I guess the accident that killed people at the fuel processing facility and exposed residents nearby to radiation in 1999 doesn't count.
And although no one died, the accident, and the cover-up of the severity of it, at the Japanese sodium breeder reactor apparently isn't worth mentioning. That was no Mark I design.
The fuel pond issues certainly aren't unique to Mark I designs. Unit 4 in Japan, which had fuel only in the fuel pond, exploded, apparently from hydrogen that came from unit 3. Neither unit 3 nor unit 4 were Mark I designs. There aren't supposed to be any common-cause failures, yet clearly that explosion pathway and the backup power had causes in common.
One of the reactors shut down in central Japan over earthquake fears was found to have salt water in the closed-loop part of the cooling system. That wasn't even known before the plant was shut down for another reason. Coupling between the ocean water and internal cooling water loops was supposed to be impossible.
In one sense the older systems may have an advantage. They didn't originally use frail and vulnerable computer systems. What modern computer systems can be trusted to work for 40 years plus?
I don't mind having them compete on even grounds with the other means of producing power, even if nuclear fails hard as a result.
How can competition be on an even ground when there are laws limiting their liability to a miniscule amount compared to the damage that could be done?
How can it be considered fair competition it the total costs of dealing with fuel aren't included (whether you call it vaulting "treasure" or the cost of running a fuel mortuary makes no difference)
How can it be considered fair competition if there's land made unusable to society far into the future?
If it allows society to enter into having population, housing, or industrial densities that are otherwise unsustainable, aren't we walking into a trap by using it? (locked in - I'm sure some feel that has happened already) How long can society sustain building plants that tie up resources long term but only produce for perhaps 50 years?
Doesn't this encourage us to use other resources at unsustainable levels? Are we failing to see a bigger picture for the future of mankind?
Shouldn't we be moving towards technology that can sustain society indefinitely? Is this supposed to be it?
All of this does not matter to the question of artists canceling appearances. If an artist does not want to appear in Israel, that's fine. An artists who cancels is being suckered into making a political statement under the guise/threat of avoiding making one.
More so than other artists that cancelled, I think Gil-Scott Heron would have delivered strong messages in his performance. As much as any performer I can think of, he has a long history of fighting racism. I'm not sure Santana and Elvis Costello would have delivered significant messages in their music had they not cancelled.
It's unfortunate that Gil-Scott Heron won't be around to perform either for the troops or general public there at some future date.
I can appreciate that the rest of the world may underestimate how difficult some policy decisions can be when we mostly lack diverse and in depth news sources. (showing more violence isn't showing more depth) I think it would be to Israels advantage to make LBA and/or other English language broadcasters more widely available (direct streaming, livestation etc.) While some internal political conflict and problems may seem an embarrassing thing to show internationally, those who have seen conflicts between political parties and groups elsewhere might at least be a little more sympathetic to the political pressure (suicide?) that sometimes cripples major policy changes.
The high level of activity in the middle-east is motivated more people to try and look a little deeper than the 'short on facts, long on pundit posturing' coverage we're mostly handed.
There are some serious issues that should at least be discussed widely. Failure to do so erodes credibility. Even friends question friends.
This time was just over money, but there have been others who cancelled appearances when reminded of political issues. A very timely example is Gil-Scott Heron who passed away May 27, 2011. From wikipedia:
'In 2010 he was due to play a gig in Tel Aviv, but this attracted criticism from Palestinian groups who stated "Your performance in Israel would be the equivalent to having performed in Sun City during South Africaâ(TM)s apartheid era... We hope that you will not play apartheid Israel." In response he cancelled the gig.'
Being a talented jazz musician and political poet, he undoubtedly had mixed feelings when some labeled him the grandfather of rap. What he did wasn't a thing for the kids, although he reached some of them too. He brought attention to what was going on in South Africa, he's the man who coined the phrase "The revolution will not be televised".
Because computers have internal electronics that generate electric currents in the GHz range, and it is not impossible that these electrical currents could radiate enough energy to interfere with airplane electronic and navigation systems.
It's not absurdly over cautions to restrict unknown electronics that might cause interference. Even the local oscillator in an simple old-fashioned analog tuned F.M. broadcast radio can affect some communications. Digital gear is worse. There are pulses at many different rates far below microwave frequencies in digital gear, and because they are pulses and not sinusoidal waveforms, they're rich in harmonics. The noise generated extends down even to relatively low frequencies due to main power supply inverters and in some cases inverters for screen backlighting. Try taking an ordinary analog tuned AM/FM radio and putting it very close to a laptop and compare the noise between stations or heard on weaker signals.
It is doubtful that they're using anything that is particularly sensitive to interference from WiFi. No one in their right mind would expect WiFi to be interference free and use it for anything critical. Read the F.C.C. notice in the manual for ANYTHING that uses WiFi. You'll see something like "must accept harmful interference, including that which may cause undesired operation".
How the hell can you abuse a translating service ?
I suppose that if stories here had links that were foreign sources being run through Google, they'd get hit pretty hard. But instead of killing something like that I'd rather see a little header added at the top of the translated page with a "donation to thank Google" button. Disabling that functionality, or things like the "powered by Google" 3rd party OS X translation widget, would feel very much like censorship, and perhaps stir negative feelings towards Google in some..
