The nuclear reactor I worked with as a grad student had bare incandescent lightbulbs in metal fixtures (I'd assume something non-corrosive) submerged in the water* surrounding the core, so that you could see to the bottom. Obviously, the water is quite pure.
What was more impressive, of course, was watching the core power up, as you stood on the walkway directly above it. The blue glow from the Cerenkov radiation is just plain impressive, no matter how often you see it.
>>I could easilly see my old Calculus prof killing himself by accidently putting drano in his coffee.
Yes. One of my profs was notorious for always having a white or yellow tongue. He'd erase the board with his hand, and then absent-mindedly lick his fingers before he flipped through the textbook. Quite amusing.
Ah, I see. Many thanks. Basically hierarchical, non-destructive filtering. Cool.
Yeah, I always end up flattening everything, copying it, reverting to the previous desired state via undo, and then pasting a new layer of the flattened layer. I could certainly use this feature.:-)
>>I've heard rumours that the next version of CS will have *filters* in layers (meaning, you can create an 'unsharp maks' layer) which will make PS even more powerful. >>
I think I am missing the point here. Would this be somehow superior to duplicating a layer, running filters on it, then blending or whathaveyou? Or masking and running filters?
Amen. Some people liken the internet as a lawless 'wild west.' If you want to continue along with that analogy, a governmental body stepping in to regulate and impose order on the internet just screams to me of what the US government did to the native american peoples.
As someone who believes that no government should have tremendous power, the UN's purpose as an overgovernment - even a benign one, troubles me.
A group of countries agreeing to standard weights, measures, and currencies is one thing - and quite a wonderful idea really. A body that imposes majority-rule over a group of ethnically/culturally diverse peoples is quite another, and I see it as just the formula for oppression, regardless of good intent.
When europeans complain about how laws here in the US differ from state to state (and I have heard it quite often) there is a reason; we are nowhere near a single, homogeneous people. Customs and cultural mores differ regionally, necessitating differing legislation in each. Hence the whole debate over gay marriage. It would be fine* for it to be permitted/prohibited on a per-state basis except for the 'full faith and credit' clause in the constitution - each state would have to recognise a marriage license from another state that allowed gay marriage.
That meandered a bit off topic...
*legally. Forget about discussing the "morality" of it for now.
When they asked for his name and address, he gave them some. Just not his. Fenway park, the Whitehouse, the Kremlin, his mother-in-law's: he had a whole list of such addresses and their corresponding phone numbers.
Ah, see, as a computer engineer who likes to do a lot of assembly and low level stuff, I see it somewhat from the other perspective. I think that an OS should handle only the most basic of tasks, like disk and direct memory access. So I'd say, yes, BIOses, etc, are, in fact, little stub operating systems.
The pretty GUIs, etc, should all be handled on the application layer. Microsoft basically blurred the distinction on the PC with 2k, XP, etc.
Whether it is a good move or a bad move remains to be seen, imho. It is certainly a good PR move to get novices using computers.
>> but I DO notice the clipping on some CD's Actually, that's probably the CD's fault. The trend in the industry is to make CDs louder and louder. CDs don't have a huge dynamic range with 16 bits, so when they push the gain, they clip on the master.
It's another reason I'd love to see DVD-A (or I would even settle for SACD) really take off - room for more dynamic range.
>>don't call DOS a "plain text OS." If DOS is an OS, then so is SYSLINUX. (http://syslinux.zytor.com/) (http://syslinux.zytor.com/comboot.php)
What the...? Of course DOS is an OS. It is OS I ran until I "switched" to win95 as my primary OS, in '96.
Slackware Linux - which I have also been using since 1996 and which is still my favorite flavor of linux - is also a "plain text OS" for me. I use it as a server OS and a personal PC OS and never install a graphical UI.
