Just imagine if google's cloud-based tablet (http://www.infopackets.com/news/business/google/2010/20100420_google_tablet_rivals_ipad_with_cloud_open_source.htm) had to go up against the iPad4 on an ATT-dominated wireless infrastructure. With ATT's selective bandwidth throttling and caps, you'd effectively be pitting glorified notepad.exe vs. technological opium.
It's pretty clear that the ATT bandwidth cap and purchasing of T-mobile is getting on the nerves of the corporations that have invested so much infrastructure on a cloud-based future that practically necessitates cheaply available bandwidth.
With so much control in the hands of telecom, pushing for net-neutrality is probably the best bet companies like google will have. Impressive how capitalism and "Don't be evil" can align like celestial bodies every now and then. Keep fighting the good fight, Three-Goog!
I'm sorry, but that is one of the most misleading and misinformed sequence of words to get marked up regarding this whole issue.
First off, it should be noted that this reactor was in the middle of what can be considered by the general public as three chronological regimes of reactors:
1. Very unsafe reactors that have little or no passive safeguards (i.e. reactors reminiscent of Chernobyl or Simcity2k's 50 year kaboom) 2. Relatively safe reactors that have many passive safeguards (multiple layers of containment, and spill region with unfavorable fission geometry etc.) but that still rely on external containment measures (active cooling in the situation we're discussing now) And finally 3. Very safe reactors that have many passive safeguards built in for every foreseeable (keyword, so no need to go thinking up magical exceptions to this category) circumstance (such as the capability to snuff themselves out via high concentrations of neutron absorbing daughters etc). As these reactors were being constructed and developed during a period of nonproliferation and disarmament, you see mixed results as many in operation were also once-off prototypes, but there are many places (Japan, France, Canada, etc.) where standarization and continued development/production means that most of the public fear is about as accurate as the tea party's propaganda regarding Kenyan birth records.
As an aside, it's also a good time to note that nuclear power plants are still nothing more than a fancy way to boil water. I.e. after a few heat exchange processes, the steamy water from these reactions is still used to do what water flowing downhill is used for, to drive a turbine.
Now the important part: Shutting down the reactors was by far the correct thing to do here because cooling was necessary for the daughter isotopes. That is, the stuff we've been cooling all this time is the result of decay from before the plant was shut down.
What does this mean? Now here comes the simple part: It means that if you took the exact same situation, but kept the reactors running critically (i.e. no full insertion of control rods), you'd not only continue to generate heat from the primary fission reaction itself, but ALSO continue to generate more heat from the fission of the daughter products.
So sure, you might have had a few hours, hell maybe a day to generate additional energy before the subsequent tsunami--that managed to wipe out: the national electrical grid, thirteen backup diesel generators; and backup batteries that last for eight hours--is now expected to leave your steam turbine energy generation system completely untouched and functional. (http://www.voximate.com/blog/article/1058/failover-backup-systems-redundant/) And in the very very likely case that it doesn't? Well now you have all that additional heat as well as even more daughter products to take care of.
No manuals will be rewritten, if this shit happens again they'll shut down the plants just like they did this time, only get plugs that fit rather than risking a full blown meltdown while hoping that a damaged powerplant can supply its own cooling somehow.
And of-course, if these defunct cores are replaces with newer designs after this is all over, we'll be in much better shape regardless.
I still have huge doubts about this level of complacency. The "everyone will pay pay pay" situation is somewhat reminiscent of Apple's iTunes store and the music industry, but with the main difference that currently, all the content providers are NOT hurting for customers like the music industry is. Whereas joining the Apple club is actually generating more revenue for everyone that works with them, regardless of how steep their membership fee is, ATT's move will end up shafting both content providers and content consumers on both ends.
It's that extra Gibb's free money energy that doesn't exist in the Apple analogy that I believe will drive the entrepreneurial action to undo ATT's greed.
