... and turned up their smugness factor by 1000. And then forgot to employ any decent writers with original storylines...
I don't know...there were flashes of brilliance. The first season was mostly crud. Once the writers started to get a little more comfortable with the characters--and weren't so afraid of being cancelled--there was some neat stuff. With his classical training, Patrick Stewart is a particularly strong actor, to wit:
"The Inner Light", where Picard lives an entire lifetime on a now-destroyed planet;
"Chain of Command", with its indelibly-etched cry of defiance: 'There are four lights!';
"Tapestry", where Q gives Picard an opportunity to live a life of caution or die on the operating table;
"All Good Things", the final episode, was very well-done, and almost redeems the mess that was "Encounter at Farpoint".
Johnathan Frakes delivered a strong performance as an involuntary insane asylum inmate in "Frame of Mind".
I also remember with fondness the sense of humour in the series. Data was the ultimate straight man, and the episodes with Barclay had their share of priceless moments. (Barclay facing a midget Riker in a holodeck duel was a hoot.)
Is it The Odyssey? Is it Citizen Kane? Nope. But it was good television, with good production values and clean writing--and better than most other things on the tube at the time.
In Asia and specially in countries like communist China the biggest employer is the government.
This is true in many Western countries, too.
The United States government employs roughly 2.7 million people, though that includes about 800 thousand in the postal service and 700 thousand in the military...
Bullshit. If you can't find a candidate you like amongst...[long list follows]...then you've got problems.
On the other hand, those parties didn't all run candidates in every riding. I live in a major city, and I had seven or eight choices on the ballot; my parents live out in the suburbs, and had only four choices.
Or if you honestly can't find someone to vote for then fucking RUN YOURSELF!
There's a long distance between "dissatisfied with the available candidates" and "pissed off enough to run for office". Some people have lives outside of Slashdot's political discussions. Some people have resonsibilities that they take just as seriously as politics. If my family doctor were to decide he wasn't happy with the candidates running in the election, what should he do? He could run for office, and abandon hundreds of patients who depend on him for care--or he could continue to help his community more directly in his role as a physician, and register his discontent through a spoiled ballot.
Then we'll have the usual problem with Non-US people...put[ting] in their two bits ON US politics.
Why is this a problem?
The rest of the world is affected by U.S. politics, whether through military action or trade and monetary policy. As a Canadian, I know that the United States is my country's largest trading partner. (For that matter, Canada is also the United States' largest trading partner.) Jobs, goods, and services flow back and forth across the world's longest undefended land border to the tune of more than a billion dollars per day.
Slashdot is a relatively open forum--even if the rest of the world can't vote in the next election (defects in electronic voting systems notwithstanding...) we still have every reason to take an interest. Besides, it's sometimes useful to have access to political ideas and viewpoints from other cultures and political systems. Call it a kind of reality check.
No...we think you have a diverse spectrum of left wing political ideologies.
Meanwhile, Slashdot readers from north of the 49th parallel (those crazy Canadians!) bemusedly note the profusion of right wing ideologies in the States and then go back to our socialized medicine and minority government with four major parties and political slants (left, middle, right, and separatist). To us, the Republicans and Democrats (loosely speaking) represent roughly the far right end and somewhat right-of-center on the political spectrum.
Not real fast, but probably works pretty good for many floppy-like applications. But will it work for data backup? Most people aren't aware that the technology there tolerates a quite limited number of rewrites. Will people be happy when they discover their $50 USB dongle fails after less than a year of daily backups?
It should be noted that the USB dongles are still significantly faster to read and write than floppies...
One might also observe that floppies don't last through an infinite number of read/write cycles, either. Their susceptibility to physical wear and tear is not to be discounted.
Unless your files are extremely tiny, floppies also suck for backups. On the other hand, if your files are very tiny, then you don't run into the read/write limits of a solid-state USB device. If we take what is now a smallish USB dongle (64 MB) then you can write to that device a floppy's worth of data more than forty times before you're overwriting the same bits. Now the 'one-year' window stretches to forty years--and no daily backup media is going to be used for that long.
For almost all applications, the USB dongle is the floppy killer.
Even if you buy 100 machines from Dell, and plan for format the drives and put Debian/Fedora/Gentoo on them, you might still order them with Linux just to make sure the hardware is compatible.
Of course you're going to do some testing on a smaller group of machines before you lay down the cash for a hundred servers, right?
The item is incorrect. All that has happened so far is that a single Judge of the Federal Court of Australia has held that it is POSSIBLE for the Australian Government to extradite Griffiths to the US, if it chooses. If that decision is not reversed on any appeal, then the Australian Government (in the person of the Attorney-General) will decide whether to extradite Griffiths.
