But if we'd never left the oceans, the Giant Canada geese, cows, horses, rats, squirrels, corn, rice, wheat, dogs, and cats wouldn't have been able to train us to take care of them.
Top secret quantum computer? The one made by Microsoft?
No, not that one. The one which Microsoft doesn't even know the source code for. They just plugged it in and because it began working, it had solved the problem of its own programming.
It only works successfully because they haven't tried to fix it, and as soon as they look at the code it will quit working because that is now the predetermined outcome.
The computer resovles directly to the actual outcome and prints your final score. This allows you to play more Quake than ever before possible, without wasting any of your valuable real life time.
Unfortunately, this just means that a quantum computer quickly determines if you won or lost. It doesn't help you play any better nor worse, merely to calculate your ranking faster.
Of course, you have to use the mod which lets you carry around sealed boxes which you open whenever you meet an opponent. You can play faster with Smell-O-Vision, as you can tell faster if a cat is dead or not.
(Yes, I intentionally phrased it so it is ambiguous whether it resembles a celebration of MS-Windows' long leadership, or of recent attempts directed at Linux)
"...a doctor is nothing more than a walking database."
But a doctor also has medical experience which the untrained do not have. The application of information is as important as the information.
When a doctor presses your abdomen during a simple physical, it's because the doctor has learned how several organs are supposed to feel. A doctor has seen many normal moles and can tell you if your moles look normal (even if not knowing what all skin cancers look like, the wider experience of normality is relevant). A human medical technician knows how injections feel and how to find a vein or artery. A human doctor can apply normal human brain power -- the first patient with reversed organ position may be a surprise, but a human mind can deal with such situations easily.
If the vehicle is used to bring down astronauts which are already in orbit, they don't have to fit in the three-foot packing box.
There are decades-old designs for inflatable reentry craft, particularly for emergency use. They were considered for Skylab, if that had become a permanent station. They've also been considered for the ISS, but a solid lifeboat was approved -- until it was cancelled.
The simplest design resembles a foil-covered cone, with one or two astronauts at the apex...and a small deceleration rocket someplace. The rocket is most easily used before inflating the reentry vehicle, but then you're committed to reentry whether your shield inflates properly or not.
Maybe "gummy" or "viscous" or "soft"? Like putty. But not Silly Putty which is non-newtonian -- if you hit it hard you bounce rather than penetrate.
How about Nerf? But it might not be so "squishy" in a vacuum, particularly if the soft foam has volatiles which evaporate. But you just want to slow down an impacting object - if it embeds itself that's fine, but merely slowing it will also help the junk fall from orbit sooner.
A disc might not be the right design. Just a balloon full of honey or syrup. "This Orbit Clearance Service Uses And Paid For By Jello"
Actually, you'd need to use a material which is not too volatile. When exposed to vacuum the material should not boil away nor have the surface harden so it can not be penetrated easily enough. Not that an object hitting at orbital speeds will be easy to stop from penetrating...
There is an awful lot of empty space up there, so the odds of hitting anything is small. But if there is indeed a 1% chance of a satellite being destroyed in a year, there must be an awful lot of junk. A Space Shuttle can carry up a 15-foot by 90-foot cargo, which could create a rather large absorbent blob. Especially if you use balloons full of foam and create the foam from much smaller liquids, so the 15x90 volume gets multiplied to a much larger volume.
You simply don't use a circular orbit. You don't want to clear just a particular spot anyway, your target is actually a swath ---- so just use an orbit which crosses from the bottom of the swath to the top. This orbit will be sometimes faster and sometimes slower than objects in circular orbit.
Not that it matters too much. How much junk is in a precisely circular orbit?
I believe that a lawyer who represented you in court could be considered to have a "prior business relationship" with you. Even if you'd never met, and all he had was your fax number.
If you're in the group, he represents you. Unless you opt out. I believe that's how class action tends to work.
Let's not let facts interfere too much with the arguing.
He issued the "accidental criticality" incantation, which is nicely vague yet sounds authoritative. He's inviting us to prove that something can't happen -- that an accident is impossible.
Many things are quite unlikely but not impossible...it isn't likely that an earthquake will crush the mountain into gravel in three years (soon enough that even medical Cesium devices will still be active), then shake all the pieces violently and happen to slam together enough high-radiation stuff to start a reaction which does anything interesting. It's hard enough to properly design and build a nuclear reactor, much less a fission weapon, much less it all happening by accident. Especially when, as you said, there isn't going to be much fissionable stuff there.
I do know most of the "waste" has low level radioactivity and it is intended that high-level material will be surrounded by low-level containers. I'm more worried about our exposures to uncontrolled natural radiation than about this stuff which has been isolated and removed from the environment.
