There are F-16s that have crashed in the lake. The military decided it was too expensive to recover them since they were destroyed anyway. So they let them sink in the mud (presumably they did). I imagine that there is other airplane junk in the lake too, being the flyover for a military base.
There are some interesting artifacts around the lake. Being a desert region seems to attract a number of artists that sees it as theircanvas. It's where you see all the car commercials with the car zooming along in a vast desert expanse on white ground (the salt flats).
It's unfortunate, but we do not have an enviromentally conscious citzenry. All sorts of trash and junk. have been dumped out at the lake, just so they wouldn't have to pay a landfill fee or bother with it.
It's true that the lake does have an ecosystem, but not much of one, as it is very salty.
Also, the Salt Lake is not the swimmer's aquatic paradise. At one time it was considered to be. There was a large resort on the shore. Unfortunately it burned to the ground when some vagrants built a campfire on the wooden floor (smart, huh?).
The lake was so salty that you would indeed float like a cork. But because of a railway causeway across the lake, the south end (where everybody goes swimming) does not have enough salinity as the lake is fed by freshwater sources there.
The lake does not have any natural beaches, but rather mud flats for shoreline. Not like what you find at the ocean. There are some man made ones, and this is where you can go spend the day if you want.
But even if you do find a spot of sand to toss the blanket on, there are "brine flies", the other half of the lake's ecosystem. Imagine a hord of gnats that want to make you their business.
There is bacteria that thrive in this anaeoribic enviroment around the shoreline. The resulting byproduct of their efforts is hydrogen sulfide, or as we like to call it "lake stink". If the wind is just right, there is not a place in the valley that you can go to escape it. But that only happens occasionally, like before a rainstorm. I think the natives like myself have a fondness for it (since it only happens a couple times a year) as it reminds us that we live in a unique place. However, if you are down on the shore, there are days it is very bad.
After years of drought, the lake is at a low point right now. However in the mid-eighties, it was at the highest point ever. An interesting engineering feat (or more likely boondoggle) was the installation of massive pumps that are capable of pumping the lake in order to lower the level.
There are a number of mineral companies that remove salt, rare metals (magnesium), and other minerals from the lake.
However, until recently (last 15-20 years), there was not that much concern for the lake ecology. The thing that people did/do not realize is that like other resources, it is finite.
There was a time that nobody harvested brine shrimp eggs. Now there are a number of companies that have to be regulated so they do not remove the entire next generation of brine shrimp from the lake. Indications are that decades of removing minerals from the lake have depleted the salt flats. So much so, that the world famous Bonneville Speedway does not have enough rock hard salt to break speed records on anymore.
My favorite thing about the lake? Without a doubt it is Pink Floyd, an escapee from a local aviary. He's more predictable than the swallows at Capistrano. Every year he makes
You have to remember the enviroment that produced this mess.
The former soviets had a very cavalier attitude towards radioactivity. Part of the problem was the extreme pressure they felt to keep up with western technology.
The soviets have radioactive waste everywhere. Not just Chernobyl, but across the continent. It really is a severe problem. There are also over 40,000 barrels of waste in the Barents sea that need to be cleaned up before it kills the fisheries.
This doesn't mention all the nuclear accidents that they had that released radioactivity in the enviroment. Many of which were never published or covered up. The only reason we learned about Chernobyl is because fallout reached Sweden.
BTW, the Chernobyl sarcophagus is crumbling, and threatens to expose the radioactive core once again, unless western nations fund some fix. So that mess is not over yet.
"Radioactive Mess" would be Russia's middle name if it had one.
Note the disclaimer on labs.google.com that says......they may disappear without warning or perform erratically.
In other words, "we're about to get slashdotted".
Re:Would be a problem even if it only affects fish
on
Buckyballs Kill Fish
·
· Score: 1
Dumping toxic compounds into ecosystems is stupid, even if the compound in question doesn't directly damage humans
Well now it may seem stupid. But earlier in the last century nobody cared. No thought was given to what happens when a chemical was introduced to the enviroment.
