That's simply not true. SpaceX designed the Falcons from the beginning to meet the requirements for Man-Rating. They met all the specs and all the safety margins. The only reason it hasn't been fully man rated yet is that they haven't finished the Dragon 2 test program through all the steps.
But just like the SLS, it was designed from day one to be man-rated.
The only "pencil whipping" by the Air Force was to allow it to launch national security payloads, and that was after it had completed a certain number of certification flights with civilian payloads. After the launch failure last June, they went right back into a probationary status until the accident was explained and dealt with. There's really been no special treatment of SpaceX, it just seems that way because they've been launching a lot more often than the ULA guys did to get certified.
Last year tens of thousands of people were exposed to dangerous levels of radiation in excess of 5 milli-sieverts.
How?
They went on vacation to the beach in Brazil for a week or so.
"Radiation levels are highest at Guarapari’s beaches, a popular seasonal tourist attraction, where readings of up to 175 mSv (millisieverts)) per year have been measured." Global Hot Spots
Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) after the San Bernadino shootings -- "Sensible gun laws work! We've proven it in California." link She is apparently unaware of what state San Bernadino is in.
Representative Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) with the debt spiraling upwards at close to $1.25T per year and insurance premiums are jumping as much as 50% per year - "ObamaCare is lowering costs and the deficit." link
Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) -- “Every month that we do not have an economic recovery package 500 million Americans lose their jobs.” – in a nation with 307 million people.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) -- “We have federal regulations and state laws that prohibit hunting ducks with more than three rounds, and yet it’s legal to hunt humans with 15-round, 30-round, even 150-round magazines.". Apparently, she doesn't know that it's illegal to hunt humans with any number of rounds.
She (Feinstein) also believes that allowing people to make calls from an airplane will result in uncontrollable brawling amongst the passengers. link
Or, her (Feinstein's) fine opinion of our Veterans: "All vets are mentally ill in some way and government should prevent them from owning firearms." link
Not to mention Feinstein's flip-flopping on this very issue [encryption]. In October, she said, "Millions of personal records and hundreds of billions of dollars fall victim to cyber-attacks every year, and we’ve done little to stem the tide." In other words, calling for enhanced cyber-security, yet only a month ago, "I can say this. [FBI] Director [James Comey] and, I think John Brennan, would agree, that the Achilles Heel in the internet is encryption. Because there are now... it's a black web! And there's no way of piercing it. And this is even in commercial products!"link
“Those who survived the San Francisco earthquake said, ‘Thank God, I’m still alive.’ But, of course, those who died, their lives will never be the same again.” – Sen. Barbara Boxer
“It [marijuana] will still be legal under federal law.” Senator Dianne Feinstein claiming that marijuana is legal
And. of course, the all-time grandaddy of a Nancy Pelosi quote, "But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it."
That was from less than 2 minutes of searching. You should really pay more attention.
You're missing the one other major effect of advertising and greed by the commercial networks:
Big Bang Theory - Season 1 episode 1: 22 minutes 58 seconds. The season averages about 21 minutes 30 seconds. The longest episode is 24:06.
Big Bang Theory - Season 9 episode 5: 18 minutes, 45 seconds. The last three episodes aired average about 18:50 seconds. The longest episode is 20:32.
So, over the past 8 years, the average episode has lost nearly 3 and a half minutes to additional commercials. A half hour show is now nearly 40% commercials. Compare that to 1966, when Star Trek episodes were 54 minutes long.
At this rate, by 2025, an hour long show will consist of less than 30 minutes of program and a majority of commercials. And then they wonder why people are pulling the plug...
Our group at FedEx released code that I wrote on a Saturday night. This was two days before the Apple iPhone 4 shipped. The code worked perfectly, however, despite our repeated warnings about nearly doubling downstream traffic, the downstream systems (like billing and tracking) weren't ready for it.
So, on the day everyone wanted to track their new iPhone, my code shut down all tracking on FedEx for about 12 hours before we could switch the config setting (10 minutes) and the downstream systems could catch up (11+ hours).
Estimate of cost was around $2 million in lost time and revenue and extra calls to customer service. Luckily, since I wasn't actually at fault, and we had multiple email chains backing up the volume estimates and warnings, we didn't get the axe.
You are correct that a H-1B cannot get a SCI clearance, however the company can get around this in two ways, namely by getting them an LAA (Limited Access Authorization - which is a sort of provisional clearance for foreign nationals that can do anything below Secret level clearance) or they can get a DSP-5 license, which is a waiver for "exporting" classified information. In this case, the export is to the H-1B group working in their company.
Finally, the more common way is to use H-1Bs as code monkeys to work on every non-classified sub-system, or to generate databases, algorithms, and networks for processing non-classified data in the same format as the classified data will be using down the road. This lets them do all the coding without ever exposing them to anything that requires a clearance.
I live in an IT community stacked with defense contractors who know every trick in the book to get around limitations. Especially the kind that lets them line their pockets with more of that sweet, sweet government contract money.
H-1B visas only have to be paid the local market average, not the company average. So you can have high-paid employees and still pay the H-1Bs squat. I worked for 10 years in contract work and that's exactly what all the contract companies were doing. They'd hire in H-1Bs at *exactly* the local salary for the city as reported in the prior year's Fortune or Forbes magazines.
When they were in place, they would never get raises or reviews, and if they complained, they'd pull the visa and have them on a plane home that afternoon. I even had the joy of seeing an H-1B (in the cube next to me) brought in at $54K, but on his first paycheck he got $45K equivalent salary. When he called the company HR department, they responded with, "We are not responsible for typographical errors on your offer letter." When he got angry, she said, "If you don't wish to continue at the rate, I can issue your plane ticket and have security take you to the airport." So he sat and took an illegal $9,000 pay cut because he didn't really have an option.
H-1Bs are used as indentured servants, especially by contracting companies who turn around and bill them out at $50-$60 an hour to other companies. They're pure profit centers.
Oh, and when that company hit hard times, they very illegally cut every non H-1B worker from the contractor payroll.