People need to keep in mind that the entire developed global society is moving towards a more bandwidth-usage-heavy internet, and that's not just driven by a few content providers that are able to make backdoors. At some point it will be cheaper for a small company to either sue rather than make such a deal, not everyone can have a backdoor, or else it'd be like not having this cap at all. Not to mention the creation of incentives for smaller broadband providers to provide service to these companies, as well as the incentive for investors to fund these companies.
And as before, too many (keyword, many) large companies have invested heavily in this cloud crap (google tablet that becomes a glorified electronic notepad without internet access, anyone?) to all be making deals with one service provider because they decided to charge for something that cost them next to nothing.
We tolerate this mostly because of the magical "I" word, infrastructure. It was only recently that mobile providers were told to open up their towers to other carriers, allowing local service providers like MetroPCS and whatnot to participate in what used to be dominated by ATT, Verizon and T-mobile. A big push for that came thanks to Google'lobbying, and right now the people that own the phone and cable lines are still making that exact same argument as was made for the cellphone towers, and they're winning.
However, I posted earlier that this might be just the impetus necessary for companies like google to once again come to the rescue.
I meant that the newer companies would be utilizing the judicial branch of our government more, rather than the (often intentionally) uninformed and ineffective legislative branch to address this issue.
On the bright side, since so many companies (Netflix, Google, youtube, any "cloud computing" company with large data usage etc.) have built their business model around the assumption of easily available and cheap bandwidth, we might start seeing companies (i.e. entities with real money and legal power) suing each other to keep internet neutrality, rather than ordinary citizens trying to push it through representatives that still think it's got something to do with their household plumbing. Or if not, at least it'll give up-and-coming broadband providers a better business justification to invest in their own infrastructure.
Fingers crossed that we're a step closer to opening up the relative crap-opoly that is ATT/Comcast in so many regions of this country.
In the old days, the most effective way to clean the cartridge was swabbing the connectors with an alcohol soaked Q-tip. Looks like it'd be an instant high score for this game as well... Funny how some things never change;)
Apologies, forgot to mention but my "separation" scenario was an indirect reference to a couple threads up regarding light and heavy water nuclear reactors (as well as any that have the balls to use a Li breeder blanket).
As an aside, calling tritium "naturally occurring" is about as much of an oxymoron as one can make, since any naturally occuring tritum that was on this planet would have turned into helium before it even cooled down and solidified. Within 100 years, of the Earth's composition settling down to a happy state, there would have been 0.3% of the tritium left that it started out with. As you're referring to the He-3 contribution to Helium's atomic mass, It's more correct to refer to it as just relative abundance in nature, rather than suggesting that there's some constant source of Tritium (which once again, any appreciable quantity that exists now is completely manmade) is decaying into He3 in nature.
Double aside: Same goes for Pu239, which has a half-life of ~24,000 years. That's why all crazy developing-nation-weapons-projects start with the enrichment of Uranium-235 (halflife of 700 billion years, when not pissed off by neutrons).
It's actually a fundamental physics + policy issue, but a different policy than the one you're referring to. As the article very briefly touched on, He-3 comes from the decay of Tritium. Tritium is the stuff that we put into the H-bomb (Fusion reaction rather than the atomic bomb's Fission reaction, basically redonkulously more powerful). The policy in question came from the end of the Cold War, where nonproliferation, disarmament, and the end of tritium creation.
The physics comes in because tritium has a half life of ~13 years. This means that if someone gave you a canister of pure tritium, after two decades it'd be 1/4 tritium, and 3/4 He-3. Do the math for when the cold war ended, and you start to see why we're feeling the hit from the end of this "production cycle".
It's also important to note that H-bombs, crafted from Tritium (Hydrogen-3), have a different yield once enough of the warhead has decayed into He3, which is actually one of the real main reasons why we're reducing our stockpile even though we didn't agree to the nonproliferation treaty. We're re-refining what tritium is left and putting it into new warheads (as a tanent: using more advanced warhead designs than the previous ones they replace too, so nonproliferation/stockpile-reduction in this case is a very generous casting).
