Most of the re-use part of nuclear fuel is, as I understand it, prohibited by government regulation, something having to do with plutonium generation. My understanding of a possible use involving breeder reactors, though, involves using the plutonium's natural decay to enrich uranium fuel, allowing the plutonium to break down into less harmful byproducts while the uranium is enriched for fuel in the near future. This seems a more complete use of the fuel to me, and could result in less hazardous waste.
However, use of plutonium is rather taboo for some reason -- witness the furor over Cassini's radioisotope generator, which some environmentalists claimed could kill thousands in the event of an accident on launch in 1997 or during the flyby of Earth in 1999, with one site suggesting a 10-micron particle could result in the exposure of a person inhaling it to thousands of REMs. Their argument was that the release of the 72 pounds of plutonium would be catastrophic over centuries.
An article in a 1993 Oak Ridge National Laboratories Review states, "according to NCRP Reports No. 92 and No. 95, population exposure from operation of 1000-MWe nuclear and coal-fired power plants amounts to 490 person-rem/year for coal plants and 4.8 person-rem/year for nuclear plants.... For the complete nuclear fuel cycle, from mining to reactor operation to waste disposal, the radiation dose is cited as 136 person-rem/year; the equivalent dose for coal use, from mining to power plant operation to waste disposal, is not listed in this report and is probably unknown."
Even factoring in mining -- where radioactive dust presumably goes into the air -- and disposal -- where various bits of radioactive dust and water are released -- nuclear plants produced only about a quarter of the average radiation dosage that coal plants do over their lives. I've seen the strip mines that are used to get at uranium, and while it's not pretty, it's not nearly as bad as the destruction of entire mountains in the Appalachians. There is also research going into extracting uranium from seawater for about $120 per pound, which, although about 10 times the current rate, could be more environmentally safe and could provide thousands of years of power, presuming we operated on nuclear power for that length of time.
I'm all for nuclear energy. While I am also a proponent of renewable sources, I don't like the environmental damage caused by hydroelectric. Solar has issues of night-time electricity use, and it is reportedly a messy thing to make, with some pretty dangerous chemicals involved, not including any batteries that would be needed for cloudy days and night use. Wind has issues of reliability, and tidal generators have a range issue, not to mention that I wonder how it would affect the beaches to have thousands of them operating.
I recognize the dangers of nuclear energy. I know that it's hard to clean up, and that there are significant security risks; I'd much rather be in a room with an exposed piece of coal than an exposed piece of reactor-grade uranium. But that piece of uranium will be useful long after the ash from the coal has been carted off and buried. It will have given off no CO2 or nitrogen or sulfur oxides during its use (save whatever transportation is used for it), and less radioactivity.
In balance, I believe that nuclear reactors are a far better source of energy than anything else we have at the moment.
So no more great picutures of the universe like Hubble is famous for. I say that it is well worth the 600 mil to keep it up til at least 2020. As inspiration / backup, Hell that is less than a paltry 60 million a year.
I fully agree, and I'm all for recovering it whenever it's decided that its mission is not to be continued. However, there is much pressure on and within NASA to prevent the shuttle from ever launching into an orbit which will not allow it to dock with the ISS. This prevents either a maintenance or a recovery mission for the Hubble.
You might want to go back and look at that legislation again. Only about $21 billion is going to Iraq, and less than $1.2 billion to Afghanistan. The remainder is for the armed forces, Homeland Security, the State Department, and a few miscellaneous other groups.
Run a Google News search on Kenneth Lay and you'll find the SEC is still breathing down his back. There's a new indictment that was filed this week that names "Enron corporate management" and "Enron managers", though not by name, in allegations of widespread deception efforts as the company neared collapse.
Enron's collapse was a complex mess that will take time to figure out. Not everything is as clear-cut as the MCI case, where the remaining executives were all too happy to let Bernie Evers hang.
Stored in RAM, updated, say, daily, from a central computer via the traffic network, the keys would be inaccessible to the vast majority of people who don't have the ability to read depowered RAM, since maintaining a constant power supply to the box to maintain the RAM would be tricky at best.
An Epilog, perhaps? I know of a shop that uses one from Epilog. I'm wondering what's so new about this, since these kind of lasers have been around for at least a decade.
I've seen this in developers at four different companies. Just because they can write code doesn't mean they keep up to date on their patches. A lot of developers barely know how to power on their systems, let alone when to go looking for patches. It's low priority.
I could be wrong, but I didn't think so. Not supported means they don't support it, not that it doesn't work. The tweaking that is done when you select a specific OS only concerns the configuration, such as amount of memory and stuff. Things you can easily adjust yourself.
