the worst case scenario in a nuclear power plant is a meltdown
A meltdown is bad enough. If serious enough, it means containment breach and release of radioactive contamination into the environment.
But actually we have living proof that meltdown is NOT the worst case scenario. I give you Chernobyl. You can have a steam and/or hydrogen gas explosion, scattering nuclear fuel rubble and other contamination all around. I give you Fukushima, another series of steam and/or hydrogen gas explosions involving scattering contamination. There have been other explosions.
Fukishima was not a nuclear disaster, it was a huge tsunami damaging a nuclear facility, complicating the existing natural disaster due to risks of radiation exposure.
RISK of exposure? How about very real documented exposure as a fact? I'll tell you what Fukushima is. Fukushima is a testament to the sad reality that, whatever you consider to be the worst scenario you deem it worthwhile to protect against, something much worse WILL beset your creation. The only question is when. That goes for natural events, human failings and ignorance, and human evildoing.
"The ceilings of the passages and corridors which circled the arena on each tier consisted of vaulted arches made of concrete but the supports they rested on were made of strong, heavy limestone... Without concrete and vaulted arches, the Colosseum could not have been built." A number of other materials, including bricks, were also instrumental in the construction.
It's the Evil Empire of today, baby, and it's going bankrupt just like the last Evil Empire did, and then we'll be rid of the fuckers. It's going to take time though.
Maybe not. You can transfer all you want, but you can't make your priorities and preferences everybody's.
I doubt his machine is as weak as you fantasize. Maybe he just wonders why we should accept less absolute performance of the desktop over what we had 15-20 years ago even though the hardware is incomparably faster and has incomparably more resources.
Razor-qt is GPL2. They can't fork it and make something that's BSD-licensed out of it. I imagine that's the motivation, whether you agree with the motivation or not. FreeBSD (and by extension PC-BSD) has gone to a lot of trouble to expunge GPL'ed pieces, including binning gcc in favor of clang for the build process and the shipped core system.
This is just speculation, but the source might have been referring to fracture mechanics. Fracture begins more easily when there is a surface imperfection. That's why you can cut glass with precision by scoring the surface and tapping it in such a way as to put the scored face under tension. And if you have a pit or scratch on the surface of either glass or sapphire, that will become a stress concentration when you put it under strain, and that is where the fracture will begin.
That's also incidentally why cracks in airplanes start at rivet holes. Here the aluminum alloy material itself is purposely selected to have good toughness, so frequent and capable inspections will find the cracks before they reach a critical length. Even so, cutouts that have corners with sharp radii are avoided following the lesson of the bursting Comet airliner fuselages.
If a material (sapphire) has high hardness (resistance to pitting and scratching), that certainly helps to minimize opportunistic fracture. But it is not the only factor. Plainly you can fracture even perfect, unpitted, unscratched glass or sapphire by bending it. Sapphire has a niche in high end LED flashlights, but if they are well engineered the sapphire is seated around the edge in elastomer and also recessed so no normal force is likely to ever be applied, which would act to bend it.
fyi, scratch resistence is also a measure of shatter resistence, so if a substance is more scratch resistant than another, it is also more shatter resistant, at least that's what I just read
Nope. Sorry. Read better sources. Scratch resistance is governed by surface hardness. Shatter resistance is governed by toughness. Hardness and toughness are the classic opposed desirables in materials science. Sure, you can play games in certain materials with surface hardness, so the surface is very hard and the underlying material is still tough, which is ideal for things like drill bits, and would be ideal for transparent covers. You can also temper and anneal certain materials to tune the tradeoff between hardness and toughness.
But no, fundamentally scratch resistance is not a measure of shatter resistance. To a great degree, scratch resistance is an INVERSE measure of shatter resistance.
Perhaps you could enlighten us on what those other things are, since the effects of nuclear explosions in space are essentially entirely limited to EMP.
No, "politics" means the criminal assholes in Congress and the White House have no problem wasting trillions of dollars on pet feel-good projects and perpetual programs of relentless ever-increasing scope, but pontificate and argue themselves blue in the face over a billion here and there for undertakings which are unquestionably vital to safeguard the life and welfare of EVERYBODY.
Sorry, what you plan for as most probable is not enough. That gives you, to pick one example, a Maginot line. They will just go around it or fly over it.
