I'm just happy *someone*, *somewhere* had enough moral integrity to defy their corporate-led masters.
I'd say you are naive. Leaking is frequently used as a political tool. Much more likely than some noble individual leaking this is that one of the countries involved didn't want to piss of the US by taking an official stance against it, and hence they leak the document instead.
"OF COURSE we agree completely with you on this treaty. It's just SUCH A SHAME it was leaked. We couldn't possibly accept it with all this negative press and all. You understand that, right ? "
Some argue that typical waste contains way to much Plutonium 240 along with the Plutonium 239 (Pu-239 is what Plutonium bombs use) for making bombs out of it.
This may be true, but you still don't want the wrong people to get their hands on a large quantity of fissile material. Chernobyl was an accident. Imagine the same thing done deliberately and optimized to cause maximum contamination. Technically it would not be difficult to cause a massive radioactive fire in a pile made from graphite and diluted plutonium. The main obstacle is that you need either very pure graphite or enriched nuclear fuel, but if you have access to pure reactor grade plutonium, it becomes a simple matter of using the graphite to dilute the plutonium to a suitable concentration, and then piling enough of it together to give a critical mass. To ensure maximum contamination the mixture could then be spiked with precursors to troublesome radioactive compounds, like radioactive iodine, strontium or cobalt.
Assemble the whole thing in a warehouse in downtown new-york or london and then you can see why this could get rather nasty.
After reprocessing you don't just pour the waste into storage tanks, you want to stabilize it first. There's two ways to do this. You either mix it with glass and cast it into a stable solid, or you separate it into noble metals and other waste products, the latter of which is usually turned into a ceramic.
Because the amount of material you need to add to the waste to stabilize it can vary depending on the wastes' exact composition ( in particular how much heat it generates ) it's not really possible to accurately know the final waste volume before you've worked out the entire process.
After 99% of the waste is eliminated, the 1% left is the pure blood of Cthulhu ready to make mankind wilt in horror??
Not quite. Nuclear waste is mostly made up of un-burnt uranium. The long-lived stuff is mainly even heavier elements than uranium, such as plutonium, americium and neptunium. What these new processes do is to recycle the heavy elements like uranium and plutonium from the waste so that it is all burnt. Thus while you still get the same amount of fission fragments per kilowatt hour of electricity, you don't get any of the heavier stuff mixed into it.
There are three huge benefits to this.
a) The waste fits in a much smaller volume b) You can get almost 100 times as much energy from the same amount of uranium c) The resulting waste decays to safe levels within a few hundred years as opposed to many thousands of years.
Since we can easily construct structures that can last a few hundred years, and because the waste volume is so much smaller, this technology would essentially solve the nuclear waste problem. The improved utilization of uranium also makes sure that the fuel will last for any foreseeable future.
The snag is that so far all reactors of this type has been prohibitively expensive compared to existing technology, and there are concerns about how to implement the recycling step in a manner that makes it possible for inspectors to monitor the process to ensure no plutonium is diverted for weapons use.
with all these different taste receptors, why can't i taste my own tongue?
You probably do to some extent, but since it is always there your brain doesn't consider it special. An interesting question might be whether you can taste another person tongue, and I guess I should mention just how daft the joke about slashdotters romantic achievements is, before somebody decides to make it in response to my post
Only history will tell if he was a heroic maverick, bucking the system and getting good medicine done a' la hundreds of bad American cop movies (and we'll all point and laugh at the slow stupid FDA for not making a faster decision and wasting our tax dollars delaying real help to real people)
Nonsense. The outcome of a gamble does not affect the information upon which the decision was made. If he happens to get lucky that does not mean he did not act irresponsibly, and conversely if the treatments end up going bad it does not mean it wasn't worth a shot. Whether his actions are responsible or not is a matter of the evidence at hand when he decided to try it, and I doubt anybody here is qualified to comment on that.
