WHAT "interesting phenomena" are there in cold fusion?
I followed that whole area very closely when it first came out (and was on the mailing list). I saw *no* interesting phenomena other than that of people willing to take sloppy experiments and create elaborate theories about them, and otherwise respectible scientists losing their cool about it.
I don't know if you were even old enough to read when the Cold Fusion fiasco started...
The (Pons and Fleishmann) paper that got all the attention, and got the whole sorry thing going, was peer reviewed in a reputable scientific journal. The authors were well respected scientists in their field.
Sadly, it was clear if you looked at the math carefully, that the claims of excess energy were derived by dividing by a small difference of large quanitities (generally a no-no) which were not measured accurately.
A lot of people spent a lot of time as a result of this paper, doing elaborate experiments and spending bundles of money (including government funds) and found no confirmation, although a lot was learned about how NOT to do electrochemical calorimetry!
Also during this time lots of peer reviewed journals published contradictory elaborate theories by genuine theoretical physicists that "explained" how the cold fusion might be working (although there was, in fact, no experimental evidence of cold fusion).
Yes, the scientific process works, and peer review is a critical part of it, BUT... it doesn't always work on the first publishing of a paper!
Oh, btw, there is still a journal of cold fusion. It is published by a guy who also writes editorials about all sorts of other junk science (in a ham radio magazine that he also owns).
The biggest travel systems are NOT converting away from this architecture.
They are based on the original PARS application running on the TP/F operating system. It was developed in the mid/60s concurrently with 360 deployment. They have zillions of dollars worth of code in them.
When I last worked in the industry (in the hotel reservation business where my company was replacing these systems with Unix based stuff), the Sabre application itself was valued at $1,000,000,000 in the airlines world. Because that application is so expensive to replace, it may be a very long time before it goes away. And it is written largely in IBM/360 assembly language (BAL)! (note: in the past the weight and balance calculations for your airline flight was calculated on this same system - in assembly language - with no memory protection among the hundreds of millions of lines of assembly language code).
When I did some work on PARS in 1980, the largest program ("segment") size was around 1500 bytes, which corresponded to the drum sector size from the original drum used on the original TPF (drum == a disk in the shape of a drum with lots of heads so it didn't have to seek tracks). Also, your airline reservation number was literally the hexadecimal of the disk address where it was stored!
These systems do very high transaction rates - over 5000 complex travel transactions per second. They get most of their speed from the vast I/O bandwidth and the assembly language code. They are extremely expensive to modify. Many of the coders I ran into had *never* coded on any other system and had no idea how any other computer system or language worked, but they were payed *a lot* for their deep knowledge of PARS and TPF.
BTW... this architecture is also widely used in the financial transaction processing industry. I suspect VISA is still using it (they were when I worked there in the mid '80s).
Today, they are extensively wrapped and interfaced, so not as many people are directly interacting with their user interface, which is a cryptic command line syntax and screens designed for 16x64 line ascii screens (PRE-3270!). Skilled operators with this system could work very fast, although we replaced it with a windows interface where their measured time was faster.
In the mid 1990's I was working with one very large airline which still had a huge network of these 16x64 terminals running am asynchronous 6-bit binary communications protocol (ALC) where the bit order was reversed and the bit voltage was inverted compared to RS232-ASCII!
Another company with which I have experience is the largest third party credit card processor. Their application runs on the mainframe architecture, and as of a few years ago was still written in assembly language from its inception 30 years ago.
Never underestimate the power of software and hardware intertia!
As I said, the times have changed. The Islamists have different goals and methods than the various Marxist and nationalist terrorists of the past.
The previous terrorists calibrated their damage to a level high enough to get attention and worry people, but not so high as to put their targets on a war footing.
The Islamists have the destruction of western civilization as their goal, and they believe any and all methods are justified.
Other nations have suffered nasty terrorist attacks, but NOTHING in history comes close to 9/11. Even the worst attacks - bombed aircraft - killed a few hundred people and cost a few millions of dollars. 9/11 was intended to kill 50,000 people and did kill over 3000, and it destroyed tens of billions in infrastructure.
People who will do the latter will not hesitate to take out the TGV.
It makes sense to construct infrastructure with some awareness of its vulnerability to intentional attack and the costs of those attacks.
Further terrorist attacks along the lines of earlier attacks are not big enough to cause major changes in infrastructure. But the first time an Islamist group kills a few hundred people on a high speed train, and then does it again as soon as the track is repaired... people will take a different view.
