There are two things that are really worrisome to me. First is the power that individual senators have over NASA....
The second thing that worries me is this whole concept of riders....
Exactly. This is the sort of sausage politics that gets everyone nowhere. Even though the committees do have to vote to get these idiot concepts on the bill and the bill has to be cleared by both houses (and often gets further amended) the practice of putting in bits that have nothing to do with the original bill really should just be banned. Unfortunately, everybody does it so no one is particularly interested in stopping the practice.
Things change. We also fought wars against Britain, Spain, put Saddam in power etc... If the Chinese truly wish to advance science we should clearly be working with them scientifically. If they want to steal secrets now to screw us in 10 years then we shouldn't be working with them. And if this policy is truly a disaster put in place by "teh TeaBaggerz" then we'll get it sorted out during the vote on the debt ceiling...or the next presidential race...or whenever.
True enough. And this is just one paragraph stuck in a completely orthogonal bill that can be nullified by another paragraph in another irrelevant bill. I hate when they do that but it's mostly a tale told by an idiot, full of sound an fury, signifying nothing.
I already copied my favorite tunes to my Android phone and, since I carry it with me everywhere, I already have convenient access to my music wherever I am -- even if I don't have a 3G signal. Why would I want to move those files from my SD card to the cloud? So I can experience the frustration that goes with not getting a 3G signal at my work nor at my home? F that.
You're walking quickly along the city street. A bus veers off and runs over you, causing serious injury and turning your phone into a bunch of dust. You are transferred to the local ER and saved (at no small expense, this is the US) by the dedicated hospital staff. You are upstairs on the ward with a morphine drip in your arm, dazed and confused. You look around for your trusty phone. It's gone. You wonder what to do - the only other source of distraction is your 88 year old demented roommate who has his television on QVC and cranked to volume 11.
A friendly nurse offers to lend you her laptop but all she has on it is Brittney Spears and some weird heavy metal from the '80s that makes your head pound even worse. It does have a 3G connection.
Now do you see why you need this service? Think of the edge cases, man!
Firstly a nice link to the Geology of the Marcellus formation. Secondly, just because the formation is deep doesn't mean there are not local and distant lines of communication. Although the well bores are cased (lined to prevent leakage) there have been problems with the casing (think Macodona blow out). And as you note, quite a bit of the pollution from fracking has come from operators dumping waste incorrectly and just being sloppy.
But even if it's done 'correctly' ALL OF THE TIME - an unlikely proposition - it's not at all clear that you will not get migration of Nasty Things into the water supply. The underground geology of water is a very imperfectly understood field.
Naw, Drudgereport has been the same since before mobile browsers. It really hasn't changed layout wise since 1996.
They must have gotten a really good deal on their monospaced font. Probably just stole it out of an old Linotype machine and never bothered to upgrade.
If you're new to the site, it can be a bit overwhelming, I'll admit. However, for a vet like me (And you have no idea how much it hurts to admit that I'm a Fox veteran) the information is right there. I know what to look for and where to go.
No excuse, I know, but again, no scrolling.
So, you're saying that the white space contains information? That's something I had always suspected. Thanks for the confirmation.
Furthermore NO ONE HAS BUILT A FUNCTIONAL, COMMERCIAL LEVEL THORIUM REACTOR yet.
Functional, yes. Commercial no. But considering that no one has tried that's not saying much.
Actually, it says quite a bit in the context of this discussion. Thorium cycle reactors are not ready to replace uranium cycle reactors. And given the long lead times for nuc plant siting, design and construction that means that thorium isn't a near term (10 - 30 year) answer. Now, should we be working on thorium designs (as well as CANDU, breeders, pebble beds and other modern designs), sure. But you can't use the argument that 'thorium can replace uranium until you get a least a couple of systems on line for a while.
