the robot arm I've already seen implemented, there's a few videos floting around with monkeys with such implants using a robotic arm to feed themselves with their own arms restrained.
Or near an easy water source for cooling. Or near a population center for workers and people who need the power. Or on really solid bedrock for building a big heavy plant which needs to survive an earthquake.
by mere chance alone it's likely there's some patets infringed somewhere or some code which has ended up the same and which can't be proven to have been deved in a cleanroom environment for anything as large as linux and windows.
there are limits. you have to be selling more than 50 million worth of stuff per year before the law kicks in.
funnily enough it completely exempts software. If microsoft use pirated software to develop code for windows then they get off completely scot free. Likewise if they use a pirated copy of photoshop to make their ads for windows then they're also in the clear.
open source violations are also excepted so if a company ignores an open source liscence they and their downstream customers also get off scot free.
a while back one of the banks was suing other companies which held liens on property which was forclosed, sometimes the 2nd or third morgage would be the same bank. someone was pushing the papers over their desk too fast and the company filed lawsuits against itself.
"The bill would affect retailers that make $50 million or more in annual sales and that have a direct contract with the manufacturer. Retailers would have 18 months to change manufacturers or persuade their manufacturers to pay for software."
set up a shell chinese company with no pirated software which buys the items and sells them on to the US company at a 0.001% markup. essentially all it would have to be would be a few papers and a server to pass on the contracts.
oh they keep saying it is but they don't want to actually tell anyone what because they know damned well that the next day updates would be pushed out with everything they claim to own replaced.
the same could be said about building towns on a floodplain, cities bellow sea level beside the sea, beach houses in areas prone to storms, schools downhill from coal slag pools etc etc etc. People live in places which experience natural disasters. there tends to be historical or economic reasons and after a while people live there because that's where they were born.
there was a town down the coast where they went nuts building a massive, thick 10 meter tall wall over 30 years because the town had suffered in the past from tsunamis. That's a wall as high as a 3 story apartment block. not trivial.
vs tsunamis it was one of the best defended towns in the country. unfortunatly when the wave hit it was 14 meters+ and the town was wiped out.
indeed there were plants elsewhere on the coast which were hit as well which survived ok.
well in practice you'd either need to eat radioactive material or be exposed to one hell of a high dose to see any significant rise in your chances of getting cancer. Our chances of getting cancer are so high already. (42% ish chance of getting cancer though some are minor or treatable since only 25% of all deaths are cancer)
I accepted a self signed cert from a college server when I was physically in the room with it and chances of MITM were stunningly low.
I go home and get a change of cert warning connecting to the server and alarm bells start ringing.
In such a case self signed certs are *more* secure than a cert signed by someone...somewhere who is apparently trusted by someone has signed their cert and which may have been compromised as in TFA.
"Ramsar, in northern Iran has some inhabited areas with the highest known natural radiation levels in the world."
"The radioactivity of the high background radiation areas (HBRAs) of Ramsar is due to Ra-226 and its decay products, which have been brought to the surface by the waters of hot springs. There are more than 9 hot springs with different concentrations of radium in Ramsar that are used as spas by both tourists and residents."
"According to the results of the surveys performed to date the radioactivity seems primarily to be due to the radium dissolved in mineral water and secondarily to travertine deposits having elevated levels of thorium combined with lesser concentrations of uranium "
but that isn't the interesting part. this is.
"The preliminary results of cytogenetical, immunological and hematological studies on the residents of high background radiation areas of Ramsar have been previously reported (Mortazavi et al. 2001, Ghiassi-Nejad et al. 2002 and Mortazavi et al. in press), suggesting that exposure to high levels of natural background radiation can induce radioadaptive response in human cells. Lymphocytes of Ramsar residents when subjected to 1.5 Gy of gamma rays showed fewer induced chromosome aberrations compared to residents in a nearby control area whose lymphocytes were subjected to the same radiation dose. Despite the fact that in in vitro experiments lymphocytes of some individuals show a synergistic effect after pretreatment with a low dose(Mortazavi et al. 2000), none of the residents of high background radiation areas showed such a response. "
yes, when exposed to long term high levels of radiation these peoples cells adapted and ramped up their DNA repair mechanisms. These people can survive radiation better than most.
now of course it's not magic, if you're out in the cold a lot you'll adapt to it a bit and your body will deal better with it. the same with heat or sunlight or etc etc. it can still be overwhelmed but we do have mechanisms for dealing with raidation
I never got firefly but then while I love scifi I hate westerns. It's just like "you've got a space ship. you have GOT to have a better way of doing things than walking around with a future-pistol. I mean the energy and technology that's got to be available...."
