Interesting, yes, but too old to be funny. Many moons ago somebody made a program that could play tunes by fiddling with the timing of the hammers on an IBM 1403 line printer. It's good to see someone keeping the traditions alive.:-)
Because the 20 who know what is in this bill is about 19 more than usually read any of the stuff they vote on. The rest just decide by working out (NOT ((bill's supporters hate the president) XOR ($I hate the president))).
Easy. Pump the sludge through thermocouple banks and you extract a bit of energy. Whether it's more than you need to run the pump, I haven't done the math to say. Possibly you could build a gadget that pumps itself convectively and only have standby pumps to handle excursions from the desired rates of reactivity. Some of it is so cool you could solidify it around the thermoelectric components and just have a big block that emits electricity. Embed the generating components in layers of cadmium or something if need be.
Possibly you could do something with amorphous semiconductors (which might hold up better than structured semiconductors in the face of micro-damage from the radiation). IIRC that turned out to be neither as amazing as some believed, nor as amazingly stupid as others believed.
It's hard to say what we could do, since so many seems determined not to think about it.
But the plutonium that we throw away is exactly what some reactor designs want. We already know exactly how to use it. And it's some of the worst stuff. It makes sense to burn it up to make something we need. It's more dangerous to store it. It makes no sense whatsoever for any member of the "Nuclear Club" to discard it in the name of nonproliferation -- we've already *got* The Bomb. And taking Pu out of the "ash" makes the problem smaller.
Don't forget medical applications. Radiation can be used therapeutically. The quantities of material in individual applications are quite small, so Bad Guys would have to make quite a lot of thefts to have enough for a credible radiologic weapon. We use such stuff already, you know.
Agreed, it makes little sense to design radwaste-powered coffee pots and suchlike. I wasn't thinking of consumer goods, but of industrial processes, or inaccessible devices (think orbiting Neptune) that need small amounts of reliable power for years.
But I think there must be some way to burn up the really energetic stuff even before we move down to this level. A lot of what we throw away is perfectly good reactor fuel, sacrificed because of some mystical connection between known nuclear powers reprocessing spent fuel and development of nuclear explosives by the have-nots.
No, you have to convert the whole fleet. Few will risk being stuck in the back of beyond with an empty tank and a nearby fueling station that has lotsa gasoline but no H2. Nobody wants to pay for parallel distribution systems, at least not for very long. The only reason that passenger diesel had a chance was because it was already available nearly everywhere and it's delivered by the same trucks and pipes.
Indeed, it takes more energy to make a storage battery than you will ever get out of it, yet battery companies make money. (Boy, do they make money! $5.00 for a cell the size of a saccharin tablet....)
Two things about LEDs. One: you can buy LED streetlamps now. Two: have you *seen* the nasty stuff that comes out of refining the materials used to make semiconductors?
The stuff that's taken out of a nuke plant is only waste if you waste it. There's still a lot of energy in it, or it wouldn't be a problem, would it? Stick it in some process that doesn't need such high energy density, or use it for nondestructive testing, sterilization, etc. There'll still be some we don't know how to use (yet) but that heap will be a lot smaller. There are a lot of uses for radioactive material that don't involve big bangs or boiling water by the kiloton.
Primitive societies know how to use every scrap of an animal they've taken. We need to think seriously about how to do the same with industrial processes.
Duuh, the pollutant released in generating hydrogen is oxygen. (At least, if you don't do something insane like cracking precious fossil hydrocarbons rather than abundant safe easily-recycled water.) Suddenly you would want to be *near* a fuel refinery.
What makes you say "fossil fuel"? Sure, hydrogen generation can be coupled to coal/oil/gas/nuclear power sources, but it can just as well be coupled to solar/wind/wave/something-we-don't-have-yet.
So, how about external combustion instead of that fuel cell? Less complicated and demanding mechanically, possibly cleaner, easier on lubricants, more choices of materials, etc. (30kg polymer engines, anyone?)
To be fair, crummy third-party software often makes it difficult to run an MS Windows setup properly. And I'm not talking about Sid's Storm Doors and Software Ltd.; I'm talking about well-known products from well-respected companies. Some of them are only well-respected because nobody listens to sysadmin.s anymore.
The world is still lousy with products that have obviously never ever been loaded on a halfway secure box, because when you do, they upchuck and die instantly. Products that have no notion of multiple users. Products that demand world write access to the directories where the program lives, or want everybody to be a member of Administrators. You'd think these people had never seen a modern computer installation.
