Sure, but the vacuum vessels of a reactor are a lot less material than the entire fuel charge of a fission plant.
Also, the fuel in a fission plant has to be regularly changed as it depletes the U 235 in it.
The reactor vessel will only have to be changed at relatively long intervals when neutron embrittlement becomes a problem. (And you can reduce that with judicious choice of materials.)
Point one can be argued, as GAO is a considerably different organization in scope and legal grounding than CRS.
As to point 2: Don't you love it when something you didn't know about renders your position moot? Yes, the mods should score my previous post -3:pwned!
CRS reports used to be rather hard to get hold of, but PHP apparently has a backdoor into getting them. Since this would be well known on Capital Hill, at least to me, it looks like de facto publication.
So I grasp what you're saying, We don't want CRS to become some politically-correct-don't-write-anything-really-us eful-the- public-might-see-it organization, but I really don't imagine that happening.
I can.
In the late 70s when there was congressional investigation over windfall profits by the oil companies. There were also trials resulting from it. The lawyers of those companies tried to subpeona the files of the CRS to try to use in their cases. (Likely it was a tactic to create a chilling effect).
Now, multiply that by everly pressure group and lobbyist you can think of on any side of any issue. It's hard to write a balanced and neutral report when you're worried about being called to testify, or going to have your phone overflow with angry (insert-special-interest).
As someone else mentioned, this was above freezing.
That said, there is work on vitrifying (freezing so fast crystals can't form) tissue and then using that for long term storage of grafts or perhaps even whole organs.
Small things can be frozen very quickly. The larger the item, the harder it is to do.
We'll have to wait a bit before putting Han Solo in carbon freeze.
Actually, Amory Lovins, one of the best known of the green energy types was asked a couple decades ago what he would think of a true cheap clean plentiful source of energy.
He said it would be a disaster.
His idea was that humans are inherently destructive and must be limited in order to prevent them from causing more damage. Such an energy source would free them their current limits.
So, to some in the environmental movement, the problem is not just the current sources of energy, but the possibility of better sources of energy as well.
I have problems with that viewpoint. Then again, (horrible moderate that I am) I seem to have greater faith in humanity than the zealots on either the left or right.
Humanity's greatest asset is our ability to stupidly and blunderingly keep muddling through until we get something approaching the right solution. (And, given evolution, it's Mom Nature's way as well.)
I was at one of their mercury testing events where they served coffee that was brewed with solar power. They're nice people, and the chicks were really cute.
You should go to some industry shows for the chemical, oil and coal industries. They'll serve you coffee brewed with electricity generated at a coal plant. The reps will be very nice people to you, and the chicks in the booth will be really cute.
1) why are you Americans so incredibly proud of your 40 hour week and miserable holiday entitlement?
Because the price of the French labor laws is the current state of the French economy.
There's no "right or wrong" here. It's just a choice.
Yes, you can have the current French labor laws and enjoy the time. It makes it hard to compete on a global scale with the US, Britain, or even more so, the developing world where labor costs are very low. It may be worth the cost to many.
The other choice is to put in the long hours and less vacation, but have a higher GDP. That may not be worth it to some. If you have young kids, being gone can be a high price to pay, for example.
You can't have both. Or more exactly, you can't have both for an extended period of time.
You can try to tariff out competition on labor and land cost intensive items like agriculture for a time, but in the long run, that's a bill that still has to be paid (And, incidently, helps impoverish third world farmers. The US is guilty of that as well, but France and Japan are both big players in that problem.)
It also tends to lead to things like the dustup with Tony Blair over reopening the agricultural subsidies that had the pundits predicting the imminent death of the EU recently.
2) I used to go out with a woman whose father had worked for the French atomic industry all his life (physics PHD) and he was emphatic that any proposed fusion reactor would produce just as much nuclear waste as a fission reactor if not more.
