Quite so, but who wants a 20 year development cycle (or whatever the life of a patent is these days)? I guess the command line would have been unimpeded around 1990, so we would be expecting Windoze 1 about now, at a very rough guess.
Still, it is fascinating to debate what might have been, in so doing we might identify the good idea that was missed, and patent it...... (or preferably put it under GPL!)
Yes indeed. It doesn't bear thinking about. What we have now is still far from perfection (and not necessarily improving, if Windoze XP in its default configuration is anything to go by, the words "garish" and "childish" are the first that come to mind), but at least reasonably useable for most people without too much training.
I somehow think that the best that would have been possible is knobs and sliders, like any other bit of equipment (which surfaces in wheel mice and so on, to an extent), but I don't know how a word processor would be possible without a keyboard. OK, voice input, but that needed many years to get working and is still an immature and slightly erratic technology, and without a solid base of computers to drive the push for performance, Moore's Law would not work so we would not have the performance to do the voice recognition. A truly vicious circle.
As an aside I was asked to look at the possibility of doing some software safety assessment on a fancy X-ray machine used for brain problems, maybe 10 years ago. The primary operator input (there also would have been a keyboard and mouse etc) was a panel of rotary knobs (can't remember exactly how many, maybe 8 or 16) which IIRC was a standard Sun peripheral at the time, because that suited exactly how they wanted to control the thing. I guess brain surgeons know best, certainly a jittery Monopoly Mouse would not have been a good idea for precise control.
I would dearly like car trains to work, in case you are in any doubt. But, you don't make the weight problem any better by making it longer, the power required and the weight of providing that power also scales. It has to be done by making it lighter per car carried, but the present day end loading regulations are there for a good reason, there have been truly horrible accidents even at low speed. IIRC the load is 200 tonnes, to carry that on a structure 23m long (as standard railway carriages are in the UK) requires a lot of structural weight. If you can reduce it by NEVER mingling with standard tarins on the same track, and NEVER shunting (using a more sophisticated method of coupling and uncoupling, poiiibly only doing it in the depot), if you use articulation to reduce the number of bogies (good for safety anyway, but you definitely need extra equipment to uncouple), and if you do a few other clever things, the weight becomes more manageable. But it is still not quite there.
As for efficiency, that scarcely gets considered when economics dominate, but likely a standard train carrying a full load of cars is somehwere near as efficient as simply running all the cars. It might be better, but not dramatically so, or it might be worse. But the train can run safely at 125mph without special precautions, the "average" driver is unsafe at almost any speed, with all due respect to the competent people who do make a positive effort to drive properly.
I wish this, or conveyor belts, or something else would be viable. I need to get from home in London up to Scotland from time to time (430 miles), in a reasonable time, and have a car available, all at reasonable cost. Tried hiring a car at the other end before, not satisfactory for lots of reasons, and can't park my car at the station near home, so what about heavy luggage? So, as I said, I really would like this to be viable, but not sadly not yet, I think.
BTW our press and "establishment" are almost universally hostile to railways, and the politicians like to be able to milk the motorist of every penny they can squeeze out of him or her, so they, despite a lot of pretence, have no desire whatsoever to solve the nation's transport problems by doing something efficient. If you are in the US, I don't think your unelected cretin is any different. Surely we can elect better governments? But that is another topic altogether, although I do seem to remember that once upon a time there were a few credible politicians of all persuasions.
I think this one clearly is for freight, but I can't imagine that in any civilised country teh authorities would allow it to be driven without the proper experience.
Depends on the time scale. Microgrammes will kill by causing failure of internal organs, AFAIK liver and kidney, but a single particle with mass of a few hundred picogrammes (maybe less) lodged in the lung will result in cancer, eventually. The reason is that plutonium is largely an alpha emitter (unless you make a bomb or a reactor), and alpha particles will be stopped by the first few layers of cells they encounter, so the small number of cells will be receiving a constant pounding. (A gamma emitter for example would dose most of the body at a low level, few cells would receive such major damage, the energy is absorbed mainly when a cell stops a particle). It has been said, and Mr. Google will no doubt know where, that a cancer, or at least a potentially cancerous mutation, tends to happen when a cell which has been damaged, and is in the process of repairing itself, is damaged again at a certain critical time. This is much more likely if a small group of cells are absorbing all the energy, as happens with alpha emitters.
BTW the theory that the alpha emitter is so dangerous gained attention about 1969 (can't remember the author) but it got conveniently ignored, but seems to be regaining favour, as the only reason for a number of tragic deaths.
Now there is a military manual about radiation, which can be legally purchased by anyone in the UK. Can't remember the title, but it more or less says in the first chapter that there is no military application for alpha radiation, then goes on to show that beta and gamma have their uses. The author, who was a complete incompetent of the dangerous kind, gave the impression that because alpha radiation will not penetrate human skin (true, or almost so), that it was safe (very untrue, he ignored ingestion or inhalation completely). This has led to a number of incidents which probably have harmed soldiers in training, and may have endangered the public, becuase this book is till used by the military, in setting up training exercises where they scatter some radioactive material about.
