the pros mostly use those loud generators on the other side of the trucks with "welding grade" extremely heavy gauge extension cords.
Just sayin, in case you wanna try it on the cheap, you don't need to buy a new car, just some (expensive) extension cords.
The "rave" guys did the same for their audio. That's how I know. In that case, once the subwoofers get louder than the gens it doesn't really matter, I suppose.
Why not just...have battery powered LED lights for the short term emergencies (since that's all your car would cover well, anyway)
Uh, not quite.
My wife's prius generates about 60 horsepower.
conservative 60 hp * conservative 700 watts per hp / conservative 220 volts = sometime like 190 amps. Probably, with the help of the batteries, a short term surge of 400 amps would be possible.
Its an older house; I believe we only have 100 amp service. Technically I could run both my house and my neighbor's house across the driveway 100% full blast. In practice I don't think either of us own 100 amps of load; but then again running a car flat out full power for long periods of time is a bad idea.
Anyway in summary its quite realistic to run an entire house off a Prius. Not just some lights and the fridge....
Even my old saturn alternator supposedly is capable of a kilowatt of continuous sustained output, according to the high power ham radio guys. Thats... a lot of power.
Its an urban legend, its not even true. Unless your hybrid vehicle is a multi-megawatt nuclear submarine, backfeeding an entire neighborhood will instantly kill any normal sized generator.
Now there are interesting ways to kill someone using a generator, but they don't involve backfeeding a neighborhood. The drop fuse goes off like a grenade, unfortunately while the lineman is holding it. The lineman walked thru a rain puddle energized by an extension cord laying in the puddle, coincidentally for the purpose of backfeeding. Any accident even remotely involving a generator and a lineman is always reported via the journalist filter as being due to "backfeeding" even if the actual accident report is the lineman tripped over it laying on the ground, or a refueling fire incident.
Its a nice story, and VERY popular to retell, but if the drop line fuse is not blown, trying to backfeed an entire subdivision will instantly stall the engine, if not burn out the alternator and/or blow the drop fuse.
The actual failure mode is the drop fuse blows, the lineman tries to replace it, your generator happens to be out of phase with the national grid, and either the fuse pretty much detonates in the linemans hands, or the generator literally blows up, as in crankshaft sheared off and piston flys thru the oilpan type of destruction.
Humorously the only people who retell this story are those who never tried it. Anyone who has actually tried this, knows for a fact that its a miracle if you can backfeed merely your own house without blowing the generator.. the inrush current of the fridge, freezer, AC compressor, furnace blower, dehumidifier, computers, maybe an oven, clothes dryer, or dishwasher that was on when the power cut, and sump pump all trying to instantly start will blow the breaker for sure... now scale that up by an entire subdivision, say a hundred homes, sometimes I wonder its a miracle the grid can be brought up at all without blowing itself back down. The inrush current to an entire subdivision must closely resemble the lightning strike that took it down...
There was a QST magazine article about half a decade ago about using the prius traction battery and what amounted to a VFD to provide emergency power. Which is nice, except for the Prius legendary HF RFI problem. You can hear a prius from quite a distance on the radio due to interference; the irony of providing emergency power for radio gear using a prius which interferes with the radios was not lost on many readers. I guess for the VHF FM only crowd it works pretty well.
I cannot find the article in google, seems like QST magazine october 2005 is likely, but...
The amount of competition between different oil companies is huge. They're all selling basically the same product**, so they deal in very small margins, trying to out-optimize their operations relative to each other, with pure, raw scale being the way to keep their total profits up.
Ah one minor correction. In exploration and production you are correct.
In refining there's lots of goofing around with nations wanting massive oversupply of capacity for national defense, and state owned refineries not really caring much about profit. Meanwhile the greenies want to burn the gas in their giant SUVs but they want to shut down all the refineries, or at least make just a couple really huge monopoly refineries. Monopolies are not exactly famous for their efficiencies. And as we begin the early-mid stages of the second great depression, refineries demand will drop. So refining is not the place to focus for future profits.
Also the majors seem to be experts at exploration and production. Not refining, not so much. So toss it off and focus on your core competencies.
Makes sense financially, makes sense strategically, etc...
Do you think all those big banks, and their bankers, give a damn about what we think of them, as long as they can take home huge bonuses ?
Which is why the marketing unit is getting the big flushing sound in this maneuver. Before the BP disaster you can't get rid of the tv commercials on CNBC, that would sink the company. Then you get the biggest disaster in the history of offshore drilling. Financial effects of the reputation hit? A big "eh". Well I guess we can downsize the marketing department. Bye bye liberal arts grads! I'm sure the geologists will miss you (not).
Is that the kind of improvement in 'safety and efficiency' you were talking about?
Yes, basically. What you've described is not a big pharma company with a lot of corrupt legal loopholes, but a big pharma company that has completely divested itself of pharma and turned into a bank. You're still calling it a pharma company, which is weirdly inaccurate, kind of like calling my credit card company an "online book retailer" merely because I bought a book from amazon once.
Clearly a hundred little companies is better for the world than one big one.
