The point is: given the other examples, ABC it's not absurd for someone to believe that the government can give them permission to do C,D and F as well. Agents under cover in criminal organizations appear to have some protection when it comes to things they have to do while under cover.
yes you're correct, I only skimmed it before. It shouldn't be too hard at all to prove if he was actually receiving the 75K pay etc.
His story certainly is plausible though he may have been doing far more than his handlers knew: multiple online identities and all.
Though I would have thought that once you busted someone and had them working for you things such as hardware keyloggers with some hardened hardware and reqirements like only using authorized hardware would be part of the deal to allow auditing to make sure they're only doing what they're told.
honestly I'm stunned by the math section. It really is trivial. considering this was for Harvard.
The only thing I notice which I know I couldn't do off the top of my head with no prep is finding the cube root. (ok I'd have to revise a bit to do the proofs section.)
I'd be very doubtful unless he has good proof he was working for the government.
the government can do a lot of things and authorize it's agents to do a lot of things which would be illegal otherwise.
For a trivial example:The executioner is not guilty of murder for executing a person sentenced to death.
Police can take someone against their will and lock them up overnight for very flimsy reasons without the same penalties as a kidnapper who does the same thing for the same reasons.(Just try locking up your neighbor in your basement against his will to punish him for being drunk in public and see how it turns out for you)
If someone believes their actions are at the behest of their government it shouldn't be a total defense but intent is important.
"The insurance industry, the industry that calculates risk, has calculated the risks of nuclear power and they want nothing to do with it. It is, according to the experts, too risky to insure. "-spun
blatant factual error which you were too lazy to check.
"Where did you get the idea that the nuclear power industry pays into a fund? Do you have some kind of citation for that? I'm pretty sure they do not."-spun
blatant factual error which you were too lazy to check.
or are you contending that you didn't make blatant factual errors.
"only carry the minimum insurance mandated by law"-spun
Some plants have more than the legally required minimum amount of coverage, example:
STPNOC purchases insurance coverage on behalf of NRG and the other owners of STP. STP maintains property, decontamination liability and nuclear hazard liability insurance coverage as required by law and periodically reviews available limits and coverage for additional protection. Currently, STP has a $2.75 billion limit in property and decontamination liability insurance coverage, which is above the legally required minimum of $1.06 billion. The $2.75 billion includes $1 billion excess blanket coverage that is shared with two other nuclear power plants, namely Diablo Canyon and D.C. Cook.
but of course I'm just being a nuclear cheerleader and emotional by point out that you're too full of yourself to admit when you're wrong and too lazy to do good research.
not to put too fine a point on it but 1 of my classmates died of lymphoma as well and another died of another form of cancer. I was nowhere near any reactors or fallout. Also an anecdote but my story is unexceptional.
The thyroid cancers are pretty much certainly due to radioactive iodine from the accident but as to the others:
chances are a quarter of everyone you know, everyone you love and everyone you will ever meet is going to die of some form cancer with or without any nuclear plants.
oh god this guy is a hoot. he's been posting on most of my recent posts and he has even decided that all the other people laughing at him are me using extra accounts and ACing.
Of course since you are an AC that means you are me as well.
for Plutonium-238 (87 years) and Plutonium-241 (14 years) you're absolutely right
but I'd be very surprised if Plutonium-239 (the one I was refering to and which is always the one trotted out when people talk about the waste having to be stored for an insane amount of time) or Plutonium-242 are more dangerous as radiation sources than as poisonous heavy metals.
I could be wrong about 239 of course but I'd be very interested if there are any papers comparing the chemical toxicity to the radiotoxicity.
just to do the math:4.4 kilowatt-hours of electricity to split one litre of water with electrolysis.
so for 55000 tons of water it would take about 242000 MW hours of electricity to split it all.
Not a show stopper but quite a lot.pretty much the full output of a large power plant for a few weeks.
just thinking a bit outside the box: how reasonable would just adding some kind of gelling agent to it so you end up with a tank full of 55000 tons of strawberry flavoured radioactive jelly?
far less risk of a leak and a hundred or so years down the line it's pretty much safe again.
yes, the GP is probably what people are talking about when they accuse the pro-nuclear side of being cavalier about radiation.
