I don't think any 12 year olds understand Feynman diagrams.
Around the age of 14 I was lucky to have access to a copy of the Douglas Robb Memorial Lectures given by Feynman. They were many generations from the original, the quality was horrible; in spite of it those were perhaps the most clear physics lectures I have heard at the time. At least he made me understand what the diagram is, even if I was nowhere near any of the math needed to use the diagrams the way they are usually used. Never mind that having a basic understanding of what QED is all about isn't anything to be scoffed at IMHO.
I expect that the easy to understand, everyday problems will be what may well kill quite a few people in short order. The refugees are still in plenty of areas that are effectively cut off (save for helicopter aid drops), or they have to walk for a day or two to get somewhere where there are simply more refugees but even less food. Localized, relatively small scale shortages of food, water, shelter, sanitation and medical care, that can lead to sickness and even death, are not only easy to visualize and understand, but should be on everyone's mind.
I was trying to explain to myself why would people want to be 'politically correct' anyway. The only thing I came up with is that some people just look for trouble. They pretend like they care, but they are just bullies and troubleseekers. They will twist everything to seem somehow against their rules, and that gives them a pretext to be upset and to demand apologies, or sue, or shoot you, or WTF ever. Political correctness is IMHO a fancy name for a symptom of psychosis. One thing is to have some sensitivity and respect to other people, but most 'politically correct' people go way farther than that.
It could run "exactly the same way" as long as you can set things up correctly. There may be, for example, a PostgreSQL extension, or a Python module, that is not available for one of the environments you develop in (but is available for the target).
As for embedded linux development: you typically don't want to be anywhere near the target with your dev environment. The development tools may not even run on the target for all you care. You cross compile, and then as long as you're on a "modern enough" Unix, you're fine. Heck, even on Windows you would be fine as long as you got the tools supported on it (or are brave enough to support yourself a.k.a. build the toolset).
Moreso, I just don't get the whole developing-on-the-target mindset. Maybe it's due to dabbling a lot with embedded development. If a developer cannot set things up to easily deploy to a test environment of her choice, maybe it's time for her to go back to basics. I happily run a bunch of VMs on my MacBook Pro, and a couple of them are CentOS development/test images.
LOL. And the "abuse tool" works by magic and fairy dust, right? The "tool" was probably just a website front end to a database. If the database contained junk, you got junk, without knowing any better.
To me, the paper really is not worth the bandwidth consumed by downloading it. It's a very, very poorly set up study, something I'd maybe expect of some not-knowing-better undergrads. More of an example how not to set up a study than anything else. The results are useless for their intended purpose.
Interesting. It looks like the pole-mounted access points do the encryption. I can't wait till someone makes an open-source dongle that could become a mesh member and, um, tweak the data. For the whole neighborhood, no less;)
We are working with the provider of the Illini-Alert service to implement additional security features in the program to prevent this type of error.
most likely means: The same contractors who messed up basic usability in the original implementation will now get paid again to "fix" it. BTW what is with people using wrong words? Additional "security" features, my ass, this is HMI 101, nothing to do with security.
I think that part of the concern is the salt encrustation of the fuel rods. Fuel is hot, and the water locally boils, depositing sea salt -- they did, after all, use sea salt for emergency flooding of the reactors. Try boiling some sea water (or salted tap water) in an electric kettle. The salt crust increases thermal resistance between fuel (heat source) and coolant, increasing fuel temperature. This may increase salt deposition rate in spite of same thermal output of the fuel (the locally boiled water can recondense elsewhere, returning the heat of vaporization back into the system).
As long as there's any salt in the coolant in the reactors, things can't but get worse, to a point where the cooling channels will get blocked by salt. Same happens when the fuel melts: it will block the coolant channels. Do recall that heat removal, everything else being equal, is proportional to surface area at the interface. Closing off coolant channels literally reduces heat removal area by two orders of magnitude or so. You go from cooling to no cooling, for all practical purposes.
