This is the problem with the arguments of a lot of global warming alarmists. They've crafted their arguments so that warmer temperatures are evidence of global warming, and cooler temperatures are also evidence of global warming. To be scientifically valid, a theory has to be falsifiable. If you concoct your argument so that no matter what happens it supports your theory, then it is not falsifiable, and either your theory or your argument is flawed. (This is the problem with string theory - nobody has presented a way to disprove it. So it remains forever stuck in the realm of maybe true but who really knows.)
Well the problem is that climate change evidence appears in the form of both rising global means and increasing global variance of temperature. The problem with this from a PR perspective is that variance (or standard deviation) is a complex statistical concept. How you do communicate that to the public? You can't so they simply point at extreme weather events as evidence (they are). And since that includes both warm and cold events and there are stupid people on both sides, you get dumb absolutist arguments. You sounds scientifically literate pointing out falsifiablity but your simplistic reduction to a binary situation allows you to both be completely wrong and sound scientifically accurate at the same time. You are wrong because we can measure variance and it is increasing which gives us even more evidence that climate change is happening. But you are right that the public wouldn't understand that more subtle point and would be unable to see the fallacy in the binary reduction you used. Either you understand PR well, or you are the victim of PR...
PS The term variance is abused in other fields like data science to mean even more vague but complex things (like error rate or uncertainty).
These scooters likely get stripped down to parts, which are completely interchangeable, so there's no point in tracking individual parts that "go together". This leaves you with the Sacred Galley of Athens question -- is it the same boat after you've replaced every single part? If you completely disassemble a dozen schooters and reassemble a dozen scooters from randomly selected parts, what happens to the "identity" of the scooters that were taken apart? The answer is you don't need it anymore.
If it were firearms, we associate the identity of the firearm with the receiver -- the metal housing into which the barrel and moving parts of the firearm are assembled. But that's purely conventional; you could just as reasonably define the identity of the firearm by the barrel. But why even have a concept for the "identity" of a firearm? Really one only: to track ownership and custody of a firearm, you have to have some kind of database. Databases require identifiers. Seventeenth century gunsmiths didn't stamp serial numbers on their guns because nobody was tracking them.
You could take the same approach as firearms to scooters by declaring that the identity of a scooter sticks to, say, the scooter's deck. But what *function* would that serve? The function of a rental scooter's id is to track user custody of company property and determine when a scooter needs to be serviced. Once the scooter is brought in for repair the need to track that ID disappears. If you insisted on having an id that persists through the rebuild process it would do something that only bad database designs do: constrain physical operations to serve the record keeping system.
In my experience every database design can be invalidated by expanding the universe of questions it must answer (or equivalently, processes it must support). This is the problem with identity in the relational model; it's *implicitly* tied to the questions the designer anticipates. That's why UUIDs are such a robust solution to many identifying tasks: their uniqueness is not tied to any particular set of questions you might want to answer, or to any context (i.e., they are unique *between* databases).
So how is the job market for a PhD of Philosophy these days? I ask that because you seem to understand philosophy quite well but what a DB is used for, not so much...
You had me until you mentioned a fictitious TV character Saul Goodman. Nice try with the bullshit'n.
Actually, its likely that illegal drugs are the world's largest employer by industry. Think about it, the number of middlemen, the soldiers, the lawyers, and in a way, even enforcement are all caught up in a huge economy. All legal industries try to reduce the number of people they employ but not for illegal drugs. Not that any of this is good or anything, but strictly by a jobs created metric it might be the largest. The other metrics we might use, not so much...but when there is no attempt to reduce the number of workers in an "industry" and there are extreme attempts to do so for all other industries, what would you expect?
For one, they actually had a working understand of the hardware on a conceptual level and could relate how their code would interact with the system. Ask your average JS coder how a computer works and grab some popcorn.
There's definitely a lot more going on nowadays with both the OS and application layer libraries. I doubt anyone can understand the entire stack the way people did back then.
In fact, I'll bet you can't figure out what machine code a simple line of JS code turns into either. And even if you did, that answer would be wrong in a few weeks when the next release of V8 comes out.
Due to the limitations of distribution methods and storage media of the time software was also far less bloated and much more stable at launch. You couldn't easily patch something post launch like you can now so you had to get it mostly right the first time. There is no such thing as bug free code but there is code with some bugs and then there is code that is mostly bugs.
I seem to recall a lot of older software that had a final version named something like 1.0.4. And those were only made available months after the initial release. In other words, you'd have software with glaring flaws that you'd have to put up with for months. Versus now, any major bug would be quickly patched up post launch and it's a matter of a few days, or even just a few hours of waiting.
Hahahahaha, modern software that is quickly patched is also broken about 99% of the time.
I recall products and code actually working as designed in the 80s. They had computers you could literally pull a running CPU out of the board and it would still continue to work correctly. If you think today's software is anywhere near as well written or reliable as software of the past, you are a fool. Today's software business is built on cheap coders pushing out crap as fast as possible. In the past we did actual engineering and testing to make sure things worked before we gave them to users. Today, we let the users's beta test software live and 'let it crash' is the moto of the ops folks.
Just Millennial SJW types. They have never seen a real recession so they think these things are the worst things that can happen.
The Great Recession hit at the same time that most millennials were attempting to enter the job market. It hurt that generation worse than any other.
Oh, fuck you. The last 3 generations have had to deal with worse financial crises. Try being 24 in 2001 like I was. This is what we get for no longer teaching history in school. A generation that thinks its the first and has it the hardest of any generation in history when in fact the opposite was true.
So why are some countries so successful at dropping their emissions?
