In a sick, sick, way I find it humorous on how they actually brag or boast about how they decreased the reboot time of the computer.
When I first started installing Windows 95 boxen several years ago me and the students I came up with the Bootstone benchmark for how long it took the systems to reboot after a Blue Screen. We started off with Pentium 60s, which had a very low Bootstone but when we started getting the 120s and 133s Bootstone performance improved incredibly. I wonder what the Bootstone index for an F-22 is, on a perfectly academic basis, I sure wouldn't want to find out in person.
Everything hooked together with protocols that have been deliberately compromised by the **AAs to enable DRM and will probably have security holes big enough to drive a tank through. I can just see the future in such a house when the script kiddies start working on this. Your TV will display nothing but pr0n and the door on your dryer will refuse to open while displaying the message "all of your socks are belong to us!"
Because these 115 grain bullets in the.45 travel at 1450 fps. Compare and contrast this to the 115 grain 9mm FMJ which has a muzzle velocity of 1100 to 1200 fps depending upon which vendor you purchase your ammo from.
If you were to take a large chunk of anti-matter and compress it to the point where it became a black hole it would be indistinguishable from a black hole made out of positive matter. The only information you can get from a black hole is it's mass, rotation and electrical charge, every other bit of information about the particles that go into it is destroyed (which gets you into some interesting speculations on black hole entropy that I don't even understand). This is known as the "Black Hole No Hair Theorem". If you were to take two black holes, one of them the aforementioned anti-matter black hole (which is a contradiction in terms because once you've created the black hole you've lost all of the information about what made it) and the positive matter black hole and run them into each other you would end up with a bigger black hole. Kip Thorne's book on Black holes Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy is a good place to start if you want to learn everything about black holes you can learn without having to be as smart as Thorne or Stephen Hawking. Timothy Ferris'sbooks The Whole Shebang: A State of the Universe Report" and Coming of Age in the Milky Way also have some good stuff on black holes.
Now, since dropping two black holes into each other isn't going to do anything more interesting than creating a bigger black hole (which is interesting in and of itself but is not particularly spectacular in an explosive sort of way what you want to do is take two neutron stars, one made of neutrons and the other made of anti-neutrons and run them into each other. That would provide a rather impressive explosion, or you could take a neutron star and pile matter on top of it until it's gravitational attraction is greater than the degeneracy pressure. At this point, according to theory, a black hole will be formed and a huge amount of energy will be released as the neutron star collapses into the black hole.
Actually instead of a bag of rocks you should get one of these and load it up with some Aquila 115 grain high velocity (1450 fps) hollowpoints. Inattentive drivers, such as the old fuck who ran into me and destroyed my left leg, cause all sorts of bad shit to happen to other people, especially motorcyclists, it's about time someone made bad things happen to them.
Q: Earlier you said you were still a products company and not a strictly IP company. This appears to have changed and you are now an IP company. Would you agree with that assessment? Linux has succceeded while your product failed in the marketplace.
A: Our Unixware product was damaged by Linux and that is why it isn't successful. That is why we are doing this. We didn't fail, it is Linux' fault we failed.
Strange, I personally had thought that UNIXware wasn't successful because it lacked features of other UNICES, lacked drivers, lacked support, lacked stability and because most systems administrators would have rather been anally raped and eaten by carnivorous lepers than have to attempt to support systems running UNIXware. I'm glad that's been cleared up for me. Oh, and in other news the Iraqi minister of information announced that Iraq didn't lose the Gulf War, parts I and II but that it was the United States' fault that it failed.
But it costs $1,000. Similarly a Mercedes Benz is better than a Hyundai, but if you don't have $40,000 and need something that will get you to work the Hyundai is better than nothing. Quark had better pay attention, this is the same strategy that Microsoft used with Windows against the Mac. Sure, the first versions of Windows sucked compared to the Mac, but they were better than the alternative (DOS) and cheaper than the Mac, so a lot of people were willing to put up with the limitations. While Scribus may have limitations compared to Quark it's free and it runs on Linux. If Quark is paying attention they'll port to some flavor of Linux and work on driving down their prices . While scribus may not be able to 'scale best of breed useres to engage in proactive content' (whatever the Hell that means) it's a start and if it's like GIMP or OpenOffice it will just get better.
in the 1630 to 1710kHz range. The FCC opened this up in the late 1980s and it remains largely unused. Sure, people are going to whine and say that AM broadcast quality isn't as good as FM, but I'd rather listen to an interesting station on AM, with the occasional crackle of static, than perfectly clear corporate clear channel crap on FM. It seems to me that the FCC could take this space and rededicate it to community low power AM stations.
