The article says nowhere that a "lifetime's" dose is only 1 mrem - the contractor said only that "a dose of less than or equal to 1 millirem" had already been detected in the affected people, and that 1 mrem over 50 years is insignificant.
But this completely glosses over the real issue, that with alpha-emitting particles lodged in your body all that time, you will be continually irradiated. Which is why the article continues on to cite four radiation experts including Dr Kaltofen, who called the contractor's statement "misleading", and said,"With plutonium, the exposure is in your body for days, months or even years. A millionth of a gram of plutonium has a measurable risk of causing a lethal lung cancer."
It's true that Plutonium is highly toxic, but an airborne particle is probably not enough to cause significant health effects from that (the toxology profile suggests the level for that is 10 ppm) - depending on how many are inhaled of course.
But the radiation is indeed the bigger hazard. Plutonium's long half-life means it's not as dangerously radioactive as some other elements - so long as exposure is relatively brief or distant (inverse square law applies). When it gets inside you though, it sticks in there for decades, and at that extremely close range the radiation is a lot more powerful, so your chances of cancer go up significantly.
Do you have any evidence that these cities wouldn't actually be worse without gun control? Or even statistics on comparative homicides per capita, rather than absolutes picked from large cities? Ideally with some attempt to control for exacerbating factors like socio-economic index - poor populations in ghettos are a lot more likely to experience violent crime than rich suburbs, after all.
The US rate of 4.88 is nearly 5x that of Australia, where our firearm homicide rate has roughly halved since we banned most guns in the mid-90s (note that murders by knives have increased slightly in that time, but at a much slower rate). And in Egypt it's 1.2 per 100,000, while in Japan it's a mere 0.3, suggesting that race may not be the factor you seem to think - more likely cultural factors and poverty (access to guns just raises the stakes).
This Australian startup has a new additive metal process that is 1000x faster, and 100x cheaper!
Seriously - and it's working today, not still in development. No filament, no lasers - they have a six-axis arm holding the part over a nozzle that blasts it with high-speed metal particles that stick to the part. Sounds crude, and it looks crude, but a quick bake to sinter it and a run through the CnC mill to finish it, and the completed result is as good as any slow laser-sintered part (which will also require milling).
They figured that since existing additive metal processes still require a final milling step to smooth out the surfaces, it takes just as much time to mill off a few hundred microns as a couple dozen, so you might as well go quick & dirty for the additive stage - same result, and much faster overall.
the most effective self defense tool on the planet
And yet the US homicide rate is still 3-10x higher than every other Western country, despite almost uniquely broad access to such an "effective" tool.
I hear a lot from gun owners denying the need for harm minimisation, but never anything more than vague claims about supposed "benefits" that make guns worth the cost. You're happy to cite statistics showing there are worse problems than accidental shootings (always glossing over the vastly higher intentional shootings rate) - but when it comes to figures supporting the purpose of gun ownership, suddenly there must be a conspiracy involved to make them look bad.
As the GP actually said, "where it is easiest to abuse". Obviously governments have more power, they control entire armies - but they're certainly not the easiest place to abuse power, short of a full military dictator.
If you think power is easier to abuse in government than it is in a corporation or private individual with a few billions, you really haven't been paying attention.
If you think corporate regulation is bad, have a look at all the red tape the bureaucracy has to fight through to get anything done. Have a look at all the public scrutiny on the higher levels of government. Have a look at how many people have to sign off on everything for even inconsequential actions.
There's no need for elections, no worries about limited terms, and public opinion is almost irrelevant to any diversified individual or corporation. And if they want more power than their money already gives them, they can lobby to get the rules changed to suit them more, or simply move to a more favourable jurisdiction.
If you have evidence that turbines disproportionately affect certain species, please cite it.
Otherwise, this chart shows that windows, communication towers, and even high-tension wires each kill thousands of times more birds annually, and those things are everywhere.