As an aside, in one of my senior college classes, there was a senior computer science major who couldn't figure out how to do one of our assignments.*
Idiot: "How do I do xxxxxx?" Me: "Well, first, open a command prompt and..." Idiot: "A what?" Me: "A command prompt and then..." Idiot: "What do you mean?" Me: "You know, DOS? Or at least, what passes for DOS on Win2k." Idiot: "Where's the icon?" Me: "Just go to start, run, and type in 'cmd' " Idiot: "Run...? Oh, I had a friend of mine take that off the menu. I've never used it." Me: ". .."
*basically to write a little command-line program that took arguments and could use pipes. Not exactly rocket science.
>>Just curious, what ogg encoder/decoder software were you using? Was it recent?
Oggenc, using libogg 1.0 I believe. Played back with winamp 5, whatever they use as their decoder. We also tried converting the Ogg back to a PCM wave file and burning the new and old wav to CD, to see if that made a difference.*
I'm not sure if there is a limitation on FLAC that makes it unable to carry more information than OGG, but remember that the real limitation would then be the CDs, which are mastered at 16bit/44.1kHz. I picked up several DVD-A disks on clearance and have been wanting to try them out. If nothing else, they should have a much better dynamic range than CD (and potentially SACD.) I just need a DVD-A player***.
The point is, DVD-A will have a ton more data to encode than what we currently have with CD - if anyone ever bypasses the much-harder-to-break-than-DVD-video encoding scheme.
*To be played back on a SACD* player, rather than a potentially noisy sound card jack.
**on loan from said friend.
***Regular DVD players play back a DD/DTS track, rather than the higher-quality DVD-A track. Even that much sounds nice.
I haven't been able to find too much more, newer work done on the subject, so I don't think there is a great deal of scientific interest in it. Interesting read though.
I personally think 256kbps or even 192kbps is good. But it depends on your output (speakers, headphones) and more importantly your ears. Some people don't mind 92kbps while others won't settle for anything less than vinyl (usually people with $30k+ wrapped up in their setups...)
I have a decent mid-range receiver & set of speakers*. I had a friend of mine administer a blind listening test on me. I could pick out the FLAC encode vs. the Ogg "higher quality" (I think it was -q7 or -q8) encode about 75% of the time.
Most of the time I am content with a good Ogg encode (I mean, hell, I'd never have heard the difference if the samples weren't played back to back!) I generally only use FLAC for a) my favorite albums and b) classical music. Size wouldn't be an issue... but for the fact that I keep an oft-updated mirror of the data on a second computer. As drive space is become rather inexpensive, I forsee a time when lossless will be the way to go, except for portables.
*Ascend Acoustics CBM-300 stereo pair, HSU sub, and a HK AVR-325 receiver.
Some of what it detects are definitely false positives. On my machine, it claimed to find registry traces of eDonkey and Grokster, which it says contain adware. But the keys it found were put there by Shareaza, a non-spyware open-source client.
Yep. Same here. It decided that VNC was obviously an attempt to remotely hijack my computer.
It also felt the need to alter my hosts file for me. It didn't like the fact that I had "ads.msn.com" pointing to 127.0.0.1 (as well as over 100 other ad domains; the only one it cared about was MSN!)
>> Ordinary laser lights will not do much to the eyes, as far as I know. Obviously if this light is going 3k feet in the air, it's not an ordinary laser. It's obviously quite high-powered and capable of causing injury. >>
You're kidding, right? Even the laser at the supermarket for scanning prices can damage your eye. It's less than 0.5mW, so casual exposure won't hurt you.
A 5mW red laser pointer is another matter. A few seconds can cause temporary blindness. In under a minute, you can cause permenant damage. And as to range, with my 5mW 632nm diode (common in 'bright' pointers), I've been able to reflect it off a stop sign just over a mile away. I used my telescope mount to align it and keep it steady (you'd need steadier hands than mine!), but the reflection was visible to the naked eye. Nothing fancy involved.
The human eye is most sensitive to green (in the middle of the visible spectrum) so a 5mW green laser looks much brighter. And can do much more damage. And so far, we've just talked about Class IV and III lasers.
