If we are bound and determined to execute people, and a criterion is that it be done "humanely", then we can use asphixiation by nitrogen gas.
Many nitrogen accidents have occurred in the past, including a fairly recent one at NASA where people have entered spaces filled with nitrogen and just passed out and died without any awareness of the danger, or any indication that bad things were about to happen. Aviators used to be required to experience anoxia (lackof oxygen) due to altitude, and as one who has experienced this, I can state from personal experience there is no discomfort whatsoever.
As a method, this is akin to a gas chamber except that no poisons are used. The chamber is flooded with nitrogen gas, which does not support life. As the oxygen content of the subject's blood falls, they experience a short period (seconds) of tunnel vision, then lose consciousness, and shortly thereafter, die. There is no choking or strangling sensation, no feeling of not being able to catch one's breath. So if you want to talk about "humane" in the same sentence as "execute" this is the way to go. it's cheap, doesn't require any toxic drugs and doesn't have any disposal problems.
However, with a lot of companies, simply quitting is burning the bridges, and a "good reference" is a fairy tale.
It all depends on the company you're working for. Not giving notice is rude and improper, and having a document that shows you did in fact give notice may be the only thing that keeps one of "those" companies from telling your prospective employer that you made off with trade secrets, the coffee fund, and the boss's secretary.
If some very bright person could figure out how to under gerrymandering of precincts, I'd vote for them on that principle alone.
Nobody likes that idea, though, because it threatens all the little fiefdoms established in congress and state legislatures, and might result in the end of millions of dollars of corporate bribes, er, contributions.
To Congressdorks: Remember Arab Spring. It can happen here.
I don't fathom why people seem so shocked by this turn of events.
The liberal politician Gore Vidal once remarked that "Now that the Great Red Menace is gone, the government can turn it's attention to the real enemy, which is now, and always has been, The People."
It always impressed me that when the Soviet Union fell apart, a huge number of "security" workers in GDR's Stasi ended up out of work. It seems that similarly to the end of WWII when rocket scientists were looking for a place to ply their trade, the US government stepped in and acquired their talents.
I've always thought that our government - the US government - should have named the agency who handles US security the UStasi. They've learned well from our East German mentors, and are in the process of jailing enemy combatants forever without trial, intercepting everyone's email and phone calls. They don't file body odor samples "for the dogs" yet, but they want to take DNA from everyone that is arrested, conviction or not. They want warrentless searches and that pesky Fourth Amendment is just an inconvenience. Who cares about the right to not self-incriminate, cough up those passwords, or else. General Michael Hayden, former head of UStasi (sorry, NSA) wanted to be able to use "aggressive interrogation."
This seems a sad turn for my country, the land that I love. Jefferson is probably rotating at high speed in his tomb.
In days of old, you could hoist a mast and run a transmitter. It was long after that that media giants were formed and moved in. As recently as 1957, you could run a TV channel without too much difficulty, though the capital investment in equipment was pretty ferrocious.
They didn't -always- belong to the kings. Don't believe it? Look up Pirate TV.
Welcome to the Cloud. In Bad old Days, the phrase ran "All your Base are Belong to Us"
When you give up control of a media - be it television or radio or web sites or email - what you do with that media is by definition under someone else's control. If that someone else, Google or Microsoft or DPRK, object to the content for _whatever_ reason, you're kid of oout of luck. You can tweet or protest or moan about it, but the bottom line is this: That media is _theirs_ and not _yours_ and if you don't like what they do with their media, tough.
Richard Stallman has railed against "The Cloud" for years, and this is just but one of the reasons.
If you want an adult blog with adverts, buy a $500 computer and a $30 domain name and put up an adult blog. If it gets popular, buy more $500 computers. Or hire a place that rents raw compute resource, and put up _your_ web site.
I should point out that for years now, places like RackSpace have been claiming that the sites hosted there belong to their clients, not themselves. Their position is simple enough, and designed to prevent someone with deep pockets (RackSpace, for example) from being sued by some bluenose for hosting content that someone finds objectionable. Now, they can hardly do an about face and tell people hosting sites, "Oh No! We don't like -that- particular content."
