Your post illustrates how futile patents are
on
Supreme Court spurns RIM
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Yes - your post is quite informative and it does illustrate how futile the patent process is. Prior examples of this would include Philo Farnsworth VS RCA.
If as you state the NTP patents were legit - then we have the issue that there is no justice and the inventor only found a way to waste money on lawyers and legal fees. Often this is the major outcome of a civil case. Theives know this and white collar crime is rampant because they know this. If you take them to court you might win something back - and in the interm they get to use your money to fight against you. If they lose - the have to pay some of that money back to you.
In the Farnsworth litigation - this would be pretty close to the situation. Farnsworth would have been better off building better products and focusing on marketing. But then - isn't this what Sony is so good at? We have similar patent issues in this area.
So if it turns out that the NTP patents are in fact valid then we see RIM as the black hat - and they are the ones with the product and the marketing. Thus like Sony and RCA they should be expected to come out as a winner - regardless of the litigation.
But - are the NTP patents valid? I say they are perfectly obvious. Back before 1985 I was using fido-net systems and there were some running over packet radio. My neighbour across the street ran packet radio back then.
To send an email over a packetized transmission system is perfectly obvious to _anyone_ who thinks about this for a moment.
It doesn't even require a practitioner of the field. Even a retard would think of this.
In slash-dot if we go back there are even stories of packet passenger pigeon systems. Yes - they will work! Does this mean the NTP patents are so obvious they are for the birds? Even a pigeon can do it...
If there were _something_ innovative in viewing emails over a wireless system then sure - they might have a valid claim. But consider.
During the 70's I read many articals about how NASA communicated from their deep space probes. The communications were innovative. In some cases they did a fourier transform and spread the bits out in order to lose the noise.
Do we have something like this here? How a BlackBerry communicates might actually be innovative. That it can communicate is not innovative. Also what a user might choose to send over that communications channel is not innovative.
A user for instance might call his mom to wish her happy birthday. Should this be subject to a patent restriction? If so - what if he calls his dad. Now calling his wife might be of course since it is common knowledge among all wives that their husbands forget their birthdays. haha!
That the USA courts upheld this claim illustrates that the court to a large extend is not capable of establishing a fundamental tennant of patent law - that is: the "invention" must actually _BE_ an invention - ie - it must be innovative.
This also illustrates that the primary effect (if not also its purpose) of a patent is to encourage litigation. This would put the legislation clearly in the area of a restraint on trade - which is what it really is and should be seen as.
As a restraint on trade it is not much different than what the USA has done in many areas and that includes ignoring the NAFTA agreements in the area of softwood lumber.
There are many areas this has happened in. With RIM it just turns out that a Canadian company is involved. While this does add more weight to the idea of protectionism in another guise - we are still left with the observation that were RIM an American company - we would still be left with the same issues. Patent law's primary effect is to encourage litigation. This is good for the [legal] business.
When we look at patent law from this perspective then we have to realise that if we complain to the legal community we will receive lip service at best because everyone in that business knows what this is all about - its about generating fees from clients... big fees. We _also_ have to realise that the legal community includes the pollies.
When I checked before some idjot had modded this to a troll. I see we have some good moderators though.
Yes - this post does express the sentiment many canadians feel about the anarchy that seems to exist in the USA. I have read that 2/3 of the world's lawyers practice in the USA. Lawsuits like this do seem to illustrate how parasitic they can be.
The USA long ago crossed the line where they ceased to me a nation goverened by laws so much as a nation shapped by litigation.
Well - this is going to sound like a Naive solution so I'll toss it out to see where the holes are.
Encript all traffic. Then the DCMA and DRM laws kick in and it is illegal for anyone to attempt to read the communications. IE - even the ATTEMPT to read is illegal.
Then you can do what you want - route the packets through Canadian Servers - or Nigerian - or whereever you like. Keep the servers secure and under constant guard.
End of issue.
This will leave the end users open I suppose. But then NTP will have to find cooperating end users and this might be considered entrapment.
Yes - this analysis is just so damn stupid that it defies the imagination!
First: Bacteria need food. The human body slough's off dead skin and hair cells constantly. Some of these end up (guess where) in the keyboard because that is typically where people place their fingers.
So is the study talking about harmful bacteria? Or just total bacterial counts?
If people try to destroy the baterial present in the keyboards then the food supply will build up. Whatever measure is used to "control" the bacteria will be defeated by ever more viralent and hense deadly bacteria.
We cannot eliminate bacteria - however - we can change which bacteria are able to survive in an increasingly hostile environment. Eventually the attempt to "control" bacteria will result in the development of bugs deadly enough to do us in. This phenomenon is present in hospitals where years of over-zealous sterilization attempts have developed super bugs that are virtually impossible to control.
Second: Lets look at the fungii. Fungii need moisture to grow. Most keyboards are used in a dry environment. Thus - there will not be any fungii growing. However there will be spores.
Spores are ubiquitous in the environment. Anyone who doubts this should place a peice of bread on the counter and after an hour cover it with a clear dish. The more technically inclined can use a petre dish.
Within minutes of a spore encountering moisture it will germinate. Within a few days a number of thriving species will be growing.
So to suggest there are "fungii" on the keyboard is both misleading and obvious. As to the numbers - well - fungal spores are ubiquitous in the enviroment. There are probably no more spores present on the keyboard than anywhere else that dust can settle (between the keys). The point is that it doesn't matter.
Third: Perhaps what this study should have done is count the bacteria present on the skin of the people using the keyboards. They would find the fauna is flourishing.
So if we want to keep the keyboards clean then perhaps we sould place the user's in plastic bags which can be disinfected. To try to disinfect the users is going to fail.
Then there is a FORTH issue: We humans have evolved a complex immune system to combat our microbial enemies. It is normal for people who grow up in a rural environment to be constantly exposed to all sorts of bugs. This is especially so if there are animals. However even in the situation where there are few animals - the soil is loaded! All that organic matter that grows year after year has to be broken down and it is the bacteria and fungii in the environment which do this. Can anyone here imagine the sorry state of affairs planet earth would be in if there were no organic decomposition in operation for say the last 1 billion years?
The issue is that unless the immune system is externally stimulated it can go awry and this is one explanation why conditions such as Asthma are on the increase. Examples include the fact that Asthma incidence is lower in rural communities than in urban communities. It has been found that as East German cities started to clean up after the fall of the Berlin wall - Asthma levels started to increase.
Stimulating the immune system is the probable explanation of why meds from organisms such as Mycobacterium vaccae work.
The conclusion is that in trying to sterilise the environment we live in - we cause more harm than good.
What we need is a recognition that most bacteria are actually beneficial. If it were not for the benign bacteria that clean up the food we humans constantly shed from our bodies then the deadly strains would flourish. Some of these strains are quite capable of doing us in.
So as far as those "dirty" keyboards go. Well - there is food there so it is pretty natural that there will be consumers.
The main reasons the general public does not want to pay $25 per month is that a) they are brainwashed into thinking this is the going rate and b) the content on the internet has been shrinking since the dot bomb.
