And you're going to get airborne particals of a material with an atomic weight of 94 from an underground bunker, how again?
Safety tip: Don't grind up your plutonium with diamond reinforced tools from Home Depot.
Atomic number is 94, but atomic mass is in the neighborhood of 239, depending on the isotope.
Plutonium, like many Actinides, is pyrophoric. Not sure how volatile the oxide is, but once the metal starts oxidizing you generate nasty particulates, heat, and even more of the oxide. But like you said, that's only a problem if you're in the bunker with it.
We've only really had a good idea of how nuclear chemistry works for 60 years or so, and it is by no means a mature field. Given 10000 years to work on it, it's highly likely that someone will come up with an efficient way to get rid of all this waste.
In the meantime I prefer my spent fuel under thousands of feet of rock.
Democracy by definition is a representative government and the majority of the citizens support laws that are in agreement with their beleifs and lifestyles. Since these arrests and restrictions aren't being passed in accordance with those beliefs, we are not in a democracy any longer, and so we should continue to fight to get our government back.
Not to get too pedantic, but we were never in a Democracy, and Democracy is not a "representative government". The US is a Republic, based on the assumption that Important Decisions were too complex to be decided by mob rule and needed to be made by a carefully selected elite. Hence the election of a legislative body, the electoral college, the indirect election of senators (later changed), &c. For more on why you don't really want a "Democracy," see Federalist #10 or Tocqueville's Democracy in America. For a more recent example, consider how Gay Marriage is being implemented--not by the people, but by the courts.
Now, on to Ed Markey. He is merely the jackass who brays loudest in the Democratic party, and every even-numbered year, tries to pull an issue out of thin air to remind his constituents that he's fighting for something (I live in his district). Our military went to Iraq with insufficiently armored HMMWV's. In 2003. This wasn't a problem until Ed Markey said it was, in the Fall of 2004. There is no job more secure than Democratic Congressman from Massachusetts, but Markey keeps trying to draw more attention to himself. He has done some good work on Homeland Security (particularly regarding the vulnerability of Boston's poorly situated LNG plant), but this latest move reeks of his typically shameless pre-election self-promotion.
And not that it's strictly releveant, but he has a truly atrocious haircut, too.
I was originally going to say: "You have to do some seriously stupid shit (or be black) to get the cops to pull a gun on you," but that seemed kind of flamebaity/trollish/racist/&c. You got me.
I've seen and lived in several different countries and visited the US long enough to have the police pull a gun on me.
You have to do some seriously stupid shit to get the cops to pull a gun on you. I don't believe for a second that you simply asked for directions and were then held at gunpoint. Why don't you tell us the rest of the story?
I promise you, the US is the one country I will never revisit. Not because of the people (I married an American, remember) but because of your laws, politics, and I hate to say it, but culture. They all scare they shit out of me.
Our laws, politics, and culture came directly from yours. We just like different things. Free speech instead of hate-speech laws. Lower taxes instead of VAT. Football instead of Futbol. Guns instead of no guns. Lager instead of Ale. Common Sense instead of 1984. And so on.
The reason these laws exist is that they're not merely tabletop dicusssions, they're incitements to violent acts.
Was the murdered individual's family actually burned?
In more civilized societies, you need an actual violent act to happen before anyone's going on trial for inciting it, and even then, good luck getting a conviction. This incident is nothing more than thoughtcrime--it wasn't an American who wrote 1984.
The funny part is that the guy got another 6 months for kiddie porn that was found on his computer.
The Louis Vuitton design is tacky as hell these days IMNSHO
You wouldn't happen to be talking about this limo or these prom dresses, would you?
The couture iPod case makes little sense, since the most likely customer would probably buy the $20 version in Chinatown anyway. Although I do tend to underestimate the crowd for whom disposable income is quite disposable. A half-hour of MTV ususally cures me of that, though.
Buying some sort of case would make sense, if Apple didn't keep changing the dimensions for every new model of iPod.
"Sounds sort of arbitrary and ridiculous, doesn't it?"
Not really. "Regular" employees are much less likely to take longer-than-average bathroom breaks during the workday.
Seriously, though, consider the importance of the credit score of an employee in any sort of industry in which employees routinely handle large monetary transactions. Who's more likely to embezzle from you, the guy with a good debt-to-income ratio who makes his payments on time, or the guy who's deeply in debt an makes only the minimum payment every month?
I'll top that. I already had my 12" iBook G4 battery replaced last summer in the previous recall. I've owned the computer 20 months, and will now be getting my third battery. I'm starting to like Apple's "battery recall every summer" program, since I haven't even had a chance to use any of my batteries long enough for loss of capacity to be a problem.