A decade ago when it cost your firstborn to host a web site, using "The Cloud" made sense from a financial perspective. Now, for half a hundred dollars a month, and a sub-thousand investment in hardware, you can host your own web site, which will be picked up by search engines, and blog to your heart's content about whatever it might be you want to blog about.
I've looked at the Cloud from Both Sides Now... Screw it.
Having worked in software development for 30 years, let me tell you a dark little secret.
QA programs are never enough.
It matters not how good your QA section is, things will get through. Why? Because the QA people have looked at the code, because QA managers are fond of believing that filling out paperwork is the same thing as careful retrospection, because the QA people work for a company whose vested interest is in getting that chunk of software out the door.
In order to do a thorough job, one needs Different Eyes.
I cannot tell you how many times I've had an intractable problem with a piece of software, and shown it to a coworker not associated with the product, only to have them turn to me and say (in effect) "You dumbass, it's right here!" Which, in fact it was. I'd have looked at it countless times, and I might well never have seen the problem.
Running software through extensive QA is an excellent idea, but in and of itself is not sufficient. Having someone not connected with the product, someone with "different eyes" look at it, is a time proven method to find things that your excellent and well managed QA department will never see.
The bottom line is very simple. If you have the math - and I'm talking diffeq and applied mechanics and dynamics - you will get jobs that others cannot. And strangely enough, those jobs pay very, very well.
Just like everyone else says, if you're content being a web programmer at a medium--to-ok salary, then forget the math.
If you want a job writing control code for F22's, at a salary that can make your head spin, then consider the math as supremely important.
I expected to be here, at this point, by the end of the 70's. Then Vietnam happened, Nixon happened, and the future was, and still is, being mortgaged.
We shouldn't take Hanford as a prototypical example of "The Nuclear Industry."
Remember, the people who planned, funded, and ran Hanford were in the process of building devices -designed- to kill people by the millions, and designed to be used in circumstances when people, by the millions, were dying here in the USA. Perhaps we should not forgive them, but we should understand their attitude that poisoning a few workers or a few thousand fish was just not on their radar. This was, in their understanding, war.
What Hanford was, and is, is a very brutal view of the simple fact that in war, lots of people are hurt, maimed, killed, poisoned, burned, and other forms of mayhem committed upon them.
Now, we as a nation and as a world, have the responsibility and opportunity to clean up our own mess, a mess that was caused by people who sincerely believed that a philosophical point and an economic model was worth murdering countless people. If nothing else, we need to learn from these experiences. We need to not forget that matters of ideology and economic theory do not count as much as living, suffering humans.
I think Poor Richard has lived in an ivory tower far too long. Ideals are laudable, but the world moves on and reality trumps pedantry every time. Bill Gates didn't get to be, well, Bill Gates - by trumpeting Basic and DOS until people started saying, "Who?" He cut corners and compromised and, ahem, borrowed good ideas. It made him a gazillion dollars. And Richard, for all I agree with your ideals, and for better or worse, Bill Gates influenced the course of development of the personal computer more than you ever will.
Finding "rare" earths isn't that difficult. In this country, the problem is that rare earth elements (technically lanthanides) are invariably associated with the other f-series elements (the actinides), specifically thorium. Mining rare earths produces thorium oxide as a byproduct, and "disposing" of this ought-to-be-valuable stuff is a real difficulty. In China, it's less of a problem, for two reasons. First, it's apparently OK to dump radioactive waste in your local waterway, and second, the Chinese government doesn't shun all things nuclear. Like reactors, and bombs, and Oh Yes, thorium deposits.
Now, finding rare earth deposits with almost no thorium in them is a real feat, and getting the US government to find ways to store thorium would a world-class miracle.
No, it's not evolution in the way that believers in a slow random process like to picture it.
This process is called adaptive radiation. Humans have moved into a very large feeding niche, and as a result our population and our genetic diversity has expanded hugely. Hygiene, agriculture, medical intervention, technology, and social institutions have hugely expanded the availability of places that people can survive. In an entirely natural and very old process, we have expanded our population into those places. There are more of us than there are locusts.
