First, email the people on this list and tell them the money saved denying Renee a Medevac flight will not be worth the bad press. Ask them to do the right thing.
Please no. This really isn't about saving money. If that's all it was, they'd do the flight just to head off the bad PR.
Sending a flight to the south pole in adverse conditions costs lives. Figuring a 1 in 15 chance of a crash per round trip and a flight crew of 3, that's 0.2 lives you're paying to airlift her out of there.
That's an acceptable risk for someone who will die unless they're rescued, but that's not the case: she had a stroke; the damage is done. They probably have her on blood thinners now and she's off-duty and taking it easy, which is basically all that they can do for her in a proper hospital to prevent a recurrence. Any rehab therapy she needs can be adequately done by videoconference until they can get a flight down there.
I understand, but this article was about a way to save HP's computers, not trying to save HP.
Of course, unlike the ThinkPad, I'm not sure why people would care about saving HP's PCs. ThinkPads were top-shelf; Compaq/HP was decent midrange, but never standout.
The initial learning curve is harder, and you'll want a good soldering iron, but once you've cleared those hurdles hand soldering SMD is a piece of cake.
Reflow soldering is completely hobbyist-accessible too: I use a syringe of solder paste to put little dots on all the pads, tweezers to place all the components, and then I lay it in a bare aluminum (NO TEFLON!) frying pan. Throw it on the stove for five minutes and pluck the board out with a pair of needle nose pliers (the pan cools too slowly) after all the solder melts.
The surface tension of the melted solder pulls all the components into alignment, so you don't have to place them perfectly. A few pins usually get messed up since I'm not as precise with the syringe as I would be with a stencil, but I just inspect with a cheap loupe and clean up any mistakes manually. Other people use toaster ovens with much success, but I've found the frying pan works great for single-sided boards.
Honestly I find it's much less tedious than through-hole soldering, and I love having access to all the cool SMD ICs that you just can't get in DIP packages. The only problem is that prototyping is a bitch. If you want to breadboard a SMD IC you have to make a SMD to DIP adapter board first. But I usually don't bother: I just design my board, get one made, manually kludge around any mistakes by lifting pins and soldering in fine wires until I get it working (usually only one or two wires per board), and then get a final one made.
some combination of horsepower reduction, weight reduction, better aerodynamics and possibly hybridization
... OK, so why is it bad that we're making them do these things? They won't be at a competitive disadvantage if all the other players are doing it too, so it's just making them take on some engineering costs to make a better product that benefits everyone in the long run.
And there are more techniques: lean-burn, drive by wire, higher compression carefully tuned with more sophisticated ECUs, variable valve timing, direct injection... There are lots of technology improvements that can be made.
I'd prefer they raise the price of gas until the changes are driven by consumer demand, but that's politically unpopular.
I never know when some story is going to get posted with completely false information in the headline or summary
This.
Slashdot is billing itself as "news". I'm tired of reading headlines that are spun or outright lying to maximize nerd rage. You're not doing original reporting here, so the bare minimum is the editors need to RTFA and see if the summary and headline are accurate and from a vaguely credible source. Bonus points if you actually fact-check the articles.
Uh, no. It has a fin for stability. The whole design of the car (long and narrow) is set up for linear speed, not agility. The fin doesn't improve the speed other than preventing you from crashing before you top out.
If you want to build an agile electric car, it'd look something like a Tesla Roadster.
I think I speak for everyone when I say: Fuck you, no it's not. I don't have any problems encrypting my personal backups even though I have nothing more private to protect than porn. You people are supposed to be professionals. Telling people their data is safe because it would require "special hardware and software" to read the tapes is pathetic. Get your shit together, sir.
The pressure vessels may be breached, but most of the fuel is still inside them, and the remainder is still inside the containment vessels. The containment still holds pressure even if the pressure vessels are breached.
"Cold shutdown" means that it's cold enough to not boil at atmospheric pressure. We can know when that happens: the pressure is easy to monitor, and if there's no big plume of steam, it's not boiling.
Normally you'd shove the control rods in and slow the reactions until not enough heat is generated to overheat even without special cooling (perhaps just immersed). But the cores are too melted for that I presume.
Shutdown: Reactivity is some safety margin below critical. The thermal power level will gradually fall.
Cold shutdown: The power level has fallen low enough that the cooling water doesn't boil even when depressurized. Active cooling may still be required.