While there are many "alternative" ways to create He-3, it's pretty obvious from this situation that trying to buy $150 dollars of decayed bomb innards is definitely going to be cheaper than trying to buy refined nuclear-reactor extract. But at the same time, that was probably taken into account for the final price adjustment to $1500/L.
I'm sorry.. but I think you literally just said something along the lines of:
"Aside from everything you wrote in your post being true, I'm disagreeing with something that was completely not mentioned nor touched upon in your post"
Actually, it's been quite thoroughly studied and shown that the inability to deal with cognitive dissonance is much more of an issue in western cultures than eastern cultures. The Chinese vocabulary even has more words to describe grey areas and situations, and it's been shown those thinking with within that logical framework are better equipped to deal with the grey area than oh say, yourself.
But don't take my word for it! Just reread your own excellent solution you ironically drew right after taking a grandstand on a culture and topic you barely seem to understand, much less see within yourself.
Maybe the only way to deal with this kind of moral squalor we see so often from the mainlanders, is to trumpet their misdeeads from the hilltops as loudly as possible; red Chinee have no morals, but they DO have a honour/shame culture, and will avoid doing the wrong thing if they will be called out on it.
The only way (your understanding of political nuance right there shows you'd do very well in politics! Probably in the Palin 2012 campaign), is to trumpet from hilltops. As loudly as possible, mind you! They [the Chinese] have no morals, (no doubt about that), but they DO have a weakness. That way, we can do this one thing and get this one result.
Yup, airtight and flawless. Not one Chink (see what I did there?) in your armor.
Actually, I didn't take OP's comment to emphasize the "extreme difficulty" of implementation, as the diameter and volume density of the particles in question combined with the actual surface area of the netting gives a negligible cross-section for collision (in other words, I'm pretty sure you'd effectively be winning the space lottery to have a net be rendered noticeably ineffective from microscopic particles). It seemed more logical to read the post as trying to point out that this method would do little to actually stopping the real threat to astronauts right now, being those high energy particles. And in that scenario, the collision of any two large lumps generating thousands more pieces of little particles seemed to be the biggest issue.
It was also an indirect response to all of those who were pondering ideas of running currents through the netting to generate local B fields (pretty sure you'd hit a short circuit by the first intersection of wire) to deflect the small particles, which would greatly increase complexity and mass, and not do much to help the netting achieve its simplest and most beneficial goal.
A single BB at 20000 km/h can burn through a solar panel array, what's to stop it from passing through a fine net?
The end problem is as you've stated, these micro-particles travelling at ridiculous velocities. However these particles are created by the breakup of much larger pieces of debris. There are ~100k+ pieces of large debris (out of which 22,000+ NASA monitors), and it's the collision/disintegration of these larger pieces that result in all the tiny deathballs. By playing Katamari Damacy, the space debris is formed into a giant blob that slowly loses energy via drag. Eventually the orbit decays and the space manatees burn up in the atmosphere (where all that energy is turned into thermal kinetic energy rather than deadly linear kinetic energy).
Metaphorically, it's not exactly saving fish from the microscopic plastic in the sea, but it's at least taking care of the floating plastic island.
Yeah! If they don't, they obviously know what we'll do for situations like that. I mean, just look at Egypt!
I hope those Chinese bastards at the top of the chain of command are ready for all the "No comment" and "We are watching the situation evolve" statements that they can handle. Especially the ones that are managing the $900B in U.S. Debt.
Granted, I shouldn't forget that Egypt isn't even going to the extremes of censoring the internet, all they did was turn the whole thing off.
Was this EVER a proposed cause of the global economic crisis put forth by any reputable source? At first I thought the article was talking about the flash crash last May. I was unaware anyone could look past the many obvious causes of the 2008 collapse and try to blame high speed trading.
What was done back in 2008 wasn't explicitly illegal, just very dishonest and clever exploits of recent deregulation deregulation and loopholes. And as we see now with their taxpayer funded bonuses, the perpetrators of that bullshit are no less bold than they were back then.