BTW think about a computer in a tank. Your in battle, and another tank shoots at you, and ALMOST penetrates, say the turret. That BIG piece of steel if just been pounded big what is effectivly a HUGE hammmer. The computer that as mounted to it has to keep working, so you can return fire, and hopefully live to another day
The most delicate item in tanks isn't the electronic gear, it's the crew. I had a TTS (tank thermal sight) system on an M60A3 blank out for five minutes once after my driver drove into a slit trench that had been covered by some grass. I was able to get the TTS back online by shutting it down and restarting it. Unfortunately my loader had two broken ribs, and took a little bit longer to get back online and I had a nice bruise on my chest from slamming into my M85 and the edge of the cupola.
Stephen Hawking - diagnosed with ALS *after* obtaining his Ph.D., and doctors still don't have any solid evidence linking ALS to genetic causes. Even after ALS took effect, Hawking *supported himself*, which is the key principle here - he didn't sue anyone or demand handouts from anyone else. Try again.
Actually there is at least one form of ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, motor neuron disease or in the US "Lou Gehrig's disease") that is genetically based. A point mutation on chromosome 21 causes the body to produce an incorrect version of the chemical superoxide dismutase. This mutated version of SOD1 does not protect against oxidative damage to motor neurons to the same extent that the normal version of SOD1. This is why there is a classification of ALS called FALS, for "familial amyotrophic lateral sclerosis".
Clutter from Sprote Research. It does live cover lookups of CD's playing in iTunes from Amazon's music site. Very cool and an easy way to find the cover art for CDs to put into your MP3 tag info.
Probably the same thing you are. What he is actually referring to is Helium 3, the abbreviation for which is He3, not H3. Helium 3/Deuterium fusion is largely aneutronic, which means that you don't have to worry about large quantities of high energy neutrons coming out of your reactor and transmuting the materials it is made out of into radioactive stuff. While He3/Deuterium fusion is more difficult than Tritium/Deuterium fusion the fact that it doesn't produce many neutrons makes it worth it.
I'll be impressed when they can print me a whole
on
Print Yourself a Femur
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
leg. Or at least the part below the knee that I no longer have. This could be a good thing for a lot of people though, I've met a lot of people who have had bone grafts and they're not pleasant (if you think about it bone and graft are two words that just don't go together) and they don't always work.
Another advantage that Amazon has is that they don't have to maintain large amounts of inventory. Amazon works to maximize inventory turns, so when you order a CD from them they'll have it in stock if it's something new and hot, or if not they'll order it from a distributor and then ship it to you. Most people are willing to wait a few days for this. However with physical retail if Tower doesn't have the CD you want you just go down the street to another record store. What I find disturbing is that a lot of really good record stores such as Easy Street Records in Seattle will also get creamed in this trend, which is too bad as the people there really know their music and like customers and make good suggestions, which is a far cry from the teenaged doper mutants that Tower employs.
OK, I have a Mac at home that I use as my audio server (actually I have two Macs, one stores copies of all of my MP3s on two internal drives in a RAID 1, and then I occasionally copy those over to an external 120Gb drive and hang it off of the iMac I have connected to my stereo. {I can afford this because I don't have expensive vices such as a girlfriend or shudder children}). I also have a 30Gb iPod which is the greatest invention since sex (OK, so I haven't been laid in a while, please don't mod me down for disclosing this, I think it's fairly common among/. readers).
Now, I rip everything onto my server with 320kbps normal stereo in MP3 or AAC. I do this since I have good speakers on my stereo system and would like to use them to their fullest capacity. But I don't need this for my iPod which I use in the car. So is there a way of converting higher bitrate MP3s or AACs to lower bitrate versions without fucking up the quality? There was an article a few months back in one of the home theatre pornography magazines that I read where the author was talking about the conversion problems between different digital audio formats. A possible solution in the form of a metadata standard that would apply to all formats was mentioned. Being able to have a central store of high bitrate recordings that you could convert to lower bitrate versions without too many artefacts would be handy. There are times, such as when I'm listening to my stereo at home that audio quality is my greatest concern, there are times, such as when I'm on the road, that I just want a bunch of toonz at hand. I mean really, you can never tell when you'll be driving through Oregon and want to listen to some Spade Cooley or Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys only to find that you don't have them on your iPod.
