How do the warranties compare? Adding the cost of a of couple years of Applecare support to match the usual 3-year Lenovo out-of-the-box warranty can make the numbers look a bit more lopsided.
The molten-salt reactor built in the US back in the 60s had a maximum output of 7MW thermal -- it never generated any electricity, the heat was dumped to air. A modern GenIII uranium reactor like those coming on-stream in China and elsewhere produces about 4500MW thermal/1600MW of electricity 24 hours a day, and with downtime for refuelling, inspection and maintenance as needed they are expected to operate for sixty years at least -- a century of operation is not impossible given the extreme overengineering that goes into the core components involved.
It's a bit like saying someone who built a model aircraft engine that ran for a few hours means they can design a reliable efficient cost-effective truck engine based on the same principles. Good luck with that.
As for the proposed Indian thorium reactors they are basically standard PWRs and heavy-water BWRs fuelled with a mixture of thorium, medium-enriched uranium and plutonium derived from conventional low-enriched uranium nuclear reactors of the sort in operation around the world today. Thorium (Th-232) isn't a good nuclear fuel by itself, it needs to be bred into fissile U-233 with neutrons from U-235 and Pu-239/240 before its energy can be extracted. India want to go this route because they're not signatories to the Non-Proliferation Treaty and therefore limited in their access to the world's nuclear materials markets and they don't have good native sources of uranium ore. If it were otherwise they probably wouldn't bother.
The bit about decommissioning costs being paid for by the government is a lie. Nuclear power plants in the West build and maintain a reserve fund to pay for end-of-life decommissioning, usually based on a percentage of the cost of the electricity generated and sold. In the US that's 0.1c to 0.2c per kWh IIRC.
Government taxpayers only pay for decommissioning non-power reactors such as the ones used to make weapons-grade cores for bombs etc. Decommissioning power reactors is paid for by the electricity consumer in the end. This isn't particularly onerous -- France's electricity consumers pay about 13c Euro per kWh for their nuclear generated electricity and that includes a decommissioning levy. Germany's electricity generated by lignite coal and Russian gas and a small amount of renewables costs twice that much to the consumer while it emits nearly twice as much carbon per kWh generated.
As for construction costs being paid for by the governnment, that's untrue as well -- there may be loan guarantees from a given government but those loans to pay for the upfront costs of building the reactors are commercial financial instruments, meant to be paid off over forty years and more of the reactor operating and generating sellable electricity. I don't actually know of a Solyndra-style billion-buck default on a loan guarantee for a nuclear construction project.
You are correct about the cost of fuel being a minor part of nuclear operations though. Thorium is a solution looking for a problem, basically -- there's lots of uranium around, it's dirt cheap, so cheap that major sources can't be economically exploited yet since they're in very remote areas of the world and getting them to market would be more expensive than they're worth.
The research into using thorium is very long-term. Centuries from now when uranium becomes scarcer thorium might become the go-to non-carbon fuel but right now it's only an interesting laboratory curiosity.
Good grief, what an utterly crap article! So many things they got wrong... Lessee, the thorium experiment involves eight (8) pellets of mixed-oxide thorium/plutonium fuel in a single fuel rod loaded into a low-powered heavy-water research reactor fuelled mostly with enriched uranium (the reactor is designed to accept other fuel elements like the thorium MOX rod for testing purposes which is why the test is being carried out in Norway). Thorium needs a neutron flux to breed Th232 up into fissile U233 and produce energy hence the mixed-oxide formulation of the pellets mentioned. Assuming the MOX pellets get commoditised they'll need an ongoing future supply of Pu to continue making them and that can come only from either reprocessing fuel rods from regular uranium reactors of the type running today or breeder reactors also burning uranium although the track record of breeders hasn't been too good up till now, lots of engineering problems with molten sodium leaking and consequential fires. Note that the travelling-wave reactor design mentioned in the original article is basically a breeder using guess what? as a coolant. Oops.
I saw an announcement recently about thorium fuel elements being loaded into a reactor for long-term engineering research to see how they perform physically. There's not a great demand for thorium fuel cycle operations at the moment though when uranium is so cheap and plentiful.
Google announced their quarterly figures last Thursday, profits up 19%. Yay! Except the haruspexers in the financial press were expecting more and the share price fell off a cliff, down about 4% on opening Friday morning. Same with MS last week, bottom-line numbers up quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year but the share price tanked although only to about the level that it had been a few months ago.
