So tired of this glass three-quarters full smiley touchy feely people are nice crap. Why anyone would produce a social network with the scale of human emotion reduced to 'positive' dandelion buttery-chinned goodness... I cannot imagine.
Bring on an equal measure of opposition and disagreement. Not just an absence of 'like'.
Though I am prepared to believe that Snowden sincerely believes that he managed to intercept bona fide materials... but he was snowed under, set up and 'encouraged' to go rogue by some person he has not specified.
If this PRISM fiasco with its involvement by trusted providers (Google, Apple etc) is demonstrated to be a fabrication (whether Snowden is aware of this or not), there is a chance for it to be debunked and the show is over.
A distraction to hide a more dangerous and more shocking secret that the NSA does not wish to be brought top the surface, the prevalence of piggyback-slurps at interchange points with near-complete data retention (no Youtube junk). That are guaranteed to consist of 99.99% domestic (illegal) intercept.
I don't understand why this Closed Cycle Brayton will work with a Thorium plant but not with a conventional nuke plant. So it would seem either that [1] a conventional plant will have the advantage of not needing water as well, or it would be cheaper or more efficient to [2] make a Thorium plant use cooling water and thus as likely they will have it.
Very insightful, pointing out the difference between use of water in the reactor and water used for (conductive) cooling. At the moment the word 'conventional' implies the use of solid fuel and a loop of water inside the reactor for moderation and cooling, and the use of phase transition (water to steam then back to water again) to drive turbines.
[1] Brayton would work with a Pebble Bed Reactor where the solid fuel is encased spherical 'pebbles' of graphite moderator and inert gas such as helium is used for cooling. There is no phase change, the helium remains a gas which varies in temperature.
One such experiment was the THTR-300 breeder in Germany, which attempted to leverage the pebble concept into reality and managed to do so from 1985-1988, despite some problems managing the solid fuel. It was not a proving ground for Brayton though, the helium was used to heat water in a Rankine (steam) cycle.
Pebble Bed Reactor designs are also considered to be "walk away safe" despite these problems. The danger of graphite igniting if the reactor is breached and the helium replaced by air seems to be overstated, but there does remain the possibility of ignition if it is reduced to dust (such as in a steam explosion, as happened at Chernobyl) or if it comes into direct contact with the solid fuel at the center of the pebble.
So both 'conventional' rod-and-pellet and Pebble Reactor manufactured pebbles both share one important characteristic --- the necessity of an extremely critical solid-fuel manufacturing process where a failure of workmanship has undesirable results.
But I wonder though as a layman (disclaimer!) if there is at least one major unresolvable problem with the pebble concept --- and that is how could you be confident you could take the reactor below critical in the presence of multiple mechanical failures? As compared to the salt concept where gravity alone drains the fissile salts out of reach of the graphite moderators with sub-criticality greatly assured.
[2] Though your biggest safety win arises from removing all water from within the reactor and its containment building, the power plant itself could employ water to assist in cooling. In coastal areas LFTR waste heat is envisioned to assist in desalinization.
Sorensen discusses the prospect of substituting a Brayton for a 'conventional' Rakine steam reactor here, citing concerns of efficiency and operating temperature where the heat necessary to drive Brayton places 'conventional' solid fuel configurations in jeopardy of melting.
And over time the men of Dale had become complacent on privacy, liberty and freedom of association, and yet they prospered. No longer content with the wealth of accumulation, they valued innovation and the free exchange of information. To this end they did help to build the greatest communications network that had ever been. Through it all their wealth flowed like a river --- real wealth --- not the dusty treasure hordes of kings locked in windowless rooms.
The fortune and fate of Dale is bound with that of the dwarves, for it is they who had built it. "Long ago in my grandfather Thror's time our family was driven out of the far North, and came back with all their wealth and their tools to this Mountain on the map." They were especially skilled in working gold, copper and silver into thin filaments which they strung far across the land. Where ever dwarves settled dial tone was sure to follow. But their skill was even greater with jewels and crystals, from which they built magical devices of geranium and silicon to carry voices and information in the aether. Altogether those were good days for us, and the poorest of us had money to spend and to lend, and leisure to make beautiful things just for the. fun of it, not to speak of the most marvelous and magical toys [...] and the toy-market of Dale was the wonder of the North."
But of all the wonders of that age the most precious was perhaps the least visible, hidden deep under the Mountain itself. "Discovered by my far ancestor, Thrain the Old, now they mined and they tunneled and they made huger halls and greater workshops." The Mountain they had built is actually many mountains and there is one in your own city. I refer to the telecommunications exchange points of Tier 1 and Tier 2 networks such as MAE-EAST and MAE-WEST, where rivers of voice and data converge into brilliant points of light, then spread out again.
The dwarves had not valued privacy per se, they had just built it for maximum throughput with minimum delay. Their vision was broad and down-to-earth and the data it carried was of practical use for the greatest number. "We use our own devices and just enough magic to make them go. Devices such as the palantir are of no interest to us, the Elves of Valinor can keep their silly patents. The palantir does work for distance communication but it is incredibly expensive and uses a lot of bandwidth. It is also dangerous. If you wish to talk to family and friend, or close a simple deal, why would you wish to link minds, wrestle in thought or lock souls with the other party? The dwarves deliver only voices and runes and stay clear of elvish mind-fuck. Besides, the palantir uses a proprietary network and has no user-servicable parts. Like the Blackberry."
But the dwarves' cleverness though inspired by wisdom was also their folly. While great wealth flowed through their network they were driven to perfect it, and that meant concentrating the flows of many through but a few interconnect points.
"Undoubtedly that was what brought the dragon. Dragons burrow themselves into networks to steal information you know, wherever they can find it; and they guard their plunder as long as they live (which is practically forever, unless they are outed by Congressional hearing), and --- if you would believe them --- they do it for only noble purposes and never enjoy a brass ring of it. Indeed they hardly know a good bit of information from a bad, though they usually have a good notion of the current market value; so despite noble aims of vigilant protection, their omnificent awareness inevitably leads to dull and stupid ends that rend the fabric of society. Insider trading, scheming false flag operations and a 'selective failure' to divulge clear warning of terrorism if it would serve their own ends, a dragon is easily turned to the dark side by its very nature." As the dwarves tell it we would be better off without these dragons altogether, and if yo
Point is there are fuck-all real solutions to the reprocessing problem. THAT is why they've never been taken up. Worse, everyone talks up molten salt thorium reactors and there is EVEN LESS idea about how that would be achieved.