One side effect of the dot.com bubble was the billions of investment capital that went into the development of internet content. That pool of capital was "burned" and has dried up. The reason this happened is because not a single penny of the BILLIONS the general public pays ever makes it back to those who provide internet content. Hense - webmasters are voting with their collective feet and looking for other forms of employment.
If you want customers you have to provide something they want. People will happily pay more than $25 per month. They typically already pay more than $25 per month for their local phone service, then often $25 per month for a long distance package and $50 per month for television service.
The money is there. The content isn't.
As an ISP if you were to blaze a new trail and actually pay those who provide the content your own customers want - then you might find that you won't need to pay very much and you'll have droves of customers.
The thing is you'll need to block that content from your upstream. I would look to free websites for church groups, boy scouts, girl guides... in fact every club you can think of... in return for their members signing up as your customers.
If the content providers formed a guild then they could force outfits like this to pay for access to the content. I wonder how many subscribers Bell South would have if the only content they had on their system was what they actually owned.
The Telcos have been getting a free ride on the backs of those who create internet content. Its time for this to change.
I've read a few of the posts. Some are reasonable. But such negative vibes!
These ideas of doomsday are something like original sin and Catholics have the guilt thingy perfected better than most religeons. This "doomsday" crap is nothing more than another wanna be religeon because it sure isn't back up by any facts. Gia is just another word for god! Since there is no evidence to support that gia even exists this is little more than a religeon in disguise and I question why it is even in slashdot.
That being said - there is no MUCH opportunity in this world that it cannot even be measured.
Here is an example.
I watched a survival program on TV a few days ago - it was about a group of people who wanted to learn forest survival skills - how to fend for themselves. So they headed off on a 2 day trek in Northern Ontario (Canada) and lived off the land. Along the way they learned to eat leaches and frogs and so forth.
I have an interest in mushrooms and fungii so I was all keen on seeing what sort of feast they were going to have. Alas. There was one silly reference to mushrooms and it was along the line that some mushrooms can kill you. It was not mentioned that some berries can kill you as well. So can some wild animals - such as bears. There are bears in Northern Ontario.
So these people ate leaches and meanwhile the forest was chock full of gormet mushrooms - probably 100's of pounds of them. All they needed to do was to study the feild and learn which species are deadly - which will make you sick - which are good to eat - and if they really want to get down to it - which can save your life!
An uninformed person can walk through the forest and starve to death. For instance, a mycologist on the other hand can walk through the forest and see so much potential for food and medicines as to defy the imagination.
Since that forest for instance is in Northern Ontario it has a lot of hardwoods and as such the bio mass that can easily be turned into gormet foods is measured in millions of tonnes. Everytime you pick up some mushrooms from the supermarket you take advantage of the knowledge and skill of professionals who know this.
Yet - the survivalists on that TV show didn't know this. They had their clients eating leaches.
This idea of collapse of civilisation is similar to the lack of knowledge portrayed by that TV show.
The world is awash with energy. We just have to start using it. There is so much biomass that can be turned into food that we cannot even begin to estimate how much. There are huge opportunities.
At the same time there are huge problems. In North America we are at the beginning of a major energy crisis. Natural gas production (production = depletion) peaked in 2001. World conventional oil production has been reported to have peaked in 2004. Still we see stupid forecasts that suggest that oil production will climb from the 82 million barrels per day to over 130 million barrels by 2050. That is a load of crap - at least for conventional oil. However - unconventional is making headway. But the investments are massive! In Albera for instance we are looking at BILLIONS per year and it will not offset declines of conventional - by 2015 we will be lucky to ramp up to 3.3 million barrels per day from the tar sands for instance - yet world declines are likely going to exceed 3% per year which is 3% of 82 million or 2+ million per day. A 3.3 million increase in synthetic crude will be a drop in the bucket compared to the declines in conventional oil production which on a year to year basis will be in the same ball park as the best synthetic can do in a decade.
So yes - there is going to be a crunch. There may even be wars.
But I do not for an instant believe that mankind is just going to find a cave to crawl into and die when we have viable alternatives such as nuclear. Many lies have been told over the last 50 years. When people are faced with frozen pipes in their houses they will start to look
The text of some of the talks is online in the links.
If you wish to watch a video of the talk he gave in Calgary 2005 May 18 then you can find it here: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/audio/audio.html#CCA LG (its one of the TOP speeches! The TOP of the TOP in fact. hint - look at the top.)
I would post an answer to the question but to be thorough would require a couple hours and I think Stallman has said it better than I can - so watch the video.
-----------------
In answer to the quesiton of why software patents are more serious than hardware patents - a very simple explanation is that software products incorporate many more ideas than are incorporated in a hardware product. Typically very large companies are behind the manufacturing of hardware and they often can afford the protracted litigation process whereas software companies are small and often undercapitalized.
However the hardware issues also exist and an example of this is the latest patent attack on Toyota on the variable speed transmission used in the Prius. First patents on this idea were issues in 1916 or 1918. Yet a superficial analysis suggests that using two electric motors to drive the planetary gears is considered innovative enough to warrent a patent in the 1980's. Toyota may get around this because they used a gas motor and an electric motor in the Prius.
But this illustrates how silly the patent system has become.
Its not about what is necessarily provable in court - in many respects it is about how much of a financial burden can be imposed through the threat of litigation and for how much the victim can be milked.
A cynic would observe the business of law is conflict and litigation and creating an environment which encourages litigation is good for [the legal] business. Whether this benefits society is not taken into consideration any more than any parasite questions whether its activities are a benefit to its prey. A related example of this phenominon is that non-payment of invoices for goods delivered is considered criminal fraud in Europe whereas in North America it is considered civil and matters that could and should be handled by police in a 1/2 hour end up dragged through the courts for close to a decade at a cost of 10's of 1000's of bux.
Part of this is the legal community serving its own self interest of course. But there are other factions who benefit by supporting a broken patent system and among these we have those who are looking for ways to prevent fair competition as well as those who are just looking for victims to shake down.
My sources are the UN reports. The wiki artical is decent. You are correct of course that the red zone had high enough radiation to kill the forest and it did glow in the dark. However outside of this zone life does seem to be pretty close to normal and the zone in question is actually quite small.
There have been robotic reconiscense as well. Probably there are animal bones.
The radiation levels in the sarcophagus are very high. Nevertheless, even with this high radiation we have animal life doing quite well.
------------
Go read the UN reports. They can be found at the united nations website. I'm too lasy to do your looking for you.
I can assure you if it were cheaper they would already have done it. Perhaps you should do a degree in chem and physics.
Often Aluminum smelters are built near remote water falls (Ie stranded water falls as in the use of the word "stranded" to refer to stranded natural gas)
If ppl went to plastic beer bottles we wouldn't need as many beer cans.
This has been done since the 40's. This is why they make yagies. Of course the guy who designed this artsy farty system forgot to design in the yagi. He forgot a dish too. And I can't see any edge connectors. If we used rabbit ears properly designed then the CPU unit could look like a cartoon character.