That's even worse.
Wait, where's the 'worse'?
A member of the executive (the Attorney General) is using the powers delimited by the Constitution and the legislature, after having that power validated by the judiciary, to make a decision that is subject to further judicial review.
Dude--how many more checks and balances do you want?
The guy is accused of committing a crime in the United States, and--this is important--the alleged acts are illegal under the laws of both countries. The system seems to be working as designed....
what I dont agree with is that the reviewers in most case for publications get paid pitance or are completely out of their depth
The former is quite true. Actually, most reviewers aren't paid, period. It's seen as a way to contribute back to the research community. It works reasonably well that way--by the time someone is likely to be asked to review papers, they have quite a few publications under their belt, and they should have some familiarity with the review process.
I disagree strongly with the latter statement. It's been my experience that reviewers are generally highly competent to review the papers that they see. Part of this is down to the journal editorial board--they have to find appropriate reviewers, and perhaps there are some third-string journals that don't have the resources or contacts to find top-rate reviewers.
what the NIH needs to do is set up a publishing system that ANYONE can use and submit their work
Why? Instead of just being able to submit to a hypothetical future NIH journal, anyone is free to submit papers to any journal now. Granted, some journals do charge to publish--generally most will waive those page charges if you can demonstrate genuinely dire financial straits. You're also welcome to self-publish on the web, but then of course you don't get any of the credibility associated with formal peer review.
you get mod points and a team of very fancy reviewers who NIH appoints and have unlimted mod points
Eek. I'm not sure that 'mod points' would be a sufficiently precise tool for this type of review. In conventional peer review, reviewers do indeed offer a recommendation about the fate of a submitted paper. Usually there are three or so categories, roughly "acceptable for publication", "acceptable with significant revision", "not acceptable for publication". However, they don't stop there. Depending on the paper and the perceived flaws or areas for improvement, they will also return anywhere from a few sentences to several pages of comments. If a paper is rejected for publication, it's very useful for a scientist to know precisely why. Were there important controls missing? Is the manuscript inappropriate for the particular journal? Did the reviewer misunderstand the results? Properly reviewing a paper takes a significant amount of time--a few hours minimum, multiplied by the number of reviewers (two or three are typical; I know of very few exceptions.)
Also, where would this pool of highly-competent reviewers come from? Generally, the most up-to-date individuals in any field are very busy doing their own research. They don't have time to do detailed review and "moderation" of thousands of unfiltered web submissions. If you filter submissions past a paid part- or full-time editor, you're essentially right back to the old school peer review process.
those publications e.g. NATURE who charge me to view somone elses work are dead
You can have open publications without abandoning traditional peer review--you don't need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. See for example PLoS Biology. It's an open publication--all articles are available for free, online. I think it's a very promising experiment, and I look forward to the launch of further PLoS (Public Library of Science) titles. Will they kill Nature or Science? Who knows? I'm willing to see how the journal ecology evolves.
A few people mentioned that Google might clamp down on the service if it is abused for purposes other than email. But how are they supposed to do this when monitoring people's mails would be a serious invasion of their privacy...
Actually, it's not too difficult. They don't have to look at the contents of a person's storage space at all. They just have to look at the server logs and say, "Oi! Someone's been making thousands of connections from scores of unique IP addresses to this one acount. They're moving hundreds of megabytes of data up and down each day. That's odd." There's all kinds of slightly more subtle things that would show up in their logs, too. Pattern of usage can be very revealing, without ever having to look at any user's content.
They could then send polite emails to the users in question ("Ease up on our pipes, eh?") or throttle them somehow (cap the number of page views per user per hour, or something.)
Google isn't evil--it says so on the box--so they won't read your emails. But neither are they stupid. I imagine that they (or, for that matter, a competent/.er) could throw together some monitoring tools in an afternoon to catch the most egregious abusers.
It's probably illegal, but does anyone know a way to (permanantly) disable a digital camera? Would a laser pointer do it? Not that I would do anything of the sort, of course.
When you go to the mall, do you also throw black paint all over any signs that advertise a sale? Were there any other acts of vandalism that you'd like advice on?
Uh, wasn't it just three articles ago we were talking about a GPS stalker, and it was a bad thing that one person was tracking one other person? Does many to many, instead of one to one, make it okay?
Leaving aside the fact that this technology is no better than a motion detector--it doesn't identify specific individuals--yes, this is still more okay than the GPS stalker.
For one thing, these billboards don't follow you to home, work, and social occasions; nor do they threaten to kill you.
