If america thinks only it has the right to push into the cosmos, on the tiny budget allotted to NASA by its government...
I wouldn't call the NASA budget tiny. It is adequate for a much larger program of exploration and research than the USA is now doing. The problem is that money is being used to feed a stable of established aerospace companies pursuing high-cost, low-risk options. Examples:
Continued use of the Space Shuttle at $15,000/lb to orbit instead of buying ELV's.
Cancellation of the Delta Clipper research program (inherited from SDIO).
Sponsorship of the X-33 VentureStar (a vastly more expensive and riskier program) instead of proceeding to the DC-Y.
Outright rejection of the LLNL "Community Spacesuit" inflatable space station (more space than the ISS, launched in one shot of a Titan IV, and with artificial gravity to boot).
Continued sponsorship of the vastly more expensive and less timely International Space Station.
Much as I love space research and exploration, I have to face facts: these programs in the USA are driven by pork-barrel spending and political log-rolling. The ugly truth is that the tail is wagging the dog and has been since 1969 (when Nixon took office and the pursuit of Kennedy's lunar initiative became a priority that [once] belonged to the other guy's party). -- Knowledge is power Power corrupts Study hard
... my impression is that if the source of the information can be traced back to a trade secret, the company can get an injunction against you from using it.
Not according to my best understanding. If your trade secret is published for the whole world to see, you have a cause of action against the person who revealed it (a tort), and no more. You can sue that person for your monetary damages. But once the whole world knows your "secret", it isn't a secret any more and you cannot prohibit anyone from doing whatever they want with it. That's part of the liability of using trade-secret protection instead of patent protection. Patent protection has a limited term and gives you exclusive rights in return for making your invention "patent" (obvious) and even gives you rights to exclude someone who made the same discovery or invention independently. Trade secret lasts as long as you are able to keep your secret but gives you no protection once it gets out or is independently duplicated. -- Knowledge is power Power corrupts Study hard
It occurs to me that turning off Javascript execution in your mailer is backwards. You should be able to have your mailer automatically remove Javascript attachments so that they are not forwarded either. This would eliminate the problem of careless people downstream from you; they could not activate the spy-attachment because there would be no attachment to activate. -- Knowledge is power Power corrupts Study hard
If its on a 400W PS, and say its using 300 out of the 400, then a substantial amount of that 300 is being converted to heat. not by the PS but by the rest of the computer.
Exactly. And if you reduce the power demand of the rest of the computer, you will not see those savings being lost in the power supply. The way switchers work you will probably have the losses go down (the efficiency will probably go down because there is all but certainly some minimum dissipation even at no load and the best efficiency point is at fairly high load, but the total losses will decrease). -- Knowledge is power Power corrupts Study hard
Try turning off the "wake-on-lan" feature on your MB bios.
I did that. Either the BIOS is locked so it cannot be changed, or it had no effect (it's all the same from my perspective). It also has no bearing on the lack of support for monitor power-down in the screen saver, which is M$'s responsibility and nobody else's. -- Knowledge is power Power corrupts Study hard
The point is, you can turn off the load side of the UPS, but the rectifier/battery charger/inverter will still draw power. Granted it's less power, but it's still power, and now it's doing absolutly nothing.
You say "granted it's less power", then you say "it's doing absolutely nothing". Which is it? Is it a savings, or not?
It's one-thing to pay the penalty for this overhead when the UPS is doing actual work, but it's another when it just sucking up juice.
So the computer power supply has some minimum standby consumption, and the inverter in the UPS also has some standby demand. I fail to see why it's pointless to use power-saving techniques if the power savings fall to 85% of the reduction at the computer's plug instead of 100%. True, it makes plenty of sense to integrate the UPS with the power supply (dual primaries in the switcher transformer, one running off rectified line voltage and the other off the 12V backup battery input) to improve your efficiency, but to condemn the exercise as worthless because you aren't grabbing 100% off the bat is ridiculous. (Almost ridiculous enough to be trollish.) -- Knowledge is power Power corrupts Study hard
IMHO a variable speed hard drive is a great idea.... It could spin down as far as say 1000 RPM when nothings going on, and up to even 15,000 RPM when business picks up.