Someone with a more powerful laser could do some serious harm in a short amount of time. Most CO2 lasers aren't in the band visible to the human eye and are very powerful. For a couple thousand dollars and some surplus parts, you can build a laser that will cut metal. If you're really gung-ho and have some skills, you can do it much cheaper.
This incident? I think they're making the guy a patsy. Even if he was being stupid and shining a laser at a vehicle in the air, he probably didn't think it would hurt anyone. Intent is a very important concept. It doesn't indemnify him, but it ought to suggest more appropriate penalties.
What should his punishment be? Since no one was hurt, I'd say probation and community service.
While I certainly don't believe that the US had any direct involvement in the events of September 11th, I also certainly see the parallel between the WTC and the burning of the German Reichstag in 1933. Be very wary of anything done in the name of 'anti-terrorism.'
>>Of course, Occam's Razor says "most likely" or "usually" as you put it. The significance is that the simplest explanation isn't ALWAYS the correct one. >>
Exactly. Weird things happen that are absolutely unexpected and most certainly not the 'easy answer'.
I have a book around here somewhere that has an article about a man who was stabbed and killed at a baseball game in the 30s. The simple explanation? Probably that someone didn't like him very much, right?
The unlikely truth of the matter was that the man sitting on his right was passing an open pocket knife to the man on his left and a foul ball struck the hand with the knife, driving the point into his throat. That's something about which - even if you were there - you'd be saying, "What the hell?! Can't be."
Even the fact that someone can spend a dollar on a lottery ticket and win millions of dollars is pretty crazy. Some people call it "a tax on people who can't do statistics", but I personally know someone who is $10,000 richer for a $1 ticket. It defies the odds.
Ocham's Razor. Explain: He has millions of dollars. dollars. Simple explanations: He inherited it. He stole it. He earned it with his business. Not simple: He managed to beat the 1 in 135,145,920 odds and won the Mega Millions jackpot. (Real odds)
>> If you are compiling a lot of code and have several Linux boxes around you could look into DistCC Nice to have around if you will install Gentoo on anything >>
You aren't kidding. Just for fun, I tried Gentoo on my 'linux backup box' (Pentium 133, 256mb ram, 200Gb hardware raid-1). Got everything up in running in about an hour, thanks to my 2.8Ghz desktop and 3Ghz laptop running distcc. (Obviously, not compiling X.org, etc.)
I'm really hoping there is a push to market for these things. Sony has exclusive rights to the technology, developed by Silicon Light Machines. I've read anecdotal accounts from people who've seen the technology demoed that the images were amazingly crisp and vivid.
Even a tiny nuclear reactor contains more radioactive material than the Hiroshima bomb. Blowing one up with a truckload of conventional explosives may not kill a lot of people, but surely will contaminate a large area for a long time.
One of the "problems" with so called dirty-bombs fashioned from reactor material is that you really can't kill a lot of people. The effect will be mostly psychological.
Thankfully, the material inside anything but a research reactor is very low enrichment. Say 3-10% at most. To make a real Nuke, you need 85-95% enrichment. And a pretty sophisticated bomb design - you can't just pack it with TNT and hope. So what are we left with?
If you just blow the thing up: really, really deadly stuff (like radioactive Xenon, etc) has a short half-life or otherwise quickly clears out. What you're left to deal with are several chunks of uranium. They're harmful, but only localy. The area can be closed off and decontaminated. Few people will die.
If you want a much bigger disbursion: You have to first grind the nasty stuff down into a fine powder. Very risky to do for a terrorist, even with lots of fancy equipment that likely wouldn't have. When you blow it up, it spreads the dust over a much larger area. The downside is that the dose to any indiviual is going to be much lower. You'll make some people sick, sure, but you won't kill many people.
This is all Good For Us(tm).