Re:Best weapon against counterfeiting:
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On the contrary, I know quite well what the GS represents. And contrary to what you think I'm not advocating replacing ALL fiat money with gold. As it has been pointed out, gold is heavy and as such quite unweildy to use in large quantities for common purposes.
In that case, if you replace just a portion of circulating currency with gold, people will continue to counterfeit the old paper stuff.
Naturally, not everybody would walk around with their money in gold in their pocket, but for common purposes, gold coins would effectively be un-fakeable (weight, non-corrodability, toughness).
On the contrary--for common purposes, gold would be utterly useless, for the reasons I described in the grandparent post. You need too small a quantity of gold for most transactions. The ubiquitous twenty-dollar bill would be replaced by a twentieth of an ounce of gold. That's about a gram and a half. If cast as a coin the diameter of a dime, it would be about two tenths of a millimeter thick--about twice the thickness of a dollar bill. Plus, gold is soft enough that those coins would get folded up in your pocket.
Current banknotes are all-but-unfakeable, but counterfeit notes are passed all the time because people don't examine their currency closely. I'm sure that more than 95% of fakes would be caught if cashiers and private individuals just looked for legible microprinting on the notes they handle. Testing for pure gold is relatively easy; that is true. It's still harder than holding a bill under ultraviolet light, looking for a watermark, or checking to see if the microprint is legible--and we can't seem to get people to do those things.
And then there are the political/economic advantages which I have briefly touched upon in an answer to another poster.
Yes, I've looked at the other posts--those 'advantages' presume a return to a full-blown fully-backed gold standard, which isn't possible for the reasons outlined in the grandparent. Plus, instead of the limited degree of control we can now exercise over the Federal Reserve, we abdicate all authority, leaving it to the whims of South African mining cartels.
Incidentally, you also suggest alloying the gold with other metals to improve its hardness and allow lower-denomination coins. While one could do that, it makes the problem of detecting counterfeits that much harder. It's very difficult to measure the purity of an alloy.
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The Gold standard. When money is gold, you can't fake it.
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
The 'gold standard' means a currency that is pegged to a fixed exchange rate with gold. Until 1971, you could redeem U.S. dollars for a set quantity of gold. In other words, you still have paper money in everyday circulation, and it's still vulnerable to counterfeiting.
Replacing all currency with gold coins (which seems to be what the parent means) is utterly impossible.
First, you have to carry highly-accurate balances (scales) with you to carry out financial transactions. A pack of gum costs about one three-hundredth of an ounce (about a tenth of a gram) of gold. Do you trust every store you visit not to put a thumb on the scales, as it were?
Of course, you could introduce gold coins of standardized weights and denominations. Gold would get shaved from the edges of these coins...you could probably take a dollar's worth off of every hundred-dollar coin and nobody would know by looking. (Even with those little ridges around the edge that are supposed to prevent shaving.) Regular wear and tear would also reduce the value of your cash. You still have the problem of awkwardly small weights for most transactions--I suppose you could introduce coins of other metals like silver, but then there would be a variable exchange rate between your small and large denomination coins....
In lieu of counterfeiting, people would instead alloy the gold with less expensive metals. A coin that was 95% gold and 5% other metals would look and feel an awful lot like the real thing.
Oh, and the United States has about $700 billion in circulating notes and coins at the moment. A total of about 3.4 billion troy ounces of gold have ever been mined in the world, with a current market value of about 400 USD per ounce. In other words, switching over to gold as a medium of exchange would require the United States to acquire more than half of all the gold ever mined anywhere in the world and cast it as coins. (Fine, I admit that's a simplification. Trying to acquire enough gold to replace all U.S. currency would screw up the world's markets--currency and commodity--so badly that it's hard to say precisely how much gold would be required, or what its value would be. Regardless, it would be ruinous.)
Pretty hard to find stores that take $100 bills these days around here, but the article notes that acceptance is improving, that counterfeit money is quite rare (1 bill per 290 people)... and that new bill technology is making it harder and harder...
It is not hard to find stores that accept $100 notes in Canada. It only seems that way because we notice stores with signs saying "No $100 bills". From the article, 95% of retailers accept $100 notes in Canada, up from a recent low of about 90% that was in response to counterfeiting.
Granted, those rates are a national average. In places where these counterfeiters were operating (southwestern Ontario) the acceptance rate is lower. I would imagine that it's also lower in areas with significant organized crime, since that's often a route for distribution of fake notes.
Still, it's not hard to spend large-denomination notes. If you're in Ontario, I've never had trouble spending them at the LCBO (the provincial liquor stores). If you're really stuck, there are always banks....
Re:Carbon-14 is *not* Plutonium or U238
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Ok, so Coal's radioactive.. but we're a bit more radioactive than Coal (more recent products of sunlight). Low half-life materials mean they are more radioactive for a shorter period.
