btw, drip irrigation is only a good thing during droughts. During times when there is enough water, flood irrigation is better for the environment, because it helps replenish the ground supply (and in the case of rice fields, it provides important wetlands for wildlife).
It also helps wash out the salt that accumulates at the boundary where the drip-supplied water finishes spreading out and dries up.
High Density Polyethylene, with carbon black to absorb UV and make them last longer.
HDP is about as safe for drinking water contact as plastic gets, if you don't put plasticizers in it to make it flexible. (While the article didn't say anything about plasticizers, these balls are better off if they're NOT flexible and were built on special-order for the purpose, so I doubt they have anything they didn't need.)
Before we shell out billions (and generate more pollution) legal reforms will be needed to eliminate this "senior water rights" nonsense.
Senior water right are property - like real estate, gold, food, houses, cars, home computers.
If the government, at any level, wants to "eliminate" this ownership, they must PAY for it. The Fifth Amendment (which has been "incorporated" to apply to the states and below, not just to the fed.) ends with:
... nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
[The student's two-word tweet] isn't a felony. The tweet isn't equivalent to falsely shouting fire in a crowded theatre, and that reasoning doesn't even make sense.
Indeed.
A side-note while we're at it: The whole "falsely shouting fire in a crowded theater" argument was coined by a supreme justice in WW I, when writing a decision upholding a law criminalizing handing out anti-draft leaflets.
My favorite story on the subject is about a time Abbie Hoffman was being interviewed about a free speech issue (in a crowderd theater, of course). Went something like this:
Talking Head: But surely you don't advocate crying fire in a crowded theater?
Abbie: FIRE!
"To have the greatest market share in a particular industry without having a monopoly" is the definition that Wikipedia gave me.
Thanks. I stand corrected.
I was under the impression that "Cornering a Market" referred specifically to the first example they gave - holding more futures contracts than there is available material to fulfil, so one can hold the short-sellers up for whatever money you want - rather than the more general case of having control of enough of the supply, through ANY mechanism, that you can effectively dictate price.
There don't seem to be very many good free alternatives other than microsoft's default package.
Signature-based anit-malware solutions require an industrial-scale operation to identify new threats and add them to the signatures. That's very costly: Those workers have to eat, so they have to be paid somehow.
Since Microsoft is pretty much the only company with a revenue stream that is substantially improved by protecting Microsoft systems generally, it is similarly pretty much the only operation that can profit by spending such industrial-scale money deploying new defences "for free".
But there are still a few who find ways to make it possible. One of the best after-infection malware-removal tools out there is Malwarebytes. They distribute a stripped-down, manually-operated, nagware version of their product for free, in the hopes that you'll subscribe to the full-function version (to get additional functionality, including automated scheduled execution, and/or spare your attention from constantly closing their popups that covered your working window. B-) )
The majority of home computer users want the computer to work... And there are a lot more of them than there are of you. And they have their wallets out.
I'm aware of that. And (unfortunately) a similar fraction of business executives think similarly - and haven't yet had enough companies killed out from under them by corporate espionage to change their minds (although we're getting there).
But I'm not talking about the majority making a choice. I'm talking about nearly all the people on Slashdot - MANY of whom are interested in security - not even TALKING about it.
So you're in favor of rape, armed robbery, assault, battery, murder, genocide, and war?
Yes, it is exactly what I said.
It's nice of you to admit it.
But why do you WANT people to be raped, robbed, assaulted, battered, murdered, have their races "cleansed" out of existence, or killed/wounded/conquered in wars, and/or subject to totalitarian governments. Do you get some thrill from it?
The government knows damn well that ideas like this are unenforceable. It's not about banning porn anymore than it's about protecting children (as if the government gives a shit about your kids safety). It's about revenue.
No, it's about control.
This gives them the camel's nose into the tent on controlling content. Chipping away at some basic rightalways starts with going after some unpopular behavior - pornography, child molestation, incest, etc. - and setting a precedent that the right isn't absolute. Once this is done, and the right converted to a privilege, there is the matter of setting the line defining what behavior is still allowed - a subset that steadily shrinks. Anyone who calls them on it, of course, can be labelled a supporter of pornography, child molestation, incest, etc., helping them get the initial precedent set.