BS. Cs-137 has a half live of 30 years, not hours. The Cs-137 spread around during Chernobyl disaster is still around, and it was quite recently (last month, I don't have the article handy) that IIRC cows somewhere in Scandinavia had to be fed a non-local feed just to lower their meat's contamination levels to make it salable. Cs-137 is the real problem, I-131 is only a problem for the thyroid and we know how to work around it (saturate the thyroid with non-radioactive iodine).
I agree on technical points. GCC is a mess of a code base to work with; good luck with anyone trying to port it. LLVM is not so bad in that respect. I could whip out a proof-of-concept port to a new architecture over a week of work, never having looked at LLVM before. I gave up the same task on gcc codebase after two weeks: it was an incomprehensible mess.
Are you sure that you can replace OS X Samba components with your own? Aren't they digitally signed (and the signatures verified)? Sure you can run your own copy of Samba alongside what's provided by OS X, but I don't think there's any way to recompile and replace the Samba provided with OS X.
OS X is closed up in a way that specifically runs afoul of the "anti-TiVOization" clause(s) in GPLv3. You cannot recompile Samba and substitute the Apple-provided system component that's based on Samba with the one you compiled on your own. Sure, you can compile and run your own Samba on OS X, but the version of Samba that's used to support access to SMB shares is a signed part of the OS X. You cannot replace it without having the signing key. If you use OS X to mount SMB shares, you can only do so with Apple binaries, not with your own binaries (unless you go via MacFuSE, that is). This limitation is allowed by GPLv2, but NOT by GPLv3.
If you take a binary created by GPL'ed code and then sign in with a key, what does that have to do with the original source?
AFAIK, the anti-TIVOization clause in GPLv3 means that if, say, OS X were to run only signed Samba binaries, anyone should be able to get the signing keys just if they ask nicely. The sprit of GPLv3 is that not only you must get the sources, but you must also have a way of modifying the software and getting it to run as a replacement. On OS X for example it's currently impossible to replace the bundled Samba component and have OS X recognize it as a valid system component (due to signing). It is OK as far as GPLv2 is concerned, but not for GPLv3.
I just don't get the argument about GPLv3 somehow being contrary to the U.S. Copyright Law. Do remember that GPLv3 is a license: it gives you extra rights that you otherwise don't have as they by default remain with the copyright holder. If you don't like the terms: do as Apple did, don't use it. That's all there is to it.
I'm not a fanboy, I don't own any iDevices, I only have my workhorse '07 Macbook Pro, and I love OS X. I would be very upset if they intended to drop it. I'd gladly pay more for an OS X license than for a Windows 7 license, since to me the former has way more value in terms of usability.
I do know that insertion of the control rods caused excess reactivity due to positive feedback inherent in various aspects of RBMK's design, and that there was an initial steam explosion. That's why I'm rather explicit that a "controlled meltdown", if such a thing could be pulled off, requires adequate venting, and perhaps an initial dry-off period where all of the coolant is boiled away at a lower thermal power so that any vents within the fuel assemblies themselves are adequate to remove the steam without raising the pressure too much -- to make sure everything is dry and there won't be any water suddenly flashing into steam and blowing things up.
As for the second explosion: that's methinks where the detailed devil sits. We don't really know what the heck happened -- unless you have better references than whatever wikipedia provides? There are claims it was a small-scale nuclear explosion, but nobody is sure about that. I'm thinking that RBMK would behave very differently than a BWR since there's no moderator at all in a dry BWR, while the moderator is an internal part of the RBMK reactor assembly. A meltdown would probably mix molten graphite with molten fuel?
So perhaps in RBMK there was no way to have a controlled meltdown. But BWR should be different -- I'm more worried that in a BWR without moderation there may not be enough heat to keep things moving. RBMK spikes exceeded designed thermal outputs by an order of magnitude, this would be impossible without moderator (?). Perhaps BWRs should contain small quantities of graphite moderator in the core that would keep it critical with control rods removed and moderator not present -- that way a meltdown could be kept up?
Alas, in Japan and in TMI, the control rods were in the core. I wonder what the thermal output would be without the control rods and without the moderator. Anyone has any pointers to that?
