There is a startling amount of ignorance in this thread. Pluto was demoted for a simple reason -- we found another body that is bigger in mass. So the IAU was faced with a stark choice. Add another 3 or so planets (there are several objects similar in mass, just one larger so far) with more likely to come, that are in weirdo orbits (kinda like pluto actually). Or demote pluto. Astronomers took their lumps and finally formally acknowledged that the largest Kuiper belt object does not deserve planetary status any more than the largest asteroid does.
... leads me to wonder why they are focused on crippling the two most open and alternative systems out there.
Because their bean-counters don't understand market dynamics -- that a small-to-modest segment of the market can drive adoption for the entire market.
Or, if you think they aren't stupid, possibly they want to switch their authoring tools (which they sell for money) to generate html5 (which is nominally a good thing) since they don't have to maintain the viewer end of that. But I would argue that they are trying to rush the transition and hurting themselves in the process.
Really? Looks like the samsung logo is there to me.
I'm sure it's clear in the court record, or, as said above, the lawyer in question may not have had very good distance vision. This is incident is not "proof" of anything in a legal sense, though perhaps that was your point.
What's really going on... capacitive touch screens. I think all the confusion comes down to people having underestimated (and still underestimating) how much better capacitive touch screens are over resistive ones. The whole smartphone & thin tablet "revolution" basically began with the introduction of capacitive touch screens. That nice smooth scroll and pad-of-the-finger every-touch-works usage -- that just doesn't happen on resistive screens. The UI we currently use on capacitive devices would be painful on a resistive screen. Having this occur at the same time as ubiquitous network access (making thin clients useful everywhere) makes for a big event in the history of personal computing.
Of course capacitive touch screens also have their limitations. I've been using a tablet with a stylus for years, so to me they are a modest disappointment in terms of their poor accuracy. Though far more usable in a general sense. I'm hoping we have capacitive / EMR stylus hybrid tablets soon. Before I have to buy an intermediate device to replace my tablet PC. But even with that I'll have to have a laptop "also" for real work.
You have misinterpreted their conclusion. By "primed" they mean that all Western populations have enough exposure already from medical sources that everyone is above any "threshold" for zero-danger. They are just saying there is no reason to quest for this threshold and we should just get on with applying models that don't assume that there is such a magic threshold.
Right, because Apple is the only one allowed to make clean, sleek designs. So anything clean and sleek is a copy of an Apple product. If that's not transparently ridiculous, nothing is.
I see someone else has already pointed out that your claims about phones and tablets are hollow. Current smartphones are very much like a palm from the late '90's on steroids. Exactly what any of us would have come up with given the resources. Basically capacitive touch screens made on-screen keyboards usable and the rest is history. Apple was in the right place at the right time with a good product. They deserve credit for good products and infrastructure, but not monopoly protection -- which is what they are requesting in the courts.
You have misunderstood the relationship between scientists and the press. OPERA could have killed the sensationalism at the source, but instead they went along with it. It turns out that a lot of people in the project seem to think this is a bad idea. And they know it is not just the press' doing.
Scientists know how to publish uncertain or most-likely-wrong results without causing a media frenzy. You don't put up a press release and hold press conferences. You publish your paper, circulate it to others, present at conferences, put it on the preprint server. And if someone from the press asks about it you say that it is mostly likely wrong and they should work on something else until the problems are worked out. This doesn't get you much press, but scientists having glitches in their experiments is not news; it happens all the time.
Why are 3 US tokamaks necessary for the US to benefit from ITER? Do they have different specialties or something?
The argument here seems to be that in order to benefit from ITER construction, the US needs to have a domestic program counterpart. However, why, in a technical sense, are all the current facilities necessary in addition to the new ITER facilities? I'm sure particle physicists would love to keep Fermilab up and running, but its a harder argument to keep the hardware (the expensive part) in place in the shadow of CERN. While it would be "better" to keep them all open or even build more, it seems reasonable to close at least one domestic tokamak facility to construct a better international one. Sure the international partners will get more benefit, but they are putting in more money and have had a far more stable commitment to the project.
Last I checked we haven't tried to invade any new countries lately. You do remember what the "bush doctorine" is right? shoot first as questions later.
Since 2008 the rest of the world is generally not scared that the US will do something totally insane at any moment. The closest we've come recently is all the crazies talking about not raising the debt ceiling (thus threatening to destabilize the #1 world reserve currency).
