It seems today to be almost common practice to announce release dates you never intend to keep. That way your product appears better than the competition, except that it won't be available until technological development has allowed to competition to equal it.
For DRM it is even worse since it will never be simpler than not having DRM in the first place, and it is rediculously easy to just record the analogue signal. Oh, but that reduces quality you say... Well, it is enough for one person to do it well and upload it to the net, and yes people WILL be able to record it well. If bored teenagers can build fusion based neutron sources in their basements, just for the fun of it, they will manage to record a khz frequency electric signal with quality degradation much lower than what the mp3 compression algorithms causes. The systematic errors could be brought down by simply using higher quality components than what most listeners bother with. The statistical errors (from thermal noise etc.. ) could be brought down by simply recording the same song several times and then combining the results.
If you're going to live in this country, legally or illegally, have the fucking courtesy to learn the dominant language. Not every American would do it, but if I went to a different country to stay for anything longer than a short vacation I'd start learning the language out of common courtesy if for no other reason. YOU get a clue.
You are hardly the one to talk, seeing you lack a couple of commas.
This is Slashdot where almost everyone wants one of those nice R&D jobs. But yet they are against the ways of funding them.
I have no problems with the way the LHC was funded, how most universities in Europe are funded, how all of Scandinavia fund their education of scientists etc... It is only if you insist on not using tax money to fund science that you need IP law in order to promote research, so except for a number of people with a naive interpretation of capitalism yelling "tax is theft" there's no contradiction in opposing both copyright and patents, yet still promote increased funding of research. The irony is that the very same people who wants the government to stay back when it is a matter of taxes are promoting draconian copyright laws when it comes to funding research. In other words, you privatise profit and socialise costs, also known as "the american way."
What US companies seems to want is low taxes, government subsidies, strong IP laws and the right to charge whatever they want from consumers. In a sane world that's a "pick one" wishlist, yet current policy seems to be that pointing it out means you like freedom, which is a bad thing if you spell it with an "L" instead of an "F".
Right. Which is why we all are still listening to analog media.
Sound is analog. ""Digital" music is simply a digital encoding of an analog signal, if you convert it back to analog, copy the analog signal, and then re-encode it into digital you will have a digital signal, but this time without whatever bullshit encryption was on it to begin with. Yes, you will get some degradation in the process, but I can guarantee you that this can be made VERY minor, and certainly much less significant than the compression algorithms used to reduce the file size. Any statistical noise can be dealt with by repeating the process and average the result, systematic errors will be no worse than those inherent in the equipment you end up using to listen to it.
As usual they ignore the obvious fact that it only takes one person to exploit the analogue hole, and after that the internet will take care of the rest. Heck, even if you could shut down the internet data storage technology is rapidly approaching the point where you would be able to carry every piece of music ever recorded in a studio on your key-chain. It's over already, adapt or die.
Boron Carbide, Tungsten, titanium, etc., sound like much better options for this application.
Boron absorbs neutrons that you want to use to produce tritium, tungsten is expensive ( yes, it does matter when you will be using several tonnes of it per reactor ), and titanium loses its strength above 430 C.
There are other options as well, all of which have their problems. Nitrogen and Cobalt produces troublesome isotopes when irradiated. Nickel does not stand up to the intense neutron irradiation, Molybdenum is expensive and it's ductility is limited. Ceramics have limited fracture hardness and ductility, some metals are expensive, others conduct heat poorly or start doing weird things in strong magnetic fields... etc etc...
I can't quite remember what the problem was with Vanadium, but it was considered a good candidate because it produces relatively benign waste products when irradiated.
What you say is largely true, but for nuclear applications you usually have a few more constraints that make steel look more attractive again.
The core of a fast breeder reactor, or the structural components of a fusion reactor, will unavoidably be exposed to a very intense flux of high energy neutrons. These neutrons can cause all kinds of defects in the material you use, ranging from dislocating atoms to changing their elements due to nuclear transmutations, and whatever material you use must be able to withstand the irradiation. Many nickel alloys fail for this reason.
