I'm a chemist and I actually did some freelance investigation into UF6 centrifuges a while back - quite fascinating. They're tall thin cylinders, barely a handsbreadth wide, with maglev vacuum bearings and a rotation speed in excess of 100,000 RPM. The outer wall of the centrifuge experiences a million G's of acceleration, and a sweaty thumb-print can off-balance one enough to self-destruct. Also, one cylinder only enriches uranium by 1% or so, so you need to daisy-chain many hundreds together flawlessly to get pure 235 out the end.
I imagine with a system that fragile, you don't need to find the precise resonant frequency. IIRC, all stuxnet did was blip the frequency down to 0 Hz for a short time - which I imagine would eventually throw the drive off-center and cause it to fail noisily.
It's at least plausible. We're so set up to detect superheavy radioactives, what happens if an elemental synthesis procedure actually produces a stable superheavy nucleus (embedded at 1 part in 10^10 in a metal target)? No decay, no detection.
Anyway I think the chances of these accusations against Assange being completely unrelated to the leak and the timing being coincidental are pretty slim.
Except that the accusations were first floated weeks ago, at around the time of the Reuters correspondent murder leak. Anyway, it would be unfortunate timing, but being a politically interesting person doesn't give you a free pass. Other posters have called for great scrutiny and impartial judges, but that only works if it's a planted accusation and not a real one.
For $15.00 a year, it's not worth living with a constant paranoid beady eye gazing at the world, thinking how best to fuck someone out of half a cent, and how best to protect the ninth decimal place of my total worth. Such an attitude would warp my mind into the shape of scrooge McDuck and I'm not prepared to debase myself to that level.
I'd much rather do what my grandparents do to save $15/year - steal ketchup packets from McDonalds and wash out drinking straws.
Oh please, that's asinine bullshit from someone without ties. When your free gaming time drops from 80 to 5 hours a week and your disposable income goes up by a factor of 10, that 20 minutes of patch hunting and firewall configuring is worth paying to avoid. Oh no, I can't sell my game collection! Guess I'd better keep on washing my toilet paper and eating from wheelie bins until I make up my deficit.
What about police guards at G8 protests, certain sporting events? Surely by turning up they are assuming guilt. Never mind that there is a 100% occurrence of violent incidents and they would be derelict in duty by staying home... What about bobbies on the beat in rough neighbourhoods where someone gets stabbed every week? Are they being offensively oppresive? Stop being so asinine.
Do I deserve the label of "Transphobe" - a term I've never seen or thought about before? Like many others, this intriguing tangential comment thread is the first window I've had to an unusual new world of personal sensitivity, yet another way I could accidentally offend someone I don't personally know with my assumptions about the world.
Every time I talk about my friends, parents, pets in casual conversation with a new acquaintance, I know there's a small chance that they might have suffered though the death of same, and that I'm unintentionally torturing them. Do I stop doing it to everyone new "just in case"? No. I'd be a ball of nerves otherwise, trying to remember every single thing I could say that people might get upset about, some of which contradict each other.
So I guess what I'm saying is that I might deserve your label. I don't have the intention to offend, but I've made a decision to continue living in happy ignorance, and not to invest a lot of my time and effort into making certain changes that would presumably benefit you if we ever happened to chitchat in a shop, or something. I can only apologise, and offer what I think the silent majority, the kindly but blundering everyman thinks about it all.
Claiming that research done with realistic budget limitations shames us all is asinine bullshit. You have this result, or you have nothing. This is intriguing, perhaps it merits further study, perhaps behavioural psychologists in other nations will study the locals there. Perhaps not. The only overarching conclusions were written by the five word headline, or by your own built-in summariser.
I'm a (professional) synthetic chemist who occasionally dabbles in the fields of pharmacology and microbiology. I know the molecular principles behind events such as protein functionality, nerve transmission, photosynthesis and other life-y things and it scares the CRAP out of me how complex and fast it is. We each of us are an entire world of kludged complexity, relying on subtle edge effects to effect thought on a timescale unimaginably slow compared to the bustle of our atoms. If a molecular interaction was two cogs turning together, each human being would be a rube goldberg machine ten light-minutes across, that took a million years just to decide whether to order a starter or not.
I also believe in a Biblical God who knows all of this, and knows how it works together, and who KNOWS MY NAME AND LOVES ME. You think I was awed before? I'm devoting my life to the study of his works, and I will never ever understand even the tiniest fraction of the possible complexity.