Polonium is much worse that plutonium in this regard, having a much shorter half-life it emits many more alpha particles. Now I know that in teh US, polonium was sold as part of anti-static devices for record players at one time (maybe it still is). A similar thing was purchased here in the UK, from the US, some years ago as part of some laboratoty equipment. It was duly reported to the safety officer, who contacted the nuclear authorities, and it was immediately removed for safe disposal. I draw my own conclusions.....
It follows that if a scumbag terrorist was to make the worst sort of dirty bomb, he could use an alpha emitter, which would be undetectable inside the very lightest shielding, and design it in such a way that it released as many small airborne particles as possible. The deaths would probably start within a year, and continue for a generation, and the cleanup would be very difficult indeed, because you have go get right on top of an alpha emitter with your detecting equipment to find it.
Very interesting point, and you may, or may not, be surprised to hear that in fact coal-burning industry, mostly power plants nowadays, has released far more uranium, thorium and radium (plus others?)into the atmosphere than the entire nuclear industry, and they continue to do so.
This is because coal contains trace amounts of these elements, which are not in the form of particles, but are more likely distributed as individual atoms in individual molecules, maybe combined with carbon, certainly oxygen, and other elements. No known technology can take individual molecules of, say, uranium oxide, out of a chimney.
Now this release of radionucleides has been going on since serious use of coal began around 1600-1700.
Interestingly enough, in the UK there is often controversy over so-called leukaemia clusters, now these cases are tragic, but it is alleged that they are due to the nuclear industry, however close inspection shows that every single such cluster, with one exception, is in an area close to or downwind of a large coal-burning plant which either still exists, or was in use relatively recently. Some of these plants were lead smelters, which adds more uranium and other toxic elements. The one exception that I know of, where no industrial presence can be seen, is in Cornwall, around the village of Tintagel, and it is hardly surprising, because the local children no doubt play on their nice beach, and behind the beach are sea caves, with uranium compounds leaching out of the rocks. There will also be a high concentration of radon gas in such places, it mainly causes lung cancer by depositing daughter products in the lungs, but some of the daughter products may indeed cause leukaemia, and may be ingested in other ways.
At a guess, I would say that similar conditions of radiation release due to coal burning, and the extraction of certain other minerals, will be found worldwide, as presumably volcanic activity had released lots of radionucleides into the atmosphere during the carbiniferous era, which would eventually have found their way into the vegetation, and hence the coal.
In one particular part of the UK, when germanium transistors were in fashion, soot from factory chimneys was collected because it was rich in germanium, I think you will find that other elements (certainly selenium, which is toxic and carcinogenic, and also cadmium) can be found in significant quantities in some geographic regions.
So, coal burning will release radioactive, toxic and carcinogenic substances, fortunately not plutonium of course, although in theory an occasional atom might be formed by natural processes. After all, there are these odd atoms of uranium embedded in the moderator, coal instead of pure graphite, so there is the remote chance that a neutron from a fissioning uranium atom might be slowed by the coal, and captured by another uranium atom. But the yield would be incredibly low.
All of that is true. The original motivation may have been quite sound, at least during WW2, but it is disgraceful that very soon afterwards steps were not taken to start improving safety. By that time there had been a number of serious accidents and the magnitude of the danger was well established.
But lunatics, sorry, military, were running the show, and quite frankly the way you hear some of these people, or their political masters, talk makes me thing that the cretin Dubya is a super-genius. But it does look as if some of those who knew of the scale of the problem should have been trying hard for 50 years to communicate it to higher authority. Politicians will tend to leave everything difficult for the next governemt to deal with, if they can get away with it, which seems to have happened here for many political generations. They should have been put on the spot by public exposure, and forced to act, long ago.
It is relatively safe and efficient when the profit motive, or military interests, are not allowed to dominate, as examination of accident reports will show. It was that way once in the UK, and I think some other countries, but now that everything is privatised, the need to make a quick buck gets in the way of decisions that need to be made. This happens in any safety-critical industry, as the privatised UK railways proved (although that situation might be under control again). The same quick buck motive caused the US and later the UK to adopt the fundamentally unsafe pressurised water reactors, when other topologies are far safer.
If a non-profit corporation or government agency was tasked with running nuclear power production, it could be made very safe indeed. It is only when there are pressures to cut corners in order to achieve output, and therefore profit, that most types of avoidable accident tend to happen, and that is true in most other industries also.
We would all still be programming with a panel of lights and toggle switches, as was common up till about the era of the PDP-11. I remember once keying in a bootstrap loader that way, fortunately it was only a very short one, designed to load a longer one from a punched tape.
Software patents would have killed progress than, as they are doing now.
After all, most of the software patents that seem to be granted are for things where there has been lots of prior art, this would be no exception if it was submitted to the overworked USPTO.
The majority of the world does not have broadband, in my case thanks to the incompetence and dishonesty of my local cable company.
