The article refers to a lot of stuff that is more "wishful thinking" than reality. Microsoft's sales and profits are setting new records every quarter and its products have never been more entrenched than they are now. The authors are living in some alternate reality universe where people are uninstalling Windows, using OpenOffice, and swearing off of Halo 3. The universe we are all in has Windows installs and desktop penetration at an all-time high, Office sales setting new records, and the xbox 360 a runaway success, even with its massive warranty problems. Those things are obvious and I don't even like Microsoft.
Microsoft owns the copyrights to part of OS/2 so IBM can't open source OS/2 without Microsoft's approval. If Microsoft ever agreed to open source OS/2, people would know that pigs were aloft and that all intelligence had left the corporate halls of Microsoft. (Okay, that's almost true anyway.)
It sounds like the flight controls, avionics, and autopilot systems all worked correctly, from reading the articles and the pilot comments. The engine controls themselves might have malfunctioned but the only supporting thing for that is that both engines simultaneously failed to respond. There are many other more likely causes for that, though, particularly some sort of fuel problem such as fuel contamination, no fuel, fuel pump problems, and the like. Even if the engine controls are found to be a fault, though, it's more likely that the problem is a mechanical problem rather than software or electronics. The indications are that the engines were still running but failed to increase thrust when commanded by both the autopilot and the manual throttle levers. Since this occurred at the end of a long flight and there was no subsequent fire after landing even though some of the fuel tanks were ruptured, lack of fuel in the tanks that the engines were feeding from seems a definite possibility.
B. Evolution has nothing to do with atheism. Evolution has nothing to say on the existence of God.
Yes it does. God has always been at the very heart of the evolution debates because evolution speaks to creation and one of the jobs that is usually ascribed to God is 'creator.' It's disappointing to get modded as 'troll' for attempting to talk about the other side of the 'evolution in education' discussion. People need to open their hearts along with their minds if they want to understand why so many care about this issue rather than just cover their ears and say 'Everyone who disagrees is against science!' followed by 'I can't hear you!'
Microsoft is releasing the specs for binary document formats. This will help those who want to support and maintain those formats so this is a gift from Microsoft. Fellow residents of Troy, let us be grateful and embrace this great offering.
This 'evolution vs. science' debate obscures the real issue...creation. Atheists want children to 'learn' that the universe accidentally exploded into existence from nothing 14 billion years ago creating all mass, space, and time in an instant, that a pile of rock coalesced into the Earth, that water condensed into oceans, and then lightning bolts and self-assembling organic molecules in a primordial 'soup' combined to create...life! People who know of God, know that's all a fairy tale and they don't want the teachers their kids respect to be forced to teach that as a 'religion of chance.' They know that God created the universe, the Earth, and all life everywhere and whatever scientists discover about the process is just uncovering the evidence of God's work. Neither side has an issue about people, dogs, and iguanas evolving from single-celled bacterial cells, though.
They *could* require us to get a bar code tattooed on our ass and then drop our drawers to be scanned whenever some authoritative somebody wanted to verify our identify.
The FCC sits on a honeypot of hundreds of billions of dollars overseen by 5 politically-appointed commissioners with no review of what they decide. Even a saint would be tempted by all of that money, and those commissioners don't look very saintly. A cynic might say that congress just wants to be sure that it's getting their cut of the action but perhaps that's wrong. Maybe consumers will see some improvements with more oversight of the FCC like wi-fi standards that are shaped by consumers rather than a couple of manufacturers, cell phones with features comparable to what the rest of the world already has, more and better hdtv broadcasts, and less-concentrated ownership of the broadcast media.
If it is a low cycle, it may very well be a test of validity for some CO2 based AGW theories.
There are no more theories to test about carbon dioxide and its effects on global warming, are there? Al Gore and my local talk radio station both say 'the debate is over' and Al got the nobel prize for saying that, plus he invented the internet.
They've been slowly going out of business for years as their clueless management phases out of retail products and services and whiles away its days with speculative investments. Now, maybe they're going into the spyware or pop-up advertising business to cash in on the dot com boom. Sears is the poster boy for the pointy-hair boss in Dilbert.
When my kids take their DS to the MLB ballpark, they pay $5 and they get team info and live video on their DS while they're in their seat. They can also order pricey food and stuff with the DS that is then delivered right to their seat, as I unfortunately found out:(.