It's a bit similar to a trial. If you execute somebody without any evidence of their guilt, then even if it is latter found out the guy did in fact murder a lot of people it does not mean the judgment was just, because it was little but sheer luck that the accused was in fact guilty. The same applies in this case. He may be acting responsibly or not ( I'm not able to tell ), but which it is does not depend on the result of his experiment.
What's with the urge to tell people that you're homosexual? I don't go around telling people that I am heterosexual and usually find it inappropriate when somebody tells me their sexual orientation. What do I care?
When you are gay, not telling people means you get to constantly worry about what happens if people find out. Will I lose my job? What would my friends think? Does he/she already know? Did I just out myself by accident ?
By telling people all that goes away. Sure some people will react badly, but at least then you know who they are. It's just a lot more comfortable being open about it and knowing who is and isn't ok with it than it is to constantly wonder who you might get issues with were they to find out.
The reason you don't feel the need to tell people about your orientation is simply that everybody assumes you are straight, hence you don't have to worry about it. Gay and Transgender individuals don't have that privilege.
Even though protection is still wholly inadequate at the federal level; microsoft does business in a number of states where anti-gay discrimination is very illegal and very actionable.
Not only US states, but have a guess how well banning gay people from being open would fare in Europe. Heck if I'm not mistaken there's EU directives that require states to implement legal protections from discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation.
In my experience with these creatures, I have not seen any evidence of sentience. They have no ability to behave outside of instinct, and insofar as I can tell, memory is only established through repetition.
I realize that it is not an infallible source, but here's a quote off wikipedia:
Specialists currently believe that all vertebrates can feel pain, and that certain invertebrates, like the octopus, might too.
Or simply put, everything with a spine can feel pain.
With regards to the behavior of calves, if drinking excessive amounts of milk do not cause them pain then that behavior is no more strange than the fact that a great deal of humans will ingest various recreational drugs, knowing full and well that it will hurt their health. That an infant animal does not display a great deal of intelligence does not justify hurting them unnecessarily, and lets be clear about one thing: Consumption of food produced from animals is by no means necessary. In fact, given what the average diet is like, ceasing consumption of meat is probably quite a healthy thing to do for most residents of industrialized nations.
The fundamental problem with DRM has always been that if it works then it will inevitably cause a lot of hassle for legitimate customers, thus driving consumers to buy different games.
To take a particular example for this scheme, imagine the following: Your net connection is down, so you can't play WoW with your mates. Good thing you have those single players games that don't need a connection... OH CRAP! Requiring an Internet connection for a single player game is about as sensible as trying to convince people they should use condoms while masturbating.
I suspect that a lot of the things that many people suspect are quackery do, in fact, actually prove beneficial *in some cases*, depending on the underlying root cause.
That's a bit like saying homeopathy works *in some cases* because a sufficiently dilute saline solution can cure dehydration. The catch is that it has nothing to do with the underlying claims of the "treatment". It just so happens that water is the proper remedy for dehydration, but it would work just as well if you just drink ordinary tap water as if you start out with a bunch of salt and dilute it until the solution contains little enough salt to be drinkable.
and anyone working to disprove that result is an enemy to be scrutinized, tied to suspicious parties and ostracized.
You're misunderstanding how science works. The criticism of theories is ever as much a theory to be scrutinized and subject to criticism as the theory itself. Some people seem to believe they should have a right to publish highly speculative criticism of scientific theories, and then not have their criticism subject to the same scrutiny as the theory they're attacking. It doesn't work that way. If you're going to launch highly speculative allegations of misconduct and corruption against other scientists, then you ought to be well prepared to defend your own conduct and affiliations as they will too be called into question. If you would rather people not discuss your personal integrity then you should not make accusations about the integrity of others.
Or put in a more blunt way: If you're going to make accusations off corruption and incompetence against others, then don't be surprised when you're met with accusations of corruption and incompetence yourself.
