The idea is that your ticket to the event entitles you to "download" up to about 40 minutes worth of music (IIRC) from the event, using a "secure" DRM system.
My wife and I went last summer and I went to download my "fair share" of the music when I got home. Guess what? The music is in a proprietary format and you need a special client to be able to download and decode it. The client is only available as a Win32.EXE
Sorry guys, I only have Solaris and Linux at home. I emailed and protested politely and was ignored. The client is called Wippit. I emailed them and got no reply, despite the fact that allegedly they welcomed feedback from non-Windows users asking for clients for other platforms.
m I to understand you believe CO2 is as dangerous as radioactive waste?
I believe it is many orders of magnitude more dangerous. Have you hear of the Greenhouse Effect, Climate change, extreme weather, flooding, hurricanes, famine, drowning, death by the millions?
Didn't the word, or phrase originate from porn? Or was it in use before that? It certanly pre-dates assembly language.
Here in the UK, "hardcore" originates in the construction industry where it refers to stones or rocks used as one of the foundation layers for roads and the like.
I used to know this guy with buck teeth and a mullet and a bottle-opener style guitar who played something he called "hardcore" too.
Allegedly, FST Modula-2 for MS-DOS (a shareware compiler) implemented co-routines. Unfortunaley I was too young and stupid to try them out. Anything other than "Hello, world!" on MS-DOS is hardcore... by the very nature of the (lack of) design.
You do distinctly get the feeling that 90% of the/. folk haven't used Windows since 1997
Correct. I for one haven't at home. I stopped using it at work (NT4) in 2000. Windows was so unmitigatingly awful in those days that we switched to Linux and other UNIX operating systems. There is absolutely nothing that has happened in the Windows world since then that will entice us back. Nothing, short of pain of death or if employment necessitates it.
I'm going to get CREAMED for saying this but, what the hell is original in Linux?
Nothing other than the license. And it beat Windows by about a decade (and Windows is still playing catch-up in most areas). Need I also mention all the other UNIXes and UNIX-like OSs that predate Linux?
Billy and his fan club are coming late to the game as usual, and as always, their gear will be huge, cumbersome, unreliable and expensive. It will also not play well with everyone else.
This is proof that Microsoft doesn't have a single original idea of its own. Once again it's too little too late. They haven't a hope in hades of making a dent on the market. Does anyone remember the ICL Windows "Mainframe?" They didn't even manage to sell one. They had to lend one free to Abbey National (now Abbey) to get one out the door. I think they ditched it.
The humble smoke detector as found in many homes, saves many lives a year.
I wonder what mass hysteria there would be if Joe Public suddenly realised that it worked because it contains a radioactive americium-241 source.
Could you imagine the mass panic and uproar there'd be when the ignorant suddenly start imagining that they're all going to die of cancer from their smoke detectors? I wonder how many more people each year would die in house fires?
All elements heavier than uranium do not occur in nature (on earth) and have to be produced artificially by nuclear reactions (in one of those horrible, evil, scary nuclear reactor thingies). That's where the dreaded plutonium comes from, as well as americium for your smoke detector.
You can also read about all the radioactive isotopes used in medicine for both diagnosis and treatment of things like cancer that we make using nuclear reactions.
Look, wise guy, we all know about the discharges from Sellafied into the sea.
What you nuclear-haters always assume is that everything radioactive is "bad" and that all radioactive substances (in whatever quantities) are equally as bad.
This is naieve and simplistic.
As environmental standards increase, the Nuclear Industry, like every other industry, makes improvements to its business such that it complies with the law on these issues. Mere compliance isn't all they reoutinely achieve anyway. But you wouldn't believe that.
How can you defend a nuclear policy that takes care of the waste by simply dumping it out in the Irish sea?
The waste is not "simply dumped into the Irish Sea."
Small, controlled amounts of certain substances are discharged into the Irish Sea, yes, but the vast majority of it (including the really nasty stuff) is stored safely. It could be reused, but public opinion (due to hysterical rantings of "environmentalists") has largely made this impossible. It's called MOX. We also could have had fast reactors which can be used to consume plutonium.