The second half of the cycle is the selection part. In the previous century, wars and local famine have played a part in this not so nice aspect of the evolutionary mill. In centuries before that, famine and plague were part of the selection process. In current times, some of the selection pressures applied to isolated parts of humanity include famine, flooding, ability to avoid being a gang member, and facile birth control. Note carefully that the term "isolated" used to refer only to geographic isolation. These days, more important is political isolation. Consider the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, for instance.
As much as some of us would like to think so, we as a species are not specially selected by supernatural powers to be immune from the evolutionary process. It goes on every day and shapes us. The cycle of adaptive radiation includes expanding into a new niche (now, the whole world), and then failure of large chunks of that population when something goes wrong. A recent instance would be the European plagues that took out 60% of the population. The descendants of that evolutionary moment are a little more resistant to Yersinia pestis, in a super-bug meets slightly better people scenario.
It's not a question of "irrational" - though that is the case. It's more a case of having a bunch of congresspeople who are technically invertebrates. If they had any spine at all, they would do what other close neighbors have done. Don't make a big PR push about "converting" - just stay shut up, and then stop printing the one dollar bills. After a few years, the problem will be an unproblem. And because it isn't a "changeover" shoved at the public, there won't be any organized resistance.
Given the way our Congress works, there's even an easy way to approach this. Treasury can simply "delay" printing one dollar bills for whatever reason they want to dream up. As the circulating bills start to resemble wet paper towels, dollar coins will gain in popularity.
Dig deep into everyone's pockets, and launch them to the L4 and L5 LaGrangian points (Earth-Solar), and make a whopping big interferometer out of them.
I use a browser (seamonkey in fact) daily, however, perhaps 5% of my work involves looking up stuff on the internet, and almost none of my work involves "browsing" for something. Seamonkey is just functional. No Windows Dressing (sic), no Ferrocious Lion, just solid day to day use.
You do realize you are so full of crap your eyes are brown?
Nuclear fuel rod storage ponds have to be treated so that they don't grow algae. The exclusion zone around Chernobyl is full of mink and fox and birds and mice. They're all radioactive, a little, but then we're all a little radioactive. If no life could live around Fukushima, why are crops from there prohibited from being shipped and sold?
At least make a token effort to get the actual facts, mmmkay?
However, it is informative to look at how and when the mess that is - among others - Hanford, came to be.
At the time, the Military was building bombs to kill a million people at a shot, and the prevailing attitude was that the Soviet Union was only a month away from launching bombers and submarines and missiles, to kill US citizens by the tens or hundreds of millions. The Russians thought the same thing of the US; I think it perplexed them terribly that we didn't attack. After all, their sworn ally, Adolf Hitler, just changed his mind one day and launched a full scale invasion. So the Russians (and Ukranians, and others) were building bombs to kill people in the US by the tens or hundreds of millions.
Along with all this paranoia, came a driving requirement to build more and bigger weapons. There was a bomber gap, then a missile gap, and if you watched Dr. Strangelove, a mine shaft gap. No one in the bomb business was worrying about poisoning a few hundred workers, or a few thousand coyotes or fish or prairie dogs. They were building bombs, and it was enough that the waste from their efforts not end up with dead workers before they managed to actually build their bombs.
They temporized, they were careless (careless enough to skewer a reactor operator to a concrete slab with a control rod), but most of all, they were in a tearing hurry. They had to build those bombs before the Rooskies (or the Amerikans) attacked.
It's no wonder they did a crap job.
One would sincerely hope that today, we are a little more rational. We can reprocess fuel - we know the basic processes - and we can do so without making a radioactive dead spot on the prairie, or creating glow-in-the-dark salmon. It's kind of like building airplanes. Mistakes happen, people die. But every time something bad happens, we send in very smart engineers and figure out what happened, and why, and design new and better processes so that the next time, fewer people die.
Chernobyl happened for exactly the same reasons. The Soviets essentially copied the very first Fermi pile (the one under the squash stadium), added cooling and steam pipes, and scaled it up by a factor of a few thousand. This was poor engineering, but it was quick, and they had to get their reactors online quickly so that they could make the materials to make the bombs that they needed to defend themselves. All delusion (well, mostly delusion) but they had a good reason, as did we. The end result was a whopping big accident, but pay close attention here, there was no nuclear explosion.
