This tsunami was by no means medium-large. It far exceeded anything they could have been reasonably prepared for.
If it could not have been reasonably prepared for, then the reactors should have not been built there, as tsunamis larger than that are known to have hit the coast of Japan before.
Someone else said it better in this thread, but it wasn't really about the browser, it was about the server and operating system. Netscape had the ambition to make server-based applications that ran in OS agnostic browsers and sell the software to run the servers and browsers, (together with all the lock-in they could muster to keep MS at bay). Free distribution of IE made it hard for Netscape to make money.
There other point is THEY'VE TRIED THIS ALREADY.....remember DEATH PANELS
Yes I remember, but it wasn't about this. It was about the addition of a provision requiring Medicare to reimburse doctors for the cost of counselling patients about living wills, DNR orders, hospices, etc. Somehow, the Republicans managed to convince their followers that that meant letting a third party decide whether Grandma should live or die.
When you purchase a CD, you do get license to play that CD, . . .
No. You do not need any license to play your own CD, implied or explicit (unless it's a public or commercial performance). When you buy a CD, you can do anything you want with that CD (other than copying it, or using it as a murder weapon - but that's another story).
- maybe gas is an option. If you don't mind dealing with bloody tyrants.
There is an oversupply of natural gas in the USA - the only bloody tyrants we have to deal with for it are the oil and gas companies. (Since natural gas is hard to transport without a big pipeline, this abundance doesn't apply to Japan and other areas without their own supplies)
The appeal to authority here is sad. It doesn't matter what Linus or Stallman says.
Only partly true. You won't need to defend yourself in a lawsuit if the copyright holders don't sue.
It matter what the GPL says and what a court says.
True.
A court will probably find if any of the source code is re-used it has to be GPL'd.
So you're saying that a wild guess from someone who is not an authority on the issue is better than an appeal to authority? Appeal to authority is a fallacy if it is presented as proof; it is perfectly acceptable to appeal to an authority when seeking an explanation of something you don't understand.
. . . it seems to me that people who swear a lot when trying to present an argument often miss or lack a lot of information even though the information they do have may be correct. Swearing can be telling as to which part of the brain is being used . ..
Language processing is a "higher" brain function and takes place in the cerebral cortex.
Emotion and instinct are "lower" brain functions and take place deep inside the brain.
Many studies suggest that the brain processes swearing in the lower regions, along with emotion and instinct. Scientists theorize that instead of processing a swearword as a series of phonemes, or units of sound that must be combined to form a word, the brain stores swear words as whole units [ref]. So, the brain doesn't need the left hemisphere's help to process them.
I have an anecdote to illustrate this. When I worked in the physical therapy department of a hospital a long time ago, I encountered a stroke patient who had severe language problems. He could understand what you said, but could not convert his own thoughts into words. The hospital did not have a speech therapy specialist (he eventually went to a rehabilitation center that did) but we tried to get him to talk. He managed to learn to say "good" in response to "How are you doing today?". But that became almost the only thing he could get out of his mouth, whatever the conversation was. This was frustrating to him, and he had no trouble swearing when he got frustrated or mad.
However, I don't think this applies to reading and writing, even for comments on Slashdot.
At first glance, it seems that TFA is claiming that the sensors detect sounds that travel faster than sound.
The sensors are each about the size of a deck of cards and can detect the supersonic sound waves generated by enemy gunfire.
After thinking about it, it seems that, in the inimitable clueless-science-reporter way, they may be trying to say that the detector hears the bullet passing by and calculates the trajectory from that. That makes sense since hearing the bang of the gun and trying to figure the direction it came from would not only require at least 2 or 3 separated microphones but could get confusing due to echoes, fireworks, etc. Then again, it might use both.
Most people ignore the FACT that the democrat party supported segregation and the republicans opposed it.
Most people weren't around in the early 1900's when that was true. It all changed when Kennedy and Johnson pushed civil rights, and Nixon took advantage of that with his "Southern Strategy". For the last 30 or 40 years (at least nationally), Democrats have been the ones pushing against bigotry, and Republicans the ones winking to the whites while trying to sound PC enough to get votes of color.
They now have power restored to reactor 2 and are working on the others.
