Plus, unlike tools which I could use at home or at other similar jobs, a lot of expensive software licenses that I need for my job would be replaced with different expensive licenses at another similar job (and unlike a case of snap-on, most of those licenses have zero resale value).
Ah yes my wife has a similar experience where their IT dept is responsible for keeping some microsoft remote desktop server machine for her up and operational and backed up and software updated and accessible via the internet VPN 24x7. That's the demarc point between IT and her. Its got some weird VOIP PBX software on it that's like five (maybe six?) digits cost. They do not care what hardware she uses, or how she accesses it, as long as it speaks "cisco vpn" at the network level and this funky microsoft remote desktop client thingy at the presentation layer. Almost no one at her employer knows anything about macs other than her, but as long as demarc points and standards are respected, no one cares or needs to know. Her IT neither knew nor cared when she upgraded to her new mac mini. She just plugs into a firewalled internet access port and works away. Apparently it works very well for all concerned, or at least her complaints are about completely different subjects, anyway.
I suppose VOIP PBX programming tools are more amenable to remote desktops than, perhaps 3-D CAD software. That kind of app would indeed be a puzzle, although with ever increasing speed and bandwidth, I've heard CAD can be slowly done over VNC, so who knows.
Sounds like you brought your own source code management server, and apparently no backup policy (whoops). In the model in the article, employees were supposed to act like contractors. So IT would have been responsible for running a GIT server, having it available 24x7 over the internet via SSH keys vetted by their security group, and backing it up daily, all you need is a new box to run "git clone" on and keep on running, worst case you also have to submit your new SSH key to them via their internet accessible ticketing system asking them to add it (probably they're running gitolite to provide your GIT access, aside from security checks thats a good 30 seconds work to add the new key)
Being a one man service provider is a whole nother separate topic, nothing to do with the original article.
If they had a "contractor" design like that, and you hadn't "git push" or equivalent with IT in over "20-30" hours as you describe, that could be a workflow or access issue, or maybe a scheduled maint issue, that is way beyond the article topic. IT refusing to back up corporate owned data, for whatever stated reason, is an internal IT management failure, not your problem.
Where I work its forbidden to work outside a corporate controlled SCMS, partially for audit reasons, security reasons, logging reasons, access control, and as seen in your example, data loss.
Now, if everyone buys iPhones there is very little problem with IT support. If 30 people buy iPhones, 10 people buy Android phones and the remaining buy a mix of Windows phones, Open Moko phones and something new that came out last week the IT job will be a nightmare. Same kind of problem happens where everyone buys a different tablet device brings them all to a meeting and someone has instructions for using some iPad-only app for displaying something important. Guess what? The help desk may not be able to resolve this to everyone's satisfaction.
It creates a contractor relationship. We do not provide equipment to our contractors, and we do not care what they use as long as it works and they don't hurt anyone else. We also demand they wear clothes and occasionally bathe, but we do not buy them clothes nor hose them down if they cannot handle it themselves. We assume they are big boys and they can take care of themselves. IT makes our things work, they do not teach you how to use your things. Much as the janitor is paid to keep the toilets unclogged, not teach us how to unclog. WRT contractors, the only help desk interaction is verifying our courtesy internet access is up for them, and our internet accessible apps such as webmail are available to them. The days of hand holding people who don't know which side of a mouse is up, are over.
We provide a courtesy wifi internet connection for contractors to use at our workplace as they see fit. The apps the contractors need access to are already internet accessible because we sure as heck are not giving contractors access to our internal LAN. Allowing the employees the same freedoms the contractors already have for many years, is not a big stretch.
It turns out that most (although perhaps not all) employees job requirements "fit" with the contractor IT model.
You've got to be kidding. No Clothes? No Shampoo? No Nail clippers? No Haircuts? No Shoes? jpeg or it didn't happen...
How about a home phone? My local HR was freaked out about my temporary lack of a landline, "Are you homeless? In Jail?". They're not willing to pay for it, but they assume you have it if you're going to work there. Ended up listing my cellphone as both home and cellphone. Not seeing it as a huge problem.
Doesn't add any problems if you were already accessing software as a service over the internet, or if you were already providing software as a service to outsource partners etc.
Merely allowing employees access to the courtesy wifi internet access doesn't create new problems. Merely allowing employees to log into "internet" apps just like the contractors already do doesn't create any new problems.
Basically, its just a concept of getting rid of the "trusted" LAN and everyone and everything lives in the DMZ, both servers and clients. Once you reach the tipping point of moving your "IT" stuff into the internet DMZ, the process accelerates until its all there, and you are basically a colocated software as a service shop and a really small time ISP.
The way I've personally seen it work out is the company provides junk, if you want to bring your own, better stuff, thats OK.
