Yes, the Chernobyl reactor was unsafe. The point, however, is that ALL nuclear fission reactors can release large amounts of radioactive isotopes if some sequence of 'bad stuff' happens due to operator error, equipment failure, design problems, terrorist attack, natural disasters, etc. You can say 'not likely' but that's not the same as 'impossible.' Once a release occurs, the consequences are significant. Large areas of land can be rendered uninhabitable for hundreds of years or longer.
As for nuclear waste: it seems a lot easier than coal waste. Coal waste is simply discharged into the atmosphere and can't be got back. Nuclear waste at least can easily be contained in a very, very small area instead of affecting the entire planet's atmosphere.
You are wrong on so many levels here. Technology exists and has been used to scrub coal plant air emissions but the use of it is an economic decision rather than a technical one. If the plant is not required to purchase air scrubbing equipment, why would they do so? With nuclear fission waste, the problem is that there is no technology in existence to safely contain and store the waste for the requisite thousands of years. And no, the waste is not in a 'very, very small area'. Typically, the waste is placed in the sturdiest containers that we can build and then placed in areas where it is hoped that nothing will disturb them and the waste is shielded from humans with dirt and distance. Nuclear wastes have affected the entire planet's atmosphere MANY times from such things as weapons testing, commercial nuclear power plant failure (Ukraine, Japan, US), nuclear weapons manufacturing, waste migration from waste reprocessing (liquid wastes, dust), waste migration from weapons manufacture and testing, nuclear-fuelled spacecraft reentry, and waste storage containment failure.
Don't really need to put them anywhere, actually. A year's worth of radioactive fuel/waste for a gigawatt reactor is about a railcar's worth. Besides, it's still about 95% fuel, so when the price of uranium rises a bit more, we can take our decades old waste that's sitting in above ground casks and recycle it. Separate out the short lived waste isotopes, put the long lived usable fuel isotopes back in the reactor. You use the old stuff because while it's still radioactive, it's much less so than stuff fresh out of the reactor, so it's easier and cheaper to handle.
You don't know what you're talking about, and that's being charitable. There is no fissionable fuel in Cesium-137 or Strontium-90 or most of the other fission wastes and reprocessing is not a solution to the problem of what to do with nuclear fission wastes. Maybe you should start a business where you take the casks of the decades-old waste off of people's hands for a song and then separate out the short-lived isotopes and sell the stuff that's left for a lot of money to people who want to put it back in their reactor as cheap fuel. Wow, you'll be wealthy in no time at all. You will have lots of suppliers for your little business but not many customers and your operating costs will stretch to infinity.
Go read about the design of the Chernobyl RBMK reactor and learn why it was a particularly dangerous design. A design that only soviet dumbfucks would build, and operated by those same soviet dumbfucks.
The Soviets copied the design of the Chernobyl graphite reactor from us. The first nuclear fission reactors in the United States were graphite reactors with no concrete containment structure, just like the Chernobyl reactors. Guess there are dumbfucks here too.
The radiation release at Chernobyl was catastrophic because the graphite reactor caught on fire and there was no concrete containment structure around it. Graphite reactors are no longer used for commercial power production in the United States although we have built and operated graphite reactors with no containment structure in the past(such as the N Reactor at Hanford, Washington). The point is that with ANY fission reactor, there can be failures of the reactor operation AND the containment that can lead to catastrophic chernobyl-type releases. These could be caused by operator error, equipment failure, terrorist attack, natural disasters, etc. A second point is that ALL nuclear fission reactors (commercial or weapons reactors) produce large quantities of extremely toxic waste that must be contained for thousands of years. You can point to umpty-ump tons of waste from a coal-burning plant and claim that that is somehow worse than the nuclear fission waste based on the total tons or the type or whatever but the nuclear fission waste will contaminate the area where it is stored for thousands of years and that is not the case with fossil fuel plant waste. France does not have any less of a problem with nuclear waste than anyone else. They produce a lot of waste and they reprocess it to extract additional fuel from it as much as they can but they still produce large amounts of waste and have no place to put it. Do you even understand that ALL nuclear fission reactors produce the same waste, regardless of whether the reactor is in France or Japan or Russia or Ukraine or the United States? Do you understand the difference between a radioactive metal isotope which releases high-energy biologically-damaging particles at a continuous rate for thousands of years and a non-radioactive isotope of the same metal which does not? Choosing to produce more nuclear fission waste is simply insane. Maybe you're planning to place it into space capsules and lauch it into deep space? Or maybe put it in stainless steel casks and sink them to the bottom of the ocean? Or maybe bury it in deep holes in the ground? The problems we may see with global warming are far less than the problems with nuclear fission waste. More importantly, global warming has occurred in the past many times and will occur in the future many more times regardless of whether we burn oil or not.