The point is that the radioisotopes naturally present in coal are many of the same long half-life materials used as nuclear fuel. Coal has been in the ground for a long time before it is recovered. Actually, in biological materials C-14 levels start pretty low--only about one part per trillion. Comparatively short-lived species like carbon-14 have long since decayed to negligible levels. (Every hundred thousand years, the C-14 level drops by a factor of about a million.)
On the other hand, most coal contains relatively larger fractions of some other species--and we've known this for quite some time. There's a detailed analysis here. Highlights include,
Coal burned in the U.S. contains about 1 part per million of uranium and 3 ppm thorium. That's 1 gram of uranium per ton of coal.
Total activity of coal is about 4 microcurie per ton.
In operation, a 1000 MWe coal plant exposes the population to about 500 person-rem/year. For a nuclear plant the figure is less than 5 person-rem/year. (If one includes exposures in mining and preparing the fuel, that goes up to 136 person-rem/year.)
The real question to "portable" reactors is the refuelling safety and shield maintanence
(think about it , fresh fuel is more radioactive than wastes).
Actually, the usual problem is that waste fuel is more active. Uranium-235 is fairly stable, long half-life stuff. It's not good for you, but I wouldn't be bothered by holding nuclear fuel pellets in my hand. On the other hand, the stuff that comes out of a reactor is a witches brew of fission products plus various heavier isotopes produced by neutron bombardment. They're not getting rid of that 'spent' fuel because it's going cold; they're getting rid of it because it's a mess. Hard to characterize, hard to control. In principle it's possible to reprocess that spent fuel to extract fissionable isotopes (mostly plutonium) that will supply more useful energy than the uranium you started with. (The so-called 'breeder' reactor). It's not done for commercial production anywhere that I know of right now, because handling spent fuel is such a messy and dangerous business.
Re:We've been seeing a lot of this "safe" nukes st
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What none of these are addressing is that a proplerly functioning nuclear fission plant produces wastes that need to be disposed of and those disposal costs are not being calculated in these reportedly cheap price tags.
You want rid of the spent fuel? Grind it up fine, mix it with coal, and it will blend in with the ash from a coal-fired power plant. Per megawatt-hour, coal plants put more radioactive material into the environment than nuclear plants produce.
Re:As a former nuclear navy reactor operator
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With the right type of manufacturing technology, one can make the fissionable material very hard to get at.
This is true. Encasing the nuclear material in a heavily armed and deadly silent warship of the U.S. Navy does tend to make it hard to get at.
While U.S. nuclear submarines do demonstrate that very safe, very portable nuclear reactors are possible, I would guess that they definitely don't represent a sound economic argument in favour of the technology. (This is not to say that I don't support the use of nuclear power--but if the idea we're interested in is portable power at a reasonable cost, a nuclear submarine is a bit shy of a proof of concept.)
Here's a thought. Vote. If you live in Utah or Vermont, vote for the strongest opponent of Hatch or Leahy. It's pretty bad when a normally-hard-line Democrat advocates voting out a Democrat, but there, I just said it.
Tennesseeans, vote against Frist. He's a sponsor. South Dakotans? Daschle. Vote them out. If enough of the bill's sponsors are voted out of office, this bill will die as it should. With the exception of Graham in South Carolina, they're -all- up for reelection this year. Vote these corporate tools out of office. Tell all your friends to vote against them, too, and tell them why.
Do check where their respective opponents stand on this type of legislation first. Not living in any of those states, I can't say. It's a pretty dumb protest if you vote out one guy because he supports these laws, only to replace him with a different shill who also supports these laws....
It might also be worthwhile to consider their stances and voting records on other economic and social issues--if they only do things you disagree with in one area, you might be better off with the devil you know. Unfortunately, voting is a very blunt tool for bringing about specific policy reforms.
...apologies to the pioneers of cold fusion, like Pons and Fleischman?
Nope. Apologies are for scientists who publish their work in good faith in peer-reviewed journals. Apologies are for scientists who submit a short manuscript to Phys. Rev. Lett. saying that under such-and-such conditions we observe extra heat and neutrons.
Apologies are not for scientists who first present a phenomenon they don't understand at a press conference and enjoy being media darlings until other people can't replicate their results.
If you're going to short-circuit proper peer review and go straight to the lay press, you have to accept the risk of being badly burned. If this effect does turn out to be real, by their profound lack of restraint they probably held back any research in the field by a decade or more.
At least someone is starting to use it again, than trying to "fly" back from space using something so fragile that it could be damaged by a piece of foam insulation going several hundred miles per hour.