Plutonium with it's 20K half life is mainly dangerous as a heavy metal, iodine-131 with it's (if I'm remembering this correctly ) 8 day half life is at least gone after a few months.
but that 12 year half life is a pretty bad one, too long to expect it to be gone in a reasonable time but short enough to be a really nasty source of radiation.
Storing it shouldn't be too much of a problem at least, it's not a source of neutron radiation so it shouldn't leave it's container radioactive and since it's an alpha emitter a plain old water tank is good enough to shield people outside from the radiation but it's a bad one when it escapes into the environment and gets drunk by people.
I'm very much in favor of nuclear power, even after the recent event but with it's 12 year half life(making it a far far more potent source than stuff with 20K year half lives but a far longer term problem than the stuff with a half life of days ) and the fact that it's part of water and easily mixed with drinking water and readily absorbed into the body it is a fairly dangerous substance.
I'd be interested how concentrated that 55K tons is. If it's not very concentrated then a few decades in a holding tank would be all you'd need.
I wouldn't worry too much about the planet. the planet will do just fine. check the earth out in a million years and there will be just as much diversity if not more.
we might make it uninhapitable for us for a while though.
Anyone know if there's any concerted effort being made to collect genetic samples from endangered animals right now? 200 years down the line if we had lots of really high quality cell samples from some of the stuff we're killing off now we might be able to bring some of them back.
"If cats looked like frogs we'd realize what nasty, cruel little bastards they are. Style. That's what people remember." â" Terry Pratchett (Lords and Ladies)
For context to anyone reading this this is my creepy stalker.
He's some pathetic unemployed bum who once made a screensaver and wrote some crapware+ PC magazine articles 15 years ago and gets buthurt when anyone points out when he says stupid things about networking and threatens to sue malware scanners which list his old malware/crapware.
at least he's probably doing better than most professors in terms of being useful to humanity in general. If his edits are even half decent then more people will read them and actually learn something than ever will from many entire departments.
Most of them never write anything of worth which isn't behind a paywall.
an expert contributing his time to an open and free store of knowledge should be lauded.
It really is amusing though how threatened some professors feel about the whole idea of wikipedia-like systems. I had one a while back who was so bitter that he spent time just about every class ranting about how awful it was. "AND YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHO WRITES THESE THINGS!!" meanwhile one of his more gifted masters students is mugging away behind him and mouthing "me".
On the other hand I had another professor who pointed the class towards a particular wiki entry(and a specific revision) which he'd read and considered to be extremely well written and without error which explained the subject material extremely clearly.
My protest about the fly ash wasn't based on how much you'd need to be equally dangerous. it was about how much is produced to generate the same amount of power.
I certainly wouldn't be happy to eat the fish at the outlet of the plant. even a few miles away I wouldn't want to long term or without first dosing up on some iodine tablets.
It's likely going to destroy the fishing industry near there for a few years like BSE destroyed the British beef industry for a few years or the gulf spill fucked over fishermen in the gulf though at least it probably won't actually kill many of the fish so when they get the all clear in a few years there will be lots of stock (one up on the gulf spill at least). With any luck it won't be too long if ocean currents carry away and dilute what's leaked.
To be fair planes are designed with vastly more safety systems, if your average car and average driver had the kind of safety systems a 747 has and the kind of training a 747 pilot has there would likely be almost no accidents on the roads... in part because every car would cost millions so there wouldn't be very many on the roads.
the deathstar flaw was repeated up and down the coast in non-nuclear scenarios, there's a heartbreaking clip from a town up the coast which had been wiped out by tsunamis in the past so this time they'd gone all out, they'd build 2 huge sea walls and the town was a model of how to resist tsunamis. they'd sunk 30 years of time and money into building the massive wall yet it was a couple of meters too short for the wave that hit in this case and most of the towns population died.
There's always a small probability that *something* extraordinary will happen, at the far end of the curve there could be a meteor strike. Again it's a decent parallel with plane crashes since there is a tiny chance of it happening but it's simply very very unlikely.