Apart from how you just repeated yourself, again without showing any more than anecdotal evidence of "forced" classes being pervasive, I'm now curious as to why you seem to think there's something wrong with boys being taught about the scale of violence and harassment aimed at female students.
Huh? That Telegraph article is an opinion piece from a guy who runs an advocacy organisation, and the only connection with colleges is a link to a Daily Mail article (ugh) about a single school in Oxford. It's no less an anecdote than the GP.
If you're arguing that forced-leftism is wide-spread, maybe you should attempt to dig up actual statistics or even a peer-reviewed study? Citing "thousands of hits on Google" can be said about virtually anything.
Budget always goes without saying. Without evidence or anything else that leads them to believe that the tapes might warrant a closer look, the time and money is always going to go to something they know will be worth it.
That said, I think they should offer them to qualified enthusiasts to restore. I'm sure there are people would be keen to put in the effort to find out, in exchange for a tiny piece of Pioneer history.
Huh? Sorry, if you're making a point that's related, then I'm not seeing it.
Obviously all participants in the energy chain bear some responsibility, but it's the primary producers who have the most direct control. Consumers rarely care how their energy is produced, only about cost, and they have little influence over methods or pricing. But if the fossil fuel companies (gradually) phased out e.g. coal production, then the electricity market would be forced to build other types of power plants.
The tunnel won't be lit, and there won't be windows in the pod either. It'll have "in-flight" entertainment, just like airlines (which are also pretty boring for 90% of the flight).
Exactly - one of the issues they had to solve was that the passage of the pod compresses the air ahead of it *too much*, like a piston. So pods use front fans to push the air ahead of it under the pod, compressed enough to keep it off the floor of the tube.
I believe pods are sealed with their own air supply, but some could potentially be diverted from the front fans if needed.
I consider Exxon, BP, Shell, and other fossil fuel producers to be energy companies, so I was including transportation and their other consumer industries as part of the wider energy market, not just electricity and heating. But whatever you prefer, I don't think it changes my point.
According to this comprehensive chart, about 66.5% of greenhouse gas emissions are from the energy sector (nearly all of it CO2), so yes, it's not unexpected that the major energy companies are the penultimate source of so much.
While this is an activist report of course, the point it's making is that these companies hold a huge amount of influence over our energy future - if they chose to scale down their investments in carbon-based energy in favour of creating and supplying low- or zero-carbon alternatives (natural gas, nuclear, solar+wind, energy storage technologies, hydrogen fuels etc), those few companies could ultimately make a dramatic difference to the planet's future climate.
That said, the feature may not have rolled out yet, and the original story now has this note:
Editor's note: This story has been updated; an earlier version named a smart home device that was not the type found in the home and credited by police with calling 911.
Fair point, Symbian and RIM were still strong then in some markets, but in others the iPhone was definitely king - such as this 78% share in Western Europe in late 2009, or 50% share worldwide early 2010.
The iPhone certainly had dominant mindshare back then, but I will concede that its peak marketshare perhaps didn't last long enough to overly concern EU regulators.
Have you forgotten that the iPhone too was once the dominant smartphone around? For many years after its release, before the rise of Android, the iPhone was the only game in town, and owned the market even more than Android does now. Same with iPads, which arguably still dominate the tablet market.
And at the time they were even more restrictive and locked down. Where was the EU then?
Wisdom is intelligently applied knowledge. Computers are already great at storing knowledge, but they've been lacking the intelligence to apply it. That is now starting to change.
As I said elsewhere, this does not explain why there are (even more) differences in liquids like apple and grape juice. Packaging is a potential source, but I haven't found the study to confirm if they controlled for that (highly likely it occurred to them to them too), as that would show up in "snack-sized" adult foods as well.
IMHO, since a difference has been established, the onus is now on the food manufacturers to explain (and hopefully eliminate) the elevated levels. But this will require pressure, either public or regulatory.
Slashdot Mirror
The article says nowhere that a "lifetime's" dose is only 1 mrem - the contractor said only that "a dose of less than or equal to 1 millirem" had already been detected in the affected people, and that 1 mrem over 50 years is insignificant.
