The input absorbed by the fuel is less than the output at the fuel. That is a very important step, showing that we can actually get more energy out than we are putting in.
Er, wasn't that part actually first demonstrated back in 1952?
I had the impression the difficult bit was controlling the fusion energy discharge within a continuously-operating reactor.
The simplicity of shutting down the pumps would have no safety-issue in a properly design system that hasn't exploded
People here seem to keep assuming that this is a functioning plant and that the original design specifications hold. It isn't and they don't. It's a debris field with lots of temporary jury-rigged power sources running everything.
Yeah, but who needs the idea to switch off the friggin' cooling pumps easily in the first place?
I'm guessing, but since main power to the reactors has been out since the tsunami, they're probably routing power to the cooling pumps via emergency generators / power cables. And it's probably one of those temporary/emergency junction boxes that lost power rather than the main control panel.
Heck, I don't even know if they have physical access to the original control rooms and wiring for much of anything anymore. This isn't a functioning nuclear plant; it's a wet, rusty junkjard full of random places that can kill you if you stand too close.
That seems like the sort of function that should be designed with a multi-step process to execute, to eliminate precisely that kind of error. How in the world did that get implemented?
Well, I imagine the process flowchart was rigorously overseen and went something like this:
1. Have an earthquake of magitude 6 local equivalent (earthquakes? in Japan? unthinkably unlikely! we can build cheaper if we ignore this contingency) 2. Have a tsunami overtop our seawall (tsunamis? in Japan? on the coast? see above) 3. Lose local, grid and backup generator power (utterly impossible, see above. and obviously flood isn't a risk so we'll put our generators in the basement) 4. Have a meltdown and explosion (this will NEVER happen because it just can't. So it won't. Ever. Full technical refutation: nananana CAN'T HEAR YOU). 5. Run around screaming with our hands in the air (precise details to be left to onsite implementors) 6. Burn out all our trained staff because of contamination 7. Quickly bodge something together to stop the leaking 8. Oh god it keeps leaking aaaaarrrrgh make it stop it won't stop why won't it stop 9. Quick hire some untrained staff and fake their dosimeters why is it still leaking 10. Toss something to the press about billion dollar frozen ice walls. Don't mention the leak. Try to smile. Randomly punch buttons. Is it hot in here?
This isn't another example of how precarious the situation at the Fukushima Daiichi plant is, but one of how massive the incompetence of TEPCO is that they keep having 'incident' after 'incident'.
... after multiple explosions and meltdowns.
You seem to be under the assumption that this is a nuclear plant. It's not. It's a nuclear meltdown site, and the thing about meltdowns is they don't have an off switch. You don't fix them - fixing the problem will require several hundred years for the corium to decay. You don't decommission them - decommissioning is what you do to an unexploded reactor that reaches the end of its natural life gracefully. You sure as heck don't operate them like they're functioning online plants. The best you can do is try to manage them and minimise the releases. And since the only management they can do is pour water onto naked radioactive corium and pump radioactive groundwater out, then try to store it in leaky tanks - all in a mess of jury-rigged pipes, cables and generators with temporary staff recruited by the Mafia who are rapidly burning out their dosimeters - it's not exactly likely to all go according to the textbook, is it?
Am I imagining things, or does it sound like a nuclear plant is being operated by a company without the barest idea of how to do that?
Well, yes and no. This isn't actually a nuclear plant anymore; it's a nuclear disaster site, full of jury-rigged temporary equipment. Of course they're making things up as they go along, and of course it's all awkward and unsafe, because nobody in the entire nuclear industry has been here before. There really is no long-term plan, but that's not entirely TEPCO's fault because the industry as a whole doesn't have any long-term plan for dealing with nuclear disasters other than to say "they will never happen because we have failsafes, so we don't need to waste any time thinking about that".
Fortunately all that saved time and effort not coming up with worst-case disaster scenarios because they were too far-fetched to imagine is now paying off! If we all just close our eyes, clap our hands and chant "THORIUM PEBBLE-BED LIQUID SODIUM BREEDERS!" this will all magically go away.
