They had to impose rules on reducing sulfur emissions from coal-fired plants because the "acid rain" was ruining forests and lakes downwind of the plant, let alone the oxides of sulfur were damaging buildings in cities. That's why coal from Wyoming's Powder River basin with its very low sulfur content came into high demand by the late 1980's.
This is why India is building a test reactor to see if Alvin Weinberg's research into molten salt nuclear reactors (MSR's) fueled by thorium-232 can be scaled up to commercial operation. If it works, India could within a generation scrap its coal-fired power plants as they are replaced by very safe MSR's, especially given India has some of the world's largest proven reserves of thorium-232.
I believe that one reason why Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) ended research into molten-salt reactors was the very fact they couldn't use it to manufacture uranium-235 and plutonium-239, the two fissile elements used in nuclear weapons. But as a power generator, the liquid fluoride thorium reactor holds enormous promise because of its inherent safety and the fact it uses thorium-232, which is as common as elemental lead in the soil.
I think in the end, the next iPhone will look very akin to the iPhone 6/6+ design, but will likely get rid of the physical home button altogether, thanks to new touchscreen technologies that will allow parts of the touchscreen to become a big Touch ID fingerprint sensor area. Given that Apple has demonstrated they can make a thinner device without sacrificing the 3.5 mm headphone jack with the current iPod touch and iPod nano models, they don't need to sacrifice the headphone jack in the name of "thinness."
I think in the end, what will happen is that we'll end up choosing molten-salt reactors fueled by thorium-232 dissolved in molten fluoride salts as fuel--the so-called liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR).
The advantages to LFTR's are numerous:
1. Thorium-232 is as common in the soil as elemental Lead--indeed, one of the huge problems with rare-Earth element mining is figuring out how to get rid of the thorium. Suddenly, all that thorium is in high demand for nuclear reactor fuel. 2. LFTR's can even use re-processed uranium-235 fuel rods and plutonium-239/241 from dismantled nuclear weapons dissolved in molten fluoride salts as fuel, making it a very viable way to get rid of a huge current nuclear waste problem. 3. You don't need expensive pressurized reactor vessels. 4. The reactor size can be scaled from 40 megawatts to over 1,000 megawatts power output. That means they could be used for powering installations as small as computer server farms all the way up to powering whole cities, and they can generate power 24 hours a day constantly. 5. Because the fuel is in liquid form in the reactor, there is no such thing as a reactor meltdown if the coolant is cut off for any reason. 6. A SCRAM emergency shutdown of the reactor is dumping the liquid fuel out of the reactor quickly, a lot easier to do than the complex safety systems found in today's uranium-fueled reactors. 7. Using closed-loop Brayton turbines to generate power, you eliminate the enormously expensive need for big cooling towers or locating the reactor near a large source of water. 8. The amount of radioactive waste generated is tiny compared to uranium-fueled reactors, and that waste has a radioactive half-life of under 320 years, which means really cheap nuclear waste disposal using disused salt mines or salt domes (if the nuclear medicine industry doesn't grab it first!).
Note that scientists think that the Moon and even Mars may have large quantities of thorium-232 that could be mined. As such, we may enough thorium-232 to power LFTR's for potentially _tens_ of thousands of years at current power consumption rates.
The problem with diesel engines is that to make them just as clean as gasoline engines, they require a combination of diesel particulate filters and a selective catalytic reduction (SCR) system to make it easier to remove NOx gases--the combination of the two is NOT cheap, as anyone notes from a US-legal Mercedes-Benz or BMW turbodiesel car. And how well will those systems stand up to the type of demanding usage on a taxicab with its heavy stop and go driving.
I wonder why London Mayor Boris Johnson didn't announce a plan as far back as 2010 to phase out the use of diesel engines on London taxicabs and buses in favor of using compressed natural gas (CNG). Here in the USA, many cities are now mandating buses and taxicabs switch to CNG, and in Asia, CNG have been used for buses and taxicabs for many years.
I'm not surprised that Disney wanted to do something different with the Star Wars universe. After all, Disney saw the precedent of the many issues of the prequel trilogy and that's why in the new trilogy, Disney wants to get back the "feel" of the original trilogy. Indeed, I expect "The Force Awakens" to be essentially a self-contained movie, but with just enough plot points "open" to do the subsequent two sequels.
