What difference does this make to the general public. We were all assurred that the older, control rod style, reactors would never, ever blow. And yet Chernobyl went sky high. Extreme example yes, but the older model reactor which was riddled with flaws was sold over and over as a "failsafe" and "foolproof" system. They said it was "impossible" for them to explode
Wait a minute. There are several different issues here.
1: It was impossible for them to explode like a nuclear bomb.
Several anti-nuclear groups were saying that nuclear power plants could explode like a nuclear weapon. This sort of explosion is impossible for a number of reasons.
The enrichment of the fuel (3% vs 90+%), the modulator that is present in the reactor is not in the bomb, the explosives that trigger the bomb are not present in the reactor, the reactor dependence on thermal vs fast neutrons, etc, etc, etc.
2: The much maligned Rasmussen report (WASH-1400) never said that a nuclear accident was impossible.
It calculated the odds of various forms of accidents happening.
The worst case had odds of 1 in a billion per reactor per year.
But what about Three Mile Island?
Worst case had 45 thousand people immediately dead and over a million suffering cancer over the next 10 years.
Unless there has been a fantastic government coverup, that has not happened at TMI.
But here is the fun part.
Read the Kermey report on TMI (the presidential commission report).
According to the Kermey report THE RASMUSSEN REPORT PREDICTED THREE MILE ISLAND.
From memory, a TMI style accident had a 30% chance of happening by the year 1980, and there was a 75% chance that it would be in a Babcock and Wilcox designed reactor, which it was.
The accident was predicted, but no one was looking at it because they were all looking at the big accident!
3: Chernobyl: for years the Russians said that the fact that the west had containment buildings and the Soviets did not was a testiment to the superiority of the communist system.
Funny how they no longer make that claim.
But here is an inditement against the Soviet reactor design.
There is an arrangement of the control rods and coolent that would make the reactor prompt neutron critical instead of thermal neutron critical.
In fission reactions there are two kinds of neutrons that come out: prompt and thermal.
Prompt neutrons come out in microseconds. Thermal ones come out over a period of several seconds.
To make a reactor controllable, you rely on thermal neutrons because no machine in the world is fast enough to control based on prompt neutrons.
The russian system, in a certain configuration, was prompt neutron critical, and that is what they did during the testing that night.
Once that happpened, no control system in the world could shut that thing down.
4: now to pebble reactors. Pebble reactors are designed using what is known as passively safe.
This means a terrorist could blow apart the pumps, the control rods, and even the containment vessel, the damn thing isn't melting.
Why? They figured out the maximum amount of heat the pebbles could produce, and then designed the ceramic coating to melt at a higher temperature.
The real problem here is not technology. People have been using cameras, copiers, photographic memories, for years. The problem is authentication and then access. Authentication verfies who you are. Once you have that, then there should be rules on whatyou can access.
Access to critical or sensitive data should be restricted to those who need it. If you can't get to the data, you can't copy it. From there you need to hire people you trust. So pay them well and treat them well. If you can't do that, it does not matter what technology you have, it will be copied.
Larger devices just mean that more data can be copied at a time.
ISPs are able to serve thousands without blocking ports or web sites, and don't disconnect customers for not installing the latest patches. Some cities are even putting in free wireless Internet access for anyone and everyone, no identification, membership, or monthly fees required. There are plenty of cafes, bookstores, motels, and other businesses that offer free Internet access. What's their secret that, unlike the typical employer, they can grant free access without having their networks slowed to uselessness by a ton of spam and virii and whatever else?
What is it about work environments that management and administration want to hold users hands more firmly than the users want them held?
Users of ISP's don't hold the ISP responsible if someone breaks in and steals their data.
They don't hold the ISP responsible if they get a virus on their machine.
As far as changing apps to those that are less vulnerable, we have done the recomendations, but they always fall on deaf ears.
The application writers only know how to write applications for IE going to IIS and a MSSQL back end.
Anything else and they are lost.
And we (Info Sec) need to secure these apps by waving a magic wand or something.
