So you mean that photograph retouching did not exist until Adobe implemented Photoshop?
It wasn't exactly retouching. More like pre touching. Smearing the lens with Vaseline or putting a thin nylon stocking over the lens (both accepted pre Photoshop techniques) were somehow different.
The author is astonishingly remiss in not asking the obvious question: did this just start? It could be that such methane plumes have existed forever, we just never detected them. This is the EIGHTH such cruise/survey. They should be able to conclusively say "we checked this area in at least one or two previous instances and such seeps weren't observed", no?
It seems logical that there must have been plumes like this for a while, to prompt (and justify) such a large-scale survey.
Yet both the scientists and article author seem to gloss over the fact that "never seen before" != "never happened before".
The team was prompted to go look after numerous boat captains, who have sailed in those waters for years, noted something new and further noted a number of instances of said new process. If you would have bothered to read TFA, this would have been apparent. Further, TFA noted that methane torches have been noted for some time, just not on this scale.
Perhaps (crazy talk around here, I know) the free market might be able to do something about this now apparently abundant resource?
Natural gas (methane and others) is currently being flared off hundreds of drilling rigs because it's not 'economical' (ie, the free market can't figure out how to do it). Now, that is in a place with drilling rigs and other infrastructure and "all" they need to do is collect the stuff, stick it in a pipe and send it to market.
At current natural gas prices, it's a no-go.
Now, lets take a diffuse, dilute methane torch, perhaps 20 meters in diameter. This particular deposit, like the others found, is in Northern Siberia, and in fact, off the coast of Northern Siberia. A place not noted for high concentrations of industrial infrastructure. So, you have to drag everything needed to collect and process the gas to the middle of nowhere. That's rather expensive.
Nope, your happy little 'free market' isn't going to solve this particular problem.
I was wondering the same thing. I don't have Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, or Google+. I can't think of any others off hand but I'm sure I don't have them either.
They'll look at your Slashdot postings and offer you a bitcoin loan.
The whole point of the ISS is to develop techniques for long term manned presence in space. Just sitting there staring out the porthole goes a long way to doing that. You don't need to do 'science'. Learning what materials work and don't work, how to fix things (a biggy), how to build things, the boring mechanics of just supplying the thing for years and keeping the crew sane - that's important.
The Russians are apparently fond of space rated duct tape for repairs. A 3D printer that was space rated could be useful (maybe yes, maybe no) but the engineering required to get it working in Zero G without poisoning the crew is very much non trivial. And something that should be done.
If you think that fully functional 3D printers are going to autoland on Mars with the ability to crank out everything from a spoon to a high pressure valve, well, you've been reading too much Kim Stanley Robinson. Baby steps people, baby steps.
It took one of the worst Earth Quakes immediately followed by one of the worst Tsunamis in modern history to take down a 40 year old nuclear plant via a flaw found and reported 35 years ago (but never corrected). Like it or not, nuclear energy has come a long way and is pretty damn safe.
Don't like that the flaw wasn't fixed or how the accident unfolded... but I admire how tough that facility was engineered.
No, the point is that a first world country that presumably was on the cutting edge of nuclear power engineering couldn't arse itself to fix critical flaws found over the course of four decades (and there was more than one of them) because of economics, graft, sloth or whatever. That makes nuclear power realistically unsafe. Further, it s not like TEPCO or the Japanese government have had major changes in how they do things. It's not like the NRC in the US has done more than reshuffle some pages in their manuals and go stare at the plants again.
Nuclear power by first gen technologies isn't safe enough to let the current level of government supervision and private corporation technical ability to manage the risk. Unless there is a concerted and effective effort to change the regulatory and technical infrastructure AND until there is enough real life experience with the newer and presumably safer reactor technologies, nuclear power is dead in the water.
Currently Toshiba, together with its Westinghouse subsidiary, is in the preliminary design review stage of the Design Certification process before the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission (USNRC).[6] Application for certification of the design is currently planned for 2012 when the standardized Design Certification application will be filed for the 4S. The most recent meeting with the NRC took place on August 8, 2008, at which time the NRC's staff met with representatives of Toshiba and Westinghouse for a pre-application presentation of a Phenomena Identification and Ranking Table (PIRT) for the Toshiba 4S (Super-Safe, Small and Simple) reactor. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory recently released an interesting study on the Toshiba 4S design, which provides an overview of the 4S design and suggests that certain goals may be easier to meet if lead is used as the coolant rather than sodium, due to lead's high transparency to neutrons and low transparency to gamma radiation, though lead has a higher melting point than sodium does.[7]
If nobody has yet got the money or balls to actually build one before siting it in the Middle of Fucking Nowhere, maybe we need to rethink things. Yeah, the design is safe and all that but things don't always go exactly as planned. The advantage of a major screwup in Galena, AK is that nobody would ever know about it. The disadvantage is going to be if you have to get some engineering expertise and equipment there in the winter you'd best hope it fits on a dog sled or a twin Otter.
