Whenever one of these astronomy articles comes up about seeing a galaxy or cluster "near the big bang", there's one fundamental question which has always bothered me. . .
We are told that the universe is expanding, and has been expanding for about 14 Billion years. This means that everything was much closer together back 13 Billion years ago (when the summary says we are seeing the light from). Also, light travels much faster than the universe expands. So. . . why didn't the light pass us billions of years ago?
I realize that light takes time to travel, and that's the idea behind the idea that we can "look back in time" when we look at very distant astronomical objects. . . but. . . again, why didn't the light PASS US billions of years ago, since light expands outward faster than the universe expands outward? Wouldn't the universe need to have been expanding at almost the speed of light, for us to just now receive light from 13 Bn years ago? Well, that is, that the expansion would have had to happen at about 13/14 C?
From what I understand, this is not absolutely definitive, but cancer researchers at Lawrence Berkeley Lab published a paper where they used imaging of cellular responses to radiation damage to show that at low levels, it appears that cells repair DNA damage due to radiation very effectively.
I prefer cable/fiber internet. Why? Because RF spectrum is finite, and there is a very real risk that if people start using their wireless data plan as their primary data, everyone will end up with crappy, low-speed connections. Maybe not so much in rural areas, but quite possibly in suburban and urban markets.
Cable/Fiber has the nice advantages of isolating different users' data, so that you can effectively re-use the same spectrum in different physical cables.
. . . is that it's perfectly possible, and even likely, that someone you think is "stupid" is still smart enough to live long enough to procreate *before* they kill themselves. So, their genes wouldn't necessarily be removed from the gene pool in any case.
Also, I'm pretty sure everyone has moments of stupidity. That doesn't mean they are actually stupid.
You can only prove a positive, not a negative. Many people are trying to make the claim that the ocean has become dangerously polluted from Fukushima, and the seafood is unsafe.
Since there has not yet been found any actual *evidence* to suggest that hypothesis to be true, until that changes, the most reasonable position is to assume it is false. Otherwise, you'd have to believe a whole host of unprovable assertions which lack actual evidence.
That video shows just about what you WANT to happen - the radioactive isotopes spread out over a VERY large volume of ocean (and growing), and is getting diluted down to incredibly, incredibly small values.
Thing about radiation is we can detect it at insanely low levels. Doesn't mean that just because we can detect it, it's dangerous or causing anyone or anything any harm.
I know, I know, this is slashdot, but there IS a link to a fine article summarizing the study. The study, in this case, wasn't a "statistical model" sort of study - they actually went around in a boat for months, sampling water, wildlife, etc. No assumptions - actual empirical evidence.
Oh, I'm sure the NOAA people never thought of that, or thought to check higher predators in the food chain. Right.
I don't claim to be an expert, but my understanding is that various living things don't absorb everything in the environment around them - they chemically reject certain elements or compounds they have no use for. My further understanding is that the main isotope of worry after a few months is Cesium-137, and Strontium. If I understand correctly, cesium and strontium tend to react like calcium, and tend to concentrate in bones and teeth, which most predators don't digest - they digest the meat and soft tissues, and leave the bones.
So, bioaccumulation may not be much of an issue, if the radioactive materials are all in the bones. Again, I'm no biologist or radiation health expert, but that's what I've heard.
Yeah, something seems odd about the GP post . . . the first computer I tried Linux on was a 386-SX (the SX was, IIRC, the stripped-down "economy" version), running at 16Mhz with 4M of RAM. I installed a version of slackware from floppies onto the 40M hard drive.
That was slow, but still booted in like 5 minutes from the floppies, and maybe 2 minutes from the HD.
I suppose that, perhaps, the main difference is that DSL, while small compared to Ubuntu or Red Hat, is still huge compared to that 1995-ish version of Slackware.
That quote sounds more like Strategic FUD. It doesn't take a genius to realize that when students and enthusiasts are, in large numbers, rallying to a competing operating system, you've got some future trouble heading your way.
As the CEO of a large company, you're not going to say anything to try to *encourage* people to look at the competition, so you demean and minimize it.
I was reading somewhere that apparently it's thought that turning lead into gold would be theoretically possible, but would require such a massive amount of energy, that the price of the energy would far exceed the value of the resulting gold.
