If so I can see why the government would want to wiretap them.
Yeah? Well if the Feds had gone to the trouble to show a judge why they wanted to tap them, then they wouldn't be in this situation in the first place.
Hard to get the blizzard forecast when your receiver can't see the satellite through the cloud cover.
Sure you can! Your satellite just changes from a receiver giving you the Weather Channel into a large and expensive Weather Rock. If your satellite is white, it's snowing, if you can't see it under the pile of snow, that's a blizzard.
No, that's why they didn't have cable because they could get the free OTA broadcasts, which they are now losing unless they pay for the converter box, meaning it's either buy a "luxury item" or lose their free source of entertainment that they already had. Why force them into that position, when the change is only happening by government fiat?
This change happened very quickly for evolutionary scales. And I'm pretty sure it's not over. Give humanity 20-30 years, and our brains will have adapted fine. No need to worry.
Yeah, because it almost certainly wasn't evolutionary. Humans brains, whether in a person born 100 years ago or 10 years ago, are amazingly flexible machines that can rewire themselves into new configurations, work around damage, and gain new abilities like the ability to block out flashy distractions. However this ability rapidly decreases as our brains age. So most likely the difference is just that people born before a certain point had brains too old and stuck in their ways to adjust, while younger people adapted.
Evolution can happen in short timescales, but it generally takes a huge amount of pressure. With no obvious major die-offs due to the inability to ignore distractions, I doubt there was a shift in genetics responsible. But take say Australian snakes and imported poisonous toads, and in a very short time the snakes evolve heads too small to eat toads big enough to give a lethal dose of poison.
Anyway, our brains are amazingly adaptable, and I'm sure that especially young people will further adapt in the next 20-30 years, but it's still the same ol' brain that we've been tugging around for a very long time, and it still has weaknesses. It is not infinitely adaptable, nor indefatigable, and still vulnerable to stress. I'm not too worried, but I'm also not completely assured that we won't push our brains too far.
No, it doesn't. You don't need to convert your car (or add any converters to the car) in order to drive in the left lane, as evidenced by multi-lane one-way streets and passing lanes not requiring on-demand reconfiguration of the car.
They didn't say "drive in the left lane", they said "driving on the left hand side of the road". That means that when there is two-way traffic on a street, from your perspective you are on the left-hand half of the road, and oncoming traffic is to your right. It has nothing to do with one-way streets or multi-lane freeways.
Everywhere in the world where they drive on the left hand side of the road, the driver sits on the right hand side of the car, and vice versa. It shouldn't be hard to figure out why having the driver on the side of the car closer to oncoming traffic is a good idea, and why car makers can only sell driver-on-left cars in the US and can only sell driver-on-right cars in the UK. If the US switched standard, then the cars would have to change too.
Why yes, only an arrogant bureaucrat would be so mean as to mandate an unnecessary change that would require everyone to go out and buy new equipment, promise to give out coupons when they realize there's public outcry, and then screw up the coupon system so many don't even get a chance to use them.
You can try and regulate temperature back down but you must have a heat sink, otherwise no cooling occurs. For instance for a standard pressurized water reactor which is cooled by creating steam, if you were to shut the steam outlet valves (and thereby remove the heat sink) then control rod motion would have no effect on temperature, except insofar as it reduces heat generation. In normal operation the heat sink is always available so it's only of theoretical concern but there is a difference between "cooling" and "temperature regulation".
You're right, you can only "cool" the reaction itself, whether that's with control rods or self-regulation. I suppose it'd be much easier to quantify the size of heat sink needed and be sure that it is sufficient when it is self-regulating. I'm sure that's part of why they are burying these things too.
the control rods on that plant were not strictly to "prevent a run away reaction" but actually did quite a few things
Of course, they were the only reliable way to regulate the reaction.
One other thing to note is that the RBMK used in Chernobyl was the only nuclear reactor in the world whose emergency shutdown system would initially cause a rise in reactor power, which lead to a prompt critical situation and disaster in this case...
One thing to note? One thing to note about Chernobyl is that there were so fucking many things wrong with both the plant and the test which lead to the disaster itself that it's almost an advertisement for nuclear safety, in the sense of all the crazy things that had to go wrong to get a disaster of that magnitude.
Control rods do not "cool the reactor down". The control the nuclear chain reaction... What control rods do in this type of reactor is to control the temperature that is maintained by the reactor.
