So when is the sports stock exchange opening? I sure would love to bet... eh ehm I mean, "exchange and buy stock", for my favorite team.
That WAS tradesports, a sister website of intrade.
tradesports flamed out utterly spectacularly in 2008 for no apparent reason.
I was always mystified how two sister sites under the same company, presumably sharing code, management and backend equipment, could have one self immolate itself so thoroughly yet the other one seems just ducky even years later.
My guess is the mafia guys told them to butt out of the sports betting business, or else... That would explain a whole lot about that situation.
Not to mention, how easy would it would be for organized crime to short sell a particular movie, and then make sure the star OD's or has an "accident" in the middle of production.
Traditionally, doesn't that make box office returns soar, not sink?
I can think of some TV shows that were canned after a major actor croaked. Specifically one Sy-Fy vampire TV show a couple years back based on the RPG game where the lead actor killed himself on a motorcycle in Jolly Ole England so they canceled the show after a couple episodes. OR maybe the ratings sucked and that was a great excuse.
But generally, dead actor equals more revenue not less.
Ideosphere/Foresight Exchange and Intrade are much more interesting. Both market "real world" events instead of hollywood flakes.
Ideosphere/Foresight is free, intrade is real dollars.
Ideosphere is semi-comatose, and the email list is currently filled with a debate over what exactly "astrology is true" means, which is at least somewhat more interesting than the past six months debating if an ipod touch/iphone is a real computer or not.
Intrade, last time I checked, is very much alive. Once I feel I know what I'm doing with monopoly money on ideosphere, I have been planning on moving to intrade and investing real money. At my present rate of learning, which only exceeds my weight loss program for failure to progress, I'll be moving to intrade right around the year 2100.
Both have been around for "forever" on the internet. The only new thing about HSX is that its securities are based on the actions of hollywood drug addicts, thus inherently unpredictable, whereas you can gain an advantage by trading intelligently on ideosphere and intrade. HSX is pure gambling, intrade is investing or at least intelligent speculation. Two inherently different activities.
If there was an actual cyber war, we would respond with real war.
The problem is, they have to figure out how to make it look, to the folks on fox news, that it was the Iranians/Iraqis/Afgans.
The other problem, is say the PLO or the IRA pulls off an attack. Then we promptly bomb bomb bomb Venezuela because we enjoys that immensely. Someone is going to get really pissed off, probably the Venezuelan special forces. Followed by physical attack on us by the Venezuelans. So the end result is a bunch of dead women and children in Venezuela, another knocked over skyscraper here, and the folks whom actually did it get away with it. To do it again, I suppose.
Our military industrial complex will make money off it, so its all good.
Why are things like power plants, banks, or telcos directly connected to the internet? You'd think they could afford a completely separate network.
A short summary of the problem:
Obviously no one manipulates the reactor control rods over the internet, outsourced to India. Although there is probably an intense desire by the MBAs to do so. Obviously the marketing guys have their PR website on the internet.
The problem is the devices in between. At a past employer, they had a customer whom had to cancel aircraft flights when their net access was down. They had to submit some form or list to the FAA or DHS or big brother or whatever for each flight, and they had a backup plan to submit the info over telephones/cellphones, but not the personnel to handle the load of all flights on backup, so the least essential flight would be canceled. Sales gave them an elaborate SLA.
That is how you shut down a nuclear plant using the internet. They can't email incident reports to the N.R.C., so they have to shut down for "safeties sake". Its not that its technically dangerous, but intentionally operating without N.R.C. oversight might be a $10M/hour fine, so they aren't gonna do it. Or maybe the plant guards won't get paid unless their internet accessible timeclock application works, they won't work for free, and the plant is not allowed to work without guards. Or the VOIP customer service in India is inaccessible and for safety reasons you can't supply power with no way to learn of lines down in the street and/or dispatch the service techs, so off goes the power to the city. To save money, city water SCADA system is now on the internet instead of a private net, and when the inet goes down, no water, no water means the plant shuts off. Thats how you use the internet to shut off a nuclear power plant, not some B.S. about remotely adjusting the control rods and turning pumps on and off.
What was almost certainly not discussed during the govt simulation was the need to remove useless regulations, because that gets the proletariat wondering if those regulations are really required under normal circumstances...