I've stayed at my brother's place when his connection to Comcast High-Speed Internet (originally) had 50 mbps download speeds, now 100 mbps download speeds. Using Speedtest.net, I was getting around 44-47 mbps under the old setup and 90-92 mbps under the new setup.
But now, Comcast is preparing to roll out DOCSIS 3.1 service by 2017; they're converting all of their HD channels to MPEG-4 compression to free up bandwidth space to allow DOCSIS 3.1 service. In theory, DOCSIS 3.1 is capable of around 1 gigabit download speeds; just how fast Comcast will the new service be is still a major unknown, though I think at least 350-500 mbps download speeds is possible.
Almost. But I think the final confirmation will come when the ESA ExoMars rover arrives on Mars and can examine the soil of Mars up to 200 cm below the Martian surface, where water should be plentiful and microbes will likely exist this deep into the soil.
The sad part is that Westerners DO have justification for being cautious around Muslims, given the known history of some very heinous terrorist acts by Muslim terrorists at least since the middle 1960's.
The way Ahmed Mohamed acted when questioned by school authorities and the police didn't help matters, either.
Here's the reason why ad-blocking software is popular: it stops most ads created with Adobe Flash, Oracle (neé Sun) Java, and Microsoft Silverlight, which means way less system resource usage and eliminating a major vector for the loading of malware.
I think the solution is simple: set a date to BAN all online ads unless the ad was specifically created completely in HTML 5.0. Just that change would eliminate the vector of loading malware via plugins and might actually speed up system performance, too.
Completely correct. Current cellphone networks often no longer support the older digital cellular standards used by older smartphones, and you're better off with a lower-end smartphone like the Lumia 530 you mentioned.
While I agree, the process of making a cup of coffee with a presspot, vacuum pot, Moka pot, or pour-over pot like a Chemex can be quite time-consuming, especially if you have to grind whole roasted coffee beans. The Keurig sold very well (until the Keurig 2.0 fiasco) because the process of getting a decent mug of coffee was very convenient and very fast.
Keurig has said they are working on a new type of K-cup that uses vegetable-based plastics for easier recycleability or easier breakdown in landfills--they hope to have them in production by 2017 or so.
I think what made people stand up and take notice of Linux was IBM's decision to port Linux so it works on IBM's mainframe hardware. In short, having an open operating system work on IBM mainframes showed that Linux was viable even running highly mission-critical tasks.
Indeed, that success paved the way for the Linux kernel to be used on consumer devices--Google's Android for cellphones/tablet computers and Chorme OS for low-cost laptops both run on the Linux kernel.
I used to have a Samsung Galaxy S III. But the glacial pace of updating to Samsung's version of Android convinced me at the end of my initial T-Mobile USA phone contract to replace it with an iPhone 6 (64 GB Space Gray). And I'm very happy with the choice, because at least I get timely updates to add functionality and fix bugs (I started at 8.0, then updated to 8.0.2, 8.1, 8.1.1., 8.1.2, 8.1.3, 8.2 and now 8.3), thanks to Apple being the arbiter of when to get updates, not the cellphone carrier or handset manufacturer.
I think THE biggest reason why the merger was called off was the very likely stipulation from the Federal government that Comcast must spin off NBC Universal to get the merger completed. Given how hard Comcast worked just to purchase NBC Universal in 2010, that was something they would not accept.
The biggest problem with Windows 8 and 8.1 was the fact you HAD to deal with the "Modern" tiled UI, even if your system booted directly to the Desktop UI (you needed Modern UI access for some functions). I've played with Windows 8.1 and frankly, the "Modern" user interface is too radically different than the Desktop UI used in Windows 7 (it was like having to learn everything from scratch all over again).
With Windows 10, at least on desktop and "conventional" laptops, you default to the Desktop UI, and that means people transitioning from Windows 7 and earlier will have a much easier time, to say the least.
Will try to play video in HTML 5.0 mode now.
on
Firefox 37 Released
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· Score: 1
There's also an important change in Firefox 37.0--if you access YouTube, videos are played back with the HTML 5.0 player, eliminate the use of Adobe Flash to play back videos. Hopefully, this means smoother video playback at higher resolutions. Hopefully, this applies to embedded videos from other sources.
And with good reason: Linux has enjoyed its biggest success in the server market, especially after IBM successfully ported Linux to run in IBM mainframes. Indeed, many of the most trafficked web sites around the run on servers that use Linux.