As of 9:45 CST the spokesmen are correcting that and saying that they have not connected power at reactor 2 yet. I have not heard any claims that they have worked to connect power anywhere else at the site. The power company is also reporting that the radiation is currently at it's peak (so far) at the site - 20 millisieverts / hr [as I am hearing on CNN now]
Well, look at the converse -- whenever corporations incur additional expense, they pass the expense onto consumers. Do you disagree?
I do disagree. Corporations will try to price their products and services to make the most profit. If passing on the extra costs to consumers causes them to lose too many sales to their competitors, they will not pass the costs on. As long as they are still making a reasonable profit, they will stay in the business.
The earthquake shifted parts of the country by 2.4 meters -- not just buildings, not just a hillside, but the land itself - how do you design a 2km pipe to handle that? If half of your pipe moves 8 feet to the left (or up, or down, or it's stretched longer, or compressed shorter), I don't see how to account for that in design
I do. Pipes expand and contract all the time due to stress and temperature changes. It's not unusual for pipes to experience changes in length on the order of 0.1% to 0.5%. Copper going from freezing (0C) to boiling (100C) would be around 0.17%. For a 2kM pipe, that's about 3.3 meters, or about 11 feet. Steel pipe would expand and contract somewhat less, plastic piping much more.
Anyway, the pipe wouldn't have gone over the fault line in this case, so one section of the pipe would not have moved 8 feet relative to another.
I have worked on projects where pipes were braced for earthquakes and flexible joints were built in to withstand shaking and relative motion of several inches between sections of the building. Though I must admit the designs I have been involved in would not have survived near a 9.0 magnitude quake, neither were they as important as nuclear safety.
Aiming for safe failure modes makes much more sense, and this plant was quite reasonable in that regard.
Too bad, then, that they didn't aim to put the emergency generators on the roof rather than down below the level of the (underestimated) tsunami for which they planned.
So far these plants have endured an earthquake 10 times what they were designed for (8.9 Richter earthquake. Design was for 7.9. Modulo distance/ground transmission from epicenter.), a 23 foot tsunami that took out backup generators and the switchyard taking out all but battery power, failures of the RCIC backup cooling system, and 2 massive hydrogen explosions that took out the buildings around the containments.
. ..
And we've got people saying the plants are fragile and unsafe?
What do you want?
Switchgear not located in the basement.
And, preferably, emergency generators and switchgear located well above the height of the worst-case tsunami of the past.
(by the way, an 8.9 on the Richter scale is about 32 times as powerful as a 7.9 - and also more destructive the longer it lasts - since the amplitude is 10 times greater and the power is approximately proportional to the 1.5 power of the amplitude.)
If people need to be in the same place to work how does telecommuting work?
It doesn't.
Except that TFA talks about developing in different "places" like freedesktop.org, Launchpad, GNOME git, Bazaar, etc. It does not talk about developing in different geographical locations or telecommuting in general.
Canonical has a policy that Canonical development is done in Launchpad, using Bazaar. Sometimes that’s fine – if you’re originating a project, then you get to choose the infrastructure. Bazaar & Launchpad are working just fine for a plethora of projects. But when you are working with other projects, you need to be where they are.
Superheated water is required for plate subduction. It acts as a lubricant. It's one of the reasons why injecting water into wells to recover more oil triggers earthquakes.
A plate subduction zone is the last place you'd be looking for oil.
. . . publishing your work constitutes prior art -- even if it's your own art -- and so disqualifies the invention for a patent.
I believe that you have a year to file for a patent after first publishing your invention, so for that first year it is not prior art that disqualifies you from getting a patent. How first-to-file interacts with that is unclear, as I haven't read the bill, but I believe that first-to-file moves the burden of proof to the second to file.
Except that, under first-to-file, publishing your works will not protect your invention if someone sees the publication, claims to have invented it first, and files a patent within a year of the publication. The non-filing publisher then bears the burden of proof in a court of law that they invented it, and the filer did not.
IANAL, YMMV
First to file doesn't favor patent trolls, they can't patent the invention if someone else was using it publicly and didn't bother to patent it.
Except that there's a one year (IIRC) period allowed between publishing and filing, in which case it becomes a first-to-invent battle with the burden of proof on the second-to-file.