Do you realize that TEPCO has no plan to even decommission these reactors, let alone clean up the mess that they have now?
Arguably "decommissioning" Fukushima Da-ichi isn't a problem because the reactors are already way, way out of commission. Decommissioning is what you do to unexploded reactors. The problem now is containment (very difficult because of groundwater flow) and then cleanup (a very long-term job).
There is no current plan to remove those spent rods--they just sit there.
Actually TEPCO is planning on moving the spent fuel rods from the mostly-unexploded reactor come November, but they're going to want to do it very very carefully. Getting them moved seems like an important thing, but actually doing it is probably the most dangerous part.
Seriously, nobody has any idea what to do about this.
And there's the rub. The problem is that there basically isn't any way to clean up a situation like Fukushima where there's a meltdown in groundwater; this has been known to the nuclear industry for decades, and the answer has always been "we know this is an unsolveable problem, but we believe the odds of this happening are so low as to be unthinkable, because we have multiple redundant safety systems." The GE boiling water reactors especially took this philosophy to extremes; they don't have containment to deal with a meltdown because the suppression torus was supposed to make a meltdown impossible.
This kind of tempting-the-wrath-from-high-atop-the-thing reasoning from the industry is exactly why the anti-nuclear-power protest movement started gaining traction in the 1970s. Activists kept asking "yes, your active failsafes are shiny, but what if the unthinkable happens? How will you clean it up?" And the industry kept saying "we can't, but don't worry, it won't! Stop worrying!"
As anyone in IT should know from bitter experience, you can have all the multiple redundant disaster planning you want, but reality always tends to come up with interesting disaster scenarios your plan didn't account for. And "we're betting the worst case will never happen" is your cue to sell stocks and head for the door.
Black markets have the same competitive pressures as regular ones -- in that the stupid, incompetent, and untalented, tend to be eaten up by people who lack those faults.
Ah, that would explain why the entire banking sector collapsed a while back in a heap of unverified, falsified and fraudulent financial instruments. All the incompetent players got competed out of existence during those years of hurly-burly open competition and now only the smartest, most ethical people in the industry remain standing, right?
If you know how electricity and electronic components work, how logic gates and ALUs work, know assembly and higher level languages you can pretty much understand enough
... to be really scared.
Like they say, if you want to sleep at night you don't actually want to know how sausages, laws or semiconductor devices are made.
I guess it's the entitlement culture... that insists that an infinite number of things be known by them without having to put an infinite amount of time into it.
Maxwell's Information Demon says: "Hi! It looks like you're trying to enumerate an infinite number of uncountably infinite sets in your head! Would you like me to read to you from the collected works of Kurt Godel and Georg Cantor while you're waiting to finish that? Aleph-1 Klein bottles of beer on the wall, Aleph-1 Klein bottles of beer, take one down, pass it around, Aleph-2 Klein bottles of beer, hey! Darn, I broke one. Now there's Koch snowflakes all over the Sierpinski carpet. Got a Menger sponge?"
Who voted for the bankers who are destroying the economy with total impunity?
That may have been a rhetorical question, but there's an actual, literal answer if you care to read history: Everyone who voted for Margaret Thatcher in 1979, 1983 and 1987, Reagan in 1980 and 1984, and Bush senior in 1988. The 1980s were the conservative ideological revolution when the political momentum in the English-speaking countries shifted from mixed capitalist-socialism to full on deregulated capitalism, in the name of 'streamlining' government. The 1990s and 2000s have been just variations and continuations on this theme.
Who gave the power to the banksters? The Baby Boom generation (and some of the older Gen-Xs) did. In the name of "personal freedom", "getting the government off our backs", and sometimes even (literally in the case of the 1984 New Zealand Labour government which was actually a temporary left/right alliance) in the name of left-wing causes.
