It's more of a method for energy storage than an energy source.
Not really. What we do when we inject a neutron into a U-238 nucleus is to convert it into a form where the energy is much easier to extract. It does not mean that we can only extract somewhere around what we put in. An analogy would be heavy fuel oil: It cannot be ignited when in room temperature. To ignite it, we need to heat it up a bit, so that it starts to produce flammable gases.
Fast breeder reactors (FBRs) solve the problem because they... (b) transmute depleted uranium and other "waste" products from legacy reactors into useful fuel.
FBRs can can reprocess or dispose of weapons material and spent fuel from legacy nuke plants. Once bootstrapped with plutonium, they'll happily run on crap that your typical nuke plant considers useless waste.
Um, no. Breeder reactors can produce fuel for other reactors by irradiating natural uranium with neutrons, which produces primarily plutonium-239 with several other minor byproducts. They cannot by themselves reprocess spent fuel ("waste") into usable fuel, although they can play a (minor) part of this process.
There are several steps that spent fuel must pass before it can be used as fresh fuel in a common LWR again. To begin with, the spent fuel contains a lot of nuclear poisons that prevent the reactor from retaining the nuclear chain reaction, so these must first be removed from the spent fuel. This is not done in a breeder reactor, but rather using centrifuges similar to the ordinary enrichment process. This produces two products: Real waste, and a precursor to fresh fuel. The waste can be transmuted into less dangerous waste in a breeder reactor or an accelerator-driven reactor. The fuel precursor then needs to have elements such as plutonium removed (unless it is meant to be part of Mox fuel) before it can be recast into its ceramic form and used again in an ordinary LWR.
As noted above, a breeder can be used to transmute the real waste into less dangerous waste, but its primary function is to transmute natural and depleted uranium into usable isotopes through neutron capture in that uranium. Breeders are not reprocessing facilities.
What I meant is that you cannot have GPL plus a couple of additional restrictions, because then it wouldn't be GPL. GPL expressly forbids additional restrictions, and "personal/non-commercial use only" is such a restriction.
Maybe the plan is to reassign the MySQL talent to work on the Oracle database.
Except the talent is volatile. The concept of buying a company for its talented employees is pretty silly, since they can all walk away the day after you paid billions for them.
EC is not the only acronym with funny expansions. For example, the USA could be made to mean e.g. Universal Stupidities of America, United Slobs of America, etc.
1. This is a website specifically aimed at US citizens.
Oh, it is? How could you tell? It lives in a generic top level domain, not the.us country code TLD. And nowhere does it say that its aimed at anything else than nerds, just nerds, not specifically American nerds.
breeder reactors extend by several times the use of available fission fuels
Actually, that is only required of your reactor requires Uranium-235 or Plutonium for fuel. There are reactors that can use natural Uranium for fuel, and for those, breeders are completely unnecessary.
But in my opinion, that isn't really the big problem with fuel scarcity. The big problem is that current nuclear reactors extract around 1% of the energy in the fuel, which is then considered "waste" and sent to deep storage for 100,000 years. If the fuel had been reprocessed, the same fuel could be cycled many times through a reactor, extracting much more energy than we extract today. But current politicians have listened too much to the anti-nuclear crowd, and are hellbent on sending this usable fuel to deep storage, despite the high residual energy content.
At least, that's how it's done in Sweden, where I live.
Sure, you don't need SPS in Arizona where it's sunny 85% of the time
Oh? What about at night? A solar power station in geostationary orbit will be unaffected by the day/night cycle for most of the year, since the orbit is high enough to seldom pass through the Earth's shadow. The only times this will happen is when the Earth is close to one of the two equinoxes. But even then the "night" will be much shorter than on the ground.
persuade the closed-software vendor to fix the issue, which they originally repeatedly denied was even an issue at all
Reminds me of an issue with a certain Microsoft Live service that we integrate with at work. One day the integration stopped working about 50% of the time. I figured out that the problem was that the Microsoft service had started sending erroneous SSL certificate chains some of the time. This information was forwarded to Microsoft support.
Their response? Not our problem. It's your fault. Reconfigure your IIS servers.. Except we have no IIS servers, and I verified that my conclusions were correct several times using OpenSSL. Only after several emails back and forth they realized that they were in fact causing the problem, and in an instant, they fixed the erroneous certificate chain and the problem disappeared.
In Sweden, where I live, GFCIs has been mandated for all new residential construction since 1994. And that is not just bathrooms, all outlets must be covered.
Circuit breakers are not fast enough to save any lives, just fast enough to prevent a short.circuit from starting a fire. You need a ground fault circuit interrupter for a cutoff quick enough to save lives.
Wrong. There is no directive requiring member states to recognize software patents, but member states can do so if they wish. According to e.g. the Swedish patent office, software can be patented, but whether this has any basis in the law is unknown to me. In other words, the Swedish Patent Office may grant you a software patent, but if the law doesn't recognize software patents, the patent is a worthless piece of paper since you cannot sue anyone for infringement.