Meanwhile, when the "protective measures" don't work, the government will use the failure as an excuse to impose progressively more, and more draconian, interventions. So they both increase the amount of behavior they claim to "legitimately" prohibit and the tools they claim to "legitimately" use to enforce the prohibitions.
Of course it isn't the pornographers, child molesters, and such that they're after. Its their political opposition. (Money too, of course, and anyone doing anything that interferes with their wishes.)
The harder it is to follow the law, the better! If nobody can actually be compliant, then everyone pays a fine.
More importantly: When nobody can follow the law they can bust anybody at their whim. The rule of law is replaced by the rule of the police - the definition of a "police state".
Where were you when the Lenovo persistent malware discussion drifted into the "administrative" backdoor, clandestine control channel, phone-home-capable, UNDER the OS, "features" built into modern Intel and AMD processors?
I, and a handful of others, have been bringing this up for YEARS, but somehow the discussions just die out, as if nobody was any more interested in this than your metaphorical herd of cows.
I actually looked for your rant but didn't find it - even modded to have-to-dig-for-it oblivion.
If we could use the better wire to increase the field (fourth power), trade that away entirely for size scale-down, and leave the plasma density the same so we take the full hit there (third power):
- A 10:1 scale-down gives you a reaction chamber just under a foot across that gives you 100 kW. Home power, car power (75 HP continuous - you need about 20 plus "peaking" for a practical car), maybe trucks with slightly larger scaling.
- A 100:1 scale-down gives you a reaction chamber just under an inch across that gives you 100W. That would give you a power brick to charge-run your laptop or whatever.
All assuming the shielding and peripheral equipment doesn't bloat it or make it too heavy. Looks OK for home power, unlikely for laptop bricks (though maybe portable gasoline generators could go nuclear), somewhere in the middle for cars and trucks.
Nuclear dragsters! Neat! If the magnets don't stick them together or push them apart and off the track, of course. And if you can keep the stray neutrons in. (They'd use hydrogen-1/boron-11, where the main reaction is aneutronic, but that DOES have a little neutron emission from occasional side-reactions involving the "exhaust" nucleii, unstable carbon-12 intermediate step, and/or impurities.)
Now I REALLY want to know what magnet technology EMC2 is assuming.
That's in fact the whole problem with this type of reactor design - no one (as of yet) has succeeded in keeping the plasma confined for long enough to generate more power than they put in to start the reaction.
Actually I understand that one of 'em recently DID reach theoretical breakeven (more fusion energy produced than input energy consumed) for a moment.
But that's still a "factor of several" from ENGINEERING breakeven (more put into the grid than pulled from it). There's still a long way to go.
Not counting fusion bombs, of course. Batch processes are a LOT easier than flow. B-)
That's one of the reasons they keep trying to do ignition with lasers. If they could trigger a fusion bomb without using a fission bomb for a primer, they could bury it, set it off, use the hot hole to make steam for a while (geothermal style), then drop in another one and repeat...
Unfortunately, somebody could also skip making the hole and just set it off in a city. So the tech would be kept under tight government control. Non-batch processes would not need such tight regulation.
It would be interesting to compute what the effect of using this tape, rather than copper windings, would have on the scale of Bussard's/EMC2's polywell fusion machine prototypes. The Polywell is essentially a big gassy vacuum tube that produces fusion-powered electricity from hydrogen and boron.
The proposed 100 MW machine is 3 meters (about 6 1/2 feet) in diameter - because the scaling rules (5th power) include both volume and mag field strength, which both go by power laws (3rd and 4th respectively) of the radius. Their sweet spot is 1.5 meters - about the size and power density of a Boeing 777's engine - with too little power produced if much smaller, needing impossible material strengths if much larger. A machine this size, peripherals and all, would fit in one store segment of a strip mall and power a small city.
But their prototypes so far have used copper magnetic windings and pulse operation. It's not clear to me whether these engineering numbers include superconducting magnets - and if they do, whether they use windings as good as this tape or something more akin to the IETR.
A 5 kW "Mr Fusion" about the size of a home furnace would finish off the power grid. A 20kW version the size of a microwave oven would run automobiles without the need for recharging.
Neutrinos don't interact with matter very much at all. Like to the point that it took abandoned mines full of water to catch enough of the neutrino blast coming from the sun ALL THE TIME to make enough blinks to finally prove they really exist.
