It's by Derek Lowe, a pharmaceutical chemist who blogs about chemical compounds that are way too dangerous. His position is that the closest you want to get to any of these things is reading about them. The closest I want to get is reading what he has to say about them.
Take FOOF, aka F2O2, aka Dioxygen Difloride. Lowe calls it "Satan's kimchi".
The latest addition to the long list of chemicals that I never hope to encounter takes us back to the wonderful world of fluorine chemistry. I'm always struck by how much work has taken place in that field, how long ago some of it was first done, and how many violently hideous compounds have been carefully studied. Here's how the experimental prep of today's fragrant breath of spring starts:
"The heater was warmed to approximately 700C. The heater block glowed a dull red color, observable with room lights turned off. The ballast tank was filled to 300 torr with oxygen, and fluorine was added until the total pressure was 901 torr. .."
And yes, what happens next is just what you think happens: you run a mixture of oxygen and fluorine through a 700-degree-heating block. "Oh, no you don't," is the common reaction of most chemists to that proposal, ". ..not unless I'm at least a mile away, two miles if I'm downwind." This, folks, is the bracingly direct route to preparing dioxygen difluoride, often referred to in the literature by its evocative formula of FOOF.
His latest posting is about the compound C2N14, which is two carbon atoms with 14 nitrogen atoms.
The compound exploded in solution, it exploded on any attempts to touch or move the solid, and (most interestingly) it exploded when they were trying to get an infrared spectrum of it. The papers mention several detonations inside the Raman spectrometer as soon as the laser source was turned on, which must have helped the time pass more quickly.
He doesn't just blog about things that go bang, he also covers things that smell really really bad. It's good he doesn't get stuck in a rut.
He has a fine turn with a descriptive phrase and a dry sense of humor. Check out his blog.
The general tone of the response on Slashdot is "these are just an ignorant bunch of lay people who are being deliberately mislead by evil anti-nuclear Luddite environmentalists." This attitude is condescending and not supported by the facts. It also embodies a strong pro-nuclear bias, which is just as arbitrary as the claimed anti-nuclear bias.
First, there is not enough information about long term low level radiation exposure to know the long term risks. The one other similar example, Chernobyl, is not a good case study. Critical information was (and perhaps still is) being withheld by the authorities. Meaningful exposure profiles are not available. In addition, the population exposed has been so negatively effected by the fall of the Soviet Union that it is difficult to determine what is caused by radiation and what is caused deteriorating environmental conditions. Having a dysfunctional health care system makes it even worse.
Second, there are more potential negative health effects then just cancer. There is some indication that increased radiation exposure leads to higher levels of cardiovascular disease. There are many potential unknown health problems
The radiation is not a uniform low level background. It is characterized by "hot spots" that are significantly more dangerous. Water caries hot material into places like roadside ditches, which is why Chernobyl visitors are told to stay on hard road surfaces and not walk off the road. This is really a problem for children, since that is the kind of thing they are prone to do. Ingesting the higher radiation material would be particularly hazardous for them.
Stress causes negative health effects. For example, being laid off with long term unemployment causes increased illness. Many peoples lives have been profoundly changed for the worse, including dislocation and job loss. This is only made worse by the radiation problem, which adds a huge amount of uncertainty.
The government and the nuclear industry has been lying to the Japanese public for decades about the risks associated with nuclear power plants. They have no credibility, so when they say that the situation is under control no one believes them. More stress.
Compensation for victims has been extremely inadequate and plagued by bureaucratic delay. Tepco is effectively bankrupt, so they and the government have strong incentives to spend as little money as possible. Also paying compensation highlights their failure, which means loosing face. This is not solely a problem in Japan; just look at the British Petroleum lying advertisements minimizing the environmental impact of the Macondo well disaster.
Speaking of bankruptcy, the nationwide economic impact of the tsunami would be bad enough, but the added burden of the Fukushima disaster makes a horrible situation even worse.
Finally, the disaster isn't over yet, it's ongoing. The damaged reactor units are not really secured. Because of the high radiation levels the most dangerous parts of the facilities have not been inspected so the amount of damage is unknown. The next earthquake could unleash radiation orders of magnitude worse that what already happened. The cores require ongoing cooling, and the equipment involved keeps having outages. An earthquake could lead to cooling loss and a full meltdown with atmospheric release of extremely radioactive core material. The spent fuel pools are also vulnerable to this kind of failure, and they are in damaged containment buildings, not reactor vessels. This is another reason for keeping residents away from the site. Safe evacuation might even not be possible in this situation.
Radiation levels in the ocean near the plant has not declined as much as expected. This is almost certainly due to continuing leakage of radioactive water from inside the damaged units.
So the negative health situation of Fukushima victims is caused by real world problems that induce stress and anxiety. Dismissing these issues is both factually wrong and ethically revolting. As is often the case, Slashdot participants are on the wrong side because they exhibit willing blindness to serious problems associated with real world technology.
