Yes folks, in the article, our Mac boy states that he sold the laptop to videopro55, who contacted him with an offer for $2900. That's outside of the eBay auction, and directly in violation of eBay policy to sell outside of auction. It's not fair to the people who placed bids (he said there were bids on it already) on the laptop...one of them won it, right?
I missed that part of it when I read the article. Yeah.... Just goes to show, like the old saying, "You can't cheat an honest man." Like the "419" scams; the people who bite on that think they're involved in smuggling, money laundering, getting a piece of money some third-world kleptocrat robbed from his starving people. What they think they're doing is something they know is illegal. It's hard to feel too sorry for them. (Still, someone does need to whack the scammers.)
(1) We already have all those tons of radioactive waste. Blocking all long-term storage of radioactive waste is not going to make all those already existing tons of radioactive waste just go away. Implementing long-term storage is not "optional". We have to do it. Period. We made it necessary decades ago.
(2) 1000 years from now, the stuff will not be all that radioactive. The fission products will have all decayed. What's left is the long-lived transuranics. "Long half life" is exactly the same thing as "weakly radioactive". The thing of most concern is plutonium, assuming we're locked into so stupidly wasteful a fuel cycle as one which buries this valuable fuel. The best disposal of plutonium is to burn it up in new fuel rods.
Even if the plutonium is mindlessly squandered by burying it with the waste, and someone drills a core sample into it 1000 years from now, what are they going to get? The wastes are solidified and mixed into molten glass or ceramic, and cast as solid, inert, insoluble lumps. Their core sample will bring up a cylinder of somewhat radioactive glass. The drilling process will, no doubt, produce some powdered, somewhat radioactive glass. But it's still locked into the glass.
It won't be anything like as radioactive as the fission products in fresh waste. Those will be pretty much gone. We're not talking "kill you if you're in the same room with it", we're talking "you might get cancer in 30 years if you eat it." But even then, only if you dissolve the glass in hydrofluoric acid, neutralize it so the hydrofluoric acid doesn't kill you dead first, and then eat it.
(3) Since we have to implement long-term storage anyway, once we've got the repository, there's no reason not to continue to use it.
You don't need to put up warnings that last for tens of thousands of years. That's nonsense. Use the French process, which removes almost all the plutonium from the waste. Plutonium is not waste, it is valuable fuel - burn it up in reactors making more electricity. Without the plutonium, the waste pretty much falls into two categories: short-lived highly radioactive fission products, and weakly radioactive long-lived transuranics. In about 500 years, the fission products are pretty much gone, and the remaining radioactivity in the waste is about as much as that of the ore the uranium was mined from. If you separate out all the transuranics and burn them in reactors, the situation gets even better.
Even if the plutonium were left there, what are the hypothetical miners 10,000 years from now going to find? Concrete vaults. OOo, interesting, break one open. What's inside. Steel casks. OOOoooo, fascinating, crack that open. Repeat a few times until they get to the center -- and what have they found? Beer-can sized cylinders of somewhat radioactive solid glass. Huh? That's not very interesting, and not worth anything. Even if they don't know about radioactivity (and how could they not, if they have the technological sophistication to dig this deeply?) they'd have to extract the plutonium out of its suspension in the solid chunks of glass to be seriously endangered by it.
When you provide a powerful experience to a disbeliever, (such as knocking them on their asses by tapping their crown Chakra, pointing to a plane dispersing a chem-trail, Dream walking into their sleep and describing to them in detail their dream the next day, knocking over a chair or lighting a candle with focused Chi, etc.)
If you can actually do any of this, why don't you go take that one million dollars that James Randi has put up saying there's no such thing? Have lots of cameras around and make sure you've got it all on tape if you don't trust him.
Hmm... I think if you get enough ionizing radiation to "feel mighty warm" (a paper I read soon after the 1987A supernova said neutrino interactions averaged about 1MeV) you'd likely be dead before you could perceive the heat.
Back then, there was an article saying that people on Earth averaged one or two neutrino interactions in their bodies just from 1987A. Based on that, the energy of the interaction, and the good old inverse square law, I figured you'd get a lethal dose of radiation (500 REMs) at about 12 AU from the supernova. At Earth's distance, it might even be enough to kill you before the blast vaporizes you.