Then MS05-039 [microsoft.com] is released. We plead and plead for the patches to be distributed right away because of how severe the threat is. But users like the submitter can't stand to have their PC rebooted unless it's the absolute perfect time. Plus, we have 1700+ applications to test compatibility with the patch on, on hundreds of different PC environments. And it requires a service pack we don't have deployed everywhere, again, because it's too invasive.
Yeah, we used to do that too. That to get a single Microsoft patch would take almost a year because you had to get buyin from the business owner, then you had to schedule it on dev, then schedule it on qa, and then schedule the outage on production.
Often we had to wait til the next rev of the application was coming out because trying to schedule the resources "just to install a patch" was next to impossible.
Then Nimda hit and took down our network for a couple weeks.
Then the policy became you install or the machine gets removed from the network.
If your in a remote office and the manager refuses, we remove the office from the network with the ok of the director of security.
Just thought you might like to know what its like on the information security side of the shop.
At times it feels like being on the Titantic, that no matter what you do the boat is going down.
Anti-Virus for example. We have it on the sendmail servers, on the exchange servers, on the file servers, and the desktops.
Yet every day we see viruses on the internal network.
I have programs that scan the firewall logs looking for worm activity.
Several times a day it picks up an email worm, or a SMB based worm, or something else.
We see applications that ONLY WORK if all the security settings are turned off.
We have seen one application that REQUIRES the Microsoft SQL sa password to be blank!
We have seen vendors recommend turning off anti-virus "because it slows down the machine".
We had to fight with Microsoft for several years because they strongly recommended AGAINST deploying antivirus on servers.
They claimed that it was unnecessary and would slow down the services too much.
When we did deploy it, it cleaned out THIRTY THOUSAND VIRUSES (yes in the day time I work for a big company).
We have seen consultant laptops trying to infect other machines on the internal network.
We have had to fight tooth and nail to get sysadmins to allow us to run vulnerabilty scans on their systems.
At least once a week we have to review an application that wants to add a firewall ruleset that turns the firewall into swiss cheese.
We see sysadmins telneting into servers as root.
We see applications with lots of access controls on the web front end.
But you can access the database back end and bypass both the controls and the audit logs.
Heck the application even allowed extended stored procedures.
Surprised the application owner when we could run "dir" on his database server.
We have seen applications that require IE with ActiveX and all the security settings set to low or off to work.
But you know, inspite of all the above, I would say that information security is now taken more seriously than before.
When we point out vulnerabilities at least now we get a little respect.
Not much, but its more than before.
Now applications are supposed to be scanned before they go into production.
It used to be it took almost a year to deploy a single critical patch. Now it can get done in under a week.
Science is more than theories. Theories must conform to known observations. And no you can't say "it was a miracle" for everything that does not fit. One of the acid tests of a theory is that it must predict something that has not been observed, and then when people look for it, they find it. This has happened many times with evolution. People are always digging up fossils that are intermediates. And you know, sometimes things don't fit, sometimes things need to be rearranged to fit the evidence. THAT IS SCIENCE. Just because someone can't explain something does not mean we need to get the mystics involved. Over a hundred years ago they worked out the rate that the earth was cooling and worked out a very short number, something like a few million years. That did not jive with the fossil record.
Later on people discovered the heat released from radioactive decay, reworked the numbers, and found the billion year estimate we use today.
No supernatural phenomona required.
PS: you will find the heat decay theory amongst the creationist literature as "proof" that the earth is really young.
I explained to the creationist that his "science" was about a hundred years out of date.
It's about the same as if you mentioned that Chrisitians are bemused by Mormons. The two religions don't think of one another as "correct" even though one builds on the other.
Um, Mormons view themselves as Christians, so how can they confuse themselves? Christians as defined as those who follow Jesus Christ, of which the Mormons call themselves "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints", which to me appears that they follow JC. (And no, I don't mean Jimmy Carter:-)).
The LDS (as they call themselves) I think also believe in evolution. There was a quote, that I can't find right now unfortunately, that said to leave evolution to the scientists. That their purpose was the salvation of mankind.
That matches my own believe that evolution and creationism are answering two different questions: How did we get here? and Why are we here?
Does the lack of dinosaurs in Genesis make a difference to the salvation of mankind?
world's uranium supply is just as finite as oil, and is quickly being exhausted.