You seem to know all these things, and yet you are not in a happy place. I hope that some day you will find your happy place. You reach down and you flip Thorium over on its back. Thorium lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can't. Not without your help. But you're not helping.
Why aren't you helping?
Holden: You're in a desert, walking along in the sand, when all of a sudden you look down... Leon: What one? Holden: What? Leon: What desert? Holden: It doesn't make any difference what desert, it's completely hypothetical. Leon: But, how come I'd be there? Holden: Maybe you're fed up. Maybe you want to be by yourself. Who knows? You look down and see a tortoise, Leon. It's crawling toward you... Leon: Tortoise? What's that? Holden: [irritated by Leon's interruptions] You know what a turtle is? Leon: Of course! Holden: Same thing. ~Blade Runner
isn't water or a cooling tower needed to efficiently make the steam produced in the final loop run a turbine?
To eliminate the need for water, a Closed Cycle Brayton is being proposed, hoping eventually to attain >50% efficiency. I attempt to describe the operating environment of LFTR in this adjacent post.
Sure there is. Every plant is a reprocessing plant for caustic hot intensely radioactive liquids filled with actinides, and nobody has a well-validated engineering design for this.
In which I attempt to describe the operating environment of LFTR and try to portray the plant as something besides a seething witches' cauldron of death,in this adjacent post.
Can anyone tell me how and end-to-end thorium fuel ecosystem is supposed to work? All of the arguments I hear go like this:
All your questions are answered here, Thorium Remix 2011. Two hours twenty minutes of fascinating stuff. Essential physics and engineering topics on nuclear energy, a roadmap of current water reactor designs, descriptions of safety features and failures, and a compelling case for developing Thorium-based energy. This presentation is simply amazing!
As far as I can tell, what's coming out the wrong end of a thorium reactor will be a molten salt soup of toxic, possibly very corrosive, and VERY radioactive materials.
Sorensen advocates a two-fluid design for the reactor itself (thorium blanket and fissile fuel loop), the fissile loop (radioactive and temperature-hot) fuel passes through a heat exchanger, passing the heat into a third loop of molten salt ("cooling salt") which carries the heat out of the reactor and through the power plant. This loop is temperature-hot but not radioactive, it heats air or inert gas to drive turbines to make electricity.
So you've got three separate loops of molten glop going round in this plant, two radioactive (blanket, fissile) and one not (cooling). The two radioactive loops are circulating through the reactor and also passing though a 'processing gizmo' inside the containment building adjacent to the reactor, I say gizmo because it will probably be bigger than a breadbox but smaller than a truck.
The thorium blanket loop has a hopper that mixes a pinch of thorium into the glop every now and then (~2.7kg/day, 1 tonne/yr). As it passes through the reactor neutrons from the adjacent fissile loop smack the thorium and it becomes Thorium-233. Which decays later into Protactinium-233. Which decays later into Uranium-233. This process takes ~27+ days so the U-233 the gizmo extracts today from the blanket is the thorium you placed into the blanket ~27+ days ago. The blanket salt glop is hazardously radioactive but (I think, just learning myself) there need only be a couple hundred gallons of it.
The fissile loop is fed U-233 by the gizmo continuously and as it circulates through the reactor this is where the fission is happening. This is where the heat is generated from fission and bled off into the cooling salt (via the heat exchanger). This salt is hazardously radioactive but I think there need only be a few hundred gallons of it.
The gizmo pulls waste products (fissioned and decayed U-233) out of the fissile loop as they are produced. One guesstimate I saw is is ~170kg of waste per year (bigger than a breadbox but but smaller than a piano). By pulling the waste out continuously the gizmo prevents it from becoming some of the the nastier stuff that water reactors produce. This LFTR waste is "safe to touch" in ~300 years. These is no free lunch, and making a safe container (casket, vitrified in glass) and finding a safe enough place to store something for 300 years do-able.
The fissile loop is also where the simple and hideously clever load-following characteristic occurs. Turbine trips, shuts down and heat remains in the cooling salt? Fissile loop gets hotter and expands, reducing the concentration of the fissile material and fission slows down. Start turbines again and cooling salt once again becomes cooler? Fissile loop loses heat and contracts, increasing the concentration of fissile in the core, fission increases. Because this is all happening in well-mixed liquids, imagine the power/heat level of this reactor finding a 'sweet spot' after a conduction delay with no human or computer intervention and keeping itself there. No valves closing or opening, no rods being inserted or extracted by white-knuckled operators. This feature is really cool in the hipster sense.
The cooling salt loop and the tanks which hold it is where the designs become more massive.
To people digitizing rare LPs and the people posting Youtube videos that show a phonograph record going round.
Please oh please fill a spray bottle with a solution of water with a tiny bit of liquid soap, and spray the surface of the record before and occasionally during recording. After, rinse and dry with fluffy-towel and lean on edge to dry completely before re-sleeving.
You will be flabbergasted with the result. Even if you do not flabbergast easily.
You are assuming 60 years of continued economic growth (averaged out). What if that paradigm is wrong, if we are at the downslope of a temporary 150 year economic growth fueled by an anomaly of cheap energy (see Peak Oil)?
So I did, how myopia-timistic of me. That's an interesting point because it happens that in 2012 SDG&E grew weary of looking at all that money just sitting there, proposed loosening the rules to allow this fund to play riskier markets for a (hopefully) greater rate of return. In its proposal is a delectable menu of recipes for Wall Street money-goblins to pimp the flava of this low-hanging fruit. This was supposed to be voted on by the Public Utilities Commission but I cannot find the result. I would hope it was HELL NO, and that the suggestion to invest it in derivatives and Real Estate tripped shrieking alarms at the plant.
In a shrinking economy, those future decommissioning costs will loom larger and larger. See also Jared Diamond's Collapse, and John Michael Greer's Long Descent.
Depends who does it and when. If you hire the Mafia and Hell's Angels it would certainly come in on time and under budget. And in a shrinking economy you will find more people willing to face the risks and just get it done. There is a real shortage these days of people and methods that just get out there and do things.
Seriously, I would be willing to go there and take a higher than occupationally permitted cumulative dose of radiation to help them cask the fuel and transport it, reduce the plant to rubble and turn this intricate and beautiful industrial complex into an ugly, desolate public park with horrid little shrubs, useless fountains and despicable art. I'd demand a high wage that would deliver enough money for that span to set my life on a much better course.