I worked with the OSCAR Euro command people for a while in the early 80s at the University of Surrey. We had an ex-Navy AA radar X-Y director head on the roof of the building with some Yagis strapped to it to track the satellites and a microcomputer to do the tracking for us as well as sending control commands to the OSCARs as they went by.
The guy in charge was someone you might have heard of, a Ph. D. student name of Martin Sweeting who was busy designing and building cheap satellites; his thesis project was something called UOSAT-1.
There you have it, folks, the modern woowoo world in a nutshell. Thimerosal, used for nearly a century without problems by billions of people is somehow totally dangerous today because it's got a magic ingredient some ignorant fool doesn't like the sound of.
"A vaccine containing 0.01% thimerosal as a preservative contains 50 micrograms of thimerosal per 0.5 mL dose or approximately 25 micrograms of mercury per 0.5 mL dose." -- from the US FDA information pages on vaccines and safety. Most of that will be excreted whole from the body over a period of a few days or a few weeks, some will break down into ethylmercury and be excreted over the same sort of time interval.
If you really want to stop ingesting mercury then I suggest you only drink distilled water and, assuming you're American, don't breathe the air -- coal-fired power stations in the US put about 50 tonnes of elemental mercury into the atmosphere and environment each year. Sushi is right out. Have a nice woowoo day.
The Marx Brothers used to run their film scripts through a data analytics grinder -- they'd go on tour to small towns across the States, putting on a stage show one night only in each location so every audience was fresh, staging scenes from the planned movie. They'd have people with stopwatches recording how long the laughter for each punchline lasted. They'd refine and tweak the script as they went and when they came back to film the movie they had a thoroughly tested script in the bag.
And then when they started filming they'd improvise and ad-lib because the were so sick of the weeks of stage shows and touring...
A friend's father was a fighter pilot, flying Lightning interceptors in the RAF. He was about five foot six and quite skinny with unexceptional eyesight. The big thing he had going for him was reaction times maybe 60% of human normal and an amazing ability to master complex technical flying, resulting in him doing two seasons in the Red Arrows at the end of his RAF career.
He didn't have to be all muscles, not in a plane with hydraulic-assisted controls. Being small and compact meant he fitted nicely into a cramped cockpit and when flying at speed and altitude he used his radar controller to vector him onto targets (usually Russian Bears over the North Sea) and used his instruments to tell him what was going on inside the plane so Eye of Eagle was not actually an operational requirement.
There is piss-all evidence that thimerosal is harmful in any way to anyone, pretty much, with a track record going back 80 years of intensive use as a preservative for vaccines. There might be an allergic reaction to thimerosal in some folks but at concentrations way above the small amount that exists in vaccines and such reactions are usually minor, as in skin testing. The notable byproducts of the small amount of the original tiny amount that is broken down in the body are mostly ethylmercury which has very little effect on the human body even at much higher dosages than would result from its use in a one-off injection or even a series of vaccinations given over several months. Methylmercury is created in even tinier amounts compared to the miniscule amounts of ethylmercury produced by breakdown.
So why are you so down on Thimerosal? Let me guess, it's the mercury molecule. Science, research, testing, analysis, decades of use and billions of thimerosal-preservative vaccinations and they all mean nothing in the face of anecdotal naturopathic detoxification woowoo and snake-oil salesmen with books to sell.
and there are alternatives today which are just as good which meet that description
Is there any proof of this statement? Decades of results showing no systematic adverse reactions, no reduction of the efficacy of the vaccine, low cost, effectiveness, storage time, patents (thimerosal is so old it's totally generic by now), availability etc. etc. Thimerosal has all these proven benefits, the new preservatives don't but you're willing to take a blind leap of religious faith and have billions of people follow you because... of that Hg molecule which you don't like.
I want a preservative made without mercury,
You've got your wish. Thimerosal is no longer used for pediatric vaccination in the West, in fact it hasn't been for over ten years because of woowoo and Jenny Bloody McCarthy and Andrew Fucking Wakefield and the uninformed adherents of crystal power and chakras and Himalayan Salt. It's still used in a few adult vaccinations like seasonal flu jabs because it's much better than the alternatives, it's cheaper, easier to produce, protects vaccines for longer than the expensive patented preservatives currently in use and we know it works really well. It's also used in third-world countries who can't afford Himalayan Salt but who really need a good vaccine preservative and who can't afford to placate the worshippers of woowoo like yourself.