Without broadband, and on a modem with a 2 hour limit, as most of the world has to put up with, not a sinle Linux distro is upgradeable with large patches, as often needed for security. I know, I have tried them all, and those I have paid good money for, such as Redf Hat, SuSe and Xandros, did not even bother to acknowledge my bug reports. It is utterly stupid, they have things like wget that can resume transfers but either they don't have that capability on the servers or their rotten update programs have been designed by a committee of idiots, as obviously was RPM. In the case of SuSE, Yast has now gone under GPL, but that is of zero help because there are masses of marginally commented files and it is not at all clear how it is supposed to work, otherwise I am so mad at it that I might try to fix it myself (says he as he nearly smashes his keyboard by pounding too hard....)I am mad about this, it has been going on for far too long, with insanely big patches like 130MB for a stupid binary kernel patch. These distros deserve to fade into oblivion, even the incompetent scumbags in Redmond can do better than that.
I have not tried major updates to BSD yet, hopefully it will be better, as presumably source patches are used, but the user interface is a total disaster, i.e. there is not one.....
As I keep saying, people with the expertise need to urgently turn their attention to basic useability things like this, or the Criminal Monopoly will deserve to wipe out FOSS, by actually having given more consideration to his customers. For instance, why has FreeBSD (which I like) not got a decent installer, such that a fairly fast worker like me still takes 6 hours to make package selections? can't they be grouped, and also take info from the previous config as a starting point? Even YaST manages that.
Come on developers, realise that everyone needs to apply patches, not 10% of users worldwide have broadband, the remaining 90% or so are living with bugs and security holes because you can't be bothered to attend to detail.
This is sure to attract flames, but jsut think about what I have said first, and if you can fix some of these things, or tell me how to fix them, please do. Lots of people including myself will be very grateful.
The simple answer is that it will die, and quite soon now.
Re:You don't know anything about railroads, do you
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By Road and Rail?
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· Score: 2, Informative
Actually it does not necessarily work like that. In countries which still have a well-developed passenger rail network, the UK being one, the passenger train usually, but not always, has priority. Freight trains are commonly held in loops for a while so several passenger trains can overtake. Passenger trains are invariably faster, freight are faster than they once were, due to better suspension on the wagons, such as the so-called low track force bogie (I hear you don't have these in the US yet, we buy your excellent GM locos, maybe you should buy our excellent bogies) so they can run at maybe 60 to 70 mph without derailing or damaging the track. The lighter ones, mail and so on, will run at 100mph. Passenger trains will run at 60 to 70mph (slow local trains) or 100mph (fairly universal) with 125mph on major routes.
Anyway, the well-developed art of the signaller is to keep it all on the move, and try to keep it all running to schedule, and that is done by making sensible real-time decisions about what will be held and what can proceed. Except in a dire emergency, such as a derailment, a train will never have to make an emergency stop because of something ahead, when the signal is cleared, that means exactly that, the route is cleared to the next signal (not at all like traffic lights, which will change to red as you approach). There are different speed limits for different classes of train to allow for stopping distances, the drivers are highly competent and know where the signals are, so they know when they may have to stop, and if for example they have a yellow signal, they know that the next one may be red, and can reduce speed accordingly.
The instances of stopped passenger trains being wiped out by following heavy goods trains are extremely rare, in fact I can't find records of one at all, the nearest was a sideswipe at the end of a loop when one train over-ran, largely due to frozen mechanical signalling equipment IIRC, and that was about 50 years ago. Oh, and maybe there was the braking problem at Shrewsbury, when a train of oil tanks ran out of control into the bay platform where an empty passenger train was standing, and wiped it out. It is surprising, but that is in no way one of the common types of accident, on a dense and overcrowded network like the UK.
One night on my way home, I was duly annoyed when a long, slow freight train was let out of the yard ahead of us, we were stopped maybe 3 minutes. But it was going non-stop (if possible) on a long journey, our train had about 15 stops so the freight would have been well on its way, at 60mph, before our second or third stop, rather than running behind and having to stop at every signal. On thinking about it, it was clear that the signaller did make the right decision.
So, in that instance, they did not run the freight immediately behind the passenger train, the expert made a real-time decision not to, but he would have been within his rights, and would not have been criticised by anyone if he had done the opposite. But, the freight would still have braked to a stop at every preceding signal, or the driver would deliberately set his speed so the signals were just changing from red to yellow as he approached, so he could keep it rolling. Either way, he would get nowhere near the passenger train. The signallers actions achiebed overall efficiency, they had no bearing whatsoever on safety, he could have run all the trains that night in any order he wished.... (but some possible sequences would have attracted complaints from the train operating companies, who might have had to pay compensation to passengers for being too late!)
The art of making it all run well in real time, despite various snags, is quite impressive, but without that expertise, the signalling systems will still enforce safe separation, and it generally takes a double human error, or maybe a rare equipment failure and a human error, to defeat that.
BTW they would have enforced double-block working for a nuclear train for example, or a Royal Train, or lots of other t
Why would truck drivers be driving a passenger vehicle, or why would you be riding in a freight vehicle anyway?
AFAIK your trains, and buses, are driven in the main by sensible people (leaving out the idiot who stopped the bus across the railway crossing, there is always one....), and new employees would be recruited and trained for something new anyway. I think with suitable people employed, your objections would be completely unfounded, anyway in the UK we do it differently. There has been very little problem recruiting tram drivers for the several recent schemes, AFAIK many of them were bus drivers, and are fully conversant with on and off street driving. I imagine the locomotive drivers union ASLEF would be trying to negotiate fancy salaries for doing two jobs, as they are entitled to try, but that is about as far as staffing problems would go.