Wait a minute...Am I allowed to write off my FOSS development as a charitable donation on my taxes?
My friend the electrician informs me that when a church gives him a receipt for installing an outlet or whatever, he gets to deduct his labor on his taxes as a gift to the church. Its not such a bad deal for him, if he has nothing better to do at that time, assuming that the church gets the parts donated from a store or the church pays for the parts. Technically I guess he's increasing his liability insurance premium by the value of his gift, and he has to drive his truck to the church, so its not all gravy, just mostly.
Get a church to "hire you" to maintain their website, then...
Am I allowed to charge the $50 an hour I think I'm worth?
You would be OK. To prevent being accused of fraud, your church either needs to do competitive bidding, have some kind of long term business relationship, or pay standard union rates. Which works pretty well for my union electrician friend, not so well for you. Chalk that up as reason number 0x1010110110101011101 that programmers should unionize as a skilled trade...
Have you read the GPL? No you can't sue them for stuff under the GPL.
Oh of course you can sue them. Anyone can sue anyone else for anything, and if they have more money, they'll win.
Lets say you sign a contract to "maintain our webserver in an operational status 99% of the time with no security breaches".
If your dude fails, you either get a contractually declared SLA payoff, or if you screwed up and did not include that in the contract, you sue them for malpractice or whatever. The license doesn't matter, except that open source stuff is better and more secure so there is a much higher likelihood that it'll actually work.
Business people don't care what license GCC and apache are under, they know you can't sue a big software company, so why bother considering that whole tactic? But, you can sue contractors and outsourced support personnel.
As if anyone could sue big corps like MS or Sun for providing bad software... Laugh.
I was talking about running them unsupported as in download-ISO-and-install, I should had been more clear about that.
I'm still not seeing that. There are plenty of folks whom will gladly contract to do that.
Oddly enough, my one and only brush with consulting/contracting with Debian was doing exactly what you say can't be done. Over half a decade ago, at my day job, I downloaded a Debian ISO and installed it on a Compaq DL/360 (back when those were new). It was a very special and unusual idea for co-located hosting. I set up and supported their box, helping them use frontpage and SCP or whatever until it was working perfectly and in production, at which point I turned it over to them like any other co-locate (where we only officially supported connectivity, electrical power, cooling, physical security, etc). My support work was an appendix to the usual colocation contract.
A game for 40 year olds? Well I don't really see too much of a market for "Change the Baby" or "Do Chores Around the House"
"The Sims" sold pretty well and its not much beyond that.
Re:OS going away, or just "contractual support"?
on
The Future of OpenSolaris
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
there are TONS of mission critical servers out there running Debian, CentOS, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and other "there is no company you can blame and/or sue" operating systems
Absolutely false inaccurate information, at least for Debian.
"811 Debian consultants listed in 64 countries worldwide."
Now, you can hire a consultant whom might actually moonlight as a debian developer, perhaps even the maintainer of something that is critical to you. And, as a private citizen or at least small consulting company, you could sue them when/if they screw up.
On the other hand, if you think you you can sue microsoft, and win, next time exchange falls over, you are in for a BIG surprise.
Assuming you use BIND, most places have something like this in named.conf on their customer facing DNS server so that only your paying users have access. Theoretically if some goofball tries a DNS amplifier attack
Holy bad proofreading... what I meant to say, is if I'm trying to attack someone "far away" and the DNS server ACL doesn't permit queries from that victim, then you can't forge their address as your source address and get the amp to amplify... the dns server sees a query from an address that is not permitted, and drops it. So if I'm on ISP A trying to DDOS someone on ISP C by using a DNS server on ISP B, if ISP B doesn't allow queries from ISP C, I can't do the DDOS.
Assuming you use BIND, most places have something like this in named.conf on their customer facing DNS server so that only your paying users have access. Theoretically if some goofball tries a DNS amplifier attack you'll be able to track them more effectively on your own network... Also if everyone else forbid query and recursion, then you'd not be able to use their servers as an amplifier, and crippling your own ISPs DNS server seems rather counterproductive.
Admittedly, if you want to whack someone with ten times the bandwidth, now-a-days the crooks use a botnet thats just ten times as big. Also, admittedly, now a days, there is no good reason to allow a DNS server to use your entire internet bandwidth, so rate limit it on the router by host or vlan to 50K or whatever seems appropriate. In which case it amplifies, but is not a very "loud" amplifier. It does kind of obfuscate your source address. Then again, with botnets everywhere, no one really cares about source addresses, its just another bot.
