The tmperatures by themselves probably wouldn't do it. You'd have to have something to accept the oxygen, and to keep it away from the freed uranium to let it form macroscopic amounts of the metallic form. Even then, if it sank, you'd end up with a molten uranium/nickle/iron mixture. I don't recall what the neutron capture profile of nickle or iron is, but most of the uranium in the mix would be U-238 anyway, not U-235, so I don't really think that a fission reaction could get going. The only heat contribution would be from regular decay.
A number of people have suggested getting rid of nuclear waste by deposition into a subduction zone. Drop it into the abyss, it gets dragged under with the mantle, get melted, mixed and dispersed. By the time it comes back up as the latest contribution to the Hawaiian Islands, the really nasty stuff will have decayed to harmlessness and the long-lived stuff is no worse than background. Personally, I don't have a problem with this, but nobody at the NRC or IAEA has yet asked me my opinion.
Uranium is rarely, if ever, found in the pure metallic form. Uranium has a valence of 6, forms uranium oxides very readily, and doesn't lose the oxygen without a lot of chemical coaxing. These oxides would rarely break down under natural conditions to free up the pure metal. Uranium is indeed denser than iron, and would be expected to sink, but uranium oxides are lighter, and float up to the mantle.
Ummmm, yeah, see, he just *thought* it was a nova event - it turned out to have been a big solar flare. (That's why all of the recent solar flares made me think of this story, get it?) The fact that it's a flare, rather than a nova, makes for an ironic twist: instead of dying quickly and happily in his girlfriend's arms, they both have to live on and try to survive in the wreckage of a brutalized planet, with human civilization having been smashed back down to pre-industrialization level. It's a case of a less devastating event causing more misery than the more. I didn't give out that info because I didn't want to have to put a SPOILER warning in my post.... but since it's hard to respond to an AC offline, there you have it.
All this talk about massive solar flares makes me think of "Inconstant Moon", by Larry Niven. It's a great short story about a guy in L.A. who is amazed by how incredibly bright the moon one evening. Bright enough to read by, so bright it's painful to look at directly. He realizes that it's the reflected light of the sun, gone nova, and that he has only a couple of hours until the shock wave hits. A great read.
So, all of the individual participants in the electric power industry use the grid to distribute power and make money, but since none of them actually own the whole grid, and there's no regulatory requirement to maintain the grid in good working order, we are back to the Tragedy of the Commons. The solution? Re-regulation, either self-imposed by the industry or government-imposed for the good of society.
This is an old technology... you can create a tremendous amount of attractive-looking vapor by emitting a bunch of hot air in the right direction. Although there's a short-lived burst of heat and light (and sound and fury), pretty soon, everybody is cool to the technology.
"Anyway, I prefer fountain pens, mostly because nobody will ever borrow them so I never lose my pens to theft."
ABSOLUTELY! I have a number of nice ballpoint pens (Waterman, Cross, etc.), and there have been numerous times when someone asked to use it, and then almost walked off with it. Now, I use a fountain pen exclusively (Prasad nib, medium-fine); now, when someone asks to borrow it, I say, "Sure, do you know how to use a fountain pen?" Every time, they look at me blankly, and then go find a ballpoint.
How about my favorite living fossil plant, the genus Equisetum, the horsetail ferns? Also known as scouring rushes, they incorporate silica in their stems and make them feel like sandpaper. This is the only surviving genus of the only surviving family (Equisetaceae) of the only surviving order (Equisetales) of a class (Sphenopsida) that emerged during the Devonian Period, around 375 million years ago, some 200 million years before the Jurassic Period (~175 mya).
So, surrounded by the first land vertebrates, early wingless insects and some animals which would eventually evolve into the arachnids, the Equisetum grew and thrived for 30 million years, and watched the gymnosperms arrive. Another 130 million or so, and Equisetum watched the rise of the dinosaurs. Another 50 million and Equisetum watched the angiosperms (flowering plants) arrive and take over dominance of the plant world, and watched as the ecological shift started to kill off the dinosaurs. 30 million years later, Equisetum watched as the asteroid finished off the dinos and the twitchy little mammals found greatness thrust upon them. Over the next 140 million years, Equisetum watched as the mammals grew tall and short, big and small, flew and crawled and ran and swam.