I would think that either the government of Japan or the US or at least Toshiba could pony up the money for a prototype somewhere sane.....
Greenpeace will probably fly in some protesters when construction starts, but the locals won't be too friendly to these strangers threatening their livelihood.
Here in Alaska, all you need is a small game license and you're good to go and collect some Greenpeaces. No seasons, no limit. The big problem is that it's hard to figure out what to do with them. You wouldn't want to cook them - tough and stringy, by and large. They look pretty bad mounted on the wall. The pelts aren't much use either.
So mostly we throw rocks at them and hope they go away. Kinda like crows.
A friend of mine was interning for a company that did a lot of work with these about 10-11 years ago. He was saying they were the big thing, back then. Lower risk, easy to setup/install, cheap due to mass production. Of course, he was stating they they wouldn't go above 100MW., which is a bit of a difference.
Anyway, I'm surprised it's taken this long for them to see the feasibility in the idea. It really does make a lot of sense.
And Toshiba has been trying to get it's small, modular 4S reactors sited in nowhere Alaska for decades and hasn't been able to do it. Not gonna happen.
The only way for this to work is, as mentioned in TFA, have the US government buy a bunch and test them out. Seems actually a fairly reasonable idea - the military has need of off grid power in odd places, has built in technical and security forces that should allow for safe evaluation of the reactors, has the money to do this. So, if this has been true for at least a decade, what's the problem? Whatcouldpossiblygowrong?
Interesting. Seems like it would be faster / easier to re engine a 747 then to create an entirely new aircraft. Maybe they could duct tape the tail end of an L1011 to the forward fuselage of a 747. That puppy ought to move.
If you drive slowly enough, you'll have time to make course corrections and react to hazards in a timely manner even while multitasking.
So YOU'RE the clown driving 35 MPH down the freeway. I'm glad you have time to think about everything that's going on, but next time, how about letting Grandma drive?
The same goes for phone usage. Texting and non-handsfree are logical. Some of the laws are silly, though. For example, hitting the Siri button on an iPhone is presumed to be illegal in California, even though it requires no undue attention being taken off the road.
Siri is actually a very bad example. You have to look at the screen to see if the idiot AI did what you wanted. You have to concentrate on what to say to said idiot AI. Much of the time you have to correct idiot AI. I've played with Siri in the car - for anything not absolutely trivial, it takes less brain cycles and concentration to type it directly into the phone.
I don't know that this is what the GP is referring to, but I see police talking on their cell phones (not their radios) while driving on a regular basis.
OTOH, the rest of your post seems pretty angry in general, so maybe your post isn't really so much about phones and radios....
And accident rates by on duty policeman are actually pretty high. Not terribly surprising given that what they do is inherently dangerous (donuts kill!). It's a risk benefit thing. Presumably, the careful police officer is discussing important business whilst driving, not telling his GF that she can't cook worth a damn.
Considering that the crown of their air force is a copy of a plane the US developed in 1961 I doubt that they can clone the most advanced drone we have.
Considering that most of the technology in that drone is probably barely more sophisticated than 1960s aviation tech, and most of the interesting stuff is just software, I suspect they could. It's not as though we're talking about an F-22 here, it's a computer flying a pretty basic aircraft with some satellite comms.
Careful, they might just put some floats on it and make it even scarier than these bad puppies
Slashdot Mirror
My God.
We're talking about makeup on Slashdot.
If there was any better indication that we are heading toward the End of Days, I don't know what it is.
what part of "self-regulating" didn't you understand?
Give him a break. He's young. Probably never had to use Metamucil.
So you mean that photograph retouching did not exist until Adobe implemented Photoshop?
It wasn't exactly retouching. More like pre touching. Smearing the lens with Vaseline or putting a thin nylon stocking over the lens (both accepted pre Photoshop techniques) were somehow different.
The author is astonishingly remiss in not asking the obvious question: did this just start? It could be that such methane plumes have existed forever, we just never detected them. This is the EIGHTH such cruise/survey. They should be able to conclusively say "we checked this area in at least one or two previous instances and such seeps weren't observed", no?