Conventional systems use refrigeration machines to provide cooling to the facility and reject the heat to water pumped through cooling towers. About 1% of the water evaporates in the cooling tower, and because of the cooling effect of the evaporation, the water approaches the ambient wet bulb temperature, which in Utah is significantly cooler than the dry bulb temperature (about 30F difference in hot weather). This means the refrigeration works against a lower temperature difference and is much more efficient. In fact, it's so dry in Utah (especially at the higher elevations) that you can often successfully provide air conditioning just by evaporating room temperature water directly into the air stream, cooling ti down to about 55F to 65F in all but the most hot and humid weather.
Trying to re-condense the water, as some others have suggested, would require an energy input, e.g. for refrigeration to cool the air below the dewpoint to get the water to condense. That defeats the whole purpose.
In order to reusing any not-evaporated water for some other purpose means dealing with the biocides, corrosion inhibiters, concentrated dissolved solids, and other fun things that come with the territory. If you piped in pure, drinkable water and used it in a once-through open system, your pipes and heat exchangers would not last very long, and the discharge water would still not be considered potable.
Slashdot Mirror
If it could not have been reasonably prepared for, then the reactors should have not been built there, as tsunamis larger than that are known to have hit the coast of Japan before.
Someone else said it better in this thread, but it wasn't really about the browser, it was about the server and operating system. Netscape had the ambition to make server-based applications that ran in OS agnostic browsers and sell the software to run the servers and browsers, (together with all the lock-in they could muster to keep MS at bay). Free distribution of IE made it hard for Netscape to make money.
If you've ever walked across a bridge, ridden in an airplane, crossed a busy street with a green light, etc., you've trusted complete strangers.
Umm, marriage is a contract, by definition.
Yes I remember, but it wasn't about this. It was about the addition of a provision requiring Medicare to reimburse doctors for the cost of counselling patients about living wills, DNR orders, hospices, etc. Somehow, the Republicans managed to convince their followers that that meant letting a third party decide whether Grandma should live or die.
No. You do not need any license to play your own CD, implied or explicit (unless it's a public or commercial performance). When you buy a CD, you can do anything you want with that CD (other than copying it, or using it as a murder weapon - but that's another story).
There is an oversupply of natural gas in the USA - the only bloody tyrants we have to deal with for it are the oil and gas companies. (Since natural gas is hard to transport without a big pipeline, this abundance doesn't apply to Japan and other areas without their own supplies)
Only partly true. You won't need to defend yourself in a lawsuit if the copyright holders don't sue.
True.
So you're saying that a wild guess from someone who is not an authority on the issue is better than an appeal to authority?
Appeal to authority is a fallacy if it is presented as proof; it is perfectly acceptable to appeal to an authority when seeking an explanation of something you don't understand.
. . . it seems to me that people who swear a lot when trying to present an argument often miss or lack a lot of information even though the information they do have may be correct. Swearing can be telling as to which part of the brain is being used . . .
I have an anecdote to illustrate this. When I worked in the physical therapy department of a hospital a long time ago, I encountered a stroke patient who had severe language problems. He could understand what you said, but could not convert his own thoughts into words. The hospital did not have a speech therapy specialist (he eventually went to a rehabilitation center that did) but we tried to get him to talk. He managed to learn to say "good" in response to "How are you doing today?". But that became almost the only thing he could get out of his mouth, whatever the conversation was. This was frustrating to him, and he had no trouble swearing when he got frustrated or mad.
However, I don't think this applies to reading and writing, even for comments on Slashdot.
After thinking about it, it seems that, in the inimitable clueless-science-reporter way, they may be trying to say that the detector hears the bullet passing by and calculates the trajectory from that. That makes sense since hearing the bang of the gun and trying to figure the direction it came from would not only require at least 2 or 3 separated microphones but could get confusing due to echoes, fireworks, etc. Then again, it might use both.
Most people weren't around in the early 1900's when that was true. It all changed when Kennedy and Johnson pushed civil rights, and Nixon took advantage of that with his "Southern Strategy". For the last 30 or 40 years (at least nationally), Democrats have been the ones pushing against bigotry, and Republicans the ones winking to the whites while trying to sound PC enough to get votes of color.