There is enough farmland available to grow enough food for all the world.
Don't forget to add in that you can probably multiply that by a factor of 10 or more if people were to go on a vegetarian diet. It would also reduce greenhouse gas emissions, diseases related to saturated fat and cholesterol, and not least animal suffering.
Yet for some reason the typical American diet consists of red meat and high fructose corn syrup.
The "first" film was the best because you were 12 years old at the time.
The first film was not that good tbh. It's just a classic adventure IN SPACE! The opening is a work of art however. Easily the best bit of the movie.
Empire strikes back is my favorite. The entire movie builds up the Darth Vader character as a cold and heartless tyrant who will kill even those closest to him merely because they disappoint him, before finally revealing at the end that he's the protagonist's father. You just didn't see it coming. The introduction of yoda is genious and completely ruined by the decision to include him in the prequels. They should have just referred to him without ever showing him on screen so you could watch the movies and still be surprised when the little green fella reveals who he is in empire strikes back. The constant failures on the millennium falcon and the tricks they need to turn to in order to hide from imperial star-destroyers is orders of magnitudes better than the mindless car chases you see in most action films. Basically Empire Strikes back is actually a pretty good film, while the other ones are a bit "meh".
I'd say revenge of the Sith is actually fairly good as well, but it Anakin comes off as too much of a kid, which kinda ruins the buildup to turn him into vader. He comes of more as a whining brat that a jedi corrupted by fear and anger.
That might not be a bad idea.../me calls for a Boston CD Party!
As an environmentalist I want to strongly object to dumping plastic in the oceans. If you want a publicity stunt then dumping the CDs by the doorstep to the department of justice might be a better idea. Sadly these days that will probably get you under trial as a terrorist.
"Philosophy of science is about as important to scientists as ornithology is to birds." - Richard Feynman
You know how you guys usually cringe when some clueless Economist or Law professor wants to introduce some new law for how the internet should work? Like demanding that all TCP connections be logged and the data kept for 10 years ( or something even more stupid ).
Well a fair share of you should now know exactly why they do this, because you keep doing the exact same thing every time a Slashdot article about science is published. To put it simply, if you're one of the idiots who thinks its a good idea to demand that every science paper to be published should document everything right down to what color of toilet paper the researchers used to blow their noses, then you never again get to complain when management wants all decisions to be accompanied with a cost-benefit analysis.
To be honest I'm more interested in seeing proper 3D chips become reality. If you find some affordable way to produce chips with, say 10 000 layers, then processing power per volume unit would increase rapidly.
I think the major obstacle is going to be what to do about heat. The center of such a chip-stack would probably get quite hot so you probably want to run some form of liquid cooling through the chip itself. Alternatively materials like silicon carbide or diamond might be able to cope better with the high power density.
I have severe depression, and have suicidal thoughts pretty much every day. I use the Web and WoW to escape from my persistent gender dysphoria. In chat rooms and online games, I can be a girl, but not in real life.
I've been in your exact same situation only a few months ago. As it happens going on estradiol and testosterone blockers have more or less pushed me from suicidal to feeling better than I even thought was humanly possible (was hard to predict in advance when you have little to compare with). Unfortunately not everybody has the same reaction, but if you're not already on them I can only recommend you give hormones a very serious thought. I know it can be hard to get them many places ( I was forced to self-medicate myself ) and that things are not that easy, but seeing your post more or less described my life 6 months ago I just wanted to let you know that things can get a heck of a lot better.
a)Low sunlight exposure can lead to vitamin D deficiency. This is not exclusive to internet use, but any indoor activity
b)It's fairly well documented that a lot of people use the internet as a coping resource. In this case it may even have a protective effect, even though the correlation looks different.
c)Lack of exercise. Daily exercise is known to help maintain a good mood. In addition a stationary lifestyle could result in obesity, which may in turn result in low confidence and other problems.
d)Common causes. Some psychological illnesses cause people to withdraw from social interactions. Such people are more likely to spend time online.
e)Dietary correlations. Would anybody here be surprised if it turns out heavy internet users also often eat pizza and soda to a greater extent than others? I can tell you from personal experience than malnutrition can easily get you depressed rapidly
Basically there are too many plausible correlations to identify why this occurs. To simply hand-wave it away shouting "correlation is not causation" would not be rational, but there's so many reasons to expect these results that are not fundamentally due to something internet specific that the study seems to be of moderate interest at best.