Dude...it's not the foam insulation at several hundred miles per hour that's the problem. It's the pound-and-a-half of foam plus ice that's the trouble.
The kinetic energy of 750 g of foam at 240 meters per second is about 22 kJ. That's about the energy delivered in ten high-powered rifle shots, or in the neighbourhood of a hundred rounds from a moderately-sized handgun. The leading edge of the Shuttle wing that took the collision is already one of the most heavily reinforced parts of the Shuttle, and it's made with a carbon-fibre composite material--not the brittle tiles. Even so, the foam was a lot more abuse than we could expect it to stand.
When the oxygen tank blew in the Apollo 13 service module, there was a great deal of concern at NASA about it because they were afraid that it might have damaged their heat shield. In that case, they tried the reentry anyway, because (as with Columbia) there wouldn't be any good way to effect rapairs or launch a rescue. It turned out all right, but there were a lot of nervous engineers. I expect that faced with a couple pounds of material at five hundred miles per hour, the Apollo heat shield wouldn't have made it either.
A major factor in improving costs is to make the engines and pumps retrievable. That way, all we're throwing away would be pressure tanks, which can be manufactured cheaply.
Not necessarily.
The cost of retrieving the engines and pumps might be non-trivial. The cost of testing each engine and pump after retrieval will certainly be non-trivial. Also, each individual engine and pump in a reusable system would have to be significantly more expensive to design and manufacture. You'd be looking at a service life measured in hours, rather than minutes; they would have to survive being dropped into the ocean multiple times--heck, you'd have to make the damn things float; you have to be able to cut them out of the old craft and install them in the new; you have to be able to open them up to repair or replace parts...
Throwing them away might well end up being cheaper.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry to reply to a sig...I know it's off topic for the thread.
For any logged in user, go here: http://politics.slashdot.org/users.pl?op=editcomm and put a check in the box labelled
and click 'Save' at the bottom of the page. Alternately, select Disable Sigs; it's at the top of the same page.I use the Signature Dash feature, so messages look fine to me.
I don't know...there were flashes of brilliance. The first season was mostly crud. Once the writers started to get a little more comfortable with the characters--and weren't so afraid of being cancelled--there was some neat stuff. With his classical training, Patrick Stewart is a particularly strong actor, to wit:
"The Inner Light", where Picard lives an entire lifetime on a now-destroyed planet;
"Chain of Command", with its indelibly-etched cry of defiance: 'There are four lights!';
"Tapestry", where Q gives Picard an opportunity to live a life of caution or die on the operating table;
"All Good Things", the final episode, was very well-done, and almost redeems the mess that was "Encounter at Farpoint".
Johnathan Frakes delivered a strong performance as an involuntary insane asylum inmate in "Frame of Mind".
I also remember with fondness the sense of humour in the series. Data was the ultimate straight man, and the episodes with Barclay had their share of priceless moments. (Barclay facing a midget Riker in a holodeck duel was a hoot.)
Is it The Odyssey? Is it Citizen Kane? Nope. But it was good television, with good production values and clean writing--and better than most other things on the tube at the time.
This is true in many Western countries, too.
The United States government employs roughly 2.7 million people, though that includes about 800 thousand in the postal service and 700 thousand in the military...
On the other hand, those parties didn't all run candidates in every riding. I live in a major city, and I had seven or eight choices on the ballot; my parents live out in the suburbs, and had only four choices.
Or if you honestly can't find someone to vote for then fucking RUN YOURSELF!
There's a long distance between "dissatisfied with the available candidates" and "pissed off enough to run for office". Some people have lives outside of Slashdot's political discussions. Some people have resonsibilities that they take just as seriously as politics. If my family doctor were to decide he wasn't happy with the candidates running in the election, what should he do? He could run for office, and abandon hundreds of patients who depend on him for care--or he could continue to help his community more directly in his role as a physician, and register his discontent through a spoiled ballot.
Why is this a problem?
The rest of the world is affected by U.S. politics, whether through military action or trade and monetary policy. As a Canadian, I know that the United States is my country's largest trading partner. (For that matter, Canada is also the United States' largest trading partner.) Jobs, goods, and services flow back and forth across the world's longest undefended land border to the tune of more than a billion dollars per day.
Slashdot is a relatively open forum--even if the rest of the world can't vote in the next election (defects in electronic voting systems notwithstanding...) we still have every reason to take an interest. Besides, it's sometimes useful to have access to political ideas and viewpoints from other cultures and political systems. Call it a kind of reality check.
