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i can tell you that ash is mostly silica

"Coal ash is composed primarily of oxides of silicon, aluminum, iron, calcium, magnesium, titanium, sodium, potassium, arsenic, mercury, and sulfur plus small quantities of uranium and thorium. Fly ash is primarily composed of non-combustible silicon compounds (glass) melted during combustion. Tiny glass spheres form the bulk of the fly ash.

"Since the 1960s particulate precipitators have been used by U.S. coal-fired power plants to retain significant amounts of fly ash rather than letting it escape to the atmosphere. When functioning properly, these precipitators are approximately 99.5% efficient. Utilities also collect furnace ash, cinders, and slag, which are kept in cinder piles or deposited in ash ponds on coal-plant sites along with the captured fly ash.

"Trace quantities of uranium in coal range from less than 1 part per million (ppm) in some samples to around 10 ppm in others. Generally, the amount of thorium contained in coal is about 2.5 times greater than the amount of uranium. For a large number of coal samples, according to Environmental Protection Agency figures released in 1984, average values of uranium and thorium content have been determined to be 1.3 ppm and 3.2 ppm, respectively. Using these values along with reported consumption and projected consumption of coal by utilities provides a means of calculating the amounts of potentially recoverable breedable and fissionable elements (see sidebar). The concentration of fissionable uranium-235 (the current fuel for nuclear power plants) has been established to be 0.71% of uranium content."

Source: Alex Gabbard for Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Oh, but I forgot. Anyone who doesn't speak well of coal is a nuclear industry shill.

No I didn't, and I suspect the only people who do know have read some pamphlet on behalf of the nuclear industry. It sounds very unlikely to me - where is it all going to come from?

From the coal beds themselves. Uranium and thorium are naturally occuring materials.

If that was the case every plant would fail unles it is built in a place with low background radiation. I suggest you read about radiation from physics, chemistry or radiography texts.

"The NRC allows 10 mrems per year to persons living next to the property line of a nuclear plant, but its guidelines recommend a maximum of 5 mrems per year, and in point of fact, it starts investigating when this guideline limit is even approached.

"In comparison, a person receives an internal dose of about 20 mrems per year from his/her own blood (mainly due to potassium 40, contained in many protein foods), 35 mrems from building materials, 35 from cosmic rays, 25 from food, 11 from the ground, 5 from the air, 103 from X-rays diagnostics, etc."

Source: Nuclear Power and the Environment, International AEC, Vienna and The US Environmental Protection Agency

Once again - straight out of an advertisement instead of reality. Invoking secrecy is a great way to cook the books and pretend you are breaking even without a subsidy - British Nuclear Fuels had no such luxury so we know how many billions they have lost.

So am I to understand that France is losing money hand over fist because they are a nuclear-heavy country with 76% of all electricity there coming from nuclear? Why does Germany have so many nuclear reactors if they are so expensive? Are they cooking the books as well? Are you also factoring the more than $1 billion paid each year to sufferers of Black Lung?

In the land of the SUV with Bush as President the greens dictate energy policy? Please think before you make such assertions. The USA stopp

i can tell you that ash is mostly silica

"Coal ash is composed primarily of oxides of silicon, aluminum, iron, calcium, magnesium, titanium, sodium, potassium, arsenic, mercury, and sulfur plus small quantities of uranium and thorium. Fly ash is primarily composed of non-combustible silicon compounds (glass) melted during combustion. Tiny glass spheres form the bulk of the fly ash.

"Since the 1960s particulate precipitators have been used by U.S. coal-fired power plants to retain significant amounts of fly ash rather than letting it escape to the atmosphere. When functioning properly, these precipitators are approximately 99.5% efficient. Utilities also collect furnace ash, cinders, and slag, which are kept in cinder piles or deposited in ash ponds on coal-plant sites along with the captured fly ash.

"Trace quantities of uranium in coal range from less than 1 part per million (ppm) in some samples to around 10 ppm in others. Generally, the amount of thorium contained in coal is about 2.5 times greater than the amount of uranium. For a large number of coal samples, according to Environmental Protection Agency figures released in 1984, average values of uranium and thorium content have been determined to be 1.3 ppm and 3.2 ppm, respectively. Using these values along with reported consumption and projected consumption of coal by utilities provides a means of calculating the amounts of potentially recoverable breedable and fissionable elements (see sidebar). The concentration of fissionable uranium-235 (the current fuel for nuclear power plants) has been established to be 0.71% of uranium content."

