You don't even need electricity for that. Just mix beryllium with a good source of alpha particles like radium.
You're right, that is a simple way to generate neutrons--for those who happen to have radium lying around the house.
Actually, I suppose some people do, and it's giving them lung cancer--radon is a decay product of radium.
Finally, a word of warning about beryllium. The bulk material isn't terribly nasty--it's not particularly readily absorbed through the skin, and ingested beryllium mostly passes through the digestive tract. Powders can be quite harmful, however, causing--appropriately enough--berylliosis.
Just because Canada has made the RIAA's pound of fless[sic] into an official tax does not make it FREE.
Yes, but it's a pretty light pound. How much is the levy? $0.77 per CD--and those are Canadian cents. Put fifteen CD audio tracks on a disc and you're paying a nickel each. (Take that, iTunes.) Burn mp3 audio, and you're down to less than a penny per track.
Point at the person who's job description says that they are responsible for ensuring that physical hard drives don't leave the bank's premises.
Precisely how it would be done. The CEO points at someone, and says "It is now your responsibility to to ensure physical hard drives don't leave."
Either the IT director or the security director would be a reasonable person to whom to assign the task. Presumably there's already someone responsible for physical security of data--it should already be in someone's job description. Just promulgate a policy that retired hard drives are to be destroyed.
I mean, come on. This is a bank. Physical security isn't exactly a new notion for the industry.
Movies come out in theaters for about 8 to 12 dollars, sometimes cheaper. This is as close to a live concert as your going to get. A live concert tickets for a major band is easily $30 dollars.
Um, no? The closest thing to a live concert you're going to get is a live play. For those, the price you will pay fairly closely parallels the cost of a live concert. A few bucks at the door for a small amateur production, ninety or a hundred bucks a pop for the good seats at a top-level professional show.
Marginal cost to display a movie is virtually nil--an underpaid projectionist (who has to dash from theatre to theatre in the multiplex) and some guy to mop the floors. Of course they're cheaper than a concert. Performers, backstage crew, backup band--all of these people have to be present for each and every concert performance.
Modern, well designed rockets can achieve 90% efficient conversion of chemical energy into kinetic energy. (Please see http://yarchive.net/space/rocket/efficiency.html.
True, but the first stages are very efficiently lifting thousands of pounds of upper stage propellant. No matter how high the efficiency of a chemical rocket, a large fraction of its output is going to go to lifting material that gets thrown away.
As for safety issues, I agree--chemical rockets can be (and are, in some cases) designed to be extremely safe and reliable.
Does anyone know what the government's policy towards this might be, and whether or not they could adequately silence such information?
I don't know the answer to the first question, but the answer to your second is a qualified no. Virtually any time anything interesting is discovered in the sky, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) will distribute a notice as part of their Minor Planet Electronic Circulars. Often, this will take place before the orbit of an asteroid is refined; data are then gathered by observatories around the world. That all of the involved institutions and personnel could sit on a major discovery like this is very difficult to imagine.
Even at 100% efficiency, it still takes a LOT of energy to reach orbit or beyond.
Ready access to orbit and beyond means ready access to that much energy. As long as we're an immature species, ready access to that much energy means that it's practically certain that someone is going to use it for immature purposes. (war)
I just did a quick back of the envelope calculation. The total change in energy (kinetic and potential) associated with going from a point on the equator to a point in geosynchronous orbit is roughly eight megajoules per kilogram lifed. At 100% efficiency, that's 2.3 kilowatt hours, or about twenty U.S. cents' worth of electricity. At 20% efficiency, that's a buck per kilo to geosynch orbit. (This is the sort of performance one would expect from a space elevator, say.) Incidentally, with a space elevator, you can also get a lot of energy back on the return trip...
Sure it takes a lot of energy to get to orbit, and always will...as long as we keep using rockets.
The parent poster is not suggesting that peer-reviewed journals are infallible, but rather that they do provide an extra (and important) sanity check on submitted work. They ask the question, "Do people who are experts in this field believe both that this result is important enough to be published, and that this methodology is sound?"
To an extent, all journalists have to investigate that question, but peer-review both formalizes the process and carries it out much more rigorously.
Six months?!?!?? I think the drug laws are kinda whacked, but do you blame a prosecutor from trying to get a stronger sentence any way he can? The guy was manufacturing meth, fer gawd's sake. Not like he was smoking a doob or doing an occasional line.