Also any material which absorbs a lot of neutrons, or reduces their energy, is going to cause issues. If you use Nitrogen in a ceramic it may need to be enriched to prevent excessive Carbon-14 production as an example. Some elements, like Lithium, Cobalt and Bismuth, produce very troublesome radioactive isotopes when irradiated. Carbon is quite good, and carbon based ceramics are heavily researched, but it is a rather light nucleus, and will slow neutrons that scatter against it. This may be desirable in a thermal reactor, but for fusion reactors and fast breeder reactors you want a very high neutron energy to enable the destruction of long lived waste isotopes, and this means you need to limit the amount of carbon present in your core and structural materials.
Furthermore materials to be used for a reactor need to go through very time consuming and thorough testing program , and this is why steels are very attractive candidates since much of the necessary data already exists. Sure, using something like Silicon Carbide may be worth investigating ( and it is indeed being investigated for a number or reactor designs ) , but even thou it has good thermal conductivity, corrosion resistance and thermal stability, it is not immediately clear that it will withstand the radiation environment, it's fracture hardness is less than ideal, and you need to be able to reliably produce it to the strict standards required by the nuclear industry. To develop and test a material for nuclear applications is a very expensive procedure, so if you can use materials that you already have data for, it will dramatically reduce the necessary research and development costs.
Also, as usual there is a cost issue of the material itself. Tungsten, with its high melting point, good strength at elevated temperatures, and low neutron absorption is very attractive from technological aspects, but building an entire reactor from it will hurt your bank account.
Re:you can't stop the doomsayers
on
LHC Success!
·
· Score: 1
When I got my first bachelor's degree, in philosophy, I thought I understood this well.
Uhm? You managed a degree in philosophy and still thought you understood things well at the end of it? That's a bit like managing a degree in computer science and afterwards claiming you can write a completely bug free, yet useful, operating system.
It is not difficult to get a long battery life if you use a very large battery, so how large is this laptop, and more importantly how heavy is it? I assume it is not quite the eeepc.
There is precisely one way to make a device un-clonable, and that is by quantum mechanically entangling it with a central authority. The no-cloning theorem of quantum mechanics then ensures that there is no way to record the state of the system without disturbing it in the process, thus destroying the entanglement. Obviously this is tricky to implement in practice ( read: impossible with existing technology ), and the device could only be identified once, after which its state would be ruined and the entanglement broken, but at least in theory every classical system ( i.e every system not relying on QM ) can be cloned. It may be exceedingly difficult to achieve in practice ( good luck creating two diamonds with the impurities at the same locations in the crystal lattice as an example ), but it is in at least in principle possible.
It would if it had any logically valid arguments. Last time I checked the ID promoters had nothing other than ad-hominems , arguments from ignorance, deliberate misinterpretations, false or forged quotations, and a bunch of lawyers. Saying "we are sceptical about existing theory" is not an argument in favour of replacing it with a fucking fairytale. Not in science class, not in philosophy class... Creationism might possibly belong in history class as an example of what people used to believe, but Inteligent Design does not since it only came about after the courts made it clear they would not allow creationism as part of the school curriculum. Hmm, thinking about it, maybe it deserves a brief mention in law school, but hardly more than a footnote.
1. TOLERANCE Yep, we use more and more of it every year that passes. Check.
2. WITHDRAWAL Check.
3. LARGE AMOUNTS OVER A LONG PERIOD Half the world's available reserves over a century ? Check.
4. UNSUCCESSFUL EFFORTS TO CUT DOWN Check.
5. TIME SPENT IN OBTAINING THE SUBSTANCE REPLACES
SOCIAL, OCCUPATIONAL OR RECREATIONAL ACTIVITIES The money spent on Iraq could easily have bought the US national healthcare for decades, and funded NASA for at least a century. Check.
6. CONTINUED USE DESPITE ADVERSE CONSEQUENCES Let's see, there is particulate emissions, acid rain, global warming, photochemical smog, spills into sensitive ecosystems, wars, economical instability... Yea, I think that will do it.
Don't worry , the grandparent is bragging. A more realistic price is about 200 SEK (31 USD ) for an unlimited 100/100 connection, and that does't give you a single static IP, just 5 dynamic ones.