Source: Alex Gabbard for Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Oh, but I forgot. Anyone who doesn't speak well of coal is a nuclear industry shill.

No I didn't, and I suspect the only people who do know have read some pamphlet on behalf of the nuclear industry. It sounds very unlikely to me - where is it all going to come from?

From the coal beds themselves. Uranium and thorium are naturally occuring materials.

If that was the case every plant would fail unles it is built in a place with low background radiation. I suggest you read about radiation from physics, chemistry or radiography texts.

"The NRC allows 10 mrems per year to persons living next to the property line of a nuclear plant, but its guidelines recommend a maximum of 5 mrems per year, and in point of fact, it starts investigating when this guideline limit is even approached.

"In comparison, a person receives an internal dose of about 20 mrems per year from his/her own blood (mainly due to potassium 40, contained in many protein foods), 35 mrems from building materials, 35 from cosmic rays, 25 from food, 11 from the ground, 5 from the air, 103 from X-rays diagnostics, etc."

Source: Nuclear Power and the Environment, International AEC, Vienna and The US Environmental Protection Agency

Once again - straight out of an advertisement instead of reality. Invoking secrecy is a great way to cook the books and pretend you are breaking even without a subsidy - British Nuclear Fuels had no such luxury so we know how many billions they have lost.

So am I to understand that France is losing money hand over fist because they are a nuclear-heavy country with 76% of all electricity there coming from nuclear? Why does Germany have so many nuclear reactors if they are so expensive? Are they cooking the books as well? Are you also factoring the more than $1 billion paid each year to sufferers of Black Lung?

In the land of the SUV with Bush as President the greens dictate energy policy? Please think before you make such assertions. The USA stopp

http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/ colmain.html

Average annual radioactivity release from a 1000MWe nuclear reactor in the early 1990s: 4.8 person-rem/year

Average annual radioactivity release from a 1000MWe coal-fired plant in the early 1990s: 490 person-rem/year

Source

Yeah, I'd prefer the reactor myself on the basis of radioactivity, not to mention the lack of soot, or the various other things (cadmium, sulfur, NOx, etc) that come with the carbon.

Besides, now around some reactors, you get iodine tablets to help prevent uptake of radioactive elements into the thyroid in case of a major catastrophe. Cool to show your friends!

As a student at a major Big Ten University (tm) I can easily tell that your perception is a bit skewed. The old cliche "you get what you put into it" applies to many things in life, and computer science is no different.

My school's core computer science curriculum is in Java. Language of instruction is a moot point to a rather great extent. You can learn as much from a data structures class taugh in Java as you can from one taught in $language_of_choice. The idea is to learn how things work fundamentally, and then apply those ideas practically. A linked list in Java works the same as a linked list in C. Its not about Java being the "industry standard" as you call it, its about Java being a perfectly modern and capable programming language. The idea

Your next analogy of the cable repairmen almost prompted me to moderate your post as +1 Funny, but when I found out you were not joking I decided to write this reply instead. To even equate a cable repair person with a computer scientist is pure madness. Even if they were programmers, how is getting the cable modem working a good metric of "computer stuff in general" being "a lot less like a science or craft and more like a factory job", or even relevant to the discussion of computer programmers vs. computer scientists at all?

None of your points even remotely explain what you consider the fundamental problem: "why software sucks...why the programming "trade" sucks...why companies can send the jobs abroad to work for peanuts" The fact is not all software sucks, many people love their jobs in the industry, and these people are getting paid well to do their jobs. Most of the computer scientists you speak of don't work in the private sector, you can find them at government research institutions.

To say that these type of people don't currently exist, and that current CS curriculums can't produce scientists of this caliber is nothing short of ignorant.

What these researchers have described is anomaly in gas-liquid mixing. In the field of chemical engineering, the mixing and flow properities of gas-liquid reactions are ongoing research subjects for the last several decades, particularly in fluidized bed reactors. Fluidized bed reactors are very important in the production of a wide variety of chemicals. While the test subject may have been fun for them to explore, it may hold clues into how gases and liquids mix in a reactor and this back-mixing may other researchers develop more accurate theories and simulations. These simulations then lead to better processes.