You have to realise, things in the 1970s were pretty stuffed up. Crime was on the rise, the economy was suffering from inflation and high oil prices, left-wing governments were supporting an unpopular foreign wars (Vietnam). Movies (before Star Wars) were grim and paranoid. There were almost constant rolling strikes; the unions gave themselves such a bad name that the public were happy to vote to restrict their power, and a swing to the right seemed like it might solve all our problems. And the right wing exploited this sense of looming apocalypse and blamed everything on too much government regulation. "Let the market decide!" was the rallying cry everywhere. "Freedom to the people! Government out of our wallets! Vote with your hard-earned dollars! Stop strangling the hard-working business owners! Free the forces of competition and enterprise!"
And in the 1970s, Russia was still frozen in the legacy of Stalinism, the Cultural Revolution was still churning in China, and Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge was demonstrating in Cambodia just how insanely genocidal a Communist regime could get. In Africa, Idi Amin was massacring Ugandans in the name of Marx and and Ethopia was convulsed by a Marxist uprising turned civil war. Leftists all over the world were becoming ashamed of their views, as it seemed that Marxism led inevitably to catastrophe and despair. Meanwhile, moderated by socialism, the capitalist "free world" seemed to be doing a lot better, but was going through an economic slump; the reasoning went that, if Marxism had caused huge human rights disasters (and seemed to have no built-in safeguards for human rights), then fully embracing the opposite would be the answer. "And what's the worst that could happen?" people thought the generation who'd grown up after WW2, at the height of the Welfare State. "It's not like they're going to cut social security, is it?"
In hindsight, that wasn't the smartest thing the Boomers did, but they are the ones who chose to give the banksters the power they now abuse with impunity. But it certainly wasn't clear-cut at the time.
If bitten you have an irresistable urge to download cracked pirate copies of the latest games? Or just want to hang around large empty buildings filled with shipping goods in transit?
The wearwolf, now that's far a more dangerous beast; it haunts the catwalks of Paris and Milan, possessed of an insatiable hunger and a suit with more dimensions than the eye can follow without watering.
No. The entire purpose of RSA is providing the illusion of security.
Fixed. The problem with security is that you can't actually sell it; the customer has no way to tell if they are really secure, or just feeling secure. But the customer can certainly tell if they feel secure. So all security vendors tend to major on the warm fuzzy feelings. That means a lot of "trust us, we're the experts" and "you don't need to know the details, put your mind at ease" and not a lot of "here is the exact proof that you are secure, including every line of our source code and every mask in our circuitry, run the analysis yourself".
The other problem is that despite the free-market view that "they wouldn't be in business if they were faulty", proprietary security vendors actually have an extremely strong perverse incentive: the stronger the illusion of security, and the more powerful and secretive the clients, the more gain there is in working with an intelligence organisation to subvert that security. And since, when the clients are nation-states and militaries, working with intelligence agencies may be a requirement for getting the sales contract... and refusing to work with those agencies may result in treason charges and jail time... well, you don't need a doctorate in either cryptoanalysis or economics to see where those incentives might lead.
It's the classic confidence-trickster problem. You have a secret. You want to keep your secret. To keep your secret and come out ahead of the game you have to deal with someone who has bigger secrets, a bigger bankroll, and is smiling a lot. You sit down at the table, and look around. Do you see who the mark is? Even if you think you do, there's no guarantee that you're not all marks for the house.
And it is actively telling people not to use it.
Sure, now RSA are, now that the beans have been spilled by Edward Snowden and the NIST themselves are reopening the standard for discussion. If they didn't say anything it would look even more suspicious and whatever tattered remnants of trust they had would be gone.
Unfortunately the illusion's pretty much torn at this point. By the way, how are Crypto AGdoing?
I think there is reason to believe the reactor is leaking stuff into the groundwater.
Stupid question: Can the melted-down reactor be moved?