Correct. Debian's not supported, but it works. OpenBSD isn't supported, but it (sort of) works. Basically, you have to be prepared to deal with some frustration in things being slow or sometimes unstable, but this does not have to do so much with the emulation as it does with the tools. VMWare has a package that is installed on the virtual machines that contains drivers for the hardware that does need to be virtualized, and a couple of utilities allowing access to a "shared drive" to allow easier movement of files between main system and VM. The Linux tools, BTW, can be compiled individually for each OS. Once I finally got Debian installed, this made things much smoother.
They did. It's called the Itanium. Look how well that's worked out.
Even running it outside of a server, you have to have a special version of Windows, which doesn't have all of the features that the 32-bit Windows does (Windows for the Opteron line is supposed to fix this). It's hideously expensive, meaning fewer people adopted it, which meant that costs stayed high, so there was less encouragement for people to adopt it, even within the server/workstation market in which it was sold.
AMD is going about it the right way. Allow a smooth and orderly transition. That they're going about it using a 64-bit adjustment to x86 makes it more difficult to move on to a new architecture, but perhaps in a few years, this will be looked back on as a successful model.
Local warming of the climate is to blame, they said -- adding that they did not have the evidence needed to link the melting ice to the steady, planet-wide climate change known as global warming.
"There's a regional trend in warming that cycles back 150 years," Mueller said in a telephone interview. "I am not comfortable linking it to global warming. It is difficult to tease out what is due to global warming and what is due to regional warming."
The Arctic region is warming far faster than the rest of the world (I seem to recall estimates of five times faster), if the rest of the world is indeed warming at all, and its related to natural shifts in water and wind currents. Even if the world temperature was stagnant, this area would still likely be warming, and the shelf would have cracked anyway.
Perhaps a marshal could have killed all four or five with no injuries to passengers, but even with injuries/deaths to passengers, the loss of a handful of them would have been preferable to what happened. One man with a gun can quickly calm a few with a knife (particularly if he drops one or two of them), and supervise other passengers in securing the hijackers.
If there had been more, that could be a problem. I'm suprised they managed to get 20 to work together without setting off too many alarms, and as it was, one ended up not making the trip; getting 80 to work together without someone setting off alerts, even pre-9/11, would have been nearly impossible.
SHUT UP! SHUT UP! SHUT UP! SHUT UP!
on
Can You Raed Tihs?
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
I can't go TEN FUCKING MINUTES without this being brought up in IRC, IM, or on the various forums I attend. It's even been brought up TWICE by phone!
Because physical locks aren't black magic beyond their understanding.
No, but to most people they're certainly gray magic at best. Generally speaking, people don't know how a lock operates anymore than they can explain how a password works -- it just does. The difference is that there is a tactile mechanism for it. I've found that some people trust keypads less than they trust combination locks; some have good reaons, and some have not-so-good reasons.
Something that is usually far beyond the understanding of most people but which still engenders trust is a good combination lock. I'm not talking about padlocks -- I mean major vault locks. People trust them because they're complex, but also because part of the mechanism consists of thick bars locking into the vault walls. They can visualize significant parts of the system. Electronic security is an abstraction that many have difficulty following. Hey, sometimes even those of us in the computer security field have to scratch our heads sometimes as we try to envision what's actually happening.
For a long time, lawyers weren't allowed to advertise in the US on TV or radio, and possibly through some other media. They were limited, for the most part, to word of mouth, phone directories, and possibly newspapers. The law changed, IIRC, about 1983, and then things got messy. Here in Southern California, we have to listen to daily (sometimes hourly) messages from Larry H. Parker, who made his name on the back of one of his clients (always shown from the shoulders up) saying, "Larry Parker got me $2.1 million." I remember seeing those when I was still watching cartoons.
This may be one of those rare cases where it's better to lock it down and then open up a few holes for legit stuff to squeak through. Sort of a firewall approach.
As mentioned in another post, this does nothing for the non-paying passengers that end up sitting on the roof, and who constitute most of the injuries and deaths in crashes as they go flying, landing everywhere -- including under the train.
The MP5's is about 650J. The M16's is about 1750J. The M134's is about 4750J.
Wound characteristics are completely different, of course. The 9mm round is more likely to lodge itself in a human target. The M16 round may blow through, or it may hit bone and travel along it. The M134 will almost certainly blow through. The latter two can blow through without significant injury due to the design of the round transferring less energy to the target.
There are, but Microsoft contracted outside to a company that specializes in this. Yahoo did the same thing after they were hit with the DDoS a couple of years back, and they now route through Akamai as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Most of the re-use part of nuclear fuel is, as I understand it, prohibited by government regulation, something having to do with plutonium generation. My understanding of a possible use involving breeder reactors, though, involves using the plutonium's natural decay to enrich uranium fuel, allowing the plutonium to break down into less harmful byproducts while the uranium is enriched for fuel in the near future. This seems a more complete use of the fuel to me, and could result in less hazardous waste.