The main reason spammers can keep doing what they do without consequences is that they are hard to track as they exploit users with insecure systems. You can't punish the companies that are advertised, because it would make it very easy for a competitor to get his rival in trouble by sending spam in the victim's name. You can't punish the users who have their machiens compromised and used tos end spam because you would hit a sizeable fraction of the population, virtually all of which simply did not know how to protect themselves.
No, there's only two places to adress the problem:
Firstly the ISPs could use traffic analysis to determine which of their users are infected and allert them about the problem. The problem with this aproach is that such systems could likely be abused to spy on the clients, so some strict regulation woudl be necessary.
Secondly you could start to actually penalise the main company responsible for having put millions and millions of extremely vulnerable systems into the wild. No, it's not just the fault of stupid users. Yes you would still get some infections because users are stupid, but it would likely be an order of magnitude fewer if it was not for Microsoft's downright pathetic security record. I know they made a bad attempt to adress it with UAC in Vista, but quite frankly they messed it up so bad that large number of users simply turn it off ( the fact they felt the need for a GUI setting that turns it off system wide says a lot about how messed up it is ). I'm not saying we should bitchslap every single software vendor that has security vulnerabilities in its code ( it is impractical for obvious reasons ) but when a company with the resoruces Microsoft has more or less ignores the problem for several years, and then makes a half arsed attempt at fixing it, then a charge of damage caused through gross negligence would not be out of line.
At the end of the day the electromagnetic spectrum can carry only so much information using a given number of frequencies. If you want to send data at this and that many bits per second, you are going to need a frequency with a similar number of periods per second. Ok, it's not quite that simple, but at the end of teh day higehr data rates means you need higher frequencies. If you fix the frequency that instantly caps the theoretical maximum amount of data you can transmit. There are two ways to adress this:
a)Increase the frequency
b)Deploy more access points so you are less likely to have many computers using the same one.
The second alternative is essentially equivalent to using more wired networks and fewer wireless ones. Even if all teh comunication in the network is done in some sort of p2p mesh, increasing the number of access points increases hardware costs, which is teh same problem as you have with wired networks.
Thus to get large data throghput you need to increase the frequency. Eventually you reach frequencies where the lightwaves no longer bend around obstacles and you will need a waveguide, such as telephone line, a coaxial cable , or optic fibre. This is why wired networks will always outperform wireless. By using a waveguide you are not limited in frequency by the requirement that the signal should have a wavelength long enough to dodge obstacles and difract around corners, and thus you can increease the frequency far beyond what you will ever achieve with wireless comunication, hence getting better bandwidth.
These are physical limits, not merely technological ones. If you want high bandwidth you will need high frequencies, which in turn means you will eventually need either line of sight between the nodes or a waveguide ( wire ). Ok, theoretically something like a proton beam has a frequency so high you will be limited by other things ( such as energy consumption ) rather than frequency, but you need line of sight for those as well. I guess if you used neutrinos or some other very penetrating radiation you would always have line of sight, but barring any sudden breakthroughs in neutrino detection/generation I doubt that is going to be practical for simple data transfer any time soon.
I'm more interested to know if this has any impact on nuclear waste. If decay can be sped up artificially one of the biggest objection points against widescale adoption of nuclear power in the US goes away.
You mean something along the lines of destroying all of the actinides and intermediate halflife fission products, thus leaving only stuff that decays to natural levels within 300 years, while simultaneously reducing the quantity of waste generated for a given amount of power by almost two orders of magnitude?
You mean something along the lines of what US scientists achived in the 1980ies before the government ordered the project to be shut down after promoters of clean-coal and natural gas alleged it would be a proliferation concern ( despite it being incapable of producing weapons grade plutonum ) ?
You mean something along the lines of what has been repeatedly demonstrated in several countries, yet is still being opposed for political rather than technological reasons?
No it won't stop somebody from blogging about it Yes it is still easy to find out who they are.