And if you control the temperature in a downward direction, that would be called "cooling". It's the same mechanism as everything else we're talking about, reducing temperature by reducing reaction rate, just mechanically instead of self-regulating. Obviously that's not their main function in a self-regulating reactor, but not all reactors were self-regulating which is what I was contrasting against. In a Chernobyl-type reactor, the control rods were the only thing preventing a run away reaction.
You say nuclear power's problems have been mitigated by learning from our mistakes, why would the same not be true for solar?
The use of nasty chemicals in solar manufacturing is not a "mistake", it's an intentional and necessary part of the process. I won't say it's impossible not to, but that would be the discovery of a fantastic new manufacturing technique, not learning from a mistake.
Whereas Chernobyl was a mistake that we have learned from.
Maybe in some cases, but I actually commit less crime when my company treats me like a criminal, since I figure I don't need to work as hard to get the point across anymore.
I am not sure of the details of these designs, but I bet they use a fuel type similar to university research reactors. This fuel is a uranium-hydride mixture. The moderation for the neutrons is built into the fuel itself, but it has an extremely strong negative temperature coefficient. This means that any increase in power, and thus temperature, reduces the reactivity, which lowers the power back to the equilibrium level. It is physically impossible for the reactor to overpower.
TFA says you are absolutely correct.
BTW what happens if you somehow put the system under pressure? My admittedly craptastic knowledge of chemistry suggests that at higher pressures the uranium hydride would hold onto its hydrogen at higher temperatures.
Summary is incorrect. The "nuclear battery" (incorrect name) would have a 99.5% chance of "going critical". After all, that's what nuclear power plants do. What they mean is that the plant would have an infinitesimally small chance of achieving super-criticality. Super-criticality would be a very bad thing, but even that can be mitigated with enough cement.
Even plain-ol criticality (or sub- for that matter) can be bad if it's producing too much heat for the system to take out. Say for example because whatever fluid is being used to extract said heat for power generation purposes stops flowing. Then you have a meltdown, i.e. the nuclear core melting. TFA says it's meltdown, not criticality, that is virtually impossible, so score another one for bad/. summaries.
The modern way to prevent this is with naturally self-regulating reactors (as opposed to say relying on control rods to cool the reactor down). Pebble bed reactors do it by having the uranium in the center of the pebbles so that at the right temperatures they are at the right density for a critical reaction. When they get hotter, they expand, and the reaction slows down. Natural, physical self-regulation. No machine to fail, no control logic to have a bug, it's the laws of physics saving your ass. I like that.
Here's the paragraph on how this one works: "When uranium hydride gets too hot, above 550 degrees Celsius, it will shed hydrogen atoms. The hydrogen flows out of the core and is stored in special storage trays within the reactor. As the fuel loses hydrogen atoms it begins to naturally cool. As it cools, it will retrieve the hydrogen atoms from the trays."
So again, self-regulating based on temperature, sounds pretty cool. The only thing I don't like is that it still relies on a fluid flow, so if somehow the storage trays were collapsed in a way that didn't let the hydrogen to escape, I would think that the increased pressure would mean the uranium hydride would hold onto its hydrogen at higher temperatures. But I'm anything but a chemist or nuclear physicist.
My gf has a Wii that we played alot over Christmas and it has alot of family-style gaming capability. However they weren't games I'd pick to play solo.
Heh, that's funny, because when people come over and see I have a wii, they're always rather shocked that I don't have any multi-player or party games other than wii sports.:)
The Wii has still sold the most non-bundled software. Bad attach rate * ridiculous number of consoles = more software than anyone else.
That said, Microsoft isn't "losing" as long as they are making money, and they have certainly solidified their place in the console market. Sony is the one whose position is questionable.
I prefer ubuntu ninjitsu
on
Ubuntu Kung Fu
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· Score: 4, Funny
Ubuntu CDs make fine shuriken. Debian CDs work well too. Haven't tried SUSE or Fedora though.
It will be REALLY interesting when this is combined with other sensors (like all the little proximity sensors that Ford's recently announced "help me parallel park" system has) to be able to not only brake, but identify that the lane to the right is empty and swerve to avoid the accident.
If by interesting you mean hilarious the first time it correctly identifies the right lane as empty but falsely identifies it as existing, I agree.
I wonder how much this will be abused? While it would be easy to try to let the computer do all the work (basically rely on it in emergencies) I would think that would be so nerve wracking most people wouldn't do it.