If anything, even more capability is needed. I'd like to see a another layer that could add the ability to translate text that's in a graphic, possibly even in a PDF (a smart OCR front-end). If I record a clip of video from one of the international newscasts on public tv, it would occasionally be helpful to be able to translate some things that appear on screen.
For democracy to work properly, people should be well informed. Access to diverse news sources is very important. There's been a serious decline in the diversity and depth of U.S. sources. Let's work to improve that.
Well a good example of a hardware feature we don't see any more is the SCSI or Firewire target disk mode. Basically that allows putting a machine in a state where another machine can hook to the first as if it were an external drive, and even boot from it.
In the era of Mac OS 7.5.x, QuickDraw GX supported advanced features I still don't get to routinely enjoy, printing or faxing with a watermark, or in effect generating the something else on the paper behind what you're printing, like company stationary or graph paper. A simple app called Poster GX allowed taking text you could grab and tilt any way you wanted, with sliders to adjust the weight and various properties. Text could be transparent to better reveal what was behind it. That was no heavy graphics program or imaging software, it was a small editor just calling features the OS extensions provided.
Some of those things killed off after System 7.6, like Open Doc / CyberDog could manually have the components added into OS 9. It could be fun to run under Sheepshaver (the COI, Classic on Intel thing)
Somehow I doubt that this was an accident.
So what's the theory?
disturbed worker? competitor? government upset over a planned Foxconn iPad factory in Brazil? coverup of theft? Apple stock manipulation? distraction from some other news?
Clearly the states that have clean air laws are discriminating against the private sector by insuring that "free" air is breathable. Clearly that has prevented the growth of new jobs in the bottled oxygen industry, at a time when jobs are so desperately needed. Why do we put up with these anti-jobs bureuocrats?
Providing free access to sidewalks and paths for bicycles also harms taxi drivers and countless other businesses.
Countless consumers make unlicensed copies of bacteria that is in the food they buy. Freeloaders, every one of them.
Will there be no end to this epidemic of unchecked freedom?
At this point it doesn't really matter so much who developed it. Regardless, we're still potentially collateral damage or potential targets of a fully disassembled/reverse-engineered/built-fresh-with-a new-twist version as well as whatever the original authors might unleash. Whoever made it was shortsighted if they felt that even versions attempting to be very specific wouldn't be analyzed and modified or cause some collateral damage as-is. Pruning target-filtering code seems it would be a relatively trivial task.
The high ticket projects all attract multinational corporations. Those corporations aren't shy about buying smaller-scale operations with technology they want. Even if you do use technology developed only in your own country, it is not sold elsewhere? Are there vulnerable systems anywhere within the local technology entity? Even if they've got 10 vulnerabilities instead of 100,000+ they're still vulnerable.
I've seen one region that didn't have any kind of electronic or software vulnerability whatsoever. Unfortunately the island people there will be driven off by rising oceans.
Certainly audits are a good thing, but we mustn't forget that we're talking about something that gets in and hides itself well, even deleting itself from some hardware along the way. An audit of hardware still only gives a snapshot in time. That laptop that was briefly plugged in, or machine that briefly had a USB key plugged in, may be long gone. Intrusion detection can help, but with things like traffic to a PLC using the normal ports, it may take deep inspection of every packet to see what's going on, and by the time something is seen, you've already been hit.
Mitigating this is tough. Corporate types are so easily led to believe that their firewalls, VPNs, anti-virus packages, intrusion detection.... will keep them secure. But if human or entity lives depend on security, for it is a fallacy to expect to achieve zero vulnerability networks. Telling upper managers that their only access will be through video cameras pointed at displays, and fax machines, won't go over well. But if it keeps something from going boom, can anything else be trusted? And what of systems that don't really have a full "off" state. Even when not fully functioning, there may be considerable complexity and some danger in pulling the plug on all vulnerable technology at once (pieces may talk to each other).
There are some huge hardware issues that are routinely ignored in not only PLCs, but in nearly every system we use. It's not just insane that a PLC make lack a physical hardware write-disable switch to prevent rogue code from being loaded, but what about all of our PCs? Is there anyone here that has an installation with no writable BIOS/EFI on motherboards, no flash upgradable optical or hard drives? Every damn thing like that should have a physical write-disable switch that is normally off. If we haven't even dealt with those things we're not even trying.
And what of the behavior of governments? Like some insane variation of the arms races, we can bet that every one of them has stockpiled collections of vulnerabilities and tools to exploit them, so they can DEFEAT security. From the massive unsolved problems that consumers, businesses, and institutions/infrastructure are facing, it would appear as if some those responsible for our security have actually put more resources into defeating it. I mean... how far have we really gotten? How many businesses and consumers are actually secure? The answer shows the massive fail.
I believe that all of the governments and larger entities that we have reason to fear already know enough to be a threat. Less information would likely slow some down, but I think that even for this, there are different classes of potential attackers. Let's pray that whatever it takes to secure things that go boom has been done. Restricting information at this point probably does more to sidestep the same segment of people that would extort money from banks.
Looking at a NTSB copy of control operator transcripts at one utility company and seeing talk of a bonkers PLC, every valve wide open, SCADA displays that didn't match what was going on, and people saying "we're screwed, we're screwed" in the hour before a pipeline blew doesn't instill much confidence in the utility's ability to manage their other much bigger impact operation. In the region of potential impact, where the power plant repeatedly has hired reporters from the only full power tv station as spokespeople, those hearings got a 20 second mention while Charlie Sheen got 3 minutes. I haven't been aware of any media that paid attention and saw there was much more to the pipeline story than crappy welds. Although not reported along with a governors latest mistress, it doesn't take that much observation and digging for those here to realize the impact of the control system threat has been more than a theoretical one for several years.
