Any nuclear fission reactor generates neutrons. If water is used in the reactor (e.g. for cooling), some of the hydrogen in the water will absorb neutrons and become deuterium or tritium. If the reactor uses heavy water (e.g. CANDU reactor, which is not the case here) tritium production is maximized, since you need to absorb less neutrons to produce the same amount of tritium. Tritium is a weak beta emitter, so it is only dangerous if you ingest it in sufficient amounts. It decays into stable Helium-3. Even natural water has some trace amounts of tritium in it. FWIW the maximum permissible level of Tritium in Canada is way, way larger than in the USA. Guess where the 'C' in CANDU comes from...
FWIW Tritium is not the thing I am most concerned about in terms of nuclear waste. Iodine-131 or Strontium-90, now those are nasty.
That is due to other reasons. One reason is the cost of making a political campaign across the entirety of the USA. I would not be surprised if the Internet changed that eventually. There are winning independent candidates in local government.
They could know where you were before you even had GPS. Triangulating the source of your signal with multiple cell towers (or satellites, whatever) can give a pretty good estimate. Here is one example, with a satellite phone, where positioning information was accurate enough to deliver a conventional weapon. It is hardly the only example either.
IMO there will be less privacy. But not zero privacy, nor the privacy levels on Facebook.
He is wrong. Eventually everyone will come to realize the extent their private lives are exposed by a system like this. I tend not to include as much personal information as possible. Used to put more information available to the public, not anymore. When you start to get spammed you get annoyed, but it gets much deeper than that. I am not even worried about the government in particular, but corporations in general abuse personal information. Personal information is used (sometimes illegally) to figure out your credit limit, or if you are suitable for a job. Could just as well be used to see if you have risky behavior when getting that health insurance, or whatever.
These information systems will eventually lead to totalitarian regimes. Hopefully people somewhere will wise up and democratic regimes will implement safeguards against these kinds of things. Most people are so caught up in security paranoia against insurgents they ignore this more insidious development.
This is one of the reasons why there is secret voting. If voting is known to everyone, people tend to vote for what is popular, or what powerful people want, not necessarily what is good.
Tried using Facebook settings lately? One of the worst interfaces known to man. I also would like to stop getting "James Bloggs got another sponge in ShaggyVille, join ShaggyVille!" messages all the time. I keep filtering these kinds of messages out, but there is always one more of these applications popping up like mushrooms every hour. Can I have a whitelist, rather than a blacklist please? Or application category selections. Or whatever.
JPEG was explicitly designed not to be patent encumbered. Sure, a couple of trolls not involved in the JPEG standard process claim to have patents. But that can happen to any format. They are not in the same category as the various MPEG standards.
Yeah MJPEG was the codec most people used in the early days of prosumer NLE. Then we all switched to DV25 which is still like this.DV formats are still pretty much like MJPEG in that they do no compression between frames. A lot of camcorders still use the format. Other early editing systems enforced that when you were using MPEG-2 you could not use compression between frames. Do not know how they work internally, but IIRC this is no longer required. Linux editing software could follow this path as well. But probably better to start with the DV family of codecs first.
People were used to film and analog video tape editing systems. The simplest editing system for video in e.g. VHS was to have two video decks, one for playing, the other for recording. You had to wind/rewind the source tape, press play on the source deck, wait for the right time to press the recording button on the destination deck, etc. It was a pain.
There were more sophisticated editing systems. But it was difficult to have frame accurate editing even then. You needed an embedded timecode in the video signal. Some camcorders came with this built in. You needed special video decks that ensured frame accuracy as well. Some video decks came with a jog/shuttle for easier editing control.
Initial software video editing systems did not store the video on the computer. Computers were too slow and had limited storage to do that. I mean, can you remember 20MB hard disks being standard? Imagine storing and playing back video using a system like that. Or worse. Just not feasible. Especially when a VHS tape could store like four hours of video.
So software for video editing just controlled the tape decks. The tape still needed to wind/rewind so this was not a non-linear video editing system. NLE only started being used once you could actually store the video in the computer or whatever.
VLC has IMO been way better than mplayer for quite some time. But yeah editing and encoding is a bother.