And as regards safety, you are 20 times safer on rail than on road, based on UK figures. With your terrible carnage on the roads in the US, caused in the main by inadequate driver education (part of the problem you no doubt correctly identify with truckers), you may even be 100 times safer on rail, or it may only be 5 times, if your railways are not up to scratch, but there is no way that you could be less safe on rail than on road, that sitiuation has never been achieved anywhere in the world.
Maybe, but the majority of guided bus schemes worldwide have been failures, partly due to the short life of the vehicles compared to rail, so there is a break-even point after maybe 10 to 15 years, when a rail system becomes cheaper.
And talking of Adelaide, the Glenelg tram was much more fun, I hope it is still running. Proper trams, on proper track, with a mixture of on-street and off-street running. Prehistoric, but with ancient technology still very efficient.
In that sort of case it would be best (cheapest, safest and quickest to implement) to simply join up the rail tracks with street running, tramcar-style in as few places as they can.
Recent UK systems have been done on this basis, they mostly work very well indeed, and attract a lot of passengers.
It is fairly disruptive to run track down a street, lots of services have to be relocated, earth mats put in to prevent electrolytic corrosion (assuming DC power is used), supports provided for the overhead wires, and so on, but it is not impossible, as has been proven in Manchester, Croydon, Sheffield, Nottingham, Wolverhampton (that one not so good), and shortly Edinburgh and a few more. It is also a good excuse to replace things that have not been seen for maybe 100 years, such as ancient, corroding water pipes, give the street a nice new surface, and generally tidy up the environment.
All the UK systems installed in the last 10 to 15 years have been based largely on old railway tracks, with street running where appropriate, and I am sure this would work in your area. Speeds are typically 80kph/50mph on "rail" and 50kph/30mph on "street", suitable vehicles could go a lot faster on rail sections if justified by distance between stops.
We tried this in the UK for many years. It was too expensive to attract many users, simply because, for good structural reasons, the train is many times heavier than the cars it carries, so the energy saving, if any, is not sufficient to cover the fixed costs. I am not sure, but I think it may still be operational on one route (it was a few years ago), if so it will be overnight on a sleeper train, again added cost, so people don't use it much.
But the concept works very well indeed in the Channel Tunnel, which continues to lose money at an ever-increasing rate......
If you can get the weight down, while maintaining end loading requirements for safety and to avoid damage during routine shunting (200 tonnes IIRC, maybe a lot less if you will only ever be coupling up to, shunting or running amongst lighter vehicles than a standard train), and find a way of safely anchoring the cars in place, it would be viable again.
The other way is to couple cars together into road trains, so the whole group of maybe 50 or 100 would occupy much less road space than individually, but some technological breakthroughs would be needed to make such a thing safe, and prevent abuse, such as some people turning off their engines, and others paying the fuel bill. Now, a burst tyre within the train would not be immediately disastrous, the adjacent vehicles would hold the one with the burst tyre in line, but there would have to be means of stopping the whole train when that happened, by signalling the driver at the front, so the defective car could be uncoupled, But a burst tyre on the leading vehicle might cause a huge catastrophe. Issues of steering and so on are also quite tricky.....
But I hope someone solves these problems too, there is the potential for another workable concept somewhere.
Other things such as automatic guidance of road vehicles should not even be considered with technology likely to be available in the next 20 years, every possible method has so many failure modes of significant probability of occurrence that they would cause a major escalation of the accident rate even if deployed only on a small scale.
If using rail, the safest option, I wonder if it might be possible to avoid carrying the considerable weight of rail wheels while on the road, and only pick them up at the station? It hardly matters on a lorry, but on a car it would be very significant, and on a bus still quite significant. It somehow makes me think of a certain German aircraft that dropped its undercarriage on takeoff, to save weight, but I am sure competent mechanical engineers could come up with something more practicable.
Re:It will never happen
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By Road and Rail?
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· Score: 2, Informative
Maybe it will not happen in the US, but in the UK where this is being developed, road-rail vehicles like this, but slightly smaller, have been in use for some years for track maintenance etc. They vary in size from medium lorry down to Landrover at present, also JCB diggers etc, so this is not really new, but many of its details seem to be quite innovative. But it has been done long ago, with bus type vehicles for carrying passengers.
If instead of being short-sighted and closed many branch lines in the early 1960's, a certain Dr. Beeching had looked to the almost immediate future, things could be very different now. It was possible with 1950 or earlier technology, you do not need electronics or software to make things like this work, as has been well demonstrated in the past. With modern engines and so on, microprocessor controlled of course, the environmemntal benefits improve dramatically, the economics slightly.