This "there's no difference" meme is nothing more than a rhetorical deception.
So you would prefer they just respond in good faith to that student who registers YourName55@gmail.com. I agree the better path is to create an authentication protocol for non-internal originating emails (like having phone contact required), but you appear to be missing the point. Or you have misinterpreted that very authentication protocol.
Maybe you should stick to physics instead of pontificating on public health topics then.
The amount of radiation discussed here (a few mSv/yr) is comparable to the variation in background radiation from place-to-place on the earth. So if this is an issue, we should be talking about moving large populations out of regions of naturally high radiation, like, oh the USA. (Japan appears to have a surprisingly low background radiation level.)
The reason this is potentially important is that there could be other sites with higher contamination. Keeping track of this stuff around Fukushima is important, but not because "any amount of radiation is evil," but because too much radiation is a public health problem and any amount of excess radiation might lead to detection of an otherwise unnoticed case of too much radiation.
I'm also a dvorak user, who has to switch to qwerty in many circumstances, and it is really funny what context cues turn out to switch you. Often ones you don't expect. My most unexpected one, from years ago, was the DOS font. The first time I was presented with an actual DOS look-alike font in an emulator such that the keyboard was dvorak, i was stunned to find that my hands just typed qwerty. And it was *hard* not to. That taught me that you never really know what the context clues your brain is using are.
One issue is the one you point out, that the correct crystalline structure at high densities/pressures is not a diamond lattice. There is also the pesky fact that the inner portions of white dwarf stars are made of carbon and oxygen.
One could actually go on and on because diamond is a covalently bonded crystal, while this stuff will be a degenerate electron gas containing an ionic crystal, much more like a crystalline metal.
I study white dwarf stars for a living (yes really) and calling this stuff diamond is just idiotic.
This is the problem: In order to make calls between two people behind a NAT work, skype (ab)uses other, completely unrelated, clients to get the connection going. This would never fly in an open application because the helper feature would be immediately removed or disabled by the "other" clients.
This was a huge discussion point when skype first came out. If you got turned into a skype "supernode" it would eat your internet connection. Universities had major problems with this. But apparently slashdot has forgotten it.
But as a closed piece of software skype can require you participate as a "helper".
Yes, this means an essential feature of skype, the one that makes it "just work", directly violates a central tenet of FLOSS software, full user choice.
If skype had done a bad job, this would have killed them. But it turns out they got everything else mostly right, so they were able to overcome this stigma. For example, they actually provide specially modified clients to universities to mitigate this issue.
This all as seat-of-the-pants because all effort up front is focused on preventing this type of accident, and less on being ready to deal with its aftermath.
But your comment is apt. There are clear lapses in oversight and on the part of the operator. The Japanese opted to not require so-called "hardened vents", which are required for this type of reactor in the US to prevent exactly the explosions that occurred at Fukushima. Basically venting hydrogen-rich gas building up in an overheating reactor presents a huge risk of explosion. This was well understood after three mile island, and the US required a hardened vent that can contain such an ignition and prevent an outright explosion. Also it mitigates against vent damage from other factors such as an earthquake. But the Japanese left this to the operators discretion. (An operator with a history of not even following actual enforced regulations.)
What happened at Fukushima is that without sufficient power to maintain cooling due to the generator destruction, the overheating cores started producing hydrogen gas. At some point the only option is to vent this. This is by design and, in fact, is one of the safety features of this type of reactor. But the vent has to work safely. Once the venting was begun, all bets were off. With the soft (sheet-metal and probably earthquake and tsunami-damaged) vents at Fukushima, an explosion was almost inevitable. This is clearly borne out at the site. They had to vent each reactor in turn, and each one exploded in turn.
It is also quite possible that the operators did not have good command of the situation as it was occurring. The US also requires more extensive internal instrumentation that is necessary for good decisions in this situation.
For the Deepwater horizon we all knew that what really went wrong is the incompetent concrete pour and the failing blowout preventer. But it seems the central problems in the case of Fukushima are being lost in the din.
I also agree that the mop-up could be being done better, but honestly the Japanese have other things going on as a result of the tens of thousands of dead from the tsunami. If the leaks at Fukushima are a bit worse than they could have been, it won't be that big a deal by comparison. But I think TEPCO has clearly shown they are not a capable operator and should be dismantled. And more realistic regulatory action is essential going forward.