Less anecdotally, I agree that pseudo-science is rife, see Feynman's essay on cargo cult science. Most people don't understand you need to go out of your way to try and prove yourself wrong first.
My point was that employee theft is worse in places with poorer labour laws and oppressive workplaces, nothing more. Such extreme measures wouldn't be needed, but rather milder ones. It's a self-reinforcing problem, the more I get treated like a potential thief, the less I'm going to care about the company in return. Don't get me wrong, I think all businesses everywhere are sociopaths, but the illusion of corporate loyalty benefits everyone.
Perhaps not suspiciously regarding your employees as thieves builds, oh, I don't know, an actual environment of trust and respect? The culture of corporate sabotage certainly exists on this side of the pond, but only in occasional moments during particularly vicious company mergers or layoffs. It's much more effective here to have one or two auditors trying to spot patterns not consistent with customer-originated shrinkage, and then come in for a closer look. Even if nobody gets caught, the one guy on the take usually backs down.
The parent has an important point - accessibility is a two-pronged approach. Sometimes, it's appropriate to modify the world (Wheelchair Ramps, disabled bathrooms) and sometimes it's appropriate to rely on technology to help individual people (White canes, seeing-eye dogs). Mostly, they meet in the middle somewhere (hearing aid loops in cinemas are much less invasive than subtitling, and service most people with hearing difficulties). I think it's important not to get too carried away and actively hinder the lives of everyone in service of some token PC gesture that never gets used. Specifically, my office has retrofitted electric push-button door openers, which take several seconds per set of door on a very long corridor in a working environment fundamentally unsuited for wheelchair accessibility.
Distant parts of the chip then have a communication lag, but yes, this will really help. Certainly much less lag than communicating with something outside the die.
This is the US education system. I recall seeing the notation when I was in primary school (ages 5-11). It may have been too long ago for you to remember. The problem is only written like that because they haven't been introduced to the concept of adding all 3 numbers together at once!
I only made the molecules and I saw a tiny corner of the industry as it was in 2008. I have general common sense in the field but I really can't say without it being my opinion.
The current thrust has always been about targeting a specific symptom (the plaques) but my feeling is that even if we get a working aB42 inhibitor, it won't stop senility. I read a few years ago about a preventative treatment that halted cognitive decay, based on a substituted ibuprofen, but I can't recall of any of the details.
I'm a chemist and I've worked on a gamma-sec modulator, so I see it from the bottom up. Drugs might be in human trials but I don't think there's any new discovery programs.
Amyloid beta was there and it was targetable by the methodology available to drugs companies. Now, they've discovered it doesn't work, and there's a few years of lag time between findings synchronising. I don't think there are any more gamma-sec or beta-sec programs in drug discovery. Let's just hope there's another target around.
Exactly the same thing happens to politicians, celebrities, and the CEOs of companies involved in unpopular accidents. Maybe guilty, maybe not, but the life is suddenly ruined for no reason. And what happens on slashdot? People bay for blood.
The key for me is not to fill it before I buy a new drive/build a new machine. Before I bought this one I was actually uninstalling games to make space for other ones. It's an unnecessary stress and worth paying to get rid of. Now, the odds state that the drive will die or become obsolete before it fills up, and that suits me fine. I've been doing this since my first drive of 500MB, that was a pain. I remember deleting a 70MB FMV from my install of dungeon keeper to make enough space for quake 1.
Also, I end up with a boxed history of my life that way, since after each upgrade I just pull/archive the old disk. They go 500MB, 5GB, 60, 160.
I'm a moderate gamer, I work and do other stuff so I only play about 10-15 hours a week, and my Steam cache alone is 146GB, almost the size of my last hard drive. I don't even have all my games downloaded, and I have a fair few not on Steam as well.
For the last few years, the Guardian has had the journalistic integrity of a Michael Moore film. It makes me ashamed to vote liberal democrat that the champion newspaper is so blatantly biased and full of loaded phrases and poor practices.
Oh please, so many problems in the US today are by enforced empowerment of litigious idiots. Not perfect? RARGH SUE. What's this? one of little jimmy's toys comes from a country where people sometimes fall over? RARGH SUE. What's this? my tap water has one atom per gallon of uranium, only detectable due to recent advances in hypersensitive ICP-AES? RARGH SUE. Liability is paralysing your nation, and all this will mean is less people making pacemakers.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a chemist and I actually did some freelance investigation into UF6 centrifuges a while back - quite fascinating. They're tall thin cylinders, barely a handsbreadth wide, with maglev vacuum bearings and a rotation speed in excess of 100,000 RPM. The outer wall of the centrifuge experiences a million G's of acceleration, and a sweaty thumb-print can off-balance one enough to self-destruct. Also, one cylinder only enriches uranium by 1% or so, so you need to daisy-chain many hundreds together flawlessly to get pure 235 out the end.