Nuclear reaction: chain reactions where neutrons split atoms releasing more neutrons.
Decay heat: When the reactor is running shot-half-life nuclides are formed. After shutdown these continue to decay for a long time, releasing heat. There is no chain reaction, only spontaneous decays. Here's what the decay curve looks like.
The Fukushima reactors are shut down - they were immediately scrammed when the quake happened. There may have been some recriticality events, but these would be brief - the BWR design requires liquid water to moderate neutrons. Even if the entire core melted into a single blob it wouldn't be critical: it requires a bunch of water interspersed with the fuel. It's possible that the fuel fell to the bottom of the reactor vessel in little chipped up pieces with water between and formed a critical configuration, but doing so will create local heating which results in at least one of: churning until it settles in a subcritical configuration; melting the fuel until it's a solid blob instead of chunked thus creating a subcritical configuration; the water boils thereby depriving the core of the moderator, and the reaction stops. It will be a while before we know if any of these things happened.
Right now we're just waiting while the decay heat falls. It will reliably do so and eventually active cooling won't be necessary to prevent boiling.
I'm not saying "few" to weasel out by limiting the scope of my argument. Let me rephrase: "That's a simple and absolute fact that's persisted from the beginning of life on Earth (estimated 3.5-4.5 billion years ago) to the present day." Better?
Water blocks UVC, and we didn't start crawling out of the ocean until 1-1.5 billion years ago, long after the ozone layer was established.
Adaptation to UVC has never occurred on this planet, partly because it's hard, but mostly because it's not been necessary. Sure, anything could happen in the future, but that's a simple and absolute fact regarding the last few billion years here.
I reflect on the megadeaths generated by rotten concepts vs a few individuals being damaged. Hee, playing carelessly with claimed absolutes is a lot like the static concept.
You're asking me to compromise on the way I present scientific facts because you don't like the political implications of my language. Fuck that.
You should buy an electric fence generator. Just run a wire along the bottom corner of your entryway. No need to catch them in the act, and I guarantee you they will get the message.
You may want to leave a security camera running for YouTube's sake, though.:)
I and the other eukaryotes are offended by your speciesism.
Do considder that the Earth isn't the only source of life.
I admit I'm being Earth-centric. I'm sure somewhere in the universe some critters have found a way.
On this rock, though, you can stick a 254nm lamp under the bio hood and it really won't matter what kind of awful bugs you were growing... In a few minutes they'll all be dead.
These are industrial lamps, several feet long and a couple dozen watts each. Yes, the bodies are fused quartz, but it's not a notch filter; they let 254nm out too.
Some plastics live longer, but the PVC on power cords yellows within minutes, probably from the organobromide flame retardants breaking down. I stood across the room for that test for a reason... Those things are violent.
I wouldn't want to leave even a low-power test source running in the open. That's just begging for someone to take a close look at the pretty glowy purple thing.
If you care to try it, run your source for a few minutes pointed into an enclosed area like a bottle or a box. You should be able to get a good whiff of ozone when you open it up. Don't inhale too deep!
Fortunately we were all living underwater back then. Before the Oxygen Catastrophe we were really damn deep where there's no light at any wavelength. Even the green things stayed well under the surface until the ozone layer was established.
Nothing has ever lived in the presence of UVC. There are few absolutes in biology, and I certainly want my readers to consider the implications of that before they go experimenting with short wavelengths: life evolves to fill any niche it can, but it has never gone there, and neither should you.
Brief glimpses won't hurt you at low power levels - this isn't a laser leaving a scorch track wherever it goes. The danger is in continuous exposure where your total absorbed dose accumulates to high levels.
365nm at a few watts is pretty low (but nonzero) risk. I work in a room with 300 watts of 365nm in the open every day and I don't really give it any thought when the lights click on.
Life has not evolved ways to deal with anything below about 300nm, which does not occur on the surface of the earth. 254nm is what they use for germicidal lamps. It kills bacteria by causing massive DNA damage... Consider that. Your skin is a little more resilient, but like sun exposure, it will result in sunburn if you blast yourself with a high dose, and over time it causes skin aging and eventually cancer. On your eyes you're running the risk of cataracts.