Homestake Mine experiment: The chlorine in 100,000 GALLONS of C2Cl4 liquid caught about ONE electron neutrino every two DAYS. Even if you're a real couch potato you're a lot smaller target than that big tank - like by four orders of magnitude, which will swamp variations in the neutrino-interaction cross-sections of your various elements. You might catch more than one electron neutrino in your lifetime, but not many more.
Measured value for the solar constant (total energy from the sun going through an area of space at the Earth's orbit - roughly that area's share of the energy delivered by the sun's fusion) is 1.361 kW per square meter. Area of a sphere is 4 pi r^2. So let's be pessimistic and assume a fusion power plant turns one part in four pi of the fusion energy into deliverable power. (It will probably be closer to 60%) A 1.361 kW generator (enough to run your house) a meter away would be about as "bright" as the sun, neutrino-wise. A 1.36 GW power plant (enough for a million houses) a kilometer away, ditto.
One nice thing about low, constant, levels of ionizing radiation is that they actually slightly REDUCE the incidence of cancer and the like. (This is part of why Denver residents don't have horrible cancer rates compared to those living nearer sea level.) Apparently the ionizing radiation provokes the production of inducible enzymes that repair DNA and scavenge free radicals - preventing more damage from both radiation and free radicals from the cell's own energy production than the radiation causes. Up to the saturation of the induciblity it's a slight net gain. Unfortunately, the neutrino flux from fusion reactors would be too low to confer this benefit.
Neutrinos don't interact with matter very much at all. Like to the point that it took abandoned mines full of water to catch enough of the neutrino blast coming from the sun ALL THE TIME to make enough blinks to finally prove they really exist.
If you're really worried, put your home's Mr. Fusion in the back yard rather than under your bed. (The inverse square law is your friend.) Remove any granite countertops from your kitchen or granite gravel from your driveway, to more than compensate by lowering the DETECTABLE background. Or move a few feet downhill to reduce your exposure to secondary cosmic rays.
TFA makes no mention of what happens if you stop supplying the energy required to confine the plasma.
Getting the right conditions for more-out-than-in fusion is REALLY HARD. So far it's pretty much only been done momentarily - using atomic fission bombs as working parts to apply enough heat and pressure.
So when there is ANY problem in the confinement, the fusion stops.
You're left with the energy in your plasma - several camera photoflashes' worth - and your superconducting magnet - which probably is unharmed and still running.
If the magnet is not properly quenched, at most it's got the energy of a large electrical fire or small bomb - on the rough order of a few hand grenades or laptop battery fires. This might be enough to throw around the small amount of low-level-radioactive material created by months or years of neutron bombardment of the reaction chamber walls and the like.
This is not in the same ballpark - by many orders of magnitude - as the few tons of molten, activated, coreium you'd get from an old-tech fission plant meltdown (all set to become an UNcontrolled, UNcooled, operating reactor if it manages to be puddled into a compact volume), or the fuel assemblies full of recent fission products still putting out, for months, heat enough to melt, ignite, or partially vaporize themselves if the coolant level drops enough to uncover them.
It's the difference between Fukushima or Chernobyl and, at most, a transformer fire in a warehouse with a substantial number of ionization smoke detectors installed.
...on the international Samsung Galaxy S3 I bought for the purpose. (The international version uses a different chipset, which is one of the few supported by Replicant, which is a fully-open CyanogenMod derivative that doesn't use a number of closed binary blobs (if you don't install them yourself to use a couple of the phone's features), some of which are known to have backdoor-capable hooks.)
Then these two flaws came to light.
So I'm waiting for Replicant to figure out whether they're vulnerable and if so what needs to be done to fix that.
As I understand it, the Replicant project is down to mostly one guy with a day job - AND is the closest thing to a fully open-source, pretty much secure, smartpphone load out there. (This is the project that DISCOVERED the Samsung backdoor...) IMHO it would be a good project for those who want to work on a secure-AND-open smartphone to contribute to (or fork from).
What's particularly annoying is that they did it TWICE!
Beta blockers do the same thing: Cut the death rate due to secondary, follow-on, heart attacks by about a quarter - which, given that heart attacks are one of the few remaining common ways to die, is a LOT of unnecessary deaths. Ivabradine does the same thing for some people for whom beta blockers don't work.