Because they export their polluting industries to the 3rd world like the US did to Mexico? This is an excellent example of an intentionally misleading analysis. CO2 emissions in CA and Germany have increased from 2010 till today. This is the period when we actually had a renewable energy policy, and the increase in CO2 was mostly due to bad renewable energy policy and doesn't count the extra emissions from methane we had during that same period.
"Once the threat of jail time is held over any CxO position, good fucking luck filling it."
Or, it would only attract those with ethics. If such an action scares you about being in management, perhaps you shouldn't be in management. Perhaps tougher sanctions would prevent those with compromised ethics from trying to get into positions of management. Perhaps that's a good thing...perhaps that even what we want.
But it is all risk management-- this outcome has such-and-such probability and will cost $X to address with a n% chance of eliminating the threat. Nobody can commit infinite sums to data security; it is unreasonable for them to commit even their annual revenue to the cause.
So, what is the alternative? Don't keep anything useful?
That's classic reductio ad absurdum. If you can't define the risk because you don't know enough about the area, you by definition aren't qualified for the CTO/CIO of an organization like Equifax. And the board, whose job it is to know this, should be raising questions about a music major in charge of their InfoSec. I understand there is a middle ground and a balance to be struck, but in this case every level failed so spectacularly in fundamental ways that they should have known about that if there is no jail time here, there never will be. This is the maximum level of incompetence beyond which there are no more higher penalties. Their performance at every level basically assured that there would be a break-in at some point. That's a good definition of maximum incompetence and a good bar for a maximum enforcement action here. If we don't, we are inviting this to happen again and again. To whom much is given, much is expected...much is given to the board and CxOs and they delivered nothing.
The algae keep dying off at certain levels of scale.
Could you be more specific? Say, providing any information at all?
Well, something is very wrong with the process. Here is more info. All those biofuel companies are pivoting away from algae. They know something we don't. As I said, current speculation on what it is is that you can't keep the algae alive at scale. Algal blooms in the wild often poison themselves and everything else in different ways after a time, perhaps that's the issue. Maybe its something else, cost of maintaining the pools perhaps. Either way, it doesn't work. Its yet another unicorn.
Do we have the technology to deal with radioactive waste yet? No, then why to add more waste we can flush?
Let me introduce you to Yucca Mountain. Stop repeating that lie. Its never been true, it will never been true. It only makes you a liar when you say it.
So about 8000h/yr (with a 90% capacity factor which is common in nuclear) and that's 6.25TWs of production or 6,250 1GW reactors.
The CF of all power plants together is less than 50%. Because that is how much the load curve over a day varies.
WTF? That's not how capacity factor works not that that matters at all since your comment would still have no relevance even if it did. The GP asked how much nuclear fuel would be needed for a theoretical 100% nuclear fuel and electricity production for the world. I answered using estimates and one of those estimates is how many hours of power you get from a nuclear plant per year. Most nuclear plants give you power 90% of the time (hence a capacity factor of 90%). That's why its a reasonable estimation. Why do you troll topics you know nothing about angelsphere?
When you gas up your car do you think about how many people could be burned to ash if we used that fuel to bomb cities instead of use it to power the transportation sector of the world?
Can't speak for anyone else, but I think about how much devastation follows this unnecessary use of fossil fuels. We could make 100% of our transportation fuel needs from algae grown on seawater by allocating a relatively small portion of desert. Well, we could have. Now that climate change is causing feet of snow to fall on Arizona, and the like, it probably wouldn't work so well as it might have.
The algae keep dying off at certain levels of scale. Also, it has to be economical and its not clear that these types of algae based bio-fuels will be economical as there is still a fair amount of effort to keep the algae alive and growing in a changing environment at scale. Plus there is the same energy density problems of bio-fuels that plague all the other renewables. Yes climate change is real. But you don't seem to be reacting as if it is because you keep telling us to wait on unicorns instead of letting us solve the problem with nuclear.
Not quite. This is a fusor, aka Electrostatic Confinement Fusion. One of the ways to use that is to use proton-boron fusion, which generates nothing but alpha particles. If the electrostatic well is designed correctly, theoretically you could capture those in the outer grid, where they will steal two electrons, thus generating electron flow, aka electricity.
Robert Bussard was working on that, his company Polywell is still doing research into different grid designs.
I was unaware of proton-boron fusion so thanks. If its just alpha particles, why not just boil water with them? Its basically heat at that point. Getting the alpha particles to capture electrons seems hard and perhaps not the most efficient way to capture power but I don't know. It would be an interesting solution to the problem. Still have to make one that actually makes more power than it consumes though. And since the confinement consumes so much power that is hard. I know scientists always love exploring the unknown (ie extreme conditions), but for civilian fission and fusion power perhaps lower energy things are better. Thermal spectrum reactors are better than fast spectrum (this is one idea the nuclear scientists really missed back in the 60s) and some sort of lower heat/lower power fusion will probably be preferable to more extreme forms of fusion. Also, particle accelerators take lots of power so I'm not holding my breath.
Sure, uranium and lithium are great.... but I think the best possible idea here would be to find something to soak up all the microplastics and other shit our species poisoned the oceans with.... Then we can come at these other great ideas again. It would be the adult thing to do, to set aside what we want until we clean up our mess. If I am not mistaken there are more than a few reactor cores left at the bottom of the ocean by Russia and the US. Might just be easier to go get those fissiles at some point, but it would be nice to do because they continue to suck, radiate, pollute.
As far as I know, there are 9 reactors in vessels that have sunk. I'm not sure how many of those reactors are still at the bottom of the sea. But its hardly fair to lump nuclear power into the same boat as nuclear weapons as seems to happen so often. They aren't the same thing anymore than gasoline is the same thing as napalm. Every energy source is a double edged sword (even solar) as the energy to make an explosion and the energy to power a machine are the same thing in physics. The difference is how we control (or don't control) those reactions. And I would bet that those fracking wells that your green leaders quietly back have done 1000x the environmental damage as any number of military nuclear accidents which again have nothing to do with civilian nuclear power. But thanks for the red herring which is the nuclear equivalent of talking about the birds killed by windmills.
