And it's already in your groundwater. Tritium is Hydrogen-3, and though it's not (obviously) the most common form of hydrogen in our environment, it does exist naturally. It doesn't bind to your body if you drink it, which makes it a lot better than a lot of crap that ends up in our water, and it has a short halflife, so assuming that the batteries manage to hold together for the supposed 30 years, the amount of radioactive material available to leak out into the environment will have already dropped by more than 200%.
Voyager didn't use tritium batteries; they wouldn't have been powerful enough, or long lasting enough.
I wouldn't worry more about using this stuff (if it works) than a lithium battery. They both have their dangers. People are so damn paranoid about radiation; this is better than a lot of stuff we expose ourselves to everyday, without a thought.
Shrug. I'm not against tritium batteries. Most of the studies I've seen on them have had the tritium encapsulated in a honeycomb-like matrix, to maximize storage, and energy generation.
That would seem to make it a lot less likely that you'd have any significant amount of tritium released by accident, and breathing vapor off a burning battery is harmful regardless of whether its an atomic battery or just a metal laden lithium battery.
Yea, I overstated the beta emitter case...Lot of beta emitters are commonly used in medical imaging, because they can be tracked and they don't stay in the body, so you're not getting a long term dosage.
Tritium is commonly used in a lot of places. If your wristwatch glows in the dark, it's probably tritium.
It's not significant really. The amount of tritium in this, even concentrated, is pretty low, and would make a really poor weapon...On the order of throwing florescent bulbs at someone to try to poison them with Mercury vapor. It also disperses pretty quickly, so the lasting effect is minimal in the area.
Tritium is available in the environment already; it's a naturally occurring isotope of hydrogen, and it's half life is pretty low (~12 years).
The power demands are wildly different between a fricking SUB and a fricking LAPTOP. The power generation is also far different; subs have active fission piles, they're literally mobile nuke reactors.
Atomic batteries, on the other hand, are just storage for existing nuclear material. They generate electricity as part of the radioactive decay process, either by using the heat generated by the decay, or by harvesting the incident energy of the decay process.
Types of radioisotope batteries (like RTG's) have been used in the space program forever.
Meh. It's a beta emitter; beta radiation is completely harmless to humans as long as you have a nice layer of skin between you and it.
However, when it gets into the body it is EXTREMELY harmful, so the worry is that people will break the batteries open and release toxic crap into the environment where it can be inhaled/ingested.
Oh, it's probably to "blame" in the sense that it's new, popular, and network intensive. I don't see any indication that it's doing anything WRONG, however.
Hard to say anything without knowing what was done, preferably from someone who isn't a student tech. It sounds like they saturated his bandwidth and he throttled 'em, which is pretty draconian. Sometimes, that's the only solution, especially if your university isn't all that tech savvy.
The first time I ever saw a solar water heater it was about the most ghetto thing imaginable...Everything bought from some seedy garden supply store, and put together crudely. Attached to a big old non-functional water heater wrapped in about a dozen layers of insulation.
Whenever you walked past it, you were expected to give it a nudge in the direction of the sun.
That damn thing produced a full tank of hot water, even on a day with only partial sun. It's a powerful and efficient technology.
Yea, that's pretty much what I was thinking. Hell, using clear plastic piping, and a small pump, you could circulate masses of the stuff (gently, I'd imagine) through an array of tubes (much like the internet) that could be set up on any kind of flat surface...Much the same as a big solar water heater. Put a T bend every now and then to pull the hydrogen out, and you're good to go.
Smarter people than me will work out the ideal deployments, but it's silly to think in terms of 2 dimensional space when we live in a 3 dimensional world.
That's more a credit to a highly paid defense lawyer than a polemic on the common man.
Anyway, 10 out of 12 thought he was guilty. That means only 1/6 of the jurors were idiots, which is way better than the ratio in our current government.
It produces nearly enough hydrogen per acre to make "backyard" hydrogen farms feasible.
Instead of thinking entirely in terms of big honking swaths of farmland covered in algae, think of 5 or 6 vertical tanks in every backyard, producing ~4kg of hydrogen a day. That would cover automotive energy needs for the average person, probably with some left over.
Also, while farming this stuff right in the ocean wouldn't make much sense, floating farms would be practical, and a good use of space.