Windows Installer has been in the field for, what, about *six years* now, and there are still many many big-name products that either don't use it or use it stupidly, making managed installation difficult to impossible. I'm working up a repackage now of a *very* popular product whose latest kitting might have been designed as an example of how *not* to deploy software.
I've taken the approach that our MS Windows setup will be secure *first*, and then the app.s are made to work. We haven't had much instability or many infections, but it's amazing the number of products that won't work out-of-the-box when you set up the platform properly. (It's also amazing the number of tech-support people who will swear up and down that their company's product can't work in an environment like ours, after I've already made it work.)
Bottom line: MS Windows can be stabilized and secured, but when you have a hundred standard app.s stability and security don't just happen; it takes a lot of hard work, a lot of investigation and experiment, and a lot of shouting at suppliers, and it never ends.
Yeahbut, CNN has more time to fill. That's why they keep republishing the same stories with different titles, I suppose. And all those stories of rumors that someone will announce today that a press conference is to be scheduled for tomorrow to discuss the possibility that something might happen next week.
'Was the "affect"/"effect" mistake supposed to be humorous?'
Actually it's more than humorous, because it works either way. (At least for those who've taken a psych. course and been taught to use "affect" as a noun.)
They still have NULL sessions enabled? They still have UPnP enabled? Wow. Next you'll tell me they don't have a policy instructing all domain members to take updates from their SUS/WSUS server everyday.
It's like my plane was diverted to Bizarro World or something.
I think here we're seeing the tension between development and production.
The shuttle has been a decent way to learn about the problems faced by reusable vehicles of a particular type. I'm glad that we did it, and that we have it. Yes, the next step, from a development standpoint, is to take what we learned and figure out how to do it more and better.
But meanwhile we have actual business in space and we need a way to get there and back again. We don't need it twenty years from now; we need it today. What we have today is (a) shuttles with a number of known problems (see above), and (b) big honkin' rockets with three decades of experience in interplanetary travel. Which can we have ready to go by next month? A design that's just been grounded again after two years of fixing, or a design that Just Works? Remember that it's for today, not next decade; we have plenty of time to work up something better for the twenty-teens and beyond.
We need *both* programs to keep the pipeline full today *and* tomorrow. Declaring a single winner sacrifices either today or tomorrow. I'm greedy: I want both.
Oh, I've done exactly that. I loaned a relative some money (don't start) by drawing a cashier's check on our account, paying a fee for the service. The relative's bank slapped a multiple days hold on the funds.
These two banks are headquartered in adjacent cities in a single state and should be able to confirm each others' instruments in milliseconds. It left me feeling that I'd wasted money on the fee, since the cashier's check conferred no advantage over a personal check that would've cost me nothing. I'll think long and hard before bothering with another cashier's check.
And I should've stated that my requirements include that it not be a "bearer" instrument, which lets out cash.
People keep saying, "the oil does not belong to the king" as if they actually know. What does the law in Country X say? In some monarchies the country's natural resources *do* belong to the king. You may feel that that is not right, but what does that have to do with whether it's legal? The only check on some kings is the one that Bierce noted: "an absolute monarch may do as he pleases, so long as he pleases the assassins."
I do agree with you on what a good king would have done. It's what I expected he would do when I began reading the account. I was bitterly disappointed by the actuality, though *sigh* not surprised.
Yeah, it seems that for years now I've been paying bank fees for cashier's checks for nothing. I'd long thought that a cashier's check *can't* bounce unless the *bank* has insufficient funds. The bank is supposed to satisfy itself that your payment to them is secure before issuing a cashier's check. But it seems that, if this was ever true, nowadays it isn't.
So *is* there some instrument I can buy that is guaranteed payable unless the bank itself is bust?
Hmmm, let's try an analogy. If Los Angeles closed all of the fire stations on its northside, that wouldn't kill off an essential service, yet lots of northside residents would be imperiled because what's left of the service would likely be of no help to them.
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So what happened when you denounced the complainant for making a false report?
Interesting, yes, but too old to be funny. Many moons ago somebody made a program that could play tunes by fiddling with the timing of the hammers on an IBM 1403 line printer. It's good to see someone keeping the traditions alive. :-)
Maybe then they can teach it to the Congresspeople who style themselves "conservative", but aren't.
Because the 20 who know what is in this bill is about 19 more than usually read any of the stuff they vote on. The rest just decide by working out (NOT ((bill's supporters hate the president) XOR ($I hate the president))).