I love it. The company doesn't buy me clothes, or shoes, or my commuter car, either. Where I work, I can get "company clothing" but its fairly hideous, I do much better at Target and don't have to look like a corporate advertising billboard.
The junkiest computer I use on a regular basis, is, no surprise, at work. The junkiest keyboard I use on a regular basis, is, no surprise, at work. The junkiest mouse, monitor, desk, chair, lighting, blah blah is all at work. Even climate control is better at home, seriously. Everyone seems to know someone who gets great smartphones paid for by work, but the rest of us get no phone at all, or a hideous recertified featurephone from the 90s, or at best a monthly $25 "cell phone use credit". One of my employers offered either $20/month flat rate for my own cell phone bill, or I could bring in an itemized detailed bill and collect the exact amount (handy if I spent hours on the phone talking to Kenya that month, otherwise I just took the default $20 for the month)
This is business as usual in the "real world", my diesel mechanic cousin owns all his tools... That wrench is his, not his bosses. Same with my electrician buddy and his tools. Its just how grown-ups do things.
In a way it all makes sense. If you provide a firewalled, isolated internet connection for your onsite contractors to VPN back to their home office over, why not let your own employees use that connection for their own purposes? If you provide your internal ticketing system / CMS / fileserver as a "software as a service" over the internet for your outsource partners, does it really matter if your employees access the same SaS apps over the internet instead of the LAN? Combine them both, and you got the guy bringing his ipad into work, connecting to your locally provided internet access, using the SaS ticketing system, no big deal.
Here's my poor non-lawyer summary of the patents for those too lazy to look them up.
Busioc granted in 2000 seems to be a troll patent on anything that reacts to detected network characteristics. TCP window size control since the 80s seems to be prior art, although anycast root DNS servers from the 90s would appear to be a close second.
Mannings1 granted in 1994 seems to be a troll patent on anything navigational that relies on a base and mobile part. Like LORAN from the 60s, or any of the moon shots from the 60s where the capsule relied on the IBM 7094 mainframe to run the calcs back home.
Titmuss1 granted in 2002 seems to be a troll patent where the the contents of a list depend on the location of the user. Like my Garmin GPS-12XL "nearest waypoint list" from the 90s, or any brick and mortar website with a "find the closest store" functionality.
Gittins granted 2003 seems to be a troll patent where you have a database server accessed over the network that has user based permissions. Like any mysql installation. It seems to be a pretty good description of the DB2 IBM mainframe server I was tangentially involved with about 20 years ago (%^&# source route bridging SDLC by mac addresses still gives me nightmares)
Mannings2 granted 2003 seems to be a troll patent where you have a Mannings1 system plus the result depends on the type of vehicle. Apparently providing different "walk" vs "drive" route results is safe because my shoes are not a vehicle, but providing "car" vs "boat" results would be a direct violation of this patent.
Titmuss2 granted 2004 seems to be a troll patent where a distributed architecture and network is used to store location information. Basically, any computing infrastructure storing location information that does not have an obvious single point of failure; The CLR/DLR circuit layout system from my previous telecom employer would seem to be a pretty good example of an infringing product; of course that was from the 1980s, and Ma Bell had much older networked location aware systems. Remember ma bell's weird V+H coordinate system? I do.
I believe this is a pretty accurate non-lawyer summary of the patents involved.
wikileaks was being used as a source, no different than a dude in a bar talking, or a written report. Another example of pretending "on the internet" means we have to pretend its all different. An investigative journalism tool would be something like "google docs word processor" to be able to write anywhere you've got a working web browser, or using a recent gen ipod touch (only recent ones have a mic) as a portable, ubiquitous, semi-discrete audio recorder (professor will notice and complain if you haul in a 1970s reel to reel recorder, and not even blink if your "ipod" is laying on the desk in front of you during lecture)
The standard/. car analogy, is Autozone (a linux using company!) is a source, and an impact wrench is a tool. Not vice versa.
There is another semi-common use of the word tool, which seems to have no bearing on this discussion at all?
Come on man, its called "google for fuel cycle of thorium reactors" and the first thing is the wikipedia article. Its not a perfect article, tries too hard to be "equal" rather than be "correct"... but I saw no obvious factual errors when I read it.
Cooling pools are not a problem. Just add a way to add more water into them. Like a simple flexible pipe that leads outside of the cooling pool building and can be connected to a fire engine).
That's an engineer looking for a complicated solution. The right answer is dig a hole beneath the local water table or below sea/lake/river level, and install a one way valve. Local water table is 500 feet below? Don't build the plant there, build it somewhere within 50 feet of the water table, or lake/sea/river level..
Whoops also forgot another reason why Th sucks, its harder to make fuel rods. Hotter manufacturing temps. So they end up being more expensive and/or less reliable than U, which is supposedly the opposite of what the system is supposed to produce. So the theoretical 3rd world operator finds it easier and safer and cheaper to use U rods.