If you don't believe this, look at what is happening to airline infrastructure. Enormous costs have peen paid by all nations to prevent hijacking and bombing. Now there may be great costs (per aircraft) to attempt to defeat MANPADS (portable surface to air missiles).
Train systems are even easier to attack than aircraft, because they run along a known path which is on the ground, thus easily accessible.
But go ahead and build the trains. What the heck. The terrorists have a lot of other things to attack. This will just add one more catastrophic possibility.
The danger is because of the very high speed of the trains, not maglev vs wheeled. A train crash at many hundreds of kph would be extremely deadly, likely killing everyone on the train.
High speed trains are easier to sabotage, compared to aircraft, because the area needed to be defended to prevent aircraft sabotage is much smaller. A saboteur can choose anywhere along a train track to mount an attack.
As far as historical context, there was an incident in France where a powerful bomb was found attached to the TGV tracks, but it was defused before it could cause the tragedy. There was a successful terrorist attack on a train in the US a few years ago - near Phoenix, Arizona. Since it wasn't a high speed train, there was only one death. But the attack was very low tech - apparently somebody just damaged the track by removing a portion of it (I don't remember the details - it was a few years ago). No explosives, no technology. One dead, a number injured. Nobody was ever caught, but there were messages left at the scene indicating that it was an intentional attack.
Finally, before September 11, 2001 no aircraft had been hijacked with box knives, and no skyscrapers had been destroyed by aircraft attacks. History is a dangerous guide in current times. We have entered an era where likely terrorism acts are different than in the past: more widespread, and with a concerted attempt to cause maximum casualties of civilians.
One of the mysteries of TSE's is the survivability of the infectious agent at high temperature and in chemical exposures that should kill all life and denature proteins.
But, it is an established fact.
The 1100 degrees F comes from an experiment that claimed to show that reducing infectious tissue to ash from very high temperature treatment failed to remove infectivity.
In assessing the suitability of a site for landfill, the Environment Agency assumes that incineration inactivates infectivity. Brown et al(1999) however, have shown that hamster TSE infected tissue is not necessarily completely destroyed at 600C. In the Brown experiment, infectivity was destroyed at 1000C. We do not know the minimum time/temperature combination required to ensure infectivity is destroyed.
I believe that the transmission of TSE's via proteins is the mostly accepted hypothesis, good enough to earn Prusiner a Nobel prize. The reason some folks have a problem with the hypothesis is exactly the sort of objection the previous poster made: How can a protein survive those conditions. However, a lot of research has failed to provide a convincing alternative.
Also, keep in mind that if the infectious agent is a protein in some form, many standard rules of infectious diseases go out the window. Prions are not life forms. They carry no genetic encoding of any sort.
Cross-infectivity of prions has long been an area of active research. In general, TSE's tend to be most infectious within the species they are found. However, most TSE's are transmissible to other species at some dosage and some method of transmission (the best is direct intracranial injection).
One fear with CWD is that it might have a low infectivity to humans - one low enough that it is not yet detectivle, but high enough to cause excess deaths from consumers of venison. I certainly plan to avoid venison (but then I am not a fan of it) and wish I had eaten less beef during my many UK visits. Oh well...
As everyone starts worrying about portable surface-to-air (MANPAD) terrorist attacks, here we have another transportation system that is *much* easier to sabotage. It doesn't take a sophisticated weapon system here to cause a tragedy, just a well placed obstacle or a small amount of explosive.
The Chinese may be able to afford a guard every 3 eters of track (although making the guard unbribable is a problem), but much of the rest of the world cannot.
The critical point is that we don't build the positive coefficient graphite moderated reactors. Unfortunately, Cuba (!!) is building one very close to Florida.
As far as positive effects of low levels of radiation, I must admit to some skepticism also. I have seen some mechanisms proposed, but I don't think it is a generally accepted fact.
Actually, there have been approximately 2 thyroid cancer deaths and about 1000 excess thyroid cancers as a result of Chernobyl. These were in children who were exposed to high doses of radioactive iodine and were not given iodine supplements to crowd out the radioactive iodine. The thryoid, especially in children, is very sensitive to radioactive iodine. The good news is that thyroid cancer has a very high cure rates, as the above statistics indicate. Other than that, there have been NO adverse effects found in those exposed to the chronic excess radiation from Chernobyl.
There have certainly been assertions of tens of thousands of deaths, but this was right after the event. It has failed to pan out. There were of course a number of deaths within the first month in the people who were exposed to high accute doses - limited to those who had worked on the fire.