So, its a semi-obsolescent attack vector now a days.
I wonder if the slashdot html filter will allow this to pass:
But still, 100 MILLION lines of code? Does anyone have any input on whether or not this is accurate? Or do automotive software engineers like to comment their code more than anyone else?
You're thinking of "the car" as the engine computer, transmission comp, and the ABS comp.
They're journalists, and they're counting the rear set DVD player, the GPS display, the onboard cellphone/big brother tracking device that unlocks the doors...
You forgot to add that it'll be bypassed anyway. And it burns CPU time / latency, for pretty much nothing.
The idea is you sign yer zone with someone elses "well known" key, not all the different than how SSL / HTTPS works.
Thus, in theory, assuming no one upstream screws up, it prevents forgeries, man in the middle attacks, phishing websites, etc.
However, the same people that screw up their SSL / HTTPS config and convince everyone to just click thru the error messages, will be running/ruining their dnssec config, and trying to convince everyone to just click thru the error messages and/or disable dnssec on their machine.
From that point of view its kind of an insanity. The general procedure / architecture for SSL/HTTPS didn't work to secure web browsing, so lets try more or less the same thing for DNS! I'm sure it'll turn out different this time!
The consultants will make money. Other than that....
vlm forgot to mention that he works for the NSA and is using their backdoor access path.
I can neither confirm nor deny that. Our backdoor access path is too busy monitoring the activities of RedFlayer to run DNS queries on it. Just kidding.
However, I can confirm I tried it again about 10 seconds ago and got:;; ->>HEADER- opcode: QUERY, status: REFUSED, id:.......
2.4 liters/day (average adult water consumption) * 2 millicuries/liter (the level of this leak) * 64 mrem/mcurie (exposure for HTO ingestion) = 307 mrem/day of ingestion
I read it was 2 microcuries total, not an unspecified amount at 2 uC/L
Unless it was a very weird practical joke involving the office coffee maker, I'd think it difficult to consume 100% of the leak.
I still stand by my statement. Its a relatively harmless isotope. Would you prefer eating Co-60 or one of the lead isotopes or one of the iodine isotopes? Breathe in uranium smoke? No, they're all way worse that tritium.
I will give you credit that I tried to think of a more harmless isotope found in quantity at a typical plant, and I finally thought of noble gasses... they'll just blow away without bioreacting at all. Everything else, however, is worse.
The most interesting part of the article didn't make the summary...
"Opt-in by changing your DNS server IP addresses to 75.75.75.75 and 75.75.76.76 (we'll be adding IPv6 addresses soon)."
75.75.75.75 will answer outside of the comcast network... so I can use it to test DNS entries. (Or presumably someone could use it in an amplifier attack)
Now you can claim it was a fluke. But you cant convince me that a 4 year old who didn't understand the infection or the treatment was miraculously cured by placebo effect.
I'm unimpressed. If you have a horrible infection, its almost certain that in two weeks either your immune system kicks in and you're cured, or it doesn't kick in and you're dead. Why would this be surprising?
Time does heal a lot of wounds. If drinking weird substances is a way to pass the time, then so be it.
Also correlation does not equal causation. I had an infected paper cut on my thumb for the last couple days. Its healing nicely thank you. I prefer vi over emacs most of the time. Therefore vi is an antibiotic. Huh? No causation means the correlation is meaningless, just a fluke.
The very fact that the rad measurement has been given as 2 million picocuries instead of 2 microcuries
Perhaps, they expressed it as 2 mega-pico-curies because the US EPA drinking water maximum limit is 20000 pCi/L, so it makes the math simple.
In other words, if you flush it down the crapper or sink or otherwise dilute it with 100 liters of water, it would be categorized as safe to drink, or at least it wouldn't be worse than public drinking water.
Another way to put it, is a simple rule is not to flush something down the drain if you're not willing to drink it. So, they had an accident with somewhat less than 100 liters of water that was somewhat too hot to flush.
Or, what leaked out, is as dangerous as 100 liters of drinking water.
Finally, if you assume you consume one liter a day of water, that would imply the increased cancer danger is equal to 100 days of drinking water.
