There are no false positives, comrade citizen, only people who harbor unpatriotic doubts about the accuracy of our Intelligence Community. Surely you aren't one of those?
Is it not more unreasonable that we have five million people (out of a total of just under 320 million, with labor force size ~155 million, unknown percentage of that with characteristics that make them getting a clearance rather unlikely) involved in Super Secret Uncle Sam Stuff? br>
I'm less interested in crying for the poor, poor, clearanceholders and more interested in why a touch over three percent of the US labor force spends its time pushing classified paper.
The one major difference between (contemporary) ethernet and wireless scenarios is that, now that switches have pretty much 100% replaced hubs, 'shared media' issues tend to occur only between a computer and its switch, so there really isn't as much pressure for research on elegant coexistence. Yeah, a bit of QoS algorithm tweaking; but 'How can we allow 1Gb, 100Mb, 10Mb, and 4800bps transmissions to coexist on a single hub and set of cables?' just isn't a relevant question. Everybody hates shared media, and switching got cheap, so we just skipped it.
With wireless, ye olde luminiferous aether is all you get, barring waveguides which are unlikely to be a big hit in the mobile device market. It isn't so much that Joe User's cellphone needs to be able to download super l33t fast, it's that there is a strong incentive to wring as much total bandwidth out of the spectrum available as we possibly can, not primarily to support silly stunts by single devices; but to get more devices with moderate performance running in the same area without falling in a screaming heap.
Especially on batteries, you hit diminishing returns pretty quickly as you increase data speed for any single device(a few oddballs with better power supplies and historical options that basically came down to 'bring an entire damn satellite uplink truck' probably do want realtime 4K streaming back to the studio...)
However, if the techniques used are suitably clever, technology that can be used to demonstrate impressive-but-irrelevant peak speeds is likely also of use to provide endurable speeds to ever more devices in the same area(and may specifically include, in addition to pure advances in signal-wrangling, more explicit definition and standardization of latency critical endpoints(voice mostly) vs. latency sensitive (cellular data cards) and lowest-cost latency insensitive (embedded sensor widgets dumping a chunk of data to HQ)).
Germany would be better off going it alone, unless they want NSA and GCHQ fingerprints all over it.
They probably do want NSA fingerprints all over it. You don't think that they let us run the "Dagger Complex" right there in the open because they are still just that terrified of the commies, or their economy is desperately dependent on our foreign aid or something?
I never saw anyone get hurt in the Math, CompSci, or Stats Labs when I was in college
Don't get too complacent, though. Even in the worst cases, the chem labs always send you home to mommy in a finite real number of small boxes. That...isn't always true... after certain classes of mathematics accident.
Seriously, they put this guys life in danger. Shame on them.
These are 'journalists', in the dreadful contemporary sense. If they thought that 'quiet, eccentric, mathematician brutally murdered in suspected cyber-revenge' would have an ROI greater than the legal exposure, they'd probably kill him themselves just to be first to the body...
I wanna know more about his trains-- does he have a cool layout?
It's pretty spartan, hey got caught up in the trains themselves. Each set of cars is arranged in a very specific sequence that he really gets worked up about, and I've noticed that it takes him longer and longer every time to decide on and add a new car to the end of the train....
So somebody is in charge of Bitcoin? What do they do?
Write and maintain bitcoin-protocol compatible clients, care for and feed mining hardware, provide the bandwidth for continued distribution of the block chain, and (maybe) actually use bitcoins for something so that they aren't just a pile of uninteresting solutions to difficult-but-totally-banal math problems?
There is no specific Bitcoin Commissar; but (not unlike most OSS projects, wholly aside from your view of the... exciting financial infrastructure that exists between bitcoin and the broader world) only software projects that are either 100% dead, or so perfect that no coder since the Heroic Age has felt worthy enough to soil them with his changes, work without some sort of team, often fairly heavily skewed toward a few core people with a (sometimes more helpful, sometimes mostly passive) cloud of peripheral users and smalltime contributors. Whatever else it may be, it is a software project, a peer to peer network, and a distributed computation setup, all of which don't exactly keep themselves running. He, presumably, is no longer interested in dealing with any of that.