Consider the problems with pebble beds - theoretically they are quite safe and efficient. Should be able to breed Unicorns from them - at the very least gets some pixie dust. But when they've been tried commercially they have had enormous problems and most of them have been shut down (go look it up, I'm too lazy at present). IMHO, the biggest problem that we've had with nuclear is that the technology is so big and costly that we've frozen engineering way long ago and really aren't doing a whole lot of basic development. Hopefully the Chinese will fix that problem, hopefully without creating additional problems.
And then there is the political problem. Don't discount that (as we tend to do here). It's real. And it's ugly.
Compared to the reactor pressure vessel, the spent fuel rods are a waste of effort. A plane could crash into the building and compromise the spent fuel rod pool, but even if cooling was compromised (unlikely), there'd be loads of time to deal with it. Fukushima was different because they lost external power, which wasn't "supposed" to happen (the grid, generators, and battery backups).
It's Quite a bit more complex than that. TL;DR - while the executive summary of the PDF I cite states that spent fuel storage accidents are 'unlikely', it freely admits that this is critically dependent on a number of assumptions that, as we've seen at Fukishima, can be shown to be very, very wrong. Further, the article doesn't seem to discuss the tendency to stack fuel in tighter concentrations that originally planned (as happened at Fukishima) but I didn't read the whole thing.
As for any claim that Thorium is some magic pixy dust that prevents all forms of nuclear accident.... pah.
Furthermore NO ONE HAS BUILT A FUNCTIONAL, COMMERCIAL LEVEL THORIUM REACTOR yet. Apparently, India is working on one. Not terribly bright to pin your hopes on a glowing Unicorn.
I know you're not very bright, even for a bot - but I think you're barking up the wrong tree. You might want to go back to the Viagra stuff. Or maybe Rhogaine.
TL;DR in my country, religious zealots and enforced morality codes forbid University students from accessing pornographic and other controversial materials even in their own dorm rooms. Can you guess which modernized first nation I live in?
You are volunteering to take on anonymous traffic, not "high-risk" traffic. There is a very big difference. In effect, you are serving as a "common carrier", and you enjoy the same legal protections as any ISP. In other words, you are only carrying traffic, you are not looking at it in any way, or even accessing it, much less altering it, yourself. You are only a relay. You have nothing to do with the actual content, so you cannot be held liable for that content.
That statement is very much open to debate. I would further argue that westlake's legal budget is significantly lower than TIme Warner, AOL or Comcast's.
Yeah, and some times they are your spouses or your colleagues at work or your boss or your neighbor or anybody, where do you think politicians come from? Space?
It does explain a few things. However, the theory that politicians form spontaneously from poorly composted horse manure fits the data better.
Why is it that slashdot goes so quickly to the patent side of things, yet so many people are not lawyers?
And since when has even the appearance of expertise in any given field been a criteria for posting? That's half the fun, chattering off about stuff that we know little about.
Anyway, I'm dubious. Why mess with a bulky, fragile, comparatively costly solar array? Is fire from wood not hot enough? Is it a matter of you'd have to supply a lot of wood?
The solar array, although bulky and fragile, is pretty low tech. Easy to copy with basically junk yard parts. Sterilization (especially of any quantity of stuff) is very energy intensive. Remember, you have to heat water to the vapor point under pressure - lots of calories involved in the phase change. And wood (or kerosene or charcoal or whatever) IS in short supply in many areas.
The idea behind this sort of device is to get people to do something they haven't been doing - sterilizing medical gear. There are many documented cases of transmission of AIDS, hepatitis and whatever infectious disease you want to mention by well intentioned but poorly trained and supported medical staff. Often the transmission comes from reuse of equipment. Much of the time, it's reuse of something designed to be thrown away (think plastic syringes). These are a real problem since they're cheap and can't be easily sterilized. Certainly you can't autoclave a plastic syringe (successfully). But even for reusable stuff, autoclaving often is a hangup. The sterilizers do use a fair amount of heat and they are often cranky of maintenance. I don't see the magic bullet in the TFA fixing this part of the equation, but it's a reasonable start to the power requirements.