As far as longer term effects over a larger area, take a look at your own reference on health effects - it says that only thyroid cancer has been found. Look at http://www.nea.fr/html/rp/chernobyl/c05.html for details.
EXTENSIVE studies have been done.
Animals do NOT show high concentrations of radioactivity in their flesh, although some show *trace* accumulations. Extensive studies of animals in the exclusion zone were done because they had the highest chronic radiation exposures. These tests included sensitive genetic tests looking for enhanced mutation rates. NO POSTIIVE RESULT WAS FOUND (other than the retracted paper). This comes from a recent survey article in Science magazine.
I think what Chernobyl will ultimately show is what many have long suspected: chronic low doses of radiation do *not* produce negative health effects in linear scaling with the known negative health effects of acute high doses. This is totally consistent with the Hiroshima and Nagasaki experience, although in those cases there was almost no chronic exposure there because there was no localized fallout from those two air burst explosions.
There are no studies that I am aware of that show negative effects on humans from low doses of radiation. There is at least one study that implies positive effects - the rate of lung cancer in the US is *inversely* proportional to the level of household radon (based on per-county death and radon statistics).
For both political and psychological reasons, the hazards of radiation exposure have been vastly overstressed, to the detriment of the public and the environment (due to its impact on nuclear power production). While it is entirely possible that low doses of radiation exposure produce very low increases in cancer incidence, the effect must be so tiny for it to have gone unmeasured.
The excess death estimates used by various agencies are based on linear extrapolations from people who received high acute doses. There is a fundamental rule on radiation exposure which is that the dose is linearly cumulative. There is, however, no evidence to support that rule at low levels.
BTW,,, as the longer term studies come in, there will *undoubtedly* be some statistically significant correlations (.95 probability level), if they test for enough possible consequences. This will happen if there is no effect at all, as the odds of a 1 in 20 significant result are pretty good if you look for more than 10 effects!
I still do a lot of programming for embedded applications in an older 8-bit computer architecture (Motorola 6800). They are still selling millions of the embedded versions of this (MC68HC05...).
It ain't purty, but it's amazing what you can do with a 8 KBytes of EEPROM and 384 bytes of RAM!
This programming, of course, is in assembly language, because C has too much memory overhead.
Oh, btw, the typical machine executes under 1,000,000 unstructions per second.
Probably the most interesting outcome of the Chernobyl "experiment" is the almost indetectable effect the radiation had on the environment. All sorts of sensitive monitoring has been done, and there has been no evidence (other than one retracted paper) of damage to animals in the Chernobyl exclusion zone. In fact, the area has become something of a nature park, since people have been kept out.
The effects of long term exposure to low to moderate levels of radiation seem to be far less than receiving that same dosage all at once. In spite of that, the standards for radiation exposure tend to treat it as lifetime cumulative.
None of this, of course, will keep people from totally freaking every time they hear the word radiation. After all, the medical profession had to change the name for their imaging machines from "Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging" to "Magnetic Resonance Imaging" because folks were scared of the word "nuclear!"
He saddled this country with trillions in debt. So-called "conservatives" should be ashamed, rather than treating him like some kind of pop-star. Yes, Reagan strengthened the military, but his entire military build-up was never paid for. It was all done on credit. This is very upsetting when you stop and think about it, which very few people actually do.
Or you could look at another way. In order to defend our country, which should be the first priority of government, he had to agree to continue social spending at its high level while increasing the defense budget back to where it needed to be. The defense budget during the Reagan years was never as high as the budget for the HHS department.
For someone who wasn't capable of running the country, he did pretty well. He certainly did a better job than Clinton. There was no reason for him to leave office.
Very little of the defense spending went to a nuclear buildup! We already had plenty of nukes. The spending went to conventional forces for the most part.
Reagan was far from a simple man. It has always amazed me at how quick people are to label Republican politicians as dumb (which is what you really meant).
The GDP increase due to the Reagan economic reforms more than made up for the total debt accumulated during that time. If the debt wasn't repaid during the economic boom, you can hardly blame it on Reagan.
Like I said, it's a CONSERVATIVE magazine, not a Libertarian magazine.
And the point about euthanasia and drug laws is well taken (except keep in mind that National Review in general, not just this article, is opposed to the drug war).
As far as Reagan's War... it was a good war, and it worked. It was about time.
I realize that doctrinaire libertarians would have prefered that we ignore the Soviet threat or have private individuals buy armies or mercenaries to fight them - which is one reason Republicans win elections and Libertarians don't.