Move four large multistorey buildings' worth of industrial plant full of poisonous liquid? Probably, if you were a supervillain, given years, with serious construction and earthmoving equipment, but you'd kill everyone who did the work and contaminate everything all of the equipment touched. The radiation near the cores is in the multi-Sievert "you die in minutes" range. And the cores themselves are hundreds of tons of molten lava which has already burned through the metal parts of the reactor vessel and is probably embedded somewhere inside blocks of concrete which is constantly flooded with groundwater. And any of this runoff water is itself radioactive enough to kill you in hours if you touched it.
Much safer to leave everything where it is - shielded by the earth and the remains of the plant - and try to somehow stop the water getting in.
As I understand it, SOP is to build an on-site water-filtration system, since water cannot become radioactive, and keep cleaning and filtering until it's done.
But the water itself actually is also radioactive. Tritium has a halflife of 12 years, so it'll go away eventually, but you don't want to drink this stuff. The fish aren't getting a choice, though.
What about them, indeed. Prancing down the streets of Neo-Londinium in their altitude scarves and and flying tweeds as if they had just stepped out of the furnace-room of Her Majesty's Airship Ultra-Titania. Always clacking on their pocket telestenographs and with a steam automaton snorting behind as like as not, fouling the pavement with coal smoke and terrifying the horses.
and the lethal dose is more like 5000 mS, 1800mS over four hours and a person would be almost to the point of "severe radiation sickness", but most would not die.
Except it's not 1800mSv over four hours, it's 1800mSv per hour over four hours, so that's 7200 mSv in four hours, 3600 in two hours. And the lethal dose is 5000.
Yeah, I won't be standing right next to that tank, I think.
if Slashdot had Unicode, trolls would have filled every thread with a certain invalid Arabic string and my iPad's browser would have crashed trying to read this thread.
Well, you chould choose to use a tablet that doesn't crash when it tries to render fonts. There is this thing called the free market...
(yeah, and if markets made rational choices all software companies would be out of business, but it's nice to dream.)
If these were instruments for measuring leakage out of a storage tank, then 100 millisieverts seems entirely appropriate to me.
Even though they knew that the liquid inside was coming from a place (the reactor basement) that they've measured in the multi-Sievert range before? Why would they think the radiation in case of a leak would be limited to millisieverts?
This is pretty shocking on all levels, but sadly, not unexpected given TEPCO's performance.
That's not any kind of excuse. Turing-completeness in itself need not imply that code should be able to break out of its execution environment.
It is a very large library that actually includes a virtual machine that has been rewritten from pascal to single-threaded non-reentrant C to reentrant C⦠The code is extremely hairy and hard to review
Yes, and that such a fundamental piece of code should be in such an awful state is pretty much exactly a summary of what's wrong with the software industry.
Any foundational platform library must reviewable and provable to be correct. I don't care how "hard" this to do because the Internet does not care. The Internet is going to crash your code if it is crashable and you connect it to the Internet. And your code and everyone who uses your code is going to get destroyed. That's all there is to it. Be provably correct, or get rooted.
If your code is so complicated that no human can prove it is correct, then your code is wrong, period. Either your language is wrong, or your architecture is wrong, or the way you've broken it down into components is wrong. If you're using C++, then your language is actively fighting against your attempts to prove correctness. If your architecture allows you to pass random unchecked raw memory pointers around and potentially execute them, then your architecture is also working to betray you. But just because these elements of the design are outside your control as a programmer doesn't mean that they aren't still wrong.
Unfortunately we've now invested so much effort into building not-provably-correct broken programs on top of broken languages and architectures that the security problem is likely to be with us forever. So, um. Good luck on the Internet, everyone. The asteroid arrives Tuesday.
Slashdot Mirror
The input absorbed by the fuel is less than the output at the fuel. That is a very important step, showing that we can actually get more energy out than we are putting in.
Er, wasn't that part actually first demonstrated back in 1952?
I had the impression the difficult bit was controlling the fusion energy discharge within a continuously-operating reactor.
The simplicity of shutting down the pumps would have no safety-issue in a properly design system that hasn't exploded
People here seem to keep assuming that this is a functioning plant and that the original design specifications hold. It isn't and they don't. It's a debris field with lots of temporary jury-rigged power sources running everything.
