The idea that somebody is going to walk down to their mailbox in Buffalo, New York, in the winter snow to get their mail is just crazy.
If a person doesn't keep their path shoveled enough to walk to their own mailbox, why should the mail carrier trek up to their door? Where I grew up if you didn't shovel the mail carrier wouldn't even bother. Maybe he or she would come up once and ring the bell to at least give you warning they won't come up again if you don't shovel. Most often they would just skip you. At least this way a kind neighbor could help the elderly couple with shoveling or bringing up their mail rather than getting nothing.
There are a lot of resources easily found on Google that discuss the problem of light spill and how improperly directed lighting is more dangerous than no lighting (since it creates dark spots and an illusion of safety).
The most recommended solution is to use lower power lighting and more units if necessary, ensure they are equipped with shades that direct the light down and make all effort possible to keep the light from being direct at the observer's eyes as that is the biggest problem with safety (and comfort). Lights that are elevated above people are the hardest to prevent from shining in eyes as they have to be restricted quite heavily to a small spotlight beneath them to prevent blinding people on approach and created dark spots. Keep the lights low, directed down and out of eyes!
I tried to find a collection of fixture designs I saw circulated a few months back but my search-fu is weak today. It basically compared designs of common lighting figures and pointed out the problems. For instance light bollards are generally quite useful since they sit below most people's eyes but poorly designed ones allow light to shine upward and into the observer's eyes directly causing night blindness. A proper bollard uses a shade or proper design to ensure the light is directed out and down and none up toward the eyes. Keeping the lighting level low and using more bollards makes it easier for people to transition into dark areas where the bollards can't go without causing them undo strain.
An anecdotal story: where I lived outside DC there was a bike / walking trail that followed the road until a certain point where it diverged into a more scenic area. The whole path was lined with tall traffic lights that shone quite brightly but where the path diverged, the lights didn't follow. The path was equipped with either timed or motion lights (that didn't detect motion well) at a completely different intensity but still quite high and shining outward. Walking that path in late dusk was super hazardous because you couldn't see where you were going. The lights would go on and off and the shadows it cast made it impossible to see if you were going to step in a hole or if the dark areas under the groups of trees you had to walk past had anyone concealed. It was a horrible design and it rendered the path unusable.
That reference was specific to the New Jersey turnpike trucker using a jamming. I was too lazy to look up the reference and used a generic memory. Here's an article which contains that anecdote as well as other information about GPS jamming.
There's no secret or trick to it - you just broadcast the same way as a GPS sat (the protocol is well documented) and since the broadcast is local, it's more powerful than Satellites. People use GPS jamming devices to get out of paying tolls in the US - that's just broadcasting noise on the right channel. Spoofing is more refined - broadcasting actual offsets in the right channel.
Really, military grade equipment should use some inertial tracking as well to prevent sudden-location shifts common with spoofing. But hindsight, weight limitations, etc.
The benefits of learning even small parts of another language exceed the practicality of using it as a part of your job.
I work with a great deal of people from various parts of India. Though Hindi is not learned universally in India, everyone I have spoken with has a fairly good grasp of it.
I learned from a book and from speaking to my coworkers. It's help build some friendships where none would have existed before and gave me the chance to augment my team with tremendous resources others had passed off because of a "language barrier." (There was no barrier; just because the grammatical structure is different doesn't mean you can't understand them if you want to. Some just didn't want to. C'est la vie - it worked out to my benefit.)
My grandfather was Norwegian so I started learning Norwegian Bokmal quite passively. As the years go by, I grow more interested in the country and culture. They are some amazing people! As a consequence, when some programmers came during Thanksgiving to get trained on a piece of MOSS software we wrote for Microsoft (did that just earn me a -1 Troll?) I was invited to attend. In this case, learning a language was an opportunity to network! As a benefit, I can now read and understand Danish and I can even understand great swaths of Dutch (which seems easier to compare to Norwegian than Swedish.)
Even if it is unlikely you will need a language for your job, there are other benefits. The important part is finding something to get you interested. It is much easier to learn a language if you have a connection to it in some way. Coworkers provide a great connection. A family history is another. A coworker of mine is learning Czech because his wife's family speaks it.