He was likely talking about neutron induced radioactivity in the walls of the reactor, which, depending on what materials are used, can indeed be a problem. However, it's a LOT less material than is generated at a fission plant, where the large amount of fuel (many tons) becomes highly radioactive and has to be switched out regularly.
There are some questions about how often the reactor vessels of a fusion reactor would have to be changed out, but likely not that often. Gaining that sort of experience is one of the reasons for funding fusion related research.
3) I work in wind power and while I don't think they should be everywhere and blighting everyone's view, renewables combined with pump storage or compressed air storage or hydrogen storage, are more than capable of supplying the world's energy needs.
Yes, they could conceivably be used to power the world. However, that tends to ignore the environmental impacts of massive use of solar, wind, tide and other sources. In the small amounts being fielded, the current environmental costs are miniscule. They will grow greatly if these technologies are heavily used. And they will have to be heavily used to supply just the current level of energy use.
Don't get me wrong. I think that using passive solar in building, photovoltaics in some areas, and wind power are very desirable. But, I think the costs associated with switching solely to them will be much higher than many who promote them think.
4) All us geeks like elegant solutions and fusion has always held out that promise but I think we all need to try to not mix up your personal fetishes with practical public policy issues.
This is absolutely true, but it applies equally well to those supporting the "green" power sources. They'll work well for some applications, however, powering the world with them will not be all roses.
The truth of the matter is, our energy problems are soluble technically, in any of several ways. They will ALL lead to problems of various sorts (technical and political).
The result of that is the real problem. That given the current political situation with each side being able to at least partly block the other, our energy problems are largely politically insoluble.
Thus, we stick with the current fuel cycles, which have their own problems and costs (technical and political) that we can all recite chapter and verse.
The Z machine (and it's earlier configuration called PBFA 2) have been on Sandia for a long time.
As said above, it's not a rail gun. It's not really even particularly useful for rail gun research.
What it's for is to put small amounts of matter at tremendous temperatures and pressures.
There are a lot of reasons to want to do this. Some of it is just basic research. i.e. What happens to matter and the laws governing it at these extreme conditions?
Another application is fusion power research. You can compress deuturium and tritium to the point they will fuse in this machine. Though it's not made to generate power, you can learn about the details of the fusion reaction.
That said, the main reason why this machine was built was indeed for military research. But even that is in a grey area. The US hasn't conducted a nuclear test detonation in quite some time. The reason it was able to do this is that computer simulations and other methods got good enough that they were able to be used instead of actually setting off a thermonuclear or nuclear device. Indeed, many of the Department of Energy's most powerful computers were created specifically to do that sort simulation (ASCII White, IIRC, for example).
When running computer simulations, you have to have some way of calibrating the simulation and checking that it's getting the right answer.
In the case of a supercomputer run simulating a car crash, you can validate it by conducting crash tests, and seeing how closely it agrees with them. Wrecking a few of a given car model is acceptable in return for it.
But, when simulating nuclear weapons, you would often run into cases where to validate the code, you'd, at first glance, have to set one off. The conditions in a nuclear blast are so extreme, that it's difficult to put matter into that sort of state. If you're trying to maintain a test moratorium, that kinda undermines the whole idea.
That's a big reason PBFA 2 and the follow on Z machine were made. They let DOE check the computer simulations and do basic research that would otherwise require nuclear testing. One of the biggest areas of interest is what happens when the materials in a bomb age. A lot of those weapons are getting quite old.
They have many other basic research uses, but a big one is making it possible to keep the nuclear test moratorium.
So, it's grey area. On the one hand, it's used for weapon research. On the other, it helps keep the test moratorium. It also has a lot of basic research uses. So, just like a supercomputer, you have to make your own decision about whether it, on the whole is a good or bad thing.
Yes, indeed! Let's make something that looks like a heavy rifle with a scope on it. Then climb up on a skyscraper in downtown LA and start pointing it round at other buildings and pedestrians down on the street, etc.
