Re:Titanium is very hard to work on
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The Sexiest Metal
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· Score: 2
They DO use it for turbine and compressor blades, because it doesn't "creep" like steel-based alloys, especially in turbine blades.
It takes a lot longer to creep out of shape (think of something like putty on a hot day) if you use a Ti based alloy like Nimonic 80 than if you use an iron based alloy to do the same job. Pure titanium is of course not the sort of thing you want in that situation - you want an alloy. Turbine blades cast as a single crystal are also good.
Write to your congressman! Let them know that this is intollerable! If you give monopolies to the cable and telephone companies they'll screw the consumer every time!
That is certainly the case in Australia, where there are two broadband providers, and one of those mostly rents capacity off the other (do a search for something like "telstra broadband charges" for info). Volume charging is the way things are done here, and it sucks enormously. One "broadband" plan offers only 300MB a month before you start to get excess charges - in a very short time you can blow your monthly limit. I'm still on a modem at home for that reason.
This has the potential to cost those who pay by the megabyte a great deal more than spam costs them. Some ISP's charge several dollars per megabyte beyond their set monthly limits, and it doesn't take particularly long (on scale of weeks) to get an extra few hundred dollars worth of traffic sent to you down the slowest connection if they use this in an irresposible manner. I suspect that they will assume that everyone is on an "all you can eat" internet plan, and shuffle the data around assuming that no-one will get hurt by this.
He went nuts and became sort of an embarassing crackpot in his later years, though.
OK - broadcast power, someone had to try it to see how ineffienct it was. Have you ever wondered why all those pencil sketches of broadcast power machines stayed in pencil? On the cutting edge people try all kind of weird ideas that sort of work but are not practical. It appears that a lot of the crackpot stuff was character assaination from other parties. You could get accused of dabbling in black magic at that time simply by being jewish, by being a member of a lodge, or coming from a country with a "z" in it that a lot of odd folk tales come from.
I'll have about 20 CSE courses under my belt when i graduate MSU. then i'll be what i call a "junior engineer."
However, what will a professional body call you?
a hard-core year might do it
Mere mortals do it in four fairly busy years. Remember that the hard core year must also contain a final year thesis, seven or more mathematics subjects, some serious physics, chemistry and thermodynamics, some programming and then all the subjects for the engineering specialty (computers/mechanical/civil/whatever). Those who could do it in a year would be much rarer than MCSE's.
Fears of nuclear power are overblown. Radiation is just like any other pollutant.... etc
An enormous chunk of the same message came up for the tidal power thread. Reposted for big atomic powered karma?
Little known fact, but according to the Lawrence Livermore Nat'l lab, coal power realeases more radiation than nuclear power.
I answered this before on the tidal power thread: sedimentary rock is mildly radioactive, coal is a sedimentary rock, heavy metal oxides don't reduce or vapourise in a coal fired plant (not enough heat or CO) and sink to the bottom in separation, leaving you with something no more radioactive than the average kindergarden sandpit - and nothing in the air apart from those NOx, SOx (if the filtering is crap) and CO2.
Home based solar plants are better than centralized ones for a few reasons
To back up a statement like this you need to use a few numbers - it all depends on how well it scales down and the competing solar and storage technologies - plus other things like siting an enormous plant in the desert versus local supply on the Washington coast (heard it rains a lot there).
No more karma guys, I got big atomic karma replying to an almost identical atomic message before.
I actually *am* an MCSE. I spent the better part of a year learning Windows 2K inside and out
That's one thing I don't like about Microsoft, you studied for less than a year and got to call yourself an Engineer. They'll borrow the prestige of professional titles for fairly trivial ends. What other titles will come next? How much would you have to pay M$ to become a "Microsoft Certified Supreme Court Judge"? OK, silly example, they would pay you in that case.
"Dead Alive" was originally titled "Braindead" and is called that in all english speaking countries outside the USA. Perhaps a nine letter word was too long for a Hollywood Exec. I hope some bastard didn't dub it to give everyone texan accents, or flip the print to put the cars on the other side of the road.