What happened in 2010 also wasn't illegal, but obviously scared the crap out of everyone as well (granted on a much shorter-lasting timescale). Did we fix the root of that issue? No, there are some stops put in to bandage any future user-error, but obviously nothing to address the fundamental issue that very rich organizations with very expensive computers are now trading and selling stocks at a rate faster than a human can blink.
Both of these situations suck, but it seems purpose of this report trying to take blame AWAY from the latter, is to remove any potential excuses that the economic titans could possibly use to further weasel their way out of accountability for the former. If anything, we'll see more emboldened algorithms in the microsecond trading arena, but in exchange for possibly more expedited reinstatement/improvements on regulations at a grander level.
Taping over the device to prevent hackers? Man that sounds like some shitty hypothetical initial design and foresight so typical of Microsoft.
Next thing you know M$ will be recommending tape to ensure even basic functionality like the ability to get signal on a phone! Ha those silly bastards.
Apple obviously figured out (through their characteristically thorough market research) that 5 is the optimum number of lobes for further screwing their own customers.
It's rather like how I enjoy The Matrix even though it doesn't make any sense at all.
Yeah but for a bunch of people, they were halfway through a re-watch of The Matrix when it turned into a mash-up of Reloaded and Revolutions; other films they didn't really want to have anything to do with or really even acknowledge ever existed.
Here's the misunderstanding again. Back in the day, age 35 did _not_ mean you'd have gray hair, or show signs of premature aging that technology has magically erased or pushed back.
Heart disease--though the leading cause of death with cancer second, it's second on this list since it has a ridiculous number of causes--has many risk factors that can be directly attributed to more advancements in society: Smoking Physical inactivity Obesity http://chinese-school.netfirms.com/heart-disease-causes.html
While that's a very compelling set of data, and it indeed does adjust for infant mortality by using life expectancy after 10 years of age, I do want to point out that the data set came from just the United States, which of itself only has a ~250 year history.
If you associated this change in life expectancy with technology and societal advancement (rather than the fact that America literally went from surviving in log cabins to indoor plumbing in its brief history), and extrapolated this rise in life expectancy backwards (about 16 years per century), we'd expect very very poor life expectancies from a millenia ago. Actually, with a linear rate of decrease, we'd actually be looking at a life expectancy of:
LE now - years/century * centuries ~ 76 - 16 * 10 ~ -80
Negative 80 years. If you look at the life expectancy from ancient Greece (~400BC, two+ millenia ago) however, you see that the life expectancy wasn't so far behind what the professor had listed for the developing countries in 1800's. With one person quoting a generous ~45 years for males. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centenarian#Centenarians_in_ancient_times
Sure, it's possible to argue a stagnation period in development between 400BC and the 1800's, during the dark ages maybe, but to chalk 2400 years worth of advancement in mankind to a 30 year increase in adult life expectancy, 16 of which apparently occurred in the last century, is a bit much.
The main point with the back of the envelope negative life expectancy math is that there are a number of additional factors much stronger than just "pure technological advancements" that affect the way we live. And to use a country as fortunate as the United States--where most of the money spent in healthcare is in the last year of a person's life (hell, that in itself is worth noting in a separate debate about the quality of the last few years)--is not quite as illustrative an example as one would think.
Although it'd be interesting to see if food poisoning beats out heart disease from obesity or lung cancer from smoking.
Slashdot Mirror
Just imagine if google's cloud-based tablet (http://www.infopackets.com/news/business/google/2010/20100420_google_tablet_rivals_ipad_with_cloud_open_source.htm) had to go up against the iPad4 on an ATT-dominated wireless infrastructure. With ATT's selective bandwidth throttling and caps, you'd effectively be pitting glorified notepad.exe vs. technological opium.
It's pretty clear that the ATT bandwidth cap and purchasing of T-mobile is getting on the nerves of the corporations that have invested so much infrastructure on a cloud-based future that practically necessitates cheaply available bandwidth.
