I am an opponent of nuclear power, but I have no problem with anyone building power plants, on a simple conditions that Slashdot libertarians should like: no subsidies of any kind, only private capital.
... and setting the cost for disposal arbitrarily high through legislation and regulation?
No, passengers do not STFU. A child I can tell to STFU and have a small chance they'll listen if they are at least five. I don't have that option with adults.
You really need to be more assertive. If you're driving and the babbling (or any other action) of the other passengers is distracting you, you give them exactly two choices: Either shut the hell up, or you will stop at the nearest safe spot until they're finished. If it happens again, change the latter choice to "leave the vehicle". If it happens yet again, don't offer the first choice anymore.
If you'd rather injure or kill your passengers than ask them to stop distracting the driver, maybe you shouldn't carry passengers in your vehicle at all.
Why is it that people seem to insist that passengers actually quiet down in the car?
Because safety is the top priority while driving. If the driver is distracted enough that it interferes with safe driving, then whatever that distraction is has to stop, period.
But also pretty stupid: they got abandoned in the USSR's collapse and they're getting vandalized for scrap metal. Obviously a huge hazard - wish I could find the article I read.
Nonsense, nothing can hit Jupiter. It is a gas giant. It probably slowed down while passing thru that massive gas layers and halted at the core because of the gravity.
At a few kilometers per second, you won't feel the difference between hitting a solid and hitting a gas.
In most failure modes of a 747, an escape module would be useless, i.e. either it's safer to stay in the plane and try to land it anyway, or things go to hell so suddenly that there's no chance to activate such a module.
Also, a 747 doesn't carry fuel and oxidizer. It can catch fire, but not nearly as spectacularly as a rocket.
Thankfully, medical doctors are notoriously conservative. I worry about radiation workers (e.g. power plant operators) who might be administered this drug to allow more routine high doses; health physicists do not have a thorough understanding of quantitative risks of inducing cancer.
From what I know, I would assume that this drug _increases_ the risk of developing cancer, since it keeps damaged cells from destroying themselves.
In a case of definitely survivable radiation sickness, I'd stay the hell away from this drug. Better be sick for a while longer than have an increased risk of cancer. In cases of potentially fatal radiation poisoning, this drug might give the victims a better chance to survive, at the cost of developing cancer a few years down the road.
After all, a single quantum or particle of ionising radiation can only ionise one target.
Err.. no. It can ionize targets as long as it has sufficient energy to do so. Never seen a cloud chamber?
The secondary electrons it creates, and the secondary chemical species those create, do the damage.
I doubt that any of those molecules (H2O2, mostly) survive for more than a few minutes before doing damage to something that may or may no be important.
Hell, it's early, so I may not be thinking correctly, but it seems to me like a little dose of this would go a long way to curing the horrible side effects of cancer treatment.
And possibly make the treatment quite ineffective, if it also works on cancer cells.
Just stick it in the molecular scanner. This is 1000 years into the future, isn't it?
2. the resources to build a player to play the damn thing.
3. a screen to view it on 4. the resources to build a screen to view it on
Oh, you want to full old-school experience? I'm sure you can replicate a player, then. Or incorporate the molecular scan from 1. in a holodeck program that simulates a player and a screen.
5. the cultural interest in such behaviour (sitting and watching a screen)
Maybe you're interested in ancient history? Or maybe that's several orders of magnitude more exciting than what people usually do in their spare time 1000 years from now?
This also isn't 300 BC. We aren't finding massive new strikes of gold and invading neighbors and carting away slaves and jewelry. The amount of gold is relatively fixed and new deposits are rare.
But the economy is usually growing. See the problem?
I can't name a resource that is non-perishable, reasonably durable, slightly scarce (but not tooscarce), readily divisible, and useful to someone with Iron Age or lower technology. But gold fulfills all those qualities except usefulness.
Coal. Salt. Bronze.
Of course, you didn't mention "compact" in your list, but the first two are way more useful than gold. Bronze makes superior tools and weapons and is quite resistant to corrosion. The bronze age didn't end because iron was "better", but because it was more abundant and easily-accessible deposits of copper and tin were exhausted.
There are good reasons (that I outlined in another post) for why this is not true, one of the big ones as you mentioned being gold's finiteness. That alone makes a dramatic collapse in gold's value much less likely than any fiat currency.
This also means that it is next to impossible to combat inflation if the economy grows faster than amount of gold mined. And deflation is seriously bad.
If you know that you'll need to be accurate to 1/100th of a cent, there's no point whatsoever in using a floating point format. Fixed point is all you need, and you're not going to run into any of the ugliness that floating point brings with it.
But gold or silver don't grow, at least not appreciably. When you have growing wealth (an expanding economy) but only a fixed pool of assets to tie it too (gold), you still make yourself a target because now even a small amount of gold has an enormous value.
Deflation is the term you're looking for. And it's bad in even smaller amounts than inflation.
They removed the $23,148,855,308,184,500.00 within a few hours, but I had to speak to a supervisor to get them to remove the $20 "Negative Balance Fee."
I wonder how many people forgot about that small detail. Free money for the CC company, yay.
I'm more curious as to why Visa is storing what could easily be a 6.2 (heck- make it a 10.2) digit field as binary...
Try adding up a bunch of 10.2 (actually, it's 10.4 I think - sub-cent precision is necessary for interest calculations and such) digit field, or calculate the interest on that.
Finished?
Ok, no try doing the same with an integer. Notice the difference?