You wouldn't by any chance be one of those whack-job Nader supporters, would you?

It amazes me how many people think Plutonium is going to kill people. It's an Alpha emitter for crying out loud. That means that you can hold it in your hand and none of the radiation will penetrate your skin. If I were you, I'd be much more worried about the Uranium, Thorium, Arsenic, Mercury and other chemicals (many radioactive) that are released by coal plants. Not to mention that rockets are composed of many chemicals which are far more dangerous than Plutonium.

Uh, try 6-7 Billion tons of carbon released globally each year here and here .

I'm getting sick and tired of the AMD is cool now that they have _the_ 64bit processor.

They (64bit procs) have been out for over 10 years now, its no big deal.

Look where Intel is now: AMD is ahead in 64-bit processors.

But, when the whole system is still bound because the memory bandwidth is bottlenecked, how does this make it ahead of Intel. For example, take a look at the memory bandwidth of the Itanium vs the Opteron. Hint, the numbers for the Itanium are 3453.0 3453.1 4020.4 4027.8, and the numbers for the Opteron are 1975 1747 1945 2018. Yes, thats 2x the performance, and that is with a 1.0GHz Itanium from a few years ago.

You also got to take into account that the compilers for the AMD Opterons are about 6 months old, the Intel Itanium compilers are years old, and made by the people that make the processors.

Well, I have to take your word for it, but cannot believe it, since Uranium has a greater atomic mass than Gold, which would make it less common fission product than Gold and is more unstable than Gold, which makes the product even rarer.

Actually, Uranium is about 500 times more common than gold. It's a *very* common substance. IIRC, most of it gets deposited on earth from meteroites (including the ones that burn up). You'll be pleased to know (sarcasm) that coal generally contains high levels of Uranium and that coal burning disperses large quantities of Uranium in populated areas.

Which requires next to no technical expertise and doesn't enables one to build atomic bombs (Hint: Sarcasm)

I didn't say that it doesn't require expertise. I said that anyone with the proper resources (ususually enough money to train or hire scientists and buy or build equipment) can enrich it. I don't know the details, but they probably use a fairly standard process of melting the metal and impurities, then using a centrifuge to separate lighter from heavier.


I did not meant that terrorists will build an atomic bomb (there are cheaper ways to scare and kill people (dirty bomb)), but that nuclear reactors are highly profilic targets for terrorists (dirty bomb for free), so they are in need of special protection.

"Dirty bombs" are not effective weapons. All the building materials in cities would tend to shield against radiation. An atomic bomb is far more effective, but takes more resources to build. An H-Bomb is all but impossible for a terrorist to build.

It's thought that 2He may be formed as an intermediate by certain radioactive nuclei in states where single proton emission is forbidden -see this report. If it can exist, it would decay very very rapidly.

Combine aerogel with the various forms of graphite foam, and you can do "anything", all lightweight.

All very true, but measuring the volume of toxic waste is not really the point. The kind of stuff we have to deal with from nuclear power plants is nasty. WAY nastier than anything which comes out of a traditional power plant. Stuff which is so nasty we have no idea how to deal with it safely.

That't not true, even things like coal have trace amounts of radioactive elements. At least with nuclear power, we have the opportunity to contain the radioactive waste rather than spew it out into the environment. ( see Coal Combustion ) And I quote ...How does the amount of nuclear material released by coal combustion compare to the amount consumed as fuel by the U.S. nuclear power industry? According to 1982 figures, 111 American nuclear plants consumed about 540 tons of nuclear fuel, generating almost 1.1 x 10E12 kWh of electricity. During the same year, about 801 tons of uranium alone were released from American coal-fired plants. Add 1971 tons of thorium, and the release of nuclear components from coal combustion far exceeds the entire U.S. consumption of nuclear fuels. The same conclusion applies for worldwide nuclear fuel and coal combustion.

I repeat, we don't have a radioactive waste problem - we have a public stupidity problem. Solve that, and the other ones will take care of themselves.

