Movement thanks to ground transport, blowing away, etc, makes things better: in addition to the decay mentioned above, the isotopes tend to become less concentrated. Ditto for stuff being sufficiently covered up.
But bioaccumulation is factor, too: eating something that you hunted in that area could be rather hazardous because of concentrating effects of the food chain. The same is true to a lesser extent for things grown.
Still, even if there's a 100x bioaccumulation factor of some isotope, that just means you need to wait 7 more half-lives before things are safe.
131I has a half life of 8 days. Basically all 131I released from something like Chernobyl is as a direct fission product of 235U.
Within a few months, substantially all the 131I is gone.
The "worst" things released for habitability, then, are the things with intermediate half-lives of a few years. The worst of these is the ~100 gigabecquerels of 125Sb released, and the 500-600 gigabecquerels of relatively short-lived isotopes of Cesium.
At this point, open-air dose rates and ground dose rates are about 1/100th of the first day dose; further gains are going to be slower because longer-lived isotopes dominate, but will be another factor of 20 in the next twenty years. Viewed another way, someone who spends their whole 75 year life in the present exclusion zone starting twenty years from now will receive a lower dose than someone who experienced the first ten days after the accident, and very few of those people died. (And there's considerable evidence that acute, high doses are much more dangerous than an equivalent dose delivered over a long time).
(According to UN reports, less than 50 deaths; most of which were emergency workers, but included 9 children who died from thyroid cancer from 131I).
This is only true if there's lots of instruction-level parallelism in the underlying code.
Bad compilers produce code with bad ILP (or sometimes, because of actual data dependencies or limitations in the programming language specifications that do not allow data dependencies to be inferred well), and then fancy processors with lots of superscalar love don't run more stuff per cycle.
By the way your cited MIPs numbers are off the chart, and refer to best-case theoretical throughput with code that uses all available parallelism in the processor. Given that most software today has problems climbing over an ILP of 1.75 on modern architectures, and has only nudged up a few hundredths in the past few years even as architectures have gotten much more parallel, this is unrealistic. (Of course, for hand-optimized, purpose-built close-to-embarassingly parallel software like video encoding, this can be a whole lot better)
Of course (in most cases) places that work less will have a greater productivity per hour worked, at the cost of lower overall productivity. That is: organizations have their employees work on the most productive things they can do within their skill-set first, before moving down the list. The less an employee works, the more likely that employee will be optimally used, everything else being equal.
I'm not implying that I agree or disagree with the initial poster, but you're severely failing at being a pedant.
If you have a rocket blasting up into the sky, and the rocket engine turns off, then the rocket is in freefall. It may still be going up because of inertia.
From wikipedia:
Free fall describes any motion of a body where gravity is the only or dominant force acting upon it, at least initially. Since this definition does not specify velocity, it also applies to objects initially moving upward.
No, because the margin on a gift card that is never spent is way better than anything else they could ever sell you with it. Way to go! Down with the man!
FTFY. Condoms break, if you're depending on them to keep you safe I hope your will is up to date.
In studies of serodiscordant couples (couples where one has HIV and the other doesn't) using condoms as a barrier, the transmission rate is well under 1% per year. It ain't perfectly safe, but even if you sleep with 100% HIV positive people, this isn't going cut your life expectancy much.
I'll never understand why a disease so easily spread that carries a death sentence never resulted in mandatory quarantines. If we had taken that simple step thousands (millions?) of lives would've been saved.
Incubation periods? Lack of an effective test back then?
Quarantines tend to be rather ineffective, even in the best cases-- on diseases with an incubation period of a week or so and very clearly defined symptoms; full-blown AIDS takes years to develop and often presents differently. It's not going to do much for you if you're only rounding up the 20% of cases that are symptomatic (and presumably spreading a lot less of the disease than the latent cases).
In a couple million years, radioactive waste will be much less 'hot' than the (naturally occurring) fuel that went in. Actually, even in a couple thousand years that will be true. Things that are very radioactive, like spent fuel, have short half lives and are used up relatively quickly.
This is unlike waste from chemical reactions which in many cases will last practically forever. Please don't FUD nuclear, as it's one of our best options.
What about social pressure? Because it's clear social pressure has a role in the mechanisms I cited. You don't approach universal compliance with a genetic testing program (like has happened with the Ashkenazis) without SOME amount of pressure.
I think we can agree that full-on coercion is bad-- the question is where the line is. Clearly, when governments are providing services to test for chromosomal disorders or for autosomal recessive disorders, the result is a eugenics program. And I think those services are mostly good things, especially in the present environment where government is the payer of last resort for health care services.
jcr-- I see your posts often and generally find them well reasoned, but I really hate absolutes like this.