Oh boy, why does no one get my point: they of course haven't buried themselves because the reactor was in shutdown within seconds of the killer power spike. Now had the reactor never undergone a shutdown, things might have been different. My only concern is that it may be hard to maintain criticality and thus full power output while a meltdown is underway -- one can assume that any water used for moderation will be gone in a short order. It'd be useful to know what would be the steady state output of a Mark I reactor assuming no moderation and fully withdrawn control rods.
Evaporation of water takes 2.270 kJ/kg; assuming 500MW thermal output due to no moderation, in one second the core produces 500MJ of heat and can evaporate 220 tons (m^3) of water. I don't know how much primary coolant there is in a Mark I BWR, or in an RBMK, but probably in a matter of seconds all the coolant would be vaporized and vented out (assuming the vents are open). A conservative assumption for the latent melting heat of "rock" can be 1MJ/kg (about 240cal/g), so the melted core would be melting about 1/2 of a ton of "rock" per second -- I presume one can ignore specific heat as it'd be dwarfed by heat of melting.
18 USC 2423 sec 105 specifically covers U.S. citizens and permanent residents engaging in sex tourism to minors, and it's the only reason why you're right. While I personally agree with the spirit of this law, I think it should be repealed. U.S. has no right to extraterritorial jurisdiction (with very limited exceptions, and this shouldn't be one), and this is exactly what happens here. You go somewhere where prostitution with people under age of 18 is legal, why the heck should U.S. laws prosecute you? Superior moral standards? WTF?! I'm sure there's plenty of U.S. allies and NATO members with ages of consent under 18. Poland would be one such example: 15 is the age of consent there. Heck, in Scotland the age of majority is 16.
Does SEC, or anyone in the U.S. for that matter, have jurisdiction over supposedly illegal acts outside of the country? Is it even SEC's business that officials abroad were bribed? Shouldn't the Chinese slap them with, say, imprisonment of responsible persons?
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I don't think any 12 year olds understand Feynman diagrams.
Around the age of 14 I was lucky to have access to a copy of the Douglas Robb Memorial Lectures given by Feynman. They were many generations from the original, the quality was horrible; in spite of it those were perhaps the most clear physics lectures I have heard at the time. At least he made me understand what the diagram is, even if I was nowhere near any of the math needed to use the diagrams the way they are usually used. Never mind that having a basic understanding of what QED is all about isn't anything to be scoffed at IMHO.
I expect that the easy to understand, everyday problems will be what may well kill quite a few people in short order. The refugees are still in plenty of areas that are effectively cut off (save for helicopter aid drops), or they have to walk for a day or two to get somewhere where there are simply more refugees but even less food. Localized, relatively small scale shortages of food, water, shelter, sanitation and medical care, that can lead to sickness and even death, are not only easy to visualize and understand, but should be on everyone's mind.
I was trying to explain to myself why would people want to be 'politically correct' anyway. The only thing I came up with is that some people just look for trouble. They pretend like they care, but they are just bullies and troubleseekers. They will twist everything to seem somehow against their rules, and that gives them a pretext to be upset and to demand apologies, or sue, or shoot you, or WTF ever. Political correctness is IMHO a fancy name for a symptom of psychosis. One thing is to have some sensitivity and respect to other people, but most 'politically correct' people go way farther than that.
It could run "exactly the same way" as long as you can set things up correctly. There may be, for example, a PostgreSQL extension, or a Python module, that is not available for one of the environments you develop in (but is available for the target).
As for embedded linux development: you typically don't want to be anywhere near the target with your dev environment. The development tools may not even run on the target for all you care. You cross compile, and then as long as you're on a "modern enough" Unix, you're fine. Heck, even on Windows you would be fine as long as you got the tools supported on it (or are brave enough to support yourself a.k.a. build the toolset).
Moreso, I just don't get the whole developing-on-the-target mindset. Maybe it's due to dabbling a lot with embedded development. If a developer cannot set things up to easily deploy to a test environment of her choice, maybe it's time for her to go back to basics. I happily run a bunch of VMs on my MacBook Pro, and a couple of them are CentOS development/test images.