With so much control in the hands of telecom, pushing for net-neutrality is probably the best bet companies like google will have. Impressive how capitalism and "Don't be evil" can align like celestial bodies every now and then.
Keep fighting the good fight, Three-Goog!
I'm sorry, but that is one of the most misleading and misinformed sequence of words to get marked up regarding this whole issue.
First off, it should be noted that this reactor was in the middle of what can be considered by the general public as three chronological regimes of reactors:
1. Very unsafe reactors that have little or no passive safeguards (i.e. reactors reminiscent of Chernobyl or Simcity2k's 50 year kaboom)
2. Relatively safe reactors that have many passive safeguards (multiple layers of containment, and spill region with unfavorable fission geometry etc.) but that still rely on external containment measures (active cooling in the situation we're discussing now)
And finally
3. Very safe reactors that have many passive safeguards built in for every foreseeable (keyword, so no need to go thinking up magical exceptions to this category) circumstance (such as the capability to snuff themselves out via high concentrations of neutron absorbing daughters etc). As these reactors were being constructed and developed during a period of nonproliferation and disarmament, you see mixed results as many in operation were also once-off prototypes, but there are many places (Japan, France, Canada, etc.) where standarization and continued development/production means that most of the public fear is about as accurate as the tea party's propaganda regarding Kenyan birth records.
As an aside, it's also a good time to note that nuclear power plants are still nothing more than a fancy way to boil water. I.e. after a few heat exchange processes, the steamy water from these reactions is still used to do what water flowing downhill is used for, to drive a turbine.
Now the important part: Shutting down the reactors was by far the correct thing to do here because cooling was necessary for the daughter isotopes.
That is, the stuff we've been cooling all this time is the result of decay from before the plant was shut down.
What does this mean? Now here comes the simple part: It means that if you took the exact same situation, but kept the reactors running critically (i.e. no full insertion of control rods), you'd not only continue to generate heat from the primary fission reaction itself, but ALSO continue to generate more heat from the fission of the daughter products.
So sure, you might have had a few hours, hell maybe a day to generate additional energy before the subsequent tsunami--that managed to wipe out: the national electrical grid, thirteen backup diesel generators; and backup batteries that last for eight hours--is now expected to leave your steam turbine energy generation system completely untouched and functional. (http://www.voximate.com/blog/article/1058/failover-backup-systems-redundant/)
And in the very very likely case that it doesn't? Well now you have all that additional heat as well as even more daughter products to take care of.
No manuals will be rewritten, if this shit happens again they'll shut down the plants just like they did this time, only get plugs that fit rather than risking a full blown meltdown while hoping that a damaged powerplant can supply its own cooling somehow.
And of-course, if these defunct cores are replaces with newer designs after this is all over, we'll be in much better shape regardless.
I still have huge doubts about this level of complacency.
The "everyone will pay pay pay" situation is somewhat reminiscent of Apple's iTunes store and the music industry, but with the main difference that currently, all the content providers are NOT hurting for customers like the music industry is. Whereas joining the Apple club is actually generating more revenue for everyone that works with them, regardless of how steep their membership fee is, ATT's move will end up shafting both content providers and content consumers on both ends.
It's that extra Gibb's free money energy that doesn't exist in the Apple analogy that I believe will drive the entrepreneurial action to undo ATT's greed.
And when that happens?
People need to keep in mind that the entire developed global society is moving towards a more bandwidth-usage-heavy internet, and that's not just driven by a few content providers that are able to make backdoors. At some point it will be cheaper for a small company to either sue rather than make such a deal, not everyone can have a backdoor, or else it'd be like not having this cap at all.
Not to mention the creation of incentives for smaller broadband providers to provide service to these companies, as well as the incentive for investors to fund these companies.
And as before, too many (keyword, many) large companies have invested heavily in this cloud crap (google tablet that becomes a glorified electronic notepad without internet access, anyone?) to all be making deals with one service provider because they decided to charge for something that cost them next to nothing.