Opps a couple of "should"s when I meant shouldn't etc. Said income, meant profit... Hopefully one can read past the typos and see the intended meaning.
Ranting is hard work, and I skipped outsourcing....
If I were the Boys Scouts of America, I'd be upset to have such a group using my alphabet soup letters.
I think with the success that Apple has had first with bringing paid digital music delivery, and more recently with free and mostly low-cost apps, they've shown that many many people will pay when the terms are reasonable. When the costs of making something are relatively fixed, normal competitiveness should drive end-user costs down as something gets more and more popular. But due to the uniqueness of a song, and to some extent software patents in apps, artificial scarcity throws a wrench into the supposedly free market competition.
There should be more freedom for developers to make competing better versions of apps. They can in the EU, why not the US? And for apps made for a smaller high-end market, perhaps tiered pricing with minor functional differences and differing levels of support could all those apps to reach all at a cost that is reasonable. Certainly app stores should be fully open to (free as in beer, and rights) FOSS projects. That improves competition, and also gives those who can't afford some of the commercial apps a way to functionally stay clear of pirating commercial apps. I think the free with donations encouraged, true shareware model should be encouraged too. And I don't mean nagware or keyware/demoware which is really DRM'd commercial crippleware until you pay. Apple should do more to encourage you people to learn to create software and other things. It's not all about content. Our digital devices should just be a modern replacement for those who one sat around watching television. Bring back an included development environment for the masses and provide a logical pathway to more advanced projects. Many machines once came with BASIC, and Macintoshes with Hypercard. If Hypercard supported HTML5, what could people do with that?
The piracy figures are pretty misleading in dollars if the use doesn't increase costs, and the users would buy at current prices even if piracy were impossible. They're not real losses. Some of what goes on amounts to viral marketing, some is essentially educational and leading to future paying customers. The heavy-handed approach isn't productive.
Some of the larger operations have gone too far to lock in people, trap them into numerous upgrades, force them to pay again when they get new machines.... Something is wrong when Americas' 400 richesst people have more wealth than the poorest 150 million people. No wonder consumer spending has had excessive use of credit and is choking. It's like the richest have taken away wealth people done even have yet, making some feel like slaves.
Some may recall that in schools years ago, before home computers, there was talk of the future. Smog would be gone (great progess has been made), there'd be push button phones, picture phones, flat screen televisions on the wall (took about 30 years longer than expected...), and the quality of life would be better because of technology. The high efficiency would allow people to live better and enjoy more while the wage earner only needed to work 3 or 4 days a week, and with shorter hours. But somehow, greed and corruption sucked the wealth of increased productivity away from the masses. The divide between the rich and poor gets wider and wider. The tales of corruption, disparity between rich and poor, and dumbed down happy happy fluff on state run television in Egypt seemed uncomfortably too familiar. Democracy is a wonderful alternative, if it doesn't get rigged to be bought.
Is piracy really just low-end theivery or is it a sign of deeper social problems?
Help repair democracy, demand and end to paid political radio and tv ads. They'll never cut their own campaign contributions, so let's cut how they can spend them. Demcocracy needs open competitive responsive media that educates, enlightens and promotes involvement and discussion.
We've got an FCC commissioner going to work for Comcast/NBC/GE.
Everything that is wrong with politics and lobbying. Make lobbying illegal, dethrone corporate power.
I think this is a good year for some changes. It's not like there's anything else going on. An old phrase comes to mind "When you need to get something done, ask a busy person" We're not the only ones with these problems.
1) More diversity in news production and in local ownership of broadcast stations
2) Full interoperable license free open standards for other to tie in with if MS buys Skype
3) Do away with paid political ads on radio and tv. Stations can choose how much free time to give as public affairs programming time on a balanced basis. (If ya can't get politicians to cut off the contributions they get, limit how they cam spend it!)
4) Bring back stations committing to a maximum number of commercial minutes per hour. They pick the number on the license renewal/application. If a competing applicant has a lower number, they may risk loss of the license. No more 18 minutes of ads in an hour show. No more infomercials.
How? It's not an antitrust case. MS doesn't have any presence in the VoIP arena (at least as far as I know.) There's not much to do about it.
My previous suggestion (Contact your senators and congressmen and ask them to stop this), and the DOJ are not the only options although I think both should be pursued.
VoiP technology has become widespread enough that I think the FCC could step in, get some feedback, and say (regulate) a few things about standards. Having MS own Skype might not be so awful if every standard involved was available license-free (or free license?) for anyone to use in the name of interoperability. And along with that, any competitor should be able to duplicate and interact with any aspect of the supporting infrastructure.
Microsoft, through incompatible enhancements, essentially tried to own the internet by making the experience on other browsers a broken one. Let's not forget that in order for ISPs to hand out Explorer for free, they had to host pages using specific features that broke other browsers. There were many dirty tricks. In this case, the interoperability situation is far worse. There's virtual lock-in if people wish to communicate through the net with Skype users. Forced opening of standards should be considered even if MS doesn't buy or doesn't bundle Skype. (Of course even if not bundled, co-promoting it might be an unfair competitive advantage)
We shouldn't need one vendors' product to surf the web, one companies' car to cruise the highways, one companies gas to drive the car, or one companies product to talk with people online and through POTS (plain old telephone service). We should be able to inter-operate freely using any sufficient device or platform we cook up.