The point is that you claim to have "zero coverage" but you actually will get treated if you get very sick or injured (or just old). It will just be on the government's dime if you can't pay. This is why all the arguments against "socialized medicine" are actually hollow. We automatically have socialized medicine just because we aren't heartless bastards. The problem is that if we don't manage it, the costs are, almost by definition, out of control.
Just to say up front, I think this is the most significant nuclear incident ever, and I expect it to have a huge effect on nuclear safety design and regulation. Chernobyl was being intentionally operated outside of spec and was a stupid design to begin with and TMI didn't actually release any harmful materials.
But to put it simply... you do not know very well what you are talking about.
Up until last week, the word "containment" had the simple and obvious meaning of radioactive materials staying inside the massive stainless steel containment vessel.
No, in reality, there are many layers to the containment, each of which contains different things to varying degrees. The outermost containment is the building itself, and in the case of a boiling water reactor this includes the turbine building because H20 that comes in contact with the core is circulated through the turbines. For example, steam containing radioactive contaminants can be vented into the building (outside the steel vessel) and still maintain zero external contamination. The big problem at Fukushima is that the top half of the reactor buildings are GONE. "containment" by your definition was lost with the first hydrogen explosion because the vented gas could then escape into the environment.
This is so far beyond a simple loss of containment accident that it is not funny. But the containment of raw core material itself is not really in terrible shape. The big problem is that the buildings are half-demolished from the hydrogen explosions. So all the plumbing and wiring and such are completely trashed. Things don't just need to be "fixed" they have to be rebuilt almost completely. Working on site is difficult, but not impossible. Every time they localize some contamination is a huge step forward because it means they know what they are dealing with and can make progress.
But back to the core breach, or to be more precise the core coolant leak. They have been saying all along that there were good chances of a leak from the reactor core, and what is happening seems like one of the less bad types of that. The cores have partially melted, so that radiative materials can mix into the water. That water has been able to leak. So far there is evidence of mostly "volatiles", mostly iodine and cesium, not much heavier stuff. But they seem to have isolated it to reactor 2. This breach was caused by, wait for it... a hydrogen explosion (you seeing a theme here?).
If they can get the contaminated water under control then a big piece of the wider impact will be more or less under control. This is why they are trying to pump this stuff out of the basements, because nobody thinks they will be strictly water tight. But that has proven challenging (where do they put it?). In the mean time if they can plug a few leaks they can reduce (not yet stop) the external impact, so that's what they are trying to do.
So wait, what's the problem? You are complaining about a lack of sensationalization? Sounds like you remembered the important parts: natural levels but not from a natural source. The reason this is headline news is actually contextual: it seems there was wide concern it was not being checked. Now it is being checked and there is no current indication that there is a problem in terms of the specific concern of the MOX fuel. Giving NPR the benefit of the doubt, I would assume that the "scariness" of the rest of the report was an attempt to explain this context. i.e. why it would be dangerous if large amounts had been detected. And thus why it should continue to be monitored since the situation has not actually stabilized.
The claim is almost insane. The amount they claim, 3x10^16 Becquerels of Cesium-137, is equivalent to the release of 10 kilograms (!) of Cesium-137 (see below). Into the air. I don't think that is a leak, that is a major core containment failure. I would say "like at Chernobyl" but there was effectively no containment in the way we think of it at Chernobyl. Internal reactor materials were splattered all over the building and grounds. While they were on fire!! Fukushima might have a leak, but there is no way there is a major containment failure.
A Becquerel is one decay per second. This means for something with a long half-life like Cs-137, 30 years = about 10^9 seconds, you need a lot to get even one Becquerel. Roughly you would need about 2x10^9 atoms to get 1 decay per second (so that half of it would be gone in the half-life, this is only approximate). This would mean there was a total of 2x10^9 x 3x10^16 = 6x10^25 atoms or 100 mol. That 137 in Cs-137 is 137 grams per mol, so that this would be about 13 kg.
There is an easy explanation for this. They are using 2 sensor readings, one northwest of tokyo (upwind from the plant) and one across the pacific from the plant and then using a model to estimate the source. (both readings from last week) This is just the slap-dab wrong data to try to measure this from. Their model is just wrong! They get giant numbers for the source because their model says that the propagation to these spots is very weak. We duh, then don't try to measure it there!
