But is that any more dangerous than a regular chemistry set?
I assume at that time that it was possible to buy chemistry sets that offered dangerous chemical combinations. How much worse is a weak radiation source?
So how much more radioactivity will water gain if it flowed over the crush containers? (Assuming that the area will be wet in the future, and water will flow through the storage area.)
I understand that you are concerned about the dispersal of nuclear waste through the southwest, I'm just not sure how it would happen in the event of an earthquake or eruption.
What is a likely scenerio where there is damage to enough casks to significantly raise the levels of radiation in the surrouding area?
I'm having trouble thinking of a likely scenerio where an earthquake or lava flow could do so. So what am I missing?
If you haven't noticed, it is possible to build structures that survive severe earthquakes. It is just a matter of making sure the structure can survive the forces involved in an earthquake.
As for a volcano, what are your concerns? Do you believe that the repository is in the middle of
a potential lava flow? Do you worry about debris from a disruption damaging the repository?
Nuclear power plants, which if they fail render the portion of the planet where they are located and any territory down wind them un-inhabitable for several thousand years.
Three Mile Island was a nuclear power plant that had a partial core meltdown. That sounds like failure in my book. Yet oddly, the territory around it is still inhabitable.
Perhaps the containment structure (which Chernobyl was lacking) is the answer.
Sure, containment structures (and other safety features) won't prevent all nasty "OMG, humans aren't going to live here anymore" accidents, but it can help to lower the risk greatly.
And I wouldn't worry too much about nuclear waste disposal. It needs to be kept shielded (trivial problem) and away from the ground water. While the later is a problem, it should be a solvable problem -- and if we cannot solve a problem that has already had millions spent for planning (Yucca Mountains), we have a bigger problem since the landfills (of conventional waste) that litter our landscape also need to be kept away from groundwater, lest bad things happen.
One of the tradeoffs of civilization is figuring out how to make it sustainable. Our current method is not sustainable. Refusing to change because you want to keep your lifestyle is to guarantee that you lose that lifestyle.
John Mccarthy (the father of lisp) believes that our progress is sustainable in a form remarkably similar to what we have now.
It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train a shapeless congerie of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter.
It really doesn't matter to what extent Global Warming is man's problem or nature's: it's still happening, and we can still help slow it down.
It's clear that it's heppening, now do we want it to happen faster, or slower?
Before we enter the realm of Pascal's Wager, shouldn't we ask ourself what the expected effects will be and their costs, versus the cost of doing something now?
A bunch of laptops to some starving, poor, thirsty people who live in terror of their government or paramilitary groups the government can't control are going to do a whole freaking lot.
Damned if I know how you can get a 10 ms "faster" response from a server.
Right now, with a run-of-the-mill cheap generic DEC-Tulip compatible card, and a 3com 905c in the server, my ping time is within a fraction of a millisecond. My tcping time is also under a millisecond.
If I could get a 10 ms improvement, I'd be witnessing time travel.
A large portion of the power usage goes towards keeping the machines cool. Moving the data centers to a hotter climate to take advantage of the extra sunlight via solar cells is essentially a wash, as the added generatoion capacity is easily eaten up by the additional cooling needs. Actually, it's a net loss, as solar power systems aren't free...
There are systems (heat pumps) which appear to operate at greater than 100% efficiency when comparing the amount cooled vs the amount of power supplied. They work by moving heat from one source to another.
Does anyone know of a study or statistics that actually evaluates exposure to pornography on non-adults?
The study would be difficult (it would probably have to rely on self-reporting for evidence, and not only is self-reporting frequently
misleading, but easy access to pornography may correlate with other factors in the home).
Sure, passing laws "protecting" the children from the evils of the world is good re-election fodder, but is there any evidence that pornography is harmful to children, and if it is harmful, how harmful is it?
Ice core samples show pretty definitively that if its a natural earth cycle it is a VERY long cycle. And from the standpoint of us dealing with the problem, it really doesn't matter. Reducing carbon in the atmosphere WILL cool things, even if it wasn't what originally started heating things up. It also will help prevent really disastrous scenarios like thawing of methane ice fields.