We had affluent from companies feed directly into lakes. DDT to control insects. Love canal. Hanford - becoming a "national sacrifice area" that still leaks into the Columbia river. The list seems endless.
I do not think anything has changed. People still pour paint, solvents, and other chemicals down the drain. They still dump oil in the ground.
I also think corporations have not changed. They will dump anything anywhere as long as they can get away with it, as the cost to dispose of waste properly is not seen as justified.
This is one reason companies are leaving the US for other countries. These other countries do not have the cost of waste disposal as there are no regulations. This is one of the reasons it is "cheaper" to do business that is rarely mentioned. So the argument "free trade" is not really "fair trade" seems particularly cogent in this area. The citizens of these countries, often under their oppressive regime, are having to pay the penalty for corporate greed.
So it seems stupid to those that see what happens to the enviroment. But there remains legions of others that simply do not care.
Even a reasonably high level of toxicity might not be a major problem if the buckyballs are not persistent in a real-world environment.
This is the problem that the article alluded to.
The buckyballs were not attracted to one another and did not "clump up" and sink. Rather they remained afloat and the fish became exposed.
Re:What about other carbon arrangements?
on
Buckyballs Kill Fish
·
· Score: 4, Informative
But AFAIK no brain damage from diamond has been reported
That's because diamonds don't get flushed down the drain, and if they did they would sink to the bottom of the lake and become part of the "muck".
If you Read The Fine Article, that's what the scientists thought would happen to the buckyballs. But in tests they remained suspended in the water and fish and small crustaceans became exposed and subsequently were affected.
There are a couple of other things to remember. Diamond is a crystalline form of carbon, which does make it inert, as other atoms are not attracted to form bonds with it. Buckyball molecules do not have this lattice structure, and are going to be more reactive. Here is a tutorail on the different aspects of carbon chemistry.
There are industrial processes that use diamond (like saws), and the resultant powder can be dangerous. But this is the case for any fine powder that might be inhaled, and the toxicity is going to be dependant upon the powder.
But generally, these are "microparticles", not "nanoparticles", which may react differently in a biological system. Being a magnitude smaller, they will by their nature tend to stay afloat longer. Rather than "clump together" and sink like other particles would.
The reason that there are no supersonic passenger airplanes is that the economics is not feasible. Also they are very noisy, which is bad if you live near an airport.
The concorde is an example of this. Sure it worked, but it was not allowed to takeoff at most airports because of the noise.
The average ticket price to cross the Atlantic was $7,000.
The initial development and operating costs was paid entirely by the British and French governments. Without this the concorde never would have been possible.
Boeing has toyed with the idea of supersonic travel for ages. But for all of the above reasons, you will not see an actual airplane.
Patenting the iPod interface is okay. But Apple should open up it's media format and DRM technology. This in turn would be good for everyone
This will not happen, though it might be a good idea for apple to do so and get a cut of each music transaction.
The reason Apple may not do this is that it would lead to products that would compete directly with their own.
Apple will want to keep a tight fist on any advantage they have market wise.
What this does is to inspire Microsoft (or someone like them who has enough money) to produce a knockoff. It will not function as smoothly as the ipod, but it will be "good enough". It will also be half the price (maybe even less, as a loss-leader. The DRM will be easy for developers/muscians to use, and halfway acceptible to all of the mp3 users.
Eventually this knockoff will catch up to Apple's ipod and supplant it.
History repeats itself.
Apple will probably try very hard to mete out enough licensing deals (like the one with hp) to try and prevent this.
The problem is, it is whoever provides the market with a commodity item will win the market. By keeping a tight fist on your technology, you do not accomplish this. The ipod is not a commodity type item. Mp3 players are.
Most companies seem blind to this fundamental fact and try to have absolute control on the technology they produce. So you have a morass of copyrights, patents, and DRM all working against the consumer whom they want to purchase their technology.