Double bonus points if Schwarzenegger or some other high profile politician is in town that day.
I grew up in a small rural town and worked on farms. I think I have a pretty good idea of how fragile it is. In fact, one of my criticisms of society is that to some, meat comes from the store, and they don't bother to think much further than that. But, really that's kinda orthogonal to the argument.
Much of the research you talk about isn't done at corporations, but at government funded universities. I've known quite a number of scientists that aren't particularly profit motivated. If you're thinking of science as a good way to get rich, a lot of grad students, post docs and researchers would beg to differ. It's a good living, but it's not the path to riches. You can make a lot more money in things that are less demanding. IT for instance (I know. I've worked both).
As to your last point, you could ask soldiers the same thing. Or factory workers making tanks, or even helmets. Or, factory workers making cigarettes. That last one has fewer possible positive uses than the others.
Your argument about the ethics of it seems to be that scientists are somehow amoral to a greater extent than the rest of humanity. I've known a lot of them, and would say they're about like the rest. Maybe a bit more conscious of the ethical dilemnas than the average random Joe or Jane on the street.
Many of them put a lot of thought into the ethics of what they do. They may not come to the same conclusions you do, but well meaning people differ pretty starkly in the conclusions they come to.
On Slashdot, it's all in the presentation. Just figure a way that it'll improve game graphics, and they'll decide it's not only moral, but a moral mandate.
Nothing new here. This has been a technique used for many years. They aren't making the Island of Dr. Moraeu. In fact, without very specialized tests, you couldn't tell the difference. The animal might be kinda sickly in some ways, but we create intentionally sickly animals all the time for many kinds of medical and other research. Mice that are nearly certain to develop cancer, or have knocked out enzymes that lead to genetic diseases similar to human ones, etc, etc.
The idea that putting some human neurons into a mouse makes it somehow "human" is very is rather like saying that when researchers lay down human neurons on silicon to monitor how they connect up and communicate, it makes the silicon "human". Are we now going to get upset about sticking human neurons on a silicon wafer? I hope not.
Been there. When you've got years of history with a system, it's awfully tough to move away from it.
That said, (and noting that my DB experience is with other systems than MySQL), given that innodb supports replication would it be possible to distribute your servers over a couple of different colos? I know that you'd have a lot of update data passing between them. It might well be expensive, but this sort of outage is expensive too now that you're a commercial service. There's also a mention in the updates that this sort of thing has happened before.
A lot of sites do multi-location DB systems, so it can be done (I just don't know if it's feasible for you guys.)
In any case, good luck from an LJ user and a veteran of some ugly multiday sleep deprived data center recoveries. I feel your pain.
Biomass production over a wide range of environments should be majorly effected by a 22% drop in solar output. We should see it in ocean plankton, wild forest growth rates, the carrying capacity of grasslands, etc.
Also, though many places have updated their agriculture, there are quite a number of subsistence farmers around the world who are using the same methods as they did 50 years ago and who haven't gotten modern hybrid seeds in that time. They should see the full effect.
Granted, plants don't use the spectrum equally at all wavelengths, so something that preferentially reflected the blue might have less impact. But still, with the large magnitudes of dimming being claimed, there should be very noticeable effects in an area that biologists and ecologists monitor very closely.
Re:larger drops in solar output seem questionable
on
BBC on Global Dimming
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· Score: 1
In places that have changed their agriculture, yes. But there are a fair number of subsistence farmers out there in the world that are doing exactly the same practices as before. They should see the full effect.
It's not just agriculture, either. This should show a massive decrease in biomass production rates over a wide range of environments, from forest to grasslands, to ocean areas.
Now, plants don't use the full spectrum, so there may be some lessening of the effect, but given the amount of dimming proposed, three should still be large effects worldwide across very different environments.