Actually a launch loop seems pretty do-able to me, it just required a tremendous amount of investment. It would make access to space almost "free" as a result. This is the kind of thing he is referring to as prohibited less by physics and more by accounting.
I think it is even evident from the picture that this is a mediocre copy. The F-22 uses thrust vectoring and computer control to overcome the lack of horizontal tail surfaces. But here they have added canards (smaller control surfaces forward of the wings). That is a total disaster in terms of stealthiness. It's like a car that looks like a BMW but has none of the interior luxuries -- i.e. all the important stuff.
Another example -- one of the big advantages of the F-22 is supersonic cruise (no afterburner) but that is largely about the engines and the article says they are still not succeeding at making their own decent engines. It's a long way from there to super-cruise. Like decades. And this tech is not going to "transfer" since it is strictly military use and very complex (e.g. absolutely requires certain kinds of materials technology that are easy to keep secret.)
Stop playing games. Your argument is one for why third-party candidates should RUN, not for us to vote for them. You are simply claiming that it defines a voter group that can be addressed in campaigns.
Until there is a rank-order voting system in place (which is what your arguments really point toward), sensible voters will continue to vote strategically. One of the problems of a winner-takes all system is that a third party candidate will always hurt the majority of his supporters more by taking relatively more away from their second choice candidate.
I suspect your whole line of reasoning as being disingenuous. The original point is that the general republican stance on this kind of speech issue is blatantly worse than that of the general democratic stance. So reacting to this with "nothing's changed" is disconnected from reality. The presence of third party candidates does not change this.
Um, no. It was possible to construct an earth-centered model that matched the data available in the 1600s. Today we have radar-ranging that can tell you exactly where the planets are located and how they are moving within a few hundred kilometers or better. The planets move around the sun. There's also the whole thing that a sun-centered model is based on universal laws of physics, while earth-centered models were constructed just to describe the motion of heavenly bodies and had no universality.
More generally, there are preferred reference frames. They're called inertial frames.
The caveats in your solution 1 immediately show that 2 is not a solution. It is a "pretend" solution.
But in the case of the original post, I agree with the general sentiment. The problem is that data security policies and procedures sound totally lax. It sounds like there were no procedures to keep control of sensitive data, so "lock everything down" became the only solution, albeit a terrible one. It is really only the first step toward your solution 1.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a startling amount of ignorance in this thread. Pluto was demoted for a simple reason -- we found another body that is bigger in mass. So the IAU was faced with a stark choice. Add another 3 or so planets (there are several objects similar in mass, just one larger so far) with more likely to come, that are in weirdo orbits (kinda like pluto actually). Or demote pluto. Astronomers took their lumps and finally formally acknowledged that the largest Kuiper belt object does not deserve planetary status any more than the largest asteroid does.
... leads me to wonder why they are focused on crippling the two most open and alternative systems out there.
Because their bean-counters don't understand market dynamics -- that a small-to-modest segment of the market can drive adoption for the entire market.
Or, if you think they aren't stupid, possibly they want to switch their authoring tools (which they sell for money) to generate html5 (which is nominally a good thing) since they don't have to maintain the viewer end of that. But I would argue that they are trying to rush the transition and hurting themselves in the process.
Really? Looks like the samsung logo is there to me.
I'm sure it's clear in the court record, or, as said above, the lawyer in question may not have had very good distance vision. This is incident is not "proof" of anything in a legal sense, though perhaps that was your point.
They are different aspect ratios. ANY slashdotter would likely have picked the correct one.
Probably the first lawyer misinterpreted the question to mean could they see the samsung logo from that distance.
What's really going on... capacitive touch screens. I think all the confusion comes down to people having underestimated (and still underestimating) how much better capacitive touch screens are over resistive ones. The whole smartphone & thin tablet "revolution" basically began with the introduction of capacitive touch screens. That nice smooth scroll and pad-of-the-finger every-touch-works usage -- that just doesn't happen on resistive screens. The UI we currently use on capacitive devices would be painful on a resistive screen. Having this occur at the same time as ubiquitous network access (making thin clients useful everywhere) makes for a big event in the history of personal computing.