Windows solves that codec problem by having media codec plugins (VFW and DirectShow). Cannot understand why Linux does not have such infrastructure. Although libavcodec from FFmpeg is so awesome it almost is not necessary to have plugins.
The stagnation started way before the West had anything to do with it. Ever since the Song Dynasty ended with the Mongol invasion the Chinese started lagging tremendously. Real recovery started when Deng Xiaoping took over.
The economics discussion was just too fallacious to be interesting. If things were as you say, prices for anything would never drop significantly. They do because cost matters. Margins matter. There is no monopoly on wind power generation. There are less regulations for wind than required to build a nuclear reactor as well. If someone was getting incredible margins a dozen more would build extra capacity to compete.
Sure Google is interested in cheaper costs. But there are other issues at play. Politics can affect your costs as well. Al Gore is a senior advisor to Google. Not that surprising the focus on wind power. I remember Google (and Microsoft) advertised installing solar panels to help power their installations not that long ago. Solar photovoltaic is like one of the least cost efficient ways to generate electricity. But it sure provides a nice press release and warm fuzzy feelings.
Shows how much you (or your economist friend) know about the energy market. Utilities do not burn petroleum (oil) in any significant fashion to generate electricity. There was this little thing called the 1973 oil crisis which made it too expensive to use for utility level electricity generation.
When people talk about "gas" power generation they are talking about natural gas. You know, methane. CH4. Not oil.
We used to have people like this. They used to be called nobility. They were perceived as parasites by the general population, even though they actually had an obligation to provide their ass for military defense in case of war. Which is more than the Phillip K Dick estate does for sure.
AFAIK DVD and CD-ROM use similar red lasers. But the filesystem is often different (ISO 9660 vs UDF) and other things like that. There were proposals at the time Bluray was launched to have higher-density DVD using red lasers. Even the Chinese made some specs like this. But it lost out because the improved storage was not large enough to justify buying a new drive. Not to mention getting content in the format. Sony jump started Bluray adoption by adding it to every PS3 sold.
So they are no longer pushing their own proprietary VML vector format? Ah well. Since Adobe bought Macromedia SVG needs more people pushing it. The saving grace has been that some browsers (e.g. Firefox) natively support SVG now. So this is good.
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Any nuclear fission reactor generates neutrons. If water is used in the reactor (e.g. for cooling), some of the hydrogen in the water will absorb neutrons and become deuterium or tritium. If the reactor uses heavy water (e.g. CANDU reactor, which is not the case here) tritium production is maximized, since you need to absorb less neutrons to produce the same amount of tritium. Tritium is a weak beta emitter, so it is only dangerous if you ingest it in sufficient amounts. It decays into stable Helium-3. Even natural water has some trace amounts of tritium in it. FWIW the maximum permissible level of Tritium in Canada is way, way larger than in the USA. Guess where the 'C' in CANDU comes from...
FWIW Tritium is not the thing I am most concerned about in terms of nuclear waste. Iodine-131 or Strontium-90, now those are nasty.
That is due to other reasons. One reason is the cost of making a political campaign across the entirety of the USA. I would not be surprised if the Internet changed that eventually. There are winning independent candidates in local government.
Actually I do segment them, you insensitive clod.
IMO there will be less privacy. But not zero privacy, nor the privacy levels on Facebook.
These information systems will eventually lead to totalitarian regimes. Hopefully people somewhere will wise up and democratic regimes will implement safeguards against these kinds of things. Most people are so caught up in security paranoia against insurgents they ignore this more insidious development.
This is one of the reasons why there is secret voting. If voting is known to everyone, people tend to vote for what is popular, or what powerful people want, not necessarily what is good.
Tried using Facebook settings lately? One of the worst interfaces known to man. I also would like to stop getting "James Bloggs got another sponge in ShaggyVille, join ShaggyVille!" messages all the time. I keep filtering these kinds of messages out, but there is always one more of these applications popping up like mushrooms every hour. Can I have a whitelist, rather than a blacklist please? Or application category selections. Or whatever.
