That would be fun, but the trouble is if it fizzled, or only the conventional explosives detonated, the fallout would be a right mare to cleanup.
Quite the contrary. Weapons grade plutonium, while toxic , is only moderately radioactive. The highly radioactive fission products from a full yield detonation is WAY worse, and in addition the neutron flux would transmute the nitrogen in the air into radioactive Carbon-14.
It feels like just yesterday we crossed the 6-Billion mark. I remember when I was younger (about 30 years ago) there being 4-billion. The number isn't just increasing, but the rate of acceleration itself is picking up in a scary way.
Since then availability of effective contraceptives have increased dramatically. If you want to fight the trend of extreme population growth the most effective way to do so will be to promote access to contraceptives and their social acceptance, in particular in third world countries.
Thinking of Cancer as one disease is about the same as thing every infection as one disease.
While partially true, one thing that makes a universal treatment against cancer more likely to ever be found than one against infections is that cancer doesn't spread from one person to another. This more or less prevents it from evolving and developing resistance at the same rate bacteria do, and if a cancer tumor were to develop resistance to a treatment, it will die with the patient and not spread the resistance to others.
Contrast this with multi-resistant tuberculosis. Because it is hard to kill, and require long treatments, the chance of somebody developing a resistant infection is quite high. The long treatment times make matters even worse since people in developing countries sometimes run out of medicine and cannot afford to complete their treatment. They then end up infecting others , and so you have a resistant strain which can quickly become a global health problem.
Btw, somebody seeing the argument for universal health-care yet ? Leave the poor without medical care and they basically become an incubator for multi-resistant bacterial strains that will eventually come back and bite you or somebody you care about. That's Karma bitches!
For comparison, lithium-ion batteries are often only rated for something like 200 c/d cycles, with the best commercial-grade lithium-ion batteries not rated for longer than 1000 c/d cycles.
That's only true if you consider LiFePO4 different from lithium ion. Some of them have demonstrated 5000 cycles. Unfortunately they are more expensive and have about half the energy density of conventional Li-Ion cells. If they come down in price , or if their capacity can be boosted without making them more expensive, then they will be very real candidates for a practical EV.
There has been many nice headlines over the months (years) about such and such new advances in battery technology.
Yep, and battery tech has improved steadily during the same time. The reduction in the sizes of mobile phones is to a large extent due to better battery tech. Black and decker has started selling batteries for their power tools that can recharge in minutes. The iPad would not have been possible with the batteries we had 10 years ago, and so on.
Yea, some of these advances never make it. Some only make it into niche applications ( Lithium sulfur is popular in model airplanes as an example ). However, it is not really in the same ballpark as with the typical hype about energy tech we see. New battery technology actually delivers, and we're starting to get close to practical electric vehicles because of it. There's even cells that are able to do the job , but the price has to come down a bit ( or the price of Oil must go up ).
Whenever I see a suggestion about using the immune system in some new and novel way I cannot help but get worried about autoimune side effects.
I guess it is a bit irrational since vaccinations are basically stimulating the immune system to hit specific pathogens, and most of them are very safe as compared to other drugs, but I can't help but feel a bit uneasy about training the body to attack its own cells.
>What could possibly go wrong and why am I reminded of the old proposal for liquid sodium cooled nuclear reactors in submarines?
Probably because you don't know that the reason such submarines were never built had fuck all to do with the sodium-water interaction, and was rather due to the navy's desire to standardise on one type of reactor, the PWR. Seriously, you're talking about a military that mixes RDX and HMX into the Nuclear Missile rocket fuel. They are unlikely to be deterred by sodium's flammability.
It doesn't. The tendency of Li-Ion cells to overheat is mostly due to the poor chemical stability of the Cobolt oxide used in them, and has very little to do with how much energy they can store. For a car analogy, consider building a car out of 90% dynamite, let it roll down a hill, and then when the breaks overheat and ignite the dynamite, you conclude the car blew up because fast moving objects have so much energy in them. If you instead built the car out of steel or aluminium, it could probably reach just as a high a speed, but it would not blow up from it. Similarly there are some novel lithium ion batteries with even higher capacities than the cobal oxide ones that you can even put a bullet through without them blowing up. They will cost you thou...