Disk drive heads fly on a layer of air. They require a certain linear speed of the disk before the heads lift off. How are you going to make a drive with a peak speed of 15,000 RPM and a lift-off speed of 1000 RPM? It would make more sense to have piezo supports for the heads which can pull the heads off when the drive stops, eliminating the sticktion problem.
A 400W power supply is basically a 400W heater that powers your computer too
It's apparent that you have no idea how a switching power supply works. They run very cool at low power, cooler than a light bulb consuming 1/6 the power. Next time, engage brain before clicking "Submit". -- Knowledge is power Power corrupts Study hard
You think that it's gonna sell machines if you tell people that the box is going to run slower than it has to?
Sure. You tell people that the machine runs only as fast as it needs to, and saves you power the rest of the time. What good does a server do if it is spending 92% of its time executing an idle loop at 1.1 GHz? Spending 68% of its time executing that loop at 275 MHz (and 1/4 the power, or less) is no worse for the business's LAN and better for their power bill. Powering down during dead time is even better, especially in California where shortages of natural gas for powerplants would be assisted by night-time energy savings. Everybody wins. -- Knowledge is power Power corrupts Study hard
Windows NT4 didn't support the full range of either spec...
It's worse than that. NT4SP5 does not even support the "Energy Star" monitor-standby mode on my machine. It will blank the monitor when idle, but will not reduce its power consumption. To get the monitor into low-power standby, I have to turn the machine off.
Worst of all, something about the LAN causes the machine to power-up within about half an hour of shutting it off. To get the machine to let the monitor to stay in standby mode, I have to unplug the computer at night!
Microsoft had the chance (and the moral obligation, given their dominance of the market) to get that much right. They failed miserably. Microsoft, you suck. -- Knowledge is power Power corrupts Study hard
But until mandatory filters are installed on every computer in the nation (not just those that children might access), it's not censoring. That said, either we must remove the mandatory filter law or change it such that local government has a large say whether to filter or not without the threat of losing thousands of dollars of funding...
There is a simple solution to this. Abolish the E-rate, aka the Gore Tax. When there is no more money attached to this, school districts will not feel compelled to dance to Washington's tune over these silly issues. They're much more likely to spend money on those things which are actually important, which may not be computers and networks. -- Knowledge is power Power corrupts Study hard
Here in New Zealand where we have pretty cheap electricity solar water heaters pay for themselves off in a year or two in most places.
Meanwhile, protest signs in California claim that hot showers have priced out of people's reach (after solar-energy subsidies going on and off back to the Carter administration). It is enough to make one doubt the sanity of soi-disant "consumer advocates" and "greens". Why on earth would they want power to be cheap, when this could be just the incentive that people need to do what they should have done 20 years ago? When California has a law requiring every home to have a solar hot-water heater within 5 years (and on all new construction and updates over a certain dollar value), I'll believe they're serious. When they are demanding that Oregon and Washington run their hydro reservoirs dry so they can avoid making productive use of the heat that goes wasted on their shingles every day, they're just proving that they deserve no better than they're getting. -- Knowledge is power Power corrupts Study hard
You wouldn't notice an increase if you're using the lights in the same room as the main thermostat. The main heat would just throttle back to keep the same temperature.
I've got 500 watts of quartz-halogen lamp in a room away from the thermostat. 500 watts is about 1700 BTU/hr, and my thermometer agrees with my personal perception: it does increase the temperature considerably, even with the door to that room open. I wish I had a reasonable fluorescent replacement for this lamp (I could save at least 375 watts) but nobody makes anything in that size. I'd rather be saving the juice and heating with natural gas instead, but the products on the market don't make that a viable alternative just yet. -- Knowledge is power Power corrupts Study hard
even a timer to turn off the tank when you won't want any more hot water ( 8pm say ) and back on in time to have hot water for your shower ( 5am? ).
That guarantees that you will not be heating water during the off-peak hours in the evening (and especially late at night), while re-heating your water immediately after your shower in the morning (contributing to the morning demand surge). Further, you're mostly shifting your demand with the timer, not cutting it (assuming that you have insulated the water heater to cut conduction losses).