I'm a big fan of the idea of using the kind of space that we already waste for energy production (e.g the tops of every wal-mart in america covered in solar cells). Even a land efficient method like this one could benefit from using parts of land that we already use for another, non-conflicting, purpose.
8 years of post secondary education would be pointless...I've known some extremely well educated people I wouldn't want anywhere near the government, and I've known some people who didn't finish high school who wouldn't bother me a bit.
Likewise "Volunteers" would still be people who really want to exert control over others. This is the big problem already. Anyone who wants to be in charge is going to be suspect. Better to set up a system to pick a random sampling of people from all over and MAKE them serve...That should keep the majority from having any desire to be there at all. Then make all laws have to be renewed every decade, and all new laws need a supermajority to pass, and are subject to ratification in yearly nationwide elections.
Always amuses me to see how many people correlate education with superiority. I'll side with Heinlein on that one...Better to have military service as a prerequisite for citizenship, because then, at least, the citizens would have to have shown themselves willing put themselves at the service of the country, even to the point of losing their lives, before they could exercise their franchise. Education says nothing about the person so educated.
If I HAD a problem with it I wouldn't use it. I know this will shock you to the core, but, for what I use Microsoft products for, they serve me pretty well. My games work, I seldom need to reboot, I have 15 applications open, and the machine's not crapping itself.
I'm working on a Windows machine right now, and the most troublesome piece of software I use on it is fricking FIREFOX, and I am actually considering boycotting it...To the point that I've actually bothered to download the new version of Opera for the first time in god knows how long.
Right now I'm running Eclipse, Putty(x4), Navicat, Reflections, Dreamweaver, MS Management Console, MySQL Query Browser(x2), Outlook, Firefox, and Access 2003. Nothings causing me any problems, I'm on top of all my systems, and I'm satisfied...If I wasn't I'd be using something else.
Apparently though, I'm some kind of intellectual traitor for not being miserable, and not boycotting all these products that aren't making my life a living hell, just because a zealot thinks I should. And yes, if you decide that my using Windows software is symptomatic of the moral decline of the US you're undoubtably a zealot.
People like me, who are comfortable dealing with open and closed source software do more for OSS and the free software movement than all the hairy fanatics who equate closed source with all the evils of the world. If you can't even appreciate that there are legitimate reasons why people use closed source products instead of their OSS competitors, you are NEVER going to create a superior OSS product because you have absolutely no idea of what the POINT of the product actually IS.
Be a zealot all you like. Spend time telling people how stupid they are for using what they're used to. No skin off my nose, because I don't have an irrational emotional stake in using any software.
I'm not wedded to using a Microsoft product when I can get it done better with OSS, and I'm not committed to forcing OSS solutions on people who don't want them.
I like pc games. I like to play them; it's one of my best sources of stress relief. I've got way too much experience with WINE and I can make most games run in WINE...Eventually. But screw that! I don't want to buy a game then spend hours tweaking things to get it to run; I do enough of that crap at work. I want to just play it.
I occasionally have to use Access and MSSQL Server. I occasionally have to use Visual Studio. It's not even always about corporate; if someone has a screwed up database, or a.Net site, and they want to pay me to fix it, I'm not above taking their money just because I don't like using those products, and I'm not going to limit myself by telling people, "Oh, I'm sorry. While I'm capable of doing this work, I refuse to do so because I'd prefer you were using OSS."
I ended up out of work for a good while during the Dot Bomb, and OSS made it possible for me to make a nice living, but I sure as hell didn't turn down Microsoft work when my customers asked me for it. Why send them to someone else when I can do the work? And you can make some good converts that way; I hooked a lot of people on Samba.
It's not about right and wrong, or good and evil. It's about tools, and giving people what they need to do their jobs. Don't cripple yourself by deciding that you're only going to deal with the tools you like.
Haven't really used Kontact, or tried to deploy it on anyone, so I'm not going to make any statements about how good or bad it is at doing its thing.
I will say however, that it looks like an excellent step in the right direction and if they get it polished enough and clean enough, and if the management back-end is good enough, it has some real potential.
