The Steve Miller band stumped me for years with "big old jet airliner," though I had no idea what he was saying. My best guess was Jeb O'Brian, whoever that was.
In my 20s I spent a LOT of time listening to and writing down lyrics for my cover band and finally figured that one out (and no, I didn't have the album, in fact, I rarely had the albums, thank you very much - not really my favorite music, but I played it).
They didn't specify the attack, but a DDoS attack (part of this group's MO) is notoriously difficult to counter because it relies on the lack of security of the user community rather than the company itself. They use, say, a half million computer bot network to flood the target servers with requests. While you can theoretically block request flooding, sheer numbers can still overwhelm systems.
Can't recall gameplay, but most major sports had games (football, baseball, basketball, hockey). I also remember the color overlays for the TV. My age was in the single digits when I played this console, so I don't remember much (and certainly don't remember when it came out - played it maybe mid-to-late 1970s).
Not to mention the forced prison labor market. Felons get to learn "valuable skills" (for third world countries) and make products to sell at full value while getting paid a pittance. Refuse to work? No problem, 3 months in solitary will cure that, or you'll just go nuts. Really, the prison system is just slavery by another name.
It may be possible to intern with a company first to prove you are a changed person, but yeah, hard to break in, especially with any established company. There is an effort to "ban the box," but until that takes root, employers will ask if you have a criminal past.
Another option would be to try contracting. My brother's contracting company (electrical engineering) requires a proven skill set, but I doubt if they do any background checks. The hard part, of course, is proving you've got the skills (they hire extremely skilled workers in a very narrow category of electrical engineering). I know another company that does web design and they occasionally hire contractors, as well.
On the forums and from personal experience I can tell you there is a crash bug with Windows 8.1 64 bit with nVidia cards during cutscenes where framerates drop to near zero. Worst thing about it is it's random. I wasn't able to reproduce it with Windows 7 64 bit also with an nVidia card (albeit older laptop card).
Fortunately, I was reading the forums and there are fixes coming. They know about nVidia framerate problems, random sound dropouts (in fact, they are looking for 60+ hour saves that have this problem) and many of the crashes.
Yeah, Cs-137 is definitely something to worry about at least in the short-to-medium term, because it is water soluble and both a beta and gamma emitter (meaning exposure and ingestion are a factor), but risk depends on how much exposure you get. It also should be about half of what it initially was, since its half life is around 30 years. Some of the longer lived (miilions of years) particles are not something you really need to worry much about - you get worse stuff from natural gas (radon in particular) and probably higher concentrations from coal (fly ash contains lots of uranium and thorium in particulate form released into the air - in solid form these two are not particularly dangerous since the skin is a very good at absorbing alpha and beta).
In any case, radiation is a vague term, since it depends on type of emitter, half life, and type of exposure (i.e.skin, lungs, stomach) as for how dangerous it is. Generally, long half life=lower risk, which is why potassium isn't a big deal to have in our bodies despite being radioactive.
Highly radioactive usually has more to do with faster decay rate. As for how dangerous, it depends on the emitter and how it is absorbed. As for how much energy, it depends on substance, if it is fissile (at least for energy producing), and its neutron efficiency. Thorium, uranium, and plutonium generate more neutrons than they consume and thus can be used for a sustainable nuclear reaction. If it isn't one of those three, it probably isn't desirable - Protactinium, for example, has a huge cross section and absorbs neutrons slowing the reaction, so in a reactor it is usually desirable to pull it out, wait for it to decay to Uranium, and toss it back in (but this is a proliferation concern:P ).
Alpha - Ok for skin exposure, bad in stomach, lungs, or other tissues Beta - relatively OK for skin exposure, bad in stomach lungs or other tissues (but not as bad as certain alpha emitters, I believe) Gamma - pass through organics, bad for them.
For instance, Polonium is a fast alpha emitter. Skin is very good at protecting against alpha emitters, so you could wear gloves and handle it (to avoid any chance of dermal absorption). You, however, in no way want to ingest it - in the lungs and tissues it wreaks havoc and can kill in days (which is why Polonium was used to kill Alexander Litvinenko, a Russian dissident). Beta emitters are mostly absorbed by the skin, but penetrate deeper than alpha emitters. Gamma emitters go through most everything except heavy metals like lead, so it is recommended that you get as little exposure to these as possible (either inside you or outside).