Th is a second class fuel. The best thing to burn in your steam locomotive is anthracite, if you can still get it. Next worse is bituminous. If you're really scraping the bottom of the barrel and gotta do what ya gotta do, you harvest irish peat and burn that in your steamie. But trying to convince people peat is just as good as anthracite, or peat is cheaper, or peat should really be your first choice, or I read an article about peat and figure it might be fun to try, thats just not gonna work. Stick to the U and Pu designs until the world runs out of U in 20000 years or so. After that, you gotta do what you gotta do, and whip out the Th designs.
Theres a whopping big wiki article that tries a little too hard to be "balanced" when in all fairness Th is a PITA fuel, that kinda sucks.
Its only good for non-proliferation from a distance. Up close its worse. You need to boot up with a slug of Pu because there are no fissile Th isotopes. So no one ever builds "a Th reactor" they build a "bomb grade Pu reactor" surrounded with a Th shell that eventually can breed itself into reacting, hopefully your breeding plan curve matches your electrical demand curve.
Its only good for non-proliferation if you define proliferation as current designs. Historically plenty of U233 bombs were blown and research done. No you cannot make a current model US B61 out of stuff from a Th reactor. Yes, you can make something almost as good as a B61 that is U233 based using what comes out of a Th reactor. It in no way prevents proliferation merely makes it a slightly more involved research project (slightly!)
In a way, not being useful for proliferation dooms Th. The US and Russia and China and god only knows who else (Iran?) are still going to need U based reactors so now you've gotta run both technologies... Why not just run one? And that one's gotta be U, at this time. So trying to push Th means your sales will be pitiful because you can only sell to 3rd world and not much else.
Plus it gives the non-proliferating Th owners experience in plant operation which they can transition to new/secret U plants of their own anyway, its like bootstrapping proliferation not preventing it.
Anyone who says Th = nonproliferation is either misinformed or being paid or trolling.
Its an unholy PITA to recycle due to hard gammas, or you can have agony when disposing. Its waste stream is just "worse" than a traditional reactor.
Its harder to run, more neutron poisons like Pa build up.
To be economical, you just have to burnup into the ground, which is kind of like saying a F-350 has a lower lifetime environmental cost IF you can get it to survive 600K miles. Its... ambitious. You don't achieve high burnup by just wishing, its difficult, dangerous if you have cladding failures, and expensive. Otherwise the prius wins again for overall lifetime costs.
Its interesting to learn about, good to learn about, but it shows good engineering judgment to avoid a Th design.
Cause and effect all backwards. Its not that small reactors are inherently more economical than large reactors, they most certainly are not. Its that new designs including some pretty radical fuels and coolants are being proposed, and you don't scale those bad boys in one jump from lab simulations to GW+. So these new designs are going to start small, then you build midrange 100s of MW, then you build the big ole GW+ roasters, thats just how its always been and going to be.
The next issue is there is a magic shopping list of rewards, but they're all interrelated to people that know about nukes. Can use natural convection cooling. Well, OK. Look at cube-square law and tell me how a smaller reactor at a given specific thermal output could not possibly be harder to cool? Or given an infinite budget to make a really low specific volume thermal output giant, you can convection cool them too, assuming you can manufacture something that huge. Also you get safety tradeoffs, the dough you spent on a 5 times larger vessel could have gone to quintuple redundant diesel drive coolant pumps on top of 100 meter tsunami wave proof seawalls... Big pieces of reactor grade steel are staggeringly expensive. So you are getting better burnup and better Pu non-proliferation? OK well tell me how to get better burn up without eating its own bomb isotope Pu? Answer, you can't, has nothing directly to do with size, the longer a rod sits in a core the less bomb grade Pu you can refine out of it.
Don't get me wrong, these are cool, very cool. But don't confuse having to release version 1.0 at a small scale as a permanent long term trend. "In the long run" the only thing better than an itty bitty cute little modernized PBMR or a cute little RS-MHR is a cool freaking huge PBMR or RS-MHR, but the big momma version is most certainly not going to be release 1.0. Maybe 10, 20 years after the new high tech ones are rolled out, then, out comes the plans for big ones.
I think this is the mistake the fine article makes, confusing this small beta release, with a long term roadmap. Its very much like thinking that internet sites that roll out slowly via invitations means they intent to stay small forever... not so, its just the scale up process.
I wonder how much a nicely paired up solar panel would upset the lift/weight balance on a high altitude balloon, and whether it would be able to charge the batteries well enough to power a transponder over a longer trip.
Thermal problems. Primary batteries might not work as well below -40 as they do at room temp, but they can be made to work. Secondary batteries, however, definitely don't like to take a charge in the deep cold. If you can keep the battery warm enough overnight, then maybe...