One of the things that will bite you in the ass every time with an OSS deployment is the hide-bound middle aged woman segment of the population. They're not all female, despite the descriptor, but they're all very set in their ways, and very VERY willing to complain about anything that doesn't work like they're used to it working.
Worst of all, even though they're almost never in management, they're almost always in a position where management has to listen to them, because they're productive, loud, and they move and think as one being. When they can't open an email or a website, or they can't put pink ponies on the background of their emails, they will complain. And don't dismiss their concerns! 90% of their concerns are trivial or cosmetic, and the other 10% are horror-show, real nitty gritty issues that are valid, real, and hard as hell to fix.
I've had that contingent break a lot of deployments. Never underestimate the secretaries.
It's easy to say when your needs are simple and straightforward. I use Linux wherever I can, and I advocate its use (especially) on failure-critical applications, because it's stable, lightweight, and it doesn't "just break" the way Windows occasionally does.
There are needs, however, that are not met by commonly available OSS software. My usual example is GIMP. I use GIMP, I like GIMP, but it's not a professional product. For the average user, retouching family photos, no problems. It works great. For a professional user, designing images that will need to be printed at some big printing house, it's lack of CMYK support is a deal breaker.
That crap shows up over and over again, that one little niggling little crappy feature that you've never even heard of, or that you thought no one wanted or used, will become this giant sticking point when you're trying to convert someone to an all linux/bsd system. OS/X has a lot less of that sort of problem...Mac, for all it's commercials to the contrary, has very friendly relationships with most of the big business software providers...Still though, there are issues (goddamn internet explorer) which can crop up and cause problems.
In a nutshell, we've come a long way toward being able to toss windows completely, but if you have complex needs, or you need certain applications, you can still be forced into using it.
Ost is the offline mirror of the crap on the server. The pst is your local archive (which, trust me, still exists in Outlook/Exchange systems). Most Exchange setups require people archive mail past a certain point, because the storage demands get obscene pretty quick.
As for the massive files, I don't know what to tell ya. I still have to fix the 2 gig ones, and we're on 2003. We have a bunch of users using Entourage which may be the source of the bulk of the pst issues; I don't manage (or particularly care for) Exchange, I just know what I have to deal with.
I can't imagine an "I slept at work" scenario in my job that didn't involve obscene overtime and after hours work. Where the hell would you find time? Where the hell do people get these JOBS?
I'm a linux/unix guy, and I've been the only one in more than a few places of employment. Sure, I produce cool things, but it doesn't make them comfortable, it makes them scared, because I'm the only one who can support my stuff. What if I quit? What if I die? Where before they were mostly windows, now there is all this crap that's going to need someone who knows how to work it, someone with more skill than your run-of-the-mill MCSE.
Freaks 'em out. They have knee jerk responses toward my requests for more equipment.
I think both the linux and the mac software libraries suck. Mac sucks less, because Microsoft isn't scared of them, and because companies like Adobe worship them, but it's still not all that great. Where I work we have tons of all three; linux and unix servers, mac desktops (and a couple of Mac servers too), and Windows desktops and servers. I'd like to replace half the windows servers with Linux servers, but so far, no luck. Don't really have any use for Mac servers; they don't play any better with Windows than Linux, and they're harder to maintain, and more expensive, and dammit, servers don't need to be all pretty.
I'm not completely anti-Vista. I've used it; it's buggy, but it'll get better. I'm used to the fact that Windows copies files as slow as crap...XP isn't all that quick either, compared to most Linux filesystems.
You didn't listen, okay. I have a legacy interface that only runs in OS 9, "Classic" mode. It does NOT NOT NO WAY run on ANY NEW MAC, because there IS NO CLASSIC ON THE INTEL MACS. Is that clear enough? No one is recompiling 10 year old software on the new hardware. That stuff is dead.
There is an emulator, which I linked in my original post, it is nice for some things but if you need advanced font support, fancy printing, or more than 512megs of RAM, you're screwed, because it doesn't cut it.
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And it's already in your groundwater. Tritium is Hydrogen-3, and though it's not (obviously) the most common form of hydrogen in our environment, it does exist naturally. It doesn't bind to your body if you drink it, which makes it a lot better than a lot of crap that ends up in our water, and it has a short halflife, so assuming that the batteries manage to hold together for the supposed 30 years, the amount of radioactive material available to leak out into the environment will have already dropped by more than 200%.