Give up caffeine for a few months and then take it up again. I was recently hospitalized and not allowed for five weeks to have any caffeinated beverages or even chocolate. When my condition changed (they amputated my left leg below the knee and I didn't need to worry about caffeine consumption causing potential circulatory problems any more) I still didn't have anything stronger than a weak cup of tea every now and then. When I got out of the hospital I found that if I had any caffeine after about 5PM I'd be up until 3 in the morning. One freaking can of coke at 8PM would keep me up all night. A grande chai latte would get me buzzing and twitching all day long. I still don't have my caffeine tolerance back and damnit, as a sysadmin I need that almost as much as I needed my left leg.
There was talk of running a fiber backbone through Kitsap County and leasing it to ISPs for cheaper access. But I have to wonder what the fuck are you babbling about with the Navy? Why are they going to give a shit about fiber under the sound? They don't seem to have objected to the underwater power cables that run under Puget Sound from South Kitsap County to Vashon Island.
Running cables under Puget Sound is not as easy as you might think, the sound is rather deep in places, over 900 feet in some areas and with an average depth of 350 feet. Running a cable from somewhere in Seattle such as Alki Point to somewhere in Kitsap County, such as Manchester, is not as easy as running a 50 foot 10BaseT to your basement pr0n server. I realize that you are probably some sort of Peacenik who has grabbed on to "Desert Storm - The Sequel" and the perfidy of the Bush administration and the oil industry as the complete explanation for everything that is wrong with your life, but I have to tell you that at least in this case you're full of shit.
Back in 96' or 97' I can recall a bunch of hype in the public markets for the infamous DEC ALpha.
What was so infamous about the DEC Alpha? I worked for a large e-commerce company that used AlphaServers from the AS1000 up to the big 8400s and they were fast, solid boxes with great storage options. Having 64 bits available for databases was nice and the megahertz of these systems wasn't that bad either. Plus the fact that you got Tru64UNIX which despite some annoyances (most notably problems with AdvFS) had some nice features and was far more pleasant to work with than any variant of Slowlaris that I ever touched. The university where I worked also used a bunch of DEC hardware for number crunching, they were quite happy with them. As far as I can see the Alpha wasn't hyped, the 8400 with a bunch of Storageworks BA-370 arrays smoked everything on the market at the time. It's a pity that DEC's marketing department was run by the people who weren't smart enough to be in their engineering department, otherwise the Alpha architecture might still be alive instead of being discarded by HP.
I think we need to decimate NASA. Since no one at the agency is willing to accept any responsibility for this disaster and since we are never going to get any straight answers out of NASA we need to just assume that the incompetence is collectively distributed and fire one employee in ten, selected at random across all pay grades and all NASA centers. The fired employees will not be allowed to ever work for the government again, or to work for any government contractor or to work for any state, municipal or local government that is receiving federal funding or to collect any pension or benefits from the federal government. While this might sound harsh the fact remains that they are alive, the Columbia astronauts are dead.
I worked with an MIT graduate with a masters degree in EE who was working on her PhD at the University of Washington and she had never used a soldering iron. Not once in six years at MIT had she picked up a soldering iron and soldered two things together. Her attitude was that you had technicians to do that for you, which I found to be roughly equivalent to a doctor saying "No, I don't know how to draw blood, I have nurses to do that for me." Now if only the U of Washington would adopt a similar curriculum I'd go back to school and finish my EE degree.
Alpha particle, last i heard, is a high energy particle that can kill you if exposed to large doses.
True, if you're exposed to really large doses of alpha particles they'll burn you to death, of course if you were exposed to this amount of alpha particles there would also be a lot of other things around, like gamma rays, neutrons, etc. Like a nuclear explosion, in which case you have other things to worry about.
People working in the WW2 bomb projects do not know of the risks (or does not care) so they were being stupid. Many finally died of cancer.If it is warm to the touch, then it must be radiating like mad.