However: If somebody's name is in an online newspaper article it is MUCH easier to find through search engine's like google. Newspapers are also vastly more likely to still have their pages up and running in 10 years time, they are more likely to be referenced again by other articles etc... Thus while this certainly does not prevent peopel from fidning the identity of the accused, it drastically reduces the probability that a false accusation will come back and haunt them in 10 years time. To be honest I've always thought it should be standard policy for newspapers to keep those accused of crimes anonymous unless they are already famous for some other reason ( i.e MPs , leaders of national organisations etc... ).
This is one area in which FLOSS software has a major opportunity to grow. With open protocols and standards you could set up a system where applications , per default, store and comunicate information securely. At pressent things like encryption and mandatory access control is hard to implement, and worse, difficult to get people to use. If you on the other hand had a standardised system for tagging and encrypting sensitive documents, then you could make it significantly easier to set a policy to use those techniques. Rather than trying to educate everybody on things like package sniffing you could have a standard interface for accessing and manipulating sensitive documents, and it could be implemented as plugins for your word processor web browser, e-mail client, etc... Of course, for this to work you would need to make it policy that sensitive documents are only to be manipulated and handled using software that implements the standard, which is why it needs to be open for it to work. The moment you start having to deal with multiple proprietary solutions and interaction between them you are stuffed.
Naaa, Sweden's policy is even worse than the US one. Not only are we on a once through cycle, we also have a law prohibiting construction of newer more modern plants, meaning the lifetime of the old ones had to be extended.
The disposal has been handled a bit better here however. The authorities were smart enough to choose a repository site right next to one of the existing nuclear sites. The people who live there are largely positive to the plant and plans for a repository, possibly because they benefit from it in terms of energy and jobs, but also because they are used to the idea of having nuclear infrastructure nearby. Compare this to the US approach where the dump was located in a state that benefits very little from the industry that generates the waste. Public relations disaster... Also, in Sweden we have an interim storage facility that is already operating, so we're not in a rush to deploy a final repository in order to be able to accept waste from the utilities. As a consequence our regoluatory institutes have had plenty of time to asses and research the possible sites and technologies that could be used.
For a primitive weapon based on highly enriched uranium that may be true, but an implosion style weapon, as is more or less necessary if you are to use plutonium, is much more tricky. You don't just "put two pieces together".
Slashdot Mirror
..if you are surprised by this.
It seems today to be almost common practice to announce release dates you never intend to keep. That way your product appears better than the competition, except that it won't be available until technological development has allowed to competition to equal it.
For DRM it is even worse since it will never be simpler than not having DRM in the first place, and it is rediculously easy to just record the analogue signal. Oh, but that reduces quality you say... Well, it is enough for one person to do it well and upload it to the net, and yes people WILL be able to record it well. If bored teenagers can build fusion based neutron sources in their basements, just for the fun of it, they will manage to record a khz frequency electric signal with quality degradation much lower than what the mp3 compression algorithms causes. The systematic errors could be brought down by simply using higher quality components than what most listeners bother with. The statistical errors (from thermal noise etc.. ) could be brought down by simply recording the same song several times and then combining the results.
You are hardly the one to talk, seeing you lack a couple of commas.
I have no problems with the way the LHC was funded, how most universities in Europe are funded, how all of Scandinavia fund their education of scientists etc... It is only if you insist on not using tax money to fund science that you need IP law in order to promote research, so except for a number of people with a naive interpretation of capitalism yelling "tax is theft" there's no contradiction in opposing both copyright and patents, yet still promote increased funding of research. The irony is that the very same people who wants the government to stay back when it is a matter of taxes are promoting draconian copyright laws when it comes to funding research. In other words, you privatise profit and socialise costs, also known as "the american way."
What US companies seems to want is low taxes, government subsidies, strong IP laws and the right to charge whatever they want from consumers. In a sane world that's a "pick one" wishlist, yet current policy seems to be that pointing it out means you like freedom, which is a bad thing if you spell it with an "L" instead of an "F".
Sound is analog. ""Digital" music is simply a digital encoding of an analog signal, if you convert it back to analog, copy the analog signal, and then re-encode it into digital you will have a digital signal, but this time without whatever bullshit encryption was on it to begin with. Yes, you will get some degradation in the process, but I can guarantee you that this can be made VERY minor, and certainly much less significant than the compression algorithms used to reduce the file size. Any statistical noise can be dealt with by repeating the process and average the result, systematic errors will be no worse than those inherent in the equipment you end up using to listen to it.