Perhaps it is time that FOSS choices and products like Skype, Google Voice, iChat and others have a set of common protocols that support key features. The F.C.C. is probably the agency to deal with the technical debates and issues if others don't work this out first. The D.O.J. may just say that is has to happen for the deal to happen. And our representatives might help us be heard.
Don't wait until after the fact to do something! We should NOT be locked in.
You obviously haven't looked at the design of the plant. There are 3 layers: - The outer cosmetic steel box, to keep the weather out - The inner concrete containment chamber - The inner steel pressure vessel that houses the actual reaction
Unit 1 reactor vessel was leaking into containment before the Tsunami hit and backup power and cooling were lost.
Unit 2, some part of containment, probably the suppression pool, ruptured and is leaking.
Unit 2, although there's still a roof, that concrete building isn't containing the leaking water. I thought the whole idea of a cooling system that used a heat exchanger and ran seawater through a secondary loop, was to have ALL contaminated water kept within the building.
One could argue that the newer buildings are much better, but the Unit 2 building is apparently intact and didn't contain the water? What's up with that? The heat exchanger and hot side pump is in the building, so that shouldn't leak outside. The turbine pipes are from the reactor vessel, not containment, so those should be a separate issue. So why is all that water getting out of the building?
Among the other oversights, it seems no one planned for explosions. What's up with that? Why were those unexpected?
It seems the first explosion occurred when they went to vent. There's something seriously wrong with the design. With nothing but the fuel pond loaded, unit 4 still blew up. More than one explosive failure mode? What possible excuse is there for that? A billion dollar plus unit blown up because of stored fuel? Maybe it is time to re-examine fuel storage.
No doubt the U.S. will see some added breast and cancer cases in 10 or 20 years from people. mostly women, who drank the milk from the cows that ate the grass, when moderate rain brought down the Iodine 131. Some high levels in rainfall were seen. Most places weren't even checking for it. The spots that got hit probably had it happen just on one day or so, and otherwise saw "No levels harmful to human health". Oh boy. Most of the cancer in Sweden from Chernobyl is believed to be from rainfall on one day. Sometimes that's how it works. The impact won't be huge, but it isn't zero either.
I think it's not a question of if there's fuel at the bottom, but how much.
It wasn't known initially due to the loss of instrumentation power, but stored data that was accessed later revealed that unit 1 had some kind of internal damage from the earthquake that was evident before the tsunami hit and there was loss of cooling. The data showed a much faster drop in coolant level in unit 1 (compared to the other reactors), falling reactor vessel pressure, and rising containment pressure. So there's some kind of a crack where a pipe passes through, or something damaged in there. That's probably also why they're doing a non-standard thing, filling the whole containment vessel with water, because the reactor vessel is going to leak there anyway. So Unit 1 was very likely in deeper trouble than the others by the time they were injecting. And the early attempts at cooling were of questionable effectiveness. Reactors don't normally have a hole in the roof that routes water to just the right places do they??? Even if they did. there probably wasn't enough water. Also, some reports say they delayed cooling attempts with salt water for a while because they knew it would spell the end of any chances of ever using those expensive reactors again.
That damage in unit 1, and the (believed) suppression tank rupture in Unit 2, it consistent with what engineers have said about the old GE Mark I design being more fragile. The other units are of newer design.
The video of the unit 4 pool does look better than expected. Light damage doesn't explain why the Iodine 131 levels above it were so high previously, but with so many reactors / pools in close proximity they very well could have been measuring something from elsewhere.
It'll probably be years before we get to see pictures of what was actually in the bottom of the reactors. Photos from inside the Three Mile Island unit showed damaged fuel at the bottom. Thankfully it didn't melt through. Recent reports say they estimate that unit 1 is producing about 1500 kW worth of heat. Although a tiny figure compared to an operating reactor, that's certainly enough to melt some cladding and steel if cooling were absent.
Unit 3 MOX fuel was NOT near end of cycle. They only fired it up last September!
But due to serious early problems with MOX which included sending fuel back to France and saying they wouldn't use it at one point, they eventually settled on running with a lower percentage of it than some other operators use.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess the accident that killed people at the fuel processing facility and exposed residents nearby to radiation in 1999 doesn't count.
And although no one died, the accident, and the cover-up of the severity of it, at the Japanese sodium breeder reactor apparently isn't worth mentioning.
That was no Mark I design.
The fuel pond issues certainly aren't unique to Mark I designs. Unit 4 in Japan, which had fuel only in the fuel pond, exploded, apparently from hydrogen that came from unit 3. Neither unit 3 nor unit 4 were Mark I designs. There aren't supposed to be any common-cause failures, yet clearly that explosion pathway and the backup power had causes in common.
One of the reactors shut down in central Japan over earthquake fears was found to have salt water in the closed-loop part of the cooling system. That wasn't even known before the plant was shut down for another reason. Coupling between the ocean water and internal cooling water loops was supposed to be impossible.
In one sense the older systems may have an advantage. They didn't originally use frail and vulnerable computer systems. What modern computer systems can be trusted to work for 40 years plus?
I don't mind having them compete on even grounds with the other means of producing power, even if nuclear fails hard as a result.
How can competition be on an even ground when there are laws limiting their liability to a miniscule amount compared to the damage that could be done?