Nuclear fission technology hasn't changed nor improved. Large quantities of long-lived radioactive isotopes are produced as waste and even after 60 years we still don't have any place to put them. The reactor containment on a fission reactor hasn't changed and would allow chernobyl-type contamination to spread if it fails due to operator or equipment failure. Significant portions of several states (Washington, South Carolina, Nevada, Tennessee) are contaminated with historical fission wastes that are poorly contained and could contaminate much larger areas as corrosion, wind, and rain allow them to spread. Large quantities of commercial fission wastes are stored in temporary facilities at nuclear power stations waiting for a safe long-term storage site to be available. Nuclear wastes don't 'go away' and don't decompose, at least in normal historical timespans. They just stay around and accumulate, requiring ever-greater expenditures and effort to contain them. Intentionally planning to produce even more of these wastes than we are already producing is... insane. Windmills, bicycles, sweaters, walking, transit, oil, coal, gas, hydropower, and solar cells are all much better alternatives.
Nuclear power is very clean compared to any power source that burns fuel.
Nuclear power is definitely not 'clean.' 'Nuclear Power' means nuclear fission which produces all sorts of 'dirty' extremely toxic fission byproducts such as radioactive isotopes of cobalt, cesium, strontium, tin, iodine, etc. which persist in the environment and require enormous expenditures of money just to contain so that they don't contaminate the air, water, and soil that we use.
The problem with these databases such as supermarket loyalty card purchase records, cell phone/gps movements, IP logs, public library checkout history, google searches, medical databases, and the like is that they can be used to get a good picture of who you are and what you are doing, without ever contacting you or seeking your permission. If the data exists, someone WILL use it, nevermind how many rules exist to keep it 'private.' No one who collects this kind of data is your friend, whatever they say to the contrary, and you should treat them accordingly.
The 'Vista Sales are not Good' stories are delusional because they suggest that somehow market forces are at work with Microsoft and that is not correct. No, Vista is not a very good iteration of 'Windows' and yes, there are some very good reasons to stay with XP or Win2K or whatever, while waiting for the next iteration or service pack. But...and this is the key...the Windows API is absolutely dominant worldwide and seems very likely to remain so for the forseeable future. This means that new computers will all continue to ship with Windows of some sort, unless you buy an Apple, and Microsoft has a lot of leverage on Intel who supplies the cpu for the Mac so don't look for Mac market penetration to increase a lot. Does Microsoft care if you pay them $204 to buy XP on your computer or pay them $204 to buy Vista? The same kind of views were expressed when XP replaced Windows 98 but there are not many people still using Windows 98 today because Microsoft just stopped supporting it and forced people to use XP.
"Hundreds of black holes that were thought to exist at the beginning of the universe..."
How can there be a 'beginning of the universe?' That would also imply that there is/was an end and what would there be after the end or between the end of the last universe and the beginning of ours?
Is this a GOOD thing or a BAD thing? Inquiring minds want to know.
Okay, the earth has been warming over the last few decades. No one disputes that. The only dispute is the cause. Either the cause is: 1) retained heat due to increased atmospheric carbon dioxide, 2) increased solar output, or 3) increased geothermal output. Global warming will give us melting ice caps, rising sea levels, increased storm energy, and new drought areas, particularly sub-saharan africa and the southwest US and northern Mexico.
Now, if global warming is due to high solar output which is now starting to decline, then we'll experience global cooling and possibly a mini ice-age or even a real ice age. In this case, large areas of the presently inhabited planetary land mass will experience unusually cool temperatures and ice formation. Sea levels will fall dramatically and many areas will be too cold to sustain food crops, leading to widespread starvation until the planetary population declines to match the food supply available from the new smaller area. Losers will be Europe, Russia, and North America. Winners will be Africa, South America, and Australia.
The starvation thing will be far worse than the rising sea level thing so, to answer your question, this is bad, very bad, if it's really true, and Al Gore will have to give back his Nobel prize. Probably it's not, though, and the solar output will bounce back in a year or tow.
The option for these kinds of schemes is always to "opt out" of the data sharing. Since I expect that the overwhelming majority of users would want to keep their calling records and data private, shouldn't the option be to "opt in" to the data sharing?
