It also ignores that there are ways of running MacOS X on the PC hardware you already have, should you be technically proficient enough to follow instructions.
I would hope that a potential developer of smartphone apps would be technically proficient enough to follow instructions. Or use Google. But that's the problem with 'hope'.
I'd like to know who is calling Ron Wyden a hardcore liberal, because they clearly haven't been paying attention to Mr. Wyden recently. Just his co-sponsoring of this bill that would partially privatize Medicare should convince anyone that he's not a 'hardcore liberal.'
He's quite moderate, actually, which explains why he's trying to cut through the bullshit and actually work with people from the "opposition" party.
Nah, we learned that moon regolith is the perfect material for shooting a portal gun at. Quoth Cave Johnson:
Welcome to the enrichment center. Since making test participation mandatory for all employees, the quality of our test subjects has risen dramatically. Employee retention, however, has not. As a result, you may have heard we're gonna phase out human testing. There's still a few things left to wrap up though - first up, conversion gel. Now, the beancounters told me we literally could not afford to buy $7 worth of moon rocks, much less 70 million. Bought 'em anyway. Ground them up, mixed them into a gel, and guess what: ground-up moon rocks are pure poison.
Ignorance is fine, but it's quite simple to figure out that depleted uranium is only radioactive in the sense that given enough time, it will decay into something else. So do some isotopes of Iron, but nobody has an irrational fear about the uses of that metal.
From the World Health Organization:
Under most circumstances, use of DU will make a negligible contribution to the overall natural background levels of uranium in the environment. Probably the greatest potential for DU exposure will follow conflict where DU munitions are used.
In case of uranium or DU intake, the radiation dose limits are applied to inhaled insoluble uranium-compounds only. For all other exposure pathways and the soluble uranium-compounds, chemical toxicity is the factor that limits exposure.
Getting back on topic, this reactor design is a "breeder" - it creates the fuel from non-fissile "fertile" material in the course of the reaction. More clearly, it happens like this:
1. Start criticality with a tiny amount of enriched reactor-grade Uranium (~15% U235, 85%U238) surrounded by depleted Uranium (99.9% U238) 2. Criticality causes neutrons to fly about, which get absorbed by the "fertile" depleted U238 surrounding the starter criticality, transmuting it into U239 3. The U239 immediately undergoes beta decay and turns into Np239. 4. And the Np239 beta decays into Pu239, which is a fissile material. 5. It then gets whacked by a neutron, splitting, and sending off some more neutrons which get absorbed by U238. Go to step 2.
In short, holding a brick of depleted uranium in your hand would give you a radiation dose about equal to holding a clay brick in your hand. You just want to wash your hands before you eat something, and don't drop it and breathe in any dust that may come off it.
Actually, there is a such thing as radioactive waste. One of the reasons why fuel rods are removed from existing reactors when they still have useable fuel is because a critical percentage of them has turned into a material that captures free neutrons without fissioning, or fissioning into another material that is also a neutron absorber, thus slowing the reaction.
It's referred to as neutron poisoning. It's also the reason for waste reprocessing - removing these absorbing materials and remanufacturing the fuel assemblies for re-use.
More to the point, this particular reactor design works on *depleted* uranium, so you're not enriching it, but you're actually using waste from the enriching process as fuel.
There is a massive amount of depleted uranium laying around that has been stockpiled since the Manhattan Project. Using it as fuel would be far more environmentally friendly than any other base-load generation, since we've already extracted it from the ground, and it's just sitting in storage.
Using what you already have is much preferable to using what you need to go get.
I'm pretty sure that when you're talking about a nuclear generating station, anyone on the premises without authorization and proper credentials constitutes an identified threat.
Maybe you're right. Instead of just putting a.50 cal round through their ear, someone should have gotten close enough to yell at them first, then put a few NATO 5.56 rounds through their chest if they don't immediately comply.
At Fukishima, the spent fuel pools are on the roof of the reactor buildings. When the reactor buildings were blown to shit by the hydrogen explosions, it caused a few leaks in the spent fuel pools.