This is just another instance of a subsidy swindle. Some organization, usually a city/county/state, offers funding/tax breaks/business space to attract new business. The target is always something glittery and/or high tech: internet, biotech, film. As soon as the subsidy ends, everyone leaves. Typically there is no earthly reason for the location to have the business in the first place. If there was, there would already be that kind of activity going on.
Film production is the poster child for this stuff. There are film production companies who never do any projects. All they do is get subsidies, lure investors, and never really make films. I head a tail about some producers who set up a company in Minnesota when they offered matching funds for equipment purchased in state. The production execs all bought fancy SUVs for "location scouting" for essentially half price. Then when the subsidy ended, they closed their office and drove off in their fancy cars.
These are not primarily technical failures, they are institutional failures. The issue is not that Java has a zero day failure; these things happen. The critical failure is that Oracle knew what was going on before this hit the news and they could have avoided the problem with better practices.
The US has a Laissez-faire attitude towards computer security. It's all left up to the good will of the provider, which is clearly a mistake. Some organizations do a good job, but many fail. This is because security requires expending effort, and there is a natural tendency to cut corners to save money.
In theory, the market will be self correcting, because of the cost associated with failure. In practice, this does not occur. Neither the direct financial cost or the reputational costs are big enough to modify organizational behavior. That's why there is an never ending stream of these kinds of events.
Ironically, it seems that highly visible open source projects have a better track record then the private sector. This shows the high level of professionalism that open source organizations maintain.
Thing will never get any better until the cost of failure becomes much greater. This means having serious fines and/or larger payouts to those who are harmed by the security breach.
Right now the cost of cleanup after a security failure is so low that there is no meaningful incentive to be proactive. Is Oracle going to have any negative economic repercussions as a result of this screw up? Of course not. Therefore, they will do nothing to change their ways. Until there is some mechanism to hold providers responsible for failure to act there will be no change.
To clarify the point, the liability should be for failure to act once a problem is found, not for the existence of the original security problem. Having a SCADA device visible on the net with a default password is the kind of event that should cause liability. Likewise not fixing a critical security hole as soon as it is discovered as in this case with Oracle.
They have a comparatively large number of existing codes (around 600) that run with no GPU acceleration. They want to continue this code base and not have to modify it very much, so they are not going to use any non CPU integrated coprocessors. According to the article:
They could have built such a machine, but it would have required either discrete accelerators (a programming model they would rather skip) or something more proprietary like the Blue Gene platform (an architecture they have avoided). The hope is that by 2015, they will be able to get something on the exascale roadmap, but with a programming model that is reasonably friendly to CPU-based codes.
That most likely means integrated heterogeneous processors like NVIDIA's "Project Denver" ARM-GPUs, AMD's x86-GPU APUs, or whatever Intel brings to the table with integrated Xeon Phi coprocessing. Although more complex than a pure CPU solution from a software point of view, the integrated designs at least avoid the messy PCIe communication and the completely separate memory space of the accelerator device.
Note that one of the possible contenders is ARM with an integrated GPU. Slashdot readers are generally hostile to the idea of ARM for servers or HPC, but it is going to happen. Making the Top 100 list in the future will require more and more attention to FLOP/Watt, and ARM has a basic advantage over legacy oriented x86 architectures. Being dismissive of ARM is just as much of a fanboy attitude as being rabidly for any other architecture.
I just dropped cable for streaming, and I added a bunch of free channels. CNET was one of them. I'm going to delete it as soon as I post this. I doubt I will ever put it back. I suggest you do the same.
This is 100% hot air. Instead of addressing real problems with real solutions, we are once again seeing the Congress bloviating instead of doing something.
I want to plant this unsavory image in your mind: Rep. Wilson has taking the podium in the House chamber, unzipped his pants, and is waving his dysfunctional penis at everyone in the room, along with the television audience on CSPAN. As each House member (yes, it is a pun) responds to him, they also expose themselves and start failing around so that everyone starts looking at their genitals. Soon they are all yelling and competing so that everyone will look at them more then any other idiot in the room.
This is pretty much what this proposal is all about: a mass outbreak of useless posturing that gets in the way of anything meaningful. I think we would, in fact, be better off if they were behaving like mentally disordered perverts. At least they would not be pretending to be "doing the peoples business", and would be acting out their true egomaniac personalities. The empty outcome would be identical with both activities, and exposing themselves in public would be much more honest.
In Joseph Heller's Catch-22 the flight surgeon, Doc Daneeka, is declared dead even though he is very much alive and waking around.
One day when Yossarian is staring over the skyline and wondering where Clevinger and Orr are, McWatt suddenly skims over the surface of the water and slices Kid Sampson in half with his propeller. Chaos ensues at the grotesque sight. Yossarian yells futilely at McWatt to come down. His cries are useless as McWatt flies higher and higher and then flies into a mountain. In response to these deaths, Colonel Cathcart increases the number of missions to sixty-five.