Yeah, but who needs the idea to switch off the friggin' cooling pumps easily in the first place?
I'm guessing, but since main power to the reactors has been out since the tsunami, they're probably routing power to the cooling pumps via emergency generators / power cables. And it's probably one of those temporary/emergency junction boxes that lost power rather than the main control panel.
Heck, I don't even know if they have physical access to the original control rooms and wiring for much of anything anymore. This isn't a functioning nuclear plant; it's a wet, rusty junkjard full of random places that can kill you if you stand too close.
That seems like the sort of function that should be designed with a multi-step process to execute, to eliminate precisely that kind of error. How in the world did that get implemented?
Well, I imagine the process flowchart was rigorously overseen and went something like this:
1. Have an earthquake of magitude 6 local equivalent (earthquakes? in Japan? unthinkably unlikely! we can build cheaper if we ignore this contingency)
2. Have a tsunami overtop our seawall (tsunamis? in Japan? on the coast? see above)
3. Lose local, grid and backup generator power (utterly impossible, see above. and obviously flood isn't a risk so we'll put our generators in the basement)
4. Have a meltdown and explosion (this will NEVER happen because it just can't. So it won't. Ever. Full technical refutation: nananana CAN'T HEAR YOU).
5. Run around screaming with our hands in the air (precise details to be left to onsite implementors)
6. Burn out all our trained staff because of contamination
7. Quickly bodge something together to stop the leaking
8. Oh god it keeps leaking aaaaarrrrgh make it stop it won't stop why won't it stop
9. Quick hire some untrained staff and fake their dosimeters why is it still leaking
10. Toss something to the press about billion dollar frozen ice walls. Don't mention the leak. Try to smile. Randomly punch buttons. Is it hot in here?
This isn't another example of how precarious the situation at the Fukushima Daiichi plant is, but one of how massive the incompetence of TEPCO is that they keep having 'incident' after 'incident'.
... after multiple explosions and meltdowns.
You seem to be under the assumption that this is a nuclear plant. It's not. It's a nuclear meltdown site, and the thing about meltdowns is they don't have an off switch. You don't fix them - fixing the problem will require several hundred years for the corium to decay. You don't decommission them - decommissioning is what you do to an unexploded reactor that reaches the end of its natural life gracefully. You sure as heck don't operate them like they're functioning online plants. The best you can do is try to manage them and minimise the releases. And since the only management they can do is pour water onto naked radioactive corium and pump radioactive groundwater out, then try to store it in leaky tanks - all in a mess of jury-rigged pipes, cables and generators with temporary staff recruited by the Mafia who are rapidly burning out their dosimeters - it's not exactly likely to all go according to the textbook, is it?
Am I imagining things, or does it sound like a nuclear plant is being operated by a company without the barest idea of how to do that?
Well, yes and no. This isn't actually a nuclear plant anymore; it's a nuclear disaster site, full of jury-rigged temporary equipment. Of course they're making things up as they go along, and of course it's all awkward and unsafe, because nobody in the entire nuclear industry has been here before. There really is no long-term plan, but that's not entirely TEPCO's fault because the industry as a whole doesn't have any long-term plan for dealing with nuclear disasters other than to say "they will never happen because we have failsafes, so we don't need to waste any time thinking about that".
Fortunately all that saved time and effort not coming up with worst-case disaster scenarios because they were too far-fetched to imagine is now paying off! If we all just close our eyes, clap our hands and chant "THORIUM PEBBLE-BED LIQUID SODIUM BREEDERS!" this will all magically go away.
Do you realize that TEPCO has no plan to even decommission these reactors, let alone clean up the mess that they have now?
Arguably "decommissioning" Fukushima Da-ichi isn't a problem because the reactors are already way, way out of commission. Decommissioning is what you do to unexploded reactors. The problem now is containment (very difficult because of groundwater flow) and then cleanup (a very long-term job).
There is no current plan to remove those spent rods--they just sit there.