Of course capacitive touch screens also have their limitations. I've been using a tablet with a stylus for years, so to me they are a modest disappointment in terms of their poor accuracy. Though far more usable in a general sense. I'm hoping we have capacitive / EMR stylus hybrid tablets soon. Before I have to buy an intermediate device to replace my tablet PC. But even with that I'll have to have a laptop "also" for real work.
You have misinterpreted their conclusion. By "primed" they mean that all Western populations have enough exposure already from medical sources that everyone is above any "threshold" for zero-danger. They are just saying there is no reason to quest for this threshold and we should just get on with applying models that don't assume that there is such a magic threshold.
Right, because Apple is the only one allowed to make clean, sleek designs. So anything clean and sleek is a copy of an Apple product. If that's not transparently ridiculous, nothing is.
I see someone else has already pointed out that your claims about phones and tablets are hollow. Current smartphones are very much like a palm from the late '90's on steroids. Exactly what any of us would have come up with given the resources. Basically capacitive touch screens made on-screen keyboards usable and the rest is history. Apple was in the right place at the right time with a good product. They deserve credit for good products and infrastructure, but not monopoly protection -- which is what they are requesting in the courts.
You have misunderstood the relationship between scientists and the press. OPERA could have killed the sensationalism at the source, but instead they went along with it. It turns out that a lot of people in the project seem to think this is a bad idea. And they know it is not just the press' doing.
Scientists know how to publish uncertain or most-likely-wrong results without causing a media frenzy. You don't put up a press release and hold press conferences. You publish your paper, circulate it to others, present at conferences, put it on the preprint server. And if someone from the press asks about it you say that it is mostly likely wrong and they should work on something else until the problems are worked out. This doesn't get you much press, but scientists having glitches in their experiments is not news; it happens all the time.
Why are 3 US tokamaks necessary for the US to benefit from ITER? Do they have different specialties or something?
The argument here seems to be that in order to benefit from ITER construction, the US needs to have a domestic program counterpart. However, why, in a technical sense, are all the current facilities necessary in addition to the new ITER facilities? I'm sure particle physicists would love to keep Fermilab up and running, but its a harder argument to keep the hardware (the expensive part) in place in the shadow of CERN. While it would be "better" to keep them all open or even build more, it seems reasonable to close at least one domestic tokamak facility to construct a better international one. Sure the international partners will get more benefit, but they are putting in more money and have had a far more stable commitment to the project.
Last I checked we haven't tried to invade any new countries lately. You do remember what the "bush doctorine" is right? shoot first as questions later.
Since 2008 the rest of the world is generally not scared that the US will do something totally insane at any moment. The closest we've come recently is all the crazies talking about not raising the debt ceiling (thus threatening to destabilize the #1 world reserve currency).
This "there's no difference" meme is nothing more than a rhetorical deception.
So you would prefer they just respond in good faith to that student who registers YourName55@gmail.com. I agree the better path is to create an authentication protocol for non-internal originating emails (like having phone contact required), but you appear to be missing the point. Or you have misinterpreted that very authentication protocol.
Maybe you should stick to physics instead of pontificating on public health topics then.
The amount of radiation discussed here (a few mSv/yr) is comparable to the variation in background radiation from place-to-place on the earth. So if this is an issue, we should be talking about moving large populations out of regions of naturally high radiation, like, oh the USA. (Japan appears to have a surprisingly low background radiation level.)
The reason this is potentially important is that there could be other sites with higher contamination. Keeping track of this stuff around Fukushima is important, but not because "any amount of radiation is evil," but because too much radiation is a public health problem and any amount of excess radiation might lead to detection of an otherwise unnoticed case of too much radiation.
I'm also a dvorak user, who has to switch to qwerty in many circumstances, and it is really funny what context cues turn out to switch you. Often ones you don't expect. My most unexpected one, from years ago, was the DOS font. The first time I was presented with an actual DOS look-alike font in an emulator such that the keyboard was dvorak, i was stunned to find that my hands just typed qwerty. And it was *hard* not to. That taught me that you never really know what the context clues your brain is using are.
The answer is no it is not diamond.
One issue is the one you point out, that the correct crystalline structure at high densities/pressures is not a diamond lattice. There is also the pesky fact that the inner portions of white dwarf stars are made of carbon and oxygen.
One could actually go on and on because diamond is a covalently bonded crystal, while this stuff will be a degenerate electron gas containing an ionic crystal, much more like a crystalline metal.
I study white dwarf stars for a living (yes really) and calling this stuff diamond is just idiotic.