This should succeed, at least in a limited range of applications. The most obvious is where coal is brought from open-cast sites by road, and transferred to rail for its final journey to the power station. One place in the UK (Kincardine), the final rail journey of 2 miles to Longannett power station is only so the lorries don't pass through the village, the road part of the journey is variable up to 10 miles or so. The coal is dumped in a heap in the yard of an obsolete power station, once or twice a week a train comes along, a digger shovels the coal from the heap into wagons, which takes at least a day, and the train trundles slowly along to the power station. Now, if the lorry simply drove into the yard, set itself on the track, and drove direct to the power station, costs would clearly be saved. And, as the continuation of this particular piece of railway has just been approved for re-opening for through freight services, and passengers over part of the route, it might be feasible to bring in the cola from other more remote opencast sites in the same way.
I wish them every success with this redevelopment of a very old idea.
True, but all the BSDs and for that matter Linux urgently need a package management system that works, and what is more can be made to work over a modem link with 2 hour time limit. Neither Xandros nor SuSE have had the decency to respond to bug reports about this from a paying customer, it is not possible in Fedora either (some packages like the kernel tend to be upwards of 130MB), and while most of the world still has to use modems, security patches can simply not be applied.
Time for a well thought out system (not RPM!) that can work with data in small chunks, and control redialling etc, as well as doing source patching to reduce the amount of download needed each time. Mostly, BSD does this, with each package having its own makefile etc. But a decent user interface is, for now, sadly lacking. The download issue should be fixable by basing it around wget or one of the variants, curl and so on. The user interface needs to show, both in GUI and text mode, a list of what is installed, with upgrade options available (such as YaST tries to do), so the average user, or the experienced user with little time to mess about, only has to rattle a few keys or click the mouse a couple of times, not mess about wasting time typing in great long package names and version strings in a plethora of formats.......
Yes, and some methods of security can turn into unmitigated disasters when something goes wrong and you dont have a root capability to get access to fix it. It is always necessary to balance security against reliability and maintainability, and ideally maximise them all, a tall order with present-day technology.
Yes, in many ways, but to a typical Windoze user who has never used a command line they might appear very different indeed.
There is one big difference, you don't get so mauch feature and application bloat with OpenBSD as you get with a typical Linux distro. True, you don't need to install it all, and FreeBSD seems to have even more......
Packaged up properly, OpenBSD could be the basis of a decent desktop OS, but Theo, who mostly runs the show, is fully occupied, and rightly so IMHO, with security issues, and things related to servers. But, as it is BSD licensed, the opportunity is there for anyone who wants to do it. What about a Blue Hat or a LuCY, or maybe a Tightware, or a WomanDuck? In fact I am surprised that no-one, apart from a few small businesses who supply "distros" has done much with FreeBSD or NetBSD either.
.....should not hesitate to report this to the police (a probable violation of the Computer Misuse Act) and the Data Protection Registrar (a very definite violation of the Data Protection Act, especially if the servers are not in the UK). Show no mercy whatsoever, companies who are lax with other people's private data will not learn to behave properly unless there are a few well-published criminal prosecutions.
The guy that found this did everyone a big favour and ought to be congratulated, but sadly the spammers will be doing the same.
Slashdot Mirror
Still, it is fascinating to debate what might have been, in so doing we might identify the good idea that was missed, and patent it...... (or preferably put it under GPL!)
I somehow think that the best that would have been possible is knobs and sliders, like any other bit of equipment (which surfaces in wheel mice and so on, to an extent), but I don't know how a word processor would be possible without a keyboard. OK, voice input, but that needed many years to get working and is still an immature and slightly erratic technology, and without a solid base of computers to drive the push for performance, Moore's Law would not work so we would not have the performance to do the voice recognition. A truly vicious circle.
As an aside I was asked to look at the possibility of doing some software safety assessment on a fancy X-ray machine used for brain problems, maybe 10 years ago. The primary operator input (there also would have been a keyboard and mouse etc) was a panel of rotary knobs (can't remember exactly how many, maybe 8 or 16) which IIRC was a standard Sun peripheral at the time, because that suited exactly how they wanted to control the thing. I guess brain surgeons know best, certainly a jittery Monopoly Mouse would not have been a good idea for precise control.
As for efficiency, that scarcely gets considered when economics dominate, but likely a standard train carrying a full load of cars is somehwere near as efficient as simply running all the cars. It might be better, but not dramatically so, or it might be worse. But the train can run safely at 125mph without special precautions, the "average" driver is unsafe at almost any speed, with all due respect to the competent people who do make a positive effort to drive properly.
I wish this, or conveyor belts, or something else would be viable. I need to get from home in London up to Scotland from time to time (430 miles), in a reasonable time, and have a car available, all at reasonable cost. Tried hiring a car at the other end before, not satisfactory for lots of reasons, and can't park my car at the station near home, so what about heavy luggage? So, as I said, I really would like this to be viable, but not sadly not yet, I think.
BTW our press and "establishment" are almost universally hostile to railways, and the politicians like to be able to milk the motorist of every penny they can squeeze out of him or her, so they, despite a lot of pretence, have no desire whatsoever to solve the nation's transport problems by doing something efficient. If you are in the US, I don't think your unelected cretin is any different. Surely we can elect better governments? But that is another topic altogether, although I do seem to remember that once upon a time there were a few credible politicians of all persuasions.
I think this one clearly is for freight, but I can't imagine that in any civilised country teh authorities would allow it to be driven without the proper experience.