That's because motive matters a lot in all criminal proceedings ( and rightly so ). Manslaughter is usually a crime you get when you do something wrong, and the consequence is that somebody dies, but you did not intend to cause such severe harm. In the case you linked two people got into an argument, one guy landed a punch, and unfortunately the guy who got hit fell from the punch and hit his head. Most people don't realize that a punch can be so dangerous, so throwing the book on the perpetrator is just stupid.
Another common situation where a manslaughter charge may be given is when you defend yourself but use excessive force to do so. Say you're outside late, somebody runs up to you from behind, you get scared and grab a nearby blunt object and hit the person to defend yourself. It then turns out that he was just trying to give you your wallet back that you dropped earlier, and your blow was severe enough to kill. That kind of situation could , depending on circumstances, land you a manslaughter conviction, but locking you up for many years would obviously not be appropriate.
You can't just compare individual cases without knowing the circumstances. We had a case in Sweden some time ago when an elderly couple had moved into a new house and found a marijuana plant left over by the previous tenants. They did not realise what it was, so they simply planted it in their front yard, and eventually police came asking them about it. Technically our law would have them guilty of growing and manufacturing an illegal drug, but fortunately this case was not handled by some insane twat, and hence there was no consequences beyond some questioning with a few amused officers.
A couple of things people seem to be getting wrong here.
1: We've already achieved "break-even" in tokamak reactors. However, in order for a power plant to be useful it must produce much more energy ( say 100 fold ) than you put in. Break even is not nearly enough.
2: You don't need ignition in a power plant. Ignition refers to the condition where the energy in the helium nuclei formed is enough to keep the plasma burning without any heating. This is not necessary in a power plant. It is sufficient that the amount of energy emitted by the plasma ( in the form of neutrons x-rays etc... ) is much greater than the energy you use heating it. Ignition is important if you are building a nuclear warhead. It is completely unnecessary , and probably undesirable , in a power plant.
3: At the moment the major issue for a fusion plant is not getting the fusion reaction to occur. That this can be done has been demonstrated many times. The difficulty is to keep it running smoothly for long time periods and finding materials to make the reactor from. The latter is particularly challenging since the best materials for coping with the heat and neutron radiation tend to be made from heavy nuclei that will mess up the plasma if even microscopic amounts of them are released from the reactor wall.
4: Building a plant that can be used to generate a lot of electricity is not the same as commercial viability. The latter requires that the energy can be generated at a reasonable cost. Since fusion reactors are much more difficult to build and maintain than a fission reactor it is not obvious that they will ever be financially viable within our lifetime.
5: The reason the time-line for building a working fusion power plant keeps getting pushed further into the future is at least in part due to the funding for the projects constantly being cut. Despite this, it is now pretty much clear that a workable fusion plant can be built. The uncertainty is if it can be made economically viable. This uncertainty is in part due to the materials problems. If neutron damage forces you to replace the reactor wall too frequently, the whole scheme quickly becomes prohibitively expensive.
6: There is no such things as neutron-free fusion. While helium-3 fusion is in theory neutron free, the products of the reaction involve nuclei that will easily cause other fusion reactions in the plasma, and these release neutrons. In addition, for any reaction other than deuterium-tritium or deuterium-deuterium , the energy losses due to x-rays are likely to greatly exceed the fusion yield, meaning D-T or maybe D-D fusion are the only viable candidates. The sun manages with just protons because the gravity ensures a sufficient density in the core that much of the radiation is re-absorbed by the plasma. It's vast size also means that it can produce a lot of energy with very slow reactions, a luxury we don't have on earth. I should note that this assumes that the plasma is somewhat neutral ( i.e contains electrons ), since it is the electrons that give rise to the x-ray losses. The problem is that for a plasma that does not contain electrons, the large collection of positive charges will make it almost impossible to achieve a sufficient density and energy confinement. Even at record breaking magnetic field strengths the confinement time necessary would have to be on the order of magnitude of several days in order to maker up for the abyssal number density. Yes, I know about polywell, and it's a load of snakeoil.
7: Thorium reactors are always mentioned in nuclear discussions. What is usually not mentioned is that if they are to operate on a thermal spectrum ( as is usually assumed since they don't really have any advantages in a fast spectrum ), then their doubling time is so long that you would have to start them up using traditional fuel. In practice this would likely imply reprocessed plutonium and recycling of the other actinides. Now if you are going to use reprocessed plutonium from spent fuel, then you are going to need fast reac
Actually it is suspected to have increased at similar rates before (as a result of cataclysmic volcanic activity messing up the permafrost ), and when it happened last time the majority of species alive on earth went extinct. Not the kinda thing you want to cause to happen if you can avoid it...