So whats the problem, exactly? Other than you don't like banks, or stock exchanges, or credit unions?
If by "nuclear material" you mean legally exempt sources, there's a couple places. United nuclear is a marketer/reseller of the actual suppliers. Kind of like digikey and mouser do not manufacture resistors, they resell them. By legal definition exempt sources are harmless; don't sweat it.
If by "nuclear material" you mean legally non-exempt sources, there's a couple perfectly legal places. Just submit your valid non-expired NRC licensing information, which they'll verify, and then ship the goods. If I recall correctly UPS had a special shipping process that was horrifically expensive. I was very tangentially involved with the NBC gear at my army reserve unit and you could get detection gear non-exempt sources thru "the mail", used for testing equipment and also for training. Think of a licensed animal veterinarian getting licensed non-exempt radio-iodine shots to treat a cat with hyperthyroidism, this stuff is all just off the shelf and business as usual. Follow the law like everyone else in the business. I suppose you could forge a Swedish license to order stuff overseas, but get caught doing that and its well deserved hard time, both for the forger and the shipper who didn't bother to verify the license "just this one time".
If by "nuclear material" you mean normal household products that are radioactive, like low-sodium salt, or old camping lantern mantles, or smoke detectors, or pretty much anything made of granite, any one of numerous "rock collection minerals", well I guess start with amazon.com. If by some miracle, you have a radiation-free house, it can be just as radioactive as any normal house with just a couple mail order purchases.
If by "nuclear material" you mean something a meth head stole and is fencing on ebay to raise some money to buy sudafed, well I guess the answer is ebay.com.
I'm sure that screwing around with a domestic fire alarm
He also ordered radioactive material from overseas.
so?
If its a non-stolen legally exempt source under the overseas country laws (probably USA) and also is a legally exempt source under local laws (most likely) and if he followed the export/import/shipping laws (hmm, getting complicated here, but for exempt sources its generally not a big deal) then it doesn't matter.
People/companies ship radioactive material overseas, perfectly legally, all the time. Even the non-exempt stuff is really no big deal even when you follow all the laws, most of which are common sense anyway.
No one wants to discuss which laws he broke, if he broke any, just a lot of "radiation = girl cooties" and "get in your couch and watch Oprah like you're supposed to, prole" babble. What he did can easily be done completely legally and above board, or if you almost intentionally try very hard can be multiple felonies.
(c) Known enough about the subject not to ask a really stupid question.
Asking an ignorant, easily researched question about safety related topics, in any field, is the intellectual equivalent of hanging a "kick me" sign on your rear.
One problem is anything radiation related is hyper sensationalized due to ignorance, so we'll probably never get the real story past the journalist filters.
I'm puzzled how this guy was going to build a "nuclear reactor" out of mail-order isotopes and smoke detectors. Smoke detectors usually contain Am-241, which is an alpha emitter. The mail order stuff I assume was uranium ore. Was he planning to create neutrons from (alpha, n) reactions and use those to trigger a few fissions from the uranium?
This sounds like his experiment bears as much similarity to a reactor as a balloon full of hairspray resembles a car engine.
Trolling the local authorities asking about homemade reactors is a pretty good sign of being crazy to anyone who knows anything about the subject, which on one side makes him harmless, but on another side might make them wanna check him out before whatever made him bonkers is making him more bonkers and he tries doing something stupid with something that he actually has a chance of successfully operating, like say, a sniper rifle.
You can build more or less whatever you want with electronic gear in your basement. Millions of people do perfectly successfully and quietly. On the other hand, asking the cops if making an electric chair is ok, and then being surprised when that pisses them off, is just beyond stupid.
Is it really necessary to raid a guy who was asking for permission in the first place?
Ask permission first and you get licensed to work with non-exempt sources. No problemo.
F around and ask stupid questions after already doing it, they're gonna come down like a ton of bricks.
Try building an addition onto your house once by acquiring a building permit before starting work, and once by acquiring a building permit after the work is complete, and report back on which experience was more "fun".
Considering he was doing this in his own home, with a risk of irradiating his neighbours, I think it was right to stop him experimenting. If he did it in a properly shielded location then it wouldn't be so bad.
No one seems able to answer if his sources were exempt or non-exempt. Thats the key.
As for the "properly shielded location" that is pretty irrelevant, if he had to dough to own a pig and pay inspection fees, unless he's trying to make a political statement, the paperwork to make it perfectly legal would be pretty easy, depending on what he's doing.
Exempt sources are technically radioactive, and great for experimenting and fooling around, and the level of radiation is right up there with a granite countertop. The reason you use an exempt source instead of a granite countertop is because unlike a granite countertop, a dude with expensive calibration gear verified the exact quantity of the exact isotope, and its reasonably pure rather than a mixture of random junk. Kind of like the difference between a wooden Chinese 25 cent ruler and my $150 American made micrometer is mostly that my micrometer is actually calibrated to measure correctly.