We can reprocess fuel rods - which to me, sounds a whole lot better than leaving thousands of tons of insanely radioactive stuff cooling its heels in ponds all over the world. By reprocessing the fuel, we can make new fuel, we can take that crazy hot stuff and concentrate it into kilograms instead of tonnes, and incidentally, make it radioactive enough that no terrorist could stay alive long enough to steal it. We can separate needed isotopes for space exporation and cancer treatment and food sterilization.
And what do we have to give up to do this? We have to give up irrational fear. There are lots of things to fear - read Feynman's talk about building Y-12 - but the things to fear are real things, not crazy paranoid fantasies. The Fukushima disaster may have achieved criticality of stored used fuel rods, but there was no nuclear explosion. People died, from the tidal wave. Some people were exposed to low levels of radiation, but as was pointed out earlier in this venue, less exposure than they would have had than had they simply lived in Denver, USA for a year.
We can do this. We have the technology, we have the scientists, we have the engineers. Like any new thing, there will be mistakes, and perhaps those mistakes will cost lives. The comparison isn't to "will bad things happen if we do this" -- the proper comparison is "what bad things will happen if we don't do this."
It's simple enough. In the good old days at the phone company, this was pretty well standard fare. Then some employee won a multi-million dollar lawsuit, and Things Changed.
Now (or as of when I left) - sexual harassment was simply a fire-on-sight offense. No counciling, no warnings, no nothing.
It's astounding how quickly things cleaned up.
I cleaned up -my- act, and I was probably one of the worst offenders.
I'm entirely content with letting Joe Sixpack have an outlet (or inlet) from this cyber universe. His (or her) treatment of the medium as "funny looking TV" will provide the capital support for those of us who actually use the net as an information source.
The net is evolving. Much like our genome, which if you haven't looked, is 95% nothing. Those of you who believe in intelligent design should ask yourself, "What intelligence would design something so poorly." The net is stuffed with junk, and unlike television, nobody is succeeding in inventing ways to force us to take it in. Look at how advertising revenues are dropping, as advertisers figure out that most of the adverts on the internet are studiously ignored or even blocked, by more of that marvelous technology that isn't captive to a corporate bottom line.
The sea of unwashed humanity who inhabit the infobahn for the pretty pictures and pirate music and hi-def videos will keep the infrastructure expanding. We owe a debt of gratitude to these people. Without them, _we_ could scarcely afford all this connectivity. And the very same connectivity that lets Trudy post what she's having for breakfast and keep track of Aunt Millie's kittens, allows me find an obscure article in a journal or find out what side effects the expensive drug my doctor wants me to take might have. To each their own.
Most of the sand on the beach does nothing but sit there and look pretty, but where else would we go to play vollyball?
As a cardiac patient who has had isotope stress tests, and as a working chemist, let me state for the record that there is nothing "slight" about the level of radioactivity of a patient after one of these tests. Low level rad wastes, radioactive ores, uranium glass, all are slight levels of radioactivity, and measured as millionths of a Curie. The isotope used for stress tests is injected at 30,000 times higher levels, and the radiation emitted, gamma rays, penetrates through things like clothes, bone, muscle, and car doors.
The isotope used has a very short half-life so that two days after a test, there is very little radioactivity left, Right after a test a patient has a level of radioactivity that would scare the gloves off a rad-safety worker. If you point a Geiger counter at one of us, it doesn't click, it -whines-.
They pulled over a vehicle that was hot, and in other circumstances would represent a substantial safety hazard. More power to them.
Slashdot Mirror
If we are bound and determined to execute people, and a criterion is that it be done "humanely", then we can use asphixiation by nitrogen gas.
Many nitrogen accidents have occurred in the past, including a fairly recent one at NASA where people have entered spaces filled with nitrogen and just passed out and died without any awareness of the danger, or any indication that bad things were about to happen. Aviators used to be required to experience anoxia (lackof oxygen) due to altitude, and as one who has experienced this, I can state from personal experience there is no discomfort whatsoever.