Voyager didn't use tritium batteries; they wouldn't have been powerful enough, or long lasting enough.
I wouldn't worry more about using this stuff (if it works) than a lithium battery. They both have their dangers. People are so damn paranoid about radiation; this is better than a lot of stuff we expose ourselves to everyday, without a thought.
Shrug. I'm not against tritium batteries. Most of the studies I've seen on them have had the tritium encapsulated in a honeycomb-like matrix, to maximize storage, and energy generation.
That would seem to make it a lot less likely that you'd have any significant amount of tritium released by accident, and breathing vapor off a burning battery is harmful regardless of whether its an atomic battery or just a metal laden lithium battery.
Yea, I overstated the beta emitter case...Lot of beta emitters are commonly used in medical imaging, because they can be tracked and they don't stay in the body, so you're not getting a long term dosage.
Tritium is commonly used in a lot of places. If your wristwatch glows in the dark, it's probably tritium.
It's not significant really. The amount of tritium in this, even concentrated, is pretty low, and would make a really poor weapon...On the order of throwing florescent bulbs at someone to try to poison them with Mercury vapor. It also disperses pretty quickly, so the lasting effect is minimal in the area.
Tritium is available in the environment already; it's a naturally occurring isotope of hydrogen, and it's half life is pretty low (~12 years).
The power demands are wildly different between a fricking SUB and a fricking LAPTOP. The power generation is also far different; subs have active fission piles, they're literally mobile nuke reactors.
Atomic batteries, on the other hand, are just storage for existing nuclear material. They generate electricity as part of the radioactive decay process, either by using the heat generated by the decay, or by harvesting the incident energy of the decay process.
Types of radioisotope batteries (like RTG's) have been used in the space program forever.
Meh. It's a beta emitter; beta radiation is completely harmless to humans as long as you have a nice layer of skin between you and it.
However, when it gets into the body it is EXTREMELY harmful, so the worry is that people will break the batteries open and release toxic crap into the environment where it can be inhaled/ingested.
Oh, it's probably to "blame" in the sense that it's new, popular, and network intensive. I don't see any indication that it's doing anything WRONG, however.
Hard to say anything without knowing what was done, preferably from someone who isn't a student tech. It sounds like they saturated his bandwidth and he throttled 'em, which is pretty draconian. Sometimes, that's the only solution, especially if your university isn't all that tech savvy.
The first time I ever saw a solar water heater it was about the most ghetto thing imaginable...Everything bought from some seedy garden supply store, and put together crudely. Attached to a big old non-functional water heater wrapped in about a dozen layers of insulation.
Whenever you walked past it, you were expected to give it a nudge in the direction of the sun.
That damn thing produced a full tank of hot water, even on a day with only partial sun. It's a powerful and efficient technology.
Yea, that's pretty much what I was thinking. Hell, using clear plastic piping, and a small pump, you could circulate masses of the stuff (gently, I'd imagine) through an array of tubes (much like the internet) that could be set up on any kind of flat surface...Much the same as a big solar water heater. Put a T bend every now and then to pull the hydrogen out, and you're good to go.
Smarter people than me will work out the ideal deployments, but it's silly to think in terms of 2 dimensional space when we live in a 3 dimensional world.
"Farm lads gone wild"
"Naked Farm lad algae wrestling"
"You're not the usual algae delivery boy"
The economic possibilities of farm lads are nothing to sneeze at.
That's more a credit to a highly paid defense lawyer than a polemic on the common man.
Anyway, 10 out of 12 thought he was guilty. That means only 1/6 of the jurors were idiots, which is way better than the ratio in our current government.
It produces nearly enough hydrogen per acre to make "backyard" hydrogen farms feasible.
Instead of thinking entirely in terms of big honking swaths of farmland covered in algae, think of 5 or 6 vertical tanks in every backyard, producing ~4kg of hydrogen a day. That would cover automotive energy needs for the average person, probably with some left over.
Also, while farming this stuff right in the ocean wouldn't make much sense, floating farms would be practical, and a good use of space.