A few decades back beta blockers had been approved in Europe for post-heart-attack preventative treatment. But the FDA held up approval of this ("off-label") use in the US for years. (If I recall correctly, it was because they wouldn't accept the results of the European research and required it to be re-run under US rules. You can see the conceptual similarity to the Thalidomide situation.) Not much incentive to spend the millions, since beta blockers were already approved for other things so the funder wouldn't get a lock on the new treatment to make back the cost. Meanwhile, people were dying like flies, for over a decade.
What finally got them off the dime was apparently a Wall Street Journal article on the subject. It ran under the headline "100,000 Dead!". (If you read the text, though, you'd see that the number was actually more like 400,000. The WSJ was just being conservative - and setting things up so that a challenge to theheadline would drag the larger number into the light. B-) )
It is great that Kelsey's "prove it" stance saved a lot of babies from birth defects. But it also helped set up the bureaucratic incentive structure that has lead to the 8-figure cost and decade-scale delays in getting new drugs and treatments to market - while people suffer and/or die for lack of the new technology.
I hear that, during the original debates on the law creating the FDA and giving it the gatekeeper power over drugs (and cosmetics) the congresscriters were pretty much agreed that it would be counterproductive if it resulted in more than a six-month delay in the deployment of new drugs. Oops!
From what I've read, I don't think the "non-addictive" nature of heroin was really a Bayer greed conspiracy as much as a byproduct of poorly understood nature of opiate dependence.
From what I've read it was a mistake, due to a testing artifact:
- They were searching for a drug that would have morphine's painkilling effects without producing withdrawal symptoms. (Morphine is the main active ingredient of Opium and was also a then-modern "miracle drug" used for treatment of pain, as a respiratory depressant, and as a life saving antidiarrheal agent.)
- They made minor modifications to the molecule and tested the result.
- With this particular modification they still got powerful painkilling effect. So they tested it for addiction potential - on several of the lab assistants.
- But it turns out that a small fraction of people don't GET withdrawal symptoms from opiates, and it happened that these lab assistants all had this odd metabolism.
- Convinced that they had found this particular holy grail, they reported it to their management, which (also convinced) went to market with it.
- It was called "heroin" because it was believed to be the "heroine" that would rescue the addicted - either from recreational opium use and from medical treatment - from their misery.
- Unfortunately, it was just a nice, soluble, molecule that could be injected - after which the body just turned it into morphine. Oops! Everybody who got withdrawal symptoms from morphine got it from heroin, too, and the injectability made for the same sort of addicting quick rush as inhalation of opium smoke.
So I see the rush to market of Heroin as primarily a matter of a drug company (doing well by doing good) trying to quickly deploy what they believed to be a new miracle drug, to solve a major medical problem (opiate addiction), rather than a "greed conspiracy" to field something they thought would make them money without solving the problem (or while making it worse).
We have a rather distorted view of opiates these days.
No kidding. As I understand it, from some reports I've noticed. (I am not a doctor...)
Pressure from the Federal authorities (including such things as examining how often and in what dosages particular doctors prescribe opiates and other controlled substances - massively dinging those whose practice involves treating people with severe chronic pain) has resulted (over several decades) in substantial undermedicaton for pain.
Recent research appears to show that adequate doses of opiate painkillers in the several days following a severe trauma (such as battlefield injures) tends to prevent development of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
So perhaps the massive rise in diagnosed PTSD among veterans of modern warfare (and other misadventures, such as being the victim of a criminal assault or rape) is at least partly the result of this undermedication.
Slashdot Mirror
btw, drip irrigation is only a good thing during droughts. During times when there is enough water, flood irrigation is better for the environment, because it helps replenish the ground supply (and in the case of rice fields, it provides important wetlands for wildlife).
It also helps wash out the salt that accumulates at the boundary where the drip-supplied water finishes spreading out and dries up.
The balls are probably made from ABS.
High Density Polyethylene, with carbon black to absorb UV and make them last longer.
HDP is about as safe for drinking water contact as plastic gets, if you don't put plasticizers in it to make it flexible. (While the article didn't say anything about plasticizers, these balls are better off if they're NOT flexible and were built on special-order for the purpose, so I doubt they have anything they didn't need.)