Non-exempt sources are supposed to be licensed and CAN theoretically be quite dangerous, in addition to being totally illegal if you're not licensed, stored in an inspected facility, etc. A lot of it is chain of custody issues... a sheet metal thickness gauge from an old mill is probably harmless in an apartment, but thrown into a recycler could make an unholy mess if melted. Or tossed into a fish pond that people eat out of, that could be really bad. Much as my box of mouse poison in the basement is perfectly safe while its in my basement, but dumped into a vat of baby food at the baby food factory could be kinda bad.
What he was doing, and what he owned, was perfectly legal, right?
That's the whole point of exempt sources... Ultra super low power, yet detectable with good gear... Assuming he wasn't stupid enough to beg borrow steal non-exempt sources...
Now if he had unlicensed non-exempt sources, I can see why they'd throw the book at him and confiscate it all. I'd even more or less support it. I have friends who are in charge of non-exempt sources and the legal requirements are mostly sane and sensible so its not only legally correct but also scientifically / morally / ethically correct to follow non-exempt source licensing laws. So many laws in the US are corrupt that its weird that I can actually whole heartedly support one...
I'm sure that screwing around with a domestic fire alarm is 1) Perfectly safe 2) thru a peculiarity of a loophole of the law is technically illegal. But thats right up there with ripping off mattress labels, or currency defacement laws.
Anyway does anyone know if he was busted with the Swedish-chef equivalent of exempt or non-exempt sources? Maybe Sweden must have the concept of exempt sources, modern industrial society more or less depends upon it?
To me this sounds more like "we want to get rid of the expensive geologists and engineers" than a break-up of the vertically integrated players
Its extremely important to note that one "bunch" of units was a net positive to the balance and income statements, and one "bunch" of units was a net negative or in the case of refining is floundering right around zero.
All the geologists and (most of the) Pet Eng work for the net positive group. I think their jobs are pretty safe. If anything, without the deadweight holding that group down, their salaries and bonuses are gonna rise.
Some of the pet eng guys and all of the chem eng guys work in the floundering group's refineries, which superficially looks really bad for them, but as long as people continue to buy gasoline, they're Probably pretty safe. If the rest of the company is floundering I would not expect extravagant pay increases or bonuses, but as long as you've got a bunch of cat crackers you need a catalyst engineer and that's kinda a secure lifetime job, until we stop burning gas, spraying bug spray, making plastic, etc.
Not just hiding profits, also splitting liability. BP is going to be paying a lot for the oil spill. Wouldn't it be so much more convenient if they didn't own or operate the rig and could just blame it on a small company, which could then pay its entire $1M capitalisation in compensation and then go bankrupt?
You write as if you don't know very much about the oil business, at all. BP did not own nor operate the rig, TO did.
One problem you have not considered is your solution would probably have saved the gulf. TO and BP are multibillion dollar companies, and as such every interaction between them is handled almost lawerly, with infinite levels of ass covering and record keeping. As anyone who has ever worked in a situation like that knows, that leads to horrendous paralysis. Which is unfortunately exactly what you don't want on a drilling rig hovering over a 3 mile deep gas filled hole.
In your scenario, Mr Million dollar company says F U guys I'm hitting the big red switch and pumping the heavy kill pill downhole. Its only a million bucks not a billion. What actually happened was a lot of "you don't wanna be the guy who broke the billion dollar contract relationship" and "who is authorized vs who is liable to declare an emergency or not to" and "who gets to push what button when and why". Which is fine if you have all the time in the world, but if you don't then the platform blows up, everyones killed, and the gulf is flooded with oil, because you can sue individuals but you can't sue oil spewing out of a well.
Basically we have a super monopoly / ogliopoly situation now. That doesn't work so well. A bunch of little companies, even if a little artificial, would provide more efficient and safer operations overall.
exploration and production unit from its refining and marketing units, took Wall Street by surprise, raising uncomfortable questions about the future of Big Oil.
The economist podcast discussed it some last week, as they discussed their previous weeks issue. I've noticed a disturbing trend where/. bifurcated around March and now some stories are fresh but the late ones are actually going further back in time as time goes on. Wasn't this a ST:TNG plotline?
Anyway, the ominous BS makes no sense. I've been following this market for, well, decades, now, and all it boils down to is the oil majors are extremely competent at exploration and production, both directly and indirectly by financing other companies exploration and production work. The refining operations are almost meaningless now because every nation either wants to shut them down to prevent pollution (although the hypocrites still want gas for their SUVs) or they want massive overproduction capability for strategic warfare reasons. So refining is a dead market. As for the marketing units, yeah, they're real geniuses alright, look how everyone loves BP, for example.
So all it amounts to is focusing on what makes a net positive on the income statement and casting off the deadwood that is a net negative to the income statement. Its the oil industry equivalent of joe average non-IT focused business outsourcing their IT department, just like they've outsourced their electrical production and (mostly) their "business standard uniform" production and maintenance.
The reason its spun as doom and gloom, is they have no empathy and only see the effect on themselves. The marketing unit sponged off the profits of the production unit to make CNBC commercials that were beyond stupid. Now they are cast off like the debris they are, so they won't have the cash to pay to CNBC... So, MSM is going to get less advertising bucks from the oil majors. Hmm, I wonder how they feel about that? Expect some attack stories in the near future along with the doom and gloom, and then the MSM will find someone else to attack and it'll all be ignored.