Enough fast neutrons and it doesn't matter if it's 235 or 238 or whatever
Yes, yes it does. First, fast neutrons need to be slowed down by moderators and generally slower (thermal) neutrons are better in a reactor as they increase the cross-section (chance of hitting) nuclei. Second, U-238 needs to be breed into Pu-239 to be used for power. U-235 is ready to make power immediately. That's why its prized and we used it first. Its also problematic as we don't like the idea of having U-235 pure enough to be made into weapons. So we make reactors in such a way as they don't need pure U-235 and can breed the U-238 into Pu-239 at the same time. But since U-238 is initially a neutron poison (because it needs a neutron or two to become fissionable Pu-239) the neutron economy is much harder to handle and you have to shuffle the fuel around in a complex manor to make it all work. Also, the waste that comes out and how long it will be dangerous matters too. U-235 tends to produce waste that lasts far less time than Pu-239 and its fission products are less dangerous. So enrichment tends to lead to much safer nuclear reactors with less dangerous and shorter lived waste. But it also scares people because of the worry that weapons could be made even though it really isn't any easier to make a bomb from 50% enriched Uranium than from 4% enriched Uranium. Guess where we put the line? The problem with nuclear isn't the technology.
Canada has been using natural uranium as fuel for decades, and sold their designs to India, China, and perhaps other nations, from which local variants have been built. This is not new technology and not rare either.
CANDU reactors have a positive void coefficient meaning if they start to boil off their water (just bubbles form, not fill boil), they overheat quickly. This is very dangerous. One of the few sensible US nuclear regulations is not allowing reactors with positive void coefficients. It is quite nice that they can use raw ore but at the cost of having to use heavy water which is really just shifting the problem of enrichment, not fixing it. However, the Canadians usually have more sensible nuclear regulations and hopefully will start licensing MSRs soon.
Now figure it out how to enrich it at the same time and watch as the world destroys itself building nukes from ocean water.
By "nukes" I assume you mean nuclear weapons. You do realize what many wars have been fought over, do you not? Resources. People fight over water, fuel, food, and so on. Access to cheap nuclear fission power by extracting uranium from seawater could mean an end to scarcity. Well, there will always be scarcity of something, just not a scarcity of energy. Energy that can be used to produce water, food, shelter, and clothing. That's not saying there won't be wars, people fight for other reasons. Many such people fight because their god tells them to convert or kill. If they were more concerned about live and let live then they'd be far better off and not feel such jealousy of other people having greater wealth, freedom, and generally a better standard of living.
Nuclear energy has as much to do with nuclear weapons as gasoline cars have with napalm. When you gas up your car do you think about how many people could be burned to ash if we used that fuel to bomb cities instead of use it to power the transportation sector of the world? You don't? Maybe that's because peaceful energy is far more valuable than weapons to deny other people of their wealth, property, and lives.
Isn't that the point? There is no such thing as a truly "global nuclear power industry." To me, the 'centuries' estimate implies a global industry providing power to the entire world while also replacing fossil fuels and supporting a general increase of demand for energy as technology progresses.
Ok, so you want to do this in global total energy. So lets do that. World consumes about 50PWh of fuel (converting fuel to electricity for simplicity) and electricity a year. We get > 90% of that from fossil fuels right now. So about 8000h/yr (with a 90% capacity factor which is common in nuclear) and that's 6.25TWs of production or 6,250 1GW reactors. So a current generation LWR will consume about 200 tons every 4 years so that's 50 tons/yr/GW. So that's 312,500 tons per year or ~283,495 tonnes. So 4.5b tonnes mentioned above (which is renewed each year naturally at an unknown rate) would be about 15,800 years. Now, I've ignored the issue of enrichment, so let's adjust for that. So the fuel is about 3% enriched (2% for initial load, 4% for refueling rods) and that's 4x more U-235 than natural Uranium, so divide by 4.
So that's a hair under 4000 years of supply for all the worlds fuel and electricity at current rates. And as I said, its naturally replenished at an unknown rate. Its likely that if we used a lot of uranium from seawater that the increased difference in concentration would increase this rate of natural replenishment.
And of course, with Thorium we have far larger reserves than Uranium and since we burn up the common isotope of Thorium we end up with far more energy per amount of raw material and a 300 years supply of the stuff is sitting around in slag heaps across the world and that doesn't count all the huge piles of the stuff near every rare earth mine. So no, there is no way we are running out of nuclear fuel anytime soon. Try doing this with any other energy source and you either get climate change (fossil fuels) or you have to ramp up mining to an absurd degree to get the raw materials you need. Try doing some research into what it would take to get 100% of just CAs energy needs from renewables (hint nameplate capacity isn't what counts). You quickly run out of the entire world's supply of various types of raw materials (including land) for any scheme you ramp up. This is why nuclear is really the only good option we have or likely will have in our lifetimes.
Fusion is something else. Nobody will build that privately for a long, long time.
That's not the only problem. The problem of how to harness 1,000,000C heat is still unsolved to put it mildly. The only real use for a fusion reactor is as a waste burner and it would be a really expensive one at that. Fusion power generation will likely be something that doesn't happen in our lifetimes. Perhaps 100s or 1000s of years from now but not anytime soon. We just don't know how to efficiently extract energy from that level of heat and don't have the materials to contain that level of heat either. We hold that heat in a magnetic bottle which uses so much power itself that its difficult to make the entire process produce energy instead of consume it.