I don't get everything I want.
Actually in this case you did. You're still thrashing around on the floor in a tantrum, face blue from holding your breath because your wish came true a decade ago and you were having such a good time feeling oppressed and angry about that Damn Molecule of Mercury you couldn't hear the good news.
Kipling wrote a story, "The Tomb of His Ancestors" in which treatments against smallpox were being carried out in remote areas of India in the late 19th century using an "official calf" infected with cowpox. The hereditary English ruler of a benighted hill tribe has to deal with the natives after they balk at the inoculations and kidnap the cowardly native inoculator.
Vaccination schedule for infants are not a problem, at least not as much of a problem as whooping cough, diptheria, polio and a number of other proven killers and cripplers in infancy. Happily nowadays folks can expect their kids not to catch these diseases when they are tiny infants with ill-developed immune systems because they and their cohorts get the damn kids vaccinated on schedule.
In the Good Old Days some societies didn't name newborns as names were important and it was better to wait a year or two since infants died so easily. It doesn't happen like that any more so people think the threat has gone away and society can stop doing what made the threat so impotent in the first place hence the big measles outbreak in Wales, the subject of this article. A single unvaccinated kid is not a real danger to the rest of the population, a number of them are a reservoir that can infect even vaccinated people since vaccines are not a golden bullet with a 100% success rate.
Thanks for insulting me. Now I can take the safeties off the weapons.
Did you really mean to say that out loud? Deary deary me.
Thimerosal has been shown to break down inside the body in exactly the way it isn't supposed to.
If it breaks down at all (most of it is excreted intact over a period of a few days or weeks) it forms ethylmercury which is not exactly harmless but is not particularly potent. Methylmercury is a lot nastier and anti-vaccination loons often don't or won't realise the difference a single letter makes in a chemical compound name hence the fluff and fluster from ill-informed folks like yourself.
And the chlorine in salt isn't the kind of chlorine that's really harmful, which is why what you're saying is fucking hilarious.
ORLY? What kind of not-really-harmful chlorine are you referring to? All isotopes of Cl are equally poisonous in elemental form and there are no other alternative forms of chlorine in the universe (well, my universe at least. I don't know what it's like where you come from). In table salt the Cl atom is bound very closely to a sodium atom, in Thimerosal the Hg atom is linked to a sulphur atom and an ethyl group, the latter of which results in ethylmercury if the molecule breaks at the sulphur bond. If there is a pathway to produce methylmercury it doesn't seem to be common or prevalent before the byproducts get excreted.
you can't comprehend that Thimerosal isn't the only preservative available.
It's a very good preservative for the specific job of preventing lots of deaths and injury from contaminated bulk vaccine -- see for example the incident (referred to in the Google article about Thimerosal) in 1928 when a batch of contaminated diptheria vaccine killed 12 children out of 21 treated. Thimerosal doesn't affect the vaccine which in many cases is basically a low-grade infection as far as the body is concerned, a soup of protein coats and killed viruses that antiseptics are designed to destroy. Thimerosal is well-proven with a long track record of not being deleterious to the population being vaccinated. What more could you want?
The standard reply to the Thimerosal nuts like you is "it's OK to eat some sodium and breathe some chlorine because eating table salt won't kill you."
Thimerosal (officially called Thiomersal) is an organometallic compound in the same way NaCl is a compound and as such the mercury atom is bonded to the rest of the molecule, not roaming around loose in the solution. Mercury is magical juju to the anti-vaccine crowd, a curseword that kills and maims because of its name and nothing more.
Thimerosal been in use as an antiseptic and antifungal agent in vaccines for about 80 years now, preventing death and injury from bulk vaccines unwittingly contaminated by assorted dangerous bugs and without affecting the vaccine's potency as other antiseptic compounds do. It's now being withdrawn from use because of unfounded panic and overabundance of caution and I confidently expect more deaths and illnesses in the future because of that. Good work, fella!
For nutrients to find their way into vegetables, they have to be in the ground first, and if they aren't there, then you don't get to eat them.
If this was remotely true then eating dirt would allow starving people to cut out the agricultural middleman. A dessert of manure would complement the main course perfectly.