You'd be surprised how easy it is to start a conversation with someone you'd normally have no connection with (run into many engineers in the wild, do you?) by trying to speak to them in their language. Hell, I've had long conversations with people who I've mistaken their accent for one from a language I've spoken! It's a great common ground!
*These are my experiences. Your mileage may vary. Offer void in Texas.
Oddly enough, the night before last I started the Gutsy Gibbon DVD download as well. Speeds weren't terrific on the download but I was shocked to see any upload speed at all. It took all night but in the morning it was fully downloaded. The upload was at a paltry 6Kb but I decided to let it run, set the ratio to unlimited and came home to find it still going.
There was only 1 peer connected and an updated to my client (with some nice new features) so I disconnected, did the update and jumped back on. Within a few minutes, I had a couple peers and was uploading 12-18Kb again (max upload I've ever seen approached 25Kb and not for very long). I had only about 1.2GB uploaded so I left it running. I didn't check it this morning but I hope it continues. I'm planning to seed until I need to shut down to install the new Mac OS this weekend.;)
The speeds aren't super but to get anything out is amazing. I'm even giving a shot back at trackers that require you to keep a good share ratio since I can contribute again.
1. Funding is allocated each year.
2. All remaining funds at the end of a fiscal year are lost. (Not rolled over into the next year. This is looking at things from an office perspective.)
3. Next year's allocation is reduced from the previous years by the amount unused in the current year.
4. Allocations are divided into Products and Services (items versus contractor work).
This leaves offices in a bit of a bind at the end of the fiscal year. If they don't use all their money, they get less next year which, of course, is a situation no manager wants to have happen to their unit regardless if they need it or not. Most units use all of their services money easily as contracts typically run over a longer term and are planned for. Product budgets are harder to watch. For the first 3/4 of the fiscal year, managers are trying to scrimp and save on everything they do "just in case." At the end of the year they find themselves with leftover money. How do they spend it to keep it from getting taken away next year?
Typical draining methods of product budget allocations:
1. Transfer the money to another unit. (This helps to get big ticket items purchased and solve many problems at once. New servers? Well, we decided we didn't need them before (savings mode) but let's get the top of the line (gotta drain it! mode).
2. Buy lots of external storage drives and thumb drives.
3. Recognizing that they still need service work completed but have no more money in that fund, negotiate a contract with a company to "buy" necessary items which happen to come with "free" service. So, a $10,000 screwdriver translates into short-term facilities contract. (Most likely re-re-reconfiguring offices and cubes to make the new feel powerful.)
So while it all seems very dubious, rest assured that it is, in fact, dubious.
Unfortunately it is all necessary as well. As long as budget allocations are done on a set scale from year to year, units can never plan for things like systems upgrades (heavy spending year) versus maintenance (lighter spending year). This means each unit needs to clear their account by the end of the fiscal year to ensure they have, at some later point, almost all the money they might need for that project which will probably need to be done, maybe. (Wording is intentional.)
They might not have a choice deciding to pay or not.
Here in the US they are required as a publicly traded company to do what's best for the shareholders / owners. They'll have to do a comparison between paying the fines until some end point and the theoretical loss they would receive from complying. It is my understanding that complying would not cause losses to the company in any significant way; certainly not comparable to the fines.
Because Microsoft is a multi-national corporation the rules might be a bit different depending on the setup of the company but it seems hard to escape the fact that, being based in WA, the main company is US, publicly traded, and therefore subject to these laws. If they do not act appropriately, they could face lawsuits from shareholders who can claim dropping stock prices are a result of negligent business practices.
Tough spot to be in. I don't envy them. I do, however, look forward to seeing what comes of this.
I thought this looked familiar. A quick search reveals this EXACT same posting from a different UID on the/. article: "Dapper Drake Hits Ubuntu Servers".