So what? Plutonium isn't appreciably radioactive. Deutrium is much more so, but still a mere trickle compared to what you'd get feeding from feeding it into a $300 fusor.
Deutrium isn't radioactive. You are thinking of Tritium which has a half-life of only 12.3 years which makes it quite radioactive even though the small size of the Tritium nucleus makes the energy per decay event quite small. And Plutonium is very radioactive with a half-life of only 24k years and a huge atomic number so a large amount of energy released per decay event. Its even more dangerous than Uranium as its also water soluble and also a poison. Also, d-t (deutrium-tritium) fusion releases neutronic radiation which is hard to shield and tends to effect internal organs. There is nothing safe about trying to make this specific reaction at home. Deutrium-Boron fusion would be safe (no neutrons released) but it take quite a bit more energy to cause it to happen.
Nobody can seem to answer this question. Why does a US based site need to comply with the GDPR? What happens if they don't?
The EU sues them if they have a legal presence in Europe. If you are a big company that is quite likely. If you just make revenue from EU companies, that money could be siphoned off as a fine.
The GP is correct, uranium dust particles are dangerous. If they get in your lungs then your clothes or a sheet of paper won't help you. Note that your lungs are not normally exposed to sunlight either.
That's the problem here. They had buckets of the stuff lying around, one without the lid even on it. Properly handled it can be safe, but it wasn't properly handled.
Yes the dust is dangerous, but not because of the alpha radiation. It kills you in your example due to poisoning (you can inhale poison), not cancer, radiation poisoning or tissue destruction. It was basically a big bucket of poison sitting around in a public place where children play, that's bad. The extra danger from the alpha radiation is probably not worth thinking about here as it doesn't really matter and is only mentioned to stir up more hysteria. That's what we are tired of seeing. Just because Uranium is dangerous doesn't mean its dangerous due to radiation. Its dangers to health are far more likely to be due to the fact that its poisonous and water soluble not because it emits alpha radiation. This isn't true for many radioactive substances but it is true for things with very long half-lives like natural Uranium.
It also gives out neutron radiation... which is not stopped by a sheet of paper.
Idiot...
No, no it doesn't. For that to happen you would need very special circumstances that reactors create. Neutronic radiation requires fission. Naturally occurring fission requires a moderator and unless the bucket was left out in the rain plus a bunch of other things that weren't true in this case it didn't happen. Perhaps a single fission or 2 occurred over many years but no chain reaction and the neutrons were probably absorbed before they left the material as most of the Uranium in that bucket was U-238 which absorbs neutrons and not U-235 which fissions instead of absorbing stray neutrons. Learn something before hurling insults.
"That said, this was uranium ore" Wrong. This was specimen grade Uranium ore. Its actual %U is unknown, but it emitted far more than your 32 Bq, lying moron.
And there's no "sheet of paper" stopping alpha particles in your lungs, where the dust from these open containers went over the course of 20 years, along with Radon gas and other nasty TU's.
Apologist faggots like you need to die under heavy ion bombardment to really understand the forces you're downplaying so casually and thoughtlessly.
First, Radon isn't a TU. Second, the danger here was from poison, not from ionizing radiation. If you breathed enough of this dust to hurt yourself from the alpha radiation, you would poison yourself first. Uranium is dangerous. Just not in the way you keep saying. Its a poison and quite an effective one at that. Its a poison like Arsenic and that's partially because Uranium is water soluble. However, all naturally occurring isotopes of Uranium have very long half-lives. Long half-live means less radiation per gram. Most radioactive things have half-lives on the order of 1000x shorter and thus have 1000x the radiation per molar mass. You probably have a higher level of radiation in your basement from radon gas than this bucket caused to most visitors. The real outrage here is having a bucket of poison near where children were playing. That seems like a very poor idea.
Thorium however is not "inert" and that nothing statement is false, but I still know what you meant.
Thorium is biologically inert because its not water soluble. So its unable to take part in any sort of biological reaction with tissue. Its not a noble element but that's a moot point. Also, alpha radiation is blocked by most things including clothing, the bucket in the article, sunscreen, air, water, and most other subsistences. The reason why we are so hard on you on this point is that you can use alpha radiation to really manipulate the amount of radiation you announce. It there is a lot of it, it makes the situation seem much more scary than it really is. Gamma radiation is the really scary stuff but that doesn't get a multiplier since it doesn't do as much damage per nuclear interaction but very little stops it and that causes it to do damage internally and to things far away from the thing emitting radiation. Like I said, you would feel the physical effects of the alpha radiation far before it actually hurt you and that's what makes it less dangerous and what makes radiation so scary in the first place. The ability to detect it without a device makes it far less dangerous and scary for most people. Somehow, not for you...
Trans-Uranic elements from U decay actually emit alpha, beta and gamma. You know nothing about this. An unsealed container was accessible by anyone for over 20 years, and one microgram in your lungs is deadly potentially.
You're a moron. Not potentially, you're a moron.
There are actually very few gamma emitters in general. Almost all radioactive decay is alpha and beta. And there are no gamma emitters in U-238 or U-235's decay chains. There are however different isotopes of Uranium that do emit gamma radiation but those usually have to be made in a reactor and can't be made from natural Uranium ore (no matter how much reprocessing you do to it). And Uranium's real hazard is that its poisonous, as in like Arsenic and unlike Thorium which is inert. The radioactivity is just window dressing here. The GP is right, alpha radiation isn't really a hazard as its blocked by clothes and is in sunlight. You can't even write one accurate sentence about this topic, maybe you should stop posting about it and clearly you shouldn't be throwing insults at others when its you are the uninformed and ignorant person here.
