Workers are pumping nitrogen into one of the reactors at Japan's damaged nuclear plant in an attempt to prevent an explosion caused by dangerously overheated fuel rods.
Officials at TEPCO, which operates the Fukushima plant, said a dangerous hydrogen buildup is taking place at its number-one reactor. Japan's NHK television quoted officials saying hydrogen is accumulating inside the reactor's containment vessel - an indication that the reactor's core has been damaged.
But there are reasons...that Fukushima is particularly vulnerable.
One is its recent use of seawater to cool the reactors's fuel rods and cores. In addition to the oxygen in water molecules, cold seawater can hold a great deal of dissolved oxygen gas. But warm water cannot; so as the seawater was heated in the reactor, the dissolved oxygen emerged and gathered in the empty space above the water.
(Ordinary reactor cooling water has had the oxygen removed from it by plant operators to reduce the possibility of rust.)
In addition, gamma radiation from the nuclear fuel in the reactor would continuously produce small amounts of hydrogen and oxygen by breaking up water molecules --- and the normal method of recombining these elements into water at such plants in a controlled fashion is no longer available.
Plants of the Fukushima variety usually have catalytic converters that accomplish that at the point where steam has run through the turbine and is condensed back into water for another trip through the reactor. But that path has been closed since the plant lost power at the moment of the March 11 earthquake.
Hydrogen can also emerge from the zirconium metal used as fuel cladding. One of the lessons of the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 near Harrisburg, Pa., is that when the cladding comes into contact with steam rather than water, it goes through a reaction that is akin to rusting; it picks up oxygen from the water molecule and gives off hydrogen.
This only happens at high temperatures, but uncertainty reigns at the moment about temperatures in the Fukushima reactor cores. With some cooling channels blocked, they are likely to have hot spots.
By design, boiling water reactors like these have far more zirconium metal in them than pressurized water reactors do. They boil water directly in the core, covering the fuel assemblies with a water/steam mixture rather than keeping them immersed in water. The water has to be directed to each individual fuel assembly and therefore each sits in its own zirconium box.
All of that zirconium is available for an oxidation reaction with steam in which the metal absorbs oxygen from water and turns to a powdery rust, releasing hydrogen.
The desktop does not matter it is only a device on which to run a web browser. The average user spends most of his online time running pages served from linux. Then he goes and sits in front of his tv powered by linux, plays with his phone powered by linux, scrolling through his dvr running linux.
The DVR that will record and play H.264 video without complaint.
The HDTV which runs a suite of Internet apps over which the geek has no control whatever. Facebook. Netflix. OnLive Gaming. Pandora. Skype. Rhapsody....
It's a whole new ball game.
In which the btowser gets shoved into the background and with it all the openess and "standards" on which the FOSS zealot has built his house of cards.
The server may be Linux - but who the hell cares when the content it streams is defined by the "walled gardens" of the home appliances, video game consoles, set top boxes, OSX, iOS and Windows devices it serves?
4 We regret to inform you, that your Google search experience due to the actions of Carlo Piana and by order of the court of Milan. The auto complete function has been disabled for the residents of Italy, due to autocomplete results raising claims of defamation.
One reason you hire competent local counsel is to save yourself from doing something profoundly stupid when you lose a case in a foreign court.
The Italian judge, I suspect, would regard a stunt like this as profoundly disrespectful of Italian law and courts and quite good evidence for a charge of an on-going defamation with malice - an attempt to have your revenge on the plaintiff.
Nor would I expect a member of the Italian Parliament to be any more charitable.
It is useful to remember that Google is not as universally loved and trusted by others as it is loved and trusted by the geek.
While some may wish to see Linux raise above Windows in market dominance, others (and I wager, most) do not see this as important, and only wish to produce a better suite of software than MS
In this, Linux has most definitely won
and it won many years ago.
If that is true, then why does Linux fare so poorly on the desktop?