I mean, if you got a few Billion to build your own nuclear reactor, you might be able to transmute a few micrograms of gold.
Alchemy happens when you change the nucleus of the atom, not the electrons. For example, in a nuclear reactor when you split Uranium or Plutonium and create entirely different daughter atoms which different numbers of protons in the nucleus than the parent had. Or, in fusion when you combine two nuclei into a single daughter nucleus.
Simply arranging atoms without changing what element they are, would not really be alchemy as the term is generally understood.
Not much to write, other than, "yes". Bonus if I can get cheap heat and hot water from the waste heat from the nuclear plant. (See "Cogeneration" and "District Heating").
I might consider otherwise in a place subject to Tsunamis, but we don't get many of those in Ohio (Lakes Erie might be able to generate a small tsunami, but I don't think the Great Lakes can generate anything quite like the ocean, and we're about a thousand miles inland from the nearest ocean, with a large mountain range between us and the beach).
And this disaster is costing Tepco and the Japanese government at least Billions of dollars, quite possibly upwards of a Trillion dollars when all's said and done.
If I were an owner, I'd rather like to protect my investments from Billions of dollars of permanently destroyed plants, cleanup and damage (property and potentially health related) claims by making a few millions of dollars of investments.
For every penny they saved before, they are spending hundreds of dollars now.
The interesting thing that nobody is bringing up is that this situation seems like a good candidate for class action lawsuits against any phone manufacturers that *claim* a certain level of OpenGL compliance, but aren't actually delivering on those claims.
The problem as I see it is that most consumers are not in a position to actually test and verify if their handset is compliant with the technologies it claims in the products marketing materials, and most developers probably aren't interested in this issue because they aren't likely to get much payout on the lawsuit over the one or two test handsets they purchased.
But, developers working together to provide "expert witness" testimony in a class action lawsuit might help lawyers craft a suit which forces handset makers and mobile networks to release operating system updates that they might otherwise never release, to fix these problems (the mobile phone industry, right now, seems pretty notorious for not releasing OS updates for handsets).
The benefit for the developers might just be a better market for them to sell their wares into.
Although, honestly, if they want to kill you, they've got much better stuff to do that job, but still, seems to me that in a pinch, an "extinguisher" grenade could still potentially be lethal, by sucking all the O2 out of the air in a closed space, for example?
I don't know why I was thinking he was Haitian. Perhaps there was another police shooting victim who was haitian, and my mind merged details about both shootings, don't remember. Anyhow, for the record, he was Guinean, not Haitian.
* I don't have a problem with the police carrying guns and shooting people so long as they are following a reasonable set of laws regulating their use (that is, in the U.S., the police generally don't shoot people unless they are a violent threat to others; yes, I know that occasionally there are tragic exceptions to that rule like that Haitian guy in NYC a few years back, Amadou Diallo, who got shot reaching for his wallet/identification).
Accountability does matter and make a difference.
* As for people working for corporations, they do get in trouble and possibly face jail time for such actions. If one of Sony's competitor corporations were behind the PSN/SOE attacks, you can be sure Sony would use every power of the law to go after them. Corporations just tend to be careful, and have lawyers to tell them how to do things in such a way that it's really hard to prove they are guilty, that it wasn't a "rogue individual" or "rogue group" within the company. But, that doesn't mean it's considered "Ok" or "legal".
* Politicians? One word: "Watergate" - a number of folks involved with that did go to jail, the President resigned in disgrace (unfortunately, he managed to avoid jail time himself, but his most of his conspirators did not). Again, politicians are just generally more careful about their wrongdoing that LulzSec or Anonymous.
They're called control rods. We tend to think of the control rods as being an on/off switch, but what happens in you insert the control rods 20% or 50% of the way in? You get fission, but at a lower rate.
The short answer is that nuclear plants are very expensive and the fuel is very cheap (relative to the amount of power released by the fuel). Owners of nuclear plants desire to maximize the revenue, so they'd rather have a market to sell the power to during off-peak times so they can continue to make money.
If you're selling power at, say, 6 cents per kWh, if you sell the power 24 hrs/day, that's 8760 hours per year you can sell electricity. If you have to throttle to, say 50% output for 8 hours/day, that means you are only at full output for 5840 hours, and are at 50% for 2920.
