There's Yandex.Money and WebMoney in Russia (and xUSSR in general), which allow to do anonymous transactions. If I want to transfer money to somebody I just need to know their 'wallet ID'. I can even use payment terminals (like iBox: http://www.pond5.com/stock-footage/1848145/ibox-terminal.html which are everywhere ) and pay with cash completely anonymously. Fees are reasonable - around 1% for small transactions.
If I want to use something more official then there are bank transfers. They are intrinsically free for banks and so very cheap for users, my bank has all-you-can-eat plan for $10 a month or 0.1% from amount of a transaction. They are also processed instantaneously (well, it might take a minute or two depending on your bank).
US bank system looks like something out of the stone age.
My parents' personal library weights about 2 tons. There's no way it could be evacuated in time to save it from, say, asteroid strike (they live in a remarkably geologically stable zone).
However, my own library fits a USB thumb drive which I can easily carry with me everywhere. And with the help of my solar charger I can charge my eBook reader (once or twice a week should be enough).
We're talking about food, so alphas ARE the most dangerous type of radiation here. Neutron radiation is more dangerous, of course, but it's not generated in significant quantities by the radioactive decay (well, you can mix beryllium with alpha emitter, of course).
And detecting alphas in food by a hand-held counter is useless, they most likely will be adsorbed by the food itself.
It all changes when you ingest a radiation source.
Gamma is the most penetrating type or radiation, so energy deposited per particle per meter of tissue is not that big. But alphas dissipate all their energy within millimeters of their source. It's OK if the source is outside you (alphas won't even penetrate your skin), but if you ingest it - that's quite a different story.
I should have amended 'most harmful in food products'. And it is.
Alpha radiation has a very short range -only a few centimetres in air and about a millimetre in live tissue, but it also has a tremendous energy (for radioactive particles). So you're safe as long as you don't eat/breathe alpha-emitters.
10 millisieverts doesn't cause detectable elevated cancer level, it's about 100 millisieverts. And background level is 0.1-0.2uSv/hr.
PS: I really liked the old "Roentgen" unit, it's so much easier to remember: 10R is elevated cancer risk, 100R is mild acute poisoning, 500R is LD50. And natural level is around 10-20 uR/hr.
Re:Geiger counters are not really useful
on
Testing Geiger Counters
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· Score: 4, Interesting
For outdoor testing Geiger counters should work just fine. You don't need to worry (much) about alpha radiation, if you are careful to not eat or drink anything from the contaminated zone and wash your clothes and shoes afterwards. Also, try to avoid dust.
You won't encounter promptly dangerous radiation levels, even if you are near the powerplant itself. Even doses as high as 100 times the normal background level require _months_ of exposure to become dangerous, and these kinds of doses will cause Geiger counter to click continuously.
Geiger counters are not really useful for food testing. They generally won't detect alpha radiation which is the most harmful type. Besides, elevated concentration of caesium or strontium can be easily mimicked by elevated levels of natural K-40.
They really need to stop worrying about food testing. Or get a professional radiometer (which will cost $$$$).
I know. However, some words are pronounced this way ('rapport', for example).
Also, this tendency of English to borrow spelling _and_ pronunciation from other languages had been driving me crazy when I was learning it. On the other hand German (which has very consistent transcription of words) was much easier to learn.
On an unrelated note: English names are stupid. Really.
Come on, why 'Colbert' is pronounced as 'Col-bear'? Or what about this 'th' sound in general? It's ridiculous!
Names starting 'w' ('William', 'Watson') are laughable and ambiguous - the first sound can not be adequately transcribed in Russian, it's either hard 'w' (as in 'water') or clear 'u'. Wouldn't it better if everyone just used perfectly serviceable Russian names like Tatyana or Fyodor?
And don't get me started on differences between 'wh' and 'th'.
First, some ozone-depleting compounds are even worse. For example, halons not only destroy the ozone layer but are also among the top global warming agents (by the virtue of their chemical unreactivity).
Second, the total amount of emitted CFC-replacement gases is not large, so we can generally ignore it for now.
Third, there are CFC replacement with less GW potential.
USB has support for bulk data transfers which can be performed just fine using DMA. It's just that DMA is performed by the USB controller, not by device itself.
USB is kinda cool in that regard, it completely separates logical data delivery and processing from physical implementation. You can work with your device using simple polling-style bitbanging or you can use a dedicated controller which can offload data transfer from CPU[s].
FireWire, on the other hand, assumes that device can work directly with the host's RAM. It has a few advantages, for example, it's possible to make dumb devices without microcontrollers in FireWire.