Why would he have to move/hire protection? I guess I can see that he might be paranoid enough to think it's necessary, but why would it be actually necessary?
Given the sorts of weirdos who end up stalking ordinary celebrities, I'd flee this gravity well at relativistic speed if I were The Celebrity among some of the more... peculiar... elements of bitcoin fandom.
How dare that consumer act as though Apple's intellectual property was something she could just 'bequeath' because she's all dead or some sentimental rubbish? She should be grateful that they deigned to permit her a limited license!
This is really ancient knowledge. Did science just get hep?
Great.
It's more about science getting approval. LSD is one of those compounds that is next to impossible for researchers to get access to and test in humans. For reasons I don't care enough about keeping kids off drugs or something to fully understand, some drugs are so wicked and dangerous and illegal that it is necessary to prevent any research (even about how dangerous they are; but definitely nothing suggesting that they aren't as dangerous as previously believed), even under hardass conditions, on terminal patients, and so forth. As quoth noted toxicologist and psycho-pharmacologist Jacqui Smith: "You cannot compare the harms of an illegal activity with a legal one." Why? Because one is illegal, of course!
I wouldn't really call this 'ancient knowledge' (if the first synthesis was in 1938, it probably isn't shamanic lore); but it was certainly an active area of scientific interest pre-ban. That somebody would want another crack at it isn't even remotely news. That they managed to fill out the paperwork, on the other hand...
I'd think that, especially if there isn't anything too esoteric about the original communication mechanism, suitably motivated people could probably bang out (especially if some documentation still exists) an SDR implementation (at negligible power, obviously) for a few tens of thousands, tops, worth of hardware. The component you'd probably have to beg, borrow, or steal would be a suitably punchy transmitter and a suitably capable receiver to plug that into.
The material of choice for cheapo masks seems to be cellulose, just because it's all nice and fibrous with minimal processing, largely borrowed from the pulp and paper industry; but I wonder if you could make maskes from fish head sludge?
There should be plenty of collagen, which can be used to produce fibers and membranes (as with sausage casings and musical instrument 'gut' strings). On the minus side, those are hydrophilic, which could cause the filter membranes to swell and close because of breath moisture, which would be counterproductive...
This is a government agency, they don't do cheap, they don't know how.
Yes; but it's also a government agency that probably has a few geeks on payroll. As an official project, there probably isn't even time to circulate the RFPs and cut the POs. As a hobby project, it's much more likely that somebody just needs to look the other way as whatever signalling gear can hit the right frequency sees a little after-hours misuse.
Aside from preventing any central bank from reacting, since they'd need sufficient consensus to modify the protocol behavior, is there anything that would stop a zOMG financial crisis style event denominated in BTC rather than USD?
Hypothetically, you might be able to prevent most leverage-providing instruments if all depositors deposited a specific bitcoin, with the right to demand that specific one back (though, since that would effectively prevent most uses to which deposits are put, any institution offering such a service would probably expect to be paid for secure storage, rather than paying you for use of capital, so they'd likely spin a more fungible 'your bitcoin in, a bitcoin out on request' offer, at which point you are back in fractional reserve territory.
The various yet-more-obscure CDOs and credit default swaps and things also seem like something that today's bitcoin holders would tend to be culturally averse to; but not something that any property of bitcoins would preclude. The only real difference would be the endgame, since you just don't get a choice about tweaking the money supply with bitcoins.
BTC is definitely too 'buyer beware' to really make it as a currency in its present state; but it's worth noting that there is apparently (a whole lot) of money in adding incomprehensibility to even relatively well behaved currencies. You don't want to let that side of the market get out of hand (Why hello there, world financial crisis, we were just talking about you, those functionally-impossible-to-value instruments, and assorted similar wacky stories...)