What chornobyl residents? There arn't any. Sadly this illustrates why a containment building is needed.
But the flip side of this horrific unintentional experiment is that the death toll is about 50 (and not as the media speculated!!!), there has not been a single documented case of leukemia (yet the media speculated there would be 100's of 1000's _AND_ they have NOT corrected their lies). At one point it was speculated that there was a thyroid cancer increase but even that has now been shown to be perfectly normal.
The Chornobyl area is becoming a beautiful wildlife preserve if for no other reason than humans for the most part are staying away and leaving it alone. Perhaps this will be its future... a wildlife park.
Birds and squirrels live in the sarcophagus. So far we havn't seen too many 3 eyed squirrels or birds.
So will be a lot of kids as the oil wars continue to unfold. As they said in the 70's... open up those pearly gates! I guess Iran rythmes with Veitnam...
So what are we going to be fighting for? The right to burn other people's oil because we don't want to use a proven safe alternative? (which BTW is more reliable and much cheaper and increadibly abundant)
The peak amount of sunlight falling on flat land in the vicinity of the 49th parallel on a clear day when you can see forever is in the vicinity of 1GWe per square mile. If anyone has some good ideas to capture it then that may solve the energy crisis as well.
It was suggested in a story posted in./ a few days ago that we could use Algae. In this story it was suggested that someone has come up with a novel idea. Of course - among the uninformed posts we didn't see any estimates of the maximum (much less average) photosynthetic efficiency of algae. If they had that number they could multipy by the _average_ solar incidence.
It has always been much cheaper to mine the fuel from a rich deposit rather than make it from intense agricultural sources. The problem is those who dream of these solutions can't seem to do the math.
The SOONER these hair brained ideas get built the better. Those windmills will not help the Northeastern Seaboard power problems. In the middle of the night when the wind isn't blowing one day the lights will go out (again - then again) and there should be a lot of people demanding to know why there is so little technical competance in the upper echelons of those who wish to manage... this includes the pollies.
Deal with reality or reality will deal with you!
Windmills can reduce consumption of non-renewable natural resources as can solar and to this extent they are worthwhile providing they are reasonably cost effective. However these power sources still need to be backed up by conventional generating capacity and when doing so the investors have to realise that their backup power plants cannot show a return on investment when they are idling.
This illustrates the problem with alternative "green" power. It is more than 2x as expensive as anything else. Not only does it typically operate at a 30% duty cycle or less - in addition it needs to be backed up by a plant that will idle while the alternative systems are operational.
---------------
A much better place to spend that investment capital is in retrofitting homes and bringing the R-values up into the R50 range for the walls and R70 for the ceilings. This can be combined with better glazing and perhaps automatic insulated shutters that close in the middle of the night when everyone is sleeping and it is dark outside anyways.
If someone hasn't noticed before the duty cycle of fiberglass insulation is close to 100% when it is in the walls. In addition it is a somewhat proven technology.
THe car has both ABS disable and tranction control enable. THe ABS disable is on the dash and the traction control enable is on the consol near the shifter. Perhaps that is called positrac or something (the one on the consol).
The ABS disable does actually work! Its saved my bacon a few times.
Alas the car would not have been wreaked if it weren't for that damn system.
-------------
I am in favour of robot drivers. But until we have a solution that is proven superior in all aspects to an above average driver (like maybe 1+ SD's better than average) I am not in favour.
Those sensors can NEVER know why a wheel does not have traction and if someone here can suggest an engineering solution that involves NOT disabling the braking on wheels with traction then I would like to hear it.
In the worst case with one wheel on ice you can loose almost all braking instead of retaining 75%. If anyone were caught approaching a rail road track with a train barreling down and the ABS decides to extend the stopping distance then I think they would agree with me that ABS should be banned.
Fortunately I can shut off the ABS system in my AUDI but it should be disabled by default! The system is F*hking dangerous.
During winter here we often have ice build up - but usually 2 or 3 wheels are on something that provides traction. So the ABS system reduces braking power to the LOWEST COMMON DENOMONATOR and thus if one wheel is on black ice the system simulates 4 wheels on black ice. This is GAWDAM DANGEROUS.
There have been many times I have been blindly punching at the damn shut off button as I was comming up to an intersection staring at a bus or semi to the right or left and all the while thinking I'm going to get T-Boned. The damn ABS system shuts off the brakes when you least expect it. Its almost like a demon sitting there ready to laugh and say - HAHA - no brakes - GOTCHA you SOB. I almost have had a heart attack thinking - Damn: I forgot to shut off that DAMN ABS system again.
Well - one day my son forget to shut the damn thing off. 1 block from home an SUV swerved over the center line and he had to swerve towards the curb to avoid it - and got caught in loose snow with a little ice under it.
GOTCHA.
You can easily imagine what happened next. The ABS system shut off the braking to the two wheels on dry pavement. With no brakes he could not stop the car. The loose snow put the car in a 360 because the ABS didn't know that loose snow would slow the wheels on the passenger side and indeed it had disabled the brakes on the drivers side.
So the car went into a slow clockwise spin of about exactly 90 degrees while it slid to a stop. If he had another 10 feet the car would probably have been fine. Alas - someone decided to place a sidewalk around that intersection and he slid into it and broke off two (2) wheels.
It was a clean break! Nevertheless my car was now a bicycle.
The insurance company wrote it off of course.
I'd like to sue AUDI for that monster of a system. To be driving a car where the engineers (or whoever) have decided that with NO WARNING the damn brakes should be disabled is F*hking dangerous. These vehicals SHOULD NOT BE APPROVED.
This is about as bad as using a WINDOWS system where suddenly you get an Unavoidable Applications Error (UAE) or a blue screen of DEATH!
Over the years people have asked what it would be like to drive a car if it crashed like windows does. Well - Microsoft seems to have an influence beyond the desktop because from what I can tell - Audi built this into the car I had!
The bottom line is that I have not replaced the Audi yet. But when I do it will NOT have ABS braking and I dont' give a damn if I have to drive a vehical built in 1985 I'll do it! Never again will I drive a car that suddenly and unexpectedly just disables the brakes with no warning!
As I said before. These vehicals should be banned.
Oh give me a break! You are a scientist? If so then you haven't even caught up to what we knew in the 50's and 60's.
Following is a copy of my post to "Europe warms to nuclear power" I titled it "solutions for waste"
It is amasing how much disinformation and outright lies have been told over the years. Without a firm grasp of the facts many solvable problems are viewed as impossible. In part - this was the objective of the disinformation campaigns.
Reactor grade here refers to Low Enriched typically used for the USA light water pressurized reactors.
In the spent fuel, the U235 fraction can be as low as 0.4% and the Pu fraction is composed of Pu239 and Pu240. The Pu isotopes are practically impossible to separate and the Pu240 is so reactive that it is questionable - although probably possible - to have use as a bomb. A dirty weapon is possible.