A much greater threat is theft of radioisotopes from hospitals, etc, which are relatively unguarded. Nothing like putting "deadly radioisotopes" in a town's water supply to comepletely freak out the general populace. Which is what they* want.
Hmm, nuclear reactions? Isn't the point to get hydrogen to be used with fusion(w/ helium3) without any byproducts? If you need to start using nuclear reactions, this still isn't a 'great' way to get hydrogen. I still believe using solarpanels and using electrolysis for getting hydrogen is still the best way. No CO2, no nuclear waste... Well that's just my opinion...
Fusion of helium-3 would be divine. Pity there isn't much here on Earth. (The moon is another matter.) It also usually costs hundred of dollars per litre. Bear in mind that there are several other reaction paths to fusion that don't require He-3. They aren't as ideal - just more practical.
Solar panels have their place, but they're never going to produce the amount of hydrogen needed for even a single nation's infrastructure. Even if solar panels were much more efficient, electrolysis itself isn't very energy efficient.
(As an aside, I was pleasantly suprised to run across an article about using good old Stirling engines & an array of mirrors to generate power from the sun - at higer efficiencies than panels and at costs comparable to fossil fuels. Have a read)
Now, on to the point of the story. Basically, some of the Generation IV nuclear reactor designs* can be used to produce lots of hydrogen, more or less as a byproduct of their operation. (Because of the extreme temperatures) So the fact that you've suddenly got the means for a hydrogen economy is a side-benefit.
Gen. IV reactor designs are cleaner, safer, more efficient, and generally smaller than their clunky old (current) counterparts. Yes, they are still fission. And while MOX reactors (which compose some of the designs) have questions about fuel reuse, a bona fide fusion reactor can be used to re-enrich spent fission fuel. (ie, blanket of uranium around reaction chamber, etc.) Fusion lets you make fission clean, or as close to it as possible.
Why is that important? Because no one is going to initially drop the trillion or so dollars to build the first commercially viable fusion reactor, when and if one is ever designed. ITER itself will be just a stepping stone, if it ever actually gets built. In the mean time, we'll still be fissioning away...
*Because of irrational fear and paranoia in the USA, most commercial reactors are Generation I or II. Not much has changed since the 70s. Nuclear can be dangerous, but it generally isn't and needn't be. It's debatable whether government run power plants would be any better, but it scares the hell out of me that our reactors in the USA are run as cheaply as they can possibly get away with. Capitalism is great, but you just can't try to undercut safety.
I have a funny feeling that Toy Story 3 may be for the Toy Story movies as Eye of the Beholder 3 was for that game series.
For those who didn't play those games, SSI dropped Westwood Studios (of Legend of Kyranda, Command and Conquer fame) after 2 great titles and opted to do the third installment themselves. And it basically sucked.
But we'll see. Disney can draw from a lot of talent if it really wants to.
Yep. There was a (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) footnote in one of my college math books that the tradition in mathematics was "...to name [things] after the second person who discovered them. Because Euler probably got there first."
>> "I recomend my highly patentable invention: "typing gloves." Take a pair of cheap wool gloves (army surplus wool gloves work great) and cut the fingers off at the first knuckle (of the gloves, not your hands) and presto! all the warmth of not-cold hands, with the dexterity required to hit 90 wpm." >>
High school marching bands have been doing that for years. I always felt it was kinda' silly, but when your [affordable-for-a-public-school] supplier only has two sizes of gloves and there are more than two sizes of hands, cutting off the tips of the fingers can improve dexterity (and blood flow!)
However, towards the end of football season, when it begins to snow... you'd wish you'd kept even that little bit of extra warmth. Just the opposite from your intentions:-)
Slashdot Mirror
The nuclear reactor I worked with as a grad student had bare incandescent lightbulbs in metal fixtures (I'd assume something non-corrosive) submerged in the water* surrounding the core, so that you could see to the bottom. Obviously, the water is quite pure.