The problem with bloggers becoming the "new journalists" is that any sense of responsibility goes out the window in the race to get page hits.
the bloggers seem to have been doing a vastly better job of reporting on this than almost any major paper or news corp.
It's actually stunning how poor the reporting has been from the major news networks .
The somthingawful GBS topic on it outlined the situation clearly and explained it far far better than any news article, after reading it I was left agape thinking "why the fuck can't reuters explain the situation that well when some kneckbeard with time on his hands can"
however the last item about temperature is ignored in a remarkable number of offices. you'd think it wouldn't be hard to keep an office at a reasonable temperature yet in many places it's as if the dial is being controlled by someone in their 90's or who has a sexual fetish for office workers with sweat dripping off them.
protip: if your keyboard has droplets of sweat falling on it you're not going to be getting much useful work done.
a fair amount of the crap sold as being "Ergonomic" is complete and utter crap. My last office had an obsession with people not using their laptop keyboards for extended periods of time... so they shelled out a lot of money for a set of "ergonomic" keyboards for the meeting rooms which could be plugged into the laptops... they were laptop keyboards, exact same size and layout and raised about the same distance off the desk. Everyone would have been better off bringing their normal, full size keyboards from their desks.
I have a feeling they may have bought my mouse and chair of the same pack of scam artists, my back started hurting and my arm would be killing me after using the craptastic "ergonomic" mice they insisted everyone use. I quietly swapped in my own cheap mouse from home and my arm was fine again, I started sitting in a cheap old regular plastic chair and my back went back to being fine.
Remember, the shysters who sell "ergonomic" equipment have a vested interest in the company having lots of problems that can only be solved by more "ergonomic" equipment.
The gist of my incoherent ranting is: the kind of people who are in favour of nuclear fission energy have no concept of exponential processes or of time. There, I said it.
That's a great example of the fuckups with the early weapons programs, but that has nothing to do with power generation.
In practice most of the radiation from waste like that isn't due to their plutonium or uranium content but rather far shorter lived fission fragments. The more radioactive it is the shorter lived it is.
if we're talking costs of energy production make sure to compare those figures to cleaning up the billions of tons of CO2 and the millions of tons of arsenic from coal, recycling the trillions of tons of solar pannels every 30 years with solar and all the industrial runoff producing them would cause if we were to power everything with solar, all the cleanup costs and environmental impacts from oil spills, the cleanup costs from steel foundries and mines for building millions of wind turbines.
Forget the solar part, the high efficiency indoor growing looks far more interesting. Are those LED's putting out light at a frequency the plants can absorb unusually well?
I imagine such tech could be very useful in colder climates where energy is cheaper like iceland.
apparently you're good for about a week even in a worst case *everyone who knows about the plant has suddenly died and all the safety systems have failed at once* scenario.
I also imagine that a direct asteroid strike would be bad for the reactor.
"Can a pebble bed reactor survive: The complete & total loss of any supporting structures which keep the fuel pebbles at a distance, the simultaneous loss of its cooling system, and the complete loss of *every single control system in place*? Plus the complete failure of humans not to do *exactly the wrong thing in every single instance in a crisis*? Or to not be able to do anything at all? (Say chemical weapon attack?) Not hours, not days, not weeks, indefinitely -- without being a risk to those living in the surrounding community?"
that's a fine philosophy as long as you apply the same standard to everything in life.
nuclear isn't special.
Bhopal killed more people than every nuclear power accident ever and maimed tens of thousands more for life. and that was just a fertaliser plant.
The Banqiao Dam collapse killed more people than every nuclear power accident ever and left countless more homless and that was just a dam.
When lakes of coal sludge break they can leave vast tracts of land unusuable due to heavy metals. Say what you like about half lives but arsenic is forever.
Drilling for gas in indonesia caused a mud volcano which destroyed the homes of 10000 people and the land will likely be unusuable for decades.