I have seen *no* anti-intellectualism in the mainstream of the Republican party, so I would hope you would back up that charge. Likewise what's this deference to authority nonsense?
The Republicans, like any party big enough to win elections need to compromise. They need to play the special interests game, just like everyone else. We may not like it, but it is not exactly an indication that they are not conservative. They are FAR MORE CONSERVATIVE than the Democrats, at least.
As far as "borrow and spend" - it was that conservative policy, by Reagan, that ultimately gave us the growth we needed to get out of the tax-and-spend mess and grow the economy so large that we stopped having budget deficits for the first time in ages. Now we are in a deficit again, but when the economy is weak, and defense is needed, you need to spend the money.
Oh, and btw, nations which create money *can* borrow as long as the future GDP will support it, just like most homeowners are in debt beyond their net worth.
William F Buckley founded and runs the National Review. He is considered the senior voice of conservatives in America. He, and National Review, are strongly pro-life and also in favor of drug legalization.
It just shows that those who blithely put all Republicans into one stereotype are undereducated.
I use connected.com to backup critical Linux files.
All it takes is two machines, one running Windows. And these days, there are so many things worth having that are only on windows... why not?
My linux system periodically creates a tar gz and copies it onto my Windows2000 disk. Late at nite, Win2K uses connected.com to back up my stuff, both the ton of critical windows data and the Linux stuff.
Works great.
As mentioned before, restores are a bit slow, but the peace of mind is worth it.
The network only restriction applies to digital only.
Many (most?) cell phones in the US will operating on the old analog service if digital service is not available. There are two analog systems in any area(A and B) and your phone will normally be set up only to roam on one of them. If your carrier doesn't have a cotract with that one, you may not get service at all (even if you switch the phone to anther).
If your provider doesn't own the analog service, then you end up paying a lot when you do so. This is called roaming (there is digital roaming also out of your home area) and the very fine print in your contract will often inform you that the roaming charge is somewhere from $.30 to $1.00 per minute.
Roaming is a very big rip-off and IMHO a defect in the system (although I wouldn't be surprised if roaming is the only thing that keeps a lot of small rural cell phone carriers in business).
You can buy no-roaming contracts (such as AT&T's Digital One Rate), but you have to be careful. A lot of "national" plans imply no roaming, but when you get out a magnifier and read the fine print, they really mean that you don't pay roaming charges *on their networks* away from your home area. In the past, I have noticed that Verizon has been especially bad at this. I know some storm chasers who read the confusing fine print (and it iw (was?) written in a very confusing manner), and called the company to find out if they were going to be charged for roaming or not. They were told they were not. After a few weeks of storm chasing in the midwest, going through the service area of one tiny rural cellular provider after anoth, they got enormous cellular bills.
Actually, having a monopoly usually means that you are the survivor in a field in which a monopoly is the natural outcome. Microsoft is a natural monopoly in the same way that an electric power distribution company is a monopoly.
The unfortunate approach of the "trust busters" is to demonize Microsoft's practices and then attempt to stop those practices. This fails to recognize that the main cause of the monopoly has nothing to do with evildoing. And because of this misapproach, the real problems from the monopoly - cross-subsidization as pointed out by many posters in this thread - is being ignored.
I would include operating system manufacturers in the natural monopoly category. Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly primarily because of nasty practices, and not primarily because of shrewdness, but rather because the market demands a standard operating system, and Microsoft now is the company that has this. In that sense, the operating system for the most widely used hardware system is a natural monopoly. Natural monopolies occur when it is far too expensive for competition to form. Cable TV is a natural monopoly ( in cable TV delivery, not necessarily in TV delivery) because it doesn't pay to run competitive systems over the same area. Microsoft is a monopoly because the "area" is applications space and hardware driver space. Folks in those two spaces have a strong economic incentive to target as few operating systems as possible, preferably one, and Microsoft is the one.
Because Microsoft has a natural monopoly in this area (and for different reasons possibly one in office software), it needs to be regulated like any other utility. And using the profits from the monopoly to subsidize below-cost entries into other markets is monopolistic abuse. Heck, if Microsoft were a company, it would be charged with "dumping" in every area other than office products and operating system.
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WHAT "interesting phenomena" are there in cold fusion?
I followed that whole area very closely when it first came out (and was on the mailing list). I saw *no* interesting phenomena other than that of people willing to take sloppy experiments and create elaborate theories about them, and otherwise respectible scientists losing their cool about it.