When Colonel Cathcart finds out that Doc Daneeka is dead, he increases the number of missions to seventy. Sergeant Towser is the first one to realize Doc Daneeka is dead. He tells Gus and Wes, and when they take Doc Daneeka’s temperature, it is half a degree lower that the usual 96.8 degrees--when Doc Daneeka, who is actually still alive, complains about being cold, they point out that he has been dead all this time, but never realized it until now. Doc Daneeka screams with anger when they say they will tell his wife that he is dead. At first, Mrs. Daneeka is very upset when she finds out. She then receives conflicting letters from her husband and from the War Department regarding the life of her husband. But as Mrs. Daneeka begins to receive widow pensions and other monetary benefits, she appreciates her new measure of wealth.
Meanwhile, Doc Daneeka is considered dead by the squadron, and he has to depend on Milo and Sergeant Towser for food. He is ostracized by everyone and almost starves to death. He writes a final intense appeal to his wife, but she moves away with the children when she receives the generic official notification from the army of his death.
This reveals perfectly the real mindset of many gun owners: I want my gun so I can intimidate people. It's not about protection, it's about the threat of violence.
This is the same mindset as terrorists. They want to enforce their will by violence and intimidation. Gun owners think this will also work for them: if I flash my sidearm, then people will have to take me very seriously. Just knowing that they have a gun somewhere means this power fantasy is within reach. "I can go get my gun and show them who's really in charge." It's the dark twisted dirty little secret of the gun worshipers.
In a free society people shouldn't fear for their lives for exercising free speech. In the US we look down on places in the world where extremists use violence to silence their opponents. This is a stark reminder that this happens in the US as well. Another example is the violence, including assassination, against abortion providers. It can and does happen here.
All the comments about the "irony" of guns needed to protect people at the newspaper are tacitly giving approval for the use of gun violence for intimidation. Intimidation is the credible threat of violence, even if it does not happen. Given recent events, and the history of gun violence in the US, the threats are credible. Those associated with the newspaper, even those who have nothing to do with the article, are rightly in fear for their safety.
Do think that's a good thing? Do you want to live in a society where the price of free speech is the threat of violence? Is our ever expanding gun culture worth this price? Remember that if I asked this in some places I would be getting threatening phone calls and might end up with someone shooting at my house. Guns don't insure freedom by any stretch of the imagination.
There is a practical test that can be used to separate "legitimate" religion from cults: taxes.
If religion is taxed then some religious organizations will continue and some will stop existing. The ones that fail obviously do not have divine connections. All religions claim to have access to some "higher power". If this is true then that power will insure that they remain in business. If they can't then their higher power is dysfunctional in the material world, so in a practical sense it does pass a basic requirement of religion.
Note that this test is no different then a popularity contest. All it takes is enough people to support the religion and it will be considered legitimate. It is perfectly acceptable for divine interventions to take the form of support from individuals. It is also the case that the tax criteria neither proves or disproves the existence of any religious belief.
Any religion or religious individual who opposes this tax change is explicitly doubting the divinity of their religious organization. If they are true believers they will assume that their organization will succeed. If tax status is all that stands between them and failure, then it's not much of a religion.
It’s difficult to find a Republican operative who is willing to say on the record that going over the fiscal cliff next Tuesday is a good idea. Provoking a crisis is bad politics: Republicans are resigned to taking the blame. And it’s bad for their policy agenda: They will likely be cornered into a broader tax hike than the best deal they could get from President Barack Obama today, and with none of the spending cuts that might now be on the table.
And yet, the dominant emotion among most Republicans here is one of sheer resignation.
“It’s a shit show,” one prominent Republican told BuzzFeed of the GOP’s messaging position. “Tax rates are going to go up on everyone, and we’re going to get the blame.”
The Republicans are being screwed by their own rhetoric. They always say the government is useless, and they want to get rid of it. There are many influential Republicans, Grover Norquist being the most prominent, who actually want a government collapse. They call it "starve the beast."
So when there is an economic crises like this, the Republicans are going to get the blame. They are always trash talking government, so when things go bad the public automatically assumes the Republicans are at fault. People listen to what they say, and they take them at their word. Everyone knows Democrats are pro-government and Republicans are ant-government. QED.
So, irrespective of who is really at fault (whatever that means), the Republicans loose the public relations battle due to their decades long record of negative opinions. This should not be a surprise, but they never seem to make the connection. They react by being bitter and pissed off, even when they cause much of their own problems. It's really pathetic. They should know better by now.
Whenever anything related to space is posted, the NASA bashing crew crawls out from their cave, hooting and slinging shit like apes in a zoo cage. I wonder why this never seems to bore them. It bores me.
NASA has the best record for space exploration of any organization in the world. If you give them sufficient resources and don't mix in politics they usually succeed beyond expectations.
The Shuttle is the poster child for political meddling. The mandate from Congress was that the military and NASA would use the Shuttle. The Air Force put in the requirement for that led to the big wings, which have been the Achilles heel of the program: less efficient to get into orbit and more vulnerable to catastrophic failure. Then the AF dropped out (I never think they wanted to be a part of it) and left NASA with a seriously flawed design. Ironically, if you look at the wing/body size ratio for the X-37B it is proportionately much smaller then the Shuttle.
The Voyagers where initially intended as 3 year missions, and they are still producing data nearly 35 years after launch.
The Opportunity Rover, which was planned as a 90 earth day mission, is still going eight years after landing.
