The article said that it was non-weapons grade material used in this reactor. Enriched material is purified and concentrated for specific isotopes.
From: http://www.epa.gov/radiation/mixed-waste/mw_pg5.ht m
Special Nuclear Material (SNM)
SNM is defined in 10 CFR 20.1003 as "(1) Plutonium, uranium-233, uranium enriched in the isotope 233 or in isotope 235, and any other material that the NRC, pursuant to the provisions of section 51 of the AEA, determines to be SNM, but does not include source material; (2) or any material artificially enriched by any of the foregoing but does not include source material." SNM is important in the fabrication of weapons grade materials and as such has strict licensing and handling controls.
What's the toxicity "half-life" of cadmium, lead, mercury, etc.? Forever.
The primary problem with heavy metals is toxicity, not really radioactivity. Water leeching can be prevented by chemically bonding the material into a non-water soluble form. There are even bateria that will do this job for you. Just as you don't worry about quartz or granite leeching into your water supply, if the material is non-water soluble, it's not a concern in that regard. It will be removed by filtration, like asbestos is removed from water today.
The radioactivity can be "effectively eliminated" by dilution; if there is only a tiny amount per cubic meter, then it's not a problem. Think granite and coal, both of which are naturally radioactive. You don't go screaming from granite buildings, do you? You don't worry about inhaling radioactive particles from a coal burning plant, right? As long as the amount per unit volume is small, the radioactivity falls below the natual, always present, background radiation.
Contrary to popular belief, radioactive material isn't manufactured. It's dug up out of the ground and purified.
What comes out of these reactors is much less radioactive, for a much shorter period of time. You can safely put it back in the ground, in a non-water soluble, non-concentrated form.
Yes, you can put that in my backyard too. I strongly suggest that people that consider this a problem not live near me. It will dramatically improve the intelligence in the area.:-)
The typical response with most nuclear devices is "not in my backyard". However, the technology used in modern reactors is exactly the type I DO want. And yes, they can put it in my backyard (heck, they can put it on my property for free, in exchange for free hydrogen, electricty, and heat). I hadn't considered Alaska as a retirement location, but where do I sign up?
Doing this is fine for the x86, but it means that other architectures are shut out. Apple PPC and Sparc-based equipment have the ability to use some of the same hardware, but this solution means that drivers will not be accessible to them. Do we really want all our eggs in the WinIntel basket?
I'd rather see this used as a tool to make reverse engineering easier. Of course, for that to be true, it would probably require that the wrappers be open source.
Sounds like a lose-lose proposition, for short-term gain.
It's an interesting perspective. Playing devil's advocate, if the two packages are incompatible at some level, why is the problem on the OpenOffice side?
It's not like MS Office is compatible with everyone except OpenOffice. And there is that whole convicted monopolist thing going against Microsoft, too.
As Microsoft is the current market leader, shouldn't they be endeavoring to improve compatability with other software their customers use? MS Office doesn't run on every platform, so compatibility is a requirement, even if Microsoft considers Linux a competitor.
If Microsoft makes a business decision, as they have, not to support Hebrew then they have taken themselves out of the sales competition in that market. Six million potential customers is a big chunk to give up.
Of course, now those OpenOffice users will be requiring interoperability from their vendors...
Anyone remember when you could go to the movies without the police having to have a car at the theater? It seems to be the norm here, and I stopped going to the theater a couple of months ago. Nothing but noisy gangs of kids, drugs, cops. Maybe that adds to the experience for a Quentin Tarantino flick, but not much else. My wife and I spent about $75 a week on that, until it became too much of a hassle.
Get youself a big screen TV, great sound system and join Netflix. Your break even point will only be a couple of years, and the food's better (and healthier).
Check out The Network CallerID Project, NCID. I've been using it for about a year, and it's very effective. You can use a simple user program to call festival (which I do), and voice announce the name of the caller (or not announce some callers, like telemarketers). If you turn the ringers on your phone off, you'll never be bothered again. The network capability lets my (802.11b connected) laptop display the information too, wherever I am in the house. Great software!
The reason that it has come to a legal device like the do-not-call list, is that some telemarketers have abused their privileges.
I have had telemarketers laugh at me when I politely asked to be removed from their call lists. I have had telemarketers actually berate me for not interrupting them sooner to tell them I was not interested. I have had the same company telemarketer call me six times a day (they don't all block CallerID).