Also note that solely transmitting APRS is not the only thing ever done by balloons. Voice repeaters are very popular. TV transmissions both NTSC and slowscan are popular. Simple beacons in multiple frequency bands are popular. Digital telemetry, such as temp / pressure / humidity is sometimes done.
My biggest fear involving parenting is having a kid that wants to play sports all the time. I wonder what the statistics are for geeky parents who raise a kid who becomes a jock, versus the "sports parents" who raise a kid who wants to be a geek?
My limited personal experience so far indicates that pre-teen the kids wanna do what mom and dad do, and teen-era the kids wanna do the exact opposite of what mom and dad do, for some peculiar definition of "opposite", and post-teen years they tend to go on their own orthogonal tangent of their own... For example, when I was a kid I got my ham radio license, and wild rebel that I was, I temporarily decided around 13 that I would become the next Nobel prize winner in chemistry, and my EE father and grandfather were like "WTF"?
Also it would seem evidence shows you'll like your kids even if you're a vi family and they like emacs. It will bug you precisely as much as you want it to bug you and no more.
My short and crude analysis of the disease and the treatment indicates this would appear to be a heads up display, essentially overwriting whatever visual signal you have left, if any. I would imagine a high res version would look an awful lot like those "augmented reality" ideas, a perfect video image of a tree overwrites a dark and blurry smudge of a tree.
Other than the inevitable cataract problems, bionic retinas would seem to be the idea solar powered bionic implant... you've got plenty of light both by design and culturally (like, bionic female chest implants don't get as much sunlight as I feel they require for proper operation) and when bionic retinas are in the dark, they doesn't need to work anyway. No huge power requirements. Unfortunately someone has probably patented this trivial idea already so we'll be stuck with implanted AAA cells in the nostrils for a couple decades, but someday the patent will expire and get out of the way of progress.
Much more likely future use, anything they own gets stolen eventually, and plenty of airliner approach paths are inherently open to anyone passing by, so you can guess how this plays out. All you need is one stolen/lost device, and one airliner, not exactly a challenge. Then you can use the disaster as an excuse to take away even more civil rights and deploy even more heinous weapons, repeat. Until revolution. Thats just my prediction anyway.
Autodarkening welding helmet. Off the shelf, cheap, and unfortunately freaking huge. And hot, in the summer. I assume we'll still be rioting in 6 months, right?
I spec'd the autodarkening helm so you can see whats going on between blasts.
I'm assuming, having not read the article, that its very much like a "woodpecker jammer" in the RF world and a similar circuit, like the one in the helm, would defeat it.
For non RF guys, the control theory is your eyes iris responds to peak flux with say a 2 second RC constant, so you basically flash the crowd every second and their iris contracts to pinpoints even if the average illumination is nighttime.
Or maybe those heartless SOBs are just running right below permanent damage, and will just blame the victims if they end up blind. Yeah I'm guessing thats how it'll turn out instead. In that case a plain ole welding helm instead of the expensive auto-darkening helm will work.
The actual best defense is probably copper jacketed lead, but the cowards in the UK gave up their human right of self defense, so I guess they deserve what happens to them, no matter how bad it is, they asked for it.
Laughably I remember after Chernobyl 1, hearing how they'll decommission those icky RBMKs real soon now. The day the last RBMK is shut off will be a good day for humanity. Hope I live that long (I figure I only got 50 good years left in me)
No technical limit. Eventually you get to replace the reactor vessel, which for all practical purposes involves disassembling nearly the entire plant, and reassembling it, so you may as well be honest with yourself and call it a brand new plant on the same site. Kind of like the old joke, which is true in my case, that I own my great grandfather-in-laws wood cutting axe, of course its had like 4 new handles and two new heads so there's not much of it older than 50 years or so...
Standard/. car analogy is that eventually a $5 bearing goes out deep in the car innards, and the labor costs to get in there, replace it, and get out, exceed the costs of a new car, or at least exceed the cost of an unbroken car of similar age and quality car.
Much like "reusable" spacecraft have kind of fizzled out because it turns out the recertification process is more expensive than making a new one.
Much like people can spend $75K on a model T restoration, where most people would just buy a much better kia, you could spend the cost of three new nukes trying to rebuild one old nuke, if you really want.
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Plus, unlike tools which I could use at home or at other similar jobs, a lot of expensive software licenses that I need for my job would be replaced with different expensive licenses at another similar job (and unlike a case of snap-on, most of those licenses have zero resale value).