Given that XP is no longer sold, it has 0% of the market share. I think they meant to say "installed base".
Maybe they're talking about torrent distribution rather than retail sales at best buy? XP is still sorta popular in that its the simplest solution to many problems.
Old school, but works. New school is just fire up your bonjour / zeroconf / whatever its called now client and see if its full of other peoples printers, desktops, and airport-extreme type devices.
Of course a dumb enough admin might filter JUST mdns and forget to filter the actual services, so it's still worthwhile to nmap.
My computer is unable to communicate with anyone without the help of a server and is a permanent client, but in today's world that's the norm.
Note that server can be your server, not someone elses server.
You're about 15 minutes of work away from signing up for a virtual host (I am a happy linode customer) and set up a bridging VPN to the vhost and you're live on the air with a static public address. Or NAT as you please from that public addrs into your internal LAN (thats what I do)
This has the other interesting side effect of your ip address being as stable as the vhost side can make it... you might have the same addrs for a decade. This is much nicer than the "every time you reboot, your cablemodem gets a new address, so you have to update all your DNS or get dynamic DNS working which in the past required sacrifice of a chicken and at least a six pack of beer.
Make sure to hire the vhost in a country you want... That way you control geolocated IP services instead of them controlling you. Get a vhost in the UK if you want free BBC stuff; get a vhost in the USA if you want... i donnu, to be monitored by the NSA or whatever. You get the idea.
Also the virtual host is a nice place for a vanity web host, vanity email server, a tor proxy (inbound just for you, or transit only, or if you want the headache allow public outbound). Or a torrent web downloader client thingy. Or set up a ftp daemon, some SSH keys and rsync/unison and call it your "dropbox clone". Or a I2P and freenet "host" much like the tor proxy above.
You can have all kinds of cheap fun with a virtual host in the country of your choice.
We are rapidly approaching the point where all TCP / UDP / whatever-P connections will be running over dynamically configured VPNs or at least SSL, to avoid the brain damage of middleboxes. You may as well get used to the idea now, and get some experience with running everything over VPNs.
The first three numbers are indeed a geographic tag, but it's where the SSN office is that processed the application. I was born in Wisconsin in the 70s, too - the first digit of my SSN is "2", because my SSN is not a Wisconsin SSN, I agree with most of the other stuff you posted; in fact, I'm surprised that you got that wrong.
No I willfully ignored it. I do some genealogy and as you probably know, the SSDI makes dead relatives SSNs public upon death. Both evidence from my own family, and in general reading on genealogical research, your situation is very unusual. Going "all the way back" pretty much everyone born after the late 30s has a SSN from the hospital they were born in, usually in the state the live in.
I'm guessing a special situation that doesn't apply to many people: 1) Military family getting transferred around? 2) You popped out early during a family vacation to WI (BTW Nice place to vacation, other than the mosquitos, I like it too..) 3) You're one of those border people... Let me guess, born in Lake Geneva or Eau Claire or someplace bordering the U.P. and the closest hospital meant crossing the Cheddar Curtain to be born in WI?
For somebody born in the 1970s, an SSN application might not have been filed until needed for a job.
Simply not true. I lived it. Back in ye olden days when SSNs were considered the public identifier that they are, I think about 1/4 of my army reserve unit had the same first 5 as me...
There has been a big push to get hospitals to get kids SSNs upon birth for a long time. Maybe a kid born with a midwife in a commune in the 70s wasn't assigned a SSN until the early 90s, but I've never heard of that.
If mom an dad opened a minor savings account for the kid after 1970, the bank required a SSN. Any kid attending school was enrolled in 1972, presumably that means any kid born after about 1967 had a SSN issued in 1972, unless they were homeschooled. Looks like in '75 any kid in a welfare family, or in '77 any kid in a food stamp family (which is now something like 30% of the child population) required a SSN. Regardless of job status, any kid with a drivers license in '76 had a SSN.
Theoretically, both in the 70s all the way to the present day, if an uninsured mom had an uninsured kid, were born outside a hospital, the parents never claimed the tax deduction, the kid never had a bank account, the kid never attended school, the kid never received any govt handouts or at least the family never got credit for the kid, the kid never filed a tax return for non-wage income, and finally the kid got a job before the kid got any sort of state drivers license or ID... then, maybe, the kid wouldn't get a SSN before they get a job.
Of course with teenager unemployment running 50% now, and new graduate unemployment nearing that, its all kind of irrelevant now...
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the pros mostly use those loud generators on the other side of the trucks with "welding grade" extremely heavy gauge extension cords.
Just sayin, in case you wanna try it on the cheap, you don't need to buy a new car, just some (expensive) extension cords.
The "rave" guys did the same for their audio. That's how I know. In that case, once the subwoofers get louder than the gens it doesn't really matter, I suppose.
Why not just...have battery powered LED lights for the short term emergencies (since that's all your car would cover well, anyway)
Uh, not quite.