LOL. And the "abuse tool" works by magic and fairy dust, right? The "tool" was probably just a website front end to a database. If the database contained junk, you got junk, without knowing any better.
Because radiation is radiation, right? Right. Sigh.
Are enzymes polar? Especially whatever enzymes would be "smoking guns" that affect bone density?
I think that to do the study they wanted to do, using similar subjects, you'd need thousands of them...
To me, the paper really is not worth the bandwidth consumed by downloading it. It's a very, very poorly set up study, something I'd maybe expect of some not-knowing-better undergrads. More of an example how not to set up a study than anything else. The results are useless for their intended purpose.
Interesting. It looks like the pole-mounted access points do the encryption. I can't wait till someone makes an open-source dongle that could become a mesh member and, um, tweak the data. For the whole neighborhood, no less ;)
And I just ran out of mod points. You win teh internets for tonight!
We are working with the provider of the Illini-Alert service to implement additional security features in the program to prevent this type of error.
most likely means: The same contractors who messed up basic usability in the original implementation will now get paid again to "fix" it. BTW what is with people using wrong words? Additional "security" features, my ass, this is HMI 101, nothing to do with security.
I think that part of the concern is the salt encrustation of the fuel rods. Fuel is hot, and the water locally boils, depositing sea salt -- they did, after all, use sea salt for emergency flooding of the reactors. Try boiling some sea water (or salted tap water) in an electric kettle. The salt crust increases thermal resistance between fuel (heat source) and coolant, increasing fuel temperature. This may increase salt deposition rate in spite of same thermal output of the fuel (the locally boiled water can recondense elsewhere, returning the heat of vaporization back into the system).
As long as there's any salt in the coolant in the reactors, things can't but get worse, to a point where the cooling channels will get blocked by salt. Same happens when the fuel melts: it will block the coolant channels. Do recall that heat removal, everything else being equal, is proportional to surface area at the interface. Closing off coolant channels literally reduces heat removal area by two orders of magnitude or so. You go from cooling to no cooling, for all practical purposes.
BS. Cs-137 has a half live of 30 years, not hours. The Cs-137 spread around during Chernobyl disaster is still around, and it was quite recently (last month, I don't have the article handy) that IIRC cows somewhere in Scandinavia had to be fed a non-local feed just to lower their meat's contamination levels to make it salable. Cs-137 is the real problem, I-131 is only a problem for the thyroid and we know how to work around it (saturate the thyroid with non-radioactive iodine).
Mod this one insightful, I can't but agree and I stand corrected. I guess the problem really affects sharing on iOS, then.
I agree on technical points. GCC is a mess of a code base to work with; good luck with anyone trying to port it. LLVM is not so bad in that respect. I could whip out a proof-of-concept port to a new architecture over a week of work, never having looked at LLVM before. I gave up the same task on gcc codebase after two weeks: it was an incomprehensible mess.
Are you sure that you can replace OS X Samba components with your own? Aren't they digitally signed (and the signatures verified)? Sure you can run your own copy of Samba alongside what's provided by OS X, but I don't think there's any way to recompile and replace the Samba provided with OS X.
OS X is closed up in a way that specifically runs afoul of the "anti-TiVOization" clause(s) in GPLv3. You cannot recompile Samba and substitute the Apple-provided system component that's based on Samba with the one you compiled on your own. Sure, you can compile and run your own Samba on OS X, but the version of Samba that's used to support access to SMB shares is a signed part of the OS X. You cannot replace it without having the signing key. If you use OS X to mount SMB shares, you can only do so with Apple binaries, not with your own binaries (unless you go via MacFuSE, that is). This limitation is allowed by GPLv2, but NOT by GPLv3.
If you take a binary created by GPL'ed code and then sign in with a key, what does that have to do with the original source?
AFAIK, the anti-TIVOization clause in GPLv3 means that if, say, OS X were to run only signed Samba binaries, anyone should be able to get the signing keys just if they ask nicely. The sprit of GPLv3 is that not only you must get the sources, but you must also have a way of modifying the software and getting it to run as a replacement. On OS X for example it's currently impossible to replace the bundled Samba component and have OS X recognize it as a valid system component (due to signing). It is OK as far as GPLv2 is concerned, but not for GPLv3.