In reality plants are cellular tissue mostly made from water and atmospheric CO2 with a dash of colouring and flavours. Their growth depends on having enough but not too much water, enough sunlight to power the process, the presence of alkaline or acid soils and the ability to deter pests. Some of the proteins and other cellular constituents of plants and such happen to be good for us, but not all of them -- see belladonna and potato greens for counterexamples.
Amino acids in plants don't lurk around in the soil to be picked up by the root system, they are constructed by nanotech factories in the plant's cells, same with the nutrients and some vitamins in muscle tissue and other constituent parts of the animals we eat.
All of the UK's current nuclear reactors use seawater for cooling. Many coal-fired power stations (but not all of them) are also on the coast or estuaries and similarly use seawater for their cooling loops.
Corrosion is not a problem, just use marine-rated stainless steel pumps and piping for the loops and carry out preventative maintenance every now and then. Odd problems with seawater cooling do occur, such as a plague of jellyfish which threatened to block the seawater intakes at a Scottish reactor site and they were shut down for a time as a precaution.
There are some uses for spent steam and even warmed water from the condensers but they are somewhat limited. My brother was involved with designing a combination generating set fuelled by natural gas which also produced process steam for sugar refining. Previously the sugar company had bought in electricity and produced low-pressure steam separately in gas-fired boilers. Afterwards they sold excess generating capacity to the grid and improved their financial bottom line by a healthy chunk.
The most efficient nuclear power stations in operation today are the Advanced Gas-cooled Reactors (AGRs) in the UK. They use CO2 as a coolant circulating through the carbon-moderator core at over 600 deg C with a generating efficiency of about 41% conversion of thermal energy to electricity compared to steam-moderated PWRs at about 34%. The low cost of uranium fuel per kWh generated means the extra efficiency doesn't help that much in terms of price of electricity generated or operating costs.
Some data recovery can be done even off multiply-overwritten tracks but it takes serious engineering of the sort only police forensics and national security can afford in terms of cash and time. Even then there is no certainty of success.
The head positioning system in a disk drive is not 100% accurate pass to pass and remnant magnetic data can persist on the edge of the main track after an overwrite or two on some sectors. That data can be read using scanning electron microscopes, SQUIDs and other exotica and some of the disk's original contents reconstructed. One (public) example where this has been carried out is where someone wiped their collection of child porn but the prosecution were able to prove the disk contained a few illegal images, enough to secure a conviction.
If you're wanting to destroy the data on a disk for sure, shred it into chips if you have the facility (most big data centres either have their own shredder or they can bring in a truck-mounted shredder and shred them on site to preserve chain of custody). Failing that, if you have the time and curiosity take the drives apart, remove the platters and next time you have a BBQ toss them in the charcoal or put them on the grill after cooking. They'll slag down but more importantly the heat will push them over their Curie point totally randomising the magnetic data. You'll also get some kickass fridge magnets out of the deal.
Apple would like some of that there "momentum"...stock price down from $600 to $420 in a year, MSFT at $35 up from $30 over the same period (although this may be inflated as MS yearly earnings are due out on the 18th of this month.)
You can usually tell when a successful company has run out of ideas, they start building stuff in the real estate sense to use up all the money they made. Google is planning to spend a billion bucks to build the world's shortest skyscraper in London, Apple's multibillion-buck mothership project is well underway in Cupertino when last heard of. In contrast there doesn't seem to be any giant MS corporate-ego construction going on -- in my home town MS leased space for sales offices in a recently renovated city-centre Victorian building rather than breaking ground on some glossy overpriced new-build monstrosity.
Yup, MSFT's stock ticker has been flat from about 2002 absent the notch in September 2008 when the stock market went into the toilet in unison. Compare that to the rollercoaster dive for AAPL Tim Cook has overseen since he took over from St. Steve but few in the Slashdot crowd are calling for him to be fired and replaced because... ummm, I'll get back to you on that.
Here's a few names for you -- Carly Fiorina, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Tim Cook. Two of those four Sooper Geniuses were MBAs, two weren't. Guess which ones.
Slashdot Mirror
How do the warranties compare? Adding the cost of a of couple years of Applecare support to match the usual 3-year Lenovo out-of-the-box warranty can make the numbers look a bit more lopsided.