VIA C3 Bug
(Score:2, Informative)
by Ed Almos (584864) on Saturday November 12, @12:01PM (#14015448)
I sure hope that they've fixed the VIA C3 bug that was present on the last distribution, 'Breezy Badger'. I tried installing it on an 800MHz C3 system and it was unstable to the point of being unusable. I can't remember the exact details, something about the C3 missing one of the Pentium instructions.
Ed Almos
In which case, I'd like to use the +5 response as my own:
Re:VIA C3 Bug
(Score:5, Insightful)
by orkysoft (93727) on Saturday November 12, @12:03PM (#14015461)
Sounds to me like it's VIA's C3 bug, not Ubuntu's bug. Maybe you should get a distro compiled for i586 or even i386 instead of for i686, as a workaround?
This will sound weird, but I've been looking for jobs in Wisconsin near UW. I've been considering going back to school (again) but needed a job in the area to rationalize it!
I've been working on legacy government apps written in VB6 COM+ with ASP and VBScript and helping them migrate to.NET (my language of choice being VB.NET but not averse to C# at all.)
I graduated with my BS Computer Engineering in 2002 and a year later started my graduate course while working full time here in Virginia. I graduated with my MS Computer Information Systems degree on December 31, 2005.
I've been looking at Madison because of UW - specifically because they are one of a few universities with a School of Scandinavian Studies in which I am considering enrolling. They offer Scandinavian and other language courses which I want to continue to learn as well as the Foreign Affairs field I've been looking at.
I have a few reservations about moving to Wisconsin though. First, what sort of job opportunities are there? What happens if I find a job that I don't like; are there other options? Do any jobs require a security clearance? (If I take a job that doesn't, I will lose my clearance and I'd rather not.) Would these jobs even provide me with the ability to attend courses? Would I be able to afford to live and attend school on the salary?
These are questions I'm sure a lot of people from the coasts ask themselves (well, maybe not the school questions but the job choice, fallback options and salary) when considering a move to the midwest (or back as I was born in Michigan and educated through undergrad in Ohio.) Looking for positions in that area, the type of work I do seems very sparse or at a level far below my abilities and experience. I can't imagine an employer would want to hire someone for a job much below their level without feeling fear that the person may leave as soon as they find something more fitting with their experience.
I could be wrong but I do feel these concerns myself and I have to think I'm not the only one.
The good thing with early information is that you can do something about it.
What use is it to find out the train has derailed, that the cancer is now inoperable or that Bush has won the election? Knowing about impending badness lets us take action to correct it before it's compulsory.
What's the saying? An ounce of prevention beats a pound of cure?
If you want to know what your government is doing and the likely reasons for its actions, don't listen to the prepared statements and Faux News...listen to other countries.
It is common for countries to collect as much info as possible about many other countries. The bigger or more powerful a country, the more intelligence has probably been gathered on it. Other countries are not afraid to share some of what they learn and will speak their mind. Yours will only tell you what it wants you to know.
Misinformation can be a powerful tool to get the masses to support personal agendas. Right, George?
You wanna know what your government is doing? Listen to what the other countries are saying about it.
From what I understand, Galileo will use a higher frequency range than GPS.
This will allow the US to jam Galileo in US territories and GPS to be jammed in other world territories. Basically, we can blind them in our area and they can blind us in theirs but we still have our own systems respectively.
It all seems a bit silly to me. I think Galileo is an excellent idea but all the posturing is foolish. This isn't just redundancy it's choice. It's progress. It can be the foundation of further innovation. Its accuracy and ubiquity can lead to some amazing new uses. As a bonus, the threat of those systems going down in the event the US gets upset at something is reduced.
This is not a bad idea. It has a high cost, true, but the potential benefit to the world society is immense.
Would you say the same thing about global wireless Internet access? After all, the areas that use it already have choices, broadband or not. Global wireless Internet access would be redundant to those areas. Still, I'd say it's a pretty good goal to have. Ubiquitous access to the Internet and Galileo brings to mind some very interesting ideas for developing nations. Can you think of some?
"...take a massive petition drive to pull it off and I doubt most Americans care that much about the practise, if they even know it exists."
So we MAKE them aware in ways they can understand.