I imagine with a system that fragile, you don't need to find the precise resonant frequency. IIRC, all stuxnet did was blip the frequency down to 0 Hz for a short time - which I imagine would eventually throw the drive off-center and cause it to fail noisily.
It's at least plausible. We're so set up to detect superheavy radioactives, what happens if an elemental synthesis procedure actually produces a stable superheavy nucleus (embedded at 1 part in 10^10 in a metal target)? No decay, no detection.
Anyway I think the chances of these accusations against Assange being completely unrelated to the leak and the timing being coincidental are pretty slim.
Except that the accusations were first floated weeks ago, at around the time of the Reuters correspondent murder leak. Anyway, it would be unfortunate timing, but being a politically interesting person doesn't give you a free pass. Other posters have called for great scrutiny and impartial judges, but that only works if it's a planted accusation and not a real one.
For $15.00 a year, it's not worth living with a constant paranoid beady eye gazing at the world, thinking how best to fuck someone out of half a cent, and how best to protect the ninth decimal place of my total worth. Such an attitude would warp my mind into the shape of scrooge McDuck and I'm not prepared to debase myself to that level.
I'd much rather do what my grandparents do to save $15/year - steal ketchup packets from McDonalds and wash out drinking straws.
Oh please, that's asinine bullshit from someone without ties. When your free gaming time drops from 80 to 5 hours a week and your disposable income goes up by a factor of 10, that 20 minutes of patch hunting and firewall configuring is worth paying to avoid. Oh no, I can't sell my game collection! Guess I'd better keep on washing my toilet paper and eating from wheelie bins until I make up my deficit.
What about police guards at G8 protests, certain sporting events? Surely by turning up they are assuming guilt. Never mind that there is a 100% occurrence of violent incidents and they would be derelict in duty by staying home... What about bobbies on the beat in rough neighbourhoods where someone gets stabbed every week? Are they being offensively oppresive? Stop being so asinine.
Do I deserve the label of "Transphobe" - a term I've never seen or thought about before? Like many others, this intriguing tangential comment thread is the first window I've had to an unusual new world of personal sensitivity, yet another way I could accidentally offend someone I don't personally know with my assumptions about the world.
Every time I talk about my friends, parents, pets in casual conversation with a new acquaintance, I know there's a small chance that they might have suffered though the death of same, and that I'm unintentionally torturing them. Do I stop doing it to everyone new "just in case"? No. I'd be a ball of nerves otherwise, trying to remember every single thing I could say that people might get upset about, some of which contradict each other.
So I guess what I'm saying is that I might deserve your label. I don't have the intention to offend, but I've made a decision to continue living in happy ignorance, and not to invest a lot of my time and effort into making certain changes that would presumably benefit you if we ever happened to chitchat in a shop, or something. I can only apologise, and offer what I think the silent majority, the kindly but blundering everyman thinks about it all.
Claiming that research done with realistic budget limitations shames us all is asinine bullshit. You have this result, or you have nothing. This is intriguing, perhaps it merits further study, perhaps behavioural psychologists in other nations will study the locals there. Perhaps not. The only overarching conclusions were written by the five word headline, or by your own built-in summariser.
So? There are a shit-ton of prisoners who are absolutely no danger to others when they go in, but may get de-habilitated by the prison experience.
I'm a (professional) synthetic chemist who occasionally dabbles in the fields of pharmacology and microbiology. I know the molecular principles behind events such as protein functionality, nerve transmission, photosynthesis and other life-y things and it scares the CRAP out of me how complex and fast it is. We each of us are an entire world of kludged complexity, relying on subtle edge effects to effect thought on a timescale unimaginably slow compared to the bustle of our atoms. If a molecular interaction was two cogs turning together, each human being would be a rube goldberg machine ten light-minutes across, that took a million years just to decide whether to order a starter or not.
I also believe in a Biblical God who knows all of this, and knows how it works together, and who KNOWS MY NAME AND LOVES ME. You think I was awed before? I'm devoting my life to the study of his works, and I will never ever understand even the tiniest fraction of the possible complexity.