I think it's kind of silly, but getting something to self-assemble cooled in liquid nitrogen is a little different than the "spontaneous" formation of fullerenes and whatnot in an electric arc furnace, since lots of things happen spontaneously at 1800 K and the yields are piss-poor. Still, this is nothing new. Zeolites have been self-assembling with large pore sizes for a while now.
It's called "self-assembly," and google scholar lists a mere 13,800 results for it. People significantly more well-known (George Whitesides, for example) have been doing this sort of chemistry for decades.
And word to the wise: the copper surface could easily be an "outside source". Get some self-assembly in the gas phase and then we're talking spontaneous and impressive.
Searching for terrorists by datamining from the comfort of your cubicle is about as likely to be successful.
Unless you have a metric crapload of intercepted communications to sort through for information that might be useful. Especially since the NSA is listening to everything.
Remember that the darling of the Left, John Kerry, insisted that terrorism was a law enforcement problem, not a military problem. A large part of law enforcement is digging through all available information from the comfort of your desk, rather than carpet-bombing potential suspects.
Besides, the Op-Ed section of the NYT is a good place to start looking for terror suspects;)
Absolutely. When used properly, the electrical stimulation can work wonders for various muscle maladies. This is hardly a new discovery. Feels a bit weird at first, but pretty damn good afterward. It's just a way of triggering the nerves repeatedly to stretch the muscle in ways that you can't yourself. But when the electrodes are misplaced oh so slightly it feels like the muscles are being ripped from the bone.
the school has no right to search a student's piece of property.
The Supremes say otherwise, at least in the case of the purse of a drug-dealing student who made the mistake of getting caught smoking. See TLO vs. New Jersey.
I see no problem with digging through cell phone call records and old text messages, as long as there's reasonable suspicion. In the TLO case, for example, a girl caught smoking denied it, but a search of her purse quickly revealed not only smokes, but rolling papers, pot, and a list of students who owed her money (this case did predate the Notorious BIG: "you think a crackhead paying you back, shit forget it").
From the majority opinion:
"The warrant requirement, in particular, is unsuited to the school environment: requiring a teacher to obtain a warrant before searching a child suspected of an infraction of school rules (or of the criminal law) would unduly interfere with the maintenance of the swift and informal disciplinary procedures needed in the schools"
That doesn't sound terribly unreasonable, especially if a suspension from school is the only punishment handed down for dealing drugs, since presumably evidence acquired in this manner wouldn't make it past pre-trial motions.
most of the PA turnpike, including parts of the NE extenstion, predates the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System. IIRC, the Harrisburg-Pittsburgh stretch was completed before WWII, with the rest of the east-west portion being completed just after the war, and I'm pretty sure the last segments of the northeast extenstion were finished just after the interstates got legislated.
Digital X-Rays involve several orders of magnitude less radiation exposure than film X-Rays.
Film X-Rays do that too, since the inside of the film cartridge is coated with a phosphorescent compound that emits visible light upon xray irradiation. Ever wonder why your xrays are all blue? It ain't 'cause of the xrays or your bones.
TiCl4 reacts instantly with as little as 0.5 ppm water vapor to produce HCl gas. You're lucky you got away with just nosebleeds from that job, especially after spilling HF on yourself.
IANAL, but the law makes a distinction between lost, mislaid, and abandoned property, which happens to have a convenient wikipedia entry. Stuff like this is obviously difficult to enforce, but generally you can only walk off with something you find if it's readily apparent that its owner had no intention of ever recovering it. Car pushed into river = abandoned. Phone left in taxi = not abandoned.
Not to mention home-made explosives (e.g. Nitrogen triiodide) from readily available materials.
Vapor extraction is only really a problem if you're doing organic chemistry in the home. In a pinch, I imagine a good commercial kitchen exhaust system could be modified into something useful. Regardless, a lot of the "fun stuff" can be done in aqueous media. I work with volatile organics all day, but my wife's nail-polish remover bothers me. Go figure.
You needn't go as far as free radicals, since Ozone by itself will react with the strained olefins in nanotubes, and is abundant in the upper atmosphere. Here is a computational paper on the matter, and here is an experimental follow-up. Then there's the problem of the increased UV radiation when you get higher, since your elevator is just one big chromophore.
You're wrong. FACT #1: Novak wrote the column. Cheney and Libby Scooter leaked it to him, read the court documents and get your information correct.
Not to get too pedantic, but you're still wrong.
You previously said" "How about the person who reported the Plame leak?". I point this out because you seem unaware of it.