Hint: the Black Sea is not the Mediterranean.
As of 9:45 CST the spokesmen are correcting that and saying that they have not connected power at reactor 2 yet. I have not heard any claims that they have worked to connect power anywhere else at the site.
The power company is also reporting that the radiation is currently at it's peak (so far) at the site - 20 millisieverts / hr [as I am hearing on CNN now]
I do disagree. Corporations will try to price their products and services to make the most profit. If passing on the extra costs to consumers causes them to lose too many sales to their competitors, they will not pass the costs on. As long as they are still making a reasonable profit, they will stay in the business.
I do. Pipes expand and contract all the time due to stress and temperature changes. It's not unusual for pipes to experience changes in length on the order of 0.1% to 0.5%. Copper going from freezing (0C) to boiling (100C) would be around 0.17%. For a 2kM pipe, that's about 3.3 meters, or about 11 feet. Steel pipe would expand and contract somewhat less, plastic piping much more.
Anyway, the pipe wouldn't have gone over the fault line in this case, so one section of the pipe would not have moved 8 feet relative to another.
I have worked on projects where pipes were braced for earthquakes and flexible joints were built in to withstand shaking and relative motion of several inches between sections of the building. Though I must admit the designs I have been involved in would not have survived near a 9.0 magnitude quake, neither were they as important as nuclear safety.
Too bad, then, that they didn't aim to put the emergency generators on the roof rather than down below the level of the (underestimated) tsunami for which they planned.
Purple, obviously.
Switchgear not located in the basement.
And, preferably, emergency generators and switchgear located well above the height of the worst-case tsunami of the past.
(by the way, an 8.9 on the Richter scale is about 32 times as powerful as a 7.9 - and also more destructive the longer it lasts - since the amplitude is 10 times greater and the power is approximately proportional to the 1.5 power of the amplitude.)
from TFA:
. . . the amount of radioactivity measured outside the plants, though twice the level Japan considers safe, has been relatively modest.
Do not assume malice where incompetence is plausible.
If people need to be in the same place to work how does telecommuting work?
It doesn't.
Except that TFA talks about developing in different "places" like freedesktop.org, Launchpad, GNOME git, Bazaar, etc. It does not talk about developing in different geographical locations or telecommuting in general.
Superheated water is required for plate subduction. It acts as a lubricant. It's one of the reasons why injecting water into wells to recover more oil triggers earthquakes.
A plate subduction zone is the last place you'd be looking for oil.
I believe that you have a year to file for a patent after first publishing your invention, so for that first year it is not prior art that disqualifies you from getting a patent. How first-to-file interacts with that is unclear, as I haven't read the bill, but I believe that first-to-file moves the burden of proof to the second to file.
Except that, under first-to-file, publishing your works will not protect your invention if someone sees the publication, claims to have invented it first, and files a patent within a year of the publication. The non-filing publisher then bears the burden of proof in a court of law that they invented it, and the filer did not.
IANAL, YMMV
Except that there's a one year (IIRC) period allowed between publishing and filing, in which case it becomes a first-to-invent battle with the burden of proof on the second-to-file.
Conventional systems use refrigeration machines to provide cooling to the facility and reject the heat to water pumped through cooling towers. About 1% of the water evaporates in the cooling tower, and because of the cooling effect of the evaporation, the water approaches the ambient wet bulb temperature, which in Utah is significantly cooler than the dry bulb temperature (about 30F difference in hot weather). This means the refrigeration works against a lower temperature difference and is much more efficient. In fact, it's so dry in Utah (especially at the higher elevations) that you can often successfully provide air conditioning just by evaporating room temperature water directly into the air stream, cooling ti down to about 55F to 65F in all but the most hot and humid weather.
Trying to re-condense the water, as some others have suggested, would require an energy input, e.g. for refrigeration to cool the air below the dewpoint to get the water to condense. That defeats the whole purpose.
In order to reusing any not-evaporated water for some other purpose means dealing with the biocides, corrosion inhibiters, concentrated dissolved solids, and other fun things that come with the territory. If you piped in pure, drinkable water and used it in a once-through open system, your pipes and heat exchangers would not last very long, and the discharge water would still not be considered potable.