Excuse me? First we can burn all the weapons material from the weapons being decomissioned. Second we can use breeder reactors, which can use the 98% of the U238 that does exist instead of the 1% of U235 that normal reactors use. Third a lot of the fossil fuel beds have so much uranium and thorium that you could actually generate more energy if you use them in a nuke instead of burning it. The something deposits of Canada come to mind (there are three kinds of coal, its the worst kind). Then there are the huge deposits in some beach in India, where the sand is quite radioactive. Then there was research I saw years ago in breeding microbes that could extract uranium (and interestingly, gold) from sea water.
Its not the magnetic poles that count, its the lack of sunlight and the cold. I'm trying to remember a very thorough article published years ago, so try to forgive me if I remember the details incorrectly.
The chemical reaction that causes the problem is the application of ultraviolet light on CFCs. These break down the CFC into chlorine, which reacts with the ozone. What takes chlorine out of the atmosphere is a reaction with nitric oxides.
What happens in the winter is that it gets really cold (thats why they call it winter). Its so cold over the south poll that the nitric oxides freeze out of the atmosphere and condense on particles and fall to the ground. In addition, there is no sunlight, so the CFC's build up without being reacted to by sunlight. Then comes spring time, the sun comes up and BLAMO, all the CFC's get turned into chlorine. And worse, the nitric oxides are still frozen on the ground. So now you have tons of chlorine reacting with the ozone, and nothing to remove it from the atmosphere. So it continues until there is no ozone left. Later in the spring, as the nitric oxides sublime back into the atmosphere, they eat up the chlorine and things return to normal.
Distributor pressure to not sell so called "naked pc"s is real. Witness the transcript below.
A couple years ago I was at -Censored big name computer store- and they had their "build it your way" stand where you could mix and match parts and they would build a system for you. Freedom, except for the OS. W2K home or professional were the options. The following is condensed, with a bunch of "let me ask my manager" lines removed.
Me: I want it without the OS.
Them: can't do it.
Me: Just sell me the parts.
Them: they needed to charge me $200 extra to buy just the parts.
me: Why?
Them: That's the policy.
Me: Why am I being charged for you to do less work?
Them: Because they said that they take a risk in selling me untested parts.
Me: How do you test it?
Them: We build it, put the OS on, and then run a test program.
Me: Ok, build it, put the OS on, test it, format the drive, and give me the parts.
Them: Sorry, we still need to charge you the $200 extra.
Me: Why?
THem: You still have a copy of the OS, a format really doesn't get rid of the copy.
Me: Ok, I'll bring in my copy of Redhat, and install over it.
Them: Sorry, we can't allow you to do that.
Me: Why not?
Them: As part of our agreement with vendors, we are only allowed to sell certain configurations
Me (cutting to the chase): are you prohibited from selling computers that do not have Windows installed?
Them: I can not answer specific questions about vendors
In the mean time I get the funny feeling that I am being watched from a video monitor by someone holding a fluffy white cat saying "Inspite of my best efforts, Mr Bond, you are still alive".
Pu239 is used for reactor fuel and for bombs. Pu238 is used for RTG generators. Pu240 is a spiking agent used to make nuclear reactor fuel go off prematurely if it were used in a bomb. Well, its not actually added to reactor fuel, its a byproduct of the process. But in a reactor it doesn't matter much. In a bomb it makes the reaction go off prematurely, and really cuts down on the yield.
Hm, a ring around the earth composed of many ships. Sounds like the shadow squares around Ringworld. Might as well use them to generate power at the same time:-).
For those of you who have not read the book, Larry Niven proposed a world as a scaled down Dysan sphere, a ring around a star. Night and day would be done by a set of squares in inner orbit that would orbit slightly faster than the main ring, thus simulating night and day. They also generated power via thermocouples.
Microsoft's standard operating practice is to release vaporware of a product long before any such products exists. They used to call it slideware because the product existed only on powerpoint slides. The idea is to choke off the air supply (ie: revenue) of any competiting company by giving people an excuse to wait for the Microsoft product.