My wife's prius generates about 60 horsepower.
conservative 60 hp * conservative 700 watts per hp / conservative 220 volts = sometime like 190 amps. Probably, with the help of the batteries, a short term surge of 400 amps would be possible.
Its an older house; I believe we only have 100 amp service. Technically I could run both my house and my neighbor's house across the driveway 100% full blast. In practice I don't think either of us own 100 amps of load; but then again running a car flat out full power for long periods of time is a bad idea.
Anyway in summary its quite realistic to run an entire house off a Prius. Not just some lights and the fridge....
Even my old saturn alternator supposedly is capable of a kilowatt of continuous sustained output, according to the high power ham radio guys. Thats... a lot of power.
Its an urban legend, its not even true. Unless your hybrid vehicle is a multi-megawatt nuclear submarine, backfeeding an entire neighborhood will instantly kill any normal sized generator.
Now there are interesting ways to kill someone using a generator, but they don't involve backfeeding a neighborhood. The drop fuse goes off like a grenade, unfortunately while the lineman is holding it. The lineman walked thru a rain puddle energized by an extension cord laying in the puddle, coincidentally for the purpose of backfeeding. Any accident even remotely involving a generator and a lineman is always reported via the journalist filter as being due to "backfeeding" even if the actual accident report is the lineman tripped over it laying on the ground, or a refueling fire incident.
Its a nice story, and VERY popular to retell, but if the drop line fuse is not blown, trying to backfeed an entire subdivision will instantly stall the engine, if not burn out the alternator and/or blow the drop fuse.
The actual failure mode is the drop fuse blows, the lineman tries to replace it, your generator happens to be out of phase with the national grid, and either the fuse pretty much detonates in the linemans hands, or the generator literally blows up, as in crankshaft sheared off and piston flys thru the oilpan type of destruction.
Humorously the only people who retell this story are those who never tried it. Anyone who has actually tried this, knows for a fact that its a miracle if you can backfeed merely your own house without blowing the generator.. the inrush current of the fridge, freezer, AC compressor, furnace blower, dehumidifier, computers, maybe an oven, clothes dryer, or dishwasher that was on when the power cut, and sump pump all trying to instantly start will blow the breaker for sure... now scale that up by an entire subdivision, say a hundred homes, sometimes I wonder its a miracle the grid can be brought up at all without blowing itself back down. The inrush current to an entire subdivision must closely resemble the lightning strike that took it down...
There was a QST magazine article about half a decade ago about using the prius traction battery and what amounted to a VFD to provide emergency power. Which is nice, except for the Prius legendary HF RFI problem. You can hear a prius from quite a distance on the radio due to interference; the irony of providing emergency power for radio gear using a prius which interferes with the radios was not lost on many readers. I guess for the VHF FM only crowd it works pretty well.
I cannot find the article in google, seems like QST magazine october 2005 is likely, but...
Yes but why does it take as much energy as it takes to run your house for 2 days just to drive your all-electric car a few miles?
The other answers are getting bogged down in wordiness and too many numbers.
Here's a simpler way to look at it, just look at the ratios of power output vs time duration.
The motor in your car is about ten to a hundred times bigger than the sum of the working electric motors in your house, right? Very roughly?
Given that, a chunk of energy runs your house about ten to a hundred times longer than it runs your car, right? Very roughly?
Makes sense to me...
The amount of competition between different oil companies is huge. They're all selling basically the same product**, so they deal in very small margins, trying to out-optimize their operations relative to each other, with pure, raw scale being the way to keep their total profits up.
Ah one minor correction. In exploration and production you are correct.
In refining there's lots of goofing around with nations wanting massive oversupply of capacity for national defense, and state owned refineries not really caring much about profit. Meanwhile the greenies want to burn the gas in their giant SUVs but they want to shut down all the refineries, or at least make just a couple really huge monopoly refineries. Monopolies are not exactly famous for their efficiencies. And as we begin the early-mid stages of the second great depression, refineries demand will drop. So refining is not the place to focus for future profits.
Also the majors seem to be experts at exploration and production. Not refining, not so much. So toss it off and focus on your core competencies.
Makes sense financially, makes sense strategically, etc...
Do you think all those big banks, and their bankers, give a damn about what we think of them, as long as they can take home huge bonuses ?
Which is why the marketing unit is getting the big flushing sound in this maneuver. Before the BP disaster you can't get rid of the tv commercials on CNBC, that would sink the company. Then you get the biggest disaster in the history of offshore drilling. Financial effects of the reputation hit? A big "eh". Well I guess we can downsize the marketing department. Bye bye liberal arts grads! I'm sure the geologists will miss you (not).
Is that the kind of improvement in 'safety and efficiency' you were talking about?
Yes, basically. What you've described is not a big pharma company with a lot of corrupt legal loopholes, but a big pharma company that has completely divested itself of pharma and turned into a bank. You're still calling it a pharma company, which is weirdly inaccurate, kind of like calling my credit card company an "online book retailer" merely because I bought a book from amazon once.