How can it be considered fair competition it the total costs of dealing with fuel aren't included (whether you call it vaulting "treasure" or the cost of running a fuel mortuary makes no difference)
How can it be considered fair competition if there's land made unusable to society far into the future?
If it allows society to enter into having population, housing, or industrial densities that are otherwise unsustainable, aren't we walking into a trap by using it? (locked in - I'm sure some feel that has happened already) How long can society sustain building plants that tie up resources long term but only produce for perhaps 50 years?
Doesn't this encourage us to use other resources at unsustainable levels? Are we failing to see a bigger picture for the future of mankind?
Shouldn't we be moving towards technology that can sustain society indefinitely? Is this supposed to be it?
All of this does not matter to the question of artists canceling appearances. If an artist does not want to appear in Israel, that's fine. An artists who cancels is being suckered into making a political statement under the guise/threat of avoiding making one.
More so than other artists that cancelled, I think Gil-Scott Heron would have delivered strong messages in his performance. As much as any performer I can think of, he has a long history of fighting racism. I'm not sure Santana and Elvis Costello would have delivered significant messages in their music had they not cancelled.
It's unfortunate that Gil-Scott Heron won't be around to perform either for the troops or general public there at some future date.
I can appreciate that the rest of the world may underestimate how difficult some policy decisions can be when we mostly lack diverse and in depth news sources. (showing more violence isn't showing more depth) I think it would be to Israels advantage to make LBA and/or other English language broadcasters more widely available (direct streaming, livestation etc.) While some internal political conflict and problems may seem an embarrassing thing to show internationally, those who have seen conflicts between political parties and groups elsewhere might at least be a little more sympathetic to the political pressure (suicide?) that sometimes cripples major policy changes.
The high level of activity in the middle-east is motivated more people to try and look a little deeper than the 'short on facts, long on pundit posturing' coverage we're mostly handed.
There are some serious issues that should at least be discussed widely. Failure to do so erodes credibility. Even friends question friends.
http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/report-44-of-israeli-jews-support-rabbis-edict-forbidding-rentals-to-arabs-in-safed-1.333825
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jan/23/world/la-fg-israel-intolerance-20110123
http://www.jpost.com/DiplomacyAndPolitics/Article.aspx?id=219464
http://www.aljazeerah.info/Opinion%20Editorials/2010/July/12%20o/Deteriorating%20Conditions%20for%20Israeli%20Arab%20Citizens%20By%20Stephen%20Lendman.htm
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/yermi-brenner/learning-from-the-rabbis-_b_821393.html
This time was just over money, but there have been others who cancelled appearances when reminded of political issues. A very timely example is Gil-Scott Heron who passed away May 27, 2011.
From wikipedia:
'In 2010 he was due to play a gig in Tel Aviv, but this attracted criticism from Palestinian groups who stated "Your performance in Israel would be the equivalent to having performed in Sun City during South Africaâ(TM)s apartheid era... We hope that you will not play apartheid Israel." In response he cancelled the gig.'
Being a talented jazz musician and political poet, he undoubtedly had mixed feelings when some labeled him the grandfather of rap. What he did wasn't a thing for the kids, although he reached some of them too. He brought attention to what was going on in South Africa, he's the man who coined the phrase "The revolution will not be televised".
(an early track "Winter in America")
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcHOq8i5Pyk
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2011/05/20115287194489734.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/8362518.stm
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Gil-Scott_Heron
Because computers have internal electronics that generate electric currents in the GHz range, and it is not impossible that these electrical currents could radiate enough energy to interfere with airplane electronic and navigation systems.
It's not absurdly over cautions to restrict unknown electronics that might cause interference. Even the local oscillator in an simple old-fashioned analog tuned F.M. broadcast radio can affect some communications. Digital gear is worse. There are pulses at many different rates far below microwave frequencies in digital gear, and because they are pulses and not sinusoidal waveforms, they're rich in harmonics. The noise generated extends down even to relatively low frequencies due to main power supply inverters and in some cases inverters for screen backlighting. Try taking an ordinary analog tuned AM/FM radio and putting it very close to a laptop and compare the noise between stations or heard on weaker signals.
It is doubtful that they're using anything that is particularly sensitive to interference from WiFi.
No one in their right mind would expect WiFi to be interference free and use it for anything critical. Read the F.C.C. notice in the manual for ANYTHING that uses WiFi. You'll see something like "must accept harmful interference, including that which may cause undesired operation".
How the hell can you abuse a translating service ?
I suppose that if stories here had links that were foreign sources being run through Google, they'd get hit pretty hard. But instead of killing something like that I'd rather see a little header added at the top of the translated page with a "donation to thank Google" button. Disabling that functionality, or things like the "powered by Google" 3rd party OS X translation widget, would feel very much like censorship, and perhaps stir negative feelings towards Google in some..
If anything, even more capability is needed. I'd like to see a another layer that could add the ability to translate text that's in a graphic, possibly even in a PDF (a smart OCR front-end). If I record a clip of video from one of the international newscasts on public tv, it would occasionally be helpful to be able to translate some things that appear on screen.
For democracy to work properly, people should be well informed. Access to diverse news sources is very important. There's been a serious decline in the diversity and depth of U.S. sources. Let's work to improve that.
Well a good example of a hardware feature we don't see any more is the SCSI or Firewire target disk mode.