I'm also aware that whatever interesting material does get buried will be known, and I would not be at all surprised if in a few decades Yucca mountain is mined and material is extracted for newly discovered uses. This will also remove more radioactive material from the pile, and refilling Yucca then resets the clock on things like the age of containers.
And as I've said before, if a new civilization goes poking around Yucca without knowing about it, the dangers are minimal. They're not going to gather their millions/billions of members around a handful of glowing mounds and wipe themselves out. More people would be killed in whatever industrial activity is needed to penetrate Yucca than in accidental deaths from Yucca radioactive material. Fortunately a civilization at the level of the Industrial Age, which would be able to quickly mine such a large installation, should also recognize dangers of, and quickly find the cause of, radiation poisoning. So the greatest danger is a primitive civilization which slowly mines the area manually and distributes material while it is still dangerous. Most members of a primitive society would have such short lifetimes that they'd die before cancers are likely, so the high-level radiation is the danger. Fortunately most of the high-level stuff is short lived. As I've said before, when we seal Yucca we can make sure it will be hard for a primitive group to open it for the first several hundred years. Camouflage, barriers, deception, and booby traps will stall simple primitives. More difficult deterrents further in can slow those who penetrate further...particularly if they've started from a deception tunnel placed there to entice attack there rather than random mining in the area. I've also suggested the last protection be a kilotons-level bomb which will kill leaders of a decades-long penetration and reseal the top of the mountain (all this far above the actual dump). The bomb will cease to function eventually as its fuel ages, just as the buried waste will have aged. Before the bomb can be warning chambers which will warn away an advanced civilization...or at least inform them enough to proceed safely.
Earthquakes might simply shake the rock surrounding the site, which would rattle around any loose objects. Waste containers will be surrounded by hard material and won't rattle around if they're in a filled tunnel. Only stuff in a tunnel which is being filled could roll around.
If an earthquake causes fracture of rock around a storage tunnel, the rock could slip and try to crack a storage container. Only those storage containers along the crack are at risk. If many cracks appear, the rock motion becomes less like a scissors and more like a mountain full of marbles, where the forces on the containers become pressure rather than shear. The forces then are much less, and containers become more at risk with extreme age...when the waste is less dangerous.
Most of the waste has little radiation. A filter or mop that has a few radioactive particles or pieces of steel which were part of nuclear equipment. Something would have to concentrate the radioactive material to make it more dangerous.
Radioactive material can be concentrated by natural action. If containers are broken open, the "accidental criticality" referred to can happen if a lot of highly-radioactive material gets crushed together (unlikely) or that material is somehow concentrated. The most likely means is through water trickling through broken containers, with acid and alkaline water dissolving various materials, carrying them to one spot, and depositing radioactive material in high density. Yucca Mountain is rather dry, so water from the surface is not likely to be a problem. There is argument as to where the water table is. This process requires many broken containers which are exposed to something like water...and bad luck of concentration rather than scattering.
Accidental criticality has happened in nature One ancient nuclear reactor has been found, where a stream concentrated natural ores. Is it better to leave radioactive material laying around in its natural state where uncontrolled things happen to it?
That natural reactor did not create a crater, just made rock around it more radioactive. Accidental concentration underground won't necessarily explode. Before explosive criticality is reached, heat will build up and alter the situation which was depositing the material. Junior-high school chemistry teaches some of the ways in which temperature or convection currents can affect material in solution.
Before anything happens to the stored material, we might have dug it up and reused it. Reset the clock.
"If a terrorist had a TOW missile, he could do a lot more damage than firing it into a nuclear waste dump... And that's the truth - been there, done that."
Wasn't the test with explosive on a cask actually done with an old design, different than the one used in the USA? As someone else mentioned, the transport casks are double-walled. The outer wall is there specifically to divert the energy of a bomb or impact.
And even if a cask got broken open, it probably only has solid fuel pellets. The cleanup crew just needs proper suits and shovels to pick it all up...along with some of the dirt just to ensure safety. It would be messier if some liquid spills, but it's still no Hiroshima -- although go right ahead and build a pretty park for everyone to visit the site, just as in Hiroshima. The parking lot will be covered with concrete, not glowing glass.
Hitting a storage cask with a missile can easily be made safer -- build a cheap sheet metal building around each group of casks. A wall detonates most missiles, and it's hard to aim at a cask through a wall.