Companies lobbying for infinite copyright length *cough*disney*cough* so that they can sit around and profit from decades-old content and not innovate or even produce new material are bad things.
I wonder.
The Disney archives are essentially intact -
down to the fragile matte paintings on glass used in films like Bambi.
Amazon.com lists over 3,600 live action and animated titles distributed by Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment. Most are quite reasonably priced.
Print quality is uniformly excellent and restoration is not dependent on scratching and clawing out funds from a dozen foundation grants.
Preservation does not happen unless there is there is the will and the money to make it happen.
Tesla is like Segway. They create a luxury product because that makes money and they use the income to scale up and create more mainstream products, like Tesla's upcoming consumer grade sedan.
When you look at the history of the American automobile, the "driving force" has always been the mass-matrket car.
That is where the money is.
When you put 20 million cars on the road, as Henry Ford did, you generate truckloads of cash that can be pumped into R & D.
No matter how matter how good the impression your electric or steamer made on the streets in 1905 you are not going to be able to compete against that kind of investment in alternative techologies.
Steamboat Willie builds its slapstick gags around synchronized sound effects and an ararchic Mouse who could have given Harpo Marx a run for his money.
Mickey pulling a cat's tail and then swinging the cat by the tail above his head, picking up a nursing sow and "playing" her babies like an accordion keyboard, and using a duck as bagpipes
Keaton's comedy is fatalistic and famously dead-pan.
Keaton stands in the street, making his way through the destruction, when an entire building facade collapses onto him. The attic window fits neatly around Keaton's body as it falls, coming within inches of flattening. Keaton did the stunt himself with a real building section and no trickery.
Steganography. Make it impossible to determine what traffic is encrypted by embedding the encrypted traffic as noise in, say, a video extolling the virtues of the dictator.
and when the secret police begin asking the right questions about the source of the video, what then?
Steganography is all about blending into the background.
In December 1947 Donald H. Ring outlined the idea in a company memo. The concept was elaborate but elegant. A large city would be divided into neighborhood-size zones called cells or cell sites. Every cell site would have its own antenna/ transceiver unit. This antenna/transceiver unit would use a "low tower, low power" approach to send and receive calls to mobiles within its cell.
it's my belief that social networks will rise and fall, endlessly in succession. simply because ubiquity eventually becomes a liability amongst a crowd who views exclusion and superiority to be more important
That sounds like a fair description of Slashdot, but does it really apply to Facebook?
It's not really a surprise no one wants to be a juror, you're treated almost like the prisoner in some case, cut off from the world and with shitty pay to boot.
Which implies that the prospecrive juror that stays the course is serious about the business.
The civic minded, small-C conservative who believes in law and order. You might want to think about that the next time a geek plays the "jury nullification" card.
By having a judge and attorneys filter the arguments and evidence to which a jury is exposed, they're substituting their own wisdom for that of jurors. Especially when judges refuse to allow defense lawyers to suggest juries consider jury-nullification of a law to be a legitimate exercise of their powers.
The geek's faith in "jury nullification" is wonderous to behold - because, that, in all probability, it is what will put a noose around his neck.
49 million PS3 consoles sold. 69 million PSN accounts. 17 milion PlayStation Home social networking accounts. 4 million MOVE controllers.
Firmware upgrades have kept the five year old PS3 feature-competitive with the latest and greatest in Blu-Ray HD and streaming media.
Netflix at 1080p with theater surround sound.
The Red Box vends Blu-Ray videos and PS3 games.
The Walmart mega-store places the PS3 Slim at the center of a golden triangle of sophisticated console video games, big screen HDTVs, DVD and Blu-Ray videos.
No one shopping here is mourning the loss of the OtherOS.
if marketing departments didn't care what we think, would they ever pay companies like New Media Strategies to sent armies of astroturfers here to post comments and disrupt our discussions on a daily basis? And by "armies" I mean most of the UIDs from 1900000 to 2000000. And according to my Texas Instruments programmable and graphic calculator, comes to about a hundred thousand astroturfers
If there really were armies of astroturfers raiding Slashdot, we should be seeing more than 120 responses to a story that presses all the right buttons.
