By this logic, we shouldn't set our sights so low. Use CAPTCHAs that require forecasting the weather 7 days out (granted, the lag is a bit much), analyze the code in the box and prove what it does, prove the equation in the box (Rieman's conjecture, anyone?)
It also makes your site really, really exclusive. The only one to use it is the lucky human (or AI) that solves the puzzle....
Right up there with buying Chrysler. I'm sure their profits will soar if they stick to their timetable regardless of the availability of batteries, alternative fuels, etc.
Perhaps new Mercedes will come with a fuel service, like getting milk in the morning.
Actually, there is a serious proposal to build out massive amounts of nuclear power (because it's "cheap" if you only count the building and the fuel) and use the energy to synthesize gasoline, closing the loop. So it is not a separate issue.
Green Freedom:
http://www.lanl.gov/news/index.php/fuseaction/home.story/story_id/12554
There's a lot of angry, paranoid, and warrantless criticism of environmentalists.
Nuclear plants have been around for 60 years, and there are only a few hundred. In that time, there have been a number of disasters, and a much larger number of near disasters. Nuclear plants are complicated, and multiple systems can and have failed. Low-level releases have occurred. Every time some know-it-all asshole says it can't possibly happen to the "new" stuff, real engineers should be shaking their heads. It can ALWAYS happen. If you deny that, you instantly show yourself to be either foolish or hopelessly naive.
It's nonsense to talk about Yucca mountain, or anywhere else. The only structures humans have built that lasted thousands of years have been simple piles of rocks like the pyramids. We have no experience building complex systems for the long term, and no way to guarantee a stable society that will maintain them.
The estimates of plant safety that do exist in the industry are based on a lot of handwaving. But let's be practical. The real measure of safety is that no one is stupid enough to ensure them except the government. By Murphy's law, of course one will go some day, and every insurance company knows it. Whether by human design, or stupidity. And you cannot possibly guarantee it won't happen.
Charles Officer, a geologist, can give you an idea of one potential issue among many http://www.amazon.com/Big-One-Earthquake-America-Science/dp/B000A176Y2/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1213915580&sr=1-1
If nothing else, a nuclear plant near a center of population is a huge potential dispersal hazard which anyone with a sequence of attacks can defeat. If the terrorists on 9/11 had dropped both planes on the reactor building at Indian Point, all of the New York metro area would be unlivable. The containment building is designed to withstand a SINGLE airplane crash. Granted, that would have been technically tough to achieve. But what about a few dozen GPS-based cruise missiles in a sequence? This kind of thing is going to happen some day.
The new gen IV plants are clever, but not clever enough. They do solve a lot of the mechanical issues, but there is still massive environmental damage from mining, and all the activities that go into making the fuel along the chain, leaking poison into the ecosystem at ever turn. The bottom line is, there is only one sensible reason to have nuclear power, and that is if you have nano technology that can "filter feed" radioactive isotopes out of materials. I welcome anyone who wants to slurp U235, Radium, etc out of area where homes are being built to lower the Radon count in people's houses, and even then, the concentrated radio-isotopes should be generating power far away.
Having said that, there is far more than 1,000 years of Thorium at current levels if you breed fuel. It's just a very stupid idea to do so.
On the other hand, coal is a worse radiological hazard than current nuclear plants, it's just that it is slowly raising the background level of contaminants rather than a single disaster. It's only recently that we finally are forcing all coal plants to filter their output. There are Mercury advisories on fish in 49 states. And an unbelievable amount of Uranium and Thorium is released. In fact, in this admittedly slanted pro nuclear article, there is more energy in the discarded Uranium and Thorium than in all the coal that has been burned.
The article is: http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/colmain.html
The sensible thing to do, which seems fairly close at hand, is to massively build out wind, wave, and distributed solar, as it doesn't matter what technology you use to generate power, having a distributed grid is a worthwhile endeavor for civil defense.
There is only one known way to get "full functionality" from Vista, and that is with an install of "Fedora Hack" which eliminates the approximately 80% of Vista that is bugs, and the 20% that constrains the user from doing anything useful. There are a number of Fedora hacks to Vista available, the most recent being Fedora Core 8.
amen!