That's a good point. It'd only be relaxing like it's always depicted if every car was computer controlled, and there were never any sudden changes in conditions (like deer running across the road).
I find it mildly arousing and I gather that most males do too. Even if they say they don't. A term like "seriously perverted" is a term of moral judgement. Someone has decided it is wrong, not merely infrequently indulged in.
The moral judgment was made by those who view breastfeeding to be equal to a sex act, too lewd for public. The ones for whom it is so exciting to them that the woman may be prancing around naked for how well they can ignore it, then yeah, they're seriously perverted.
I could talk about how social mores of the US have made any exposure of a female breast a sexual act, but you know what? It doesn't really matter. It's a pretty body part attached to an apparently fertile female and hence is inherently sexual no matter what the mores of society are.
Well you should talk about social mores because it obviously does matter, otherwise we wouldn't be having this conversation in the first place. What you're saying applies equally well to women's ankles, earlobes, collar bones, and those oh-so-pretty eyes. Only a few cultures of today have decided that ankles are so "inherently sexual" that they need to be covered. Ours has decided nipples are shameful and must be covered (with clothes not babies). Then there are places in Europe with a strong incest taboo, yet where a man wouldn't be embarrassed to go to a topless beach with a female relative. Breasts are not, apparently, that inherently sexual. Just like ankles, they certainly can be and are in the right context, but not inherently (as in unavoidably) so.
If those body parts are unavoidably arousing and sexual, that sounds like either social mores, or nymphomania (or whatever the male equivalent is called).
Again? It wasn't that good. Will check IMDB instead:
Heh. That's about as smart as telling someone to RTFA when all you read was the/. summary. Seriously, using the phrasing of an IMDB summary to make a technical distinction? You could have at least used Wikipedia, which specifies that it's PGD, just like what is being used in this case. Actually watching the movie would verify this.
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If so I can see why the government would want to wiretap them.
Yeah? Well if the Feds had gone to the trouble to show a judge why they wanted to tap them, then they wouldn't be in this situation in the first place.
It certainly wasn't in ICU though.
Well yeah, no insurance. Have you tried getting a policy for a bullet? The rates are insane!
Whoa, for a moment I thought you said _million_ years. No need to panic, people.
Are you kidding?! This totally screws my long-term investment strategy!
Hard to get the blizzard forecast when your receiver can't see the satellite through the cloud cover.
Sure you can! Your satellite just changes from a receiver giving you the Weather Channel into a large and expensive Weather Rock. If your satellite is white, it's snowing, if you can't see it under the pile of snow, that's a blizzard.
No, that's why they didn't have cable because they could get the free OTA broadcasts, which they are now losing unless they pay for the converter box, meaning it's either buy a "luxury item" or lose their free source of entertainment that they already had. Why force them into that position, when the change is only happening by government fiat?
Then explain the existence of contrary vehicles on the roads in both countries.
Exceptions exist.
Just like there are low-power TV stations that will still be broadcasting in analog.
This change happened very quickly for evolutionary scales. And I'm pretty sure it's not over. Give humanity 20-30 years, and our brains will have adapted fine. No need to worry.
Yeah, because it almost certainly wasn't evolutionary. Humans brains, whether in a person born 100 years ago or 10 years ago, are amazingly flexible machines that can rewire themselves into new configurations, work around damage, and gain new abilities like the ability to block out flashy distractions. However this ability rapidly decreases as our brains age. So most likely the difference is just that people born before a certain point had brains too old and stuck in their ways to adjust, while younger people adapted.
Evolution can happen in short timescales, but it generally takes a huge amount of pressure. With no obvious major die-offs due to the inability to ignore distractions, I doubt there was a shift in genetics responsible. But take say Australian snakes and imported poisonous toads, and in a very short time the snakes evolve heads too small to eat toads big enough to give a lethal dose of poison.
Anyway, our brains are amazingly adaptable, and I'm sure that especially young people will further adapt in the next 20-30 years, but it's still the same ol' brain that we've been tugging around for a very long time, and it still has weaknesses. It is not infinitely adaptable, nor indefatigable, and still vulnerable to stress. I'm not too worried, but I'm also not completely assured that we won't push our brains too far.
No, it doesn't. You don't need to convert your car (or add any converters to the car) in order to drive in the left lane, as evidenced by multi-lane one-way streets and passing lanes not requiring on-demand reconfiguration of the car.