We have ways to handle and safely transport highly radioactive substances. Those that exist and better ways we would invent. Life without risk is not worth living, and a world without risk-takers is a world bereft of heroes. Would that be a better world?
The real problem is that there is nowhere to ship and store the casks of waste, so the good people of San Diego country cannot obtain the closure they desire at any price.
I would rather think of this as the Dawn of the Age of Thorium rather than Peak Oil Declining. But the dawn will not arrive unless all of us sing together.
Nuclear proponents are always running around yelling wind and solar pawer can't compete on a per KW basis. Well, not if you skim off the profits and leave the cleanup to taxpayers!
Just a reminder that a decommissioning fund of almost ~$3 billion has already been collected and is sitting there ready to pay for the cleanup. And for 60 years the place will be watched over by a few security guards. $3 billion in the bank plus long term interest earned on $3 billion minus the cost of a few security guards... might cover it.
The money for this fund is skimmed off the top from operating revenues over the life of every nuclear plant. This arrangement is not imposed on all types of power plants, if a coal plant folds you're left with ash piles and poisoned ponds. And yet despite this financial hardship nuclear energy manages to deliver some of the lowest cost per KWh of any energy source. For many years.
I was bopping around trying to beautify this discussion with some real total energy output and cost per KWh over time for this particular plant, but I was soon taken into a whirlwind of ugly sentiment and hysteria spanning many years. It's hard even to dredge up meaningful figures without blasting one's way through Internet hate-articles written by Californians.
Many of those articles and hate-blogs written on computers powered by the plant itself, filled with dreams of paving Nevada (or just Somewhere Else) with windmills and unspecified solar miracle-widgets to generate 2 gigawatts to replace San Onofre.
This plant which has never hurt or injured anyone... which has generated an incredible amount of energy over the years... whose units seem to have run with impressive up-time and efficiency until that dreadful mistake with the steam generator tube upgrade, the wrath of Barbara Boxer.
A valuable public service... it has been hated for years.
Never mind the damned numbers, I can't take any more. My sympathy lies with the decommissioned power plant. California does not deserve to have nuclear energy until they grow up.
I wish the Diablo Canyon plant could grow giant legs like Howl's Castle and walk out of California overnight taking its 2 gigawatts with it. Let the Enron-era brownouts and predatory rate scalping by neighboring states begin once again.
Out of interest - anyone know why we've not re-visited thorium?
There is no good reason, only various excuses people give when pressed on the matter. Some of the excuses are pretty lame, some are clever but are lacking in know-how, such as how different molten salt designs are from water reactors. Many excuses defer to fear of radioactivity, imaginary authorities who would never "permit" such a thing to come about. It's sad to witness.
Most commonly it's Mr. Nobody. "If thorium was such a big deal somebody would have made it happen by now." A whole generation seems to feel comfortable saying things like that. People were not saying things like that as steam power was conquered and harnessed.
Because it serves to keep all the traffic cloaked from OTHER governments. That is, provided someone in each of these companies might do just one little thing: routinely hand over the private keys used for their public SSL servers for www, pop3, smtp and imap.
Do you think this little thing is so unlikely? Frankly I'm amazed. Over 400 comments on this article and only one Anonymous Coward seems to have even fronted the idea.
Plenty of chatter about brute force attacks, elaborate backdoors. Compulsory XKCD. Methinks more Slashdotters should bone up on the basics of public key SSL.
I am not quite as anonymous and my own rabbit hole on the topic leads here and here.
Parent Score +1 ON topic. "And ida been able to get away with my Obama astroturfing... if it weren't for those meddling kids." Must! suppress! dissent! for! Obama!
I press it all day. When I heard Microsoft took it away I wanted to press it even more.
Windows XP forever. Same version frozen in time forever. I don't care if my dot-net is screwed beyond repair or Windows Update keeps offering the same hotfix over and over, it's like a worn out recording of a favorite song.
Or chocolate ready to spread frosting, only strawberry and vanilla, the crap that no one wants. Once that is finally gone (it takes a long time) the shelves are restocked with equal amounts of each.
Once again I show up at the store to find a mountain of coca-cola products stacked to the ceiling with an empty space in the middle where Diet Coke used to be. And there beside it is a tall obelisk of caffine-free diet coke. Still there from last time.
The only time caffine-free diet coke is sold is when someone asks someone else to pick up a box of diet coke and they do not realize the difference.
Maybe they could use those infrared cameras to detect rises of heat and blood pressure as customers stand in front of empty shelves surrounded by unwanted products.
'Aye, I've got it tuff, I do. Cruel world it is. I think I'll go get a "pity me! ask me why" tattoo.
Screw the overblown 'proliferation issues', which are used by governments all over the world as blunt billy clubs to discourage the development of cleaner, better nuclear energy and its alternative methods, while the chosen few use a false moral high ground to perpetuate a condition of endless war for oil. There is already enough processed uranium and spent nuclear fuel out there to make bombs.
Isn't it time we begin to make electricity with it?
And bring the entire world up to a standard of living that is reasonable by our own personal standards, not those politicians impose upon the less-developed areas of the world. Just sayin.'
This means YOU, United States techie boyz & girlz. This thing is playing out just as I sketched it out here on Slashdot a couple days ago.
NSA is orchestrating a limited hangout to try and focus and tie off the entire surveillance issue into a neat little package of FISA and a 'manageable' number of transactional transgressions. Not surprisingly the New York Times gobbled up the bait, fronting the idea that this whole rasmatazz is about a few digital drop boxes where companies dropped users' data upon being served with warrants.
"Look marge, the Times says there were only 1,856 FISA warrants served last year. Probably for baad people. What's all the fuss about?"
Straw man going DOWN.
NSA needs to be summoned to Congress to disclose the nature and extent of their domestic communications backbone piggyback-slurp operation: its collection points, its storage capabilities and the number of personnel who are aware of and have access to this raw data source. And whether SOME of those personnel are foreign nationals recruited for the task to reduce their exposure and liability. (Greetz Israel.)
NSA needs to be summoned to Congress to disclose any SSL private key sharing agreements, an intimidation tactic that goes like this, "We're either going to move in here with secret directives, equipment and gag orders... OR you will share all your private keys on a regular basis," which gives them access even to emails that never left their networks, they can read it as you drop it off and pick it up.
Nothing less will work.