We tolerate this mostly because of the magical "I" word, infrastructure. It was only recently that mobile providers were told to open up their towers to other carriers, allowing local service providers like MetroPCS and whatnot to participate in what used to be dominated by ATT, Verizon and T-mobile. A big push for that came thanks to Google'lobbying, and right now the people that own the phone and cable lines are still making that exact same argument as was made for the cellphone towers, and they're winning.
However, I posted earlier that this might be just the impetus necessary for companies like google to once again come to the rescue.
http://news.cnet.com/Google-lobbies-for-open-wireless-networks/2100-1039_3-6190863.html
I meant that the newer companies would be utilizing the judicial branch of our government more, rather than the (often intentionally) uninformed and ineffective legislative branch to address this issue.
On the bright side, since so many companies (Netflix, Google, youtube, any "cloud computing" company with large data usage etc.) have built their business model around the assumption of easily available and cheap bandwidth, we might start seeing companies (i.e. entities with real money and legal power) suing each other to keep internet neutrality, rather than ordinary citizens trying to push it through representatives that still think it's got something to do with their household plumbing. Or if not, at least it'll give up-and-coming broadband providers a better business justification to invest in their own infrastructure.
Fingers crossed that we're a step closer to opening up the relative crap-opoly that is ATT/Comcast in so many regions of this country.
In the old days, the most effective way to clean the cartridge was swabbing the connectors with an alcohol soaked Q-tip. Looks like it'd be an instant high score for this game as well... ;)
Funny how some things never change
Apologies, forgot to mention but my "separation" scenario was an indirect reference to a couple threads up regarding light and heavy water nuclear reactors (as well as any that have the balls to use a Li breeder blanket).
As an aside, calling tritium "naturally occurring" is about as much of an oxymoron as one can make, since any naturally occuring tritum that was on this planet would have turned into helium before it even cooled down and solidified. Within 100 years, of the Earth's composition settling down to a happy state, there would have been 0.3% of the tritium left that it started out with. As you're referring to the He-3 contribution to Helium's atomic mass, It's more correct to refer to it as just relative abundance in nature, rather than suggesting that there's some constant source of Tritium (which once again, any appreciable quantity that exists now is completely manmade) is decaying into He3 in nature.
Double aside: Same goes for Pu239, which has a half-life of ~24,000 years. That's why all crazy developing-nation-weapons-projects start with the enrichment of Uranium-235 (halflife of 700 billion years, when not pissed off by neutrons).
It's actually a fundamental physics + policy issue, but a different policy than the one you're referring to. As the article very briefly touched on, He-3 comes from the decay of Tritium. Tritium is the stuff that we put into the H-bomb (Fusion reaction rather than the atomic bomb's Fission reaction, basically redonkulously more powerful). The policy in question came from the end of the Cold War, where nonproliferation, disarmament, and the end of tritium creation.
The physics comes in because tritium has a half life of ~13 years. This means that if someone gave you a canister of pure tritium, after two decades it'd be 1/4 tritium, and 3/4 He-3. Do the math for when the cold war ended, and you start to see why we're feeling the hit from the end of this "production cycle".
It's also important to note that H-bombs, crafted from Tritium (Hydrogen-3), have a different yield once enough of the warhead has decayed into He3, which is actually one of the real main reasons why we're reducing our stockpile even though we didn't agree to the nonproliferation treaty. We're re-refining what tritium is left and putting it into new warheads (as a tanent: using more advanced warhead designs than the previous ones they replace too, so nonproliferation/stockpile-reduction in this case is a very generous casting).
While there are many "alternative" ways to create He-3, it's pretty obvious from this situation that trying to buy $150 dollars of decayed bomb innards is definitely going to be cheaper than trying to buy refined nuclear-reactor extract. But at the same time, that was probably taken into account for the final price adjustment to $1500/L.