On the upside: your glasses almost certainly block 254nm. Pretty much everything does - the bulbs and any windows are made of fused quartz which is one of very few things that will pass 254nm. It also doesn't tend to reflect around as much as visible light. Even shiny aluminum surfaces will absorb most of it. Silver mirrors reflect it as long as it's first-surface reflections; glass in front will absorb it. So perhaps you're not getting that much exposure except when you reach under the lamp. You can measure it with a radiometer if you have one handy to see how much is really being reflected toward you.
My suggestion: I always use glasses regardless of exposure. For your skin, it kind of depends how you use it. If you flip the lights on for a minute to examine a sample and then turn them off, and you're only reaching under the light for a few seconds, it might be OK to accept (but not ignore!) the skin risks. If you're leaving samples to react under the lights for hours at a time, I'd suggest you go down to Tap Plastics and buy a sheet of polycarbonate - it's what they use in UV safety goggles, and it's completely opaque to UV. Attach it to the front of the bench, and just reach around when you have to prod your sample.
UV is a very wide spectrum. Near-UV isn't too scary.
UV-A (400-315 nm) is OK for short-term exposure. Your pupils won't constrict like they do for visible light, so keep the intensity low. Plain old blacklights are 350-400nm with the peak at 365nm, plus a small peak in the very bottom of the visible spectrum (which is the purple glow).
UV-B (315-280 nm) will probably be invisible, and it will do bad things to your eyes, so please stick to very low intensities if you want to fool with this. Read up on the risks first.
UV-C (280-100 nm) is utterly hostile to biology - the upper atmosphere filters this range out so life never evolved mechanisms to deal with it. Actually, UV-C is hostile to damn near everything: just from my own experience, it bleaches everything, and most plastics will degrade and become brittle with mere hours of exposure. I've test-fired a 185nm lamp in the open for a few seconds (wearing goggles!) and even across the room you can instantly smell ozone forming as it starts ripping oxygen apart. Stay away!
Slashdot Mirror
First, email the people on this list and tell them the money saved denying Renee a Medevac flight will not be worth the bad press. Ask them to do the right thing.
Please no. This really isn't about saving money. If that's all it was, they'd do the flight just to head off the bad PR.
Sending a flight to the south pole in adverse conditions costs lives. Figuring a 1 in 15 chance of a crash per round trip and a flight crew of 3, that's 0.2 lives you're paying to airlift her out of there.
That's an acceptable risk for someone who will die unless they're rescued, but that's not the case: she had a stroke; the damage is done. They probably have her on blood thinners now and she's off-duty and taking it easy, which is basically all that they can do for her in a proper hospital to prevent a recurrence. Any rehab therapy she needs can be adequately done by videoconference until they can get a flight down there.
I understand, but this article was about a way to save HP's computers, not trying to save HP.
Of course, unlike the ThinkPad, I'm not sure why people would care about saving HP's PCs. ThinkPads were top-shelf; Compaq/HP was decent midrange, but never standout.
The initial learning curve is harder, and you'll want a good soldering iron, but once you've cleared those hurdles hand soldering SMD is a piece of cake.
Reflow soldering is completely hobbyist-accessible too: I use a syringe of solder paste to put little dots on all the pads, tweezers to place all the components, and then I lay it in a bare aluminum (NO TEFLON!) frying pan. Throw it on the stove for five minutes and pluck the board out with a pair of needle nose pliers (the pan cools too slowly) after all the solder melts.
The surface tension of the melted solder pulls all the components into alignment, so you don't have to place them perfectly. A few pins usually get messed up since I'm not as precise with the syringe as I would be with a stencil, but I just inspect with a cheap loupe and clean up any mistakes manually. Other people use toaster ovens with much success, but I've found the frying pan works great for single-sided boards.
Honestly I find it's much less tedious than through-hole soldering, and I love having access to all the cool SMD ICs that you just can't get in DIP packages. The only problem is that prototyping is a bitch. If you want to breadboard a SMD IC you have to make a SMD to DIP adapter board first. But I usually don't bother: I just design my board, get one made, manually kludge around any mistakes by lifting pins and soldering in fine wires until I get it working (usually only one or two wires per board), and then get a final one made.
some combination of horsepower reduction, weight reduction, better aerodynamics and possibly hybridization
... OK, so why is it bad that we're making them do these things? They won't be at a competitive disadvantage if all the other players are doing it too, so it's just making them take on some engineering costs to make a better product that benefits everyone in the long run.