I think now that we may be on the verge of major breakthroughs in battery technology, we could soon see the beginning of the end of using gasoline and diesel fuel for motor vehicles anyway.
Around 2010, Volkswagen Chairman Martin Winterkorn predicted that by 2020, a vehicle about the size of today's VW Golf model--with similar carrying capacity in terms of passengers and cargo--could travel 800 km (497 miles) on a single full charge of the car's electric battery pack. Thanks to new forms of lithium-ion batteries that use dry electrodes and graphene sheets and carbon nanotube supercapacitors, such a goal may not be such a far-fetched idea; if Winterkorn's prediction proves true, that will truly start the transition from away from using internal combustion engines fueled by gasoline or diesel fuel for personal vehicles.
However, gasoline and diesel fuel will be around longer until the change I mention above is complete, thanks to new industrial catalysts ("cat crackers") that can convert natural gas into very clean-burning forms of gasoline and diesel fuel--and it will be cheap to make, too. This will provide a "bridge" of fuel technology until long-range electric cars I described earlier become common.
....defining English spelling and grammar like the famous "Académie française" in France or the "Office québécois de la langue française" in Canada does for the French language. As such, the English language has changed at an enormous pace, and people would be amazed that the average English spoken in the USA circa 1900 can be quite different than the English spoken in the USA in 2015.
1. It is definitely WAY sturdier than the MIcro USB Micro-B connector.
2. Lightning offered more I/O flexibility than the Micro USB connection.
Now that the USB Type C connector has all the physical advantages of the Lightning connector (small size, reversible and much more durable physical connections) and offers far higher throughput than Lightning (which is limited to USB 2.0 speeds), it's not a far-fetched possibility that Apple may drop the Lightning connector in favor of USB Type C on the iPhone by 2017.
It's still a terrible idea in my humble opinion, unless Hillary Clinton hired the very best IT people to diligently upgrade the server operating system, the mail server software and properly configure the server to make it as secure as possible. Otherwise, someone--including the Russian FSB and the Chinese Ministry of State Security with their excellent hackers--could have taken all of the mail from that server and she would have never known what happened.
Slashdot Mirror
They had to impose rules on reducing sulfur emissions from coal-fired plants because the "acid rain" was ruining forests and lakes downwind of the plant, let alone the oxides of sulfur were damaging buildings in cities. That's why coal from Wyoming's Powder River basin with its very low sulfur content came into high demand by the late 1980's.
This is why India is building a test reactor to see if Alvin Weinberg's research into molten salt nuclear reactors (MSR's) fueled by thorium-232 can be scaled up to commercial operation. If it works, India could within a generation scrap its coal-fired power plants as they are replaced by very safe MSR's, especially given India has some of the world's largest proven reserves of thorium-232.
I believe that one reason why Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) ended research into molten-salt reactors was the very fact they couldn't use it to manufacture uranium-235 and plutonium-239, the two fissile elements used in nuclear weapons. But as a power generator, the liquid fluoride thorium reactor holds enormous promise because of its inherent safety and the fact it uses thorium-232, which is as common as elemental lead in the soil.
I think in the end, the next iPhone will look very akin to the iPhone 6/6+ design, but will likely get rid of the physical home button altogether, thanks to new touchscreen technologies that will allow parts of the touchscreen to become a big Touch ID fingerprint sensor area. Given that Apple has demonstrated they can make a thinner device without sacrificing the 3.5 mm headphone jack with the current iPod touch and iPod nano models, they don't need to sacrifice the headphone jack in the name of "thinness."
I think in the end, what will happen is that we'll end up choosing molten-salt reactors fueled by thorium-232 dissolved in molten fluoride salts as fuel--the so-called liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR).
The advantages to LFTR's are numerous:
1. Thorium-232 is as common in the soil as elemental Lead--indeed, one of the huge problems with rare-Earth element mining is figuring out how to get rid of the thorium. Suddenly, all that thorium is in high demand for nuclear reactor fuel.
2. LFTR's can even use re-processed uranium-235 fuel rods and plutonium-239/241 from dismantled nuclear weapons dissolved in molten fluoride salts as fuel, making it a very viable way to get rid of a huge current nuclear waste problem.
3. You don't need expensive pressurized reactor vessels.
4. The reactor size can be scaled from 40 megawatts to over 1,000 megawatts power output. That means they could be used for powering installations as small as computer server farms all the way up to powering whole cities, and they can generate power 24 hours a day constantly.