The Candu fuel cycle starts with 99.3% U238 and 0.7% U235. The spent fuel is about 0.23% U235 and 0.27% Pu.
The Thorium fuel cycle converts Th to U233 which is as good as U235 for weapons and which can be easily chemically separated from the thorium.
---------------
It should be painfully obvious to just about everyone that only about 3% of the mass of the spent fuel is crud. This is the nuclear waste and it _can_ be burned up several ways including spallation. The _other_ 97% is fuel. Furthermore the spent fuel from a light water pressurized reactor would generally be considered enriched for a CANDU reactor.
Fuel reprocessing removes the "crud" and allows over 97% of the "spent fuel" to be elegible to be stuffed right back into the reactor.
So why isn't reprocessing used? Well - in Europe it is. The USA in a magnificent display of stupidity and circular thinking decided to go it alone and proclaim that a once through fuel cycle is the _only_ way to go. Part of of the political support for this stems from the build up of stock piles of "spent fuel" which the public is told has no use. It does - it's future reactor fuel. By analogy - if someone were to dump a litre of crud in a barrel of oil we certainly wouldn't call it "spent oil"! We'd figure out a way to remove the crud. However I can remember my father dumping "waste oil" on the ground - hopefully we now collect it and re-refine it.
So one faction of the anti-nuclear crowd realised that keeping large stockpiles of deemed "waste" around gave them something to point their fingers at. Another faction perhaps with some justification just didn't want anyone to develop the technology to recycle the fuel because this does involve building plants that can separate the Plutonium. Also - by shortening the exposure time of the fuel mix the ratios of Pu 239 to Pu 240 can be controlled with the Pu 240 fraction reduced to under 7%. This is weapons grade plutonium. Yet another faction didn't want competition from a viable nuclear industry so they supported anything that generally doesn't make much sense.
Now the thing is to look at the issue of depleated verses natural uranium. The enrichment process is expensive and still leaves about 1/2 of the original U235 in place.
As such - there is very little difference in radioactivity between natural and depleated uranium. To say one is "safe" and the other is "unsafe" is splitting hairs. They are about the same.
In fact - if we look at "spent fuel" and reprocess it to remove the highly radioactive fraction - then what is left over is very similar to both "natural" and "depleated" uranium... it just has a little plutonium. The 1/2 life of plutonium makes it more radioactive than uranium. However one must also realise that
This story is as old as the hills. I personally was looking at research in this area in 1998. You can find a lot of literature on bio-fuels. Just do a google search on biofuel algae and you'll see that research is being conducted worldwide.
It is amasing how much disinformation and outright lies have been told over the years. Without a firm grasp of the facts many solvable problems are viewed as impossible. In part - this was the objective of the disinformation campaigns.
Reactor grade here refers to Low Enriched typically used for the USA light water pressurized reactors.
In the spent fuel, the U235 fraction can be as low as 0.4% and the Pu fraction is composed of Pu239 and Pu240. The Pu isotopes are practically impossible to separate and the Pu240 is so reactive that it is questionable - although probably possible - to have use as a bomb. A dirty weapon is possible.
The Candu fuel cycle starts with 99.3% U238 and 0.7% U235. The spent fuel is about 0.23% U235 and 0.27% Pu.
The Thorium fuel cycle converts Th to U233 which is as good as U235 for weapons and which can be easily chemically separated from the thorium.
---------------
It should be painfully obvious to just about everyone that only about 3% of the mass of the spent fuel is crud. This is the nuclear waste and it _can_ be burned up several ways including spallation. The _other_ 97% is fuel. Furthermore the spent fuel from a light water pressurized reactor would generally be considered enriched for a CANDU reactor.
Fuel reprocessing removes the "crud" and allows over 97% of the "spent fuel" to be elegible to be stuffed right back into the reactor.
So why isn't reprocessing used? Well - in Europe it is. The USA in a magnificent display of stupidity and circular thinking decided to go it alone and proclaim that a once through fuel cycle is the _only_ way to go. Part of of the political support for this stems from the build up of stock piles of "spent fuel" which the public is told has no use. It does - its future reactor fuel. By analogy - if someone were to dump a litre of crud in a barrel of oil we certainly wouldn't call it "spent oil"! We'd figure out a way to remove the crud. However I can remember my father dumping "waste oil" on the ground - hopefully we now collect it and re-refine it.
So one faction of the anti-nuclear crowd realised that keeping large stockpiles of deemed "waste" around gave them something to point their fingers at. Another faction perhaps with some justification just didn't want anyone to develop the technology to recycle the fuel because this does involve building plants that can separate the Plutonium. Also - by shortening the exposure time of the fuel mix the ratios of Pu 239 to Pu 240 can be controlled with the Pu 240 fraction reduced to under 7%. This is weapons grade plutonium. Yet another faction didn't want competition from a viable nuclear industry so they supported anything that generally doesn't make much sense.
Now the thing is to look at the issue of depleated verses natural uranium. The enrichment process is expensive and still leaves about 1/2 of the original U235 in place.
As such - there is very little difference in radioactivity between natural and depleated uranium. To say one is "safe" and the other is "unsafe" is splitting hairs. They are about the same.
In fact - if we look at "spent fuel" and reprocess it to remove the highly radioactive fraction - then what is left over is very similar to both "natural" and "depleated" uranium... it just has a little plutonium. The 1/2 life of plutonium makes it more radioactive than uranium. However one must also realise that since both uranium and plutonium are very heavy metals, they act as excellent sheilds for radiation... more effective for instance than lead.
What this all boils down to is that there is very little r
Well - it was the shareholders who were defrauded and its the shareholders that foot the bill for the fines.
Question: Did any of the execs who perpetrated the fraud have to pay the fine? I don't think so. So if the fine is paid from the company treasury then its the shareholders who lose out.
Today I am a moderator adn rather than mod up the post which is perhaps what I should be doing - I'm making a post instead. Yes - the moderation has sunk to terrible new lows.
I did have to laugh at the post however because the guy should have charged more for his work than the stupid blokes who wrote the first version of hte code. Alas in my exeriance people who can write good code often get paid poorly while the technically challenged are often so technically challenged that they don't know they can't write good code - and hense they charge more.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes - your post is quite informative and it does illustrate how futile the patent process is. Prior examples of this would include Philo Farnsworth VS RCA.
If as you state the NTP patents were legit - then we have the issue that there is no justice and the inventor only found a way to waste money on lawyers and legal fees. Often this is the major outcome of a civil case. Theives know this and white collar crime is rampant because they know this. If you take them to court you might win something back - and in the interm they get to use your money to fight against you. If they lose - the have to pay some of that money back to you.
In the Farnsworth litigation - this would be pretty close to the situation. Farnsworth would have been better off building better products and focusing on marketing. But then - isn't this what Sony is so good at? We have similar patent issues in this area.
So if it turns out that the NTP patents are in fact valid then we see RIM as the black hat - and they are the ones with the product and the marketing. Thus like Sony and RCA they should be expected to come out as a winner - regardless of the litigation.