I read the PC review with an open mind because I was curious about how a $200 machine would be. For a 1.5 star rating, I was expecting the review to say things like 'it died' or 'refused to work' or 'it was impossible to install the software that was provided' or something. Instead, the PC criticisms were: 1) "slapped together" (what does that mean), 2)"low-power, relatively low-performing VIA C7-D processor", 3)"the gOS team is working on a modem driver" 4)"the gPC defaulted to 1,280-by-800 resolution", 5)"it has no Energy Star rating" (but used only 50 watts), 6)"programs written for Mac OS X or Windows that you can buy online or in a retail store won't work on the Linux-based gPC", 7)"It would've been nice if the folks at Everex or gOS preinstalled Flash support".
The article summarizes the above with: "In the end, though, it has so many shortcomings I would have a problem recommending it to anyone." With the possible exception of 2), these are all minor nitpicks and hardly justify a 1.5 star rating. Based on the author's own description of his use of the machine, it should have been given a 3-star rating and that would be marked down from 4-stars because of the low-power processor. PC Magazine feeds on Microsoft to survive and this article shows that.
These days, I only play it in party conditions and when we have friends over for dinner. Its a great social game console, but beyond that I find it no fun to play.
If your experience were common, then ebay and Craig's list would be flooded with used Wiis' for sale. As it is, used Wiis' for sale are relatively rare. The truth is that the Wii is a great console that people find to be a lot of fun. Yes, there are a lot of crappy games for Wii that are just cheap ports of PS2 or Xbox 360 games. A few of these are good such as Resident Evil 4 or Guitar Hero 3 but most are not. No, there are not a lot of great Wii games yet. Yes, most of the better Wii games are from Nintendo, such as Zelda or Super Mario Galaxy.
All of that is about to change, though. There are a lot of native Wii games that are due in the next 3-6 months that will finally natively use the Wii's Broadway processor, controllers, and built-in wireless internet connectivity. With its motion-sensitive wireless controllers with individual sound channels, the Wii has the potential for some awesomely good online multiplayer games, which it lacks now.
Sorry, I didn't mean to do mindless bashing. What I was trying to say was that designing and manufacturing hardware, such as the xbox 360 console, takes an entirely different infrastructure of engineers and design and manufacturing facilities than software development does. Of course, modern hardware has a certain amount of software embedded into it but generally, the hardware is the hard part. I get the feeling that Microsoft approached the xbox 360 with an arrogant idea that the hardware design was the easy part. They just went out and hired some hardware engineers to develop the xbox but really didn't have the experience and capability to develop hardware and the unsurprising result was that the xbox 360 has a lot of hardware technical problems, such as now the wireless implementation issue that TFA describes, and costs a lot per copy to make. If Microsoft didn't have a lot of cash from selling Windows to keep the xbox going, they would have lost their ass selling xbox 360s and would have declared bankruptcy a year ago in a wave of consumer warranty claims. As it is, they just pony up money and keep on going. As a side note, if you hate Microsoft, you should go out and buy an xbox 360 because they are losing big money on every unit they sell and you can't make unit losses like that up with volume sales. Even Microsoft with all of their money is going to eventually have to throw in the towel on xbox 360 as the billions add up or else sell off the division to someone like Sony or Nintendo who can bail it out.
Why would the orbits decay? Are you worried that the Moon will be hitting us soon?
I thought the idea of decaying orbits was obvious but...maybe not. Generally, yes, the Moon's orbit is decaying and has been doing so since it was formed. Eventually, in a couple of billion years, as a result of tidal interactions between the Moon and Earth as well as the Sun, the Moon will approach more closely to the Earth and break apart into short-lived Saturn-like rings that will then rain down upon the Earth. The rings of Saturn are composed of all different sizes of rocky material orbiting Saturn in a tight equatorial orbit. The amazing thing is that this apparently-unsteady-state system is apparently 4+ billion years old which then prompts the interesting-to-me question of what process is maintaining the tight equatorial orbit of the ring material over a 4 billion year period.
If the rings are 4.5 billion years old, what process is maintaining them? If they are just an aggregate of rocks in orbit around a planet, their orbits should have decayed and they should have fallen into Saturn about 4.49 billion years ago. Obviously something completely out of the realm of our current understanding is going on.