Figuring out the correct draw order is absolute fucking murder, and there still isn't a generalized approach for anybody but the most advanced of the most advanced (like Dual depth peeling [nvidia.com] or making convex hulls out of all translucent geo in the scene).
Is this one of those things you would get practically automatically with ray-tracing? It seems to me that a z-buffer just isn't capable of adequately dealing with this kind of situation unless you actually want to sort the objects by depth for every single pixel.
Perhaps somebody in the know can enlighten me about this.
I see many fairly advanced features and functions in both the DX and OpenGL APIs , but I was under the impression that a modern graphics cards were basically designed to do a few fairly primitive operations very well and in parallel. So basically, how much of these APIs actually deal with interfacing the graphics card and it's hardware accelerated features, and how much of it is more along the lines of just a standard library that contains frequently used graphics algorithms?
Maybe my view of how programming is done these days is a bit naive, but I've always sort of felt there was a difference between the APIs that are there in order to let you use the hardware without mucking around with terribly low level and platform dependent stuff like interupts and so on, and on the other hand just standard libraries that is pretty much things where the code would be more or less the same on most platforms, but you just don't want to write it all over again whenever you make a new program ( things like some container class for C++ ).
My idea of what OpenGL and DirectX did was to let you access the features of the video card without having to worry about all the little differences between one card and another. So you could send the card a bunch of textures or something without having to rewrite the code for every card you wanted to run on.
Am I missing a lot here? Do the OpenGL and DirectX APIs also deal with a load of stuff that is just generally handy to have around when writing graphics programs?
I forgot to add that while plutonium is not very toxic, it is quite reactive and can be a fire hazard if stored inappropriately. In particular it can react with water to create some easily ignited compounds. For this reason it is best to store it in hermetically sealed containers, or as a compound that is less reactive ( such as plutonium oxide ). Nuclear bomb makers get around this problem by electro-plating the plutonium with less reactive metals.
That Americium is some nasty crap. It's not as toxic as Plutonium, but it's no fun.
You're wrong. Americium is a stronger alpha-emitter than both reactor and weapons grade plutonium. There are some exotic isotopes of plutonium used in space probes that are considerably more radioactive, but most plutonium produced in industry is a mix of Pu-239, Pu-240 and some Pu-241.
Both elements have similar biological properties, and only a very small fraction is absorbed by the body were you to eat it. As compared to many other radioisotopes ( such as radio-iodine or radium ) both Plutonium and Americium are relatively benign ( but by no means safe ). The greatest health risk is probably if you're exposed to dust of the elements, since the metal particles can then stick to your lungs, increasing the risk of cancer.
Btw, the toxicicty of plutonium is often greatly exaggerated in general media and movies. It is actually fairly safe compared to many things you can buy off the shelf (drain cleaner, insecticides, sulfuric acid , dishwasher powder , petrol etc... ) . In general it is the fission waste products produced when nuclear fuel is burned that is responsible for the severe radioactivity of the waste. The fuel itself is fairly safe before it is exposed to neutron radiation. It's the stuff left over after you split the uranium/plutonium that you don't want to even look at without several metres of water in between you and it.
But the problem was that it is not even illegal to do that in Sweden. It is only a legal "greyzone", and there is no laws for it either.
I work at a nuclear physics lab in Sweden, and you're very wrong. There's quite strict regulations on how you're allowed to handle radioactive and poisonous materials, and opening up smoke detectors to extract the americium might very well qualify.
Now I guess this may be one of those cases where the regulations have been carelessly written and hence only apply to people who received permission to use them, but in either case I certainly don't blame the police for intervening, especially seeing the guy in question seems completely clueless about what he is playing with. I'd expect them to react the same way if he was grinding up asbestos for some hobby project...
You don't need criticality in order to have nuclear reactions. Criticality just means the whole thing is self sustaining. You can however mix an alpha-emitter ( such as americium ) with beryllium, and the alpha-beryllium interactions would create neutrons that can split even depleted uranium.
With americium it's probably not too dangerous, but if he had gotten his hand on something like radium or polonium, then it would be reason to worry.