As usual they ignore the obvious fact that it only takes one person to exploit the analogue hole, and after that the internet will take care of the rest. Heck, even if you could shut down the internet data storage technology is rapidly approaching the point where you would be able to carry every piece of music ever recorded in a studio on your key-chain. It's over already, adapt or die.
Boron absorbs neutrons that you want to use to produce tritium, tungsten is expensive ( yes, it does matter when you will be using several tonnes of it per reactor ), and titanium loses its strength above 430 C.
There are other options as well, all of which have their problems. ...
Nitrogen and Cobalt produces troublesome isotopes when irradiated. Nickel does not stand up to the intense neutron irradiation, Molybdenum is expensive and it's ductility is limited. Ceramics have limited fracture hardness and ductility, some metals are expensive, others conduct heat poorly or start doing weird things in strong magnetic fields... etc etc
I can't quite remember what the problem was with Vanadium, but it was considered a good candidate because it produces relatively benign waste products when irradiated.
What you say is largely true, but for nuclear applications you usually have a few more constraints that make steel look more attractive again.
The core of a fast breeder reactor, or the structural components of a fusion reactor, will unavoidably be exposed to a very intense flux of high energy neutrons. These neutrons can cause all kinds of defects in the material you use, ranging from dislocating atoms to changing their elements due to nuclear transmutations, and whatever material you use must be able to withstand the irradiation. Many nickel alloys fail for this reason.
Also any material which absorbs a lot of neutrons, or reduces their energy, is going to cause issues. If you use Nitrogen in a ceramic it may need to be enriched to prevent excessive Carbon-14 production as an example. Some elements, like Lithium, Cobalt and Bismuth, produce very troublesome radioactive isotopes when irradiated. Carbon is quite good, and carbon based ceramics are heavily researched, but it is a rather light nucleus, and will slow neutrons that scatter against it. This may be desirable in a thermal reactor, but for fusion reactors and fast breeder reactors you want a very high neutron energy to enable the destruction of long lived waste isotopes, and this means you need to limit the amount of carbon present in your core and structural materials.
Furthermore materials to be used for a reactor need to go through very time consuming and thorough testing program , and this is why steels are very attractive candidates since much of the necessary data already exists. Sure, using something like Silicon Carbide may be worth investigating ( and it is indeed being investigated for a number or reactor designs ) , but even thou it has good thermal conductivity, corrosion resistance and thermal stability, it is not immediately clear that it will withstand the radiation environment, it's fracture hardness is less than ideal, and you need to be able to reliably produce it to the strict standards required by the nuclear industry. To develop and test a material for nuclear applications is a very expensive procedure, so if you can use materials that you already have data for, it will dramatically reduce the necessary research and development costs.
Also, as usual there is a cost issue of the material itself. Tungsten, with its high melting point, good strength at elevated temperatures, and low neutron absorption is very attractive from technological aspects, but building an entire reactor from it will hurt your bank account.
Uhm? You managed a degree in philosophy and still thought you understood things well at the end of it? That's a bit like managing a degree in computer science and afterwards claiming you can write a completely bug free, yet useful, operating system.
http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/pscmisc/vac/us/product_pdfs/6930p.pdf
2.1 kg it would appear. That's still a bit heavy for my taste.
It is not difficult to get a long battery life if you use a very large battery, so how large is this laptop, and more importantly how heavy is it? I assume it is not quite the eeepc.
There is precisely one way to make a device un-clonable, and that is by quantum mechanically entangling it with a central authority. The no-cloning theorem of quantum mechanics then ensures that there is no way to record the state of the system without disturbing it in the process, thus destroying the entanglement. Obviously this is tricky to implement in practice ( read: impossible with existing technology ), and the device could only be identified once, after which its state would be ruined and the entanglement broken, but at least in theory every classical system ( i.e every system not relying on QM ) can be cloned. It may be exceedingly difficult to achieve in practice ( good luck creating two diamonds with the impurities at the same locations in the crystal lattice as an example ), but it is in at least in principle possible.