But - are the NTP patents valid? I say they are perfectly obvious. Back before 1985 I was using fido-net systems and there were some running over packet radio. My neighbour across the street ran packet radio back then.
To send an email over a packetized transmission system is perfectly obvious to _anyone_ who thinks about this for a moment.
It doesn't even require a practitioner of the field. Even a retard would think of this.
In slash-dot if we go back there are even stories of packet passenger pigeon systems. Yes - they will work! Does this mean the NTP patents are so obvious they are for the birds? Even a pigeon can do it...
If there were _something_ innovative in viewing emails over a wireless system then sure - they might have a valid claim. But consider.
During the 70's I read many articals about how NASA communicated from their deep space probes. The communications were innovative. In some cases they did a fourier transform and spread the bits out in order to lose the noise.
Do we have something like this here? How a BlackBerry communicates might actually be innovative. That it can communicate is not innovative. Also what a user might choose to send over that communications channel is not innovative.
A user for instance might call his mom to wish her happy birthday. Should this be subject to a patent restriction? If so - what if he calls his dad. Now calling his wife might be of course since it is common knowledge among all wives that their husbands forget their birthdays. haha!
That the USA courts upheld this claim illustrates that the court to a large extend is not capable of establishing a fundamental tennant of patent law - that is: the "invention" must actually _BE_ an invention - ie - it must be innovative.
This also illustrates that the primary effect (if not also its purpose) of a patent is to encourage litigation. This would put the legislation clearly in the area of a restraint on trade - which is what it really is and should be seen as.
As a restraint on trade it is not much different than what the USA has done in many areas and that includes ignoring the NAFTA agreements in the area of softwood lumber.
There are many areas this has happened in. With RIM it just turns out that a Canadian company is involved. While this does add more weight to the idea of protectionism in another guise - we are still left with the observation that were RIM an American company - we would still be left with the same issues. Patent law's primary effect is to encourage litigation. This is good for the [legal] business.
When we look at patent law from this perspective then we have to realise that if we complain to the legal community we will receive lip service at best because everyone in that business knows what this is all about - its about generating fees from clients... big fees. We _also_ have to realise that the legal community includes the pollies.
When I checked before some idjot had modded this to a troll. I see we have some good moderators though.
Yes - this post does express the sentiment many canadians feel about the anarchy that seems to exist in the USA. I have read that 2/3 of the world's lawyers practice in the USA. Lawsuits like this do seem to illustrate how parasitic they can be.
The USA long ago crossed the line where they ceased to me a nation goverened by laws so much as a nation shapped by litigation.
Company has to have more than just a suspicion to get a court order.
USA court orders are not enforceble in canada.
Well - this is going to sound like a Naive solution so I'll toss it out to see where the holes are.
Encript all traffic. Then the DCMA and DRM laws kick in and it is illegal for anyone to attempt to read the communications. IE - even the ATTEMPT to read is illegal.
Then you can do what you want - route the packets through Canadian Servers - or Nigerian - or whereever you like. Keep the servers secure and under constant guard.
End of issue.
This will leave the end users open I suppose. But then NTP will have to find cooperating end users and this might be considered entrapment.
Yes - this analysis is just so damn stupid that it defies the imagination!
First: Bacteria need food. The human body slough's off dead skin and hair cells constantly. Some of these end up (guess where) in the keyboard because that is typically where people place their fingers.
So is the study talking about harmful bacteria? Or just total bacterial counts?
If people try to destroy the baterial present in the keyboards then the food supply will build up. Whatever measure is used to "control" the bacteria will be defeated by ever more viralent and hense deadly bacteria.
We cannot eliminate bacteria - however - we can change which bacteria are able to survive in an increasingly hostile environment. Eventually the attempt to "control" bacteria will result in the development of bugs deadly enough to do us in. This phenomenon is present in hospitals where years of over-zealous sterilization attempts have developed super bugs that are virtually impossible to control.
Second: Lets look at the fungii. Fungii need moisture to grow. Most keyboards are used in a dry environment. Thus - there will not be any fungii growing. However there will be spores.
Spores are ubiquitous in the environment. Anyone who doubts this should place a peice of bread on the counter and after an hour cover it with a clear dish. The more technically inclined can use a petre dish.
Within minutes of a spore encountering moisture it will germinate. Within a few days a number of thriving species will be growing.
So to suggest there are "fungii" on the keyboard is both misleading and obvious. As to the numbers - well - fungal spores are ubiquitous in the enviroment. There are probably no more spores present on the keyboard than anywhere else that dust can settle (between the keys). The point is that it doesn't matter.
Third: Perhaps what this study should have done is count the bacteria present on the skin of the people using the keyboards. They would find the fauna is flourishing.
So if we want to keep the keyboards clean then perhaps we sould place the user's in plastic bags which can be disinfected. To try to disinfect the users is going to fail.
Then there is a FORTH issue: We humans have evolved a complex immune system to combat our microbial enemies. It is normal for people who grow up in a rural environment to be constantly exposed to all sorts of bugs. This is especially so if there are animals. However even in the situation where there are few animals - the soil is loaded! All that organic matter that grows year after year has to be broken down and it is the bacteria and fungii in the environment which do this. Can anyone here imagine the sorry state of affairs planet earth would be in if there were no organic decomposition in operation for say the last 1 billion years?
The issue is that unless the immune system is externally stimulated it can go awry and this is one explanation why conditions such as Asthma are on the increase. Examples include the fact that Asthma incidence is lower in rural communities than in urban communities. It has been found that as East German cities started to clean up after the fall of the Berlin wall - Asthma levels started to increase.
Stimulating the immune system is the probable explanation of why meds from organisms such as Mycobacterium vaccae work.
The conclusion is that in trying to sterilise the environment we live in - we cause more harm than good.
What we need is a recognition that most bacteria are actually beneficial. If it were not for the benign bacteria that clean up the food we humans constantly shed from our bodies then the deadly strains would flourish. Some of these strains are quite capable of doing us in.
So as far as those "dirty" keyboards go. Well - there is food there so it is pretty natural that there will be consumers.
The main reasons the general public does not want to pay $25 per month is that a) they are brainwashed into thinking this is the going rate and b) the content on the internet has been shrinking since the dot bomb.
One side effect of the dot.com bubble was the billions of investment capital that went into the development of internet content. That pool of capital was "burned" and has dried up. The reason this happened is because not a single penny of the BILLIONS the general public pays ever makes it back to those who provide internet content. Hense - webmasters are voting with their collective feet and looking for other forms of employment.
If you want customers you have to provide something they want. People will happily pay more than $25 per month. They typically already pay more than $25 per month for their local phone service, then often $25 per month for a long distance package and $50 per month for television service.
The money is there. The content isn't.
As an ISP if you were to blaze a new trail and actually pay those who provide the content your own customers want - then you might find that you won't need to pay very much and you'll have droves of customers.
The thing is you'll need to block that content from your upstream. I would look to free websites for church groups, boy scouts, girl guides... in fact every club you can think of... in return for their members signing up as your customers.