Apple Records (a 'music' company) sued Apple Computer (a 'computer' company) over the name thing. Apple Records initially didn't do much about Steve Jobs use of their name back when Apple records was the big dog and Apple Computer was a nobody because no one would ever confuse computers with music. Right. Apple Records has pretty much been eclipsed by Apple Computer now and Jobs won the latest trademark dispute thanks to so many years of using the Apple name. Hormel will lose their famous 'SPAM' brand if they don't fight (and they may still lose it anyway even if they do.) If Hormel loses, we will no longer know if we are getting the genuine SPAM, or an imitator, when we go the supermarket.
The Wii is popular not because it's so good but because the competition is not very good. The antique PS2 is probably giving the Wii the most competition due to its huge game selection of (mostly older) games and its relatively low price but anyone who's owned a PS2 knows about 'Disk Read Error.' Maybe Sony has solved that problem...maybe. And then there's the XBOX 360 with its powerful graphics, awesome games such as Halo xx and Rock Band, and the financial backing of the largest 'software' company in the world. Maybe that's why the XBOX 360 'hardware' has problems with disk scratching, red ring of death, and random freezes. Well then, you say, what about the PS3? The PS3 has a powerful processor and great graphics but it's more difficult to develop for, pricey, and the game selection is not as good as the other platforms. So...there's the Wii. Medium power, medium graphics, and not a lot of newer great games (although that's improving with Guitar Hero 3, Metroid Prime 3 Corruption, and Super Smash Brothers Brawl) but the Wii is priced low, can run a huge library of older Ninetendo games for Game Cube, N64, and SNES, and has typically bulletproof Nintendo hardware. It also doesn't hurt that the Wii has a new 3-axis accelerometer wireless controller design but can still use legacy controller designs.
The bottom line is that Wii sales are going to be dominant until one of the other platforms solves enough of their problems to achieve dominance...which will probably be either the Xbox 360 Rev 2.0 with the new 10-year blanket warranty or the $200 PS3-lite with the PS2 compatibility module built-in bundled with "Ratchet and Clank 3rd Generation." Say in 2 years or so...
We use the concept of 'half life' when describing the decay rate of radioactive materials. The half life is determined by the decay rate and is so constant that it is used for atomic clocks. After one half life of time has elapsed, one half of the radioactive isotope in question will have decayed. After a second half life has passed, one half of the remaining isotope (i.e. one quarter of the original amount) will have decayed. So yes, the decay rate is unchanging ('continuous') but the quantity of radioactive material gradually decreases as it decays. Now, you said...
The more radioactive the isotope is, the faster it sheds material and becomes something significantly less radioactive.
This is completely wrong. No material is 'shed' (other than high energy particles) and the degree of radioactivity has no effect whatsoever on the half life or decay rate. The degree of radioactivity is determined by 1) the mass of the isotope which is present 2) the decay rate of the isotope, and 3) its decay chain. Nuclear fission waste is a mixture of many different isotopes, some of which have very short half-lives and some which have longer half lives. Cs-137 for example has a half life of 30 years so after only 120 years, its radioactivity will be reduced to 'only' 6 percent of it what it was originally. On the other hand, Cs-135 is also a fission waste isotope but has a half life of 2.3 million years which means that its radioactivity will be reduced to 99.9995 percent of what it was originally after 120 years.
Further, if it's still significantly radioactive, then it's almost always useful as fuel in another type of reactor (that radioactivity is energy that can be captured, after all).
Again, this is just wrong. The only signficant form of energy that can be captured from radioactive fission waste is...heat...and the amount depends on the decay heat generation rate of each of the isotopes present. Usually, the problem is to provide sufficient passive cooling so that the waste will not self-heat to undesirable temperatures which means that the waste is stored in storage basins filled with water. Much of the heat comes from the shorter half-life isotopes so after a few decades, cooling may be unnecessary.
Whatever is left will half-life itself into insignificance within 50-100 years and then turns into something that you can sleep next to and absorb barely more radiation than an X-Ray for a broken bone.
Again...wrong. Some half-lifes are very short and others are very long and others fall in between. The waste is a mixture and it is not feasible to chemically separate out the various isotopes based on their half-lives due to the difficulty, technical impossibility (in some cases), and/or the additional liquid and solid waste that separation processes involve.
the design of the reactor portion of a fission reactor has changed quite a bit since back when TMI and Chernobyl were built. Look into some of the newer designs like Pebble-bed reactors.