There have been eight USA attempts to land on Mars: Viking I, Viking II, Mars Pathfinder, Mars Polar Lander, Mars Exploration Rover Spirit, Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity, the Phoenix lander and the Mars Exploration Rover Curiosity. Of all these missions, only the Polar Lander failed, This is a 87.5% success rate. The overall success rate for all Mars missions is around 50%.
The only two missions to Mercury were NASA spacecraft.
After a serious failure, the Hubble was fixed in orbit. It was later upgraded in a way that was never originally planned for. Success is often about recovering from failure. (The Hubble mirror was flawed because the Air Force was making classified equipment at the same facility, and the number of NASA personal was restricted as a result. Lack of on site inspections was the management failure.)
I could go on and on, but I know the NASA bashing will never stop. I can only guess that those who try to denigrate the successful feel they are failures, and thus attempt to drag everyone down to their level.
I just saw fresh whole (not ground) wasabi root for sale in a Japanese market in Los Angeles for $149 a pound. A one inch diameter piece 3/4 inch long was around $9. The second most expensive food I found was Spanish Blue Fin tuna for $55 a pound.
The MBA wants to me the undisputed leader, and you are in the way. All of the "multiple team leaders and consultants" will be his guys, and will be chosen because they are loyal to him. Anyone who was there before he was will be eliminated unless they show they are following him, not you.
If you stay, all the blame for problems will be heaped on you. All the success will be because of his great leadership. You will not be given a chance to be in charge of anything, even if you publicly grovel.
MBA types have tech envy. They know they are not capable of that kind of creative thinking and it makes them resentful. The way they deal with this is by making sure that all the technical people work for them. The higher pay grade and executive perks reassure them that technical ability is a commodity, while management is an irreplaceable skill.
Your presence on the project will be a continual reminder that he is not ultimately a creative person. He will do whatever it takes to show that you are inferior to him. Staying will be a very painful experience.
There is no "technological fix" that will make nuclear power safe. All the bad outcomes at nuclear power plants are due to organizational failures. TMI, Chernobyl and Fukushima all resulted from bad decisions, both short term and long term.
One of the units at San Onofre is indefinitely off line because an upgraded heat exchange system was designed incorrectly. This is not exactly new technology, but somehow a flawed design made it through all the review processes. This is ultimately a organizational failure, not a technical failure.
Going from uranium to thorium will not make any difference in the long term. Serious nuclear accidents are low probability events will hugely destructive outcomes. Any claims that a technology change will result in a safe system is dangerously naive thinking.
Cameron is a conservative. He and his business constituency are only interesting in making money right now and have no interest in the future except for their own personal fortunes. This is true of conservatives all over the world. This is why the infrastructure in the US and Japan is falling apart: "No new taxes". Wall Street is not a source of capital for innovations, it is a rigged casino that fleeces investors and governments for insider profits. It is much more lucrative to run scams like high frequency trading then to make money the old fashioned way by lending it out.
This is what conservative politics means today: avoid or rewrite the rules to make as much money as you can, and screw as many people as you can when you do it.
You are completely disconnected from the real world, which is typical of gun owners. Here are real statistics from the LA Times homicide tracking page. http://projects.latimes.com/homicide/map/
Homicides: Jan. 1, 2007 to Nov. 10, 2012
Blunt force 246
Gunshot 3,227
Other 192
Stabbing 438
Strangled 47
Unspecified 99
Even if all the Other and Unspecified were done by "beer bottles", they would only total 6.9% of the total. Stabbing, which is the second largest category, are 10.3%. Guns are 75.9% of the total. In the real world, guns are used in homicide three times out of four. These numbers ignore suicide and accidental gun deaths, which would make the gun death numbers even larger.
Number of Murders, Britain, 2011*: 638
(Since Britain's population is 1/5 that of US, this is equivalent to 3,095 US murders)
Number of Murders by firearms, Britain, 2011*: 58
(equivalent to 290 US murders)
Number of Murders by crossbow in Britain, 2011*: 2
(equivalent to 10 US murders).
The international comparisons show conclusively that fewer gun owners per capita produce not only fewer murders by firearm, but fewer murders per capita overall.
In the case of Britain, firearms murders are 30 times fewer than in the US per capita.
* British crime statistics are September to September, so 2011 is actually 2010-2011.
If I fear for my life because of someone with a beer bottle, it's because they are drinking and driving. So who is responding with "ignorant panic"?
This is an interesting concept, which might have a practical application. By reading the article I learned something and I found it interesting. This is, by definition, "News for Nerds".
As typically happens here on Slashdot, most of the comments deliberately ignore the technical content and make bad irrelevant jokes and/or trash the researcher for being stupid. The person who wrote the original paper is clearly a very intelligent and accomplished academic and doesn't rate this kind of mindless attack. You don't get on the faculty at UC Berkeley by being less then competent.
The "cloaking" description was clearly written by the semi-literate incompetent hack who wrote the fluff piece that quoted the original research. They were trying to tie this research into the recent publicity on electromagnetic cloaking with microwaves and did a very bad job. Any criticism or analysis based on the idea of cloaking is obviously bogus and irrelevant.