The Linux kernel is not copyrighted by the FSF. In addition, many embedded devices use uClibc instead of regular GNU libc. Thus, in neither case, reporting the situation to the FSF will help at all.
Umm where do you live that you don't have a license plate?
That only identifies the car, not you. There are many instances where the registered owner of the car is not the driver. You could borrow the car from a friend or family member, use a carpool, use a rental car, or you could even steal a car.
You have plates with a unique identifier on at least the back of your car, visible to everybody. In some places (such as here in the UK) these identifiers are routinely read and logged by roadside equipment and stored in a database.
That identifies the car, not the driver. I don't know about you, but I'm not physically and irreversibly connected to any car, so I can use any car that I can get permission from the owner to use.
Sure, the police can in theory stop you just to check your driver's license, but that occurring is exceedingly rare.
Godwin's Law does not apply where the comparison is warranted. It is simply an observation that as debates grow longer, the probability that someone will make a comparison, no matter how outrageous, with Hitler or Nazi Germany approaches 1.
after 9/11 and the anthrax hoohaw, no post office will take a package of any significant size for delivery without at least attempting to ID the sender.
I thought that the anthrax letters used regular envelopes. At least that's the way it has been portrayed in the media here. And AFAIK, regular envelopes can still be dropped at regular mail boxes, without any ID required. So my question is how such a requirement helps avert any similar episode. Of course, it is likely that it is just another part of the extensive security theater that has been put in place since 9/11.
Um, no. At least Linux gives I/O-bound threads higher priority than CPU-bound threads, so that when a thread that is blocked waiting for I/O has some data to process, it preempts any running CPU-bound thread. Whether a thread is I/O-bound or CPU-bound is determined dynamically, by looking at the execution pattern.
That won't do any difference if it doesn't include any software that the FSF holds the copyrights to. Only the copyright holder of the software in question can sue for copyright infringement.
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Uh, yes you can. And we do. Look up what MOX is.
IIRC, that requires the reactor to be somewhat modified, probably because of different fuel characteristics.
it is not something that was previously stored
Unless you count the supernova that produced the uranium. :)
It's more of a method for energy storage than an energy source.
Not really. What we do when we inject a neutron into a U-238 nucleus is to convert it into a form where the energy is much easier to extract. It does not mean that we can only extract somewhere around what we put in. An analogy would be heavy fuel oil: It cannot be ignited when in room temperature. To ignite it, we need to heat it up a bit, so that it starts to produce flammable gases.
uranium-238 is the most abundant form of uranium, a form that isn't actually useful to drive a reactor
True for the mainstream commercial power reactors, but there are reactors that can use U-238.
Fast breeder reactors (FBRs) solve the problem because they ... (b) transmute depleted uranium and other "waste" products from legacy reactors into useful fuel.
FBRs can can reprocess or dispose of weapons material and spent fuel from legacy nuke plants. Once bootstrapped with plutonium, they'll happily run on crap that your typical nuke plant considers useless waste.
Um, no. Breeder reactors can produce fuel for other reactors by irradiating natural uranium with neutrons, which produces primarily plutonium-239 with several other minor byproducts. They cannot by themselves reprocess spent fuel ("waste") into usable fuel, although they can play a (minor) part of this process.
There are several steps that spent fuel must pass before it can be used as fresh fuel in a common LWR again. To begin with, the spent fuel contains a lot of nuclear poisons that prevent the reactor from retaining the nuclear chain reaction, so these must first be removed from the spent fuel. This is not done in a breeder reactor, but rather using centrifuges similar to the ordinary enrichment process. This produces two products: Real waste, and a precursor to fresh fuel. The waste can be transmuted into less dangerous waste in a breeder reactor or an accelerator-driven reactor. The fuel precursor then needs to have elements such as plutonium removed (unless it is meant to be part of Mox fuel) before it can be recast into its ceramic form and used again in an ordinary LWR.
As noted above, a breeder can be used to transmute the real waste into less dangerous waste, but its primary function is to transmute natural and depleted uranium into usable isotopes through neutron capture in that uranium. Breeders are not reprocessing facilities.
What I meant is that you cannot have GPL plus a couple of additional restrictions, because then it wouldn't be GPL. GPL expressly forbids additional restrictions, and "personal/non-commercial use only" is such a restriction.
Maybe the plan is to reassign the MySQL talent to work on the Oracle database.
Except the talent is volatile. The concept of buying a company for its talented employees is pretty silly, since they can all walk away the day after you paid billions for them.
if they're doing something that's not for business; otherwise, MySQL does charge for business users.
MySQL can be used by business users just fine without paying a dime. Anything else would be incompatible with the GPL.