This is only equal time for all groups. I am already subject to anti-adult noise all the time (pop, rap) blared loudly on the street by juveniles only slightly older than the targeted demographic here.
I'll put a stop to comments like this once my boob patent is accepted. Then anyone who wants to write about boobs (software) will have to license the technology first;-)
Accenture has people who do research? My experience with Accenture is that they rob financial institutions by claiming to sell computing and management expertise. Instead, they bill junior people learning Word at $1000/day, because they are Accenture (with a capital A) and the principal who made the deal went to school with some high exec at the firm being fleeced.
If there is any actual expertise at Accenture, that is indeed news.
So when they patent the molecules, the newly formed DIAA will demand that you give back all those "illegally copied" patented molecules that are in your body, because their bacteria got loose and started generating strange new chemicals all over the landscape, which you illegally ingested.
As the keyword says, what could possibly go wrong?
Gee, this solves the problem of worrying about terrorists getting dirty bombs. No one will bother to build a dirty bomb when they can just use conventional weapons to blow up the reactor in your apartment building.
Scaled down further, this could also solve the pesky problem of having to change the batteries in proctoscopes so often....
The notion of an "intrinsically safe" reactor is naive in the extreme.
Even if you neglect design flaws, maintenance problems (and even if your device had no maintenance needs, that doesn't mean that something in the environment could not steadily degrade it).
No, the problem with distributed nuclear power is the lethality of the interior, and the potential for access by criminals/terrorists. It's bad enough now in a few places. But distributed nuclear power would be a nightmare. And of course, I would never trust anyone who claimed their device was "intrinsically safe" any more than I believe that Irish company that is selling the perpetual motion machine. See the vaporware article earlier today.
At least the device you spoke of was district wide. For individual buildings? madness.
With children in Nigeria chatting unsupervised with children across the world, the One Laptop Per Pedophile project has just been launched. Congratulations!
Books that affected me as a child included "Carry on Mr. Bowditch" by Virginia Lee Latham, a fictionalized biography about the great navigator and mathematician whose formal schooling ended at age 10, but who ended up getting that doctorate at Harvard (and offered a professorship, which he declined) anyway. A great story about a great, fiery individual.
I also enjoyed "The Monitor and the Merrimack," in the Landmark series (don't recall the author) which tells in a simple children's story, how a young inventor (John Ericson) grew up and created a battleship on whose success of failure the civil war could depend. For any young war buff, granted mostly male, it's pretty gripping stuff. The vision of this tiny little "tin can on a shingle" interposing itself between the conferedate ironclad and the helpless wooden ship run aground, suddenly rotating, pointing two enormous cannons and firing, and then the duel which resulted in a draw, the frustration of the gunner on the monitor who was not allowed to use full charges due to a ridiculous navy order, the captain who was blinded, and to whom President Lincoln personally went to give the thanks of the nation -- an interesting contrast, I don't recall Bush ever visiting wounded soldiers, I'll have to look that one up.
Last of the three, I loved a biography of Thomas Edison. I don't remember the one, but frankly you can pick a well written biography, in these specific examples, it's the people who are interesting, and their stories are so entwined with science, engineering and mathematics that the excitement rubs off.
While I'm now 40, I think that some parts of the biography of Einstein I'm now reading would be wonderful for a class. While the book is enormous and not all appropriate for children, some parts are funny, some are enlightening, and some are simply inspirational. When his parents brought his little sister home, after talking up how much fun she was going to be, having a little sister, he said "But where are the wheels?" Perhaps a better example is Feinman's autobiographies, starting with "Surely you must be joking Mr. Feinman" which are full of his highjinks, and shows that scientists can have fun, like cracking safes, not just making atomic bombs. He cared enough to be on the Challenger commission and while he was dying of cancer, had the wit to end a particularly silly argument about what could have happened to the Challenger's O-ring by doing the experiment quietly in his drinking glass while others yakked about it.