And there are more techniques: lean-burn, drive by wire, higher compression carefully tuned with more sophisticated ECUs, variable valve timing, direct injection... There are lots of technology improvements that can be made.
I'd prefer they raise the price of gas until the changes are driven by consumer demand, but that's politically unpopular.
Why do they care if it's a proxy when I'm logged in?
Actually, it's by current law in California.
I never know when some story is going to get posted with completely false information in the headline or summary
This.
Slashdot is billing itself as "news". I'm tired of reading headlines that are spun or outright lying to maximize nerd rage. You're not doing original reporting here, so the bare minimum is the editors need to RTFA and see if the summary and headline are accurate and from a vaguely credible source. Bonus points if you actually fact-check the articles.
capped by a tail fin for speed and agility
Uh, no. It has a fin for stability. The whole design of the car (long and narrow) is set up for linear speed, not agility. The fin doesn't improve the speed other than preventing you from crashing before you top out.
If you want to build an agile electric car, it'd look something like a Tesla Roadster.
It's very hard to encrypt a backup tape.
I think I speak for everyone when I say: Fuck you, no it's not. I don't have any problems encrypting my personal backups even though I have nothing more private to protect than porn. You people are supposed to be professionals. Telling people their data is safe because it would require "special hardware and software" to read the tapes is pathetic. Get your shit together, sir.
Because then they could have their customers literally drinking the kool-aid.
The pressure vessels may be breached, but most of the fuel is still inside them, and the remainder is still inside the containment vessels. The containment still holds pressure even if the pressure vessels are breached.
"Cold shutdown" means that it's cold enough to not boil at atmospheric pressure. We can know when that happens: the pressure is easy to monitor, and if there's no big plume of steam, it's not boiling.
Normally you'd shove the control rods in and slow the reactions until not enough heat is generated to overheat even without special cooling (perhaps just immersed). But the cores are too melted for that I presume.
Shutdown: Reactivity is some safety margin below critical. The thermal power level will gradually fall.
Cold shutdown: The power level has fallen low enough that the cooling water doesn't boil even when depressurized. Active cooling may still be required.
Nuclear reaction: chain reactions where neutrons split atoms releasing more neutrons.
Decay heat: When the reactor is running shot-half-life nuclides are formed. After shutdown these continue to decay for a long time, releasing heat. There is no chain reaction, only spontaneous decays. Here's what the decay curve looks like.
The Fukushima reactors are shut down - they were immediately scrammed when the quake happened. There may have been some recriticality events, but these would be brief - the BWR design requires liquid water to moderate neutrons. Even if the entire core melted into a single blob it wouldn't be critical: it requires a bunch of water interspersed with the fuel. It's possible that the fuel fell to the bottom of the reactor vessel in little chipped up pieces with water between and formed a critical configuration, but doing so will create local heating which results in at least one of: churning until it settles in a subcritical configuration; melting the fuel until it's a solid blob instead of chunked thus creating a subcritical configuration; the water boils thereby depriving the core of the moderator, and the reaction stops. It will be a while before we know if any of these things happened.
Right now we're just waiting while the decay heat falls. It will reliably do so and eventually active cooling won't be necessary to prevent boiling.
I'm not saying "few" to weasel out by limiting the scope of my argument. Let me rephrase: "That's a simple and absolute fact that's persisted from the beginning of life on Earth (estimated 3.5-4.5 billion years ago) to the present day." Better?
Water blocks UVC, and we didn't start crawling out of the ocean until 1-1.5 billion years ago, long after the ozone layer was established.
Adaptation to UVC has never occurred on this planet, partly because it's hard, but mostly because it's not been necessary. Sure, anything could happen in the future, but that's a simple and absolute fact regarding the last few billion years here.
I reflect on the megadeaths generated by rotten concepts vs a few individuals being damaged. Hee, playing carelessly with claimed absolutes is a lot like the static concept.
You're asking me to compromise on the way I present scientific facts because you don't like the political implications of my language. Fuck that.
Oh, for the love of crypto.
piss in my entrance
You should buy an electric fence generator. Just run a wire along the bottom corner of your entryway. No need to catch them in the act, and I guarantee you they will get the message.
You may want to leave a security camera running for YouTube's sake, though. :)
All life is made out of bacteria.
I and the other eukaryotes are offended by your speciesism.
Do considder that the Earth isn't the only source of life.