Basically, you can only get about 83% of the revenue over the life of the plant as you could if you can find a way to continue to sell the full output of the plant at full price.
Of course, if you built enough nuclear plants to provide a substantial proportion of the country's electrical needs like France does, then as another poster pointed out, you are pretty much forced to throttle the plant because power consumption really does drop off at night.
As someone else pointed out, electric cars are the perfect match for nuclear plants - they would be charging just at the time that other power demands are decreasing, keeping the total power demand somewhat close to constant throughout the day.
Great points all. I watched Avatar not too long ago (didn't see it when it first came out). The world and visuals were engaging, but the writing kind of sucked. Should a movie where the writing sucks get Best Movie?
As for the categories - another great point - if we gave category awards, there'd be like 40 or 50 more Academy Awards and the show would have to be extended two or three nights.
It seems to me that the courts generally frown on "unenforceable laws". In this case, if the government can't decrypt your hard drive without your cooperation, they can't really "force" you to reveal it. They could try to torture you for it, but that's, at least presently, illegal. They could throw you in jail, but if you know that the penalty for refusing to cooperate is less than the penalty for whatever crime your data might provide proof of, then the rational thing is just to take the penalty for refusing to cooperate.
This would probably not be your "primary" weapons because the fact that you'd likely have to maneuver your whole ship to aim the weapon, so might not be as convenient as lasers, etc, but. . .
Presuming that you have some sort of fusion rocket or ion engine, it occurs to me that in a pinch, you have a very high-energy "weapon" you could bring to bear on your enemy's hull (if you are close enough - although the exhaust "tail" from a space ship's engine might be quite long), if you need to?
Tell that to Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Vietnam, or. . . well, an almost endless list of nations which have been torn apart by wars which happened in the last 70 years.
I guess the logical conclusion of war must be that it happens to those nations which aren't "lucky enough" to have nuclear weapons.
Slashdot Mirror
Whenever one of these astronomy articles comes up about seeing a galaxy or cluster "near the big bang", there's one fundamental question which has always bothered me. . .
We are told that the universe is expanding, and has been expanding for about 14 Billion years. This means that everything was much closer together back 13 Billion years ago (when the summary says we are seeing the light from). Also, light travels much faster than the universe expands. So. . . why didn't the light pass us billions of years ago?
I realize that light takes time to travel, and that's the idea behind the idea that we can "look back in time" when we look at very distant astronomical objects. . . but. . . again, why didn't the light PASS US billions of years ago, since light expands outward faster than the universe expands outward? Wouldn't the universe need to have been expanding at almost the speed of light, for us to just now receive light from 13 Bn years ago? Well, that is, that the expansion would have had to happen at about 13/14 C?
From what I understand, this is not absolutely definitive, but cancer researchers at Lawrence Berkeley Lab published a paper where they used imaging of cellular responses to radiation damage to show that at low levels, it appears that cells repair DNA damage due to radiation very effectively.
Seriously, follow that link, and learn.
I prefer cable/fiber internet. Why? Because RF spectrum is finite, and there is a very real risk that if people start using their wireless data plan as their primary data, everyone will end up with crappy, low-speed connections. Maybe not so much in rural areas, but quite possibly in suburban and urban markets.
Cable/Fiber has the nice advantages of isolating different users' data, so that you can effectively re-use the same spectrum in different physical cables.
. . . is that it's perfectly possible, and even likely, that someone you think is "stupid" is still smart enough to live long enough to procreate *before* they kill themselves. So, their genes wouldn't necessarily be removed from the gene pool in any case.
Also, I'm pretty sure everyone has moments of stupidity. That doesn't mean they are actually stupid.
You can only prove a positive, not a negative. Many people are trying to make the claim that the ocean has become dangerously polluted from Fukushima, and the seafood is unsafe.
Since there has not yet been found any actual *evidence* to suggest that hypothesis to be true, until that changes, the most reasonable position is to assume it is false. Otherwise, you'd have to believe a whole host of unprovable assertions which lack actual evidence.
That video shows just about what you WANT to happen - the radioactive isotopes spread out over a VERY large volume of ocean (and growing), and is getting diluted down to incredibly, incredibly small values.