Careful what you wish for...
http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/02/17/1828232/Sysbrain-Lets-Satellites-Think-For-Themselves
Haha no problem. From the looks of the moderation, it's apparently bash the Chinaman day regardless.
I'm sorry.. but I think you literally just said something along the lines of:
"Aside from everything you wrote in your post being true, I'm disagreeing with something that was completely not mentioned nor touched upon in your post"
In Eastern Civilization, incongruence is not as excruciating as in Western Civilization. Our civilization wants things in order.
http://www.examiner.com/relationship-psychology-in-mobile/cognitive-dissonance-decision-making
Actually, it's been quite thoroughly studied and shown that the inability to deal with cognitive dissonance is much more of an issue in western cultures than eastern cultures. The Chinese vocabulary even has more words to describe grey areas and situations, and it's been shown those thinking with within that logical framework are better equipped to deal with the grey area than oh say, yourself.
But don't take my word for it! Just reread your own excellent solution you ironically drew right after taking a grandstand on a culture and topic you barely seem to understand, much less see within yourself.
Maybe the only way to deal with this kind of moral squalor we see so often from the mainlanders, is to trumpet their misdeeads from the hilltops as loudly as possible; red Chinee have no morals, but they DO have a honour/shame culture, and will avoid doing the wrong thing if they will be called out on it.
The only way (your understanding of political nuance right there shows you'd do very well in politics! Probably in the Palin 2012 campaign), is to trumpet from hilltops. As loudly as possible, mind you! They [the Chinese] have no morals, (no doubt about that), but they DO have a weakness. That way, we can do this one thing and get this one result.
Yup, airtight and flawless. Not one Chink (see what I did there?) in your armor.
Actually, I didn't take OP's comment to emphasize the "extreme difficulty" of implementation, as the diameter and volume density of the particles in question combined with the actual surface area of the netting gives a negligible cross-section for collision (in other words, I'm pretty sure you'd effectively be winning the space lottery to have a net be rendered noticeably ineffective from microscopic particles). It seemed more logical to read the post as trying to point out that this method would do little to actually stopping the real threat to astronauts right now, being those high energy particles. And in that scenario, the collision of any two large lumps generating thousands more pieces of little particles seemed to be the biggest issue.
It was also an indirect response to all of those who were pondering ideas of running currents through the netting to generate local B fields (pretty sure you'd hit a short circuit by the first intersection of wire) to deflect the small particles, which would greatly increase complexity and mass, and not do much to help the netting achieve its simplest and most beneficial goal.
A single BB at 20000 km/h can burn through a solar panel array, what's to stop it from passing through a fine net?
The end problem is as you've stated, these micro-particles travelling at ridiculous velocities. However these particles are created by the breakup of much larger pieces of debris. There are ~100k+ pieces of large debris (out of which 22,000+ NASA monitors), and it's the collision/disintegration of these larger pieces that result in all the tiny deathballs. By playing Katamari Damacy, the space debris is formed into a giant blob that slowly loses energy via drag. Eventually the orbit decays and the space manatees burn up in the atmosphere (where all that energy is turned into thermal kinetic energy rather than deadly linear kinetic energy).
Metaphorically, it's not exactly saving fish from the microscopic plastic in the sea, but it's at least taking care of the floating plastic island.
Yeah! If they don't, they obviously know what we'll do for situations like that. I mean, just look at Egypt!
I hope those Chinese bastards at the top of the chain of command are ready for all the "No comment" and "We are watching the situation evolve" statements that they can handle. Especially the ones that are managing the $900B in U.S. Debt.
Granted, I shouldn't forget that Egypt isn't even going to the extremes of censoring the internet, all they did was turn the whole thing off.
In that case, our government seems to be sending a mixed message by adding the internet kill-switch back into proposed legislation...
Was this EVER a proposed cause of the global economic crisis put forth by any reputable source? At first I thought the article was talking about the flash crash last May. I was unaware anyone could look past the many obvious causes of the 2008 collapse and try to blame high speed trading.
