Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Fairness, Radioactivity, Recovery
Ha, ha, puny earthlings! TinoMNYY24 writes "The Independent broke the story of SpaceShipOne leaving the Earth's atmosphere. The headline of the story is "'SpaceShipOne' becomes first privately funded vehicle to break through earth's atmosphere." One more step towards the X-Prize."
A data recovery success story - please send more. bigdog1 writes "I also had the IBM 75GXP data loss problem reported on slashdot. Like the guy in this article, I was not able to pay someone to do my data recovery. However, I eventually was able to get almost all of my data back using a free program, NTFS Reader. The only problem was that the file names were not in the long format. From now on I am buying an extra hard drive, but has anyone else had success stories recovering their data? Long file names?"
Too little, too late. An anonymous reader writes "I recently e-mailed paypals's public relations department and urged them to restore Freenet's paypal account. Their reply indicates that they have reexamined Freenet's account and decided not to terminate it after all. No news on the freenet project page, but here's paypal's reply:
'I apologize that your concerns were not addressed in the previous email. Our Compliance Department has reviewed The Freenet Project account in question and the service has been fully restored. If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact us again.
Sincerely,
Andrew
PayPal Account Manager'"
ultranova writes "Because PayPal has offered no explanation or apology, the project does not intend to continue advocating its usage, and has migrated to Amazon Honor System."
'Adventure Capitalist' is a much better motorcycle story anyhow. malign writes "Mary Mycio notes that the 'Ghost town' photo essay is probably faked, and notes her reasons. There go my fantasies! :(" Rumors and grumblings to this effect have been around for quite a while, but this seems the most straightforward debunking I've seen of the trip a Ukrainian woman named Elena claimed to have taken through the Chernobyl area.
(We posted two stories about the alleged trip in March.)
Corporate machinations meet the mounties. los furtive writes "The CBC is reporting that HP has agreed to pay back the Canadian Government $146 million that had been defrauded from the Department of National Defense (previously mentioned here). HP claims it was the victim of 'a complex scheme designed to exploit both parties through contracts inherited through HP's merger with Compaq Computer Corp.' In the end they decided it was more appropriate to take action against those responsible and not engage in protracted litigation with the government."
The HP/Compaq story seems to be implying that they are actually taking action against individual employees of the corporation who were responsible for doing such-and-such, as opposed to HP/Compaq itself.
This could set a GREAT precedent! As things stand currently, people within corporations can pretty much do whatever they want, while acting in the interest of the corporation, and they'll never see a personal fine or the inside of a jail cell. (Case in point: Bill Gates was never fined or jailed for all the things he did. MS just got a slap on the wrist, but nothing happened to Gates himself.) Maybe now, we'll see some accountability, as people won't simply be able to hide behind their involvement with $BIG_CORPORATION to avoid criminal charges...
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
The question I have is why did she fake it? I mean, the story says she went in the standard Chernobyl tourist ride with a helmet, in order to fake photos, so it was a deliberate, planned deception.
So why did she take the pain to do all this? I doubt it's the money, since she didn't sell her story AFAIK, and I doubt she wants to promote some form of radioactive tourism. So, unless she's completely mythomaniac and/or she really really wanted to delude herself that she had made the trip for real, I just don't get it...
At least that explains her stories about all the people who "stayed after the evacuation". There's been a careful, ongoing international study done on the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster. Her claims just didn't fit the facts of that study.
Of course, the inconsistencies didn't tip me off either. I just thought that she was stretching things a bit. *shrug*
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
It's a tour of an abandoned missile silo. Pretty kool. Don't try this at home (well unless your home IS a missile silo).
That is such total bullshit that it's not even funny (and the political comments in the article makes it pretty likely the author isn't the kind of peg flaws on the Soviet system, if you know what I mean.)
It's not that the Soviets couldn't have built a safe reactor, it's because they chose not to do so. The reactor was most definitely technologically faulty - it failed some of the most basic safety requirements. It was a human error only in that the Soviet authorities ever allowed this reactor design to be built and fuelled.
So what was this technological flaw? The graphite-moderated reactor has a so-called positive void coefficient, which means that a overheating reactor will speed up the reaction in the core. Western - and some Soviet - reactors have a negative void coefficient, in which an overheating reactor will slow itself down and reach equilibrium.
That difference, combined with a solid containment, was the chief difference between the Three Mile Island and the Chernobyl accidents. Both were major disasters, but the former was confined to the plant and had economic consequences; the latter spread radioactivity over large parts of Europe and had yet-untold consequences in terms of both human life and environmental destruction.
A nuclear reactor should not depend on humans doing the right thing for its safe operation, and in the event of a disaster, its safe shutdown. Any reactor that does so is dangerously flawed and technically unfit for operation.
Unfortunately there is in Sweden a sizable group who has as their political agenda to close down domestic nuclear power, whereas what probably would make more sense is to take the money that would cost and pay for the Russians and Lithuanians to built new plants and shut down the currently operating RBMK (Chernobyl-type) reactors on the Baltic coast.