Recently, Equisetum watched as one bunch of upstart, big-headed mammals learned to control fire, plants, other mammals, and go on to create ceramics, double entry accounting, antibiotics, TiVo and Mr. Coffee. If we think of Equisetum's long residency on Earth as a single year, starting on January 1, then humans showed up around 11:00pm on December 31.
Turn off the computer and go take a walk in the woods, folks. It's an amazing world we live in.
Good lord, someone who *enjoyed* writing grant requests? You poor, sad, sick bastard. Therapy helps, my friend. Trust me... I know.
I use WordPerfect for all of my internal documents and scientific publications, and have since 5.0, back in the DOS days. I stay with it (now 10.0) because WP does what I tell it to do, and doesn't do anything I didn't explicitly tell it to. It's like a dog that takes well to training. I resist my colleagues' groupthink "standardization" on MS Word, but I do have to use it periodically. I find that using MS Word is like living with a wolf/dog mixed breed. It does what you tell it to 95% of the time, but it isn't really under your control, no matter how much you try to train it.
If there are 5 checkout lanes open in a grocery store, only one of them will be the fastest. So, 4 times out of 5, the lane you pick will be slower than another lane.
Come to think of it, Microsoft announced that it has a big Linux work center on July 31, and just a few days later, on
Aug 5, SCO wants $699 per Linux deployment. Hmmmm.... so, after some reflection and soul-searching, Microsoft announces that it will work to remain compliant by respecting the principles of honorable business practice with regard to IP, and hands SCO 10,000x$699, and a boatload of legitimacy in the eyes of Joe BestBuy. SCO, now flush with cash, starts suing everybody in sight to prevent them from using Linux without paying. As the cases drag on, SCO loudly trumpets that Linux isn't free, that it, in fact will cost you more than WinXP.
And every time they run low on cash to pay the lawyers and the ad agencies, Microsoft "liscences" another 10,000 copies of Linux. MS's hands are clean, as it's SCO that's doing the dirty work. By the time the FTC or Justice Department investigate and try to stop it, Linux will be persona-non-grata in the commercial world; kept alive on the fringes of enterprise computing, not dead, but driven underground with a bad reputation as a legal quagmire.
We need a robot from the future to come back in time to save us from this nightmare.
"Just a reminder: you are not required to mod lame humor up as "Funny" just because the poster has a low ID number."
Ah, young grasshopper, you are still under the impression that Grandpa expects you to laugh at his jokes, regardless of wether you think they are funny or not. The truth is, Grandpa tells his jokes because *he* thinks they are funny, and actually doesn't much care wether you laugh or not. Neither reaction will either inhibit or encourage his future joke telling, nor the quality of said jokes.
Moderators, please ignore this one, off-topic as it is. I would have responded to this by e.mail, but Anonymous Cowards are, well, Anonymous.
When you click on the link the parent poster provides, the first thing you see is this:
"Welcome Slashdot visitor! You have been redirected to a ligher version of our article in order to conserve bandwidth and keep the site running smoothly for everybody."
Clearly they are doing their best to avoid being Slashdotted, while not shutting out the Slashdotters completely. As intelligent and reasonable as this is, it still strikes me as amusing.
"Welcome Mongol horde visitor! You have been redirected to a ligher version of Rome in order to conserve food and water and keep the city running smoothly for everybody."
"Welcome O Pioneer! You have been redirected to a ligher version of Ohio/Illinois/Missouri/Kansas in order to conserve land rights and keep the state running smoothly for everybody."
"a desperate gambit by proprietary software interests to kill OSS before it kills them"
Come to think of it, Microsoft announced that it has a big Linux work center on July 31, and just a few days later, on
Aug 5, SCO wants $699 per Linux deployment. Hmmmm.... so, after some reflection and soul-searching, Microsoft announces that it will work to remain compliant by respecting the principles of honorable business practice with regard to IP, and hands SCO 10,000x$699, and a boatload of legitimacy in the eyes of Joe BestBuy. SCO, now flush with cash, starts suing everybody in sight to prevent them from using Linux without paying. As the cases drag on, SCO loudly trumpets that Linux isn't free, that it, in fact will cost you more than WinXP.