That means either the guy who wrote the column (Novak), or the person who reported that Novak wrote the column. I'll read the court documents if you read what YOU ALREADY SAID! If you'd said "how about the person who leaked Plame's name" then you'd be correct, but you didn't. This makes you, not me, wrong.
Think then type. Click on "Preview" before clicking on "Send".
FACT#2 Cryptography such as PGP is unbreakable as it is known. Assume? We know the breakdown of that term.
All the claims I've read of PGP qualify "Unbreakable" with terms such as "virtually", "nearly", "as good as", &c, and it certainly isn't advertised as unbreakable. Search pgp.com for the word "unbreakable". I dare you. Regardless, if the NSA can break PGP, it would be stupid to publicize that fact. Presumably it would be classified, or at least not publicized.
Forgive me for trivializing the claim followed by the words: "golly gee Wilbur", but I did give the correct requirements for "unbreakable cryptography".
FACT#3 If the NSA should decide to sniff encrypted traffic, and if by slight chance they had enough disk space and time to break the message, chances are, within the amount of time needed to break the encryption, an act of terrorism would have been acted out making their sniffing worthless.
FACT? No. Assumption on your part, and as you so eloquently observed, we all know the break-down of that term, except insofar as you attempt to apply it to me. Also, I wouldn't be overly concerned about the NSA having enough disk space.
Lets reverse this and search for those dissidents who are leaking information to the public shall we? How about the person who reported the Plame leak?
We found him; his name's Bob Novak.
So what you have is FUD being pushed at this point. First they're stating the terrorists are using and I quote "UNBREAKABLE CRYPTO". Well golly gee Wilbur, if they're using unbreakable crypto then why bother tapping them. Give me a break.
Cryptography is only unbreakable if the key is at least the length of the message and used only once. I'm going to assume that that's not what they're doing. So the NSA should just sniff for encrypted traffic and get to work, right?
How about securing my communications from eavesdropping, wouldn't that TRULY be homeland security.
If guys living in tents in central Asia are using "UNBREAKABLE CRYPTO", shouldn't you be?
and FWIW, my name isn't "Wilbur," and Mr. Ed was a horse, not a jackass.
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And you're going to get airborne particals of a material with an atomic weight of 94 from an underground bunker, how again?
Safety tip: Don't grind up your plutonium with diamond reinforced tools from Home Depot.
Atomic number is 94, but atomic mass is in the neighborhood of 239, depending on the isotope.
Plutonium, like many Actinides, is pyrophoric. Not sure how volatile the oxide is, but once the metal starts oxidizing you generate nasty particulates, heat, and even more of the oxide. But like you said, that's only a problem if you're in the bunker with it.
We've only really had a good idea of how nuclear chemistry works for 60 years or so, and it is by no means a mature field. Given 10000 years to work on it, it's highly likely that someone will come up with an efficient way to get rid of all this waste.
In the meantime I prefer my spent fuel under thousands of feet of rock.
IANAL, but that seems like a serious ethics violation. Not sure if it's enough to get her disbarred, though.
The Nintendo 64 controller had a trigger on the bottom and was released in 1996.
Democracy by definition is a representative government and the majority of the citizens support laws that are in agreement with their beleifs and lifestyles. Since these arrests and restrictions aren't being passed in accordance with those beliefs, we are not in a democracy any longer, and so we should continue to fight to get our government back.
Not to get too pedantic, but we were never in a Democracy, and Democracy is not a "representative government". The US is a Republic, based on the assumption that Important Decisions were too complex to be decided by mob rule and needed to be made by a carefully selected elite. Hence the election of a legislative body, the electoral college, the indirect election of senators (later changed), &c. For more on why you don't really want a "Democracy," see Federalist #10 or Tocqueville's Democracy in America. For a more recent example, consider how Gay Marriage is being implemented--not by the people, but by the courts.
Now, on to Ed Markey. He is merely the jackass who brays loudest in the Democratic party, and every even-numbered year, tries to pull an issue out of thin air to remind his constituents that he's fighting for something (I live in his district). Our military went to Iraq with insufficiently armored HMMWV's. In 2003. This wasn't a problem until Ed Markey said it was, in the Fall of 2004. There is no job more secure than Democratic Congressman from Massachusetts, but Markey keeps trying to draw more attention to himself. He has done some good work on Homeland Security (particularly regarding the vulnerability of Boston's poorly situated LNG plant), but this latest move reeks of his typically shameless pre-election self-promotion.
And not that it's strictly releveant, but he has a truly atrocious haircut, too.
I was originally going to say: "You have to do some seriously stupid shit (or be black) to get the cops to pull a gun on you," but that seemed kind of flamebaity/trollish/racist/&c. You got me.