121. Robbery (use of violence or the threat of violence to deprive another of property)
92. Sex offenses
85. Drug offenses
76. Weapons, explosives, arson
67. Burglary, larceny, property offenses
51. National security
38. Immigration
30. Courts or corrections
27. Extortion, fraud, bribery
19. Banking and insurance, counterfeit, embezzlement offenses
Noting that these figures are for federal prisons only (YMMV locally), it seems to suggest that drug offenses are usually punished relatively harshly. If the guy was running a meth lab, and the prosecution actually had a strong case, he would face a significant prison sentence. Possession of 5 grams (about a sixth of an ounce) of methamphetamine carries a federally mandated minimum five-year prison sentence--if it is his first offense. Quite frankly, any prosecutor that has to resort to "weapons of mass destruction" claims to incarcerate a guy running a meth lab for a significant period of time is either lazy or incompetent.
To be fair, it is possible for most people to consume alcohol responsibly and in a manner that does not reduce life expectancy. There are indeed numerous studies that support the prophylactic effects of moderate alcohol consumption with respect to heart disease and a host of other ailments (Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, stroke).
See, for example,
Ruitenberg A
et al/, "Alcohol consumption and risk of dementia: the Rotterdam Study." The Lancet. 2002 Jan 26; 359(9303):281-6.
Fernandez-Jarne E et al.. "Type of alcoholic beverage and first acute myocaral infardction: a case-control study in a Mediterranean country." Clin Cardiol. 2003 Jul;26(7):313-8.
The same cannot be said for cigarette smoking, or for illegal drugs. (Mind, marijuana consumption may be justified in some cases for pain control or as an antinauseant. In those cases, the marijuana won't kill you because there's already an underlying disease that is most likely to get you first.)
You could put the base station at sea. It makes it much harder to sneak up on, and has the added benefit of allowing you to move out of the way of the nastiest weather. Task a couple of aircraft carriers to defending it--a carrier battle group is awfully difficult to surprise. It's still cheaper than conventional rocketry.
Note also that all of the techniques you described could be used to attack a conventional launch of a Shuttle, too.
So t= 10,000 seconds, or roughly 2.8 hours traveling at a velociy of 10,000 meters per second (36,000 km/hr or 21600 mph).
Eek. We have enough trouble building a horizontal railway that travels faster than a few hundred kilometres per hour--now you want us to build a vertical one that reaches a speed thirty times greater? One little hiccup in your track mechanism (presumably some sort of magnetic suspension) and the moving cargo drags against the elevator cable at ten kilometres per second. Suddenly, you have a much shorter cable...
I'm prepared to accept a slow and stately climb at four or five hundred km/h, even if it means it will take ten days to ascend.
Furthermore I'd hesitate to call nuclear energy 'clean'. It maybe so at the actual power station site, but the production of the fuel rods (digging up and enriching uranium) and the actual power station both require a lot of clean-up.
I would respectfully argue that digging up uranium is no dirtier than any other mining operation--and due to the very high energy density of the fuel, its mining may result in less overall environmental damage than other fuels (coal, I'm looking at you.) Granted, solar and wind power are quite clean in terms of gathering their fuel, but actually building the power plants requires significant resources. Steel and aluminum require mining; the preparation of silicon or gallium arsenide for solar cells isn't exactly pristine.
Enriched uranium is not necessarily required for civilian nuclear reactors. Canada's CANDU reactors use a more efficient deuterated water moderator that permits the use of unenriched uranium oxide fuel.
For what it's worth, I'm quite fond of both solar and wind power (my family cottage is off the grid and uses solar for a large portion of its energy), but neither technology should be considered a panacea.
Where's the crime? This is copyright violation, not a crime.
Actually, under some circumstances copyright infringement is a crime. Those conditions (and the associated remedies) are laid out in USC Title 17 Section 506.
Obviously the United States Code only applies in the United States; YMMV with respect to the criminality of copyright infringement in other jurisdictions. I assume that since you mentioned invoking the DMCA you are in the United States.
Well, where do you suggest that we put Galileo? It doesn't have the ability to soft land anwhere in the Jovian system, and it lacks the propellant to get out of Jupiter's gravity well.
The decision to deliberately deorbit Galileo and drop it on Jupiter was made so that Galileo wouldn't make an uncontrolled landing (crash) on Europa--potentially contaminating the only other liquid water in the solar system with Earth life.
It seems the best option. As other posters have noted, the Jovian atmosphere is big. The probe will be sterilized by heat from drag as it descends, and its plutonium will be dispersed. Yes, one could suggest that we're not being the best of neighbours, but this doesn't seem like an unreasonable choice to make. Rough calculation--forty pounds of plutonium evenly distributed through Jupiter's mass corresponds to less than one extra atom of plutonium for every ten tons of Jupiter... There's a natural background level of radioactivity within Jupiter's atmosphere, and we won't perceptibly affect that.
