Slashdot Mirror

Yes, this would make things simpler. The French have done this (PDF link), using one standard reactor design wherever possible. IIRC the American method was to use some standard components, but allow the architect responsible for the plant to make lots of changes (e.g. the piping between the standard components is different at each plant).

Part of this is a problem of capability. Companies like Siemens, Alstom, Areva, etc build turnkey plants based on a "reference" design in Europe. They have thousands of engineers to plan every detail of a power station, all under the umbrella of 1 company. But in the USA, no single company has this capability. GE and Westinghouse (Toshiba) have decided they don't want to be in that business, and want to sell equipment only. Customers are accustomed to buying the condenser from one company, the turbine from another company, the overall control system from a different company etc. The European conglomerates have the capability to provide everything, but have decided that since the tradition in the US is equipment-only (not turnkey), they don't want to take the risk in trying to push that kind of solution. This goes for both nuclear plants and conventional (gas, coal, etc) plants. I don't see this practice changing unless 1/2 of the major equipment OEMs in the US leave the business, which might lead to consortiums or joint-ventures between the manufacturers of different types of equipment. This isn't that likely so the situation of custom-built plants in the US will likely never change.

Yes, this would make things simpler. The French have done this (PDF link), using one standard reactor design wherever possible. IIRC the American method was to use some standard components, but allow the architect responsible for the plant to make lots of changes (e.g. the piping between the standard components is different at each plant).

Code quality in the Linux kernel varies a lot per individual driver or subsystem

Well, Linus uses a broader definition of kernel than is customary, referring to a monolithic (macro) kernel. If you really seek elegance in OS code, you start by looking at microkernels, stripped of all the device-dependent clutter. Harmony, for instance was a mere 20 kbyte kernel, even on 68K architectures. http://books.google.com/books?id=xvOpC0_r14wC&pg=PA100 http://www.researchgate.net/publication/234826460_Harmony_as_an_object-oriented_operating_system This led to the even more succinct MQX, which is embedded in quajjillions of devices.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MQX

... I know one could setup a shell script to dump it out using the pdftoxml converter, but the output is a bit messy to parse.

"A bit messy to parse" is quite an understatement. There is no known general purpose method for reconstructing PDF structure, and the ones that are close enough require extensive knowledge to configure for each class of documents. The authors of the Dolores system claim to have a system that can be taught in a few minutes per system at least for simple elements like titles, subtitles and paragraphs. They don't seem to handle images, though, and tables are most likely out of their scope.

Most people get "diabetes" on a regular basis, to some extent. Or rather insulin resistance. Best article I've read ever on diabetes http://www.researchgate.net/publication/237658613_New_Insights_and_New_Therapies_for_Insulin_Resistance

Haven't done any reviewed work in years, I kinda miss it! I'm not going to bother doing full citations, just title and link, if that's OK with you.

"With a 50 ng/mL cutoff concentration and following low doses of 10 to 45 mg cocaine by multiple routes, detection times extended up to 98 h." - Urinary Excretion of Ecgonine and Five Other Cocaine Metabolites Following Controlled Oral, Intravenous, Intranasal, and Smoked Administration of Cocaine, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3159558/

"In serum, in chronic users, benzoylecgonine (primary metabolite of cocaine, the standard screening chemical) (BE; LOD 25 ng/mL) was detectable for 5.1 days on average (maximum 8.6 days)." - Detection Times of Drugs of Abuse in Blood, Urine, and Oral Fluid, http://www.researchgate.net/publication/8480649_Detection_times_of_drugs_of_abuse_in_blood_urine_and_oral_fluid/file/60b7d52a213aab0fb

The issue is not whether they kill germs. Hell, "old age" will eventually kill bacteria. The issue is whether antibacterial soaps are any more effective than just soap and water.

Though Scientists using the acoustic-ethylene method have not succeeded in proving that plants have feelings - which may come as a disappointment to plant-lovers - the chemical voices of flora allows them to distinguish between healthy and sick plants.

Plant is damaged, releases chemicals. Calling it 'crying' and 'pain' is a poetic interpretation but not really entirely accurate. It is a response to damage and is communication to other plants though (insofar as causing responses).

http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Kuehnemann/publications/

I'm assuming the 'Herbivore-induced volatiles..." are the 'cow chewing grass makes it scream" studies.

fortran, really? fortran is an algol-like language (well, sort of). why not use C, at least? I'm seriously curious.

There is still a significant amount of old scientific and numerical code out there built around Fortran. Good discussion here: http://www.researchgate.net/post/Is_FORTRAN_an_outdated_programming_language2

The average stay on welfare at least used to be three years, which means that most (not all) wanted to get off it. In that case, for most people it does not foster dependence or entitlement complexes

Pre or post reform? Because the Clinton reforms are largely viewed as a success in reducing dependence on the system by reducing the false positive rate: http://www.fordschool.umich.edu/research/poverty/pdf/Isrconference.pdf. Studies on welfare outside of the US seem to concur with a similar view on dependence as well, such as this study from Canada:

You also seem to ignore the other entitlements as well, since welfare is not the end all of dependency syndrome. It is in fact one of our best designed safety nets since its reform in '92.

and it does serve a social benefit, namely allowing somebody to resume being a productive citizen after some hard times. You may want to do your own research.