Actually TEPCO is planning on moving the spent fuel rods from the mostly-unexploded reactor come November, but they're going to want to do it very very carefully. Getting them moved seems like an important thing, but actually doing it is probably the most dangerous part.
Seriously, nobody has any idea what to do about this.
And there's the rub. The problem is that there basically isn't any way to clean up a situation like Fukushima where there's a meltdown in groundwater; this has been known to the nuclear industry for decades, and the answer has always been "we know this is an unsolveable problem, but we believe the odds of this happening are so low as to be unthinkable, because we have multiple redundant safety systems." The GE boiling water reactors especially took this philosophy to extremes; they don't have containment to deal with a meltdown because the suppression torus was supposed to make a meltdown impossible.
This kind of tempting-the-wrath-from-high-atop-the-thing reasoning from the industry is exactly why the anti-nuclear-power protest movement started gaining traction in the 1970s. Activists kept asking "yes, your active failsafes are shiny, but what if the unthinkable happens? How will you clean it up?" And the industry kept saying "we can't, but don't worry, it won't! Stop worrying!"
As anyone in IT should know from bitter experience, you can have all the multiple redundant disaster planning you want, but reality always tends to come up with interesting disaster scenarios your plan didn't account for. And "we're betting the worst case will never happen" is your cue to sell stocks and head for the door.
I never heard of a transaction which took place in real life
So it's just a really complicated way of selling EVE Online stats?
Black markets have the same competitive pressures as regular ones -- in that the stupid, incompetent, and untalented, tend to be eaten up by people who lack those faults.
Ah, that would explain why the entire banking sector collapsed a while back in a heap of unverified, falsified and fraudulent financial instruments. All the incompetent players got competed out of existence during those years of hurly-burly open competition and now only the smartest, most ethical people in the industry remain standing, right?
Being as there is a deterministic hardware state machine that successfully executes the instruction sequence
There's a Mr Shroedinger and a Mr Bohr here to see you about that statement. Oh - sorry. A single Mr Shroedinger-and/or-Bohr.
And a Mr Murphy, who just set both their beards afire to, and I quote, "see what would be the worst that could happen."
If you know how electricity and electronic components work, how logic gates and ALUs work, know assembly and higher level languages you can pretty much understand enough
... to be really scared.
Like they say, if you want to sleep at night you don't actually want to know how sausages, laws or semiconductor devices are made.
I guess it's the entitlement culture... that insists that an infinite number of things be known by them without having to put an infinite amount of time into it.
Maxwell's Information Demon says: "Hi! It looks like you're trying to enumerate an infinite number of uncountably infinite sets in your head! Would you like me to read to you from the collected works of Kurt Godel and Georg Cantor while you're waiting to finish that? Aleph-1 Klein bottles of beer on the wall, Aleph-1 Klein bottles of beer, take one down, pass it around, Aleph-2 Klein bottles of beer, hey! Darn, I broke one. Now there's Koch snowflakes all over the Sierpinski carpet. Got a Menger sponge?"
Who voted for the bankers who are destroying the economy with total impunity?
That may have been a rhetorical question, but there's an actual, literal answer if you care to read history: Everyone who voted for Margaret Thatcher in 1979, 1983 and 1987, Reagan in 1980 and 1984, and Bush senior in 1988. The 1980s were the conservative ideological revolution when the political momentum in the English-speaking countries shifted from mixed capitalist-socialism to full on deregulated capitalism, in the name of 'streamlining' government. The 1990s and 2000s have been just variations and continuations on this theme.
Who gave the power to the banksters? The Baby Boom generation (and some of the older Gen-Xs) did. In the name of "personal freedom", "getting the government off our backs", and sometimes even (literally in the case of the 1984 New Zealand Labour government which was actually a temporary left/right alliance) in the name of left-wing causes.