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This is the problem with the arguments of a lot of global warming alarmists. They've crafted their arguments so that warmer temperatures are evidence of global warming, and cooler temperatures are also evidence of global warming. To be scientifically valid, a theory has to be falsifiable. If you concoct your argument so that no matter what happens it supports your theory, then it is not falsifiable, and either your theory or your argument is flawed. (This is the problem with string theory - nobody has presented a way to disprove it. So it remains forever stuck in the realm of maybe true but who really knows.)
Well the problem is that climate change evidence appears in the form of both rising global means and increasing global variance of temperature. The problem with this from a PR perspective is that variance (or standard deviation) is a complex statistical concept. How you do communicate that to the public? You can't so they simply point at extreme weather events as evidence (they are). And since that includes both warm and cold events and there are stupid people on both sides, you get dumb absolutist arguments. You sounds scientifically literate pointing out falsifiablity but your simplistic reduction to a binary situation allows you to both be completely wrong and sound scientifically accurate at the same time. You are wrong because we can measure variance and it is increasing which gives us even more evidence that climate change is happening. But you are right that the public wouldn't understand that more subtle point and would be unable to see the fallacy in the binary reduction you used. Either you understand PR well, or you are the victim of PR...
PS The term variance is abused in other fields like data science to mean even more vague but complex things (like error rate or uncertainty).
These scooters likely get stripped down to parts, which are completely interchangeable, so there's no point in tracking individual parts that "go together". This leaves you with the Sacred Galley of Athens question -- is it the same boat after you've replaced every single part? If you completely disassemble a dozen schooters and reassemble a dozen scooters from randomly selected parts, what happens to the "identity" of the scooters that were taken apart? The answer is you don't need it anymore.
If it were firearms, we associate the identity of the firearm with the receiver -- the metal housing into which the barrel and moving parts of the firearm are assembled. But that's purely conventional; you could just as reasonably define the identity of the firearm by the barrel. But why even have a concept for the "identity" of a firearm? Really one only: to track ownership and custody of a firearm, you have to have some kind of database. Databases require identifiers. Seventeenth century gunsmiths didn't stamp serial numbers on their guns because nobody was tracking them.
You could take the same approach as firearms to scooters by declaring that the identity of a scooter sticks to, say, the scooter's deck. But what *function* would that serve? The function of a rental scooter's id is to track user custody of company property and determine when a scooter needs to be serviced. Once the scooter is brought in for repair the need to track that ID disappears. If you insisted on having an id that persists through the rebuild process it would do something that only bad database designs do: constrain physical operations to serve the record keeping system.
In my experience every database design can be invalidated by expanding the universe of questions it must answer (or equivalently, processes it must support). This is the problem with identity in the relational model; it's *implicitly* tied to the questions the designer anticipates. That's why UUIDs are such a robust solution to many identifying tasks: their uniqueness is not tied to any particular set of questions you might want to answer, or to any context (i.e., they are unique *between* databases).
So how is the job market for a PhD of Philosophy these days? I ask that because you seem to understand philosophy quite well but what a DB is used for, not so much...
You had me until you mentioned a fictitious TV character Saul Goodman. Nice try with the bullshit'n.
Actually, its likely that illegal drugs are the world's largest employer by industry. Think about it, the number of middlemen, the soldiers, the lawyers, and in a way, even enforcement are all caught up in a huge economy. All legal industries try to reduce the number of people they employ but not for illegal drugs. Not that any of this is good or anything, but strictly by a jobs created metric it might be the largest. The other metrics we might use, not so much...but when there is no attempt to reduce the number of workers in an "industry" and there are extreme attempts to do so for all other industries, what would you expect?
For one, they actually had a working understand of the hardware on a conceptual level and could relate how their code would interact with the system. Ask your average JS coder how a computer works and grab some popcorn.
There's definitely a lot more going on nowadays with both the OS and application layer libraries. I doubt anyone can understand the entire stack the way people did back then.
In fact, I'll bet you can't figure out what machine code a simple line of JS code turns into either. And even if you did, that answer would be wrong in a few weeks when the next release of V8 comes out.
Due to the limitations of distribution methods and storage media of the time software was also far less bloated and much more stable at launch. You couldn't easily patch something post launch like you can now so you had to get it mostly right the first time. There is no such thing as bug free code but there is code with some bugs and then there is code that is mostly bugs.
I seem to recall a lot of older software that had a final version named something like 1.0.4. And those were only made available months after the initial release. In other words, you'd have software with glaring flaws that you'd have to put up with for months. Versus now, any major bug would be quickly patched up post launch and it's a matter of a few days, or even just a few hours of waiting.
Hahahahaha, modern software that is quickly patched is also broken about 99% of the time.
I recall products and code actually working as designed in the 80s. They had computers you could literally pull a running CPU out of the board and it would still continue to work correctly. If you think today's software is anywhere near as well written or reliable as software of the past, you are a fool. Today's software business is built on cheap coders pushing out crap as fast as possible. In the past we did actual engineering and testing to make sure things worked before we gave them to users. Today, we let the users's beta test software live and 'let it crash' is the moto of the ops folks.
Just Millennial SJW types. They have never seen a real recession so they think these things are the worst things that can happen.
The Great Recession hit at the same time that most millennials were attempting to enter the job market. It hurt that generation worse than any other.
Oh, fuck you. The last 3 generations have had to deal with worse financial crises. Try being 24 in 2001 like I was. This is what we get for no longer teaching history in school. A generation that thinks its the first and has it the hardest of any generation in history when in fact the opposite was true.
So why are some countries so successful at dropping their emissions?