I've since similar numbers in other places, so I guess I didn't drop a decimal point anywhere.
Preventing beamed power accidents
on
Lunar Power
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· Score: 2
What happens when the aiming device gets hit by a meteor, and the microwaves fry some poor shmuck? oops.
The solution to that is to have the oscillator necessary to produce the microwave beam here on Earth, powered by a tap off the microwaves coming down. If the power transmitter doesn't get that signal, it can't make microwaves. And if the power beam wanders off the receiver, the power goes off on the transmitter that's sending that signal.
You have give the transmitter local power for startup, like that button you hold down on your water heater to bypass the safety valve on the pilot light until it heats up.
I don't want a microwave oven that goes strictly by time, whether I punch a time in or it reads the time off the package. I just want an oven that I put the food in, press the button, and it dings when the food is done.
All of 'em seem to have hot and cold spots, even with a turntable. Can't they be made to distribute the microwaves more evenly?
For defrosting, is there a wavelength of microwaves which is moderately absorbed by ice, and absorbed by water very little? Normal microwaves are more absorbed by liquid water than ice; the first part to thaw gets cooked while the rest stays frozen.
(The FCC, of course, has say-so about what frequencies you can use. I suspect ovens use frequencies determined by other factors than what's best for cooking. Perhaps rules could be relaxed for ovens designed to keep the microwaves inside better?)
Best of all would be if there was a way to sweep a beam of microwaves around the oven, and detect the temperature of the food in the beam. Concentrate the beam on the cold spots. Set a temperature, and it dings when the entire object is evenly heated to that temperature, without having to mess around with probes.
Combine with a convection oven and maybe one of those GE "cooking with light" things to brown the surface if desired.
There just aren't many sites I would sign up for a subscription to.
However, there are lots of sites I would pay a nickel to read if I had some reason (a link, a google reference) to think it had the information I wanted.
I used to use 555-1212.com about once every other month to do a reverse phone number lookup. I would happily pay a nickel, or a quarter, to do a lookup. Maybe even a dollar. Then they went to a subscription, and I have not used them since. There just ain't no way I am going to pay $10/month for a subscription; that's $20 per lookup! My "Reverse phone number lookup" bookmark now points to a competitor who still provides free lookups.
Speaking of Google, here's a bigger flaw in the pay-for-surf model: How do you find stuff you are looking for? Sites that require a subscription to reference obviously aren't going to be indexed, so even if the site had something I wanted and would pay for, how am I going to find it?
What's the big holdup with micropayments? It's been "Real Soon Now" for a lot of years.
Someone could make it automatic - poison the spam lists with some addresses which, if they receive email, instantly start up a DDOS against the source of the email. Perhaps even shutting down the spam spew while it's in progress.
My own personal fantasy is a virus, the payload of which triggers on the presence of known spamware on the infected machine. When spamware is running, it intercepts outgoing port 25 and simulates an SMTP transaction, while actually doing nothing.
However, the disk is fast enough to keep up with reading and writing a program simultaneously, so you can still "watch one thing and record another" if the "one thing" is something you recorded previously.
I'm told some of the Tivo systems have two tuners, and Dish is supposedly coming out with a system "real soon now" which will have dual tuners. Then you can (I assume) record two things while watching a third that you recorded previously.
Price? VCRs were hugely popular when they cost far more than the current under-$300 price of Tivo and Dish PVR.
Ease of use? I can't say for sure about Tivo, but the Dish 501 -- You can't get easier. Assuming your dish is already installed, you plug the 501 in and it sets its own time. Press "Guide" and you get a program guide. Move the cursor around and pick a program. Press "Record" and it will be recorded. Press the PVR button to see a list of your previously recorded programs, by name.
I'd be surprised if Tivo was much different. Of course, the Tivo has a lot more features for finding things you "might" be interested in.
Maybe the $10/month charge is enough of an annoyance to turn people off -- there isn't any charge (other than your regular satellite subscription) for Dish's PVR501.