As a method, this is akin to a gas chamber except that no poisons are used. The chamber is flooded with nitrogen gas, which does not support life. As the oxygen content of the subject's blood falls, they experience a short period (seconds) of tunnel vision, then lose consciousness, and shortly thereafter, die. There is no choking or strangling sensation, no feeling of not being able to catch one's breath. So if you want to talk about "humane" in the same sentence as "execute" this is the way to go. it's cheap, doesn't require any toxic drugs and doesn't have any disposal problems.
I also think you shouldn't burn bridges.
However, with a lot of companies, simply quitting is burning the bridges, and a "good reference" is a fairy tale.
It all depends on the company you're working for. Not giving notice is rude and improper, and having a document that shows you did in fact give notice may be the only thing that keeps one of "those" companies from telling your prospective employer that you made off with trade secrets, the coffee fund, and the boss's secretary.
If some very bright person could figure out how to under gerrymandering of precincts, I'd vote for them on that principle alone.
Nobody likes that idea, though, because it threatens all the little fiefdoms established in congress and state legislatures, and might result in the end of millions of dollars of corporate bribes, er, contributions.
To Congressdorks: Remember Arab Spring. It can happen here.
I don't fathom why people seem so shocked by this turn of events.
The liberal politician Gore Vidal once remarked that "Now that the Great Red Menace is gone, the government can turn it's attention to the real enemy, which is now, and always has been, The People."
It always impressed me that when the Soviet Union fell apart, a huge number of "security" workers in GDR's Stasi ended up out of work. It seems that similarly to the end of WWII when rocket scientists were looking for a place to ply their trade, the US government stepped in and acquired their talents.
I've always thought that our government - the US government - should have named the agency who handles US security the UStasi. They've learned well from our East German mentors, and are in the process of jailing enemy combatants forever without trial, intercepting everyone's email and phone calls. They don't file body odor samples "for the dogs" yet, but they want to take DNA from everyone that is arrested, conviction or not. They want warrentless searches and that pesky Fourth Amendment is just an inconvenience. Who cares about the right to not self-incriminate, cough up those passwords, or else. General Michael Hayden, former head of UStasi (sorry, NSA) wanted to be able to use "aggressive interrogation."
This seems a sad turn for my country, the land that I love. Jefferson is probably rotating at high speed in his tomb.
I couldn't help notice the line calling this (among other things) a python-scripted oscilloscope.
As an engineer, let me say, "To heck with the laptop bit, where do I sign up and buy one?"
Daughter boards. WiFi (if you must), Bluetooth (if you must), and Analog Channels, Bay-Bee!
I'm -old- ...
In days of old, you could hoist a mast and run a transmitter. It was long after that that media giants were formed and moved in. As recently as 1957, you could run a TV channel without too much difficulty, though the capital investment in equipment was pretty ferrocious.
They didn't -always- belong to the kings. Don't believe it? Look up Pirate TV.
Ladies and Gentlemen, Friends and Foes
Welcome to the Cloud. In Bad old Days, the phrase ran "All your Base are Belong to Us"
When you give up control of a media - be it television or radio or web sites or email - what you do with that media is by definition under someone else's control. If that someone else, Google or Microsoft or DPRK, object to the content for _whatever_ reason, you're kid of oout of luck. You can tweet or protest or moan about it, but the bottom line is this: That media is _theirs_ and not _yours_ and if you don't like what they do with their media, tough.
Richard Stallman has railed against "The Cloud" for years, and this is just but one of the reasons.
If you want an adult blog with adverts, buy a $500 computer and a $30 domain name and put up an adult blog. If it gets popular, buy more $500 computers. Or hire a place that rents raw compute resource, and put up _your_ web site.
I should point out that for years now, places like RackSpace have been claiming that the sites hosted there belong to their clients, not themselves. Their position is simple enough, and designed to prevent someone with deep pockets (RackSpace, for example) from being sued by some bluenose for hosting content that someone finds objectionable. Now, they can hardly do an about face and tell people hosting sites, "Oh No! We don't like -that- particular content."