In areas where voter turnout was huge in the last election due to the "gay marriage" issues (which seems oddly absent from topics of news since) we tell people the "Government can legalize gay marriages whenever they want by slipping it in with the budget measures for civil war recreationists!"
In Texas, we tell them the "Government can force them to open their electric grid to help stabilize the other grids and will raise their electric prices to boot by attaching it to hair-spray and shoulder pad subsidies."
Or tell soccer mom that the "Government can push taxes on cars and gas any time they want by slipping in legislation that gives school's money for sports and activities."
If you speak their langauge, they'll understand. Make them understand!
Ohio University has its own reactor which is used for experiments in power generation as well as irradiation of materials. Anyone from nearby colleges can request time with the reactor to irradiate just about anything they want.
To get the material close to the core, pressurized tubes are used. The canisters that hold the material are made of some sort of plastic-like material for the specific purpose of letting radiation pass through. The problem is, repeated exposure causes the material to become brittle and occasionally a canister will break on the return trip (most often, it seems, when it slams into the retrieval portion of the tube and comes to a halt.)
The tubes are necessary to prevent people from coming into close contact with materials that are still radioactive for a time. The person running the experiment only has to load the canister with the material they wish to irradiate, load it in the tube system and send it on its way. The system halts when the tube reaches the core. After some time, the experimenter recalls the canister and can do whatever they please with it, knowing that it will still be emitting small amounts of radiation.
I don't know what the procedure was in the case that a canister failed during transit and material was caught somewhere between source and core. I do know the reactor is not very big (but neat to watch glow in the water) and the radiation danger wasn't too great. I believe it was said that most of the remaining radiation from the material dissipates within 5 minutes of the return. There are tables and shielding boxes with timers on them near the retrieval area.
The point is that radiation can eat through materials. It may not be the best way to phrase what really happens, but materials exposed to radiation react differently. Many materials become brittle. A radiation source as strong as the one in the article (with no mention as to what the cylinder was composed of) could cause any number of problems for anything nearby. The tubes are meant for short exposures as a material passes through, not prolonged exposure of a stuck cylinder.
Slashdot Mirror
so much for "neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, ..."
Who can afford snow AND heat in this economy?
The idea that somebody is going to walk down to their mailbox in Buffalo, New York, in the winter snow to get their mail is just crazy.
If a person doesn't keep their path shoveled enough to walk to their own mailbox, why should the mail carrier trek up to their door? Where I grew up if you didn't shovel the mail carrier wouldn't even bother. Maybe he or she would come up once and ring the bell to at least give you warning they won't come up again if you don't shovel. Most often they would just skip you. At least this way a kind neighbor could help the elderly couple with shoveling or bringing up their mail rather than getting nothing.
There are a lot of resources easily found on Google that discuss the problem of light spill and how improperly directed lighting is more dangerous than no lighting (since it creates dark spots and an illusion of safety).
The most recommended solution is to use lower power lighting and more units if necessary, ensure they are equipped with shades that direct the light down and make all effort possible to keep the light from being direct at the observer's eyes as that is the biggest problem with safety (and comfort). Lights that are elevated above people are the hardest to prevent from shining in eyes as they have to be restricted quite heavily to a small spotlight beneath them to prevent blinding people on approach and created dark spots. Keep the lights low, directed down and out of eyes!
I tried to find a collection of fixture designs I saw circulated a few months back but my search-fu is weak today. It basically compared designs of common lighting figures and pointed out the problems. For instance light bollards are generally quite useful since they sit below most people's eyes but poorly designed ones allow light to shine upward and into the observer's eyes directly causing night blindness. A proper bollard uses a shade or proper design to ensure the light is directed out and down and none up toward the eyes. Keeping the lighting level low and using more bollards makes it easier for people to transition into dark areas where the bollards can't go without causing them undo strain.