This is the problem: In order to make calls between two people behind a NAT work, skype (ab)uses other, completely unrelated, clients to get the connection going. This would never fly in an open application because the helper feature would be immediately removed or disabled by the "other" clients.
This was a huge discussion point when skype first came out. If you got turned into a skype "supernode" it would eat your internet connection. Universities had major problems with this. But apparently slashdot has forgotten it.
But as a closed piece of software skype can require you participate as a "helper".
Yes, this means an essential feature of skype, the one that makes it "just work", directly violates a central tenet of FLOSS software, full user choice.
If skype had done a bad job, this would have killed them. But it turns out they got everything else mostly right, so they were able to overcome this stigma. For example, they actually provide specially modified clients to universities to mitigate this issue.
This all as seat-of-the-pants because all effort up front is focused on preventing this type of accident, and less on being ready to deal with its aftermath.
But your comment is apt. There are clear lapses in oversight and on the part of the operator. The Japanese opted to not require so-called "hardened vents", which are required for this type of reactor in the US to prevent exactly the explosions that occurred at Fukushima. Basically venting hydrogen-rich gas building up in an overheating reactor presents a huge risk of explosion. This was well understood after three mile island, and the US required a hardened vent that can contain such an ignition and prevent an outright explosion. Also it mitigates against vent damage from other factors such as an earthquake. But the Japanese left this to the operators discretion. (An operator with a history of not even following actual enforced regulations.)
What happened at Fukushima is that without sufficient power to maintain cooling due to the generator destruction, the overheating cores started producing hydrogen gas. At some point the only option is to vent this. This is by design and, in fact, is one of the safety features of this type of reactor. But the vent has to work safely. Once the venting was begun, all bets were off. With the soft (sheet-metal and probably earthquake and tsunami-damaged) vents at Fukushima, an explosion was almost inevitable. This is clearly borne out at the site. They had to vent each reactor in turn, and each one exploded in turn.
It is also quite possible that the operators did not have good command of the situation as it was occurring. The US also requires more extensive internal instrumentation that is necessary for good decisions in this situation.
For the Deepwater horizon we all knew that what really went wrong is the incompetent concrete pour and the failing blowout preventer. But it seems the central problems in the case of Fukushima are being lost in the din.
I also agree that the mop-up could be being done better, but honestly the Japanese have other things going on as a result of the tens of thousands of dead from the tsunami. If the leaks at Fukushima are a bit worse than they could have been, it won't be that big a deal by comparison. But I think TEPCO has clearly shown they are not a capable operator and should be dismantled. And more realistic regulatory action is essential going forward.
The point is that you claim to have "zero coverage" but you actually will get treated if you get very sick or injured (or just old). It will just be on the government's dime if you can't pay. This is why all the arguments against "socialized medicine" are actually hollow. We automatically have socialized medicine just because we aren't heartless bastards. The problem is that if we don't manage it, the costs are, almost by definition, out of control.
Just to say up front, I think this is the most significant nuclear incident ever, and I expect it to have a huge effect on nuclear safety design and regulation. Chernobyl was being intentionally operated outside of spec and was a stupid design to begin with and TMI didn't actually release any harmful materials.
But to put it simply... you do not know very well what you are talking about.
No, in reality, there are many layers to the containment, each of which contains different things to varying degrees. The outermost containment is the building itself, and in the case of a boiling water reactor this includes the turbine building because H20 that comes in contact with the core is circulated through the turbines. For example, steam containing radioactive contaminants can be vented into the building (outside the steel vessel) and still maintain zero external contamination. The big problem at Fukushima is that the top half of the reactor buildings are GONE. "containment" by your definition was lost with the first hydrogen explosion because the vented gas could then escape into the environment.
This is so far beyond a simple loss of containment accident that it is not funny. But the containment of raw core material itself is not really in terrible shape. The big problem is that the buildings are half-demolished from the hydrogen explosions. So all the plumbing and wiring and such are completely trashed. Things don't just need to be "fixed" they have to be rebuilt almost completely. Working on site is difficult, but not impossible. Every time they localize some contamination is a huge step forward because it means they know what they are dealing with and can make progress.