Tritium is pretty safe outside your body. Not so safe inside it.
Actually, no, its pretty harmless. Water gets peed or sweated or breathed (or whatever-d) away in a couple weeks. As a gas its virtually non-bio-reactive, and when it gets far enough away into the environment to oxidize into water, it tends to be pretty dilute.
Compared to heavy metal compounds that permanently stay in your bones, or radioactive particles in tobacco smoke that permanently lodge in the lungs, or weird stuff that's chemically poisonous, tritium is pretty harmless. Which is probably why its widely used for lighting compasses, gunsights, signs, etc.
"HTO has a short biological half life in the human body of 7 to 14 days which both reduces the total effects of single-incident ingestion and precludes long-term bioaccumulation of HTO from the environment."
A)There is no reason to believe that plant management would act competently to avert them. B)There is no reason to believe that plant management would be honest about admitting to them if they were to occur. and C) It does not appear that the NRC is up to the task of forcing plant management to undertake A and B.
Throwing soda cans in the trash instead of recycling is naughty, although its effect on the public is mostly harmless. About as bad as dumping 2 microcuries of 3H.
I admit, I threw a soda can in the trash. Intentionally, even. (That's because I have personal, generally secret knowledge that the janitorial staff simply empties both the trash bucket and the recyclable bucket into the same trash cart, but that's beside the point)
My CEO has no idea I failed to recycle.
I'm sure my CEO would testify that we have a recycling policy, and we are here to Save The Earth (tm), and we don't throw cans in the trash.
The question should not be what else is my CEO covering up, or can he be trusted. The real question should be why anyone cares about something harmless.
Slashdot Mirror
So when is the sports stock exchange opening? I sure would love to bet... eh ehm I mean, "exchange and buy stock", for my favorite team.
That WAS tradesports, a sister website of intrade.
tradesports flamed out utterly spectacularly in 2008 for no apparent reason.
I was always mystified how two sister sites under the same company, presumably sharing code, management and backend equipment, could have one self immolate itself so thoroughly yet the other one seems just ducky even years later.
My guess is the mafia guys told them to butt out of the sports betting business, or else... That would explain a whole lot about that situation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TradeSports
Not to mention, how easy would it would be for organized crime to short sell a particular movie, and then make sure the star OD's or has an "accident" in the middle of production.
Traditionally, doesn't that make box office returns soar, not sink?
I can think of some TV shows that were canned after a major actor croaked. Specifically one Sy-Fy vampire TV show a couple years back based on the RPG game where the lead actor killed himself on a motorcycle in Jolly Ole England so they canceled the show after a couple episodes. OR maybe the ratings sucked and that was a great excuse.
But generally, dead actor equals more revenue not less.
Ideosphere/Foresight Exchange and Intrade are much more interesting. Both market "real world" events instead of hollywood flakes.
Ideosphere/Foresight is free, intrade is real dollars.
Ideosphere is semi-comatose, and the email list is currently filled with a debate over what exactly "astrology is true" means, which is at least somewhat more interesting than the past six months debating if an ipod touch/iphone is a real computer or not.
Intrade, last time I checked, is very much alive. Once I feel I know what I'm doing with monopoly money on ideosphere, I have been planning on moving to intrade and investing real money. At my present rate of learning, which only exceeds my weight loss program for failure to progress, I'll be moving to intrade right around the year 2100.
http://www.ideosphere.com/
http://www.intrade.com/
Both have been around for "forever" on the internet. The only new thing about HSX is that its securities are based on the actions of hollywood drug addicts, thus inherently unpredictable, whereas you can gain an advantage by trading intelligently on ideosphere and intrade. HSX is pure gambling, intrade is investing or at least intelligent speculation. Two inherently different activities.
If there was an actual cyber war, we would respond with real war.
The problem is, they have to figure out how to make it look, to the folks on fox news, that it was the Iranians/Iraqis/Afgans.
The other problem, is say the PLO or the IRA pulls off an attack. Then we promptly bomb bomb bomb Venezuela because we enjoys that immensely. Someone is going to get really pissed off, probably the Venezuelan special forces. Followed by physical attack on us by the Venezuelans. So the end result is a bunch of dead women and children in Venezuela, another knocked over skyscraper here, and the folks whom actually did it get away with it. To do it again, I suppose.