Yes, it's radiating alpha particles, which cannot penetrate your skin and which are stopped by a sheet of paper. Also while lots of people working on the bomb got cancer lots more didn't. Glenn Seaborg, the discoverer of plutonium, survived to a ripe old age, as did Luis Alvarez, Edward Teller and a whole host of other bomb era luminaries. Sure, some of the Manhattan project members died of cancer, like Robert Oppenheimer, except, whoops, he was a chain smoker, which probably had more to do with his throat cancer than any radioactive exposure did.
The longer the half life has little to do with the danger it poses to you. According to your logic, U-234 (245000 yrs) and U-238 (4.47 Billion years) are as safe as plutonium, both by the way emit Alpha Particles in their decay. It is the amount of radiation that kills you,and if you have a lot of those who cares how slowly is the decay rate.
That's not my "logic". It's a fact. Yes, I am saying that the longer the half life the safer the element. If the half life is long then it takes a long time for the element to decay by emitting particles. If the half life is short then it does not take a long time to decay by emitting particles. If you are standing next to a kilo of U-234 or U-238 you are at less risk than you are standing next to a kilo of Strontium-90, Cesium-137 or Cobalt-60. You will get hit with more particles standing next to something with a short half-life than you will with a long half life. This will fuck you up.
Alpha particles will not penetrate your skin, but you can inahle plutonium and it will then kill you.
Yeah, but it's pretty hard to inhale plutonium, in order for Pu to fuck up your lungs it has to be the right size, if the particles are too big or too small they won't linger in the lungs to cause damage. Again, we've dumped hundreds of pounds of this stuff into the atmosphere and we're still here. So much for Pu toxicity. Dumping tons of Plutonium into the atmosphere will spread it out, and there's a lot of atmosphere so I am not worried. But I'll like to see you live next to a ton of Plutonium. Do you believe enough in what you say to do that?
I don't want to live next door to a ton of Plutonium, but then I don't want to live next door to a coal burning power plant, or a bunch of windmills, or a gas fired powerplant or downstream from a hydroelectric dam. If I have the choice between burning fossil fuels to generate the power necessary to transition to a hydrogen economy and generate electricity or using nuclear power I'll choose the nukes thank you very much. Asking me if I want to live next to a ton of plutonium is such a stupid question. Have you ever flown anywhere on an airplane? If so do you want to live in the flight approach pattern to O'Hare international? If you don't then you are obviously an evil hypocrite and everything you say should be modded down accordingly.
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In a sick, sick, way I find it humorous on how they actually brag or boast about how they decreased the reboot time of the computer.
When I first started installing Windows 95 boxen several years ago me and the students I came up with the Bootstone benchmark for how long it took the systems to reboot after a Blue Screen. We started off with Pentium 60s, which had a very low Bootstone but when we started getting the 120s and 133s Bootstone performance improved incredibly. I wonder what the Bootstone index for an F-22 is, on a perfectly academic basis, I sure wouldn't want to find out in person.
Everything hooked together with protocols that have been deliberately compromised by the **AAs to enable DRM and will probably have security holes big enough to drive a tank through. I can just see the future in such a house when the script kiddies start working on this. Your TV will display nothing but pr0n and the door on your dryer will refuse to open while displaying the message "all of your socks are belong to us!"
Because these 115 grain bullets in the .45 travel at 1450 fps. Compare and contrast this to the 115 grain 9mm FMJ which has a muzzle velocity of 1100 to 1200 fps depending upon which vendor you purchase your ammo from.
If you were to take a large chunk of anti-matter and compress it to the point where it became a black hole it would be indistinguishable from a black hole made out of positive matter. The only information you can get from a black hole is it's mass, rotation and electrical charge, every other bit of information about the particles that go into it is destroyed (which gets you into some interesting speculations on black hole entropy that I don't even understand). This is known as the "Black Hole No Hair Theorem". If you were to take two black holes, one of them the aforementioned anti-matter black hole (which is a contradiction in terms because once you've created the black hole you've lost all of the information about what made it) and the positive matter black hole and run them into each other you would end up with a bigger black hole.
Kip Thorne's book on Black holes Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy is a good place to start if you want to learn everything about black holes you can learn without having to be as smart as Thorne or Stephen Hawking. Timothy Ferris'sbooks The Whole Shebang: A State of the Universe Report" and Coming of Age in the Milky Way also have some good stuff on black holes.