Because they export their polluting industries to the 3rd world like the US did to Mexico? This is an excellent example of an intentionally misleading analysis. CO2 emissions in CA and Germany have increased from 2010 till today. This is the period when we actually had a renewable energy policy, and the increase in CO2 was mostly due to bad renewable energy policy and doesn't count the extra emissions from methane we had during that same period.
"Once the threat of jail time is held over any CxO position, good fucking luck filling it."
Or, it would only attract those with ethics. If such an action scares you about being in management, perhaps you shouldn't be in management. Perhaps tougher sanctions would prevent those with compromised ethics from trying to get into positions of management. Perhaps that's a good thing...perhaps that even what we want.
But it is all risk management-- this outcome has such-and-such probability and will cost $X to address with a n% chance of eliminating the threat. Nobody can commit infinite sums to data security; it is unreasonable for them to commit even their annual revenue to the cause.
So, what is the alternative? Don't keep anything useful?
That's classic reductio ad absurdum. If you can't define the risk because you don't know enough about the area, you by definition aren't qualified for the CTO/CIO of an organization like Equifax. And the board, whose job it is to know this, should be raising questions about a music major in charge of their InfoSec. I understand there is a middle ground and a balance to be struck, but in this case every level failed so spectacularly in fundamental ways that they should have known about that if there is no jail time here, there never will be. This is the maximum level of incompetence beyond which there are no more higher penalties. Their performance at every level basically assured that there would be a break-in at some point. That's a good definition of maximum incompetence and a good bar for a maximum enforcement action here. If we don't, we are inviting this to happen again and again. To whom much is given, much is expected...much is given to the board and CxOs and they delivered nothing.
The algae keep dying off at certain levels of scale.
Could you be more specific? Say, providing any information at all?
Well, something is very wrong with the process. Here is more info. All those biofuel companies are pivoting away from algae. They know something we don't. As I said, current speculation on what it is is that you can't keep the algae alive at scale. Algal blooms in the wild often poison themselves and everything else in different ways after a time, perhaps that's the issue. Maybe its something else, cost of maintaining the pools perhaps. Either way, it doesn't work. Its yet another unicorn.
Do we have the technology to deal with radioactive waste yet? No, then why to add more waste we can flush?
Let me introduce you to Yucca Mountain. Stop repeating that lie. Its never been true, it will never been true. It only makes you a liar when you say it.
So about 8000h/yr (with a 90% capacity factor which is common in nuclear) and that's 6.25TWs of production or 6,250 1GW reactors. The CF of all power plants together is less than 50%. Because that is how much the load curve over a day varies.
WTF? That's not how capacity factor works not that that matters at all since your comment would still have no relevance even if it did. The GP asked how much nuclear fuel would be needed for a theoretical 100% nuclear fuel and electricity production for the world. I answered using estimates and one of those estimates is how many hours of power you get from a nuclear plant per year. Most nuclear plants give you power 90% of the time (hence a capacity factor of 90%). That's why its a reasonable estimation. Why do you troll topics you know nothing about angelsphere?
When you gas up your car do you think about how many people could be burned to ash if we used that fuel to bomb cities instead of use it to power the transportation sector of the world?
Can't speak for anyone else, but I think about how much devastation follows this unnecessary use of fossil fuels. We could make 100% of our transportation fuel needs from algae grown on seawater by allocating a relatively small portion of desert. Well, we could have. Now that climate change is causing feet of snow to fall on Arizona, and the like, it probably wouldn't work so well as it might have.
The algae keep dying off at certain levels of scale. Also, it has to be economical and its not clear that these types of algae based bio-fuels will be economical as there is still a fair amount of effort to keep the algae alive and growing in a changing environment at scale. Plus there is the same energy density problems of bio-fuels that plague all the other renewables. Yes climate change is real. But you don't seem to be reacting as if it is because you keep telling us to wait on unicorns instead of letting us solve the problem with nuclear.
Not quite. This is a fusor, aka Electrostatic Confinement Fusion. One of the ways to use that is to use proton-boron fusion, which generates nothing but alpha particles. If the electrostatic well is designed correctly, theoretically you could capture those in the outer grid, where they will steal two electrons, thus generating electron flow, aka electricity.
Robert Bussard was working on that, his company Polywell is still doing research into different grid designs.
I was unaware of proton-boron fusion so thanks. If its just alpha particles, why not just boil water with them? Its basically heat at that point. Getting the alpha particles to capture electrons seems hard and perhaps not the most efficient way to capture power but I don't know. It would be an interesting solution to the problem. Still have to make one that actually makes more power than it consumes though. And since the confinement consumes so much power that is hard. I know scientists always love exploring the unknown (ie extreme conditions), but for civilian fission and fusion power perhaps lower energy things are better. Thermal spectrum reactors are better than fast spectrum (this is one idea the nuclear scientists really missed back in the 60s) and some sort of lower heat/lower power fusion will probably be preferable to more extreme forms of fusion. Also, particle accelerators take lots of power so I'm not holding my breath.
Sure, uranium and lithium are great.... but I think the best possible idea here would be to find something to soak up all the microplastics and other shit our species poisoned the oceans with.... Then we can come at these other great ideas again. It would be the adult thing to do, to set aside what we want until we clean up our mess. If I am not mistaken there are more than a few reactor cores left at the bottom of the ocean by Russia and the US. Might just be easier to go get those fissiles at some point, but it would be nice to do because they continue to suck, radiate, pollute.
As far as I know, there are 9 reactors in vessels that have sunk. I'm not sure how many of those reactors are still at the bottom of the sea. But its hardly fair to lump nuclear power into the same boat as nuclear weapons as seems to happen so often. They aren't the same thing anymore than gasoline is the same thing as napalm. Every energy source is a double edged sword (even solar) as the energy to make an explosion and the energy to power a machine are the same thing in physics. The difference is how we control (or don't control) those reactions. And I would bet that those fracking wells that your green leaders quietly back have done 1000x the environmental damage as any number of military nuclear accidents which again have nothing to do with civilian nuclear power. But thanks for the red herring which is the nuclear equivalent of talking about the birds killed by windmills.