But what this means is that the consumer in turn has no control of the technology they purchase. So the format dies. Aka ebooks.
I suspect if Apple is not careful in this area, they will leave themselves vulnerable to a competitor.
This was done at the only time it could be done, as casinoes eventually caught on to others with "shoe computers". They were taken to a back room and their equipment "confiscated".
You could actually buy shoe computers ready made for this purpose in the early eighties.
Casinoes now (and have had for quite some time) equipment that can detect your shoe computer via the hash it generates. Also there are scramblers that generate an RF field that can cause computers to glitch.
I believe the shoe computer in the book was based on the venerable 6502 microprocessor (at least at first anyway).
Slashdot Mirror
That is how I read it
Yeah, they're tagging them so they'll be easier to process for Soylent Green
Another April Fools article. We all know that Linux is not real
Yeah, I heard that they stole all the code from SCO.
and we gotta endure a whole 24 hours of these posts over and over?
Ugh, shoot me now...
You're new here, aren't you?
gmail.com works.
Generally they wait until 12 pm eastern to launch holiday sites.
They did pick a poor time to launch it though.
They probably anticipate such schemes, and probably will limit the size of attachments.
I hope that the filesharers don't ruin it for the rest of us.
For those that want to know, here is the definition.
There is a note about how they apply to NET here.
Remember when you were kids and you showed each other your "outie" or your "innie". It's pronounced like that.
These are intelligent, wealthy people, and they did not get that way by filing groundless lawsuits
Unless you are those particular attorneys that are filing groundless lawsuits.
There are F-16s that have crashed in the lake. The military decided it was too expensive to recover them since they were destroyed anyway. So they let them sink in the mud (presumably they did). I imagine that there is other airplane junk in the lake too, being the flyover for a military base.
There are some interesting artifacts around the lake. Being a desert region seems to attract a number of artists that sees it as their canvas. It's where you see all the car commercials with the car zooming along in a vast desert expanse on white ground (the salt flats).
It's unfortunate, but we do not have an enviromentally conscious citzenry. All sorts of trash and junk. have been dumped out at the lake, just so they wouldn't have to pay a landfill fee or bother with it.
It's true that the lake does have an ecosystem, but not much of one, as it is very salty.
Also, the Salt Lake is not the swimmer's aquatic paradise. At one time it was considered to be. There was a large resort on the shore. Unfortunately it burned to the ground when some vagrants built a campfire on the wooden floor (smart, huh?).
The lake was so salty that you would indeed float like a cork. But because of a railway causeway across the lake, the south end (where everybody goes swimming) does not have enough salinity as the lake is fed by freshwater sources there.
The lake does not have any natural beaches, but rather mud flats for shoreline. Not like what you find at the ocean. There are some man made ones, and this is where you can go spend the day if you want.
But even if you do find a spot of sand to toss the blanket on, there are "brine flies", the other half of the lake's ecosystem. Imagine a hord of gnats that want to make you their business.
There is bacteria that thrive in this anaeoribic enviroment around the shoreline. The resulting byproduct of their efforts is hydrogen sulfide, or as we like to call it "lake stink". If the wind is just right, there is not a place in the valley that you can go to escape it. But that only happens occasionally, like before a rainstorm. I think the natives like myself have a fondness for it (since it only happens a couple times a year) as it reminds us that we live in a unique place. However, if you are down on the shore, there are days it is very bad.
After years of drought, the lake is at a low point right now. However in the mid-eighties, it was at the highest point ever. An interesting engineering feat (or more likely boondoggle) was the installation of massive pumps that are capable of pumping the lake in order to lower the level.
There are a number of mineral companies that remove salt, rare metals (magnesium), and other minerals from the lake.
However, until recently (last 15-20 years), there was not that much concern for the lake ecology. The thing that people did/do not realize is that like other resources, it is finite.