A decade ago when it cost your firstborn to host a web site, using "The Cloud" made sense from a financial perspective. Now, for half a hundred dollars a month, and a sub-thousand investment in hardware, you can host your own web site, which will be picked up by search engines, and blog to your heart's content about whatever it might be you want to blog about.
I've looked at the Cloud from Both Sides Now... Screw it.
Having worked in software development for 30 years, let me tell you a dark little secret.
QA programs are never enough.
It matters not how good your QA section is, things will get through. Why? Because the QA people have looked at the code, because QA managers are fond of believing that filling out paperwork is the same thing as careful retrospection, because the QA people work for a company whose vested interest is in getting that chunk of software out the door.
In order to do a thorough job, one needs Different Eyes.
I cannot tell you how many times I've had an intractable problem with a piece of software, and shown it to a coworker not associated with the product, only to have them turn to me and say (in effect) "You dumbass, it's right here!" Which, in fact it was. I'd have looked at it countless times, and I might well never have seen the problem.
Running software through extensive QA is an excellent idea, but in and of itself is not sufficient. Having someone not connected with the product, someone with "different eyes" look at it, is a time proven method to find things that your excellent and well managed QA department will never see.
Gee, that moon sure is reflective of radar. Almost like it was specular and made of metal.
The bottom line is very simple. If you have the math - and I'm talking diffeq and applied mechanics and dynamics - you will get jobs that others cannot. And strangely enough, those jobs pay very, very well.
Just like everyone else says, if you're content being a web programmer at a medium--to-ok salary, then forget the math.
If you want a job writing control code for F22's, at a salary that can make your head spin, then consider the math as supremely important.
Some of us are already on in years.
I expected to be here, at this point, by the end of the 70's. Then Vietnam happened, Nixon happened, and the future was, and still is, being mortgaged.
If I could get to orbit for $1,000,000, forget it. The problem is that $200K is just barely in reach, and I'd start thinking about selling my house.
So, short answer. Yes.
We shouldn't take Hanford as a prototypical example of "The Nuclear Industry."
Remember, the people who planned, funded, and ran Hanford were in the process of building devices -designed- to kill people by the millions, and designed to be used in circumstances when people, by the millions, were dying here in the USA. Perhaps we should not forgive them, but we should understand their attitude that poisoning a few workers or a few thousand fish was just not on their radar. This was, in their understanding, war.
What Hanford was, and is, is a very brutal view of the simple fact that in war, lots of people are hurt, maimed, killed, poisoned, burned, and other forms of mayhem committed upon them.
Now, we as a nation and as a world, have the responsibility and opportunity to clean up our own mess, a mess that was caused by people who sincerely believed that a philosophical point and an economic model was worth murdering countless people. If nothing else, we need to learn from these experiences. We need to not forget that matters of ideology and economic theory do not count as much as living, suffering humans.
I think Poor Richard has lived in an ivory tower far too long. Ideals are laudable, but the world moves on and reality trumps pedantry every time. Bill Gates didn't get to be, well, Bill Gates - by trumpeting Basic and DOS until people started saying, "Who?" He cut corners and compromised and, ahem, borrowed good ideas. It made him a gazillion dollars. And Richard, for all I agree with your ideals, and for better or worse, Bill Gates influenced the course of development of the personal computer more than you ever will.
-- Norm Reitzel
Finding "rare" earths isn't that difficult. In this country, the problem is that rare earth elements (technically lanthanides) are invariably associated with the other f-series elements (the actinides), specifically thorium. Mining rare earths produces thorium oxide as a byproduct, and "disposing" of this ought-to-be-valuable stuff is a real difficulty. In China, it's less of a problem, for two reasons. First, it's apparently OK to dump radioactive waste in your local waterway, and second, the Chinese government doesn't shun all things nuclear. Like reactors, and bombs, and Oh Yes, thorium deposits.
Now, finding rare earth deposits with almost no thorium in them is a real feat, and getting the US government to find ways to store thorium would a world-class miracle.
No, it's not evolution in the way that believers in a slow random process like to picture it.
This process is called adaptive radiation. Humans have moved into a very large feeding niche, and as a result our population and our genetic diversity has expanded hugely. Hygiene, agriculture, medical intervention, technology, and social institutions have hugely expanded the availability of places that people can survive. In an entirely natural and very old process, we have expanded our population into those places. There are more of us than there are locusts.