I've been at three contracting companies that used that identical technique. They hire some citizens to establish a pool so they do lip service to the law about hiring local, then they bring in a gob of H-1Bs at half the price, then they dump all the locals. They end up with pure H-1B work forces, and depress the local economy. I've even seen defense contractors turn away TSI Clearance people in favor of H-1B visas at a discount, because they'd rather pay the $5K for the clearance and $50K for the H-1B than hire a qualified citizen who might earn $80K.
See, that's how it depresses the salaries in the whole market. If I can get headcount "A" at $55K, I'm not going to pay $60K for headcount "B". Most management feel that every STEM person is functionally equivalent. Then they wonder why so many projects fail.
I worked with three H-1B visa "programmers" who had "degrees" from a university in India that doesn't exist. Who in America is going to check that the university has a history or background? These guys laughed about how their "university" was just a guy who ran a business back in New Delhi where you paid the equivalent of about $20 and he paid a bunch of women to pose as university registrars that would answer the phone and confirm your "degree".
One of them hadn't even finished high school, much less college.
Yes, all these stories are anecdotal, and while I could give you the names and places of most of these guys (the ones I remember, anyway) the point I'm trying to make is that the system is being abused from both sides. It's broken, and it needs to be fixed. Tell me, would CEO's be so in favor of it if we had H-1B visas for CEOs?
No, a "troll" is someone who persists in a contrary position, no matter if they are proven wrong. If they cannot defend their position, they simply move to a new position while claiming they were "not answered" or that "wasn't the question they asked." Trolls will also claim that a response was given that was never made. You have engaged in all this behavior.
My first posting said quite clearly that the explosions at Fukushima were not inside the reactor but inside the building that housed it. I cannot make it simpler than that. Your willful ignorance as to the difference between those two is stunning.
When you raged that there was no difference, I tried a simple analogy, which you then criticized as not the same thing. This is the "not answered" claim.
I then proceeded to give another example, more simple than the analogy, namely "The explosion spread zero material." You then claimed this was impossible, and that I was now claiming the explosion was in the reactor. There was no possible way to read the answer that way, but that's the way you read it. This fulfills the "response given that was not made" troll logic.
Finally, I laid out, with scientific documents backing me, the difference between a pressure explosion from burning hydrogen and a true detonation explosive, and showed why the reactor vessel would have suffered no damage from the low overpressure at Fukushima.
In response, you claimed I was saying Fukushima was a "perfectly run site" and I was "endorsing nuclear power." This perfectly fulfills the "Not what I asked" and the "response not given" troll meme.
You have called me such wonderful names as "Coder Boy", "idiot", and "fucking stupid." You might note that, other than the now proven "troll" moniker, I did not use any such epithets towards you, even when you created a false dichotomy of "Saying it was perfect is either being an idiot or pretending to be one in the hope of tricking others..."
At this point, since you were the one who added the word "perfect" to the conversation, I'd almost agree with that statement, since I made no such claim. I merely said that the main cause of the Fukushima Daishi disaster was a lack of accessible backup generators.
It's interesting to note that the Fukushima Daini plant, a mere 11 miles away which had waterproofed generators survived the earthquake and tsunami without major incident because it was able to maintain cooling through the disaster, even though it was hit by the same earthquake and same 14.5m tidal wave. It uses the same BWR4 reactor cores as the Fukushima Daishi plant. Both plants SCRAMmed their reactors moments after the start of the earthquake, but F. Daishi lost all of its diesel generation capacity in the tidal wave. F. Daini did not. That was the critical difference.
So, as I said in the other message. I only pursued this chain to see just how far down this rabbit hole you'd go. I see now that there's no bottom. I'm sure you will reply to this so you can have the "Last Word" in the conversation. Enjoy it, because at this point you are Macbeth's, "poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage". Tell us your final tale.
Five times I explained to you that the hydrogen did no explosion damage to the reactor. I have restated over an over as to why this is the case. I have corrected your misinformation repeatedly about the nature of what happened.
In return you have claimed that I said things that I did not say. You have mis-read or simply ignored information I've presented, including links to supporting data. You have created arguments out of whole cloth and resorted, even in your first message to ad-hominem attacks.
I've kept this up only because I wanted to see how far you would go trying to defend your invalid position. I am, frankly, amazed at the depths you have plumbed.
I've looked at your history and found claims that you are everything from a material engineer to a rocket scientist at SpaceX. Every one of your messages follows the same form of ad-hominem and shaky science. You attack science in dozens of threads and are almost always wrong, or simply throwing "verbal hand-grenades" into conversations.
Everyone who has bothered to follow this thread this far is quite clear about what happened. You are stubbornly denying it. And then calling me childish. If I've acted in any way childish, it was only because I was trying to talk down to your level of understanding. Yet even that has failed. That leaves only willful ignorance as your modus operandi. In that case, further discussion is pointless.
Searching grandparent message chain for denial of subsequent meltdown and leakage of radiation through coolant leaks... Not Found.
Searching grandparent message for word "perfect".... Not Found.
Searching grandparent message chain for endorsement of nuclear power.... Not Found.
Searching grandparent message for endorsement of Fukushima Daishi as a model-run site.... Not Found.
Searching grandparent message for argument against the "explosion" at Fukushima Daishi 1, 3, and 4 being a core-related explosion releasing radioactive material to the environment... Cohesive argument found - the reactor was not involved in the explosive gas release at Fukushima Daishi site.
Searching parent message for straw-man arguments, off-topic commentary, misinformation, changing claims, claim that issues were not addressed, false dichotomies, and misquotes... FOUND FOUND FOUND FOUND FOUND FOUND FOUND.
Thanks to this page I can tell you your friend was in at most a 2.4 PSI overpressure situation, which is more than adequate to break bricks (2-3 PSI), without causing eardrum rupture ( > 2.4PSI). So there's your "Hydrogen Explosion" overpressure.