Not really. If everyone gets/48 with 3 reserved bits, then it's just 35184372088832 addresses. Sure, it's a lot. But IPv6 address space was initially designed to be sparse, but in reality it's not THAT sparse.
I recon that there's about 8 bits of 'sparseness' in it - we have about 2^31 addresses used right now with about the best possible density. Routed IPv6 space is 2^45 which gives us 14 bits of extra address space. Nice, but not THAT much.
Actually, the dirty little secret of IPv6 is that it provides only 61 bits of addressing.
The lower 3 bits are reserved (for now) and the upper 64 bits are 'reserved' for stateless autoconfiguration. You can use them, of course, but expect problems with a lot of entrprise-level gear that stores only/64 prefixes in routing tables. And to compound this, IETF policies initially were designed to give/48 to EACH client - so we have only 45 bits of useful routed address space.
So while the address space is certainly bigger than in IPv4, it's not THAT bigger in fact.
So is almost any other mining. Including mining of rare earths used in turbines, or disposal of toxic compounds used in construction of solar panels. Compared to dirty mining of coal, Uranium mining is nothing.
Besides, a large amount of Uranium is mined in deserts (in Kazakhstan and Australia) with minimal impact on wildlife.
Note the word 'theoretically'. It's used in the same sense as in: "theoretically RSA encryption might be vulnerable if someone solves the problem of fast factorization".
In practice, there are no serious attacks on PRNG used in Linux.
Uranium mining is fairly benign, it's done mostly in open-air quarries. Underground mining is not economic for Uranium mining alone, so it's usually done only when there are significant reserves of other resources (silver or copper ores, etc.) alongside.
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There are alternatives, just not in the USA.
There's Yandex.Money and WebMoney in Russia (and xUSSR in general), which allow to do anonymous transactions. If I want to transfer money to somebody I just need to know their 'wallet ID'. I can even use payment terminals (like iBox: http://www.pond5.com/stock-footage/1848145/ibox-terminal.html which are everywhere ) and pay with cash completely anonymously. Fees are reasonable - around 1% for small transactions.
If I want to use something more official then there are bank transfers. They are intrinsically free for banks and so very cheap for users, my bank has all-you-can-eat plan for $10 a month or 0.1% from amount of a transaction. They are also processed instantaneously (well, it might take a minute or two depending on your bank).
US bank system looks like something out of the stone age.
JSESSIONID is not a persistent cookie, it'll be gone upon the restart of the browser.
Yeah, a good argument!
My parents' personal library weights about 2 tons. There's no way it could be evacuated in time to save it from, say, asteroid strike (they live in a remarkably geologically stable zone).
However, my own library fits a USB thumb drive which I can easily carry with me everywhere. And with the help of my solar charger I can charge my eBook reader (once or twice a week should be enough).
Why the fuck not?
I routinely use my 3G modem to download gigabytes of data. So it's certainly possible technically - there's more than enough spectrum for this.
We're talking about food, so alphas ARE the most dangerous type of radiation here. Neutron radiation is more dangerous, of course, but it's not generated in significant quantities by the radioactive decay (well, you can mix beryllium with alpha emitter, of course).
And detecting alphas in food by a hand-held counter is useless, they most likely will be adsorbed by the food itself.
It all changes when you ingest a radiation source.
Gamma is the most penetrating type or radiation, so energy deposited per particle per meter of tissue is not that big. But alphas dissipate all their energy within millimeters of their source. It's OK if the source is outside you (alphas won't even penetrate your skin), but if you ingest it - that's quite a different story.
I should have amended 'most harmful in food products'. And it is.
Alpha radiation has a very short range -only a few centimetres in air and about a millimetre in live tissue, but it also has a tremendous energy (for radioactive particles). So you're safe as long as you don't eat/breathe alpha-emitters.
10 millisieverts doesn't cause detectable elevated cancer level, it's about 100 millisieverts. And background level is 0.1-0.2uSv/hr.
PS: I really liked the old "Roentgen" unit, it's so much easier to remember: 10R is elevated cancer risk, 100R is mild acute poisoning, 500R is LD50. And natural level is around 10-20 uR/hr.
For outdoor testing Geiger counters should work just fine. You don't need to worry (much) about alpha radiation, if you are careful to not eat or drink anything from the contaminated zone and wash your clothes and shoes afterwards. Also, try to avoid dust.
You won't encounter promptly dangerous radiation levels, even if you are near the powerplant itself. Even doses as high as 100 times the normal background level require _months_ of exposure to become dangerous, and these kinds of doses will cause Geiger counter to click continuously.