Enough fast neutrons and it doesn't matter if it's 235 or 238 or whatever
Yes, yes it does. First, fast neutrons need to be slowed down by moderators and generally slower (thermal) neutrons are better in a reactor as they increase the cross-section (chance of hitting) nuclei. Second, U-238 needs to be breed into Pu-239 to be used for power. U-235 is ready to make power immediately. That's why its prized and we used it first. Its also problematic as we don't like the idea of having U-235 pure enough to be made into weapons. So we make reactors in such a way as they don't need pure U-235 and can breed the U-238 into Pu-239 at the same time. But since U-238 is initially a neutron poison (because it needs a neutron or two to become fissionable Pu-239) the neutron economy is much harder to handle and you have to shuffle the fuel around in a complex manor to make it all work. Also, the waste that comes out and how long it will be dangerous matters too. U-235 tends to produce waste that lasts far less time than Pu-239 and its fission products are less dangerous. So enrichment tends to lead to much safer nuclear reactors with less dangerous and shorter lived waste. But it also scares people because of the worry that weapons could be made even though it really isn't any easier to make a bomb from 50% enriched Uranium than from 4% enriched Uranium. Guess where we put the line? The problem with nuclear isn't the technology.
Canada has been using natural uranium as fuel for decades, and sold their designs to India, China, and perhaps other nations, from which local variants have been built. This is not new technology and not rare either.
CANDU reactors have a positive void coefficient meaning if they start to boil off their water (just bubbles form, not fill boil), they overheat quickly. This is very dangerous. One of the few sensible US nuclear regulations is not allowing reactors with positive void coefficients. It is quite nice that they can use raw ore but at the cost of having to use heavy water which is really just shifting the problem of enrichment, not fixing it. However, the Canadians usually have more sensible nuclear regulations and hopefully will start licensing MSRs soon.
Now figure it out how to enrich it at the same time and watch as the world destroys itself building nukes from ocean water.
By "nukes" I assume you mean nuclear weapons. You do realize what many wars have been fought over, do you not? Resources. People fight over water, fuel, food, and so on. Access to cheap nuclear fission power by extracting uranium from seawater could mean an end to scarcity. Well, there will always be scarcity of something, just not a scarcity of energy. Energy that can be used to produce water, food, shelter, and clothing. That's not saying there won't be wars, people fight for other reasons. Many such people fight because their god tells them to convert or kill. If they were more concerned about live and let live then they'd be far better off and not feel such jealousy of other people having greater wealth, freedom, and generally a better standard of living.
Nuclear energy has as much to do with nuclear weapons as gasoline cars have with napalm. When you gas up your car do you think about how many people could be burned to ash if we used that fuel to bomb cities instead of use it to power the transportation sector of the world? You don't? Maybe that's because peaceful energy is far more valuable than weapons to deny other people of their wealth, property, and lives.
Well said and spot on...
>given that no new reactors are constructed
Isn't that the point? There is no such thing as a truly "global nuclear power industry." To me, the 'centuries' estimate implies a global industry providing power to the entire world while also replacing fossil fuels and supporting a general increase of demand for energy as technology progresses.
Ok, so you want to do this in global total energy. So lets do that. World consumes about 50PWh of fuel (converting fuel to electricity for simplicity) and electricity a year. We get > 90% of that from fossil fuels right now. So about 8000h/yr (with a 90% capacity factor which is common in nuclear) and that's 6.25TWs of production or 6,250 1GW reactors. So a current generation LWR will consume about 200 tons every 4 years so that's 50 tons/yr/GW. So that's 312,500 tons per year or ~283,495 tonnes. So 4.5b tonnes mentioned above (which is renewed each year naturally at an unknown rate) would be about 15,800 years. Now, I've ignored the issue of enrichment, so let's adjust for that. So the fuel is about 3% enriched (2% for initial load, 4% for refueling rods) and that's 4x more U-235 than natural Uranium, so divide by 4.
So that's a hair under 4000 years of supply for all the worlds fuel and electricity at current rates. And as I said, its naturally replenished at an unknown rate. Its likely that if we used a lot of uranium from seawater that the increased difference in concentration would increase this rate of natural replenishment.
And of course, with Thorium we have far larger reserves than Uranium and since we burn up the common isotope of Thorium we end up with far more energy per amount of raw material and a 300 years supply of the stuff is sitting around in slag heaps across the world and that doesn't count all the huge piles of the stuff near every rare earth mine. So no, there is no way we are running out of nuclear fuel anytime soon. Try doing this with any other energy source and you either get climate change (fossil fuels) or you have to ramp up mining to an absurd degree to get the raw materials you need. Try doing some research into what it would take to get 100% of just CAs energy needs from renewables (hint nameplate capacity isn't what counts). You quickly run out of the entire world's supply of various types of raw materials (including land) for any scheme you ramp up. This is why nuclear is really the only good option we have or likely will have in our lifetimes.
Fusion is something else. Nobody will build that privately for a long, long time.
That's not the only problem. The problem of how to harness 1,000,000C heat is still unsolved to put it mildly. The only real use for a fusion reactor is as a waste burner and it would be a really expensive one at that. Fusion power generation will likely be something that doesn't happen in our lifetimes. Perhaps 100s or 1000s of years from now but not anytime soon. We just don't know how to efficiently extract energy from that level of heat and don't have the materials to contain that level of heat either. We hold that heat in a magnetic bottle which uses so much power itself that its difficult to make the entire process produce energy instead of consume it.