RDX, which is a real explosive, detonates at 25 times the speed of sound, or about 8500 m/s. It devolves about 900 liters of gas per kilogram during detonation, creating overpressures close to the detonation center that can exceed 3000PSI, which will reduce concrete to dust and melt metal to slag through compression heating.
This versus the H2 + 2O2 --> 2H2O reaction where three liters of gas at STP become 2 liters of gas, which expand to about 200 liters because of heating to 2800C (100:1 expansion). The flame speed of hydrogen/oxygen is about 50 m/s maximum. The expansion of the gas pressures the container until something breaks (a few bricks in the wall, some windows, or in the case of Fukushima Daishi, the failure of some corrugated metal siding and roofing materials.) Then the pressure escapes into the environment, and no further damage is done.
This is the difference between something burning, like a HydrOx reaction, and something exploding. This is what you can't seem to grasp here. There was an "explosion" in the colloquial sense that a surrounding building was rapidly disassembled. But in the pure physics sense, there was a contained burn that ruptured its container. The H/O reaction may seem fast in our everyday experience, but in the realm of explosives and explosions, it's moving at a snail's pace.
The BWR3/4 reactors were designed for operation in excess of 1000PSI operating pressures - in fact, the primary coolant loop in the U.S. PWRs typically runs at 2250PSI. Meaning that your "EXPLOSIONS" (caps doesn't make it true) wouldn't have had the slightest effect on the reactor or the coolant loops.
Additionally, the corrugated steel outer walls would have failed at a 2 PSI overpressure, which they did. Again, because this is a burn (deflagration) and not an explosion (detonation) there would be no point in the process where the reactor would have been exposed to a higher pressure than 2-3PSI in the containment building.
Much like putting a garbage bag filled with hydrogen/oxygen on a bank vault inside a glass building, you blew out all the windows, but you're no closer to the money.
So, again, there might be someone out of their depth in their conversation, but it's not me.
To mis-read what I wrote to that point shows your ignorance. Your "friend" was inside the hydrogen explosion and escaped unharmed. The reactor was inside the hydrogen explosion and escaped unharmed. Everyone else who reads this understands it. Your willful mis-reading to try to make your story stand up crosses into the pathetic.
The only "fuckup" at Fukushima, other than the lack of backup emergency generators for cooling, was having a 9.0 earthquake strike a reactor designed to survive an 8.0 earthquake. The fact it survived as well as it did shows not a failure of engineering, but a survival of 10 times the destructive energy it was designed to withstand.
Yes, a "coder boy" with a Federal High Explosives license and experience with everything from gas explosions up to C4 and RDX.. You might think you know high energy and "explosives" but you don't know the first thing about them. Even your example proves my point. Your "friend" lost eyebrows because he was "inside the box" -- same as the reactor vessel at Fukushima -- while the box was damaged by the expanding gas of the burning hydrogen/oxygen -- exactly the same as the building 3 super-structure at Fukushima.
Thanks for proving *EXACTLY* what I said.
Everyone here is laughing at your stupidity at this point. Go home troll.
I answered your question. NO MATERIAL WAS 'TOSSED OUT". The fact that you did not read it shows which of us is the "child pretending to be a man." I'm done feeding you, troll.
Imagine a steel ball, sitting inside a cardboard box.
The ball is filled with nasty stuff, but the ball contains it -- because steel. (Actually, layers of steel, concrete, and steel and concrete in reality, but I digress)
The nasty stuff in the ball is making hydrogen, rather than break the ball, the hydrogen is released into the box. The box fills with an air/hydrogen mix.
A spark is introduced. The hydrogen burns with the air, and the term "deflagration" is not just a clever euphemism for explosion, there is a very real difference between the two. In deflagration, a flame front travels through the material, usually causing expansion through heating and burning byproducts, but the flame-front travels slowly through the medium, far slower than the pressure wave. In an explosion also known as detonation the decomposition of the explosive occurs at the pressure wave, amplifying it and creating a shock wave or brisance. A detonation, therefore, is far more destructive than a deflagration. For example, you can deflagrate as much flammable material as you want on one side of armor plate, and the armor plate will not burn though (okay, if you did it for hours, or with a very focused deflagration, i.e. a cutting torch, you could get through it, but again, that's off topic.) On the other hand, even a small amount of an explosive can cut through, deform, or even shatter armor plate. I used the word deflagration very, very intentionally.
Now, back to the example.
The cardboard box is torn apart by the increasing pressure. If it were a balloon, it would puff up, but cardboard, like the thin corrugated steel walls (think every cheap warehouse you've ever seen in the movies) does not stretch. Thus it tears apart. This is an "explosion" of the building.
The steel ball sits happily at the bottom of the now shredded box. No "nasty stuff" has been released.
That, in the simple-stupid version, is what happened at Fukushima. The "steel ball" is the reactor vessel, unbroken, and not leaking. The cardboard box was the surrounding building. The fact that everyone else gets this and not you, means you have no idea how a reactor is designed, how it works, or what actually happened. To answer your, "what matters" question -- The explosion scattered *ZERO* material, The area around it was not contaminated by *ANY* radiation from the explosion.
All of the leakage of radiation came from leakage from the cooling tanks in the primary loop coolant water. No one has ever said, or ever believed that the reactor vessels suffered any major breaches. (Yes, there were some minor cracks and seal breaks that leaked contaminated coolant, but no one has shown or believes that any of the primary fuel melt escaped the containment vessel.)
Because all of the explosions that occurred at Fukushima were hydrogen/oxygen explosions caused by bleeding the built up hydrogen from the pressure vessel. The hydrogen was being thermally separated from the oxygen because of the high temperatures in the core. Rather than let pressure build up in the pressure vessel (and exposing the core) emergency relief valves bled it into the environment -- the environment in this case being the mostly sealed building around the reactor. Hydrogen built up near the roof until an electrical spark -- or just something hot enough -- caused it to ignite.
The result was the "explosion" (rapid deflagration) of the hydrogen/air mix which rapidly disassembled the thin steel building around the reactor vessel. The reactor itself was never open to the air, and no one has ever claimed it was.
Educate yourself on what happened before making wild claims.