From what I could glean from the garbled information, this technique is applicable for the conditions found in deep water oil drilling platforms. It seems that it could decrease the energy of large waves by channeling some of their energy into the water density boundary layer below the rig, providing an extra margin of protection. I doubt that it would diminish waves at all frequencies, but it would be tuned for the most destructive energy band. If it is practical it would be very useful.
Ogg is dumber then a box of rocks. If dumping a bunch of random sized rocks on the ocean floor would protect an oil rig then they would already be doing it. These things are so expensive that if this worked it would be cheap insurance and standard to the industry. To the best of my knowledge dumping rocks is done in shallow water to protect coastlines and harbors, not in deep water. Even if Ogg knows how to spell "Gaussian harmonic" that doesn't mean he is refuting the content of the academic paper. The dumb description just says "ripples", which could actually be a structure like Ogg described. Ogg is throwing stones at a straw man. Ogg's critique is at the same level as a chimpanzee throwing it's shit at something, and has a similar intellectual content.
If your follow the links far enough you get here http://physics.aps.org/articles/v5/129 where they have a detailed non-mathematical description of the experiment.
After detecting and identifying the mesons, the experimenters determined the proper time difference between the decay of the two B states by determining the energy of each meson and measuring the separation of the two meson decay vertices along the e-e+ beam axis. When time-reversed pairs were compared, the BaBar collaboration found discrepancies in the decay rates. The asymmetry, which could only come from a T transformation and not a CP violation, was significant, being fourteen standard deviations away from time invariance. Thus the long wait for an unequivocal time-reversal violation in particle physics is finally over.
IANAP, but here is my understanding of the experiment. They knew that two different decay chains occur from some positron/electron collisions. If time is symmetric, there should be equal numbers of both chains. By making the beam energies different between the positron and electron (e-e+) beams, they were able to differentiate the decay order. If time symmetric decay occurred then there would be one spacial pattern in the results, and if time was asymmetric there would be another. The results conclusively show that for this subatomic event time runs in the direction we know as "forward". This is a big deal for subatomic physics.
This is typical monopolistic/cartel behavior. It is a symptom of a closed environment where there is no effective competition.
This is the business model that dominates a large segment of the US economy, and is endemic in telecommunications, software, finance, agribusiness, pharmaceuticals, health care and energy. Companies in these areas using lobbying to suppress competition and write legislation that guarantees high profit margins.
This kind of corrupt system ultimately leads to extreme failure. The worldwide economic meltdown in 2008 was the direct result of a greedy, corrupt and incompetent financial system with a primary goal of making insiders as personally rich as possible. The meningitis epidemic is a more recent example. In both cases business groups were able to shut down all effective regulation.
Sadly nothing is really changing. All the fines for the failed financial business are a joke. JP Morgan just paid a $296.9 million dollar fine for misrepresenting mortgage backed securities, which is meaningless considering their market capitalization is $150.27 billion dollars. Similarly, BP was just fined $4.5 billion for the Gulf oils spill. This sounds like a lot, but that amount is around the profit for a quarter of a year. Considering that in 2005 BP had an explosion at a Texas refinery that killed 14 and injured over 175, it is clear that the corporate culture did not really change. Until the people running these dangerous corrupt organizations are held personally responsible we will continue to see this occur on a world wide basis
Most of the comment assume that this is a slam against the West/USA. Remember that from a emerging global power prospective, China and India are vying for dominance. This is also a regional conflict.
Although there is no lack of vegetarians in China, pork, chicken, and seafood are all basic traditional parts of their cuisine. If a textbook is going to denigrate a rival by saying
'They easily cheat, tell lies, forget promises, they are dishonest and tell bad words, steal, fight and turn to violence and commit sex crimes,'
This could be as much or more about China, as opposed to the rest of the world.
Slashdot Mirror
It's by Derek Lowe, a pharmaceutical chemist who blogs about chemical compounds that are way too dangerous. His position is that the closest you want to get to any of these things is reading about them. The closest I want to get is reading what he has to say about them.
Take FOOF, aka F2O2, aka Dioxygen Difloride. Lowe calls it "Satan's kimchi".
His latest posting is about the compound C2N14, which is two carbon atoms with 14 nitrogen atoms.
He doesn't just blog about things that go bang, he also covers things that smell really really bad. It's good he doesn't get stuck in a rut.
He has a fine turn with a descriptive phrase and a dry sense of humor. Check out his blog.
Do they come with different dipping sauces?
First, there is not enough information about long term low level radiation exposure to know the long term risks. The one other similar example, Chernobyl, is not a good case study. Critical information was (and perhaps still is) being withheld by the authorities. Meaningful exposure profiles are not available. In addition, the population exposed has been so negatively effected by the fall of the Soviet Union that it is difficult to determine what is caused by radiation and what is caused deteriorating environmental conditions. Having a dysfunctional health care system makes it even worse.