Less anecdotally, I agree that pseudo-science is rife, see Feynman's essay on cargo cult science. Most people don't understand you need to go out of your way to try and prove yourself wrong first.
My point was that employee theft is worse in places with poorer labour laws and oppressive workplaces, nothing more. Such extreme measures wouldn't be needed, but rather milder ones. It's a self-reinforcing problem, the more I get treated like a potential thief, the less I'm going to care about the company in return. Don't get me wrong, I think all businesses everywhere are sociopaths, but the illusion of corporate loyalty benefits everyone.
Perhaps not suspiciously regarding your employees as thieves builds, oh, I don't know, an actual environment of trust and respect? The culture of corporate sabotage certainly exists on this side of the pond, but only in occasional moments during particularly vicious company mergers or layoffs. It's much more effective here to have one or two auditors trying to spot patterns not consistent with customer-originated shrinkage, and then come in for a closer look. Even if nobody gets caught, the one guy on the take usually backs down.
The parent has an important point - accessibility is a two-pronged approach. Sometimes, it's appropriate to modify the world (Wheelchair Ramps, disabled bathrooms) and sometimes it's appropriate to rely on technology to help individual people (White canes, seeing-eye dogs). Mostly, they meet in the middle somewhere (hearing aid loops in cinemas are much less invasive than subtitling, and service most people with hearing difficulties). I think it's important not to get too carried away and actively hinder the lives of everyone in service of some token PC gesture that never gets used. Specifically, my office has retrofitted electric push-button door openers, which take several seconds per set of door on a very long corridor in a working environment fundamentally unsuited for wheelchair accessibility.
Distant parts of the chip then have a communication lag, but yes, this will really help. Certainly much less lag than communicating with something outside the die.
If your *** is blue you need to see a doctor, man!
This is the US education system. I recall seeing the notation when I was in primary school (ages 5-11). It may have been too long ago for you to remember. The problem is only written like that because they haven't been introduced to the concept of adding all 3 numbers together at once!
I only made the molecules and I saw a tiny corner of the industry as it was in 2008. I have general common sense in the field but I really can't say without it being my opinion.
The current thrust has always been about targeting a specific symptom (the plaques) but my feeling is that even if we get a working aB42 inhibitor, it won't stop senility. I read a few years ago about a preventative treatment that halted cognitive decay, based on a substituted ibuprofen, but I can't recall of any of the details.
IIRC, the two founders own more than 50% of the shares, but don't quote me on that as I can't find any current proof.
I'm a chemist and I've worked on a gamma-sec modulator, so I see it from the bottom up. Drugs might be in human trials but I don't think there's any new discovery programs.
Amyloid beta was there and it was targetable by the methodology available to drugs companies. Now, they've discovered it doesn't work, and there's a few years of lag time between findings synchronising. I don't think there are any more gamma-sec or beta-sec programs in drug discovery. Let's just hope there's another target around.
Exactly the same thing happens to politicians, celebrities, and the CEOs of companies involved in unpopular accidents. Maybe guilty, maybe not, but the life is suddenly ruined for no reason. And what happens on slashdot? People bay for blood.
The key for me is not to fill it before I buy a new drive/build a new machine. Before I bought this one I was actually uninstalling games to make space for other ones. It's an unnecessary stress and worth paying to get rid of. Now, the odds state that the drive will die or become obsolete before it fills up, and that suits me fine. I've been doing this since my first drive of 500MB, that was a pain. I remember deleting a 70MB FMV from my install of dungeon keeper to make enough space for quake 1.
Also, I end up with a boxed history of my life that way, since after each upgrade I just pull/archive the old disk. They go 500MB, 5GB, 60, 160.
I'm a moderate gamer, I work and do other stuff so I only play about 10-15 hours a week, and my Steam cache alone is 146GB, almost the size of my last hard drive. I don't even have all my games downloaded, and I have a fair few not on Steam as well.
For the last few years, the Guardian has had the journalistic integrity of a Michael Moore film. It makes me ashamed to vote liberal democrat that the champion newspaper is so blatantly biased and full of loaded phrases and poor practices.
Oh please, so many problems in the US today are by enforced empowerment of litigious idiots. Not perfect? RARGH SUE. What's this? one of little jimmy's toys comes from a country where people sometimes fall over? RARGH SUE. What's this? my tap water has one atom per gallon of uranium, only detectable due to recent advances in hypersensitive ICP-AES? RARGH SUE. Liability is paralysing your nation, and all this will mean is less people making pacemakers.