I still have the VCR for rented tapes, but the PVR completely changes the way I watch TV. Rather than look for something I'm interested in, and maybe ending up watching something I don't care much for just because it's the least offensive thing on at the moment, I have the last 30 hour or so of stuff that looked interesting enough that I clicked "Sure, record this" in the program guide.
I almost never watch "off the air" any more - And I don't see many commercials any more, not even in fast forward, by use of the "forward 30sec" and "back 10sec" buttons.
Even when watching off the air, you can use the "back 10 sec" button for instant replays, or pause the show. This is a feature you get used to real quick.
Maybe "the masses" just don't understand how useful these features are. I bet Tivo could get a lot of customers by renting the boxes, and making the first two months free. Once you get used to having these features, you won't want to give 'em up!
It's not just the "issue" that the anti-nukes want. They figure that if the powerplants and other generators can't dispose of their waste, then they will have to stop operating.
Bingo.
The problem with their approach even in their own terms is that even if all the nuclear power plants were shut down this very moment, waste disposal is still not optional. There's enough existing waste that it is necessary to implement a disposal program for what we've already got.
I'm not sure why people think a special reactor is necessary in order to burn up the plutonium in a power plant. It fissions perfectly well in an ordinary power reactor - by the time a fuel rod is too laden with neutron-absorbing fission products to sustain a chain reaction any more, about 40% (IIRC) of its power output is from the plutonium that was bred in the rod. By that time, a significant percentage of the plutonium has been transmuted to Pu240 and Pu242, which makes it somewhere between very difficult and impossible to make a bomb out of it.
(If power plant plutonium could easily be made into bombs, wouldn't India have done so, rather than going to the trouble and expense of building a special-purpose breeder? Wouldn't Pakistan have done so, rather than building an isotope separation plant to make U235 bombs?)
It may require something special if you want to use pure plutonium in a fuel rod, but mixed uranium and plutonium is producing power in every nuclear power plant on the planet, right now.
Current thought on the other transuranics is, you put them in a new fuel rod, and they'll alternately absorb neutrons and decay, until they hit a fissionable isotope of something, at which time they will cease to be part of the "transuranic" problem, and become part of the "fission products" problem. (And generate energy to boot.)
If you only bury fission products, forget the "tens of thousands of years" hype. In about 500 years, there's less radioactivity in the waste than there was in the ore the uranium came from.
The inescapable fact is that there is no choice about implementing disposal of nuclear waste. We already have enough of it that not developing a disposal site is not an option.
The anti-nuke types do not want any disposal of nuclear waste to be permitted. It doesn't matter how good the site is. They want the waste to remain right here on the surface, where it can be used as an "issue".
It does not challenge "all senders of legitimate email." It challenges (or challenged; according to this thread it apparantly it doesn't do challenges any more) senders of mail from domains that are the sources of significant spam. If you are sending email from AOL, you will get challenged the first time you send email to me. If you are sending mail from a non-spamming company address, you probably won't get challenged.
I don't inherently oppose reproductive cloning, though I'd be pretty suspicious of the reason for doing it. The first principle (as in Gregory Benford's article in Reason) is that a cloned human being is entirely human, every bit as much as an identical twin. (Or anyone else.) If the reason for doing the cloning is compatible with that first principle, then fine.
But what I vehemently oppose is producing 50 or 100 deformed babies for every healthy clone, or even for the first healthy clone.
Before it is proper to even consider any arguments about why a particular cloning should be done, those doing the clones must:
1) Demonstrate that they can clone orangutangs with a rate of birth defects comparable to natural births, and show that those orangutangs live out a normal life span without significantly more health problems than normally produced orangutangs.
2) Having done this, demonstrate that they can take their results with organgutangs and, on the first attempt, achieve the same results with chimpanzees and gorillas.
Then, and only then, is it appropriate to attempt reproductive cloning of human beings.
Andromda has been one of the more interesting shows - Granted, the occasional bad episodes have been unspeakably putrid, but they have a dynamite premise, some fascinating background, and interesting characters who aren't necessarily what they seem at first glance.
Bad points - those unspeakably putrid episodes, of course, and gack!! two time travel episodes in the first season.
I'm very disappointed that they're apparantly planning to trash everything that made the show worth watching.