What a naive argument you make. You think that your anecdotal experience of the last 17 years means ANYTHING in the grand scope of global climate change? Do you REALLY think that you can make such a confident statement about environmental dynamics with only 17 years of merely anecdotal data? You are very brave.

17 Years is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. Even 200 or 2000 years would not be enough data to express any kind of reliable trend. Silly... just plain silly..

And here's another thing for you to consider. The climate does change. OH MY GOD! I CAN'T BELIEVE IT! The weather patterns on this little speck of a planet we live on have varied WILDLY over the past thousands and millions of years. 12000 years ago, you could walk from Florida to France by way of the Bering Strait. Since then, the Earth has warmed dramatically, WITHOUT THE HELP OF HUMANS.

To think that we are solely responsible for every little climatic change is not only arrogant, but completely ludicrous. This has become the battle cry of various political groups who succeed only by misinforming their supporters and followers.

The cries from the left about global warming would be no different that the cries of a whale keeper about a kid dripping red food coloring into an 80-million gallon whale tank. Any effect we have on climate is probably NOTHING compared to the changes made by the natural process. Think logically for a second..

Look at how many tons of CO2 we put in the atmosphere annually... then look at how much mass the atmosphere has. I would be very surprised if the ratio were any larger than about 0.001%.

Here's a little exercise in critical thinking for you:

According to this page, fossil fuel consumption, which has been the meterstick of the left for human damage to the environment, has been 283 billion tons since 1751. In contrast, think of the CO2 emitted by 6 BILLION people. At an average lung capacity of 600cc per person, and an approximate %/v of 12% in exhaled air, that's 72cc of CO2 per breath. If everyone breathes an average of 10 times per minute, that's 14400 times per day, and 5256000 times per year. That gives us 378432000 cc CO2 per human per year, or 2.271E18 cc CO2 for all of humanity. At standard temperature and pressure, using PV=nRT, n = PV/RT or 2.271E18/(0.0821 * 273.15 * 1000) = 1.012E14 mols. CO2 weighs 44 grams per mol, which gives us 4.456E15 grams of CO2 annually, which is the same thing as 4.912E9 TONS of CO2, JUST FROM HUMANS.

4.9 BILLION TONS of CO2 just from people breathing.

Here's some more, think of it in terms of energy. If the average person needs to eat 1600 calories per day (which is 1.6 million energy calories), and the average lifespan of a human is about 50 years world wide (a conservative estimate, I believe), that's 29 BILLION calories of energy over the lifespan, which is 122 billion joules. Thought of differently, 6 billion people burning 1600 calories per day is 4E16 joules PER DAY, just for humans. In contrast, in one gallon of refined gasoline contains about 132 megajoules of energy, so the energy output from humans every day is equivalent to the burning of 300 MILLION GALLONS of gasoline.

And this is just HUMAN energy dissipation. Think, McFly, THINK...

No, not really.

Probably the completion of the human genome mapping.

90% chemical-to-heat efficiency
30-40% internal-combustion engine efficiency
60-70% large scale turbine efficiency
70% lead-acid battery efficiency
Another reference for gasoline energy density

Which numbers were out to lunch in the real world, and what are the correct numbers?

The rest of the initial setup of eight cabinets won't arrive until ORNL completes construction of its new 40,000-square-foot computational sciences facility.

6 months later, its proponents were telling people the same thing - "every entry was verified an open relay" (here)

Of course, these lists can be workable when combined with a system such as spamassassin, which uses them to weight whether or not a message might be spam, thus taking into account the too often power tripping and overreacting operators.

It must be frustrating playing whack-a-mole with spammers, but, slandering entire network service providers is wrong, too.

Remember the old adage: "be careful when you fight monsters lest you become one yourself"?

Or, how about "100 guilty men go free than for one innocent man to be put to death"? Just like with censorware, when people see legitimate sites and users suffering at the hands of the "protectors", it leads to wariness of placing much trust in these "protectors".

Umm, hate to burst your bubble, but it's not really all that impressive. The first Beowulf-style systems were "amazing" for the fact that noone had done it before, and they blew away the price performance of the previous solutions by absolutely huge margins. They literally invented a new type of computing by taking "worthless" PC's, combining them with a free operating system and some spare parts, and creating a single computational engine. In the intervening 10 years since the first ones were built, clusters of commodity boxes have been put together using all sorts of non-x86 cpus, and some even run Windows. This Mac based one is fine and dandy for the new performance level that it has achieved, but it is hardly revolutionary or notable in the larger scale of high performance computing.