Second, there are more potential negative health effects then just cancer. There is some indication that increased radiation exposure leads to higher levels of cardiovascular disease. There are many potential unknown health problems
The radiation is not a uniform low level background. It is characterized by "hot spots" that are significantly more dangerous. Water caries hot material into places like roadside ditches, which is why Chernobyl visitors are told to stay on hard road surfaces and not walk off the road. This is really a problem for children, since that is the kind of thing they are prone to do. Ingesting the higher radiation material would be particularly hazardous for them.
Stress causes negative health effects. For example, being laid off with long term unemployment causes increased illness. Many peoples lives have been profoundly changed for the worse, including dislocation and job loss. This is only made worse by the radiation problem, which adds a huge amount of uncertainty.
The government and the nuclear industry has been lying to the Japanese public for decades about the risks associated with nuclear power plants. They have no credibility, so when they say that the situation is under control no one believes them. More stress.
Compensation for victims has been extremely inadequate and plagued by bureaucratic delay. Tepco is effectively bankrupt, so they and the government have strong incentives to spend as little money as possible. Also paying compensation highlights their failure, which means loosing face. This is not solely a problem in Japan; just look at the British Petroleum lying advertisements minimizing the environmental impact of the Macondo well disaster.
Speaking of bankruptcy, the nationwide economic impact of the tsunami would be bad enough, but the added burden of the Fukushima disaster makes a horrible situation even worse.
Finally, the disaster isn't over yet, it's ongoing. The damaged reactor units are not really secured. Because of the high radiation levels the most dangerous parts of the facilities have not been inspected so the amount of damage is unknown. The next earthquake could unleash radiation orders of magnitude worse that what already happened. The cores require ongoing cooling, and the equipment involved keeps having outages. An earthquake could lead to cooling loss and a full meltdown with atmospheric release of extremely radioactive core material. The spent fuel pools are also vulnerable to this kind of failure, and they are in damaged containment buildings, not reactor vessels. This is another reason for keeping residents away from the site. Safe evacuation might even not be possible in this situation.
Radiation levels in the ocean near the plant has not declined as much as expected. This is almost certainly due to continuing leakage of radioactive water from inside the damaged units.
So the negative health situation of Fukushima victims is caused by real world problems that induce stress and anxiety. Dismissing these issues is both factually wrong and ethically revolting. As is often the case, Slashdot participants are on the wrong side because they exhibit willing blindness to serious problems associated with real world technology.
Film production is the poster child for this stuff. There are film production companies who never do any projects. All they do is get subsidies, lure investors, and never really make films. I head a tail about some producers who set up a company in Minnesota when they offered matching funds for equipment purchased in state. The production execs all bought fancy SUVs for "location scouting" for essentially half price. Then when the subsidy ended, they closed their office and drove off in their fancy cars.
These are not primarily technical failures, they are institutional failures. The issue is not that Java has a zero day failure; these things happen. The critical failure is that Oracle knew what was going on before this hit the news and they could have avoided the problem with better practices.
The US has a Laissez-faire attitude towards computer security. It's all left up to the good will of the provider, which is clearly a mistake. Some organizations do a good job, but many fail. This is because security requires expending effort, and there is a natural tendency to cut corners to save money.
In theory, the market will be self correcting, because of the cost associated with failure. In practice, this does not occur. Neither the direct financial cost or the reputational costs are big enough to modify organizational behavior. That's why there is an never ending stream of these kinds of events.
Ironically, it seems that highly visible open source projects have a better track record then the private sector. This shows the high level of professionalism that open source organizations maintain.
Thing will never get any better until the cost of failure becomes much greater. This means having serious fines and/or larger payouts to those who are harmed by the security breach.
Right now the cost of cleanup after a security failure is so low that there is no meaningful incentive to be proactive. Is Oracle going to have any negative economic repercussions as a result of this screw up? Of course not. Therefore, they will do nothing to change their ways. Until there is some mechanism to hold providers responsible for failure to act there will be no change.
To clarify the point, the liability should be for failure to act once a problem is found, not for the existence of the original security problem. Having a SCADA device visible on the net with a default password is the kind of event that should cause liability. Likewise not fixing a critical security hole as soon as it is discovered as in this case with Oracle.
Note that one of the possible contenders is ARM with an integrated GPU. Slashdot readers are generally hostile to the idea of ARM for servers or HPC, but it is going to happen. Making the Top 100 list in the future will require more and more attention to FLOP/Watt, and ARM has a basic advantage over legacy oriented x86 architectures. Being dismissive of ARM is just as much of a fanboy attitude as being rabidly for any other architecture.
I just dropped cable for streaming, and I added a bunch of free channels. CNET was one of them. I'm going to delete it as soon as I post this. I doubt I will ever put it back. I suggest you do the same.
I want to plant this unsavory image in your mind: Rep. Wilson has taking the podium in the House chamber, unzipped his pants, and is waving his dysfunctional penis at everyone in the room, along with the television audience on CSPAN. As each House member (yes, it is a pun) responds to him, they also expose themselves and start failing around so that everyone starts looking at their genitals. Soon they are all yelling and competing so that everyone will look at them more then any other idiot in the room.