Ah yes my wife has a similar experience where their IT dept is responsible for keeping some microsoft remote desktop server machine for her up and operational and backed up and software updated and accessible via the internet VPN 24x7. That's the demarc point between IT and her. Its got some weird VOIP PBX software on it that's like five (maybe six?) digits cost. They do not care what hardware she uses, or how she accesses it, as long as it speaks "cisco vpn" at the network level and this funky microsoft remote desktop client thingy at the presentation layer. Almost no one at her employer knows anything about macs other than her, but as long as demarc points and standards are respected, no one cares or needs to know. Her IT neither knew nor cared when she upgraded to her new mac mini. She just plugs into a firewalled internet access port and works away. Apparently it works very well for all concerned, or at least her complaints are about completely different subjects, anyway.
I suppose VOIP PBX programming tools are more amenable to remote desktops than, perhaps 3-D CAD software. That kind of app would indeed be a puzzle, although with ever increasing speed and bandwidth, I've heard CAD can be slowly done over VNC, so who knows.
Sounds like you brought your own source code management server, and apparently no backup policy (whoops). In the model in the article, employees were supposed to act like contractors. So IT would have been responsible for running a GIT server, having it available 24x7 over the internet via SSH keys vetted by their security group, and backing it up daily, all you need is a new box to run "git clone" on and keep on running, worst case you also have to submit your new SSH key to them via their internet accessible ticketing system asking them to add it (probably they're running gitolite to provide your GIT access, aside from security checks thats a good 30 seconds work to add the new key)
Being a one man service provider is a whole nother separate topic, nothing to do with the original article.
If they had a "contractor" design like that, and you hadn't "git push" or equivalent with IT in over "20-30" hours as you describe, that could be a workflow or access issue, or maybe a scheduled maint issue, that is way beyond the article topic. IT refusing to back up corporate owned data, for whatever stated reason, is an internal IT management failure, not your problem.
Where I work its forbidden to work outside a corporate controlled SCMS, partially for audit reasons, security reasons, logging reasons, access control, and as seen in your example, data loss.
Now, if everyone buys iPhones there is very little problem with IT support. If 30 people buy iPhones, 10 people buy Android phones and the remaining buy a mix of Windows phones, Open Moko phones and something new that came out last week the IT job will be a nightmare. Same kind of problem happens where everyone buys a different tablet device brings them all to a meeting and someone has instructions for using some iPad-only app for displaying something important. Guess what? The help desk may not be able to resolve this to everyone's satisfaction.
It creates a contractor relationship. We do not provide equipment to our contractors, and we do not care what they use as long as it works and they don't hurt anyone else. We also demand they wear clothes and occasionally bathe, but we do not buy them clothes nor hose them down if they cannot handle it themselves. We assume they are big boys and they can take care of themselves. IT makes our things work, they do not teach you how to use your things. Much as the janitor is paid to keep the toilets unclogged, not teach us how to unclog. WRT contractors, the only help desk interaction is verifying our courtesy internet access is up for them, and our internet accessible apps such as webmail are available to them. The days of hand holding people who don't know which side of a mouse is up, are over.
We provide a courtesy wifi internet connection for contractors to use at our workplace as they see fit. The apps the contractors need access to are already internet accessible because we sure as heck are not giving contractors access to our internal LAN. Allowing the employees the same freedoms the contractors already have for many years, is not a big stretch.
It turns out that most (although perhaps not all) employees job requirements "fit" with the contractor IT model.
You've got to be kidding. No Clothes? No Shampoo? No Nail clippers? No Haircuts? No Shoes? jpeg or it didn't happen...
How about a home phone? My local HR was freaked out about my temporary lack of a landline, "Are you homeless? In Jail?". They're not willing to pay for it, but they assume you have it if you're going to work there. Ended up listing my cellphone as both home and cellphone. Not seeing it as a huge problem.
Doesn't add any problems if you were already accessing software as a service over the internet, or if you were already providing software as a service to outsource partners etc.
Merely allowing employees access to the courtesy wifi internet access doesn't create new problems. Merely allowing employees to log into "internet" apps just like the contractors already do doesn't create any new problems.
Basically, its just a concept of getting rid of the "trusted" LAN and everyone and everything lives in the DMZ, both servers and clients. Once you reach the tipping point of moving your "IT" stuff into the internet DMZ, the process accelerates until its all there, and you are basically a colocated software as a service shop and a really small time ISP.
The way I've personally seen it work out is the company provides junk, if you want to bring your own, better stuff, thats OK.
I love it. The company doesn't buy me clothes, or shoes, or my commuter car, either. Where I work, I can get "company clothing" but its fairly hideous, I do much better at Target and don't have to look like a corporate advertising billboard.