You have to realise, things in the 1970s were pretty stuffed up. Crime was on the rise, the economy was suffering from inflation and high oil prices, left-wing governments were supporting an unpopular foreign wars (Vietnam). Movies (before Star Wars) were grim and paranoid. There were almost constant rolling strikes; the unions gave themselves such a bad name that the public were happy to vote to restrict their power, and a swing to the right seemed like it might solve all our problems. And the right wing exploited this sense of looming apocalypse and blamed everything on too much government regulation. "Let the market decide!" was the rallying cry everywhere. "Freedom to the people! Government out of our wallets! Vote with your hard-earned dollars! Stop strangling the hard-working business owners! Free the forces of competition and enterprise!"
And in the 1970s, Russia was still frozen in the legacy of Stalinism, the Cultural Revolution was still churning in China, and Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge was demonstrating in Cambodia just how insanely genocidal a Communist regime could get. In Africa, Idi Amin was massacring Ugandans in the name of Marx and and Ethopia was convulsed by a Marxist uprising turned civil war. Leftists all over the world were becoming ashamed of their views, as it seemed that Marxism led inevitably to catastrophe and despair. Meanwhile, moderated by socialism, the capitalist "free world" seemed to be doing a lot better, but was going through an economic slump; the reasoning went that, if Marxism had caused huge human rights disasters (and seemed to have no built-in safeguards for human rights), then fully embracing the opposite would be the answer. "And what's the worst that could happen?" people thought the generation who'd grown up after WW2, at the height of the Welfare State. "It's not like they're going to cut social security, is it?"
In hindsight, that wasn't the smartest thing the Boomers did, but they are the ones who chose to give the banksters the power they now abuse with impunity. But it certainly wasn't clear-cut at the time.
Warewolfs
If bitten you have an irresistable urge to download cracked pirate copies of the latest games? Or just want to hang around large empty buildings filled with shipping goods in transit?
The wearwolf, now that's far a more dangerous beast; it haunts the catwalks of Paris and Milan, possessed of an insatiable hunger and a suit with more dimensions than the eye can follow without watering.
Apple Inc. has lost MUCH talent in the last 14 months!
Turnover can kill a great company!
So you're saying investors be wary of the (sunglasses) Apple turnover?
No. The entire purpose of RSA is providing the illusion of security.
Fixed. The problem with security is that you can't actually sell it; the customer has no way to tell if they are really secure, or just feeling secure. But the customer can certainly tell if they feel secure. So all security vendors tend to major on the warm fuzzy feelings. That means a lot of "trust us, we're the experts" and "you don't need to know the details, put your mind at ease" and not a lot of "here is the exact proof that you are secure, including every line of our source code and every mask in our circuitry, run the analysis yourself".
The other problem is that despite the free-market view that "they wouldn't be in business if they were faulty", proprietary security vendors actually have an extremely strong perverse incentive: the stronger the illusion of security, and the more powerful and secretive the clients, the more gain there is in working with an intelligence organisation to subvert that security. And since, when the clients are nation-states and militaries, working with intelligence agencies may be a requirement for getting the sales contract... and refusing to work with those agencies may result in treason charges and jail time... well, you don't need a doctorate in either cryptoanalysis or economics to see where those incentives might lead.
It's the classic confidence-trickster problem. You have a secret. You want to keep your secret. To keep your secret and come out ahead of the game you have to deal with someone who has bigger secrets, a bigger bankroll, and is smiling a lot. You sit down at the table, and look around. Do you see who the mark is? Even if you think you do, there's no guarantee that you're not all marks for the house.
And it is actively telling people not to use it.
Sure, now RSA are, now that the beans have been spilled by Edward Snowden and the NIST themselves are reopening the standard for discussion. If they didn't say anything it would look even more suspicious and whatever tattered remnants of trust they had would be gone.
Unfortunately the illusion's pretty much torn at this point. By the way, how are Crypto AG doing?
I think there is reason to believe the reactor is leaking stuff into the groundwater.
Stupid question: Can the melted-down reactor be moved?