Before we shell out billions (and generate more pollution) legal reforms will be needed to eliminate this "senior water rights" nonsense.
Senior water right are property - like real estate, gold, food, houses, cars, home computers.
If the government, at any level, wants to "eliminate" this ownership, they must PAY for it. The Fifth Amendment (which has been "incorporated" to apply to the states and below, not just to the fed.) ends with:
[The student's two-word tweet] isn't a felony. The tweet isn't equivalent to falsely shouting fire in a crowded theatre, and that reasoning doesn't even make sense.
Indeed.
A side-note while we're at it: The whole "falsely shouting fire in a crowded theater" argument was coined by a supreme justice in WW I, when writing a decision upholding a law criminalizing handing out anti-draft leaflets.
My favorite story on the subject is about a time Abbie Hoffman was being interviewed about a free speech issue (in a crowderd theater, of course). Went something like this:
Talking Head: But surely you don't advocate crying fire in a crowded theater?
Abbie: FIRE!
"To have the greatest market share in a particular industry without having a monopoly" is the definition that Wikipedia gave me.
Thanks. I stand corrected.
I was under the impression that "Cornering a Market" referred specifically to the first example they gave - holding more futures contracts than there is available material to fulfil, so one can hold the short-sellers up for whatever money you want - rather than the more general case of having control of enough of the supply, through ANY mechanism, that you can effectively dictate price.
... these services desperately want to corner the market on kid's shows.
They desperately want to own more shares of commitments to deliver kid's shows than makers of kid's shows have committed to?
Sesame Street needs to do a segment explaining the definition of "corner the market".
... where you analyze the executable and then based off that determine if it's malicious or not.
That's provably impossible. It's trivial to convert it to the halting problem.
There don't seem to be very many good free alternatives other than microsoft's default package.
Signature-based anit-malware solutions require an industrial-scale operation to identify new threats and add them to the signatures. That's very costly: Those workers have to eat, so they have to be paid somehow.
Since Microsoft is pretty much the only company with a revenue stream that is substantially improved by protecting Microsoft systems generally, it is similarly pretty much the only operation that can profit by spending such industrial-scale money deploying new defences "for free".
But there are still a few who find ways to make it possible. One of the best after-infection malware-removal tools out there is Malwarebytes. They distribute a stripped-down, manually-operated, nagware version of their product for free, in the hopes that you'll subscribe to the full-function version (to get additional functionality, including automated scheduled execution, and/or spare your attention from constantly closing their popups that covered your working window. B-) )
The majority of home computer users want the computer to work ... And there are a lot more of them than there are of you. And they have their wallets out.
I'm aware of that. And (unfortunately) a similar fraction of business executives think similarly - and haven't yet had enough companies killed out from under them by corporate espionage to change their minds (although we're getting there).
But I'm not talking about the majority making a choice. I'm talking about nearly all the people on Slashdot - MANY of whom are interested in security - not even TALKING about it.
So you're in favor of rape, armed robbery, assault, battery, murder, genocide, and war?
Yes, it is exactly what I said.
It's nice of you to admit it.
But why do you WANT people to be raped, robbed, assaulted, battered, murdered, have their races "cleansed" out of existence, or killed/wounded/conquered in wars, and/or subject to totalitarian governments. Do you get some thrill from it?
The whole point is that it shouldn't be a constitutional right to have guns.
So you're in favor of rape, armed robbery, assault, battery, murder, genocide, and war?
Not to mention totalitarianism (both despotism and other forms), which is why it IS a constitutional right.
The whole point is that it shouldn't be a constitutional right to have guns.
So you're in favor of rape, armed robbery, assault, battery, murder, genocide, and war?
The government knows damn well that ideas like this are unenforceable. It's not about banning porn anymore than it's about protecting children (as if the government gives a shit about your kids safety). It's about revenue.
No, it's about control.
This gives them the camel's nose into the tent on controlling content. Chipping away at some basic rightalways starts with going after some unpopular behavior - pornography, child molestation, incest, etc. - and setting a precedent that the right isn't absolute. Once this is done, and the right converted to a privilege, there is the matter of setting the line defining what behavior is still allowed - a subset that steadily shrinks. Anyone who calls them on it, of course, can be labelled a supporter of pornography, child molestation, incest, etc., helping them get the initial precedent set.