Yes, I have filed complaints with the companies involved. I have gotten polite responses. I have never gotten my name removed from any call lists (at least not that I can tell from the dozen calls a day that I have gotten).
The last couple of days, the silence is deafening! I guess an $11,000 fine per offense is an adequate deterrent.
Mainframes, using Logical Partitioning (LPAR) or the z/VM operating system, use a microcode facility in the CPUs called SIE (start interpretive execution) to run multiple operating systems concurrently.
This allows the CPU to schedule and dispatch a virtual system (in its chosen architectual mode and configuration) with a single instruction. Execution under SIE continues until the end of the dispatch timeslice, or intervention is required from the hypervisor. This dramatically simplifies the operation of LPAR or z/VM. The instruction takes a 4k descriptor block as a parameter, which describes all the attributes and configuration of the virtual system.
Essentially, when IBM created the SIE instruction, they moved the bulk of the (pre-SIE) VM operating system into microcode. This is an extraordinarily powerful facility. We can only hope that Intel has something similar in mind.
More info on SIE here: http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/301/ibmsj30 01E.pdf
That's all it takes. I installed yum from FreshRPMs, and no configuration was required.
If you issue the following two commands:
chkconfig yum on
service yum start
then any software you have installed will be kept up-to-date automatically, every night. It doesn't have to be hard to use Linux. Why do people insist on making it appear harder than it is? To frighten noobies?
"T1 is 1.5 both ways, and its GUARANTEED service."
True, but only between the termination points, and assuming that there is no constrained resource on the end-point equipment. Throughput is governed by many variable. Same for cable, same for DSL. Connecting to a busy server over a dedicated T1 will still only give you a trickle of data, no matter what the size of your pipe is.
Affordability (or lack thereof) is not justification for downloading it illegally
It's human nature, and anything that goes against that is going to fail (or at least have a real hard time).
If a bag of money falls out of an armored car and the money starts blowing around you will:
Collect as many bills as you can, and return them to the company, or
Collect as many bills as you can, to buy that plasma TV.
Most people will keep the money they find. It's human nature (greed). Companies aren't the only ones that are greedy. The only way to overcome greed, is with another aspect of human nature; sloth. If it's just easier/better to pay for something than to get it for free, people will do that.
If there are only one or two dollar bills being blown around in a strong wind, few people will bother to chase them down.
How good do you think Microsoft's support is going to be when you have a problem with Linux in the VMs? VMWare is OS neutral; Microsoft is not. When a company calls a product you use a cancer, I don't think you want their help solving a problem; you lose all your leverage.
I don't even trust paper ballots. I had an old college professor who used to say, "if you're going to cheat, don't change the results, change the raw data".
Paper ballots that match the manipulated result can be produced well in advance, and substituted for the actual ballots before the results are announced.
Then, when the outrage and recount demands occur (think Florida), you can go back to the ballots and "verify" the result. Remember the warehoused boxes of ballots they "found" in Florida?
The physical replacement of a few tons of paper is the easy part, and most people forget that. Any system that is intended to replace the current system must be secure and trusted end-to-end.
OK, so we devise a great, secure, verifiable and auditable, accessible, open source system for voting.
Election day roles around, and candidate X wins over candidate Y by 17% of the vote.
Who's counting and reporting on the votes? Do you trust them? Do you trust the auditors?
Unless the system provides open access for counting and auditing the vote, it's still not going to provide the level of trust needed. Everyone needs to be able to see and validate the result at the same time.
Trusting the code is only half the problem. From the article:
"Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything." --Russian Dictator Joseph Stalin
I won't see this movie, because I was a fan of the series. I'm tied of being yanked around by the studios.
Everytime I get interested in a program, it gets cancelled, usually without closure. Sometimes the cancellation occurs on a cliff-hanger, like "John Doe". That's a clear indication that the studios have no respect for the viewers; why should I have any respect for them? If they are not going to make a multi-year commitment, why should I?
Firefly, FarScape, John Doe are all recent casualties. I'm pissed. I've decided to drop back, and wait for a few seasons before I start watching any new program. If it doesn't survive, then at least I wasn't impacted. If it's getting good buzz after a few seasons, then I'll watch the reruns or DVD to catch up.