What was more impressive, of course, was watching the core power up, as you stood on the walkway directly above it. The blue glow from the Cerenkov radiation is just plain impressive, no matter how often you see it.
*light water, in case you were wondering.
>>I could easilly see my old Calculus prof killing himself by accidently putting drano in his coffee.
Yes. One of my profs was notorious for always having a white or yellow tongue. He'd erase the board with his hand, and then absent-mindedly lick his fingers before he flipped through the textbook. Quite amusing.
Ah, I see. Many thanks. Basically hierarchical, non-destructive filtering. Cool.
:-)
Yeah, I always end up flattening everything, copying it, reverting to the previous desired state via undo, and then pasting a new layer of the flattened layer. I could certainly use this feature.
'fraid not. It was posted at 6:59pm EST. You poor Europeans get dredged into several more hours of terrible April Fools posts. C'est la vie.
>>I've heard rumours that the next version of CS will have *filters* in layers (meaning, you can create an 'unsharp maks' layer) which will make PS even more powerful.
>>
I think I am missing the point here. Would this be somehow superior to duplicating a layer, running filters on it, then blending or whathaveyou? Or masking and running filters?
Amen. Some people liken the internet as a lawless 'wild west.' If you want to continue along with that analogy, a governmental body stepping in to regulate and impose order on the internet just screams to me of what the US government did to the native american peoples.
As someone who believes that no government should have tremendous power, the UN's purpose as an overgovernment - even a benign one, troubles me.
A group of countries agreeing to standard weights, measures, and currencies is one thing - and quite a wonderful idea really. A body that imposes majority-rule over a group of ethnically/culturally diverse peoples is quite another, and I see it as just the formula for oppression, regardless of good intent.
When europeans complain about how laws here in the US differ from state to state (and I have heard it quite often) there is a reason; we are nowhere near a single, homogeneous people. Customs and cultural mores differ regionally, necessitating differing legislation in each. Hence the whole debate over gay marriage. It would be fine* for it to be permitted/prohibited on a per-state basis except for the 'full faith and credit' clause in the constitution - each state would have to recognise a marriage license from another state that allowed gay marriage.
That meandered a bit off topic...
*legally. Forget about discussing the "morality" of it for now.
Back in college, one of my Electrical Engineering Profs had at least a hundred one-liners about Radio Shack.
"Somehow, no matter what I go in there for, I always seem to come out with nothing but a pack of batteries."
"You know their motto:
'You've got questions?
We've got blank stares!' "
When they asked for his name and address, he gave them some. Just not his. Fenway park, the Whitehouse, the Kremlin, his mother-in-law's: he had a whole list of such addresses and their corresponding phone numbers.
And it appears he isn't the only one.
Ah, see, as a computer engineer who likes to do a lot of assembly and low level stuff, I see it somewhat from the other perspective. I think that an OS should handle only the most basic of tasks, like disk and direct memory access. So I'd say, yes, BIOses, etc, are, in fact, little stub operating systems.
The pretty GUIs, etc, should all be handled on the application layer. Microsoft basically blurred the distinction on the PC with 2k, XP, etc.
Whether it is a good move or a bad move remains to be seen, imho. It is certainly a good PR move to get novices using computers.
>> but I DO notice the clipping on some CD's
Actually, that's probably the CD's fault. The trend in the industry is to make CDs louder and louder. CDs don't have a huge dynamic range with 16 bits, so when they push the gain, they clip on the master.
It's another reason I'd love to see DVD-A (or I would even settle for SACD) really take off - room for more dynamic range.
>>don't call DOS a "plain text OS." If DOS is an OS, then so is SYSLINUX. (http://syslinux.zytor.com/) (http://syslinux.zytor.com/comboot.php)
."
What the...? Of course DOS is an OS. It is OS I ran until I "switched" to win95 as my primary OS, in '96.
Slackware Linux - which I have also been using since 1996 and which is still my favorite flavor of linux - is also a "plain text OS" for me. I use it as a server OS and a personal PC OS and never install a graphical UI.