Our military industrial complex will make money off it, so its all good.
The team lost the wargame, and was punished by having to be interviewed by Wolf Blitzer.
A bunch of useless politicians failed? A pity seppuku is not in style.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seppuku
Why are things like power plants, banks, or telcos directly connected to the internet? You'd think they could afford a completely separate network.
A short summary of the problem:
Obviously no one manipulates the reactor control rods over the internet, outsourced to India. Although there is probably an intense desire by the MBAs to do so. Obviously the marketing guys have their PR website on the internet.
The problem is the devices in between. At a past employer, they had a customer whom had to cancel aircraft flights when their net access was down. They had to submit some form or list to the FAA or DHS or big brother or whatever for each flight, and they had a backup plan to submit the info over telephones/cellphones, but not the personnel to handle the load of all flights on backup, so the least essential flight would be canceled. Sales gave them an elaborate SLA.
That is how you shut down a nuclear plant using the internet. They can't email incident reports to the N.R.C., so they have to shut down for "safeties sake". Its not that its technically dangerous, but intentionally operating without N.R.C. oversight might be a $10M/hour fine, so they aren't gonna do it. Or maybe the plant guards won't get paid unless their internet accessible timeclock application works, they won't work for free, and the plant is not allowed to work without guards. Or the VOIP customer service in India is inaccessible and for safety reasons you can't supply power with no way to learn of lines down in the street and/or dispatch the service techs, so off goes the power to the city. To save money, city water SCADA system is now on the internet instead of a private net, and when the inet goes down, no water, no water means the plant shuts off. Thats how you use the internet to shut off a nuclear power plant, not some B.S. about remotely adjusting the control rods and turning pumps on and off.
What was almost certainly not discussed during the govt simulation was the need to remove useless regulations, because that gets the proletariat wondering if those regulations are really required under normal circumstances...
Wait a minute...Am I allowed to write off my FOSS development as a charitable donation on my taxes?
My friend the electrician informs me that when a church gives him a receipt for installing an outlet or whatever, he gets to deduct his labor on his taxes as a gift to the church. Its not such a bad deal for him, if he has nothing better to do at that time, assuming that the church gets the parts donated from a store or the church pays for the parts. Technically I guess he's increasing his liability insurance premium by the value of his gift, and he has to drive his truck to the church, so its not all gravy, just mostly.
Get a church to "hire you" to maintain their website, then ...
Am I allowed to charge the $50 an hour I think I'm worth?
You would be OK. To prevent being accused of fraud, your church either needs to do competitive bidding, have some kind of long term business relationship, or pay standard union rates. Which works pretty well for my union electrician friend, not so well for you. Chalk that up as reason number 0x1010110110101011101 that programmers should unionize as a skilled trade...
Have you read the GPL? No you can't sue them for stuff under the GPL.
Oh of course you can sue them. Anyone can sue anyone else for anything, and if they have more money, they'll win.
Lets say you sign a contract to "maintain our webserver in an operational status 99% of the time with no security breaches".
If your dude fails, you either get a contractually declared SLA payoff, or if you screwed up and did not include that in the contract, you sue them for malpractice or whatever. The license doesn't matter, except that open source stuff is better and more secure so there is a much higher likelihood that it'll actually work.
Business people don't care what license GCC and apache are under, they know you can't sue a big software company, so why bother considering that whole tactic? But, you can sue contractors and outsourced support personnel.
As if anyone could sue big corps like MS or Sun for providing bad software... Laugh.
I was talking about running them unsupported as in download-ISO-and-install, I should had been more clear about that.
I'm still not seeing that. There are plenty of folks whom will gladly contract to do that.
Oddly enough, my one and only brush with consulting/contracting with Debian was doing exactly what you say can't be done. Over half a decade ago, at my day job, I downloaded a Debian ISO and installed it on a Compaq DL/360 (back when those were new). It was a very special and unusual idea for co-located hosting. I set up and supported their box, helping them use frontpage and SCP or whatever until it was working perfectly and in production, at which point I turned it over to them like any other co-locate (where we only officially supported connectivity, electrical power, cooling, physical security, etc). My support work was an appendix to the usual colocation contract.