I've seen and lived in several different countries and visited the US long enough to have the police pull a gun on me.
...yet you post as one.
You have to do some seriously stupid shit to get the cops to pull a gun on you. I don't believe for a second that you simply asked for directions and were then held at gunpoint. Why don't you tell us the rest of the story?
I promise you, the US is the one country I will never revisit. Not because of the people (I married an American, remember) but because of your laws, politics, and I hate to say it, but culture. They all scare they shit out of me.
Our laws, politics, and culture came directly from yours. We just like different things. Free speech instead of hate-speech laws. Lower taxes instead of VAT. Football instead of Futbol. Guns instead of no guns. Lager instead of Ale. Common Sense instead of 1984. And so on.
And I'm no coward.
The reason these laws exist is that they're not merely tabletop dicusssions, they're incitements to violent acts.
Was the murdered individual's family actually burned?
In more civilized societies, you need an actual violent act to happen before anyone's going on trial for inciting it, and even then, good luck getting a conviction. This incident is nothing more than thoughtcrime--it wasn't an American who wrote 1984.
The funny part is that the guy got another 6 months for kiddie porn that was found on his computer.
The Louis Vuitton design is tacky as hell these days IMNSHO
You wouldn't happen to be talking about this limo or these prom dresses, would you?
The couture iPod case makes little sense, since the most likely customer would probably buy the $20 version in Chinatown anyway. Although I do tend to underestimate the crowd for whom disposable income is quite disposable. A half-hour of MTV ususally cures me of that, though.
Buying some sort of case would make sense, if Apple didn't keep changing the dimensions for every new model of iPod.
"Sounds sort of arbitrary and ridiculous, doesn't it?"
Not really. "Regular" employees are much less likely to take longer-than-average bathroom breaks during the workday.
Seriously, though, consider the importance of the credit score of an employee in any sort of industry in which employees routinely handle large monetary transactions. Who's more likely to embezzle from you, the guy with a good debt-to-income ratio who makes his payments on time, or the guy who's deeply in debt an makes only the minimum payment every month?
I'll top that. I already had my 12" iBook G4 battery replaced last summer in the previous recall. I've owned the computer 20 months, and will now be getting my third battery. I'm starting to like Apple's "battery recall every summer" program, since I haven't even had a chance to use any of my batteries long enough for loss of capacity to be a problem.
I think it's kind of silly, but getting something to self-assemble cooled in liquid nitrogen is a little different than the "spontaneous" formation of fullerenes and whatnot in an electric arc furnace, since lots of things happen spontaneously at 1800 K and the yields are piss-poor. Still, this is nothing new. Zeolites have been self-assembling with large pore sizes for a while now.
It's called "self-assembly," and google scholar lists a mere 13,800 results for it. People significantly more well-known (George Whitesides, for example) have been doing this sort of chemistry for decades.
And word to the wise: the copper surface could easily be an "outside source". Get some self-assembly in the gas phase and then we're talking spontaneous and impressive.
Searching for terrorists by datamining from the comfort of your cubicle is about as likely to be successful.
;)
Unless you have a metric crapload of intercepted communications to sort through for information that might be useful. Especially since the NSA is listening to everything.
Remember that the darling of the Left, John Kerry, insisted that terrorism was a law enforcement problem, not a military problem. A large part of law enforcement is digging through all available information from the comfort of your desk, rather than carpet-bombing potential suspects.
Besides, the Op-Ed section of the NYT is a good place to start looking for terror suspects
Absolutely. When used properly, the electrical stimulation can work wonders for various muscle maladies. This is hardly a new discovery. Feels a bit weird at first, but pretty damn good afterward. It's just a way of triggering the nerves repeatedly to stretch the muscle in ways that you can't yourself. But when the electrodes are misplaced oh so slightly it feels like the muscles are being ripped from the bone.
the school has no right to search a student's piece of property.
The Supremes say otherwise, at least in the case of the purse of a drug-dealing student who made the mistake of getting caught smoking. See TLO vs. New Jersey.
I see no problem with digging through cell phone call records and old text messages, as long as there's reasonable suspicion. In the TLO case, for example, a girl caught smoking denied it, but a search of her purse quickly revealed not only smokes, but rolling papers, pot, and a list of students who owed her money (this case did predate the Notorious BIG: "you think a crackhead paying you back, shit forget it").