Thing about radiation is we can detect it at insanely low levels. Doesn't mean that just because we can detect it, it's dangerous or causing anyone or anything any harm.
I know, I know, this is slashdot, but there IS a link to a fine article summarizing the study. The study, in this case, wasn't a "statistical model" sort of study - they actually went around in a boat for months, sampling water, wildlife, etc. No assumptions - actual empirical evidence.
Oh, I'm sure the NOAA people never thought of that, or thought to check higher predators in the food chain. Right.
I don't claim to be an expert, but my understanding is that various living things don't absorb everything in the environment around them - they chemically reject certain elements or compounds they have no use for. My further understanding is that the main isotope of worry after a few months is Cesium-137, and Strontium. If I understand correctly, cesium and strontium tend to react like calcium, and tend to concentrate in bones and teeth, which most predators don't digest - they digest the meat and soft tissues, and leave the bones.
So, bioaccumulation may not be much of an issue, if the radioactive materials are all in the bones. Again, I'm no biologist or radiation health expert, but that's what I've heard.
Yeah, something seems odd about the GP post . . . the first computer I tried Linux on was a 386-SX (the SX was, IIRC, the stripped-down "economy" version), running at 16Mhz with 4M of RAM. I installed a version of slackware from floppies onto the 40M hard drive.
That was slow, but still booted in like 5 minutes from the floppies, and maybe 2 minutes from the HD.
I suppose that, perhaps, the main difference is that DSL, while small compared to Ubuntu or Red Hat, is still huge compared to that 1995-ish version of Slackware.
That quote sounds more like Strategic FUD. It doesn't take a genius to realize that when students and enthusiasts are, in large numbers, rallying to a competing operating system, you've got some future trouble heading your way.
As the CEO of a large company, you're not going to say anything to try to *encourage* people to look at the competition, so you demean and minimize it.
I was reading somewhere that apparently it's thought that turning lead into gold would be theoretically possible, but would require such a massive amount of energy, that the price of the energy would far exceed the value of the resulting gold.
I mean, if you got a few Billion to build your own nuclear reactor, you might be able to transmute a few micrograms of gold.
Alchemy happens when you change the nucleus of the atom, not the electrons. For example, in a nuclear reactor when you split Uranium or Plutonium and create entirely different daughter atoms which different numbers of protons in the nucleus than the parent had. Or, in fusion when you combine two nuclei into a single daughter nucleus.
Simply arranging atoms without changing what element they are, would not really be alchemy as the term is generally understood.
Not much to write, other than, "yes". Bonus if I can get cheap heat and hot water from the waste heat from the nuclear plant. (See "Cogeneration" and "District Heating").
I might consider otherwise in a place subject to Tsunamis, but we don't get many of those in Ohio (Lakes Erie might be able to generate a small tsunami, but I don't think the Great Lakes can generate anything quite like the ocean, and we're about a thousand miles inland from the nearest ocean, with a large mountain range between us and the beach).
And this disaster is costing Tepco and the Japanese government at least Billions of dollars, quite possibly upwards of a Trillion dollars when all's said and done.
If I were an owner, I'd rather like to protect my investments from Billions of dollars of permanently destroyed plants, cleanup and damage (property and potentially health related) claims by making a few millions of dollars of investments.
For every penny they saved before, they are spending hundreds of dollars now.
The interesting thing that nobody is bringing up is that this situation seems like a good candidate for class action lawsuits against any phone manufacturers that *claim* a certain level of OpenGL compliance, but aren't actually delivering on those claims.
The problem as I see it is that most consumers are not in a position to actually test and verify if their handset is compliant with the technologies it claims in the products marketing materials, and most developers probably aren't interested in this issue because they aren't likely to get much payout on the lawsuit over the one or two test handsets they purchased.
But, developers working together to provide "expert witness" testimony in a class action lawsuit might help lawyers craft a suit which forces handset makers and mobile networks to release operating system updates that they might otherwise never release, to fix these problems (the mobile phone industry, right now, seems pretty notorious for not releasing OS updates for handsets).
The benefit for the developers might just be a better market for them to sell their wares into.