I'm transsexual. Based on how border guards tend to react from seeing a big fat "male" stamped in my passport I can't wait to have them able to scan my genitals... Fucktards...
Slashdot Mirror
Do I get a tax credit for preferring other women then?
I'd say you are naive. Leaking is frequently used as a political tool. Much more likely than some noble individual leaking this is that one of the countries involved didn't want to piss of the US by taking an official stance against it, and hence they leak the document instead.
"OF COURSE we agree completely with you on this treaty. It's just SUCH A SHAME it was leaked. We couldn't possibly accept it with all this negative press and all. You understand that, right ? "
This may be true, but you still don't want the wrong people to get their hands on a large quantity of fissile material. Chernobyl was an accident. Imagine the same thing done deliberately and optimized to cause maximum contamination. Technically it would not be difficult to cause a massive radioactive fire in a pile made from graphite and diluted plutonium. The main obstacle is that you need either very pure graphite or enriched nuclear fuel, but if you have access to pure reactor grade plutonium, it becomes a simple matter of using the graphite to dilute the plutonium to a suitable concentration, and then piling enough of it together to give a critical mass. To ensure maximum contamination the mixture could then be spiked with precursors to troublesome radioactive compounds, like radioactive iodine, strontium or cobalt.
Assemble the whole thing in a warehouse in downtown new-york or london and then you can see why this could get rather nasty.
After reprocessing you don't just pour the waste into storage tanks, you want to stabilize it first. There's two ways to do this. You either mix it with glass and cast it into a stable solid, or you separate it into noble metals and other waste products, the latter of which is usually turned into a ceramic.
Because the amount of material you need to add to the waste to stabilize it can vary depending on the wastes' exact composition ( in particular how much heat it generates ) it's not really possible to accurately know the final waste volume before you've worked out the entire process.
Not quite. Nuclear waste is mostly made up of un-burnt uranium. The long-lived stuff is mainly even heavier elements than uranium, such as plutonium, americium and neptunium. What these new processes do is to recycle the heavy elements like uranium and plutonium from the waste so that it is all burnt. Thus while you still get the same amount of fission fragments per kilowatt hour of electricity, you don't get any of the heavier stuff mixed into it.
There are three huge benefits to this.
a) The waste fits in a much smaller volume
b) You can get almost 100 times as much energy from the same amount of uranium
c) The resulting waste decays to safe levels within a few hundred years as opposed to many thousands of years.
Since we can easily construct structures that can last a few hundred years, and because the waste volume is so much smaller, this technology would essentially solve the nuclear waste problem. The improved utilization of uranium also makes sure that the fuel will last for any foreseeable future.
The snag is that so far all reactors of this type has been prohibitively expensive compared to existing technology, and there are concerns about how to implement the recycling step in a manner that makes it possible for inspectors to monitor the process to ensure no plutonium is diverted for weapons use.
You probably do to some extent, but since it is always there your brain doesn't consider it special. An interesting question might be whether you can taste another person tongue, and I guess I should mention just how daft the joke about slashdotters romantic achievements is, before somebody decides to make it in response to my post
Nonsense. The outcome of a gamble does not affect the information upon which the decision was made. If he happens to get lucky that does not mean he did not act irresponsibly, and conversely if the treatments end up going bad it does not mean it wasn't worth a shot. Whether his actions are responsible or not is a matter of the evidence at hand when he decided to try it, and I doubt anybody here is qualified to comment on that.