You misunderstand. I concur that safety nets in general serve a societal benefit. However, the statement I made is that Demcorats generally believe that any spending on any implementation of a "safety net" is a net win for society, regardless of effectiveness or design. And I'm saying that the effect is a net loss for society. Safety net programs require careful design, limits, and milestones -- they must be designed to fight the human predisposition to take advantage, as well as designed to teach people to be "fishermen" rather than just "giving out fish". Democrats are very poor at this, generally (and naively) viewing that any opportunity to yank money out of a rich man's pockets and give it to a poorer person is a "win". It's also largely what fuels the "taxes as theft" argument amongst Repbulicans. If Democrats truly cared about an effective program, they'd be far more judicial with their handouts, requiring more accountability in the programs.

Here are some links in English:

http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/world-our-backyard/2013/oct/31/romanian-scientists-create-artificial-blood/

http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Radu_Silaghi/publications/

Here are some links in English:

http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/world-our-backyard/2013/oct/31/romanian-scientists-create-artificial-blood/

http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Radu_Silaghi/publications/

It coming from the daily fail I had my doubts, so I followed a link from them to softpedia, that had a link to a Romanian news source, I don't know Romanian though to know if it is an Onion like site or not.

http://www.descopera.ro/dnews/11576517-inventia-extraordinara-a-unui-cercetator-din-cluj-sangele-artificial-creat-cu-ajutorul-viermilor-marini-galerie-foto

Here are some links:

http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Radu_Silaghi/publications/

http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/world-our-backyard/2013/oct/31/romanian-scientists-create-artificial-blood/

Seriously, did you even read the damned summary before you post? They controlled for demographic variables over time. The exact quote from the abstract is "Two fixed-effects regression models were used to estimate the relationship between emerald ash borer presence and county-level mortality from 1990 to 2007 in 15 U.S. states, while controlling for a wide range of demographic covariates." But yeah, I'm sure you identified the major problem with the whole study in 10 seconds. A study that was done over several years analyzing 17 years of collected data. But it's wrong, because there is absolutely no way they thought to correct for human behavior, no matter what the summary says.

Oh, hey, whats that, they controlled for income? Even spelled out that the effect of the ash borer was greater in wealthier regions thanks to the greater amounts of tree cover? Well, what do you know, scientists can sometimes actually know what they're talking about! Shocking, I know.

Next time, you could even try reading the full paper before you comment and call them "amateur scientists." Especially when they, you know, have already thought of everything you've pointed out.

http://www.researchgate.net/

The actual advantage of Java lies mainly --there are other advantages of course-- in the JiT compiler. This allows for run-time optimization that isn't possible at compile time. Which makes Java fast(er) in certain situations (and slow(er) in others). Here's an extensive stackoverflow discussion covering the topic.

Another great thing about Java is that you have a type-safe language (although you can break it in some cases -- particularly certain casts). This also makes it much easier to write secure code in Java through the use of software verification. For more on that, refer to this page on JML (Java Modelling Language) or OpenJML. Microsoft (as well as many others) has done a lot on the C/C++ side of verification (see also this discussion).

There is no reason to believe that the second law of thermodynamics can be violated

Other than certain instances of the Casimir effect you mean.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casimir_effect#Repulsive_forces

Filter error: That's an awful long string of letters there, the slashdot filter is fucking retarded, it can't even handle a couple of links, but anyway this link should read - The Dynamical and Static Casimir Effects and the Thermodynamic Instability

The Casimir Effect and Thermodynamic Instability

I'm no physics expert but that last paper seems to say that black hole theories also break the second law of thermodynamics.

http://www.researchgate.net/publication/223725981_Components_of_hypothalamic_obesity_bipiperidyl-mustard_lesions_add_hyperphagia_to_monosodium_glutamate-induced_hyperinsulinemia

To get the full effect, you need to add BPM damage to the AH (arcuate hypothalamic nucleus)..

So, herbicides plus extracts of seaweed make you oh so fat... sweet.

A Dense Plasma Focus can produce Giga Gauss fields (1GG = 10^5 Tesla), though only in a very small space.

See for example:
http://www.researchgate.net/publication/1770673_Advances_towards_pB11_Fusion_with_the_Dense_Plasma_Focus"

(Was the first link that came up at Google searching for "dense plasma focus gg")

I mentioned somewhere in this thread that an old friend of mine is working on taking phage therapy mainstream in the US.

As for links, there are quite a few. Forgive me if you can't see them all, as I am at a terminal in a university right now, so lots of things are available to me for free:

http://ramsites.net/~mhickson/1934.pdf
http://www.researchgate.net/publication/51637351_Bacteriophage_therapy_potential_uses_in_the_control_of_antibiotic-resistant_pathogens
http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2009-03/next-phage
http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/jamp.2008.0701

There are many papers out there. You can google "phage therapy" and probably come up with many more.

And to answer your question, it is out of the "good idea" stage, and is now moving out of the "FDA approval" stage and into the clinic. I don't know if you can get it just yet, but if you can't, it won't be long. You just have to find some place that does it.

Turns out that Melanin is a semiconductor. Here are some references:

- http://www.organicsemiconductors.com/
- https://www.researchgate.net/publication/16014151_Semiconductor_properties_of_natural_melanins

While this may not be a solution for everyone, even small scale manufacture could be enough to spur research to improvement of the technology. Maybe the wool industry should start investing in this?