Clearly a hundred little companies is better for the world than one big one.
So whats the problem, exactly? Other than you don't like banks, or stock exchanges, or credit unions?
If by "nuclear material" you mean legally exempt sources, there's a couple places. United nuclear is a marketer/reseller of the actual suppliers. Kind of like digikey and mouser do not manufacture resistors, they resell them. By legal definition exempt sources are harmless; don't sweat it.
If by "nuclear material" you mean legally non-exempt sources, there's a couple perfectly legal places. Just submit your valid non-expired NRC licensing information, which they'll verify, and then ship the goods. If I recall correctly UPS had a special shipping process that was horrifically expensive. I was very tangentially involved with the NBC gear at my army reserve unit and you could get detection gear non-exempt sources thru "the mail", used for testing equipment and also for training. Think of a licensed animal veterinarian getting licensed non-exempt radio-iodine shots to treat a cat with hyperthyroidism, this stuff is all just off the shelf and business as usual. Follow the law like everyone else in the business. I suppose you could forge a Swedish license to order stuff overseas, but get caught doing that and its well deserved hard time, both for the forger and the shipper who didn't bother to verify the license "just this one time".
If by "nuclear material" you mean normal household products that are radioactive, like low-sodium salt, or old camping lantern mantles, or smoke detectors, or pretty much anything made of granite, any one of numerous "rock collection minerals", well I guess start with amazon.com. If by some miracle, you have a radiation-free house, it can be just as radioactive as any normal house with just a couple mail order purchases.
If by "nuclear material" you mean something a meth head stole and is fencing on ebay to raise some money to buy sudafed, well I guess the answer is ebay.com.
I'm sure that screwing around with a domestic fire alarm
He also ordered radioactive material from overseas.
so?
If its a non-stolen legally exempt source under the overseas country laws (probably USA) and also is a legally exempt source under local laws (most likely) and if he followed the export/import/shipping laws (hmm, getting complicated here, but for exempt sources its generally not a big deal) then it doesn't matter.
People/companies ship radioactive material overseas, perfectly legally, all the time. Even the non-exempt stuff is really no big deal even when you follow all the laws, most of which are common sense anyway.
No one wants to discuss which laws he broke, if he broke any, just a lot of "radiation = girl cooties" and "get in your couch and watch Oprah like you're supposed to, prole" babble. What he did can easily be done completely legally and above board, or if you almost intentionally try very hard can be multiple felonies.
(c) Known enough about the subject not to ask a really stupid question.
Asking an ignorant, easily researched question about safety related topics, in any field, is the intellectual equivalent of hanging a "kick me" sign on your rear.
One problem is anything radiation related is hyper sensationalized due to ignorance, so we'll probably never get the real story past the journalist filters.
I'm puzzled how this guy was going to build a "nuclear reactor" out of mail-order isotopes and smoke detectors. Smoke detectors usually contain Am-241, which is an alpha emitter. The mail order stuff I assume was uranium ore. Was he planning to create neutrons from (alpha, n) reactions and use those to trigger a few fissions from the uranium?
This sounds like his experiment bears as much similarity to a reactor as a balloon full of hairspray resembles a car engine.
Trolling the local authorities asking about homemade reactors is a pretty good sign of being crazy to anyone who knows anything about the subject, which on one side makes him harmless, but on another side might make them wanna check him out before whatever made him bonkers is making him more bonkers and he tries doing something stupid with something that he actually has a chance of successfully operating, like say, a sniper rifle.
You can build more or less whatever you want with electronic gear in your basement. Millions of people do perfectly successfully and quietly. On the other hand, asking the cops if making an electric chair is ok, and then being surprised when that pisses them off, is just beyond stupid.
Is it really necessary to raid a guy who was asking for permission in the first place?
Ask permission first and you get licensed to work with non-exempt sources. No problemo.
F around and ask stupid questions after already doing it, they're gonna come down like a ton of bricks.
Try building an addition onto your house once by acquiring a building permit before starting work, and once by acquiring a building permit after the work is complete, and report back on which experience was more "fun".
Considering he was doing this in his own home, with a risk of irradiating his neighbours, I think it was right to stop him experimenting. If he did it in a properly shielded location then it wouldn't be so bad.
No one seems able to answer if his sources were exempt or non-exempt. Thats the key.
As for the "properly shielded location" that is pretty irrelevant, if he had to dough to own a pig and pay inspection fees, unless he's trying to make a political statement, the paperwork to make it perfectly legal would be pretty easy, depending on what he's doing.
Exempt sources are technically radioactive, and great for experimenting and fooling around, and the level of radiation is right up there with a granite countertop. The reason you use an exempt source instead of a granite countertop is because unlike a granite countertop, a dude with expensive calibration gear verified the exact quantity of the exact isotope, and its reasonably pure rather than a mixture of random junk. Kind of like the difference between a wooden Chinese 25 cent ruler and my $150 American made micrometer is mostly that my micrometer is actually calibrated to measure correctly.