They didn't say "drive in the left lane", they said "driving on the left hand side of the road". That means that when there is two-way traffic on a street, from your perspective you are on the left-hand half of the road, and oncoming traffic is to your right. It has nothing to do with one-way streets or multi-lane freeways.
Everywhere in the world where they drive on the left hand side of the road, the driver sits on the right hand side of the car, and vice versa. It shouldn't be hard to figure out why having the driver on the side of the car closer to oncoming traffic is a good idea, and why car makers can only sell driver-on-left cars in the US and can only sell driver-on-right cars in the UK. If the US switched standard, then the cars would have to change too.
Why yes, only an arrogant bureaucrat would be so mean as to mandate an unnecessary change that would require everyone to go out and buy new equipment, promise to give out coupons when they realize there's public outcry, and then screw up the coupon system so many don't even get a chance to use them.
You can try and regulate temperature back down but you must have a heat sink, otherwise no cooling occurs. For instance for a standard pressurized water reactor which is cooled by creating steam, if you were to shut the steam outlet valves (and thereby remove the heat sink) then control rod motion would have no effect on temperature, except insofar as it reduces heat generation. In normal operation the heat sink is always available so it's only of theoretical concern but there is a difference between "cooling" and "temperature regulation".
You're right, you can only "cool" the reaction itself, whether that's with control rods or self-regulation. I suppose it'd be much easier to quantify the size of heat sink needed and be sure that it is sufficient when it is self-regulating. I'm sure that's part of why they are burying these things too.
the control rods on that plant were not strictly to "prevent a run away reaction" but actually did quite a few things
Of course, they were the only reliable way to regulate the reaction.
One other thing to note is that the RBMK used in Chernobyl was the only nuclear reactor in the world whose emergency shutdown system would initially cause a rise in reactor power, which lead to a prompt critical situation and disaster in this case...
One thing to note? One thing to note about Chernobyl is that there were so fucking many things wrong with both the plant and the test which lead to the disaster itself that it's almost an advertisement for nuclear safety, in the sense of all the crazy things that had to go wrong to get a disaster of that magnitude.
Control rods do not "cool the reactor down". The control the nuclear chain reaction... What control rods do in this type of reactor is to control the temperature that is maintained by the reactor.
And if you control the temperature in a downward direction, that would be called "cooling". It's the same mechanism as everything else we're talking about, reducing temperature by reducing reaction rate, just mechanically instead of self-regulating. Obviously that's not their main function in a self-regulating reactor, but not all reactors were self-regulating which is what I was contrasting against. In a Chernobyl-type reactor, the control rods were the only thing preventing a run away reaction.
You say nuclear power's problems have been mitigated by learning from our mistakes, why would the same not be true for solar?
The use of nasty chemicals in solar manufacturing is not a "mistake", it's an intentional and necessary part of the process. I won't say it's impossible not to, but that would be the discovery of a fantastic new manufacturing technique, not learning from a mistake.
Whereas Chernobyl was a mistake that we have learned from.
Maybe in some cases, but I actually commit less crime when my company treats me like a criminal, since I figure I don't need to work as hard to get the point across anymore.
I am not sure of the details of these designs, but I bet they use a fuel type similar to university research reactors. This fuel is a uranium-hydride mixture. The moderation for the neutrons is built into the fuel itself, but it has an extremely strong negative temperature coefficient. This means that any increase in power, and thus temperature, reduces the reactivity, which lowers the power back to the equilibrium level. It is physically impossible for the reactor to overpower.
TFA says you are absolutely correct.
BTW what happens if you somehow put the system under pressure? My admittedly craptastic knowledge of chemistry suggests that at higher pressures the uranium hydride would hold onto its hydrogen at higher temperatures.
Summary is incorrect. The "nuclear battery" (incorrect name) would have a 99.5% chance of "going critical". After all, that's what nuclear power plants do. What they mean is that the plant would have an infinitesimally small chance of achieving super-criticality. Super-criticality would be a very bad thing, but even that can be mitigated with enough cement.
Even plain-ol criticality (or sub- for that matter) can be bad if it's producing too much heat for the system to take out. Say for example because whatever fluid is being used to extract said heat for power generation purposes stops flowing. Then you have a meltdown, i.e. the nuclear core melting. TFA says it's meltdown, not criticality, that is virtually impossible, so score another one for bad /. summaries.