I first heard about it in a Scientific American article in the mid 70s. It lets us put some pretty strong bounds on how much the laws of physics, and the values of some physical constants have changed over the period since the reactors shut down. (We "assume" normally that they don't change, but we have no a priori guarantee they haven't. It's nice having a real test via the nuclear decay rates and isotope ratios of the fission products.)
It also gives us some info on how fission decay products move when buried in the ground over very long periods. That last is currently pretty important given the debates over what to do with nuclear waste for long time storage.
Plutonium was being produced in the Oklo natural nuclear reactor that was running in Gabon 2 billion years ago. It had decayed away by the time we showed up on the scene. See this, for example.
We learned of it by making it, but nature had done it long before us.
Indeed. This went immediately into my favorites list. Kudos to Google on this. As to the name collison, "A rose by any other name..." lists the same references.
Excellent stuff. On a quick test, it's complete enough to bring up some rather obscure papers from the 60s in several different fields.
I see a minor glitch in the cartogram in the link. Montana is colored as going strongly for Kerry, when it was strongly for Bush. The percentages listed are right. Likely just a data entry error.
It's the same old "cool people that I like" versus "uncool people I dislike" sort of thing you see in a lot of fandoms. And a lot of people treat politics about the same way as they would a sports rivalry or Trekkies vs Trekkers, but more bitter.
There's very little more human than saying your friends deserve special consideration and your enemies don't. Double standards are pretty deeply wired into us all.
This year it seems that the political equivalent of the soccer hooligans have been out in greater force than usual on both sides.
To be prior restraint, it has to happen before the material in question was published. A punitive measure after the fact is by definition not prior restraint. It would be prior restraint if they had shut down the server before it was posted.
As an example, the US government attempted a prior restraint on the publishing of the Pentagon Papers. That is, they went to the Post and tried to get them to not publish the rest of them. That is a case of prior restraint. If they had instead shut down the paper afterward, that would indeed be aggregious, but not a "prior" restraint.
This is action taken after the fact. Prior restraint has a well defined legal definition. People often misuse the term as I think you are here.
I'm not arguing about the action, just calling it "prior" restraint.
How can it be PRIOR restraint when the information in question had already been published on Indymedia's site? Prior restraint would be preventing the publishing of the information by shutting them down beforehand.
You can argue that it was an unlawful restraint, but I can't see how it was a prior restraint.
Unless you're saying that taking down the server prevents the publishing of some yet unknown material.
But that's a bit like me taking some lady to task for not going out with me as it would interfere with the rights of our as yet unconcieved children.
Thermally driven pumps without SOLID moving parts:
on
Pumps Without Moving Parts
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· Score: 5, Interesting
have been known for a long time.
They work fine in some cases. A ramjet is one such. If you want to be picky and want one that uses just heat rather than an injected fuel as an input, then the nuclear thermal ramjet that was looked at in the 50s for Project Pluto.
Apparently he's figured out how to make one that's more effective for liquids in more day to day environments. The site gives few details on it though. He won a prize for it, but I'm a little leary of the hype factor with no technical details.
Actually, IIRC it wasn't a taxi test of the shuttle. It was mounted on the back of a Bison bomber and the bomber went off the runway. They had timed this so that no US spy sats would be overhead. (Timing outdoor operations to avoid surveillance is a common thing in military programs). Getting stuck pushed them out of that time window, and they were photographed.
This is the same as how the US uses a modified 747 to move the US shuttle.
What you say might be true. But, science doesn't live in a vacuum. Setting aside the idea of shading results for political reasons (sadly it happens), the decision of what to study and when is often motivated in part by political considerations. That can have effects just as strong.
Example: The decision to put a major effort into developing the hydrogen bomb as a follow on to the already devastatingly destructive fission bomb. The result that it worked was an indisputable scientific fact regardless of politics. The decision to do the research and development was heavily influenced for good or ill by the political climate of the world and the United States in the post WW2 period.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, but the vacuum vessels of a reactor are a lot less material than the entire fuel charge of a fission plant.