It's a bit similar to a trial. If you execute somebody without any evidence of their guilt, then even if it is latter found out the guy did in fact murder a lot of people it does not mean the judgment was just, because it was little but sheer luck that the accused was in fact guilty. The same applies in this case. He may be acting responsibly or not ( I'm not able to tell ), but which it is does not depend on the result of his experiment.
When you are gay, not telling people means you get to constantly worry about what happens if people find out. Will I lose my job? What would my friends think? Does he/she already know? Did I just out myself by accident ?
By telling people all that goes away. Sure some people will react badly, but at least then you know who they are. It's just a lot more comfortable being open about it and knowing who is and isn't ok with it than it is to constantly wonder who you might get issues with were they to find out.
The reason you don't feel the need to tell people about your orientation is simply that everybody assumes you are straight, hence you don't have to worry about it. Gay and Transgender individuals don't have that privilege.
Not only US states, but have a guess how well banning gay people from being open would fare in Europe. Heck if I'm not mistaken there's EU directives that require states to implement legal protections from discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation.
I realize that it is not an infallible source, but here's a quote off wikipedia:
Or simply put, everything with a spine can feel pain.
With regards to the behavior of calves, if drinking excessive amounts of milk do not cause them pain then that behavior is no more strange than the fact that a great deal of humans will ingest various recreational drugs, knowing full and well that it will hurt their health. That an infant animal does not display a great deal of intelligence does not justify hurting them unnecessarily, and lets be clear about one thing: Consumption of food produced from animals is by no means necessary. In fact, given what the average diet is like, ceasing consumption of meat is probably quite a healthy thing to do for most residents of industrialized nations.
When you find a source of that, will you ask them if they can give me a pony unicorn? Preferably a pink one that flies.
The fundamental problem with DRM has always been that if it works then it will inevitably cause a lot of hassle for legitimate customers, thus driving consumers to buy different games.
To take a particular example for this scheme, imagine the following: Your net connection is down, so you can't play WoW with your mates. Good thing you have those single players games that don't need a connection... OH CRAP! Requiring an Internet connection for a single player game is about as sensible as trying to convince people they should use condoms while masturbating.
That's a bit like saying homeopathy works *in some cases* because a sufficiently dilute saline solution can cure dehydration. The catch is that it has nothing to do with the underlying claims of the "treatment". It just so happens that water is the proper remedy for dehydration, but it would work just as well if you just drink ordinary tap water as if you start out with a bunch of salt and dilute it until the solution contains little enough salt to be drinkable.
You're misunderstanding how science works. The criticism of theories is ever as much a theory to be scrutinized and subject to criticism as the theory itself. Some people seem to believe they should have a right to publish highly speculative criticism of scientific theories, and then not have their criticism subject to the same scrutiny as the theory they're attacking. It doesn't work that way. If you're going to launch highly speculative allegations of misconduct and corruption against other scientists, then you ought to be well prepared to defend your own conduct and affiliations as they will too be called into question. If you would rather people not discuss your personal integrity then you should not make accusations about the integrity of others.
Or put in a more blunt way: If you're going to make accusations off corruption and incompetence against others, then don't be surprised when you're met with accusations of corruption and incompetence yourself.
You reap what you sow.
a) Configure your web browser so it asks you to download pdf files instead of opening them automatically.
b) Use an alternative PDF reader/viewer.
Don't forget to add in that you can probably multiply that by a factor of 10 or more if people were to go on a vegetarian diet. It would also reduce greenhouse gas emissions, diseases related to saturated fat and cholesterol, and not least animal suffering.
Yet for some reason the typical American diet consists of red meat and high fructose corn syrup.
That has been true for regular A4 paper for quite a while...
Yo Dawg! We heard you like updates...
The first film was not that good tbh. It's just a classic adventure IN SPACE! The opening is a work of art however. Easily the best bit of the movie.