Hey, uranium is not nasty stuff. You could hold a brick of it in your hand, and unless your emitting lots of neutrons, or you've exceeded critical mass, the only hazard would be a broken toe when you drop it. Uranium is an alpha particle emitter, which means it gets stopped by a piece of paper. If you grind it up and blow it into the air, yes, your work force will die of lung cancer in 20 years. So they have plenty of time to make plentyh of bombs.
You want weapons of mass destruction?
Try smallpox, ebola, or the plague.
There are damns in the US where there are 100K people downstream. How well do you think they are guarded?
You want a dirty radiological bomb? Try radio-cobalt.
No nuclear material needed to make this stuff.
20% U235 is used in nuclear submarines. They need to burn for a long time.
3% to 5% is used in commercial PWR (pressure water reactor). They use light water, so need a small amount of enrichment, not a lot.
0.5% (or there abouts) Canada uses natural uranium, but a heavy water modulator
If you have pure Plutonium 239 I believe you can use a gun type bomb. But pure plutonium 239 is alnmost impossible to come by, there is always contanamation from pu-240, which would cause the bomb to go off prematurely and fizzle instead.
I don't recall anything about a heavy metal casing to hold the bomb together. If memory serves, its usually made of berillium, a very light weight metal. Its used because its a good neutron reflector, which reflects neutrons back into the core to keep the reaction going.
big missing "yeah but" on reprocessing & pluto
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Nuclear Fuel How-To
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The reprocessing slide has a big "yeah but" missing. Yes, you do get plutonium-239 by reprocessing spent fuel. But you also get plutonium-240 at the same time. What's the difference? The existence of pu-240 almost killed the plutonium bomb in WW2. Pu240 releases a lot of neutrons spontanously. In a reactor this is generally not a problem. In a weapon, you want the neutron count to go from almost zero to through the roof within microseconds. The original plutonum bomb was to be a cannon bomb like the uranium one. But the speed at which the plutonium cores came together was too slow to avoid having the pu240 set the reaction off prematurely and thus killing most of the yield. They solved this by (a) limiting the time fuel was in the reactor, and (b) going to the implosion model.
If I have a copy of a song on one media, that I own, I should be able to move it to any media I want to as long as I, or my immediate family, are using it. I should not have to buy it once for VHS, again for DVD, and again for HDDVD and again for my portable player and again to view it on my notebook. Conversely, this does NOT mean I can copy it to all my friends, that should not be allowed.
Not as long as Microsoft can find them funding. Their plan is to keep the lawsuits up as long as possible to give them as much time as possible to finish shorthorn, I mean longhorn. Whoops, I meant as long as possible to get Longhorn up to beta quality so they can sell it.
Yes it would, but most places do not encrypt the data. Most backup programs DO NOT HAVE ENCRYPTION EVEN AS AN OPTION. And most backup programs backup over the network IN THE CLEAR. When I had to secure sensitive data, I shut down the database, copied and then GPG encrypted the data. I told backup not to backup the database directory, but to backup the encrypted copy. The private keys are kept on several other machines. So if the backup tape gets lost, I don't care from a security standpoint.
Yes, someone could get ahold of the backup tape and get a copy of the key. Anything is doable, its just a lot harder. And no, the machines with the key are not backed up onto the same backup server.
(BTW, the Chernobyl core exploded because they tried to instantly stop the reactor by hitting a switch after they had put it into a state where that couldn't be done.
Um, no. The Chernobyl people had turned off most of the safety equipment in order to conduct a test. The reactor was almost at zero power. They were pulling out control rods in an effort to start the reaction up. But they made a fundamental mistake with reactors. The control rods control rate of change, not the absolute power rating. So when the reaction did start up, it rapidly overloaded the reactor. On top of that, the reactor was designed with a positive thermal coefficient. English translation: the hotter it gets, the faster the reaction runs. No wonder the damn thing exploded. Its like Windows, when you see how well it was designed, its no wonder it gets hacked.
But this is old technology. Look at the more recent technologies like pebble reactors. They figured out the maximum temperature a reactor could hit, and then designed the ceramic shell to melt at a higher temperature. It can't melt under its own power. Its passive safety, which I trust a lot more than active safety with all its pumps and valves and moving parts that can fail.