Wrong - fast breeders in the United States were killed over basically proliferation concerns and safety issues. Financial was never a reason - you go from.5-5% fuel efficiency to 70% (without reprocessing) or 99.5% (with reprocessing) - that's pretty much like going from a Abrams tank to a Prius - you basically go from a subsidized industry (because it can't compete with coal in the US due to the overhead) to an industry that can sustain itself and could beat coal handily. Sadly, the "facts" given to kill the program were largely based on Gen I and II reactors and largely didn't apply to the FBR program.
Meanwhile, Russia is already exporting theirs. China bought the BN-800 design in 2009, making it the first exported Fast Breeder (though they won't get it until Russia's goes fully online in 2015 - it currently is running in low power mode).
In this case, what we call waste is actually a viable fuel. We (and I'm talking about most countries, not just the US) just have an aversion to breeder reactors that can make it so and on-site reprocessing that makes the process more fuel efficient (up to about 99.5%). Whether a need for such reactors appears before fusion is a viable alternative is the question, though if we keep throwing money at tokamak designs like ITER instead of much cheaper designs like polywell it may be.
Plutonium is the fuel a fast breeder reactor burns, actually. You use fertile uranium (aka nuclear waste) with a starter of fissile plutonium (or uranium?) and breed the fertile uranium up to fissile plutonium and split it. Usually this is U-238 to P-239. The main issue with this type of reactor is designs call for on-site reprocessing for better fuel efficiency and this is considered a proliferation risk. The proliferation issue is why Russia's fast breeder designs at Beloyarsk don't have on-site reprocessing and only achieve about 70% fuel efficiency (the US abandoned fast breeders in 1996, though private work continues). Still, 70% >.5-5% for conventional reactors, and it burns actinides and nuclear waste.
Fast breeder isn't the only Gen IV design, just the one most like conventional reactors, which is why the US and Russia both initially adopted that design.
I don't pretend to be a climate scientist, so I have to go off of charts and information they provide. I also didn't jump on a bandwagon, I read arguments by both sides and studies.
In the end, there was a paper where something like 97% of scientists in the climate sciences field agree in climate change/global warming including the biggest naysayer that most republicans were using as a reference for a long time. The major flaw in the 97% study I believe was that about 75% of them assumed humans were at fault as part of their study, but you've still got 22% vs 3% or less with no pre-assumptions. If you don't believe them, here is a simple NASA chart showing carbon dioxide levels for the past 650000 years. That shows greenhouse gasses up a lot in a short period of time. It could be caused by emissions, chopping down rainforests, or whatever combo, but the bottom line is carbon dioxide is at the highest level in 650000 years and it happened in a short period of time. The earth takes a long time to warm and cool - we may not notice the effects of this for 20000 years or more and we may be able to fix it in the meantime and never see change.
But if you are like my brother, you will deny any climate results older than 10000 years because the devil put them there. As I said, there always will be naysayers.
The problem is, the code looks something like this right now #include <sys/types.h> #include <unistd.h>
int dem = 1; int rep = 1;
void main() {
while (dem||rep)
{
fork();
} }
For you non programmers, that is a slight take on an old UNIX joke for taking down the mainframe before we had process limits. Pretty sure congress doesn't have any limits, and they certainly can't budget.
Religion and political ideology indoctrination sometimes trump science, even with otherwise intelligent people. Proof: my brother believes both evolution and climate change are not real. He is a rich religious conservative republican that eats up both ideologies and listens to pretty much nothing but conservative talk radio. Other than that, he is also a brilliant electrical engineer with hundreds of patents that both codes and owns an electrical/computer engineering contracting company. Whenever people suggest global warming he says there is not enough evidence, and says the devil created old fossils and such to sway Christians from God and the truth. There is no way I can possibly fully disprove either assertion - no matter how much science I shove in his face, he will counter it with "not enough research," "the earth is in a warming cycle and will soon begin a cooling cycle like it has for millenniums" or some bullshit like that.
Can't say I've castrated a pig, but I did butcher chickens and shear sheep at my grandpa's farm. I got skillz.