Last, recall that Jupiter took a fully-fledged comet impact a few years ago and didn't blink.
Having the public watch the cams and call in accidents as soon as they happen could be a *very* good thing.
Actually, most auto accidents are already quickly and rapidly reported by persons on the scene. Usually this process involves prying the cell phone from the collion victim's hand and using it to call the authorities.
Indeed. We need to rebuild the Saturn V. Well, not exactly--we've learned a bit of materials science, and had a lot of space practice since the Apollo days.
Nevertheless, we need to get people to think big again. You want to put a space station in orbit? Don't do it one bolt at a time with the Shuttle. Put the whole sucker up there in a handful of heavy lift launches--and put it in a higher orbit, so that you don't have to nudge upward as often. The Saturn V could put about 130 tons into earth orbit in one shot--why can't we do better than that (or even as well) all these decades later?
there i said it, i know its japanese but it had to be said.
Why?
Re:way behind hubbard, toklein and asimov
on
New Heinlein Novel
·
· Score: 1
Ron Hubbard published at least 13- including the ten volume Mission Earth series.
...which was terrible, and should have stayed safely buried. Unless they got dramatically better as they went along--I only read the first one, before becoming completely put off by the poor writing.
Slashdot Mirror
You're right, that is a simple way to generate neutrons--for those who happen to have radium lying around the house.
Actually, I suppose some people do, and it's giving them lung cancer--radon is a decay product of radium.
Finally, a word of warning about beryllium. The bulk material isn't terribly nasty--it's not particularly readily absorbed through the skin, and ingested beryllium mostly passes through the digestive tract. Powders can be quite harmful, however, causing--appropriately enough--berylliosis.
As a physicist who has worked a lot of high-voltage stuff in his time, it's because you can't spill a CD.
Yes, but it's a pretty light pound. How much is the levy? $0.77 per CD--and those are Canadian cents. Put fifteen CD audio tracks on a disc and you're paying a nickel each. (Take that, iTunes.) Burn mp3 audio, and you're down to less than a penny per track.
Precisely how it would be done. The CEO points at someone, and says "It is now your responsibility to to ensure physical hard drives don't leave."
Either the IT director or the security director would be a reasonable person to whom to assign the task. Presumably there's already someone responsible for physical security of data--it should already be in someone's job description. Just promulgate a policy that retired hard drives are to be destroyed.
I mean, come on. This is a bank. Physical security isn't exactly a new notion for the industry.
Yeah, but General Electric makes fighter jet engines. Now how do you feel about on-the-fly patches from GE?
Um, no? The closest thing to a live concert you're going to get is a live play. For those, the price you will pay fairly closely parallels the cost of a live concert. A few bucks at the door for a small amateur production, ninety or a hundred bucks a pop for the good seats at a top-level professional show.
Marginal cost to display a movie is virtually nil--an underpaid projectionist (who has to dash from theatre to theatre in the multiplex) and some guy to mop the floors. Of course they're cheaper than a concert. Performers, backstage crew, backup band--all of these people have to be present for each and every concert performance.
True, but the first stages are very efficiently lifting thousands of pounds of upper stage propellant. No matter how high the efficiency of a chemical rocket, a large fraction of its output is going to go to lifting material that gets thrown away.
As for safety issues, I agree--chemical rockets can be (and are, in some cases) designed to be extremely safe and reliable.
I don't know the answer to the first question, but the answer to your second is a qualified no. Virtually any time anything interesting is discovered in the sky, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) will distribute a notice as part of their Minor Planet Electronic Circulars. Often, this will take place before the orbit of an asteroid is refined; data are then gathered by observatories around the world. That all of the involved institutions and personnel could sit on a major discovery like this is very difficult to imagine.
Ready access to orbit and beyond means ready access to that much energy. As long as we're an immature species, ready access to that much energy means that it's practically certain that someone is going to use it for immature purposes. (war)
I just did a quick back of the envelope calculation. The total change in energy (kinetic and potential) associated with going from a point on the equator to a point in geosynchronous orbit is roughly eight megajoules per kilogram lifed. At 100% efficiency, that's 2.3 kilowatt hours, or about twenty U.S. cents' worth of electricity. At 20% efficiency, that's a buck per kilo to geosynch orbit. (This is the sort of performance one would expect from a space elevator, say.) Incidentally, with a space elevator, you can also get a lot of energy back on the return trip...
Sure it takes a lot of energy to get to orbit, and always will...as long as we keep using rockets.
To an extent, all journalists have to investigate that question, but peer-review both formalizes the process and carries it out much more rigorously.