And every time they run low on cash to pay the lawyers and the ad agencies, Microsoft "liscences" another 10,000 copies of Linux. MS's hands are clean, as it's SCO that's doing the dirty work. By the time the FTC or Justice Department investigate and try to stop it, Linux will be persona-non-grata in the commercial world; kept alive on the fringes of enterprise computing, not dead, but driven underground with a bad reputation as a legal quagmire.
We need a robot from the future to come back in time to save us from this nightmare.
I wonder what kind of odds John Poindexter would offer on "MS-based systems will be the subject of a successful cyberattack resulting in significant economic impact in lost data, functionality, uptime and manhours." Any bets? Anyone? C'mon, no body wants to take this bet?
Seriously, if they wanted to take bets on which national leader would get hit, couldn't they do the same for which OS will fail first/most? Or bet on how much the next big expolit will cost, to the nearest $10M?
"America started out as a handful of colonies... if living/working conditions improve in China - it won't drive us back into the 3d world."
100 years later, take a look at our parent country, England. Not to diss my Brit friends, but, while they obviously remain a 1st world economy, the UK just as obviously doesn't enjoy the same power and influence it once did. When the great European powers balanced each other, none was absolutely predominant, all myths about "Pax Brittanica" aside. In the Cold War, the two superpowers balanced each other. Now, in the age of "Pax Americana" (just as mythical), we have an unrivaled level of power and influence. If China gets its act together and starts to enact the same labor and social reforms that the US saw in the 19th and 20th centuries (strong labor unions, universal sufferage, more accountability in public officials, etc.) thereby encouraging economies of scale, a middle class and concommitant economic power, is there any doubt that the US's relative power will necessarily wane as China's waxes?
100 years ago, would anyone have taken seriously a suggestion that the US would emerge to dramatically supercede the great world powers? Hell, in 1918-19, President Wilson was more or less patted on the head like a precocious child at Versailles. Now, in 2003, we're saying, "Oh look, the Chinese have made their very own little CPU, isn't that cute?"
I seems that some of the anaylsis software developed for genomics would come in handy here. The same gene, taken from two different organisms, can be pretty similar in terms of its coding DNA, but have frameshift mutations which make the actual overall sequence pretty different. To analogize DNA (which I know) and computer code (which I barely know), you can think of the protein-coding regions (the exon DNA) as the actual code, and the non-coding junk DNA that interrupts it (intron DNA) as comments, inserted witticisms, copyright statements and other crap that interrupts the code. When you string it all together, a program from two programmers might use the same functional code to do the same job, but the overall sequence of lines of code can be pretty different.
In the case of DNA the frame is three nucleotides; in the case of md5, it appears that the frame can be artibrarily set to 5, 10, 13, whatever. Can the comments and other non-functional lines of code be automatically stripped out before the checksum is run without calling it an examination of the code (which would violate the NDA)? That would help to eliminate a lot of the potential for misaligned comparisons. The genomics software can be told, "I have sequence ATTGCG...CTTACG. See if it or any of its derivative small pieces (of arbitrary length N) can be found in the big genome in the database, wether they appear concurrently or not." Can a similar procedure be used to comare the source code from different versions of the software?
Slashdot Mirror
Shoot, I'll go along with that one, in a heartbeat.
The tmperatures by themselves probably wouldn't do it. You'd have to have something to accept the oxygen, and to keep it away from the freed uranium to let it form macroscopic amounts of the metallic form. Even then, if it sank, you'd end up with a molten uranium/nickle/iron mixture. I don't recall what the neutron capture profile of nickle or iron is, but most of the uranium in the mix would be U-238 anyway, not U-235, so I don't really think that a fission reaction could get going. The only heat contribution would be from regular decay.