The molten-salt reactor built in the US back in the 60s had a maximum output of 7MW thermal -- it never generated any electricity, the heat was dumped to air. A modern GenIII uranium reactor like those coming on-stream in China and elsewhere produces about 4500MW thermal /1600MW of electricity 24 hours a day, and with downtime for refuelling, inspection and maintenance as needed they are expected to operate for sixty years at least -- a century of operation is not impossible given the extreme overengineering that goes into the core components involved.
It's a bit like saying someone who built a model aircraft engine that ran for a few hours means they can design a reliable efficient cost-effective truck engine based on the same principles. Good luck with that.
As for the proposed Indian thorium reactors they are basically standard PWRs and heavy-water BWRs fuelled with a mixture of thorium, medium-enriched uranium and plutonium derived from conventional low-enriched uranium nuclear reactors of the sort in operation around the world today. Thorium (Th-232) isn't a good nuclear fuel by itself, it needs to be bred into fissile U-233 with neutrons from U-235 and Pu-239/240 before its energy can be extracted. India want to go this route because they're not signatories to the Non-Proliferation Treaty and therefore limited in their access to the world's nuclear materials markets and they don't have good native sources of uranium ore. If it were otherwise they probably wouldn't bother.
The bit about decommissioning costs being paid for by the government is a lie. Nuclear power plants in the West build and maintain a reserve fund to pay for end-of-life decommissioning, usually based on a percentage of the cost of the electricity generated and sold. In the US that's 0.1c to 0.2c per kWh IIRC.
Government taxpayers only pay for decommissioning non-power reactors such as the ones used to make weapons-grade cores for bombs etc. Decommissioning power reactors is paid for by the electricity consumer in the end. This isn't particularly onerous -- France's electricity consumers pay about 13c Euro per kWh for their nuclear generated electricity and that includes a decommissioning levy. Germany's electricity generated by lignite coal and Russian gas and a small amount of renewables costs twice that much to the consumer while it emits nearly twice as much carbon per kWh generated.
As for construction costs being paid for by the governnment, that's untrue as well -- there may be loan guarantees from a given government but those loans to pay for the upfront costs of building the reactors are commercial financial instruments, meant to be paid off over forty years and more of the reactor operating and generating sellable electricity. I don't actually know of a Solyndra-style billion-buck default on a loan guarantee for a nuclear construction project.
You are correct about the cost of fuel being a minor part of nuclear operations though. Thorium is a solution looking for a problem, basically -- there's lots of uranium around, it's dirt cheap, so cheap that major sources can't be economically exploited yet since they're in very remote areas of the world and getting them to market would be more expensive than they're worth.
The research into using thorium is very long-term. Centuries from now when uranium becomes scarcer thorium might become the go-to non-carbon fuel but right now it's only an interesting laboratory curiosity.
Good grief, what an utterly crap article! So many things they got wrong... Lessee, the thorium experiment involves eight (8) pellets of mixed-oxide thorium/plutonium fuel in a single fuel rod loaded into a low-powered heavy-water research reactor fuelled mostly with enriched uranium (the reactor is designed to accept other fuel elements like the thorium MOX rod for testing purposes which is why the test is being carried out in Norway). Thorium needs a neutron flux to breed Th232 up into fissile U233 and produce energy hence the mixed-oxide formulation of the pellets mentioned. Assuming the MOX pellets get commoditised they'll need an ongoing future supply of Pu to continue making them and that can come only from either reprocessing fuel rods from regular uranium reactors of the type running today or breeder reactors also burning uranium although the track record of breeders hasn't been too good up till now, lots of engineering problems with molten sodium leaking and consequential fires. Note that the travelling-wave reactor design mentioned in the original article is basically a breeder using guess what? as a coolant. Oops.
I saw an announcement recently about thorium fuel elements being loaded into a reactor for long-term engineering research to see how they perform physically. There's not a great demand for thorium fuel cycle operations at the moment though when uranium is so cheap and plentiful.
Yeah but the performance would suck under DOSbox. I wanted it to run native on the bare metal OS.
God's Wonderful BASIC... I was very disappointed to find it wouldn't run under Windows 8.
Google announced their quarterly figures last Thursday, profits up 19%. Yay! Except the haruspexers in the financial press were expecting more and the share price fell off a cliff, down about 4% on opening Friday morning. Same with MS last week, bottom-line numbers up quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year but the share price tanked although only to about the level that it had been a few months ago.