If this means that new shows won't get done, that's fine too. I'm old enough to know there are better things I should be spending my time on anyway (even/. qualifies in that regard).:-)
It doesn't matter what address you use on your internal network, so long as you use NAT. You can pick ANY valid IP address; anyone you connect to will only see the external address, not the internal network address range.
Every company in the world could use the same internal address range, and return all their privately held addresses. They only need:
(number of externally visible servers / 65535)
Internet visible addresses. For most every company in the world, that's just one address.
Many companies (especially the larger, older ones) use "real" adddresses internally, for historical reasons. Many have also switched to DHCP, which would make giving up those addresses easier. Why does the printer in the corner that is only accessible to the local net need a unique Internet address?
Unfortunately, IP addresses are like spectrum; once a company has them, it's a corporate resource. The idea of giving them up (without compensation) is insane.
In the "old days" crystal radios were popular. No battery, just an antenna, ground, tuning coil, "cat's whisker" diode, and earphone. The power is supplied by the radio signal itself. Reception was pretty good, even 50 miles from the transmitter.
Now, if you want real power, run 1000+ feet of wire elevated and insulated from the ground. Instead of just harvesting RF, you've now created a long-wire capacitor, and you are harvesting static electricity from the moving air! These were usually combined with a spark gap (an old spark plug), and step-down transformer to create a pulse charger for a battery. See:
http://www.zetatalk.com/energy/tengx084.htm
By the way, a neon bulb is not a flourescent bulb. A neon bulb is a small glass bulb filled with neon gas, with two connections. It draws less than a watt, but needs high voltage (70V or so) to light.
Back when I was a cub scout (about 40 years ago), we ran a 50 foot wire and a ground connection. Connected them to a neon bulb and it lit up.
What's happening, if it isn't obvious, is that the radio signals broadcast all over the place are being "harvested" by the wire (antenna).
Forty years later, there's so much more RF (cell phones, cordless phones, 802.11, more radio stations, leakage from power lines, etc.), you could probably get the same effect with a 10 foot wire, especially in urban areas.
The wire can be (at least partially) coiled so it doesn't take as much space. It can also be "tuned" (trimmed to a specific length) to optimize signal reception. With a small capacitor to smooth fluctuations, you have more than enough power for micro-electronic devices.
Slashdot Mirror
The article said that it was non-weapons grade material used in this reactor. Enriched material is purified and concentrated for specific isotopes.
t m
From: http://www.epa.gov/radiation/mixed-waste/mw_pg5.h
Special Nuclear Material (SNM)
SNM is defined in 10 CFR 20.1003 as "(1) Plutonium, uranium-233, uranium enriched in the isotope 233 or in isotope 235, and any other material that the NRC, pursuant to the provisions of section 51 of the AEA, determines to be SNM, but does not include source material; (2) or any material artificially enriched by any of the foregoing but does not include source material." SNM is important in the fabrication of weapons grade materials and as such has strict licensing and handling controls.
What's the toxicity "half-life" of cadmium, lead, mercury, etc.? Forever.
The primary problem with heavy metals is toxicity, not really radioactivity. Water leeching can be prevented by chemically bonding the material into a non-water soluble form. There are even bateria that will do this job for you. Just as you don't worry about quartz or granite leeching into your water supply, if the material is non-water soluble, it's not a concern in that regard. It will be removed by filtration, like asbestos is removed from water today.
The radioactivity can be "effectively eliminated" by dilution; if there is only a tiny amount per cubic meter, then it's not a problem. Think granite and coal, both of which are naturally radioactive. You don't go screaming from granite buildings, do you? You don't worry about inhaling radioactive particles from a coal burning plant, right? As long as the amount per unit volume is small, the radioactivity falls below the natual, always present, background radiation.
Contrary to popular belief, radioactive material isn't manufactured. It's dug up out of the ground and purified.
:-)
What comes out of these reactors is much less radioactive, for a much shorter period of time. You can safely put it back in the ground, in a non-water soluble, non-concentrated form.
Yes, you can put that in my backyard too. I strongly suggest that people that consider this a problem not live near me. It will dramatically improve the intelligence in the area.
The typical response with most nuclear devices is "not in my backyard". However, the technology used in modern reactors is exactly the type I DO want. And yes, they can put it in my backyard (heck, they can put it on my property for free, in exchange for free hydrogen, electricty, and heat). I hadn't considered Alaska as a retirement location, but where do I sign up?
