The sad, self-indulgent wankers over at CNN like to claim that the so-called 'Arab Spring', came about because of Twitter, Facebook and smartphones.
The reality, according to people in the know, is that the Angry Arab Jamboree of 2011/2012 was caused by severe financial pressure caused by food poverty on already badly-run middle-eastern Muslim countries. The people who run these countries like to keep their people illiterate, corrupt, religious and poor so they can maintain control; unfortunately for them, it gives them VERY little margin for error when a few harvests fail, especially when even in good times, 70% of the country is quite literally on the breadline.
I have little sympathy for anybody here. It's self inflicted -- people dumb enough to wait until they're starving -- and spending 70% of their incomes on bread -- before they hold their governments accountable probably deserve the kicking they're getting.
What is it about ageing white conservatives and their fixation on other people's iPads?
According to retarded right wing thinking, if you own a $600 iDevice, you're rich, and therefore if you sympathise with liberal political causes, you're a hypocrite. These same idiots think that having an income of $120k a year is "rich" too, not realizing just how rich "rich" actually is.
Probably the same morons who think that if we just didn't buy that iPad, we'd be rich too. Sad.
The impending connector ripoff reminds me of those bloody worthless white earbuds.
They don't last more than a few months for me. I'm on my fifth pair. And they charge me 25 fucking pounds for each replacement. And they sound terrible.
The white earbuds and cables are a nasty, shitty Apple ripoff designed purely to screw their customers. And it looks like they're about to get a lot better at it -- the iPhone has a terrible battery life, so I needed three charging cables. Guess who's going to have to spring for new cables if (and now it's a BIG 'if'), they upgrade?
It's the baby boomers. They grew up in the drug-fucked 'free love' Sixties, got free education, raped and pillaged the environment, robbed their kids and grandkids in the asset bubble.
The "bugger you Jack, I've got mine" Baby Boomer generation are the worst generation. We should take their pensions and health insurance off them, let them die in the gutter and use the pay to pay off the deficit.
They just tipped off the crooks. Simply taking them down leaves the criminals at large, and they just learn to spam better.
Microsoft's silly and pointless lawsuits won't work either. How do you sue somebody in a different jurisdiction, with different laws, no buy-in by host government, where you don't know their names? These people are CRIMINALS, and don't give a rat's ass.
The only way to stop this kind of criminality is hard jail time. Getting buggered rotten in the Gulag should help concentrate some minds wonderfully.
If I had a dollar for every time my teenage pothead friends told me that weed was harmless, I'd be a very rich man.
Thing is, none of them did anything useful with their lives, or even had jobs. And now they're all completely drug-fucked wastes of space, to a man.
A spliff or two, now and again when you're old enough to handle it, might be okay. But when you're in your late teens, the stuff will destroy your mind -- because teens are inconsiderate, obnoxious douchebags, generally because the "not being a complete cunt" part of your brain is the last part of your brain to fully develop, and pot messes with its development.
I follow Kirk's LFTR stuff closely; what they appear to gloss over, is the difficulty of doing on-line chemical fuel reprocessing; the LFTR crowd also don't explain how they're going to deal with the materials challenges of highly reactive fuel-salt mixes bubbling away at close to 700 degrees.
Admittedly, they're small problems compared to what the fusion community is faced with; but some realism from the LFTR advocates would boost their credibility greatly.
Tungsten is used on the divertor, not the first wall, so the fact that it's a high-Z material is less relevant.
The confined plasma itself doesn't contact anything (and if it were to, it would cool down and fizzle out); the region of the interior where the magnetic field lines are closed never contact the first wall or divertor. The region outside the closed field lines, the 'scrape off layer', is drawn close to (and particles impinge on), the tungsten divertor strike plates. It's not the plasma per se; but there are still loads of hot, fast particles, and there's still the possibility of material being ejected from the strike plates. However, it will not get drawn in to the main ('confined') plasma, where the impurities can radiate energy away from the plasma. This is the beauty of the divertor configuration, as opposed to, say, limiters -- contaminants are kept out of the plasma, and ash is transported out through the scrape-off layer.
I was making a point about high-Z materials being a poor choice for the first wall.
That's not to say that nothing could be done with all those fast neutrons. I'm not familiar with the literature, but I remember seeing something from MIT, exploring hybrid fission/fusion designs, where specially designed blanket modules could be used to transmute nuclear waste, manufacture medical isotopes, and burn thorium to generate power.
They were using carbon tiles in JET until fairly recently too. They have some big advantages (tough as hell), but serious disadvantages too (retails fuel and contaminants).