The big problem, in California at least, is the afternoon/evening demand peak; you could do more for availability by cutting usage or coasting on stored energy for those hours. If you can go for some time on the hot water still in the tank, it would help to shut the water heater off immediately after your morning shower (weekdays when nobody is home), use point-of-use heaters for cooking in the early evening (heat only the bare minimum amount of water), and turn the tank back on after 8 or 9 PM. If you put your washing machine (and dishwasher?) on an appliance timer to have it run at 2 AM, you could have the machine and all of its associated power consumption going during off-off-peak hours when availability is highest (and prices, at least at wholesale, are lowest). -- Knowledge is power Power corrupts Study hard
That's just a list off the top of my head. It's not hard to see why a large handbook of design rules, designs and other resources would be worth $300 or more; it has a relatively small market (mostly other serious designers and dealers), takes a large effort to compile and check, and it gets obsoleted quickly with the products on the market. It's also not hard to see how someone with an interest in selling their wares could bend the results to be favorable to what they are peddling. On the other hand, a web site full of elementary information and lists of suppliers (and consumer experiences) appears more reasonable to manage as an open-source effort. -- Knowledge is power Power corrupts Study hard
1. Inprecisely what ways were we free-er in the 1930's - free-er to starve?
More free to create, more free to talk, to move, to disappear... disappearing is now a crime in the USA if you are subject to certain penalties which amount to peonage. Until 1934 you could buy any kind of gun or accessory you wanted including machine guns and silencers (silencers used to be popular with farmers taking out predators in the henhouse); you could go to jail if you committed a crime with such articles, but mere ownership was not even cause for suspicion. You could buy a huge variety of chemicals and other things which are now restricted or "scheduled" (banned for personal purchase); people did a lot of really neat stuff that you can only read about in old amateur scientist articles today, because you can't buy the materials any more (you cannot do a very good job of educating yourself in laboratory chemistry, for example). People were free in a lot of ways I'm happy are gone (free to poison the water and air going over their land and pass the costs off on to their neighbors, free to fire people because of their skin color or religion; perhaps I should call it license instead of freedom), but I don't see any conflict between the freedoms I mourn and the licenses I'm glad are no more.
2. WW2 fought by americans? - of course us brits, the russians, aussies etc had nothing to do with it
Maybe if the USA hadn't had several times the population of Britain and Australia combined, and the only real energy and industrial base outside Axis reach, you might have a point. If it hadn't been for the USA Britain would have been under German rule starting about 60 years ago.
3. Governments have many flaws but without governments you have the law of the jungle with no protection whatsoever - eg the power of the employee does not match that of the employer.
The author to whom you responded wrote "When freedom is lost for promises of safety, it is always for false promises." Note, he said freedom, not the right to seek redress for harm. People in the USA have lost a lot of freedom to act in ways which harm no one because someone (often a self-aggrandizing government official) demanded that government Do Something To Prevent This Outrage, when the only thing that was necessary was to identify the harmful acts and punish the actors appropriately. Laws criminalizing acts which just might have some relationship to the alleged harm are a huge blow to freedom, and the USA has such laws by the thousand.
4. No I don't think governments are always right or perfect (guess my politics from the userid)
Finally, something I can agree with w/o reservations. -- Knowledge is power Power corrupts Study hard
Those issues are not caused by a lack of computing technology.... If you live in such an environment, your first concern is to get out of it - and this has zero to do with the issue at hand.
Exactly. Those issues are not caused by a lack of computing technology! Bridging the so-called "digital divide" in schools isn't going to do anything about these issues for several years. A shiny new computer on a T1 line will do nothing about the gang outside the school or the dripping water and falling ceiling tiles within. There are issues which need to be addressed before a computer will help... starting with the elected and appointed officials, union members and public who will let a district spend $8,000 per student per year (that's $240,000 for a classroom of 30) and permit these problems to not only continue but get worse. Without people who give a damn from top to bottom no computer initiative will do squat.
A society which respects and values education and educated people wouldn't have these problems. Almost needless to say, there are big pockets of the United States which does not have such a society. (<rant> The USA is socially diverse and it makes little sense to try to talk about it as a monolith; this is one area in which "diversity" deserves and needs to be denigrated, attacked and even suppressed, not praised. If people are acting in a way to continue or aggravate the lousy education kids are getting, they ought to be pariahs. There should be a special term for them, just as pejorative and common as "deadbeat dad". </rant>) -- Knowledge is power Power corrupts Study hard
I would guess with $200 or even $100 you could get a cobbled together 486, and put linux on it. Presto! That's ALL YOU NEED to learn about computer technology.