What I find really amusing is that on continental Europe, some countries (e.g. Germany) are closing all of their nuclear power stations for "environmental" reasons, and instead moving to wind and gas power. However, they can't produce enough of it themselves and are having to import electricity from France. In France, 80% of electricity is produced from nuclear power. France is a net exporter of electricity.
The MOX debacle was regretable and a symptom of shoddyness, but it was a failure in a manual system of checks that was largely superfluous.
MOX fuel is a kind of nuclear fuel in which enrichment of uranium is replaced by the addition of fissile plutonium from previously used fuel. It takes the form of a ceramic oxide pellet with a central hole (much like a polo mint, and a similar size) in a very strong stainless steel jacket.
The production of MOX is almost completely automated. The pellets are checked for defects and conformance by machines. One of the stages of the process involves measuring, by laser, the dimensions of the pellet to ensure conformance to the specifications. At the end of the procedure, a small random sample is taken and measured manually using a micrometer (to much less precision) as an additional check to please the Regulator (HM NII). As you can imagine, this is a boring and repetitive job. Some of the engineers were fed up with doing this so wrote an Excel spread sheet to fabricate the results, complete with "random experimental error."
This was not serious from a safety point of view in this particular case, but it was symptomatic of poor management, and people took a wider view that if something like this was going on, things needed fixing (management processes and staff motivation etc.)
You see, a lot of the engineering jobs in the nuclear industry, for which science degrees, extensive professional training and experience are required, are very repetitive and boring and require vast amounts of beaurocracy. This is deemed necessary, to have human involvement (at least in a monitoring capacity) at every single stage in the process as an extra safety check, to enure that people are intimately familiar with processes and systems, and that nothing is left to chance.
As this incident shows, things aren't perfect. However, many changes have been put in place since the MOX incident.
And you never quite get the whole story from the media.
Oddly enough, the scientists I know who are most disparaging about nuclear power in general, and Sellafield in particular, are the ones who have worked there...
The entire British nuclear industry is still weighed down by 1960's and 70's unionism. None of the industrial staff will do any work except on overtime. There was one incident in the late 1990s when someone unwired a standard 3-pin mains electricity plug (c.f. on a TV set or electric kettle) and all the electricians walked out...
A 2nd generation AGR was considered when it came to looking at a 3rd generation reactor programme for the UK, it came way behind a Westinghouse PWR - so we ended up with Sizewell B.
Interesting. How did it differ from previous AGRs?
AGRs are cool. Heysham 2 anyone?:-) And as long as you keep you moderator cooling on, it's a negative feedback system, so no runaway power transients. Oh, and the concrete pressure vessels are pretty strong too. 40% thermal efficiency? You only get 33% maximum from a PWR:-)
I think nuclear power is useful too, but a multi-pronged approach, with a little imagination and determination, is the best approach.
Indeed. Very wise. Putting all your eggs in one basket is always a bad idea. I plan to get a diesel car one day and experiment with running it on vegetable oil. I was wondering if you could do the same with central heating too. I'm sure we could make much better use of solar as well. Wind has its place, but I think covering the entire country in turbines is a bit extreme and misguided.
I don't know about you, but I say "better dead than shitting uranium".
Wouldn't that depend on the quantity of uranium and relative risk associated with it? Do you know how much uranium naturally occurs in soil? Do you eat vegetables? Have you any idea what you're talking about? Mark Thomas makes good, sensational tabloid television. As usual, to make his point, he ommits many pertinent facts. But you obviously know best because it's probably all some fascist government conspiracy together with the aliens to give childern leukemia to give the mad evil scientists a bit of perverse fun.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I present you with exhibit A: Windscale, a powerplant so disastrous and badly designed that they spared no expense in making it safe -- they changed its name to Sellafield.50 or so years ago, they were in a hurry to build something that could produce plutonium from natural uranium for the Britsh nuclear weapons programme. The Cold War was on. People were very scared, so they build the two windscale piles - a very poor and primitive design - in a hurry. Hindisght is always perfect. Windscale wasn't. Luckily they fitted iodine filters to the exhaust stacks which saved Western Europe when they set the core alight annealing out Wigner energy from the core (a practice illegal since then).
The whole dodgyness of the Windscale design is an article in itself. You can read about it. Open gas circuit (i.e. natural air exhaused to atmosphere for core cooling) and aluminium fuel cans...A lack of sufficient core instrumentation. Poor operating procedure (annealing Wigner energy).