There's a lot of potential good that can happen from deliberate changes to how we select mates. It's a question of where those mechanisms are implemented (individual choice, social pressure, or governmental coercion), how forceful those mechanisms are, and the potential gains to be realized.
From wikipedia:
Mate selection. In Orthodox Jewish circles, the organization Dor Yeshorim carries out an anonymous screening program so that couples who are likely to conceive a child with Tay-Sachs or another genetic disorder can avoid marriage.[27] Nomi Stone of Dartmouth College describes this approach. "Orthodox Jewish high school students are given blood tests to determine if they have the Tay-Sachs gene. Instead of receiving direct results as to their carrier status, each person is given a six-digit identification number. Couples can call a hotline, if both are carriers, they will be deemed 'incompatible.' Individuals are not told they are carriers directly to avoid any possibility of stigmatization or discrimination. If the information were released, carriers could potentially become unmarriageable within the community.
This is definitely a mechanism rooted in eugenics, and it's not free of coercion (there's a fair bit of social pressure). But it has meant that Tay Sachs has transformed from a "Jewish disease" to something nearly unknown in the Jewish community. It's also an elegant mechanism that was chosen that largely prevents stigmatization of those with the problematic alleles.
Similarly, the huge downtick in the incidence of Downs has had outside influence (e.g. social and medical standards about chromosomal testing, various government-funded testing programs, etc). I understand this could be controversial depending on your take on the abortion issue.
As with anything, taken to extremes it can be bad, but there have been gains realized with minimal costs to individuals.
Actually, lead vehicles benefit from this, too, just not nearly as much.
Even though vehicle aerodynamics have tried to combat it, there is a big negative pressure bubble forming your car's wake 'pulling' it backwards. Partially filling it with another vehicle's high pressure region where it 'cuts' the oncoming air helps.
Heat loss for a given temperature difference is proportional to surface area.
A giant dome has very little surface area compared to internal volume compared to a great number of dwellings.
The surface area of a big dome over many houses might very well be much less than the surface area of all the houses inside.
Of course, there are other factors, like the effectiveness of the insulation of the houses vs. the effectiveness of the thin plastic material of the dome, but these would be at least partially offset by the (inherent) use of solar radiation to heat the dome during the day and the thermal mass of the ground retaining heat during the night.
On January 5th, Jobs said that he had a hormone imbalance. On January 14th, he said that he had "learned [his] health issues are more complex than [he] originally thought".
A Whipple procedure really screws up your digestive system and almost everyone afterwards has bouts of weight loss, etc. It's altogether possible that his doctors thought that was going on until metastases were discovered between Jan 5th and Jan 14th.
It's a complicated matter, you know-- how much are stockholders entitled to know versus an executive's right to privacy in his medical information.
Title 17, 204: Â 204. Execution of transfers of copyright ownership
(a) A transfer of copyright ownership, other than by operation of law, is not valid unless an instrument of conveyance, or a note or memorandum of the transfer, is in writing and signed by the owner of the rights conveyed or such owner's duly authorized agent.
Nope. Phase difference between the pulses can tell you about changes in distances and thus your position; no slowing needed, just a knowledge of period and initial phase at a known reference time.
Then, a very approximate clock running from that reference time would tell you the expected phase differences between the next pulses at earth for the next pulse; differences from this lets you solve for x, y, z, and t at your location. If you are going to travel further than the pulsars' periods light distance from earth, you'd better have been tracking your position the whole time to remove ambiguities (or, with additional references and overdetermination it is possible to overcome this).
Because it's a lot easier to do trials and get preliminary approval in Europe than in North America. Just about everything makes it to Europe first, because the bar to establish safety and efficacy is so much higher in the States and Canada.
It's not as if Google doesn't pull photos all the time from Streetview due to people requesting it.
I've made repeated requests to Google to pull a couple of images of my property from streetview, and they've been ignored for a year now-- both by email and by the 'report inappropriate image' option.
So despite Google's overtures to the contrary, I don't think they yank anything unless they are sued.
I participated a bit in that 'witch hunt'. I don't have a Kindle (I'm hoping there's a rev 2 that's just a bit better than I can bring myself to pull the trigger on buying), but when I was investigating the product, I tried to read the negative reviews. It was pretty frustrating because 80-90% of the reviews were people disagreeing with the concept of the product or its price without having used it.
It was annoying because I like to read reviews of people who have actually purchased and used a product and disliked it, to see if I am likely to run into the same pitfalls... and some people who were upset at the trendiness of the Kindle or whatever felt the need to write nasty reviews that buried the useful nasty reviews in the noise.
So, I voted all of those I saw not helpful and wrote a nasty comment or two.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a very complicated story.