Non-exempt sources are supposed to be licensed and CAN theoretically be quite dangerous, in addition to being totally illegal if you're not licensed, stored in an inspected facility, etc. A lot of it is chain of custody issues... a sheet metal thickness gauge from an old mill is probably harmless in an apartment, but thrown into a recycler could make an unholy mess if melted. Or tossed into a fish pond that people eat out of, that could be really bad. Much as my box of mouse poison in the basement is perfectly safe while its in my basement, but dumped into a vat of baby food at the baby food factory could be kinda bad.
Everything about the story makes sense except for
- all the nuclear stuff was confiscated
What he was doing, and what he owned, was perfectly legal, right?
That's the whole point of exempt sources... Ultra super low power, yet detectable with good gear... Assuming he wasn't stupid enough to beg borrow steal non-exempt sources...
Now if he had unlicensed non-exempt sources, I can see why they'd throw the book at him and confiscate it all. I'd even more or less support it. I have friends who are in charge of non-exempt sources and the legal requirements are mostly sane and sensible so its not only legally correct but also scientifically / morally / ethically correct to follow non-exempt source licensing laws. So many laws in the US are corrupt that its weird that I can actually whole heartedly support one...
I'm sure that screwing around with a domestic fire alarm is 1) Perfectly safe 2) thru a peculiarity of a loophole of the law is technically illegal. But thats right up there with ripping off mattress labels, or currency defacement laws.
Anyway does anyone know if he was busted with the Swedish-chef equivalent of exempt or non-exempt sources? Maybe Sweden must have the concept of exempt sources, modern industrial society more or less depends upon it?
To me this sounds more like "we want to get rid of the expensive geologists and engineers" than a break-up of the vertically integrated players
Its extremely important to note that one "bunch" of units was a net positive to the balance and income statements, and one "bunch" of units was a net negative or in the case of refining is floundering right around zero.
All the geologists and (most of the) Pet Eng work for the net positive group. I think their jobs are pretty safe. If anything, without the deadweight holding that group down, their salaries and bonuses are gonna rise.
Some of the pet eng guys and all of the chem eng guys work in the floundering group's refineries, which superficially looks really bad for them, but as long as people continue to buy gasoline, they're Probably pretty safe. If the rest of the company is floundering I would not expect extravagant pay increases or bonuses, but as long as you've got a bunch of cat crackers you need a catalyst engineer and that's kinda a secure lifetime job, until we stop burning gas, spraying bug spray, making plastic, etc.
I wouldn't start sending out the resumes yet.
I don't think making all 25K employees 1099 contractors is gonna help anyone but the tax lawyers.
Not just hiding profits, also splitting liability. BP is going to be paying a lot for the oil spill. Wouldn't it be so much more convenient if they didn't own or operate the rig and could just blame it on a small company, which could then pay its entire $1M capitalisation in compensation and then go bankrupt?
You write as if you don't know very much about the oil business, at all. BP did not own nor operate the rig, TO did.
One problem you have not considered is your solution would probably have saved the gulf. TO and BP are multibillion dollar companies, and as such every interaction between them is handled almost lawerly, with infinite levels of ass covering and record keeping. As anyone who has ever worked in a situation like that knows, that leads to horrendous paralysis. Which is unfortunately exactly what you don't want on a drilling rig hovering over a 3 mile deep gas filled hole.
In your scenario, Mr Million dollar company says F U guys I'm hitting the big red switch and pumping the heavy kill pill downhole. Its only a million bucks not a billion. What actually happened was a lot of "you don't wanna be the guy who broke the billion dollar contract relationship" and "who is authorized vs who is liable to declare an emergency or not to" and "who gets to push what button when and why". Which is fine if you have all the time in the world, but if you don't then the platform blows up, everyones killed, and the gulf is flooded with oil, because you can sue individuals but you can't sue oil spewing out of a well.
Basically we have a super monopoly / ogliopoly situation now. That doesn't work so well. A bunch of little companies, even if a little artificial, would provide more efficient and safer operations overall.
exploration and production unit from its refining and marketing units, took Wall Street by surprise, raising uncomfortable questions about the future of Big Oil.
The economist podcast discussed it some last week, as they discussed their previous weeks issue. I've noticed a disturbing trend where /. bifurcated around March and now some stories are fresh but the late ones are actually going further back in time as time goes on. Wasn't this a ST:TNG plotline?
Anyway, the ominous BS makes no sense. I've been following this market for, well, decades, now, and all it boils down to is the oil majors are extremely competent at exploration and production, both directly and indirectly by financing other companies exploration and production work. The refining operations are almost meaningless now because every nation either wants to shut them down to prevent pollution (although the hypocrites still want gas for their SUVs) or they want massive overproduction capability for strategic warfare reasons. So refining is a dead market. As for the marketing units, yeah, they're real geniuses alright, look how everyone loves BP, for example.
So all it amounts to is focusing on what makes a net positive on the income statement and casting off the deadwood that is a net negative to the income statement. Its the oil industry equivalent of joe average non-IT focused business outsourcing their IT department, just like they've outsourced their electrical production and (mostly) their "business standard uniform" production and maintenance.