EFF is fighting a jurisdictional war right now. FISA has told them they must take their case to local district and federal court. Those courts have said they must take it to FISA. It is an impasse. This is a bas Constitutional Supreme Court issue and the only way to get there is through the circuit. Enough Congress must be raised to estabish through legislation or resolution that this issue is an existential threat to the republic and the courts are authorized to hear it because this surveillance is occurring within the borders and citizens are being targeted.
Only Congress has the power to do this. No amount of picketing or marching or whining will win this one.
Or just let it go and knock that PRISM limited hangout straw man down, declare the problem solved and let the terrorists win. Fall of the republic.
"James R. Clapper, the nation's Director of National Intelligence, claimed that recent reports about the NSA monitoring Americans' Internet and phone communications are inaccurate.
In fact they are probably not. Hey technologically savvy geeks and Internet gurus... does this whole PRISM thing with its internal backdoors to everything and it comes to light suddenly and completely, does this make sense??
Actually to computer geeks aware of the mechanisms involved it might sound more like a Hollywood script. Perhaps because it is. Let me spell out my own theory.
1. NSA is concerned that they are directly implicated in the mining of Verizon and others' meta-data which is delivered to them on a regular basis. They sensed correctly that this story will grow legs and start to walk, perhaps all the way to become a 21st century Church Committee Congressional Action. AS IT SHOULD. When something erupts that cannot be surpressed, the tactic is to release a FAKE something that is BIGGER and can be used to gather all attention. And control that.
2. NSA has secrets to keep. The secret they most wish to keep is that there is charter-be-damned network-level slurping of all domestic backbones, just as James Bamford warned us about in 1982. First slated for voice, it has expanded to cover Internet as well. It is being carried out by them or at their behest by private contractors (greetz to Comverse). This is a network level piggyback slurp operation, a total vacuum cleaner.
3. So they got together and burned the midnight oil, and came up with this fake PRISM distraction, a series of "leaked" slides that implies that the major providers have willingly provided backdoor access into their servers and clouds. As technological folks you should see that if such an operation did exist, involving disparate providers, each with their own proprietary systems, with thousands of senior-level operators, it would have been impossible to contain, let alone manage.
4. It falsely implicates the providers directly. All those Corporations Are Evil conspiracy nuts will eat it up. Moderate people will start to question the veracity of PRISM outright as representatives from trusted corporations like Apple and Google step forward. No one will be able to produce evidence of this back-door collusion framework because it does not exist.
5. The PRISM straw man will be knocked down. Congressional hearings will commence, but they will be pre-injected with specific questions about PRISM, NOT the piggyback slurp operation. PRISM this, PRISM that. If anyone begs their congress to press NSA on its network level surveillance operations under oath, that congress critter will ask a question.... about PRISM instead. "Because that is the issue we are investigating, and we don't have time to discuss anything else." Meanwhile lots of ancillary leaks about PRISM will be fed to the press to keep everyone talking about it.
6. Then amid fanfare, everyone will reluctantly admit that the (fake) PRISM operation has been shut down.
7. And perhaps, in exchange for turning off the heat with a (fake) witch hunt in which the PRISM witch is drowned, the providers might be more willing to pass on the SSL keys to the web, SPOP and SIMAP servers on a regular basis so all that end to end encryption they intercept at the borders becomes completely transparent. Something that could be done without any spook setting foot in someone's server room.
I think some of this PRISM story is smoke and mirrors, like a magician's trick where the hand flourishes to reveal it is empty while the other hand swaps the coins.
What is being alleged that the spooks 'magically somehow' (Google denies it) have back door access into these companies' internal networks, the servers and clouds where the data resides... such as a level of access granted to the most senior of administrators, or a 'root virus'. It is a lot to swallow.
This is no Hollywood one-workstation Windows rootkit hack, These systems are unique, tightly integrated and watched over by thousands of potential whistleblowers. And the amount of data movement for surveillance alleged here is immense. In other words, it is an unlikely scenario.
I think someone cooked up this PRISM thing as an straw man to divert attention away from the real truth --- that what NSA actually has is full-slurp access to the digital transport networks behind these providers. As I've said elsewhere, they have no need to access your mailbox if they already saw the mail as it was arriving.
Make a grandiose claim that the providers are directly colluding with the government, let them each come clean (with a flourish of the empty hand) because there really is no 'backdoor' per se and knock that straw man down. Nothing to see, move along.
Meanwhile the full-slurp of the transport network continues, and by agreement or outright intimidation, the providers could each pass a little pocket flash drive with their SSL web, SPOP and SIMAP cert private keys to the spooks, so they can see right into the encryption streams.
The providers are fully protected from liability (there's no backdoor) and everyone is happy. Except those who value their privacy of course.
Nevertheless, it's impeachment and recall time, and it is time for EVERYONE to give every bloviation containing the words 'National Security' the only proper response it deserves --- an extended middle finger and concerted action.
It is time to DEFUND the domestic surveillance arms of NSA and the FBI and the DHS. Pretty much completely. Let the front-line cubicle spooks find honest jobs like growing corn or fixing potholes, something that matters.
And send those Israeli private contractors home.
I surely hope everyone is up to it. It's the last chance we'll get.
You realize that lower Manhattan completely flooded this year, right? A large amount of infrastructure was unavailable for the better part of a week in the nation's business and finance center. That is a SERIOUS problem.
That is because the nation's business and finance infrastructure was founded and placed with casual disregard for tsunamis or storm surges. Only James Hansen believes that this normal hurricane with its normal storm surge was abnormal. Think of it as evolution in action.
I couldn't agree more that a real things matter. I'm an embedded software person. [...] When people pitch things to me on the job hunt about how their crap is going to change the world my eyes glaze over. When they mention "social graph" I usually get up and leave.
I appreciate your candor. Read Atlas Shrugged again, and I will do my very best to bring about a renaissance of interest in infrastructure such as the world has never seen. And some day in the future, embedded software persons such as yourself who enjoy developing industrial controls will no longer need to post as Anonymous Coward on Slashdot.
Slashdot Mirror
How about not using friggin' Facebook at all?
I wouldn't if I just had some friggin' friends on Slashdot.
(Checking again) Nope.
So tired of this glass three-quarters full smiley touchy feely people are nice crap. Why anyone would produce a social network with the scale of human emotion reduced to 'positive' dandelion buttery-chinned goodness... I cannot imagine.
Bring on an equal measure of opposition and disagreement. Not just an absence of 'like'.
Though I am prepared to believe that Snowden sincerely believes that he managed to intercept bona fide materials... but he was snowed under, set up and 'encouraged' to go rogue by some person he has not specified.