Peter Jackson directed the very funny but very gory "Braindead", and the very funny but quite disgusting "Meet The Feebles". Expect lots of blood and entrails - however I don't think we'll see Sam chopping up goblins with a lawn mover.
but most students are looking for the skills/terminology that will get them the most coin
But who are they to judge when they come out of high school and don't know what the choices are?
Most engineering students would happily avoid mathematics, since the money is elsewhere, but without that knowledge they will not be able to do their jobs any better than someone that has never been to university. A basic education at least as broad as your expected profession is very important - training for a specific position in a specific company may ensure that you'll be driving a taxi once technology or economic factors move on.
LOTR or Harry Potter will never get best picture
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LoTR Takes 4 Oscars
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· Score: 2
all the voters want to show how important and meaningful Hollywood is by choosing the film that's serious and has a meaningful message.
If it's not made in Hollywood it won't get the Oscar - it's surprising enough that LOTR got the awards that it did, especially since the Weta guys are not based in Hollywood. Face it, it's not a global award, but a USA event - if LOTR didn't have an American actor in it then it wouldn't have got a single award - Hollywood funding or not. This in not necessarily a bad thing, but it is something that people should remember each year when the awards come out - it's not award for the best picture in the world but the best picture in the USA.
Seriously, which film is going to be remembered in a couple of years (or really a couple of weeks) - Training Day or Harry Potter?
Best Original Screenplay for "Gosford Park" shows the lack of originality in Hollywood. It must be time for another three asteriod movies, a couple more Robin Hoods released in the same year, or a few more sixties sitcom remakes.
it doesn't really make sense in the context of the post....
Think of it as a ".sig" added onto the end - a sad attempt at humor that is vaguely related to the subject matter, and meant to lighten the venom about a scary bunch that has been involved in a few deaths.
As for mind virus - I mean adding an irrelevant association that will come up each time one of the two things is mentioned.
I could have sworn it was L. Ron Hubbard. Is there some sort of anti-scientology jab there I'm missing?
Mispelled attempt at humor. If I explain it it won't be funny anymore, but here goes:
After seeing how well the Conan books were selling (by L.Sprague de Camp etc) an english lecturer in liguistics named Tolkein wrote a couple of fantasy novels, in which there is a character called "Elrond". Now "Elrond" sounds like L. Ron and.............. I give up
I still don't see it as a religeon of any kind - just a con like magnetic water or any of the other semi-mystical things that have popped out of peoples mouths in the last few decades. Taking a character out of an A.E. Van Vougt short story and saying that it is real and has existed for millenia (and is an evil adversary to something, I couldn't be bothered to listen furthur) does not make a religeon.
My bit for today was to tell a Scientologist handing out "Free Personality Test" leaflets that I think the behavior of their group in the aftermath of September 11 is appalling. There ought to be a law against it - actually, now that I think about about it, there is, and it's called fraud.
Anyway, everyone that reads this has probably read the stuff on xenu.net by now - and about Ron Hubbard's amazing war service (very funny - it's just as well he never got into a war zone or he would have cost the navy lives instead of just resources).
I think it's time to class the scientology a "dangerous sect"
If you consider the mystical ramblings as window dressing the whole thing is just a confidence trick. It's certainly hard to take anyone that calls their critics "suppressive squirrels" seriously - however they have impoverished many and contributed directly to the deaths of others. They would die out (literally) in my country without fresh recruits. Skin cancer is very common here, and scientologists don't let their members get treatment for cancer - they are just supposed to do expensive mediation classes to fix it.
One coolant/moderator being researched for use in fast breeders is helium. A fast breeder using helium would be great. Helium does not become radioactive. A fast breeder using helium would be extremly safe.
That's true, the consequences of failure of such a plant would likely be a lot less than the current plants.