The next two sites, Calder Hall and Chapel Cross, had carbon dioxide cooling in clode gas circuits, better core instrumentaion, automatic safety circuits and NO ANNEALING OF WIGNER ENERGY allowed.
Still leaking radiation, still poisoning the Irish Sea, but now we needn't associate it with the near-fatal meltdown or the hole linking the nuclear-waste chute with the chimney!
Absolute nonsense. Rubbish. Not even half true. The Windscale site is still there, on the Sellafield site. It's not "leaking radiation" and it's not poisoning the Irish Sea. Most of the poisoning was on land anyway, 50 years ago. The residual radioactivity of the Windscale chimneys was low enough several years ago that men were able to work on them, to begin dismantling. You can read about this on the BNFL web site.
Sellafield does a lot of reprocessing. If you ignorant fools weren't so stupid, we'd be using spent Magnox and AGR fuel again in AGRs in the form of MOX. Sellafield does discharge some effluent into the Irish sea, It's realtively small and harmless. You can check out the facts with HM NII if you like, and the NRPB. You wouldn't want to drink it, but then I wouldn't want to drink sea water...
If you ignorant, self-styled experts would stop scaremongering and telling lies, those of us with a clue could get on and deal with things properly.
The activities at Dounreay were somewhat ammateurish.
Expertise? I think not. The prosecution rests, your honour.
So, you're going to damn the entire industry on two unrelated incidents from many years ago? Have you heard of progress? What rock have you been living under? Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth?
That and the fact that our nuclear industry is a bankrupt money pit despite the high subsidies it receieves, never having made a profit or even having faced its running costs, let alone the cost of spent fuel disposal.
The market has historically always been rigged against the success of nuclear power. Nuclear power in the UK was never designed to be operated by commercial companies for a profit. There was supposed to be a continual, long term reasearch and development program with new generations of reactors being built every 25 years or so. Then along came the Tories in the 1980s and did the cheapskate thing with the electricity industry.
Nuclear's running costs would be more palatable if the fossil fuel burners had to store all of their carbon dioxied or at least mitigate its effects.
Unfortunately, the problems are political, not technical.
The economics of reprocessing don't make sense. Sellafield could not exist without the British government imposing a levy on all energy sales AND bailing BNFL out on a regular basis.
Funny that, how the fossil fuel people are allowed to pump all their dirty crap (carbon dioxide) out into the atmosphere. When the day comes when they have to offset their CO2 emissions by law, we'll soon see who's really the most expensive.
Slashdot Mirror
The idea is that your ticket to the event entitles you to "download" up to about 40 minutes worth of music (IIRC) from the event, using a "secure" DRM system.
My wife and I went last summer and I went to download my "fair share" of the music when I got home. Guess what? The music is in a proprietary format and you need a special client to be able to download and decode it. The client is only available as a Win32 .EXE
Sorry guys, I only have Solaris and Linux at home. I emailed and protested politely and was ignored. The client is called Wippit. I emailed them and got no reply, despite the fact that allegedly they welcomed feedback from non-Windows users asking for clients for other platforms.
Tell me something, do you drink coffee? Do you eat bananas? Have you ever eaten Brazil nuts?
I believe it is many orders of magnitude more dangerous. Have you hear of the Greenhouse Effect, Climate change, extreme weather, flooding, hurricanes, famine, drowning, death by the millions?
Here in the UK, "hardcore" originates in the construction industry where it refers to stones or rocks used as one of the foundation layers for roads and the like.
I used to know this guy with buck teeth and a mullet and a bottle-opener style guitar who played something he called "hardcore" too.
No, but they write a mean PERL script... :-)
Now, don't get me started on TSRs....
I think it's all this beer they make me drink. ;-)
Now, FORTH,... if only...
Correct. I for one haven't at home. I stopped using it at work (NT4) in 2000. Windows was so unmitigatingly awful in those days that we switched to Linux and other UNIX operating systems. There is absolutely nothing that has happened in the Windows world since then that will entice us back. Nothing, short of pain of death or if employment necessitates it.