From the majority opinion:
"The warrant requirement, in particular, is unsuited to the school environment: requiring a teacher to obtain a warrant before searching a child suspected of an infraction of school rules (or of the criminal law) would unduly interfere with the maintenance of the swift and informal disciplinary procedures needed in the schools"
That doesn't sound terribly unreasonable, especially if a suspension from school is the only punishment handed down for dealing drugs, since presumably evidence acquired in this manner wouldn't make it past pre-trial motions.
most of the PA turnpike, including parts of the NE extenstion, predates the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System. IIRC, the Harrisburg-Pittsburgh stretch was completed before WWII, with the rest of the east-west portion being completed just after the war, and I'm pretty sure the last segments of the northeast extenstion were finished just after the interstates got legislated.
Digital X-Rays involve several orders of magnitude less radiation exposure than film X-Rays.
Film X-Rays do that too, since the inside of the film cartridge is coated with a phosphorescent compound that emits visible light upon xray irradiation. Ever wonder why your xrays are all blue? It ain't 'cause of the xrays or your bones.
TiCl4 reacts instantly with as little as 0.5 ppm water vapor to produce HCl gas. You're lucky you got away with just nosebleeds from that job, especially after spilling HF on yourself.
IANAL, but the law makes a distinction between lost, mislaid, and abandoned property, which happens to have a convenient wikipedia entry. Stuff like this is obviously difficult to enforce, but generally you can only walk off with something you find if it's readily apparent that its owner had no intention of ever recovering it. Car pushed into river = abandoned. Phone left in taxi = not abandoned.
Not to mention home-made explosives (e.g. Nitrogen triiodide) from readily available materials.
Vapor extraction is only really a problem if you're doing organic chemistry in the home. In a pinch, I imagine a good commercial kitchen exhaust system could be modified into something useful. Regardless, a lot of the "fun stuff" can be done in aqueous media. I work with volatile organics all day, but my wife's nail-polish remover bothers me. Go figure.
Hopefully this new wireless technology will help them crack the 50% literacy milestone. I'm sure the 4% of the population with internet access will really appreaciate it, though.
You needn't go as far as free radicals, since Ozone by itself will react with the strained olefins in nanotubes, and is abundant in the upper atmosphere. Here is a computational paper on the matter, and here is an experimental follow-up. Then there's the problem of the increased UV radiation when you get higher, since your elevator is just one big chromophore.
You're wrong. FACT #1: Novak wrote the column. Cheney and Libby Scooter leaked it to him, read the court documents and get your information correct.
Not to get too pedantic, but you're still wrong.
You previously said" "How about the person who reported the Plame leak?". I point this out because you seem unaware of it.
That means either the guy who wrote the column (Novak), or the person who reported that Novak wrote the column. I'll read the court documents if you read what YOU ALREADY SAID! If you'd said "how about the person who leaked Plame's name" then you'd be correct, but you didn't. This makes you, not me, wrong.
Think then type. Click on "Preview" before clicking on "Send".
FACT#2 Cryptography such as PGP is unbreakable as it is known. Assume? We know the breakdown of that term.
All the claims I've read of PGP qualify "Unbreakable" with terms such as "virtually", "nearly", "as good as", &c, and it certainly isn't advertised as unbreakable. Search pgp.com for the word "unbreakable". I dare you. Regardless, if the NSA can break PGP, it would be stupid to publicize that fact. Presumably it would be classified, or at least not publicized.
Forgive me for trivializing the claim followed by the words: "golly gee Wilbur", but I did give the correct requirements for "unbreakable cryptography".
FACT#3 If the NSA should decide to sniff encrypted traffic, and if by slight chance they had enough disk space and time to break the message, chances are, within the amount of time needed to break the encryption, an act of terrorism would have been acted out making their sniffing worthless.
FACT? No. Assumption on your part, and as you so eloquently observed, we all know the break-down of that term, except insofar as you attempt to apply it to me. Also, I wouldn't be overly concerned about the NSA having enough disk space.
Lets reverse this and search for those dissidents who are leaking information to the public shall we? How about the person who reported the Plame leak?
We found him; his name's Bob Novak.
So what you have is FUD being pushed at this point. First they're stating the terrorists are using and I quote "UNBREAKABLE CRYPTO". Well golly gee Wilbur, if they're using unbreakable crypto then why bother tapping them. Give me a break.
Cryptography is only unbreakable if the key is at least the length of the message and used only once. I'm going to assume that that's not what they're doing. So the NSA should just sniff for encrypted traffic and get to work, right?
How about securing my communications from eavesdropping, wouldn't that TRULY be homeland security.
If guys living in tents in central Asia are using "UNBREAKABLE CRYPTO", shouldn't you be?
and FWIW, my name isn't "Wilbur," and Mr. Ed was a horse, not a jackass.
Ozone is a more likely culprit than dioxygen, so once we pollute the ozone layer out of existance, then the space elevator should be no problem ;)