However, I still think things like the wave power generator mentioned in the article, wind, and huge solar plants (eg. solar thermal cracking ammonia in the day and recombining it at night) would be good in the approriate regions for base load - however it would require a bit more control of the power grid than we currently need. Coal is currently the cheapest option for base load in most places (and a lot easier to control output than waves, wind etc - although solar in a desert should give you a predictable output 360 days a year), which is why I keep refering back to it. It's dirty, breathing enough of the dust will kill you if you keep doing it for a few years, and you've got to put in some effort to keep all the NOx and SOx out of the atmosphere - but since everyone accepts all of the above it gets done, and the only remaining problem is the carbon dioxide. The nuclear power industry still has a few problems to solve - I think they should have solved a few more before they solved their public relations problems.
Actualy, even with that factored in, it's still very cheap... That includes ALL operating costs.
The problem here is that ecomonics of running nuclear power plants has all been skewed by large government handouts - and then relased as advertising material. I tend to believe the figures that came out of the UK a bit more than those about nuclear power plants in marginal electorates in the USA - in the UK it appears that they've made a bit more financial information available. In the USA, nuclear power has spent too many years being promoted as the nice, fluffy, peaceful spinoff of nuclear weapons, and has not had to stand on it's own merits like in the UK. Like it or not, it seems that for many years nuclear power in "in the national interest" of the USA and has been financially protected as such.
The pebble bed reactor is modular and provides 110 MW of power
In other words, hardly anything - there's a baby off peak hydro down the road from me that has two 350MW turbines.
Breeders are already seeing service in France
Look up some info about one that was decomissioned in France a couple of years back - I can't recall how many workers died. It isn't listed as a nuclear accident since the sodium killed them, and not radiation.
BTW, if I made a typo, just tell me about it. I do that a lot. I'll correct myself.
Good stuff about the fast breeder reactors - I just don't think your sources are correct about the economic costs.
The Chernobyl reactor was a crappy commie RBMK reactor with no containment building
After the steam explosion there was no roof remaining in the containment building.
Little known fact, but according to the Lawrence Livermore Nat'l lab, coal power realeases more radiation than nuclear power
Here we go again - the advertising of the AEC has won another convert. Here's how you get numbers like those:
First, you consider a new, well run nuclear power plant with on site storage of all radioactive materials. The radiation output of such a plant should be zero. Then you measure the entire world consumption of coal, work out how much radioactive material there would be on average in all of that coal, and you get a large number. Compare the ratio of the two and you get an infinite amount. Everyone would probably agree that this is a very silly way to do a comparison.
So why is the coal radioactive? Sedimentary rock is made up of other rock that has been ground down, and then laid down as sediment - you have a wide mix of minerals in such rock. As a consequence, if you consider a large amount of any sedimentary rock you will find some radioactive material present - this is one of the sources of natural background radiation. So, if you go a step furthur, and consider VAST amounts of coal, oil or even foodstuffs, you will find large amounts of radioactive material. The difference between the radioactivity in a childs sandpit, an ash storage dam at a coal fired power plant and the lowest grade of nuclear waste to merit special storage is that of concentration of radioactive material. It would probably be extemely difficult to distingish the radioactivity in an ash heap from the background radiation.
we realease around 150 thousand tons of uranium and 350 thousand tons of thorium into the atmosphere
Now the odd thing about heavy metals that people tend to forget, is that they are heavy. The cheapest form of anti-pollution equipment in a power station is to let the solid particles fall out by gravity - if you look at fifty year old plants they have at least that in place. The major material that is trapped in this process is silicon dioxide, and usually the aim is to trap extremely fine (sub-micron sized) particles of silicon dioxide. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to calculate the size of a uranium oxide particle that would weigh the same as a micron sized silicon dioxide particle - but I can tell you that it is very unlikely to get such a small chunk of material without trying very hard to get it.
In short - if gravity seperation catches the light stuff it also gets the heavy stuff.