This site used to have a complete, day-by-day discussion of everything going on at Fukushima.
Jordan was asked that question at a reading and confirmed it was just Lews Therin drawing too much of the One Power to hold. So much power, in fact that he vaporized himself and a large portion of the ground (down to the mantle?) resulting in DragonMount.
The code is encrypted and rotates every week. It can only be used by contracted partners of Verizon, and the contract contains a "no-advertising" clause.
The EFF should spend money on something actually important.
This "Anti-PAC" is just a PAC supporting the two largest Democrat campaign finance bills which are more properly termed the "Silence Dissent Acts" or "Incumbent Protection Act" then any kind of real campaign finance reform.
So, all they are is another Democrat PAC masquerading under a fake name. Oh, they claim to support three other bills with bi-partisan support, which are bills sponsored by four back-benchers (Tom Petrie anyone? 30+ years in Congress and I don't think he's successfully sponsored one bill.) that will never make it out of sub-committee.
So, two hyper-left (Barbara Boxer, Henry Waxman, Dianne Feinstein type) proposals, and three non-events.
Anti-PAC, it's another way of saying "Democrat".
Makes you wonder why they feel they have to lie about their intentions.
In case no one has noticed, California is a desert (or nearly one) for most of its area. Before the farm subsidy act of the 1950's, no one grew food crops in California, and no one raised cattle. Then, after subsidies were based on your distance from Eau Claire, Wisconsin, where they get 30-40" of rain a year, suddenly California became *the* address for raising food. When you can raise dairy cattle at a loss, milk them at a loss, and produce a gallon of milk for $6, and still sell it for $2 wholesale -- and the government ensures you're making a profit by handing you a $5 a gallon subsidy, of course you're going to raise cattle and farm in California.
California has to drain the Colorado river, and the showsheds of something like 1,000,000 hectares of mountains to even get close to their water needs on a good year. In the meantime, farms in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Nebraska, Kansas, and the rest of the heartland are all collapsing into bankruptcy, unable to compete with the ever-increasing subsidies bought by the legislatures of California with its 50+ congressmen and electoral votes.
Assuming, of course, the Captain Planet model of industry, where the moment the Federal Regulator steps away, the CEO pulls the lever to dump the toxic waste into the nearby river.
Or, maybe the guys running the plant (and likely living nearby) don't want to die in a nuclear waste spill either.
I'd think that one regulator on-site, one shift a day, would be more than enough to catch any worrisome behaviors. Maybe with a surprise inspection once a week on an off-shift time if you really think "Mr. Slimeholio" runs the plant.
The article says 90% of employees is 3600 furloughed. Which would say the remaining 10% would be 400 workers.
To monitor 100 plants.
That would mean you could have one regulator on-site 24 hours a day, seven days a week (That's 21 eight-hour shifts for the math challenged) or 5 shifts per person, with one overtime shift.
At every plant. 24/7 surveillance, with 10% of the workforce. What the hell were they doing before that? 10 regulators per plant, 24/7?!?!?!
Arrhenius stated only that CO2 acted to absorb heat (long-wave infra-red radiation for the nitpickers). He posited that if you added CO2 to the atmosphere the heat would increase. What Arrhenius didn't know, or didn't fully grasp, is that at 280ppm, the atmospheric CO2 already absorbs 97% of all incoming long-wave infra-red radiation. Doubling the CO2 to 560ppm, would not make it absorb 194% of the radiation, it would make it absorb about 99% of the incoming radiation. Since CO2 accounts for approximately 4-7 degrees C of the Earth's warming (there's arguments on the exact figure) that would be an increase of about 0.08 to 0.14 degrees C. Now, there are some factors that add to that (re-radiation, tropospheric concentration and re-reflection of albedo infra-red, etc) that could make that as much as 1 degree C of surface warming. But that's it.
Adding twice the CO2 doesn't mean twice the temperature. And the feedback mechanisms are neutral to negative. They must be, or the 7000ppm CO2 of the carboniferous period would have resulted in Earth looking like a ball of molten rock.
Now, let's get back to the real point.
Climate scientists continue to make statements like, "We can expect more Katrina's every year!" Yet the U.S. is now in its longest cycle without a major hurricane landing since records began being kept in the 1930's. "We can expect more tornados to ravage cities across the U.S.!", yet tornadic activity across the U.S. is at a 50 year low. Total thunderstorms are average at best, and while there is some evidence of slightly stronger convection cells, there's a certain bias in the fact that we never before had satellites capable of sampling and quantifying such activity in seconds rather than days.
In short, the evidence all points the other way.
Now, don't get me wrong, I'm no shill for gas or oil or coal. I'd rather see all of it go away. Give me clean, safe, cheap, plentiful nuclear power every day of the week over all of that. Preferably LFTR designs spread out like candy all over the country. I'd love fusion too, but like my Grandfather who was promised to see it "within his lifetime" and died in 1988, I'm not holding my breath on that one.
Solar power is a joke, with its rare earths and sulfur-hexafluoride washes doing a dozen times more damage to the environment then they'll ever recover in a lifetime. We've already tapped 95% or more of the hydropower on Earth, and I doubt the birds will live through putting up enough windmills to power a typical city, much less the planet. Not to mention, that has it's own problems. Wind Power Potential Overestimated
Your point, "We've seen warming" ignores the one great thing about climate change -- the climate is a complex system -- it is always changing. It is a vast, living, breathing system taking in all life on earth, all changes in the sun, all chemistry in the oceans, every wave, every sunbeam, every butterfly flapping its wings. It must be constantly changing. We are looking at a tiny sliver of it and saying, "Oh no, we're all doomed!" We act as if we want the climate never to change, not one iota, not one jot.
The climate never changes on Venus, on Mercury, on Mars... They all have one thing in common. They're dead worlds.
Slashdot Mirror
...as it would make all of the evidence against her in ServerGate inadmissible.
That's simply not true. SpaceX designed the Falcons from the beginning to meet the requirements for Man-Rating. They met all the specs and all the safety margins. The only reason it hasn't been fully man rated yet is that they haven't finished the Dragon 2 test program through all the steps.