BTW the theory that the alpha emitter is so dangerous gained attention about 1969 (can't remember the author) but it got conveniently ignored, but seems to be regaining favour, as the only reason for a number of tragic deaths.
Now there is a military manual about radiation, which can be legally purchased by anyone in the UK. Can't remember the title, but it more or less says in the first chapter that there is no military application for alpha radiation, then goes on to show that beta and gamma have their uses. The author, who was a complete incompetent of the dangerous kind, gave the impression that because alpha radiation will not penetrate human skin (true, or almost so), that it was safe (very untrue, he ignored ingestion or inhalation completely). This has led to a number of incidents which probably have harmed soldiers in training, and may have endangered the public, becuase this book is till used by the military, in setting up training exercises where they scatter some radioactive material about.
Polonium is much worse that plutonium in this regard, having a much shorter half-life it emits many more alpha particles. Now I know that in teh US, polonium was sold as part of anti-static devices for record players at one time (maybe it still is). A similar thing was purchased here in the UK, from the US, some years ago as part of some laboratoty equipment. It was duly reported to the safety officer, who contacted the nuclear authorities, and it was immediately removed for safe disposal. I draw my own conclusions.....
It follows that if a scumbag terrorist was to make the worst sort of dirty bomb, he could use an alpha emitter, which would be undetectable inside the very lightest shielding, and design it in such a way that it released as many small airborne particles as possible. The deaths would probably start within a year, and continue for a generation, and the cleanup would be very difficult indeed, because you have go get right on top of an alpha emitter with your detecting equipment to find it.
This is because coal contains trace amounts of these elements, which are not in the form of particles, but are more likely distributed as individual atoms in individual molecules, maybe combined with carbon, certainly oxygen, and other elements. No known technology can take individual molecules of, say, uranium oxide, out of a chimney.
Now this release of radionucleides has been going on since serious use of coal began around 1600-1700.
Interestingly enough, in the UK there is often controversy over so-called leukaemia clusters, now these cases are tragic, but it is alleged that they are due to the nuclear industry, however close inspection shows that every single such cluster, with one exception, is in an area close to or downwind of a large coal-burning plant which either still exists, or was in use relatively recently. Some of these plants were lead smelters, which adds more uranium and other toxic elements. The one exception that I know of, where no industrial presence can be seen, is in Cornwall, around the village of Tintagel, and it is hardly surprising, because the local children no doubt play on their nice beach, and behind the beach are sea caves, with uranium compounds leaching out of the rocks. There will also be a high concentration of radon gas in such places, it mainly causes lung cancer by depositing daughter products in the lungs, but some of the daughter products may indeed cause leukaemia, and may be ingested in other ways.
At a guess, I would say that similar conditions of radiation release due to coal burning, and the extraction of certain other minerals, will be found worldwide, as presumably volcanic activity had released lots of radionucleides into the atmosphere during the carbiniferous era, which would eventually have found their way into the vegetation, and hence the coal.
In one particular part of the UK, when germanium transistors were in fashion, soot from factory chimneys was collected because it was rich in germanium, I think you will find that other elements (certainly selenium, which is toxic and carcinogenic, and also cadmium) can be found in significant quantities in some geographic regions.
So, coal burning will release radioactive, toxic and carcinogenic substances, fortunately not plutonium of course, although in theory an occasional atom might be formed by natural processes. After all, there are these odd atoms of uranium embedded in the moderator, coal instead of pure graphite, so there is the remote chance that a neutron from a fissioning uranium atom might be slowed by the coal, and captured by another uranium atom. But the yield would be incredibly low.
But lunatics, sorry, military, were running the show, and quite frankly the way you hear some of these people, or their political masters, talk makes me thing that the cretin Dubya is a super-genius. But it does look as if some of those who knew of the scale of the problem should have been trying hard for 50 years to communicate it to higher authority. Politicians will tend to leave everything difficult for the next governemt to deal with, if they can get away with it, which seems to have happened here for many political generations. They should have been put on the spot by public exposure, and forced to act, long ago.
If a non-profit corporation or government agency was tasked with running nuclear power production, it could be made very safe indeed. It is only when there are pressures to cut corners in order to achieve output, and therefore profit, that most types of avoidable accident tend to happen, and that is true in most other industries also.
Software patents would have killed progress than, as they are doing now.
After all, most of the software patents that seem to be granted are for things where there has been lots of prior art, this would be no exception if it was submitted to the overworked USPTO.
No, Sir Bill has already arranged that.......
Without broadband, and on a modem with a 2 hour limit, as most of the world has to put up with, not a sinle Linux distro is upgradeable with large patches, as often needed for security. I know, I have tried them all, and those I have paid good money for, such as Redf Hat, SuSe and Xandros, did not even bother to acknowledge my bug reports. It is utterly stupid, they have things like wget that can resume transfers but either they don't have that capability on the servers or their rotten update programs have been designed by a committee of idiots, as obviously was RPM. In the case of SuSE, Yast has now gone under GPL, but that is of zero help because there are masses of marginally commented files and it is not at all clear how it is supposed to work, otherwise I am so mad at it that I might try to fix it myself (says he as he nearly smashes his keyboard by pounding too hard....)I am mad about this, it has been going on for far too long, with insanely big patches like 130MB for a stupid binary kernel patch. These distros deserve to fade into oblivion, even the incompetent scumbags in Redmond can do better than that.