Last time I checked, the earth has had colder climates than the current climate, and warmer climates than what the climate change predicts for the coming century.
Presumably, if the methane ice deposits will melt under human-caused climate change in the next century, they have already melted under similar natural climate changes (and is thus a part of the natural cycle).
Since you are claiming that natural cycles take a long time to happen, presumably the methane release won't upset the climate rapidly.
A century later lifespans were significantly longer, overall health is significantly higher... and lung disease has remained the #1 or #2 killer for decades. It's worthwhile to look at what's changed in the environment, even if it appears to be unrelated.
In what country are you referring to?
I was under the impression that heart disease and cancer were the main killers in the US. While smoking can increase the risk factors of both, there are other causes. For example, lung cancer is listed as causing 30% of all cancer deaths. Even assuming that smoking is the sole cause of lung cancer, that's not a majority of cancer deaths.
A career-ending offense exicts in this country too, but just on different subjects. Try publicly saying that whites are smarter than blacks, or that teenage girls should have have hands-on sex ed in junior high, or that ice floes are a good way of relieving the social security crunch, and see what happens to your career. ( The previous three ideas or - similar forms of them - have been considered obvious truisms in other places and times. I'm not expressing these opinions myself, just mentioning them as examples )
Try putting any of these on english Wikipedia, and see how long they last.
The wiki article on "Race and Intelligence" has, at the top of an article, a graph of IQs of different races. Whites, on average, are shown as scoring higher than blacks.
The article discusses the amount (if any) of difference in the average intelligence of the different races and possible reasons why there would be a difference.
Look closely at your policy. It probably has a maximum lifetime payout.
Looking at ehealthinsurance.com (not affiliated, just using them for numbers), a healthcare plan for two 20-somethings with two young children in my area would be $170/month, with 20% copay, $5000 yearly deductable per person ($10k max), and has a $5,000,000 per person lifetime limit.
The cheapo government insurance for the poor can be much more nasty. ISTR someone (vague for their privacy) being kicked off MinnesotaCare in the fall of the year for exceeding the yearly spending limits (less than $10k or $20k for prescriptions and health aids).
How is that better than voting by marking up a heavy card stock ballot with a marker and running it through an optical scanner? If the goal is to minimize steps, why have the touch screen mumbo jumbo at all?
Because, with a computer-generated card, the result should be more or less binary -- either Bob voted for a candidate or he didn't.
With a card filled in by a voter, there can be some debate about how complete a mark must be before it counts. Witness the hanging chad hell in Florida.
(OTOH, with computer generated cards, since they are computer generated, it should be trivial to print out fake ballots and stuff the box. But the fake ballots will lack different and unique finger prints.):/
This is somewhat off-topic, but I killed an older Sparc running Solaris 10 within a few minutes of installing.
Someone I know needed to test out a program on Solaris 10/Sparc. Since we had a smaller sparc (I believe it was the E4000) not being used, I installed Solaris 10 on it, doing the default install.
Then I copied the code over, and uncompressed it in/tmp.
The machine died.
Ah ha, you are going to say -- you ran out of disk space in/tmp, and the machine couldn't make the temporary files it needed.
Kinda.
The default install I did made the/tmp partition out of a ramdisk. So when I filled up/tmp, I starved the machine of memory.
Whoopsie.
(This is probably why the other sparcs are running Linux.)
In Solaris's defense, I know very little about the OS. I still find it humorous that I managed to bring an enterprise machine to its knees accidentally.
Not that I trust the media either, but asking soldiers? Here, let me tell you in advance how it's going to play out:
"You mean I just spent the last X months (years) of my life away from my family in this god forsaken dust bowl getting shot at, not knowing when the next IED is going to go off, seeing my buddies get killed, maimed or shell shocked, all for nothing?"
Nobody wants to think they've endured all that pointlessly. So they'll continue to cling to the notion that this fight can be won, or that civil war can be averted. Otherwise, their sacrifice is meaningless - and that is a thought too hard to bear. To ask a soldier is to get the answer that victory is attainable, because the alternative doesn't bear thinking about.