I pay my use tax when I go over the catalog exception. It doesn't happen often, but I feel it's my civic duty when it does.
I also REALLY HATE paying use tax, however - it is based on where I live and both my city/county combination has the highest sales tax in the state. Since use tax is based on where you live, you have to pay as if your house is the point of sale. I can drive 5 minutes away and pay nearly 2% less tax (1.86% I believe).
Incidentally, the USSR largely chose that for themselves. Lenin wanted Trotsky in charge and Trotsky wanted the party to elect a leader democratically. Unfortunately, Stalin grabbed power in the wake of Lenin's death and exiled Trotsky, convicted him of treason in absentia and eventually had one of his secret service agents assassinate him with an ice axe in Mexico.
Yeah - my schedule is usually at the beck-and-call of half the world, anyway. Sometimes I start at 4AM (Israel), other times have meetings at 9 at night (China), others 7AM (India). My meetings dictate my work schedule already, and when Europe switches at a different time than the US my meeting schedule gets tossed into a blender.
Um, uranium isn't all that radioactive or even dangerous to handle. The only reason people actually wear gloves when handling it is to keep contaminants like oils from the hand off of them. Sticking it on a lathe isn't going to make a bomb, though. You could make a pretty poor dirty bomb because breathing uranium dust isn't healthy (the skin stops alpha and beta emitters pretty well, but the lungs don't), but it also isn't the best emitter. In fact, with a dirty bomb you want something with a high alpha emission rate like polonium. Spent reactor fuel contains all kinds of actinides with high emission rates, so nuclear waste makes a much better dirty bomb than raw uranium.
As for getting fissile uranium out of pieces of uranium, well it isn't particularly hard, but it is time consuming. You basically dissolve the uranium into a solution and then run it in a centrifuge and the heavier stuff moves to the walls and lighter stuff toward the center. You then remove the lighter solution and repeat over and over again to get more purity. You need to do this to a certain level for a reactor and a much higher level for a bomb. If you wanted to take it one step further, you could use reactor level uranium and build a breeder reactor that converts uranium to plutonium and then make a plutonium bomb. Just to get it to reactor grade requires a lot of centrifuges and/or a lot of time... I think I read Iran has something like 77000 of them just to create fuel grade nuclear material.
Well WINE should run Windows games relatively well, since they implement Windows API calls on Linux. Basically, it's Windows on a different kernel. As for graphics, there were two versions last I checked - one converted DirectX to OpenGL and the other (Gallium3D) used DirectX calls directly. I haven't used WINE in a couple of years, so I'm not sure what the state of things is today or which they default to using.
yesish... If they use API calls that depend on other window managers toolkits (since SteamOS is a Debian with GNOME fork), you would at least need a dependencies package and sometimes even that doesn't work. I remember having such issues with metacity (GNOME 2, this was replaced with Mutter in Gnome 3) dependencies when running a different window manager, I think Enlightenment. I pretty much needed to kill Enlightenment, start GNOME, and then could run the program. I had a lot better luck with GTK apps running in KDE, which was my primary desktop for a long time (more because my work provided it than personal preference).
The Kim family is built on Stalin's "Cult of Personality" style leadership. Basically, the person in power runs the entire system like a cult, brainwashing those underneath and threatening/killing anyone outside of their core belief system. It would be frightening to have a non-human AI take over as the cult leader, especially one that isn't programmed for emotions. That said, I completely agree - disassociate the AI with any ability to get resources on its own except knowledge and there isn't much it will be able to do. You could also program it with rules that forbid it to do certain things, like take over the internet or subway system or whatever.
Half that - it sounds like the proof of concept is done (announced in 2013, this article seems to confirm they finished that), 5 years to the operational prototype and 10 years to production.
Lockheed has tight military ties and the military doesn't have to obey NRC regulatory restrictions and can do basically anything they want. It would not surprise me if they built one or more of these for the military before they even started trying to push one through the NRC. It also is a good way to avoid the nuclear lobby, which would do everything in its power to delay construction of such a reactor for as long as possible (because their clients have a vested interest in this technology failing).