Once you count the dreadful freakshows grafted onto real currencies, BTC actually scores relatively low on complexity, on average; but the trouble is that there isn't really a 'safe for noobs' option.
With USD and friends, you should Stay Out Of The Deep End, because that's where the sharks live; but (in no small part because regulators stepped in to make it so) just getting a smallish bank account isn't a harrowing experience.
Although I wouldn't blame anyone who got the contrary impression, I'm actually a supporter of nuclear energy as well (and, just by way of vaguely connected story, I was a veritable nuclear power fanboy at the age when kids are supposed to be enthusiastic about trains or trucks. I had cutaway posters in my room showing the layouts and components of major commercial reactors, my model fuel pellet, assorted nuclear-physics-at-the-picture-book-level books... One time my dad arranged a tour at the nearest nuclear plant for my birthday. We got lost on the way in and ended up innocently wandering right into the main control room. Luckily, this was pre terrorist-hysteria, and having a kid along probably helps with the harmlessness, so we didn't get hassled. I think the operators thought it was cute that there was this random kid who wanted to see their stuff. Unfortunately, some sort of NRC regulation pertaining to areas of potential exposure meant no under-18s. I was crushed).
In this case, having to pull workers out at inconveniently short intervals to keep doses down is a specific nuclear nuisance (heavy construction/demolition work, plus aggressive dust control, isn't any faster because the workers are limited to very, very short shifts); but I was thinking of the much broader, and much older, cultural habit of putting certain people (mostly those who needed a very particular combination of independence and motivation-management) into a role where they are The Leader, and enjoy nontrivial power; but if things go bad, they have nontrivial responsibility, and it is both considered shameful(and often illegal) not to fulfil that as well. Take ship captains. That one in Italy is being raked over the coals right now over the question of whether or not he left his post before all possible rescuing was done. That's not because one pudgy 40-something was considered vital to the rescue effort; but because he was The Captain, and being the captain means that that is among your duties. Some military designations and higher level government posts(where resignation is effectively mandatory on the occasion of certain types of scandal, even if you could easily mount a legally sound defense) carry similar flavors.
As for the 'nontrivial power' bit, there are certain people who you want to put the fear of god into and make, within their sphere, more powerful than people who would ordinarily be above them on the hierarchy. You want the captain to be able to say "Listen, the nautical something system is not seaworthy. There is no way that that ship is going anywhere under my command until that is fixed. Period." You would want a nuclear plant operator to be able to say the same thing about the system under his charge. Those are just the sort of functions where you need to power, even impunity, some of the time(do you want the guy handling safety systems to know that he'll be fired if he raises any expensive questions? You would want him to be able to barge into the CEO's office and tell him that This Isn't Bloody Good Enough, if that's what it takes. On the other hand, you can't just toss him a load of general-purpose power and impunity; because failure to carry out his own assignment dutifully and correctly could have very, very, messy consequences indeed.
'Red' smog alert is expressed by drawing the chinese pictogram for 'sandpaper' inside the pictogram for 'lungs'.
(yes, I know that that's absolutely bullshit; but I've had enough of that 'Since I've been strongarmed into giving a commencement address to H.S. 341232's singularly uninteresting class, did you know that the Chinese word for 'crisis' is the combination of their word for 'danger' with their word for 'opportunity'? Really makes you think, doesn't it? Now, don't get too shiftfaced in college, what you learn there costs you more per hour than you are ever likely to make, so keep that in mind. And, um, Go class of 2000-and-something!'
If I were wearing a respirator for something Seriously Important(pathogens, war gasses, beryllium dust, etc.) it would be very important to me that absolutely everything is as it ought to be (and I'd probably be fucked, because good luck getting a nice seal if you get caught with a faceful of stubble, and sucks to be the beard guy, though that isn't a concern of mine personally).