There was a time that nobody harvested brine shrimp eggs. Now there are a number of companies that have to be regulated so they do not remove the entire next generation of brine shrimp from the lake. Indications are that decades of removing minerals from the lake have depleted the salt flats. So much so, that the world famous Bonneville Speedway does not have enough rock hard salt to break speed records on anymore.
My favorite thing about the lake? Without a doubt it is Pink Floyd, an escapee from a local aviary. He's more predictable than the swallows at Capistrano. Every year he makes
You have to remember the enviroment that produced this mess.
The former soviets had a very cavalier attitude towards radioactivity. Part of the problem was the extreme pressure they felt to keep up with western technology.
The soviets have radioactive waste everywhere. Not just Chernobyl, but across the continent.
It really is a severe problem. There are also over 40,000 barrels of waste in the Barents sea that need to be cleaned up before it kills the fisheries.
This doesn't mention all the nuclear accidents that they had that released radioactivity in the enviroment. Many of which were never published or covered up. The only reason we learned about Chernobyl is because fallout reached Sweden.
BTW, the Chernobyl sarcophagus is crumbling, and threatens to expose the radioactive core once again, unless western nations fund some fix. So that mess is not over yet.
"Radioactive Mess" would be Russia's middle name if it had one.
Note the disclaimer on labs.google.com that says......they may disappear without warning or perform erratically.
In other words, "we're about to get slashdotted".
Dumping toxic compounds into ecosystems is stupid, even if the compound in question doesn't directly damage humans
Well now it may seem stupid. But earlier in the last century nobody cared. No thought was given to what happens when a chemical was introduced to the enviroment.
We had affluent from companies feed directly into lakes. DDT to control insects. Love canal. Hanford - becoming a "national sacrifice area" that still leaks into the Columbia river. The list seems endless.
I do not think anything has changed. People still pour paint, solvents, and other chemicals down the drain. They still dump oil in the ground.
I also think corporations have not changed. They will dump anything anywhere as long as they can get away with it, as the cost to dispose of waste properly is not seen as justified.
This is one reason companies are leaving the US for other countries. These other countries do not have the cost of waste disposal as there are no regulations. This is one of the reasons it is "cheaper" to do business that is rarely mentioned. So the argument "free trade" is not really "fair trade" seems particularly cogent in this area. The citizens of these countries, often under their oppressive regime, are having to pay the penalty for corporate greed.
So it seems stupid to those that see what happens to the enviroment. But there remains legions of others that simply do not care.
Even a reasonably high level of toxicity might not be a major problem if the buckyballs are not persistent in a real-world environment.
This is the problem that the article alluded to.
The buckyballs were not attracted to one another and did not "clump up" and sink. Rather they remained afloat and the fish became exposed.
But AFAIK no brain damage from diamond has been reported
That's because diamonds don't get flushed down the drain, and if they did they would sink to the bottom of the lake and become part of the "muck".
If you Read The Fine Article, that's what the scientists thought would happen to the buckyballs. But in tests they remained suspended in the water and fish and small crustaceans became exposed and subsequently were affected.
There are a couple of other things to remember. Diamond is a crystalline form of carbon, which does make it inert, as other atoms are not attracted to form bonds with it. Buckyball molecules do not have this lattice structure, and are going to be more reactive. Here is a tutorail on the different aspects of carbon chemistry.
There are industrial processes that use diamond (like saws), and the resultant powder can be dangerous. But this is the case for any fine powder that might be inhaled, and the toxicity is going to be dependant upon the powder.
But generally, these are "microparticles", not "nanoparticles", which may react differently in a biological system. Being a magnitude smaller, they will by their nature tend to stay afloat longer. Rather than "clump together" and sink like other particles would.
Here is a study about diamond's biocompatibility.
Their conclusion - "Thus it appears that diamond is extremely -- indeed outstandingly -- biocompatible with living cells."
As long as that is true the fishes have little to worry about
What this does show is that buckyballs are not an inert substance.
The problem is that if it affects fish, it most likely affects animals higher up on the food chain (us).