Also, the fuel in a fission plant has to be regularly changed as it depletes the U 235 in it.
The reactor vessel will only have to be changed at relatively long intervals when neutron embrittlement becomes a problem. (And you can reduce that with judicious choice of materials.)
Point one can be argued, as GAO is a considerably different organization in scope and legal grounding than CRS.
As to point 2: Don't you love it when something you didn't know about renders your position moot? Yes, the mods should score my previous post -3:pwned!
CRS reports used to be rather hard to get hold of, but PHP apparently has a backdoor into getting them. Since this would be well known on Capital Hill, at least to me, it looks like de facto publication.
So I grasp what you're saying, We don't want CRS to become some politically-correct-don't-write-anything-really-us eful-the- public-might-see-it organization, but I really don't imagine that happening.
I can.
In the late 70s when there was congressional investigation over windfall profits by the oil companies. There were also trials resulting from it. The lawyers of those companies tried to subpeona the files of the CRS to try to use in their cases. (Likely it was a tactic to create a chilling effect).
Now, multiply that by everly pressure group and lobbyist you can think of on any side of any issue. It's hard to write a balanced and neutral report when you're worried about being called to testify, or going to have your phone overflow with angry (insert-special-interest).
As someone else mentioned, this was above freezing.
That said, there is work on vitrifying (freezing so fast crystals can't form) tissue and then using that for long term storage of grafts or perhaps even whole organs.
Small things can be frozen very quickly. The larger the item, the harder it is to do.
We'll have to wait a bit before putting Han Solo in carbon freeze.
Actually, Amory Lovins, one of the best known of the green energy types was asked a couple decades ago what he would think of a true cheap clean plentiful source of energy.
He said it would be a disaster.
His idea was that humans are inherently destructive and must be limited in order to prevent them from causing more damage. Such an energy source would free them their current limits.
So, to some in the environmental movement, the problem is not just the current sources of energy, but the possibility of better sources of energy as well.
I have problems with that viewpoint. Then again, (horrible moderate that I am) I seem to have greater faith in humanity than the zealots on either the left or right.
Humanity's greatest asset is our ability to stupidly and blunderingly keep muddling through until we get something approaching the right solution. (And, given evolution, it's Mom Nature's way as well.)
I was at one of their mercury testing events where they served coffee that was brewed with solar power. They're nice people, and the chicks were really cute.
You should go to some industry shows for the chemical, oil and coal industries. They'll serve you coffee brewed with electricity generated at a coal plant. The reps will be very nice people to you, and the chicks in the booth will be really cute.
1) why are you Americans so incredibly proud of your 40 hour week and miserable holiday entitlement?
Because the price of the French labor laws is the current state of the French economy.
There's no "right or wrong" here. It's just a choice.
Yes, you can have the current French labor laws and enjoy the time. It makes it hard to compete on a global scale with the US, Britain, or even more so, the developing world where labor costs are very low. It may be worth the cost to many.
The other choice is to put in the long hours and less vacation, but have a higher GDP. That may not be worth it to some. If you have young kids, being gone can be a high price to pay, for example.
You can't have both. Or more exactly, you can't have both for an extended period of time.
You can try to tariff out competition on labor and land cost intensive items like agriculture for a time, but in the long run, that's a bill that still has to be paid (And, incidently, helps impoverish third world farmers. The US is guilty of that as well, but France and Japan are both big players in that problem.)
It also tends to lead to things like the dustup with Tony Blair over reopening the agricultural subsidies that had the pundits predicting the imminent death of the EU recently.
2) I used to go out with a woman whose father had worked for the French atomic industry all his life (physics PHD) and he was emphatic that any proposed fusion reactor would produce just as much nuclear waste as a fission reactor if not more.