This is pretty much what this proposal is all about: a mass outbreak of useless posturing that gets in the way of anything meaningful. I think we would, in fact, be better off if they were behaving like mentally disordered perverts. At least they would not be pretending to be "doing the peoples business", and would be acting out their true egomaniac personalities. The empty outcome would be identical with both activities, and exposing themselves in public would be much more honest.
http://www.gradesaver.com/catch22/study-guide/section5/
Just wondering.
This is the same mindset as terrorists. They want to enforce their will by violence and intimidation. Gun owners think this will also work for them: if I flash my sidearm, then people will have to take me very seriously. Just knowing that they have a gun somewhere means this power fantasy is within reach. "I can go get my gun and show them who's really in charge." It's the dark twisted dirty little secret of the gun worshipers.
In a free society people shouldn't fear for their lives for exercising free speech. In the US we look down on places in the world where extremists use violence to silence their opponents. This is a stark reminder that this happens in the US as well. Another example is the violence, including assassination, against abortion providers. It can and does happen here.
All the comments about the "irony" of guns needed to protect people at the newspaper are tacitly giving approval for the use of gun violence for intimidation. Intimidation is the credible threat of violence, even if it does not happen. Given recent events, and the history of gun violence in the US, the threats are credible. Those associated with the newspaper, even those who have nothing to do with the article, are rightly in fear for their safety.
Do think that's a good thing? Do you want to live in a society where the price of free speech is the threat of violence? Is our ever expanding gun culture worth this price? Remember that if I asked this in some places I would be getting threatening phone calls and might end up with someone shooting at my house. Guns don't insure freedom by any stretch of the imagination.
If religion is taxed then some religious organizations will continue and some will stop existing. The ones that fail obviously do not have divine connections. All religions claim to have access to some "higher power". If this is true then that power will insure that they remain in business. If they can't then their higher power is dysfunctional in the material world, so in a practical sense it does pass a basic requirement of religion.
Note that this test is no different then a popularity contest. All it takes is enough people to support the religion and it will be considered legitimate. It is perfectly acceptable for divine interventions to take the form of support from individuals. It is also the case that the tax criteria neither proves or disproves the existence of any religious belief.
Any religion or religious individual who opposes this tax change is explicitly doubting the divinity of their religious organization. If they are true believers they will assume that their organization will succeed. If tax status is all that stands between them and failure, then it's not much of a religion.
The Republicans are being screwed by their own rhetoric. They always say the government is useless, and they want to get rid of it. There are many influential Republicans, Grover Norquist being the most prominent, who actually want a government collapse. They call it "starve the beast."
So when there is an economic crises like this, the Republicans are going to get the blame. They are always trash talking government, so when things go bad the public automatically assumes the Republicans are at fault. People listen to what they say, and they take them at their word. Everyone knows Democrats are pro-government and Republicans are ant-government. QED.
So, irrespective of who is really at fault (whatever that means), the Republicans loose the public relations battle due to their decades long record of negative opinions. This should not be a surprise, but they never seem to make the connection. They react by being bitter and pissed off, even when they cause much of their own problems. It's really pathetic. They should know better by now.
You must be new here.
NASA has the best record for space exploration of any organization in the world. If you give them sufficient resources and don't mix in politics they usually succeed beyond expectations.
The Shuttle is the poster child for political meddling. The mandate from Congress was that the military and NASA would use the Shuttle. The Air Force put in the requirement for that led to the big wings, which have been the Achilles heel of the program: less efficient to get into orbit and more vulnerable to catastrophic failure. Then the AF dropped out (I never think they wanted to be a part of it) and left NASA with a seriously flawed design. Ironically, if you look at the wing/body size ratio for the X-37B it is proportionately much smaller then the Shuttle.
The Voyagers where initially intended as 3 year missions, and they are still producing data nearly 35 years after launch.
The Opportunity Rover, which was planned as a 90 earth day mission, is still going eight years after landing.
There have been eight USA attempts to land on Mars: Viking I, Viking II, Mars Pathfinder, Mars Polar Lander, Mars Exploration Rover Spirit, Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity, the Phoenix lander and the Mars Exploration Rover Curiosity. Of all these missions, only the Polar Lander failed, This is a 87.5% success rate. The overall success rate for all Mars missions is around 50%.
The only two missions to Mercury were NASA spacecraft.
After a serious failure, the Hubble was fixed in orbit. It was later upgraded in a way that was never originally planned for. Success is often about recovering from failure. (The Hubble mirror was flawed because the Air Force was making classified equipment at the same facility, and the number of NASA personal was restricted as a result. Lack of on site inspections was the management failure.)
I could go on and on, but I know the NASA bashing will never stop. I can only guess that those who try to denigrate the successful feel they are failures, and thus attempt to drag everyone down to their level.
I just saw fresh whole (not ground) wasabi root for sale in a Japanese market in Los Angeles for $149 a pound. A one inch diameter piece 3/4 inch long was around $9. The second most expensive food I found was Spanish Blue Fin tuna for $55 a pound.
If you stay, all the blame for problems will be heaped on you. All the success will be because of his great leadership. You will not be given a chance to be in charge of anything, even if you publicly grovel.