âoeWhat is the probability that, for all flights in history, one or more could have been downed by a meteor?â They concluded that there was a 1-in-10 chance that this could happen
I completely agree with you on the need for extraordinary safeguards but there will always be the case at the far extreme of the normal curve, if you build a wall 100 meters high there's the chance (p=0.00000....0001) of a wave 101 meters high hitting it.
If you build it beside a river there's the chance of a dam collapse, some kind of natural flash flood or something really weird happening like, as mentioned before, a meteor strike directly on the reactor.
life is all about probabilities, a car could swerve off the road and crash through the wall of the building you're in now but the cost of reinforcing that wall *and every other wall of every other building you're in regularly* isn't worth it vs the actual risk of that happening.
so if you're looking for 100% certainty of no disasters or accidents you won't ever get it. with any energy source.
A plant making solvents for the production of solar panels could leak and cause another Bhopal, a dam could collapse and cause a another Banqiao etc. there's always the possibility of something at the far end of the normal curve though we absolutely should try to make the chance of disaster as small as possible.
The possible harm from a nuclear accident is significant and that absolutely does mean we should invest heavily in safety systems, backups, backups for backups etc but there's still always going to be the occasional event at the far end of the normal curve.
The way it's looking to turn out the nuclear plant issues likely going to be almost entirely economic though as a human disaster you're right that it's eclipsed by what's already happened.
"This is one of those items that â" although wrong in many of its details â" isn't exactly false in an overall sense and is perhaps more fairly labeled as "True, but for trivial and unremarkable reasons.""
so.... not really debunked but technically it could have gone another way and we could have ended up with a different size track.
Slashdot Mirror
The point is: given the other examples, ABC it's not absurd for someone to believe that the government can give them permission to do C,D and F as well.
Agents under cover in criminal organizations appear to have some protection when it comes to things they have to do while under cover.
well the whole server seems to be down so I'd go with a simple slashdotting.
yes you're correct, I only skimmed it before.
It shouldn't be too hard at all to prove if he was actually receiving the 75K pay etc.
His story certainly is plausible though he may have been doing far more than his handlers knew: multiple online identities and all.
Though I would have thought that once you busted someone and had them working for you things such as hardware keyloggers with some hardened hardware and reqirements like only using authorized hardware would be part of the deal to allow auditing to make sure they're only doing what they're told.
honestly I'm stunned by the math section.
It really is trivial.
considering this was for Harvard.
The only thing I notice which I know I couldn't do off the top of my head with no prep is finding the cube root.
(ok I'd have to revise a bit to do the proofs section.)
I'd be very doubtful unless he has good proof he was working for the government.
the government can do a lot of things and authorize it's agents to do a lot of things which would be illegal otherwise.
For a trivial example:The executioner is not guilty of murder for executing a person sentenced to death.
Police can take someone against their will and lock them up overnight for very flimsy reasons without the same penalties as a kidnapper who does the same thing for the same reasons.(Just try locking up your neighbor in your basement against his will to punish him for being drunk in public and see how it turns out for you)
If someone believes their actions are at the behest of their government it shouldn't be a total defense but intent is important.
biological half life is of course important.
I'd be interested in any table of the relative decay energy of different isotopes.
that sounds fascinating, I'd be very interested.
actually that's one of a number of posts, he's been stalking me for quite some time.
others appear to have had similar experiences with him.
blatant factual errors:
"The insurance industry, the industry that calculates risk, has calculated the risks of nuclear power and they want nothing to do with it. It is, according to the experts, too risky to insure. "-spun
blatant factual error which you were too lazy to check.
"Where did you get the idea that the nuclear power industry pays into a fund? Do you have some kind of citation for that? I'm pretty sure they do not."-spun
blatant factual error which you were too lazy to check.
or are you contending that you didn't make blatant factual errors.