...see also here.
From the Federal Bureau of Prisons (PDF, 4.8 MB), median sentences in months for various classes of offenses.
207. Continuing criminal enterprise
135. Homicide, aggravated assault, kidnapping
121. Robbery (use of violence or the threat of violence to deprive another of property)
92. Sex offenses
85. Drug offenses
76. Weapons, explosives, arson
67. Burglary, larceny, property offenses
51. National security
38. Immigration
30. Courts or corrections
27. Extortion, fraud, bribery
19. Banking and insurance, counterfeit, embezzlement offenses
Noting that these figures are for federal prisons only (YMMV locally), it seems to suggest that drug offenses are usually punished relatively harshly. If the guy was running a meth lab, and the prosecution actually had a strong case, he would face a significant prison sentence. Possession of 5 grams (about a sixth of an ounce) of methamphetamine carries a federally mandated minimum five-year prison sentence--if it is his first offense. Quite frankly, any prosecutor that has to resort to "weapons of mass destruction" claims to incarcerate a guy running a meth lab for a significant period of time is either lazy or incompetent.
See, for example,
The same cannot be said for cigarette smoking, or for illegal drugs. (Mind, marijuana consumption may be justified in some cases for pain control or as an antinauseant. In those cases, the marijuana won't kill you because there's already an underlying disease that is most likely to get you first.)Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
And that's everything you need to see, right there.
Yes it's a cheap shot, but I'm not proud.
Note also that all of the techniques you described could be used to attack a conventional launch of a Shuttle, too.
Eek. We have enough trouble building a horizontal railway that travels faster than a few hundred kilometres per hour--now you want us to build a vertical one that reaches a speed thirty times greater? One little hiccup in your track mechanism (presumably some sort of magnetic suspension) and the moving cargo drags against the elevator cable at ten kilometres per second. Suddenly, you have a much shorter cable...
I'm prepared to accept a slow and stately climb at four or five hundred km/h, even if it means it will take ten days to ascend.
CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW? GOOD!
Is a library call number a derivative work?
I would respectfully argue that digging up uranium is no dirtier than any other mining operation--and due to the very high energy density of the fuel, its mining may result in less overall environmental damage than other fuels (coal, I'm looking at you.) Granted, solar and wind power are quite clean in terms of gathering their fuel, but actually building the power plants requires significant resources. Steel and aluminum require mining; the preparation of silicon or gallium arsenide for solar cells isn't exactly pristine.
Enriched uranium is not necessarily required for civilian nuclear reactors. Canada's CANDU reactors use a more efficient deuterated water moderator that permits the use of unenriched uranium oxide fuel.
For what it's worth, I'm quite fond of both solar and wind power (my family cottage is off the grid and uses solar for a large portion of its energy), but neither technology should be considered a panacea.
Actually, under some circumstances copyright infringement is a crime. Those conditions (and the associated remedies) are laid out in USC Title 17 Section 506.
Obviously the United States Code only applies in the United States; YMMV with respect to the criminality of copyright infringement in other jurisdictions. I assume that since you mentioned invoking the DMCA you are in the United States.
Well, where do you suggest that we put Galileo? It doesn't have the ability to soft land anwhere in the Jovian system, and it lacks the propellant to get out of Jupiter's gravity well.
The decision to deliberately deorbit Galileo and drop it on Jupiter was made so that Galileo wouldn't make an uncontrolled landing (crash) on Europa--potentially contaminating the only other liquid water in the solar system with Earth life.
It seems the best option. As other posters have noted, the Jovian atmosphere is big. The probe will be sterilized by heat from drag as it descends, and its plutonium will be dispersed. Yes, one could suggest that we're not being the best of neighbours, but this doesn't seem like an unreasonable choice to make. Rough calculation--forty pounds of plutonium evenly distributed through Jupiter's mass corresponds to less than one extra atom of plutonium for every ten tons of Jupiter... There's a natural background level of radioactivity within Jupiter's atmosphere, and we won't perceptibly affect that.
Last, recall that Jupiter took a fully-fledged comet impact a few years ago and didn't blink.
Actually, most auto accidents are already quickly and rapidly reported by persons on the scene. Usually this process involves prying the cell phone from the collion victim's hand and using it to call the authorities.
Nevertheless, we need to get people to think big again. You want to put a space station in orbit? Don't do it one bolt at a time with the Shuttle. Put the whole sucker up there in a handful of heavy lift launches--and put it in a higher orbit, so that you don't have to nudge upward as often. The Saturn V could put about 130 tons into earth orbit in one shot--why can't we do better than that (or even as well) all these decades later?
Why?