They would obviously have fixed it the moment somebody points it out. If somebody was daft enough to go to court over it. They'd basically say "yea, this was a mistake, we didn't notice it because nobody seems to have been bothered with it, so we don't think it really affected anybody. When we became aware of it we fixed it." If that kind of thing did not stand up in court you'd basically be liable every time you had a network problem. Now granted some countries have fucked up legal systems, but that is not the fault of the Emacs developers.
Big surprise, computer models that can't predict the weather accurately 2 weeks into the future fail to accurately predict global temperatures years out.
I can't predict the weather tomorrow, but I can certainly tell you that Sweden will get progressively colder over the coming 6 months than it is at present.
I wonder what would happen if you fed my stuff to this algorithm. I'm transsexual and hang out in very different environments depending on which of my friends I psend time with. It can range from LANs to baking parties. On the overall I'd say I'm a poor fit for both male and female stereotypes. It would also be fun to see what it would do with my lesbian friends, many of which are immense tomboys.
If the battery is transparent it should be able to lose heat more efficiently through infra-red radiation. This might in turn enable it to charge/discharge quicker.
The longer version is: thermodynamics is a model of the behavior of gasses in a closed system which makes a lot of assumptions (for starters: it treats all gas molecules as solid, perfect spheres that bounce off once another with no loss of velocity - e.g. energy transfer without friction).
Nonsense. In physics the entropy of a macro-state is defined in terms of a logarithm of the number of micro-sates that give the macro-state in question. For a system where the number of possible micro-states is large, and where any particular micro-state has comparable probability of occurring, then the most probably macro-state is one which is composed of a large number of micro-states.
The second law of thermodynamics essentially say that for large systems the probability that the system will spontaneously tend towards a macro-state with few micro-state is very small. As an example, if you take a box full of dice and shake it, it is very unlikely that they all come up with the same side up.
It so happens that you can demonstrate that every conservative force ( i.e all forces we know about including gravity ) obeys this basic principle
Long story short: bad nuclear reactor design, should never be done again. Also, its been being decommissioned since 1977. So, yeah, lets not do that again.
You don't happen to know why alkali metals are useful in a fast breeder? Let me see:
Alkali metals don't corrode the structural materials in the reactor, unlike superheated water, salt or lead.
The coolant doesn't need to be pressurised, greatly reducing the risk of a leak.
The heat conductivity is superior to any other coolant, making it much easier to design a passive cooling system
The coolant is compatible with metal fuel. Metal fuel has much better heat conductivity than
the helium-ceramic type of fuel bundles used in most reactors, which aids in cooling. Metal fuel is also MUCH easier to reprocess ( necessary for a breeding cycle ).
Unlike salt and lead, sodium alloys are liquid close to room temperature, making service, repair and standby operations much simpler.
Unlike salt and water, alkali coolants don't undergo radiolysis at any temperature.
The electrical conductivity in sodium is good enough that you can make electromagnetic pumps with no moving parts ( less risk of pump failure ).
The neutron spectrum with alkali coolants is quite hard, giving such a reactor excellent breeding and actinide burning potential.
So basically while the fire hazard is an issue for these reactors, there are numerous advantages with alkali metals that actually give a lot of safety advantages. Also, while a sodium fire would be bad, it's not exactly as if rupture of a pipe carrying superheated steam would be very benign either.
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Quite the contrary. Weapons grade plutonium, while toxic , is only moderately radioactive. The highly radioactive fission products from a full yield detonation is WAY worse, and in addition the neutron flux would transmute the nitrogen in the air into radioactive Carbon-14.
The question that separates the two is essentially who will be "balanced" and who will get to live.
Alternatively we could make an active effort to promote effective contraceptives, comprehensive sex ed, and tackle poverty.
Since then availability of effective contraceptives have increased dramatically. If you want to fight the trend of extreme population growth the most effective way to do so will be to promote access to contraceptives and their social acceptance, in particular in third world countries.
October 16th is also the day that several major
Nazis were executed following the Nuremberg trials.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_trial
While partially true, one thing that makes a universal treatment against cancer more likely to ever be found than one against infections is that cancer doesn't spread from one person to another. This more or less prevents it from evolving and developing resistance at the same rate bacteria do, and if a cancer tumor were to develop resistance to a treatment, it will die with the patient and not spread the resistance to others.
Contrast this with multi-resistant tuberculosis. Because it is hard to kill, and require long treatments, the chance of somebody developing a resistant infection is quite high. The long treatment times make matters even worse since people in developing countries sometimes run out of medicine and cannot afford to complete their treatment. They then end up infecting others , and so you have a resistant strain which can quickly become a global health problem.