It seems logical that there must have been plumes like this for a while, to prompt (and justify) such a large-scale survey.
Yet both the scientists and article author seem to gloss over the fact that "never seen before" != "never happened before".
The team was prompted to go look after numerous boat captains, who have sailed in those waters for years, noted something new and further noted a number of instances of said new process. If you would have bothered to read TFA, this would have been apparent. Further, TFA noted that methane torches have been noted for some time, just not on this scale.
Perhaps (crazy talk around here, I know) the free market might be able to do something about this now apparently abundant resource?
Natural gas (methane and others) is currently being flared off hundreds of drilling rigs because it's not 'economical' (ie, the free market can't figure out how to do it). Now, that is in a place with drilling rigs and other infrastructure and "all" they need to do is collect the stuff, stick it in a pipe and send it to market.
At current natural gas prices, it's a no-go.
Now, lets take a diffuse, dilute methane torch, perhaps 20 meters in diameter. This particular deposit, like the others found, is in Northern Siberia, and in fact, off the coast of Northern Siberia. A place not noted for high concentrations of industrial infrastructure. So, you have to drag everything needed to collect and process the gas to the middle of nowhere. That's rather expensive.
Nope, your happy little 'free market' isn't going to solve this particular problem.
You mean Asus Transformer?
No, Samsung has quit trying to copy Apple. They're going after Asus now - maybe they believe they're less likely to sue their pant off.. /Cheap Shot
That one was (presumably) landing. Landing crashes with UAV's aren't all that uncommon.
I was wondering the same thing. I don't have Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, or Google+. I can't think of any others off hand but I'm sure I don't have them either.
They'll look at your Slashdot postings and offer you a bitcoin loan.
Microsoft won't be the ones getting the angry customer phone calls. The devs of broken, backwards web apps will.
Now, is that a feature, or a bug?
Not to mention driving on the wrong side of the road.
And Vegemite.
The whole point of the ISS is to develop techniques for long term manned presence in space. Just sitting there staring out the porthole goes a long way to doing that. You don't need to do 'science'. Learning what materials work and don't work, how to fix things (a biggy), how to build things, the boring mechanics of just supplying the thing for years and keeping the crew sane - that's important.
The Russians are apparently fond of space rated duct tape for repairs. A 3D printer that was space rated could be useful (maybe yes, maybe no) but the engineering required to get it working in Zero G without poisoning the crew is very much non trivial. And something that should be done.
If you think that fully functional 3D printers are going to autoland on Mars with the ability to crank out everything from a spoon to a high pressure valve, well, you've been reading too much Kim Stanley Robinson. Baby steps people, baby steps.
It took one of the worst Earth Quakes immediately followed by one of the worst Tsunamis in modern history to take down a 40 year old nuclear plant via a flaw found and reported 35 years ago (but never corrected). Like it or not, nuclear energy has come a long way and is pretty damn safe.
Don't like that the flaw wasn't fixed or how the accident unfolded ... but I admire how tough that facility was engineered.
No, the point is that a first world country that presumably was on the cutting edge of nuclear power engineering couldn't arse itself to fix critical flaws found over the course of four decades (and there was more than one of them) because of economics, graft, sloth or whatever. That makes nuclear power realistically unsafe. Further, it
s not like TEPCO or the Japanese government have had major changes in how they do things. It's not like the NRC in the US has done more than reshuffle some pages in their manuals and go stare at the plants again.
Nuclear power by first gen technologies isn't safe enough to let the current level of government supervision and private corporation technical ability to manage the risk. Unless there is a concerted and effective effort to change the regulatory and technical infrastructure AND until there is enough real life experience with the newer and presumably safer reactor technologies, nuclear power is dead in the water.
You forgot "and it's pretty much vaporware", never having been tested or proven in hardware.
Exactly this:
Currently Toshiba, together with its Westinghouse subsidiary, is in the preliminary design review stage of the Design Certification process before the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission (USNRC).[6] Application for certification of the design is currently planned for 2012 when the standardized Design Certification application will be filed for the 4S. The most recent meeting with the NRC took place on August 8, 2008, at which time the NRC's staff met with representatives of Toshiba and Westinghouse for a pre-application presentation of a Phenomena Identification and Ranking Table (PIRT) for the Toshiba 4S (Super-Safe, Small and Simple) reactor. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory recently released an interesting study on the Toshiba 4S design, which provides an overview of the 4S design and suggests that certain goals may be easier to meet if lead is used as the coolant rather than sodium, due to lead's high transparency to neutrons and low transparency to gamma radiation, though lead has a higher melting point than sodium does.[7]
If nobody has yet got the money or balls to actually build one before siting it in the Middle of Fucking Nowhere, maybe we need to rethink things. Yeah, the design is safe and all that but things don't always go exactly as planned. The advantage of a major screwup in Galena, AK is that nobody would ever know about it. The disadvantage is going to be if you have to get some engineering expertise and equipment there in the winter you'd best hope it fits on a dog sled or a twin Otter.