We're Catholics here. For us, God is more like the feeling of working for a really, really great supervisor rather than the euphoric high with the helmet thing. For that, I need about 48 oz of cold beer.
No one ever talks about the good things about electronic voting machines so I'll try.
1) They save paper. No umpty-ump thousands of paper ballots to print out and truck around.
2) They save time with the vote counting. Computers can tally in an instant while manual vote tallying by an army of poll workers takes hours, and sometimes days.
3) They restrict access to the balloting to just a few people. Instead of all of those vote counters putting their hands all over a mass of paper ballots, there are just a handful of people who operate and service the machines and then report the results.
4) They generate new jobs for technical people as the machines become obsolete every 3 or 4 years and are replaced by the new models.
There are probably more advantages but those are all I can think of. Now, I know what you're thinking: 'So what about the so-called advantages...the process is inherently untrustworthy.' To that we would say...(crickets chirping)
Excerpts: "Even as meteorite samples arrived in Lima Thursday for testing, Peruvian scientists seemed to unanimously agree that it was a meteorite that had struck their territory."
How can the scientist unanimously agree (unuusual in itself) if the samples were just arriving? "Preliminary analysis by Macedo's institute revealed no metal fragments, indicating a rare rock meteorite."
I don't think there has ever been a meteorite in the past with 'metal fragments' if, by that term, they mean an unoxidized form of a metal. Many meterites contain iron, a 'metal,' but it is has always been present in an oxidized form. Maybe they mean that there was a complete absence of metals, oxidized or unoxidized, which would not be at all unusual (and certainly not 'rare). However, in that case, the next part of the article makes no sense:
"The samples also had a significant amount of magnetic material "characteristic of meteorites," she said. "The samples stick to the magnet," Ishitsuka, the astronomer, confirmed. "That shows that there is iron present." "
All in all, the article provides no useful information other than to say that arsenic is present in the groundwater, the arsenic ions were somehow present in significant quantities in the steam clouds created by the meteorite impact, and people inhaled the steam clouds and thereby somehow absorbed a significant amount of arsenic.
Aluminum isn't all that great either. If it gets hot, it loses most of its strength and the wings will just droop and fall off. That's not the worst, though. Aluminum is a metal that is prone to cracking under stress. This is an especially bad thing if there is an undetected crack in a critical part that suddenly grows and...the wings fall off or the fuselage blows out, maybe carrying people inside out of the plane, too. And then there's corrosion. Aluminum will oxidize to the useless oxide form when exposed to moisture and oxygen, two ubiquitous substances around airplanes. Corrosion can build up over time, slowly weakening critical parts over time until, one day, the wings fall off. See a pattern here? And then, if theres' a fire, aluminum will actually 'burn' and turn to dust as it oxidizes under high temperatures. Of course, by this time, the wings have probably already fallen off.
A much safer material to use for airplanes is wood, which doesn't oxidize at ambient temperatures, doesn't weaken when heated, and doesn't allow crack propagation if properly designed, Of course, it will oxidize under the right conditions but nothing's absolutely perfect. Finally, wood will allow the use of high tech fabrics, instead of dangerous aluminum skins, to cover skin surfaces and the fabric can be covered with special surface coatings to reduce air permeability. Best of all, there is some operating history with using wood and fabrics for aviation purposes to provide designers to proceed with confidence! After all, when something works well, why bother assuming a lot of new risk?
Nasa plans to retire the uber-complicated space shuttle and supply the space station via Russian Soyuz capsules. Under the Bush Administration foreign policy, our relations with Russia are not exactly improving. What happens, then, if there comes a day in 2012 or whenever when Russia just says "no, we are not going to fly any Americans to the space station." Then we can call the space station the Russian Space Station and maybe NASA doesn't need those new astronauts.
Seems like these kinds of storys always refer to some visual subject but never actually have a picture of it. In this case, the visual thing is... the crater. How hard could it be to take a digital snap of the crater and post it on the internet? Seems like that police force in Peru could scare up a cheap digital camera to snap a pic of the crater that made six of their officers sick if they found the time to tell the world about it. I mean, it is not every day that a big enough meteroite hits the earth to leave a significant crater.
Mod up! Great comments. This guy doing burnouts in the parking lot is no different than Evel Knievel breaking bones jumping a bike over cars. At least Evel knew something about motorcycles, although I don't think he was ever an actual rider.