Although, honestly, if they want to kill you, they've got much better stuff to do that job, but still, seems to me that in a pinch, an "extinguisher" grenade could still potentially be lethal, by sucking all the O2 out of the air in a closed space, for example?
I don't know why I was thinking he was Haitian. Perhaps there was another police shooting victim who was haitian, and my mind merged details about both shootings, don't remember. Anyhow, for the record, he was Guinean, not Haitian.
* I don't have a problem with the police carrying guns and shooting people so long as they are following a reasonable set of laws regulating their use (that is, in the U.S., the police generally don't shoot people unless they are a violent threat to others; yes, I know that occasionally there are tragic exceptions to that rule like that Haitian guy in NYC a few years back, Amadou Diallo, who got shot reaching for his wallet/identification).
Accountability does matter and make a difference.
* As for people working for corporations, they do get in trouble and possibly face jail time for such actions. If one of Sony's competitor corporations were behind the PSN/SOE attacks, you can be sure Sony would use every power of the law to go after them. Corporations just tend to be careful, and have lawyers to tell them how to do things in such a way that it's really hard to prove they are guilty, that it wasn't a "rogue individual" or "rogue group" within the company. But, that doesn't mean it's considered "Ok" or "legal".
* Politicians? One word: "Watergate" - a number of folks involved with that did go to jail, the President resigned in disgrace (unfortunately, he managed to avoid jail time himself, but his most of his conspirators did not). Again, politicians are just generally more careful about their wrongdoing that LulzSec or Anonymous.
They're called control rods. We tend to think of the control rods as being an on/off switch, but what happens in you insert the control rods 20% or 50% of the way in? You get fission, but at a lower rate.
The short answer is that nuclear plants are very expensive and the fuel is very cheap (relative to the amount of power released by the fuel). Owners of nuclear plants desire to maximize the revenue, so they'd rather have a market to sell the power to during off-peak times so they can continue to make money.
If you're selling power at, say, 6 cents per kWh, if you sell the power 24 hrs/day, that's 8760 hours per year you can sell electricity. If you have to throttle to, say 50% output for 8 hours/day, that means you are only at full output for 5840 hours, and are at 50% for 2920.
Basically, you can only get about 83% of the revenue over the life of the plant as you could if you can find a way to continue to sell the full output of the plant at full price.
Of course, if you built enough nuclear plants to provide a substantial proportion of the country's electrical needs like France does, then as another poster pointed out, you are pretty much forced to throttle the plant because power consumption really does drop off at night.
As someone else pointed out, electric cars are the perfect match for nuclear plants - they would be charging just at the time that other power demands are decreasing, keeping the total power demand somewhat close to constant throughout the day.
Great points all. I watched Avatar not too long ago (didn't see it when it first came out). The world and visuals were engaging, but the writing kind of sucked. Should a movie where the writing sucks get Best Movie?
As for the categories - another great point - if we gave category awards, there'd be like 40 or 50 more Academy Awards and the show would have to be extended two or three nights.
It seems to me that the courts generally frown on "unenforceable laws". In this case, if the government can't decrypt your hard drive without your cooperation, they can't really "force" you to reveal it. They could try to torture you for it, but that's, at least presently, illegal. They could throw you in jail, but if you know that the penalty for refusing to cooperate is less than the penalty for whatever crime your data might provide proof of, then the rational thing is just to take the penalty for refusing to cooperate.
So, fundamentally, unenforceable.
There's an old Iron mine in Missouri called Pea Ridge, where they have found REEs. The owner wants to re-open the mine to mine Iron and REEs.
"Obayashi to enter bankruptcy by 2050"
This would probably not be your "primary" weapons because the fact that you'd likely have to maneuver your whole ship to aim the weapon, so might not be as convenient as lasers, etc, but. . .
Presuming that you have some sort of fusion rocket or ion engine, it occurs to me that in a pinch, you have a very high-energy "weapon" you could bring to bear on your enemy's hull (if you are close enough - although the exhaust "tail" from a space ship's engine might be quite long), if you need to?
"It brought war to its obvious conclusion. . ."
Tell that to Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Vietnam, or. . . well, an almost endless list of nations which have been torn apart by wars which happened in the last 70 years.
I guess the logical conclusion of war must be that it happens to those nations which aren't "lucky enough" to have nuclear weapons.