If this PRISM fiasco with its involvement by trusted providers (Google, Apple etc) is demonstrated to be a fabrication (whether Snowden is aware of this or not), there is a chance for it to be debunked and the show is over.
A distraction to hide a more dangerous and more shocking secret that the NSA does not wish to be brought top the surface, the prevalence of piggyback-slurps at interchange points with near-complete data retention (no Youtube junk). That are guaranteed to consist of 99.99% domestic (illegal) intercept.
1. Clap on! Clap off! Clapper's PRISM DISINFO Gambit
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3837249&cid=43937933
2. RAISE CONGRESS, while you still can!
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3842539&cid=43952565
3. A fable: NSA and the Desolation of Smaug
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3863455&cid=44005849
I don't understand why this Closed Cycle Brayton will work with a Thorium plant but not with a conventional nuke plant. So it would seem either that [1] a conventional plant will have the advantage of not needing water as well, or it would be cheaper or more efficient to [2] make a Thorium plant use cooling water and thus as likely they will have it.
Very insightful, pointing out the difference between use of water in the reactor and water used for (conductive) cooling. At the moment the word 'conventional' implies the use of solid fuel and a loop of water inside the reactor for moderation and cooling, and the use of phase transition (water to steam then back to water again) to drive turbines.
[1] Brayton would work with a Pebble Bed Reactor where the solid fuel is encased spherical 'pebbles' of graphite moderator and inert gas such as helium is used for cooling. There is no phase change, the helium remains a gas which varies in temperature.
One such experiment was the THTR-300 breeder in Germany, which attempted to leverage the pebble concept into reality and managed to do so from 1985-1988, despite some problems managing the solid fuel. It was not a proving ground for Brayton though, the helium was used to heat water in a Rankine (steam) cycle.
Pebble Bed Reactor designs are also considered to be "walk away safe" despite these problems. The danger of graphite igniting if the reactor is breached and the helium replaced by air seems to be overstated, but there does remain the possibility of ignition if it is reduced to dust (such as in a steam explosion, as happened at Chernobyl) or if it comes into direct contact with the solid fuel at the center of the pebble.
So both 'conventional' rod-and-pellet and Pebble Reactor manufactured pebbles both share one important characteristic --- the necessity of an extremely critical solid-fuel manufacturing process where a failure of workmanship has undesirable results.
But I wonder though as a layman (disclaimer!) if there is at least one major unresolvable problem with the pebble concept --- and that is how could you be confident you could take the reactor below critical in the presence of multiple mechanical failures? As compared to the salt concept where gravity alone drains the fissile salts out of reach of the graphite moderators with sub-criticality greatly assured.
[2] Though your biggest safety win arises from removing all water from within the reactor and its containment building, the power plant itself could employ water to assist in cooling. In coastal areas LFTR waste heat is envisioned to assist in desalinization.
Sorensen discusses the prospect of substituting a Brayton for a 'conventional' Rakine steam reactor here, citing concerns of efficiency and operating temperature where the heat necessary to drive Brayton places 'conventional' solid fuel configurations in jeopardy of melting.
And over time the men of Dale had become complacent on privacy, liberty and freedom of association, and yet they prospered. No longer content with the wealth of accumulation, they valued innovation and the free exchange of information. To this end they did help to build the greatest communications network that had ever been. Through it all their wealth flowed like a river --- real wealth --- not the dusty treasure hordes of kings locked in windowless rooms.
The fortune and fate of Dale is bound with that of the dwarves, for it is they who had built it. "Long ago in my grandfather Thror's time our family was driven out of the far North, and came back with all their wealth and their tools to this Mountain on the map." They were especially skilled in working gold, copper and silver into thin filaments which they strung far across the land. Where ever dwarves settled dial tone was sure to follow. But their skill was even greater with jewels and crystals, from which they built magical devices of geranium and silicon to carry voices and information in the aether. Altogether those were good days for us, and the poorest of us had money to spend and to lend, and leisure to make beautiful things just for the. fun of it, not to speak of the most marvelous and magical toys [...] and the toy-market of Dale was the wonder of the North."
But of all the wonders of that age the most precious was perhaps the least visible, hidden deep under the Mountain itself. "Discovered by my far ancestor, Thrain the Old, now they mined and they tunneled and they made huger halls and greater workshops." The Mountain they had built is actually many mountains and there is one in your own city. I refer to the telecommunications exchange points of Tier 1 and Tier 2 networks such as MAE-EAST and MAE-WEST, where rivers of voice and data converge into brilliant points of light, then spread out again.
The dwarves had not valued privacy per se, they had just built it for maximum throughput with minimum delay. Their vision was broad and down-to-earth and the data it carried was of practical use for the greatest number. "We use our own devices and just enough magic to make them go. Devices such as the palantir are of no interest to us, the Elves of Valinor can keep their silly patents. The palantir does work for distance communication but it is incredibly expensive and uses a lot of bandwidth. It is also dangerous. If you wish to talk to family and friend, or close a simple deal, why would you wish to link minds, wrestle in thought or lock souls with the other party? The dwarves deliver only voices and runes and stay clear of elvish mind-fuck. Besides, the palantir uses a proprietary network and has no user-servicable parts. Like the Blackberry."
But the dwarves' cleverness though inspired by wisdom was also their folly. While great wealth flowed through their network they were driven to perfect it, and that meant concentrating the flows of many through but a few interconnect points.
"Undoubtedly that was what brought the dragon. Dragons burrow themselves into networks to steal information you know, wherever they can find it; and they guard their plunder as long as they live (which is practically forever, unless they are outed by Congressional hearing), and --- if you would believe them --- they do it for only noble purposes and never enjoy a brass ring of it. Indeed they hardly know a good bit of information from a bad, though they usually have a good notion of the current market value; so despite noble aims of vigilant protection, their omnificent awareness inevitably leads to dull and stupid ends that rend the fabric of society. Insider trading, scheming false flag operations and a 'selective failure' to divulge clear warning of terrorism if it would serve their own ends, a dragon is easily turned to the dark side by its very nature." As the dwarves tell it we would be better off without these dragons altogether, and if yo
Point is there are fuck-all real solutions to the reprocessing problem. THAT is why they've never been taken up. Worse, everyone talks up molten salt thorium reactors and there is EVEN LESS idea about how that would be achieved.
You seem to know all these things, and yet you are not in a happy place. I hope that some day you will find your happy place. You reach down and you flip Thorium over on its back. Thorium lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can't. Not without your help. But you're not helping.
