Here's the problem: the REAL people that should be standing up to NSA snooping are the Level 1 Internet backbone providers: AT&T, Level 3, Sprint and Verizon. Because the NSA directly tapped into the backbone, the spy agency don't need access to the servers at AOL, Apple, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft and Yahoo! to get all the information they need. Indeed, I've read that NSA already has special rooms inside AT&T and Verizon operations to directly tap into the backbone--and this known for many years.
In fact, the very fact you don't need a pressurized reactor vessel and hope the coolant flow still works even in case of an emergency is why MSR's are potentially vastly safer than today's light-water pressurized uranium reactors.
And that would mean even in earthquake-prone areas like Japan, an emergency shutdown can happen a lot faster and there is no danger of the reactor vessel exploding and spew dangerous radiation products into a wide area.
There's still one nuclear reactor technology they haven't actually scaled up yet: the molten-salt reactor, where the nuclear fuel is dissolved in molten fluoride salts. Alvin Weinberg's experimental reactor at Oak Ridge National Laboratory was only a small 5 MW unit that actually ran successfully but was shelved because it couldn't produce fissile material for nuclear weapons.
I'd like to see someone scale up MSR technology as a technology demonstrator to prove it can work to generate large amounts of electricity, at least in the 85 to 100 MW range. If they can do that, that could mean we can get far safer nuclear power plants, especially since shutting down the reactor is very easy to do (just drain the liquid nuclear fuel from the reactor) and it only generates a very small amount of radioactive waste, waste that has a radioactive half-life of around 300 years.
The thing is that Arizona is right in the part of the USA that is among the best places on Earth for solar power generation, period. There are enough sunny days in much of Arizona where large scale solar power projects are actually financially viable.
However, the process of getting the hack to work wasn't a cheap solution--the process to make it that far was a complicated and expensive process, far beyond the skills of most people. They're going to have to show how it works to Apple engineers to prove the process is repeatable.
I'm running iOS 7.0 on my iPad 2 and did not experience any slowdown issues--in fact, Safari in iOS 7.0 renders web pages a lot faster than before.
However, I did see one noticeable issue: the graphical design--especially the text fonts--don't look good on an iPad 2 with its lower-resolution screen. I've seen the final iOS 7.0 on an 4th-generation iPad and thanks to its "Retina Display" resolution touchscreen, it does look really good.
True, but note that the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket doesn't need a gigantic ground crew at the launch site like you needed with the Space Shuttle. In fact, the crew needed to assemble, test and launch the United Launch Alliance Delta IV or Atlas V rockets are much smaller than they used to be, thanks to much more efficient rocket assembly buildings.
Most corporations have pretty much migrated to Windows 7, not only because of the end of life support issue but also Windows 7 can handle large amounts of RAM, which makes it very useful running multiple corporate custom apps.
In my opinion, Windows 7 is probably the best version of Windows ever released: stable, fast, and most importantly, the user interface is familiar enough that anyone who's used Windows 95 or later can master Windows 7 fairly quickly.
I think the A7 SoC (system on a chip) may be more intended for the iPad than the iPhone. 64-bit memory may make it possible for iPads with as much as 4 GB of RAM, which may become important as iOS apps become more and more sophisticated in future years.
Interestingly, in Japan, where local Japanese dialects are spoken with pride, if you can speak/write fluently the what's known as "hyoujungo" or "standard language" Japanese (the Japanese language taught by schools in Japan from kindergarten on and the reference Japanese dialect used in newspapers/periodicals and TV broadcasts), you can usually converse with most people in Japan in general. Sure, the people of Osaka, Okayama, Fukuoka, etc. speak their own dialects, but most people living there also understand "hyoujungo."
In short, what the Chinese government needs to do is start teaching the Mandarin dialect at ALL schools starting from kindergarten on and require that to graduate high school you have to be fluent in speaking and writing/reading the dialect.
The big issue here--and a lot of people don't want to admit this--is that the biggest determinant of the climate on Earth is this nuclear fireball circa 93 million miles away called the Sun. The Sun's solar radiation and solar wind output--which varies a lot depending on the number of active sunspots--can hugely affect the Earth's climate, as the famous Maunder Minimum when there were no reported sunspots between 1645 and 1715 so clear demonstrated.