Move four large multistorey buildings' worth of industrial plant full of poisonous liquid? Probably, if you were a supervillain, given years, with serious construction and earthmoving equipment, but you'd kill everyone who did the work and contaminate everything all of the equipment touched. The radiation near the cores is in the multi-Sievert "you die in minutes" range. And the cores themselves are hundreds of tons of molten lava which has already burned through the metal parts of the reactor vessel and is probably embedded somewhere inside blocks of concrete which is constantly flooded with groundwater. And any of this runoff water is itself radioactive enough to kill you in hours if you touched it.
Much safer to leave everything where it is - shielded by the earth and the remains of the plant - and try to somehow stop the water getting in.
As I understand it, SOP is to build an on-site water-filtration system, since water cannot become radioactive, and keep cleaning and filtering until it's done.
Yep, they've got one of those, and it's not working. So they're going to get another one. Which also probably won't work.
But the water itself actually is also radioactive. Tritium has a halflife of 12 years, so it'll go away eventually, but you don't want to drink this stuff. The fish aren't getting a choice, though.
What about Gogglers?
What about them, indeed. Prancing down the streets of Neo-Londinium in their altitude scarves and and flying tweeds as if they had just stepped out of the furnace-room of Her Majesty's Airship Ultra-Titania. Always clacking on their pocket telestenographs and with a steam automaton snorting behind as like as not, fouling the pavement with coal smoke and terrifying the horses.
Youth of today have no respect.
"1 million deths"
Citations please.
Here you are!
That's 1,000,000 of these or just one of these.
It's pretty bad.
and the lethal dose is more like 5000 mS, 1800mS over four hours and a person would be almost to the point of "severe radiation sickness", but most would not die.
Except it's not 1800mSv over four hours, it's 1800mSv per hour over four hours, so that's 7200 mSv in four hours, 3600 in two hours. And the lethal dose is 5000.
Yeah, I won't be standing right next to that tank, I think.
if Slashdot had Unicode, trolls would have filled every thread with a certain invalid Arabic string and my iPad's browser would have crashed trying to read this thread.
Well, you chould choose to use a tablet that doesn't crash when it tries to render fonts. There is this thing called the free market...
(yeah, and if markets made rational choices all software companies would be out of business, but it's nice to dream.)
If these were instruments for measuring leakage out of a storage tank, then 100 millisieverts seems entirely appropriate to me.
Even though they knew that the liquid inside was coming from a place (the reactor basement) that they've measured in the multi-Sievert range before? Why would they think the radiation in case of a leak would be limited to millisieverts?
This is pretty shocking on all levels, but sadly, not unexpected given TEPCO's performance.
it's a very obeisant culture.
Well sure they eat a lot of carbohydrates, but c'mon, I'm sure most Americans are fatter than the average Japanese....
Did you know that TTF fonts are turing complete?
That's not any kind of excuse. Turing-completeness in itself need not imply that code should be able to break out of its execution environment.
It is a very large library that actually includes a virtual machine that has been rewritten from pascal to single-threaded non-reentrant C to reentrant C⦠The code is extremely hairy and hard to review
Yes, and that such a fundamental piece of code should be in such an awful state is pretty much exactly a summary of what's wrong with the software industry.
Any foundational platform library must reviewable and provable to be correct. I don't care how "hard" this to do because the Internet does not care. The Internet is going to crash your code if it is crashable and you connect it to the Internet. And your code and everyone who uses your code is going to get destroyed. That's all there is to it. Be provably correct, or get rooted.
If your code is so complicated that no human can prove it is correct, then your code is wrong, period. Either your language is wrong, or your architecture is wrong, or the way you've broken it down into components is wrong. If you're using C++, then your language is actively fighting against your attempts to prove correctness. If your architecture allows you to pass random unchecked raw memory pointers around and potentially execute them, then your architecture is also working to betray you. But just because these elements of the design are outside your control as a programmer doesn't mean that they aren't still wrong.
Unfortunately we've now invested so much effort into building not-provably-correct broken programs on top of broken languages and architectures that the security problem is likely to be with us forever. So, um. Good luck on the Internet, everyone. The asteroid arrives Tuesday.