An anecdotal story: where I lived outside DC there was a bike / walking trail that followed the road until a certain point where it diverged into a more scenic area. The whole path was lined with tall traffic lights that shone quite brightly but where the path diverged, the lights didn't follow. The path was equipped with either timed or motion lights (that didn't detect motion well) at a completely different intensity but still quite high and shining outward. Walking that path in late dusk was super hazardous because you couldn't see where you were going. The lights would go on and off and the shadows it cast made it impossible to see if you were going to step in a hole or if the dark areas under the groups of trees you had to walk past had anyone concealed. It was a horrible design and it rendered the path unusable.
Interesting.
To direct link, click the time when the Tweet was made (from the Web client) and it will take you to the direct link for that Tweet.
Is this the message to which you're referring?
The 'Ocean Marketing guy' is a made-up character in a MacHeist stunt that spiraled out of our control. We are very very sorry.
That reference was specific to the New Jersey turnpike trucker using a jamming. I was too lazy to look up the reference and used a generic memory. Here's an article which contains that anecdote as well as other information about GPS jamming.
There's no secret or trick to it - you just broadcast the same way as a GPS sat (the protocol is well documented) and since the broadcast is local, it's more powerful than Satellites. People use GPS jamming devices to get out of paying tolls in the US - that's just broadcasting noise on the right channel. Spoofing is more refined - broadcasting actual offsets in the right channel. Really, military grade equipment should use some inertial tracking as well to prevent sudden-location shifts common with spoofing. But hindsight, weight limitations, etc.
The benefits of learning even small parts of another language exceed the practicality of using it as a part of your job.
I work with a great deal of people from various parts of India. Though Hindi is not learned universally in India, everyone I have spoken with has a fairly good grasp of it.
I learned from a book and from speaking to my coworkers. It's help build some friendships where none would have existed before and gave me the chance to augment my team with tremendous resources others had passed off because of a "language barrier." (There was no barrier; just because the grammatical structure is different doesn't mean you can't understand them if you want to. Some just didn't want to. C'est la vie - it worked out to my benefit.)
My grandfather was Norwegian so I started learning Norwegian Bokmal quite passively. As the years go by, I grow more interested in the country and culture. They are some amazing people! As a consequence, when some programmers came during Thanksgiving to get trained on a piece of MOSS software we wrote for Microsoft (did that just earn me a -1 Troll?) I was invited to attend. In this case, learning a language was an opportunity to network! As a benefit, I can now read and understand Danish and I can even understand great swaths of Dutch (which seems easier to compare to Norwegian than Swedish.)
Even if it is unlikely you will need a language for your job, there are other benefits. The important part is finding something to get you interested. It is much easier to learn a language if you have a connection to it in some way. Coworkers provide a great connection. A family history is another. A coworker of mine is learning Czech because his wife's family speaks it.
You'd be surprised how easy it is to start a conversation with someone you'd normally have no connection with (run into many engineers in the wild, do you?) by trying to speak to them in their language. Hell, I've had long conversations with people who I've mistaken their accent for one from a language I've spoken! It's a great common ground!
*These are my experiences. Your mileage may vary. Offer void in Texas.
I'm on Comcast in Arlington, VA.
;)
Oddly enough, the night before last I started the Gutsy Gibbon DVD download as well. Speeds weren't terrific on the download but I was shocked to see any upload speed at all. It took all night but in the morning it was fully downloaded. The upload was at a paltry 6Kb but I decided to let it run, set the ratio to unlimited and came home to find it still going.
There was only 1 peer connected and an updated to my client (with some nice new features) so I disconnected, did the update and jumped back on. Within a few minutes, I had a couple peers and was uploading 12-18Kb again (max upload I've ever seen approached 25Kb and not for very long). I had only about 1.2GB uploaded so I left it running. I didn't check it this morning but I hope it continues. I'm planning to seed until I need to shut down to install the new Mac OS this weekend.
The speeds aren't super but to get anything out is amazing. I'm even giving a shot back at trackers that require you to keep a good share ratio since I can contribute again.
What part of fun don't you understand?
The few basic laws of US Government budgets.
1. Funding is allocated each year.
2. All remaining funds at the end of a fiscal year are lost. (Not rolled over into the next year. This is looking at things from an office perspective.)