What was done back in 2008 wasn't explicitly illegal, just very dishonest and clever exploits of recent deregulation deregulation and loopholes. And as we see now with their taxpayer funded bonuses, the perpetrators of that bullshit are no less bold than they were back then.
What happened in 2010 also wasn't illegal, but obviously scared the crap out of everyone as well (granted on a much shorter-lasting timescale). Did we fix the root of that issue? No, there are some stops put in to bandage any future user-error, but obviously nothing to address the fundamental issue that very rich organizations with very expensive computers are now trading and selling stocks at a rate faster than a human can blink.
Both of these situations suck, but it seems purpose of this report trying to take blame AWAY from the latter, is to remove any potential excuses that the economic titans could possibly use to further weasel their way out of accountability for the former. If anything, we'll see more emboldened algorithms in the microsecond trading arena, but in exchange for possibly more expedited reinstatement/improvements on regulations at a grander level.
As geeks, we can only hope the core of Betelgeuse undergoes catastrophic failure in our lifetime.
Or rather, that we find out it underwent a catastrophic failure 600 years ago.
Taping over the device to prevent hackers? Man that sounds like some shitty hypothetical initial design and foresight so typical of Microsoft.
Next thing you know M$ will be recommending tape to ensure even basic functionality like the ability to get signal on a phone! Ha those silly bastards.
Not so mysterious, really.
Apple obviously figured out (through their characteristically thorough market research) that 5 is the optimum number of lobes for further screwing their own customers.
It's rather like how I enjoy The Matrix even though it doesn't make any sense at all.
Yeah but for a bunch of people, they were halfway through a re-watch of The Matrix when it turned into a mash-up of Reloaded and Revolutions; other films they didn't really want to have anything to do with or really even acknowledge ever existed.
Here's the misunderstanding again. Back in the day, age 35 did _not_ mean you'd have gray hair, or show signs of premature aging that technology has magically erased or pushed back.
As for preexisting causes of death:
Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death, it's main cause is from smoking.
http://ezinearticles.com/?The-Leading-Causes-Of-Lung-Cancer&id=162376
Heart disease--though the leading cause of death with cancer second, it's second on this list since it has a ridiculous number of causes--has many risk factors that can be directly attributed to more advancements in society:
Smoking
Physical inactivity
Obesity
http://chinese-school.netfirms.com/heart-disease-causes.html
While that's a very compelling set of data, and it indeed does adjust for infant mortality by using life expectancy after 10 years of age, I do want to point out that the data set came from just the United States, which of itself only has a ~250 year history.
If you associated this change in life expectancy with technology and societal advancement (rather than the fact that America literally went from surviving in log cabins to indoor plumbing in its brief history), and extrapolated this rise in life expectancy backwards (about 16 years per century), we'd expect very very poor life expectancies from a millenia ago. Actually, with a linear rate of decrease, we'd actually be looking at a life expectancy of:
LE now - years/century * centuries ~
76 - 16 * 10 ~ -80
Negative 80 years. If you look at the life expectancy from ancient Greece (~400BC, two+ millenia ago) however, you see that the life expectancy wasn't so far behind what the professor had listed for the developing countries in 1800's. With one person quoting a generous ~45 years for males.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centenarian#Centenarians_in_ancient_times
Sure, it's possible to argue a stagnation period in development between 400BC and the 1800's, during the dark ages maybe, but to chalk 2400 years worth of advancement in mankind to a 30 year increase in adult life expectancy, 16 of which apparently occurred in the last century, is a bit much.
The main point with the back of the envelope negative life expectancy math is that there are a number of additional factors much stronger than just "pure technological advancements" that affect the way we live. And to use a country as fortunate as the United States--where most of the money spent in healthcare is in the last year of a person's life (hell, that in itself is worth noting in a separate debate about the quality of the last few years)--is not quite as illustrative an example as one would think.
Although it'd be interesting to see if food poisoning beats out heart disease from obesity or lung cancer from smoking.