The junkiest computer I use on a regular basis, is, no surprise, at work. The junkiest keyboard I use on a regular basis, is, no surprise, at work. The junkiest mouse, monitor, desk, chair, lighting, blah blah is all at work. Even climate control is better at home, seriously. Everyone seems to know someone who gets great smartphones paid for by work, but the rest of us get no phone at all, or a hideous recertified featurephone from the 90s, or at best a monthly $25 "cell phone use credit". One of my employers offered either $20/month flat rate for my own cell phone bill, or I could bring in an itemized detailed bill and collect the exact amount (handy if I spent hours on the phone talking to Kenya that month, otherwise I just took the default $20 for the month)
This is business as usual in the "real world", my diesel mechanic cousin owns all his tools... That wrench is his, not his bosses. Same with my electrician buddy and his tools. Its just how grown-ups do things.
In a way it all makes sense. If you provide a firewalled, isolated internet connection for your onsite contractors to VPN back to their home office over, why not let your own employees use that connection for their own purposes? If you provide your internal ticketing system / CMS / fileserver as a "software as a service" over the internet for your outsource partners, does it really matter if your employees access the same SaS apps over the internet instead of the LAN? Combine them both, and you got the guy bringing his ipad into work, connecting to your locally provided internet access, using the SaS ticketing system, no big deal.
Here's my poor non-lawyer summary of the patents for those too lazy to look them up.
Busioc granted in 2000 seems to be a troll patent on anything that reacts to detected network characteristics. TCP window size control since the 80s seems to be prior art, although anycast root DNS servers from the 90s would appear to be a close second.
Mannings1 granted in 1994 seems to be a troll patent on anything navigational that relies on a base and mobile part. Like LORAN from the 60s, or any of the moon shots from the 60s where the capsule relied on the IBM 7094 mainframe to run the calcs back home.
Titmuss1 granted in 2002 seems to be a troll patent where the the contents of a list depend on the location of the user. Like my Garmin GPS-12XL "nearest waypoint list" from the 90s, or any brick and mortar website with a "find the closest store" functionality.
Gittins granted 2003 seems to be a troll patent where you have a database server accessed over the network that has user based permissions. Like any mysql installation. It seems to be a pretty good description of the DB2 IBM mainframe server I was tangentially involved with about 20 years ago (%^&# source route bridging SDLC by mac addresses still gives me nightmares)
Mannings2 granted 2003 seems to be a troll patent where you have a Mannings1 system plus the result depends on the type of vehicle. Apparently providing different "walk" vs "drive" route results is safe because my shoes are not a vehicle, but providing "car" vs "boat" results would be a direct violation of this patent.
Titmuss2 granted 2004 seems to be a troll patent where a distributed architecture and network is used to store location information. Basically, any computing infrastructure storing location information that does not have an obvious single point of failure; The CLR/DLR circuit layout system from my previous telecom employer would seem to be a pretty good example of an infringing product; of course that was from the 1980s, and Ma Bell had much older networked location aware systems. Remember ma bell's weird V+H coordinate system? I do.
I believe this is a pretty accurate non-lawyer summary of the patents involved.
wikileaks was being used as a source, no different than a dude in a bar talking, or a written report. Another example of pretending "on the internet" means we have to pretend its all different.
An investigative journalism tool would be something like "google docs word processor" to be able to write anywhere you've got a working web browser, or using a recent gen ipod touch (only recent ones have a mic) as a portable, ubiquitous, semi-discrete audio recorder (professor will notice and complain if you haul in a 1970s reel to reel recorder, and not even blink if your "ipod" is laying on the desk in front of you during lecture)
The standard /. car analogy, is Autozone (a linux using company!) is a source, and an impact wrench is a tool. Not vice versa.
There is another semi-common use of the word tool, which seems to have no bearing on this discussion at all?
Cite?
Come on man, its called "google for fuel cycle of thorium reactors" and the first thing is the wikipedia article. Its not a perfect article, tries too hard to be "equal" rather than be "correct"... but I saw no obvious factual errors when I read it.
Cooling pools are not a problem. Just add a way to add more water into them. Like a simple flexible pipe that leads outside of the cooling pool building and can be connected to a fire engine).
That's an engineer looking for a complicated solution. The right answer is dig a hole beneath the local water table or below sea/lake/river level, and install a one way valve. Local water table is 500 feet below? Don't build the plant there, build it somewhere within 50 feet of the water table, or lake/sea/river level..
Whoops also forgot another reason why Th sucks, its harder to make fuel rods. Hotter manufacturing temps. So they end up being more expensive and/or less reliable than U, which is supposedly the opposite of what the system is supposed to produce. So the theoretical 3rd world operator finds it easier and safer and cheaper to use U rods.
Th is a second class fuel. The best thing to burn in your steam locomotive is anthracite, if you can still get it. Next worse is bituminous. If you're really scraping the bottom of the barrel and gotta do what ya gotta do, you harvest irish peat and burn that in your steamie. But trying to convince people peat is just as good as anthracite, or peat is cheaper, or peat should really be your first choice, or I read an article about peat and figure it might be fun to try, thats just not gonna work. Stick to the U and Pu designs until the world runs out of U in 20000 years or so. After that, you gotta do what you gotta do, and whip out the Th designs.