Why aren't you helping?
Holden: You're in a desert, walking along in the sand, when all of a sudden you look down...
Leon: What one?
Holden: What?
Leon: What desert?
Holden: It doesn't make any difference what desert, it's completely hypothetical.
Leon: But, how come I'd be there?
Holden: Maybe you're fed up. Maybe you want to be by yourself. Who knows? You look down and see a tortoise, Leon. It's crawling toward you...
Leon: Tortoise? What's that?
Holden: [irritated by Leon's interruptions] You know what a turtle is?
Leon: Of course!
Holden: Same thing.
~Blade Runner
isn't water or a cooling tower needed to efficiently make the steam produced in the final loop run a turbine?
To eliminate the need for water, a Closed Cycle Brayton is being proposed, hoping eventually to attain >50% efficiency. I attempt to describe the operating environment of LFTR in this adjacent post.
Sure there is. Every plant is a reprocessing plant for caustic hot intensely radioactive liquids filled with actinides, and nobody has a well-validated engineering design for this.
In which I attempt to describe the operating environment of LFTR and try to portray the plant as something besides a seething witches' cauldron of death, in this adjacent post.
Can anyone tell me how and end-to-end thorium fuel ecosystem is supposed to work? All of the arguments I hear go like this:
All your questions are answered here, Thorium Remix 2011 . Two hours twenty minutes of fascinating stuff. Essential physics and engineering topics on nuclear energy, a roadmap of current water reactor designs, descriptions of safety features and failures, and a compelling case for developing Thorium-based energy. This presentation is simply amazing!
As far as I can tell, what's coming out the wrong end of a thorium reactor will be a molten salt soup of toxic, possibly very corrosive, and VERY radioactive materials.
Sorensen advocates a two-fluid design for the reactor itself (thorium blanket and fissile fuel loop), the fissile loop (radioactive and temperature-hot) fuel passes through a heat exchanger, passing the heat into a third loop of molten salt ("cooling salt") which carries the heat out of the reactor and through the power plant. This loop is temperature-hot but not radioactive, it heats air or inert gas to drive turbines to make electricity.
So you've got three separate loops of molten glop going round in this plant, two radioactive (blanket, fissile) and one not (cooling). The two radioactive loops are circulating through the reactor and also passing though a 'processing gizmo' inside the containment building adjacent to the reactor, I say gizmo because it will probably be bigger than a breadbox but smaller than a truck.
The thorium blanket loop has a hopper that mixes a pinch of thorium into the glop every now and then (~2.7kg/day, 1 tonne/yr). As it passes through the reactor neutrons from the adjacent fissile loop smack the thorium and it becomes Thorium-233. Which decays later into Protactinium-233. Which decays later into Uranium-233. This process takes ~27+ days so the U-233 the gizmo extracts today from the blanket is the thorium you placed into the blanket ~27+ days ago. The blanket salt glop is hazardously radioactive but (I think, just learning myself) there need only be a couple hundred gallons of it.
The fissile loop is fed U-233 by the gizmo continuously and as it circulates through the reactor this is where the fission is happening. This is where the heat is generated from fission and bled off into the cooling salt (via the heat exchanger). This salt is hazardously radioactive but I think there need only be a few hundred gallons of it.
The gizmo pulls waste products (fissioned and decayed U-233) out of the fissile loop as they are produced. One guesstimate I saw is is ~170kg of waste per year (bigger than a breadbox but but smaller than a piano). By pulling the waste out continuously the gizmo prevents it from becoming some of the the nastier stuff that water reactors produce. This LFTR waste is "safe to touch" in ~300 years. These is no free lunch, and making a safe container (casket, vitrified in glass) and finding a safe enough place to store something for 300 years do-able.
The fissile loop is also where the simple and hideously clever load-following characteristic occurs. Turbine trips, shuts down and heat remains in the cooling salt? Fissile loop gets hotter and expands, reducing the concentration of the fissile material and fission slows down. Start turbines again and cooling salt once again becomes cooler? Fissile loop loses heat and contracts, increasing the concentration of fissile in the core, fission increases. Because this is all happening in well-mixed liquids, imagine the power/heat level of this reactor finding a 'sweet spot' after a conduction delay with no human or computer intervention and keeping itself there. No valves closing or opening, no rods being inserted or extracted by white-knuckled operators. This feature is really cool in the hipster sense.
The cooling salt loop and the tanks which hold it is where the designs become more massive.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spsnQWtsUFM
Great documentary and sound theory but the music did not inspire me.
So I made a version of my own.
Here is my version.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHA9BkCAvMM
To people digitizing rare LPs and the people posting Youtube videos that show a phonograph record going round.
Please oh please fill a spray bottle with a solution of water with a tiny bit of liquid soap, and spray the surface of the record before and occasionally during recording. After, rinse and dry with fluffy-towel and lean on edge to dry completely before re-sleeving.
You will be flabbergasted with the result. Even if you do not flabbergast easily.
You are assuming 60 years of continued economic growth (averaged out). What if that paradigm is wrong, if we are at the downslope of a temporary 150 year economic growth fueled by an anomaly of cheap energy (see Peak Oil)?
So I did, how myopia-timistic of me. That's an interesting point because it happens that in 2012 SDG&E grew weary of looking at all that money just sitting there, proposed loosening the rules to allow this fund to play riskier markets for a (hopefully) greater rate of return. In its proposal is a delectable menu of recipes for Wall Street money-goblins to pimp the flava of this low-hanging fruit. This was supposed to be voted on by the Public Utilities Commission but I cannot find the result. I would hope it was HELL NO, and that the suggestion to invest it in derivatives and Real Estate tripped shrieking alarms at the plant.
In a shrinking economy, those future decommissioning costs will loom larger and larger. See also Jared Diamond's Collapse, and John Michael Greer's Long Descent.
Depends who does it and when. If you hire the Mafia and Hell's Angels it would certainly come in on time and under budget. And in a shrinking economy you will find more people willing to face the risks and just get it done. There is a real shortage these days of people and methods that just get out there and do things.
Seriously, I would be willing to go there and take a higher than occupationally permitted cumulative dose of radiation to help them cask the fuel and transport it, reduce the plant to rubble and turn this intricate and beautiful industrial complex into an ugly, desolate public park with horrid little shrubs, useless fountains and despicable art. I'd demand a high wage that would deliver enough money for that span to set my life on a much better course.