Nuclear power is also cheap
The situation with British Nuclear Fuels argues the opposite. I can't recall the exact number of hundreds of billions of pounds sterling they recently announced that they had lost - but a quick google search should tell. All of those rare earths used in the equipmnet are not cheap - plus none of the radiation resistant steels or iron based superalloys are cheap.
With some new tech, they have gotten the cost of some nuclear power plants below the cost of coal.
I think you will find that this should read "with a new government subsity." Anyone can make a profit if an outside source keeps shovelling in money.
Each plant only uses several tons pounds of uranium a year. That would fit in an area just a few feet square.
Therin lies the problem - a concentrated source of radioactivity. Comparing this to a beach full of sand or a hundred ash heaps is missing the point.
Nuclear waste storage is very good.
A google search will turn up dozens of incidents where the clueless have done silly things with nuclear waste - things like poorly trained staff stacking all of the drums very close together - so that everything gets nice and hot, and kids finding highly radioactive material form the USA in a dump in Mexico. It's the idiots that say "it's clean" that cause perception problems. We have the stuff, and use the stuff, but we should never pretend that it's clean.
No real management is going to take this seriously.
Yes, but what if you work in a place that doesn't have real management - just someone that follows that latest fad and bounces from one failure to the next.
Maybe you call your boss to see if he knows anything about this, and more likely than not your boss hasn't been informed, because the message has been lost in the corporate fog. Or maybe he has been informed, but he's in the bathroom and you can't get him on the phone.
So you wait until someone that has a clue can turn up. You can just keep the guy until the plane goes if you have to, the airline would certainly be happier about that than court action over injuries incurred and equipment damage as the result of a search. I suspect that the guys involved will have some sort of disiplinary action taken against them as soon as the legal costs start to come in.
"We don't tell the security firms that there is going to be an exception made," said Nicole Couture-Simard, a spokeswoman for Air Canada. "We don't have that authority."
It looks like it's time for them to to hire another security company. The tendancy to subcontract, then point the blame at the subcontractor only works in the playground - in the real world the person that gives the orders has to wear the blame. In this case we don't have a clue which security company it was, but the airline's name is mud.
Slashdot Mirror
I've got a degree in Engineering, specialising in Metallurgy and I can't say it better than what's above - so mod the parent up guys.
This has the potential to cost those who pay by the megabyte a great deal more than spam costs them. Some ISP's charge several dollars per megabyte beyond their set monthly limits, and it doesn't take particularly long (on scale of weeks) to get an extra few hundred dollars worth of traffic sent to you down the slowest connection if they use this in an irresposible manner. I suspect that they will assume that everyone is on an "all you can eat" internet plan, and shuffle the data around assuming that no-one will get hurt by this.
No more karma guys, I got big atomic karma replying to an almost identical atomic message before.
"Dead Alive" was originally titled "Braindead" and is called that in all english speaking countries outside the USA. Perhaps a nine letter word was too long for a Hollywood Exec. I hope some bastard didn't dub it to give everyone texan accents, or flip the print to put the cars on the other side of the road.
Peter Jackson directed the very funny but very gory "Braindead", and the very funny but quite disgusting "Meet The Feebles". Expect lots of blood and entrails - however I don't think we'll see Sam chopping up goblins with a lawn mover.
Most engineering students would happily avoid mathematics, since the money is elsewhere, but without that knowledge they will not be able to do their jobs any better than someone that has never been to university. A basic education at least as broad as your expected profession is very important - training for a specific position in a specific company may ensure that you'll be driving a taxi once technology or economic factors move on.
Seriously, which film is going to be remembered in a couple of years (or really a couple of weeks) - Training Day or Harry Potter?
Best Original Screenplay for "Gosford Park" shows the lack of originality in Hollywood. It must be time for another three asteriod movies, a couple more Robin Hoods released in the same year, or a few more sixties sitcom remakes.
As for mind virus - I mean adding an irrelevant association that will come up each time one of the two things is mentioned.