The biggest problem for Apple in China is that even though the hardware is potentially capable of supporting it now, the iPhone 4S and 5 does NOT support the unique TD-SCDMA digital cellular network used by China Mobile for its 750 million customers.
Hopefully, when the new iPhone models (5S and the new 5C lower cost model) arrive this fall, it will enable TD-SCDMA support, and that will allow China Mobile to officially support the iPhone so China Mobile customers can buy them at the Apple Store or China Mobile authorized retailers.
I think in the end, once we start to scale up the molten-salt reactors based on Alvin Weinberg's research at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, it could open the door for the biggest breakthrough in electricity generation in many, many years.
The liquid fluoride thorium reactor has several major advantages over uranium-fueled reactors:
1. It uses commonly-found thorium-232 dissolved in molten sodium fluoride salts as fuel, vastly cheaper than uranium-235 processed into fuel rods. 2. it does not need a pressurized reactor vessel. 3. It can even use reprocessed spent uranium-235 fuel rods or even plutonium-239 from dismantled nuclear weapons dissolved in molten sodium fluoride salts as reactor fuel. 4. During an emergency (SCRAM) shutdown, all you need to do is dump the liquid fuel mix out of the reactor vessel. It can be done completely mechanically, very important in earthquake-prone areas like Japan or the US West Coast. 5. By using closed-loop Brayton turbines to generate electricity, we eliminate the need for expensive cooling towers or having to locate the reactor site near a large body of cooling water. 6. The amount of nuclear waste generated is very small, and the waste only has a half-life of under 300 years. That means waste disposal can be done at disused salt mines or salt domes--if the nuclear medicine industry doesn't grab it first!
The Department of Energy should help design a "cookie cutter" complete LFTR generating plant rated at 1,000 MW output, and build possibly over 100 of them across the continental USA. This would allow us to phase out many older coal-fired power plants and create enough elecctric generating power to do things like electrifying all our long-distance railroads and even do large-scale water desalinization.
True if if the book requires you flip back and forth between pages a lot.
But you're talking _novels_ to biographies, I prefer an e-book reader. A big problem with the latest bestseller is the physical size of the book, which can make them unwieldy to hold. I ended up reading Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs on the Kindle app on my iPad 2 because even the iPad 2 is much easier to hold in your hands than the hardcover version of the book, to say the least.
Here's the problem: hardback novels are big and unwieldy to carry around nowadays. For example, J. K. Rowling's "Harry Potter" novels from "Goblet of Fire" on are hard to hold even for an adult given the sheer size of the hardback editions. With the current Amazon Kindle e-book reader, I can hold many novels in a single reader, and the device is easy to hold in your hands.
What's the alternative, Apple? Unfortunately, they're probably the most monitored phone in the world when it comes to intelligence agencies given so many of iPhone are out there....
What bothers me even more is whether the plane could do automatic landings based on data from a three-axis (latitude, longitude and altitude) commercial-airplane quality GPS receiver, which should be able to position a plane within 20 feet accuracy anywhere on Earth. If the flight crew of Asiana Flight 214 had access to this technology and programmed it into the computers on board the plane, the 777 could have brought the plane down on the right glide path and on the right landing spot within 20 feet of the centerline of the runway.
It appears that the plane had a VERY hard landing for one reason: the flight crew did not follow correct procedures on the final descent.
From reports of survivors on the plane sitting in the window seats, it appears the plane was descending towards the runway threshold at an unusually steep angle, but when the flight crew realized this and tried to apply engine power to level the plane off, it was too late and the plane hit the end of the runway at a fairly high angle of attack (AOA). In my humble opinion, this tells me the flight crew attempted a completely visual flight rule landing and not following landing procedures correctly. One wonders if this 777-200ER had a high-accuracy three-axis GPS system, which if programmed properly would have allowed a completely automatic landing based on "listening" to at minimum six GPS satellites to get very high position accuracy for latitude, longitude and altitude.