TMI was within a couple of hours of a *total meltdown* before they finally figured out what was going on
According to the Kermey (sp?) report, the reactor actually melted down about 25-50%. The reactor designers were quite conservative.
They assumed that steam would not cool the reactor core at all. In reality it cooled about half as effective as water. So in spite of the operators turning off the ECCS (emergency core cooling system) pumps, the absolute wrong thing to do, the reactor didn't completely melt down.
it's not a given that the containment building would have stopped a liquid pool of molten nuclear fuel from eating through down to the water table
Kermey report actually goes into that. TMI-2 had a relatively new reactor load, therefore had few waste products built up. It would not have penetrated the containment building. I think the doc even questions if it would eat through the reactor vessel. Its been years since I've read those docs, so memory fades a bit.
I'll tell you what. I'll set up two cabins. One will have a bucket of nuclear waste under the bed. The other will have a bucket coal dust and carbon under the bed.
As for radiation, coal fired power plants typically emit more radiation than nuclear power plants. For that matter, some sources of uranium are actually coal. (note: might be thorium, its been a few years since I was active in nuclear energy). In addition you have heavy metals like mercury and arsenic. Not only are they in the coal ash, they get into the air. On top of this are the sulfer dioxides, nitrous oxides, carbon dioxide, fly ash, etc, etc. Nuclear waste is no day at the beach, but coal is no picnic either.
And remember, in between 300 and 1200 years the radioactive waste will be less toxic than the ore it came from (depending on which way you measure toxicity). A million years from now the arsnic and mercury in coal ash will be just as toxic.
Did he not know what regression testing was..."
I don't know, I did not know that term back then.
My influence was a book called "Systems Programming", where it said that if you ever found a bug, devise a test to exercise it and include it into a test suite.
As to whether or not I made the bug test general purpose, it depended. Some of the routines I wrote were very complicated, so I tried to generalize the testing for those. Others were more specific to the bug.
What tests would i do today if I do if I were responsible for the code that broke due to the LAND attack? At the minimum I would have the original test. I would also do similar tests for UDP and ICMP. Would I do all the IP protocols? Maybe. I would at least do all the ones that I supported.
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Wait a minute. There are several different issues here.
1: It was impossible for them to explode like a nuclear bomb. Several anti-nuclear groups were saying that nuclear power plants could explode like a nuclear weapon. This sort of explosion is impossible for a number of reasons. The enrichment of the fuel (3% vs 90+%), the modulator that is present in the reactor is not in the bomb, the explosives that trigger the bomb are not present in the reactor, the reactor dependence on thermal vs fast neutrons, etc, etc, etc.
2: The much maligned Rasmussen report (WASH-1400) never said that a nuclear accident was impossible. It calculated the odds of various forms of accidents happening. The worst case had odds of 1 in a billion per reactor per year. But what about Three Mile Island? Worst case had 45 thousand people immediately dead and over a million suffering cancer over the next 10 years. Unless there has been a fantastic government coverup, that has not happened at TMI. But here is the fun part. Read the Kermey report on TMI (the presidential commission report). According to the Kermey report THE RASMUSSEN REPORT PREDICTED THREE MILE ISLAND. From memory, a TMI style accident had a 30% chance of happening by the year 1980, and there was a 75% chance that it would be in a Babcock and Wilcox designed reactor, which it was. The accident was predicted, but no one was looking at it because they were all looking at the big accident!
3: Chernobyl: for years the Russians said that the fact that the west had containment buildings and the Soviets did not was a testiment to the superiority of the communist system. Funny how they no longer make that claim. But here is an inditement against the Soviet reactor design. There is an arrangement of the control rods and coolent that would make the reactor prompt neutron critical instead of thermal neutron critical. In fission reactions there are two kinds of neutrons that come out: prompt and thermal. Prompt neutrons come out in microseconds. Thermal ones come out over a period of several seconds. To make a reactor controllable, you rely on thermal neutrons because no machine in the world is fast enough to control based on prompt neutrons. The russian system, in a certain configuration, was prompt neutron critical, and that is what they did during the testing that night. Once that happpened, no control system in the world could shut that thing down.