But just like the SLS, it was designed from day one to be man-rated.
The only "pencil whipping" by the Air Force was to allow it to launch national security payloads, and that was after it had completed a certain number of certification flights with civilian payloads. After the launch failure last June, they went right back into a probationary status until the accident was explained and dealt with. There's really been no special treatment of SpaceX, it just seems that way because they've been launching a lot more often than the ULA guys did to get certified.
Last year tens of thousands of people were exposed to dangerous levels of radiation in excess of 5 milli-sieverts.
How?
They went on vacation to the beach in Brazil for a week or so.
"Radiation levels are highest at Guarapari’s beaches, a popular seasonal tourist attraction, where readings of up to 175 mSv (millisieverts)) per year have been measured." Global Hot Spots
Really? You haven't been paying much attention...
Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) after the San Bernadino shootings -- "Sensible gun laws work! We've proven it in California." link She is apparently unaware of what state San Bernadino is in.
Representative Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) with the debt spiraling upwards at close to $1.25T per year and insurance premiums are jumping as much as 50% per year - "ObamaCare is lowering costs and the deficit." link
Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) -- “Every month that we do not have an economic recovery package 500 million Americans lose their jobs.” – in a nation with 307 million people.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) -- “We have federal regulations and state laws that prohibit hunting ducks with more than three rounds, and yet it’s legal to hunt humans with 15-round, 30-round, even 150-round magazines.". Apparently, she doesn't know that it's illegal to hunt humans with any number of rounds.
She (Feinstein) also believes that allowing people to make calls from an airplane will result in uncontrollable brawling amongst the passengers. link
Or, her (Feinstein's) fine opinion of our Veterans: "All vets are mentally ill in some way and government should prevent them from owning firearms." link
Not to mention Feinstein's flip-flopping on this very issue [encryption]. In October, she said, "Millions of personal records and hundreds of billions of dollars fall victim to cyber-attacks every year, and we’ve done little to stem the tide." In other words, calling for enhanced cyber-security, yet only a month ago, "I can say this. [FBI] Director [James Comey] and, I think John Brennan, would agree, that the Achilles Heel in the internet is encryption. Because there are now... it's a black web! And there's no way of piercing it. And this is even in commercial products!"link
“Those who survived the San Francisco earthquake said, ‘Thank God, I’m still alive.’ But, of course, those who died, their lives will never be the same again.” – Sen. Barbara Boxer
“It [marijuana] will still be legal under federal law.” Senator Dianne Feinstein claiming that marijuana is legal
And. of course, the all-time grandaddy of a Nancy Pelosi quote, "But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it."
That was from less than 2 minutes of searching. You should really pay more attention.
You're missing the one other major effect of advertising and greed by the commercial networks:
Big Bang Theory - Season 1 episode 1: 22 minutes 58 seconds. The season averages about 21 minutes 30 seconds. The longest episode is 24:06.
Big Bang Theory - Season 9 episode 5: 18 minutes, 45 seconds. The last three episodes aired average about 18:50 seconds. The longest episode is 20:32.
So, over the past 8 years, the average episode has lost nearly 3 and a half minutes to additional commercials. A half hour show is now nearly 40% commercials. Compare that to 1966, when Star Trek episodes were 54 minutes long.
At this rate, by 2025, an hour long show will consist of less than 30 minutes of program and a majority of commercials. And then they wonder why people are pulling the plug...
Our group at FedEx released code that I wrote on a Saturday night. This was two days before the Apple iPhone 4 shipped. The code worked perfectly, however, despite our repeated warnings about nearly doubling downstream traffic, the downstream systems (like billing and tracking) weren't ready for it.
So, on the day everyone wanted to track their new iPhone, my code shut down all tracking on FedEx for about 12 hours before we could switch the config setting (10 minutes) and the downstream systems could catch up (11+ hours).
Estimate of cost was around $2 million in lost time and revenue and extra calls to customer service. Luckily, since I wasn't actually at fault, and we had multiple email chains backing up the volume estimates and warnings, we didn't get the axe.
You are correct that a H-1B cannot get a SCI clearance, however the company can get around this in two ways, namely by getting them an LAA (Limited Access Authorization - which is a sort of provisional clearance for foreign nationals that can do anything below Secret level clearance) or they can get a DSP-5 license, which is a waiver for "exporting" classified information. In this case, the export is to the H-1B group working in their company.
Finally, the more common way is to use H-1Bs as code monkeys to work on every non-classified sub-system, or to generate databases, algorithms, and networks for processing non-classified data in the same format as the classified data will be using down the road. This lets them do all the coding without ever exposing them to anything that requires a clearance.
I live in an IT community stacked with defense contractors who know every trick in the book to get around limitations. Especially the kind that lets them line their pockets with more of that sweet, sweet government contract money.
H-1B visas only have to be paid the local market average, not the company average. So you can have high-paid employees and still pay the H-1Bs squat. I worked for 10 years in contract work and that's exactly what all the contract companies were doing. They'd hire in H-1Bs at *exactly* the local salary for the city as reported in the prior year's Fortune or Forbes magazines.
When they were in place, they would never get raises or reviews, and if they complained, they'd pull the visa and have them on a plane home that afternoon. I even had the joy of seeing an H-1B (in the cube next to me) brought in at $54K, but on his first paycheck he got $45K equivalent salary. When he called the company HR department, they responded with, "We are not responsible for typographical errors on your offer letter." When he got angry, she said, "If you don't wish to continue at the rate, I can issue your plane ticket and have security take you to the airport." So he sat and took an illegal $9,000 pay cut because he didn't really have an option.
H-1Bs are used as indentured servants, especially by contracting companies who turn around and bill them out at $50-$60 an hour to other companies. They're pure profit centers.
Oh, and when that company hit hard times, they very illegally cut every non H-1B worker from the contractor payroll.