It doesn't matter if it'a KillaCycle, motorcycle, bicycle, or even a small car, because none of them are safe as long as they share the road with vehicles that are relatively so much more massive.
Yours is the kind of narrow-minded thinking that says 'I'll buy a 6,000 lb SUV so the guy in the 4,000 lb car can't hurt me when we collide.' This is the kind of thinking that says 'Small cars are too dangerous to drive.' People in 80,000 lb trucks get killed when the truck jack knifes and hits an obstruction. People in big cars get killed when the thing rolls over, hits another vehicle, or drives off the road over a cliff. People in small cars get killed the same way. People on motorcycles get killed when they go too fast, fail to watch for other vehicles, pull wheelies on the freeway, drive after drinking, or hit a car that pulls in front of them. People in crosswalks get killed when the SUV driven by the careless driver on his cellphone mows them down like bambi on opening day. Is there a common thread? Yes, mistakes, and those are what we all make, and they sometimes kill us. Vehicles and pedestrians of ALL sizes have to share the road and they always will. Driving a 6,000 lb SUV or a 600 lb motorcycle will not protect you from being killed by your own mistakes.
The 'killacycle' operator was obviously to me, not very familiar with the operation of the killacycle, or motorcycles in general, and was just trying to showboat for the press. Maybe he didn't want to pay the 'real' driver to be there for the demo or maybe he wanted his 10 seconds of fame in front of the cameras. Any experienced biker doing a demonstration like he was doing would have looked ahead to see where he would be going if the front brake didn't hold. They guy in the video never looks ahead to the minivan he was going to collide with seconds later. Any drag biker would have had a helmet, too, although the guy didn't apparently sustain a head injury in this case. Mistakes, not the size of the vehicle, hurt this guy. He was lucky that he wasn't hurt worse than he was.
AMD and Intel kept making more powerful processors for desktop machines. Laptops had to become more powerful to stay competitive in performance with desktops. Then AMD came out with new low power processors and people started putting Pentium 4 parts in laptops to compete (fortunately, Intel finally managed to come up with the Pentium M a year later or the problem would be 100x worse), which put battery makers under enormous pressure to come out with products that could supply the power. The Li battery is basically sound but the technology was pushed beyond what it was capable of. Too much power in too small a space.
1) Microsoft has kept on supplying Windows to computer makers who offer a non-Windows option.
2) Microsoft has allowed hardware vendors to live who offer non-Windows drivers for their hardware.
3) Microsoft has not forced hardware and software vendors to exclusively use Microsoft protocols and standards.
4) Microsoft lets the user install software on their Windows sytems such as Open Office and Firefox that competes with Microsoft software.
5) Windows users don't have to pay a 'per minute' charge to use their system, just a one-time license fee when they buy it.
Of course, once the antitrust judicial oversight ends, so will all of this kindness by Microsoft. On day 1, Microsoft will pick up the phone to Intel and tell them to implement some Windows-only stuff on the next gen of 'Core Quadro' processors that will make their use by Apple...how shall we say it?...challenging.
...who hated software from servers as a 'service.' I want MY data sitting on MY hardware and I do NOT want to rent, borrow, or steal but OWN the software that's needed to use the data. Also, 'new' hardware and software MUST give me full and complete access to my 'old' data. Is that too much to ask?
Note to Microsoft: I will NEVER use software that doesn't give me the above.
...we'll end up living in huts made of logs and sod, driving pushcarts full of firewood, and eating soybeans. Seriously, doesn't 'trade' mean an 'exchange' of goods and services? Obviously, the exchange is not happening, just a transfer of currency.
Biggest problem here is that Vista uses new hardware drivers so it will not work with older hardware unless your hardware vendor releases a new vista driver (unlikely in most cases and much-delayed in others), a third-party driver appears (rare) or some other driver can be substituted (very rare). The next biggest problem is that vista cannot reliably run a lot of older win32 software and forget completely about win16 or dos software. These two things are significant limitations for many business users. Microsoft should have worked a little bit more at improving the compatibility of vista with existing hardware and software.
Technology of the last few years has made this sort of tracking possible and governments everywhere will begin doing it. It's only a matter of time. Would Americans ever go for this? Maybe they would if it was sold to them as a way to fight crime, protect their children, combat terrorism, and prevent illegal immigrants from taking their jobs. Once it's in, like driver's license identification, income tax forms, or social security numbers, it will never leave.
