Disclaimer: I am a nuclear engineering graduate student.
The main reason we're having such problems with nuclear waste repositories such as Yucca mountain is because of the rather long timescales of decay of a small class of fission byproducts. This class of elements (the 'transuranics' ; Z > 92) comprises a very small fraction of the total waste volume and has (in general) the majority of ill-effects, such as long half-lives, toxicity, excessive heat generation, etc. (Different isotopes contribute to each of these effects in some small fashion.)
A key insight to the problem is that we do not have to store the waste as it comes out of the reactor (or otherwise packaged for long-term storage). It is possible to process the spent fuel in a way to transmute the problem isotopes into others that decay away quickly (days to tens/hundreds of years vs 1x10^6 + years). Neutron bombardment is one method of 'bumping' these decay chains onto different tracks. Doing this effectively, efficiently, and economically is
the challenge; many people (including some of my professors) have been working on it at Los Alamos. A good introduction to the process and its rationale are located here.
Of couse, these transmutation schemes require their own energy to run them, and we can't beat the second law of thermodynamics -- it has to come from somewhere. These days it's mostly coal, the same source we're trying to replace with nuclear power! (Don't get me wrong -- nuclear power plants are by far the best we've currently got in terms of environmental impact, reliability, and production capacity. It's not the best, but it's the least of the other evils at the moment.) A better solution would be to provide this energy from an environmentally clean source, such as fusion energy. (It's nice to see two nuclear physics articles in a day!)
Of course, providing funding for disposal solutions such as Yucca and transmutation technologies is expensive and a political hot potato. (It also requires members of Congress to be a bit more forward-sighted, instead of just looking ahead to the next election cycle. Just think: ITER is on the order of $10B [a drop in the bucket to Congress], and has been scrounging for funds from all across the world for more than 20 years -- when it has the potential to unlock safe, envirionmentally clean energy that's powered from constituents of seawater.)
I decided to try out TransGaming's Cedega product shortly after it was released. In addition to their modified wineserver, they have come out with a game manager, Point2Play. This tool has made it _easy_ to install and configure games.
I think that the fact that TransGaming has been able to successfully negotiate with vendors providing copy-protection and other proprietary code for use with Cedega is a big step towards making Linux a more predominant gaming platform. (I was pleasantly surprised to find that some of my titles, such as Warcraft III, ran better with the Cedega emulation!)
While I prefer the idea of native Linux builds of games, there are also many (older) titles that simply will never be ported over. The best thing that we can do at this point is to vote with our wallets. For now, that means TransGaming will keep getting my subscription!
... you can sue anybody for anything. It doesn't mean you'll win."
I like to repeat that saying to myself when reading about lawsuit X, which I heard from a very successful personal injury law firm leader.
IANAL, but it seems to me that this public admission of change from one acceptable accounting practice to another should help things blow over; we'll likely see this case dismissed.
It also strikes me as odd that they'd put out a press release about their shiny new lawsuit without a plaintiff.
I ran a WHOIS query on my domain, kravlor.com, and it was placed in Chicago, IL, as opposed to Minneapolis, MN! Apparently I'm an e-commerce site, whatever that is, too!
I think that when the chief of elections has to apologize -- not for disenfranchising voters, but getting caught disenfranchising voters -- election officials will really need to think hard about using their products in any way, shape, or form.
In all my voting experience in Minnesota, we've used optical scan machines that have an easy to read paper ballot that can be manually verified. I look forward to using that technology in the future.
If the bad Photoshop work and the poor website wasn't enough to set your fraud alarms off, some basic physics can be used to show that this vehicle is completely unsafe if it were to really exist. Being a certified diver myself, perhaps a bit of information can make my point.
Have you ever sank yourself down to the bottom of the deep end of the pool? Odds are you felt some discomfort in your sinuses. This is because of the increased pressure exerted on your body at depth. Remember the ideal gas law? PV = nRT? Rearrange that to show V is proportional to 1/P. Thus, for a fixed number of molecules of gas, increasing the pressure (due to the water column above you) will reduce the volume that gas occupies. That is, the air in your sinuses is occupying less volume, causing what divers refer to as a 'squeeze.'