But this completely glosses over the real issue, that with alpha-emitting particles lodged in your body all that time, you will be continually irradiated. Which is why the article continues on to cite four radiation experts including Dr Kaltofen, who called the contractor's statement "misleading", and said,"With plutonium, the exposure is in your body for days, months or even years. A millionth of a gram of plutonium has a measurable risk of causing a lethal lung cancer."
It's true that Plutonium is highly toxic, but an airborne particle is probably not enough to cause significant health effects from that (the toxology profile suggests the level for that is 10 ppm) - depending on how many are inhaled of course.
But the radiation is indeed the bigger hazard. Plutonium's long half-life means it's not as dangerously radioactive as some other elements - so long as exposure is relatively brief or distant (inverse square law applies). When it gets inside you though, it sticks in there for decades, and at that extremely close range the radiation is a lot more powerful, so your chances of cancer go up significantly.
Do you have any evidence that these cities wouldn't actually be worse without gun control? Or even statistics on comparative homicides per capita, rather than absolutes picked from large cities? Ideally with some attempt to control for exacerbating factors like socio-economic index - poor populations in ghettos are a lot more likely to experience violent crime than rich suburbs, after all.
The US rate of 4.88 is nearly 5x that of Australia, where our firearm homicide rate has roughly halved since we banned most guns in the mid-90s (note that murders by knives have increased slightly in that time, but at a much slower rate). And in Egypt it's 1.2 per 100,000, while in Japan it's a mere 0.3, suggesting that race may not be the factor you seem to think - more likely cultural factors and poverty (access to guns just raises the stakes).
Best I could find (and the source of the above comments) was this link, which has an interview with the CEO.
This Australian startup has a new additive metal process that is 1000x faster, and 100x cheaper!
Seriously - and it's working today, not still in development. No filament, no lasers - they have a six-axis arm holding the part over a nozzle that blasts it with high-speed metal particles that stick to the part. Sounds crude, and it looks crude, but a quick bake to sinter it and a run through the CnC mill to finish it, and the completed result is as good as any slow laser-sintered part (which will also require milling).
They figured that since existing additive metal processes still require a final milling step to smooth out the surfaces, it takes just as much time to mill off a few hundred microns as a couple dozen, so you might as well go quick & dirty for the additive stage - same result, and much faster overall.
the most effective self defense tool on the planet
And yet the US homicide rate is still 3-10x higher than every other Western country, despite almost uniquely broad access to such an "effective" tool.
I hear a lot from gun owners denying the need for harm minimisation, but never anything more than vague claims about supposed "benefits" that make guns worth the cost. You're happy to cite statistics showing there are worse problems than accidental shootings (always glossing over the vastly higher intentional shootings rate) - but when it comes to figures supporting the purpose of gun ownership, suddenly there must be a conspiracy involved to make them look bad.
As the GP actually said, "where it is easiest to abuse". Obviously governments have more power, they control entire armies - but they're certainly not the easiest place to abuse power, short of a full military dictator.
If you think power is easier to abuse in government than it is in a corporation or private individual with a few billions, you really haven't been paying attention.
If you think corporate regulation is bad, have a look at all the red tape the bureaucracy has to fight through to get anything done. Have a look at all the public scrutiny on the higher levels of government. Have a look at how many people have to sign off on everything for even inconsequential actions.
There's no need for elections, no worries about limited terms, and public opinion is almost irrelevant to any diversified individual or corporation. And if they want more power than their money already gives them, they can lobby to get the rules changed to suit them more, or simply move to a more favourable jurisdiction.
If you have evidence that turbines disproportionately affect certain species, please cite it.
Otherwise, this chart shows that windows, communication towers, and even high-tension wires each kill thousands of times more birds annually, and those things are everywhere.
Apart from how you just repeated yourself, again without showing any more than anecdotal evidence of "forced" classes being pervasive, I'm now curious as to why you seem to think there's something wrong with boys being taught about the scale of violence and harassment aimed at female students.
