Slow but inevitable death? A corporation can't grow forever. There's only one planet, for one thing. All Walmart has to do is acknowledge that they are a huge player in one niche, and continue to do well in that niche. All that money they blew trying other things could have been paid as dividends to shareholders.
??? Are you serious? Sunelec is a credible retailer that sells a working, packaged product. Sure you could solder together your own panels...just like you could manufacture your own computer case instead of buying it from newegg.
Well, I looked in to it myself. The best case scenario is you DIY, half for the fun of tinkering with it. If you DIY, and get the panels from sunelec.com (the cheapest place I have found so far), and install them yourself (all but the last step - get an electrician to sign off on your wiring and do the final connection to the grid) it's a pretty good deal. You'd break even in 5 or 6 years at 10 cents a kilowatt hour.
This is one of the reasons why it's supposed to be worth it to install solar in some places. There's heavy subsidies that bring down the cost, and electricity rates are extremely high during parts of the day in California. And you get your money back instantly when you install the panels, because if you were to sell the house the next day, the sale price would be boosted by the value of the panels.
Well, that's what they say, at least, and this article seems to prove it.
Because it is simpler to prove and involves less constitutional rights. You are being fined for your vehicle operating out of spec. It is only a civil fine, and one that will not result in your incarceration. Thus, they don't have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that your vehicle operated out of spec, and it doesn't matter WHY it operated out of spec. If you show it was because your speednometer was faulty, you are still guilty of speeding even if it was impossible for you to avoid speeding.
Yes. The simplest is to give the tech an account with limited privileges, let him log on and look around, and then when you have this server up and running, reduce the privileges on his account further so that he can't interfere with anything.
But here's bigger factors you should worry about : think longer term. There's a chance that your hacked together server will be in use for the next 10-20+ years. Just how things go. Make sure to make an image file of the final configuration of the server onto a DVD or something and tape it to the server, with a text file on the disk and hand written instructions how to restore from this image. Make sure to save the newegg receipt with the exact hardware configuration of the server. I hope you used a passively cooled cpu, a solid state disk, and a good quality power supply.
Look, get real here. You're talking about a large quantity of high dense nuclear fuel, in an application where the WEIGHT matters. Everything you add to protect against a meltdown is going to slow your ship or sub down. Actual, real world accidents show that just 2 or 3 things going wrong - a stuck valve plus some rust somewhere plus a control panel putting critical information somewhere hard to find - is enough to cause serious accidents.
I find it hard to believe that given merely a power loss has destroyed an entire complex of 4 reactors utterly with contamination everywhere that naval reactors could be any better. And causing a power loss is easy - one or two grenades at the right instrument panel. Combine that with a radioactive steam leak to flood the compartment, preventing anyone from repairing the damage, and that's all she wrote.
This is one of the biggest problems with the military - they drink their own koolaid. Yeah, there's safety measures, but blithly saying that they can stop any individual sailor gone rougue is stupid. They might RESIST some attempts to cause a deliberate failure, but there are likely many many vulnerabilities that anyone with the knowledge could find IF they were trying to find them (instead of trying to find evidence to adhere to the official declaration that "it's perfectly safe!"
A small bomb or a soldering iron, perhaps? All your assumptions are that the safety hardware in intact, not sabotaged, and no one has hot wired the battle overrides. Also, that no one has destructively blown a gaping hole in a crucial bit of piping. All that failure analysis for stuff like high pressure steam lines is done assuming leaks that come from a progressive material failure - not someone blasting the pipes into pieces.
Also, you're assuming all these safety measures actually work according to the designer's assumptions. But many of the emergency core cooling systems are not routinely exposed to the conditions they are supposed to work under.
Technology that makes some jobs redundant has always, ALWAYS resulted in increases in total material wealth for a country because it frees up people to do other jobs. More automation means we can have more scientists and engineers (who can create the next generation of automation), and also to pay the teachers we will need to train them.