Coal and radiation
Gravity controlled reactor.
This story is from 1996, but if you Google, you'll find the test results and see that it works as expected.

Actually your coal plants produce more nuclear waste than nuclear plants do. Coal contains a lot of impurities including radioactive heavy metals such as uranium-235, thorium and potasium-40. Then there's all the CO2 and SO2 (acid rain) and other goodies that make for really pretty sunsets in industrial towns. In fact coal fired plants release more energy in the form of wasted nuclear fuel than the create by burning the coal! We could actually produce more energy by extracting the fissionable materials from coal than by burning it, while reducing the level of radioactive waste that enters the eviroment. Neat huh? .

See this paper at the Oak Ridge lab for more info on the radioactive waste found in coal ash.

I can detoxify chemical waste in a variety of ways which make it far less hazardous (insoluble arsenic salts, for example)

Fine. You eat a spoonful of "insoluble arsenic salts". We'll see how long you last.

Organics can be incinerated at very high temperatures;

Requiring yet more coal?

With radioactive isotopes

Which are also present in coal ash and flue gases. Aside from obvious stuff like radon and potassium-40, coal also contains uranium-235 and 238, polonium-210, lead-210, and thorium-232. (See this article, or this note for example.) In fact the energy content of the uranium and thorium in coal is greater than the energy you get by burning it.

plutonium, for example, in a soluble form, is the most toxic element known to man

I'm inclined to doubt that, although it may be literally true as far as elements go, but there are far more toxic substances -- most of them organic -- botulism toxin, for one (yeah, the stuff in botox).

- in insoluble form, it is still bad via emission of gamma rays

Nope, plutonium emits alpha particles, not gamma rays. Relatively harmless -- they're stopped by the layer of dead cells on your skin -- unless the plutonium gets into your lungs or bloodstream.

Keep in mind that:

• Oak Ridge Nuclear Laboratory may not be an unbiased source: they may have a vested interest in emphasizing the risks of non-nuclear technologies.
• 5000 tons of uranium is still kind of a lot.
• The uranium in coal ash is very dilute: its concentration is not much greater than the uranium content of a typical granite rock.

how viable it would be to run a cluster of various platforms, for example a couple of macPPC, x-86, and UltraSPARC computers running as a netBSD cluster. Would NetBSD be able to overcome these big platform differences?

Actually, yes. While I am not a specialist of NetBSD, it runs very well on all these machines -- I had a doubt about the UltraSPARC, then I read this.

The only thing that would be slightly different between these platforms would be the installation procedure, and even that procedure is fairly standardized.

Once the NetBSD system is installed ,everything should work exactly in the same way over all these platforms -- the only difference would be the device names and the name assigned to the network interfaces.

Please note that this type of cluster has been attempted before and it seems to work very well, albeit much more slowly than a high-performance (all Opteron, for instance) cluster.

A portion of the Human Genome Project's budget is dedicated "toward studying the ethical, legal, and social issues (ELSI) surrounding availability of genetic information..." Many interesting issues have already been identified..

According to the human genome project information page, gene therapy is still in a very experimental state, and it could potentially be very dangerous for atheletes to engage in.

http://www.ornl.gov/ORNL/BTC/Restructuring/ORNLTM2 00341.pdf

http://certs.lbl.gov/RealTime_K2.html

sPh

I don't think anyone would patch me if a security hole was found...

I know you were joking, but that isn't quite true due to the wonders of retroviral gene therapy. This is actually a somewhat viable technology now, having first been successfully demonstrated by Alain Fischer in 1999 to treat a group of children with X-SCID (better known as "bubble boy syndrome"). (However, there admittedly remain certain obstacles to gene therapy's widespread application. Damned bureaucrats!)

Can't fix all the problems in the world.

Anyway, its just a matter of spreading the "good neighbor policy" to fix spoofing.