Movement thanks to ground transport, blowing away, etc, makes things better: in addition to the decay mentioned above, the isotopes tend to become less concentrated. Ditto for stuff being sufficiently covered up.
But bioaccumulation is factor, too: eating something that you hunted in that area could be rather hazardous because of concentrating effects of the food chain. The same is true to a lesser extent for things grown.
Still, even if there's a 100x bioaccumulation factor of some isotope, that just means you need to wait 7 more half-lives before things are safe.
Hotter radioisotopes have shorter half lives.
131I has a half life of 8 days. Basically all 131I released from something like Chernobyl is as a direct fission product of 235U.
Within a few months, substantially all the 131I is gone.
The "worst" things released for habitability, then, are the things with intermediate half-lives of a few years. The worst of these is the ~100 gigabecquerels of 125Sb released, and the 500-600 gigabecquerels of relatively short-lived isotopes of Cesium.
At this point, open-air dose rates and ground dose rates are about 1/100th of the first day dose; further gains are going to be slower because longer-lived isotopes dominate, but will be another factor of 20 in the next twenty years. Viewed another way, someone who spends their whole 75 year life in the present exclusion zone starting twenty years from now will receive a lower dose than someone who experienced the first ten days after the accident, and very few of those people died. (And there's considerable evidence that acute, high doses are much more dangerous than an equivalent dose delivered over a long time).
(According to UN reports, less than 50 deaths; most of which were emergency workers, but included 9 children who died from thyroid cancer from 131I).
This is only true if there's lots of instruction-level parallelism in the underlying code.
Bad compilers produce code with bad ILP (or sometimes, because of actual data dependencies or limitations in the programming language specifications that do not allow data dependencies to be inferred well), and then fancy processors with lots of superscalar love don't run more stuff per cycle.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instruction_level_parallelism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superscalar#Limitations
By the way your cited MIPs numbers are off the chart, and refer to best-case theoretical throughput with code that uses all available parallelism in the processor. Given that most software today has problems climbing over an ILP of 1.75 on modern architectures, and has only nudged up a few hundredths in the past few years even as architectures have gotten much more parallel, this is unrealistic. (Of course, for hand-optimized, purpose-built close-to-embarassingly parallel software like video encoding, this can be a whole lot better)
Per hour worked.
Of course (in most cases) places that work less will have a greater productivity per hour worked, at the cost of lower overall productivity. That is: organizations have their employees work on the most productive things they can do within their skill-set first, before moving down the list. The less an employee works, the more likely that employee will be optimally used, everything else being equal.
Seems like it would really take trying to bust the cap with radio to do it.
(160 (kilobits / second)) * 3 * (16 (hours / day)) * (1 month) = 100.316766 gigabytes
I'm not implying that I agree or disagree with the initial poster, but you're severely failing at being a pedant.
If you have a rocket blasting up into the sky, and the rocket engine turns off, then the rocket is in freefall. It may still be going up because of inertia.
From wikipedia:
Free fall describes any motion of a body where gravity is the only or dominant force acting upon it, at least initially. Since this definition does not specify velocity, it also applies to objects initially moving upward.
Given that the problem is not exploitable on MacOS X with Safari... I think they'll be very slow to release a fix.
No, because the margin on a gift card that is never spent is way better than anything else they could ever sell you with it. Way to go! Down with the man!
PS, also:
In studies of serodiscordant couples (couples where one has HIV and the other doesn't) using condoms as a barrier, the transmission rate is well under 1% per year. It ain't perfectly safe, but even if you sleep with 100% HIV positive people, this isn't going cut your life expectancy much.
Incubation periods? Lack of an effective test back then?
Quarantines tend to be rather ineffective, even in the best cases-- on diseases with an incubation period of a week or so and very clearly defined symptoms; full-blown AIDS takes years to develop and often presents differently. It's not going to do much for you if you're only rounding up the 20% of cases that are symptomatic (and presumably spreading a lot less of the disease than the latent cases).
In a couple million years, radioactive waste will be much less 'hot' than the (naturally occurring) fuel that went in. Actually, even in a couple thousand years that will be true. Things that are very radioactive, like spent fuel, have short half lives and are used up relatively quickly.
Please see: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Spent_nuclear_fuel_decay.png
This is unlike waste from chemical reactions which in many cases will last practically forever. Please don't FUD nuclear, as it's one of our best options.
What about social pressure? Because it's clear social pressure has a role in the mechanisms I cited. You don't approach universal compliance with a genetic testing program (like has happened with the Ashkenazis) without SOME amount of pressure.
I think we can agree that full-on coercion is bad-- the question is where the line is. Clearly, when governments are providing services to test for chromosomal disorders or for autosomal recessive disorders, the result is a eugenics program. And I think those services are mostly good things, especially in the present environment where government is the payer of last resort for health care services.
jcr-- I see your posts often and generally find them well reasoned, but I really hate absolutes like this.