I've known some soldiers who think that Iraq is fixable.
I've known some soldiers who think that that Iraq is beyond fixing. (This is putting it mildly in some cases. One of the soldiers I know is in the base nicknamed 'mortaritaville' due to the frequent mortar attacks. I think he considers shit-flinging chimps as being more civilized than the Iraqis.)
Soldiers are humans too. They don't all think alike. They can have different opinions on the Iraq war, and some of those opinions are rather negative.
"Threaten to learn how to fish, and get a discount from the fishmonger!"
Since MS seems to give discounts to anyone who looks at OSS, if I was the head of a large city's IT department, I'd put a cheap student intern on the job of writing up a migration plan and publicize the plan loudly. It may be impossible to get everyone to move to OSS (especially with local politics and entrenched technologies), but Microsoft seems to be willing to give discounts on the next round of pricing.;)
This device is fairly well known by now. Google generates 455.000 hits on the Antikythera and has more than 800 images, including a 2005 X-ray image at Wikipedia
Slashdot Mirror
But is that any more dangerous than a regular chemistry set?
I assume at that time that it was possible to buy chemistry sets that offered dangerous chemical combinations. How much worse is a weak radiation source?
So how much more radioactivity will water gain if it flowed over the crush containers? (Assuming that the area will be wet in the future, and water will flow through the storage area.)
I understand that you are concerned about the dispersal of nuclear waste through the southwest, I'm just not sure how it would happen in the event of an earthquake or eruption.
What is a likely scenerio where there is damage to enough casks to significantly raise the levels of radiation in the surrouding area?
I'm having trouble thinking of a likely scenerio where an earthquake or lava flow could do so. So what am I missing?
If you haven't noticed, it is possible to build structures that survive severe earthquakes. It is just a matter of making sure the structure can survive the forces involved in an earthquake.
As for a volcano, what are your concerns? Do you believe that the repository is in the middle of a potential lava flow? Do you worry about debris from a disruption damaging the repository?
Three Mile Island was a nuclear power plant that had a partial core meltdown. That sounds like failure in my book. Yet oddly, the territory around it is still inhabitable.
Perhaps the containment structure (which Chernobyl was lacking) is the answer.
Sure, containment structures (and other safety features) won't prevent all nasty "OMG, humans aren't going to live here anymore" accidents, but it can help to lower the risk greatly.
And I wouldn't worry too much about nuclear waste disposal. It needs to be kept shielded (trivial problem) and away from the ground water. While the later is a problem, it should be a solvable problem -- and if we cannot solve a problem that has already had millions spent for planning (Yucca Mountains), we have a bigger problem since the landfills (of conventional waste) that litter our landscape also need to be kept away from groundwater, lest bad things happen.
John Mccarthy (the father of lisp) believes that our progress is sustainable in a form remarkably similar to what we have now.
So you would also be skeptical of the claim that I may be a billionaire by 2040?
Pffft. They sound like shoggoths to me.
My god, what have they awakened?
Before we enter the realm of Pascal's Wager, shouldn't we ask ourself what the expected effects will be and their costs, versus the cost of doing something now?
Perhaps we need H.E.A.P. instead.
Damned if I know how you can get a 10 ms "faster" response from a server.
Right now, with a run-of-the-mill cheap generic DEC-Tulip compatible card, and a 3com 905c in the server, my ping time is within a fraction of a millisecond. My tcping time is also under a millisecond.
If I could get a 10 ms improvement, I'd be witnessing time travel.
There are systems (heat pumps) which appear to operate at greater than 100% efficiency when comparing the amount cooled vs the amount of power supplied. They work by moving heat from one source to another.
That's why I suggested self-reporting. You can always quiz adults about their childhood activities.
Does anyone know of a study or statistics that actually evaluates exposure to pornography on non-adults?
The study would be difficult (it would probably have to rely on self-reporting for evidence, and not only is self-reporting frequently misleading, but easy access to pornography may correlate with other factors in the home).