4: now to pebble reactors. Pebble reactors are designed using what is known as passively safe. This means a terrorist could blow apart the pumps, the control rods, and even the containment vessel, the damn thing isn't melting. Why? They figured out the maximum amount of heat the pebbles could produce, and then designed the ceramic coating to melt at a higher temperature.
The real problem here is not technology. People have been using cameras, copiers, photographic memories, for years. The problem is authentication and then access. Authentication verfies who you are. Once you have that, then there should be rules on whatyou can access. Access to critical or sensitive data should be restricted to those who need it. If you can't get to the data, you can't copy it. From there you need to hire people you trust. So pay them well and treat them well. If you can't do that, it does not matter what technology you have, it will be copied. Larger devices just mean that more data can be copied at a time.
Users of ISP's don't hold the ISP responsible if someone breaks in and steals their data. They don't hold the ISP responsible if they get a virus on their machine.
As far as changing apps to those that are less vulnerable, we have done the recomendations, but they always fall on deaf ears. The application writers only know how to write applications for IE going to IIS and a MSSQL back end. Anything else and they are lost. And we (Info Sec) need to secure these apps by waving a magic wand or something.
Yeah, we used to do that too. That to get a single Microsoft patch would take almost a year because you had to get buyin from the business owner, then you had to schedule it on dev, then schedule it on qa, and then schedule the outage on production. Often we had to wait til the next rev of the application was coming out because trying to schedule the resources "just to install a patch" was next to impossible. Then Nimda hit and took down our network for a couple weeks. Then the policy became you install or the machine gets removed from the network. If your in a remote office and the manager refuses, we remove the office from the network with the ok of the director of security.
But you know, inspite of all the above, I would say that information security is now taken more seriously than before. When we point out vulnerabilities at least now we get a little respect. Not much, but its more than before. Now applications are supposed to be scanned before they go into production. It used to be it took almost a year to deploy a single critical patch. Now it can get done in under a week.
PS: you will find the heat decay theory amongst the creationist literature as "proof" that the earth is really young. I explained to the creationist that his "science" was about a hundred years out of date.
Um, Mormons view themselves as Christians, so how can they confuse themselves? Christians as defined as those who follow Jesus Christ, of which the Mormons call themselves "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints", which to me appears that they follow JC. (And no, I don't mean Jimmy Carter :-)).
The LDS (as they call themselves) I think also believe in evolution. There was a quote, that I can't find right now unfortunately, that said to leave evolution to the scientists. That their purpose was the salvation of mankind. That matches my own believe that evolution and creationism are answering two different questions: How did we get here? and Why are we here? Does the lack of dinosaurs in Genesis make a difference to the salvation of mankind?
Sure, now we're going to be innundated with Windows CD's offering 1000 hours of Windows free with your credit card.
Excuse me? First we can burn all the weapons material from the weapons being decomissioned. Second we can use breeder reactors, which can use the 98% of the U238 that does exist instead of the 1% of U235 that normal reactors use. Third a lot of the fossil fuel beds have so much uranium and thorium that you could actually generate more energy if you use them in a nuke instead of burning it. The something deposits of Canada come to mind (there are three kinds of coal, its the worst kind). Then there are the huge deposits in some beach in India, where the sand is quite radioactive. Then there was research I saw years ago in breeding microbes that could extract uranium (and interestingly, gold) from sea water.
The chemical reaction that causes the problem is the application of ultraviolet light on CFCs. These break down the CFC into chlorine, which reacts with the ozone. What takes chlorine out of the atmosphere is a reaction with nitric oxides.
What happens in the winter is that it gets really cold (thats why they call it winter). Its so cold over the south poll that the nitric oxides freeze out of the atmosphere and condense on particles and fall to the ground. In addition, there is no sunlight, so the CFC's build up without being reacted to by sunlight. Then comes spring time, the sun comes up and BLAMO, all the CFC's get turned into chlorine. And worse, the nitric oxides are still frozen on the ground. So now you have tons of chlorine reacting with the ozone, and nothing to remove it from the atmosphere. So it continues until there is no ozone left. Later in the spring, as the nitric oxides sublime back into the atmosphere, they eat up the chlorine and things return to normal.