There's a lot of potential good that can happen from deliberate changes to how we select mates. It's a question of where those mechanisms are implemented (individual choice, social pressure, or governmental coercion), how forceful those mechanisms are, and the potential gains to be realized.
From wikipedia:
This is definitely a mechanism rooted in eugenics, and it's not free of coercion (there's a fair bit of social pressure). But it has meant that Tay Sachs has transformed from a "Jewish disease" to something nearly unknown in the Jewish community. It's also an elegant mechanism that was chosen that largely prevents stigmatization of those with the problematic alleles.
Similarly, the huge downtick in the incidence of Downs has had outside influence (e.g. social and medical standards about chromosomal testing, various government-funded testing programs, etc). I understand this could be controversial depending on your take on the abortion issue.
As with anything, taken to extremes it can be bad, but there have been gains realized with minimal costs to individuals.
Actually, lead vehicles benefit from this, too, just not nearly as much.
Even though vehicle aerodynamics have tried to combat it, there is a big negative pressure bubble forming your car's wake 'pulling' it backwards. Partially filling it with another vehicle's high pressure region where it 'cuts' the oncoming air helps.
Heat loss for a given temperature difference is proportional to surface area.
A giant dome has very little surface area compared to internal volume compared to a great number of dwellings.
The surface area of a big dome over many houses might very well be much less than the surface area of all the houses inside.
Of course, there are other factors, like the effectiveness of the insulation of the houses vs. the effectiveness of the thin plastic material of the dome, but these would be at least partially offset by the (inherent) use of solar radiation to heat the dome during the day and the thermal mass of the ground retaining heat during the night.
That's not exactly how it went down.
On January 5th, Jobs said that he had a hormone imbalance. On January 14th, he said that he had "learned [his] health issues are more complex than [he] originally thought".
A Whipple procedure really screws up your digestive system and almost everyone afterwards has bouts of weight loss, etc. It's altogether possible that his doctors thought that was going on until metastases were discovered between Jan 5th and Jan 14th.
It's a complicated matter, you know-- how much are stockholders entitled to know versus an executive's right to privacy in his medical information.
Are you dense?
From your own quote:
While Eason said the confirmation was being provided with Jobs' approval ...
A judgment of this type is not necessarily dischargeable in bankruptcy court.
The law in question is still developing and varies a lot by jurisdiction, but:
http://www.pepperlaw.com/publications_update.aspx?ArticleKey=1505
Title 17, 204:
 204. Execution of transfers of copyright ownership
(a) A transfer of copyright ownership, other than by operation of law, is not valid unless an instrument of conveyance, or a note or memorandum of the transfer, is in writing and signed by the owner of the rights conveyed or such owner's duly authorized agent.
Nope. Phase difference between the pulses can tell you about changes in distances and thus your position; no slowing needed, just a knowledge of period and initial phase at a known reference time.
Then, a very approximate clock running from that reference time would tell you the expected phase differences between the next pulses at earth for the next pulse; differences from this lets you solve for x, y, z, and t at your location. If you are going to travel further than the pulsars' periods light distance from earth, you'd better have been tracking your position the whole time to remove ambiguities (or, with additional references and overdetermination it is possible to overcome this).
Because it's a lot easier to do trials and get preliminary approval in Europe than in North America. Just about everything makes it to Europe first, because the bar to establish safety and efficacy is so much higher in the States and Canada.
It's not as if Google doesn't pull photos all the time from Streetview due to people requesting it.
I've made repeated requests to Google to pull a couple of images of my property from streetview, and they've been ignored for a year now-- both by email and by the 'report inappropriate image' option.
So despite Google's overtures to the contrary, I don't think they yank anything unless they are sued.
> I think an even better comparison would be a car with a helicopter stapled to the trunk.
Ack should preview next time; this was my link.
> I think an even better comparison would be a car with a helicopter stapled to the trunk.
You mean like this?
I participated a bit in that 'witch hunt'. I don't have a Kindle (I'm hoping there's a rev 2 that's just a bit better than I can bring myself to pull the trigger on buying), but when I was investigating the product, I tried to read the negative reviews. It was pretty frustrating because 80-90% of the reviews were people disagreeing with the concept of the product or its price without having used it.
It was annoying because I like to read reviews of people who have actually purchased and used a product and disliked it, to see if I am likely to run into the same pitfalls... and some people who were upset at the trendiness of the Kindle or whatever felt the need to write nasty reviews that buried the useful nasty reviews in the noise.
So, I voted all of those I saw not helpful and wrote a nasty comment or two.