Meanwhile, Slashdot readers from north of the 49th parallel (those crazy Canadians!) bemusedly note the profusion of right wing ideologies in the States and then go back to our socialized medicine and minority government with four major parties and political slants (left, middle, right, and separatist). To us, the Republicans and Democrats (loosely speaking) represent roughly the far right end and somewhat right-of-center on the political spectrum.
It should be noted that the USB dongles are still significantly faster to read and write than floppies...
One might also observe that floppies don't last through an infinite number of read/write cycles, either. Their susceptibility to physical wear and tear is not to be discounted.
Unless your files are extremely tiny, floppies also suck for backups. On the other hand, if your files are very tiny, then you don't run into the read/write limits of a solid-state USB device. If we take what is now a smallish USB dongle (64 MB) then you can write to that device a floppy's worth of data more than forty times before you're overwriting the same bits. Now the 'one-year' window stretches to forty years--and no daily backup media is going to be used for that long.
For almost all applications, the USB dongle is the floppy killer.
Of course you're going to do some testing on a smaller group of machines before you lay down the cash for a hundred servers, right?
A member of the executive (the Attorney General) is using the powers delimited by the Constitution and the legislature, after having that power validated by the judiciary, to make a decision that is subject to further judicial review.
Dude--how many more checks and balances do you want?
The guy is accused of committing a crime in the United States, and--this is important--the alleged acts are illegal under the laws of both countries. The system seems to be working as designed....
The former is quite true. Actually, most reviewers aren't paid, period. It's seen as a way to contribute back to the research community. It works reasonably well that way--by the time someone is likely to be asked to review papers, they have quite a few publications under their belt, and they should have some familiarity with the review process.
I disagree strongly with the latter statement. It's been my experience that reviewers are generally highly competent to review the papers that they see. Part of this is down to the journal editorial board--they have to find appropriate reviewers, and perhaps there are some third-string journals that don't have the resources or contacts to find top-rate reviewers.
what the NIH needs to do is set up a publishing system that ANYONE can use and submit their work
Why? Instead of just being able to submit to a hypothetical future NIH journal, anyone is free to submit papers to any journal now. Granted, some journals do charge to publish--generally most will waive those page charges if you can demonstrate genuinely dire financial straits. You're also welcome to self-publish on the web, but then of course you don't get any of the credibility associated with formal peer review.
you get mod points and a team of very fancy reviewers who NIH appoints and have unlimted mod points
Eek. I'm not sure that 'mod points' would be a sufficiently precise tool for this type of review. In conventional peer review, reviewers do indeed offer a recommendation about the fate of a submitted paper. Usually there are three or so categories, roughly "acceptable for publication", "acceptable with significant revision", "not acceptable for publication". However, they don't stop there. Depending on the paper and the perceived flaws or areas for improvement, they will also return anywhere from a few sentences to several pages of comments. If a paper is rejected for publication, it's very useful for a scientist to know precisely why. Were there important controls missing? Is the manuscript inappropriate for the particular journal? Did the reviewer misunderstand the results? Properly reviewing a paper takes a significant amount of time--a few hours minimum, multiplied by the number of reviewers (two or three are typical; I know of very few exceptions.)
Also, where would this pool of highly-competent reviewers come from? Generally, the most up-to-date individuals in any field are very busy doing their own research. They don't have time to do detailed review and "moderation" of thousands of unfiltered web submissions. If you filter submissions past a paid part- or full-time editor, you're essentially right back to the old school peer review process.
those publications e.g. NATURE who charge me to view somone elses work are dead
You can have open publications without abandoning traditional peer review--you don't need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. See for example PLoS Biology. It's an open publication--all articles are available for free, online. I think it's a very promising experiment, and I look forward to the launch of further PLoS (Public Library of Science) titles. Will they kill Nature or Science? Who knows? I'm willing to see how the journal ecology evolves.
Actually, it's not too difficult. They don't have to look at the contents of a person's storage space at all. They just have to look at the server logs and say, "Oi! Someone's been making thousands of connections from scores of unique IP addresses to this one acount. They're moving hundreds of megabytes of data up and down each day. That's odd." There's all kinds of slightly more subtle things that would show up in their logs, too. Pattern of usage can be very revealing, without ever having to look at any user's content.
They could then send polite emails to the users in question ("Ease up on our pipes, eh?") or throttle them somehow (cap the number of page views per user per hour, or something.)
Google isn't evil--it says so on the box--so they won't read your emails. But neither are they stupid. I imagine that they (or, for that matter, a competent /.er) could throw together some monitoring tools in an afternoon to catch the most egregious abusers.
Perhaps if LCD is sufficiently improved, it will obviate the need for a costly transition to DLP in most applications?