With the "black boxes" now recovered from the plane, we should soon get an idea if my supposition is right.
I think you're forgetting that the NSA has access to supercomputing capacity far beyond you could imagine. As such, they could probably "break" most common encryption schemes, and could probably even break PGP, too. All they need is access to the "backbone" near where the likes of Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, etc. keep their server farms.
One thing Steve Gibson of TWiT Network's "Security Now" mentioned was that the NSA essentially tapped critical points in the Internet backbone to get all the data--they don't need to be directly accessing the servers of Amazon.com, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and so on to get all the data from these companies. And I bet every intelligence agency worldwide has done this a long time ago.
In short, blame the Tier 1 backbone providers for allowing such free access to the Internet by the government intelligence agencies.
The original A350 proposal sounded too much like a "rehashed" 777-200ER and it's not surprising that the airlines eventually rejected the idea. But Airbus decided to start over with a "clean sheet" airliner with the newest aerodynamic design and a lot of lightweight structural parts--the result is the A350XWB that flew for the first time today.
Also, Airbus has been continually improving the A330-200 model, which has proved to be VERY popular with many airlines (in fact, Airbus was actually reluctant to build the A330-200 because it feared it would affect A340 sales). The original state range was 6,400 nautical miles, and thanks to the availability of increased mean takeoff weight (MTOW) variants, the A330-200 can now fly nearly 7,200 nautical miles, which means flights as far as San Francisco to Hong Kong non-stop becomes possible.
The A350XWB-900 carries the same payload as the 777-200ER, but has over 20% lower fuel cost and can fly 8,100 nautical miles, 400 more than the 777-200ER. Small wonder why there's a long list of orders--a list that could grow even longer at the Paris Air Show.
The big issue nowadays is how much RAM you can install on your system. If you can install 16 to 32 GB of RAM to run under Windows 7 Professional, you can work on VERY large media files with nary a slowdown issue on most Intel Core i5 and i7 CPU's.
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Here's the problem: the REAL people that should be standing up to NSA snooping are the Level 1 Internet backbone providers: AT&T, Level 3, Sprint and Verizon. Because the NSA directly tapped into the backbone, the spy agency don't need access to the servers at AOL, Apple, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft and Yahoo! to get all the information they need. Indeed, I've read that NSA already has special rooms inside AT&T and Verizon operations to directly tap into the backbone--and this known for many years.
In fact, the very fact you don't need a pressurized reactor vessel and hope the coolant flow still works even in case of an emergency is why MSR's are potentially vastly safer than today's light-water pressurized uranium reactors.
And that would mean even in earthquake-prone areas like Japan, an emergency shutdown can happen a lot faster and there is no danger of the reactor vessel exploding and spew dangerous radiation products into a wide area.
There's still one nuclear reactor technology they haven't actually scaled up yet: the molten-salt reactor, where the nuclear fuel is dissolved in molten fluoride salts. Alvin Weinberg's experimental reactor at Oak Ridge National Laboratory was only a small 5 MW unit that actually ran successfully but was shelved because it couldn't produce fissile material for nuclear weapons.
I'd like to see someone scale up MSR technology as a technology demonstrator to prove it can work to generate large amounts of electricity, at least in the 85 to 100 MW range. If they can do that, that could mean we can get far safer nuclear power plants, especially since shutting down the reactor is very easy to do (just drain the liquid nuclear fuel from the reactor) and it only generates a very small amount of radioactive waste, waste that has a radioactive half-life of around 300 years.
Arizona is located smack dab in the middle of one of the best regions in the world for solar power generation. Why not take full advantage of it?
The thing is that Arizona is right in the part of the USA that is among the best places on Earth for solar power generation, period. There are enough sunny days in much of Arizona where large scale solar power projects are actually financially viable.
It was a joke at the time, but rapid advances in technology in the last year or so could actually turn the "Gmail Motion" idea in actual reality.
However, the process of getting the hack to work wasn't a cheap solution--the process to make it that far was a complicated and expensive process, far beyond the skills of most people. They're going to have to show how it works to Apple engineers to prove the process is repeatable.