Now, since dropping two black holes into each other isn't going to do anything more interesting than creating a bigger black hole (which is interesting in and of itself but is not particularly spectacular in an explosive sort of way what you want to do is take two neutron stars, one made of neutrons and the other made of anti-neutrons and run them into each other. That would provide a rather impressive explosion, or you could take a neutron star and pile matter on top of it until it's gravitational attraction is greater than the degeneracy pressure. At this point, according to theory, a black hole will be formed and a huge amount of energy will be released as the neutron star collapses into the black hole.
Actually instead of a bag of rocks you should get one of these and load it up with some Aquila 115 grain high velocity (1450 fps) hollowpoints. Inattentive drivers, such as the old fuck who ran into me and destroyed my left leg, cause all sorts of bad shit to happen to other people, especially motorcyclists, it's about time someone made bad things happen to them.
Q: Earlier you said you were still a products company and not a strictly IP company. This appears to have changed and you are now an IP company. Would you agree with that assessment? Linux has succceeded while your product failed in the marketplace.
A: Our Unixware product was damaged by Linux and that is why it isn't successful. That is why we are doing this. We didn't fail, it is Linux' fault we failed.
Strange, I personally had thought that UNIXware wasn't successful because it lacked features of other UNICES, lacked drivers, lacked support, lacked stability and because most systems administrators would have rather been anally raped and eaten by carnivorous lepers than have to attempt to support systems running UNIXware. I'm glad that's been cleared up for me. Oh, and in other news the Iraqi minister of information announced that Iraq didn't lose the Gulf War, parts I and II but that it was the United States' fault that it failed.
and route IPv4. Otherwise we'd be screwed.
But it costs $1,000. Similarly a Mercedes Benz is better than
a Hyundai, but if you don't have $40,000 and need something that will get you to work the Hyundai is better than nothing. Quark had better pay attention, this is the same strategy that Microsoft used with Windows against the Mac. Sure, the first versions of Windows sucked compared to the Mac, but they were better than the alternative (DOS) and cheaper than the Mac, so a lot of people were willing to put up with the limitations. While Scribus may have limitations compared to Quark it's free and it runs on Linux. If Quark is paying attention they'll port to some flavor of Linux and work on driving down their prices . While scribus may not be able to 'scale best of breed useres to engage in proactive content' (whatever the Hell that means) it's a start and if it's like GIMP or OpenOffice it will just get better.
in the 1630 to 1710kHz range. The FCC opened this up in the late 1980s and it remains largely unused. Sure, people are going to whine and say that AM broadcast quality isn't as good as FM, but I'd rather listen to an interesting station on AM, with the occasional crackle of static, than perfectly clear corporate clear channel crap on FM. It seems to me that the FCC could take this space and rededicate it to community low power AM stations.
BTW think about a computer in a tank. Your in battle, and another tank shoots at you, and ALMOST penetrates, say the turret. That BIG piece of steel if just been pounded big what is effectivly a HUGE hammmer. The computer that as mounted to it has to keep working, so you can return fire, and hopefully live to another day
The most delicate item in tanks isn't the electronic gear, it's the crew. I had a TTS (tank thermal sight) system on an M60A3 blank out for five minutes once after my driver drove into a slit trench that had been covered by some grass. I was able to get the TTS back online by shutting it down and restarting it. Unfortunately my loader had two broken ribs, and took a little bit longer to get back online and I had a nice bruise on my chest from slamming into my M85 and the edge of the cupola.
Stephen Hawking - diagnosed with ALS *after* obtaining his Ph.D., and doctors still don't have any solid evidence linking ALS to genetic causes. Even after ALS took effect, Hawking *supported himself*, which is the key principle here - he didn't sue anyone or demand handouts from anyone else. Try again.
Actually there is at least one form of ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, motor neuron disease or in the US "Lou Gehrig's disease") that is genetically based. A point mutation on chromosome 21 causes the body to produce an incorrect version of the chemical superoxide dismutase. This mutated version of SOD1 does not protect against oxidative damage to motor neurons to the same extent that the normal version of SOD1. This is why there is a classification of ALS called FALS, for "familial amyotrophic lateral sclerosis".