More apropos recent history, having a military system which is devastatingly effective against mass tank attacks and tanks dug in defensively, but is absolutely helpless against IEDs and snipers, is not effective. But neither is the opposite. You either make your military system flexible and effective against as wide a variety of strategies and tactics as possible, or you are derelict in your duty.
Many antennas, each miles to hundreds of miles long, is hardly the same thing as a single antenna hundreds of thousands of miles long. You have 100,000 km of blood vessels great and tiny packed inside your body, but you don't drag around a train 100,000 km long when you move about.
The article of your first reference doesn't say there is "no way to protect"; it says forward looking measures can indeed be taken to mitigate the havoc. Your second reference talks about EMP from nuclear bursts concentrated within tiny time spans. The most damaging pulse effect E1 is over within one microsecond. E2 lasts up to one second, but is basically only damaging to structures already devastated by E1. E3 lasts several minutes and is the part to which which geomagnetic storms bear some resemblance. But the latter last hours, so they are nowhere near as concentrated.
The P in EMP stands for "pulse". A geomagnetic storm has qualities nothing like a pulse.
Fundamentally I agree with you about the imbecilic quality of the fear for, and utter lack of real knowledge about, the boogeyman, EMP.
But there are also real dangers on account of the hair's edge on which is balanced the life support system of the civilized world. If the North American electric power grid were to go down for more than a day, dislocation starts. More than a handful of days, the machine stops. The ENTIRE machine. I'll tell you why trucks stop coming to the city (and every place else) to keep up the stock of of groceries and home heating oil. Put very simply, because their individual fuel tanks only hold a few hours' worth of fuel before hitting empty. All of the "gas" (actually mostly diesel) stations rely on the grid to pump fuel from their below-ground tanks. I'll wager you that the percentage of fueling stations with backup generators installed which would last more than a few hours is a fraction of one percent approaching zero.
Meanwhile, liquid and gas delivery pipelines have lost power too. All the refineries have stopped refining. Nobody can run the pumps to refuel the constant stream of supertankers and LNG carriers which are absolutely required to sustain the system. The supply of well water to individual rural homes, that is to say proper sanitation, stops immediately. Water in the cities isn't much better. It still has to be pumped to water towers so it can flow from there to individual use sites. That flow would stop pretty quickly.
We don't have a world of little houses on the prairie which are all sited near natural available surface water out of necessity, with carriages pulled by horses "fueled" by large quantities of locally stored grain. We ouldn't even recreate that world on demand if we wanted to at anywhere near the present level of population.
I figured you would say that. The trap you fell into is that economy of scale is about manufacturing, not consumption. If you had to mine one tonne of iron and process it into steel ingot, it would cost you a lot, but the process is globally run on such a vast scale that it is very cheap. But the idea that if you buy a crapload of steel they will give you a special price is silly. Nothing you do is going to affect the global scale of the industry.
There is a problem or two with hydrogen fuel cells, which is why everybody who played with the idea before long shelved it, or put it on the back burner "for later", sort of like fusion power. 1) They are phenomenally expensive. 2) They require exacting thermal management. 3) You can't just "turn them on" with a click like an electric motor, or even with a handful of seconds cranking like an internal combustion engine. 4) No practical way to store the fuel. 5) Kids, they don't last forever any more than internal combustion engines or batteries do.
Wrong, GM will use it as a way to bash people into submission. When someone talks about suing and gets noisy enough, GM will send them a very powerful letter explaining to them in the most confusing way possible that they're already agreed to not sue them and that suing them would break this contract which would result in a counter suite from GM.
Every single article of the Constitution requires common sense to interpret. Of speech the First Amendment says simply "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech". It doesn't say the President will not executive-order that nobody can say anything mean. It doesn't even say that States can't infringe on the freedom of speech. It doesn't imply that you can threaten people recklessly with impunity. Hardly anyone even claims it implies you can shout "fire" in a crowded theater when you have no reason to believe there is fire.
Do you really want a Constitution 10,000 or 100,000 pages long? One whose Second Amendment alone has to be constantly reviewed and updated because new devastating chemical and biological agents are developed, or something 1000 times more powerful than a nuclear weapon and weighs only one pound is invented?
Slashdot Mirror
Are you trying to say Cromemco?