It would if it had any logically valid arguments. Last time I checked the ID promoters had nothing other than ad-hominems , arguments from ignorance, deliberate misinterpretations, false or forged quotations, and a bunch of lawyers. Saying "we are sceptical about existing theory" is not an argument in favour of replacing it with a fucking fairytale. Not in science class, not in philosophy class... Creationism might possibly belong in history class as an example of what people used to believe, but Inteligent Design does not since it only came about after the courts made it clear they would not allow creationism as part of the school curriculum. Hmm, thinking about it, maybe it deserves a brief mention in law school, but hardly more than a footnote.
Interesting, lets try it for Oil and Nations:
1. TOLERANCE
Yep, we use more and more of it every year that passes. Check.
2. WITHDRAWAL
Check.
3. LARGE AMOUNTS OVER A LONG PERIOD
Half the world's available reserves over a century ? Check.
4. UNSUCCESSFUL EFFORTS TO CUT DOWN
Check.
5. TIME SPENT IN OBTAINING THE SUBSTANCE REPLACES
SOCIAL, OCCUPATIONAL OR RECREATIONAL ACTIVITIES
The money spent on Iraq could easily have bought the US national healthcare for decades, and funded NASA for at least a century. Check.
6. CONTINUED USE DESPITE ADVERSE CONSEQUENCES
Let's see, there is particulate emissions, acid rain, global warming, photochemical smog, spills into sensitive ecosystems, wars, economical instability... Yea, I think that will do it.
So what does this make Kyoto ? An AA meeting ?
Don't worry , the grandparent is bragging. A more realistic price is about 200 SEK (31 USD ) for an unlimited 100/100 connection, and that does't give you a single static IP, just 5 dynamic ones.
The main reason spammers can keep doing what they do without consequences is that they are hard to track as they exploit users with insecure systems. You can't punish the companies that are advertised, because it would make it very easy for a competitor to get his rival in trouble by sending spam in the victim's name. You can't punish the users who have their machiens compromised and used tos end spam because you would hit a sizeable fraction of the population, virtually all of which simply did not know how to protect themselves.
No, there's only two places to adress the problem:
Firstly the ISPs could use traffic analysis to determine which of their users are infected and allert them about the problem. The problem with this aproach is that such systems could likely be abused to spy on the clients, so some strict regulation woudl be necessary.
Secondly you could start to actually penalise the main company responsible for having put millions and millions of extremely vulnerable systems into the wild. No, it's not just the fault of stupid users. Yes you would still get some infections because users are stupid, but it would likely be an order of magnitude fewer if it was not for Microsoft's downright pathetic security record. I know they made a bad attempt to adress it with UAC in Vista, but quite frankly they messed it up so bad that large number of users simply turn it off ( the fact they felt the need for a GUI setting that turns it off system wide says a lot about how messed up it is ). I'm not saying we should bitchslap every single software vendor that has security vulnerabilities in its code ( it is impractical for obvious reasons ) but when a company with the resoruces Microsoft has more or less ignores the problem for several years, and then makes a half arsed attempt at fixing it, then a charge of damage caused through gross negligence would not be out of line.
At the end of the day the electromagnetic spectrum can carry only so much information using a given number of frequencies. If you want to send data at this and that many bits per second, you are going to need a frequency with a similar number of periods per second. Ok, it's not quite that simple, but at the end of teh day higehr data rates means you need higher frequencies. If you fix the frequency that instantly caps the theoretical maximum amount of data you can transmit. There are two ways to adress this:
a)Increase the frequency
b)Deploy more access points so you are less likely to have many computers using the same one.
The second alternative is essentially equivalent to using more wired networks and fewer wireless ones. Even if all teh comunication in the network is done in some sort of p2p mesh, increasing the number of access points increases hardware costs, which is teh same problem as you have with wired networks.