However, if I were just trying to help my odds against something in the 'definitely unpleasant, very probably not good, especially at a population level' category, I'd see a role for something that provides 100% only in the hands of an expert; but 50-90 in the hands of n00bs.
That said, though, most filters impede air passing through them to some degree, so inhalations would likely favor any unfiltered imperfections in fit over a trip through the filters, making even dimensionally modest gaps much more serious in practice.
Does anybody know how badly that effect bites you? Obviously, for viruses or something where literally tens of them, if you aren't lucky, can be enough, it basically doesn't matter; but what's the efficiency drop-off for generic bulk particulate masks as user competence declines? Is it, because of airflow taking the low resistance path, basically all or nothing, or is it a fairly smooth decline in effectiveness, with progressively less competent users getting less protection; but no ugly cliff somewhere in the effectiveness value?
Luckily, ethernet totally has this covered: in the event of a collision, you just back off for a random number of milliseconds and then retransmit. No big deal! And cars are basically just big packets, right?
I wonder where they got that estimate. At worst it should take them less than five years. What they're really saying is that they've got no clue, no plan, and no place to put the radioactive materials once they've got it sealed up.
Estimated time until the last of the responsible parties retires and no longer has even a nominal obligation to give a fuck?
Some tasks are difficult because of the assorted parameters that you have to adhere to while doing them. In this case, relatively low tolerance for irradiation of workers and human morbidity and mortality are probably major inconveniences.
This being so, it seems only logical to employ TEPCO management as decommisioning operators. It's not like they were good for whatever their existing job descriptions are, and we can safely value their radiation exposure as unimportant, or even a benefit.
No, of course not. When you call a library funnction, do you count all the lines of code in the library? When you write a for loop, do you count all the lines of assembly it compiles into? No. The number of lines you count is the number of lines you have to debug, and the ones that hurt more count extra.
Slashdot Mirror
There are no false positives, comrade citizen, only people who harbor unpatriotic doubts about the accuracy of our Intelligence Community. Surely you aren't one of those?
Is it not more unreasonable that we have five million people (out of a total of just under 320 million, with labor force size ~155 million, unknown percentage of that with characteristics that make them getting a clearance rather unlikely) involved in Super Secret Uncle Sam Stuff?
br> I'm less interested in crying for the poor, poor, clearanceholders and more interested in why a touch over three percent of the US labor force spends its time pushing classified paper.
The one major difference between (contemporary) ethernet and wireless scenarios is that, now that switches have pretty much 100% replaced hubs, 'shared media' issues tend to occur only between a computer and its switch, so there really isn't as much pressure for research on elegant coexistence. Yeah, a bit of QoS algorithm tweaking; but 'How can we allow 1Gb, 100Mb, 10Mb, and 4800bps transmissions to coexist on a single hub and set of cables?' just isn't a relevant question. Everybody hates shared media, and switching got cheap, so we just skipped it.
With wireless, ye olde luminiferous aether is all you get, barring waveguides which are unlikely to be a big hit in the mobile device market. It isn't so much that Joe User's cellphone needs to be able to download super l33t fast, it's that there is a strong incentive to wring as much total bandwidth out of the spectrum available as we possibly can, not primarily to support silly stunts by single devices; but to get more devices with moderate performance running in the same area without falling in a screaming heap.
Especially on batteries, you hit diminishing returns pretty quickly as you increase data speed for any single device(a few oddballs with better power supplies and historical options that basically came down to 'bring an entire damn satellite uplink truck' probably do want realtime 4K streaming back to the studio...)
However, if the techniques used are suitably clever, technology that can be used to demonstrate impressive-but-irrelevant peak speeds is likely also of use to provide endurable speeds to ever more devices in the same area(and may specifically include, in addition to pure advances in signal-wrangling, more explicit definition and standardization of latency critical endpoints(voice mostly) vs. latency sensitive (cellular data cards) and lowest-cost latency insensitive (embedded sensor widgets dumping a chunk of data to HQ)).