I've been at three contracting companies that used that identical technique. They hire some citizens to establish a pool so they do lip service to the law about hiring local, then they bring in a gob of H-1Bs at half the price, then they dump all the locals. They end up with pure H-1B work forces, and depress the local economy. I've even seen defense contractors turn away TSI Clearance people in favor of H-1B visas at a discount, because they'd rather pay the $5K for the clearance and $50K for the H-1B than hire a qualified citizen who might earn $80K.
See, that's how it depresses the salaries in the whole market. If I can get headcount "A" at $55K, I'm not going to pay $60K for headcount "B". Most management feel that every STEM person is functionally equivalent. Then they wonder why so many projects fail.
I worked with three H-1B visa "programmers" who had "degrees" from a university in India that doesn't exist. Who in America is going to check that the university has a history or background? These guys laughed about how their "university" was just a guy who ran a business back in New Delhi where you paid the equivalent of about $20 and he paid a bunch of women to pose as university registrars that would answer the phone and confirm your "degree".
One of them hadn't even finished high school, much less college.
Yes, all these stories are anecdotal, and while I could give you the names and places of most of these guys (the ones I remember, anyway) the point I'm trying to make is that the system is being abused from both sides. It's broken, and it needs to be fixed. Tell me, would CEO's be so in favor of it if we had H-1B visas for CEOs?
No, a "troll" is someone who persists in a contrary position, no matter if they are proven wrong. If they cannot defend their position, they simply move to a new position while claiming they were "not answered" or that "wasn't the question they asked." Trolls will also claim that a response was given that was never made. You have engaged in all this behavior.
My first posting said quite clearly that the explosions at Fukushima were not inside the reactor but inside the building that housed it. I cannot make it simpler than that. Your willful ignorance as to the difference between those two is stunning.
When you raged that there was no difference, I tried a simple analogy, which you then criticized as not the same thing. This is the "not answered" claim.
I then proceeded to give another example, more simple than the analogy, namely "The explosion spread zero material." You then claimed this was impossible, and that I was now claiming the explosion was in the reactor. There was no possible way to read the answer that way, but that's the way you read it. This fulfills the "response given that was not made" troll logic.
Finally, I laid out, with scientific documents backing me, the difference between a pressure explosion from burning hydrogen and a true detonation explosive, and showed why the reactor vessel would have suffered no damage from the low overpressure at Fukushima.
In response, you claimed I was saying Fukushima was a "perfectly run site" and I was "endorsing nuclear power." This perfectly fulfills the "Not what I asked" and the "response not given" troll meme.
You have called me such wonderful names as "Coder Boy", "idiot", and "fucking stupid." You might note that, other than the now proven "troll" moniker, I did not use any such epithets towards you, even when you created a false dichotomy of "Saying it was perfect is either being an idiot or pretending to be one in the hope of tricking others..."
At this point, since you were the one who added the word "perfect" to the conversation, I'd almost agree with that statement, since I made no such claim. I merely said that the main cause of the Fukushima Daishi disaster was a lack of accessible backup generators.
It's interesting to note that the Fukushima Daini plant, a mere 11 miles away which had waterproofed generators survived the earthquake and tsunami without major incident because it was able to maintain cooling through the disaster, even though it was hit by the same earthquake and same 14.5m tidal wave. It uses the same BWR4 reactor cores as the Fukushima Daishi plant. Both plants SCRAMmed their reactors moments after the start of the earthquake, but F. Daishi lost all of its diesel generation capacity in the tidal wave. F. Daini did not. That was the critical difference.
So, as I said in the other message. I only pursued this chain to see just how far down this rabbit hole you'd go. I see now that there's no bottom. I'm sure you will reply to this so you can have the "Last Word" in the conversation. Enjoy it, because at this point you are Macbeth's, "poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage". Tell us your final tale.
Five times I explained to you that the hydrogen did no explosion damage to the reactor. I have restated over an over as to why this is the case. I have corrected your misinformation repeatedly about the nature of what happened.
In return you have claimed that I said things that I did not say. You have mis-read or simply ignored information I've presented, including links to supporting data. You have created arguments out of whole cloth and resorted, even in your first message to ad-hominem attacks.
I've kept this up only because I wanted to see how far you would go trying to defend your invalid position. I am, frankly, amazed at the depths you have plumbed.
I've looked at your history and found claims that you are everything from a material engineer to a rocket scientist at SpaceX. Every one of your messages follows the same form of ad-hominem and shaky science. You attack science in dozens of threads and are almost always wrong, or simply throwing "verbal hand-grenades" into conversations.
Everyone who has bothered to follow this thread this far is quite clear about what happened. You are stubbornly denying it. And then calling me childish. If I've acted in any way childish, it was only because I was trying to talk down to your level of understanding. Yet even that has failed. That leaves only willful ignorance as your modus operandi. In that case, further discussion is pointless.
Searching grandparent message chain for denial of subsequent meltdown and leakage of radiation through coolant leaks... Not Found.
Searching grandparent message for word "perfect".... Not Found.
Searching grandparent message chain for endorsement of nuclear power.... Not Found.
Searching grandparent message for endorsement of Fukushima Daishi as a model-run site.... Not Found.
Searching grandparent message for argument against the "explosion" at Fukushima Daishi 1, 3, and 4 being a core-related explosion releasing radioactive material to the environment... Cohesive argument found - the reactor was not involved in the explosive gas release at Fukushima Daishi site.
Searching parent message for straw-man arguments, off-topic commentary, misinformation, changing claims, claim that issues were not addressed, false dichotomies, and misquotes... FOUND FOUND FOUND FOUND FOUND FOUND FOUND.
Troll factor of dbIII... 99.97%
Thanks to this page I can tell you your friend was in at most a 2.4 PSI overpressure situation, which is more than adequate to break bricks (2-3 PSI), without causing eardrum rupture ( > 2.4PSI). So there's your "Hydrogen Explosion" overpressure.
RDX, which is a real explosive, detonates at 25 times the speed of sound, or about 8500 m/s. It devolves about 900 liters of gas per kilogram during detonation, creating overpressures close to the detonation center that can exceed 3000PSI, which will reduce concrete to dust and melt metal to slag through compression heating.