He was likely talking about neutron induced radioactivity in the walls of the reactor, which, depending on what materials are used, can indeed be a problem. However, it's a LOT less material than is generated at a fission plant, where the large amount of fuel (many tons) becomes highly radioactive and has to be switched out regularly.
There are some questions about how often the reactor vessels of a fusion reactor would have to be changed out, but likely not that often. Gaining that sort of experience is one of the reasons for funding fusion related research.
3) I work in wind power and while I don't think they should be everywhere and blighting everyone's view, renewables combined with pump storage or compressed air storage or hydrogen storage, are more than capable of supplying the world's energy needs.
Yes, they could conceivably be used to power the world. However, that tends to ignore the environmental impacts of massive use of solar, wind, tide and other sources. In the small amounts being fielded, the current environmental costs are miniscule. They will grow greatly if these technologies are heavily used. And they will have to be heavily used to supply just the current level of energy use.
Don't get me wrong. I think that using passive solar in building, photovoltaics in some areas, and wind power are very desirable. But, I think the costs associated with switching solely to them will be much higher than many who promote them think.
4) All us geeks like elegant solutions and fusion has always held out that promise but I think we all need to try to not mix up your personal fetishes with practical public policy issues.
This is absolutely true, but it applies equally well to those supporting the "green" power sources. They'll work well for some applications, however, powering the world with them will not be all roses.
The truth of the matter is, our energy problems are soluble technically, in any of several ways. They will ALL lead to problems of various sorts (technical and political).
The result of that is the real problem. That given the current political situation with each side being able to at least partly block the other, our energy problems are largely politically insoluble.
Thus, we stick with the current fuel cycles, which have their own problems and costs (technical and political) that we can all recite chapter and verse.
TANSTAAFL
The Z machine (and it's earlier configuration called PBFA 2) have been on Sandia for a long time.
As said above, it's not a rail gun. It's not really even particularly useful for rail gun research.
What it's for is to put small amounts of matter at tremendous temperatures and pressures.
There are a lot of reasons to want to do this. Some of it is just basic research. i.e. What happens to matter and the laws governing it at these extreme conditions?
Another application is fusion power research. You can compress deuturium and tritium to the point they will fuse in this machine. Though it's not made to generate power, you can learn about the details of the fusion reaction.
That said, the main reason why this machine was built was indeed for military research. But even that is in a grey area. The US hasn't conducted a nuclear test detonation in quite some time. The reason it was able to do this is that computer simulations and other methods got good enough that they were able to be used instead of actually setting off a thermonuclear or nuclear device. Indeed, many of the Department of Energy's most powerful computers were created specifically to do that sort simulation (ASCII White, IIRC, for example).
When running computer simulations, you have to have some way of calibrating the simulation and checking that it's getting the right answer.
In the case of a supercomputer run simulating a car crash, you can validate it by conducting crash tests, and seeing how closely it agrees with them. Wrecking a few of a given car model is acceptable in return for it.
But, when simulating nuclear weapons, you would often run into cases where to validate the code, you'd, at first glance, have to set one off. The conditions in a nuclear blast are so extreme, that it's difficult to put matter into that sort of state. If you're trying to maintain a test moratorium, that kinda undermines the whole idea.
That's a big reason PBFA 2 and the follow on Z machine were made. They let DOE check the computer simulations and do basic research that would otherwise require nuclear testing. One of the biggest areas of interest is what happens when the materials in a bomb age. A lot of those weapons are getting quite old.
They have many other basic research uses, but a big one is making it possible to keep the nuclear test moratorium.
So, it's grey area. On the one hand, it's used for weapon research. On the other, it helps keep the test moratorium. It also has a lot of basic research uses. So, just like a supercomputer, you have to make your own decision about whether it, on the whole is a good or bad thing.
Slashdotters think: "Mensans are all arrogant socially hopeless geeks."
Mensans think: "Slashdotters are all arrogant socially hopeless geeks."