I think you forgot a few other essentials you take for granted:
You need access to the old parts; it's easy to dumpster-dive in the office district if you're a white guy with a car, but if you're a black kid who has to get home by the bus or subway you might well be risking trouble just by being around the loading area. It is private property after all.
Once you have the parts you have to have some idea of what to do with them. It's probably easier with PnP BIOSes, but I didn't think 486's had those. If you get an entire box in bootable condition, you don't have this hurdle.
You've got to have someplace to keep your hardware where it won't get stolen or trashed. This is a serious problem; I know someone who was tutoring a kid and lent him an ancient laptop. The kid's brother stole it and sold it for drugs. Or your mother's boyfriend throws the monitor across the room during a fight. You get the idea.
You've got to have some idea of what Linux is and where to get it. If you don't already have exposure to the nerd culture, you might not have the Linux meme.
I agree that it's entirely possible for lots of disadvantaged kids to have access to real computing environments and serious tools. I do not agree that this is enough to compensate for the disadvantages of an underclass environment or family troubles. -- Knowledge is power Power corrupts Study hard
And you think kids know what to emphasize?
on
Kids and Computers
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· Score: 3
One of the (alleged) benefits of age is the accumulation of wisdom and good judgement. Good judgement is usually developed by watching the results of bad decisions, either someone else's (if you're lucky or smart) or your own (if you're unlucky and dumb).
I don't think we should keep forcing education in this country - we basically force feed it to unwilling children.... I think once you learn how to read and access resources - it should be up to the students to reach out for more.
Being able to write (construct grammatical and coherent sentences, assemble sentences into a structure which illustrates an idea) is absolutely essential to literacy. The only way to learn how to write is by doing it;
As goatherd learns his trade by goat,
So writer learns his trade by wrote.
The same is true of arithmetic, mathematics (which is distinct from mere calculation with numbers), the biological and physical sciences, and so forth. Just to be an informed voter you really need the equivalent of a full high-school program of AP credits in both the sciences and basic humanities. You're assuming that the students - many of whom come from homes with no tradition of education - will realize the importance of these things and have the discipline to pursue them independently. I fear that you are very sadly mistaken. By the time they realize the cost of their mistakes, most will be much too far behind to catch up. That's a hell of a price to pay for "academic freedom" for minor children.
Seriously - how many kids can you remember from high school that were really that interested most of the time - like 10 or 20 probably.
Every AP class I had was full of the interested (I'm talking 25-30 per section) and the rest weren't exactly lacking them (perhaps half). I grew up in a university town, YMMV.
For those of you that have gone to college - how many of you have walked into an undergrad class to find that the whole semester was a Japanese TA reading to you out of a book in a mono-tone broken English accent?
I had one oriental TA teaching a class I needed, whose English was so bad I could not understand the material or the answers to my questions. I switched sections and got my money's worth. The oriental prof who taught one of my upper-level math classes was much better in that respect. Do you have a point to make other than knowledge of material and communications skills are two different things? -- Knowledge is power Power corrupts Study hard
That the shifts are not accepted until the opponents are gone is an urban legend unsupported by facts.
It's been ages since I read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, but I believe that this was an assertion propounded by Thomas Kuhn. -- Knowledge is power Power corrupts Study hard
We need to get our sh*t together, come up with a sane way to get value out of the fuel we have piling up
We can do it. We could convert all the spent fuel into stable form for storage. Check out this link for an example. A quote:
Completed tests indicate that a unit about the size of a bathtub could process a ton of spent fuel in a day.
The only problem with this technology is that the transuranics segregate with the fission products. This is wasteful, as they represent both lost energy production and also increase the half-life of the waste fraction by roughly a factor of 1000. (One way around this is to avoid using U-238 and only employ U-233 bred from Th-232.)
You might also want to look at this abstract. It suggests, but does not state clearly, that all the trans-uranics (TRU) can be recovered from the salt bath using a liquid metal cathode. If that keeps them out of the waste stream until they've been converted to fission products, so much the better. -- Knowledge is power Power corrupts Study hard
I thought that I would never see
A nuke defender from Ber-kley
But if PC-ness does not fall
We will have no nukes at all.