Slashdot Mirror
If you can see the future, there is no reason to obfuscate.
That assumes that there is only one possible future - and that you can see it fully and explain it clearly.
Workers are pumping nitrogen into one of the reactors at Japan's damaged nuclear plant in an attempt to prevent an explosion caused by dangerously overheated fuel rods.
Officials at TEPCO, which operates the Fukushima plant, said a dangerous hydrogen buildup is taking place at its number-one reactor. Japan's NHK television quoted officials saying hydrogen is accumulating inside the reactor's containment vessel - an indication that the reactor's core has been damaged.
Crisis at Japan Nuclear Plant Shifts to New Blast Risk
Chemistry 201: Why Is Fukushima So Gassy?
But there are reasons...that Fukushima is particularly vulnerable.
One is its recent use of seawater to cool the reactors's fuel rods and cores. In addition to the oxygen in water molecules, cold seawater can hold a great deal of dissolved oxygen gas. But warm water cannot; so as the seawater was heated in the reactor, the dissolved oxygen emerged and gathered in the empty space above the water.
(Ordinary reactor cooling water has had the oxygen removed from it by plant operators to reduce the possibility of rust.)
In addition, gamma radiation from the nuclear fuel in the reactor would continuously produce small amounts of hydrogen and oxygen by breaking up water molecules --- and the normal method of recombining these elements into water at such plants in a controlled fashion is no longer available.
Plants of the Fukushima variety usually have catalytic converters that accomplish that at the point where steam has run through the turbine and is condensed back into water for another trip through the reactor. But that path has been closed since the plant lost power at the moment of the March 11 earthquake.
Hydrogen can also emerge from the zirconium metal used as fuel cladding. One of the lessons of the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 near Harrisburg, Pa., is that when the cladding comes into contact with steam rather than water, it goes through a reaction that is akin to rusting; it picks up oxygen from the water molecule and gives off hydrogen.
This only happens at high temperatures, but uncertainty reigns at the moment about temperatures in the Fukushima reactor cores. With some cooling channels blocked, they are likely to have hot spots.
By design, boiling water reactors like these have far more zirconium metal in them than pressurized water reactors do. They boil water directly in the core, covering the fuel assemblies with a water/steam mixture rather than keeping them immersed in water. The water has to be directed to each individual fuel assembly and therefore each sits in its own zirconium box.
All of that zirconium is available for an oxidation reaction with steam in which the metal absorbs oxygen from water and turns to a powdery rust, releasing hydrogen.
The desktop does not matter it is only a device on which to run a web browser. The average user spends most of his online time running pages served from linux. Then he goes and sits in front of his tv powered by linux, plays with his phone powered by linux, scrolling through his dvr running linux.
The DVR that will record and play H.264 video without complaint.
The HDTV which runs a suite of Internet apps over which the geek has no control whatever. Facebook. Netflix. OnLive Gaming. Pandora. Skype. Rhapsody....
It's a whole new ball game.
In which the btowser gets shoved into the background and with it all the openess and "standards" on which the FOSS zealot has built his house of cards.
The server may be Linux - but who the hell cares when the content it streams is defined by the "walled gardens" of the home appliances, video game consoles, set top boxes, OSX, iOS and Windows devices it serves?
4 We regret to inform you, that your Google search experience due to the actions of Carlo Piana and by order of the court of Milan. The auto complete function has been disabled for the residents of Italy, due to autocomplete results raising claims of defamation.
One reason you hire competent local counsel is to save yourself from doing something profoundly stupid when you lose a case in a foreign court.
The Italian judge, I suspect, would regard a stunt like this as profoundly disrespectful of Italian law and courts and quite good evidence for a charge of an on-going defamation with malice - an attempt to have your revenge on the plaintiff.
Nor would I expect a member of the Italian Parliament to be any more charitable.