The two things that leap out when you read about the pebble-bed reactors are that 1) There are no commercial units in operation and 2) the biggest advantage of the pebble-bed reactor is supposed to be a "dramatically higher level of safety." The 'conventional' nuclear fission power plants currently operating are already routinely touted as being extremely 'safe,' so I find it impossible to be enthusiastic about a new, untried process that is supposed to improve safety dramatically.
Let's try some truth here: Nuclear fission power plants are extremely expensive, produce large amounts of toxic radioactive waste, and have terrible consequences in the event of a catastrophic accident. Other than that, they're great.
The problem with reprocessing is that it creates a lot of new liquid and solid radioactive wastes from the reprocessing that more than offset the quantity of uranium that is removed from the waste and recovered for fuel. And, of course, it also costs a LOT of money, so that the reprocessed uranium is very expensive. Your statement that reprocessing would 'vastly reduce disposal costs' is a funny.
Here's a summary of the wisdom here on Slashdot:
1) There is no problem anymore with nuclear safety thanks to better technology, better reactor processes, and people much smarter than russians.
2) There is no problem anymore with nuclear waste because the better reactor processes will generate very little waste that will then quickly be reprocessed back into fuel instead of disposed of as waste
3) Anyone who fails to appreciate the greatness of the wisdom above is just an ignorant fearmonger.
There are designs which don't produce long-lived waste. Our lovely government just happened to can the project before it was completed.
No, there are no designs that don't produce long-lived waste. The IFR concept which you referenced never got beyond a small-scale prototype stage. Pointing to that as a 'design' that doesn't produce long-lived waste is incorrect and misleading since, at best, it only reduces the waste volume. More importantly, there are many years of development needed before it would even be known if the IFR concept were operationally feasible. I'll fix your sentence for you: 'There are 'ideas' for designs which reduce the quantity of long-lived waste.'
Slashdot Mirror
The article refers to a lot of stuff that is more "wishful thinking" than reality. Microsoft's sales and profits are setting new records every quarter and its products have never been more entrenched than they are now. The authors are living in some alternate reality universe where people are uninstalling Windows, using OpenOffice, and swearing off of Halo 3. The universe we are all in has Windows installs and desktop penetration at an all-time high, Office sales setting new records, and the xbox 360 a runaway success, even with its massive warranty problems. Those things are obvious and I don't even like Microsoft.
Microsoft owns the copyrights to part of OS/2 so IBM can't open source OS/2 without Microsoft's approval. If Microsoft ever agreed to open source OS/2, people would know that pigs were aloft and that all intelligence had left the corporate halls of Microsoft. (Okay, that's almost true anyway.)
It sounds like the flight controls, avionics, and autopilot systems all worked correctly, from reading the articles and the pilot comments. The engine controls themselves might have malfunctioned but the only supporting thing for that is that both engines simultaneously failed to respond. There are many other more likely causes for that, though, particularly some sort of fuel problem such as fuel contamination, no fuel, fuel pump problems, and the like. Even if the engine controls are found to be a fault, though, it's more likely that the problem is a mechanical problem rather than software or electronics. The indications are that the engines were still running but failed to increase thrust when commanded by both the autopilot and the manual throttle levers. Since this occurred at the end of a long flight and there was no subsequent fire after landing even though some of the fuel tanks were ruptured, lack of fuel in the tanks that the engines were feeding from seems a definite possibility.
B. Evolution has nothing to do with atheism. Evolution has nothing to say on the existence of God.
Yes it does. God has always been at the very heart of the evolution debates because evolution speaks to creation and one of the jobs that is usually ascribed to God is 'creator.' It's disappointing to get modded as 'troll' for attempting to talk about the other side of the 'evolution in education' discussion. People need to open their hearts along with their minds if they want to understand why so many care about this issue rather than just cover their ears and say 'Everyone who disagrees is against science!' followed by 'I can't hear you!'
Microsoft is releasing the specs for binary document formats. This will help those who want to support and maintain those formats so this is a gift from Microsoft. Fellow residents of Troy, let us be grateful and embrace this great offering.