So what? Plutonium isn't appreciably radioactive. Deutrium is much more so, but still a mere trickle compared to what you'd get feeding from feeding it into a $300 fusor.
Deutrium isn't radioactive. You are thinking of Tritium which has a half-life of only 12.3 years which makes it quite radioactive even though the small size of the Tritium nucleus makes the energy per decay event quite small. And Plutonium is very radioactive with a half-life of only 24k years and a huge atomic number so a large amount of energy released per decay event. Its even more dangerous than Uranium as its also water soluble and also a poison. Also, d-t (deutrium-tritium) fusion releases neutronic radiation which is hard to shield and tends to effect internal organs. There is nothing safe about trying to make this specific reaction at home. Deutrium-Boron fusion would be safe (no neutrons released) but it take quite a bit more energy to cause it to happen.
Nobody can seem to answer this question. Why does a US based site need to comply with the GDPR? What happens if they don't?
The EU sues them if they have a legal presence in Europe. If you are a big company that is quite likely. If you just make revenue from EU companies, that money could be siphoned off as a fine.
The GP is correct, uranium dust particles are dangerous. If they get in your lungs then your clothes or a sheet of paper won't help you. Note that your lungs are not normally exposed to sunlight either.
That's the problem here. They had buckets of the stuff lying around, one without the lid even on it. Properly handled it can be safe, but it wasn't properly handled.
Yes the dust is dangerous, but not because of the alpha radiation. It kills you in your example due to poisoning (you can inhale poison), not cancer, radiation poisoning or tissue destruction. It was basically a big bucket of poison sitting around in a public place where children play, that's bad. The extra danger from the alpha radiation is probably not worth thinking about here as it doesn't really matter and is only mentioned to stir up more hysteria. That's what we are tired of seeing. Just because Uranium is dangerous doesn't mean its dangerous due to radiation. Its dangers to health are far more likely to be due to the fact that its poisonous and water soluble not because it emits alpha radiation. This isn't true for many radioactive substances but it is true for things with very long half-lives like natural Uranium.
It also gives out neutron radiation ... which is not stopped by a sheet of paper.
Idiot ...
No, no it doesn't. For that to happen you would need very special circumstances that reactors create. Neutronic radiation requires fission. Naturally occurring fission requires a moderator and unless the bucket was left out in the rain plus a bunch of other things that weren't true in this case it didn't happen. Perhaps a single fission or 2 occurred over many years but no chain reaction and the neutrons were probably absorbed before they left the material as most of the Uranium in that bucket was U-238 which absorbs neutrons and not U-235 which fissions instead of absorbing stray neutrons. Learn something before hurling insults.
"That said, this was uranium ore" Wrong. This was specimen grade Uranium ore. Its actual %U is unknown, but it emitted far more than your 32 Bq, lying moron.
And there's no "sheet of paper" stopping alpha particles in your lungs, where the dust from these open containers went over the course of 20 years, along with Radon gas and other nasty TU's.
Apologist faggots like you need to die under heavy ion bombardment to really understand the forces you're downplaying so casually and thoughtlessly.
First, Radon isn't a TU. Second, the danger here was from poison, not from ionizing radiation. If you breathed enough of this dust to hurt yourself from the alpha radiation, you would poison yourself first. Uranium is dangerous. Just not in the way you keep saying. Its a poison and quite an effective one at that. Its a poison like Arsenic and that's partially because Uranium is water soluble. However, all naturally occurring isotopes of Uranium have very long half-lives. Long half-live means less radiation per gram. Most radioactive things have half-lives on the order of 1000x shorter and thus have 1000x the radiation per molar mass. You probably have a higher level of radiation in your basement from radon gas than this bucket caused to most visitors. The real outrage here is having a bucket of poison near where children were playing. That seems like a very poor idea.
Thorium however is not "inert" and that nothing statement is false, but I still know what you meant.
Thorium is biologically inert because its not water soluble. So its unable to take part in any sort of biological reaction with tissue. Its not a noble element but that's a moot point. Also, alpha radiation is blocked by most things including clothing, the bucket in the article, sunscreen, air, water, and most other subsistences. The reason why we are so hard on you on this point is that you can use alpha radiation to really manipulate the amount of radiation you announce. It there is a lot of it, it makes the situation seem much more scary than it really is. Gamma radiation is the really scary stuff but that doesn't get a multiplier since it doesn't do as much damage per nuclear interaction but very little stops it and that causes it to do damage internally and to things far away from the thing emitting radiation. Like I said, you would feel the physical effects of the alpha radiation far before it actually hurt you and that's what makes it less dangerous and what makes radiation so scary in the first place. The ability to detect it without a device makes it far less dangerous and scary for most people. Somehow, not for you...
Trans-Uranic elements from U decay actually emit alpha, beta and gamma. You know nothing about this. An unsealed container was accessible by anyone for over 20 years, and one microgram in your lungs is deadly potentially.
You're a moron. Not potentially, you're a moron.
There are actually very few gamma emitters in general. Almost all radioactive decay is alpha and beta. And there are no gamma emitters in U-238 or U-235's decay chains. There are however different isotopes of Uranium that do emit gamma radiation but those usually have to be made in a reactor and can't be made from natural Uranium ore (no matter how much reprocessing you do to it). And Uranium's real hazard is that its poisonous, as in like Arsenic and unlike Thorium which is inert. The radioactivity is just window dressing here. The GP is right, alpha radiation isn't really a hazard as its blocked by clothes and is in sunlight. You can't even write one accurate sentence about this topic, maybe you should stop posting about it and clearly you shouldn't be throwing insults at others when its you are the uninformed and ignorant person here.