The reason its spun as doom and gloom, is they have no empathy and only see the effect on themselves. The marketing unit sponged off the profits of the production unit to make CNBC commercials that were beyond stupid. Now they are cast off like the debris they are, so they won't have the cash to pay to CNBC... So, MSM is going to get less advertising bucks from the oil majors. Hmm, I wonder how they feel about that? Expect some attack stories in the near future along with the doom and gloom, and then the MSM will find someone else to attack and it'll all be ignored.
Given that XP is no longer sold, it has 0% of the market share. I think they meant to say "installed base".
Maybe they're talking about torrent distribution rather than retail sales at best buy? XP is still sorta popular in that its the simplest solution to many problems.
There's no reason to be unsure.
Just fire up nmap or Netscan and have a peek.
Old school, but works. New school is just fire up your bonjour / zeroconf / whatever its called now client and see if its full of other peoples printers, desktops, and airport-extreme type devices.
Of course a dumb enough admin might filter JUST mdns and forget to filter the actual services, so it's still worthwhile to nmap.
My computer is unable to communicate with anyone without the help of a server and is a permanent client, but in today's world that's the norm.
Note that server can be your server, not someone elses server.
You're about 15 minutes of work away from signing up for a virtual host (I am a happy linode customer) and set up a bridging VPN to the vhost and you're live on the air with a static public address. Or NAT as you please from that public addrs into your internal LAN (thats what I do)
This has the other interesting side effect of your ip address being as stable as the vhost side can make it... you might have the same addrs for a decade. This is much nicer than the "every time you reboot, your cablemodem gets a new address, so you have to update all your DNS or get dynamic DNS working which in the past required sacrifice of a chicken and at least a six pack of beer.
Make sure to hire the vhost in a country you want... That way you control geolocated IP services instead of them controlling you. Get a vhost in the UK if you want free BBC stuff; get a vhost in the USA if you want ... i donnu, to be monitored by the NSA or whatever. You get the idea.
Also the virtual host is a nice place for a vanity web host, vanity email server, a tor proxy (inbound just for you, or transit only, or if you want the headache allow public outbound). Or a torrent web downloader client thingy. Or set up a ftp daemon, some SSH keys and rsync/unison and call it your "dropbox clone". Or a I2P and freenet "host" much like the tor proxy above.
You can have all kinds of cheap fun with a virtual host in the country of your choice.
We are rapidly approaching the point where all TCP / UDP / whatever-P connections will be running over dynamically configured VPNs or at least SSL, to avoid the brain damage of middleboxes. You may as well get used to the idea now, and get some experience with running everything over VPNs.
The first three numbers are indeed a geographic tag, but it's where the SSN office is that processed the application. I was born in Wisconsin in the 70s, too - the first digit of my SSN is "2", because my SSN is not a Wisconsin SSN, I agree with most of the other stuff you posted; in fact, I'm surprised that you got that wrong.
No I willfully ignored it. I do some genealogy and as you probably know, the SSDI makes dead relatives SSNs public upon death. Both evidence from my own family, and in general reading on genealogical research, your situation is very unusual. Going "all the way back" pretty much everyone born after the late 30s has a SSN from the hospital they were born in, usually in the state the live in.
I'm guessing a special situation that doesn't apply to many people:
1) Military family getting transferred around?
2) You popped out early during a family vacation to WI (BTW Nice place to vacation, other than the mosquitos, I like it too..)
3) You're one of those border people... Let me guess, born in Lake Geneva or Eau Claire or someplace bordering the U.P. and the closest hospital meant crossing the Cheddar Curtain to be born in WI?
For somebody born in the 1970s, an SSN application might not have been filed until needed for a job.
Simply not true. I lived it. Back in ye olden days when SSNs were considered the public identifier that they are, I think about 1/4 of my army reserve unit had the same first 5 as me...
There has been a big push to get hospitals to get kids SSNs upon birth for a long time. Maybe a kid born with a midwife in a commune in the 70s wasn't assigned a SSN until the early 90s, but I've never heard of that.
Check out
http://www.ssa.gov/history/ssn/ssnchron.html
If mom an dad opened a minor savings account for the kid after 1970, the bank required a SSN. Any kid attending school was enrolled in 1972, presumably that means any kid born after about 1967 had a SSN issued in 1972, unless they were homeschooled. Looks like in '75 any kid in a welfare family, or in '77 any kid in a food stamp family (which is now something like 30% of the child population) required a SSN. Regardless of job status, any kid with a drivers license in '76 had a SSN.
Theoretically, both in the 70s all the way to the present day, if an uninsured mom had an uninsured kid, were born outside a hospital, the parents never claimed the tax deduction, the kid never had a bank account, the kid never attended school, the kid never received any govt handouts or at least the family never got credit for the kid, the kid never filed a tax return for non-wage income, and finally the kid got a job before the kid got any sort of state drivers license or ID... then, maybe, the kid wouldn't get a SSN before they get a job.
Of course with teenager unemployment running 50% now, and new graduate unemployment nearing that, its all kind of irrelevant now...