Theres a whopping big wiki article that tries a little too hard to be "balanced" when in all fairness Th is a PITA fuel, that kinda sucks.
Its only good for non-proliferation from a distance. Up close its worse. You need to boot up with a slug of Pu because there are no fissile Th isotopes. So no one ever builds "a Th reactor" they build a "bomb grade Pu reactor" surrounded with a Th shell that eventually can breed itself into reacting, hopefully your breeding plan curve matches your electrical demand curve.
Its only good for non-proliferation if you define proliferation as current designs. Historically plenty of U233 bombs were blown and research done. No you cannot make a current model US B61 out of stuff from a Th reactor. Yes, you can make something almost as good as a B61 that is U233 based using what comes out of a Th reactor. It in no way prevents proliferation merely makes it a slightly more involved research project (slightly!)
In a way, not being useful for proliferation dooms Th. The US and Russia and China and god only knows who else (Iran?) are still going to need U based reactors so now you've gotta run both technologies... Why not just run one? And that one's gotta be U, at this time. So trying to push Th means your sales will be pitiful because you can only sell to 3rd world and not much else.
Plus it gives the non-proliferating Th owners experience in plant operation which they can transition to new/secret U plants of their own anyway, its like bootstrapping proliferation not preventing it.
Anyone who says Th = nonproliferation is either misinformed or being paid or trolling.
Its an unholy PITA to recycle due to hard gammas, or you can have agony when disposing. Its waste stream is just "worse" than a traditional reactor.
Its harder to run, more neutron poisons like Pa build up.
To be economical, you just have to burnup into the ground, which is kind of like saying a F-350 has a lower lifetime environmental cost IF you can get it to survive 600K miles. Its... ambitious. You don't achieve high burnup by just wishing, its difficult, dangerous if you have cladding failures, and expensive. Otherwise the prius wins again for overall lifetime costs.
Its interesting to learn about, good to learn about, but it shows good engineering judgment to avoid a Th design.
Cause and effect all backwards. Its not that small reactors are inherently more economical than large reactors, they most certainly are not. Its that new designs including some pretty radical fuels and coolants are being proposed, and you don't scale those bad boys in one jump from lab simulations to GW+. So these new designs are going to start small, then you build midrange 100s of MW, then you build the big ole GW+ roasters, thats just how its always been and going to be.
The next issue is there is a magic shopping list of rewards, but they're all interrelated to people that know about nukes. Can use natural convection cooling. Well, OK. Look at cube-square law and tell me how a smaller reactor at a given specific thermal output could not possibly be harder to cool? Or given an infinite budget to make a really low specific volume thermal output giant, you can convection cool them too, assuming you can manufacture something that huge. Also you get safety tradeoffs, the dough you spent on a 5 times larger vessel could have gone to quintuple redundant diesel drive coolant pumps on top of 100 meter tsunami wave proof seawalls... Big pieces of reactor grade steel are staggeringly expensive. So you are getting better burnup and better Pu non-proliferation? OK well tell me how to get better burn up without eating its own bomb isotope Pu? Answer, you can't, has nothing directly to do with size, the longer a rod sits in a core the less bomb grade Pu you can refine out of it.
Don't get me wrong, these are cool, very cool. But don't confuse having to release version 1.0 at a small scale as a permanent long term trend. "In the long run" the only thing better than an itty bitty cute little modernized PBMR or a cute little RS-MHR is a cool freaking huge PBMR or RS-MHR, but the big momma version is most certainly not going to be release 1.0. Maybe 10, 20 years after the new high tech ones are rolled out, then, out comes the plans for big ones.
I think this is the mistake the fine article makes, confusing this small beta release, with a long term roadmap. Its very much like thinking that internet sites that roll out slowly via invitations means they intent to stay small forever... not so, its just the scale up process.
I wonder how much a nicely paired up solar panel would upset the lift/weight balance on a high altitude balloon, and whether it would be able to charge the batteries well enough to power a transponder over a longer trip.
Thermal problems. Primary batteries might not work as well below -40 as they do at room temp, but they can be made to work. Secondary batteries, however, definitely don't like to take a charge in the deep cold. If you can keep the battery warm enough overnight, then maybe...
Upcoming launches at
http://www.arhab.org/ARHABlaunchannouncements.html
Also note that solely transmitting APRS is not the only thing ever done by balloons. Voice repeaters are very popular. TV transmissions both NTSC and slowscan are popular. Simple beacons in multiple frequency bands are popular. Digital telemetry, such as temp / pressure / humidity is sometimes done.