This 'evolution vs. science' debate obscures the real issue...creation. Atheists want children to 'learn' that the universe accidentally exploded into existence from nothing 14 billion years ago creating all mass, space, and time in an instant, that a pile of rock coalesced into the Earth, that water condensed into oceans, and then lightning bolts and self-assembling organic molecules in a primordial 'soup' combined to create...life! People who know of God, know that's all a fairy tale and they don't want the teachers their kids respect to be forced to teach that as a 'religion of chance.' They know that God created the universe, the Earth, and all life everywhere and whatever scientists discover about the process is just uncovering the evidence of God's work. Neither side has an issue about people, dogs, and iguanas evolving from single-celled bacterial cells, though.
They *could* require us to get a bar code tattooed on our ass and then drop our drawers to be scanned whenever some authoritative somebody wanted to verify our identify.
The FCC sits on a honeypot of hundreds of billions of dollars overseen by 5 politically-appointed commissioners with no review of what they decide. Even a saint would be tempted by all of that money, and those commissioners don't look very saintly. A cynic might say that congress just wants to be sure that it's getting their cut of the action but perhaps that's wrong. Maybe consumers will see some improvements with more oversight of the FCC like wi-fi standards that are shaped by consumers rather than a couple of manufacturers, cell phones with features comparable to what the rest of the world already has, more and better hdtv broadcasts, and less-concentrated ownership of the broadcast media.
More info here about Al and his internet work...
If it is a low cycle, it may very well be a test of validity for some CO2 based AGW theories.
There are no more theories to test about carbon dioxide and its effects on global warming, are there? Al Gore and my local talk radio station both say 'the debate is over' and Al got the nobel prize for saying that, plus he invented the internet.
They've been slowly going out of business for years as their clueless
management phases out of retail products and services and whiles away
its days with speculative
investments. Now, maybe they're going into the spyware
or pop-up advertising business to cash in on the dot com
boom. Sears is the poster boy for the pointy-hair boss in
Dilbert.
When my kids take their DS to the MLB ballpark, they pay $5 and they get team info and live video on their DS while they're in their seat. They can also order pricey food and stuff with the DS that is then delivered right to their seat, as I unfortunately found out :(.
What's the wildcard in this calculation that injects uncertainty?
It's small size. It's diameter is only 30m.
I read the PC review with an open mind because I was curious about how a $200 machine would be. For a 1.5 star rating, I was expecting the review to say things like 'it died' or 'refused to work' or 'it was impossible to install the software that was provided' or something. Instead, the PC criticisms were: 1) "slapped together" (what does that mean), 2)"low-power, relatively low-performing VIA C7-D processor", 3)"the gOS team is working on a modem driver" 4)"the gPC defaulted to 1,280-by-800 resolution", 5)"it has no Energy Star rating" (but used only 50 watts), 6)"programs written for Mac OS X or Windows that you can buy online or in a retail store won't work on the Linux-based gPC", 7)"It would've been nice if the folks at Everex or gOS preinstalled Flash support".
The article summarizes the above with: "In the end, though, it has so many shortcomings I would have a problem recommending it to anyone." With the possible exception of 2), these are all minor nitpicks and hardly justify a 1.5 star rating. Based on the author's own description of his use of the machine, it should have been given a 3-star rating and that would be marked down from 4-stars because of the low-power processor. PC Magazine feeds on Microsoft to survive and this article shows that.
These days, I only play it in party conditions and when we have friends over for dinner. Its a great social game console, but beyond that I find it no fun to play.
If your experience were common, then ebay and Craig's list would be flooded with used Wiis' for sale. As it is, used Wiis' for sale are relatively rare. The truth is that the Wii is a great console that people find to be a lot of fun. Yes, there are a lot of crappy games for Wii that are just cheap ports of PS2 or Xbox 360 games. A few of these are good such as Resident Evil 4 or Guitar Hero 3 but most are not. No, there are not a lot of great Wii games yet. Yes, most of the better Wii games are from Nintendo, such as Zelda or Super Mario Galaxy.
All of that is about to change, though. There are a lot of native Wii games that are due in the next 3-6 months that will finally natively use the Wii's Broadway processor, controllers, and built-in wireless internet connectivity. With its motion-sensitive wireless controllers with individual sound channels, the Wii has the potential for some awesomely good online multiplayer games, which it lacks now.