Note that the squeeze problem is precisely why you can't use regular swimming goggles when scuba diving; the volume contraction sucks on your eyes.
The way divers fix the 'squeeze' problem is by equalization -- adding more gas molecules into the space that the squeeze is happening in. This is accomplished by either pinching the nose and blowing into it. However, the image of the scooter shows that the hands are sealed away from the head! Any passenger will quickly become uncomfortable when unable to equalize -- certainly before the 10m depth floor.
I also have doubts about buoyancy control of the device.
At least the nitrogen accumulation would not be sufficient at 10m to warrant decompression stops. It's too bad that this device isn't real...;)
No -- it's St. Olaf College. Essentially, outgoing network traffic is allowed, but if it is not going over, say, port 80 with HTTP, it is sent at such a rate as to timeout most connections, including online gaming services such as Battle.net.
I attend college at an institution with highly restrictive Internet access. We are incapable of playing games on the Internet, such as through Battle.net.
Intra-network traffic is not restricted, however. As such, with the help of bnetd, I am able to run a server that is used campuswide daily.
I've been following the case for the past two years, and I'm glad to see that it's finally getting some press -- much as I love Blizzard's products, I'm also a big fan of reverse-engineering products.
The services offered by bnetd (and other offshoots like PvPGN) are invaluable to many users who would otherwise have no means of taking advantage of the matchmaking services offered by Blizzard's official servers. I'd love to see their work continue unhindered by legal pressure.
In my primary education, I was introduced to computers in Kindergarten. Thanks to the wonderful products of MECC such as Number Munchers, Oregon Trail, etc. I was able to enjoy my math, history, and improve my typing skills.
LogoWriter introduced me to programming in third grade. From there, it was integrating BASIC.
I am of the opinion that these types of programs should still be sufficient for today's youth. After all, with crippled (censored) Internet connections, research is out of the question. (Ex: "breast cancer" -- a typical blocked search.) The whole point of the computers in the classroom is to learn valuable, transferable skills (math, programming, etc.) as opposed to "how to use PowerPoint."
While I use Mozilla for email, I have only one regret -- Mozilla's handling of IMAP accounts, which is what my college provides. The behavior is particularly annoying, since upon deleting a message from the IMAP server it does not expunge the account. (Outlook Express provides such a button, and Ximian Evolution provides a button and a handy keyboard shortcut.)
Mozilla does provide a way to expunge; it's called "Compact This Folder" when you right-click on an IMAP folder. While it works, it's not the best in usability.
For what it's worth, though, Mozilla is my client of choice on Windows.
This certainly sounds like an excellent advance in the field.I have been aware of interesting work with shock waves in other materials, for example, to create hydrogen metal, but it wouldn't surprise me if these claimed results were valid.
There are a couple of problems with the article and its claims, however:
Near 100% efficiency -- I'd like to see a reproducable demonstration of this. If it is true, we will have a revolution in the solar cell industry. However, the Second Law of Thermodynamics is a difficult thing to contend with; anything that comes near 100% should set off any good physicist's red flags.
The article is going to be published in the Physical Review Letters -- This is significantly different than saying the article has been published in the PRL's. Such a journal is peer reviewed, which means that other respected scientists in the field have read and commented on the article and its methods, and endorse the results. This case, however, seems a lot like "cold fusion" -- with researchers calling a press conference before letting others reproduce their results.
I hope for the best, but remain sceptical; let's hope these new shockwave effects become easier to generate and exploit!
My research is in atomic physics, and the data analysis routines we currently use are written in MathCad worksheets. While MathCad is great at (and easily readable for) simple integrals or sigma-summations, it gets very slow and incredibly difficult to read.
So difficult, in fact, that this past summer, one of our team members started hard-coding some of our more commonly used custom MathCad routines in C++ and compiling them into.dll files. This offered significant improvements in performance, between thirty and seventy percent increases in speed. Despite that, due to the vast amounts of data we need to analyze, it just isn't enough.