"I don't want to hear "we run our reactor with a 99.997% safety record"."
that's a lovely lovely soundbyte but it's nothing but that. a soundbyte. Everything in life is a matter of 99.9999.
nothing is ever 100% and no that doesn't automatically win you the argument. There's a finite chance that every single dam in the US could collapse at once, that every solar pannel could fall from their roofs at once and kill people, that ever wind turbine could fail explosively at once.
nuclear is dangerous like air travel while most of it's competitors are safe like driving to the airport.
you're more likely to die in your car on the way to the airport yet people are more afraid of flying. why? drama. when there's a plane crash everyone hears about it. when there's a near miss everyone hears about it. It only makes the local news whenever someone dies driving there.
it's the same with nuclear. It's vastly vaslty safer than almost any other option. that nuclear plant near you is orders of magnitude less likely to kill you than almost anything else in it's place yet whenever there's any drama involving nuclear you hear about it.
so you hear stupidity from people like "I'm too afraid that a nuclear plant would kill be, I'd much rather install solar pannels on my roof, that's far safer" when in reality you're vastly more likely to fall off and die while installing or cleaning the pannels than to die in a nuclear accident.
quite litterally anyone with the right radio could pick up this info. he's not disclosing anything secret. This is what the planes are shouting out to the world.
any libyan loyalist could be sitting 2 streets over from him with the same equipment passing on the same info quietly.
the sad thing is that about 25% of everyone in or around that plant is going to die of cancer unless someone comes up with a cure soon. This would be without the reactor at all because a quarter of everyone you know will probably die of cancer anyway. with what's happened that might go up a fraction of a percent but greenpeace will attribute every single cancer death within a hundred mile radius to it for the next 30 years .
I've been bitching about this from the start, every morning I'd look at the news stands and there would be sensationalist headlines about things which I knew damn well had been sorted out long before the papers had gone to print but the papers presented them as an ongoing drama.
Slashdot Mirror
the robot arm I've already seen implemented, there's a few videos floting around with monkeys with such implants using a robotic arm to feed themselves with their own arms restrained.
Or near an easy water source for cooling.
Or near a population center for workers and people who need the power.
Or on really solid bedrock for building a big heavy plant which needs to survive an earthquake.
by mere chance alone it's likely there's some patets infringed somewhere or some code which has ended up the same and which can't be proven to have been deved in a cleanroom environment for anything as large as linux and windows.
there are limits. you have to be selling more than 50 million worth of stuff per year before the law kicks in.
funnily enough it completely exempts software.
If microsoft use pirated software to develop code for windows then they get off completely scot free.
Likewise if they use a pirated copy of photoshop to make their ads for windows then they're also in the clear.
open source violations are also excepted so if a company ignores an open source liscence they and their downstream customers also get off scot free.
isn't that convenient.
a while back one of the banks was suing other companies which held liens on property which was forclosed, sometimes the 2nd or third morgage would be the same bank. someone was pushing the papers over their desk too fast and the company filed lawsuits against itself.
Why bother?
"The bill would affect retailers that make $50 million or more in annual sales and that have a direct contract with the manufacturer. Retailers would have 18 months to change manufacturers or persuade their manufacturers to pay for software."
set up a shell chinese company with no pirated software which buys the items and sells them on to the US company at a 0.001% markup.
essentially all it would have to be would be a few papers and a server to pass on the contracts.
no direct contract, no legal problems.
oh they keep saying it is but they don't want to actually tell anyone what because they know damned well that the next day updates would be pushed out with everything they claim to own replaced.
the same could be said about building towns on a floodplain, cities bellow sea level beside the sea, beach houses in areas prone to storms, schools downhill from coal slag pools etc etc etc.
People live in places which experience natural disasters.
there tends to be historical or economic reasons and after a while people live there because that's where they were born.
there was a town down the coast where they went nuts building a massive, thick 10 meter tall wall over 30 years because the town had suffered in the past from tsunamis.
That's a wall as high as a 3 story apartment block.
not trivial.
vs tsunamis it was one of the best defended towns in the country.
unfortunatly when the wave hit it was 14 meters+ and the town was wiped out.
indeed there were plants elsewhere on the coast which were hit as well which survived ok.
well in practice you'd either need to eat radioactive material or be exposed to one hell of a high dose to see any significant rise in your chances of getting cancer.
Our chances of getting cancer are so high already. (42% ish chance of getting cancer though some are minor or treatable since only 25% of all deaths are cancer)
I accepted a self signed cert from a college server when I was physically in the room with it and chances of MITM were stunningly low.
I go home and get a change of cert warning connecting to the server and alarm bells start ringing.