After seeing how well the Conan books were selling (by L.Sprague de Camp etc) an english lecturer in liguistics named Tolkein wrote a couple of fantasy novels, in which there is a character called "Elrond". Now "Elrond" sounds like L. Ron and .............. I give up
My bit for today was to tell a Scientologist handing out "Free Personality Test" leaflets that I think the behavior of their group in the aftermath of September 11 is appalling. There ought to be a law against it - actually, now that I think about about it, there is, and it's called fraud.
Anyway, everyone that reads this has probably read the stuff on xenu.net by now - and about Ron Hubbard's amazing war service (very funny - it's just as well he never got into a war zone or he would have cost the navy lives instead of just resources).
DANGER - MIND VIRUS BELOW
Elrond Hubberd
END OF MIND VIRUS
However, I still think things like the wave power generator mentioned in the article, wind, and huge solar plants (eg. solar thermal cracking ammonia in the day and recombining it at night) would be good in the approriate regions for base load - however it would require a bit more control of the power grid than we currently need. Coal is currently the cheapest option for base load in most places (and a lot easier to control output than waves, wind etc - although solar in a desert should give you a predictable output 360 days a year), which is why I keep refering back to it. It's dirty, breathing enough of the dust will kill you if you keep doing it for a few years, and you've got to put in some effort to keep all the NOx and SOx out of the atmosphere - but since everyone accepts all of the above it gets done, and the only remaining problem is the carbon dioxide. The nuclear power industry still has a few problems to solve - I think they should have solved a few more before they solved their public relations problems.
First, you consider a new, well run nuclear power plant with on site storage of all radioactive materials. The radiation output of such a plant should be zero. Then you measure the entire world consumption of coal, work out how much radioactive material there would be on average in all of that coal, and you get a large number. Compare the ratio of the two and you get an infinite amount. Everyone would probably agree that this is a very silly way to do a comparison.
So why is the coal radioactive? Sedimentary rock is made up of other rock that has been ground down, and then laid down as sediment - you have a wide mix of minerals in such rock. As a consequence, if you consider a large amount of any sedimentary rock you will find some radioactive material present - this is one of the sources of natural background radiation. So, if you go a step furthur, and consider VAST amounts of coal, oil or even foodstuffs, you will find large amounts of radioactive material. The difference between the radioactivity in a childs sandpit, an ash storage dam at a coal fired power plant and the lowest grade of nuclear waste to merit special storage is that of concentration of radioactive material. It would probably be extemely difficult to distingish the radioactivity in an ash heap from the background radiation.
Now the odd thing about heavy metals that people tend to forget, is that they are heavy. The cheapest form of anti-pollution equipment in a power station is to let the solid particles fall out by gravity - if you look at fifty year old plants they have at least that in place. The major material that is trapped in this process is silicon dioxide, and usually the aim is to trap extremely fine (sub-micron sized) particles of silicon dioxide. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to calculate the size of a uranium oxide particle that would weigh the same as a micron sized silicon dioxide particle - but I can tell you that it is very unlikely to get such a small chunk of material without trying very hard to get it.In short - if gravity seperation catches the light stuff it also gets the heavy stuff.
The situation with British Nuclear Fuels argues the opposite. I can't recall the exact number of hundreds of billions of pounds sterling they recently announced that they had lost - but a quick google search should tell. All of those rare earths used in the equipmnet are not cheap - plus none of the radiation resistant steels or iron based superalloys are cheap. I think you will find that this should read "with a new government subsity." Anyone can make a profit if an outside source keeps shovelling in money. Therin lies the problem - a concentrated source of radioactivity. Comparing this to a beach full of sand or a hundred ash heaps is missing the point. A google search will turn up dozens of incidents where the clueless have done silly things with nuclear waste - things like poorly trained staff stacking all of the drums very close together - so that everything gets nice and hot, and kids finding highly radioactive material form the USA in a dump in Mexico. It's the idiots that say "it's clean" that cause perception problems. We have the stuff, and use the stuff, but we should never pretend that it's clean.