EC is not the only acronym with funny expansions. For example, the USA could be made to mean e.g. Universal Stupidities of America, United Slobs of America, etc.
Defining acronyms isn't dumbing down, it's just standard academic practice.
1. This is a website specifically aimed at US citizens.
Oh, it is? How could you tell? It lives in a generic top level domain, not the .us country code TLD. And nowhere does it say that its aimed at anything else than nerds, just nerds, not specifically American nerds.
breeder reactors extend by several times the use of available fission fuels
Actually, that is only required of your reactor requires Uranium-235 or Plutonium for fuel. There are reactors that can use natural Uranium for fuel, and for those, breeders are completely unnecessary.
But in my opinion, that isn't really the big problem with fuel scarcity. The big problem is that current nuclear reactors extract around 1% of the energy in the fuel, which is then considered "waste" and sent to deep storage for 100,000 years. If the fuel had been reprocessed, the same fuel could be cycled many times through a reactor, extracting much more energy than we extract today. But current politicians have listened too much to the anti-nuclear crowd, and are hellbent on sending this usable fuel to deep storage, despite the high residual energy content.
At least, that's how it's done in Sweden, where I live.
Sure, you don't need SPS in Arizona where it's sunny 85% of the time
Oh? What about at night? A solar power station in geostationary orbit will be unaffected by the day/night cycle for most of the year, since the orbit is high enough to seldom pass through the Earth's shadow. The only times this will happen is when the Earth is close to one of the two equinoxes. But even then the "night" will be much shorter than on the ground.
persuade the closed-software vendor to fix the issue, which they originally repeatedly denied was even an issue at all
Reminds me of an issue with a certain Microsoft Live service that we integrate with at work. One day the integration stopped working about 50% of the time. I figured out that the problem was that the Microsoft service had started sending erroneous SSL certificate chains some of the time. This information was forwarded to Microsoft support.
Their response? Not our problem. It's your fault. Reconfigure your IIS servers.. Except we have no IIS servers, and I verified that my conclusions were correct several times using OpenSSL. Only after several emails back and forth they realized that they were in fact causing the problem, and in an instant, they fixed the erroneous certificate chain and the problem disappeared.
I'd assume that the law won't be far behind.
In Sweden, where I live, GFCIs has been mandated for all new residential construction since 1994. And that is not just bathrooms, all outlets must be covered.
Circuit breakers are not fast enough to save any lives, just fast enough to prevent a short.circuit from starting a fire. You need a ground fault circuit interrupter for a cutoff quick enough to save lives.
There is no software patents in Europe.
Wrong. There is no directive requiring member states to recognize software patents, but member states can do so if they wish. According to e.g. the Swedish patent office, software can be patented, but whether this has any basis in the law is unknown to me. In other words, the Swedish Patent Office may grant you a software patent, but if the law doesn't recognize software patents, the patent is a worthless piece of paper since you cannot sue anyone for infringement.
The Linux kernel is not copyrighted by the FSF. In addition, many embedded devices use uClibc instead of regular GNU libc. Thus, in neither case, reporting the situation to the FSF will help at all.
Umm where do you live that you don't have a license plate?
That only identifies the car, not you. There are many instances where the registered owner of the car is not the driver. You could borrow the car from a friend or family member, use a carpool, use a rental car, or you could even steal a car.
You have plates with a unique identifier on at least the back of your car, visible to everybody. In some places (such as here in the UK) these identifiers are routinely read and logged by roadside equipment and stored in a database.
That identifies the car, not the driver. I don't know about you, but I'm not physically and irreversibly connected to any car, so I can use any car that I can get permission from the owner to use.
Sure, the police can in theory stop you just to check your driver's license, but that occurring is exceedingly rare.
Godwin's Law does not apply where the comparison is warranted. It is simply an observation that as debates grow longer, the probability that someone will make a comparison, no matter how outrageous, with Hitler or Nazi Germany approaches 1.
after 9/11 and the anthrax hoohaw, no post office will take a package of any significant size for delivery without at least attempting to ID the sender.
I thought that the anthrax letters used regular envelopes. At least that's the way it has been portrayed in the media here. And AFAIK, regular envelopes can still be dropped at regular mail boxes, without any ID required. So my question is how such a requirement helps avert any similar episode. Of course, it is likely that it is just another part of the extensive security theater that has been put in place since 9/11.
and the OS tries to give them all equal priority
Um, no. At least Linux gives I/O-bound threads higher priority than CPU-bound threads, so that when a thread that is blocked waiting for I/O has some data to process, it preempts any running CPU-bound thread. Whether a thread is I/O-bound or CPU-bound is determined dynamically, by looking at the execution pattern.
That won't do any difference if it doesn't include any software that the FSF holds the copyrights to. Only the copyright holder of the software in question can sue for copyright infringement.
Are you a troll, or are you just extremely stupid?