Btw, somebody seeing the argument for universal health-care yet ? Leave the poor without medical care and they basically become an incubator for multi-resistant bacterial strains that will eventually come back and bite you or somebody you care about. That's Karma bitches!
That's only true if you consider LiFePO4 different from lithium ion. Some of them have demonstrated 5000 cycles. Unfortunately they are more expensive and have about half the energy density of conventional Li-Ion cells. If they come down in price , or if their capacity can be boosted without making them more expensive, then they will be very real candidates for a practical EV.
Yep, and battery tech has improved steadily during the same time. The reduction in the sizes of mobile phones is to a large extent due to better battery tech. Black and decker has started selling batteries for their power tools that can recharge in minutes. The iPad would not have been possible with the batteries we had 10 years ago, and so on.
Yea, some of these advances never make it. Some only make it into niche applications ( Lithium sulfur is popular in model airplanes as an example ). However, it is not really in the same ballpark as with the typical hype about energy tech we see. New battery technology actually delivers, and we're starting to get close to practical electric vehicles because of it. There's even cells that are able to do the job , but the price has to come down a bit ( or the price of Oil must go up ).
Whenever I see a suggestion about using the immune system in some new and novel way I cannot help but get worried about autoimune side effects.
I guess it is a bit irrational since vaccinations are basically stimulating the immune system to hit specific pathogens, and most of them are very safe as compared to other drugs, but I can't help but feel a bit uneasy about training the body to attack its own cells.
>What could possibly go wrong and why am I reminded of the old proposal for liquid sodium cooled nuclear reactors in submarines?
Probably because you don't know that the reason such submarines were never built had fuck all to do with the sodium-water interaction, and was rather due to the navy's desire to standardise on one type of reactor, the PWR. Seriously, you're talking about a military that mixes RDX and HMX into the Nuclear Missile rocket fuel. They are unlikely to be deterred by sodium's flammability.
It doesn't. The tendency of Li-Ion cells to overheat is mostly due to the poor chemical stability of the Cobolt oxide used in them, and has very little to do with how much energy they can store. For a car analogy, consider building a car out of 90% dynamite, let it roll down a hill, and then when the breaks overheat and ignite the dynamite, you conclude the car blew up because fast moving objects have so much energy in them. If you instead built the car out of steel or aluminium, it could probably reach just as a high a speed, but it would not blow up from it. Similarly there are some novel lithium ion batteries with even higher capacities than the cobal oxide ones that you can even put a bullet through without them blowing up. They will cost you thou ...
That's because motive matters a lot in all criminal proceedings ( and rightly so ). Manslaughter is usually a crime you get when you do something wrong, and the consequence is that somebody dies, but you did not intend to cause such severe harm. In the case you linked two people got into an argument, one guy landed a punch, and unfortunately the guy who got hit fell from the punch and hit his head. Most people don't realize that a punch can be so dangerous, so throwing the book on the perpetrator is just stupid.
Another common situation where a manslaughter charge may be given is when you defend yourself but use excessive force to do so. Say you're outside late, somebody runs up to you from behind, you get scared and grab a nearby blunt object and hit the person to defend yourself. It then turns out that he was just trying to give you your wallet back that you dropped earlier, and your blow was severe enough to kill. That kind of situation could , depending on circumstances, land you a manslaughter conviction, but locking you up for many years would obviously not be appropriate.
You can't just compare individual cases without knowing the circumstances. We had a case in Sweden some time ago when an elderly couple had moved into a new house and found a marijuana plant left over by the previous tenants. They did not realise what it was, so they simply planted it in their front yard, and eventually police came asking them about it. Technically our law would have them guilty of growing and manufacturing an illegal drug, but fortunately this case was not handled by some insane twat, and hence there was no consequences beyond some questioning with a few amused officers.
A couple of things people seem to be getting wrong here.
1: We've already achieved "break-even" in tokamak reactors. However, in order for a power plant to be useful it must produce much more energy ( say 100 fold ) than you put in. Break even is not nearly enough.
2: You don't need ignition in a power plant. Ignition refers to the condition where the energy in the helium nuclei formed is enough to keep the plasma burning without any heating. This is not necessary in a power plant. It is sufficient that the amount of energy emitted by the plasma ( in the form of neutrons x-rays etc... ) is much greater than the energy you use heating it. Ignition is important if you are building a nuclear warhead. It is completely unnecessary , and probably undesirable , in a power plant.