Nothing other than the license. And it beat Windows by about a decade (and Windows is still playing catch-up in most areas). Need I also mention all the other UNIXes and UNIX-like OSs that predate Linux?
Billy and his fan club are coming late to the game as usual, and as always, their gear will be huge, cumbersome, unreliable and expensive. It will also not play well with everyone else.
This is proof that Microsoft doesn't have a single original idea of its own. Once again it's too little too late. They haven't a hope in hades of making a dent on the market. Does anyone remember the ICL Windows "Mainframe?" They didn't even manage to sell one. They had to lend one free to Abbey National (now Abbey) to get one out the door. I think they ditched it.
I wonder what mass hysteria there would be if Joe Public suddenly realised that it worked because it contains a radioactive americium-241 source.
Could you imagine the mass panic and uproar there'd be when the ignorant suddenly start imagining that they're all going to die of cancer from their smoke detectors? I wonder how many more people each year would die in house fires?
All elements heavier than uranium do not occur in nature (on earth) and have to be produced artificially by nuclear reactions (in one of those horrible, evil, scary nuclear reactor thingies). That's where the dreaded plutonium comes from, as well as americium for your smoke detector.
You can also read about all the radioactive isotopes used in medicine for both diagnosis and treatment of things like cancer that we make using nuclear reactions.
What you nuclear-haters always assume is that everything radioactive is "bad" and that all radioactive substances (in whatever quantities) are equally as bad.
This is naieve and simplistic.
As environmental standards increase, the Nuclear Industry, like every other industry, makes improvements to its business such that it complies with the law on these issues. Mere compliance isn't all they reoutinely achieve anyway. But you wouldn't believe that.
If you want some facts, go here.
The waste is not "simply dumped into the Irish Sea."
Small, controlled amounts of certain substances are discharged into the Irish Sea, yes, but the vast majority of it (including the really nasty stuff) is stored safely. It could be reused, but public opinion (due to hysterical rantings of "environmentalists") has largely made this impossible. It's called MOX. We also could have had fast reactors which can be used to consume plutonium.
What I find really amusing is that on continental Europe, some countries (e.g. Germany) are closing all of their nuclear power stations for "environmental" reasons, and instead moving to wind and gas power. However, they can't produce enough of it themselves and are having to import electricity from France. In France, 80% of electricity is produced from nuclear power. France is a net exporter of electricity.
There are several delicious ironies there....
So do you like um have to leave the big grey plastic security tag on as a symbol of your out-sized virility?
MOX fuel is a kind of nuclear fuel in which enrichment of uranium is replaced by the addition of fissile plutonium from previously used fuel. It takes the form of a ceramic oxide pellet with a central hole (much like a polo mint, and a similar size) in a very strong stainless steel jacket.
The production of MOX is almost completely automated. The pellets are checked for defects and conformance by machines. One of the stages of the process involves measuring, by laser, the dimensions of the pellet to ensure conformance to the specifications. At the end of the procedure, a small random sample is taken and measured manually using a micrometer (to much less precision) as an additional check to please the Regulator (HM NII). As you can imagine, this is a boring and repetitive job. Some of the engineers were fed up with doing this so wrote an Excel spread sheet to fabricate the results, complete with "random experimental error."
This was not serious from a safety point of view in this particular case, but it was symptomatic of poor management, and people took a wider view that if something like this was going on, things needed fixing (management processes and staff motivation etc.)
You see, a lot of the engineering jobs in the nuclear industry, for which science degrees, extensive professional training and experience are required, are very repetitive and boring and require vast amounts of beaurocracy. This is deemed necessary, to have human involvement (at least in a monitoring capacity) at every single stage in the process as an extra safety check, to enure that people are intimately familiar with processes and systems, and that nothing is left to chance.
As this incident shows, things aren't perfect. However, many changes have been put in place since the MOX incident.
And you never quite get the whole story from the media.
The entire British nuclear industry is still weighed down by 1960's and 70's unionism. None of the industrial staff will do any work except on overtime. There was one incident in the late 1990s when someone unwired a standard 3-pin mains electricity plug (c.f. on a TV set or electric kettle) and all the electricians walked out...
Interesting. How did it differ from previous AGRs?