In an ideal world, each router would be configured with ingress filters that would drop packets arriving from "internal" networks whose source address was not a member of the set of network addresses that this router serves. The majority of routers could be so configured. Backbone routers and edge routers for complex topologies probably could not be configured with such filters. These ingress filters should be required as part of a "good neighbor policy." Ingress filters would not totally eliminate denial of service attacks but could greatly reduce such attacks. An attacker could still spoof an address within a local subnet, but that would permit backtracking the packets to the source subnet. Cisco's unicast reverse path forwarding also can be used to block spoofed packets at edge routers.

http://www.csm.ornl.gov/~dunigan/oci/bktrk.html

It is possible to build under linux using a cross-compiler and some .h files from the NT or Sun versions. I've done it and it works.

See SNS or the tech-talk thread

It's a minimization technique, ie finding the minimum of a function (say a cost function). I'm by no means an expert in the field, but I guess in this case they're using it to dynamically find the optimal menu configuration based on use or something like that.

Here's a page that explains some of it.

You're right, that is a simple way to generate neutrons--for those who happen to have radium lying around the house.

Actually, I suppose some people do, and it's giving them lung cancer--radon is a decay product of radium.

Finally, a word of warning about beryllium. The bulk material isn't terribly nasty--it's not particularly readily absorbed through the skin, and ingested beryllium mostly passes through the digestive tract. Powders can be quite harmful, however, causing--appropriately enough--berylliosis.

Actually there are many studies that show Ethanol isn't that beneficial to the environment. It burns cleaner out of the tailpipe, but consider the agriculture, refinement, cost, politics (subsidies), and you're just about back at square one. Also you don't get as many MPG from ethanol because there is a higher Oxygen content.

Don't take my word on it. Look at what our national laboratories say.

Anybody who has actually looked at how bad coal plants are for the environment and human health must realize what a joke the "dangers" of nuclear power are.

Sorry, I thought it was well known. I used to have a DOE report around - I don't seem to have it at the moment - but random googling turns up one from a national lab:
The main sources of radiation released from coal combustion include not only uranium and thorium but also daughter products produced by the decay of these isotopes, such as radium, radon, polonium, bismuth, and lead. Although not a decay product, naturally occurring radioactive potassium-40 is also a significant contributor. The population effective dose equivalent from coal plants is 100 times that from nuclear plants.

On Three Mile Island, a random physicist says:
Despite the impression that the people of Middletown, PA were irrevocably damaged by the radiation released at Three Mile Island, the exposure was small compared to the exposure from natural radiation. A generous estimate of the radiation exposure due to the accident was 100 rems over the area within a 20 mile radius of the plant.[9] For comparison, the average American is exposed to 200 mrems per year from naturally occurring radon gas, and nearly 500 mrems over all sources.[10] It is likely that the natural levels of radiation near Three Mile Island are even higher than average since there is an unusually high level of radon gas in the area because of naturally occurring uranium deposits. [11] In this context, the amount of radiation emitted over such a large area is small compared to what is experienced naturally. (plenty of sources cited)

Here's another interesting aspect, anscillary health issues:
Since air pollution from coal burning is estimated to be causing 10,000 deaths per year, there would have to be 25 melt-downs each year for nuclear power to be as dangerous as coal burning.

I've lived in Oak Ridge. Very nice area...very clean for Eastern Tennessee standards. Lots of trees, rivers, etc. Everything was very professional, and I never heard of any problems regarding radioactive waste. Heck, even their speed limit signs have kilometers per hour on them!

In contrast, travel 10 miles outside of Oak Ridge back in the redneck hills, and you'll see all sorts of trash. Empty motor oil bottles, dead batteries, lighter fluid containers, etc, all sitting in the middle of streams. Seeing that, the *last* thing you'll ever think is "Did Oak Ridge dump a few pounds of radioactive waste in the ground?" Worst of all, these redneck towns still keep their speed limit signs in miles per hour!!!!

By the way, Oak Ridge National Labratory did a very nice study comparing the huge amounts of radioactive emissions from coal power plants compared to nuclear powered plants. Check it out here: http://www.ornl.gov/ORNLReview/rev26-34/text/colma in.html

I was going to make an argument about vehicle age, but I ran out of patience. Here's some facts I've been able to glean:

For each aircraft model in commercial use in the USA, the FAA reports average ages. There are 85 different models reported, with an average (design) age of 23.5 years (not weighted by count of planes). Another site on airline safety (with counts of planes, year 2002) puts a weighted (by total planes) average of the top 14 carriers at 11.7 years. A rough guess from this is that 75% of the entire fleet is less than 13 years old (1989 with respect to the survey).