... For the complete nuclear fuel cycle, from mining to reactor operation to waste disposal, the radiation dose is cited as 136 person-rem/year; the equivalent dose for coal use, from mining to power plant operation to waste disposal, is not listed in this report and is probably unknown."
However, use of plutonium is rather taboo for some reason -- witness the furor over Cassini's radioisotope generator, which some environmentalists claimed could kill thousands in the event of an accident on launch in 1997 or during the flyby of Earth in 1999, with one site suggesting a 10-micron particle could result in the exposure of a person inhaling it to thousands of REMs. Their argument was that the release of the 72 pounds of plutonium would be catastrophic over centuries.
An article in a 1993 Oak Ridge National Laboratories Review states, "according to NCRP Reports No. 92 and No. 95, population exposure from operation of 1000-MWe nuclear and coal-fired power plants amounts to 490 person-rem/year for coal plants and 4.8 person-rem/year for nuclear plants.
Even factoring in mining -- where radioactive dust presumably goes into the air -- and disposal -- where various bits of radioactive dust and water are released -- nuclear plants produced only about a quarter of the average radiation dosage that coal plants do over their lives. I've seen the strip mines that are used to get at uranium, and while it's not pretty, it's not nearly as bad as the destruction of entire mountains in the Appalachians. There is also research going into extracting uranium from seawater for about $120 per pound, which, although about 10 times the current rate, could be more environmentally safe and could provide thousands of years of power, presuming we operated on nuclear power for that length of time.
I'm all for nuclear energy. While I am also a proponent of renewable sources, I don't like the environmental damage caused by hydroelectric. Solar has issues of night-time electricity use, and it is reportedly a messy thing to make, with some pretty dangerous chemicals involved, not including any batteries that would be needed for cloudy days and night use. Wind has issues of reliability, and tidal generators have a range issue, not to mention that I wonder how it would affect the beaches to have thousands of them operating.
I recognize the dangers of nuclear energy. I know that it's hard to clean up, and that there are significant security risks; I'd much rather be in a room with an exposed piece of coal than an exposed piece of reactor-grade uranium. But that piece of uranium will be useful long after the ash from the coal has been carted off and buried. It will have given off no CO2 or nitrogen or sulfur oxides during its use (save whatever transportation is used for it), and less radioactivity.
In balance, I believe that nuclear reactors are a far better source of energy than anything else we have at the moment.
So no more great picutures of the universe like Hubble is famous for. I say that it is well worth the 600 mil to keep it up til at least 2020. As inspiration / backup, Hell that is less than a paltry 60 million a year.
I fully agree, and I'm all for recovering it whenever it's decided that its mission is not to be continued. However, there is much pressure on and within NASA to prevent the shuttle from ever launching into an orbit which will not allow it to dock with the ISS. This prevents either a maintenance or a recovery mission for the Hubble.
And in which case he would be comparing dissimilar OSes, as Windows 2000/2003 servers run $1000 at the low end, IIRC.
You might want to go back and look at that legislation again. Only about $21 billion is going to Iraq, and less than $1.2 billion to Afghanistan. The remainder is for the armed forces, Homeland Security, the State Department, and a few miscellaneous other groups.
Run a Google News search on Kenneth Lay and you'll find the SEC is still breathing down his back. There's a new indictment that was filed this week that names "Enron corporate management" and "Enron managers", though not by name, in allegations of widespread deception efforts as the company neared collapse.
Enron's collapse was a complex mess that will take time to figure out. Not everything is as clear-cut as the MCI case, where the remaining executives were all too happy to let Bernie Evers hang.
Stored in RAM, updated, say, daily, from a central computer via the traffic network, the keys would be inaccessible to the vast majority of people who don't have the ability to read depowered RAM, since maintaining a constant power supply to the box to maintain the RAM would be tricky at best.
An Epilog, perhaps? I know of a shop that uses one from Epilog. I'm wondering what's so new about this, since these kind of lasers have been around for at least a decade.
I've seen this in developers at four different companies. Just because they can write code doesn't mean they keep up to date on their patches. A lot of developers barely know how to power on their systems, let alone when to go looking for patches. It's low priority.
I could be wrong, but I didn't think so. Not supported means they don't support it, not that it doesn't work. The tweaking that is done when you select a specific OS only concerns the configuration, such as amount of memory and stuff. Things you can easily adjust yourself.
Correct. Debian's not supported, but it works. OpenBSD isn't supported, but it (sort of) works. Basically, you have to be prepared to deal with some frustration in things being slow or sometimes unstable, but this does not have to do so much with the emulation as it does with the tools. VMWare has a package that is installed on the virtual machines that contains drivers for the hardware that does need to be virtualized, and a couple of utilities allowing access to a "shared drive" to allow easier movement of files between main system and VM. The Linux tools, BTW, can be compiled individually for each OS. Once I finally got Debian installed, this made things much smoother.