One nit: Graphite moderation is only a problem if it can come into contact with air. There are a number of designs for HTGRs (High Temperature Gas-cooled Reactors) which use graphite as the moderator. They avoid problems by using CO2 (Britain) or helium (just about everyone else) as the coolant. HTGR designs have some advantages over PWRs, including:
Higher thermal efficiencies due to higher operating temperatures.
Reduced radioisotope leakage due to the coolant being in the gas phase.
Easier to use continuous refuelling by the method of "pebble bed" reactor cores, with graphite-coated ceramic "pebbles" as fuel elements.
Easy to make inherently safe by using Doppler broadening to shut off the reaction if coolant flow is lost.
Inherent resistance to thermal damage due to large thermal mass and guaranteed over-temp shutdown even without use of control rods.
I agree with most of your points, I just wanted to point out that you are probably tarring graphite moderators with the brush of the Soviet RMBK and that the whole bunch don't really deserve it. -- Knowledge is power Power corrupts Study hard
This was just too silly to avoid a response, especially after someone with more points than sense called it "insightful".
Radioactive material is dangerous, hands down, no matter what.
You're composed of a number of chemical elements, including carbon (some fraction of which is the radioisotope carbon-14) and potassium (some fraction of which is the radioisotope potassium-40). I guess you're dangerous, hands down, no matter what. Anyone seated near you in an airplane, bus or restaurant should probably ask to be re-assigned for their own safety. Heck, maybe society should just force you to live in the middle of the Sahara for the greater good.
</sarcasm>
If hazard is the measure, the only sensible way to rate it is in mortality and morbidity per unit of energy. If you are rating only the radio-isotope exposure from a given source you'll miss things like environmental disruption and flooding hazards from dams, worker hazards from wind plants (working on towers isn't the safest thing to do even if there isn't heavy machinery at the top) and chemical hazards from the production of solar cells. Even within the limited category of radiation hazards you've got plenty of radon, uranium and thorium emissions from coal and a surprising amount of hot material (NORM, Naturally Occurring Radioactive Material) coming up out of the earth along with the hot brines used for geothermal power. Saying "Nuclear is bad because of radiation", then ignoring the same hazards from either conventional or "green" energy supplies is sheer hypocrisy.
Contained Nuclear Explosions fall in to the 'potentially dangerous' category.
So do contained chemical explosions, but people crank up their car engines in the morning and don't think twice about what's going on inside the cylinders... unless they don't fire. Besides, nuclear electricity does not involve explosions, contained or otherwise.
Take in to account that this technology is hard, and very expensive to fix when problems are found...
Hard? We've been doing it on an industrial scale since 1944. Expensive? What's expensive is re-working things from the ground up when someone changes the requirements. Nuclear plants are not unique in this respect, as anyone who's managed a software development budget will tell you.
Hey, if all your waters polluted, you just work a little harder and buy bottled water from farther north.
Where do I get the water that's free of uranium, thorium, polonium and mercury from coal combustion? Wouldn't I be better off if the plants upwind split a few tons of atoms instead of burning millions of tons of black stuff?
If you don't have the strength to defend what you laughably call "common sense", you have no business posting here. If the effort to respond leads you to an early grave, you can share it with the thousands dead and dying of the effluent of coal in Pittsburgh, London, the ex-Soviet Bloc, China.... -- Knowledge is power Power corrupts Study hard
Slashdot Mirror
- Continued use of the Space Shuttle at $15,000/lb to orbit instead of buying ELV's.
- Cancellation of the Delta Clipper research program (inherited from SDIO).
- Sponsorship of the X-33 VentureStar (a vastly more expensive and riskier program) instead of proceeding to the DC-Y.
- Outright rejection of the LLNL "Community Spacesuit" inflatable space station (more space than the ISS, launched in one shot of a Titan IV, and with artificial gravity to boot).
- Continued sponsorship of the vastly more expensive and less timely International Space Station.