When you go to the mall, do you also throw black paint all over any signs that advertise a sale? Were there any other acts of vandalism that you'd like advice on?
Leaving aside the fact that this technology is no better than a motion detector--it doesn't identify specific individuals--yes, this is still more okay than the GPS stalker.
For one thing, these billboards don't follow you to home, work, and social occasions; nor do they threaten to kill you.
In that case, if you replace just a portion of circulating currency with gold, people will continue to counterfeit the old paper stuff.
Naturally, not everybody would walk around with their money in gold in their pocket, but for common purposes, gold coins would effectively be un-fakeable (weight, non-corrodability, toughness).
On the contrary--for common purposes, gold would be utterly useless, for the reasons I described in the grandparent post. You need too small a quantity of gold for most transactions. The ubiquitous twenty-dollar bill would be replaced by a twentieth of an ounce of gold. That's about a gram and a half. If cast as a coin the diameter of a dime, it would be about two tenths of a millimeter thick--about twice the thickness of a dollar bill. Plus, gold is soft enough that those coins would get folded up in your pocket.
Current banknotes are all-but-unfakeable, but counterfeit notes are passed all the time because people don't examine their currency closely. I'm sure that more than 95% of fakes would be caught if cashiers and private individuals just looked for legible microprinting on the notes they handle. Testing for pure gold is relatively easy; that is true. It's still harder than holding a bill under ultraviolet light, looking for a watermark, or checking to see if the microprint is legible--and we can't seem to get people to do those things.
And then there are the political/economic advantages which I have briefly touched upon in an answer to another poster.
Yes, I've looked at the other posts--those 'advantages' presume a return to a full-blown fully-backed gold standard, which isn't possible for the reasons outlined in the grandparent. Plus, instead of the limited degree of control we can now exercise over the Federal Reserve, we abdicate all authority, leaving it to the whims of South African mining cartels.
Incidentally, you also suggest alloying the gold with other metals to improve its hardness and allow lower-denomination coins. While one could do that, it makes the problem of detecting counterfeits that much harder. It's very difficult to measure the purity of an alloy.
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
The 'gold standard' means a currency that is pegged to a fixed exchange rate with gold. Until 1971, you could redeem U.S. dollars for a set quantity of gold. In other words, you still have paper money in everyday circulation, and it's still vulnerable to counterfeiting.
Replacing all currency with gold coins (which seems to be what the parent means) is utterly impossible.
First, you have to carry highly-accurate balances (scales) with you to carry out financial transactions. A pack of gum costs about one three-hundredth of an ounce (about a tenth of a gram) of gold. Do you trust every store you visit not to put a thumb on the scales, as it were?
Of course, you could introduce gold coins of standardized weights and denominations. Gold would get shaved from the edges of these coins...you could probably take a dollar's worth off of every hundred-dollar coin and nobody would know by looking. (Even with those little ridges around the edge that are supposed to prevent shaving.) Regular wear and tear would also reduce the value of your cash. You still have the problem of awkwardly small weights for most transactions--I suppose you could introduce coins of other metals like silver, but then there would be a variable exchange rate between your small and large denomination coins....
In lieu of counterfeiting, people would instead alloy the gold with less expensive metals. A coin that was 95% gold and 5% other metals would look and feel an awful lot like the real thing.
Oh, and the United States has about $700 billion in circulating notes and coins at the moment. A total of about 3.4 billion troy ounces of gold have ever been mined in the world, with a current market value of about 400 USD per ounce. In other words, switching over to gold as a medium of exchange would require the United States to acquire more than half of all the gold ever mined anywhere in the world and cast it as coins. (Fine, I admit that's a simplification. Trying to acquire enough gold to replace all U.S. currency would screw up the world's markets--currency and commodity--so badly that it's hard to say precisely how much gold would be required, or what its value would be. Regardless, it would be ruinous.)
It is not hard to find stores that accept $100 notes in Canada. It only seems that way because we notice stores with signs saying "No $100 bills". From the article, 95% of retailers accept $100 notes in Canada, up from a recent low of about 90% that was in response to counterfeiting.
Granted, those rates are a national average. In places where these counterfeiters were operating (southwestern Ontario) the acceptance rate is lower. I would imagine that it's also lower in areas with significant organized crime, since that's often a route for distribution of fake notes.
Still, it's not hard to spend large-denomination notes. If you're in Ontario, I've never had trouble spending them at the LCBO (the provincial liquor stores). If you're really stuck, there are always banks....
The point is that the radioisotopes naturally present in coal are many of the same long half-life materials used as nuclear fuel. Coal has been in the ground for a long time before it is recovered. Actually, in biological materials C-14 levels start pretty low--only about one part per trillion. Comparatively short-lived species like carbon-14 have long since decayed to negligible levels. (Every hundred thousand years, the C-14 level drops by a factor of about a million.)