It is useful to remember that Google is not as universally loved and trusted by others as it is loved and trusted by the geek.
While some may wish to see Linux raise above Windows in market dominance, others (and I wager, most) do not see this as important, and only wish to produce a better suite of software than MS
In this, Linux has most definitely won and it won many years ago.
If that is true, then why does Linux fare so poorly on the desktop?
Every week more Android phones ship than all the XBoxes that ship in an entire year.
The key word here is "Android" and the driving force is Google.
Whatever Android is, it is not a traditional, community-oriented Linux distribution, and its success is bound to the mega-corp that made it happen.
Microsoft sells a product.
Google sells its "customers." It lives and dies by the add click.
How very strange it is that "free and open source" should end up here.
The size of say, the spreadsheet program's binary files on both machines and ask yourself exactly how many of those "features" you actually use.
The geek spends too much time alone.
MS Office rules because it scales to an enterprise of any size .
A clerical worker - often a temp - can be assigned any available machine on a twenty-five acre campus and still be productive in her specialty.
Companies lobbying for infinite copyright length *cough*disney*cough* so that they can sit around and profit from decades-old content and not innovate or even produce new material are bad things.
I wonder.
The Disney archives are essentially intact -
down to the fragile matte paintings on glass used in films like Bambi.
Amazon.com lists over 3,600 live action and animated titles distributed by Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment. Most are quite reasonably priced.
Print quality is uniformly excellent and restoration is not dependent on scratching and clawing out funds from a dozen foundation grants.
Preservation does not happen unless there is there is the will and the money to make it happen.
Oh look, another quickly-posted reply that attempts to paint MS in a positive light. What are the odds.
about the same as a geek shouting "astroturf" the moment anyone paints Microsoft in a positive light.
no need to subscribe.
there is never the slightest difficulty in guessing which posts on the Firehose will make the front page.
and the canned response from all sides is no less predictable.
I remember back in the day when you had to hang out in IRC channels and share FTP warez server lists. Maybe it'll revert back to that.
When was the last time you saw anyone but a geek install an IRC chat or FTP client?
"Security through obscurity."
A return to a level of complexity the masses abandoned along about the time dial-up AOL was in its prime.
Tesla is like Segway. They create a luxury product because that makes money and they use the income to scale up and create more mainstream products, like Tesla's upcoming consumer grade sedan.
When you look at the history of the American automobile, the "driving force" has always been the mass-matrket car.
That is where the money is.
When you put 20 million cars on the road, as Henry Ford did, you generate truckloads of cash that can be pumped into R & D.
No matter how matter how good the impression your electric or steamer made on the streets in 1905 you are not going to be able to compete against that kind of investment in alternative techologies.
Alcohol was made illegal and what happened?
Alcohol consumption dropped to less than one gallon per person per year.
1906-1910 2.60 gal.
1916-1919 1.96 gal.
1934 0.97 gal.
1955 2.0 gal.
1973 2.62 gal.
1980 2.76 gal.
2007 2.31 gal.
Apparent per capita ethanol consumption for the United States, 1850-2007. (Gallons of ethanol, based on population age 15 and older prior to 1970 and on population age 14 and other thereafter).
Higher addiction rates, instead of lower ones like you might expect
If this were true, you should be seeing higher liver cirrhosis mortality rates.
In fact, the rates between 1920 and 1940 are about half those of 1910. Age-Adjusted Liver Cirrhosis Mortality U.S. 1910-1996 [chart]
With this 'accidental' shutdown, microsoft successfully covered all of the countries that were experiencing unrest
Even The Register put a damper on this story: Microsoft: Mystery bug blocks Syrian secure Hotmail - Sun worshipers and fat cats hit too
Funny thing is that Steamboat Willie is a ripoff of Steamboat Bill.
No it's not.
The only thing they have in common is using a steamboat as a prop.
Steamboat Willie - Plot
Steamboat Bill, Jr.