The problem with a generic UV sterilizer is that every surface that you want to sterilize has to be exposed to the UV. The box joint inside a scissor, for example, would not be sterilized. The advantage of the device in TFA is that it presumeably would be easy to build in the field and would not need electricity. A potential issue would be clean water. Running dirty water, or even water with a large amount of dissolved solids (hard water) is rough on sterilizers.
Also, steam sterilization is very well understood and is pretty easy to track. Quality assurance for UV sterilization isn't easy in a low tech society.
I'm pretty sure internet access in the middle of nowhere is quite shitty, and barely serviceable.
Depends, for certain values of 'middle of nowhere', you're probably correct. However, I live in rural Alaska and we have really quite good connectivity. Listening to everyone else in the US complain about their trials and tribulations, we may pay a bit more than along the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis but have similar line speeds. I have a choice of DSL with 3 Mbs down / 512 Kbs up or Cable with 10 down / 1 up (along with dial up for the true traditionalist).
High speed connectivity is the boonies is still in it's infancy and is spotty. Alaska benefited from Saint Ted (Stevens) who would whore out his Senate vote for a couple of bucks, as long as Alaska got it's fair share. It's an ill wind that blows nobody good....
Slashdot Mirror
There are two things that are really worrisome to me. First is the power that individual senators have over NASA. ...
...
The second thing that worries me is this whole concept of riders.
Exactly. This is the sort of sausage politics that gets everyone nowhere. Even though the committees do have to vote to get these idiot concepts on the bill and the bill has to be cleared by both houses (and often gets further amended) the practice of putting in bits that have nothing to do with the original bill really should just be banned. Unfortunately, everybody does it so no one is particularly interested in stopping the practice.
Things change. We also fought wars against Britain, Spain, put Saddam in power etc... If the Chinese truly wish to advance science we should clearly be working with them scientifically. If they want to steal secrets now to screw us in 10 years then we shouldn't be working with them. And if this policy is truly a disaster put in place by "teh TeaBaggerz" then we'll get it sorted out during the vote on the debt ceiling...or the next presidential race...or whenever.
True enough. And this is just one paragraph stuck in a completely orthogonal bill that can be nullified by another paragraph in another irrelevant bill. I hate when they do that but it's mostly a tale told by an idiot, full of sound an fury, signifying nothing.
I already copied my favorite tunes to my Android phone and, since I carry it with me everywhere, I already have convenient access to my music wherever I am -- even if I don't have a 3G signal. Why would I want to move those files from my SD card to the cloud? So I can experience the frustration that goes with not getting a 3G signal at my work nor at my home? F that.
You're walking quickly along the city street. A bus veers off and runs over you, causing serious injury and turning your phone into a bunch of dust. You are transferred to the local ER and saved (at no small expense, this is the US) by the dedicated hospital staff. You are upstairs on the ward with a morphine drip in your arm, dazed and confused. You look around for your trusty phone. It's gone. You wonder what to do - the only other source of distraction is your 88 year old demented roommate who has his television on QVC and cranked to volume 11.
A friendly nurse offers to lend you her laptop but all she has on it is Brittney Spears and some weird heavy metal from the '80s that makes your head pound even worse. It does have a 3G connection.
Now do you see why you need this service? Think of the edge cases, man!
And have declared long-since declared HTML5 not Silverlight as their preferred technology for cross-platform apps.
But, in classic Microsoft Madness, it's going to be a special HTML.
No wonder people are confused.
Firstly a nice link to the Geology of the Marcellus formation. Secondly, just because the formation is deep doesn't mean there are not local and distant lines of communication. Although the well bores are cased (lined to prevent leakage) there have been problems with the casing (think Macodona blow out). And as you note, quite a bit of the pollution from fracking has come from operators dumping waste incorrectly and just being sloppy.