I'm a big fan of the idea of using the kind of space that we already waste for energy production (e.g the tops of every wal-mart in america covered in solar cells). Even a land efficient method like this one could benefit from using parts of land that we already use for another, non-conflicting, purpose.
Oh, I don't disagree. I never demoed it and had anyone say, "Oooo, I want that."
8 years of post secondary education would be pointless...I've known some extremely well educated people I wouldn't want anywhere near the government, and I've known some people who didn't finish high school who wouldn't bother me a bit.
Likewise "Volunteers" would still be people who really want to exert control over others. This is the big problem already. Anyone who wants to be in charge is going to be suspect. Better to set up a system to pick a random sampling of people from all over and MAKE them serve...That should keep the majority from having any desire to be there at all. Then make all laws have to be renewed every decade, and all new laws need a supermajority to pass, and are subject to ratification in yearly nationwide elections.
Always amuses me to see how many people correlate education with superiority. I'll side with Heinlein on that one...Better to have military service as a prerequisite for citizenship, because then, at least, the citizens would have to have shown themselves willing put themselves at the service of the country, even to the point of losing their lives, before they could exercise their franchise. Education says nothing about the person so educated.
If I HAD a problem with it I wouldn't use it. I know this will shock you to the core, but, for what I use Microsoft products for, they serve me pretty well. My games work, I seldom need to reboot, I have 15 applications open, and the machine's not crapping itself.
I'm working on a Windows machine right now, and the most troublesome piece of software I use on it is fricking FIREFOX, and I am actually considering boycotting it...To the point that I've actually bothered to download the new version of Opera for the first time in god knows how long.
Right now I'm running Eclipse, Putty(x4), Navicat, Reflections, Dreamweaver, MS Management Console, MySQL Query Browser(x2), Outlook, Firefox, and Access 2003. Nothings causing me any problems, I'm on top of all my systems, and I'm satisfied...If I wasn't I'd be using something else.
Apparently though, I'm some kind of intellectual traitor for not being miserable, and not boycotting all these products that aren't making my life a living hell, just because a zealot thinks I should. And yes, if you decide that my using Windows software is symptomatic of the moral decline of the US you're undoubtably a zealot.
People like me, who are comfortable dealing with open and closed source software do more for OSS and the free software movement than all the hairy fanatics who equate closed source with all the evils of the world. If you can't even appreciate that there are legitimate reasons why people use closed source products instead of their OSS competitors, you are NEVER going to create a superior OSS product because you have absolutely no idea of what the POINT of the product actually IS.
Be a zealot all you like. Spend time telling people how stupid they are for using what they're used to. No skin off my nose, because I don't have an irrational emotional stake in using any software.
I'm not wedded to using a Microsoft product when I can get it done better with OSS, and I'm not committed to forcing OSS solutions on people who don't want them.
I like pc games. I like to play them; it's one of my best sources of stress relief. I've got way too much experience with WINE and I can make most games run in WINE...Eventually. But screw that! I don't want to buy a game then spend hours tweaking things to get it to run; I do enough of that crap at work. I want to just play it.
.Net site, and they want to pay me to fix it, I'm not above taking their money just because I don't like using those products, and I'm not going to limit myself by telling people, "Oh, I'm sorry. While I'm capable of doing this work, I refuse to do so because I'd prefer you were using OSS."
I occasionally have to use Access and MSSQL Server. I occasionally have to use Visual Studio. It's not even always about corporate; if someone has a screwed up database, or a
I ended up out of work for a good while during the Dot Bomb, and OSS made it possible for me to make a nice living, but I sure as hell didn't turn down Microsoft work when my customers asked me for it. Why send them to someone else when I can do the work? And you can make some good converts that way; I hooked a lot of people on Samba.
It's not about right and wrong, or good and evil. It's about tools, and giving people what they need to do their jobs. Don't cripple yourself by deciding that you're only going to deal with the tools you like.
Haven't really used Kontact, or tried to deploy it on anyone, so I'm not going to make any statements about how good or bad it is at doing its thing.
I will say however, that it looks like an excellent step in the right direction and if they get it polished enough and clean enough, and if the management back-end is good enough, it has some real potential.