JPEG was explicitly designed not to be patent encumbered. Sure, a couple of trolls not involved in the JPEG standard process claim to have patents. But that can happen to any format. They are not in the same category as the various MPEG standards.
Check out the number of DVD players with xvid, divx, and even mpeg 4 avc support.
Yeah MJPEG was the codec most people used in the early days of prosumer NLE. Then we all switched to DV25 which is still like this.DV formats are still pretty much like MJPEG in that they do no compression between frames. A lot of camcorders still use the format. Other early editing systems enforced that when you were using MPEG-2 you could not use compression between frames. Do not know how they work internally, but IIRC this is no longer required. Linux editing software could follow this path as well. But probably better to start with the DV family of codecs first.
People were used to film and analog video tape editing systems. The simplest editing system for video in e.g. VHS was to have two video decks, one for playing, the other for recording. You had to wind/rewind the source tape, press play on the source deck, wait for the right time to press the recording button on the destination deck, etc. It was a pain.
There were more sophisticated editing systems. But it was difficult to have frame accurate editing even then. You needed an embedded timecode in the video signal. Some camcorders came with this built in. You needed special video decks that ensured frame accuracy as well. Some video decks came with a jog/shuttle for easier editing control.
Initial software video editing systems did not store the video on the computer. Computers were too slow and had limited storage to do that. I mean, can you remember 20MB hard disks being standard? Imagine storing and playing back video using a system like that. Or worse. Just not feasible. Especially when a VHS tape could store like four hours of video.
So software for video editing just controlled the tape decks. The tape still needed to wind/rewind so this was not a non-linear video editing system. NLE only started being used once you could actually store the video in the computer or whatever.
Windows solves that codec problem by having media codec plugins (VFW and DirectShow). Cannot understand why Linux does not have such infrastructure. Although libavcodec from FFmpeg is so awesome it almost is not necessary to have plugins.
The stagnation started way before the West had anything to do with it. Ever since the Song Dynasty ended with the Mongol invasion the Chinese started lagging tremendously. Real recovery started when Deng Xiaoping took over.
Sure Google is interested in cheaper costs. But there are other issues at play. Politics can affect your costs as well. Al Gore is a senior advisor to Google. Not that surprising the focus on wind power. I remember Google (and Microsoft) advertised installing solar panels to help power their installations not that long ago. Solar photovoltaic is like one of the least cost efficient ways to generate electricity. But it sure provides a nice press release and warm fuzzy feelings.
You can also find gold quite often in veins of quartz. Is gold quartz?
Shows how much you (or your economist friend) know about the energy market. Utilities do not burn petroleum (oil) in any significant fashion to generate electricity. There was this little thing called the 1973 oil crisis which made it too expensive to use for utility level electricity generation.
When people talk about "gas" power generation they are talking about natural gas. You know, methane. CH4. Not oil.
Consumer Electronics Show 2010 is happening right now. Lots of product announcements. I mean even Nexus One was announced just a couple of days ago!
We used to have people like this. They used to be called nobility. They were perceived as parasites by the general population, even though they actually had an obligation to provide their ass for military defense in case of war. Which is more than the Phillip K Dick estate does for sure.
Nexus: The Jupiter Incident. It is a great game too.
Nah its clearly The Race.
WiFi is nice and all, but some of us do need to make calls in the middle of nowhere. Without bothering to ask passwords or WPA keys or whatever too.
Doh. You are correct. Just checked the wavelength on Wikipedia and it is not the same.
I remember the same thing being true for PNG. It will change in time...
AFAIK DVD and CD-ROM use similar red lasers. But the filesystem is often different (ISO 9660 vs UDF) and other things like that. There were proposals at the time Bluray was launched to have higher-density DVD using red lasers. Even the Chinese made some specs like this. But it lost out because the improved storage was not large enough to justify buying a new drive. Not to mention getting content in the format. Sony jump started Bluray adoption by adding it to every PS3 sold.
So they are no longer pushing their own proprietary VML vector format? Ah well. Since Adobe bought Macromedia SVG needs more people pushing it. The saving grace has been that some browsers (e.g. Firefox) natively support SVG now. So this is good.