They have water in those pools for a reason. The water cools the spent fuel which still gives off quite a bit of heat, as well as acts as radiation shielding. Without pumping and circulation, the water will boil off or get cracked into hydrogen, building up in the building for a nicely explosive atmosphere. Then, depending on the fuel assembly, you can have lots of radioactive elements released to the environment.
Maintaining water circulation in the spent fuel pools is rather important.
Unfortunately, there is the problem of the Senate Majority Leader being from the State of Nevada, and any possible Congressional action to get the Yucca Mountain facility operating will be immediately tabled without debate, much less a vote to send it to the President for signature / veto.
They only kind-of breached security. They got to the outside of the containment building, which is still several yards of reinforced concrete away from anything to do with the reactor. It's highly unlikely that anything they could carry with them could breach the containment building.
If they actually got inside of the containment, then there would be something to seriously worry about.
You used to have this with AppleScript Studio. Interface Builder created UI, with AppleScript code behind the events. However, that was killed in Snow Leopard in favor of AppleScript-ObjC.
I also think there is a far cry between using federal transportation dollars to create a railroad from California to Ohio, to using federal transportation dollars to create a railroad from California to California.
It's not an either / or proposition, unfortunately. The HSR connect between San Francisco and Los Angeles will not prevent the $171B in expenditure for highway lanes, runways, and airline gates. It will prevent only *some* of it that was to handle traffic between those two cities. There are still plenty of freeways all over California that will still get expanded. There will be new runways built. There will be gates added.
What you get with this plan, is ($171B - $X) + $98B*, which will still be more than $171B.
*$98B is the current estimate before lifting one spadeful of dirt. It *will* go up, as all rail projects do. The biggest lie the passenger rail proponents always try to pass off is their budgets.
Funny you should say that, since Jobs and Page had a conversation not too long ago. Excerpt from biography:
"Figure out what Google wants to be when it grows up. It’s now all over the map,” read the biography of Jobs’ interaction with Page. Later Jobs came to Page with a sharp advising tongue warning Google was making products, “that are adequate but not great. They’re turning you into Microsoft.”
This is probably Larry Page taking a meat axe to projects that are diluting focus away from making things that are good, which prevents them from being great.
I wonder how much of this is the result of Larry Page having a long conversation with Steve Jobs, where Jobs told him that he should be asking "what does Google want to be when it grows up." In his typical harsh way, Jobs said that Google is going in every direction at once, and there is no focus to half of what they're doing.
This might be part of Google's attempt to regain focus.
And it's better be an iconic solution, with game-changing tangibles that can be quantified, to say nothing of soft-costs saved.
Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"
on
Occupy Flash?
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· Score: 1
"It's time to stop the redistribution of wealth from the 99% to the 1%. We created it, we want more of it."
And when you created it, you used someone else's resources to do it, with a previously agreed-upon arrangement where you would be compensated for your work at a pre-determined rate. Let me repeat that: When you accepted that work in a factory, in construction, or in a programmer's cube, you accepted the compensation that you'd be getting for doing that work. If you no longer think that compensation is fair, feel free to negotiate for better, or leave that position and find one that you think is acceptable.
Or, better yet, come up with your own resources to develop a product or service that people will buy from you, so that you get that wealth you feel you so richly deserve.
Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"
on
Occupy Flash?
·
· Score: 1
"Occupy $NOUN" is just the new "Change You Can Believe In", which was "The New Direction" of the 2006 midterm elections. You can probably continue the cliche train as far back as you'd like.
It's all horseshit, and means nothing. Actually improving things is what matters, and that's a slow train indeed.
Perhaps not, but it's an eternity in technological time.
100 years ago, we were still trying to get electric lights installed outside of cities. Telephones were a new concept, and radio was a brand new thing. Television wasn't even conceptualized yet. Powered flight was still a few years away, and the conceptual model of the atom with orbiting electrons was just published months ago.
Now we are on the edge of commercial manned spaceflight, we have vast self-correcting networks of computers, with exabytes of information available instantly to just about everyone in the developed world. Who's to say what the next 100 years will bring for fixing the problems of today?