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Yes, the Chernobyl reactor was unsafe. The point, however, is that ALL nuclear fission reactors can release large amounts of radioactive isotopes if some sequence of 'bad stuff' happens due to operator error, equipment failure, design problems, terrorist attack, natural disasters, etc. You can say 'not likely' but that's not the same as 'impossible.' Once a release occurs, the consequences are significant. Large areas of land can be rendered uninhabitable for hundreds of years or longer.
As for nuclear waste: it seems a lot easier than coal waste. Coal waste is simply discharged into the atmosphere and can't be got back. Nuclear waste at least can easily be contained in a very, very small area instead of affecting the entire planet's atmosphere.
You are wrong on so many levels here. Technology exists and has been used to scrub coal plant air emissions but the use of it is an economic decision rather than a technical one. If the plant is not required to purchase air scrubbing equipment, why would they do so? With nuclear fission waste, the problem is that there is no technology in existence to safely contain and store the waste for the requisite thousands of years. And no, the waste is not in a 'very, very small area'. Typically, the waste is placed in the sturdiest containers that we can build and then placed in areas where it is hoped that nothing will disturb them and the waste is shielded from humans with dirt and distance. Nuclear wastes have affected the entire planet's atmosphere MANY times from such things as weapons testing, commercial nuclear power plant failure (Ukraine, Japan, US), nuclear weapons manufacturing, waste migration from waste reprocessing (liquid wastes, dust), waste migration from weapons manufacture and testing, nuclear-fuelled spacecraft reentry, and waste storage containment failure.
Don't really need to put them anywhere, actually. A year's worth of radioactive fuel/waste for a gigawatt reactor is about a railcar's worth. Besides, it's still about 95% fuel, so when the price of uranium rises a bit more, we can take our decades old waste that's sitting in above ground casks and recycle it. Separate out the short lived waste isotopes, put the long lived usable fuel isotopes back in the reactor. You use the old stuff because while it's still radioactive, it's much less so than stuff fresh out of the reactor, so it's easier and cheaper to handle.
You don't know what you're talking about, and that's being charitable. There is no fissionable fuel in Cesium-137 or Strontium-90 or most of the other fission wastes and reprocessing is not a solution to the problem of what to do with nuclear fission wastes. Maybe you should start a business where you take the casks of the decades-old waste off of people's hands for a song and then separate out the short-lived isotopes and sell the stuff that's left for a lot of money to people who want to put it back in their reactor as cheap fuel. Wow, you'll be wealthy in no time at all. You will have lots of suppliers for your little business but not many customers and your operating costs will stretch to infinity.
Go read about the design of the Chernobyl RBMK reactor and learn why it was a particularly dangerous design. A design that only soviet dumbfucks would build, and operated by those same soviet dumbfucks.
The Soviets copied the design of the Chernobyl graphite reactor from us. The first nuclear fission reactors in the United States were graphite reactors with no concrete containment structure, just like the Chernobyl reactors. Guess there are dumbfucks here too.
The radiation release at Chernobyl was catastrophic because the graphite reactor caught on fire and there was no concrete containment structure around it. Graphite reactors are no longer used for commercial power production in the United States although we have built and operated graphite reactors with no containment structure in the past(such as the N Reactor at Hanford, Washington). The point is that with ANY fission reactor, there can be failures of the reactor operation AND the containment that can lead to catastrophic chernobyl-type releases. These could be caused by operator error, equipment failure, terrorist attack, natural disasters, etc. A second point is that ALL nuclear fission reactors (commercial or weapons reactors) produce large quantities of extremely toxic waste that must be contained for thousands of years. You can point to umpty-ump tons of waste from a coal-burning plant and claim that that is somehow worse than the nuclear fission waste based on the total tons or the type or whatever but the nuclear fission waste will contaminate the area where it is stored for thousands of years and that is not the case with fossil fuel plant waste. France does not have any less of a problem with nuclear waste than anyone else. They produce a lot of waste and they reprocess it to extract additional fuel from it as much as they can but they still produce large amounts of waste and have no place to put it. Do you even understand that ALL nuclear fission reactors produce the same waste, regardless of whether the reactor is in France or Japan or Russia or Ukraine or the United States? Do you understand the difference between a radioactive metal isotope which releases high-energy biologically-damaging particles at a continuous rate for thousands of years and a non-radioactive isotope of the same metal which does not? Choosing to produce more nuclear fission waste is simply insane. Maybe you're planning to place it into space capsules and lauch it into deep space? Or maybe put it in stainless steel casks and sink them to the bottom of the ocean? Or maybe bury it in deep holes in the ground? The problems we may see with global warming are far less than the problems with nuclear fission waste. More importantly, global warming has occurred in the past many times and will occur in the future many more times regardless of whether we burn oil or not.