So I am genuinely curious. WHAT phenomena?
I don't know if you were even old enough to read when the Cold Fusion fiasco started...
The (Pons and Fleishmann) paper that got all the attention, and got the whole sorry thing going, was peer reviewed in a reputable scientific journal. The authors were well respected scientists in their field.
Sadly, it was clear if you looked at the math carefully, that the claims of excess energy were derived by dividing by a small difference of large quanitities (generally a no-no) which were not measured accurately.
A lot of people spent a lot of time as a result of this paper, doing elaborate experiments and spending bundles of money (including government funds) and found no confirmation, although a lot
was learned about how NOT to do electrochemical calorimetry!
Also during this time lots of peer reviewed journals published contradictory elaborate theories by genuine theoretical physicists that "explained" how the cold fusion might be working (although there was, in fact, no experimental evidence of cold fusion).
Yes, the scientific process works, and peer review is a critical part of it, BUT... it doesn't always work on the first publishing of a paper!
Oh, btw, there is still a journal of cold fusion. It is published by a guy who also writes editorials about all sorts of other junk science (in a ham radio magazine that he also owns).
The biggest travel systems are NOT converting away from this architecture.
/60s concurrently with 360 deployment. They have zillions of dollars worth of code in them.
They are based on the original PARS application running on the TP/F operating system. It was developed in the mid
When I last worked in the industry (in the hotel reservation business where my company was replacing these systems with Unix based stuff), the Sabre application itself was valued at $1,000,000,000 in the airlines world. Because that application is so expensive to replace, it may be a very long time before it goes away. And it is written largely in IBM/360 assembly language (BAL)! (note: in the past the weight and balance calculations for your airline flight was calculated on this same system - in assembly language - with no memory protection among the hundreds of millions of lines of assembly language code).
When I did some work on PARS in 1980, the largest program ("segment") size was around 1500 bytes, which corresponded to the drum sector size from the original drum used on the original TPF (drum == a disk in the shape of a drum with lots of heads so it didn't have to seek tracks). Also, your airline reservation number was literally the hexadecimal of the disk address where it was stored!
These systems do very high transaction rates - over 5000 complex travel transactions per second. They get most of their speed from the vast I/O bandwidth and the assembly language code. They are extremely expensive to modify. Many of the coders I ran into had *never* coded on any other system and had no idea how any other computer system or language worked, but they were payed *a lot* for their deep knowledge of PARS and TPF.
BTW... this architecture is also widely used in the financial transaction processing industry. I suspect VISA is still using it (they were when I worked there in the mid '80s).
Today, they are extensively wrapped and interfaced, so not as many people are directly interacting with their user interface, which is a cryptic command line syntax and screens designed for 16x64 line ascii screens (PRE-3270!). Skilled operators with this system could work very fast, although we replaced it with a windows interface where their measured time was faster.
In the mid 1990's I was working with one very large airline which still had a huge network of these 16x64 terminals running am asynchronous 6-bit binary communications protocol (ALC) where the bit order was reversed and the bit voltage was inverted compared to RS232-ASCII!
Another company with which I have experience is the largest third party credit card processor. Their application runs on the mainframe architecture, and as of a few years ago was still written in assembly language from its inception 30 years ago.
Never underestimate the power of software and hardware intertia!
As I said, the times have changed. The Islamists have different goals and methods than the various Marxist and nationalist terrorists of the past.
The previous terrorists calibrated their damage to a level high enough to get attention and worry people, but not so high as to put their targets on a war footing.
The Islamists have the destruction of western civilization as their goal, and they believe any and all methods are justified.
Other nations have suffered nasty terrorist attacks, but NOTHING in history comes close to 9/11. Even the worst attacks - bombed aircraft - killed a few hundred people and cost a few millions of dollars. 9/11 was intended to kill 50,000 people and did kill over 3000, and it destroyed tens of billions in infrastructure.
People who will do the latter will not hesitate to take out the TGV.
It makes sense to construct infrastructure with some awareness of its vulnerability to intentional attack and the costs of those attacks.
Further terrorist attacks along the lines of earlier attacks are not big enough to cause major changes in infrastructure. But the first time an Islamist group kills a few hundred people on a high speed train, and then does it again as soon as the track is repaired... people will take a different view.
If you don't believe this, look at what is happening to airline infrastructure. Enormous costs have peen paid by all nations to prevent hijacking and bombing. Now there may be great costs (per aircraft) to attempt to defeat MANPADS (portable surface to air missiles).