Seriously. Compare the performance of an RC reset circuit to that of a supervisor chip, especially in conditions where the power supply is shaky.
You wouldn't believe how many "problems" posted in microcontroller forums can be narrowed down to the OP using an RC reset "like shown in the datasheet".
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Not exactly libertarian.
As I understand the article, the laser still ignites the mixture purely by heating it.
I wonder if using UV light would work even better, where you also get some ionization effect to start the combustion?
Captcha "underway". Huh. Does that mean that this is already being researched?
No, passengers do not STFU. A child I can tell to STFU and have a small chance they'll listen if they are at least five. I don't have that option with adults.
You really need to be more assertive. If you're driving and the babbling (or any other action) of the other passengers is distracting you, you give them exactly two choices: Either shut the hell up, or you will stop at the nearest safe spot until they're finished. If it happens again, change the latter choice to "leave the vehicle". If it happens yet again, don't offer the first choice anymore.
If you'd rather injure or kill your passengers than ask them to stop distracting the driver, maybe you shouldn't carry passengers in your vehicle at all.
Why is it that people seem to insist that passengers actually quiet down in the car?
Because safety is the top priority while driving. If the driver is distracted enough that it interferes with safe driving, then whatever that distraction is has to stop, period.
Try
http://www-pub.iaea.org/mtcd/publications/publications.asp
and search for "radiological accident". Also interesting are the reports on the accidents in San Salvador, Soreq, Nesvizh, Istanbul, Tammiku, Samut Prakarn and Goiania.
... how we can turn this thing into something useful. Gasoline, maybe?
At a few kilometers per second, you won't feel the difference between hitting a solid and hitting a gas.
In most failure modes of a 747, an escape module would be useless, i.e. either it's safer to stay in the plane and try to land it anyway, or things go to hell so suddenly that there's no chance to activate such a module.
Also, a 747 doesn't carry fuel and oxidizer. It can catch fire, but not nearly as spectacularly as a rocket.
From what I know, I would assume that this drug _increases_ the risk of developing cancer, since it keeps damaged cells from destroying themselves.
In a case of definitely survivable radiation sickness, I'd stay the hell away from this drug. Better be sick for a while longer than have an increased risk of cancer. In cases of potentially fatal radiation poisoning, this drug might give the victims a better chance to survive, at the cost of developing cancer a few years down the road.
If you already have cancer, then developing another type of it one or two decades down the road is the least of your worries.
Err .. no. It can ionize targets as long as it has sufficient energy to do so. Never seen a cloud chamber?
The secondary electrons it creates, and the secondary chemical species those create, do the damage.
I doubt that any of those molecules (H2O2, mostly) survive for more than a few minutes before doing damage to something that may or may no be important.
And possibly make the treatment quite ineffective, if it also works on cancer cells.
So this can patch you DNA back together after it's been ripped to shreds?
Pardon me, but I'm a bit sceptical.
1. a player to play the damn thing
Just stick it in the molecular scanner. This is 1000 years into the future, isn't it?
2. the resources to build a player to play the damn thing.
3. a screen to view it on
4. the resources to build a screen to view it on
Oh, you want to full old-school experience? I'm sure you can replicate a player, then. Or incorporate the molecular scan from 1. in a holodeck program that simulates a player and a screen.
5. the cultural interest in such behaviour (sitting and watching a screen)
Maybe you're interested in ancient history? Or maybe that's several orders of magnitude more exciting than what people usually do in their spare time 1000 years from now?
And if that's not enough, realize that the guy they put in charge of finding the tapes is the SAME SOB THAT LOST THEM.
Why is that bad? Ah, I see, they're still paying him while he's searching. Small mistake here.
But the economy is usually growing. See the problem?
I can't name a resource that is non-perishable, reasonably durable, slightly scarce (but not tooscarce), readily divisible, and useful to someone with Iron Age or lower technology. But gold fulfills all those qualities except usefulness.
Coal. Salt. Bronze.
Of course, you didn't mention "compact" in your list, but the first two are way more useful than gold. Bronze makes superior tools and weapons and is quite resistant to corrosion. The bronze age didn't end because iron was "better", but because it was more abundant and easily-accessible deposits of copper and tin were exhausted.
Replace inflation by deflation.
This also means that it is next to impossible to combat inflation if the economy grows faster than amount of gold mined. And deflation is seriously bad.
Anyone who's doing serious calculations with it?
If you know that you'll need to be accurate to 1/100th of a cent, there's no point whatsoever in using a floating point format. Fixed point is all you need, and you're not going to run into any of the ugliness that floating point brings with it.
But gold or silver don't grow, at least not appreciably. When you have growing wealth (an expanding economy) but only a fixed pool of assets to tie it too (gold), you still make yourself a target because now even a small amount of gold has an enormous value.
Deflation is the term you're looking for. And it's bad in even smaller amounts than inflation.
I wonder how many people forgot about that small detail. Free money for the CC company, yay.
"If you owe $100,000 to the bank, the bank owns you, but if you own 23 quadrillion to the bank, you own the bank"?
I'm more curious as to why Visa is storing what could easily be a 6.2 (heck- make it a 10.2) digit field as binary...
Try adding up a bunch of 10.2 (actually, it's 10.4 I think - sub-cent precision is necessary for interest calculations and such) digit field, or calculate the interest on that.
Finished?
Ok, no try doing the same with an integer. Notice the difference?
You wouldn't believe how many "problems" posted in microcontroller forums can be narrowed down to the OP using an RC reset "like shown in the datasheet".