MBA types have tech envy. They know they are not capable of that kind of creative thinking and it makes them resentful. The way they deal with this is by making sure that all the technical people work for them. The higher pay grade and executive perks reassure them that technical ability is a commodity, while management is an irreplaceable skill.
Your presence on the project will be a continual reminder that he is not ultimately a creative person. He will do whatever it takes to show that you are inferior to him. Staying will be a very painful experience.
Prepare your resume. You'll need it.
One of the units at San Onofre is indefinitely off line because an upgraded heat exchange system was designed incorrectly. This is not exactly new technology, but somehow a flawed design made it through all the review processes. This is ultimately a organizational failure, not a technical failure.
Going from uranium to thorium will not make any difference in the long term. Serious nuclear accidents are low probability events will hugely destructive outcomes. Any claims that a technology change will result in a safe system is dangerously naive thinking.
Extra Points for "Profit!"
This is what conservative politics means today: avoid or rewrite the rules to make as much money as you can, and screw as many people as you can when you do it.
Homicides: Jan. 1, 2007 to Nov. 10, 2012
Even if all the Other and Unspecified were done by "beer bottles", they would only total 6.9% of the total. Stabbing, which is the second largest category, are 10.3%. Guns are 75.9% of the total. In the real world, guns are used in homicide three times out of four. These numbers ignore suicide and accidental gun deaths, which would make the gun death numbers even larger.
Gun homicides in Great Britten vs. the US http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/335-156/12554-58-murders-a-year-by-firearms-in-britain-8775-in-us
If I fear for my life because of someone with a beer bottle, it's because they are drinking and driving. So who is responding with "ignorant panic"?
As typically happens here on Slashdot, most of the comments deliberately ignore the technical content and make bad irrelevant jokes and/or trash the researcher for being stupid. The person who wrote the original paper is clearly a very intelligent and accomplished academic and doesn't rate this kind of mindless attack. You don't get on the faculty at UC Berkeley by being less then competent.
The "cloaking" description was clearly written by the semi-literate incompetent hack who wrote the fluff piece that quoted the original research. They were trying to tie this research into the recent publicity on electromagnetic cloaking with microwaves and did a very bad job. Any criticism or analysis based on the idea of cloaking is obviously bogus and irrelevant.
From what I could glean from the garbled information, this technique is applicable for the conditions found in deep water oil drilling platforms. It seems that it could decrease the energy of large waves by channeling some of their energy into the water density boundary layer below the rig, providing an extra margin of protection. I doubt that it would diminish waves at all frequencies, but it would be tuned for the most destructive energy band. If it is practical it would be very useful.
Ogg is dumber then a box of rocks. If dumping a bunch of random sized rocks on the ocean floor would protect an oil rig then they would already be doing it. These things are so expensive that if this worked it would be cheap insurance and standard to the industry. To the best of my knowledge dumping rocks is done in shallow water to protect coastlines and harbors, not in deep water. Even if Ogg knows how to spell "Gaussian harmonic" that doesn't mean he is refuting the content of the academic paper. The dumb description just says "ripples", which could actually be a structure like Ogg described. Ogg is throwing stones at a straw man. Ogg's critique is at the same level as a chimpanzee throwing it's shit at something, and has a similar intellectual content.
IANAP, but here is my understanding of the experiment. They knew that two different decay chains occur from some positron/electron collisions. If time is symmetric, there should be equal numbers of both chains. By making the beam energies different between the positron and electron (e-e+) beams, they were able to differentiate the decay order. If time symmetric decay occurred then there would be one spacial pattern in the results, and if time was asymmetric there would be another. The results conclusively show that for this subatomic event time runs in the direction we know as "forward". This is a big deal for subatomic physics.
This is the business model that dominates a large segment of the US economy, and is endemic in telecommunications, software, finance, agribusiness, pharmaceuticals, health care and energy. Companies in these areas using lobbying to suppress competition and write legislation that guarantees high profit margins.
This kind of corrupt system ultimately leads to extreme failure. The worldwide economic meltdown in 2008 was the direct result of a greedy, corrupt and incompetent financial system with a primary goal of making insiders as personally rich as possible. The meningitis epidemic is a more recent example. In both cases business groups were able to shut down all effective regulation.
Sadly nothing is really changing. All the fines for the failed financial business are a joke. JP Morgan just paid a $296.9 million dollar fine for misrepresenting mortgage backed securities, which is meaningless considering their market capitalization is $150.27 billion dollars. Similarly, BP was just fined $4.5 billion for the Gulf oils spill. This sounds like a lot, but that amount is around the profit for a quarter of a year. Considering that in 2005 BP had an explosion at a Texas refinery that killed 14 and injured over 175, it is clear that the corporate culture did not really change. Until the people running these dangerous corrupt organizations are held personally responsible we will continue to see this occur on a world wide basis
Although there is no lack of vegetarians in China, pork, chicken, and seafood are all basic traditional parts of their cuisine. If a textbook is going to denigrate a rival by saying
This could be as much or more about China, as opposed to the rest of the world.