Meanwhile, when the "protective measures" don't work, the government will use the failure as an excuse to impose progressively more, and more draconian, interventions. So they both increase the amount of behavior they claim to "legitimately" prohibit and the tools they claim to "legitimately" use to enforce the prohibitions.
Of course it isn't the pornographers, child molesters, and such that they're after. Its their political opposition. (Money too, of course, and anyone doing anything that interferes with their wishes.)
The harder it is to follow the law, the better! If nobody can actually be compliant, then everyone pays a fine.
More importantly: When nobody can follow the law they can bust anybody at their whim. The rule of law is replaced by the rule of the police - the definition of a "police state".
You are all cows. ...
Where were you when the Lenovo persistent malware discussion drifted into the "administrative" backdoor, clandestine control channel, phone-home-capable, UNDER the OS, "features" built into modern Intel and AMD processors?
I, and a handful of others, have been bringing this up for YEARS, but somehow the discussions just die out, as if nobody was any more interested in this than your metaphorical herd of cows.
I actually looked for your rant but didn't find it - even modded to have-to-dig-for-it oblivion.
If we could use the better wire to increase the field (fourth power), trade that away entirely for size scale-down, and leave the plasma density the same so we take the full hit there (third power):
- A 10:1 scale-down gives you a reaction chamber just under a foot across that gives you 100 kW. Home power, car power (75 HP continuous - you need about 20 plus "peaking" for a practical car), maybe trucks with slightly larger scaling.
- A 100:1 scale-down gives you a reaction chamber just under an inch across that gives you 100W. That would give you a power brick to charge-run your laptop or whatever.
All assuming the shielding and peripheral equipment doesn't bloat it or make it too heavy. Looks OK for home power, unlikely for laptop bricks (though maybe portable gasoline generators could go nuclear), somewhere in the middle for cars and trucks.
Nuclear dragsters! Neat! If the magnets don't stick them together or push them apart and off the track, of course. And if you can keep the stray neutrons in. (They'd use hydrogen-1/boron-11, where the main reaction is aneutronic, but that DOES have a little neutron emission from occasional side-reactions involving the "exhaust" nucleii, unstable carbon-12 intermediate step, and/or impurities.)
Now I REALLY want to know what magnet technology EMC2 is assuming.
That's in fact the whole problem with this type of reactor design - no one (as of yet) has succeeded in keeping the plasma confined for long enough to generate more power than they put in to start the reaction.
Actually I understand that one of 'em recently DID reach theoretical breakeven (more fusion energy produced than input energy consumed) for a moment.
But that's still a "factor of several" from ENGINEERING breakeven (more put into the grid than pulled from it). There's still a long way to go.
Not counting fusion bombs, of course. Batch processes are a LOT easier than flow. B-)
That's one of the reasons they keep trying to do ignition with lasers. If they could trigger a fusion bomb without using a fission bomb for a primer, they could bury it, set it off, use the hot hole to make steam for a while (geothermal style), then drop in another one and repeat...
Unfortunately, somebody could also skip making the hole and just set it off in a city. So the tech would be kept under tight government control. Non-batch processes would not need such tight regulation.
It would be interesting to compute what the effect of using this tape, rather than copper windings, would have on the scale of Bussard's/EMC2's polywell fusion machine prototypes. The Polywell is essentially a big gassy vacuum tube that produces fusion-powered electricity from hydrogen and boron.
The proposed 100 MW machine is 3 meters (about 6 1/2 feet) in diameter - because the scaling rules (5th power) include both volume and mag field strength, which both go by power laws (3rd and 4th respectively) of the radius. Their sweet spot is 1.5 meters - about the size and power density of a Boeing 777's engine - with too little power produced if much smaller, needing impossible material strengths if much larger. A machine this size, peripherals and all, would fit in one store segment of a strip mall and power a small city.
But their prototypes so far have used copper magnetic windings and pulse operation. It's not clear to me whether these engineering numbers include superconducting magnets - and if they do, whether they use windings as good as this tape or something more akin to the IETR.
A 5 kW "Mr Fusion" about the size of a home furnace would finish off the power grid. A 20kW version the size of a microwave oven would run automobiles without the need for recharging.