The second half of the cycle is the selection part. In the previous century, wars and local famine have played a part in this not so nice aspect of the evolutionary mill. In centuries before that, famine and plague were part of the selection process. In current times, some of the selection pressures applied to isolated parts of humanity include famine, flooding, ability to avoid being a gang member, and facile birth control. Note carefully that the term "isolated" used to refer only to geographic isolation. These days, more important is political isolation. Consider the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, for instance.
As much as some of us would like to think so, we as a species are not specially selected by supernatural powers to be immune from the evolutionary process. It goes on every day and shapes us. The cycle of adaptive radiation includes expanding into a new niche (now, the whole world), and then failure of large chunks of that population when something goes wrong. A recent instance would be the European plagues that took out 60% of the population. The descendants of that evolutionary moment are a little more resistant to Yersinia pestis, in a super-bug meets slightly better people scenario.
It's not a question of "irrational" - though that is the case. It's more a case of having a bunch of congresspeople who are technically invertebrates. If they had any spine at all, they would do what other close neighbors have done. Don't make a big PR push about "converting" - just stay shut up, and then stop printing the one dollar bills. After a few years, the problem will be an unproblem. And because it isn't a "changeover" shoved at the public, there won't be any organized resistance.
Given the way our Congress works, there's even an easy way to approach this. Treasury can simply "delay" printing one dollar bills for whatever reason they want to dream up. As the circulating bills start to resemble wet paper towels, dollar coins will gain in popularity.
Are you kidding, -two- Hubble class telescopes.
Dig deep into everyone's pockets, and launch them to the L4 and L5 LaGrangian points (Earth-Solar), and make a whopping big interferometer out of them.
What Vlad said.
I use a browser (seamonkey in fact) daily, however, perhaps 5% of my work involves looking up stuff on the internet, and almost none of my work involves "browsing" for something. Seamonkey is just functional. No Windows Dressing (sic), no Ferrocious Lion, just solid day to day use.
It ain't pretty, but it ain't broken, either.
No life can exist for millions of years?
You do realize you are so full of crap your eyes are brown?
Nuclear fuel rod storage ponds have to be treated so that they don't grow algae. The exclusion zone around Chernobyl is full of mink and fox and birds and mice. They're all radioactive, a little, but then we're all a little radioactive. If no life could live around Fukushima, why are crops from there prohibited from being shipped and sold?
At least make a token effort to get the actual facts, mmmkay?
-- Norm
Yes, there is a waste stream from reprocessing.
However, it is informative to look at how and when the mess that is - among others - Hanford, came to be.
At the time, the Military was building bombs to kill a million people at a shot, and the prevailing attitude was that the Soviet Union was only a month away from launching bombers and submarines and missiles, to kill US citizens by the tens or hundreds of millions. The Russians thought the same thing of the US; I think it perplexed them terribly that we didn't attack. After all, their sworn ally, Adolf Hitler, just changed his mind one day and launched a full scale invasion. So the Russians (and Ukranians, and others) were building bombs to kill people in the US by the tens or hundreds of millions.
Along with all this paranoia, came a driving requirement to build more and bigger weapons. There was a bomber gap, then a missile gap, and if you watched Dr. Strangelove, a mine shaft gap. No one in the bomb business was worrying about poisoning a few hundred workers, or a few thousand coyotes or fish or prairie dogs. They were building bombs, and it was enough that the waste from their efforts not end up with dead workers before they managed to actually build their bombs.
They temporized, they were careless (careless enough to skewer a reactor operator to a concrete slab with a control rod), but most of all, they were in a tearing hurry. They had to build those bombs before the Rooskies (or the Amerikans) attacked.
It's no wonder they did a crap job.
One would sincerely hope that today, we are a little more rational. We can reprocess fuel - we know the basic processes - and we can do so without making a radioactive dead spot on the prairie, or creating glow-in-the-dark salmon. It's kind of like building airplanes. Mistakes happen, people die. But every time something bad happens, we send in very smart engineers and figure out what happened, and why, and design new and better processes so that the next time, fewer people die.