Geiger counters are not really useful for food testing. They generally won't detect alpha radiation which is the most harmful type. Besides, elevated concentration of caesium or strontium can be easily mimicked by elevated levels of natural K-40.
They really need to stop worrying about food testing. Or get a professional radiometer (which will cost $$$$).
Brilliant!
I know. However, some words are pronounced this way ('rapport', for example).
Also, this tendency of English to borrow spelling _and_ pronunciation from other languages had been driving me crazy when I was learning it. On the other hand German (which has very consistent transcription of words) was much easier to learn.
On an unrelated note: English names are stupid. Really.
Come on, why 'Colbert' is pronounced as 'Col-bear'? Or what about this 'th' sound in general? It's ridiculous!
Names starting 'w' ('William', 'Watson') are laughable and ambiguous - the first sound can not be adequately transcribed in Russian, it's either hard 'w' (as in 'water') or clear 'u'. Wouldn't it better if everyone just used perfectly serviceable Russian names like Tatyana or Fyodor?
And don't get me started on differences between 'wh' and 'th'.
First, some ozone-depleting compounds are even worse. For example, halons not only destroy the ozone layer but are also among the top global warming agents (by the virtue of their chemical unreactivity).
Second, the total amount of emitted CFC-replacement gases is not large, so we can generally ignore it for now.
Third, there are CFC replacement with less GW potential.
USB can be used with DMA just fine. You just need to do it in your USB controller chips - where it rightfully belongs in any case.
USB has support for bulk data transfers which can be performed just fine using DMA. It's just that DMA is performed by the USB controller, not by device itself.
USB is kinda cool in that regard, it completely separates logical data delivery and processing from physical implementation. You can work with your device using simple polling-style bitbanging or you can use a dedicated controller which can offload data transfer from CPU[s].
FireWire, on the other hand, assumes that device can work directly with the host's RAM. It has a few advantages, for example, it's possible to make dumb devices without microcontrollers in FireWire.
"I just want all the files modified in 1997: ls -l | grep 1997"
So? Just do this. File information is transferred as JSON objects, and you can still do simple greps on them.
Not really. If everyone gets /48 with 3 reserved bits, then it's just 35184372088832 addresses. Sure, it's a lot. But IPv6 address space was initially designed to be sparse, but in reality it's not THAT sparse.
I recon that there's about 8 bits of 'sparseness' in it - we have about 2^31 addresses used right now with about the best possible density. Routed IPv6 space is 2^45 which gives us 14 bits of extra address space. Nice, but not THAT much.
Actually, the dirty little secret of IPv6 is that it provides only 61 bits of addressing.
The lower 3 bits are reserved (for now) and the upper 64 bits are 'reserved' for stateless autoconfiguration. You can use them, of course, but expect problems with a lot of entrprise-level gear that stores only /64 prefixes in routing tables. And to compound this, IETF policies initially were designed to give /48 to EACH client - so we have only 45 bits of useful routed address space.
So while the address space is certainly bigger than in IPv4, it's not THAT bigger in fact.
Let's say that if Linux's PRNG is broken then you'd have other problems, much much much worse.
Currently it relies on hashed counters, with mixed-in real entropy.
So is almost any other mining. Including mining of rare earths used in turbines, or disposal of toxic compounds used in construction of solar panels. Compared to dirty mining of coal, Uranium mining is nothing.
Besides, a large amount of Uranium is mined in deserts (in Kazakhstan and Australia) with minimal impact on wildlife.
Note the word 'theoretically'. It's used in the same sense as in: "theoretically RSA encryption might be vulnerable if someone solves the problem of fast factorization".
In practice, there are no serious attacks on PRNG used in Linux.
Uranium mining is fairly benign, it's done mostly in open-air quarries. Underground mining is not economic for Uranium mining alone, so it's usually done only when there are significant reserves of other resources (silver or copper ores, etc.) alongside.
Why, just last year, 38 people died in the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upper_Big_Branch_Mine_disaster . And these are direct immediate deaths.
If you count deaths caused by 'black lung' disease, cancers and other coal-related deaths, you'll be counting in hundreds of thousands pretty soon.
1) NO!!!! IT DOES NOT! It uses a PRNG to generate more 'pseudoentropy', mixing in new entropy if it's available.
2) No, you can't. That's a property of cryptographically secure PRNGs.
3) It means exactly what it means. RTFM: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographically_secure_pseudorandom_number_generator