My Dad has a SliMP3 hooked up to a Linksys wireless ethernet bridge. Works like a charm and the antenna can be stashed behind your stereo rack.
Clutter from Sprote Research. It does live cover lookups of CD's playing in iTunes from Amazon's music site. Very cool and an easy way to find the cover art for CDs to put into your MP3 tag info.
Probably the same thing you are. What he is actually referring to is Helium 3, the abbreviation for which is He3, not H3. Helium 3/Deuterium fusion is largely aneutronic, which means that you don't have to worry about large quantities of high energy neutrons coming out of your reactor and transmuting the materials it is made out of into radioactive stuff. While He3/Deuterium fusion is more difficult than Tritium/Deuterium fusion the fact that it doesn't produce many neutrons makes it worth it.
leg. Or at least the part below the knee that I no longer have. This could be a good thing for a lot of people though, I've met a lot of people who have had bone grafts and they're not pleasant (if you think about it bone and graft are two words that just don't go together) and they don't always work.
Another advantage that Amazon has is that they don't have to maintain large amounts of inventory. Amazon works to maximize inventory turns, so when you order a CD from them they'll have it in stock if it's something new and hot, or if not they'll order it from a distributor and then ship it to you. Most people are willing to wait a few days for this. However with physical retail if Tower doesn't have the CD you want you just go down the street to another record store. What I find disturbing is that a lot of really good record stores such as Easy Street Records in Seattle will also get creamed in this trend, which is too bad as the people there really know their music and like customers and make good suggestions, which is a far cry from the teenaged doper mutants that Tower employs.
Now, I rip everything onto my server with 320kbps normal stereo in MP3 or AAC. I do this since I have good speakers on my stereo system and would like to use them to their fullest capacity. But I don't need this for my iPod which I use in the car. So is there a way of converting higher bitrate MP3s or AACs to lower bitrate versions without fucking up the quality? There was an article a few months back in one of the home theatre pornography magazines that I read where the author was talking about the conversion problems between different digital audio formats. A possible solution in the form of a metadata standard that would apply to all formats was mentioned. Being able to have a central store of high bitrate recordings that you could convert to lower bitrate versions without too many artefacts would be handy. There are times, such as when I'm listening to my stereo at home that audio quality is my greatest concern, there are times, such as when I'm on the road, that I just want a bunch of toonz at hand. I mean really, you can never tell when you'll be driving through Oregon and want to listen to some Spade Cooley or Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys only to find that you don't have them on your iPod.
Give up caffeine for a few months and then take it up again. I was recently hospitalized and not allowed for five weeks to have any caffeinated beverages or even chocolate. When my condition changed (they amputated my left leg below the knee and I didn't need to worry about caffeine consumption causing potential circulatory problems any more) I still didn't have anything stronger than a weak cup of tea every now and then. When I got out of the hospital I found that if I had any caffeine after about 5PM I'd be up until 3 in the morning. One freaking can of coke at 8PM would keep me up all night. A grande chai latte would get me buzzing and twitching all day long. I still don't have my caffeine tolerance back and damnit, as a sysadmin I need that almost as much as I needed my left leg.
Running cables under Puget Sound is not as easy as you might think, the sound is rather deep in places, over 900 feet in some areas and with an average depth of 350 feet. Running a cable from somewhere in Seattle such as Alki Point to somewhere in Kitsap County, such as Manchester, is not as easy as running a 50 foot 10BaseT to your basement pr0n server. I realize that you are probably some sort of Peacenik who has grabbed on to "Desert Storm - The Sequel" and the perfidy of the Bush administration and the oil industry as the complete explanation for everything that is wrong with your life, but I have to tell you that at least in this case you're full of shit.
Back in 96' or 97' I can recall a bunch of hype in the public markets for the infamous DEC ALpha.
What was so infamous about the DEC Alpha? I worked for a large e-commerce company that used AlphaServers from the AS1000 up to the big 8400s and they were fast, solid boxes with great storage options. Having 64 bits available for databases was nice and the megahertz of these systems wasn't that bad either. Plus the fact that you got Tru64UNIX which despite some annoyances (most notably problems with AdvFS) had some nice features and was far more pleasant to work with than any variant of Slowlaris that I ever touched. The university where I worked also used a bunch of DEC hardware for number crunching, they were quite happy with them. As far as I can see the Alpha wasn't hyped, the 8400 with a bunch of Storageworks BA-370 arrays smoked everything on the market at the time. It's a pity that DEC's marketing department was run by the people who weren't smart enough to be in their engineering department, otherwise the Alpha architecture might still be alive instead of being discarded by HP.