I have not tried major updates to BSD yet, hopefully it will be better, as presumably source patches are used, but the user interface is a total disaster, i.e. there is not one.....
As I keep saying, people with the expertise need to urgently turn their attention to basic useability things like this, or the Criminal Monopoly will deserve to wipe out FOSS, by actually having given more consideration to his customers. For instance, why has FreeBSD (which I like) not got a decent installer, such that a fairly fast worker like me still takes 6 hours to make package selections? can't they be grouped, and also take info from the previous config as a starting point? Even YaST manages that.
Come on developers, realise that everyone needs to apply patches, not 10% of users worldwide have broadband, the remaining 90% or so are living with bugs and security holes because you can't be bothered to attend to detail.
This is sure to attract flames, but jsut think about what I have said first, and if you can fix some of these things, or tell me how to fix them, please do. Lots of people including myself will be very grateful.
The simple answer is that it will die, and quite soon now.
Anyway, the well-developed art of the signaller is to keep it all on the move, and try to keep it all running to schedule, and that is done by making sensible real-time decisions about what will be held and what can proceed. Except in a dire emergency, such as a derailment, a train will never have to make an emergency stop because of something ahead, when the signal is cleared, that means exactly that, the route is cleared to the next signal (not at all like traffic lights, which will change to red as you approach). There are different speed limits for different classes of train to allow for stopping distances, the drivers are highly competent and know where the signals are, so they know when they may have to stop, and if for example they have a yellow signal, they know that the next one may be red, and can reduce speed accordingly.
The instances of stopped passenger trains being wiped out by following heavy goods trains are extremely rare, in fact I can't find records of one at all, the nearest was a sideswipe at the end of a loop when one train over-ran, largely due to frozen mechanical signalling equipment IIRC, and that was about 50 years ago. Oh, and maybe there was the braking problem at Shrewsbury, when a train of oil tanks ran out of control into the bay platform where an empty passenger train was standing, and wiped it out. It is surprising, but that is in no way one of the common types of accident, on a dense and overcrowded network like the UK.
One night on my way home, I was duly annoyed when a long, slow freight train was let out of the yard ahead of us, we were stopped maybe 3 minutes. But it was going non-stop (if possible) on a long journey, our train had about 15 stops so the freight would have been well on its way, at 60mph, before our second or third stop, rather than running behind and having to stop at every signal. On thinking about it, it was clear that the signaller did make the right decision.
So, in that instance, they did not run the freight immediately behind the passenger train, the expert made a real-time decision not to, but he would have been within his rights, and would not have been criticised by anyone if he had done the opposite. But, the freight would still have braked to a stop at every preceding signal, or the driver would deliberately set his speed so the signals were just changing from red to yellow as he approached, so he could keep it rolling. Either way, he would get nowhere near the passenger train. The signallers actions achiebed overall efficiency, they had no bearing whatsoever on safety, he could have run all the trains that night in any order he wished.... (but some possible sequences would have attracted complaints from the train operating companies, who might have had to pay compensation to passengers for being too late!)
The art of making it all run well in real time, despite various snags, is quite impressive, but without that expertise, the signalling systems will still enforce safe separation, and it generally takes a double human error, or maybe a rare equipment failure and a human error, to defeat that.
BTW they would have enforced double-block working for a nuclear train for example, or a Royal Train, or lots of other t
The very well developed systems of railway signalling in most civilised parts of the world do not allow this sort of thing, for good reason!
AFAIK your trains, and buses, are driven in the main by sensible people (leaving out the idiot who stopped the bus across the railway crossing, there is always one....), and new employees would be recruited and trained for something new anyway. I think with suitable people employed, your objections would be completely unfounded, anyway in the UK we do it differently. There has been very little problem recruiting tram drivers for the several recent schemes, AFAIK many of them were bus drivers, and are fully conversant with on and off street driving. I imagine the locomotive drivers union ASLEF would be trying to negotiate fancy salaries for doing two jobs, as they are entitled to try, but that is about as far as staffing problems would go.
And as regards safety, you are 20 times safer on rail than on road, based on UK figures. With your terrible carnage on the roads in the US, caused in the main by inadequate driver education (part of the problem you no doubt correctly identify with truckers), you may even be 100 times safer on rail, or it may only be 5 times, if your railways are not up to scratch, but there is no way that you could be less safe on rail than on road, that sitiuation has never been achieved anywhere in the world.
And talking of Adelaide, the Glenelg tram was much more fun, I hope it is still running. Proper trams, on proper track, with a mixture of on-street and off-street running. Prehistoric, but with ancient technology still very efficient.
Recent UK systems have been done on this basis, they mostly work very well indeed, and attract a lot of passengers.