The technology has vastly improved...
... insane. Windmills, bicycles, sweaters, walking, transit, oil, coal, gas, hydropower, and solar cells are all much better alternatives.
Nuclear fission technology hasn't changed nor improved. Large quantities of long-lived radioactive isotopes are produced as waste and even after 60 years we still don't have any place to put them. The reactor containment on a fission reactor hasn't changed and would allow chernobyl-type contamination to spread if it fails due to operator or equipment failure. Significant portions of several states (Washington, South Carolina, Nevada, Tennessee) are contaminated with historical fission wastes that are poorly contained and could contaminate much larger areas as corrosion, wind, and rain allow them to spread. Large quantities of commercial fission wastes are stored in temporary facilities at nuclear power stations waiting for a safe long-term storage site to be available. Nuclear wastes don't 'go away' and don't decompose, at least in normal historical timespans. They just stay around and accumulate, requiring ever-greater expenditures and effort to contain them. Intentionally planning to produce even more of these wastes than we are already producing is
Nuclear power is very clean compared to any power source that burns fuel.
Nuclear power is definitely not 'clean.' 'Nuclear Power' means nuclear
fission which produces all sorts of 'dirty' extremely toxic fission
byproducts
such as radioactive isotopes of cobalt, cesium, strontium, tin,
iodine, etc. which persist in the environment and require enormous
expenditures of money just to contain so that they don't contaminate
the air, water, and soil that we use.
The problem with these databases such as supermarket loyalty card purchase records, cell phone/gps movements, IP logs, public library checkout history, google searches, medical databases, and the like is that they can be used to get a good picture of who you are and what you are doing, without ever contacting you or seeking your permission. If the data exists, someone WILL use it, nevermind how many rules exist to keep it 'private.' No one who collects this kind of data is your friend, whatever they say to the contrary, and you should treat them accordingly.
The 'Vista Sales are not Good' stories are delusional because they suggest that somehow market forces are at work with Microsoft and that is not correct. No, Vista is not a very good iteration of 'Windows' and yes, there are some very good reasons to stay with XP or Win2K or whatever, while waiting for the next iteration or service pack. But...and this is the key...the Windows API is absolutely dominant worldwide and seems very likely to remain so for the forseeable future. This means that new computers will all continue to ship with Windows of some sort, unless you buy an Apple, and Microsoft has a lot of leverage on Intel who supplies the cpu for the Mac so don't look for Mac market penetration to increase a lot. Does Microsoft care if you pay them $204 to buy XP on your computer or pay them $204 to buy Vista? The same kind of views were expressed when XP replaced Windows 98 but there are not many people still using Windows 98 today because Microsoft just stopped supporting it and forced people to use XP.
"Hundreds of black holes that were thought to exist at the beginning of the universe..."
How can there be a 'beginning of the universe?' That would also imply that there is/was an end and what would there be after the end or between the end of the last universe and the beginning of ours?
Is this a GOOD thing or a BAD thing? Inquiring minds want to know.
Okay, the earth has been warming over the last few decades. No one disputes that. The only dispute is the cause. Either the cause is: 1) retained heat due to increased atmospheric carbon dioxide, 2) increased solar output, or 3) increased geothermal output. Global warming will give us melting ice caps, rising sea levels, increased storm energy, and new drought areas, particularly sub-saharan africa and the southwest US and northern Mexico.
Now, if global warming is due to high solar output which is now starting to decline, then we'll experience global cooling and possibly a mini ice-age or even a real ice age. In this case, large areas of the presently inhabited planetary land mass will experience unusually cool temperatures and ice formation. Sea levels will fall dramatically and many areas will be too cold to sustain food crops, leading to widespread starvation until the planetary population declines to match the food supply available from the new smaller area. Losers will be Europe, Russia, and North America. Winners will be Africa, South America, and Australia.
The starvation thing will be far worse than the rising sea level thing so, to answer your question, this is bad, very bad, if it's really true, and Al Gore will have to give back his Nobel prize. Probably it's not, though, and the solar output will bounce back in a year or tow.