Basically that allows putting a machine in a state where another machine can hook to the first as if it were an external drive, and even boot from it.
In the era of Mac OS 7.5.x, QuickDraw GX supported advanced features I still don't get to routinely enjoy, printing or faxing with a watermark, or in effect generating the something else on the paper behind what you're printing, like company stationary or graph paper. A simple app called Poster GX allowed taking text you could grab and tilt any way you wanted, with sliders to adjust the weight and various properties. Text could be transparent to better reveal what was behind it. That was no heavy graphics program or imaging software, it was a small editor just calling features the OS extensions provided.
Some of those things killed off after System 7.6, like Open Doc / CyberDog could manually have the components added into OS 9. It could be fun to run under Sheepshaver (the COI, Classic on Intel thing)
Little windmills at both ends of flatulent bureucrats
While you are at is, remove the user too. :-)
Yes, you'd better, those genetic exploits in the water supply can be a real pain
My Etch-a-Sketch is malware proof, and reboots in seconds!
There's a new breed of silverfish with your name on it
Somehow I doubt that this was an accident.
So what's the theory?
disturbed worker? competitor? government upset over a planned Foxconn iPad factory in Brazil? coverup of theft? Apple stock manipulation? distraction from some other news?
Clearly the states that have clean air laws are discriminating against the private sector by insuring that "free" air is breathable. Clearly that has prevented the growth of new jobs in the bottled oxygen industry, at a time when jobs are so desperately needed. Why do we put up with these anti-jobs bureuocrats?
Providing free access to sidewalks and paths for bicycles also harms taxi drivers and countless other businesses.
Countless consumers make unlicensed copies of bacteria that is in the food they buy.
Freeloaders, every one of them.
Will there be no end to this epidemic of unchecked freedom?
At this point it doesn't really matter so much who developed it. Regardless, we're still potentially collateral damage or potential targets of a fully disassembled/reverse-engineered/built-fresh-with-a new-twist version as well as whatever the original authors might unleash. Whoever made it was shortsighted if they felt that even versions attempting to be very specific wouldn't be analyzed and modified or cause some collateral damage as-is. Pruning target-filtering code seems it would be a relatively trivial task.
Some say Israel had people bragging about it.
http://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=10596
Collateral damage adding to some other bad event? You decide.
I don't think the victims had a clue.
http://www.publicradio.org/columns/kpcc/kpccnewsinbrief/2008/11/officials-unveil-why-yorba-lin.html
http://articles.latimes.com/keyword/yorba-linda-ca
http://www.ylwd.com/fireupdate/pdf/Freeway%20Complex%20Fire%20Report.pdf
The high ticket projects all attract multinational corporations. Those corporations aren't shy about buying smaller-scale operations with technology they want. Even if you do use technology developed only in your own country, it is not sold elsewhere? Are there vulnerable systems anywhere within the local technology entity? Even if they've got 10 vulnerabilities instead of 100,000+ they're still vulnerable.
I've seen one region that didn't have any kind of electronic or software vulnerability whatsoever. Unfortunately the island people there will be driven off by rising oceans.
Certainly audits are a good thing, but we mustn't forget that we're talking about something that gets in and hides itself well, even deleting itself from some hardware along the way. An audit of hardware still only gives a snapshot in time. That laptop that was briefly plugged in, or machine that briefly had a USB key plugged in, may be long gone. Intrusion detection can help, but with things like traffic to a PLC using the normal ports, it may take deep inspection of every packet to see what's going on, and by the time something is seen, you've already been hit.
Mitigating this is tough. Corporate types are so easily led to believe that their firewalls, VPNs, anti-virus packages, intrusion detection.... will keep them secure. But if human or entity lives depend on security, for it is a fallacy to expect to achieve zero vulnerability networks. Telling upper managers that their only access will be through video cameras pointed at displays, and fax machines, won't go over well. But if it keeps something from going boom, can anything else be trusted? And what of systems that don't really have a full "off" state. Even when not fully functioning, there may be considerable complexity and some danger in pulling the plug on all vulnerable technology at once (pieces may talk to each other).
There are some huge hardware issues that are routinely ignored in not only PLCs, but in nearly every system we use. It's not just insane that a PLC make lack a physical hardware write-disable switch to prevent rogue code from being loaded, but what about all of our PCs? Is there anyone here that has an installation with no writable BIOS/EFI on motherboards, no flash upgradable optical or hard drives? Every damn thing like that should have a physical write-disable switch that is normally off. If we haven't even dealt with those things we're not even trying.
And what of the behavior of governments? Like some insane variation of the arms races, we can bet that every one of them has stockpiled collections of vulnerabilities and tools to exploit them, so they can DEFEAT security. From the massive unsolved problems that consumers, businesses, and institutions/infrastructure are facing, it would appear as if some those responsible for our security have actually put more resources into defeating it. I mean... how far have we really gotten? How many businesses and consumers are actually secure? The answer shows the massive fail.
I believe that all of the governments and larger entities that we have reason to fear already know enough to be a threat. Less information would likely slow some down, but I think that even for this, there are different classes of potential attackers. Let's pray that whatever it takes to secure things that go boom has been done. Restricting information at this point probably does more to sidestep the same segment of people that would extort money from banks.