A number of people have suggested getting rid of nuclear waste by deposition into a subduction zone. Drop it into the abyss, it gets dragged under with the mantle, get melted, mixed and dispersed. By the time it comes back up as the latest contribution to the Hawaiian Islands, the really nasty stuff will have decayed to harmlessness and the long-lived stuff is no worse than background. Personally, I don't have a problem with this, but nobody at the NRC or IAEA has yet asked me my opinion.
Uranium is rarely, if ever, found in the pure metallic form. Uranium has a valence of 6, forms uranium oxides very readily, and doesn't lose the oxygen without a lot of chemical coaxing. These oxides would rarely break down under natural conditions to free up the pure metal. Uranium is indeed denser than iron, and would be expected to sink, but uranium oxides are lighter, and float up to the mantle.
The name of the book is Revelation, not Revelations.
Now you know.
No, that would be space *bombing*.
*knock knock*
Please put down the mouse and come with me, sir.
It's for your own protection, sir. Please get in the car.
We really don't have time to stand and discuss this, sir. Please get in the car.
You can use the cell phone in the car. Please get in the car, sir.
Get in the car. Now.
*crackle*
We've got him, Base. He's en route. We just have to put the sacks of fertilizer and the barrel of fuel oil in his garage, and we'll be done here.
PLOT SPOILER AHEAD
"...some lesser (but still devastating) event."
Ummmm, yeah, see, he just *thought* it was a nova event - it turned out to have been a big solar flare. (That's why all of the recent solar flares made me think of this story, get it?) The fact that it's a flare, rather than a nova, makes for an ironic twist: instead of dying quickly and happily in his girlfriend's arms, they both have to live on and try to survive in the wreckage of a brutalized planet, with human civilization having been smashed back down to pre-industrialization level. It's a case of a less devastating event causing more misery than the more. I didn't give out that info because I didn't want to have to put a SPOILER warning in my post.... but since it's hard to respond to an AC offline, there you have it.
All this talk about massive solar flares makes me think of "Inconstant Moon", by Larry Niven. It's a great short story about a guy in L.A. who is amazed by how incredibly bright the moon one evening. Bright enough to read by, so bright it's painful to look at directly. He realizes that it's the reflected light of the sun, gone nova, and that he has only a couple of hours until the shock wave hits. A great read.
Watch the skies....
So do I. The book in the Bible is "Revelation", not "Revelations". God will know his own, pal.
So, all of the individual participants in the electric power industry use the grid to distribute power and make money, but since none of them actually own the whole grid, and there's no regulatory requirement to maintain the grid in good working order, we are back to the Tragedy of the Commons. The solution? Re-regulation, either self-imposed by the industry or government-imposed for the good of society.
This is an old technology... you can create a tremendous amount of attractive-looking vapor by emitting a bunch of hot air in the right direction. Although there's a short-lived burst of heat and light (and sound and fury), pretty soon, everybody is cool to the technology.
"Anyway, I prefer fountain pens, mostly because nobody will ever borrow them so I never lose my pens to theft."
ABSOLUTELY! I have a number of nice ballpoint pens (Waterman, Cross, etc.), and there have been numerous times when someone asked to use it, and then almost walked off with it. Now, I use a fountain pen exclusively (Prasad nib, medium-fine); now, when someone asks to borrow it, I say, "Sure, do you know how to use a fountain pen?" Every time, they look at me blankly, and then go find a ballpoint.
How about my favorite living fossil plant, the genus Equisetum, the horsetail ferns? Also known as scouring rushes, they incorporate silica in their stems and make them feel like sandpaper. This is the only surviving genus of the only surviving family (Equisetaceae) of the only surviving order (Equisetales) of a class (Sphenopsida) that emerged during the Devonian Period, around 375 million years ago, some 200 million years before the Jurassic Period (~175 mya).