The option for these kinds of schemes is always to "opt out" of the data sharing. Since I expect that the overwhelming majority of users would want to keep their calling records and data private, shouldn't the option be to "opt in" to the data sharing?
We're Catholics here. For us, God is more like the feeling of working for a really, really great supervisor rather than the euphoric high with the helmet thing. For that, I need about 48 oz of cold beer.
No one ever talks about the good things about electronic voting machines so I'll try.
1) They save paper. No umpty-ump thousands of paper ballots to print out and truck around.
2) They save time with the vote counting. Computers can tally in an instant while manual vote tallying by an army of poll workers takes hours, and sometimes days.
3) They restrict access to the balloting to just a few people. Instead of all of those vote counters putting their hands all over a mass of paper ballots, there are just a handful of people who operate and service the machines and then report the results.
4) They generate new jobs for technical people as the machines become obsolete every 3 or 4 years and are replaced by the new models.
There are probably more advantages but those are all I can think of. Now, I know what you're thinking: 'So what about the so-called advantages...the process is inherently untrustworthy.' To that we would say...(crickets chirping)
Excerpts:
"Even as meteorite samples arrived in Lima Thursday for testing, Peruvian scientists seemed to unanimously agree that it was a meteorite that had struck their territory."
How can the scientist unanimously agree (unuusual in itself) if the samples were just arriving?
"Preliminary analysis by Macedo's institute revealed no metal fragments, indicating a rare rock meteorite."
I don't think there has ever been a meteorite in the past with 'metal fragments' if, by that term, they mean an unoxidized form of a metal. Many meterites contain iron, a 'metal,' but it is has always been present in an oxidized form. Maybe they mean that there was a complete absence of metals, oxidized or unoxidized, which would not be at all unusual (and certainly not 'rare). However, in that case, the next part of the article makes no sense:
"The samples also had a significant amount of magnetic material "characteristic of meteorites," she said. "The samples stick to the magnet," Ishitsuka, the astronomer, confirmed. "That shows that there is iron present." "
All in all, the article provides no useful information other than to say that arsenic is present in the groundwater, the arsenic ions were somehow present in significant quantities in the steam clouds created by the meteorite impact, and people inhaled the steam clouds and thereby somehow absorbed a significant amount of arsenic.
Aluminum isn't all that great either. If it gets hot, it loses most of its strength and the wings will just droop and fall off. That's not the worst, though. Aluminum is a metal that is prone to cracking under stress. This is an especially bad thing if there is an undetected crack in a critical part that suddenly grows and...the wings fall off or the fuselage blows out, maybe carrying people inside out of the plane, too. And then there's corrosion. Aluminum will oxidize to the useless oxide form when exposed to moisture and oxygen, two ubiquitous substances around airplanes. Corrosion can build up over time, slowly weakening critical parts over time until, one day, the wings fall off. See a pattern here? And then, if theres' a fire, aluminum will actually 'burn' and turn to dust as it oxidizes under high temperatures. Of course, by this time, the wings have probably already fallen off.
A much safer material to use for airplanes is wood, which doesn't oxidize at ambient temperatures, doesn't weaken when heated, and doesn't allow crack propagation if properly designed, Of course, it will oxidize under the right conditions but nothing's absolutely perfect. Finally, wood will allow the use of high tech fabrics, instead of dangerous aluminum skins, to cover skin surfaces and the fabric can be covered with special surface coatings to reduce air permeability. Best of all, there is some operating history with using wood and fabrics for aviation purposes to provide designers to proceed with confidence! After all, when something works well, why bother assuming a lot of new risk?
Nasa plans to retire the uber-complicated space shuttle and supply the space station via Russian Soyuz capsules. Under the Bush Administration foreign policy, our relations with Russia are not exactly improving. What happens, then, if there comes a day in 2012 or whenever when Russia just says "no, we are not going to fly any Americans to the space station." Then we can call the space station the Russian Space Station and maybe NASA doesn't need those new astronauts.
Seems like these kinds of storys always refer to some visual subject but never actually have a picture of it. In this case, the visual thing is... the crater. How hard could it be to take a digital snap of the crater and post it on the internet? Seems like that police force in Peru could scare up a cheap digital camera to snap a pic of the crater that made six of their officers sick if they found the time to tell the world about it. I mean, it is not every day that a big enough meteroite hits the earth to leave a significant crater.
Mod up! Great comments. This guy doing burnouts in the parking lot is no different than Evel Knievel breaking bones jumping a bike over cars. At least Evel knew something about motorcycles, although I don't think he was ever an actual rider.