5. Because the fuel is in liquid form in the reactor, there is no such thing as a reactor meltdown if the coolant is cut off for any reason.
6. A SCRAM emergency shutdown of the reactor is dumping the liquid fuel out of the reactor quickly, a lot easier to do than the complex safety systems found in today's uranium-fueled reactors.
7. Using closed-loop Brayton turbines to generate power, you eliminate the enormously expensive need for big cooling towers or locating the reactor near a large source of water.
8. The amount of radioactive waste generated is tiny compared to uranium-fueled reactors, and that waste has a radioactive half-life of under 320 years, which means really cheap nuclear waste disposal using disused salt mines or salt domes (if the nuclear medicine industry doesn't grab it first!).
Note that scientists think that the Moon and even Mars may have large quantities of thorium-232 that could be mined. As such, we may enough thorium-232 to power LFTR's for potentially _tens_ of thousands of years at current power consumption rates.
The problem with diesel engines is that to make them just as clean as gasoline engines, they require a combination of diesel particulate filters and a selective catalytic reduction (SCR) system to make it easier to remove NOx gases--the combination of the two is NOT cheap, as anyone notes from a US-legal Mercedes-Benz or BMW turbodiesel car. And how well will those systems stand up to the type of demanding usage on a taxicab with its heavy stop and go driving.
I wonder why London Mayor Boris Johnson didn't announce a plan as far back as 2010 to phase out the use of diesel engines on London taxicabs and buses in favor of using compressed natural gas (CNG). Here in the USA, many cities are now mandating buses and taxicabs switch to CNG, and in Asia, CNG have been used for buses and taxicabs for many years.
I'm not surprised that Disney wanted to do something different with the Star Wars universe. After all, Disney saw the precedent of the many issues of the prequel trilogy and that's why in the new trilogy, Disney wants to get back the "feel" of the original trilogy. Indeed, I expect "The Force Awakens" to be essentially a self-contained movie, but with just enough plot points "open" to do the subsequent two sequels.
I've stayed at my brother's place when his connection to Comcast High-Speed Internet (originally) had 50 mbps download speeds, now 100 mbps download speeds. Using Speedtest.net, I was getting around 44-47 mbps under the old setup and 90-92 mbps under the new setup.
But now, Comcast is preparing to roll out DOCSIS 3.1 service by 2017; they're converting all of their HD channels to MPEG-4 compression to free up bandwidth space to allow DOCSIS 3.1 service. In theory, DOCSIS 3.1 is capable of around 1 gigabit download speeds; just how fast Comcast will the new service be is still a major unknown, though I think at least 350-500 mbps download speeds is possible.
Almost. But I think the final confirmation will come when the ESA ExoMars rover arrives on Mars and can examine the soil of Mars up to 200 cm below the Martian surface, where water should be plentiful and microbes will likely exist this deep into the soil.
I noticed that Google pushed out a new update to Chrome (45.0.2454.101 m) just today. I wonder did that update fix this vulnerability.
The sad part is that Westerners DO have justification for being cautious around Muslims, given the known history of some very heinous terrorist acts by Muslim terrorists at least since the middle 1960's.
The way Ahmed Mohamed acted when questioned by school authorities and the police didn't help matters, either.
Here's the reason why ad-blocking software is popular: it stops most ads created with Adobe Flash, Oracle (neé Sun) Java, and Microsoft Silverlight, which means way less system resource usage and eliminating a major vector for the loading of malware.
I think the solution is simple: set a date to BAN all online ads unless the ad was specifically created completely in HTML 5.0. Just that change would eliminate the vector of loading malware via plugins and might actually speed up system performance, too.
Completely correct. Current cellphone networks often no longer support the older digital cellular standards used by older smartphones, and you're better off with a lower-end smartphone like the Lumia 530 you mentioned.
While I agree, the process of making a cup of coffee with a presspot, vacuum pot, Moka pot, or pour-over pot like a Chemex can be quite time-consuming, especially if you have to grind whole roasted coffee beans. The Keurig sold very well (until the Keurig 2.0 fiasco) because the process of getting a decent mug of coffee was very convenient and very fast.
Keurig has said they are working on a new type of K-cup that uses vegetable-based plastics for easier recycleability or easier breakdown in landfills--they hope to have them in production by 2017 or so.