Much as I love space research and exploration, I have to face facts: these programs in the USA are driven by pork-barrel spending and political log-rolling. The ugly truth is that the tail is wagging the dog and has been since 1969 (when Nixon took office and the pursuit of Kennedy's lunar initiative became a priority that [once] belonged to the other guy's party).--
Knowledge is power
Power corrupts
Study hard
If we can cheer for anybody being replaced with the change of administration, Louis Freeh is it.
--
Knowledge is power
Power corrupts
Study hard
--
Knowledge is power
Power corrupts
Study hard
It occurs to me that turning off Javascript execution in your mailer is backwards. You should be able to have your mailer automatically remove Javascript attachments so that they are not forwarded either. This would eliminate the problem of careless people downstream from you; they could not activate the spy-attachment because there would be no attachment to activate.
--
Knowledge is power
Power corrupts
Study hard
--
Knowledge is power
Power corrupts
Study hard
--
Knowledge is power
Power corrupts
Study hard
--
Knowledge is power
Power corrupts
Study hard
--
Knowledge is power
Power corrupts
Study hard
--
Knowledge is power
Power corrupts
Study hard
Worst of all, something about the LAN causes the machine to power-up within about half an hour of shutting it off. To get the machine to let the monitor to stay in standby mode, I have to unplug the computer at night!
Microsoft had the chance (and the moral obligation, given their dominance of the market) to get that much right. They failed miserably. Microsoft, you suck.
--
Knowledge is power
Power corrupts
Study hard
--
Knowledge is power
Power corrupts
Study hard
--
Knowledge is power
Power corrupts
Study hard
--
Knowledge is power
Power corrupts
Study hard
I've got 500 watts of quartz-halogen lamp in a room away from the thermostat. 500 watts is about 1700 BTU/hr, and my thermometer agrees with my personal perception: it does increase the temperature considerably, even with the door to that room open. I wish I had a reasonable fluorescent replacement for this lamp (I could save at least 375 watts) but nobody makes anything in that size. I'd rather be saving the juice and heating with natural gas instead, but the products on the market don't make that a viable alternative just yet.
--
Knowledge is power
Power corrupts
Study hard
The big problem, in California at least, is the afternoon/evening demand peak; you could do more for availability by cutting usage or coasting on stored energy for those hours. If you can go for some time on the hot water still in the tank, it would help to shut the water heater off immediately after your morning shower (weekdays when nobody is home), use point-of-use heaters for cooking in the early evening (heat only the bare minimum amount of water), and turn the tank back on after 8 or 9 PM. If you put your washing machine (and dishwasher?) on an appliance timer to have it run at 2 AM, you could have the machine and all of its associated power consumption going during off-off-peak hours when availability is highest (and prices, at least at wholesale, are lowest).
--
Knowledge is power
Power corrupts
Study hard
- Solar PV cells.
- Solar PV panels.
- Solar PV charge controllers.
- Wind turbine airfoils.
- Wind turbine blades/rotors.
- Wind turbine controllers, including overspeed and overcharge shutdown systems.
- Battery systems.
- Energy management systems.
- DC distribution systems.
- AC distribution systems.
- Asynchronous inverters.
- Synchronous inverters.
- Synchronous inverter/chargers.
- Solar-thermal hot water systems.
- Solar-thermal space heat systems.
- Solar-thermal absorption air-conditioning systems.
That's just a list off the top of my head. It's not hard to see why a large handbook of design rules, designs and other resources would be worth $300 or more; it has a relatively small market (mostly other serious designers and dealers), takes a large effort to compile and check, and it gets obsoleted quickly with the products on the market. It's also not hard to see how someone with an interest in selling their wares could bend the results to be favorable to what they are peddling. On the other hand, a web site full of elementary information and lists of suppliers (and consumer experiences) appears more reasonable to manage as an open-source effort.--
Knowledge is power
Power corrupts
Study hard
--
Knowledge is power
Power corrupts
Study hard
A society which respects and values education and educated people wouldn't have these problems. Almost needless to say, there are big pockets of the United States which does not have such a society. (<rant> The USA is socially diverse and it makes little sense to try to talk about it as a monolith; this is one area in which "diversity" deserves and needs to be denigrated, attacked and even suppressed, not praised. If people are acting in a way to continue or aggravate the lousy education kids are getting, they ought to be pariahs. There should be a special term for them, just as pejorative and common as "deadbeat dad". </rant>)
--
Knowledge is power
Power corrupts
Study hard
This deserves at least one "insightful".