Enterprise is growing on me. The last episode, "Fortunate Son", had some real stupidities, but there was enough good stuff to overbalance them - The stuff about the freighter crews, which really made this seem like a real world with real people, other than just Star Fleet and non-player-characters, as too much of the rest of Star Trek seemed to be. They seem to have accomplished one thing they were after, anyway, which is the sense of wonder, that they really are going where no human has gone before, and it's all exciting, fascinating, wonderful, and a more than a bit scary sometimes. Other recent Trek incarnations had lost that.
Those who think that Earth being at odds with the Vulcans is inconsistent with the rest of Trek don't seem to have watched Kirk-era Trek that closely - There was some very real suspicion of Spock in the old series (especially in "Balance of Terror") and some rather snide remarks about "Vulcan mysticism" from pretty high up in Star Fleet in "The Search for Spock".
Voyager I thought was a load of crap, and I quit watching it early in the first season. The Kazon were such goofball "bad guys", and why in the world were they hanging around in Kazon space for the whole season? They were supposed to be trying to get home, right?
Goofball villians were what ruined DS9 for me, which I liked the first few seasons. I just didn't find the Jem Hadar remotely believable, and didn't want to watch them every week.
DS9 did have my all time favorite line, from the "Temporal Police" -- "James T. Kirk -- The man was a menace. Seventeen separate temporal violations."
All TV skiffy shows need to have a technical advisor with a large-caliber gun and a license to kill.
Case in point, Farscape, which I wanted to like, but I quit watching it back in the first season. Pilot, and the living ship, are marvelous. Some of the other characters, less so, but are tolerable. But Rygel... Give me a break. Would someone please explain to me what sort of metabolic processes could possibly produce enough helium so everyone in the room talks with a high-pitched voice when the character passes gas? Someone just isn't clear on the concept of what "inert gas" means. Rygel's body can not produce helium, unless he's fusion-powered, and to produce that much helium, he'd have to be producing more energy than Superman would need. (The 60's "Stupendousman" version, not the more limited current Superman).
I didn't get into Stargate, mostly because I do not subscribe to Showtime. I think it's showing on some Fox stations? I'll have to check it out.
The person who gave up broadband probably got that "You have reached the end of the Internet" web page and took it seriously.
As long as your ISP has dialup as a backup, even if it isn't entirely reliable, it beats dialup by a huge margin.
It isn't just the speed. Its "always on" nature is a qualitative difference from dialup.
It's fast enough to do streaming audio. At last, I can listen to Dr. Demento again.
It's fast enough that I can feed it into a router that does NAT and the whole family can web browse, do email, video chat, and stream audio.
Only when it's working, of course, but that's most of the time. When it isn't, and if I really need to do something on line, I can still dial up.
I had 384/128 ADSL for five months at the beginning of the year. Then it "went away" due to some Pac Bell actions that I'm still fuming about. Just last week, Earthlink was finally able to hook me back up (I guess Pac Bell put a repeater in my neighborhood?) and the measured speed, according to dslreports.com, is 1.2M/312.
How many people are there on this planet? About six billion, right?
How many of those people have something to sell? One one hundredth of one percent?
OK, if the "just delete it" folks carry the day, that one one hundredth of one percent means that you are going to get six hundred thousand spam emails in your inbox.
Long before that point, email has been utterly destroyed as a useful means of communication.
I like email! I do not want to see its usefulness destroyed.
Yeah, cool... But that's not the watch I want. I want the watch I lost a few years ago, which had a scientific calculator in it, complete with trig and log functions, exponents, and a "binary" mode with base conversions and logical operations.
Casio quit making it, and nobody else makes one either. (Yeah, I've tried Ebay. Whoever has one isn't selling it.)
In "Journey to Babel", McCoy said that Spock's father was (I think) 104 years old in Kirk's time. I figured if "Enterprise" was 100 years earlier, we might see Sarek as a kid.
However, now, it seems, "Enterprise" is set 150 years earlier, so Sarek hasn't been born yet.