Neutrinos don't interact with matter very much at all. Like to the point that it took abandoned mines full of water to catch enough of the neutrino blast coming from the sun ALL THE TIME to make enough blinks to finally prove they really exist.
Homestake Mine experiment: The chlorine in 100,000 GALLONS of C2Cl4 liquid caught about ONE electron neutrino every two DAYS. Even if you're a real couch potato you're a lot smaller target than that big tank - like by four orders of magnitude, which will swamp variations in the neutrino-interaction cross-sections of your various elements. You might catch more than one electron neutrino in your lifetime, but not many more.
Measured value for the solar constant (total energy from the sun going through an area of space at the Earth's orbit - roughly that area's share of the energy delivered by the sun's fusion) is 1.361 kW per square meter. Area of a sphere is 4 pi r^2. So let's be pessimistic and assume a fusion power plant turns one part in four pi of the fusion energy into deliverable power. (It will probably be closer to 60%) A 1.361 kW generator (enough to run your house) a meter away would be about as "bright" as the sun, neutrino-wise. A 1.36 GW power plant (enough for a million houses) a kilometer away, ditto.
One nice thing about low, constant, levels of ionizing radiation is that they actually slightly REDUCE the incidence of cancer and the like. (This is part of why Denver residents don't have horrible cancer rates compared to those living nearer sea level.) Apparently the ionizing radiation provokes the production of inducible enzymes that repair DNA and scavenge free radicals - preventing more damage from both radiation and free radicals from the cell's own energy production than the radiation causes. Up to the saturation of the induciblity it's a slight net gain. Unfortunately, the neutrino flux from fusion reactors would be too low to confer this benefit.
good luck with that.
Neutrinos don't interact with matter very much at all. Like to the point that it took abandoned mines full of water to catch enough of the neutrino blast coming from the sun ALL THE TIME to make enough blinks to finally prove they really exist.
If you're really worried, put your home's Mr. Fusion in the back yard rather than under your bed. (The inverse square law is your friend.) Remove any granite countertops from your kitchen or granite gravel from your driveway, to more than compensate by lowering the DETECTABLE background. Or move a few feet downhill to reduce your exposure to secondary cosmic rays.
TFA makes no mention of what happens if you stop supplying the energy required to confine the plasma.
Getting the right conditions for more-out-than-in fusion is REALLY HARD. So far it's pretty much only been done momentarily - using atomic fission bombs as working parts to apply enough heat and pressure.
So when there is ANY problem in the confinement, the fusion stops.
You're left with the energy in your plasma - several camera photoflashes' worth - and your superconducting magnet - which probably is unharmed and still running.
If the magnet is not properly quenched, at most it's got the energy of a large electrical fire or small bomb - on the rough order of a few hand grenades or laptop battery fires. This might be enough to throw around the small amount of low-level-radioactive material created by months or years of neutron bombardment of the reaction chamber walls and the like.
This is not in the same ballpark - by many orders of magnitude - as the few tons of molten, activated, coreium you'd get from an old-tech fission plant meltdown (all set to become an UNcontrolled, UNcooled, operating reactor if it manages to be puddled into a compact volume), or the fuel assemblies full of recent fission products still putting out, for months, heat enough to melt, ignite, or partially vaporize themselves if the coolant level drops enough to uncover them.
It's the difference between Fukushima or Chernobyl and, at most, a transformer fire in a warehouse with a substantial number of ionization smoke detectors installed.
Safe usage of the old phones is putting them in a container and sending them to rural Africa.
And I bet the rural folks can get a bit of cash by selling them to the scammers in Nigeria.
Why bother to spam you to scam you out of your bank account information if they can get hold of a cellphone you've used to access your accounts. B-)
What? You factory-reset the phone? Do you KNOW if that REALLY clears your personal information beyond all recovery on your phone model?
...on the international Samsung Galaxy S3 I bought for the purpose. (The international version uses a different chipset, which is one of the few supported by Replicant, which is a fully-open CyanogenMod derivative that doesn't use a number of closed binary blobs (if you don't install them yourself to use a couple of the phone's features), some of which are known to have backdoor-capable hooks.)
Then these two flaws came to light.