Doing this is fine for the x86, but it means that other architectures are shut out. Apple PPC and Sparc-based equipment have the ability to use some of the same hardware, but this solution means that drivers will not be accessible to them. Do we really want all our eggs in the WinIntel basket?
I'd rather see this used as a tool to make reverse engineering easier. Of course, for that to be true, it would probably require that the wrappers be open source.
Sounds like a lose-lose proposition, for short-term gain.
Both democrats and republicans are interchaneable parts as far as I'm concerned.
"What are you going to do? You have to vote for one of us!"
"We'll vote independent!"
"Go ahead! Throw away your vote!"
-Simpsons
It's an interesting perspective. Playing devil's advocate, if the two packages are incompatible at some level, why is the problem on the OpenOffice side?
It's not like MS Office is compatible with everyone except OpenOffice. And there is that whole convicted monopolist thing going against Microsoft, too.
As Microsoft is the current market leader, shouldn't they be endeavoring to improve compatability with other software their customers use? MS Office doesn't run on every platform, so compatibility is a requirement, even if Microsoft considers Linux a competitor.
If Microsoft makes a business decision, as they have, not to support Hebrew then they have taken themselves out of the sales competition in that market. Six million potential customers is a big chunk to give up.
Of course, now those OpenOffice users will be requiring interoperability from their vendors...
Anyone remember when you could go to the movies without the police having to have a car at the theater? It seems to be the norm here, and I stopped going to the theater a couple of months ago. Nothing but noisy gangs of kids, drugs, cops. Maybe that adds to the experience for a Quentin Tarantino flick, but not much else. My wife and I spent about $75 a week on that, until it became too much of a hassle.
Get youself a big screen TV, great sound system and join Netflix. Your break even point will only be a couple of years, and the food's better (and healthier).
D-Link has some nice units that are OS independant.
How many computers does it take before they finally "wake up"?
Check out The Network CallerID Project, NCID. I've been using it for about a year, and it's very effective. You can use a simple user program to call festival (which I do), and voice announce the name of the caller (or not announce some callers, like telemarketers). If you turn the ringers on your phone off, you'll never be bothered again. The network capability lets my (802.11b connected) laptop display the information too, wherever I am in the house. Great software!
The reason that it has come to a legal device like the do-not-call list, is that some telemarketers have abused their privileges.
I have had telemarketers laugh at me when I politely asked to be removed from their call lists. I have had telemarketers actually berate me for not interrupting them sooner to tell them I was not interested. I have had the same company telemarketer call me six times a day (they don't all block CallerID).
Yes, I have filed complaints with the companies involved. I have gotten polite responses. I have never gotten my name removed from any call lists (at least not that I can tell from the dozen calls a day that I have gotten).
The last couple of days, the silence is deafening! I guess an $11,000 fine per offense is an adequate deterrent.
This allows the CPU to schedule and dispatch a virtual system (in its chosen architectual mode and configuration) with a single instruction. Execution under SIE continues until the end of the dispatch timeslice, or intervention is required from the hypervisor. This dramatically simplifies the operation of LPAR or z/VM. The instruction takes a 4k descriptor block as a parameter, which describes all the attributes and configuration of the virtual system.
Essentially, when IBM created the SIE instruction, they moved the bulk of the (pre-SIE) VM operating system into microcode. This is an extraordinarily powerful facility. We can only hope that Intel has something similar in mind.
More info on SIE here: http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/301/ibmsj30 01E.pdf
That's all it takes. I installed yum from FreshRPMs, and no configuration was required.
If you issue the following two commands:
then any software you have installed will be kept up-to-date automatically, every night. It doesn't have to be hard to use Linux. Why do people insist on making it appear harder than it is? To frighten noobies?
True, but only between the termination points, and assuming that there is no constrained resource on the end-point equipment. Throughput is governed by many variable. Same for cable, same for DSL. Connecting to a busy server over a dedicated T1 will still only give you a trickle of data, no matter what the size of your pipe is.
I thought they already did.
One step with yum:
yum install mplayer
Same for Xine, ogle, videolan-client
Yum!
There should be a yum rpm available for most releases (check with your distribution), including Yellowdog on Macs running ppc Linux.
It's human nature, and anything that goes against that is going to fail (or at least have a real hard time).