Slashdot Mirror
I missed that part of it when I read the article. Yeah.... Just goes to show, like the old saying, "You can't cheat an honest man." Like the "419" scams; the people who bite on that think they're involved in smuggling, money laundering, getting a piece of money some third-world kleptocrat robbed from his starving people. What they think they're doing is something they know is illegal. It's hard to feel too sorry for them. (Still, someone does need to whack the scammers.)
"Spaced: Abort, Retry, and Ignore"?
Good?
This is obviously some new definition of the word "good" that I have not previously encountered.
It had the potential to be good, but the people making it decided to go for the "90210" audience who dropped "90210" because it was too cerebral.
Does any military, anywhere, use highly and expensively trained fighter jocks as ground-pounding cannon fodder like they did in that show?
(Sheesh. Next, someone's going to be praising that "Squid Trek" thing of Spielberg's.)
(1) We already have all those tons of radioactive waste. Blocking all long-term storage of radioactive waste is not going to make all those already existing tons of radioactive waste just go away. Implementing long-term storage is not "optional". We have to do it. Period. We made it necessary decades ago.
(2) 1000 years from now, the stuff will not be all that radioactive. The fission products will have all decayed. What's left is the long-lived transuranics. "Long half life" is exactly the same thing as "weakly radioactive". The thing of most concern is plutonium, assuming we're locked into so stupidly wasteful a fuel cycle as one which buries this valuable fuel. The best disposal of plutonium is to burn it up in new fuel rods.
Even if the plutonium is mindlessly squandered by burying it with the waste, and someone drills a core sample into it 1000 years from now, what are they going to get? The wastes are solidified and mixed into molten glass or ceramic, and cast as solid, inert, insoluble lumps. Their core sample will bring up a cylinder of somewhat radioactive glass. The drilling process will, no doubt, produce some powdered, somewhat radioactive glass. But it's still locked into the glass.
It won't be anything like as radioactive as the fission products in fresh waste. Those will be pretty much gone. We're not talking "kill you if you're in the same room with it", we're talking "you might get cancer in 30 years if you eat it." But even then, only if you dissolve the glass in hydrofluoric acid, neutralize it so the hydrofluoric acid doesn't kill you dead first, and then eat it.
(3) Since we have to implement long-term storage anyway, once we've got the repository, there's no reason not to continue to use it.
Well... Ever compare Lucas's filming of the awards ceremony at the end of Episode IV with Lani Riefenstahl's filming of the Nuremburg rallies?
Shudder!!
You don't need to put up warnings that last for tens of thousands of years. That's nonsense. Use the French process, which removes almost all the plutonium from the waste. Plutonium is not waste, it is valuable fuel - burn it up in reactors making more electricity. Without the plutonium, the waste pretty much falls into two categories: short-lived highly radioactive fission products, and weakly radioactive long-lived transuranics. In about 500 years, the fission products are pretty much gone, and the remaining radioactivity in the waste is about as much as that of the ore the uranium was mined from. If you separate out all the transuranics and burn them in reactors, the situation gets even better.
Even if the plutonium were left there, what are the hypothetical miners 10,000 years from now going to find? Concrete vaults. OOo, interesting, break one open. What's inside. Steel casks. OOOoooo, fascinating, crack that open. Repeat a few times until they get to the center -- and what have they found? Beer-can sized cylinders of somewhat radioactive solid glass. Huh? That's not very interesting, and not worth anything. Even if they don't know about radioactivity (and how could they not, if they have the technological sophistication to dig this deeply?) they'd have to extract the plutonium out of its suspension in the solid chunks of glass to be seriously endangered by it.
If you can actually do any of this, why don't you go take that one million dollars that James Randi has put up saying there's no such thing? Have lots of cameras around and make sure you've got it all on tape if you don't trust him.
Hmm... I think if you get enough ionizing radiation to "feel mighty warm" (a paper I read soon after the 1987A supernova said neutrino interactions averaged about 1MeV) you'd likely be dead before you could perceive the heat.
Back then, there was an article saying that people on Earth averaged one or two neutrino interactions in their bodies just from 1987A. Based on that, the energy of the interaction, and the good old inverse square law, I figured you'd get a lethal dose of radiation (500 REMs) at about 12 AU from the supernova. At Earth's distance, it might even be enough to kill you before the blast vaporizes you.