3: At the moment the major issue for a fusion plant is not getting the fusion reaction to occur. That this can be done has been demonstrated many times. The difficulty is to keep it running smoothly for long time periods and finding materials to make the reactor from. The latter is particularly challenging since the best materials for coping with the heat and neutron radiation tend to be made from heavy nuclei that will mess up the plasma if even microscopic amounts of them are released from the reactor wall.
4: Building a plant that can be used to generate a lot of electricity is not the same as commercial viability. The latter requires that the energy can be generated at a reasonable cost. Since fusion reactors are much more difficult to build and maintain than a fission reactor it is not obvious that they will ever be financially viable within our lifetime.
5: The reason the time-line for building a working fusion power plant keeps getting pushed further into the future is at least in part due to the funding for the projects constantly being cut. Despite this, it is now pretty much clear that a workable fusion plant can be built. The uncertainty is if it can be made economically viable. This uncertainty is in part due to the materials problems. If neutron damage forces you to replace the reactor wall too frequently, the whole scheme quickly becomes prohibitively expensive.
6: There is no such things as neutron-free fusion. While helium-3 fusion is in theory neutron free, the products of the reaction involve nuclei that will easily cause other fusion reactions in the plasma, and these release neutrons. In addition, for any reaction other than deuterium-tritium or deuterium-deuterium , the energy losses due to x-rays are likely to greatly exceed the fusion yield, meaning D-T or maybe D-D fusion are the only viable candidates. The sun manages with just protons because the gravity ensures a sufficient density in the core that much of the radiation is re-absorbed by the plasma. It's vast size also means that it can produce a lot of energy with very slow reactions, a luxury we don't have on earth. I should note that this assumes that the plasma is somewhat neutral ( i.e contains electrons ), since it is the electrons that give rise to the x-ray losses. The problem is that for a plasma that does not contain electrons, the large collection of positive charges will make it almost impossible to achieve a sufficient density and energy confinement. Even at record breaking magnetic field strengths the confinement time necessary would have to be on the order of magnitude of several days in order to maker up for the abyssal number density. Yes, I know about polywell, and it's a load of snakeoil.
7: Thorium reactors are always mentioned in nuclear discussions. What is usually not mentioned is that if they are to operate on a thermal spectrum ( as is usually assumed since they don't really have any advantages in a fast spectrum ), then their doubling time is so long that you would have to start them up using traditional fuel. In practice this would likely imply reprocessed plutonium and recycling of the other actinides. Now if you are going to use reprocessed plutonium from spent fuel, then you are going to need fast reac
Actually it is suspected to have increased at similar rates before (as a result of cataclysmic volcanic activity messing up the permafrost ), and when it happened last time the majority of species alive on earth went extinct. Not the kinda thing you want to cause to happen if you can avoid it ...
Is this one of those things you would get practically automatically with ray-tracing? It seems to me that a z-buffer just isn't capable of adequately dealing with this kind of situation unless you actually want to sort the objects by depth for every single pixel.
Perhaps somebody in the know can enlighten me about this.
I see many fairly advanced features and functions in both the DX and OpenGL APIs , but I was under the impression that a modern graphics cards were basically designed to do a few fairly primitive operations very well and in parallel. So basically, how much of these APIs actually deal with interfacing the graphics card and it's hardware accelerated features, and how much of it is more along the lines of just a standard library that contains frequently used graphics algorithms?
Maybe my view of how programming is done these days is a bit naive, but I've always sort of felt there was a difference between the APIs that are there in order to let you use the hardware without mucking around with terribly low level and platform dependent stuff like interupts and so on, and on the other hand just standard libraries that is pretty much things where the code would be more or less the same on most platforms, but you just don't want to write it all over again whenever you make a new program ( things like some container class for C++ ).
My idea of what OpenGL and DirectX did was to let you access the features of the video card without having to worry about all the little differences between one card and another. So you could send the card a bunch of textures or something without having to rewrite the code for every card you wanted to run on.
Am I missing a lot here? Do the OpenGL and DirectX APIs also deal with a load of stuff that is just generally handy to have around when writing graphics programs?
I forgot to add that while plutonium is not very toxic, it is quite reactive and can be a fire hazard if stored inappropriately. In particular it can react with water to create some easily ignited compounds. For this reason it is best to store it in hermetically sealed containers, or as a compound that is less reactive ( such as plutonium oxide ). Nuclear bomb makers get around this problem by electro-plating the plutonium with less reactive metals.