AGRs are cool. Heysham 2 anyone? :-) And as long as you keep you moderator cooling on, it's a negative feedback system, so no runaway power transients. Oh, and the concrete pressure vessels are pretty strong too. 40% thermal efficiency? You only get 33% maximum from a PWR :-)
I guess not. Would you mind finding out and posting the answer here?
It would have been even better if the reactors had been designed so as to make prompt criticality unatainable. Prevention is better than the cure.
Indeed. Very wise. Putting all your eggs in one basket is always a bad idea. I plan to get a diesel car one day and experiment with running it on vegetable oil. I was wondering if you could do the same with central heating too. I'm sure we could make much better use of solar as well. Wind has its place, but I think covering the entire country in turbines is a bit extreme and misguided.
Wouldn't that depend on the quantity of uranium and relative risk associated with it? Do you know how much uranium naturally occurs in soil? Do you eat vegetables? Have you any idea what you're talking about? Mark Thomas makes good, sensational tabloid television. As usual, to make his point, he ommits many pertinent facts. But you obviously know best because it's probably all some fascist government conspiracy together with the aliens to give childern leukemia to give the mad evil scientists a bit of perverse fun.
Admit it, that's what you think.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I present you with exhibit A: Windscale, a powerplant so disastrous and badly designed that they spared no expense in making it safe -- they changed its name to Sellafield.50 or so years ago, they were in a hurry to build something that could produce plutonium from natural uranium for the Britsh nuclear weapons programme. The Cold War was on. People were very scared, so they build the two windscale piles - a very poor and primitive design - in a hurry. Hindisght is always perfect. Windscale wasn't. Luckily they fitted iodine filters to the exhaust stacks which saved Western Europe when they set the core alight annealing out Wigner energy from the core (a practice illegal since then).
The whole dodgyness of the Windscale design is an article in itself. You can read about it. Open gas circuit (i.e. natural air exhaused to atmosphere for core cooling) and aluminium fuel cans...A lack of sufficient core instrumentation. Poor operating procedure (annealing Wigner energy).
The next two sites, Calder Hall and Chapel Cross, had carbon dioxide cooling in clode gas circuits, better core instrumentaion, automatic safety circuits and NO ANNEALING OF WIGNER ENERGY allowed.
Still leaking radiation, still poisoning the Irish Sea, but now we needn't associate it with the near-fatal meltdown or the hole linking the nuclear-waste chute with the chimney!
Absolute nonsense. Rubbish. Not even half true. The Windscale site is still there, on the Sellafield site. It's not "leaking radiation" and it's not poisoning the Irish Sea. Most of the poisoning was on land anyway, 50 years ago. The residual radioactivity of the Windscale chimneys was low enough several years ago that men were able to work on them, to begin dismantling. You can read about this on the BNFL web site.
Sellafield does a lot of reprocessing. If you ignorant fools weren't so stupid, we'd be using spent Magnox and AGR fuel again in AGRs in the form of MOX. Sellafield does discharge some effluent into the Irish sea, It's realtively small and harmless. You can check out the facts with HM NII if you like, and the NRPB. You wouldn't want to drink it, but then I wouldn't want to drink sea water...
If you ignorant, self-styled experts would stop scaremongering and telling lies, those of us with a clue could get on and deal with things properly.
The activities at Dounreay were somewhat ammateurish.
Expertise? I think not. The prosecution rests, your honour.
So, you're going to damn the entire industry on two unrelated incidents from many years ago? Have you heard of progress? What rock have you been living under? Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth?
The market has historically always been rigged against the success of nuclear power. Nuclear power in the UK was never designed to be operated by commercial companies for a profit. There was supposed to be a continual, long term reasearch and development program with new generations of reactors being built every 25 years or so. Then along came the Tories in the 1980s and did the cheapskate thing with the electricity industry.
Nuclear's running costs would be more palatable if the fossil fuel burners had to store all of their carbon dioxied or at least mitigate its effects.
Unfortunately, the problems are political, not technical.
Funny that, how the fossil fuel people are allowed to pump all their dirty crap (carbon dioxide) out into the atmosphere. When the day comes when they have to offset their CO2 emissions by law, we'll soon see who's really the most expensive.
Wind turbines kill birds by the thousand. Nuclear power stations do not.