Fuck, don't let them hear you call the remote handling equipment 'robots'. I made that mistake, and the scientist showing me around got fair up me for it. It's 'remote handling', not 'robotics', apparently.
The reactors have to run hot and efficiently enough to heat up the walls and blanket, where the heat is pumped away to drive a turbine.
The plasma is trapped using incredibly powerful magnetic fields, but there are points in the reactor where hot particles come near the wall (e.g. the divertor region). This is required to pump out waste helium and other impurities to keep the reaction running.
For a tokamak first wall, you want a very tough, lightweight material. Something with very few electrons to strip off when it inevitably contaminates the plasma. If you use heavy elements, loads of energy is wasted ionizing the contaminants, and the energy is radiated away.
They're using beryllium, which is a very lightweight metal, doesn't retain expensive fuel, but toxic six ways to Sunday. It melts at a low temperature, but the operators of JET have installed elaborate safety systems to prevent as much as possible, damage to the first wall.
For the divertor (the 'exhaust pipe'), they use tungsten: heavy, but has the highest melting point of any known material, and there are few worries about contamination of the plasma, where the plasma edge ('scrape off layer') contacts a physical surface inside the reactor.
These are way better than the old material: carbon composites; which are incredibly tough and don't melt or sputter easily, but trap fuel away from the plasma.
War between heavily-armed sectarian enemies who hate each other even more than they hate the dirty kuffar West. That's what I call a self-cleaning oven.
These white collar traitors and criminals, will just try, and keep trying to shove their tyrannical laws down our throats.
Short of actually identifying and shooting the people attempting these corporate power grabs, we all must come to the realization that the corporate fascists will simply keep trying and trying until they succeed.
We must adjust accordingly, and simply move to a kind of permanent war footing. They will never let up, and we must assume that they'll keep trying it on.
We must realize that this is a war that it will never end, and that the fight will NEVER be over -- and plan and fund that fight accordingly.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't grain a fungible resource?
The sad, self-indulgent wankers over at CNN like to claim that the so-called 'Arab Spring', came about because of Twitter, Facebook and smartphones.
The reality, according to people in the know, is that the Angry Arab Jamboree of 2011/2012 was caused by severe financial pressure caused by food poverty on already badly-run middle-eastern Muslim countries. The people who run these countries like to keep their people illiterate, corrupt, religious and poor so they can maintain control; unfortunately for them, it gives them VERY little margin for error when a few harvests fail, especially when even in good times, 70% of the country is quite literally on the breadline.
I have little sympathy for anybody here. It's self inflicted -- people dumb enough to wait until they're starving -- and spending 70% of their incomes on bread -- before they hold their governments accountable probably deserve the kicking they're getting.
What is it about ageing white conservatives and their fixation on other people's iPads?
According to retarded right wing thinking, if you own a $600 iDevice, you're rich, and therefore if you sympathise with liberal political causes, you're a hypocrite. These same idiots think that having an income of $120k a year is "rich" too, not realizing just how rich "rich" actually is.
Probably the same morons who think that if we just didn't buy that iPad, we'd be rich too. Sad.
I don't want to be forced to have to boot into Windows just to make use of it.
The impending connector ripoff reminds me of those bloody worthless white earbuds.
They don't last more than a few months for me. I'm on my fifth pair. And they charge me 25 fucking pounds for each replacement. And they sound terrible.
The white earbuds and cables are a nasty, shitty Apple ripoff designed purely to screw their customers. And it looks like they're about to get a lot better at it -- the iPhone has a terrible battery life, so I needed three charging cables. Guess who's going to have to spring for new cables if (and now it's a BIG 'if'), they upgrade?
Penises.
"I don't understand it, therefore God did it"
Derp.
> You sound like an unemployed white racist who blames blacks for his troubles and the black who blames whites for his poverty
Lulwot?
What are you smoking -- and are you sharing?
It's the baby boomers. They grew up in the drug-fucked 'free love' Sixties, got free education, raped and pillaged the environment, robbed their kids and grandkids in the asset bubble.
The "bugger you Jack, I've got mine" Baby Boomer generation are the worst generation. We should take their pensions and health insurance off them, let them die in the gutter and use the pay to pay off the deficit.
They just tipped off the crooks. Simply taking them down leaves the criminals at large, and they just learn to spam better.
Microsoft's silly and pointless lawsuits won't work either. How do you sue somebody in a different jurisdiction, with different laws, no buy-in by host government, where you don't know their names? These people are CRIMINALS, and don't give a rat's ass.
The only way to stop this kind of criminality is hard jail time. Getting buggered rotten in the Gulag should help concentrate some minds wonderfully.