--
Knowledge is power
Power corrupts
Study hard
- You need access to the old parts; it's easy to dumpster-dive in the office district if you're a white guy with a car, but if you're a black kid who has to get home by the bus or subway you might well be risking trouble just by being around the loading area. It is private property after all.
- Once you have the parts you have to have some idea of what to do with them. It's probably easier with PnP BIOSes, but I didn't think 486's had those. If you get an entire box in bootable condition, you don't have this hurdle.
- You've got to have someplace to keep your hardware where it won't get stolen or trashed. This is a serious problem; I know someone who was tutoring a kid and lent him an ancient laptop. The kid's brother stole it and sold it for drugs. Or your mother's boyfriend throws the monitor across the room during a fight. You get the idea.
- You've got to have some idea of what Linux is and where to get it. If you don't already have exposure to the nerd culture, you might not have the Linux meme.
I agree that it's entirely possible for lots of disadvantaged kids to have access to real computing environments and serious tools. I do not agree that this is enough to compensate for the disadvantages of an underclass environment or family troubles.--
Knowledge is power
Power corrupts
Study hard
--
Knowledge is power
Power corrupts
Study hard
--
Knowledge is power
Power corrupts
Study hard
You might also want to look at this abstract. It suggests, but does not state clearly, that all the trans-uranics (TRU) can be recovered from the salt bath using a liquid metal cathode. If that keeps them out of the waste stream until they've been converted to fission products, so much the better.
--
Knowledge is power
Power corrupts
Study hard
I thought that I would never see
A nuke defender from Ber-kley
But if PC-ness does not fall
We will have no nukes at all.
One nit: Graphite moderation is only a problem if it can come into contact with air. There are a number of designs for HTGRs (High Temperature Gas-cooled Reactors) which use graphite as the moderator. They avoid problems by using CO2 (Britain) or helium (just about everyone else) as the coolant. HTGR designs have some advantages over PWRs, including:
- Higher thermal efficiencies due to higher operating temperatures.
- Reduced radioisotope leakage due to the coolant being in the gas phase.
- Easier to use continuous refuelling by the method of "pebble bed" reactor cores, with graphite-coated ceramic "pebbles" as fuel elements.
- Easy to make inherently safe by using Doppler broadening to shut off the reaction if coolant flow is lost.
- Inherent resistance to thermal damage due to large thermal mass and guaranteed over-temp shutdown even without use of control rods.
I agree with most of your points, I just wanted to point out that you are probably tarring graphite moderators with the brush of the Soviet RMBK and that the whole bunch don't really deserve it.--
Knowledge is power
Power corrupts
Study hard
</sarcasm>
If hazard is the measure, the only sensible way to rate it is in mortality and morbidity per unit of energy. If you are rating only the radio-isotope exposure from a given source you'll miss things like environmental disruption and flooding hazards from dams, worker hazards from wind plants (working on towers isn't the safest thing to do even if there isn't heavy machinery at the top) and chemical hazards from the production of solar cells. Even within the limited category of radiation hazards you've got plenty of radon, uranium and thorium emissions from coal and a surprising amount of hot material (NORM, Naturally Occurring Radioactive Material) coming up out of the earth along with the hot brines used for geothermal power. Saying "Nuclear is bad because of radiation", then ignoring the same hazards from either conventional or "green" energy supplies is sheer hypocrisy.
So do contained chemical explosions, but people crank up their car engines in the morning and don't think twice about what's going on inside the cylinders... unless they don't fire. Besides, nuclear electricity does not involve explosions, contained or otherwise. Hard? We've been doing it on an industrial scale since 1944. Expensive? What's expensive is re-working things from the ground up when someone changes the requirements. Nuclear plants are not unique in this respect, as anyone who's managed a software development budget will tell you. Where do I get the water that's free of uranium, thorium, polonium and mercury from coal combustion? Wouldn't I be better off if the plants upwind split a few tons of atoms instead of burning millions of tons of black stuff?If you don't have the strength to defend what you laughably call "common sense", you have no business posting here. If the effort to respond leads you to an early grave, you can share it with the thousands dead and dying of the effluent of coal in Pittsburgh, London, the ex-Soviet Bloc, China....
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