Easy. Pump the sludge through thermocouple banks and you extract a bit of energy. Whether it's more than you need to run the pump, I haven't done the math to say. Possibly you could build a gadget that pumps itself convectively and only have standby pumps to handle excursions from the desired rates of reactivity. Some of it is so cool you could solidify it around the thermoelectric components and just have a big block that emits electricity. Embed the generating components in layers of cadmium or something if need be.
Possibly you could do something with amorphous semiconductors (which might hold up better than structured semiconductors in the face of micro-damage from the radiation). IIRC that turned out to be neither as amazing as some believed, nor as amazingly stupid as others believed.
It's hard to say what we could do, since so many seems determined not to think about it.
But the plutonium that we throw away is exactly what some reactor designs want. We already know exactly how to use it. And it's some of the worst stuff. It makes sense to burn it up to make something we need. It's more dangerous to store it. It makes no sense whatsoever for any member of the "Nuclear Club" to discard it in the name of nonproliferation -- we've already *got* The Bomb. And taking Pu out of the "ash" makes the problem smaller.
Don't forget medical applications. Radiation can be used therapeutically. The quantities of material in individual applications are quite small, so Bad Guys would have to make quite a lot of thefts to have enough for a credible radiologic weapon. We use such stuff already, you know.
Agreed, it makes little sense to design radwaste-powered coffee pots and suchlike. I wasn't thinking of consumer goods, but of industrial processes, or inaccessible devices (think orbiting Neptune) that need small amounts of reliable power for years.
But I think there must be some way to burn up the really energetic stuff even before we move down to this level. A lot of what we throw away is perfectly good reactor fuel, sacrificed because of some mystical connection between known nuclear powers reprocessing spent fuel and development of nuclear explosives by the have-nots.
No, you have to convert the whole fleet. Few will risk being stuck in the back of beyond with an empty tank and a nearby fueling station that has lotsa gasoline but no H2. Nobody wants to pay for parallel distribution systems, at least not for very long. The only reason that passenger diesel had a chance was because it was already available nearly everywhere and it's delivered by the same trucks and pipes.
Indeed, it takes more energy to make a storage battery than you will ever get out of it, yet battery companies make money. (Boy, do they make money! $5.00 for a cell the size of a saccharin tablet....)
Two things about LEDs. One: you can buy LED streetlamps now. Two: have you *seen* the nasty stuff that comes out of refining the materials used to make semiconductors?
The stuff that's taken out of a nuke plant is only waste if you waste it. There's still a lot of energy in it, or it wouldn't be a problem, would it? Stick it in some process that doesn't need such high energy density, or use it for nondestructive testing, sterilization, etc. There'll still be some we don't know how to use (yet) but that heap will be a lot smaller. There are a lot of uses for radioactive material that don't involve big bangs or boiling water by the kiloton.
Primitive societies know how to use every scrap of an animal they've taken. We need to think seriously about how to do the same with industrial processes.
Well, under the right conditions CO2 would change phase and exit the atmosphere, but those are conditions we wouldn't want to live in. :-/
Duuh, the pollutant released in generating hydrogen is oxygen. (At least, if you don't do something insane like cracking precious fossil hydrocarbons rather than abundant safe easily-recycled water.) Suddenly you would want to be *near* a fuel refinery.
Two comments:
What makes you say "fossil fuel"? Sure, hydrogen generation can be coupled to coal/oil/gas/nuclear power sources, but it can just as well be coupled to solar/wind/wave/something-we-don't-have-yet.
So, how about external combustion instead of that fuel cell? Less complicated and demanding mechanically, possibly cleaner, easier on lubricants, more choices of materials, etc. (30kg polymer engines, anyone?)
To be fair, crummy third-party software often makes it difficult to run an MS Windows setup properly. And I'm not talking about Sid's Storm Doors and Software Ltd.; I'm talking about well-known products from well-respected companies. Some of them are only well-respected because nobody listens to sysadmin.s anymore.
The world is still lousy with products that have obviously never ever been loaded on a halfway secure box, because when you do, they upchuck and die instantly. Products that have no notion of multiple users. Products that demand world write access to the directories where the program lives, or want everybody to be a member of Administrators. You'd think these people had never seen a modern computer installation.
Windows Installer has been in the field for, what, about *six years* now, and there are still many many big-name products that either don't use it or use it stupidly, making managed installation difficult to impossible. I'm working up a repackage now of a *very* popular product whose latest kitting might have been designed as an example of how *not* to deploy software.