Now, the U.S. economy has a nasty problem : much of the increased prosperity is not equitably shared with the people who CREATE the prosperity. A corporate executive may perform a valuable service, but he is not worth thousands or millions of times the other managers and engineers and other people who make his decisions reality. If this problem were reduced, and it were straightforward for people to move to higher tech careers without artificial barriers making it so inefficient, then things would work a lot smoother.
Personally, there's nothing I hate more than a slow computer. But, basic upgrades that make the typical dust bunny filled corporate Dell shit-box are pretty easy. The darn thing probably needs more RAM and an SSD. Most of the time, you can swap those out without the IT weenies even noticing. Just clone the hard drive over and swap sticks for the memory. Yeah, you might lose the parts you bought in a year or two when the IT boys come to collect your machine without asking, but a few hundred bucks is worth it when it saves hours of aggravation.
What a way to make a living. And it's a nice chunk of change...IF you don't end up being the 1/100 or 1/1000 that develops some kind of nasty cancer early and dies slowly and horribly...or is forced to spend hundreds of k on medical bills.
Radiation poisoning happens at 400 mS. Your analogy fails. 100 mS is the minimum level at which we KNOW cancer rates go up significantly. They probably rise at lower radiation doses as well.
So according to the chart, if you hang around an area with 100 mS per hour for an hour, you'll receive a dose likely to cause cancer. Hang around for 4 hours, and you get radiation poisoning. That's not a lot of time - it takes days of labor to do anything major. Probably takes 30 minutes just to walk around part of the plant looking for radiation leaks. This must be why it took so long to plug that water leak - no one could hang around the leak for more than brief intervals.
Heck, even refueling a diesel pump - which is just increasing the amount of highly radioactive water you have to dispose of somehow - is going to take 20 minutes at a minimum, right?
I'm sure the workers are doing what they can - sprinting through the hot areas, working in shifts, using automation when they can - but the larger the contaminated area gets and the more fission products leak the worse the problem becomes. If you cannot even enter the building the reactor is in, how can you fix anything? They can't just send in robots and spray concrete willy nilly - if the reactor cores fully melt down and form critical masses at the bottom of the reactor vessel, gigawatts of heat will be produces and burn through any containment.
They need to have active pumps flushing water through the reactor vessels and out to the cooling tower and back again. This is the only method that won't create more and more radioactive water that has to be disposed of. (because right now they are just pumping water in and it leaks out of the reactor vessel and pools somewhere)
But to do that, somehow has to enter the building, install new pumps, fix breaks in the wiring, fix holes in the pipes, install sensors, power it up, and so forth. That's many hours of labor, and beyond the dexterity of what robots can do.
Is air conditioning even possible in theory with an off grid system? A one ton air conditioner would suck about 1055 watts. It seems like it might be doable if your array and battery banks were big enough, and if you designed your home to have extremely good insulation.
A small geodesic dome with 7 inches of foam insulation, perhaps? And a big enough array. Maybe your air conditioner system could be a ground source heat pump system (aka geothermal) that would use a water to water heat exchanger. There would be a huge water tank underground, insulated with more foam, that would store coldness. The water would have antifreeze in it. Then the air registers in the house would run off off a water-air heat exchanger. That would let you run the geothermal AC only in the day time during the peak sunlight hours, with software controlled cut outs that would shut the system down if there were a sustained period of low sunlight. (a small battery bank would smooth out brief fluctuations)
All this stuff could be bought off the shelf. You can buy geothermal units that have water-water heat exchangers (normally configured to work only for when the geothermal unit is in heat source mode but this is easy to mod), you can buy solar panels, you can buy heat exchangers that use chilled water to cool air (used in commercial buildings and condos and stuff).
The part I question is the efficiency...I'd need to set up a differential equation to model the efficiency of running the air system at night when your cold source is coming from a water tank that the water inside is rising in temperature.