It doesn't matter if it'a KillaCycle, motorcycle, bicycle, or even a small car, because none of them are safe as long as they share the road with vehicles that are relatively so much more massive.
Yours is the kind of narrow-minded thinking that says 'I'll buy a 6,000 lb SUV so the guy in the 4,000 lb car can't hurt me when we collide.' This is the kind of thinking that says 'Small cars are too dangerous to drive.' People in 80,000 lb trucks get killed when the truck jack knifes and hits an obstruction. People in big cars get killed when the thing rolls over, hits another vehicle, or drives off the road over a cliff. People in small cars get killed the same way. People on motorcycles get killed when they go too fast, fail to watch for other vehicles, pull wheelies on the freeway, drive after drinking, or hit a car that pulls in front of them. People in crosswalks get killed when the SUV driven by the careless driver on his cellphone mows them down like bambi on opening day. Is there a common thread? Yes, mistakes, and those are what we all make, and they sometimes kill us. Vehicles and pedestrians of ALL sizes have to share the road and they always will. Driving a 6,000 lb SUV or a 600 lb motorcycle will not protect you from being killed by your own mistakes.
The 'killacycle' operator was obviously to me, not very familiar with the operation of the killacycle, or motorcycles in general, and was just trying to showboat for the press. Maybe he didn't want to pay the 'real' driver to be there for the demo or maybe he wanted his 10 seconds of fame in front of the cameras. Any experienced biker doing a demonstration like he was doing would have looked ahead to see where he would be going if the front brake didn't hold. They guy in the video never looks ahead to the minivan he was going to collide with seconds later. Any drag biker would have had a helmet, too, although the guy didn't apparently sustain a head injury in this case. Mistakes, not the size of the vehicle, hurt this guy. He was lucky that he wasn't hurt worse than he was.
AMD and Intel kept making more powerful processors for desktop machines. Laptops had to become more powerful to stay competitive in performance with desktops. Then AMD came out with new low power processors and people started putting Pentium 4 parts in laptops to compete (fortunately, Intel finally managed to come up with the Pentium M a year later or the problem would be 100x worse), which put battery makers under enormous pressure to come out with products that could supply the power. The Li battery is basically sound but the technology was pushed beyond what it was capable of. Too much power in too small a space.
1) Microsoft has kept on supplying Windows to computer makers who offer a non-Windows option.
2) Microsoft has allowed hardware vendors to live who offer non-Windows drivers for their hardware.
3) Microsoft has not forced hardware and software vendors to exclusively use Microsoft protocols and standards.
4) Microsoft lets the user install software on their Windows sytems such as Open Office and Firefox that competes with Microsoft software.
5) Windows users don't have to pay a 'per minute' charge to use their system, just a one-time license fee when they buy it.
Of course, once the antitrust judicial oversight ends, so will all of this kindness by Microsoft. On day 1, Microsoft will pick up the phone to Intel and tell them to implement some Windows-only stuff on the next gen of 'Core Quadro' processors that will make their use by Apple...how shall we say it?...challenging.
...who hated software from servers as a 'service.' I want MY data sitting on MY hardware and I do NOT want to rent, borrow, or steal but OWN the software that's needed to use the data. Also, 'new' hardware and software MUST give me full and complete access to my 'old' data. Is that too much to ask?
Note to Microsoft: I will NEVER use software that doesn't give me the above.
...we'll end up living in huts made of logs and sod, driving pushcarts full of firewood, and eating soybeans. Seriously, doesn't 'trade' mean an 'exchange' of goods and services? Obviously, the exchange is not happening, just a transfer of currency.
Biggest problem here is that Vista uses new hardware drivers so it will not work with older hardware unless your hardware vendor releases a new vista driver (unlikely in most cases and much-delayed in others), a third-party driver appears (rare) or some other driver can be substituted (very rare). The next biggest problem is that vista cannot reliably run a lot of older win32 software and forget completely about win16 or dos software. These two things are significant limitations for many business users. Microsoft should have worked a little bit more at improving the compatibility of vista with existing hardware and software.
Technology of the last few years has made this sort of tracking possible and governments everywhere will begin doing it. It's only a matter of time. Would Americans ever go for this? Maybe they would if it was sold to them as a way to fight crime, protect their children, combat terrorism, and prevent illegal immigrants from taking their jobs. Once it's in, like driver's license identification, income tax forms, or social security numbers, it will never leave.