The real reason we had switched to MathCad in the first place was because some of our old C++ programs had become antiquated and we were shifting from UNIX-based to Windows-based machines; the ease of programming in MathCad won out over the performance gains of hard-coding. Now, that decision is beginning to haunt our research group, and I will be working on a new data analysis program, written from scratch, in C++.
The point is, for some applications, speed is essential. Case in point: with our old applications, a typical fit of data would require around 10 seconds on a 486. With our MathCad versions, it takes anywhere from 20 minutes to two hours, depending on the machines (currently Pentium 4 boxes)!
I think that we'll get to the bottom of this eventually. Given enough time, of course.
However, I must wonder about how much of the shuttle funds were diverted to help fund the ISS...
In any event, the loss of Columbia and its crew should not be a terminating point for manned space exploration; we all have to escape from Earth in the end!
If Only More Schools Would Do This...
on
Maine School & Linux
·
· Score: 5, Informative
"... many schools in the western US were being audited by Microsoft concerning the school's use of Windows and Office software..."
After working in a public school district, the fear of Microsoft had certainly struck us. We had an entire room devoted to holding the "Welcome to Windows" manuals, licenses, and EULA's, and were hoping never to get that dreaded audit.
While we were unable to make the switch to Linux while I was working at the district (we had entered into contracts beta-testing new Windows-based attendance/grading software), it certainly struck me as the way to go.
In addition, the quality general computer instruction available at this school is something to strive for. I think that students are quite capable of utilizing Linux efficiently, especially if they are familiarized with it early on.
At St. Olaf College in Northfield, MN, the admins have decided that 150 Kb of our 3 T1 lines is adequate for P2P traffic -- except that it is split over 3000 students at any given time! Packetshaping at Olaf has essentially removed any ability to use the Internet (gaming, FTP, anything not over port 80 -- including secure web traffic (!)).
P2P is still active and running -- but only on-campus, with a nifty little program called Stotella.It's a clone of some old Gnutella clients, but it does the job very effectively; traffic is not shaped at all between buildings.
I suggest getting some mildly skilled programmers and making your own clone!
Keep in mind that if you're creating your own custom-built interfaces, it's *much easier* to rig them for serial/parallel communication, rather than running through Firewire or USB.
Besides, how else are we supposed to play Doom via SS20? IPX?;)
Slashdot Mirror
Any step towards a 3D holographic X-Men simulation chamber is a good step to me. ;)
Disclaimer: I am a nuclear engineering graduate student.
The main reason we're having such problems with nuclear waste repositories such as Yucca mountain is because of the rather long timescales of decay of a small class of fission byproducts. This class of elements (the 'transuranics' ; Z > 92) comprises a very small fraction of the total waste volume and has (in general) the majority of ill-effects, such as long half-lives, toxicity, excessive heat generation, etc. (Different isotopes contribute to each of these effects in some small fashion.)
A key insight to the problem is that we do not have to store the waste as it comes out of the reactor (or otherwise packaged for long-term storage). It is possible to process the spent fuel in a way to transmute the problem isotopes into others that decay away quickly (days to tens/hundreds of years vs 1x10^6 + years). Neutron bombardment is one method of 'bumping' these decay chains onto different tracks. Doing this effectively, efficiently, and economically is the challenge; many people (including some of my professors) have been working on it at Los Alamos. A good introduction to the process and its rationale are located here.
Of couse, these transmutation schemes require their own energy to run them, and we can't beat the second law of thermodynamics -- it has to come from somewhere. These days it's mostly coal, the same source we're trying to replace with nuclear power! (Don't get me wrong -- nuclear power plants are by far the best we've currently got in terms of environmental impact, reliability, and production capacity. It's not the best, but it's the least of the other evils at the moment.) A better solution would be to provide this energy from an environmentally clean source, such as fusion energy. (It's nice to see two nuclear physics articles in a day!)
Of course, providing funding for disposal solutions such as Yucca and transmutation technologies is expensive and a political hot potato. (It also requires members of Congress to be a bit more forward-sighted, instead of just looking ahead to the next election cycle. Just think: ITER is on the order of $10B [a drop in the bucket to Congress], and has been scrounging for funds from all across the world for more than 20 years -- when it has the potential to unlock safe, envirionmentally clean energy that's powered from constituents of seawater.)