3. Next year's allocation is reduced from the previous years by the amount unused in the current year.
4. Allocations are divided into Products and Services (items versus contractor work).
This leaves offices in a bit of a bind at the end of the fiscal year. If they don't use all their money, they get less next year which, of course, is a situation no manager wants to have happen to their unit regardless if they need it or not. Most units use all of their services money easily as contracts typically run over a longer term and are planned for. Product budgets are harder to watch. For the first 3/4 of the fiscal year, managers are trying to scrimp and save on everything they do "just in case." At the end of the year they find themselves with leftover money. How do they spend it to keep it from getting taken away next year?
Typical draining methods of product budget allocations:
1. Transfer the money to another unit. (This helps to get big ticket items purchased and solve many problems at once. New servers? Well, we decided we didn't need them before (savings mode) but let's get the top of the line (gotta drain it! mode).
2. Buy lots of external storage drives and thumb drives.
3. Recognizing that they still need service work completed but have no more money in that fund, negotiate a contract with a company to "buy" necessary items which happen to come with "free" service. So, a $10,000 screwdriver translates into short-term facilities contract. (Most likely re-re-reconfiguring offices and cubes to make the new feel powerful.)
So while it all seems very dubious, rest assured that it is, in fact, dubious.
Unfortunately it is all necessary as well. As long as budget allocations are done on a set scale from year to year, units can never plan for things like systems upgrades (heavy spending year) versus maintenance (lighter spending year). This means each unit needs to clear their account by the end of the fiscal year to ensure they have, at some later point, almost all the money they might need for that project which will probably need to be done, maybe. (Wording is intentional.)
They might not have a choice deciding to pay or not.
Here in the US they are required as a publicly traded company to do what's best for the shareholders / owners. They'll have to do a comparison between paying the fines until some end point and the theoretical loss they would receive from complying. It is my understanding that complying would not cause losses to the company in any significant way; certainly not comparable to the fines.
Because Microsoft is a multi-national corporation the rules might be a bit different depending on the setup of the company but it seems hard to escape the fact that, being based in WA, the main company is US, publicly traded, and therefore subject to these laws. If they do not act appropriately, they could face lawsuits from shareholders who can claim dropping stock prices are a result of negligent business practices.
Tough spot to be in. I don't envy them. I do, however, look forward to seeing what comes of this.
In which case, I'd like to use the +5 response as my own:
Thanks!
This will sound weird, but I've been looking for jobs in Wisconsin near UW. I've been considering going back to school (again) but needed a job in the area to rationalize it!
.NET (my language of choice being VB.NET but not averse to C# at all.)
I've been working on legacy government apps written in VB6 COM+ with ASP and VBScript and helping them migrate to
I graduated with my BS Computer Engineering in 2002 and a year later started my graduate course while working full time here in Virginia. I graduated with my MS Computer Information Systems degree on December 31, 2005.
I've been looking at Madison because of UW - specifically because they are one of a few universities with a School of Scandinavian Studies in which I am considering enrolling. They offer Scandinavian and other language courses which I want to continue to learn as well as the Foreign Affairs field I've been looking at.
I have a few reservations about moving to Wisconsin though. First, what sort of job opportunities are there? What happens if I find a job that I don't like; are there other options? Do any jobs require a security clearance? (If I take a job that doesn't, I will lose my clearance and I'd rather not.) Would these jobs even provide me with the ability to attend courses? Would I be able to afford to live and attend school on the salary?
These are questions I'm sure a lot of people from the coasts ask themselves (well, maybe not the school questions but the job choice, fallback options and salary) when considering a move to the midwest (or back as I was born in Michigan and educated through undergrad in Ohio.) Looking for positions in that area, the type of work I do seems very sparse or at a level far below my abilities and experience. I can't imagine an employer would want to hire someone for a job much below their level without feeling fear that the person may leave as soon as they find something more fitting with their experience.
I could be wrong but I do feel these concerns myself and I have to think I'm not the only one.
They're NOT going to see all my anti-NSA pr0n queries? All that effort wasted!