Everyone else thinks: "Look at the arrogant socially crippled geeks getting a verbal slap fight. What a bunch of weenies!"
Yes, indeed! Let's make something that looks like a heavy rifle with a scope on it. Then climb up on a skyscraper in downtown LA and start pointing it round at other buildings and pedestrians down on the street, etc.
Double bonus points if Schwarzenegger or some other high profile politician is in town that day.
I grew up in a small rural town and worked on farms. I think I have a pretty good idea of how fragile it is. In fact, one of my criticisms of society is that to some, meat comes from the store, and they don't bother to think much further than that. But, really that's kinda orthogonal to the argument.
Much of the research you talk about isn't done at corporations, but at government funded universities. I've known quite a number of scientists that aren't particularly profit motivated. If you're thinking of science as a good way to get rich, a lot of grad students, post docs and researchers would beg to differ. It's a good living, but it's not the path to riches. You can make a lot more money in things that are less demanding. IT for instance (I know. I've worked both).
As to your last point, you could ask soldiers the same thing. Or factory workers making tanks, or even helmets. Or, factory workers making cigarettes. That last one has fewer possible positive uses than the others.
Your argument about the ethics of it seems to be that scientists are somehow amoral to a greater extent than the rest of humanity. I've known a lot of them, and would say they're about like the rest. Maybe a bit more conscious of the ethical dilemnas than the average random Joe or Jane on the street.
Many of them put a lot of thought into the ethics of what they do. They may not come to the same conclusions you do, but well meaning people differ pretty starkly in the conclusions they come to.
On Slashdot, it's all in the presentation. Just figure a way that it'll improve game graphics, and they'll decide it's not only moral, but a moral mandate.
Nothing new here. This has been a technique used for many years. They aren't making the Island of Dr. Moraeu. In fact, without very specialized tests, you couldn't tell the difference. The animal might be kinda sickly in some ways, but we create intentionally sickly animals all the time for many kinds of medical and other research. Mice that are nearly certain to develop cancer, or have knocked out enzymes that lead to genetic diseases similar to human ones, etc, etc.
The idea that putting some human neurons into a mouse makes it somehow "human" is very is rather like saying that when researchers lay down human neurons on silicon to monitor how they connect up and communicate, it makes the silicon "human". Are we now going to get upset about sticking human neurons on a silicon wafer? I hope not.
Been there. When you've got years of history with a system, it's awfully tough to move away from it.
That said, (and noting that my DB experience is with other systems than MySQL), given that innodb supports replication would it be possible to distribute your servers over a couple of different colos? I know that you'd have a lot of update data passing between them. It might well be expensive, but this sort of outage is expensive too now that you're a commercial service. There's also a mention in the updates that this sort of thing has happened before.
A lot of sites do multi-location DB systems, so it can be done (I just don't know if it's feasible for you guys.)
In any case, good luck from an LJ user and a veteran of some ugly multiday sleep deprived data center recoveries. I feel your pain.
Biomass production over a wide range of environments should be majorly effected by a 22% drop in solar output. We should see it in ocean plankton, wild forest growth rates, the carrying capacity of grasslands, etc.
Also, though many places have updated their agriculture, there are quite a number of subsistence farmers around the world who are using the same methods as they did 50 years ago and who haven't gotten modern hybrid seeds in that time. They should see the full effect.
Granted, plants don't use the spectrum equally at all wavelengths, so something that preferentially reflected the blue might have less impact. But still, with the large magnitudes of dimming being claimed, there should be very noticeable effects in an area that biologists and ecologists monitor very closely.
In places that have changed their agriculture, yes. But there are a fair number of subsistence farmers out there in the world that are doing exactly the same practices as before. They should see the full effect.
It's not just agriculture, either. This should show a massive decrease in biomass production rates over a wide range of environments, from forest to grasslands, to ocean areas.
Now, plants don't use the full spectrum, so there may be some lessening of the effect, but given the amount of dimming proposed, three should still be large effects worldwide across very different environments.