I just don't get the argument about GPLv3 somehow being contrary to the U.S. Copyright Law. Do remember that GPLv3 is a license: it gives you extra rights that you otherwise don't have as they by default remain with the copyright holder. If you don't like the terms: do as Apple did, don't use it. That's all there is to it.
I'm not a fanboy, I don't own any iDevices, I only have my workhorse '07 Macbook Pro, and I love OS X. I would be very upset if they intended to drop it. I'd gladly pay more for an OS X license than for a Windows 7 license, since to me the former has way more value in terms of usability.
I do know that insertion of the control rods caused excess reactivity due to positive feedback inherent in various aspects of RBMK's design, and that there was an initial steam explosion. That's why I'm rather explicit that a "controlled meltdown", if such a thing could be pulled off, requires adequate venting, and perhaps an initial dry-off period where all of the coolant is boiled away at a lower thermal power so that any vents within the fuel assemblies themselves are adequate to remove the steam without raising the pressure too much -- to make sure everything is dry and there won't be any water suddenly flashing into steam and blowing things up.
As for the second explosion: that's methinks where the detailed devil sits. We don't really know what the heck happened -- unless you have better references than whatever wikipedia provides? There are claims it was a small-scale nuclear explosion, but nobody is sure about that. I'm thinking that RBMK would behave very differently than a BWR since there's no moderator at all in a dry BWR, while the moderator is an internal part of the RBMK reactor assembly. A meltdown would probably mix molten graphite with molten fuel?
So perhaps in RBMK there was no way to have a controlled meltdown. But BWR should be different -- I'm more worried that in a BWR without moderation there may not be enough heat to keep things moving. RBMK spikes exceeded designed thermal outputs by an order of magnitude, this would be impossible without moderator (?). Perhaps BWRs should contain small quantities of graphite moderator in the core that would keep it critical with control rods removed and moderator not present -- that way a meltdown could be kept up?
Alas, in Japan and in TMI, the control rods were in the core. I wonder what the thermal output would be without the control rods and without the moderator. Anyone has any pointers to that?
Oh boy, why does no one get my point: they of course haven't buried themselves because the reactor was in shutdown within seconds of the killer power spike. Now had the reactor never undergone a shutdown, things might have been different. My only concern is that it may be hard to maintain criticality and thus full power output while a meltdown is underway -- one can assume that any water used for moderation will be gone in a short order. It'd be useful to know what would be the steady state output of a Mark I reactor assuming no moderation and fully withdrawn control rods.
Evaporation of water takes 2.270 kJ/kg; assuming 500MW thermal output due to no moderation, in one second the core produces 500MJ of heat and can evaporate 220 tons (m^3) of water. I don't know how much primary coolant there is in a Mark I BWR, or in an RBMK, but probably in a matter of seconds all the coolant would be vaporized and vented out (assuming the vents are open). A conservative assumption for the latent melting heat of "rock" can be 1MJ/kg (about 240cal/g), so the melted core would be melting about 1/2 of a ton of "rock" per second -- I presume one can ignore specific heat as it'd be dwarfed by heat of melting.
18 USC 2423 sec 105 specifically covers U.S. citizens and permanent residents engaging in sex tourism to minors, and it's the only reason why you're right. While I personally agree with the spirit of this law, I think it should be repealed. U.S. has no right to extraterritorial jurisdiction (with very limited exceptions, and this shouldn't be one), and this is exactly what happens here. You go somewhere where prostitution with people under age of 18 is legal, why the heck should U.S. laws prosecute you? Superior moral standards? WTF?! I'm sure there's plenty of U.S. allies and NATO members with ages of consent under 18. Poland would be one such example: 15 is the age of consent there. Heck, in Scotland the age of majority is 16.
Does SEC, or anyone in the U.S. for that matter, have jurisdiction over supposedly illegal acts outside of the country? Is it even SEC's business that officials abroad were bribed? Shouldn't the Chinese slap them with, say, imprisonment of responsible persons?