Yeah, I'm surprised that they aren't selling this on thinkgeek. It's the ideal accessory for a large pr0n collection.
Or imagine this picture being displayed on it.
I think we need to decimate NASA. Since no one at the agency is willing to accept any responsibility for this disaster and since we are never going to get any straight answers out of NASA we need to just assume that the incompetence is collectively distributed and fire one employee in ten, selected at random across all pay grades and all NASA centers.
The fired employees will not be allowed to ever work for the government again, or to work for any government contractor or to work for any state, municipal or local government that is receiving federal funding or to collect any pension or benefits from the federal government. While this might sound harsh the fact remains that they are alive, the Columbia astronauts are dead.
I worked with an MIT graduate with a masters degree in EE who was working on her PhD at the University of Washington and she had never used a soldering iron. Not once in six years at MIT had she picked up a soldering iron and soldered two things together. Her attitude was that you had technicians to do that for you, which I found to be roughly equivalent to a doctor saying "No, I don't know how to draw blood, I have nurses to do that for me."
Now if only the U of Washington would adopt a similar curriculum I'd go back to school and finish my EE degree.
True, if you're exposed to really large doses of alpha particles they'll burn you to death, of course if you were exposed to this amount of alpha particles there would also be a lot of other things around, like gamma rays, neutrons, etc. Like a nuclear explosion, in which case you have other things to worry about.
People working in the WW2 bomb projects do not know of the risks (or does not care) so they were being stupid. Many finally died of cancer.If it is warm to the touch, then it must be radiating like mad.
Yes, it's radiating alpha particles, which cannot penetrate your skin and which are stopped by a sheet of paper. Also while lots of people working on the bomb got cancer lots more didn't. Glenn Seaborg, the discoverer of plutonium, survived to a ripe old age, as did Luis Alvarez, Edward Teller and a whole host of other bomb era luminaries. Sure, some of the Manhattan project members died of cancer, like Robert Oppenheimer, except, whoops, he was a chain smoker, which probably had more to do with his throat cancer than any radioactive exposure did.
The longer the half life has little to do with the danger it poses to you. According to your logic, U-234 (245000 yrs) and U-238 (4.47 Billion years) are as safe as plutonium, both by the way emit Alpha Particles in their decay. It is the amount of radiation that kills you,and if you have a lot of those who cares how slowly is the decay rate.
That's not my "logic". It's a fact. Yes, I am saying that the longer the half life the safer the element. If the half life is long then it takes a long time for the element to decay by emitting particles. If the half life is short then it does not take a long time to decay by emitting particles. If you are standing next to a kilo of U-234 or U-238 you are at less risk than you are standing next to a kilo of Strontium-90, Cesium-137 or Cobalt-60. You will get hit with more particles standing next to something with a short half-life than you will with a long half life. This will fuck you up.
Alpha particles will not penetrate your skin, but you can inahle plutonium and it will then kill you.
Yeah, but it's pretty hard to inhale plutonium, in order for Pu to fuck up your lungs it has to be the right size, if the particles are too big or too small they won't linger in the lungs to cause damage. Again, we've dumped hundreds of pounds of this stuff into the atmosphere and we're still here. So much for Pu toxicity.
Dumping tons of Plutonium into the atmosphere will spread it out, and there's a lot of atmosphere so I am not worried. But I'll like to see you live next to a ton of Plutonium. Do you believe enough in what you say to do that?
I don't want to live next door to a ton of Plutonium, but then I don't want to live next door to a coal burning power plant, or a bunch of windmills, or a gas fired powerplant or downstream from a hydroelectric dam.
If I have the choice between burning fossil fuels to generate the power necessary to transition to a hydrogen economy and generate electricity or using nuclear power I'll choose the nukes thank you very much. Asking me if I want to live next to a ton of plutonium is such a stupid question. Have you ever flown anywhere on an airplane? If so do you want to live in the flight approach pattern to O'Hare international? If you don't then you are obviously an evil hypocrite and everything you say should be modded down accordingly.