A couple years ago I was at -Censored big name computer store- and they had their "build it your way" stand where you could mix and match parts and they would build a system for you. Freedom, except for the OS. W2K home or professional were the options. The following is condensed, with a bunch of "let me ask my manager" lines removed.
Me: I want it without the OS.
Them: can't do it.
Me: Just sell me the parts.
Them: they needed to charge me $200 extra to buy just the parts.
me: Why?
Them: That's the policy.
Me: Why am I being charged for you to do less work?
Them: Because they said that they take a risk in selling me untested parts.
Me: How do you test it?
Them: We build it, put the OS on, and then run a test program.
Me: Ok, build it, put the OS on, test it, format the drive, and give me the parts.
Them: Sorry, we still need to charge you the $200 extra.
Me: Why?
THem: You still have a copy of the OS, a format really doesn't get rid of the copy.
Me: Ok, I'll bring in my copy of Redhat, and install over it.
Them: Sorry, we can't allow you to do that.
Me: Why not?
Them: As part of our agreement with vendors, we are only allowed to sell certain configurations
Me (cutting to the chase): are you prohibited from selling computers that do not have Windows installed?
Them: I can not answer specific questions about vendors
In the mean time I get the funny feeling that I am being watched from a video monitor by someone holding a fluffy white cat saying "Inspite of my best efforts, Mr Bond, you are still alive".
Pu239 is used for reactor fuel and for bombs. Pu238 is used for RTG generators. Pu240 is a spiking agent used to make nuclear reactor fuel go off prematurely if it were used in a bomb. Well, its not actually added to reactor fuel, its a byproduct of the process. But in a reactor it doesn't matter much. In a bomb it makes the reaction go off prematurely, and really cuts down on the yield.
Gota wonder if those Sinclair wires turn out to be nanotubes :-).
For those of you who have not read the book, Larry Niven proposed a world as a scaled down Dysan sphere, a ring around a star. Night and day would be done by a set of squares in inner orbit that would orbit slightly faster than the main ring, thus simulating night and day. They also generated power via thermocouples.
Microsoft's standard operating practice is to release vaporware of a product long before any such products exists. They used to call it slideware because the product existed only on powerpoint slides. The idea is to choke off the air supply (ie: revenue) of any competiting company by giving people an excuse to wait for the Microsoft product.
Hey, uranium is not nasty stuff. You could hold a brick of it in your hand, and unless your emitting lots of neutrons, or you've exceeded critical mass, the only hazard would be a broken toe when you drop it. Uranium is an alpha particle emitter, which means it gets stopped by a piece of paper. If you grind it up and blow it into the air, yes, your work force will die of lung cancer in 20 years. So they have plenty of time to make plentyh of bombs.
You want weapons of mass destruction? Try smallpox, ebola, or the plague. There are damns in the US where there are 100K people downstream. How well do you think they are guarded? You want a dirty radiological bomb? Try radio-cobalt. No nuclear material needed to make this stuff.
If you have pure Plutonium 239 I believe you can use a gun type bomb. But pure plutonium 239 is alnmost impossible to come by, there is always contanamation from pu-240, which would cause the bomb to go off prematurely and fizzle instead.
I don't recall anything about a heavy metal casing to hold the bomb together. If memory serves, its usually made of berillium, a very light weight metal. Its used because its a good neutron reflector, which reflects neutrons back into the core to keep the reaction going.
The reprocessing slide has a big "yeah but" missing. Yes, you do get plutonium-239 by reprocessing spent fuel. But you also get plutonium-240 at the same time. What's the difference? The existence of pu-240 almost killed the plutonium bomb in WW2. Pu240 releases a lot of neutrons spontanously. In a reactor this is generally not a problem. In a weapon, you want the neutron count to go from almost zero to through the roof within microseconds. The original plutonum bomb was to be a cannon bomb like the uranium one. But the speed at which the plutonium cores came together was too slow to avoid having the pu240 set the reaction off prematurely and thus killing most of the yield. They solved this by (a) limiting the time fuel was in the reactor, and (b) going to the implosion model.