I've since similar numbers in other places, so I guess I didn't drop a decimal point anywhere.
The solution to that is to have the oscillator necessary to produce the microwave beam here on Earth, powered by a tap off the microwaves coming down. If the power transmitter doesn't get that signal, it can't make microwaves. And if the power beam wanders off the receiver, the power goes off on the transmitter that's sending that signal.
You have give the transmitter local power for startup, like that button you hold down on your water heater to bypass the safety valve on the pilot light until it heats up.
I don't want a microwave oven that goes strictly by time, whether I punch a time in or it reads the time off the package. I just want an oven that I put the food in, press the button, and it dings when the food is done.
All of 'em seem to have hot and cold spots, even with a turntable. Can't they be made to distribute the microwaves more evenly?
For defrosting, is there a wavelength of microwaves which is moderately absorbed by ice, and absorbed by water very little? Normal microwaves are more absorbed by liquid water than ice; the first part to thaw gets cooked while the rest stays frozen.
(The FCC, of course, has say-so about what frequencies you can use. I suspect ovens use frequencies determined by other factors than what's best for cooking. Perhaps rules could be relaxed for ovens designed to keep the microwaves inside better?)
Best of all would be if there was a way to sweep a beam of microwaves around the oven, and detect the temperature of the food in the beam. Concentrate the beam on the cold spots. Set a temperature, and it dings when the entire object is evenly heated to that temperature, without having to mess around with probes.
Combine with a convection oven and maybe one of those GE "cooking with light" things to brown the surface if desired.
There just aren't many sites I would sign up for a subscription to.
However, there are lots of sites I would pay a nickel to read if I had some reason (a link, a google reference) to think it had the information I wanted.
I used to use 555-1212.com about once every other month to do a reverse phone number lookup. I would happily pay a nickel, or a quarter, to do a lookup. Maybe even a dollar. Then they went to a subscription, and I have not used them since. There just ain't no way I am going to pay $10/month for a subscription; that's $20 per lookup! My "Reverse phone number lookup" bookmark now points to a competitor who still provides free lookups.
Speaking of Google, here's a bigger flaw in the pay-for-surf model: How do you find stuff you are looking for? Sites that require a subscription to reference obviously aren't going to be indexed, so even if the site had something I wanted and would pay for, how am I going to find it?
What's the big holdup with micropayments? It's been "Real Soon Now" for a lot of years.
Someone could make it automatic - poison the spam lists with some addresses which, if they receive email, instantly start up a DDOS against the source of the email. Perhaps even shutting down the spam spew while it's in progress.
My own personal fantasy is a virus, the payload of which triggers on the presence of known spamware on the infected machine. When spamware is running, it intercepts outgoing port 25 and simulates an SMTP transaction, while actually doing nothing.
"But that would be wrong."
Nope... One channel. This is sometimes a pain.
However, the disk is fast enough to keep up with reading and writing a program simultaneously, so you can still "watch one thing and record another" if the "one thing" is something you recorded previously.
I'm told some of the Tivo systems have two tuners, and Dish is supposedly coming out with a system "real soon now" which will have dual tuners. Then you can (I assume) record two things while watching a third that you recorded previously.
Price? VCRs were hugely popular when they cost far more than the current under-$300 price of Tivo and Dish PVR.
Ease of use? I can't say for sure about Tivo, but the Dish 501 -- You can't get easier. Assuming your dish is already installed, you plug the 501 in and it sets its own time. Press "Guide" and you get a program guide. Move the cursor around and pick a program. Press "Record" and it will be recorded. Press the PVR button to see a list of your previously recorded programs, by name.
I'd be surprised if Tivo was much different. Of course, the Tivo has a lot more features for finding things you "might" be interested in.
Maybe the $10/month charge is enough of an annoyance to turn people off -- there isn't any charge (other than your regular satellite subscription) for Dish's PVR501.
I still have the VCR for rented tapes, but the PVR completely changes the way I watch TV. Rather than look for something I'm interested in, and maybe ending up watching something I don't care much for just because it's the least offensive thing on at the moment, I have the last 30 hour or so of stuff that looked interesting enough that I clicked "Sure, record this" in the program guide.