The modern way to prevent this is with naturally self-regulating reactors (as opposed to say relying on control rods to cool the reactor down). Pebble bed reactors do it by having the uranium in the center of the pebbles so that at the right temperatures they are at the right density for a critical reaction. When they get hotter, they expand, and the reaction slows down. Natural, physical self-regulation. No machine to fail, no control logic to have a bug, it's the laws of physics saving your ass. I like that.
Here's the paragraph on how this one works: "When uranium hydride gets too hot, above 550 degrees Celsius, it will shed hydrogen atoms. The hydrogen flows out of the core and is stored in special storage trays within the reactor. As the fuel loses hydrogen atoms it begins to naturally cool. As it cools, it will retrieve the hydrogen atoms from the trays."
So again, self-regulating based on temperature, sounds pretty cool. The only thing I don't like is that it still relies on a fluid flow, so if somehow the storage trays were collapsed in a way that didn't let the hydrogen to escape, I would think that the increased pressure would mean the uranium hydride would hold onto its hydrogen at higher temperatures. But I'm anything but a chemist or nuclear physicist.
My gf has a Wii that we played alot over Christmas and it has alot of family-style gaming capability. However they weren't games I'd pick to play solo.
Heh, that's funny, because when people come over and see I have a wii, they're always rather shocked that I don't have any multi-player or party games other than wii sports. :)
Scientists were shocked to discovered that when PS3 was released all PS2 consoles around the worlds did not spontaneously explode!
So mine was the only one? That figures.
The Wii has still sold the most non-bundled software. Bad attach rate * ridiculous number of consoles = more software than anyone else.
That said, Microsoft isn't "losing" as long as they are making money, and they have certainly solidified their place in the console market. Sony is the one whose position is questionable.
Ubuntu CDs make fine shuriken. Debian CDs work well too. Haven't tried SUSE or Fedora though.
Personally I think the most surprising thing is that the risk factor for simplifying risk to a single number is 70%.
Of course, before you think "Well that isn't me!" another statistic for you: 80% of drivers think they're above average.
That's actually true. I know a guy who is personally responsible for dragging the average down low enough for this to be so.
It will be REALLY interesting when this is combined with other sensors (like all the little proximity sensors that Ford's recently announced "help me parallel park" system has) to be able to not only brake, but identify that the lane to the right is empty and swerve to avoid the accident.
If by interesting you mean hilarious the first time it correctly identifies the right lane as empty but falsely identifies it as existing, I agree.
I wonder how much this will be abused? While it would be easy to try to let the computer do all the work (basically rely on it in emergencies) I would think that would be so nerve wracking most people wouldn't do it.
That's a good point. It'd only be relaxing like it's always depicted if every car was computer controlled, and there were never any sudden changes in conditions (like deer running across the road).
I find it mildly arousing and I gather that most males do too. Even if they say they don't. A term like "seriously perverted" is a term of moral judgement. Someone has decided it is wrong, not merely infrequently indulged in.
The moral judgment was made by those who view breastfeeding to be equal to a sex act, too lewd for public. The ones for whom it is so exciting to them that the woman may be prancing around naked for how well they can ignore it, then yeah, they're seriously perverted.
I could talk about how social mores of the US have made any exposure of a female breast a sexual act, but you know what? It doesn't really matter. It's a pretty body part attached to an apparently fertile female and hence is inherently sexual no matter what the mores of society are.
Well you should talk about social mores because it obviously does matter, otherwise we wouldn't be having this conversation in the first place. What you're saying applies equally well to women's ankles, earlobes, collar bones, and those oh-so-pretty eyes. Only a few cultures of today have decided that ankles are so "inherently sexual" that they need to be covered. Ours has decided nipples are shameful and must be covered (with clothes not babies). Then there are places in Europe with a strong incest taboo, yet where a man wouldn't be embarrassed to go to a topless beach with a female relative. Breasts are not, apparently, that inherently sexual. Just like ankles, they certainly can be and are in the right context, but not inherently (as in unavoidably) so.
If those body parts are unavoidably arousing and sexual, that sounds like either social mores, or nymphomania (or whatever the male equivalent is called).
Again? It wasn't that good. Will check IMDB instead:
Heh. That's about as smart as telling someone to RTFA when all you read was the /. summary. Seriously, using the phrasing of an IMDB summary to make a technical distinction? You could have at least used Wikipedia, which specifies that it's PGD, just like what is being used in this case. Actually watching the movie would verify this.
Nudity is nudity.
But a pasty or bikini covering a nipple isn't nudity, while a baby covering a nipple is.
Yeah, it's so black and white. That's not a cultural exception at all.