Looking at a NTSB copy of control operator transcripts at one utility company and seeing talk of a bonkers PLC, every valve wide open, SCADA displays that didn't match what was going on, and people saying "we're screwed, we're screwed" in the hour before a pipeline blew doesn't instill much confidence in the utility's ability to manage their other much bigger impact operation. In the region of potential impact, where the power plant repeatedly has hired reporters from the only full power tv station as spokespeople, those hearings got a 20 second mention while Charlie Sheen got 3 minutes. I haven't been aware of any media that paid attention and saw there was much more to the pipeline story than crappy welds. Although not reported along with a governors latest mistress, it doesn't take that much observation and digging for those here to realize the impact of the control system threat has been more than a theoretical one for several years.
Opps a couple of "should"s when I meant shouldn't etc. Said income, meant profit... Hopefully one can read past the typos and see the intended meaning.
Ranting is hard work, and I skipped outsourcing....
If I were the Boys Scouts of America, I'd be upset to have such a group using my alphabet soup letters.
I think with the success that Apple has had first with bringing paid digital music delivery, and more recently with free and mostly low-cost apps, they've shown that many many people will pay when the terms are reasonable. When the costs of making something are relatively fixed, normal competitiveness should drive end-user costs down as something gets more and more popular. But due to the uniqueness of a song, and to some extent software patents in apps, artificial scarcity throws a wrench into the supposedly free market competition.
There should be more freedom for developers to make competing better versions of apps. They can in the EU, why not the US? And for apps made for a smaller high-end market, perhaps tiered pricing with minor functional differences and differing levels of support could all those apps to reach all at a cost that is reasonable. Certainly app stores should be fully open to (free as in beer, and rights) FOSS projects. That improves competition, and also gives those who can't afford some of the commercial apps a way to functionally stay clear of pirating commercial apps. I think the free with donations encouraged, true shareware model should be encouraged too. And I don't mean nagware or keyware/demoware which is really DRM'd commercial crippleware until you pay. Apple should do more to encourage you people to learn to create software and other things. It's not all about content. Our digital devices should just be a modern replacement for those who one sat around watching television. Bring back an included development environment for the masses and provide a logical pathway to more advanced projects. Many machines once came with BASIC, and Macintoshes with Hypercard. If Hypercard supported HTML5, what could people do with that?
The piracy figures are pretty misleading in dollars if the use doesn't increase costs, and the users would buy at current prices even if piracy were impossible. They're not real losses. Some of what goes on amounts to viral marketing, some is essentially educational and leading to future paying customers. The heavy-handed approach isn't productive.
Some of the larger operations have gone too far to lock in people, trap them into numerous upgrades, force them to pay again when they get new machines....
Something is wrong when Americas' 400 richesst people have more wealth than the poorest 150 million people. No wonder consumer spending has had excessive use of credit and is choking. It's like the richest have taken away wealth people done even have yet, making some feel like slaves.
Some may recall that in schools years ago, before home computers, there was talk of the future. Smog would be gone (great progess has been made), there'd be push button phones, picture phones, flat screen televisions on the wall (took about 30 years longer than expected...), and the quality of life would be better because of technology. The high efficiency would allow people to live better and enjoy more while the wage earner only needed to work 3 or 4 days a week, and with shorter hours. But somehow, greed and corruption sucked the wealth of increased productivity away from the masses. The divide between the rich and poor gets wider and wider.
The tales of corruption, disparity between rich and poor, and dumbed down happy happy fluff on state run television in Egypt seemed uncomfortably too familiar. Democracy is a wonderful alternative, if it doesn't get rigged to be bought.
Is piracy really just low-end theivery or is it a sign of deeper social problems?
Help repair democracy, demand and end to paid political radio and tv ads. They'll never cut their own campaign contributions, so let's cut how they can spend them. Demcocracy needs open competitive responsive media that educates, enlightens and promotes involvement and discussion.
We've got an FCC commissioner going to work for Comcast/NBC/GE.
How ironic
Everything that is wrong with politics and lobbying. Make lobbying illegal, dethrone corporate power.
I think this is a good year for some changes. It's not like there's anything else going on.
An old phrase comes to mind "When you need to get something done, ask a busy person"
We're not the only ones with these problems.
http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/20110419p2a00m0na012000c.html
Maybe we should demand the FCC fix a few things:
1) More diversity in news production and in local ownership of broadcast stations
2) Full interoperable license free open standards for other to tie in with if MS buys Skype
3) Do away with paid political ads on radio and tv. Stations can choose how much free time to give as public affairs programming time on a balanced basis. (If ya can't get politicians to cut off the contributions they get, limit how they cam spend it!)
4) Bring back stations committing to a maximum number of commercial minutes per hour. They pick the number on the license renewal/application. If a competing applicant has a lower number, they may risk loss of the license. No more 18 minutes of ads in an hour show. No more infomercials.
Naw, graphics out to be of something that's a real threat...
http://en.rian.ru/cartoons/20110511/163969086.html
How? It's not an antitrust case. MS doesn't have any presence in the VoIP arena (at least as far as I know.) There's not much to do about it.
My previous suggestion (Contact your senators and congressmen and ask them to stop this), and the DOJ are not the only options although I think both should be pursued.
VoiP technology has become widespread enough that I think the FCC could step in, get some feedback, and say (regulate) a few things about standards. Having MS own Skype might not be so awful if every standard involved was available license-free (or free license?) for anyone to use in the name of interoperability. And along with that, any competitor should be able to duplicate and interact with any aspect of the supporting infrastructure.