"only carry the minimum insurance mandated by law"-spun
Some plants have more than the legally required minimum amount of coverage, example:
STPNOC purchases insurance coverage on behalf of NRG and the
other owners of STP. STP maintains property, decontamination
liability and nuclear hazard liability insurance coverage as
required by law and periodically reviews available limits and
coverage for additional protection. Currently, STP has a
$2.75 billion limit in property and decontamination
liability insurance coverage, which is above the legally
required minimum of $1.06 billion. The $2.75 billion
includes $1 billion excess blanket coverage that is shared
with two other nuclear power plants, namely Diablo Canyon and
D.C. Cook.
http://www.wikinvest.com/stock/NRG_Energy_(NRG)/Nuclear_Insurance
but of course I'm just being a nuclear cheerleader and emotional by point out that you're too full of yourself to admit when you're wrong and too lazy to do good research.
not to put too fine a point on it but 1 of my classmates died of lymphoma as well and another died of another form of cancer.
I was nowhere near any reactors or fallout.
Also an anecdote but my story is unexceptional.
The thyroid cancers are pretty much certainly due to radioactive iodine from the accident but as to the others:
chances are a quarter of everyone you know, everyone you love and everyone you will ever meet is going to die of some form cancer with or without any nuclear plants.
oh god this guy is a hoot.
he's been posting on most of my recent posts and he has even decided that all the other people laughing at him are me using extra accounts and ACing.
Of course since you are an AC that means you are me as well.
we're all against him!
(as are the voices)
for Plutonium-238 (87 years) and Plutonium-241 (14 years) you're absolutely right
but I'd be very surprised if Plutonium-239 (the one I was refering to and which is always the one trotted out when people talk about the waste having to be stored for an insane amount of time) or Plutonium-242 are more dangerous as radiation sources than as poisonous heavy metals.
I could be wrong about 239 of course but I'd be very interested if there are any papers comparing the chemical toxicity to the radiotoxicity.
You are of course entirely correct. I was only thinking about the tritium.
1000 years seems a bit much.
initial quantity*(1/2^(numberofyearsyears/12.3))
even if it's 55000 tons of pure tritium after 200 years you'd down to less than a ton which is fairly reasonable.
just to do the math :4.4 kilowatt-hours of electricity to split one litre of water with electrolysis.
so for 55000 tons of water it would take about
242000 MW hours of electricity to split it all.
Not a show stopper but quite a lot.pretty much the full output of a large power plant for a few weeks.
just thinking a bit outside the box: how reasonable would just adding some kind of gelling agent to it so you end up with a tank full of 55000 tons of strawberry flavoured radioactive jelly?
far less risk of a leak and a hundred or so years down the line it's pretty much safe again.
yes, the GP is probably what people are talking about when they accuse the pro-nuclear side of being cavalier about radiation.
Plutonium with it's 20K half life is mainly dangerous as a heavy metal, iodine-131 with it's (if I'm remembering this correctly ) 8 day half life is at least gone after a few months.
but that 12 year half life is a pretty bad one, too long to expect it to be gone in a reasonable time but short enough to be a really nasty source of radiation.
Storing it shouldn't be too much of a problem at least, it's not a source of neutron radiation so it shouldn't leave it's container radioactive and since it's an alpha emitter a plain old water tank is good enough to shield people outside from the radiation but it's a bad one when it escapes into the environment and gets drunk by people.
" can't even get through a sheet of paper."
until you drink it...
I'm very much in favor of nuclear power, even after the recent event but with it's 12 year half life(making it a far far more potent source than stuff with 20K year half lives but a far longer term problem than the stuff with a half life of days ) and the fact that it's part of water and easily mixed with drinking water and readily absorbed into the body it is a fairly dangerous substance.
I'd be interested how concentrated that 55K tons is. If it's not very concentrated then a few decades in a holding tank would be all you'd need.
I wouldn't worry too much about the planet. the planet will do just fine.
check the earth out in a million years and there will be just as much diversity if not more.
we might make it uninhapitable for us for a while though.
Anyone know if there's any concerted effort being made to collect genetic samples from endangered animals right now?
200 years down the line if we had lots of really high quality cell samples from some of the stuff we're killing off now we might be able to bring some of them back.
"If cats looked like frogs we'd realize what nasty, cruel little bastards they are. Style. That's what people remember."
â" Terry Pratchett (Lords and Ladies)
if he's written 60K then chances are at least some of them haven't been reverted.
For context to anyone reading this this is my creepy stalker.