A game for 40 year olds? Well I don't really see too much of a market for "Change the Baby" or "Do Chores Around the House"
"The Sims" sold pretty well and its not much beyond that.
there are TONS of mission critical servers out there running Debian, CentOS, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and other "there is no company you can blame and/or sue" operating systems
Absolutely false inaccurate information, at least for Debian.
As per
http://www.debian.org/consultants/
"811 Debian consultants listed in 64 countries worldwide."
Now, you can hire a consultant whom might actually moonlight as a debian developer, perhaps even the maintainer of something that is critical to you. And, as a private citizen or at least small consulting company, you could sue them when/if they screw up.
On the other hand, if you think you you can sue microsoft, and win, next time exchange falls over, you are in for a BIG surprise.
Assuming you use BIND, most places have something like this in named.conf on their customer facing DNS server so that only your paying users have access. Theoretically if some goofball tries a DNS amplifier attack
Holy bad proofreading... what I meant to say, is if I'm trying to attack someone "far away" and the DNS server ACL doesn't permit queries from that victim, then you can't forge their address as your source address and get the amp to amplify... the dns server sees a query from an address that is not permitted, and drops it. So if I'm on ISP A trying to DDOS someone on ISP C by using a DNS server on ISP B, if ISP B doesn't allow queries from ISP C, I can't do the DDOS.
Its different in that they let me use it.
Assuming you use BIND, most places have something like this in named.conf on their customer facing DNS server so that only your paying users have access. Theoretically if some goofball tries a DNS amplifier attack you'll be able to track them more effectively on your own network... Also if everyone else forbid query and recursion, then you'd not be able to use their servers as an amplifier, and crippling your own ISPs DNS server seems rather counterproductive.
Admittedly, if you want to whack someone with ten times the bandwidth, now-a-days the crooks use a botnet thats just ten times as big. Also, admittedly, now a days, there is no good reason to allow a DNS server to use your entire internet bandwidth, so rate limit it on the router by host or vlan to 50K or whatever seems appropriate. In which case it amplifies, but is not a very "loud" amplifier. It does kind of obfuscate your source address. Then again, with botnets everywhere, no one really cares about source addresses, its just another bot.
So, its a semi-obsolescent attack vector now a days.
I wonder if the slashdot html filter will allow this to pass:
acl our-addresses {
10.0.0.0/8;
};
options {
allow-query { our-addresses; };
allow-recursion { our-addresses; };
}
But still, 100 MILLION lines of code? Does anyone have any input on whether or not this is accurate? Or do automotive software engineers like to comment their code more than anyone else?
You're thinking of "the car" as the engine computer, transmission comp, and the ABS comp.
They're journalists, and they're counting the rear set DVD player, the GPS display, the onboard cellphone/big brother tracking device that unlocks the doors...
Did I miss anything?
You forgot to add that it'll be bypassed anyway. And it burns CPU time / latency, for pretty much nothing.
The idea is you sign yer zone with someone elses "well known" key, not all the different than how SSL / HTTPS works.
Thus, in theory, assuming no one upstream screws up, it prevents forgeries, man in the middle attacks, phishing websites, etc.
However, the same people that screw up their SSL / HTTPS config and convince everyone to just click thru the error messages, will be running/ruining their dnssec config, and trying to convince everyone to just click thru the error messages and/or disable dnssec on their machine.
From that point of view its kind of an insanity. The general procedure / architecture for SSL/HTTPS didn't work to secure web browsing, so lets try more or less the same thing for DNS! I'm sure it'll turn out different this time!
The consultants will make money. Other than that....
vlm forgot to mention that he works for the NSA and is using their backdoor access path.
I can neither confirm nor deny that. Our backdoor access path is too busy monitoring the activities of RedFlayer to run DNS queries on it. Just kidding.
However, I can confirm I tried it again about 10 seconds ago and got: ;; ->>HEADER- opcode: QUERY, status: REFUSED, id: .......
Oh thats nothing.
Your request gives a response of 107 bytes, according to dig. Blah.
Try "dig +bufsize=4096 +dnssec any isc.org @75.75.75.75" you get a 5279 byte response.
Now forge the source address to be someone else's address, and you've just (re-)invented the DNS amplifier attack.
Hopefully they rate limit the heck out of it.