In 2001, the Department of Transportation conducted a National Household Travel Survey , which has an online query engine attached to it. From that data, I was able to find that of the reported 196.5 million cars in the USA (that the owners know the date of ownership), 75% of all cars driven in 2001 were built after 1990 (the 11 years matching the planes). 50% of all cars in use were built after 1995.

This matches fairly well with the age of planes in use, therefore age alone is not a factor. But then again, we should know that, because a plane has many different design considerations than an average car.

Incidentally, a brief history of the cellphone lists that it wasn't until 1987 that the FCC opened up the 800MHz band to digital cell phone research. Standards weren't complete until 1991, and digital PCS bandwidth was officially reserved in 1994.

You could argue that planes & cars built before that date could not take cell phone use into account. However, my gut tells me that it is the chassis of each vehicle that is the restriction... because planes are designed to be airtight, they tend to also be signal-tight Farraday cages, trapping EM inside. Secondly, cars are mostly hollow frames covered with plates and have fewer distributed sensor arrays that are critical to operation.

I work at the Labs, right down the hall from these guys. I play soccer with a man named Panos Datskos. He recently finished building a cantilever based electronic nose that has the potential to detect a single molecule. Datskos is working on a "universal" sensor that shares many of the same processes of a gas chromatograph to identify any substance. As described in the article, it uses very basic technology (a CD laser). It's also very compact, the size and shape of a discman. The coolest thing about the technology is that it functions in the ambient environment. It does not, like most laboratory equipment, require a vacuum, extreme temperatures, or special shock absorbance to reduce vibration. This is the kind of device that they'll be deploying to airports, I believe.

I work at the Labs, right down the hall from these guys. I play soccer with a man named Panos Datskos. He recently finished building a cantilever based electronic nose that has the potential to detect a single molecule. Datskos is working on a "universal" sensor that shares many of the same processes of a gas chromatograph to identify any substance. As described in the article, it uses very basic technology (a CD laser). It's also very compact, the size and shape of a discman. The coolest thing about the technology is that it functions in the ambient environment. It does not, like most laboratory equipment, require a vacuum, extreme temperatures, or special shock absorbance to reduce vibration. This is the kind of device that they'll be deploying to airports, I believe.

Here at the Yucca Mountain Project, we are evaluating an Open Source application called eNote . To use it, you need a web server that can run Perl.

Although editing is straightforward, the application is not so much for collaborative editing as it is for collaborative documentation of work and data. Here is the first paragraph from the eNote web site:

An electronic R&D Notebook is the electronic equivalent of a paper research notebook. Instead of recording information on paper, the sketches, text, equations, images, graphs, signatures, and other data are recorded on electronic notebook "pages", which can be read and navigated just like in a paper notebook. Instead of writing with a pen and taping in images and graphs, reading and adding to an electronic notebook is done through a computer and can involve input from keyboard, sketchpads, mouse, image files, microphone, and directly from scientific instruments. Electronic notebook software varies in how much it "looks and feels" like a paper notebook, but all the basic functions of a paper notebook are present. In addition, electronic notebooks allow easier input of scientific data and the ability for collaborators in different geographic locations to share the record of ideas, data and events of the joint experiments and research programs.

• DNA profiles from juvenile offenders and from adults who have been arrested but not convicted would be added to the FBI's national DNA database under a Bush administration proposal.

• 1.) Arrested for any crime? Even non-violent crime?
• 2.) Would anybody who was arrested be required to submit a DNA sample or merely could his/her DNA sample be accepted for CODIS?

• The state and local backlog problem has two components:
• "casework sample backlogs," which consist of DNA samples obtained from crime scenes, victims, and suspects in criminal cases,
• and
• "convicted offender backlogs," which consist of DNA samples obtained from convicted offenders who are incarcerated or under supervision.