This should be an _interesting_ movie to see, given the total lack of plot in the games and the cast they're able to assemble!
... and I want to see John take some serious revenge for Hellspawn killing your pet bunny. :)
I decided to try out TransGaming's Cedega product shortly after it was released. In addition to their modified wineserver, they have come out with a game manager, Point2Play. This tool has made it _easy_ to install and configure games.
I think that the fact that TransGaming has been able to successfully negotiate with vendors providing copy-protection and other proprietary code for use with Cedega is a big step towards making Linux a more predominant gaming platform. (I was pleasantly surprised to find that some of my titles, such as Warcraft III, ran better with the Cedega emulation!)
While I prefer the idea of native Linux builds of games, there are also many (older) titles that simply will never be ported over. The best thing that we can do at this point is to vote with our wallets. For now, that means TransGaming will keep getting my subscription!
... you can sue anybody for anything. It doesn't mean you'll win."
I like to repeat that saying to myself when reading about lawsuit X, which I heard from a very successful personal injury law firm leader.
IANAL, but it seems to me that this public admission of change from one acceptable accounting practice to another should help things blow over; we'll likely see this case dismissed.
It also strikes me as odd that they'd put out a press release about their shiny new lawsuit without a plaintiff.
I ran a WHOIS query on my domain, kravlor.com, and it was placed in Chicago, IL, as opposed to Minneapolis, MN! Apparently I'm an e-commerce site, whatever that is, too!
I think that when the chief of elections has to apologize -- not for disenfranchising voters, but getting caught disenfranchising voters -- election officials will really need to think hard about using their products in any way, shape, or form.
In all my voting experience in Minnesota, we've used optical scan machines that have an easy to read paper ballot that can be manually verified. I look forward to using that technology in the future.
If the bad Photoshop work and the poor website wasn't enough to set your fraud alarms off, some basic physics can be used to show that this vehicle is completely unsafe if it were to really exist. Being a certified diver myself, perhaps a bit of information can make my point.
Have you ever sank yourself down to the bottom of the deep end of the pool? Odds are you felt some discomfort in your sinuses. This is because of the increased pressure exerted on your body at depth. Remember the ideal gas law? PV = nRT? Rearrange that to show V is proportional to 1/P. Thus, for a fixed number of molecules of gas, increasing the pressure (due to the water column above you) will reduce the volume that gas occupies. That is, the air in your sinuses is occupying less volume, causing what divers refer to as a 'squeeze.'
Note that the squeeze problem is precisely why you can't use regular swimming goggles when scuba diving; the volume contraction sucks on your eyes.
The way divers fix the 'squeeze' problem is by equalization -- adding more gas molecules into the space that the squeeze is happening in. This is accomplished by either pinching the nose and blowing into it. However, the image of the scooter shows that the hands are sealed away from the head! Any passenger will quickly become uncomfortable when unable to equalize -- certainly before the 10m depth floor.
I also have doubts about buoyancy control of the device.
At least the nitrogen accumulation would not be sufficient at 10m to warrant decompression stops. It's too bad that this device isn't real... ;)
Besides, what happens when the radio transmitter breaks?
No -- it's St. Olaf College. Essentially, outgoing network traffic is allowed, but if it is not going over, say, port 80 with HTTP, it is sent at such a rate as to timeout most connections, including online gaming services such as Battle.net.
I attend college at an institution with highly restrictive Internet access. We are incapable of playing games on the Internet, such as through Battle.net. Intra-network traffic is not restricted, however. As such, with the help of bnetd, I am able to run a server that is used campuswide daily. I've been following the case for the past two years, and I'm glad to see that it's finally getting some press -- much as I love Blizzard's products, I'm also a big fan of reverse-engineering products. The services offered by bnetd (and other offshoots like PvPGN) are invaluable to many users who would otherwise have no means of taking advantage of the matchmaking services offered by Blizzard's official servers. I'd love to see their work continue unhindered by legal pressure.