In such a case self signed certs are *more* secure than a cert signed by someone...somewhere who is apparently trusted by someone has signed their cert and which may have been compromised as in TFA.
actually it handled the earthquake extremely well and shut down.
it was the massive tsunami right after that that caused problems for the plant.
http://www.angelfire.com/mo/radioadaptive/ramsar.html
"Ramsar, in northern Iran has some inhabited areas with the highest known natural radiation levels in the world."
"The radioactivity of the high background radiation areas (HBRAs) of Ramsar is due to Ra-226 and its decay products, which have been brought to the surface by the waters of hot springs. There are more than 9 hot springs with different concentrations of radium in Ramsar that are used as spas by both tourists and residents."
"According to the results of the surveys performed to date the radioactivity seems primarily to be due to the radium dissolved in mineral water and secondarily to travertine deposits having elevated levels of thorium combined with lesser concentrations of uranium "
but that isn't the interesting part.
this is.
"The preliminary results of cytogenetical, immunological and hematological studies on the residents of high background radiation areas of Ramsar have been previously reported (Mortazavi et al. 2001, Ghiassi-Nejad et al. 2002 and Mortazavi et al. in press), suggesting that exposure to high levels of natural background radiation can induce radioadaptive response in human cells. Lymphocytes of Ramsar residents when subjected to 1.5 Gy of gamma rays showed fewer induced chromosome aberrations compared to residents in a nearby control area whose lymphocytes were subjected to the same radiation dose. Despite the fact that in in vitro experiments lymphocytes of some individuals show a synergistic effect after pretreatment with a low dose(Mortazavi et al. 2000), none of the residents of high background radiation areas showed such a response. "
yes, when exposed to long term high levels of radiation these peoples cells adapted and ramped up their DNA repair mechanisms.
These people can survive radiation better than most.
now of course it's not magic, if you're out in the cold a lot you'll adapt to it a bit and your body will deal better with it. the same with heat or sunlight or etc etc.
it can still be overwhelmed but we do have mechanisms for dealing with raidation
I never got firefly but then while I love scifi I hate westerns.
It's just like "you've got a space ship. you have GOT to have a better way of doing things than walking around with a future-pistol. I mean the energy and technology that's got to be available...."
I read the methods of rationality too much.
everything is a matter of tastes, personally I don't think any of the starwars movies are much good.
If you're interested in giving Dr who a go though forget the really old ones, many of the oldest episodes are gone, tapes reused, episodes lost.
A good starting point would be the 2005 revamp.
Yes Dr Who is camp, yes it's a bit hit an miss but I like Dr who, as long as you're good at suspending disbelief it's a charming series.
The problem with bloggers becoming the "new journalists" is that any sense of responsibility goes out the window in the race to get page hits.
the bloggers seem to have been doing a vastly better job of reporting on this than almost any major paper or news corp.
It's actually stunning how poor the reporting has been from the major news networks .
The somthingawful GBS topic on it outlined the situation clearly and explained it far far better than any news article, after reading it I was left agape thinking "why the fuck can't reuters explain the situation that well when some kneckbeard with time on his hands can"
however the last item about temperature is ignored in a remarkable number of offices.
you'd think it wouldn't be hard to keep an office at a reasonable temperature yet in many places it's as if the dial is being controlled by someone in their 90's or who has a sexual fetish for office workers with sweat dripping off them.
protip: if your keyboard has droplets of sweat falling on it you're not going to be getting much useful work done.
a fair amount of the crap sold as being "Ergonomic" is complete and utter crap.
My last office had an obsession with people not using their laptop keyboards for extended periods of time... so they shelled out a lot of money for a set of "ergonomic" keyboards for the meeting rooms which could be plugged into the laptops... they were laptop keyboards, exact same size and layout and raised about the same distance off the desk.
Everyone would have been better off bringing their normal, full size keyboards from their desks.
I have a feeling they may have bought my mouse and chair of the same pack of scam artists, my back started hurting and my arm would be killing me after using the craptastic "ergonomic" mice they insisted everyone use.
I quietly swapped in my own cheap mouse from home and my arm was fine again, I started sitting in a cheap old regular plastic chair and my back went back to being fine.
Remember, the shysters who sell "ergonomic" equipment have a vested interest in the company having lots of problems that can only be solved by more "ergonomic" equipment.