I admit I'm being Earth-centric. I'm sure somewhere in the universe some critters have found a way.
On this rock, though, you can stick a 254nm lamp under the bio hood and it really won't matter what kind of awful bugs you were growing... In a few minutes they'll all be dead.
No, the story poster has the implants, but I was replying to someone else.
These are industrial lamps, several feet long and a couple dozen watts each. Yes, the bodies are fused quartz, but it's not a notch filter; they let 254nm out too.
Some plastics live longer, but the PVC on power cords yellows within minutes, probably from the organobromide flame retardants breaking down. I stood across the room for that test for a reason... Those things are violent.
I wouldn't want to leave even a low-power test source running in the open. That's just begging for someone to take a close look at the pretty glowy purple thing.
If you care to try it, run your source for a few minutes pointed into an enclosed area like a bottle or a box. You should be able to get a good whiff of ozone when you open it up. Don't inhale too deep!
Fortunately we were all living underwater back then. Before the Oxygen Catastrophe we were really damn deep where there's no light at any wavelength. Even the green things stayed well under the surface until the ozone layer was established.
Nothing has ever lived in the presence of UVC. There are few absolutes in biology, and I certainly want my readers to consider the implications of that before they go experimenting with short wavelengths: life evolves to fill any niche it can, but it has never gone there, and neither should you.
Brief glimpses won't hurt you at low power levels - this isn't a laser leaving a scorch track wherever it goes. The danger is in continuous exposure where your total absorbed dose accumulates to high levels.
365nm at a few watts is pretty low (but nonzero) risk. I work in a room with 300 watts of 365nm in the open every day and I don't really give it any thought when the lights click on.
Life has not evolved ways to deal with anything below about 300nm, which does not occur on the surface of the earth. 254nm is what they use for germicidal lamps. It kills bacteria by causing massive DNA damage... Consider that. Your skin is a little more resilient, but like sun exposure, it will result in sunburn if you blast yourself with a high dose, and over time it causes skin aging and eventually cancer. On your eyes you're running the risk of cataracts.
On the upside: your glasses almost certainly block 254nm. Pretty much everything does - the bulbs and any windows are made of fused quartz which is one of very few things that will pass 254nm. It also doesn't tend to reflect around as much as visible light. Even shiny aluminum surfaces will absorb most of it. Silver mirrors reflect it as long as it's first-surface reflections; glass in front will absorb it. So perhaps you're not getting that much exposure except when you reach under the lamp. You can measure it with a radiometer if you have one handy to see how much is really being reflected toward you.
My suggestion: I always use glasses regardless of exposure. For your skin, it kind of depends how you use it. If you flip the lights on for a minute to examine a sample and then turn them off, and you're only reaching under the light for a few seconds, it might be OK to accept (but not ignore!) the skin risks. If you're leaving samples to react under the lights for hours at a time, I'd suggest you go down to Tap Plastics and buy a sheet of polycarbonate - it's what they use in UV safety goggles, and it's completely opaque to UV. Attach it to the front of the bench, and just reach around when you have to prod your sample.
UV is a very wide spectrum. Near-UV isn't too scary.
UV-A (400-315 nm) is OK for short-term exposure. Your pupils won't constrict like they do for visible light, so keep the intensity low. Plain old blacklights are 350-400nm with the peak at 365nm, plus a small peak in the very bottom of the visible spectrum (which is the purple glow).
UV-B (315-280 nm) will probably be invisible, and it will do bad things to your eyes, so please stick to very low intensities if you want to fool with this. Read up on the risks first.
UV-C (280-100 nm) is utterly hostile to biology - the upper atmosphere filters this range out so life never evolved mechanisms to deal with it. Actually, UV-C is hostile to damn near everything: just from my own experience, it bleaches everything, and most plastics will degrade and become brittle with mere hours of exposure. I've test-fired a 185nm lamp in the open for a few seconds (wearing goggles!) and even across the room you can instantly smell ozone forming as it starts ripping oxygen apart. Stay away!
Slashdot needs a "Sad but true" moderation option. :/
I know there are defenses, but you're looking at this the wrong way: I shouldn't have to defend myself from my own service provider.
Can it be reached by NASA
Unfortunately, no. NASA doesn't currently have a man-rated vehicle that can exceed about 60,000 feet.
The DOD can probably deliver a decent size payload to it, but their craft aren't exactly designed to dock in a diplomatic way.