Train systems are even easier to attack than aircraft, because they run along a known path which is on the ground, thus easily accessible.
But go ahead and build the trains. What the heck. The terrorists have a lot of other things to attack. This will just add one more catastrophic possibility.
The danger is because of the very high speed of the trains, not maglev vs wheeled. A train crash at many hundreds of kph would be extremely deadly, likely killing everyone on the train.
High speed trains are easier to sabotage, compared to aircraft, because the area needed to be defended to prevent aircraft sabotage is much smaller. A saboteur can choose anywhere along a train track to mount an attack.
As far as historical context, there was an incident in France where a powerful bomb was found attached to the TGV tracks, but it was defused before it could cause the tragedy. There was a successful terrorist attack on a train in the US a few years ago - near Phoenix, Arizona. Since it wasn't a high speed train, there was only one death. But the attack was very low tech - apparently somebody just damaged the track by removing a portion of it (I don't remember the details - it was a few years ago). No explosives, no technology. One dead, a number injured. Nobody was ever caught, but there were messages left at the scene indicating that it was an intentional attack.
Finally, before September 11, 2001 no aircraft had been hijacked with box knives, and no skyscrapers had been destroyed by aircraft attacks. History is a dangerous guide in current times. We have entered an era where likely terrorism acts are different than in the past: more widespread, and with a concerted attempt to cause maximum casualties of civilians.
One of the mysteries of TSE's is the survivability of the infectious agent at high temperature and in chemical exposures that should kill all life and denature proteins.
But, it is an established fact.
The 1100 degrees F comes from an experiment that claimed to show that reducing infectious tissue to ash from very high temperature treatment failed to remove infectivity.
In assessing the suitability of a site for landfill, the Environment Agency assumes that incineration inactivates infectivity. Brown et al(1999) however, have shown that hamster TSE infected tissue is not necessarily completely destroyed at 600C. In the Brown experiment, infectivity was destroyed at 1000C. We do not know the minimum time/temperature combination required to ensure infectivity is destroyed.
I believe that the transmission of TSE's via proteins is the mostly accepted hypothesis, good enough to earn Prusiner a Nobel prize. The reason some folks have a problem with the hypothesis is exactly the sort of objection the previous poster made: How can a protein survive those conditions.
However, a lot of research has failed to provide a convincing alternative.
Also, keep in mind that if the infectious agent is a protein in some form, many standard rules of infectious diseases go out the window. Prions are not life forms. They carry no genetic encoding of any sort.
Cross-infectivity of prions has long been an area of active research. In general, TSE's tend to be most infectious within the species they are found. However, most TSE's are transmissible to other species at some dosage and some method of transmission (the best is direct intracranial injection).
One fear with CWD is that it might have a low infectivity to humans - one low enough that it is not yet detectivle, but high enough to cause excess deaths from consumers of venison. I certainly plan to avoid venison (but then I am not a fan of it) and wish I had eaten less beef during my many UK visits. Oh well...
As everyone starts worrying about portable surface-to-air (MANPAD) terrorist attacks, here we have another transportation system that is *much* easier to sabotage. It doesn't take a sophisticated weapon system here to cause a tragedy, just a well placed obstacle or a small amount of explosive.
The Chinese may be able to afford a guard every 3 eters of track (although making the guard unbribable is a problem), but much of the rest of the world cannot.
The critical point is that we don't build the positive coefficient graphite moderated reactors. Unfortunately, Cuba (!!) is building one very close to Florida.
As far as positive effects of low levels of radiation, I must admit to some skepticism also. I have seen some mechanisms proposed, but I don't think it is a generally accepted fact.
Actually, there have been approximately 2 thyroid cancer deaths and about 1000 excess thyroid cancers as a result of Chernobyl. These were in children who were exposed to high doses of radioactive iodine and were not given iodine supplements to crowd out the radioactive iodine. The thryoid, especially in children, is very sensitive to radioactive iodine. The good news is that thyroid cancer has a very high cure rates, as the above statistics indicate. Other than that, there have been NO adverse effects found in those exposed to the chronic excess radiation from Chernobyl.
There have certainly been assertions of tens of thousands of deaths, but this was right after the event. It has failed to pan out. There were of course a number of deaths within the first month in the people who were exposed to high accute doses - limited to those who had worked on the fire.
As far as longer term effects over a larger area, take a look at your own reference on health effects - it says that only thyroid cancer has been found. Look at http://www.nea.fr/html/rp/chernobyl/c05.html for details.
EXTENSIVE studies have been done.