• The answer to the first question appears to be:
• A criminal case arises when the government seeks to punish an individual for an act that has been classified as a crime by Congress or a state legislature. Thus this would include collecting DNA from drunk drivers, etc., folks for whom there's really not a good investigative reason to collect their DNA, generally.
• Here's some information on DNA Forensics
  
  It may not pass right away here, but I'd be really surprised if it doesn't eventually. Already DNA samples are collected from suspects. However, AFAIK those samples (collected from suspects) *cannot* be kept in the national DNA DB b/c that DB is supposedly only convicted criminals.
  
  DNA collection is one of the encroachments on civil liberties that scares me the most because SO many people are so unaware of any potentially nefarious results from it (eugenics being the most tame) and simultaneously are so WOWED by how DNA evidence solves cases that they will willingly submit to this new rule WHEN said initiative hits stateside in earnest.
  

A friend of mine, Eli Greenbaum, has been getting Hydrogen from algae for three years now, with no metals involved. He just starves them of O2 and they activate a dormant gene that produces a protein that synthesizes H2. See here for the details.

Interesting to note is that #3, #6, and #8 are all linux clusters. All three of which are at Livermore.

Cray's X1 also debuted, but it was much lower @112. However, it ought to be noted, that the examples out so far are only 60 processors at tops. As soon as the money gets ponied up, prolly at ORNL, they'll be waaaay up towards the top. My guess is, if all goes as planned, they'll be at #15 by year's end.

What I find exciting these days is actually the High Productivity Computing Systems Effort, the Blue Planet or Blue Gene. These are a little ways off from being on the Top500 list yet though. :D

I do wish there were more SC companies doing hardware development in the US. I love Cray, but a single vendor smacks of eggs in one backet syndrome...So, geeks, if ya wanna start a startup with a design, go for it...Betcha the NSA (aka Cthuhlu of HPC) would be happy to sponsor ya...;)

Most common single-server mail transports can sustain ~10k-100k deliveries per hour under ideal conditions, with this delivery rate frequently saturating available bandwidth. Issues such as MX and DNS resolution become significant at these volumes. Thus, 100m mails is 1,000 server-hours of time.

Sending more mail requires multiple servers and mulitple pipes. Both of these are resources which are only available to the spamhaus at additional cost or reduced control.

The mitigating issue is that multiple drops (cramming hundreds or thousands of local deliveries to a receiving MTA at once) can reduce the total outbound time. Again, anything that reduces this capability (allowing, say, no more than 10 local deliveries on a single connection) increases the spamhaus's need for resources: servers, time, or specialized software.

See:

• Google:mail server performance messages hour
• ListManager (250k msgs/hr) Note that List MailEngine claims up to 10m messages/hr, but only 150k/hr for a single server.
• Exim FAQ claims 13k/hr max
• Intershield - 45k/hr
• qmail: 135k/day

You have to achieve 100% containment of the coal or else you let out some annoying things into the atmosphere. From this article in the Oak Ridge National Laboratories Review:

"Coal is one of the most impure of fuels. Its impurities range from trace quantities of many metals, including uranium and thorium, to much larger quantities of aluminum and iron to still larger quantities of impurities such as sulfur. Products of coal combustion include the oxides of carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur; carcinogenic and mutagenic substances; and recoverable minerals of commercial value, including nuclear fuels naturally occurring in coal.

Even containing 99.5% of the waste (the target in 1993 when the article was written) means an awful lot of material gets out into the air, some of it not too pleasant. The same article goes into some detail about the amount of material, particularly uranium and thorium, that have been released into the environment worldwide from burning coal for power.

is right here

As has been well documented, coal is in fact the leading source of radioactive materials released to the environment.

This would be true even if we sprinkled the waste from N-fission plants randomly across the oceans, and in that scenario, the impact on life - both human and animal - would be minimal.

The fear of nuclear power will one day go down in history as one of the great superstitions of our age. Even a geek-heavy site like /. is filled with people who won't let the facts get in the way of their feelings on this issue.

Oh well.

Coal Combustion: Nuclear Resource or Danger

Sorry guys....too busy today :)

SB

"(we haven't gotten to doing this between architectures yet, mind you)"


Mabye you havn't heard of PVM or MPI.

That's why we need to switch to cheap relatively non-polluting nuclear power.