Comments?
If the content providers formed a guild then they could force outfits like this to pay for access to the content. I wonder how many subscribers Bell South would have if the only content they had on their system was what they actually owned.
The Telcos have been getting a free ride on the backs of those who create internet content. Its time for this to change.
I've read a few of the posts. Some are reasonable. But such negative vibes!
These ideas of doomsday are something like original sin and Catholics have the guilt thingy perfected better than most religeons. This "doomsday" crap is nothing more than another wanna be religeon because it sure isn't back up by any facts. Gia is just another word for god! Since there is no evidence to support that gia even exists this is little more than a religeon in disguise and I question why it is even in slashdot.
That being said - there is no MUCH opportunity in this world that it cannot even be measured.
Here is an example.
I watched a survival program on TV a few days ago - it was about a group of people who wanted to learn forest survival skills - how to fend for themselves. So they headed off on a 2 day trek in Northern Ontario (Canada) and lived off the land. Along the way they learned to eat leaches and frogs and so forth.
I have an interest in mushrooms and fungii so I was all keen on seeing what sort of feast they were going to have. Alas. There was one silly reference to mushrooms and it was along the line that some mushrooms can kill you. It was not mentioned that some berries can kill you as well. So can some wild animals - such as bears. There are bears in Northern Ontario.
So these people ate leaches and meanwhile the forest was chock full of gormet mushrooms - probably 100's of pounds of them. All they needed to do was to study the feild and learn which species are deadly - which will make you sick - which are good to eat - and if they really want to get down to it - which can save your life!
An uninformed person can walk through the forest and starve to death. For instance, a mycologist on the other hand can walk through the forest and see so much potential for food and medicines as to defy the imagination.
Since that forest for instance is in Northern Ontario it has a lot of hardwoods and as such the bio mass that can easily be turned into gormet foods is measured in millions of tonnes. Everytime you pick up some mushrooms from the supermarket you take advantage of the knowledge and skill of professionals who know this.
Yet - the survivalists on that TV show didn't know this. They had their clients eating leaches.
This idea of collapse of civilisation is similar to the lack of knowledge portrayed by that TV show.
The world is awash with energy. We just have to start using it. There is so much biomass that can be turned into food that we cannot even begin to estimate how much. There are huge opportunities.
At the same time there are huge problems. In North America we are at the beginning of a major energy crisis. Natural gas production (production = depletion) peaked in 2001. World conventional oil production has been reported to have peaked in 2004. Still we see stupid forecasts that suggest that oil production will climb from the 82 million barrels per day to over 130 million barrels by 2050. That is a load of crap - at least for conventional oil. However - unconventional is making headway. But the investments are massive! In Albera for instance we are looking at BILLIONS per year and it will not offset declines of conventional - by 2015 we will be lucky to ramp up to 3.3 million barrels per day from the tar sands for instance - yet world declines are likely going to exceed 3% per year which is 3% of 82 million or 2+ million per day. A 3.3 million increase in synthetic crude will be a drop in the bucket compared to the declines in conventional oil production which on a year to year basis will be in the same ball park as the best synthetic can do in a decade.
So yes - there is going to be a crunch. There may even be wars.
But I do not for an instant believe that mankind is just going to find a cave to crawl into and die when we have viable alternatives such as nuclear. Many lies have been told over the last 50 years. When people are faced with frozen pipes in their houses they will start to look
You can find many answers here: http://lpf.ai.mit.edu/Patents/patents.html
A LG (its one of the TOP speeches! The TOP of the TOP in fact. hint - look at the top.)
The text of some of the talks is online in the links.
If you wish to watch a video of the talk he gave in Calgary 2005 May 18 then you can find it here: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/audio/audio.html#CC
The complete list if talks is found here: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/audio/audio.html
I would post an answer to the question but to be thorough would require a couple hours and I think Stallman has said it better than I can - so watch the video.
-----------------
In answer to the quesiton of why software patents are more serious than hardware patents - a very simple explanation is that software products incorporate many more ideas than are incorporated in a hardware product. Typically very large companies are behind the manufacturing of hardware and they often can afford the protracted litigation process whereas software companies are small and often undercapitalized.
However the hardware issues also exist and an example of this is the latest patent attack on Toyota on the variable speed transmission used in the Prius. First patents on this idea were issues in 1916 or 1918. Yet a superficial analysis suggests that using two electric motors to drive the planetary gears is considered innovative enough to warrent a patent in the 1980's. Toyota may get around this because they used a gas motor and an electric motor in the Prius.
But this illustrates how silly the patent system has become.
Its not about what is necessarily provable in court - in many respects it is about how much of a financial burden can be imposed through the threat of litigation and for how much the victim can be milked.
A cynic would observe the business of law is conflict and litigation and creating an environment which encourages litigation is good for [the legal] business. Whether this benefits society is not taken into consideration any more than any parasite questions whether its activities are a benefit to its prey. A related example of this phenominon is that non-payment of invoices for goods delivered is considered criminal fraud in Europe whereas in North America it is considered civil and matters that could and should be handled by police in a 1/2 hour end up dragged through the courts for close to a decade at a cost of 10's of 1000's of bux.
Part of this is the legal community serving its own self interest of course. But there are other factions who benefit by supporting a broken patent system and among these we have those who are looking for ways to prevent fair competition as well as those who are just looking for victims to shake down.
My sources are the UN reports. The wiki artical is decent. You are correct of course that the red zone had high enough radiation to kill the forest and it did glow in the dark. However outside of this zone life does seem to be pretty close to normal and the zone in question is actually quite small.
There have been robotic reconiscense as well. Probably there are animal bones.
The radiation levels in the sarcophagus are very high. Nevertheless, even with this high radiation we have animal life doing quite well.
------------
Go read the UN reports. They can be found at the united nations website. I'm too lasy to do your looking for you.
Yup - just stinks. Mod this to funny please.
I can assure you if it were cheaper they would already have done it. Perhaps you should do a degree in chem and physics.
Often Aluminum smelters are built near remote water falls (Ie stranded water falls as in the use of the word "stranded" to refer to stranded natural gas)
If ppl went to plastic beer bottles we wouldn't need as many beer cans.
This has been done since the 40's. This is why they make yagies. Of course the guy who designed this artsy farty system forgot to design in the yagi. He forgot a dish too. And I can't see any edge connectors. If we used rabbit ears properly designed then the CPU unit could look like a cartoon character.
What chornobyl residents? There arn't any. Sadly this illustrates why a containment building is needed.
But the flip side of this horrific unintentional experiment is that the death toll is about 50 (and not as the media speculated!!!), there has not been a single documented case of leukemia (yet the media speculated there would be 100's of 1000's _AND_ they have NOT corrected their lies). At one point it was speculated that there was a thyroid cancer increase but even that has now been shown to be perfectly normal.
The Chornobyl area is becoming a beautiful wildlife preserve if for no other reason than humans for the most part are staying away and leaving it alone. Perhaps this will be its future... a wildlife park.