But even if it's done 'correctly' ALL OF THE TIME - an unlikely proposition - it's not at all clear that you will not get migration of Nasty Things into the water supply. The underground geology of water is a very imperfectly understood field.
Naw, Drudgereport has been the same since before mobile browsers. It really hasn't changed layout wise since 1996.
They must have gotten a really good deal on their monospaced font. Probably just stole it out of an old Linotype machine and never bothered to upgrade.
If you're new to the site, it can be a bit overwhelming, I'll admit. However, for a vet like me (And you have no idea how much it hurts to admit that I'm a Fox veteran) the information is right there. I know what to look for and where to go.
No excuse, I know, but again, no scrolling.
So, you're saying that the white space contains information? That's something I had always suspected. Thanks for the confirmation.
Here, try this one.
What Google keywords should I try if I want to learn more about this?
"Tin Foil Hat" should do nicely. You can also try "What happens if I don't take my medication?"
Furthermore NO ONE HAS BUILT A FUNCTIONAL, COMMERCIAL LEVEL THORIUM REACTOR yet.
Functional, yes. Commercial no. But considering that no one has tried that's not saying much.
Actually, it says quite a bit in the context of this discussion. Thorium cycle reactors are not ready to replace uranium cycle reactors. And given the long lead times for nuc plant siting, design and construction that means that thorium isn't a near term (10 - 30 year) answer. Now, should we be working on thorium designs (as well as CANDU, breeders, pebble beds and other modern designs), sure. But you can't use the argument that 'thorium can replace uranium until you get a least a couple of systems on line for a while.
Consider the problems with pebble beds - theoretically they are quite safe and efficient. Should be able to breed Unicorns from them - at the very least gets some pixie dust. But when they've been tried commercially they have had enormous problems and most of them have been shut down (go look it up, I'm too lazy at present). IMHO, the biggest problem that we've had with nuclear is that the technology is so big and costly that we've frozen engineering way long ago and really aren't doing a whole lot of basic development. Hopefully the Chinese will fix that problem, hopefully without creating additional problems.
And then there is the political problem. Don't discount that (as we tend to do here). It's real. And it's ugly.
Compared to the reactor pressure vessel, the spent fuel rods are a waste of effort. A plane could crash into the building and compromise the spent fuel rod pool, but even if cooling was compromised (unlikely), there'd be loads of time to deal with it. Fukushima was different because they lost external power, which wasn't "supposed" to happen (the grid, generators, and battery backups).
It's Quite a bit more complex than that. TL;DR - while the executive summary of the PDF I cite states that spent fuel storage accidents are 'unlikely', it freely admits that this is critically dependent on a number of assumptions that, as we've seen at Fukishima, can be shown to be very, very wrong. Further, the article doesn't seem to discuss the tendency to stack fuel in tighter concentrations that originally planned (as happened at Fukishima) but I didn't read the whole thing.
To your question: Madame Curry invented radioactivity with husband. It killed them both.
Could you tell the assembled audience just exactly where you went to school? We'd like to carpet bomb the region. For the planet's sake.
As for any claim that Thorium is some magic pixy dust that prevents all forms of nuclear accident.... pah.
Furthermore NO ONE HAS BUILT A FUNCTIONAL, COMMERCIAL LEVEL THORIUM REACTOR yet. Apparently, India is working on one. Not terribly bright to pin your hopes on a glowing Unicorn.
$10 Bikini (Ed hardy,polo)
I know you're not very bright, even for a bot - but I think you're barking up the wrong tree. You might want to go back to the Viagra stuff. Or maybe Rhogaine.
TL;DR in my country, religious zealots and enforced morality codes forbid University students from accessing pornographic and other controversial materials even in their own dorm rooms. Can you guess which modernized first nation I live in?
Vatican City?