If a bag of money falls out of an armored car and the money starts blowing around you will:
Most people will keep the money they find. It's human nature (greed). Companies aren't the only ones that are greedy. The only way to overcome greed, is with another aspect of human nature; sloth. If it's just easier/better to pay for something than to get it for free, people will do that.
If there are only one or two dollar bills being blown around in a strong wind, few people will bother to chase them down.
How good do you think Microsoft's support is going to be when you have a problem with Linux in the VMs? VMWare is OS neutral; Microsoft is not. When a company calls a product you use a cancer, I don't think you want their help solving a problem; you lose all your leverage.
Paper ballots that match the manipulated result can be produced well in advance, and substituted for the actual ballots before the results are announced.
Then, when the outrage and recount demands occur (think Florida), you can go back to the ballots and "verify" the result. Remember the warehoused boxes of ballots they "found" in Florida?
The physical replacement of a few tons of paper is the easy part, and most people forget that. Any system that is intended to replace the current system must be secure and trusted end-to-end.
OK, so we devise a great, secure, verifiable and auditable, accessible, open source system for voting.
Election day roles around, and candidate X wins over candidate Y by 17% of the vote.
Who's counting and reporting on the votes? Do you trust them? Do you trust the auditors?
Unless the system provides open access for counting and auditing the vote, it's still not going to provide the level of trust needed. Everyone needs to be able to see and validate the result at the same time.
Trusting the code is only half the problem. From the article:
"Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything." --Russian Dictator Joseph Stalin
Everytime I get interested in a program, it gets cancelled, usually without closure. Sometimes the cancellation occurs on a cliff-hanger, like "John Doe". That's a clear indication that the studios have no respect for the viewers; why should I have any respect for them? If they are not going to make a multi-year commitment, why should I?
Firefly, FarScape, John Doe are all recent casualties. I'm pissed. I've decided to drop back, and wait for a few seasons before I start watching any new program. If it doesn't survive, then at least I wasn't impacted. If it's getting good buzz after a few seasons, then I'll watch the reruns or DVD to catch up.
If this means that new shows won't get done, that's fine too. I'm old enough to know there are better things I should be spending my time on anyway (even /. qualifies in that regard). :-)
It doesn't matter what address you use on your internal network, so long as you use NAT. You can pick ANY valid IP address; anyone you connect to will only see the external address, not the internal network address range.
Every company in the world could use the same internal address range, and return all their privately held addresses. They only need:
(number of externally visible servers / 65535)
Internet visible addresses. For most every company in the world, that's just one address.
Many companies (especially the larger, older ones) use "real" adddresses internally, for historical reasons. Many have also switched to DHCP, which would make giving up those addresses easier. Why does the printer in the corner that is only accessible to the local net need a unique Internet address?
Unfortunately, IP addresses are like spectrum; once a company has them, it's a corporate resource. The idea of giving them up (without compensation) is insane.
Heh, no offense, but you must be pretty young. :-)
In the "old days" crystal radios were popular. No battery, just an antenna, ground, tuning coil, "cat's whisker" diode, and earphone. The power is supplied by the radio signal itself. Reception was pretty good, even 50 miles from the transmitter.
Now, if you want real power, run 1000+ feet of wire elevated and insulated from the ground. Instead of just harvesting RF, you've now created a long-wire capacitor, and you are harvesting static electricity from the moving air! These were usually combined with a spark gap (an old spark plug), and step-down transformer to create a pulse charger for a battery. See:
http://www.zetatalk.com/energy/tengx084.htm
By the way, a neon bulb is not a flourescent bulb. A neon bulb is a small glass bulb filled with neon gas, with two connections. It draws less than a watt, but needs high voltage (70V or so) to light.
Back when I was a cub scout (about 40 years ago), we ran a 50 foot wire and a ground connection. Connected them to a neon bulb and it lit up.
What's happening, if it isn't obvious, is that the radio signals broadcast all over the place are being "harvested" by the wire (antenna).
Forty years later, there's so much more RF (cell phones, cordless phones, 802.11, more radio stations, leakage from power lines, etc.), you could probably get the same effect with a 10 foot wire, especially in urban areas.
The wire can be (at least partially) coiled so it doesn't take as much space. It can also be "tuned" (trimmed to a specific length) to optimize signal reception. With a small capacitor to smooth fluctuations, you have more than enough power for micro-electronic devices.