I'm running iOS 7.0 on my iPad 2 and did not experience any slowdown issues--in fact, Safari in iOS 7.0 renders web pages a lot faster than before.
However, I did see one noticeable issue: the graphical design--especially the text fonts--don't look good on an iPad 2 with its lower-resolution screen. I've seen the final iOS 7.0 on an 4th-generation iPad and thanks to its "Retina Display" resolution touchscreen, it does look really good.
True, but note that the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket doesn't need a gigantic ground crew at the launch site like you needed with the Space Shuttle. In fact, the crew needed to assemble, test and launch the United Launch Alliance Delta IV or Atlas V rockets are much smaller than they used to be, thanks to much more efficient rocket assembly buildings.
Most corporations have pretty much migrated to Windows 7, not only because of the end of life support issue but also Windows 7 can handle large amounts of RAM, which makes it very useful running multiple corporate custom apps.
In my opinion, Windows 7 is probably the best version of Windows ever released: stable, fast, and most importantly, the user interface is familiar enough that anyone who's used Windows 95 or later can master Windows 7 fairly quickly.
I think the A7 SoC (system on a chip) may be more intended for the iPad than the iPhone. 64-bit memory may make it possible for iPads with as much as 4 GB of RAM, which may become important as iOS apps become more and more sophisticated in future years.
Interestingly, in Japan, where local Japanese dialects are spoken with pride, if you can speak/write fluently the what's known as "hyoujungo" or "standard language" Japanese (the Japanese language taught by schools in Japan from kindergarten on and the reference Japanese dialect used in newspapers/periodicals and TV broadcasts), you can usually converse with most people in Japan in general. Sure, the people of Osaka, Okayama, Fukuoka, etc. speak their own dialects, but most people living there also understand "hyoujungo."
In short, what the Chinese government needs to do is start teaching the Mandarin dialect at ALL schools starting from kindergarten on and require that to graduate high school you have to be fluent in speaking and writing/reading the dialect.
The big issue here--and a lot of people don't want to admit this--is that the biggest determinant of the climate on Earth is this nuclear fireball circa 93 million miles away called the Sun. The Sun's solar radiation and solar wind output--which varies a lot depending on the number of active sunspots--can hugely affect the Earth's climate, as the famous Maunder Minimum when there were no reported sunspots between 1645 and 1715 so clear demonstrated.
The biggest problem for Apple in China is that even though the hardware is potentially capable of supporting it now, the iPhone 4S and 5 does NOT support the unique TD-SCDMA digital cellular network used by China Mobile for its 750 million customers.
Hopefully, when the new iPhone models (5S and the new 5C lower cost model) arrive this fall, it will enable TD-SCDMA support, and that will allow China Mobile to officially support the iPhone so China Mobile customers can buy them at the Apple Store or China Mobile authorized retailers.
I think in the end, once we start to scale up the molten-salt reactors based on Alvin Weinberg's research at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, it could open the door for the biggest breakthrough in electricity generation in many, many years.
The liquid fluoride thorium reactor has several major advantages over uranium-fueled reactors:
1. It uses commonly-found thorium-232 dissolved in molten sodium fluoride salts as fuel, vastly cheaper than uranium-235 processed into fuel rods.
2. it does not need a pressurized reactor vessel.
3. It can even use reprocessed spent uranium-235 fuel rods or even plutonium-239 from dismantled nuclear weapons dissolved in molten sodium fluoride salts as reactor fuel.
4. During an emergency (SCRAM) shutdown, all you need to do is dump the liquid fuel mix out of the reactor vessel. It can be done completely mechanically, very important in earthquake-prone areas like Japan or the US West Coast.
5. By using closed-loop Brayton turbines to generate electricity, we eliminate the need for expensive cooling towers or having to locate the reactor site near a large body of cooling water.
6. The amount of nuclear waste generated is very small, and the waste only has a half-life of under 300 years. That means waste disposal can be done at disused salt mines or salt domes--if the nuclear medicine industry doesn't grab it first!