Animals do NOT show high concentrations of radioactivity in their flesh, although some show *trace* accumulations. Extensive studies of animals in the exclusion zone were done because they had the highest chronic radiation exposures. These tests included sensitive genetic tests looking for enhanced mutation rates. NO POSTIIVE RESULT WAS FOUND (other than the retracted paper). This comes from a recent survey article in Science magazine.
I think what Chernobyl will ultimately show is what many have long suspected: chronic low doses of radiation do *not* produce negative health effects in linear scaling with the known negative health effects of acute high doses. This is totally consistent with the Hiroshima and Nagasaki experience, although in those cases there was almost no chronic exposure there because there was no localized fallout from those two air burst explosions.
There are no studies that I am aware of that show negative effects on humans from low doses of radiation. There is at least one study that implies positive effects - the rate of lung cancer in the US is *inversely* proportional to the level of household radon (based on per-county death and radon statistics).
For both political and psychological reasons, the hazards of radiation exposure have been vastly overstressed, to the detriment of the public and the environment (due to its impact on nuclear power production). While it is entirely possible that low doses of radiation exposure produce very low increases in cancer incidence, the effect must be so tiny for it to have gone unmeasured.
The excess death estimates used by various agencies are based on linear extrapolations from people who received high acute doses. There is a fundamental rule on radiation exposure which is that the dose is linearly cumulative. There is, however, no evidence to support that rule at low levels.
BTW,,, as the longer term studies come in, there will *undoubtedly* be some statistically significant correlations (.95 probability level), if they test for enough possible consequences. This will happen if there is no effect at all, as the odds of a 1 in 20 significant result are pretty good if you look for more than 10 effects!
I still do a lot of programming for embedded applications in an older 8-bit computer architecture (Motorola 6800). They are still selling millions of the embedded versions of this (MC68HC05...).
It ain't purty, but it's amazing what you can do with a 8 KBytes of EEPROM and 384 bytes of RAM!
This programming, of course, is in assembly language, because C has too much memory overhead.
Oh, btw, the typical machine executes under 1,000,000 unstructions per second.
Probably the most interesting outcome of the Chernobyl "experiment" is the almost indetectable effect the radiation had on the environment. All sorts of sensitive monitoring has been done, and there has been no evidence (other than one retracted paper) of damage to animals in the Chernobyl exclusion zone. In fact, the area has become something of a nature park, since people have been kept out.
The effects of long term exposure to low to moderate levels of radiation seem to be far less than receiving that same dosage all at once. In spite of that, the standards for radiation exposure tend to treat it as lifetime cumulative.
None of this, of course, will keep people from totally freaking every time they hear the word radiation. After all, the medical profession had to change the name for their imaging machines from "Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging" to "Magnetic Resonance Imaging" because folks were scared of the word "nuclear!"
By known criminals, I assume you mean those victims of a democratic witch hunt whose convictions were reversed on appeal?
He saddled this country with trillions in debt. So-called "conservatives" should be ashamed, rather than treating him like some kind of pop-star. Yes, Reagan strengthened the military, but his entire military build-up was never paid for. It was all done on credit. This is very upsetting when you stop and think about it, which very few people actually do.
Or you could look at another way. In order to defend our country, which should be the first priority of government, he had to agree to continue social spending at its high level while increasing the defense budget back to where it needed to be. The defense budget during the Reagan years was never as high as the budget for the HHS department.
For someone who wasn't capable of running the country, he did pretty well. He certainly did a better job than Clinton. There was no reason for him to leave office.
Very little of the defense spending went to a nuclear buildup! We already had plenty of nukes. The spending went to conventional forces for the most part.
Reagan was far from a simple man. It has always amazed me at how quick people are to label Republican politicians as dumb (which is what you really meant).
The GDP increase due to the Reagan economic reforms more than made up for the total debt accumulated during that time. If the debt wasn't repaid during the economic boom, you can hardly blame it on Reagan.
I calculate that it would emit 4200 Joules per centimeter of travel through matter. That is quite a bit of energy.
Like I said, it's a CONSERVATIVE magazine, not a Libertarian magazine.
And the point about euthanasia and drug laws is well taken (except keep in mind that National Review in general, not just this article, is opposed to the drug war).
As far as Reagan's War... it was a good war, and it worked. It was about time.
I realize that doctrinaire libertarians would have prefered that we ignore the Soviet threat or have private individuals buy armies or mercenaries to fight them - which is one reason Republicans win elections and Libertarians don't.