There were suggestions published that solid structures be built to protect the storage casks against impacts and explosions. Wrong. Hit a group of storage casks with an airplane and they'll just roll away like marbles. The casks should be as they are, sitting on a flat open space with nothing nearby that they can be pushed against. A weak steel structure around them won't stop them from rolling through if necessary.
(Anyone arguing about breaking a steel object should pick up a piece of quarter-inch plate steel a couple of feet long on each side and try to do anything to it. Then imagine it several inches thick. Oh, yeah.. Lay it on the floor and post pictures of your first attempt at picking it up with your hands.)
Shouldn't those figures include coal power in the "nuclear" category? Coal plants have exposed people to 100 times more radiation than nuclear plants.Here's one source, you can find many sources for the amount of radioactive materials in coal.
I don't know how much radioactive dust passes through a wind generator:-)
You did not say whether your laptop is using chemical batteries or plutonium thermal batteries. You also did not define what you consider to be a "better" quality of a source.
Of course, the Club of Rome in the 1970s knew where Malthus had made mistakes. According to their "Limits To Growth", we ran out of oil...um.. now. Good thing my wife filled up the gas tank yesterday.
We don't all have to go there. They're saying that for everyone to use the largest number of acreage to support them, we need the surface area of two more planets to support them. So we just need those planets to be full of farms and industry, not people.
Fortunately, smaller rocks have a lot more surface area than the same weight of large rocks. We can use a bunch of asteroids instead. Flatten them for more surface area (no, not Ringworld -- we don't have a material strong enough for that).
Slashdot Mirror
But if we'd never left the oceans, the Giant Canada geese, cows, horses, rats, squirrels, corn, rice, wheat, dogs, and cats wouldn't have been able to train us to take care of them.
How do these restricted reading technologies make the material available to everyone when copyright expires?
The one made by Microsoft?
No, not that one. The one which Microsoft doesn't even know the source code for. They just plugged it in and because it began working, it had solved the problem of its own programming.
It only works successfully because they haven't tried to fix it, and as soon as they look at the code it will quit working because that is now the predetermined outcome.
Unfortunately, this just means that a quantum computer quickly determines if you won or lost. It doesn't help you play any better nor worse, merely to calculate your ranking faster.
Of course, you have to use the mod which lets you carry around sealed boxes which you open whenever you meet an opponent. You can play faster with Smell-O-Vision, as you can tell faster if a cat is dead or not.
(Yes, I intentionally phrased it so it is ambiguous whether it resembles a celebration of MS-Windows' long leadership, or of recent attempts directed at Linux)
But a doctor also has medical experience which the untrained do not have. The application of information is as important as the information.
When a doctor presses your abdomen during a simple physical, it's because the doctor has learned how several organs are supposed to feel. A doctor has seen many normal moles and can tell you if your moles look normal (even if not knowing what all skin cancers look like, the wider experience of normality is relevant). A human medical technician knows how injections feel and how to find a vein or artery. A human doctor can apply normal human brain power -- the first patient with reversed organ position may be a surprise, but a human mind can deal with such situations easily.
Define "basic research".
There are decades-old designs for inflatable reentry craft, particularly for emergency use. They were considered for Skylab, if that had become a permanent station. They've also been considered for the ISS, but a solid lifeboat was approved -- until it was cancelled.
The simplest design resembles a foil-covered cone, with one or two astronauts at the apex...and a small deceleration rocket someplace. The rocket is most easily used before inflating the reentry vehicle, but then you're committed to reentry whether your shield inflates properly or not.
Did your airbag inflate faster than the spacecraft deflated?
We're Number One! We're Number One! We're Num... oh. Never mind.
We know how to move planets. "Venus Flytrap" is when we put Venus in Earth orbit and use it to clean up the orbital debris.
I think Venus covers a large enough volume that it should clean up a lot of the junk.
How about Nerf? But it might not be so "squishy" in a vacuum, particularly if the soft foam has volatiles which evaporate. But you just want to slow down an impacting object - if it embeds itself that's fine, but merely slowing it will also help the junk fall from orbit sooner.
A disc might not be the right design. Just a balloon full of honey or syrup. "This Orbit Clearance Service Uses And Paid For By Jello"
Actually, you'd need to use a material which is not too volatile. When exposed to vacuum the material should not boil away nor have the surface harden so it can not be penetrated easily enough. Not that an object hitting at orbital speeds will be easy to stop from penetrating...
There is an awful lot of empty space up there, so the odds of hitting anything is small. But if there is indeed a 1% chance of a satellite being destroyed in a year, there must be an awful lot of junk. A Space Shuttle can carry up a 15-foot by 90-foot cargo, which could create a rather large absorbent blob. Especially if you use balloons full of foam and create the foam from much smaller liquids, so the 15x90 volume gets multiplied to a much larger volume.