Sure, passing laws "protecting" the children from the evils of the world is good re-election fodder, but is there any evidence that pornography is harmful to children, and if it is harmful, how harmful is it?
Last time I checked, the earth has had colder climates than the current climate, and warmer climates than what the climate change predicts for the coming century.
Presumably, if the methane ice deposits will melt under human-caused climate change in the next century, they have already melted under similar natural climate changes (and is thus a part of the natural cycle).
Since you are claiming that natural cycles take a long time to happen, presumably the methane release won't upset the climate rapidly.
Or is there a flaw in your logic?
In what country are you referring to?
I was under the impression that heart disease and cancer were the main killers in the US. While smoking can increase the risk factors of both, there are other causes. For example, lung cancer is listed as causing 30% of all cancer deaths. Even assuming that smoking is the sole cause of lung cancer, that's not a majority of cancer deaths.
The wiki article on "Race and Intelligence" has, at the top of an article, a graph of IQs of different races. Whites, on average, are shown as scoring higher than blacks.
The article discusses the amount (if any) of difference in the average intelligence of the different races and possible reasons why there would be a difference.
Insurance companies do cap expenses.
Look closely at your policy. It probably has a maximum lifetime payout.
Looking at ehealthinsurance.com (not affiliated, just using them for numbers), a healthcare plan for two 20-somethings with two young children in my area would be $170/month, with 20% copay, $5000 yearly deductable per person ($10k max), and has a $5,000,000 per person lifetime limit.
The cheapo government insurance for the poor can be much more nasty. ISTR someone (vague for their privacy) being kicked off MinnesotaCare in the fall of the year for exceeding the yearly spending limits (less than $10k or $20k for prescriptions and health aids).
Because, with a computer-generated card, the result should be more or less binary -- either Bob voted for a candidate or he didn't.
With a card filled in by a voter, there can be some debate about how complete a mark must be before it counts. Witness the hanging chad hell in Florida.
(OTOH, with computer generated cards, since they are computer generated, it should be trivial to print out fake ballots and stuff the box. But the fake ballots will lack different and unique finger prints.) :/
Or in my neck of the woods, it is called "well within normal tolerances".
It has to get up to 133V-ish before they will do anything about it. :/
This is somewhat off-topic, but I killed an older Sparc running Solaris 10 within a few minutes of installing.
Someone I know needed to test out a program on Solaris 10/Sparc. Since we had a smaller sparc (I believe it was the E4000) not being used, I installed Solaris 10 on it, doing the default install.
Then I copied the code over, and uncompressed it in /tmp.
The machine died.
Ah ha, you are going to say -- you ran out of disk space in /tmp, and the machine couldn't make the temporary files it needed.
Kinda.
The default install I did made the /tmp partition out of a ramdisk. So when I filled up /tmp, I starved the machine of memory.
Whoopsie.
(This is probably why the other sparcs are running Linux.)
In Solaris's defense, I know very little about the OS. I still find it humorous that I managed to bring an enterprise machine to its knees accidentally.
I've known some soldiers who think that Iraq is fixable.
I've known some soldiers who think that that Iraq is beyond fixing. (This is putting it mildly in some cases. One of the soldiers I know is in the base nicknamed 'mortaritaville' due to the frequent mortar attacks. I think he considers shit-flinging chimps as being more civilized than the Iraqis.)
Soldiers are humans too. They don't all think alike. They can have different opinions on the Iraq war, and some of those opinions are rather negative.
Sparc is up to eight cores.
Razors have better hurry.
I think we need a new saying:
"Threaten to learn how to fish, and get a discount from the fishmonger!"
Since MS seems to give discounts to anyone who looks at OSS, if I was the head of a large city's IT department, I'd put a cheap student intern on the job of writing up a migration plan and publicize the plan loudly. It may be impossible to get everyone to move to OSS (especially with local politics and entrenched technologies), but Microsoft seems to be willing to give discounts on the next round of pricing. ;)
I find this google news link rather informative myself. ;)