A meltdown is bad enough. If serious enough, it means containment breach and release of radioactive contamination into the environment.
But actually we have living proof that meltdown is NOT the worst case scenario. I give you Chernobyl. You can have a steam and/or hydrogen gas explosion, scattering nuclear fuel rubble and other contamination all around. I give you Fukushima, another series of steam and/or hydrogen gas explosions involving scattering contamination. There have been other explosions.
RISK of exposure? How about very real documented exposure as a fact? I'll tell you what Fukushima is. Fukushima is a testament to the sad reality that, whatever you consider to be the worst scenario you deem it worthwhile to protect against, something much worse WILL beset your creation. The only question is when. That goes for natural events, human failings and ignorance, and human evildoing.
Both concrete and stone.
"The ceilings of the passages and corridors which circled the arena on each tier consisted of vaulted arches made of concrete but the supports they rested on were made of strong, heavy limestone ... Without concrete and vaulted arches, the Colosseum could not have been built." A number of other materials, including bricks, were also instrumental in the construction.
Moron.
It's the Evil Empire of today, baby, and it's going bankrupt just like the last Evil Empire did, and then we'll be rid of the fuckers. It's going to take time though.
Maybe not. You can transfer all you want, but you can't make your priorities and preferences everybody's.
I doubt his machine is as weak as you fantasize. Maybe he just wonders why we should accept less absolute performance of the desktop over what we had 15-20 years ago even though the hardware is incomparably faster and has incomparably more resources.
Razor-qt is GPL2. They can't fork it and make something that's BSD-licensed out of it. I imagine that's the motivation, whether you agree with the motivation or not. FreeBSD (and by extension PC-BSD) has gone to a lot of trouble to expunge GPL'ed pieces, including binning gcc in favor of clang for the build process and the shipped core system.
One thing NOBODY who is the least bit informed thinks is that it was 45 kT.
Aluminum oxide is not aluminum. Water is not hydrogen. You wouldn't call water "wet hydrogen".
I doubt it.
This is just speculation, but the source might have been referring to fracture mechanics. Fracture begins more easily when there is a surface imperfection. That's why you can cut glass with precision by scoring the surface and tapping it in such a way as to put the scored face under tension. And if you have a pit or scratch on the surface of either glass or sapphire, that will become a stress concentration when you put it under strain, and that is where the fracture will begin.
That's also incidentally why cracks in airplanes start at rivet holes. Here the aluminum alloy material itself is purposely selected to have good toughness, so frequent and capable inspections will find the cracks before they reach a critical length. Even so, cutouts that have corners with sharp radii are avoided following the lesson of the bursting Comet airliner fuselages.
If a material (sapphire) has high hardness (resistance to pitting and scratching), that certainly helps to minimize opportunistic fracture. But it is not the only factor. Plainly you can fracture even perfect, unpitted, unscratched glass or sapphire by bending it. Sapphire has a niche in high end LED flashlights, but if they are well engineered the sapphire is seated around the edge in elastomer and also recessed so no normal force is likely to ever be applied, which would act to bend it.
Nope. Sorry. Read better sources. Scratch resistance is governed by surface hardness. Shatter resistance is governed by toughness. Hardness and toughness are the classic opposed desirables in materials science. Sure, you can play games in certain materials with surface hardness, so the surface is very hard and the underlying material is still tough, which is ideal for things like drill bits, and would be ideal for transparent covers. You can also temper and anneal certain materials to tune the tradeoff between hardness and toughness.
But no, fundamentally scratch resistance is not a measure of shatter resistance. To a great degree, scratch resistance is an INVERSE measure of shatter resistance.
Perhaps you could enlighten us on what those other things are, since the effects of nuclear explosions in space are essentially entirely limited to EMP.
No, "politics" means the criminal assholes in Congress and the White House have no problem wasting trillions of dollars on pet feel-good projects and perpetual programs of relentless ever-increasing scope, but pontificate and argue themselves blue in the face over a billion here and there for undertakings which are unquestionably vital to safeguard the life and welfare of EVERYBODY.
Sorry, what you plan for as most probable is not enough. That gives you, to pick one example, a Maginot line. They will just go around it or fly over it.