Sorry, I didn't mean to do mindless bashing. What I was trying to say was that designing and manufacturing hardware, such as the xbox 360 console, takes an entirely different infrastructure of engineers and design and manufacturing facilities than software development does. Of course, modern hardware has a certain amount of software embedded into it but generally, the hardware is the hard part. I get the feeling that Microsoft approached the xbox 360 with an arrogant idea that the hardware design was the easy part. They just went out and hired some hardware engineers to develop the xbox but really didn't have the experience and capability to develop hardware and the unsurprising result was that the xbox 360 has a lot of hardware technical problems, such as now the wireless implementation issue that TFA describes, and costs a lot per copy to make. If Microsoft didn't have a lot of cash from selling Windows to keep the xbox going, they would have lost their ass selling xbox 360s and would have declared bankruptcy a year ago in a wave of consumer warranty claims. As it is, they just pony up money and keep on going. As a side note, if you hate Microsoft, you should go out and buy an xbox 360 because they are losing big money on every unit they sell and you can't make unit losses like that up with volume sales. Even Microsoft with all of their money is going to eventually have to throw in the towel on xbox 360 as the billions add up or else sell off the division to someone like Sony or Nintendo who can bail it out.
Why would the orbits decay? Are you worried that the Moon will be hitting us soon?
I thought the idea of decaying orbits was obvious but...maybe not. Generally, yes, the Moon's orbit is decaying and has been doing so since it was formed. Eventually, in a couple of billion years, as a result of tidal interactions between the Moon and Earth as well as the Sun, the Moon will approach more closely to the Earth and break apart into short-lived Saturn-like rings that will then rain down upon the Earth. The rings of Saturn are composed of all different sizes of rocky material orbiting Saturn in a tight equatorial orbit. The amazing thing is that this apparently-unsteady-state system is apparently 4+ billion years old which then prompts the interesting-to-me question of what process is maintaining the tight equatorial orbit of the ring material over a 4 billion year period.
If the rings are 4.5 billion years old, what process is maintaining them? If they are just an aggregate of rocks in orbit around a planet, their orbits should have decayed and they should have fallen into Saturn about 4.49 billion years ago. Obviously something completely out of the realm of our current understanding is going on.
Apple Records (a 'music' company) sued Apple Computer (a 'computer' company) over the name thing. Apple Records initially didn't do much about Steve Jobs use of their name back when Apple records was the big dog and Apple Computer was a nobody because no one would ever confuse computers with music. Right. Apple Records has pretty much been eclipsed by Apple Computer now and Jobs won the latest trademark dispute thanks to so many years of using the Apple name. Hormel will lose their famous 'SPAM' brand if they don't fight (and they may still lose it anyway even if they do.) If Hormel loses, we will no longer know if we are getting the genuine SPAM, or an imitator, when we go the supermarket.
The Wii is popular not because it's so good but because the competition is not very good. The antique PS2 is probably giving the Wii the most competition due to its huge game selection of (mostly older) games and its relatively low price but anyone who's owned a PS2 knows about 'Disk Read Error.' Maybe Sony has solved that problem...maybe. And then there's the XBOX 360 with its powerful graphics, awesome games such as Halo xx and Rock Band, and the financial backing of the largest 'software' company in the world. Maybe that's why the XBOX 360 'hardware' has problems with disk scratching, red ring of death, and random freezes. Well then, you say, what about the PS3? The PS3 has a powerful processor and great graphics but it's more difficult to develop for, pricey, and the game selection is not as good as the other platforms. So...there's the Wii. Medium power, medium graphics, and not a lot of newer great games (although that's improving with Guitar Hero 3, Metroid Prime 3 Corruption, and Super Smash Brothers Brawl) but the Wii is priced low, can run a huge library of older Ninetendo games for Game Cube, N64, and SNES, and has typically bulletproof Nintendo hardware. It also doesn't hurt that the Wii has a new 3-axis accelerometer wireless controller design but can still use legacy controller designs.
The bottom line is that Wii sales are going to be dominant until one of the other platforms solves enough of their problems to achieve dominance...which will probably be either the Xbox 360 Rev 2.0 with the new 10-year blanket warranty or the $200 PS3-lite with the PS2 compatibility module built-in bundled with "Ratchet and Clank 3rd Generation." Say in 2 years or so...