Slashdot Mirror
The Steve Miller band stumped me for years with "big old jet airliner," though I had no idea what he was saying. My best guess was Jeb O'Brian, whoever that was.
In my 20s I spent a LOT of time listening to and writing down lyrics for my cover band and finally figured that one out (and no, I didn't have the album, in fact, I rarely had the albums, thank you very much - not really my favorite music, but I played it).
Not really - that is the actual lyrics, a record exec or something like that couldn't understand them and thus the song name.
They didn't specify the attack, but a DDoS attack (part of this group's MO) is notoriously difficult to counter because it relies on the lack of security of the user community rather than the company itself. They use, say, a half million computer bot network to flood the target servers with requests. While you can theoretically block request flooding, sheer numbers can still overwhelm systems.
Can't recall gameplay, but most major sports had games (football, baseball, basketball, hockey). I also remember the color overlays for the TV. My age was in the single digits when I played this console, so I don't remember much (and certainly don't remember when it came out - played it maybe mid-to-late 1970s).
Not to mention the forced prison labor market. Felons get to learn "valuable skills" (for third world countries) and make products to sell at full value while getting paid a pittance. Refuse to work? No problem, 3 months in solitary will cure that, or you'll just go nuts. Really, the prison system is just slavery by another name.
Most often I have heard of that with "three strikes" laws.
It may be possible to intern with a company first to prove you are a changed person, but yeah, hard to break in, especially with any established company. There is an effort to "ban the box," but until that takes root, employers will ask if you have a criminal past.
Another option would be to try contracting. My brother's contracting company (electrical engineering) requires a proven skill set, but I doubt if they do any background checks. The hard part, of course, is proving you've got the skills (they hire extremely skilled workers in a very narrow category of electrical engineering). I know another company that does web design and they occasionally hire contractors, as well.
On the forums and from personal experience I can tell you there is a crash bug with Windows 8.1 64 bit with nVidia cards during cutscenes where framerates drop to near zero. Worst thing about it is it's random. I wasn't able to reproduce it with Windows 7 64 bit also with an nVidia card (albeit older laptop card).
Fortunately, I was reading the forums and there are fixes coming. They know about nVidia framerate problems, random sound dropouts (in fact, they are looking for 60+ hour saves that have this problem) and many of the crashes.
Yeah, Cs-137 is definitely something to worry about at least in the short-to-medium term, because it is water soluble and both a beta and gamma emitter (meaning exposure and ingestion are a factor), but risk depends on how much exposure you get. It also should be about half of what it initially was, since its half life is around 30 years. Some of the longer lived (miilions of years) particles are not something you really need to worry much about - you get worse stuff from natural gas (radon in particular) and probably higher concentrations from coal (fly ash contains lots of uranium and thorium in particulate form released into the air - in solid form these two are not particularly dangerous since the skin is a very good at absorbing alpha and beta).
In any case, radiation is a vague term, since it depends on type of emitter, half life, and type of exposure (i.e.skin, lungs, stomach) as for how dangerous it is. Generally, long half life=lower risk, which is why potassium isn't a big deal to have in our bodies despite being radioactive.
Highly radioactive usually has more to do with faster decay rate. As for how dangerous, it depends on the emitter and how it is absorbed. As for how much energy, it depends on substance, if it is fissile (at least for energy producing), and its neutron efficiency. Thorium, uranium, and plutonium generate more neutrons than they consume and thus can be used for a sustainable nuclear reaction. If it isn't one of those three, it probably isn't desirable - Protactinium, for example, has a huge cross section and absorbs neutrons slowing the reaction, so in a reactor it is usually desirable to pull it out, wait for it to decay to Uranium, and toss it back in (but this is a proliferation concern :P ).
Alpha - Ok for skin exposure, bad in stomach, lungs, or other tissues
Beta - relatively OK for skin exposure, bad in stomach lungs or other tissues (but not as bad as certain alpha emitters, I believe)
Gamma - pass through organics, bad for them.
For instance, Polonium is a fast alpha emitter. Skin is very good at protecting against alpha emitters, so you could wear gloves and handle it (to avoid any chance of dermal absorption). You, however, in no way want to ingest it - in the lungs and tissues it wreaks havoc and can kill in days (which is why Polonium was used to kill Alexander Litvinenko, a Russian dissident). Beta emitters are mostly absorbed by the skin, but penetrate deeper than alpha emitters. Gamma emitters go through most everything except heavy metals like lead, so it is recommended that you get as little exposure to these as possible (either inside you or outside).