Huh? That Telegraph article is an opinion piece from a guy who runs an advocacy organisation, and the only connection with colleges is a link to a Daily Mail article (ugh) about a single school in Oxford. It's no less an anecdote than the GP.
If you're arguing that forced-leftism is wide-spread, maybe you should attempt to dig up actual statistics or even a peer-reviewed study? Citing "thousands of hits on Google" can be said about virtually anything.
"It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea."
-- Robert Anton Wilson, 1980
Budget always goes without saying. Without evidence or anything else that leads them to believe that the tapes might warrant a closer look, the time and money is always going to go to something they know will be worth it.
That said, I think they should offer them to qualified enthusiasts to restore. I'm sure there are people would be keen to put in the effort to find out, in exchange for a tiny piece of Pioneer history.
Huh? Sorry, if you're making a point that's related, then I'm not seeing it.
Obviously all participants in the energy chain bear some responsibility, but it's the primary producers who have the most direct control. Consumers rarely care how their energy is produced, only about cost, and they have little influence over methods or pricing. But if the fossil fuel companies (gradually) phased out e.g. coal production, then the electricity market would be forced to build other types of power plants.
The tunnel won't be lit, and there won't be windows in the pod either. It'll have "in-flight" entertainment, just like airlines (which are also pretty boring for 90% of the flight).
Exactly - one of the issues they had to solve was that the passage of the pod compresses the air ahead of it *too much*, like a piston. So pods use front fans to push the air ahead of it under the pod, compressed enough to keep it off the floor of the tube.
I believe pods are sealed with their own air supply, but some could potentially be diverted from the front fans if needed.
Except it's not a hard vacuum. It's somewhat thinner than the air outside an airliner, but we know how to deal with that.
I consider Exxon, BP, Shell, and other fossil fuel producers to be energy companies, so I was including transportation and their other consumer industries as part of the wider energy market, not just electricity and heating. But whatever you prefer, I don't think it changes my point.
According to this comprehensive chart, about 66.5% of greenhouse gas emissions are from the energy sector (nearly all of it CO2), so yes, it's not unexpected that the major energy companies are the penultimate source of so much.
While this is an activist report of course, the point it's making is that these companies hold a huge amount of influence over our energy future - if they chose to scale down their investments in carbon-based energy in favour of creating and supplying low- or zero-carbon alternatives (natural gas, nuclear, solar+wind, energy storage technologies, hydrogen fuels etc), those few companies could ultimately make a dramatic difference to the planet's future climate.
That said, the feature may not have rolled out yet, and the original story now has this note:
Editor's note: This story has been updated; an earlier version named a smart home device that was not the type found in the home and credited by police with calling 911.
May 17: Google Home can now make phone calls for free
Fair point, Symbian and RIM were still strong then in some markets, but in others the iPhone was definitely king - such as this 78% share in Western Europe in late 2009, or 50% share worldwide early 2010.
The iPhone certainly had dominant mindshare back then, but I will concede that its peak marketshare perhaps didn't last long enough to overly concern EU regulators.
Have you forgotten that the iPhone too was once the dominant smartphone around? For many years after its release, before the rise of Android, the iPhone was the only game in town, and owned the market even more than Android does now. Same with iPads, which arguably still dominate the tablet market.
And at the time they were even more restrictive and locked down. Where was the EU then?
Wisdom is intelligently applied knowledge. Computers are already great at storing knowledge, but they've been lacking the intelligence to apply it. That is now starting to change.
They grind the daylights out of that food.
As I said elsewhere, this does not explain why there are (even more) differences in liquids like apple and grape juice. Packaging is a potential source, but I haven't found the study to confirm if they controlled for that (highly likely it occurred to them to them too), as that would show up in "snack-sized" adult foods as well.
IMHO, since a difference has been established, the onus is now on the food manufacturers to explain (and hopefully eliminate) the elevated levels. But this will require pressure, either public or regulatory.