The gist of my incoherent ranting is: the kind of people who are in favour of nuclear fission energy have no concept of exponential processes or of time. There, I said it.
That's a great example of the fuckups with the early weapons programs, but that has nothing to do with power generation.
In practice most of the radiation from waste like that isn't due to their plutonium or uranium content but rather far shorter lived fission fragments.
The more radioactive it is the shorter lived it is.
if we're talking costs of energy production make sure to compare those figures to cleaning up the billions of tons of CO2 and the millions of tons of arsenic from coal, recycling the trillions of tons of solar pannels every 30 years with solar and all the industrial runoff producing them would cause if we were to power everything with solar, all the cleanup costs and environmental impacts from oil spills, the cleanup costs from steel foundries and mines for building millions of wind turbines.
etc
etc
etc
etc
Forget the solar part, the high efficiency indoor growing looks far more interesting.
Are those LED's putting out light at a frequency the plants can absorb unusually well?
I imagine such tech could be very useful in colder climates where energy is cheaper like iceland.
A paper on possible failure modes:
http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/17748
apparently you're good for about a week even in a worst case *everyone who knows about the plant has suddenly died and all the safety systems have failed at once* scenario.
I also imagine that a direct asteroid strike would be bad for the reactor.
"Can a pebble bed reactor survive: The complete & total loss of any supporting structures which keep the fuel pebbles at a distance, the simultaneous loss of its cooling system, and the complete loss of *every single control system in place*? Plus the complete failure of humans not to do *exactly the wrong thing in every single instance in a crisis*? Or to not be able to do anything at all? (Say chemical weapon attack?) Not hours, not days, not weeks, indefinitely -- without being a risk to those living in the surrounding community?"
that's a fine philosophy as long as you apply the same standard to everything in life.
nuclear isn't special.
Bhopal killed more people than every nuclear power accident ever and maimed tens of thousands more for life.
and that was just a fertaliser plant.
The Banqiao Dam collapse killed more people than every nuclear power accident ever and left countless more homless and that was just a dam.
When lakes of coal sludge break they can leave vast tracts of land unusuable due to heavy metals.
Say what you like about half lives but arsenic is forever.
Drilling for gas in indonesia caused a mud volcano which destroyed the homes of 10000 people and the land will likely be unusuable for decades.
"I don't want to hear "we run our reactor with a 99.997% safety record"."
that's a lovely lovely soundbyte but it's nothing but that. a soundbyte.
Everything in life is a matter of 99.9999.
nothing is ever 100% and no that doesn't automatically win you the argument.
There's a finite chance that every single dam in the US could collapse at once, that every solar pannel could fall from their roofs at once and kill people, that ever wind turbine could fail explosively at once.
nuclear is dangerous like air travel while most of it's competitors are safe like driving to the airport.
you're more likely to die in your car on the way to the airport yet people are more afraid of flying.
why? drama.
when there's a plane crash everyone hears about it.
when there's a near miss everyone hears about it.
It only makes the local news whenever someone dies driving there.
it's the same with nuclear. It's vastly vaslty safer than almost any other option. that nuclear plant near you is orders of magnitude less likely to kill you than almost anything else in it's place yet whenever there's any drama involving nuclear you hear about it.
so you hear stupidity from people like "I'm too afraid that a nuclear plant would kill be, I'd much rather install solar pannels on my roof, that's far safer" when in reality you're vastly more likely to fall off and die while installing or cleaning the pannels than to die in a nuclear accident.
anyone with the right radio could pick up this info.
he's not disclosing anything secret.
This is what the planes are shouting out to the world.
delaying it by a "WIDE margin" would be utterly pointless since the libyans would have already heard it themselves.
quite litterally anyone with the right radio could pick up this info.
he's not disclosing anything secret.
This is what the planes are shouting out to the world.
any libyan loyalist could be sitting 2 streets over from him with the same equipment passing on the same info quietly.
the sad thing is that about 25% of everyone in or around that plant is going to die of cancer unless someone comes up with a cure soon.
This would be without the reactor at all because a quarter of everyone you know will probably die of cancer anyway.
with what's happened that might go up a fraction of a percent but greenpeace will attribute every single cancer death within a hundred mile radius to it for the next 30 years .
I've been bitching about this from the start, every morning I'd look at the news stands and there would be sensationalist headlines about things which I knew damn well had been sorted out long before the papers had gone to print but the papers presented them as an ongoing drama.