It is fairly disruptive to run track down a street, lots of services have to be relocated, earth mats put in to prevent electrolytic corrosion (assuming DC power is used), supports provided for the overhead wires, and so on, but it is not impossible, as has been proven in Manchester, Croydon, Sheffield, Nottingham, Wolverhampton (that one not so good), and shortly Edinburgh and a few more. It is also a good excuse to replace things that have not been seen for maybe 100 years, such as ancient, corroding water pipes, give the street a nice new surface, and generally tidy up the environment.
All the UK systems installed in the last 10 to 15 years have been based largely on old railway tracks, with street running where appropriate, and I am sure this would work in your area. Speeds are typically 80kph/50mph on "rail" and 50kph/30mph on "street", suitable vehicles could go a lot faster on rail sections if justified by distance between stops.
But the concept works very well indeed in the Channel Tunnel, which continues to lose money at an ever-increasing rate......
If you can get the weight down, while maintaining end loading requirements for safety and to avoid damage during routine shunting (200 tonnes IIRC, maybe a lot less if you will only ever be coupling up to, shunting or running amongst lighter vehicles than a standard train), and find a way of safely anchoring the cars in place, it would be viable again.
The other way is to couple cars together into road trains, so the whole group of maybe 50 or 100 would occupy much less road space than individually, but some technological breakthroughs would be needed to make such a thing safe, and prevent abuse, such as some people turning off their engines, and others paying the fuel bill. Now, a burst tyre within the train would not be immediately disastrous, the adjacent vehicles would hold the one with the burst tyre in line, but there would have to be means of stopping the whole train when that happened, by signalling the driver at the front, so the defective car could be uncoupled, But a burst tyre on the leading vehicle might cause a huge catastrophe. Issues of steering and so on are also quite tricky.....
But I hope someone solves these problems too, there is the potential for another workable concept somewhere.
Other things such as automatic guidance of road vehicles should not even be considered with technology likely to be available in the next 20 years, every possible method has so many failure modes of significant probability of occurrence that they would cause a major escalation of the accident rate even if deployed only on a small scale.
If using rail, the safest option, I wonder if it might be possible to avoid carrying the considerable weight of rail wheels while on the road, and only pick them up at the station? It hardly matters on a lorry, but on a car it would be very significant, and on a bus still quite significant. It somehow makes me think of a certain German aircraft that dropped its undercarriage on takeoff, to save weight, but I am sure competent mechanical engineers could come up with something more practicable.
If instead of being short-sighted and closed many branch lines in the early 1960's, a certain Dr. Beeching had looked to the almost immediate future, things could be very different now. It was possible with 1950 or earlier technology, you do not need electronics or software to make things like this work, as has been well demonstrated in the past. With modern engines and so on, microprocessor controlled of course, the environmemntal benefits improve dramatically, the economics slightly.
This should succeed, at least in a limited range of applications. The most obvious is where coal is brought from open-cast sites by road, and transferred to rail for its final journey to the power station. One place in the UK (Kincardine), the final rail journey of 2 miles to Longannett power station is only so the lorries don't pass through the village, the road part of the journey is variable up to 10 miles or so. The coal is dumped in a heap in the yard of an obsolete power station, once or twice a week a train comes along, a digger shovels the coal from the heap into wagons, which takes at least a day, and the train trundles slowly along to the power station. Now, if the lorry simply drove into the yard, set itself on the track, and drove direct to the power station, costs would clearly be saved. And, as the continuation of this particular piece of railway has just been approved for re-opening for through freight services, and passengers over part of the route, it might be feasible to bring in the cola from other more remote opencast sites in the same way.
I wish them every success with this redevelopment of a very old idea.
Time for a well thought out system (not RPM!) that can work with data in small chunks, and control redialling etc, as well as doing source patching to reduce the amount of download needed each time. Mostly, BSD does this, with each package having its own makefile etc. But a decent user interface is, for now, sadly lacking. The download issue should be fixable by basing it around wget or one of the variants, curl and so on. The user interface needs to show, both in GUI and text mode, a list of what is installed, with upgrade options available (such as YaST tries to do), so the average user, or the experienced user with little time to mess about, only has to rattle a few keys or click the mouse a couple of times, not mess about wasting time typing in great long package names and version strings in a plethora of formats.......
Someone please fix it!
Yes, and some methods of security can turn into unmitigated disasters when something goes wrong and you dont have a root capability to get access to fix it. It is always necessary to balance security against reliability and maintainability, and ideally maximise them all, a tall order with present-day technology.
There is one big difference, you don't get so mauch feature and application bloat with OpenBSD as you get with a typical Linux distro. True, you don't need to install it all, and FreeBSD seems to have even more......
Packaged up properly, OpenBSD could be the basis of a decent desktop OS, but Theo, who mostly runs the show, is fully occupied, and rightly so IMHO, with security issues, and things related to servers. But, as it is BSD licensed, the opportunity is there for anyone who wants to do it. What about a Blue Hat or a LuCY, or maybe a Tightware, or a WomanDuck? In fact I am surprised that no-one, apart from a few small businesses who supply "distros" has done much with FreeBSD or NetBSD either.
The guy that found this did everyone a big favour and ought to be congratulated, but sadly the spammers will be doing the same.
Come on, you people with mod points to use, these are good reports, they deserve to be modded up, and up, and up.......