One of the things that will bite you in the ass every time with an OSS deployment is the hide-bound middle aged woman segment of the population. They're not all female, despite the descriptor, but they're all very set in their ways, and very VERY willing to complain about anything that doesn't work like they're used to it working.
Worst of all, even though they're almost never in management, they're almost always in a position where management has to listen to them, because they're productive, loud, and they move and think as one being. When they can't open an email or a website, or they can't put pink ponies on the background of their emails, they will complain. And don't dismiss their concerns! 90% of their concerns are trivial or cosmetic, and the other 10% are horror-show, real nitty gritty issues that are valid, real, and hard as hell to fix.
I've had that contingent break a lot of deployments. Never underestimate the secretaries.
It's easy to say when your needs are simple and straightforward. I use Linux wherever I can, and I advocate its use (especially) on failure-critical applications, because it's stable, lightweight, and it doesn't "just break" the way Windows occasionally does.
There are needs, however, that are not met by commonly available OSS software. My usual example is GIMP. I use GIMP, I like GIMP, but it's not a professional product. For the average user, retouching family photos, no problems. It works great. For a professional user, designing images that will need to be printed at some big printing house, it's lack of CMYK support is a deal breaker.
That crap shows up over and over again, that one little niggling little crappy feature that you've never even heard of, or that you thought no one wanted or used, will become this giant sticking point when you're trying to convert someone to an all linux/bsd system. OS/X has a lot less of that sort of problem...Mac, for all it's commercials to the contrary, has very friendly relationships with most of the big business software providers...Still though, there are issues (goddamn internet explorer) which can crop up and cause problems.
In a nutshell, we've come a long way toward being able to toss windows completely, but if you have complex needs, or you need certain applications, you can still be forced into using it.
Ost is the offline mirror of the crap on the server. The pst is your local archive (which, trust me, still exists in Outlook/Exchange systems). Most Exchange setups require people archive mail past a certain point, because the storage demands get obscene pretty quick.
As for the massive files, I don't know what to tell ya. I still have to fix the 2 gig ones, and we're on 2003. We have a bunch of users using Entourage which may be the source of the bulk of the pst issues; I don't manage (or particularly care for) Exchange, I just know what I have to deal with.
I've used it; the only problems I have with it are all SOX based; there would need to be some way of doing backups, etc.
I never know what the PHBs will think.
They got sleeping bags? Pussies.
I can't imagine an "I slept at work" scenario in my job that didn't involve obscene overtime and after hours work. Where the hell would you find time? Where the hell do people get these JOBS?
As in, "There is no such thing as a free puppy?"
I'm a linux/unix guy, and I've been the only one in more than a few places of employment. Sure, I produce cool things, but it doesn't make them comfortable, it makes them scared, because I'm the only one who can support my stuff. What if I quit? What if I die? Where before they were mostly windows, now there is all this crap that's going to need someone who knows how to work it, someone with more skill than your run-of-the-mill MCSE.
Freaks 'em out. They have knee jerk responses toward my requests for more equipment.
I think both the linux and the mac software libraries suck. Mac sucks less, because Microsoft isn't scared of them, and because companies like Adobe worship them, but it's still not all that great. Where I work we have tons of all three; linux and unix servers, mac desktops (and a couple of Mac servers too), and Windows desktops and servers. I'd like to replace half the windows servers with Linux servers, but so far, no luck. Don't really have any use for Mac servers; they don't play any better with Windows than Linux, and they're harder to maintain, and more expensive, and dammit, servers don't need to be all pretty.
I'm not completely anti-Vista. I've used it; it's buggy, but it'll get better. I'm used to the fact that Windows copies files as slow as crap...XP isn't all that quick either, compared to most Linux filesystems.
Yep, everything that is still running on the old PPC hardware, which they no longer sell, can run Classic.
When you upgrade to a new Mac though, that's it.
You didn't listen, okay. I have a legacy interface that only runs in OS 9, "Classic" mode. It does NOT NOT NO WAY run on ANY NEW MAC, because there IS NO CLASSIC ON THE INTEL MACS. Is that clear enough? No one is recompiling 10 year old software on the new hardware. That stuff is dead.
There is an emulator, which I linked in my original post, it is nice for some things but if you need advanced font support, fancy printing, or more than 512megs of RAM, you're screwed, because it doesn't cut it.