We have ways to handle and safely transport highly radioactive substances. Those that exist and better ways we would invent. Life without risk is not worth living, and a world without risk-takers is a world bereft of heroes. Would that be a better world?
The real problem is that there is nowhere to ship and store the casks of waste, so the good people of San Diego country cannot obtain the closure they desire at any price.
I would rather think of this as the Dawn of the Age of Thorium rather than Peak Oil Declining. But the dawn will not arrive unless all of us sing together.
Nuclear proponents are always running around yelling wind and solar pawer can't compete on a per KW basis. Well, not if you skim off the profits and leave the cleanup to taxpayers!
Just a reminder that a decommissioning fund of almost ~$3 billion has already been collected and is sitting there ready to pay for the cleanup. And for 60 years the place will be watched over by a few security guards. $3 billion in the bank plus long term interest earned on $3 billion minus the cost of a few security guards... might cover it.
The money for this fund is skimmed off the top from operating revenues over the life of every nuclear plant. This arrangement is not imposed on all types of power plants, if a coal plant folds you're left with ash piles and poisoned ponds. And yet despite this financial hardship nuclear energy manages to deliver some of the lowest cost per KWh of any energy source. For many years.
I was bopping around trying to beautify this discussion with some real total energy output and cost per KWh over time for this particular plant, but I was soon taken into a whirlwind of ugly sentiment and hysteria spanning many years. It's hard even to dredge up meaningful figures without blasting one's way through Internet hate-articles written by Californians.
Many of those articles and hate-blogs written on computers powered by the plant itself, filled with dreams of paving Nevada (or just Somewhere Else) with windmills and unspecified solar miracle-widgets to generate 2 gigawatts to replace San Onofre.
This plant which has never hurt or injured anyone... which has generated an incredible amount of energy over the years... whose units seem to have run with impressive up-time and efficiency until that dreadful mistake with the steam generator tube upgrade, the wrath of Barbara Boxer.
A valuable public service... it has been hated for years.
Never mind the damned numbers, I can't take any more. My sympathy lies with the decommissioned power plant. California does not deserve to have nuclear energy until they grow up.
I wish the Diablo Canyon plant could grow giant legs like Howl's Castle and walk out of California overnight taking its 2 gigawatts with it. Let the Enron-era brownouts and predatory rate scalping by neighboring states begin once again.
The cost of ignorance has no bounds.
Out of interest - anyone know why we've not re-visited thorium?
There is no good reason, only various excuses people give when pressed on the matter. Some of the excuses are pretty lame, some are clever but are lacking in know-how, such as how different molten salt designs are from water reactors. Many excuses defer to fear of radioactivity, imaginary authorities who would never "permit" such a thing to come about. It's sad to witness.
Most commonly it's Mr. Nobody. "If thorium was such a big deal somebody would have made it happen by now." A whole generation seems to feel comfortable saying things like that. People were not saying things like that as steam power was conquered and harnessed.
Help us to find Somebody. The story begins here and here.
Because it serves to keep all the traffic cloaked from OTHER governments. That is, provided someone in each of these companies might do just one little thing: routinely hand over the private keys used for their public SSL servers for www, pop3, smtp and imap.
Do you think this little thing is so unlikely? Frankly I'm amazed. Over 400 comments on this article and only one Anonymous Coward seems to have even fronted the idea.
Plenty of chatter about brute force attacks, elaborate backdoors. Compulsory XKCD. Methinks more Slashdotters should bone up on the basics of public key SSL.
I am not quite as anonymous and my own rabbit hole on the topic leads here and here.
70% of Obama's twitter followers are fake and paid for.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/fashion/twitter-followers-for-sale.html?_r=0
Parent Score +1 ON topic. "And ida been able to get away with my Obama astroturfing... if it weren't for those meddling kids." Must! suppress! dissent! for! Obama!
All Glory to the Hypnotoad
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHU2RlSCdxU
I press it all day. When I heard Microsoft took it away I wanted to press it even more.
Windows XP forever. Same version frozen in time forever. I don't care if my dot-net is screwed beyond repair or Windows Update keeps offering the same hotfix over and over, it's like a worn out recording of a favorite song.
I want to be buried with Windows XP.
And paperclip man, that huggable veracious knid.
Or chocolate ready to spread frosting, only strawberry and vanilla, the crap that no one wants. Once that is finally gone (it takes a long time) the shelves are restocked with equal amounts of each.
Once again I show up at the store to find a mountain of coca-cola products stacked to the ceiling with an empty space in the middle where Diet Coke used to be. And there beside it is a tall obelisk of caffine-free diet coke. Still there from last time.
The only time caffine-free diet coke is sold is when someone asks someone else to pick up a box of diet coke and they do not realize the difference.
Maybe they could use those infrared cameras to detect rises of heat and blood pressure as customers stand in front of empty shelves surrounded by unwanted products.
'Aye, I've got it tuff, I do. Cruel world it is. I think I'll go get a "pity me! ask me why" tattoo.
And cleaner. And safer. There's only one to choose,
Robert Hargraves - Thorium Energy Cheaper than Coal @ ThEC12
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayIyiVua8cY
Screw the overblown 'proliferation issues', which are used by governments all over the world as blunt billy clubs to discourage the development of cleaner, better nuclear energy and its alternative methods, while the chosen few use a false moral high ground to perpetuate a condition of endless war for oil. There is already enough processed uranium and spent nuclear fuel out there to make bombs.
Isn't it time we begin to make electricity with it?
And bring the entire world up to a standard of living that is reasonable by our own personal standards, not those politicians impose upon the less-developed areas of the world. Just sayin.'
The journey begins here. It's quite a trip.
This means YOU, United States techie boyz & girlz. This thing is playing out just as I sketched it out here on Slashdot a couple days ago.
NSA is orchestrating a limited hangout to try and focus and tie off the entire surveillance issue into a neat little package of FISA and a 'manageable' number of transactional transgressions. Not surprisingly the New York Times gobbled up the bait, fronting the idea that this whole rasmatazz is about a few digital drop boxes where companies dropped users' data upon being served with warrants.
"Look marge, the Times says there were only 1,856 FISA warrants served last year. Probably for baad people. What's all the fuss about?"
Straw man going DOWN.
NSA needs to be summoned to Congress to disclose the nature and extent of their domestic communications backbone piggyback-slurp operation: its collection points, its storage capabilities and the number of personnel who are aware of and have access to this raw data source. And whether SOME of those personnel are foreign nationals recruited for the task to reduce their exposure and liability. (Greetz Israel.)