The Department of Energy should help design a "cookie cutter" complete LFTR generating plant rated at 1,000 MW output, and build possibly over 100 of them across the continental USA. This would allow us to phase out many older coal-fired power plants and create enough elecctric generating power to do things like electrifying all our long-distance railroads and even do large-scale water desalinization.
True if if the book requires you flip back and forth between pages a lot.
But you're talking _novels_ to biographies, I prefer an e-book reader. A big problem with the latest bestseller is the physical size of the book, which can make them unwieldy to hold. I ended up reading Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs on the Kindle app on my iPad 2 because even the iPad 2 is much easier to hold in your hands than the hardcover version of the book, to say the least.
...I like to read it on a e-book reader nowadays.
Here's the problem: hardback novels are big and unwieldy to carry around nowadays. For example, J. K. Rowling's "Harry Potter" novels from "Goblet of Fire" on are hard to hold even for an adult given the sheer size of the hardback editions. With the current Amazon Kindle e-book reader, I can hold many novels in a single reader, and the device is easy to hold in your hands.
What's the alternative, Apple? Unfortunately, they're probably the most monitored phone in the world when it comes to intelligence agencies given so many of iPhone are out there....
What bothers me even more is whether the plane could do automatic landings based on data from a three-axis (latitude, longitude and altitude) commercial-airplane quality GPS receiver, which should be able to position a plane within 20 feet accuracy anywhere on Earth. If the flight crew of Asiana Flight 214 had access to this technology and programmed it into the computers on board the plane, the 777 could have brought the plane down on the right glide path and on the right landing spot within 20 feet of the centerline of the runway.
It appears that the plane had a VERY hard landing for one reason: the flight crew did not follow correct procedures on the final descent.
From reports of survivors on the plane sitting in the window seats, it appears the plane was descending towards the runway threshold at an unusually steep angle, but when the flight crew realized this and tried to apply engine power to level the plane off, it was too late and the plane hit the end of the runway at a fairly high angle of attack (AOA). In my humble opinion, this tells me the flight crew attempted a completely visual flight rule landing and not following landing procedures correctly. One wonders if this 777-200ER had a high-accuracy three-axis GPS system, which if programmed properly would have allowed a completely automatic landing based on "listening" to at minimum six GPS satellites to get very high position accuracy for latitude, longitude and altitude.
With the "black boxes" now recovered from the plane, we should soon get an idea if my supposition is right.
I think you're forgetting that the NSA has access to supercomputing capacity far beyond you could imagine. As such, they could probably "break" most common encryption schemes, and could probably even break PGP, too. All they need is access to the "backbone" near where the likes of Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, etc. keep their server farms.
One thing Steve Gibson of TWiT Network's "Security Now" mentioned was that the NSA essentially tapped critical points in the Internet backbone to get all the data--they don't need to be directly accessing the servers of Amazon.com, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and so on to get all the data from these companies. And I bet every intelligence agency worldwide has done this a long time ago.
In short, blame the Tier 1 backbone providers for allowing such free access to the Internet by the government intelligence agencies.
The original A350 proposal sounded too much like a "rehashed" 777-200ER and it's not surprising that the airlines eventually rejected the idea. But Airbus decided to start over with a "clean sheet" airliner with the newest aerodynamic design and a lot of lightweight structural parts--the result is the A350XWB that flew for the first time today.
Also, Airbus has been continually improving the A330-200 model, which has proved to be VERY popular with many airlines (in fact, Airbus was actually reluctant to build the A330-200 because it feared it would affect A340 sales). The original state range was 6,400 nautical miles, and thanks to the availability of increased mean takeoff weight (MTOW) variants, the A330-200 can now fly nearly 7,200 nautical miles, which means flights as far as San Francisco to Hong Kong non-stop becomes possible.
The A350XWB-900 carries the same payload as the 777-200ER, but has over 20% lower fuel cost and can fly 8,100 nautical miles, 400 more than the 777-200ER. Small wonder why there's a long list of orders--a list that could grow even longer at the Paris Air Show.
The big issue nowadays is how much RAM you can install on your system. If you can install 16 to 32 GB of RAM to run under Windows 7 Professional, you can work on VERY large media files with nary a slowdown issue on most Intel Core i5 and i7 CPU's.