In my primary education, I was introduced to computers in Kindergarten. Thanks to the wonderful products of MECC such as Number Munchers, Oregon Trail, etc. I was able to enjoy my math, history, and improve my typing skills.
LogoWriter introduced me to programming in third grade. From there, it was integrating BASIC.
I am of the opinion that these types of programs should still be sufficient for today's youth. After all, with crippled (censored) Internet connections, research is out of the question. (Ex: "breast cancer" -- a typical blocked search.) The whole point of the computers in the classroom is to learn valuable, transferable skills (math, programming, etc.) as opposed to "how to use PowerPoint."
While I use Mozilla for email, I have only one regret -- Mozilla's handling of IMAP accounts, which is what my college provides. The behavior is particularly annoying, since upon deleting a message from the IMAP server it does not expunge the account. (Outlook Express provides such a button, and Ximian Evolution provides a button and a handy keyboard shortcut.) Mozilla does provide a way to expunge; it's called "Compact This Folder" when you right-click on an IMAP folder. While it works, it's not the best in usability. For what it's worth, though, Mozilla is my client of choice on Windows.
This certainly sounds like an excellent advance in the field.I have been aware of interesting work with shock waves in other materials, for example, to create hydrogen metal, but it wouldn't surprise me if these claimed results were valid.
There are a couple of problems with the article and its claims, however:
I hope for the best, but remain sceptical; let's hope these new shockwave effects become easier to generate and exploit!
My research is in atomic physics, and the data analysis routines we currently use are written in MathCad worksheets. While MathCad is great at (and easily readable for) simple integrals or sigma-summations, it gets very slow and incredibly difficult to read.
So difficult, in fact, that this past summer, one of our team members started hard-coding some of our more commonly used custom MathCad routines in C++ and compiling them into .dll files. This offered significant improvements in performance, between thirty and seventy percent increases in speed. Despite that, due to the vast amounts of data we need to analyze, it just isn't enough.
The real reason we had switched to MathCad in the first place was because some of our old C++ programs had become antiquated and we were shifting from UNIX-based to Windows-based machines; the ease of programming in MathCad won out over the performance gains of hard-coding. Now, that decision is beginning to haunt our research group, and I will be working on a new data analysis program, written from scratch, in C++.
The point is, for some applications, speed is essential. Case in point: with our old applications, a typical fit of data would require around 10 seconds on a 486. With our MathCad versions, it takes anywhere from 20 minutes to two hours, depending on the machines (currently Pentium 4 boxes)!
I think that we'll get to the bottom of this eventually. Given enough time, of course.
However, I must wonder about how much of the shuttle funds were diverted to help fund the ISS...
In any event, the loss of Columbia and its crew should not be a terminating point for manned space exploration; we all have to escape from Earth in the end!
After working in a public school district, the fear of Microsoft had certainly struck us. We had an entire room devoted to holding the "Welcome to Windows" manuals, licenses, and EULA's, and were hoping never to get that dreaded audit.
While we were unable to make the switch to Linux while I was working at the district (we had entered into contracts beta-testing new Windows-based attendance/grading software), it certainly struck me as the way to go.
In addition, the quality general computer instruction available at this school is something to strive for. I think that students are quite capable of utilizing Linux efficiently, especially if they are familiarized with it early on.
At St. Olaf College in Northfield, MN, the admins have decided that 150 Kb of our 3 T1 lines is adequate for P2P traffic -- except that it is split over 3000 students at any given time! Packetshaping at Olaf has essentially removed any ability to use the Internet (gaming, FTP, anything not over port 80 -- including secure web traffic (!)).
P2P is still active and running -- but only on-campus, with a nifty little program called Stotella.It's a clone of some old Gnutella clients, but it does the job very effectively; traffic is not shaped at all between buildings.
I suggest getting some mildly skilled programmers and making your own clone!
Keep in mind that if you're creating your own custom-built interfaces, it's *much easier* to rig them for serial/parallel communication, rather than running through Firewire or USB. Besides, how else are we supposed to play Doom via SS20? IPX? ;)