, but it's not an issue in my appartment.

I wasn't talking about radon, I was talking about uranium in the coal exhaust. According to http://www.ornl.gov/ORNLReview/rev26-34/text/colma in.html, worldwide about 5,000 tons of uranium and 12,000 tons of thorium were released into the atmosphere by coal burning.

And yet nobody seems to worry about that anywhere near like people worry about the much smaller amount of uranium involved in the A-10's depleted uranium ammunition.

Yes. It never ceases to amaze me either. That's why I wrote a reply in response to a poster who claimed that so-called "depleted" uranium isn't radioactive.

I didn't say it wasn't radioactive, just that it's not radioactive enough to worry about.

Now that one of us has quoted some numbers to support his argument, is the other one going to? Something tells me it's just going to be more of the same bullshit.

http://inconnu.isu.edu/~ink/GLOBAL_WARMING.pdf

Get one. Just like the unjust villification of super-clean, cheap, nuclear power, the Green Party folks are crying that the sky is falling again (and people are buying it again). People really are gullible.

The wheel is turning but the hamster is dead.

It is still around, http://www.isu.edu/~trinmich/00.n.games.html has it for 14.99

Also, googling for it, I found an old journal from the version 1 of the game. It's pretty funny.


Brant

It's funny that the proposal comes from South Africa, because there were quite a few natural nuclear ractors nearby, such as in Oklo , in Gabon. (here is a more technical article, and a cross-section diagram, neatly labelled in Japanese). And, of course, you can expect it to be threatened by mining...

(Here is my google search for the stuff).

--

It made me feel a little better about my CIS degree.

So what? Bananas are radioactive (Potassium-40). You get an annual dose of about 39 millirem from radioactive elements in your own body, most of the dose is from Potassium-40 (see this page).

As opposed to the plutonium naturally forming?

http://inconnu.isu.edu/~ink/new/links/computing/li nks/gront

The wheel is turning but the hamster is dead.