But back to the core breach, or to be more precise the core coolant leak. They have been saying all along that there were good chances of a leak from the reactor core, and what is happening seems like one of the less bad types of that. The cores have partially melted, so that radiative materials can mix into the water. That water has been able to leak. So far there is evidence of mostly "volatiles", mostly iodine and cesium, not much heavier stuff. But they seem to have isolated it to reactor 2. This breach was caused by, wait for it... a hydrogen explosion (you seeing a theme here?).
If they can get the contaminated water under control then a big piece of the wider impact will be more or less under control. This is why they are trying to pump this stuff out of the basements, because nobody thinks they will be strictly water tight. But that has proven challenging (where do they put it?). In the mean time if they can plug a few leaks they can reduce (not yet stop) the external impact, so that's what they are trying to do.
So wait, what's the problem? You are complaining about a lack of sensationalization? Sounds like you remembered the important parts: natural levels but not from a natural source. The reason this is headline news is actually contextual: it seems there was wide concern it was not being checked. Now it is being checked and there is no current indication that there is a problem in terms of the specific concern of the MOX fuel. Giving NPR the benefit of the doubt, I would assume that the "scariness" of the rest of the report was an attempt to explain this context. i.e. why it would be dangerous if large amounts had been detected. And thus why it should continue to be monitored since the situation has not actually stabilized.
A Becquerel is one decay per second. This means for something with a long half-life like Cs-137, 30 years = about 10^9 seconds, you need a lot to get even one Becquerel. Roughly you would need about 2x10^9 atoms to get 1 decay per second (so that half of it would be gone in the half-life, this is only approximate). This would mean there was a total of 2x10^9 x 3x10^16 = 6x10^25 atoms or 100 mol. That 137 in Cs-137 is 137 grams per mol, so that this would be about 13 kg.
There is an easy explanation for this. They are using 2 sensor readings, one northwest of tokyo (upwind from the plant) and one across the pacific from the plant and then using a model to estimate the source. (both readings from last week) This is just the slap-dab wrong data to try to measure this from. Their model is just wrong! They get giant numbers for the source because their model says that the propagation to these spots is very weak. We duh, then don't try to measure it there!
Actually a launch loop seems pretty do-able to me, it just required a tremendous amount of investment. It would make access to space almost "free" as a result. This is the kind of thing he is referring to as prohibited less by physics and more by accounting.
I think it is even evident from the picture that this is a mediocre copy. The F-22 uses thrust vectoring and computer control to overcome the lack of horizontal tail surfaces. But here they have added canards (smaller control surfaces forward of the wings). That is a total disaster in terms of stealthiness. It's like a car that looks like a BMW but has none of the interior luxuries -- i.e. all the important stuff.
Another example -- one of the big advantages of the F-22 is supersonic cruise (no afterburner) but that is largely about the engines and the article says they are still not succeeding at making their own decent engines. It's a long way from there to super-cruise. Like decades. And this tech is not going to "transfer" since it is strictly military use and very complex (e.g. absolutely requires certain kinds of materials technology that are easy to keep secret.)
Stop playing games. Your argument is one for why third-party candidates should RUN, not for us to vote for them. You are simply claiming that it defines a voter group that can be addressed in campaigns.
Until there is a rank-order voting system in place (which is what your arguments really point toward), sensible voters will continue to vote strategically. One of the problems of a winner-takes all system is that a third party candidate will always hurt the majority of his supporters more by taking relatively more away from their second choice candidate.
I suspect your whole line of reasoning as being disingenuous. The original point is that the general republican stance on this kind of speech issue is blatantly worse than that of the general democratic stance. So reacting to this with "nothing's changed" is disconnected from reality. The presence of third party candidates does not change this.
Um, no. It was possible to construct an earth-centered model that matched the data available in the 1600s. Today we have radar-ranging that can tell you exactly where the planets are located and how they are moving within a few hundred kilometers or better. The planets move around the sun. There's also the whole thing that a sun-centered model is based on universal laws of physics, while earth-centered models were constructed just to describe the motion of heavenly bodies and had no universality.
More generally, there are preferred reference frames. They're called inertial frames.
Please mod this guy into oblivion.
The caveats in your solution 1 immediately show that 2 is not a solution. It is a "pretend" solution.
But in the case of the original post, I agree with the general sentiment. The problem is that data security policies and procedures sound totally lax. It sounds like there were no procedures to keep control of sensitive data, so "lock everything down" became the only solution, albeit a terrible one. It is really only the first step toward your solution 1.