Birds and squirrels live in the sarcophagus. So far we havn't seen too many 3 eyed squirrels or birds.
So will be a lot of kids as the oil wars continue to unfold. As they said in the 70's... open up those pearly gates! I guess Iran rythmes with Veitnam...
So what are we going to be fighting for? The right to burn other people's oil because we don't want to use a proven safe alternative? (which BTW is more reliable and much cheaper and increadibly abundant)
Deal with reality ro reality will deal with you.
Brilliant post!
./ a few days ago that we could use Algae. In this story it was suggested that someone has come up with a novel idea. Of course - among the uninformed posts we didn't see any estimates of the maximum (much less average) photosynthetic efficiency of algae. If they had that number they could multipy by the _average_ solar incidence.
The peak amount of sunlight falling on flat land in the vicinity of the 49th parallel on a clear day when you can see forever is in the vicinity of 1GWe per square mile. If anyone has some good ideas to capture it then that may solve the energy crisis as well.
It was suggested in a story posted in
It has always been much cheaper to mine the fuel from a rich deposit rather than make it from intense agricultural sources. The problem is those who dream of these solutions can't seem to do the math.
The SOONER these hair brained ideas get built the better. Those windmills will not help the Northeastern Seaboard power problems. In the middle of the night when the wind isn't blowing one day the lights will go out (again - then again) and there should be a lot of people demanding to know why there is so little technical competance in the upper echelons of those who wish to manage... this includes the pollies.
Deal with reality or reality will deal with you!
Windmills can reduce consumption of non-renewable natural resources as can solar and to this extent they are worthwhile providing they are reasonably cost effective. However these power sources still need to be backed up by conventional generating capacity and when doing so the investors have to realise that their backup power plants cannot show a return on investment when they are idling.
This illustrates the problem with alternative "green" power. It is more than 2x as expensive as anything else. Not only does it typically operate at a 30% duty cycle or less - in addition it needs to be backed up by a plant that will idle while the alternative systems are operational.
---------------
A much better place to spend that investment capital is in retrofitting homes and bringing the R-values up into the R50 range for the walls and R70 for the ceilings. This can be combined with better glazing and perhaps automatic insulated shutters that close in the middle of the night when everyone is sleeping and it is dark outside anyways.
If someone hasn't noticed before the duty cycle of fiberglass insulation is close to 100% when it is in the walls. In addition it is a somewhat proven technology.
THe car has both ABS disable and tranction control enable. THe ABS disable is on the dash and the traction control enable is on the consol near the shifter. Perhaps that is called positrac or something (the one on the consol).
The ABS disable does actually work! Its saved my bacon a few times.
Alas the car would not have been wreaked if it weren't for that damn system.
-------------
I am in favour of robot drivers. But until we have a solution that is proven superior in all aspects to an above average driver (like maybe 1+ SD's better than average) I am not in favour.
Those sensors can NEVER know why a wheel does not have traction and if someone here can suggest an engineering solution that involves NOT disabling the braking on wheels with traction then I would like to hear it.
In the worst case with one wheel on ice you can loose almost all braking instead of retaining 75%. If anyone were caught approaching a rail road track with a train barreling down and the ABS decides to extend the stopping distance then I think they would agree with me that ABS should be banned.
Fortunately I can shut off the ABS system in my AUDI but it should be disabled by default! The system is F*hking dangerous.
During winter here we often have ice build up - but usually 2 or 3 wheels are on something that provides traction. So the ABS system reduces braking power to the LOWEST COMMON DENOMONATOR and thus if one wheel is on black ice the system simulates 4 wheels on black ice. This is GAWDAM DANGEROUS.
There have been many times I have been blindly punching at the damn shut off button as I was comming up to an intersection staring at a bus or semi to the right or left and all the while thinking I'm going to get T-Boned. The damn ABS system shuts off the brakes when you least expect it. Its almost like a demon sitting there ready to laugh and say - HAHA - no brakes - GOTCHA you SOB. I almost have had a heart attack thinking - Damn: I forgot to shut off that DAMN ABS system again.
Well - one day my son forget to shut the damn thing off. 1 block from home an SUV swerved over the center line and he had to swerve towards the curb to avoid it - and got caught in loose snow with a little ice under it.
GOTCHA.
You can easily imagine what happened next. The ABS system shut off the braking to the two wheels on dry pavement. With no brakes he could not stop the car. The loose snow put the car in a 360 because the ABS didn't know that loose snow would slow the wheels on the passenger side and indeed it had disabled the brakes on the drivers side.
So the car went into a slow clockwise spin of about exactly 90 degrees while it slid to a stop. If he had another 10 feet the car would probably have been fine. Alas - someone decided to place a sidewalk around that intersection and he slid into it and broke off two (2) wheels.
It was a clean break! Nevertheless my car was now a bicycle.
The insurance company wrote it off of course.
I'd like to sue AUDI for that monster of a system. To be driving a car where the engineers (or whoever) have decided that with NO WARNING the damn brakes should be disabled is F*hking dangerous. These vehicals SHOULD NOT BE APPROVED.
This is about as bad as using a WINDOWS system where suddenly you get an Unavoidable Applications Error (UAE) or a blue screen of DEATH!
Over the years people have asked what it would be like to drive a car if it crashed like windows does. Well - Microsoft seems to have an influence beyond the desktop because from what I can tell - Audi built this into the car I had!
The bottom line is that I have not replaced the Audi yet. But when I do it will NOT have ABS braking and I dont' give a damn if I have to drive a vehical built in 1985 I'll do it! Never again will I drive a car that suddenly and unexpectedly just disables the brakes with no warning!
As I said before. These vehicals should be banned.
Oh give me a break! You are a scientist? If so then you haven't even caught up to what we knew in the 50's and 60's.
Following is a copy of my post to "Europe warms to nuclear power" I titled it "solutions for waste"
It is amasing how much disinformation and outright lies have been told over the years. Without a firm grasp of the facts many solvable problems are viewed as impossible. In part - this was the objective of the disinformation campaigns.
First some terminology:
Natural uranium......... 99.3% U238, 0.7% U235
Depleated Uranium....... 99.7% U238, 0.3% U235 (varies: 0.2%-0.4% U235)
Reactor grade uranium... 96.0% U238, 4.0% U235 but this varies also.
Slightly enriched(CANDU) 99.1% U238, 0.9% U235 (varies: 0.9%-2.0% U235)
Spent fuel.............. 95.0% U238, 1.0% U235, 1.0% Pu, 3% crud (varies)
Reactor grade here refers to Low Enriched typically used for the USA light water pressurized reactors.
In the spent fuel, the U235 fraction can be as low as 0.4% and the Pu fraction is composed of Pu239 and Pu240. The Pu isotopes are practically impossible to separate and the Pu240 is so reactive that it is questionable - although probably possible - to have use as a bomb. A dirty weapon is possible.
