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User: Andy+Dodd

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  1. Re:Bluetooth sucks on Apple Adopts Bluetooth 4.0. Could It Reject NFC? · · Score: 2

    Because Sony performs some not-quite-standard tricks with the Bluetooth implementation of its controllers/the PS3. They also do extensive testing to make absolutely sure those two units interop.

    Which is why things work. Have you noticed that there are NO other Bluetooth wireless controllers for the PS3? All other wireless controllers plug into a USB port because there's some Sony "special sauce". Also, to my knowledge, few if any people have ever gotten a PS3 controller to pair with a non-PS3 host. (USB is a whole other story for PS3 controllers.)

  2. Re:Sensitive data... again? on Anonymous Hack One Gigabyte of Data From NATO · · Score: 1

    Or Anonymous thinks the data is a lot more sensitive than it really is.

  3. Re:NATO Hacking on Anonymous Hack One Gigabyte of Data From NATO · · Score: 2

    It's either not that sensitive, or someone REALLY fucked up.

    Actual classified data is supposed to be airgapped, or protected by NSA Type I crypto. If these guys broke an approved Type I system, that would be some of the biggest news in crypto history.

  4. Re:I did a double-take on Anonymous Creates Its Own Social Network · · Score: 1

    Yeah. There's no way for Google to know who is a member of Anonymous, unless they are violating Google's "use your real name" policy for +.

  5. How much of that is nuke-dedicated? on Cut Down On Nukes To Shave the Deficit · · Score: 1

    Subs - Even boomers have quite a few uses other than flinging nukes.
    Aircraft - Same thing. The B-2 has been successfully used in many conflicts, none of which were its original design purpose (penetrating Soviet airspace with a nuclear payload)
    Missiles - OK, hard to justify that one unless the article is missing something (like the missile being derived from an orbital launch vehicle, or developed with orbital launch as a secondary capability)

    We've got more than enough bombs, but as delivery systems age, they need to be replaced. In many cases, the replacements can be more multipurpose than the units they replace.

  6. Re:Interesting fact on Zuckerberg Quits Google+ Over Privacy Concerns · · Score: 1

    As to photo geolocation - if it doesn't exist in the first place it won't show it. Don't geotag photos you want the locations of to be private.

    I'm glad that finally a social network supports geolocation, there are lots of times when I WANT people to know where a photo was taken. I make a point of not geotagging anything that I don't want the location of to be known.

  7. Re:Thorium Reactors on Congressmen Pushing To Reopen Yucca Mountain · · Score: 2

    Note: Thorium fuel cycle has nothing to do with burning our existing waste. Yes, it does happen to support a low-waste low-proliferation-risk cycle, but there are actually low-proliferation-risk cycles such as that used by the IFR that work with our existing waste regardless of thorium use as fuel.

  8. Re:Thorium Reactors on Congressmen Pushing To Reopen Yucca Mountain · · Score: 2

    Burning waste products up requires reprocessing. Carter banned reprocessing unilaterally due to proliferation concerns and a false assumption that reprocessing = PUREX = proliferation - but there are fuel cycles that use reprocessing other than PUREX.

  9. Re:It needs to be reopened, and spent fuel moved i on Congressmen Pushing To Reopen Yucca Mountain · · Score: 1

    Nothing wrong with our freight rail system - it's one of the best in the world.

    Our passenger rail system is a whole other story, but good passenger rail infrastructure and good freight rail infrastructure are completely independent.

    Yes, in our country our passenger infrastructure is heavily dependent on our freight infrastructure, which is WHY our passenger infrastructure is so bad.

  10. Re:Safer alternative designs? on German Parliament Backs Nuclear Exit By 2022 · · Score: 1

    No they're not. THTR-300 proved that pebble bed reactors have issues with fuel management, including a high risk of emitting radioactive dust.

    Plus after Chernobyl I find the concept of superheated graphite in a reactor core to always be worrying. It's always a bad idea to have your reactor core contain highly flammable materials.

    I'd rather have a meltdown than a graphite core fire. Look at the history of reactor accidents - Fukushima is the first meltdown to actually release significant amounts of radiation to the environment. In the case of Chernobyl, the bulk of the radiation release was from the graphite fire that preceded the meltdown.

  11. Re:Moving on on German Parliament Backs Nuclear Exit By 2022 · · Score: 2

    Please stop using Chernobyl as an example, it's an extremely poor one. It was a known dangerous, fundamentally unstable reactor design that has always been illegal to build in the United States, and I believe Germany also never built reactors with positive void coefficients that completely lacked any form of containment.

  12. Re:future on German Parliament Backs Nuclear Exit By 2022 · · Score: 2

    I don't think either have been proven to be completely safe... In fact I think one of the reasons thorium cycle hasn't been widely deployed is the difficulties of designing a completely safe thorium cycle reactor.

    However, both DO have a lot of promise and good safety potential. But I wouldn't yet call them "completely safe".

    Remember, lots of people said pebble bed reactors were completely safe. Germany has managed to disprove that...

    That said, almost any modern reactor design is significantly safer than the old clunkers in operation today, especially Fukushima which has some of the oldest operating reactors on the planet.

  13. Re:I couldn't care less... on German Parliament Backs Nuclear Exit By 2022 · · Score: 1

    Yup. Russia and France are quite happy about this I'm sure, because it means either:
    1) Germany will be buying French nuclear power
    2) Germany will be buying Russian natural gas

    Either way, this makes Germany dependent on other countries for energy. Not a good idea.

  14. Re:Safer alternative designs? on German Parliament Backs Nuclear Exit By 2022 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I'm not sure if any power generation reactor can be 100% resistant to meltdown.

    However, modern reactor designs ARE much more resilient and in fact nearly every failure mode encountered at Fukushima has already been addressed in them.