They did. It's called the Itanium. Look how well that's worked out.
Even running it outside of a server, you have to have a special version of Windows, which doesn't have all of the features that the 32-bit Windows does (Windows for the Opteron line is supposed to fix this). It's hideously expensive, meaning fewer people adopted it, which meant that costs stayed high, so there was less encouragement for people to adopt it, even within the server/workstation market in which it was sold.
AMD is going about it the right way. Allow a smooth and orderly transition. That they're going about it using a 64-bit adjustment to x86 makes it more difficult to move on to a new architecture, but perhaps in a few years, this will be looked back on as a successful model.
RTFA, in particular the following two passages:
Local warming of the climate is to blame, they said -- adding that they did not have the evidence needed to link the melting ice to the steady, planet-wide climate change known as global warming.
"There's a regional trend in warming that cycles back 150 years," Mueller said in a telephone interview. "I am not comfortable linking it to global warming. It is difficult to tease out what is due to global warming and what is due to regional warming."
The Arctic region is warming far faster than the rest of the world (I seem to recall estimates of five times faster), if the rest of the world is indeed warming at all, and its related to natural shifts in water and wind currents. Even if the world temperature was stagnant, this area would still likely be warming, and the shelf would have cracked anyway.
Next thing you know, someone's going to start charging for Linux.
Oh, wait...
Perhaps a marshal could have killed all four or five with no injuries to passengers, but even with injuries/deaths to passengers, the loss of a handful of them would have been preferable to what happened. One man with a gun can quickly calm a few with a knife (particularly if he drops one or two of them), and supervise other passengers in securing the hijackers.
If there had been more, that could be a problem. I'm suprised they managed to get 20 to work together without setting off too many alarms, and as it was, one ended up not making the trip; getting 80 to work together without someone setting off alerts, even pre-9/11, would have been nearly impossible.
I can't go TEN FUCKING MINUTES without this being brought up in IRC, IM, or on the various forums I attend. It's even been brought up TWICE by phone!
GRAH!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I recall reading about one being done in the mid-90s, which turned up no significant traces of anything more than schools of fish.
So does the original Half-Life.
Because physical locks aren't black magic beyond their understanding.
No, but to most people they're certainly gray magic at best. Generally speaking, people don't know how a lock operates anymore than they can explain how a password works -- it just does. The difference is that there is a tactile mechanism for it. I've found that some people trust keypads less than they trust combination locks; some have good reaons, and some have not-so-good reasons.
Something that is usually far beyond the understanding of most people but which still engenders trust is a good combination lock. I'm not talking about padlocks -- I mean major vault locks. People trust them because they're complex, but also because part of the mechanism consists of thick bars locking into the vault walls. They can visualize significant parts of the system. Electronic security is an abstraction that many have difficulty following. Hey, sometimes even those of us in the computer security field have to scratch our heads sometimes as we try to envision what's actually happening.
For a long time, lawyers weren't allowed to advertise in the US on TV or radio, and possibly through some other media. They were limited, for the most part, to word of mouth, phone directories, and possibly newspapers. The law changed, IIRC, about 1983, and then things got messy. Here in Southern California, we have to listen to daily (sometimes hourly) messages from Larry H. Parker, who made his name on the back of one of his clients (always shown from the shoulders up) saying, "Larry Parker got me $2.1 million." I remember seeing those when I was still watching cartoons.
The article was posted at 10:42 (my time listing); the response was at 10:43. Since it took me a few minutes to read, my guess is no.
This may be one of those rare cases where it's better to lock it down and then open up a few holes for legit stuff to squeak through. Sort of a firewall approach.
As mentioned in another post, this does nothing for the non-paying passengers that end up sitting on the roof, and who constitute most of the injuries and deaths in crashes as they go flying, landing everywhere -- including under the train.
Should have clarified which were which...
The MP5 is 9mm.
The M16 is 5.56mm.
The M134 is 7.62mm.
Muzzle energies are quite different:
The MP5's is about 650J.
The M16's is about 1750J.
The M134's is about 4750J.
Wound characteristics are completely different, of course. The 9mm round is more likely to lodge itself in a human target. The M16 round may blow through, or it may hit bone and travel along it. The M134 will almost certainly blow through. The latter two can blow through without significant injury due to the design of the round transferring less energy to the target.
The difference is not significant. 275 knots is 319mph, still a fair bit from 400mph.
There are, but Microsoft contracted outside to a company that specializes in this. Yahoo did the same thing after they were hit with the DDoS a couple of years back, and they now route through Akamai as well.