Don't quit your day job, Cicero.
That's the THC psychosis talking.
If I had a dollar for every time my teenage pothead friends told me that weed was harmless, I'd be a very rich man.
Thing is, none of them did anything useful with their lives, or even had jobs. And now they're all completely drug-fucked wastes of space, to a man.
A spliff or two, now and again when you're old enough to handle it, might be okay. But when you're in your late teens, the stuff will destroy your mind -- because teens are inconsiderate, obnoxious douchebags, generally because the "not being a complete cunt" part of your brain is the last part of your brain to fully develop, and pot messes with its development.
Mod me down, potheads.
I follow Kirk's LFTR stuff closely; what they appear to gloss over, is the difficulty of doing on-line chemical fuel reprocessing; the LFTR crowd also don't explain how they're going to deal with the materials challenges of highly reactive fuel-salt mixes bubbling away at close to 700 degrees.
Admittedly, they're small problems compared to what the fusion community is faced with; but some realism from the LFTR advocates would boost their credibility greatly.
Tungsten is used on the divertor, not the first wall, so the fact that it's a high-Z material is less relevant.
The confined plasma itself doesn't contact anything (and if it were to, it would cool down and fizzle out); the region of the interior where the magnetic field lines are closed never contact the first wall or divertor. The region outside the closed field lines, the 'scrape off layer', is drawn close to (and particles impinge on), the tungsten divertor strike plates. It's not the plasma per se; but there are still loads of hot, fast particles, and there's still the possibility of material being ejected from the strike plates. However, it will not get drawn in to the main ('confined') plasma, where the impurities can radiate energy away from the plasma. This is the beauty of the divertor configuration, as opposed to, say, limiters -- contaminants are kept out of the plasma, and ash is transported out through the scrape-off layer.
I was making a point about high-Z materials being a poor choice for the first wall.
That's not to say that nothing could be done with all those fast neutrons. I'm not familiar with the literature, but I remember seeing something from MIT, exploring hybrid fission/fusion designs, where specially designed blanket modules could be used to transmute nuclear waste, manufacture medical isotopes, and burn thorium to generate power.
You are dumb.
Yeah, carbon fibre composites.
They were using carbon tiles in JET until fairly recently too. They have some big advantages (tough as hell), but serious disadvantages too (retails fuel and contaminants).
Fuck, don't let them hear you call the remote handling equipment 'robots'. I made that mistake, and the scientist showing me around got fair up me for it. It's 'remote handling', not 'robotics', apparently.
I've seen the facilities they use at CCFE Culham to make and refurbish beryllium components. It's all remotely operated.
The reactors have to run hot and efficiently enough to heat up the walls and blanket, where the heat is pumped away to drive a turbine.
The plasma is trapped using incredibly powerful magnetic fields, but there are points in the reactor where hot particles come near the wall (e.g. the divertor region). This is required to pump out waste helium and other impurities to keep the reaction running.
Thorium is very heavy. This is a bad thing.
For a tokamak first wall, you want a very tough, lightweight material. Something with very few electrons to strip off when it inevitably contaminates the plasma. If you use heavy elements, loads of energy is wasted ionizing the contaminants, and the energy is radiated away.
They're using beryllium, which is a very lightweight metal, doesn't retain expensive fuel, but toxic six ways to Sunday. It melts at a low temperature, but the operators of JET have installed elaborate safety systems to prevent as much as possible, damage to the first wall.
For the divertor (the 'exhaust pipe'), they use tungsten: heavy, but has the highest melting point of any known material, and there are few worries about contamination of the plasma, where the plasma edge ('scrape off layer') contacts a physical surface inside the reactor.
These are way better than the old material: carbon composites; which are incredibly tough and don't melt or sputter easily, but trap fuel away from the plasma.
War between heavily-armed sectarian enemies who hate each other even more than they hate the dirty kuffar West. That's what I call a self-cleaning oven.
*gets popcorn*
This is gonna be *FUN*
Just shoot the bastards. They can't take their money with them.
These white collar traitors and criminals, will just try, and keep trying to shove their tyrannical laws down our throats.
Short of actually identifying and shooting the people attempting these corporate power grabs, we all must come to the realization that the corporate fascists will simply keep trying and trying until they succeed.
We must adjust accordingly, and simply move to a kind of permanent war footing. They will never let up, and we must assume that they'll keep trying it on.
We must realize that this is a war that it will never end, and that the fight will NEVER be over -- and plan and fund that fight accordingly.
Top notch healthcare does fuck all for me if I can't afford decent cover.