On the other hand, most coal contains relatively larger fractions of some other species--and we've known this for quite some time. There's a detailed analysis here. Highlights include,
Coal burned in the U.S. contains about 1 part per million of uranium and 3 ppm thorium. That's 1 gram of uranium per ton of coal.
Total activity of coal is about 4 microcurie per ton.
In operation, a 1000 MWe coal plant exposes the population to about 500 person-rem/year. For a nuclear plant the figure is less than 5 person-rem/year. (If one includes exposures in mining and preparing the fuel, that goes up to 136 person-rem/year.)
The real question to "portable" reactors is the refuelling safety and shield maintanence (think about it , fresh fuel is more radioactive than wastes).
Actually, the usual problem is that waste fuel is more active. Uranium-235 is fairly stable, long half-life stuff. It's not good for you, but I wouldn't be bothered by holding nuclear fuel pellets in my hand. On the other hand, the stuff that comes out of a reactor is a witches brew of fission products plus various heavier isotopes produced by neutron bombardment. They're not getting rid of that 'spent' fuel because it's going cold; they're getting rid of it because it's a mess. Hard to characterize, hard to control. In principle it's possible to reprocess that spent fuel to extract fissionable isotopes (mostly plutonium) that will supply more useful energy than the uranium you started with. (The so-called 'breeder' reactor). It's not done for commercial production anywhere that I know of right now, because handling spent fuel is such a messy and dangerous business.
You want rid of the spent fuel? Grind it up fine, mix it with coal, and it will blend in with the ash from a coal-fired power plant. Per megawatt-hour, coal plants put more radioactive material into the environment than nuclear plants produce.
This is true. Encasing the nuclear material in a heavily armed and deadly silent warship of the U.S. Navy does tend to make it hard to get at.
While U.S. nuclear submarines do demonstrate that very safe, very portable nuclear reactors are possible, I would guess that they definitely don't represent a sound economic argument in favour of the technology. (This is not to say that I don't support the use of nuclear power--but if the idea we're interested in is portable power at a reasonable cost, a nuclear submarine is a bit shy of a proof of concept.)
To be fair, some Apple interface decisions in multi-platform products have genuinely sucked ass, too...
It might also be worthwhile to consider their stances and voting records on other economic and social issues--if they only do things you disagree with in one area, you might be better off with the devil you know. Unfortunately, voting is a very blunt tool for bringing about specific policy reforms.
Nope. Apologies are for scientists who publish their work in good faith in peer-reviewed journals. Apologies are for scientists who submit a short manuscript to Phys. Rev. Lett. saying that under such-and-such conditions we observe extra heat and neutrons.
Apologies are not for scientists who first present a phenomenon they don't understand at a press conference and enjoy being media darlings until other people can't replicate their results.
If you're going to short-circuit proper peer review and go straight to the lay press, you have to accept the risk of being badly burned. If this effect does turn out to be real, by their profound lack of restraint they probably held back any research in the field by a decade or more.
Dude...it's not the foam insulation at several hundred miles per hour that's the problem. It's the pound-and-a-half of foam plus ice that's the trouble.
The kinetic energy of 750 g of foam at 240 meters per second is about 22 kJ. That's about the energy delivered in ten high-powered rifle shots , or in the neighbourhood of a hundred rounds from a moderately-sized handgun. The leading edge of the Shuttle wing that took the collision is already one of the most heavily reinforced parts of the Shuttle, and it's made with a carbon-fibre composite material--not the brittle tiles. Even so, the foam was a lot more abuse than we could expect it to stand.
When the oxygen tank blew in the Apollo 13 service module, there was a great deal of concern at NASA about it because they were afraid that it might have damaged their heat shield. In that case, they tried the reentry anyway, because (as with Columbia) there wouldn't be any good way to effect rapairs or launch a rescue. It turned out all right, but there were a lot of nervous engineers. I expect that faced with a couple pounds of material at five hundred miles per hour, the Apollo heat shield wouldn't have made it either.
Not necessarily.
The cost of retrieving the engines and pumps might be non-trivial. The cost of testing each engine and pump after retrieval will certainly be non-trivial. Also, each individual engine and pump in a reusable system would have to be significantly more expensive to design and manufacture. You'd be looking at a service life measured in hours, rather than minutes; they would have to survive being dropped into the ocean multiple times--heck, you'd have to make the damn things float; you have to be able to cut them out of the old craft and install them in the new; you have to be able to open them up to repair or replace parts...
Throwing them away might well end up being cheaper.