If I have a copy of a song on one media, that I own, I should be able to move it to any media I want to as long as I, or my immediate family, are using it. I should not have to buy it once for VHS, again for DVD, and again for HDDVD and again for my portable player and again to view it on my notebook. Conversely, this does NOT mean I can copy it to all my friends, that should not be allowed.
Not as long as Microsoft can find them funding. Their plan is to keep the lawsuits up as long as possible to give them as much time as possible to finish shorthorn, I mean longhorn. Whoops, I meant as long as possible to get Longhorn up to beta quality so they can sell it.
Yes it would, but most places do not encrypt the data. Most backup programs DO NOT HAVE ENCRYPTION EVEN AS AN OPTION. And most backup programs backup over the network IN THE CLEAR. When I had to secure sensitive data, I shut down the database, copied and then GPG encrypted the data. I told backup not to backup the database directory, but to backup the encrypted copy. The private keys are kept on several other machines. So if the backup tape gets lost, I don't care from a security standpoint.
Yes, someone could get ahold of the backup tape and get a copy of the key. Anything is doable, its just a lot harder. And no, the machines with the key are not backed up onto the same backup server.
Methane is a greenhouse gas, a lot worse than carbon dioxide. I don't think it reacts with ozone.
Um, no. The Chernobyl people had turned off most of the safety equipment in order to conduct a test. The reactor was almost at zero power. They were pulling out control rods in an effort to start the reaction up. But they made a fundamental mistake with reactors. The control rods control rate of change, not the absolute power rating. So when the reaction did start up, it rapidly overloaded the reactor. On top of that, the reactor was designed with a positive thermal coefficient. English translation: the hotter it gets, the faster the reaction runs. No wonder the damn thing exploded. Its like Windows, when you see how well it was designed, its no wonder it gets hacked.
But this is old technology. Look at the more recent technologies like pebble reactors. They figured out the maximum temperature a reactor could hit, and then designed the ceramic shell to melt at a higher temperature. It can't melt under its own power. Its passive safety, which I trust a lot more than active safety with all its pumps and valves and moving parts that can fail.
TMI was within a couple of hours of a *total meltdown* before they finally figured out what was going on
According to the Kermey (sp?) report, the reactor actually melted down about 25-50%. The reactor designers were quite conservative. They assumed that steam would not cool the reactor core at all. In reality it cooled about half as effective as water. So in spite of the operators turning off the ECCS (emergency core cooling system) pumps, the absolute wrong thing to do, the reactor didn't completely melt down.
it's not a given that the containment building would have stopped a liquid pool of molten nuclear fuel from eating through down to the water table
Kermey report actually goes into that. TMI-2 had a relatively new reactor load, therefore had few waste products built up. It would not have penetrated the containment building. I think the doc even questions if it would eat through the reactor vessel. Its been years since I've read those docs, so memory fades a bit.
As for radiation, coal fired power plants typically emit more radiation than nuclear power plants. For that matter, some sources of uranium are actually coal. (note: might be thorium, its been a few years since I was active in nuclear energy). In addition you have heavy metals like mercury and arsenic. Not only are they in the coal ash, they get into the air. On top of this are the sulfer dioxides, nitrous oxides, carbon dioxide, fly ash, etc, etc. Nuclear waste is no day at the beach, but coal is no picnic either. And remember, in between 300 and 1200 years the radioactive waste will be less toxic than the ore it came from (depending on which way you measure toxicity). A million years from now the arsnic and mercury in coal ash will be just as toxic.
I don't know, I did not know that term back then. My influence was a book called "Systems Programming", where it said that if you ever found a bug, devise a test to exercise it and include it into a test suite.
As to whether or not I made the bug test general purpose, it depended. Some of the routines I wrote were very complicated, so I tried to generalize the testing for those. Others were more specific to the bug.
What tests would i do today if I do if I were responsible for the code that broke due to the LAND attack? At the minimum I would have the original test. I would also do similar tests for UDP and ICMP. Would I do all the IP protocols? Maybe. I would at least do all the ones that I supported.