Germany would be better off going it alone, unless they want NSA and GCHQ fingerprints all over it.
They probably do want NSA fingerprints all over it. You don't think that they let us run the "Dagger Complex" right there in the open because they are still just that terrified of the commies, or their economy is desperately dependent on our foreign aid or something?
I never saw anyone get hurt in the Math, CompSci, or Stats Labs when I was in college
Don't get too complacent, though. Even in the worst cases, the chem labs always send you home to mommy in a finite real number of small boxes. That...isn't always true... after certain classes of mathematics accident.
Seriously, they put this guys life in danger. Shame on them.
These are 'journalists', in the dreadful contemporary sense. If they thought that 'quiet, eccentric, mathematician brutally murdered in suspected cyber-revenge' would have an ROI greater than the legal exposure, they'd probably kill him themselves just to be first to the body...
I wanna know more about his trains-- does he have a cool layout?
It's pretty spartan, hey got caught up in the trains themselves. Each set of cars is arranged in a very specific sequence that he really gets worked up about, and I've noticed that it takes him longer and longer every time to decide on and add a new car to the end of the train....
So somebody is in charge of Bitcoin? What do they do?
Write and maintain bitcoin-protocol compatible clients, care for and feed mining hardware, provide the bandwidth for continued distribution of the block chain, and (maybe) actually use bitcoins for something so that they aren't just a pile of uninteresting solutions to difficult-but-totally-banal math problems?
There is no specific Bitcoin Commissar; but (not unlike most OSS projects, wholly aside from your view of the... exciting financial infrastructure that exists between bitcoin and the broader world) only software projects that are either 100% dead, or so perfect that no coder since the Heroic Age has felt worthy enough to soil them with his changes, work without some sort of team, often fairly heavily skewed toward a few core people with a (sometimes more helpful, sometimes mostly passive) cloud of peripheral users and smalltime contributors. Whatever else it may be, it is a software project, a peer to peer network, and a distributed computation setup, all of which don't exactly keep themselves running. He, presumably, is no longer interested in dealing with any of that.
a career shrouded in secrecy, having done classified work for major corporations and the U.S. military
"Taking The System Down From The Inside?" or "The Man's Ultimate Long Con?"
We ask vague, hyperbolic, questions; you fight it out in the comments section!
Why would he have to move/hire protection? I guess I can see that he might be paranoid enough to think it's necessary, but why would it be actually necessary?
Given the sorts of weirdos who end up stalking ordinary celebrities, I'd flee this gravity well at relativistic speed if I were The Celebrity among some of the more... peculiar... elements of bitcoin fandom.
How dare that consumer act as though Apple's intellectual property was something she could just 'bequeath' because she's all dead or some sentimental rubbish? She should be grateful that they deigned to permit her a limited license!
This is really ancient knowledge. Did science just get hep? Great.
It's more about science getting approval. LSD is one of those compounds that is next to impossible for researchers to get access to and test in humans. For reasons I don't care enough about keeping kids off drugs or something to fully understand, some drugs are so wicked and dangerous and illegal that it is necessary to prevent any research (even about how dangerous they are; but definitely nothing suggesting that they aren't as dangerous as previously believed), even under hardass conditions, on terminal patients, and so forth. As quoth noted toxicologist and psycho-pharmacologist Jacqui Smith: "You cannot compare the harms of an illegal activity with a legal one." Why? Because one is illegal, of course!
I wouldn't really call this 'ancient knowledge' (if the first synthesis was in 1938, it probably isn't shamanic lore); but it was certainly an active area of scientific interest pre-ban. That somebody would want another crack at it isn't even remotely news. That they managed to fill out the paperwork, on the other hand...
I'd think that, especially if there isn't anything too esoteric about the original communication mechanism, suitably motivated people could probably bang out (especially if some documentation still exists) an SDR implementation (at negligible power, obviously) for a few tens of thousands, tops, worth of hardware. The component you'd probably have to beg, borrow, or steal would be a suitably punchy transmitter and a suitably capable receiver to plug that into.