NSA needs to be summoned to Congress to disclose any SSL private key sharing agreements, an intimidation tactic that goes like this, "We're either going to move in here with secret directives, equipment and gag orders ... OR you will share all your private keys on a regular basis," which gives them access even to emails that never left their networks, they can read it as you drop it off and pick it up.
Nothing less will work.
EFF is fighting a jurisdictional war right now. FISA has told them they must take their case to local district and federal court. Those courts have said they must take it to FISA. It is an impasse. This is a bas Constitutional Supreme Court issue and the only way to get there is through the circuit. Enough Congress must be raised to estabish through legislation or resolution that this issue is an existential threat to the republic and the courts are authorized to hear it because this surveillance is occurring within the borders and citizens are being targeted.
Only Congress has the power to do this. No amount of picketing or marching or whining will win this one.
Or just let it go and knock that PRISM limited hangout straw man down, declare the problem solved and let the terrorists win. Fall of the republic.
Ball's in our court.
"James R. Clapper, the nation's Director of National Intelligence, claimed that recent reports about the NSA monitoring Americans' Internet and phone communications are inaccurate.
In fact they are probably not. Hey technologically savvy geeks and Internet gurus... does this whole PRISM thing with its internal backdoors to everything and it comes to light suddenly and completely, does this make sense??
Actually to computer geeks aware of the mechanisms involved it might sound more like a Hollywood script. Perhaps because it is. Let me spell out my own theory.
1. NSA is concerned that they are directly implicated in the mining of Verizon and others' meta-data which is delivered to them on a regular basis. They sensed correctly that this story will grow legs and start to walk, perhaps all the way to become a 21st century Church Committee Congressional Action. AS IT SHOULD. When something erupts that cannot be surpressed, the tactic is to release a FAKE something that is BIGGER and can be used to gather all attention. And control that.
2. NSA has secrets to keep. The secret they most wish to keep is that there is charter-be-damned network-level slurping of all domestic backbones, just as James Bamford warned us about in 1982. First slated for voice, it has expanded to cover Internet as well. It is being carried out by them or at their behest by private contractors (greetz to Comverse). This is a network level piggyback slurp operation, a total vacuum cleaner.
3. So they got together and burned the midnight oil, and came up with this fake PRISM distraction, a series of "leaked" slides that implies that the major providers have willingly provided backdoor access into their servers and clouds. As technological folks you should see that if such an operation did exist, involving disparate providers, each with their own proprietary systems, with thousands of senior-level operators, it would have been impossible to contain, let alone manage.
4. It falsely implicates the providers directly. All those Corporations Are Evil conspiracy nuts will eat it up. Moderate people will start to question the veracity of PRISM outright as representatives from trusted corporations like Apple and Google step forward. No one will be able to produce evidence of this back-door collusion framework because it does not exist.
5. The PRISM straw man will be knocked down. Congressional hearings will commence, but they will be pre-injected with specific questions about PRISM, NOT the piggyback slurp operation. PRISM this, PRISM that. If anyone begs their congress to press NSA on its network level surveillance operations under oath, that congress critter will ask a question.... about PRISM instead. "Because that is the issue we are investigating, and we don't have time to discuss anything else." Meanwhile lots of ancillary leaks about PRISM will be fed to the press to keep everyone talking about it.
6. Then amid fanfare, everyone will reluctantly admit that the (fake) PRISM operation has been shut down.
7. And perhaps, in exchange for turning off the heat with a (fake) witch hunt in which the PRISM witch is drowned, the providers might be more willing to pass on the SSL keys to the web, SPOP and SIMAP servers on a regular basis so all that end to end encryption they intercept at the borders becomes completely transparent. Something that could be done without any spook setting foot in someone's server room.
Just sayin'. I like to say things like that.
I think some of this PRISM story is smoke and mirrors, like a magician's trick where the hand flourishes to reveal it is empty while the other hand swaps the coins.
What is being alleged that the spooks 'magically somehow' (Google denies it) have back door access into these companies' internal networks, the servers and clouds where the data resides ... such as a level of access granted to the most senior of administrators, or a 'root virus'. It is a lot to swallow.
This is no Hollywood one-workstation Windows rootkit hack, These systems are unique, tightly integrated and watched over by thousands of potential whistleblowers. And the amount of data movement for surveillance alleged here is immense. In other words, it is an unlikely scenario.
I think someone cooked up this PRISM thing as an straw man to divert attention away from the real truth --- that what NSA actually has is full-slurp access to the digital transport networks behind these providers. As I've said elsewhere, they have no need to access your mailbox if they already saw the mail as it was arriving.
Make a grandiose claim that the providers are directly colluding with the government, let them each come clean (with a flourish of the empty hand) because there really is no 'backdoor' per se and knock that straw man down. Nothing to see, move along.
Meanwhile the full-slurp of the transport network continues, and by agreement or outright intimidation, the providers could each pass a little pocket flash drive with their SSL web, SPOP and SIMAP cert private keys to the spooks, so they can see right into the encryption streams.
The providers are fully protected from liability (there's no backdoor) and everyone is happy. Except those who value their privacy of course.
Nevertheless, it's impeachment and recall time, and it is time for EVERYONE to give every bloviation containing the words 'National Security' the only proper response it deserves --- an extended middle finger and concerted action.
It is time to DEFUND the domestic surveillance arms of NSA and the FBI and the DHS. Pretty much completely. Let the front-line cubicle spooks find honest jobs like growing corn or fixing potholes, something that matters.
And send those Israeli private contractors home.
I surely hope everyone is up to it. It's the last chance we'll get.
You realize that lower Manhattan completely flooded this year, right? A large amount of infrastructure was unavailable for the better part of a week in the nation's business and finance center. That is a SERIOUS problem.
That is because the nation's business and finance infrastructure was founded and placed with casual disregard for tsunamis or storm surges. Only James Hansen believes that this normal hurricane with its normal storm surge was abnormal. Think of it as evolution in action.
I couldn't agree more that a real things matter. I'm an embedded software person. [...] When people pitch things to me on the job hunt about how their crap is going to change the world my eyes glaze over. When they mention "social graph" I usually get up and leave.
I appreciate your candor. Read Atlas Shrugged again, and I will do my very best to bring about a renaissance of interest in infrastructure such as the world has never seen. And some day in the future, embedded software persons such as yourself who enjoy developing industrial controls will no longer need to post as Anonymous Coward on Slashdot.
It will be a long uphill battle. He he.