    For example, the latest generation BWR (ESBWR) uses heatpipes to pools on the reactor building roof to provide passive core cooling. No intervention is needed for 72 hours, after that all you need is a fire truck to refill the pools. (no special generators, etc.) The next refill will likely be significantly later since decay heat is significantly less after 72 hours. Since these pools are fully isolated from radioactive materials, they're a lot easier to top off than the SFPs at Fukushima.

    Modern reactor buildings have catalytic hydrogen recombiners that prevent hydrogen buildup, eliminating the explosions that have made management and cleanup MUCH more difficult.

    Obviously SFP management needs to be revisited - I think it simply didn't get the attention it needed, but none of the SFP thermal management issues are insurmountable or even difficult to solve. Most of the SFPs are only dissipating about as much power as a tractor-trailer engine, with Unit 4 being the exception. (That pool is rather overloaded with a full reactor load of freshly spent fuel. Lesson learned - don't pack pools so densely with fuel.)

  15. Re:The trouble with nuclear on Bill Gates On Energy · · Score: 1

    The nuclear industry would love to. But people fight the construction of new nuke plants tooth and nail.

    End result - old clunkers get service life extensions instead of decommisioning. You DO realize Fukushima Unit 1 was originally scheduled to be shutdown and begin decommissioning at the beginning of the month before the earthquake but received a service life extension?

  16. Re:The trouble with nuclear on Bill Gates On Energy · · Score: 1

    Solution to con:
    Don't keep old known-unsafe clunkers in operation. Problem solved.

    Chernobyl was a known-dangerous/known-unstable reactor design that traded away safety in order to achieve a dual-purpose goal (the ability to use the reactor for weapons materials production - while it was never used for such a purpose, its design allowed for this purpose and compromised safety in the process.). No similar reactors have ever been used for civilian power generation in the USA, and in fact the NRC explicitly bans construction of reactors with positive void coefficients. (It's one reason we don't have any CANDUs.)

    Fukushima was one of the oldest plants in operation prior to the disaster. It didn't have the 4 decades worth of safety design improvements that modern reactors have.

  17. Re:The down side to nuclear is the waste on Bill Gates On Energy · · Score: 4, Informative

    Let's not forget that in the United States, our nuclear waste management practices are WAY behind the times.

    France generates 75-80% of their power from nuclear, and they don't have a waste problem because they not only reprocess their own fuel, they have enough reprocessing capacity to reprocess fuel from their neighbors too.

    And that's just for thermal neutron based fuel cycles... Fast reactors have fuel cycles with even less waste. For example the IFR had the potential 100% of this country's electrical needs for a century using only existing nuclear waste as fuel - and the remaining waste would only be dangerous for 200-300 years as opposed to the thousands of years for current waste.

  18. Re:Google+, the social network you cannot join! on Google To Rebrand Blogger & Picasa For Google+ Integration · · Score: 1

    Not a big limitation - when a person is in college, the bulk of their social circle is at the same school.

    There's a huge difference between "invite only + account creation throttling" and "anyone at college campus X can get an account".

    It happens to be effective for a social network to start out in a specific localized group that already is well connected socially - e.g. Facebook started out on a single college campus (Harvard) and achieved significant market penetration within that specific market in a short period of time. Google, meanwhile, is "spread thin", providing invites to only a small subset of various people's social networks.

  19. Re:Google+, the social network you cannot join! on Google To Rebrand Blogger & Picasa For Google+ Integration · · Score: 1

    Yeah, good way to shoot yourself in the foot.

    The value of any social networking site is in how many users it has. If no one you know uses something, why will you use it?

    I don't use Latitude because none of my friends do. I don't use Buzz because no one I'm friends with wound up using it. Same for Wave. Google+ will probably wind up the same.

  20. Re:But the Best Buy guy said it does on Retailer Calls Rivals' Bluff On "HDMI Scam" · · Score: 1
  21. Re:Only one way to fix this on Yet Another "People Plug In Strange USB Sticks" Story · · Score: 1

    "What happens if you short the USB power lines?"

    Most host controllers have current limiters. Short the power lines and the port is disabled until it is reset.

  22. Re:Only one way to fix this on Yet Another "People Plug In Strange USB Sticks" Story · · Score: 2

    No harm can come to a computer from having the 5v lines get shorted to D+ or D-.

    Having a high voltage boost circuit and enough capacitor to do serious damage would result in a physically HUGE stick.

    If you short +5v and ground, most USB host chipsets have current limiters and soft-breakers built-in.

  23. Re:Only one way to fix this on Yet Another "People Plug In Strange USB Sticks" Story · · Score: 1

    If your PC's autorun settings for USB sticks are disabled (they SHOULD be), then no harm can originate from merely plugging a USB memory stick into a PC.

    (Disclaimer: If someone comes up with a root compromise for Windows that involves attacking the USB enumeration stack a la the PS3 jailbreaks, things could be different - but no one has implemented this attack vector yet and probably never will as there are FAR easier ways to compromise a Windows machine.)

  24. Re:Can it crash less often than Windows? on Can Ubuntu Linux Consume Less Power Than Windows? · · Score: 3, Informative

    11.04 seems to include a kernel with LOTS of regressions, or the Ubuntu maintainers added some to the kernel/modules packages.

    For example, the wireless drivers for Ralink RT2860 chipsets were rock solid from 9.04 to 10.10, but were completely broken after an 11.04 update. Even after doing some module blacklist magic, the wireless drivers now perform horrifically and fail to connect very often.

  25. Re:They will make a fortune on France To Invest One Billion Euros In Nuclear Power · · Score: 1

    As an example of what happens when a reactor is attempted to be restarted from an iodine pit by someone not competent enough to do so - Chernobyl.