He's some pathetic unemployed bum who once made a screensaver and wrote some crapware+ PC magazine articles 15 years ago and gets buthurt when anyone points out when he says stupid things about networking and threatens to sue malware scanners which list his old malware/crapware.
so now he stalks me.
please.
show me examples.
at least he's probably doing better than most professors in terms of being useful to humanity in general.
If his edits are even half decent then more people will read them and actually learn something than ever will from many entire departments.
Most of them never write anything of worth which isn't behind a paywall.
an expert contributing his time to an open and free store of knowledge should be lauded.
It really is amusing though how threatened some professors feel about the whole idea of wikipedia-like systems.
I had one a while back who was so bitter that he spent time just about every class ranting about how awful it was. "AND YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHO WRITES THESE THINGS!!" meanwhile one of his more gifted masters students is mugging away behind him and mouthing "me".
On the other hand I had another professor who pointed the class towards a particular wiki entry(and a specific revision) which he'd read and considered to be extremely well written and without error which explained the subject material extremely clearly.
My protest about the fly ash wasn't based on how much you'd need to be equally dangerous.
it was about how much is produced to generate the same amount of power.
I certainly wouldn't be happy to eat the fish at the outlet of the plant.
even a few miles away I wouldn't want to long term or without first dosing up on some iodine tablets.
It's likely going to destroy the fishing industry near there for a few years like BSE destroyed the British beef industry for a few years or the gulf spill fucked over fishermen in the gulf though at least it probably won't actually kill many of the fish so when they get the all clear in a few years there will be lots of stock (one up on the gulf spill at least).
With any luck it won't be too long if ocean currents carry away and dilute what's leaked.
To be fair planes are designed with vastly more safety systems, if your average car and average driver had the kind of safety systems a 747 has and the kind of training a 747 pilot has there would likely be almost no accidents on the roads... in part because every car would cost millions so there wouldn't be very many on the roads.
the deathstar flaw was repeated up and down the coast in non-nuclear scenarios, there's a heartbreaking clip from a town up the coast which had been wiped out by tsunamis in the past so this time they'd gone all out, they'd build 2 huge sea walls and the town was a model of how to resist tsunamis.
they'd sunk 30 years of time and money into building the massive wall yet it was a couple of meters too short for the wave that hit in this case and most of the towns population died.
There's always a small probability that *something* extraordinary will happen, at the far end of the curve there could be a meteor strike.
Again it's a decent parallel with plane crashes since there is a tiny chance of it happening but it's simply very very unlikely.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2009/06/04/did-a-meteor-bring-down-air-france-447/
âoeWhat is the probability that, for all flights in history, one or more could have been downed by a meteor?â They concluded that there was a 1-in-10 chance that this could happen
I completely agree with you on the need for extraordinary safeguards but there will always be the case at the far extreme of the normal curve, if you build a wall 100 meters high there's the chance (p=0.00000....0001) of a wave 101 meters high hitting it.
If you build it beside a river there's the chance of a dam collapse, some kind of natural flash flood or something really weird happening like, as mentioned before, a meteor strike directly on the reactor.
life is all about probabilities, a car could swerve off the road and crash through the wall of the building you're in now but the cost of reinforcing that wall *and every other wall of every other building you're in regularly* isn't worth it vs the actual risk of that happening.
so if you're looking for 100% certainty of no disasters or accidents you won't ever get it.
with any energy source.
A plant making solvents for the production of solar panels could leak and cause another Bhopal, a dam could collapse and cause a another Banqiao etc.
there's always the possibility of something at the far end of the normal curve though we absolutely should try to make the chance of disaster as small as possible.
The possible harm from a nuclear accident is significant and that absolutely does mean we should invest heavily in safety systems, backups, backups for backups etc but there's still always going to be the occasional event at the far end of the normal curve.
The way it's looking to turn out the nuclear plant issues likely going to be almost entirely economic though as a human disaster you're right that it's eclipsed by what's already happened.
"This is one of those items that â" although wrong in many of its details â" isn't exactly false in an overall sense and is perhaps more fairly labeled as "True, but for trivial and unremarkable reasons.""
so.... not really debunked but technically it could have gone another way and we could have ended up with a different size track.