2.4 liters/day (average adult water consumption) * 2 millicuries/liter (the level of this leak) * 64 mrem/mcurie (exposure for HTO ingestion) = 307 mrem/day of ingestion
I read it was 2 microcuries total, not an unspecified amount at 2 uC/L
Unless it was a very weird practical joke involving the office coffee maker, I'd think it difficult to consume 100% of the leak.
I still stand by my statement. Its a relatively harmless isotope. Would you prefer eating Co-60 or one of the lead isotopes or one of the iodine isotopes? Breathe in uranium smoke? No, they're all way worse that tritium.
I will give you credit that I tried to think of a more harmless isotope found in quantity at a typical plant, and I finally thought of noble gasses... they'll just blow away without bioreacting at all. Everything else, however, is worse.
The most interesting part of the article didn't make the summary...
"Opt-in by changing your DNS server IP addresses to 75.75.75.75 and 75.75.76.76 (we'll be adding IPv6 addresses soon)."
75.75.75.75 will answer outside of the comcast network... so I can use it to test DNS entries. (Or presumably someone could use it in an amplifier attack)
Now you can claim it was a fluke. But you cant convince me that a 4 year old who didn't understand the infection or the treatment was miraculously cured by placebo effect.
I'm unimpressed. If you have a horrible infection, its almost certain that in two weeks either your immune system kicks in and you're cured, or it doesn't kick in and you're dead. Why would this be surprising?
Time does heal a lot of wounds. If drinking weird substances is a way to pass the time, then so be it.
Also correlation does not equal causation. I had an infected paper cut on my thumb for the last couple days. Its healing nicely thank you. I prefer vi over emacs most of the time. Therefore vi is an antibiotic. Huh? No causation means the correlation is meaningless, just a fluke.
Placebos work great till people start getting addicted to them.
Like a religion?
The very fact that the rad measurement has been given as 2 million picocuries instead of 2 microcuries
Perhaps, they expressed it as 2 mega-pico-curies because the US EPA drinking water maximum limit is 20000 pCi/L, so it makes the math simple.
In other words, if you flush it down the crapper or sink or otherwise dilute it with 100 liters of water, it would be categorized as safe to drink, or at least it wouldn't be worse than public drinking water.
Another way to put it, is a simple rule is not to flush something down the drain if you're not willing to drink it. So, they had an accident with somewhat less than 100 liters of water that was somewhat too hot to flush.
Or, what leaked out, is as dangerous as 100 liters of drinking water.
Finally, if you assume you consume one liter a day of water, that would imply the increased cancer danger is equal to 100 days of drinking water.
Tritium is pretty safe outside your body. Not so safe inside it.
Actually, no, its pretty harmless. Water gets peed or sweated or breathed (or whatever-d) away in a couple weeks. As a gas its virtually non-bio-reactive, and when it gets far enough away into the environment to oxidize into water, it tends to be pretty dilute.
Compared to heavy metal compounds that permanently stay in your bones, or radioactive particles in tobacco smoke that permanently lodge in the lungs, or weird stuff that's chemically poisonous, tritium is pretty harmless. Which is probably why its widely used for lighting compasses, gunsights, signs, etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium
"HTO has a short biological half life in the human body of 7 to 14 days which both reduces the total effects of single-incident ingestion and precludes long-term bioaccumulation of HTO from the environment."
A)There is no reason to believe that plant management would act competently to avert them. B)There is no reason to believe that plant management would be honest about admitting to them if they were to occur. and C) It does not appear that the NRC is up to the task of forcing plant management to undertake A and B.
Throwing soda cans in the trash instead of recycling is naughty, although its effect on the public is mostly harmless. About as bad as dumping 2 microcuries of 3H.
I admit, I threw a soda can in the trash. Intentionally, even. (That's because I have personal, generally secret knowledge that the janitorial staff simply empties both the trash bucket and the recyclable bucket into the same trash cart, but that's beside the point)
My CEO has no idea I failed to recycle.
I'm sure my CEO would testify that we have a recycling policy, and we are here to Save The Earth (tm), and we don't throw cans in the trash.
The question should not be what else is my CEO covering up, or can he be trusted. The real question should be why anyone cares about something harmless.
Where are you getting that $10M figure from?
SpaceX's site says $44-49M.
My mistake, I was reading about the falcon 1.
Point still stands, its cheap compared to its competitors.