Thus to get large data throghput you need to increase the frequency. Eventually you reach frequencies where the lightwaves no longer bend around obstacles and you will need a waveguide, such as telephone line, a coaxial cable , or optic fibre. This is why wired networks will always outperform wireless. By using a waveguide you are not limited in frequency by the requirement that the signal should have a wavelength long enough to dodge obstacles and difract around corners, and thus you can increease the frequency far beyond what you will ever achieve with wireless comunication, hence getting better bandwidth.
These are physical limits, not merely technological ones. If you want high bandwidth you will need high frequencies, which in turn means you will eventually need either line of sight between the nodes or a waveguide ( wire ). Ok, theoretically something like a proton beam has a frequency so high you will be limited by other things ( such as energy consumption ) rather than frequency, but you need line of sight for those as well. I guess if you used neutrinos or some other very penetrating radiation you would always have line of sight, but barring any sudden breakthroughs in neutrino detection/generation I doubt that is going to be practical for simple data transfer any time soon.
Well, according to the Free Software Foundation:
'Freedom is a matter of liberty, not price. Think of free as in "free speech" not "free beer".'
You mean something along the lines of destroying all of the actinides and intermediate halflife fission products, thus leaving only stuff that decays to natural levels within 300 years, while simultaneously reducing the quantity of waste generated for a given amount of power by almost two orders of magnitude?
You mean something along the lines of what US scientists achived in the 1980ies before the government ordered the project to be shut down after promoters of clean-coal and natural gas alleged it would be a proliferation concern ( despite it being incapable of producing weapons grade plutonum ) ?
You mean something along the lines of what has been repeatedly demonstrated in several countries, yet is still being opposed for political rather than technological reasons?
Oh yes, read and cry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor
No it won't stop somebody from blogging about it
Yes it is still easy to find out who they are.
However: If somebody's name is in an online newspaper article it is MUCH easier to find through search engine's like google. Newspapers are also vastly more likely to still have their pages up and running in 10 years time, they are more likely to be referenced again by other articles etc... Thus while this certainly does not prevent peopel from fidning the identity of the accused, it drastically reduces the probability that a false accusation will come back and haunt them in 10 years time. To be honest I've always thought it should be standard policy for newspapers to keep those accused of crimes anonymous unless they are already famous for some other reason ( i.e MPs , leaders of national organisations etc ... ).
Here is a one dimensional projection of a 5 billion dimensional sphere: _
This is one area in which FLOSS software has a major opportunity to grow. With open protocols and standards you could set up a system where applications , per default, store and comunicate information securely. At pressent things like encryption and mandatory access control is hard to implement, and worse, difficult to get people to use. If you on the other hand had a standardised system for tagging and encrypting sensitive documents, then you could make it significantly easier to set a policy to use those techniques. Rather than trying to educate everybody on things like package sniffing you could have a standard interface for accessing and manipulating sensitive documents, and it could be implemented as plugins for your word processor web browser, e-mail client, etc... Of course, for this to work you would need to make it policy that sensitive documents are only to be manipulated and handled using software that implements the standard, which is why it needs to be open for it to work. The moment you start having to deal with multiple proprietary solutions and interaction between them you are stuffed.
I never said you could reach the sun's temperature. I claimed you could reach 2500 C , which is less than half the sun's surface temperature.
Naaa, Sweden's policy is even worse than the US one. Not only are we on a once through cycle, we also have a law prohibiting construction of newer more modern plants, meaning the lifetime of the old ones had to be extended.
The disposal has been handled a bit better here however. The authorities were smart enough to choose a repository site right next to one of the existing nuclear sites. The people who live there are largely positive to the plant and plans for a repository, possibly because they benefit from it in terms of energy and jobs, but also because they are used to the idea of having nuclear infrastructure nearby. Compare this to the US approach where the dump was located in a state that benefits very little from the industry that generates the waste. Public relations disaster... Also, in Sweden we have an interim storage facility that is already operating, so we're not in a rush to deploy a final repository in order to be able to accept waste from the utilities. As a consequence our regoluatory institutes have had plenty of time to asses and research the possible sites and technologies that could be used.
For a primitive weapon based on highly enriched uranium that may be true, but an implosion style weapon, as is more or less necessary if you are to use plutonium, is much more tricky. You don't just "put two pieces together".