I would think that either the government of Japan or the US or at least Toshiba could pony up the money for a prototype somewhere sane.....
Greenpeace will probably fly in some protesters when construction starts, but the locals won't be too friendly to these strangers threatening their livelihood.
Here in Alaska, all you need is a small game license and you're good to go and collect some Greenpeaces. No seasons, no limit. The big problem is that it's hard to figure out what to do with them. You wouldn't want to cook them - tough and stringy, by and large. They look pretty bad mounted on the wall. The pelts aren't much use either.
So mostly we throw rocks at them and hope they go away. Kinda like crows.
A friend of mine was interning for a company that did a lot of work with these about 10-11 years ago. He was saying they were the big thing, back then. Lower risk, easy to setup/install, cheap due to mass production. Of course, he was stating they they wouldn't go above 100MW., which is a bit of a difference.
Anyway, I'm surprised it's taken this long for them to see the feasibility in the idea. It really does make a lot of sense.
And Toshiba has been trying to get it's small, modular 4S reactors sited in nowhere Alaska for decades and hasn't been able to do it. Not gonna happen.
The only way for this to work is, as mentioned in TFA, have the US government buy a bunch and test them out. Seems actually a fairly reasonable idea - the military has need of off grid power in odd places, has built in technical and security forces that should allow for safe evaluation of the reactors, has the money to do this. So, if this has been true for at least a decade, what's the problem? Whatcouldpossiblygowrong?
I try to interpret everything exactly as it says.
This has to be one of the most nonsensical statements in the entire thread..
Congrats. You should win a couple of Internets.
Maybe THIS is the cause of global warming? Sure looks like a smoking gun to me.
The only thing that is smoking is the joint you're holding on to. Time to put it down for a while.
Interesting. Seems like it would be faster / easier to re engine a 747 then to create an entirely new aircraft. Maybe they could duct tape the tail end of an L1011 to the forward fuselage of a 747. That puppy ought to move.
If you drive slowly enough, you'll have time to make course corrections and react to hazards in a timely manner even while multitasking.
So YOU'RE the clown driving 35 MPH down the freeway. I'm glad you have time to think about everything that's going on, but next time, how about letting Grandma drive?
The same goes for phone usage. Texting and non-handsfree are logical. Some of the laws are silly, though. For example, hitting the Siri button on an iPhone is presumed to be illegal in California, even though it requires no undue attention being taken off the road.
Siri is actually a very bad example. You have to look at the screen to see if the idiot AI did what you wanted. You have to concentrate on what to say to said idiot AI. Much of the time you have to correct idiot AI. I've played with Siri in the car - for anything not absolutely trivial, it takes less brain cycles and concentration to type it directly into the phone.
I don't know that this is what the GP is referring to, but I see police talking on their cell phones (not their radios) while driving on a regular basis.
OTOH, the rest of your post seems pretty angry in general, so maybe your post isn't really so much about phones and radios....
And accident rates by on duty policeman are actually pretty high. Not terribly surprising given that what they do is inherently dangerous (donuts kill!). It's a risk benefit thing. Presumably, the careful police officer is discussing important business whilst driving, not telling his GF that she can't cook worth a damn.
I bet they could make them cheaper than Lockheed Martin. Might work out for us in the end.
+5 Irony points if they can get Foxconn to build it for them.
Considering that the crown of their air force is a copy of a plane the US developed in 1961 I doubt that they can clone the most advanced drone we have.
Considering that most of the technology in that drone is probably barely more sophisticated than 1960s aviation tech, and most of the interesting stuff is just software, I suspect they could. It's not as though we're talking about an F-22 here, it's a computer flying a pretty basic aircraft with some satellite comms.
Careful, they might just put some floats on it and make it even scarier than these bad puppies
It doesn't have to self-destruct at an explosive level, just fry all the electronics and you're good.
And we don't know if this didn't happen. 'Course, as usual, we don't know much at all about what really happened.
This is just a test but, i will send 5$ to anyone o mod me up until i reach +5 informative.
Nobody is buying it. Try bitcoins instead - a different demographic.