"true conservative" is a fleeting concept.
I have seen *no* anti-intellectualism in the mainstream of the Republican party, so I would hope you would back up that charge. Likewise what's this deference to authority nonsense?
The Republicans, like any party big enough to win elections need to compromise. They need to play the special interests game, just like everyone else. We may not like it, but it is not exactly an indication that they are not conservative. They are FAR MORE CONSERVATIVE than the Democrats, at least.
As far as "borrow and spend" - it was that conservative policy, by Reagan, that ultimately gave us the growth we needed to get out of the tax-and-spend mess and grow the economy so large that we stopped having budget deficits for the first time in ages. Now we are in a deficit again, but when the economy is weak, and defense is needed, you need to spend the money.
Oh, and btw, nations which create money *can* borrow as long as the future GDP will support it, just like most homeowners are in debt beyond their net worth.
William F Buckley founded and runs the National Review. He is considered the senior voice of conservatives in America. He, and National Review, are strongly pro-life and also in favor of drug legalization.
It just shows that those who blithely put all Republicans into one stereotype are undereducated.
I use connected.com to backup critical Linux files.
All it takes is two machines, one running Windows. And these days, there are so many things worth having that are only on windows... why not?
My linux system periodically creates a tar gz and copies it onto my Windows2000 disk. Late at nite, Win2K uses connected.com to back up my stuff, both the ton of critical windows data and the Linux stuff.
Works great.
As mentioned before, restores are a bit slow, but the peace of mind is worth it.
Interstingly, it also applies to analog roaming.
The network only restriction applies to digital only.
Many (most?) cell phones in the US will operating on the old analog service if digital service is not available. There are two analog systems in any area(A and B) and your phone will normally be set up only to roam on one of them. If your carrier doesn't have a cotract with that one, you may not get service at all (even if you switch the phone to anther).
If your provider doesn't own the analog service, then you end up paying a lot when you do so. This is called roaming (there is digital roaming also out of your home area) and the very fine print in your contract will often inform you that the roaming charge is somewhere from $.30 to $1.00 per minute.
Roaming is a very big rip-off and IMHO a defect in the system (although I wouldn't be surprised if roaming is the only thing that keeps a lot of small rural cell phone carriers in business).
You can buy no-roaming contracts (such as AT&T's Digital One Rate), but you have to be careful. A lot of "national" plans imply no roaming, but when you get out a magnifier and read the fine print, they really mean that you don't pay roaming charges *on their networks* away from your home area. In the past, I have noticed that Verizon has been especially bad at this. I know some storm chasers who read the confusing fine print (and it iw (was?) written in a very confusing manner), and called the company to find out if they were going to be charged for roaming or not. They were told they were not. After a few weeks of storm chasing in the midwest, going through the service area of one tiny rural cellular provider after anoth, they got enormous cellular bills.
More frequencies per head would help, as the only added capital cost is more transceivers (or channel fractions thereof).
It is much more expensive to add sites than it is to add equipment to an existing site.
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Actually, having a monopoly usually means that you are the survivor in a field in which a monopoly is the natural outcome. Microsoft is a natural monopoly in the same way that an electric power distribution company is a monopoly.
The unfortunate approach of the "trust busters" is to demonize Microsoft's practices and then attempt to stop those practices. This fails to recognize that the main cause of the monopoly has nothing to do with evildoing. And because of this misapproach, the real problems from the monopoly - cross-subsidization as pointed out by many posters in this thread - is being ignored.
I would include operating system manufacturers in the natural monopoly category. Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly primarily because of nasty practices, and not primarily because of shrewdness, but rather because the market demands a standard operating system, and Microsoft now is the company that has this. In that sense, the operating system for the most widely used hardware system is a natural monopoly. Natural monopolies occur when it is far too expensive for competition to form. Cable TV is a natural monopoly ( in cable TV delivery, not necessarily in TV delivery) because it doesn't pay to run competitive systems over the same area. Microsoft is a monopoly because the "area" is applications space and hardware driver space. Folks in those two spaces have a strong economic incentive to target as few operating systems as possible, preferably one, and Microsoft is the one.
Because Microsoft has a natural monopoly in this area (and for different reasons possibly one in office software), it needs to be regulated like any other utility. And using the profits from the monopoly to subsidize below-cost entries into other markets is monopolistic abuse. Heck, if Microsoft were a company, it would be charged with "dumping" in every area other than office products and operating system.
And there is even evidence that there were several waves of migration, with later "native americans" wiping out the previous "native americans".