I've taken the approach that our MS Windows setup will be secure *first*, and then the app.s are made to work. We haven't had much instability or many infections, but it's amazing the number of products that won't work out-of-the-box when you set up the platform properly. (It's also amazing the number of tech-support people who will swear up and down that their company's product can't work in an environment like ours, after I've already made it work.)
Bottom line: MS Windows can be stabilized and secured, but when you have a hundred standard app.s stability and security don't just happen; it takes a lot of hard work, a lot of investigation and experiment, and a lot of shouting at suppliers, and it never ends.
Yeahbut, CNN has more time to fill. That's why they keep republishing the same stories with different titles, I suppose. And all those stories of rumors that someone will announce today that a press conference is to be scheduled for tomorrow to discuss the possibility that something might happen next week.
'Was the "affect"/"effect" mistake supposed to be humorous?'
Actually it's more than humorous, because it works either way. (At least for those who've taken a psych. course and been taught to use "affect" as a noun.)
If you're in IT for recognition from end users, you have the wrong job. You know you've done well when hardly anybody speaks to you.
Me, I have things to do which are a lot more fun than sponging viruses out of workstations, so I do all I can to keep them from getting in.
They still have NULL sessions enabled? They still have UPnP enabled? Wow. Next you'll tell me they don't have a policy instructing all domain members to take updates from their SUS/WSUS server everyday.
It's like my plane was diverted to Bizarro World or something.
Assuredly Rutan's ideas have a way to go. I doubt that the end product will look a whole lot like Spaceship One. S1 looks like it had two purposes:
o Test the engine and control system in actual use.
o Drum up interest to encourage investment and promote a nonhostile political environment.
Look at Goddard's early rockets. They don't look a whole lot like a Titan or an Ariane, do they? They had a different job.
I think here we're seeing the tension between development and production.
The shuttle has been a decent way to learn about the problems faced by reusable vehicles of a particular type. I'm glad that we did it, and that we have it. Yes, the next step, from a development standpoint, is to take what we learned and figure out how to do it more and better.
But meanwhile we have actual business in space and we need a way to get there and back again. We don't need it twenty years from now; we need it today. What we have today is (a) shuttles with a number of known problems (see above), and (b) big honkin' rockets with three decades of experience in interplanetary travel. Which can we have ready to go by next month? A design that's just been grounded again after two years of fixing, or a design that Just Works? Remember that it's for today, not next decade; we have plenty of time to work up something better for the twenty-teens and beyond.
We need *both* programs to keep the pipeline full today *and* tomorrow. Declaring a single winner sacrifices either today or tomorrow. I'm greedy: I want both.
It's a whole lot safer than loading them into a hollow artillery shell, and closer to reality than antigravity paint.
If you think we can do better, please provide links to your completed requirements, specifications, prints, and procedures manual.
Oh, I've done exactly that. I loaned a relative some money (don't start) by drawing a cashier's check on our account, paying a fee for the service. The relative's bank slapped a multiple days hold on the funds.
These two banks are headquartered in adjacent cities in a single state and should be able to confirm each others' instruments in milliseconds. It left me feeling that I'd wasted money on the fee, since the cashier's check conferred no advantage over a personal check that would've cost me nothing. I'll think long and hard before bothering with another cashier's check.
And I should've stated that my requirements include that it not be a "bearer" instrument, which lets out cash.
People keep saying, "the oil does not belong to the king" as if they actually know. What does the law in Country X say? In some monarchies the country's natural resources *do* belong to the king. You may feel that that is not right, but what does that have to do with whether it's legal? The only check on some kings is the one that Bierce noted: "an absolute monarch may do as he pleases, so long as he pleases the assassins."
I do agree with you on what a good king would have done. It's what I expected he would do when I began reading the account. I was bitterly disappointed by the actuality, though *sigh* not surprised.
Yeah, it seems that for years now I've been paying bank fees for cashier's checks for nothing. I'd long thought that a cashier's check *can't* bounce unless the *bank* has insufficient funds. The bank is supposed to satisfy itself that your payment to them is secure before issuing a cashier's check. But it seems that, if this was ever true, nowadays it isn't.
So *is* there some instrument I can buy that is guaranteed payable unless the bank itself is bust?
Hmmm, let's try an analogy. If Los Angeles closed all of the fire stations on its northside, that wouldn't kill off an essential service, yet lots of northside residents would be imperiled because what's left of the service would likely be of no help to them.