My biggest fear involving parenting is having a kid that wants to play sports all the time. I wonder what the statistics are for geeky parents who raise a kid who becomes a jock, versus the "sports parents" who raise a kid who wants to be a geek?
My limited personal experience so far indicates that pre-teen the kids wanna do what mom and dad do, and teen-era the kids wanna do the exact opposite of what mom and dad do, for some peculiar definition of "opposite", and post-teen years they tend to go on their own orthogonal tangent of their own... For example, when I was a kid I got my ham radio license, and wild rebel that I was, I temporarily decided around 13 that I would become the next Nobel prize winner in chemistry, and my EE father and grandfather were like "WTF"?
Also it would seem evidence shows you'll like your kids even if you're a vi family and they like emacs. It will bug you precisely as much as you want it to bug you and no more.
My short and crude analysis of the disease and the treatment indicates this would appear to be a heads up display, essentially overwriting whatever visual signal you have left, if any. I would imagine a high res version would look an awful lot like those "augmented reality" ideas, a perfect video image of a tree overwrites a dark and blurry smudge of a tree.
Other than the inevitable cataract problems, bionic retinas would seem to be the idea solar powered bionic implant... you've got plenty of light both by design and culturally (like, bionic female chest implants don't get as much sunlight as I feel they require for proper operation) and when bionic retinas are in the dark, they doesn't need to work anyway. No huge power requirements. Unfortunately someone has probably patented this trivial idea already so we'll be stuck with implanted AAA cells in the nostrils for a couple decades, but someday the patent will expire and get out of the way of progress.
What about if someone has a gun, they may just start firing towards the general direction of the blinding light, hitting innocent bystanders,...
Guns are hard to aim when blind. Molotov cocktails, not so hard. Just saying.
have you tried doing anything OTHER than welding while wearing a welding mask?
It virtually blinds you.
Yeah, yes I have. thats why I bought an autodarkening helm. They used to cost like ten times what a plain helm cost, now they're like 2 maybe 3 times.
Much more likely future use, anything they own gets stolen eventually, and plenty of airliner approach paths are inherently open to anyone passing by, so you can guess how this plays out. All you need is one stolen/lost device, and one airliner, not exactly a challenge. Then you can use the disaster as an excuse to take away even more civil rights and deploy even more heinous weapons, repeat. Until revolution. Thats just my prediction anyway.
Autodarkening welding helmet. Off the shelf, cheap, and unfortunately freaking huge. And hot, in the summer. I assume we'll still be rioting in 6 months, right?
I spec'd the autodarkening helm so you can see whats going on between blasts.
I'm assuming, having not read the article, that its very much like a "woodpecker jammer" in the RF world and a similar circuit, like the one in the helm, would defeat it.
For non RF guys, the control theory is your eyes iris responds to peak flux with say a 2 second RC constant, so you basically flash the crowd every second and their iris contracts to pinpoints even if the average illumination is nighttime.
Or maybe those heartless SOBs are just running right below permanent damage, and will just blame the victims if they end up blind. Yeah I'm guessing thats how it'll turn out instead. In that case a plain ole welding helm instead of the expensive auto-darkening helm will work.
The actual best defense is probably copper jacketed lead, but the cowards in the UK gave up their human right of self defense, so I guess they deserve what happens to them, no matter how bad it is, they asked for it.
Yes, point lasers at me and blind me. That's really healthy
Although I am pretty sure this goes against a Geneva convention this is healthier for you than high speed lead.
Thats the next step, after we get used to this.
Laughably I remember after Chernobyl 1, hearing how they'll decommission those icky RBMKs real soon now. The day the last RBMK is shut off will be a good day for humanity. Hope I live that long (I figure I only got 50 good years left in me)
No technical limit. Eventually you get to replace the reactor vessel, which for all practical purposes involves disassembling nearly the entire plant, and reassembling it, so you may as well be honest with yourself and call it a brand new plant on the same site. Kind of like the old joke, which is true in my case, that I own my great grandfather-in-laws wood cutting axe, of course its had like 4 new handles and two new heads so there's not much of it older than 50 years or so...
Standard /. car analogy is that eventually a $5 bearing goes out deep in the car innards, and the labor costs to get in there, replace it, and get out, exceed the costs of a new car, or at least exceed the cost of an unbroken car of similar age and quality car.
Much like "reusable" spacecraft have kind of fizzled out because it turns out the recertification process is more expensive than making a new one.
Much like people can spend $75K on a model T restoration, where most people would just buy a much better kia, you could spend the cost of three new nukes trying to rebuild one old nuke, if you really want.
He's the one who wants to clone them, as opposed to whoever it is who is unleashing hordes of them upon us.
Its like the star wars distinction between an army of clones exists, vs My clone army exists.