Here's how it would work : wikipedia editors would be divided into tiers :
1. Anonymous Users and untrusted logged in users
2. Logged in Users with more than a certain number of non-reversed edits and above a certain number of months old
3. Verified Real name editor
4. Editor with a college degree or verified employment in a particular topic
5. Editor with a PhD in a particular topic or some type of citation showing they are a known world-class expert in a particlar topic
For example, an article on pitching a baseball would be editable by a user considered to be in category 5
Editors in categories 4 and 5 would be given special priviledges in enties tagged with a subject they are verified to have knowledge in.
Any user category at 2 or above would be able to "finalize" a section of an article stating that that section of the article was accurate to the best of their knowledge, and that they did not expect it to change in the near future. That section would be locked to anyone in a lower tier.
For the administrators to verify disputes, these admins would receive +1 to their power level. So to reverse a PhD's Editing you'd need to be in at least category 4.
The background checks to verify credentials would be paid for with some kind of honesty check system. You would be required to put up front the money it costs the wikimedia foundation to do the background check - say, $10 - and you would be refunded the money if your credentials were what you said they were.
Wikimedia would need a larger budget to pay to check all these backgrounds, and would need to find another source of money besides user donations. However, given the central role they already have in acting as a store of knowledge, this improvement, which would substantially increase the quality of some articles permanently, might very well be worth it.
Doing it this way would still preserve the flexibility and freedom of wikipedia for new content - and you could always append something to an article as a new section, editors with powers would only be able to lock sections of an article not the entire thing.
But it also means that if a PhD in math takes the time out of their busy day to explain how to solve a particular type of problem, only another PhD could dispute their work - not some anonymous 13 year old kid or some 20 year old college dropout with a power trip who happens to have wikipedia admin powers.
Actually, no, the gear does not exist to keep people safe. Gamma rays go through anything but lots of lead, and there's a limit how heavy you can make a suit before it is unusable. The gear you see all the responders wearing does not protect against gamma at all.
There's a very complex network of interconnects in the spinal cord of vertebrates that does perform low level processing. It's entirely possible that the interconnects that enable to rooster to keep flying are in the spinal cord - although not for long, due to blood loss and a lack of centralized guidance. (eyes and decision making and so forth)
Haha. No. If this were true, why would we have laser scanners? As I understand it, the parallax effect is only true for a single point focused on by both lens of two optical cameras. Everything else is just an approximation. And parallax must have some big limitations, or we would use it in favor of lasers.
If I were a nuclear engineer, I would start thinking about an exit strategy from the field. If I were a nuclear engineering student or a wanna-be, I'd switch majors. If I were investing in a nuclear reactor, I'd sell my shares.
Why? The truth is, a minor dose of radiation doesn't increase your risk of dying any worse than a bad sunburn. Ever had your skin burned so bad you had some blisters and/or peeling? Congrats, you just may die from melanoma. The UV radiation is not significantly different than gamma rays in the ultimate effect it has on living tissue.
And perhaps a few hundred people will die at most in the long, long term from this disaster. No more than killed by coal pollution and coal mining accidents.
But none of that matters. The Japanese have a sterling reputation for good engineering and adherence to standards : if they can't keep the nuclear demon under control, who can? Just like 3 mile island put a halt to new generators in the U.S. for 30 years, this disaster will stop new plant worldwide for the next 30 years.
It's time to stop wasting money on nuclear and spend it on something the public will accept - massive amounts of solar and wind, backed up with massive amounts of storage. Truth is, in the long term it'll probably cost more to do it this way - but it's still better than throwing more money down the nuclear rathole when public pressure will stop almost all new plants from ever being built
Umm, the best modern designs have a big tank of water at the top of the plant, so that a passive feed of water cools the reactor. It eliminates the need for an active electric pump - but you still get a radioactive mess if the piping breaks, and you still get a mess if the water in the tank leaks out from the same damage that killed the main cooling...
Pebble bed reactors are as of yet unproven, and they aren't compatible with existing fuel pellet technology which will drive the cost up.
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Slow but inevitable death? A corporation can't grow forever. There's only one planet, for one thing. All Walmart has to do is acknowledge that they are a huge player in one niche, and continue to do well in that niche. All that money they blew trying other things could have been paid as dividends to shareholders.