As an aside, in one of my senior college classes, there was a senior computer science major who couldn't figure out how to do one of our assignments.*
Idiot: "How do I do xxxxxx?"
Me: "Well, first, open a command prompt and..."
Idiot: "A what?"
Me: "A command prompt and then..."
Idiot: "What do you mean?"
Me: "You know, DOS? Or at least, what passes for DOS on Win2k."
Idiot: "Where's the icon?"
Me: "Just go to start, run, and type in 'cmd' "
Idiot: "Run...? Oh, I had a friend of mine take that off the menu. I've never used it."
Me: ". .
*basically to write a little command-line program that took arguments and could use pipes. Not exactly rocket science.
>>Just curious, what ogg encoder/decoder software were you using? Was it recent?
Oggenc, using libogg 1.0 I believe. Played back with winamp 5, whatever they use as their decoder. We also tried converting the Ogg back to a PCM wave file and burning the new and old wav to CD, to see if that made a difference.*
I'm not sure if there is a limitation on FLAC that makes it unable to carry more information than OGG, but remember that the real limitation would then be the CDs, which are mastered at 16bit/44.1kHz. I picked up several DVD-A disks on clearance and have been wanting to try them out. If nothing else, they should have a much better dynamic range than CD (and potentially SACD.) I just need a DVD-A player***.
The point is, DVD-A will have a ton more data to encode than what we currently have with CD - if anyone ever bypasses the much-harder-to-break-than-DVD-video encoding scheme.
*To be played back on a SACD* player, rather than a potentially noisy sound card jack.
**on loan from said friend.
***Regular DVD players play back a DD/DTS track, rather than the higher-quality DVD-A track. Even that much sounds nice.
>>So, people who would benefit from a 24/96 ogg are extremely small in number.
h tm
Have a read: "There's Life Above 20kHz!"
http://www.cco.caltech.edu/~boyk/spectra/spectra.
Feel free to jump to section X & XI (results).
I haven't been able to find too much more, newer work done on the subject, so I don't think there is a great deal of scientific interest in it. Interesting read though.
Most of the time I am content with a good Ogg encode (I mean, hell, I'd never have heard the difference if the samples weren't played back to back!) I generally only use FLAC for a) my favorite albums and b) classical music. Size wouldn't be an issue... but for the fact that I keep an oft-updated mirror of the data on a second computer. As drive space is become rather inexpensive, I forsee a time when lossless will be the way to go, except for portables.
*Ascend Acoustics CBM-300 stereo pair, HSU sub, and a HK AVR-325 receiver.
UltraVNC's default action was 'quarantine', thank you very much.
It also felt the need to alter my hosts file for me. It didn't like the fact that I had "ads.msn.com" pointing to 127.0.0.1 (as well as over 100 other ad domains; the only one it cared about was MSN!)
>> And depending on the speaker's idea of pronunciation, you might see 'an history' on occasion.
Many journalism programs teach that. It makes me want to violently throttle the speaker, every time I hear someone say it on TV. *sigh*
>>
Ordinary laser lights will not do much to the eyes, as far as I know. Obviously if this light is going 3k feet in the air, it's not an ordinary laser. It's obviously quite high-powered and capable of causing injury.
>>
You're kidding, right? Even the laser at the supermarket for scanning prices can damage your eye. It's less than 0.5mW, so casual exposure won't hurt you.
A 5mW red laser pointer is another matter. A few seconds can cause temporary blindness. In under a minute, you can cause permenant damage. And as to range, with my 5mW 632nm diode (common in 'bright' pointers), I've been able to reflect it off a stop sign just over a mile away. I used my telescope mount to align it and keep it steady (you'd need steadier hands than mine!), but the reflection was visible to the naked eye. Nothing fancy involved.
The human eye is most sensitive to green (in the middle of the visible spectrum) so a 5mW green laser looks much brighter. And can do much more damage. And so far, we've just talked about Class IV and III lasers.