Microsoft, through incompatible enhancements, essentially tried to own the internet by making the experience on other browsers a broken one. Let's not forget that in order for ISPs to hand out Explorer for free, they had to host pages using specific features that broke other browsers. There were many dirty tricks.
In this case, the interoperability situation is far worse. There's virtual lock-in if people wish to communicate through the net with Skype users. Forced opening of standards should be considered even if MS doesn't buy or doesn't bundle Skype. (Of course even if not bundled, co-promoting it might be an unfair competitive advantage)
We shouldn't need one vendors' product to surf the web, one companies' car to cruise the highways, one companies gas to drive the car, or one companies product to talk with people online and through POTS (plain old telephone service). We should be able to inter-operate freely using any sufficient device or platform we cook up.
Perhaps it is time that FOSS choices and products like Skype, Google Voice, iChat and others have a set of common protocols that support key features. The F.C.C. is probably the agency to deal with the technical debates and issues if others don't work this out first. The D.O.J. may just say that is has to happen for the deal to happen. And our representatives might help us be heard.
Don't wait until after the fact to do something! We should NOT be locked in.
Contact your senators and congressmen and ask them to stop this
The real question is, what will your atoms be a part of? Or will you be energy?
Maybe someday I will travel to another star system as a beam of light, and shine on the solar cell of a childs' toy.
Does this count Sony?
You obviously haven't looked at the design of the plant. There are 3 layers:
- The outer cosmetic steel box, to keep the weather out
- The inner concrete containment chamber
- The inner steel pressure vessel that houses the actual reaction
Unit 1 reactor vessel was leaking into containment before the Tsunami hit and backup power and cooling were lost.
Unit 2, some part of containment, probably the suppression pool, ruptured and is leaking.
Unit 2, although there's still a roof, that concrete building isn't containing the leaking water. I thought the whole idea of a cooling system that used a heat exchanger and ran seawater through a secondary loop, was to have ALL contaminated water kept within the building.
One could argue that the newer buildings are much better, but the Unit 2 building is apparently intact and didn't contain the water? What's up with that? The heat exchanger and hot side pump is in the building, so that shouldn't leak outside. The turbine pipes are from the reactor vessel, not containment, so those should be a separate issue. So why is all that water getting out of the building?
Among the other oversights, it seems no one planned for explosions. What's up with that? Why were those unexpected?
It seems the first explosion occurred when they went to vent. There's something seriously wrong with the design. With nothing but the fuel pond loaded, unit 4 still blew up. More than one explosive failure mode?
What possible excuse is there for that? A billion dollar plus unit blown up because of stored fuel? Maybe it is time to re-examine fuel storage.
No doubt the U.S. will see some added breast and cancer cases in 10 or 20 years from people. mostly women, who drank the milk from the cows that ate the grass, when moderate rain brought down the Iodine 131. Some high levels in rainfall were seen. Most places weren't even checking for it. The spots that got hit probably had it happen just on one day or so, and otherwise saw "No levels harmful to human health". Oh boy. Most of the cancer in Sweden from Chernobyl is believed to be from rainfall on one day. Sometimes that's how it works.
The impact won't be huge, but it isn't zero either.
(info on Sweden and other places in this Chernobyl pdf)
http://www.strahlentelex.de/Yablokov%20Chernobyl%20book.pdf
http://www.strahlentelex.de/Yablokov%20Chernobyl%20book.pdf
I think it's not a question of if there's fuel at the bottom, but how much.
It wasn't known initially due to the loss of instrumentation power, but stored data that was accessed later revealed that unit 1 had some kind of internal damage from the earthquake that was evident before the tsunami hit and there was loss of cooling.
The data showed a much faster drop in coolant level in unit 1 (compared to the other reactors), falling reactor vessel pressure, and rising containment pressure. So there's some kind of a crack where a pipe passes through, or something damaged in there. That's probably also why they're doing a non-standard thing, filling the whole containment vessel with water, because the reactor vessel is going to leak there anyway.
So Unit 1 was very likely in deeper trouble than the others by the time they were injecting. And the early attempts at cooling were of questionable effectiveness. Reactors don't normally have a hole in the roof that routes water to just the right places do they??? Even if they did. there probably wasn't enough water. Also, some reports say they delayed cooling attempts with salt water for a while because they knew it would spell the end of any chances of ever using those expensive reactors again.
That damage in unit 1, and the (believed) suppression tank rupture in Unit 2, it consistent with what engineers have said about the old GE Mark I design being more fragile. The other units are of newer design.
The video of the unit 4 pool does look better than expected. Light damage doesn't explain why the Iodine 131 levels above it were so high previously, but with so many reactors / pools in close proximity they very well could have been measuring something from elsewhere.
It'll probably be years before we get to see pictures of what was actually in the bottom of the reactors. Photos from inside the Three Mile Island unit showed damaged fuel at the bottom. Thankfully it didn't melt through. Recent reports say they estimate that unit 1 is producing about 1500 kW worth of heat. Although a tiny figure compared to an operating reactor, that's certainly enough to melt some cladding and steel if cooling were absent.
Unit 3 MOX fuel was NOT near end of cycle. They only fired it up last September!
http://bionicbong.com/tech/tepco-nuclear-power-plant-starts-power-output-mox-fuel/
But due to serious early problems with MOX which included sending fuel back to France and saying they wouldn't use it at one point, they eventually settled on running with a lower percentage of it than some other operators use.