??? Are you serious? Sunelec is a credible retailer that sells a working, packaged product. Sure you could solder together your own panels...just like you could manufacture your own computer case instead of buying it from newegg.
You know your comment is just BEGGING for an "eh, convict labor...what do you expect" remark...
Well, I looked in to it myself. The best case scenario is you DIY, half for the fun of tinkering with it. If you DIY, and get the panels from sunelec.com (the cheapest place I have found so far), and install them yourself (all but the last step - get an electrician to sign off on your wiring and do the final connection to the grid) it's a pretty good deal. You'd break even in 5 or 6 years at 10 cents a kilowatt hour.
This is one of the reasons why it's supposed to be worth it to install solar in some places. There's heavy subsidies that bring down the cost, and electricity rates are extremely high during parts of the day in California. And you get your money back instantly when you install the panels, because if you were to sell the house the next day, the sale price would be boosted by the value of the panels.
Well, that's what they say, at least, and this article seems to prove it.
Hey, google hires everyone. They just put the people in the jobs they are good at.
Because it is simpler to prove and involves less constitutional rights. You are being fined for your vehicle operating out of spec. It is only a civil fine, and one that will not result in your incarceration. Thus, they don't have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that your vehicle operated out of spec, and it doesn't matter WHY it operated out of spec. If you show it was because your speednometer was faulty, you are still guilty of speeding even if it was impossible for you to avoid speeding.
Yes. The simplest is to give the tech an account with limited privileges, let him log on and look around, and then when you have this server up and running, reduce the privileges on his account further so that he can't interfere with anything.
But here's bigger factors you should worry about : think longer term. There's a chance that your hacked together server will be in use for the next 10-20+ years. Just how things go. Make sure to make an image file of the final configuration of the server onto a DVD or something and tape it to the server, with a text file on the disk and hand written instructions how to restore from this image. Make sure to save the newegg receipt with the exact hardware configuration of the server. I hope you used a passively cooled cpu, a solid state disk, and a good quality power supply.
Look, get real here. You're talking about a large quantity of high dense nuclear fuel, in an application where the WEIGHT matters. Everything you add to protect against a meltdown is going to slow your ship or sub down. Actual, real world accidents show that just 2 or 3 things going wrong - a stuck valve plus some rust somewhere plus a control panel putting critical information somewhere hard to find - is enough to cause serious accidents.
I find it hard to believe that given merely a power loss has destroyed an entire complex of 4 reactors utterly with contamination everywhere that naval reactors could be any better. And causing a power loss is easy - one or two grenades at the right instrument panel. Combine that with a radioactive steam leak to flood the compartment, preventing anyone from repairing the damage, and that's all she wrote.
This is one of the biggest problems with the military - they drink their own koolaid. Yeah, there's safety measures, but blithly saying that they can stop any individual sailor gone rougue is stupid. They might RESIST some attempts to cause a deliberate failure, but there are likely many many vulnerabilities that anyone with the knowledge could find IF they were trying to find them (instead of trying to find evidence to adhere to the official declaration that "it's perfectly safe!"
A small bomb or a soldering iron, perhaps? All your assumptions are that the safety hardware in intact, not sabotaged, and no one has hot wired the battle overrides. Also, that no one has destructively blown a gaping hole in a crucial bit of piping. All that failure analysis for stuff like high pressure steam lines is done assuming leaks that come from a progressive material failure - not someone blasting the pipes into pieces.
Also, you're assuming all these safety measures actually work according to the designer's assumptions. But many of the emergency core cooling systems are not routinely exposed to the conditions they are supposed to work under.
You seem pretty blithely confident in your assertions there.
Technology that makes some jobs redundant has always, ALWAYS resulted in increases in total material wealth for a country because it frees up people to do other jobs. More automation means we can have more scientists and engineers (who can create the next generation of automation), and also to pay the teachers we will need to train them.