I first heard about it in a Scientific American article in the mid 70s. It lets us put some pretty strong bounds on how much the laws of physics, and the values of some physical constants have changed over the period since the reactors shut down. (We "assume" normally that they don't change, but we have no a priori guarantee they haven't. It's nice having a real test via the nuclear decay rates and isotope ratios of the fission products.)
It also gives us some info on how fission decay products move when buried in the ground over very long periods. That last is currently pretty important given the debates over what to do with nuclear waste for long time storage.
Not really.
Plutonium was being produced in the Oklo natural nuclear reactor that was running in Gabon 2 billion years ago. It had decayed away by the time we showed up on the scene. See this, for example.
We learned of it by making it, but nature had done it long before us.
Indeed. This went immediately into my favorites list. Kudos to Google on this. As to the name collison, "A rose by any other name..." lists the same references.
Excellent stuff. On a quick test, it's complete enough to bring up some rather obscure papers from the 60s in several different fields.
I see a minor glitch in the cartogram in the link. Montana is colored as going strongly for Kerry, when it was strongly for Bush. The percentages listed are right. Likely just a data entry error.
It's the same old "cool people that I like" versus "uncool people I dislike" sort of thing you see in a lot of fandoms. And a lot of people treat politics about the same way as they would a sports rivalry or Trekkies vs Trekkers, but more bitter.
There's very little more human than saying your friends deserve special consideration and your enemies don't. Double standards are pretty deeply wired into us all.
This year it seems that the political equivalent of the soccer hooligans have been out in greater force than usual on both sides.
To be prior restraint, it has to happen before the material in question was published. A punitive measure after the fact is by definition not prior restraint. It would be prior restraint if they had shut down the server before it was posted.
As an example, the US government attempted a prior restraint on the publishing of the Pentagon Papers. That is, they went to the Post and tried to get them to not publish the rest of them. That is a case of prior restraint. If they had instead shut down the paper afterward, that would indeed be aggregious, but not a "prior" restraint.
This is action taken after the fact. Prior restraint has a well defined legal definition. People often misuse the term as I think you are here.
I'm not arguing about the action, just calling it "prior" restraint.
How can it be PRIOR restraint when the information in question had already been published on Indymedia's site? Prior restraint would be preventing the publishing of the information by shutting them down beforehand.
You can argue that it was an unlawful restraint, but I can't see how it was a prior restraint.
Unless you're saying that taking down the server prevents the publishing of some yet unknown material.
But that's a bit like me taking some lady to task for not going out with me as it would interfere with the rights of our as yet unconcieved children.
have been known for a long time.
They work fine in some cases. A ramjet is one such. If you want to be picky and want one that uses just heat rather than an injected fuel as an input, then the nuclear thermal ramjet that was looked at in the 50s for Project Pluto.
Apparently he's figured out how to make one that's more effective for liquids in more day to day environments. The site gives few details on it though. He won a prize for it, but I'm a little leary of the hype factor with no technical details.
Actually, IIRC it wasn't a taxi test of the shuttle. It was mounted on the back of a Bison bomber and the bomber went off the runway. They had timed this so that no US spy sats would be overhead. (Timing outdoor operations to avoid surveillance is a common thing in military programs). Getting stuck pushed them out of that time window, and they were photographed.
This is the same as how the US uses a modified 747 to move the US shuttle.
What you say might be true. But, science doesn't live in a vacuum. Setting aside the idea of shading results for political reasons (sadly it happens), the decision of what to study and when is often motivated in part by political considerations. That can have effects just as strong.
Example: The decision to put a major effort into developing the hydrogen bomb as a follow on to the already devastatingly destructive fission bomb. The result that it worked was an indisputable scientific fact regardless of politics. The decision to do the research and development was heavily influenced for good or ill by the political climate of the world and the United States in the post WW2 period.