Knowing this, we can not go washing buckyballs down the sink, where it will find its way into streams, rivers and lakes.
As bad as it is for the fish, if humans eat the contanimated fish, that could have bad biological repercussions (not unlike mercury).
I'm curious to find what other carbon nano-arrangements will do to sea life
It most likely would be the same as buckyballs, as the molecules are made out of the same atoms, hence the same biological reaction would take place.
surely it would be transformed somehow?
Into burnt carbon stuff.
Diamonds require a complex process to form with the right combination of chemical, heat, and pressure factors.
All falling through the atmosphere would do is heat the carbon up to a high temperature.
I think you hit it. "Tom Spires" and Newburn are one in the same.
She new that what she was doing was wrong. But greed pretty much overrided that.
I really think that a prosecutor somewhere needs to make an example of her.
The reason that there are no supersonic passenger airplanes is that the economics is not feasible. Also they are very noisy, which is bad if you live near an airport.
The concorde is an example of this. Sure it worked, but it was not allowed to takeoff at most airports because of the noise.
The average ticket price to cross the Atlantic was $7,000.
The initial development and operating costs was paid entirely by the British and French governments. Without this the concorde never would have been possible.
Boeing has toyed with the idea of supersonic travel for ages. But for all of the above reasons, you will not see an actual airplane.
Patenting the iPod interface is okay. But Apple should open up it's media format and DRM technology. This in turn would be good for everyone
This will not happen, though it might be a good idea for apple to do so and get a cut of each music transaction.
The reason Apple may not do this is that it would lead to products that would compete directly with their own.
Apple will want to keep a tight fist on any advantage they have market wise.
What this does is to inspire Microsoft (or someone like them who has enough money) to produce a knockoff. It will not function as smoothly as the ipod, but it will be "good enough". It will also be half the price (maybe even less, as a loss-leader. The DRM will be easy for developers/muscians to use, and halfway acceptible to all of the mp3 users.
Eventually this knockoff will catch up to Apple's ipod and supplant it.
History repeats itself.
Apple will probably try very hard to mete out enough licensing deals (like the one with hp) to try and prevent this.
The problem is, it is whoever provides the market with a commodity item will win the market. By keeping a tight fist on your technology, you do not accomplish this. The ipod is not a commodity type item. Mp3 players are.
Most companies seem blind to this fundamental fact and try to have absolute control on the technology they produce. So you have a morass of copyrights, patents, and DRM all working against the consumer whom they want to purchase their technology.
But what this means is that the consumer in turn has no control of the technology they purchase. So the format dies. Aka ebooks.
I suspect if Apple is not careful in this area, they will leave themselves vulnerable to a competitor.
Slashdot has lost its hard core geeks. This happens to be a Futurama reference.
I would not consider Futurama geek canon. Though it is climbing towards that status.
Highly entertaining read. You can find if here
This was done at the only time it could be done, as casinoes eventually caught on to others with "shoe computers". They were taken to a back room and their equipment "confiscated".
You could actually buy shoe computers ready made for this purpose in the early eighties.
Casinoes now (and have had for quite some time) equipment that can detect your shoe computer via the hash it generates. Also there are scramblers that generate an RF field that can cause computers to glitch.
I believe the shoe computer in the book was based on the venerable 6502 microprocessor (at least at first anyway).
Wearable computers are all descended from this.
This does not simpute. Simputer will return after deciding your punishment
Gee, it sounds a lot like Landru.
What is interesting is that if you read the technical paper on this, the design calls for using off the shelf solid state 2 Watt lasers.
That seems to me to be very low power. But they are using an interferometer which by their nature are very sensitive.
I think I'm in love.
:-(
You and about another 10,000 slashdotters, each cramming her inbox with spam asking for a date.
Of course, our kids will each have 9 heads.
I'm all for biodiversity, and they're gonna be my nine headed kids.
Get in line. I was first.
I think this is a time that I would have used a "donate" button for paypal if it had been available, to help pay for bandwidth.