Steamboat Willie builds its slapstick gags around synchronized sound effects and an ararchic Mouse who could have given Harpo Marx a run for his money.
Mickey pulling a cat's tail and then swinging the cat by the tail above his head, picking up a nursing sow and "playing" her babies like an accordion keyboard, and using a duck as bagpipes
Keaton's comedy is fatalistic and famously dead-pan.
Keaton stands in the street, making his way through the destruction, when an entire building facade collapses onto him. The attic window fits neatly around Keaton's body as it falls, coming within inches of flattening. Keaton did the stunt himself with a real building section and no trickery.
Steganography. Make it impossible to determine what traffic is encrypted by embedding the encrypted traffic as noise in, say, a video extolling the virtues of the dictator.
and when the secret police begin asking the right questions about the source of the video, what then?
Steganography is all about blending into the background.
Not drawing attention to yourself.
I can name two really quick. Transistors and UNIX.
There is Williard Boyle and the CCD. The Miracle of Digital Imaging
Donald H. Ring and the cell phone.
In December 1947 Donald H. Ring outlined the idea in a company memo. The concept was elaborate but elegant. A large city would be divided into neighborhood-size zones called cells or cell sites. Every cell site would have its own antenna/ transceiver unit. This antenna/transceiver unit would use a "low tower, low power" approach to send and receive calls to mobiles within its cell.
The Cell-Phone Revolution
it's my belief that social networks will rise and fall, endlessly in succession. simply because ubiquity eventually becomes a liability amongst a crowd who views exclusion and superiority to be more important
That sounds like a fair description of Slashdot, but does it really apply to Facebook?
Piddling around with this irrelevant stuff takes ICE away from the far greater threat to the US of A: IP theft!>/quote>
Govetnments multitask. Deal with it.
Why do people keep spending money on EA Games?
EA publishes the games they want to play.
Dragon Age
The Sims
Madden NFL
Medal of Honor
Crysis
It's not really a surprise no one wants to be a juror, you're treated almost like the prisoner in some case, cut off from the world and with shitty pay to boot.
Which implies that the prospecrive juror that stays the course is serious about the business.
The civic minded, small-C conservative who believes in law and order. You might want to think about that the next time a geek plays the "jury nullification" card.
By having a judge and attorneys filter the arguments and evidence to which a jury is exposed, they're substituting their own wisdom for that of jurors. Especially when judges refuse to allow defense lawyers to suggest juries consider jury-nullification of a law to be a legitimate exercise of their powers.
The geek's faith in "jury nullification" is wonderous to behold - because, that, in all probability, it is what will put a noose around his neck.
THEY WEREN'T LISTENING IN THE FIRST PLACE. Sometimes you only can get people to listen to you by disagreeing "arrogantly".
But more often they will slam the door in your face.
I dont know why people support Sony.
By the numbers:
49 million PS3 consoles sold. 69 million PSN accounts. 17 milion PlayStation Home social networking accounts. 4 million MOVE controllers.
Firmware upgrades have kept the five year old PS3 feature-competitive with the latest and greatest in Blu-Ray HD and streaming media.
Netflix at 1080p with theater surround sound.
The Red Box vends Blu-Ray videos and PS3 games.
The Walmart mega-store places the PS3 Slim at the center of a golden triangle of sophisticated console video games, big screen HDTVs, DVD and Blu-Ray videos.
No one shopping here is mourning the loss of the OtherOS.
if marketing departments didn't care what we think, would they ever pay companies like New Media Strategies to sent armies of astroturfers here to post comments and disrupt our discussions on a daily basis? And by "armies" I mean most of the UIDs from 1900000 to 2000000. And according to my Texas Instruments programmable and graphic calculator, comes to about a hundred thousand astroturfers
If there really were armies of astroturfers raiding Slashdot, we should be seeing more than 120 responses to a story that presses all the right buttons.
Before digital cameras, that was known as a "viewfinder": capture a still image while previewing the world through a tiny little window.
The viewfinder didn't "capture" or "still" anything.