The material of choice for cheapo masks seems to be cellulose, just because it's all nice and fibrous with minimal processing, largely borrowed from the pulp and paper industry; but I wonder if you could make maskes from fish head sludge?
There should be plenty of collagen, which can be used to produce fibers and membranes (as with sausage casings and musical instrument 'gut' strings). On the minus side, those are hydrophilic, which could cause the filter membranes to swell and close because of breath moisture, which would be counterproductive...
Manservant! My finest Laboratory!
This is a government agency, they don't do cheap, they don't know how.
Yes; but it's also a government agency that probably has a few geeks on payroll. As an official project, there probably isn't even time to circulate the RFPs and cut the POs. As a hobby project, it's much more likely that somebody just needs to look the other way as whatever signalling gear can hit the right frequency sees a little after-hours misuse.
Aside from preventing any central bank from reacting, since they'd need sufficient consensus to modify the protocol behavior, is there anything that would stop a zOMG financial crisis style event denominated in BTC rather than USD?
Hypothetically, you might be able to prevent most leverage-providing instruments if all depositors deposited a specific bitcoin, with the right to demand that specific one back (though, since that would effectively prevent most uses to which deposits are put, any institution offering such a service would probably expect to be paid for secure storage, rather than paying you for use of capital, so they'd likely spin a more fungible 'your bitcoin in, a bitcoin out on request' offer, at which point you are back in fractional reserve territory.
The various yet-more-obscure CDOs and credit default swaps and things also seem like something that today's bitcoin holders would tend to be culturally averse to; but not something that any property of bitcoins would preclude. The only real difference would be the endgame, since you just don't get a choice about tweaking the money supply with bitcoins.
BTC is definitely too 'buyer beware' to really make it as a currency in its present state; but it's worth noting that there is apparently (a whole lot) of money in adding incomprehensibility to even relatively well behaved currencies. You don't want to let that side of the market get out of hand (Why hello there, world financial crisis, we were just talking about you, those functionally-impossible-to-value instruments, and assorted similar wacky stories...)
Once you count the dreadful freakshows grafted onto real currencies, BTC actually scores relatively low on complexity, on average; but the trouble is that there isn't really a 'safe for noobs' option.
With USD and friends, you should Stay Out Of The Deep End, because that's where the sharks live; but (in no small part because regulators stepped in to make it so) just getting a smallish bank account isn't a harrowing experience.
Although I wouldn't blame anyone who got the contrary impression, I'm actually a supporter of nuclear energy as well (and, just by way of vaguely connected story, I was a veritable nuclear power fanboy at the age when kids are supposed to be enthusiastic about trains or trucks. I had cutaway posters in my room showing the layouts and components of major commercial reactors, my model fuel pellet, assorted nuclear-physics-at-the-picture-book-level books... One time my dad arranged a tour at the nearest nuclear plant for my birthday. We got lost on the way in and ended up innocently wandering right into the main control room. Luckily, this was pre terrorist-hysteria, and having a kid along probably helps with the harmlessness, so we didn't get hassled. I think the operators thought it was cute that there was this random kid who wanted to see their stuff. Unfortunately, some sort of NRC regulation pertaining to areas of potential exposure meant no under-18s. I was crushed).
In this case, having to pull workers out at inconveniently short intervals to keep doses down is a specific nuclear nuisance (heavy construction/demolition work, plus aggressive dust control, isn't any faster because the workers are limited to very, very short shifts); but I was thinking of the much broader, and much older, cultural habit of putting certain people (mostly those who needed a very particular combination of independence and motivation-management) into a role where they are The Leader, and enjoy nontrivial power; but if things go bad, they have nontrivial responsibility, and it is both considered shameful(and often illegal) not to fulfil that as well. Take ship captains. That one in Italy is being raked over the coals right now over the question of whether or not he left his post before all possible rescuing was done. That's not because one pudgy 40-something was considered vital to the rescue effort; but because he was The Captain, and being the captain means that that is among your duties. Some military designations and higher level government posts(where resignation is effectively mandatory on the occasion of certain types of scandal, even if you could easily mount a legally sound defense) carry similar flavors.