Now, the U.S. economy has a nasty problem : much of the increased prosperity is not equitably shared with the people who CREATE the prosperity. A corporate executive may perform a valuable service, but he is not worth thousands or millions of times the other managers and engineers and other people who make his decisions reality. If this problem were reduced, and it were straightforward for people to move to higher tech careers without artificial barriers making it so inefficient, then things would work a lot smoother.
Personally, there's nothing I hate more than a slow computer. But, basic upgrades that make the typical dust bunny filled corporate Dell shit-box are pretty easy. The darn thing probably needs more RAM and an SSD. Most of the time, you can swap those out without the IT weenies even noticing. Just clone the hard drive over and swap sticks for the memory. Yeah, you might lose the parts you bought in a year or two when the IT boys come to collect your machine without asking, but a few hundred bucks is worth it when it saves hours of aggravation.
What a way to make a living. And it's a nice chunk of change...IF you don't end up being the 1/100 or 1/1000 that develops some kind of nasty cancer early and dies slowly and horribly...or is forced to spend hundreds of k on medical bills.
Radiation poisoning happens at 400 mS. Your analogy fails. 100 mS is the minimum level at which we KNOW cancer rates go up significantly. They probably rise at lower radiation doses as well.
So according to the chart, if you hang around an area with 100 mS per hour for an hour, you'll receive a dose likely to cause cancer. Hang around for 4 hours, and you get radiation poisoning. That's not a lot of time - it takes days of labor to do anything major. Probably takes 30 minutes just to walk around part of the plant looking for radiation leaks. This must be why it took so long to plug that water leak - no one could hang around the leak for more than brief intervals.
Heck, even refueling a diesel pump - which is just increasing the amount of highly radioactive water you have to dispose of somehow - is going to take 20 minutes at a minimum, right?
I'm sure the workers are doing what they can - sprinting through the hot areas, working in shifts, using automation when they can - but the larger the contaminated area gets and the more fission products leak the worse the problem becomes. If you cannot even enter the building the reactor is in, how can you fix anything? They can't just send in robots and spray concrete willy nilly - if the reactor cores fully melt down and form critical masses at the bottom of the reactor vessel, gigawatts of heat will be produces and burn through any containment.
They need to have active pumps flushing water through the reactor vessels and out to the cooling tower and back again. This is the only method that won't create more and more radioactive water that has to be disposed of. (because right now they are just pumping water in and it leaks out of the reactor vessel and pools somewhere)
But to do that, somehow has to enter the building, install new pumps, fix breaks in the wiring, fix holes in the pipes, install sensors, power it up, and so forth. That's many hours of labor, and beyond the dexterity of what robots can do.
http://xkcd.com/radiation/
Is air conditioning even possible in theory with an off grid system? A one ton air conditioner would suck about 1055 watts. It seems like it might be doable if your array and battery banks were big enough, and if you designed your home to have extremely good insulation.
A small geodesic dome with 7 inches of foam insulation, perhaps? And a big enough array. Maybe your air conditioner system could be a ground source heat pump system (aka geothermal) that would use a water to water heat exchanger. There would be a huge water tank underground, insulated with more foam, that would store coldness. The water would have antifreeze in it. Then the air registers in the house would run off off a water-air heat exchanger. That would let you run the geothermal AC only in the day time during the peak sunlight hours, with software controlled cut outs that would shut the system down if there were a sustained period of low sunlight. (a small battery bank would smooth out brief fluctuations)
All this stuff could be bought off the shelf. You can buy geothermal units that have water-water heat exchangers (normally configured to work only for when the geothermal unit is in heat source mode but this is easy to mod), you can buy solar panels, you can buy heat exchangers that use chilled water to cool air (used in commercial buildings and condos and stuff).
The part I question is the efficiency...I'd need to set up a differential equation to model the efficiency of running the air system at night when your cold source is coming from a water tank that the water inside is rising in temperature.
Viol8 : are you planning to preserve the data in said hardware when you die? Through cryogenic freezing or some other method not available yet?