So, surrounded by the first land vertebrates, early wingless insects and some animals which would eventually evolve into the arachnids, the Equisetum grew and thrived for 30 million years, and watched the gymnosperms arrive. Another 130 million or so, and Equisetum watched the rise of the dinosaurs. Another 50 million and Equisetum watched the angiosperms (flowering plants) arrive and take over dominance of the plant world, and watched as the ecological shift started to kill off the dinosaurs. 30 million years later, Equisetum watched as the asteroid finished off the dinos and the twitchy little mammals found greatness thrust upon them. Over the next 140 million years, Equisetum watched as the mammals grew tall and short, big and small, flew and crawled and ran and swam.
Recently, Equisetum watched as one bunch of upstart, big-headed mammals learned to control fire, plants, other mammals, and go on to create ceramics, double entry accounting, antibiotics, TiVo and Mr. Coffee. If we think of Equisetum's long residency on Earth as a single year, starting on January 1, then humans showed up around 11:00pm on December 31.
Turn off the computer and go take a walk in the woods, folks. It's an amazing world we live in.
"This will only be revealed in Revolutions (Revelations?)"
Actually, the book in the bible is Revelation, not Revelations, so therefore your whole theory is wrong.
Good lord, someone who *enjoyed* writing grant requests? You poor, sad, sick bastard. Therapy helps, my friend. Trust me... I know.
I use WordPerfect for all of my internal documents and scientific publications, and have since 5.0, back in the DOS days. I stay with it (now 10.0) because WP does what I tell it to do, and doesn't do anything I didn't explicitly tell it to. It's like a dog that takes well to training. I resist my colleagues' groupthink "standardization" on MS Word, but I do have to use it periodically. I find that using MS Word is like living with a wolf/dog mixed breed. It does what you tell it to 95% of the time, but it isn't really under your control, no matter how much you try to train it.
If there are 5 checkout lanes open in a grocery store, only one of them will be the fastest. So, 4 times out of 5, the lane you pick will be slower than another lane.
Murphy's Law is all about perception.
Come to think of it, Microsoft announced that it has a big Linux work center on July 31, and just a few days later, on Aug 5, SCO wants $699 per Linux deployment. Hmmmm.... so, after some reflection and soul-searching, Microsoft announces that it will work to remain compliant by respecting the principles of honorable business practice with regard to IP, and hands SCO 10,000x$699, and a boatload of legitimacy in the eyes of Joe BestBuy. SCO, now flush with cash, starts suing everybody in sight to prevent them from using Linux without paying. As the cases drag on, SCO loudly trumpets that Linux isn't free, that it, in fact will cost you more than WinXP.
And every time they run low on cash to pay the lawyers and the ad agencies, Microsoft "liscences" another 10,000 copies of Linux. MS's hands are clean, as it's SCO that's doing the dirty work. By the time the FTC or Justice Department investigate and try to stop it, Linux will be persona-non-grata in the commercial world; kept alive on the fringes of enterprise computing, not dead, but driven underground with a bad reputation as a legal quagmire.
We need a robot from the future to come back in time to save us from this nightmare.
"Just a reminder: you are not required to mod lame humor up as "Funny" just because the poster has a low ID number."
Ah, young grasshopper, you are still under the impression that Grandpa expects you to laugh at his jokes, regardless of wether you think they are funny or not. The truth is, Grandpa tells his jokes because *he* thinks they are funny, and actually doesn't much care wether you laugh or not. Neither reaction will either inhibit or encourage his future joke telling, nor the quality of said jokes.
Moderators, please ignore this one, off-topic as it is. I would have responded to this by e.mail, but Anonymous Cowards are, well, Anonymous.
When you click on the link the parent poster provides, the first thing you see is this:
"Welcome Slashdot visitor! You have been redirected to a ligher version of our article in order to conserve bandwidth and keep the site running smoothly for everybody."
Clearly they are doing their best to avoid being Slashdotted, while not shutting out the Slashdotters completely. As intelligent and reasonable as this is, it still strikes me as amusing.
"Welcome Mongol horde visitor! You have been redirected to a ligher version of Rome in order to conserve food and water and keep the city running smoothly for everybody."
"Welcome O Pioneer! You have been redirected to a ligher version of Ohio/Illinois/Missouri/Kansas in order to conserve land rights and keep the state running smoothly for everybody."