More apropos recent history, having a military system which is devastatingly effective against mass tank attacks and tanks dug in defensively, but is absolutely helpless against IEDs and snipers, is not effective. But neither is the opposite. You either make your military system flexible and effective against as wide a variety of strategies and tactics as possible, or you are derelict in your duty.
Many antennas, each miles to hundreds of miles long, is hardly the same thing as a single antenna hundreds of thousands of miles long. You have 100,000 km of blood vessels great and tiny packed inside your body, but you don't drag around a train 100,000 km long when you move about.
The article of your first reference doesn't say there is "no way to protect"; it says forward looking measures can indeed be taken to mitigate the havoc. Your second reference talks about EMP from nuclear bursts concentrated within tiny time spans. The most damaging pulse effect E1 is over within one microsecond. E2 lasts up to one second, but is basically only damaging to structures already devastated by E1. E3 lasts several minutes and is the part to which which geomagnetic storms bear some resemblance. But the latter last hours, so they are nowhere near as concentrated.
The P in EMP stands for "pulse". A geomagnetic storm has qualities nothing like a pulse.
Fundamentally I agree with you about the imbecilic quality of the fear for, and utter lack of real knowledge about, the boogeyman, EMP.
But there are also real dangers on account of the hair's edge on which is balanced the life support system of the civilized world. If the North American electric power grid were to go down for more than a day, dislocation starts. More than a handful of days, the machine stops. The ENTIRE machine. I'll tell you why trucks stop coming to the city (and every place else) to keep up the stock of of groceries and home heating oil. Put very simply, because their individual fuel tanks only hold a few hours' worth of fuel before hitting empty. All of the "gas" (actually mostly diesel) stations rely on the grid to pump fuel from their below-ground tanks. I'll wager you that the percentage of fueling stations with backup generators installed which would last more than a few hours is a fraction of one percent approaching zero.
Meanwhile, liquid and gas delivery pipelines have lost power too. All the refineries have stopped refining. Nobody can run the pumps to refuel the constant stream of supertankers and LNG carriers which are absolutely required to sustain the system. The supply of well water to individual rural homes, that is to say proper sanitation, stops immediately. Water in the cities isn't much better. It still has to be pumped to water towers so it can flow from there to individual use sites. That flow would stop pretty quickly.
We don't have a world of little houses on the prairie which are all sited near natural available surface water out of necessity, with carriages pulled by horses "fueled" by large quantities of locally stored grain. We ouldn't even recreate that world on demand if we wanted to at anywhere near the present level of population.
I figured you would say that. The trap you fell into is that economy of scale is about manufacturing, not consumption. If you had to mine one tonne of iron and process it into steel ingot, it would cost you a lot, but the process is globally run on such a vast scale that it is very cheap. But the idea that if you buy a crapload of steel they will give you a special price is silly. Nothing you do is going to affect the global scale of the industry.
I rather suspect you'll find the cost of 10,000 tonnes of steel ingot will be pretty exactly 10,000 times as much as one tonne of steel ingot.
And the number of charge cycles is directly related to miles, duh.
Er, "average" is "mean". They are synonyms. Perhaps you meant "median" for one of your two income figures?
There is a problem or two with hydrogen fuel cells, which is why everybody who played with the idea before long shelved it, or put it on the back burner "for later", sort of like fusion power.
1) They are phenomenally expensive.
2) They require exacting thermal management.
3) You can't just "turn them on" with a click like an electric motor, or even with a handful of seconds cranking like an internal combustion engine.
4) No practical way to store the fuel.
5) Kids, they don't last forever any more than internal combustion engines or batteries do.
Nonsense. It doesn't add a single synaptic transaction of difficulty or a single cent of expense to challenging them.
Go ahead. Try that shit on me. I'm begging you.
Every single article of the Constitution requires common sense to interpret. Of speech the First Amendment says simply "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech". It doesn't say the President will not executive-order that nobody can say anything mean. It doesn't even say that States can't infringe on the freedom of speech. It doesn't imply that you can threaten people recklessly with impunity. Hardly anyone even claims it implies you can shout "fire" in a crowded theater when you have no reason to believe there is fire.
Do you really want a Constitution 10,000 or 100,000 pages long? One whose Second Amendment alone has to be constantly reviewed and updated because new devastating chemical and biological agents are developed, or something 1000 times more powerful than a nuclear weapon and weighs only one pound is invented?