Empire strikes back is my favorite. The entire movie builds up the Darth Vader character as a cold and heartless tyrant who will kill even those closest to him merely because they disappoint him, before finally revealing at the end that he's the protagonist's father. You just didn't see it coming. The introduction of yoda is genious and completely ruined by the decision to include him in the prequels. They should have just referred to him without ever showing him on screen so you could watch the movies and still be surprised when the little green fella reveals who he is in empire strikes back. The constant failures on the millennium falcon and the tricks they need to turn to in order to hide from imperial star-destroyers is orders of magnitudes better than the mindless car chases you see in most action films. Basically Empire Strikes back is actually a pretty good film, while the other ones are a bit "meh".
I'd say revenge of the Sith is actually fairly good as well, but it Anakin comes off as too much of a kid, which kinda ruins the buildup to turn him into vader. He comes of more as a whining brat that a jedi corrupted by fear and anger.
As an environmentalist I want to strongly object to dumping plastic in the oceans.
If you want a publicity stunt then dumping the CDs by the doorstep to the department
of justice might be a better idea. Sadly these days that will probably get you
under trial as a terrorist.
"Philosophy of science is about as important to scientists as ornithology is to birds." - Richard Feynman
You know how you guys usually cringe when some clueless Economist or Law professor wants to introduce some new law for how the internet should work? Like demanding that all TCP connections be logged and the data kept for 10 years ( or something even more stupid ).
Well a fair share of you should now know exactly why they do this, because you keep doing the exact same thing every time a Slashdot article about science is published. To put it simply, if you're one of the idiots who thinks its a good idea to demand that every science paper to be published should document everything right down to what color of toilet paper the researchers used to blow their noses, then you never again get to complain when management wants all decisions to be accompanied with a cost-benefit analysis.
To be honest I'm more interested in seeing proper 3D chips become reality. If you find some affordable way to produce chips with, say 10 000 layers, then processing power per volume unit would increase rapidly.
I think the major obstacle is going to be what to do about heat. The center of such a chip-stack would probably get quite hot so you probably want to run some form of liquid cooling through the chip itself. Alternatively materials like silicon carbide or diamond might be able to cope better with the high power density.
I've been in your exact same situation only a few months ago. As it happens going on estradiol and testosterone blockers have more or less pushed me from suicidal to feeling better than I even thought was humanly possible (was hard to predict in advance when you have little to compare with). Unfortunately not everybody has the same reaction, but if you're not already on them I can only recommend you give hormones a very serious thought. I know it can be hard to get them many places ( I was forced to self-medicate myself ) and that things are not that easy, but seeing your post more or less described my life 6 months ago I just wanted to let you know that things can get a heck of a lot better.
A couple of plausible explanations seem likely:
a)Low sunlight exposure can lead to vitamin D deficiency. This is not exclusive to internet use, but any indoor activity
b)It's fairly well documented that a lot of people use the internet as a coping resource. In this case it may even have a protective effect, even though the correlation looks different.
c)Lack of exercise. Daily exercise is known to help maintain a good mood. In addition a stationary lifestyle could result in obesity, which may in turn result in low confidence and other problems.
d)Common causes. Some psychological illnesses cause people to withdraw from social interactions. Such people are more likely to spend time online.
e)Dietary correlations. Would anybody here be surprised if it turns out heavy internet users also often eat pizza and soda to a greater extent than others? I can tell you from personal experience than malnutrition can easily get you depressed rapidly
Basically there are too many plausible correlations to identify why this occurs. To simply hand-wave it away shouting "correlation is not causation" would not be rational, but there's so many reasons to expect these results that are not fundamentally due to something internet specific that the study seems to be of moderate interest at best.
I'm transsexual. Based on how border guards tend to react from seeing a big fat "male" stamped in my passport I can't wait to have them able to scan my genitals... Fucktards...