I wish I had some text to go with that subject.
"a desperate gambit by proprietary software interests to kill OSS before it kills them"
Come to think of it, Microsoft announced that it has a big Linux work center on July 31, and just a few days later, on Aug 5, SCO wants $699 per Linux deployment. Hmmmm.... so, after some reflection and soul-searching, Microsoft announces that it will work to remain compliant by respecting the principles of honorable business practice with regard to IP, and hands SCO 10,000x$699, and a boatload of legitimacy in the eyes of Joe BestBuy. SCO, now flush with cash, starts suing everybody in sight to prevent them from using Linux without paying. As the cases drag on, SCO loudly trumpets that Linux isn't free, that it, in fact will cost you more than WinXP.
And every time they run low on cash to pay the lawyers and the ad agencies, Microsoft "liscences" another 10,000 copies of Linux. MS's hands are clean, as it's SCO that's doing the dirty work. By the time the FTC or Justice Department investigate and try to stop it, Linux will be persona-non-grata in the commercial world; kept alive on the fringes of enterprise computing, not dead, but driven underground with a bad reputation as a legal quagmire.
We need a robot from the future to come back in time to save us from this nightmare.
God, No! Then they'd cook up some way to lay claim to Slashdot's readership, at $699 a head.
I wonder what kind of odds John Poindexter would offer on "MS-based systems will be the subject of a successful cyberattack resulting in significant economic impact in lost data, functionality, uptime and manhours." Any bets? Anyone? C'mon, no body wants to take this bet?
Seriously, if they wanted to take bets on which national leader would get hit, couldn't they do the same for which OS will fail first/most? Or bet on how much the next big expolit will cost, to the nearest $10M?
"America started out as a handful of colonies ... if living/working conditions improve in China - it won't drive us back into the 3d world."
100 years later, take a look at our parent country, England. Not to diss my Brit friends, but, while they obviously remain a 1st world economy, the UK just as obviously doesn't enjoy the same power and influence it once did. When the great European powers balanced each other, none was absolutely predominant, all myths about "Pax Brittanica" aside. In the Cold War, the two superpowers balanced each other. Now, in the age of "Pax Americana" (just as mythical), we have an unrivaled level of power and influence. If China gets its act together and starts to enact the same labor and social reforms that the US saw in the 19th and 20th centuries (strong labor unions, universal sufferage, more accountability in public officials, etc.) thereby encouraging economies of scale, a middle class and concommitant economic power, is there any doubt that the US's relative power will necessarily wane as China's waxes?
100 years ago, would anyone have taken seriously a suggestion that the US would emerge to dramatically supercede the great world powers? Hell, in 1918-19, President Wilson was more or less patted on the head like a precocious child at Versailles. Now, in 2003, we're saying, "Oh look, the Chinese have made their very own little CPU, isn't that cute?"
I seems that some of the anaylsis software developed for genomics would come in handy here. The same gene, taken from two different organisms, can be pretty similar in terms of its coding DNA, but have frameshift mutations which make the actual overall sequence pretty different. To analogize DNA (which I know) and computer code (which I barely know), you can think of the protein-coding regions (the exon DNA) as the actual code, and the non-coding junk DNA that interrupts it (intron DNA) as comments, inserted witticisms, copyright statements and other crap that interrupts the code. When you string it all together, a program from two programmers might use the same functional code to do the same job, but the overall sequence of lines of code can be pretty different.
In the case of DNA the frame is three nucleotides; in the case of md5, it appears that the frame can be artibrarily set to 5, 10, 13, whatever. Can the comments and other non-functional lines of code be automatically stripped out before the checksum is run without calling it an examination of the code (which would violate the NDA)? That would help to eliminate a lot of the potential for misaligned comparisons. The genomics software can be told, "I have sequence ATTGCG...CTTACG. See if it or any of its derivative small pieces (of arbitrary length N) can be found in the big genome in the database, wether they appear concurrently or not." Can a similar procedure be used to comare the source code from different versions of the software?