This versus the H2 + 2O2 --> 2H2O reaction where three liters of gas at STP become 2 liters of gas, which expand to about 200 liters because of heating to 2800C (100:1 expansion). The flame speed of hydrogen/oxygen is about 50 m/s maximum. The expansion of the gas pressures the container until something breaks (a few bricks in the wall, some windows, or in the case of Fukushima Daishi, the failure of some corrugated metal siding and roofing materials.) Then the pressure escapes into the environment, and no further damage is done.
This is the difference between something burning, like a HydrOx reaction, and something exploding. This is what you can't seem to grasp here. There was an "explosion" in the colloquial sense that a surrounding building was rapidly disassembled. But in the pure physics sense, there was a contained burn that ruptured its container. The H/O reaction may seem fast in our everyday experience, but in the realm of explosives and explosions, it's moving at a snail's pace.
The BWR3/4 reactors were designed for operation in excess of 1000PSI operating pressures - in fact, the primary coolant loop in the U.S. PWRs typically runs at 2250PSI. Meaning that your "EXPLOSIONS" (caps doesn't make it true) wouldn't have had the slightest effect on the reactor or the coolant loops.
Additionally, the corrugated steel outer walls would have failed at a 2 PSI overpressure, which they did. Again, because this is a burn (deflagration) and not an explosion (detonation) there would be no point in the process where the reactor would have been exposed to a higher pressure than 2-3PSI in the containment building.
Much like putting a garbage bag filled with hydrogen/oxygen on a bank vault inside a glass building, you blew out all the windows, but you're no closer to the money.
So, again, there might be someone out of their depth in their conversation, but it's not me.
To mis-read what I wrote to that point shows your ignorance. Your "friend" was inside the hydrogen explosion and escaped unharmed. The reactor was inside the hydrogen explosion and escaped unharmed. Everyone else who reads this understands it. Your willful mis-reading to try to make your story stand up crosses into the pathetic.
The only "fuckup" at Fukushima, other than the lack of backup emergency generators for cooling, was having a 9.0 earthquake strike a reactor designed to survive an 8.0 earthquake. The fact it survived as well as it did shows not a failure of engineering, but a survival of 10 times the destructive energy it was designed to withstand.
A "materials engineer" should realize that.
I say again, "Troll".
Yes, a "coder boy" with a Federal High Explosives license and experience with everything from gas explosions up to C4 and RDX.. You might think you know high energy and "explosives" but you don't know the first thing about them. Even your example proves my point. Your "friend" lost eyebrows because he was "inside the box" -- same as the reactor vessel at Fukushima -- while the box was damaged by the expanding gas of the burning hydrogen/oxygen -- exactly the same as the building 3 super-structure at Fukushima.
Thanks for proving *EXACTLY* what I said.
Everyone here is laughing at your stupidity at this point. Go home troll.
I answered your question. NO MATERIAL WAS 'TOSSED OUT". The fact that you did not read it shows which of us is the "child pretending to be a man." I'm done feeding you, troll.
Okay, let's make this stupid-simple.
Imagine a steel ball, sitting inside a cardboard box.
The ball is filled with nasty stuff, but the ball contains it -- because steel. (Actually, layers of steel, concrete, and steel and concrete in reality, but I digress)
The nasty stuff in the ball is making hydrogen, rather than break the ball, the hydrogen is released into the box. The box fills with an air/hydrogen mix.
A spark is introduced. The hydrogen burns with the air, and the term "deflagration" is not just a clever euphemism for explosion, there is a very real difference between the two. In deflagration, a flame front travels through the material, usually causing expansion through heating and burning byproducts, but the flame-front travels slowly through the medium, far slower than the pressure wave. In an explosion also known as detonation the decomposition of the explosive occurs at the pressure wave, amplifying it and creating a shock wave or brisance. A detonation, therefore, is far more destructive than a deflagration. For example, you can deflagrate as much flammable material as you want on one side of armor plate, and the armor plate will not burn though (okay, if you did it for hours, or with a very focused deflagration, i.e. a cutting torch, you could get through it, but again, that's off topic.) On the other hand, even a small amount of an explosive can cut through, deform, or even shatter armor plate. I used the word deflagration very, very intentionally.
Now, back to the example.
The cardboard box is torn apart by the increasing pressure. If it were a balloon, it would puff up, but cardboard, like the thin corrugated steel walls (think every cheap warehouse you've ever seen in the movies) does not stretch. Thus it tears apart. This is an "explosion" of the building.
The steel ball sits happily at the bottom of the now shredded box. No "nasty stuff" has been released.
That, in the simple-stupid version, is what happened at Fukushima. The "steel ball" is the reactor vessel, unbroken, and not leaking. The cardboard box was the surrounding building. The fact that everyone else gets this and not you, means you have no idea how a reactor is designed, how it works, or what actually happened. To answer your, "what matters" question -- The explosion scattered *ZERO* material, The area around it was not contaminated by *ANY* radiation from the explosion.
All of the leakage of radiation came from leakage from the cooling tanks in the primary loop coolant water. No one has ever said, or ever believed that the reactor vessels suffered any major breaches. (Yes, there were some minor cracks and seal breaks that leaked contaminated coolant, but no one has shown or believes that any of the primary fuel melt escaped the containment vessel.)
Because all of the explosions that occurred at Fukushima were hydrogen/oxygen explosions caused by bleeding the built up hydrogen from the pressure vessel. The hydrogen was being thermally separated from the oxygen because of the high temperatures in the core. Rather than let pressure build up in the pressure vessel (and exposing the core) emergency relief valves bled it into the environment -- the environment in this case being the mostly sealed building around the reactor. Hydrogen built up near the roof until an electrical spark -- or just something hot enough -- caused it to ignite.
The result was the "explosion" (rapid deflagration) of the hydrogen/air mix which rapidly disassembled the thin steel building around the reactor vessel. The reactor itself was never open to the air, and no one has ever claimed it was.