I was thinking more along the lines of "every company that has a name that isn't 5 letters, starts with an 'A', and is named for a seed-bearing fruit that grows on trees, founded in the late 1970s.
Slashdot Mirror
It also ignores that there are ways of running MacOS X on the PC hardware you already have, should you be technically proficient enough to follow instructions.
I would hope that a potential developer of smartphone apps would be technically proficient enough to follow instructions. Or use Google. But that's the problem with 'hope'.
Awesome. Because there's no chance whatsoever that someone in a car would want to use a phone, when that someone is not sitting in the driver's seat.
Oh, and I also forgot that all stores, offices, houses, sidewalks, and public plazas are built with 980 ft offsets from every road.
I'd like to know who is calling Ron Wyden a hardcore liberal, because they clearly haven't been paying attention to Mr. Wyden recently. Just his co-sponsoring of this bill that would partially privatize Medicare should convince anyone that he's not a 'hardcore liberal.'
He's quite moderate, actually, which explains why he's trying to cut through the bullshit and actually work with people from the "opposition" party.
Nah, we learned that moon regolith is the perfect material for shooting a portal gun at. Quoth Cave Johnson:
Clearly that's where it all went.
Ignorance is fine, but it's quite simple to figure out that depleted uranium is only radioactive in the sense that given enough time, it will decay into something else. So do some isotopes of Iron, but nobody has an irrational fear about the uses of that metal.
From the World Health Organization:
Getting back on topic, this reactor design is a "breeder" - it creates the fuel from non-fissile "fertile" material in the course of the reaction. More clearly, it happens like this:
1. Start criticality with a tiny amount of enriched reactor-grade Uranium (~15% U235, 85%U238) surrounded by depleted Uranium (99.9% U238)
2. Criticality causes neutrons to fly about, which get absorbed by the "fertile" depleted U238 surrounding the starter criticality, transmuting it into U239
3. The U239 immediately undergoes beta decay and turns into Np239.
4. And the Np239 beta decays into Pu239, which is a fissile material.
5. It then gets whacked by a neutron, splitting, and sending off some more neutrons which get absorbed by U238. Go to step 2.
In short, holding a brick of depleted uranium in your hand would give you a radiation dose about equal to holding a clay brick in your hand. You just want to wash your hands before you eat something, and don't drop it and breathe in any dust that may come off it.
Wikipedia is hard.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_decommissioning#North_America
Actually, there is a such thing as radioactive waste. One of the reasons why fuel rods are removed from existing reactors when they still have useable fuel is because a critical percentage of them has turned into a material that captures free neutrons without fissioning, or fissioning into another material that is also a neutron absorber, thus slowing the reaction.
It's referred to as neutron poisoning. It's also the reason for waste reprocessing - removing these absorbing materials and remanufacturing the fuel assemblies for re-use.
More to the point, this particular reactor design works on *depleted* uranium, so you're not enriching it, but you're actually using waste from the enriching process as fuel.
There is a massive amount of depleted uranium laying around that has been stockpiled since the Manhattan Project. Using it as fuel would be far more environmentally friendly than any other base-load generation, since we've already extracted it from the ground, and it's just sitting in storage.
Using what you already have is much preferable to using what you need to go get.
I'm pretty sure that when you're talking about a nuclear generating station, anyone on the premises without authorization and proper credentials constitutes an identified threat.
Maybe you're right. Instead of just putting a .50 cal round through their ear, someone should have gotten close enough to yell at them first, then put a few NATO 5.56 rounds through their chest if they don't immediately comply.
At Fukishima, the spent fuel pools are on the roof of the reactor buildings. When the reactor buildings were blown to shit by the hydrogen explosions, it caused a few leaks in the spent fuel pools.
They have water in those pools for a reason. The water cools the spent fuel which still gives off quite a bit of heat, as well as acts as radiation shielding. Without pumping and circulation, the water will boil off or get cracked into hydrogen, building up in the building for a nicely explosive atmosphere. Then, depending on the fuel assembly, you can have lots of radioactive elements released to the environment.
Maintaining water circulation in the spent fuel pools is rather important.