Here's how it would work : wikipedia editors would be divided into tiers :
1. Anonymous Users and untrusted logged in users
2. Logged in Users with more than a certain number of non-reversed edits and above a certain number of months old
3. Verified Real name editor
4. Editor with a college degree or verified employment in a particular topic
5. Editor with a PhD in a particular topic or some type of citation showing they are a known world-class expert in a particlar topic
For example, an article on pitching a baseball would be editable by a user considered to be in category 5
Editors in categories 4 and 5 would be given special priviledges in enties tagged with a subject they are verified to have knowledge in.
Any user category at 2 or above would be able to "finalize" a section of an article stating that that section of the article was accurate to the best of their knowledge, and that they did not expect it to change in the near future. That section would be locked to anyone in a lower tier.
For the administrators to verify disputes, these admins would receive +1 to their power level. So to reverse a PhD's Editing you'd need to be in at least category 4.
The background checks to verify credentials would be paid for with some kind of honesty check system. You would be required to put up front the money it costs the wikimedia foundation to do the background check - say, $10 - and you would be refunded the money if your credentials were what you said they were.
Wikimedia would need a larger budget to pay to check all these backgrounds, and would need to find another source of money besides user donations. However, given the central role they already have in acting as a store of knowledge, this improvement, which would substantially increase the quality of some articles permanently, might very well be worth it.
Doing it this way would still preserve the flexibility and freedom of wikipedia for new content - and you could always append something to an article as a new section, editors with powers would only be able to lock sections of an article not the entire thing.
But it also means that if a PhD in math takes the time out of their busy day to explain how to solve a particular type of problem, only another PhD could dispute their work - not some anonymous 13 year old kid or some 20 year old college dropout with a power trip who happens to have wikipedia admin powers.
Actually, no, the gear does not exist to keep people safe. Gamma rays go through anything but lots of lead, and there's a limit how heavy you can make a suit before it is unusable. The gear you see all the responders wearing does not protect against gamma at all.
There's a very complex network of interconnects in the spinal cord of vertebrates that does perform low level processing. It's entirely possible that the interconnects that enable to rooster to keep flying are in the spinal cord - although not for long, due to blood loss and a lack of centralized guidance. (eyes and decision making and so forth)
Haha. No. If this were true, why would we have laser scanners? As I understand it, the parallax effect is only true for a single point focused on by both lens of two optical cameras. Everything else is just an approximation. And parallax must have some big limitations, or we would use it in favor of lasers.
If I were a nuclear engineer, I would start thinking about an exit strategy from the field. If I were a nuclear engineering student or a wanna-be, I'd switch majors. If I were investing in a nuclear reactor, I'd sell my shares.
Why? The truth is, a minor dose of radiation doesn't increase your risk of dying any worse than a bad sunburn. Ever had your skin burned so bad you had some blisters and/or peeling? Congrats, you just may die from melanoma. The UV radiation is not significantly different than gamma rays in the ultimate effect it has on living tissue.
And perhaps a few hundred people will die at most in the long, long term from this disaster. No more than killed by coal pollution and coal mining accidents.
But none of that matters. The Japanese have a sterling reputation for good engineering and adherence to standards : if they can't keep the nuclear demon under control, who can? Just like 3 mile island put a halt to new generators in the U.S. for 30 years, this disaster will stop new plant worldwide for the next 30 years.
It's time to stop wasting money on nuclear and spend it on something the public will accept - massive amounts of solar and wind, backed up with massive amounts of storage. Truth is, in the long term it'll probably cost more to do it this way - but it's still better than throwing more money down the nuclear rathole when public pressure will stop almost all new plants from ever being built
Umm, the best modern designs have a big tank of water at the top of the plant, so that a passive feed of water cools the reactor. It eliminates the need for an active electric pump - but you still get a radioactive mess if the piping breaks, and you still get a mess if the water in the tank leaks out from the same damage that killed the main cooling...
Pebble bed reactors are as of yet unproven, and they aren't compatible with existing fuel pellet technology which will drive the cost up.
Did they get hit by the Tsunami?