Someone with a more powerful laser could do some serious harm in a short amount of time. Most CO2 lasers aren't in the band visible to the human eye and are very powerful. For a couple thousand dollars and some surplus parts, you can build a laser that will cut metal. If you're really gung-ho and have some skills, you can do it much cheaper.
This incident? I think they're making the guy a patsy. Even if he was being stupid and shining a laser at a vehicle in the air, he probably didn't think it would hurt anyone. Intent is a very important concept. It doesn't indemnify him, but it ought to suggest more appropriate penalties.
What should his punishment be? Since no one was hurt, I'd say probation and community service.
While I certainly don't believe that the US had any direct involvement in the events of September 11th, I also certainly see the parallel between the WTC and the burning of the German Reichstag in 1933. Be very wary of anything done in the name of 'anti-terrorism.'
>>Of course, Occam's Razor says "most likely" or "usually" as you put it. The significance is that the simplest explanation isn't ALWAYS the correct one.
>>
Exactly. Weird things happen that are absolutely unexpected and most certainly not the 'easy answer'.
I have a book around here somewhere that has an article about a man who was stabbed and killed at a baseball game in the 30s. The simple explanation? Probably that someone didn't like him very much, right?
The unlikely truth of the matter was that the man sitting on his right was passing an open pocket knife to the man on his left and a foul ball struck the hand with the knife, driving the point into his throat. That's something about which - even if you were there - you'd be saying, "What the hell?! Can't be."
Even the fact that someone can spend a dollar on a lottery ticket and win millions of dollars is pretty crazy. Some people call it "a tax on people who can't do statistics", but I personally know someone who is $10,000 richer for a $1 ticket. It defies the odds.
Ocham's Razor.
Explain: He has millions of dollars.
dollars.
Simple explanations: He inherited it. He stole it. He earned it with his business.
Not simple: He managed to beat the 1 in 135,145,920 odds and won the Mega Millions jackpot. (Real odds)
>> If you are compiling a lot of code and have several Linux boxes around you could look into DistCC Nice to have around if you will install Gentoo on anything
>>
You aren't kidding. Just for fun, I tried Gentoo on my 'linux backup box' (Pentium 133, 256mb ram, 200Gb hardware raid-1). Got everything up in running in about an hour, thanks to my 2.8Ghz desktop and 3Ghz laptop running distcc. (Obviously, not compiling X.org, etc.)
...just not mass produced or affordable.
I'm really hoping there is a push to market for these things. Sony has exclusive rights to the technology, developed by Silicon Light Machines. I've read anecdotal accounts from people who've seen the technology demoed that the images were amazingly crisp and vivid.
This link for a little blurb & small picture
This link for an abstract & link to a semi-technical pdf
Kodak just introduced a similar, competing system, as you can read here. Maybe that will drive the pricepoint down...if the demand exists.
I know I want one.
Even a tiny nuclear reactor contains more radioactive material than the Hiroshima bomb. Blowing one up with a truckload of conventional explosives may not kill a lot of people, but surely will contaminate a large area for a long time.
One of the "problems" with so called dirty-bombs fashioned from reactor material is that you really can't kill a lot of people. The effect will be mostly psychological.
Thankfully, the material inside anything but a research reactor is very low enrichment. Say 3-10% at most. To make a real Nuke, you need 85-95% enrichment. And a pretty sophisticated bomb design - you can't just pack it with TNT and hope.
So what are we left with?
If you just blow the thing up: really, really deadly stuff (like radioactive Xenon, etc) has a short half-life or otherwise quickly clears out. What you're left to deal with are several chunks of uranium. They're harmful, but only localy. The area can be closed off and decontaminated. Few people will die.