Slashdot Mirror
By this logic, we shouldn't set our sights so low. Use CAPTCHAs that require forecasting the weather 7 days out (granted, the lag is a bit much), analyze the code in the box and prove what it does, prove the equation in the box (Rieman's conjecture, anyone?) It also makes your site really, really exclusive. The only one to use it is the lucky human (or AI) that solves the puzzle....
Right up there with buying Chrysler. I'm sure their profits will soar if they stick to their timetable regardless of the availability of batteries, alternative fuels, etc. Perhaps new Mercedes will come with a fuel service, like getting milk in the morning.
Actually, there is a serious proposal to build out massive amounts of nuclear power (because it's "cheap" if you only count the building and the fuel) and use the energy to synthesize gasoline, closing the loop. So it is not a separate issue.
Green Freedom: http://www.lanl.gov/news/index.php/fuseaction/home.story/story_id/12554
Nuclear plants have been around for 60 years, and there are only a few hundred. In that time, there have been a number of disasters, and a much larger number of near disasters. Nuclear plants are complicated, and multiple systems can and have failed. Low-level releases have occurred. Every time some know-it-all asshole says it can't possibly happen to the "new" stuff, real engineers should be shaking their heads. It can ALWAYS happen. If you deny that, you instantly show yourself to be either foolish or hopelessly naive.
It's nonsense to talk about Yucca mountain, or anywhere else. The only structures humans have built that lasted thousands of years have been simple piles of rocks like the pyramids. We have no experience building complex systems for the long term, and no way to guarantee a stable society that will maintain them.
The estimates of plant safety that do exist in the industry are based on a lot of handwaving. But let's be practical. The real measure of safety is that no one is stupid enough to ensure them except the government. By Murphy's law, of course one will go some day, and every insurance company knows it. Whether by human design, or stupidity. And you cannot possibly guarantee it won't happen. Charles Officer, a geologist, can give you an idea of one potential issue among many http://www.amazon.com/Big-One-Earthquake-America-Science/dp/B000A176Y2/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1213915580&sr=1-1
If nothing else, a nuclear plant near a center of population is a huge potential dispersal hazard which anyone with a sequence of attacks can defeat. If the terrorists on 9/11 had dropped both planes on the reactor building at Indian Point, all of the New York metro area would be unlivable. The containment building is designed to withstand a SINGLE airplane crash. Granted, that would have been technically tough to achieve. But what about a few dozen GPS-based cruise missiles in a sequence? This kind of thing is going to happen some day.
The new gen IV plants are clever, but not clever enough. They do solve a lot of the mechanical issues, but there is still massive environmental damage from mining, and all the activities that go into making the fuel along the chain, leaking poison into the ecosystem at ever turn. The bottom line is, there is only one sensible reason to have nuclear power, and that is if you have nano technology that can "filter feed" radioactive isotopes out of materials. I welcome anyone who wants to slurp U235, Radium, etc out of area where homes are being built to lower the Radon count in people's houses, and even then, the concentrated radio-isotopes should be generating power far away. Having said that, there is far more than 1,000 years of Thorium at current levels if you breed fuel. It's just a very stupid idea to do so.
On the other hand, coal is a worse radiological hazard than current nuclear plants, it's just that it is slowly raising the background level of contaminants rather than a single disaster. It's only recently that we finally are forcing all coal plants to filter their output. There are Mercury advisories on fish in 49 states. And an unbelievable amount of Uranium and Thorium is released. In fact, in this admittedly slanted pro nuclear article, there is more energy in the discarded Uranium and Thorium than in all the coal that has been burned. The article is: http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/colmain.html
The sensible thing to do, which seems fairly close at hand, is to massively build out wind, wave, and distributed solar, as it doesn't matter what technology you use to generate power, having a distributed grid is a worthwhile endeavor for civil defense.
Then, fusion
There is only one known way to get "full functionality" from Vista, and that is with an install of "Fedora Hack" which eliminates the approximately 80% of Vista that is bugs, and the 20% that constrains the user from doing anything useful. There are a number of Fedora hacks to Vista available, the most recent being Fedora Core 8.
amen! This is only equal time for all groups. I am already subject to anti-adult noise all the time (pop, rap) blared loudly on the street by juveniles only slightly older than the targeted demographic here.