Educate yourself on what happened before making wild claims.
This site used to have a complete, day-by-day discussion of everything going on at Fukushima.
Trust the scientists, they know what they're doing....
Dinosaurs, Season 4, episode 7: Changing Nature
Jordan was asked that question at a reading and confirmed it was just Lews Therin drawing too much of the One Power to hold. So much power, in fact that he vaporized himself and a large portion of the ground (down to the mantle?) resulting in DragonMount.
He specifically stated it was not balefire.
The code is encrypted and rotates every week. It can only be used by contracted partners of Verizon, and the contract contains a "no-advertising" clause. The EFF should spend money on something actually important.
This "Anti-PAC" is just a PAC supporting the two largest Democrat campaign finance bills which are more properly termed the "Silence Dissent Acts" or "Incumbent Protection Act" then any kind of real campaign finance reform.
So, all they are is another Democrat PAC masquerading under a fake name. Oh, they claim to support three other bills with bi-partisan support, which are bills sponsored by four back-benchers (Tom Petrie anyone? 30+ years in Congress and I don't think he's successfully sponsored one bill.) that will never make it out of sub-committee.
So, two hyper-left (Barbara Boxer, Henry Waxman, Dianne Feinstein type) proposals, and three non-events.
Anti-PAC, it's another way of saying "Democrat".
Makes you wonder why they feel they have to lie about their intentions.
In case no one has noticed, California is a desert (or nearly one) for most of its area. Before the farm subsidy act of the 1950's, no one grew food crops in California, and no one raised cattle. Then, after subsidies were based on your distance from Eau Claire, Wisconsin, where they get 30-40" of rain a year, suddenly California became *the* address for raising food. When you can raise dairy cattle at a loss, milk them at a loss, and produce a gallon of milk for $6, and still sell it for $2 wholesale -- and the government ensures you're making a profit by handing you a $5 a gallon subsidy, of course you're going to raise cattle and farm in California.
California has to drain the Colorado river, and the showsheds of something like 1,000,000 hectares of mountains to even get close to their water needs on a good year. In the meantime, farms in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Nebraska, Kansas, and the rest of the heartland are all collapsing into bankruptcy, unable to compete with the ever-increasing subsidies bought by the legislatures of California with its 50+ congressmen and electoral votes.
Assuming, of course, the Captain Planet model of industry, where the moment the Federal Regulator steps away, the CEO pulls the lever to dump the toxic waste into the nearby river.
Or, maybe the guys running the plant (and likely living nearby) don't want to die in a nuclear waste spill either.
I'd think that one regulator on-site, one shift a day, would be more than enough to catch any worrisome behaviors. Maybe with a surprise inspection once a week on an off-shift time if you really think "Mr. Slimeholio" runs the plant.
The article says 90% of employees is 3600 furloughed. Which would say the remaining 10% would be 400 workers.
To monitor 100 plants.
That would mean you could have one regulator on-site 24 hours a day, seven days a week (That's 21 eight-hour shifts for the math challenged) or 5 shifts per person, with one overtime shift.
At every plant. 24/7 surveillance, with 10% of the workforce. What the hell were they doing before that? 10 regulators per plant, 24/7?!?!?!
Arrhenius stated only that CO2 acted to absorb heat (long-wave infra-red radiation for the nitpickers). He posited that if you added CO2 to the atmosphere the heat would increase. What Arrhenius didn't know, or didn't fully grasp, is that at 280ppm, the atmospheric CO2 already absorbs 97% of all incoming long-wave infra-red radiation. Doubling the CO2 to 560ppm, would not make it absorb 194% of the radiation, it would make it absorb about 99% of the incoming radiation. Since CO2 accounts for approximately 4-7 degrees C of the Earth's warming (there's arguments on the exact figure) that would be an increase of about 0.08 to 0.14 degrees C. Now, there are some factors that add to that (re-radiation, tropospheric concentration and re-reflection of albedo infra-red, etc) that could make that as much as 1 degree C of surface warming. But that's it.
Adding twice the CO2 doesn't mean twice the temperature. And the feedback mechanisms are neutral to negative. They must be, or the 7000ppm CO2 of the carboniferous period would have resulted in Earth looking like a ball of molten rock.
Now, let's get back to the real point.
Climate scientists continue to make statements like, "We can expect more Katrina's every year!" Yet the U.S. is now in its longest cycle without a major hurricane landing since records began being kept in the 1930's. "We can expect more tornados to ravage cities across the U.S.!", yet tornadic activity across the U.S. is at a 50 year low. Total thunderstorms are average at best, and while there is some evidence of slightly stronger convection cells, there's a certain bias in the fact that we never before had satellites capable of sampling and quantifying such activity in seconds rather than days.
In short, the evidence all points the other way.
Now, don't get me wrong, I'm no shill for gas or oil or coal. I'd rather see all of it go away. Give me clean, safe, cheap, plentiful nuclear power every day of the week over all of that. Preferably LFTR designs spread out like candy all over the country. I'd love fusion too, but like my Grandfather who was promised to see it "within his lifetime" and died in 1988, I'm not holding my breath on that one.
Solar power is a joke, with its rare earths and sulfur-hexafluoride washes doing a dozen times more damage to the environment then they'll ever recover in a lifetime. We've already tapped 95% or more of the hydropower on Earth, and I doubt the birds will live through putting up enough windmills to power a typical city, much less the planet. Not to mention, that has it's own problems. Wind Power Potential Overestimated
Your point, "We've seen warming" ignores the one great thing about climate change -- the climate is a complex system -- it is always changing. It is a vast, living, breathing system taking in all life on earth, all changes in the sun, all chemistry in the oceans, every wave, every sunbeam, every butterfly flapping its wings. It must be constantly changing. We are looking at a tiny sliver of it and saying, "Oh no, we're all doomed!" We act as if we want the climate never to change, not one iota, not one jot.
The climate never changes on Venus, on Mercury, on Mars... They all have one thing in common. They're dead worlds.
Give me a changing climate any day over that.