If you want a much bigger disbursion: You have to first grind the nasty stuff down into a fine powder. Very risky to do for a terrorist, even with lots of fancy equipment that likely wouldn't have. When you blow it up, it spreads the dust over a much larger area. The downside is that the dose to any indiviual is going to be much lower. You'll make some people sick, sure, but you won't kill many people.
This is all Good For Us(tm).
A much greater threat is theft of radioisotopes from hospitals, etc, which are relatively unguarded. Nothing like putting "deadly radioisotopes" in a town's water supply to comepletely freak out the general populace.
Which is what they* want.
*insert your favorite evil terrorist group here.
Hmm, nuclear reactions? Isn't the point to get hydrogen to be used with fusion(w/ helium3) without any byproducts? If you need to start using nuclear reactions, this still isn't a 'great' way to get hydrogen. I still believe using solarpanels and using electrolysis for getting hydrogen is still the best way. No CO2, no nuclear waste... Well that's just my opinion...
Fusion of helium-3 would be divine. Pity there isn't much here on Earth. (The moon is another matter.) It also usually costs hundred of dollars per litre. Bear in mind that there are several other reaction paths to fusion that don't require He-3. They aren't as ideal - just more practical.
Solar panels have their place, but they're never going to produce the amount of hydrogen needed for even a single nation's infrastructure. Even if solar panels were much more efficient, electrolysis itself isn't very energy efficient.
(As an aside, I was pleasantly suprised to run across an article about using good old Stirling engines & an array of mirrors to generate power from the sun - at higer efficiencies than panels and at costs comparable to fossil fuels. Have a read)
Now, on to the point of the story. Basically, some of the Generation IV nuclear reactor designs* can be used to produce lots of hydrogen, more or less as a byproduct of their operation. (Because of the extreme temperatures) So the fact that you've suddenly got the means for a hydrogen economy is a side-benefit.
Gen. IV reactor designs are cleaner, safer, more efficient, and generally smaller than their clunky old (current) counterparts. Yes, they are still fission. And while MOX reactors (which compose some of the designs) have questions about fuel reuse, a bona fide fusion reactor can be used to re-enrich spent fission fuel. (ie, blanket of uranium around reaction chamber, etc.) Fusion lets you make fission clean, or as close to it as possible.
Why is that important? Because no one is going to initially drop the trillion or so dollars to build the first commercially viable fusion reactor, when and if one is ever designed. ITER itself will be just a stepping stone, if it ever actually gets built. In the mean time, we'll still be fissioning away...
*Because of irrational fear and paranoia in the USA, most commercial reactors are Generation I or II. Not much has changed since the 70s. Nuclear can be dangerous, but it generally isn't and needn't be. It's debatable whether government run power plants would be any better, but it scares the hell out of me that our reactors in the USA are run as cheaply as they can possibly get away with. Capitalism is great, but you just can't try to undercut safety.
I have a funny feeling that Toy Story 3 may be for the Toy Story movies as Eye of the Beholder 3 was for that game series.
For those who didn't play those games, SSI dropped Westwood Studios (of Legend of Kyranda, Command and Conquer fame) after 2 great titles and opted to do the third installment themselves. And it basically sucked.
But we'll see. Disney can draw from a lot of talent if it really wants to.
Yep. There was a (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) footnote in one of my college math books that the tradition in mathematics was
"...to name [things] after the second person who discovered them. Because Euler probably got there first."
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:-)
"I recomend my highly patentable invention: "typing gloves." Take a pair of cheap wool gloves (army surplus wool gloves work great) and cut the fingers off at the first knuckle (of the gloves, not your hands) and presto! all the warmth of not-cold hands, with the dexterity required to hit 90 wpm."
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High school marching bands have been doing that for years. I always felt it was kinda' silly, but when your [affordable-for-a-public-school] supplier only has two sizes of gloves and there are more than two sizes of hands, cutting off the tips of the fingers can improve dexterity (and blood flow!)
However, towards the end of football season, when it begins to snow... you'd wish you'd kept even that little bit of extra warmth. Just the opposite from your intentions