Unfortunately, there is the problem of the Senate Majority Leader being from the State of Nevada, and any possible Congressional action to get the Yucca Mountain facility operating will be immediately tabled without debate, much less a vote to send it to the President for signature / veto.
They only kind-of breached security. They got to the outside of the containment building, which is still several yards of reinforced concrete away from anything to do with the reactor. It's highly unlikely that anything they could carry with them could breach the containment building.
If they actually got inside of the containment, then there would be something to seriously worry about.
You used to have this with AppleScript Studio. Interface Builder created UI, with AppleScript code behind the events. However, that was killed in Snow Leopard in favor of AppleScript-ObjC.
I also think there is a far cry between using federal transportation dollars to create a railroad from California to Ohio, to using federal transportation dollars to create a railroad from California to California.
It's not an either / or proposition, unfortunately. The HSR connect between San Francisco and Los Angeles will not prevent the $171B in expenditure for highway lanes, runways, and airline gates. It will prevent only *some* of it that was to handle traffic between those two cities. There are still plenty of freeways all over California that will still get expanded. There will be new runways built. There will be gates added.
What you get with this plan, is ($171B - $X) + $98B*, which will still be more than $171B.
*$98B is the current estimate before lifting one spadeful of dirt. It *will* go up, as all rail projects do. The biggest lie the passenger rail proponents always try to pass off is their budgets.
Funny you should say that, since Jobs and Page had a conversation not too long ago. Excerpt from biography:
"Figure out what Google wants to be when it grows up. It’s now all over the map,” read the biography of Jobs’ interaction with Page. Later Jobs came to Page with a sharp advising tongue warning Google was making products, “that are adequate but not great. They’re turning you into Microsoft.”
This is probably Larry Page taking a meat axe to projects that are diluting focus away from making things that are good, which prevents them from being great.
I wonder how much of this is the result of Larry Page having a long conversation with Steve Jobs, where Jobs told him that he should be asking "what does Google want to be when it grows up." In his typical harsh way, Jobs said that Google is going in every direction at once, and there is no focus to half of what they're doing.
This might be part of Google's attempt to regain focus.
Source: excerpt from the Jobs biography, at http://www.edibleapple.com/2011/10/22/steve-jobs-advice-to-larry-page/
And it's better be an iconic solution, with game-changing tangibles that can be quantified, to say nothing of soft-costs saved.
"It's time to stop the redistribution of wealth from the 99% to the 1%. We created it, we want more of it."
And when you created it, you used someone else's resources to do it, with a previously agreed-upon arrangement where you would be compensated for your work at a pre-determined rate. Let me repeat that: When you accepted that work in a factory, in construction, or in a programmer's cube, you accepted the compensation that you'd be getting for doing that work. If you no longer think that compensation is fair, feel free to negotiate for better, or leave that position and find one that you think is acceptable.
Or, better yet, come up with your own resources to develop a product or service that people will buy from you, so that you get that wealth you feel you so richly deserve.
"Occupy $NOUN" is just the new "Change You Can Believe In", which was "The New Direction" of the 2006 midterm elections. You can probably continue the cliche train as far back as you'd like.
It's all horseshit, and means nothing. Actually improving things is what matters, and that's a slow train indeed.
I heard you like occupying, so I occupied your occupation, so you can occupy occupations while you occupy!
Perhaps not, but it's an eternity in technological time.
100 years ago, we were still trying to get electric lights installed outside of cities. Telephones were a new concept, and radio was a brand new thing. Television wasn't even conceptualized yet. Powered flight was still a few years away, and the conceptual model of the atom with orbiting electrons was just published months ago.
Now we are on the edge of commercial manned spaceflight, we have vast self-correcting networks of computers, with exabytes of information available instantly to just about everyone in the developed world. Who's to say what the next 100 years will bring for fixing the problems of today?
Because Apple wants to use them as a legal cudgel to smash in their competitors' faces? Isn't this amazingly obvious?
You do realize that location-based services on smartphones has been WILDLY popular since about 2007?
I was thinking more along the lines of "every company that has a name that isn't 5 letters, starts with an 'A', and is named for a seed-bearing fruit that grows on trees, founded in the late 1970s.