I would have done it on MSN or Yahoo but they'd already turned over their data.
Well, back to family-friendly pr0n searches I guess.
The good thing with early information is that you can do something about it.
What use is it to find out the train has derailed, that the cancer is now inoperable or that Bush has won the election? Knowing about impending badness lets us take action to correct it before it's compulsory.
What's the saying? An ounce of prevention beats a pound of cure?
If you want to know what your government is doing and the likely reasons for its actions, don't listen to the prepared statements and Faux News...listen to other countries.
It is common for countries to collect as much info as possible about many other countries. The bigger or more powerful a country, the more intelligence has probably been gathered on it. Other countries are not afraid to share some of what they learn and will speak their mind. Yours will only tell you what it wants you to know.
Misinformation can be a powerful tool to get the masses to support personal agendas. Right, George?
You wanna know what your government is doing? Listen to what the other countries are saying about it.
From what I understand, Galileo will use a higher frequency range than GPS.
This will allow the US to jam Galileo in US territories and GPS to be jammed in other world territories. Basically, we can blind them in our area and they can blind us in theirs but we still have our own systems respectively.
It all seems a bit silly to me. I think Galileo is an excellent idea but all the posturing is foolish. This isn't just redundancy it's choice. It's progress. It can be the foundation of further innovation. Its accuracy and ubiquity can lead to some amazing new uses. As a bonus, the threat of those systems going down in the event the US gets upset at something is reduced.
This is not a bad idea. It has a high cost, true, but the potential benefit to the world society is immense.
Would you say the same thing about global wireless Internet access? After all, the areas that use it already have choices, broadband or not. Global wireless Internet access would be redundant to those areas. Still, I'd say it's a pretty good goal to have. Ubiquitous access to the Internet and Galileo brings to mind some very interesting ideas for developing nations. Can you think of some?
"...take a massive petition drive to pull it off and I doubt most Americans care that much about the practise, if they even know it exists."
So we MAKE them aware in ways they can understand.
In areas where voter turnout was huge in the last election due to the "gay marriage" issues (which seems oddly absent from topics of news since) we tell people the "Government can legalize gay marriages whenever they want by slipping it in with the budget measures for civil war recreationists!"
In Texas, we tell them the "Government can force them to open their electric grid to help stabilize the other grids and will raise their electric prices to boot by attaching it to hair-spray and shoulder pad subsidies."
Or tell soccer mom that the "Government can push taxes on cars and gas any time they want by slipping in legislation that gives school's money for sports and activities."
If you speak their langauge, they'll understand. Make them understand!
Ohio University has its own reactor which is used for experiments in power generation as well as irradiation of materials. Anyone from nearby colleges can request time with the reactor to irradiate just about anything they want.
To get the material close to the core, pressurized tubes are used. The canisters that hold the material are made of some sort of plastic-like material for the specific purpose of letting radiation pass through. The problem is, repeated exposure causes the material to become brittle and occasionally a canister will break on the return trip (most often, it seems, when it slams into the retrieval portion of the tube and comes to a halt.)
The tubes are necessary to prevent people from coming into close contact with materials that are still radioactive for a time. The person running the experiment only has to load the canister with the material they wish to irradiate, load it in the tube system and send it on its way. The system halts when the tube reaches the core. After some time, the experimenter recalls the canister and can do whatever they please with it, knowing that it will still be emitting small amounts of radiation.
I don't know what the procedure was in the case that a canister failed during transit and material was caught somewhere between source and core. I do know the reactor is not very big (but neat to watch glow in the water) and the radiation danger wasn't too great. I believe it was said that most of the remaining radiation from the material dissipates within 5 minutes of the return. There are tables and shielding boxes with timers on them near the retrieval area.
The point is that radiation can eat through materials. It may not be the best way to phrase what really happens, but materials exposed to radiation react differently. Many materials become brittle. A radiation source as strong as the one in the article (with no mention as to what the cylinder was composed of) could cause any number of problems for anything nearby. The tubes are meant for short exposures as a material passes through, not prolonged exposure of a stuck cylinder.