I almost never watch "off the air" any more - And I don't see many commercials any more, not even in fast forward, by use of the "forward 30sec" and "back 10sec" buttons.
Even when watching off the air, you can use the "back 10 sec" button for instant replays, or pause the show. This is a feature you get used to real quick.
Maybe "the masses" just don't understand how useful these features are. I bet Tivo could get a lot of customers by renting the boxes, and making the first two months free. Once you get used to having these features, you won't want to give 'em up!
... As long as they don't spam me with solicitations to invest in this scheme!
Bingo.
The problem with their approach even in their own terms is that even if all the nuclear power plants were shut down this very moment, waste disposal is still not optional. There's enough existing waste that it is necessary to implement a disposal program for what we've already got.
I'm not sure why people think a special reactor is necessary in order to burn up the plutonium in a power plant. It fissions perfectly well in an ordinary power reactor - by the time a fuel rod is too laden with neutron-absorbing fission products to sustain a chain reaction any more, about 40% (IIRC) of its power output is from the plutonium that was bred in the rod. By that time, a significant percentage of the plutonium has been transmuted to Pu240 and Pu242, which makes it somewhere between very difficult and impossible to make a bomb out of it.
(If power plant plutonium could easily be made into bombs, wouldn't India have done so, rather than going to the trouble and expense of building a special-purpose breeder? Wouldn't Pakistan have done so, rather than building an isotope separation plant to make U235 bombs?)
It may require something special if you want to use pure plutonium in a fuel rod, but mixed uranium and plutonium is producing power in every nuclear power plant on the planet, right now.
Current thought on the other transuranics is, you put them in a new fuel rod, and they'll alternately absorb neutrons and decay, until they hit a fissionable isotope of something, at which time they will cease to be part of the "transuranic" problem, and become part of the "fission products" problem. (And generate energy to boot.)
If you only bury fission products, forget the "tens of thousands of years" hype. In about 500 years, there's less radioactivity in the waste than there was in the ore the uranium came from.
The inescapable fact is that there is no choice about implementing disposal of nuclear waste. We already have enough of it that not developing a disposal site is not an option.
The anti-nuke types do not want any disposal of nuclear waste to be permitted. It doesn't matter how good the site is. They want the waste to remain right here on the surface, where it can be used as an "issue".
To use their image browser, you must download some silly plugin which only exists for Mac and Windoze.
What a crock. Why do companies do this?
It does not challenge "all senders of legitimate email." It challenges (or challenged; according to this thread it apparantly it doesn't do challenges any more) senders of mail from domains that are the sources of significant spam. If you are sending email from AOL, you will get challenged the first time you send email to me. If you are sending mail from a non-spamming company address, you probably won't get challenged.
I don't inherently oppose reproductive cloning, though I'd be pretty suspicious of the reason for doing it. The first principle (as in Gregory Benford's article in Reason) is that a cloned human being is entirely human, every bit as much as an identical twin. (Or anyone else.) If the reason for doing the cloning is compatible with that first principle, then fine.
But what I vehemently oppose is producing 50 or 100 deformed babies for every healthy clone, or even for the first healthy clone.
Before it is proper to even consider any arguments about why a particular cloning should be done, those doing the clones must:
1) Demonstrate that they can clone orangutangs with a rate of birth defects comparable to natural births, and show that those orangutangs live out a normal life span without significantly more health problems than normally produced orangutangs.
2) Having done this, demonstrate that they can take their results with organgutangs and, on the first attempt, achieve the same results with chimpanzees and gorillas.
Then, and only then, is it appropriate to attempt reproductive cloning of human beings.
Andromda has been one of the more interesting shows - Granted, the occasional bad episodes have been unspeakably putrid, but they have a dynamite premise, some fascinating background, and interesting characters who aren't necessarily what they seem at first glance.
Bad points - those unspeakably putrid episodes, of course, and gack!! two time travel episodes in the first season.
I'm very disappointed that they're apparantly planning to trash everything that made the show worth watching.