We use the concept of 'half life' when describing the decay rate of radioactive materials. The half life is determined by the decay rate and is so constant that it is used for atomic clocks. After one half life of time has elapsed, one half of the radioactive isotope in question will have decayed. After a second half life has passed, one half of the remaining isotope (i.e. one quarter of the original amount) will have decayed. So yes, the decay rate is unchanging ('continuous') but the quantity of radioactive material gradually decreases as it decays. Now, you said...
The more radioactive the isotope is, the faster it sheds material and becomes something significantly less radioactive.
This is completely wrong. No material is 'shed' (other than high energy particles) and the degree of radioactivity has no effect whatsoever on the half life or decay rate. The degree of radioactivity is determined by 1) the mass of the isotope which is present 2) the decay rate of the isotope, and 3) its decay chain. Nuclear fission waste is a mixture of many different isotopes, some of which have very short half-lives and some which have longer half lives. Cs-137 for example has a half life of 30 years so after only 120 years, its radioactivity will be reduced to 'only' 6 percent of it what it was originally. On the other hand, Cs-135 is also a fission waste isotope but has a half life of 2.3 million years which means that its radioactivity will be reduced to 99.9995 percent of what it was originally after 120 years.
Further, if it's still significantly radioactive, then it's almost always useful as fuel in another type of reactor (that radioactivity is energy that can be captured, after all).
Again, this is just wrong. The only signficant form of energy that can be captured from radioactive fission waste is...heat...and the amount depends on the decay heat generation rate of each of the isotopes present. Usually, the problem is to provide sufficient passive cooling so that the waste will not self-heat to undesirable temperatures which means that the waste is stored in storage basins filled with water. Much of the heat comes from the shorter half-life isotopes so after a few decades, cooling may be unnecessary.
Whatever is left will half-life itself into insignificance within 50-100 years and then turns into something that you can sleep next to and absorb barely more radiation than an X-Ray for a broken bone.
Again...wrong. Some half-lifes are very short and others are very long and others fall in between. The waste is a mixture and it is not feasible to chemically separate out the various isotopes based on their half-lives due to the difficulty, technical impossibility (in some cases), and/or the additional liquid and solid waste that separation processes involve.
the design of the reactor portion of a fission reactor has changed quite a bit since back when TMI and Chernobyl were built. Look into some of the newer designs like Pebble-bed reactors.
The two things that leap out when you read about the pebble-bed reactors are that 1) There are no commercial units in operation and 2) the biggest advantage of the pebble-bed reactor is supposed to be a "dramatically higher level of safety." The 'conventional' nuclear fission power plants currently operating are already routinely touted as being extremely 'safe,' so I find it impossible to be enthusiastic about a new, untried process that is supposed to improve safety dramatically.
Let's try some truth here: Nuclear fission power plants are extremely expensive, produce large amounts of toxic radioactive waste, and have terrible consequences in the event of a catastrophic accident. Other than that, they're great.
The problem with reprocessing is that it creates a lot of new liquid and solid radioactive wastes from the reprocessing that more than offset the quantity of uranium that is removed from the waste and recovered for fuel. And, of course, it also costs a LOT of money, so that the reprocessed uranium is very expensive. Your statement that reprocessing would 'vastly reduce disposal costs' is a funny.
Here's a summary of the wisdom here on Slashdot:
1) There is no problem anymore with nuclear safety thanks to better technology, better reactor processes, and people much smarter than russians.
2) There is no problem anymore with nuclear waste because the better reactor processes will generate very little waste that will then quickly be reprocessed back into fuel instead of disposed of as waste
3) Anyone who fails to appreciate the greatness of the wisdom above is just an ignorant fearmonger.
There are designs which don't produce long-lived waste. Our lovely government just happened to can the project before it was completed.
No, there are no designs that don't produce long-lived waste. The IFR concept which you referenced never got beyond a small-scale prototype stage. Pointing to that as a 'design' that doesn't produce long-lived waste is incorrect and misleading since, at best, it only reduces the waste volume. More importantly, there are many years of development needed before it would even be known if the IFR concept were operationally feasible. I'll fix your sentence for you: 'There are 'ideas' for designs which reduce the quantity of long-lived waste.'