Wrong - fast breeders in the United States were killed over basically proliferation concerns and safety issues. Financial was never a reason - you go from .5-5% fuel efficiency to 70% (without reprocessing) or 99.5% (with reprocessing) - that's pretty much like going from a Abrams tank to a Prius - you basically go from a subsidized industry (because it can't compete with coal in the US due to the overhead) to an industry that can sustain itself and could beat coal handily. Sadly, the "facts" given to kill the program were largely based on Gen I and II reactors and largely didn't apply to the FBR program.
Meanwhile, Russia is already exporting theirs. China bought the BN-800 design in 2009, making it the first exported Fast Breeder (though they won't get it until Russia's goes fully online in 2015 - it currently is running in low power mode).
In this case, what we call waste is actually a viable fuel. We (and I'm talking about most countries, not just the US) just have an aversion to breeder reactors that can make it so and on-site reprocessing that makes the process more fuel efficient (up to about 99.5%). Whether a need for such reactors appears before fusion is a viable alternative is the question, though if we keep throwing money at tokamak designs like ITER instead of much cheaper designs like polywell it may be.
Plutonium is the fuel a fast breeder reactor burns, actually. You use fertile uranium (aka nuclear waste) with a starter of fissile plutonium (or uranium?) and breed the fertile uranium up to fissile plutonium and split it. Usually this is U-238 to P-239. The main issue with this type of reactor is designs call for on-site reprocessing for better fuel efficiency and this is considered a proliferation risk. The proliferation issue is why Russia's fast breeder designs at Beloyarsk don't have on-site reprocessing and only achieve about 70% fuel efficiency (the US abandoned fast breeders in 1996, though private work continues). Still, 70% > .5-5% for conventional reactors, and it burns actinides and nuclear waste.
Fast breeder isn't the only Gen IV design, just the one most like conventional reactors, which is why the US and Russia both initially adopted that design.
I don't pretend to be a climate scientist, so I have to go off of charts and information they provide. I also didn't jump on a bandwagon, I read arguments by both sides and studies.
In the end, there was a paper where something like 97% of scientists in the climate sciences field agree in climate change/global warming including the biggest naysayer that most republicans were using as a reference for a long time. The major flaw in the 97% study I believe was that about 75% of them assumed humans were at fault as part of their study, but you've still got 22% vs 3% or less with no pre-assumptions. If you don't believe them, here is a simple NASA chart showing carbon dioxide levels for the past 650000 years. That shows greenhouse gasses up a lot in a short period of time. It could be caused by emissions, chopping down rainforests, or whatever combo, but the bottom line is carbon dioxide is at the highest level in 650000 years and it happened in a short period of time. The earth takes a long time to warm and cool - we may not notice the effects of this for 20000 years or more and we may be able to fix it in the meantime and never see change.
But if you are like my brother, you will deny any climate results older than 10000 years because the devil put them there. As I said, there always will be naysayers.
The problem is, the code looks something like this right now
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <unistd.h>
int dem = 1;
int rep = 1;
void main() {
while (dem||rep)
{
fork();
}
}
For you non programmers, that is a slight take on an old UNIX joke for taking down the mainframe before we had process limits. Pretty sure congress doesn't have any limits, and they certainly can't budget.
Religion and political ideology indoctrination sometimes trump science, even with otherwise intelligent people. Proof: my brother believes both evolution and climate change are not real. He is a rich religious conservative republican that eats up both ideologies and listens to pretty much nothing but conservative talk radio. Other than that, he is also a brilliant electrical engineer with hundreds of patents that both codes and owns an electrical/computer engineering contracting company. Whenever people suggest global warming he says there is not enough evidence, and says the devil created old fossils and such to sway Christians from God and the truth. There is no way I can possibly fully disprove either assertion - no matter how much science I shove in his face, he will counter it with "not enough research," "the earth is in a warming cycle and will soon begin a cooling cycle like it has for millenniums" or some bullshit like that.