Enterprise is growing on me. The last episode, "Fortunate Son", had some real stupidities, but there was enough good stuff to overbalance them - The stuff about the freighter crews, which really made this seem like a real world with real people, other than just Star Fleet and non-player-characters, as too much of the rest of Star Trek seemed to be. They seem to have accomplished one thing they were after, anyway, which is the sense of wonder, that they really are going where no human has gone before, and it's all exciting, fascinating, wonderful, and a more than a bit scary sometimes. Other recent Trek incarnations had lost that.
Those who think that Earth being at odds with the Vulcans is inconsistent with the rest of Trek don't seem to have watched Kirk-era Trek that closely - There was some very real suspicion of Spock in the old series (especially in "Balance of Terror") and some rather snide remarks about "Vulcan mysticism" from pretty high up in Star Fleet in "The Search for Spock".
Voyager I thought was a load of crap, and I quit watching it early in the first season. The Kazon were such goofball "bad guys", and why in the world were they hanging around in Kazon space for the whole season? They were supposed to be trying to get home, right?
Goofball villians were what ruined DS9 for me, which I liked the first few seasons. I just didn't find the Jem Hadar remotely believable, and didn't want to watch them every week.
DS9 did have my all time favorite line, from the "Temporal Police" -- "James T. Kirk -- The man was a menace. Seventeen separate temporal violations."
All TV skiffy shows need to have a technical advisor with a large-caliber gun and a license to kill.
Case in point, Farscape, which I wanted to like, but I quit watching it back in the first season. Pilot, and the living ship, are marvelous. Some of the other characters, less so, but are tolerable. But Rygel... Give me a break. Would someone please explain to me what sort of metabolic processes could possibly produce enough helium so everyone in the room talks with a high-pitched voice when the character passes gas? Someone just isn't clear on the concept of what "inert gas" means. Rygel's body can not produce helium, unless he's fusion-powered, and to produce that much helium, he'd have to be producing more energy than Superman would need. (The 60's "Stupendousman" version, not the more limited current Superman).
I didn't get into Stargate, mostly because I do not subscribe to Showtime. I think it's showing on some Fox stations? I'll have to check it out.
Do a google search for "The World Inside the Crystal" by Stephen Savitzky. Cool song along these lines.
The person who gave up broadband probably got that "You have reached the end of the Internet" web page and took it seriously.
As long as your ISP has dialup as a backup, even if it isn't entirely reliable, it beats dialup by a huge margin.
It isn't just the speed. Its "always on" nature is a qualitative difference from dialup.
It's fast enough to do streaming audio. At last, I can listen to Dr. Demento again.
It's fast enough that I can feed it into a router that does NAT and the whole family can web browse, do email, video chat, and stream audio.
Only when it's working, of course, but that's most of the time. When it isn't, and if I really need to do something on line, I can still dial up.
I had 384/128 ADSL for five months at the beginning of the year. Then it "went away" due to some Pac Bell actions that I'm still fuming about. Just last week, Earthlink was finally able to hook me back up (I guess Pac Bell put a repeater in my neighborhood?) and the measured speed, according to dslreports.com, is 1.2M/312.
I will not willingly go without broadband again.
How many people are there on this planet? About six billion, right?
How many of those people have something to sell? One one hundredth of one percent?
OK, if the "just delete it" folks carry the day, that one one hundredth of one percent means that you are going to get six hundred thousand spam emails in your inbox.
Long before that point, email has been utterly destroyed as a useful means of communication.
I like email! I do not want to see its usefulness destroyed.
That's why I want the spammers stopped.
By any means necessary.
Yeah, cool... But that's not the watch I want. I want the watch I lost a few years ago, which had a scientific calculator in it, complete with trig and log functions, exponents, and a "binary" mode with base conversions and logical operations.
Casio quit making it, and nobody else makes one either. (Yeah, I've tried Ebay. Whoever has one isn't selling it.)
Nope.
In "Journey to Babel", McCoy said that Spock's father was (I think) 104 years old in Kirk's time. I figured if "Enterprise" was 100 years earlier, we might see Sarek as a kid.
However, now, it seems, "Enterprise" is set 150 years earlier, so Sarek hasn't been born yet.