Chernobyl happened for exactly the same reasons. The Soviets essentially copied the very first Fermi pile (the one under the squash stadium), added cooling and steam pipes, and scaled it up by a factor of a few thousand. This was poor engineering, but it was quick, and they had to get their reactors online quickly so that they could make the materials to make the bombs that they needed to defend themselves. All delusion (well, mostly delusion) but they had a good reason, as did we. The end result was a whopping big accident, but pay close attention here, there was no nuclear explosion.
We can reprocess fuel rods - which to me, sounds a whole lot better than leaving thousands of tons of insanely radioactive stuff cooling its heels in ponds all over the world. By reprocessing the fuel, we can make new fuel, we can take that crazy hot stuff and concentrate it into kilograms instead of tonnes, and incidentally, make it radioactive enough that no terrorist could stay alive long enough to steal it. We can separate needed isotopes for space exporation and cancer treatment and food sterilization.
And what do we have to give up to do this? We have to give up irrational fear. There are lots of things to fear - read Feynman's talk about building Y-12 - but the things to fear are real things, not crazy paranoid fantasies. The Fukushima disaster may have achieved criticality of stored used fuel rods, but there was no nuclear explosion. People died, from the tidal wave. Some people were exposed to low levels of radiation, but as was pointed out earlier in this venue, less exposure than they would have had than had they simply lived in Denver, USA for a year.
We can do this. We have the technology, we have the scientists, we have the engineers. Like any new thing, there will be mistakes, and perhaps those mistakes will cost lives. The comparison isn't to "will bad things happen if we do this" -- the proper comparison is "what bad things will happen if we don't do this."
-- Norm Reitzel
It's simple enough. In the good old days at the phone company, this was pretty well standard fare. Then some employee won a multi-million dollar lawsuit, and Things Changed.
Now (or as of when I left) - sexual harassment was simply a fire-on-sight offense. No counciling, no warnings, no nothing.
It's astounding how quickly things cleaned up.
I cleaned up -my- act, and I was probably one of the worst offenders.
I'm entirely content with letting Joe Sixpack have an outlet (or inlet) from this cyber universe. His (or her) treatment of the medium as "funny looking TV" will provide the capital support for those of us who actually use the net as an information source.
The net is evolving. Much like our genome, which if you haven't looked, is 95% nothing. Those of you who believe in intelligent design should ask yourself, "What intelligence would design something so poorly." The net is stuffed with junk, and unlike television, nobody is succeeding in inventing ways to force us to take it in. Look at how advertising revenues are dropping, as advertisers figure out that most of the adverts on the internet are studiously ignored or even blocked, by more of that marvelous technology that isn't captive to a corporate bottom line.
The sea of unwashed humanity who inhabit the infobahn for the pretty pictures and pirate music and hi-def videos will keep the infrastructure expanding. We owe a debt of gratitude to these people. Without them, _we_ could scarcely afford all this connectivity. And the very same connectivity that lets Trudy post what she's having for breakfast and keep track of Aunt Millie's kittens, allows me find an obscure article in a journal or find out what side effects the expensive drug my doctor wants me to take might have. To each their own.
Most of the sand on the beach does nothing but sit there and look pretty, but where else would we go to play vollyball?
Yep. Fast. Cheap. Good.
Pick two.
As a cardiac patient who has had isotope stress tests, and as a working chemist, let me state for the record that there is nothing "slight" about the level of radioactivity of a patient after one of these tests. Low level rad wastes, radioactive ores, uranium glass, all are slight levels of radioactivity, and measured as millionths of a Curie. The isotope used for stress tests is injected at 30,000 times higher levels, and the radiation emitted, gamma rays, penetrates through things like clothes, bone, muscle, and car doors.
The isotope used has a very short half-life so that two days after a test, there is very little radioactivity left, Right after a test a patient has a level of radioactivity that would scare the gloves off a rad-safety worker. If you point a Geiger counter at one of us, it doesn't click, it -whines-.
They pulled over a vehicle that was hot, and in other circumstances would represent a substantial safety hazard. More power to them.