I worked with the OSCAR Euro command people for a while in the early 80s at the University of Surrey. We had an ex-Navy AA radar X-Y director head on the roof of the building with some Yagis strapped to it to track the satellites and a microcomputer to do the tracking for us as well as sending control commands to the OSCARs as they went by.
The guy in charge was someone you might have heard of, a Ph. D. student name of Martin Sweeting who was busy designing and building cheap satellites; his thesis project was something called UOSAT-1.
There you have it, folks, the modern woowoo world in a nutshell. Thimerosal, used for nearly a century without problems by billions of people is somehow totally dangerous today because it's got a magic ingredient some ignorant fool doesn't like the sound of.
"A vaccine containing 0.01% thimerosal as a preservative contains 50 micrograms of thimerosal per 0.5 mL dose or approximately 25 micrograms of mercury per 0.5 mL dose." -- from the US FDA information pages on vaccines and safety. Most of that will be excreted whole from the body over a period of a few days or a few weeks, some will break down into ethylmercury and be excreted over the same sort of time interval.
If you really want to stop ingesting mercury then I suggest you only drink distilled water and, assuming you're American, don't breathe the air -- coal-fired power stations in the US put about 50 tonnes of elemental mercury into the atmosphere and environment each year. Sushi is right out. Have a nice woowoo day.
The Marx Brothers used to run their film scripts through a data analytics grinder -- they'd go on tour to small towns across the States, putting on a stage show one night only in each location so every audience was fresh, staging scenes from the planned movie. They'd have people with stopwatches recording how long the laughter for each punchline lasted. They'd refine and tweak the script as they went and when they came back to film the movie they had a thoroughly tested script in the bag.
And then when they started filming they'd improvise and ad-lib because the were so sick of the weeks of stage shows and touring...
A friend's father was a fighter pilot, flying Lightning interceptors in the RAF. He was about five foot six and quite skinny with unexceptional eyesight. The big thing he had going for him was reaction times maybe 60% of human normal and an amazing ability to master complex technical flying, resulting in him doing two seasons in the Red Arrows at the end of his RAF career.
He didn't have to be all muscles, not in a plane with hydraulic-assisted controls. Being small and compact meant he fitted nicely into a cramped cockpit and when flying at speed and altitude he used his radar controller to vector him onto targets (usually Russian Bears over the North Sea) and used his instruments to tell him what was going on inside the plane so Eye of Eagle was not actually an operational requirement.
I want a preservative made without mercury
And I want a pony.
There is piss-all evidence that thimerosal is harmful in any way to anyone, pretty much, with a track record going back 80 years of intensive use as a preservative for vaccines. There might be an allergic reaction to thimerosal in some folks but at concentrations way above the small amount that exists in vaccines and such reactions are usually minor, as in skin testing. The notable byproducts of the small amount of the original tiny amount that is broken down in the body are mostly ethylmercury which has very little effect on the human body even at much higher dosages than would result from its use in a one-off injection or even a series of vaccinations given over several months. Methylmercury is created in even tinier amounts compared to the miniscule amounts of ethylmercury produced by breakdown.
So why are you so down on Thimerosal? Let me guess, it's the mercury molecule. Science, research, testing, analysis, decades of use and billions of thimerosal-preservative vaccinations and they all mean nothing in the face of anecdotal naturopathic detoxification woowoo and snake-oil salesmen with books to sell.
and there are alternatives today which are just as good which meet that description
Is there any proof of this statement? Decades of results showing no systematic adverse reactions, no reduction of the efficacy of the vaccine, low cost, effectiveness, storage time, patents (thimerosal is so old it's totally generic by now), availability etc. etc. Thimerosal has all these proven benefits, the new preservatives don't but you're willing to take a blind leap of religious faith and have billions of people follow you because... of that Hg molecule which you don't like.
I want a preservative made without mercury,
You've got your wish. Thimerosal is no longer used for pediatric vaccination in the West, in fact it hasn't been for over ten years because of woowoo and Jenny Bloody McCarthy and Andrew Fucking Wakefield and the uninformed adherents of crystal power and chakras and Himalayan Salt. It's still used in a few adult vaccinations like seasonal flu jabs because it's much better than the alternatives, it's cheaper, easier to produce, protects vaccines for longer than the expensive patented preservatives currently in use and we know it works really well. It's also used in third-world countries who can't afford Himalayan Salt but who really need a good vaccine preservative and who can't afford to placate the worshippers of woowoo like yourself.