The Candu fuel cycle starts with 99.3% U238 and 0.7% U235. The spent fuel is about 0.23% U235 and 0.27% Pu.
The Thorium fuel cycle converts Th to U233 which is as good as U235 for weapons and which can be easily chemically separated from the thorium.
---------------
It should be painfully obvious to just about everyone that only about 3% of the mass of the spent fuel is crud. This is the nuclear waste and it _can_ be burned up several ways including spallation. The _other_ 97% is fuel. Furthermore the spent fuel from a light water pressurized reactor would generally be considered enriched for a CANDU reactor.
Fuel reprocessing removes the "crud" and allows over 97% of the "spent fuel" to be elegible to be stuffed right back into the reactor.
So why isn't reprocessing used? Well - in Europe it is. The USA in a magnificent display of stupidity and circular thinking decided to go it alone and proclaim that a once through fuel cycle is the _only_ way to go. Part of of the political support for this stems from the build up of stock piles of "spent fuel" which the public is told has no use. It does - it's future reactor fuel. By analogy - if someone were to dump a litre of crud in a barrel of oil we certainly wouldn't call it "spent oil"! We'd figure out a way to remove the crud. However I can remember my father dumping "waste oil" on the ground - hopefully we now collect it and re-refine it.
So one faction of the anti-nuclear crowd realised that keeping large stockpiles of deemed "waste" around gave them something to point their fingers at. Another faction perhaps with some justification just didn't want anyone to develop the technology to recycle the fuel because this does involve building plants that can separate the Plutonium. Also - by shortening the exposure time of the fuel mix the ratios of Pu 239 to Pu 240 can be controlled with the Pu 240 fraction reduced to under 7%. This is weapons grade plutonium. Yet another faction didn't want competition from a viable nuclear industry so they supported anything that generally doesn't make much sense.
Now the thing is to look at the issue of depleated verses natural uranium. The enrichment process is expensive and still leaves about 1/2 of the original U235 in place.
As such - there is very little difference in radioactivity between natural and depleated uranium. To say one is "safe" and the other is "unsafe" is splitting hairs. They are about the same.
In fact - if we look at "spent fuel" and reprocess it to remove the highly radioactive fraction - then what is left over is very similar to both "natural" and "depleated" uranium... it just has a little plutonium. The 1/2 life of plutonium makes it more radioactive than uranium. However one must also realise that
Nobody has to bio-engineer an oil eating fungus. They have been around for millions of years. An example is Stropharia rugosoannulata.
You might try using some fungicides for your carbs. Well - I suppose we could say you've got some rotten carbs on your hands!
This story is as old as the hills. I personally was looking at research in this area in 1998. You can find a lot of literature on bio-fuels. Just do a google search on biofuel algae and you'll see that research is being conducted worldwide.
It is amasing how much disinformation and outright lies have been told over the years. Without a firm grasp of the facts many solvable problems are viewed as impossible. In part - this was the objective of the disinformation campaigns.
First some terminology:
Natural uranium......... 99.3% U238, 0.7% U235
Depleated Uranium....... 99.7% U238, 0.3% U235 (varies: 0.2%-0.4% U235)
Reactor grade uranium... 96.0% U238, 4.0% U235 but this varies also.
Slightly enriched(CANDU) 99.1% U238, 0.9% U235 (varies: 0.9%-2.0% U235)
Spent fuel.............. 95.0% U238, 1.0% U235, 1.0% Pu, 3% crud (varies)
Reactor grade here refers to Low Enriched typically used for the USA light water pressurized reactors.
In the spent fuel, the U235 fraction can be as low as 0.4% and the Pu fraction is composed of Pu239 and Pu240. The Pu isotopes are practically impossible to separate and the Pu240 is so reactive that it is questionable - although probably possible - to have use as a bomb. A dirty weapon is possible.
The Candu fuel cycle starts with 99.3% U238 and 0.7% U235. The spent fuel is about 0.23% U235 and 0.27% Pu.
The Thorium fuel cycle converts Th to U233 which is as good as U235 for weapons and which can be easily chemically separated from the thorium.
---------------
It should be painfully obvious to just about everyone that only about 3% of the mass of the spent fuel is crud. This is the nuclear waste and it _can_ be burned up several ways including spallation. The _other_ 97% is fuel. Furthermore the spent fuel from a light water pressurized reactor would generally be considered enriched for a CANDU reactor.
Fuel reprocessing removes the "crud" and allows over 97% of the "spent fuel" to be elegible to be stuffed right back into the reactor.
So why isn't reprocessing used? Well - in Europe it is. The USA in a magnificent display of stupidity and circular thinking decided to go it alone and proclaim that a once through fuel cycle is the _only_ way to go. Part of of the political support for this stems from the build up of stock piles of "spent fuel" which the public is told has no use. It does - its future reactor fuel. By analogy - if someone were to dump a litre of crud in a barrel of oil we certainly wouldn't call it "spent oil"! We'd figure out a way to remove the crud. However I can remember my father dumping "waste oil" on the ground - hopefully we now collect it and re-refine it.
So one faction of the anti-nuclear crowd realised that keeping large stockpiles of deemed "waste" around gave them something to point their fingers at. Another faction perhaps with some justification just didn't want anyone to develop the technology to recycle the fuel because this does involve building plants that can separate the Plutonium. Also - by shortening the exposure time of the fuel mix the ratios of Pu 239 to Pu 240 can be controlled with the Pu 240 fraction reduced to under 7%. This is weapons grade plutonium. Yet another faction didn't want competition from a viable nuclear industry so they supported anything that generally doesn't make much sense.
Now the thing is to look at the issue of depleated verses natural uranium. The enrichment process is expensive and still leaves about 1/2 of the original U235 in place.
As such - there is very little difference in radioactivity between natural and depleated uranium. To say one is "safe" and the other is "unsafe" is splitting hairs. They are about the same.
In fact - if we look at "spent fuel" and reprocess it to remove the highly radioactive fraction - then what is left over is very similar to both "natural" and "depleated" uranium... it just has a little plutonium. The 1/2 life of plutonium makes it more radioactive than uranium. However one must also realise that since both uranium and plutonium are very heavy metals, they act as excellent sheilds for radiation... more effective for instance than lead.
What this all boils down to is that there is very little r
Missing 9 fingers? Isn't that like a mouse? A mouse is jsut a binary keyboard in disgiuse?
Well - it was the shareholders who were defrauded and its the shareholders that foot the bill for the fines.
Question: Did any of the execs who perpetrated the fraud have to pay the fine? I don't think so. So if the fine is paid from the company treasury then its the shareholders who lose out.
Wasting other people's money is just so much fun!
Today I am a moderator adn rather than mod up the post which is perhaps what I should be doing - I'm making a post instead. Yes - the moderation has sunk to terrible new lows.
I did have to laugh at the post however because the guy should have charged more for his work than the stupid blokes who wrote the first version of hte code. Alas in my exeriance people who can write good code often get paid poorly while the technically challenged are often so technically challenged that they don't know they can't write good code - and hense they charge more.