Not that it matters too much. How much junk is in a precisely circular orbit?
If you're in the group, he represents you. Unless you opt out. I believe that's how class action tends to work.
He issued the "accidental criticality" incantation, which is nicely vague yet sounds authoritative. He's inviting us to prove that something can't happen -- that an accident is impossible.
Many things are quite unlikely but not impossible...it isn't likely that an earthquake will crush the mountain into gravel in three years (soon enough that even medical Cesium devices will still be active), then shake all the pieces violently and happen to slam together enough high-radiation stuff to start a reaction which does anything interesting. It's hard enough to properly design and build a nuclear reactor, much less a fission weapon, much less it all happening by accident. Especially when, as you said, there isn't going to be much fissionable stuff there.
I do know most of the "waste" has low level radioactivity and it is intended that high-level material will be surrounded by low-level containers. I'm more worried about our exposures to uncontrolled natural radiation than about this stuff which has been isolated and removed from the environment.
I'm also aware that whatever interesting material does get buried will be known, and I would not be at all surprised if in a few decades Yucca mountain is mined and material is extracted for newly discovered uses. This will also remove more radioactive material from the pile, and refilling Yucca then resets the clock on things like the age of containers.
And as I've said before, if a new civilization goes poking around Yucca without knowing about it, the dangers are minimal. They're not going to gather their millions/billions of members around a handful of glowing mounds and wipe themselves out. More people would be killed in whatever industrial activity is needed to penetrate Yucca than in accidental deaths from Yucca radioactive material. Fortunately a civilization at the level of the Industrial Age, which would be able to quickly mine such a large installation, should also recognize dangers of, and quickly find the cause of, radiation poisoning. So the greatest danger is a primitive civilization which slowly mines the area manually and distributes material while it is still dangerous. Most members of a primitive society would have such short lifetimes that they'd die before cancers are likely, so the high-level radiation is the danger. Fortunately most of the high-level stuff is short lived. As I've said before, when we seal Yucca we can make sure it will be hard for a primitive group to open it for the first several hundred years. Camouflage, barriers, deception, and booby traps will stall simple primitives. More difficult deterrents further in can slow those who penetrate further...particularly if they've started from a deception tunnel placed there to entice attack there rather than random mining in the area. I've also suggested the last protection be a kilotons-level bomb which will kill leaders of a decades-long penetration and reseal the top of the mountain (all this far above the actual dump). The bomb will cease to function eventually as its fuel ages, just as the buried waste will have aged. Before the bomb can be warning chambers which will warn away an advanced civilization...or at least inform them enough to proceed safely.
Wow. Where'd you get the TOW missile?
And even if a cask got broken open, it probably only has solid fuel pellets. The cleanup crew just needs proper suits and shovels to pick it all up...along with some of the dirt just to ensure safety. It would be messier if some liquid spills, but it's still no Hiroshima -- although go right ahead and build a pretty park for everyone to visit the site, just as in Hiroshima. The parking lot will be covered with concrete, not glowing glass.
Hitting a storage cask with a missile can easily be made safer -- build a cheap sheet metal building around each group of casks. A wall detonates most missiles, and it's hard to aim at a cask through a wall.
There were suggestions published that solid structures be built to protect the storage casks against impacts and explosions. Wrong. Hit a group of storage casks with an airplane and they'll just roll away like marbles. The casks should be as they are, sitting on a flat open space with nothing nearby that they can be pushed against. A weak steel structure around them won't stop them from rolling through if necessary.
(Anyone arguing about breaking a steel object should pick up a piece of quarter-inch plate steel a couple of feet long on each side and try to do anything to it. Then imagine it several inches thick. Oh, yeah.. Lay it on the floor and post pictures of your first attempt at picking it up with your hands.)
I don't know how much radioactive dust passes through a wind generator :-)
You did not say whether your laptop is using chemical batteries or plutonium thermal batteries. You also did not define what you consider to be a "better" quality of a source.
Well, I charge all the change that you have. I see it as a positive charge.
Of course, the Club of Rome in the 1970s knew where Malthus had made mistakes. According to their "Limits To Growth", we ran out of oil...um.. now. Good thing my wife filled up the gas tank yesterday.
Fortunately, smaller rocks have a lot more surface area than the same weight of large rocks. We can use a bunch of asteroids instead. Flatten them for more surface area (no, not Ringworld -- we don't have a material strong enough for that).
Copyrights are for a limited time. That's written on a piece of parchment somewhere.
So how will DRM allow me to access this stuff when the copyright expires?