I think what made people stand up and take notice of Linux was IBM's decision to port Linux so it works on IBM's mainframe hardware. In short, having an open operating system work on IBM mainframes showed that Linux was viable even running highly mission-critical tasks.
Indeed, that success paved the way for the Linux kernel to be used on consumer devices--Google's Android for cellphones/tablet computers and Chorme OS for low-cost laptops both run on the Linux kernel.
I used to have a Samsung Galaxy S III. But the glacial pace of updating to Samsung's version of Android convinced me at the end of my initial T-Mobile USA phone contract to replace it with an iPhone 6 (64 GB Space Gray). And I'm very happy with the choice, because at least I get timely updates to add functionality and fix bugs (I started at 8.0, then updated to 8.0.2, 8.1, 8.1.1., 8.1.2, 8.1.3, 8.2 and now 8.3), thanks to Apple being the arbiter of when to get updates, not the cellphone carrier or handset manufacturer.
I think THE biggest reason why the merger was called off was the very likely stipulation from the Federal government that Comcast must spin off NBC Universal to get the merger completed. Given how hard Comcast worked just to purchase NBC Universal in 2010, that was something they would not accept.
The biggest problem with Windows 8 and 8.1 was the fact you HAD to deal with the "Modern" tiled UI, even if your system booted directly to the Desktop UI (you needed Modern UI access for some functions). I've played with Windows 8.1 and frankly, the "Modern" user interface is too radically different than the Desktop UI used in Windows 7 (it was like having to learn everything from scratch all over again).
With Windows 10, at least on desktop and "conventional" laptops, you default to the Desktop UI, and that means people transitioning from Windows 7 and earlier will have a much easier time, to say the least.
There's also an important change in Firefox 37.0--if you access YouTube, videos are played back with the HTML 5.0 player, eliminate the use of Adobe Flash to play back videos. Hopefully, this means smoother video playback at higher resolutions. Hopefully, this applies to embedded videos from other sources.
And with good reason: Linux has enjoyed its biggest success in the server market, especially after IBM successfully ported Linux to run in IBM mainframes. Indeed, many of the most trafficked web sites around the run on servers that use Linux.
Google recently updated Chrome 41 to 41.0.2272.101 m, probably to fix the vulnerability found in Pwn2own "testing."
I think now that we may be on the verge of major breakthroughs in battery technology, we could soon see the beginning of the end of using gasoline and diesel fuel for motor vehicles anyway.
Around 2010, Volkswagen Chairman Martin Winterkorn predicted that by 2020, a vehicle about the size of today's VW Golf model--with similar carrying capacity in terms of passengers and cargo--could travel 800 km (497 miles) on a single full charge of the car's electric battery pack. Thanks to new forms of lithium-ion batteries that use dry electrodes and graphene sheets and carbon nanotube supercapacitors, such a goal may not be such a far-fetched idea; if Winterkorn's prediction proves true, that will truly start the transition from away from using internal combustion engines fueled by gasoline or diesel fuel for personal vehicles.
However, gasoline and diesel fuel will be around longer until the change I mention above is complete, thanks to new industrial catalysts ("cat crackers") that can convert natural gas into very clean-burning forms of gasoline and diesel fuel--and it will be cheap to make, too. This will provide a "bridge" of fuel technology until long-range electric cars I described earlier become common.
....defining English spelling and grammar like the famous "Académie française" in France or the "Office québécois de la langue française" in Canada does for the French language. As such, the English language has changed at an enormous pace, and people would be amazed that the average English spoken in the USA circa 1900 can be quite different than the English spoken in the USA in 2015.
Apple chose to develop Lightning for two reasons:
1. It is definitely WAY sturdier than the MIcro USB Micro-B connector.
2. Lightning offered more I/O flexibility than the Micro USB connection.
Now that the USB Type C connector has all the physical advantages of the Lightning connector (small size, reversible and much more durable physical connections) and offers far higher throughput than Lightning (which is limited to USB 2.0 speeds), it's not a far-fetched possibility that Apple may drop the Lightning connector in favor of USB Type C on the iPhone by 2017.
It's still a terrible idea in my humble opinion, unless Hillary Clinton hired the very best IT people to diligently upgrade the server operating system, the mail server software and properly configure the server to make it as secure as possible. Otherwise, someone--including the Russian FSB and the Chinese Ministry of State Security with their excellent hackers--could have taken all of the mail from that server and she would have never known what happened.