I'll put a stop to comments like this once my boob patent is accepted. Then anyone who wants to write about boobs (software) will have to license the technology first ;-)
Accenture has people who do research?
My experience with Accenture is that they rob financial institutions by claiming to sell computing and management expertise.
Instead, they bill junior people learning Word at $1000/day, because they are Accenture (with a capital A) and the principal who made the deal went to school with some high exec at the firm being fleeced.
If there is any actual expertise at Accenture, that is indeed news.
So when they patent the molecules, the newly formed DIAA will demand that you give back all those "illegally copied" patented molecules that are in your body, because their bacteria got loose and started generating strange new chemicals all over the landscape, which you illegally ingested.
As the keyword says, what could possibly go wrong?
Aren't the terrorists the original proposers of problems to reduce waiting time problems?
Mass casualties, less waiting in line (perhaps some waiting in triage).
Gee, this solves the problem of worrying about terrorists getting dirty bombs. No one will bother to build a dirty bomb when they can just use conventional weapons to blow up the reactor in your apartment building. Scaled down further, this could also solve the pesky problem of having to change the batteries in proctoscopes so often....
I'm sure the lower rents will attract all those tenants who have always wanted to live in close proximity to a nuclear reactor.
The notion of an "intrinsically safe" reactor is naive in the extreme. Even if you neglect design flaws, maintenance problems (and even if your device had no maintenance needs, that doesn't mean that something in the environment could not steadily degrade it). No, the problem with distributed nuclear power is the lethality of the interior, and the potential for access by criminals/terrorists. It's bad enough now in a few places. But distributed nuclear power would be a nightmare. And of course, I would never trust anyone who claimed their device was "intrinsically safe" any more than I believe that Irish company that is selling the perpetual motion machine. See the vaporware article earlier today. At least the device you spoke of was district wide. For individual buildings? madness.
With children in Nigeria chatting unsupervised with children across the world, the One Laptop Per Pedophile project has just been launched. Congratulations!
Books that affected me as a child included "Carry on Mr. Bowditch" by Virginia Lee Latham, a fictionalized biography about the great navigator and mathematician whose formal schooling ended at age 10, but who ended up getting that doctorate at Harvard (and offered a professorship, which he declined) anyway. A great story about a great, fiery individual. I also enjoyed "The Monitor and the Merrimack," in the Landmark series (don't recall the author) which tells in a simple children's story, how a young inventor (John Ericson) grew up and created a battleship on whose success of failure the civil war could depend. For any young war buff, granted mostly male, it's pretty gripping stuff. The vision of this tiny little "tin can on a shingle" interposing itself between the conferedate ironclad and the helpless wooden ship run aground, suddenly rotating, pointing two enormous cannons and firing, and then the duel which resulted in a draw, the frustration of the gunner on the monitor who was not allowed to use full charges due to a ridiculous navy order, the captain who was blinded, and to whom President Lincoln personally went to give the thanks of the nation -- an interesting contrast, I don't recall Bush ever visiting wounded soldiers, I'll have to look that one up. Last of the three, I loved a biography of Thomas Edison. I don't remember the one, but frankly you can pick a well written biography, in these specific examples, it's the people who are interesting, and their stories are so entwined with science, engineering and mathematics that the excitement rubs off. While I'm now 40, I think that some parts of the biography of Einstein I'm now reading would be wonderful for a class. While the book is enormous and not all appropriate for children, some parts are funny, some are enlightening, and some are simply inspirational. When his parents brought his little sister home, after talking up how much fun she was going to be, having a little sister, he said "But where are the wheels?" Perhaps a better example is Feinman's autobiographies, starting with "Surely you must be joking Mr. Feinman" which are full of his highjinks, and shows that scientists can have fun, like cracking safes, not just making atomic bombs. He cared enough to be on the Challenger commission and while he was dying of cancer, had the wit to end a particularly silly argument about what could have happened to the Challenger's O-ring by doing the experiment quietly in his drinking glass while others yakked about it.