Can't say I've castrated a pig, but I did butcher chickens and shear sheep at my grandpa's farm. I got skillz.
I pay my use tax when I go over the catalog exception. It doesn't happen often, but I feel it's my civic duty when it does.
I also REALLY HATE paying use tax, however - it is based on where I live and both my city/county combination has the highest sales tax in the state. Since use tax is based on where you live, you have to pay as if your house is the point of sale. I can drive 5 minutes away and pay nearly 2% less tax (1.86% I believe).
Incidentally, the USSR largely chose that for themselves. Lenin wanted Trotsky in charge and Trotsky wanted the party to elect a leader democratically. Unfortunately, Stalin grabbed power in the wake of Lenin's death and exiled Trotsky, convicted him of treason in absentia and eventually had one of his secret service agents assassinate him with an ice axe in Mexico.
Yeah - my schedule is usually at the beck-and-call of half the world, anyway. Sometimes I start at 4AM (Israel), other times have meetings at 9 at night (China), others 7AM (India). My meetings dictate my work schedule already, and when Europe switches at a different time than the US my meeting schedule gets tossed into a blender.
Um, uranium isn't all that radioactive or even dangerous to handle. The only reason people actually wear gloves when handling it is to keep contaminants like oils from the hand off of them. Sticking it on a lathe isn't going to make a bomb, though. You could make a pretty poor dirty bomb because breathing uranium dust isn't healthy (the skin stops alpha and beta emitters pretty well, but the lungs don't), but it also isn't the best emitter. In fact, with a dirty bomb you want something with a high alpha emission rate like polonium. Spent reactor fuel contains all kinds of actinides with high emission rates, so nuclear waste makes a much better dirty bomb than raw uranium.
As for getting fissile uranium out of pieces of uranium, well it isn't particularly hard, but it is time consuming. You basically dissolve the uranium into a solution and then run it in a centrifuge and the heavier stuff moves to the walls and lighter stuff toward the center. You then remove the lighter solution and repeat over and over again to get more purity. You need to do this to a certain level for a reactor and a much higher level for a bomb. If you wanted to take it one step further, you could use reactor level uranium and build a breeder reactor that converts uranium to plutonium and then make a plutonium bomb. Just to get it to reactor grade requires a lot of centrifuges and/or a lot of time... I think I read Iran has something like 77000 of them just to create fuel grade nuclear material.
Well WINE should run Windows games relatively well, since they implement Windows API calls on Linux. Basically, it's Windows on a different kernel. As for graphics, there were two versions last I checked - one converted DirectX to OpenGL and the other (Gallium3D) used DirectX calls directly. I haven't used WINE in a couple of years, so I'm not sure what the state of things is today or which they default to using.
yesish... If they use API calls that depend on other window managers toolkits (since SteamOS is a Debian with GNOME fork), you would at least need a dependencies package and sometimes even that doesn't work. I remember having such issues with metacity (GNOME 2, this was replaced with Mutter in Gnome 3) dependencies when running a different window manager, I think Enlightenment. I pretty much needed to kill Enlightenment, start GNOME, and then could run the program. I had a lot better luck with GTK apps running in KDE, which was my primary desktop for a long time (more because my work provided it than personal preference).
The Kim family is built on Stalin's "Cult of Personality" style leadership. Basically, the person in power runs the entire system like a cult, brainwashing those underneath and threatening/killing anyone outside of their core belief system. It would be frightening to have a non-human AI take over as the cult leader, especially one that isn't programmed for emotions. That said, I completely agree - disassociate the AI with any ability to get resources on its own except knowledge and there isn't much it will be able to do. You could also program it with rules that forbid it to do certain things, like take over the internet or subway system or whatever.
Half that - it sounds like the proof of concept is done (announced in 2013, this article seems to confirm they finished that), 5 years to the operational prototype and 10 years to production.
Lockheed has tight military ties and the military doesn't have to obey NRC regulatory restrictions and can do basically anything they want. It would not surprise me if they built one or more of these for the military before they even started trying to push one through the NRC. It also is a good way to avoid the nuclear lobby, which would do everything in its power to delay construction of such a reactor for as long as possible (because their clients have a vested interest in this technology failing).