I don't get everything I want.
Actually in this case you did. You're still thrashing around on the floor in a tantrum, face blue from holding your breath because your wish came true a decade ago and you were having such a good time feeling oppressed and angry about that Damn Molecule of Mercury you couldn't hear the good news.
Kipling wrote a story, "The Tomb of His Ancestors" in which treatments against smallpox were being carried out in remote areas of India in the late 19th century using an "official calf" infected with cowpox. The hereditary English ruler of a benighted hill tribe has to deal with the natives after they balk at the inoculations and kidnap the cowardly native inoculator.
Vaccination schedule for infants are not a problem, at least not as much of a problem as whooping cough, diptheria, polio and a number of other proven killers and cripplers in infancy. Happily nowadays folks can expect their kids not to catch these diseases when they are tiny infants with ill-developed immune systems because they and their cohorts get the damn kids vaccinated on schedule.
In the Good Old Days some societies didn't name newborns as names were important and it was better to wait a year or two since infants died so easily. It doesn't happen like that any more so people think the threat has gone away and society can stop doing what made the threat so impotent in the first place hence the big measles outbreak in Wales, the subject of this article. A single unvaccinated kid is not a real danger to the rest of the population, a number of them are a reservoir that can infect even vaccinated people since vaccines are not a golden bullet with a 100% success rate.
Thanks for insulting me. Now I can take the safeties off the weapons.
Did you really mean to say that out loud? Deary deary me.
Thimerosal has been shown to break down inside the body in exactly the way it isn't supposed to.
If it breaks down at all (most of it is excreted intact over a period of a few days or weeks) it forms ethylmercury which is not exactly harmless but is not particularly potent. Methylmercury is a lot nastier and anti-vaccination loons often don't or won't realise the difference a single letter makes in a chemical compound name hence the fluff and fluster from ill-informed folks like yourself.
And the chlorine in salt isn't the kind of chlorine that's really harmful, which is why what you're saying is fucking hilarious.
ORLY? What kind of not-really-harmful chlorine are you referring to? All isotopes of Cl are equally poisonous in elemental form and there are no other alternative forms of chlorine in the universe (well, my universe at least. I don't know what it's like where you come from). In table salt the Cl atom is bound very closely to a sodium atom, in Thimerosal the Hg atom is linked to a sulphur atom and an ethyl group, the latter of which results in ethylmercury if the molecule breaks at the sulphur bond. If there is a pathway to produce methylmercury it doesn't seem to be common or prevalent before the byproducts get excreted.
you can't comprehend that Thimerosal isn't the only preservative available.
It's a very good preservative for the specific job of preventing lots of deaths and injury from contaminated bulk vaccine -- see for example the incident (referred to in the Google article about Thimerosal) in 1928 when a batch of contaminated diptheria vaccine killed 12 children out of 21 treated. Thimerosal doesn't affect the vaccine which in many cases is basically a low-grade infection as far as the body is concerned, a soup of protein coats and killed viruses that antiseptics are designed to destroy. Thimerosal is well-proven with a long track record of not being deleterious to the population being vaccinated. What more could you want?
The standard reply to the Thimerosal nuts like you is "it's OK to eat some sodium and breathe some chlorine because eating table salt won't kill you."
Thimerosal (officially called Thiomersal) is an organometallic compound in the same way NaCl is a compound and as such the mercury atom is bonded to the rest of the molecule, not roaming around loose in the solution. Mercury is magical juju to the anti-vaccine crowd, a curseword that kills and maims because of its name and nothing more.
Thimerosal been in use as an antiseptic and antifungal agent in vaccines for about 80 years now, preventing death and injury from bulk vaccines unwittingly contaminated by assorted dangerous bugs and without affecting the vaccine's potency as other antiseptic compounds do. It's now being withdrawn from use because of unfounded panic and overabundance of caution and I confidently expect more deaths and illnesses in the future because of that. Good work, fella!
For nutrients to find their way into vegetables, they have to be in the ground first, and if they aren't there, then you don't get to eat them.