So I'm waiting for Replicant to figure out whether they're vulnerable and if so what needs to be done to fix that.
As I understand it, the Replicant project is down to mostly one guy with a day job - AND is the closest thing to a fully open-source, pretty much secure, smartpphone load out there. (This is the project that DISCOVERED the Samsung backdoor...) IMHO it would be a good project for those who want to work on a secure-AND-open smartphone to contribute to (or fork from).
Link to Wikipedia article on Ivabradine]
What's particularly annoying is that they did it TWICE!
Beta blockers do the same thing: Cut the death rate due to secondary, follow-on, heart attacks by about a quarter - which, given that heart attacks are one of the few remaining common ways to die, is a LOT of unnecessary deaths. Ivabradine does the same thing for some people for whom beta blockers don't work.
A few decades back beta blockers had been approved in Europe for post-heart-attack preventative treatment. But the FDA held up approval of this ("off-label") use in the US for years. (If I recall correctly, it was because they wouldn't accept the results of the European research and required it to be re-run under US rules. You can see the conceptual similarity to the Thalidomide situation.) Not much incentive to spend the millions, since beta blockers were already approved for other things so the funder wouldn't get a lock on the new treatment to make back the cost. Meanwhile, people were dying like flies, for over a decade.
What finally got them off the dime was apparently a Wall Street Journal article on the subject. It ran under the headline "100,000 Dead!". (If you read the text, though, you'd see that the number was actually more like 400,000. The WSJ was just being conservative - and setting things up so that a challenge to theheadline would drag the larger number into the light. B-) )
It is great that Kelsey's "prove it" stance saved a lot of babies from birth defects. But it also helped set up the bureaucratic incentive structure that has lead to the 8-figure cost and decade-scale delays in getting new drugs and treatments to market - while people suffer and/or die for lack of the new technology.
I hear that, during the original debates on the law creating the FDA and giving it the gatekeeper power over drugs (and cosmetics) the congresscriters were pretty much agreed that it would be counterproductive if it resulted in more than a six-month delay in the deployment of new drugs. Oops!
From what I've read, I don't think the "non-addictive" nature of heroin was really a Bayer greed conspiracy as much as a byproduct of poorly understood nature of opiate dependence.
From what I've read it was a mistake, due to a testing artifact:
- They were searching for a drug that would have morphine's painkilling effects without producing withdrawal symptoms. (Morphine is the main active ingredient of Opium and was also a then-modern "miracle drug" used for treatment of pain, as a respiratory depressant, and as a life saving antidiarrheal agent.)
- They made minor modifications to the molecule and tested the result.
- With this particular modification they still got powerful painkilling effect. So they tested it for addiction potential - on several of the lab assistants.
- But it turns out that a small fraction of people don't GET withdrawal symptoms from opiates, and it happened that these lab assistants all had this odd metabolism.
- Convinced that they had found this particular holy grail, they reported it to their management, which (also convinced) went to market with it.
- It was called "heroin" because it was believed to be the "heroine" that would rescue the addicted - either from recreational opium use and from medical treatment - from their misery.
- Unfortunately, it was just a nice, soluble, molecule that could be injected - after which the body just turned it into morphine. Oops! Everybody who got withdrawal symptoms from morphine got it from heroin, too, and the injectability made for the same sort of addicting quick rush as inhalation of opium smoke.
So I see the rush to market of Heroin as primarily a matter of a drug company (doing well by doing good) trying to quickly deploy what they believed to be a new miracle drug, to solve a major medical problem (opiate addiction), rather than a "greed conspiracy" to field something they thought would make them money without solving the problem (or while making it worse).
We have a rather distorted view of opiates these days.
No kidding. As I understand it, from some reports I've noticed. (I am not a doctor...)
Pressure from the Federal authorities (including such things as examining how often and in what dosages particular doctors prescribe opiates and other controlled substances - massively dinging those whose practice involves treating people with severe chronic pain) has resulted (over several decades) in substantial undermedicaton for pain.
Recent research appears to show that adequate doses of opiate painkillers in the several days following a severe trauma (such as battlefield injures) tends to prevent development of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
So perhaps the massive rise in diagnosed PTSD among veterans of modern warfare (and other misadventures, such as being the victim of a criminal assault or rape) is at least partly the result of this undermedication.