You are volunteering to take on anonymous traffic, not "high-risk" traffic. There is a very big difference. In effect, you are serving as a "common carrier", and you enjoy the same legal protections as any ISP. In other words, you are only carrying traffic, you are not looking at it in any way, or even accessing it, much less altering it, yourself. You are only a relay. You have nothing to do with the actual content, so you cannot be held liable for that content.
That statement is very much open to debate. I would further argue that westlake's legal budget is significantly lower than TIme Warner, AOL or Comcast's.
Yeah, and some times they are your spouses or your colleagues at work or your boss or your neighbor or anybody, where do you think politicians come from? Space?
It does explain a few things. However, the theory that politicians form spontaneously from poorly composted horse manure fits the data better.
OK, OK,
....
If liquid water is ubiquitous
Man, this is a hard audience.
Why is it that slashdot goes so quickly to the patent side of things, yet so many people are not lawyers?
And since when has even the appearance of expertise in any given field been a criteria for posting? That's half the fun, chattering off about stuff that we know little about.
Anyway, I'm dubious. Why mess with a bulky, fragile, comparatively costly solar array? Is fire from wood not hot enough? Is it a matter of you'd have to supply a lot of wood?
The solar array, although bulky and fragile, is pretty low tech. Easy to copy with basically junk yard parts. Sterilization (especially of any quantity of stuff) is very energy intensive. Remember, you have to heat water to the vapor point under pressure - lots of calories involved in the phase change. And wood (or kerosene or charcoal or whatever) IS in short supply in many areas.
The idea behind this sort of device is to get people to do something they haven't been doing - sterilizing medical gear. There are many documented cases of transmission of AIDS, hepatitis and whatever infectious disease you want to mention by well intentioned but poorly trained and supported medical staff. Often the transmission comes from reuse of equipment. Much of the time, it's reuse of something designed to be thrown away (think plastic syringes). These are a real problem since they're cheap and can't be easily sterilized. Certainly you can't autoclave a plastic syringe (successfully). But even for reusable stuff, autoclaving often is a hangup. The sterilizers do use a fair amount of heat and they are often cranky of maintenance. I don't see the magic bullet in the TFA fixing this part of the equation, but it's a reasonable start to the power requirements.
The problem with a generic UV sterilizer is that every surface that you want to sterilize has to be exposed to the UV. The box joint inside a scissor, for example, would not be sterilized. The advantage of the device in TFA is that it presumeably would be easy to build in the field and would not need electricity. A potential issue would be clean water. Running dirty water, or even water with a large amount of dissolved solids (hard water) is rough on sterilizers.
Also, steam sterilization is very well understood and is pretty easy to track. Quality assurance for UV sterilization isn't easy in a low tech society.
Republicans - "Freedom." See also "Arbeit Macht Frei."
Godwinned in 6! Best effort this week. Although -1 for actually being on topic.
That was Europa. Remember: 'Attempt no landings there'.
This is very interesting. If water is ubiquitous and there is energy and time, that may be all we need for life. Drake equation, here we come!
Yeah. And I want one. (As does pretty much everybody else here).
I wonder how long the batteries last?
I'm pretty sure internet access in the middle of nowhere is quite shitty, and barely serviceable.
Depends, for certain values of 'middle of nowhere', you're probably correct. However, I live in rural Alaska and we have really quite good connectivity. Listening to everyone else in the US complain about their trials and tribulations, we may pay a bit more than along the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis but have similar line speeds. I have a choice of DSL with 3 Mbs down / 512 Kbs up or Cable with 10 down / 1 up (along with dial up for the true traditionalist).
High speed connectivity is the boonies is still in it's infancy and is spotty. Alaska benefited from Saint Ted (Stevens) who would whore out his Senate vote for a couple of bucks, as long as Alaska got it's fair share. It's an ill wind that blows nobody good....
World to Slashdot calling, it would like you to know about little tiny things called "testing environments". You should learn about them.
And exactly where do you think you are now? The best testing environments look exactly like the production environments. Taco is such a smart dude!