As for the 'nontrivial power' bit, there are certain people who you want to put the fear of god into and make, within their sphere, more powerful than people who would ordinarily be above them on the hierarchy. You want the captain to be able to say "Listen, the nautical something system is not seaworthy. There is no way that that ship is going anywhere under my command until that is fixed. Period." You would want a nuclear plant operator to be able to say the same thing about the system under his charge. Those are just the sort of functions where you need to power, even impunity, some of the time(do you want the guy handling safety systems to know that he'll be fired if he raises any expensive questions? You would want him to be able to barge into the CEO's office and tell him that This Isn't Bloody Good Enough, if that's what it takes. On the other hand, you can't just toss him a load of general-purpose power and impunity; because failure to carry out his own assignment dutifully and correctly could have very, very, messy consequences indeed.
'Red' smog alert is expressed by drawing the chinese pictogram for 'sandpaper' inside the pictogram for 'lungs'.
(yes, I know that that's absolutely bullshit; but I've had enough of that 'Since I've been strongarmed into giving a commencement address to H.S. 341232's singularly uninteresting class, did you know that the Chinese word for 'crisis' is the combination of their word for 'danger' with their word for 'opportunity'? Really makes you think, doesn't it? Now, don't get too shiftfaced in college, what you learn there costs you more per hour than you are ever likely to make, so keep that in mind. And, um, Go class of 2000-and-something!'
If I were wearing a respirator for something Seriously Important(pathogens, war gasses, beryllium dust, etc.) it would be very important to me that absolutely everything is as it ought to be (and I'd probably be fucked, because good luck getting a nice seal if you get caught with a faceful of stubble, and sucks to be the beard guy, though that isn't a concern of mine personally).
However, if I were just trying to help my odds against something in the 'definitely unpleasant, very probably not good, especially at a population level' category, I'd see a role for something that provides 100% only in the hands of an expert; but 50-90 in the hands of n00bs.
That said, though, most filters impede air passing through them to some degree, so inhalations would likely favor any unfiltered imperfections in fit over a trip through the filters, making even dimensionally modest gaps much more serious in practice.
Does anybody know how badly that effect bites you? Obviously, for viruses or something where literally tens of them, if you aren't lucky, can be enough, it basically doesn't matter; but what's the efficiency drop-off for generic bulk particulate masks as user competence declines? Is it, because of airflow taking the low resistance path, basically all or nothing, or is it a fairly smooth decline in effectiveness, with progressively less competent users getting less protection; but no ugly cliff somewhere in the effectiveness value?
Really. What could possibly go wrong?
Luckily, ethernet totally has this covered: in the event of a collision, you just back off for a random number of milliseconds and then retransmit. No big deal! And cars are basically just big packets, right?
I wonder where they got that estimate. At worst it should take them less than five years. What they're really saying is that they've got no clue, no plan, and no place to put the radioactive materials once they've got it sealed up.
Estimated time until the last of the responsible parties retires and no longer has even a nominal obligation to give a fuck?
Some tasks are difficult because of the assorted parameters that you have to adhere to while doing them. In this case, relatively low tolerance for irradiation of workers and human morbidity and mortality are probably major inconveniences.
This being so, it seems only logical to employ TEPCO management as decommisioning operators. It's not like they were good for whatever their existing job descriptions are, and we can safely value their radiation exposure as unimportant, or even a benefit.
No, of course not. When you call a library funnction, do you count all the lines of code in the library? When you write a for loop, do you count all the lines of assembly it compiles into? No. The number of lines you count is the number of lines you have to debug, and the ones that hurt more count extra.
Fixed that for you.