If this was remotely true then eating dirt would allow starving people to cut out the agricultural middleman. A dessert of manure would complement the main course perfectly.
In reality plants are cellular tissue mostly made from water and atmospheric CO2 with a dash of colouring and flavours. Their growth depends on having enough but not too much water, enough sunlight to power the process, the presence of alkaline or acid soils and the ability to deter pests. Some of the proteins and other cellular constituents of plants and such happen to be good for us, but not all of them -- see belladonna and potato greens for counterexamples.
Amino acids in plants don't lurk around in the soil to be picked up by the root system, they are constructed by nanotech factories in the plant's cells, same with the nutrients and some vitamins in muscle tissue and other constituent parts of the animals we eat.
All of the UK's current nuclear reactors use seawater for cooling. Many coal-fired power stations (but not all of them) are also on the coast or estuaries and similarly use seawater for their cooling loops.
Corrosion is not a problem, just use marine-rated stainless steel pumps and piping for the loops and carry out preventative maintenance every now and then. Odd problems with seawater cooling do occur, such as a plague of jellyfish which threatened to block the seawater intakes at a Scottish reactor site and they were shut down for a time as a precaution.
There are some uses for spent steam and even warmed water from the condensers but they are somewhat limited. My brother was involved with designing a combination generating set fuelled by natural gas which also produced process steam for sugar refining. Previously the sugar company had bought in electricity and produced low-pressure steam separately in gas-fired boilers. Afterwards they sold excess generating capacity to the grid and improved their financial bottom line by a healthy chunk.
The most efficient nuclear power stations in operation today are the Advanced Gas-cooled Reactors (AGRs) in the UK. They use CO2 as a coolant circulating through the carbon-moderator core at over 600 deg C with a generating efficiency of about 41% conversion of thermal energy to electricity compared to steam-moderated PWRs at about 34%. The low cost of uranium fuel per kWh generated means the extra efficiency doesn't help that much in terms of price of electricity generated or operating costs.
Some data recovery can be done even off multiply-overwritten tracks but it takes serious engineering of the sort only police forensics and national security can afford in terms of cash and time. Even then there is no certainty of success.
The head positioning system in a disk drive is not 100% accurate pass to pass and remnant magnetic data can persist on the edge of the main track after an overwrite or two on some sectors. That data can be read using scanning electron microscopes, SQUIDs and other exotica and some of the disk's original contents reconstructed. One (public) example where this has been carried out is where someone wiped their collection of child porn but the prosecution were able to prove the disk contained a few illegal images, enough to secure a conviction.
If you're wanting to destroy the data on a disk for sure, shred it into chips if you have the facility (most big data centres either have their own shredder or they can bring in a truck-mounted shredder and shred them on site to preserve chain of custody). Failing that, if you have the time and curiosity take the drives apart, remove the platters and next time you have a BBQ toss them in the charcoal or put them on the grill after cooking. They'll slag down but more importantly the heat will push them over their Curie point totally randomising the magnetic data. You'll also get some kickass fridge magnets out of the deal.
Apple would like some of that there "momentum"...stock price down from $600 to $420 in a year, MSFT at $35 up from $30 over the same period (although this may be inflated as MS yearly earnings are due out on the 18th of this month.)
You can usually tell when a successful company has run out of ideas, they start building stuff in the real estate sense to use up all the money they made. Google is planning to spend a billion bucks to build the world's shortest skyscraper in London, Apple's multibillion-buck mothership project is well underway in Cupertino when last heard of. In contrast there doesn't seem to be any giant MS corporate-ego construction going on -- in my home town MS leased space for sales offices in a recently renovated city-centre Victorian building rather than breaking ground on some glossy overpriced new-build monstrosity.
Yup, MSFT's stock ticker has been flat from about 2002 absent the notch in September 2008 when the stock market went into the toilet in unison. Compare that to the rollercoaster dive for AAPL Tim Cook has overseen since he took over from St. Steve but few in the Slashdot crowd are calling for him to be fired and replaced because... ummm, I'll get back to you on that.
Here's a few names for you -- Carly Fiorina, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Tim Cook. Two of those four Sooper Geniuses were MBAs, two weren't. Guess which ones.
In USA, Fed hacks YOU!
In an alternate universe the Def Con membership includes somebody by the name of Snowden... is he considered a Fed or not-Fed?