You're wrong. Americium is a stronger alpha-emitter than both reactor and weapons grade plutonium. There are some exotic isotopes of plutonium used in space probes that are considerably more radioactive, but most plutonium produced in industry is a mix of Pu-239, Pu-240 and some Pu-241.
Both elements have similar biological properties, and only a very small fraction is absorbed by the body were you to eat it. As compared to many other radioisotopes ( such as radio-iodine or radium ) both Plutonium and Americium are relatively benign ( but by no means safe ). The greatest health risk is probably if you're exposed to dust of the elements, since the metal particles can then stick to your lungs, increasing the risk of cancer.
Btw, the toxicicty of plutonium is often greatly exaggerated in general media and movies. It is actually fairly safe compared to many things you can buy off the shelf (drain cleaner, insecticides, sulfuric acid , dishwasher powder , petrol etc ... ) . In general it is the fission waste products produced when nuclear fuel is burned that is responsible for the severe radioactivity of the waste. The fuel itself is fairly safe before it is exposed to neutron radiation. It's the stuff left over after you split the uranium/plutonium that you don't want to even look at without several metres of water in between you and it.
I work at a nuclear physics lab in Sweden, and you're very wrong. There's quite strict regulations on how you're allowed to handle radioactive and poisonous materials, and opening up smoke detectors to extract the americium might very well qualify.
Now I guess this may be one of those cases where the regulations have been carelessly written and hence only apply to people who received permission to use them, but in either case I certainly don't blame the police for intervening, especially seeing the guy in question seems completely clueless about what he is playing with. I'd expect them to react the same way if he was grinding up asbestos for some hobby project...
You don't need criticality in order to have nuclear reactions. Criticality just means the whole thing is self sustaining. You can however mix an alpha-emitter ( such as americium ) with beryllium, and the alpha-beryllium interactions would create neutrons that can split even depleted uranium.
With americium it's probably not too dangerous, but if he had gotten his hand on something like radium or polonium, then it would be reason to worry.
They would obviously have fixed it the moment somebody points it out. If somebody was daft enough to go to court over it. They'd basically say "yea, this was a mistake, we didn't notice it because nobody seems to have been bothered with it, so we don't think it really affected anybody. When we became aware of it we fixed it." If that kind of thing did not stand up in court you'd basically be liable every time you had a network problem. Now granted some countries have fucked up legal systems, but that is not the fault of the Emacs developers.
I can't predict the weather tomorrow, but I can certainly tell you that Sweden will get progressively colder over the coming 6 months than it is at present.
I wonder what would happen if you fed my stuff to this algorithm. I'm transsexual and hang out in very different environments depending on which of my friends I psend time with. It can range from LANs to baking parties. On the overall I'd say I'm a poor fit for both male and female stereotypes. It would also be fun to see what it would do with my lesbian friends, many of which are immense tomboys.
If the battery is transparent it should be able to lose heat more efficiently through infra-red radiation. This might in turn enable it to charge/discharge quicker.
Nonsense. In physics the entropy of a macro-state is defined in terms of a logarithm of the number of micro-sates that give the macro-state in question. For a system where the number of possible micro-states is large, and where any particular micro-state has comparable probability of occurring, then the most probably macro-state is one which is composed of a large number of micro-states.
The second law of thermodynamics essentially say that for large systems the probability that the system will spontaneously tend towards a macro-state with few micro-state is very small. As an example, if you take a box full of dice and shake it, it is very unlikely that they all come up with the same side up.
It so happens that you can demonstrate that every conservative force ( i.e all forces we know about including gravity ) obeys this basic principle
You don't happen to know why alkali metals are useful in a fast breeder?
Let me see:
Alkali metals don't corrode the structural materials in the reactor, unlike superheated water, salt or lead.
The coolant doesn't need to be pressurised, greatly reducing the risk of a leak.
The heat conductivity is superior to any other coolant, making it much easier to design a passive cooling system
The coolant is compatible with metal fuel. Metal fuel has much better heat conductivity than
the helium-ceramic type of fuel bundles used in most reactors, which aids in cooling. Metal fuel
is also MUCH easier to reprocess ( necessary for a breeding cycle ).
Unlike salt and lead, sodium alloys are liquid close to room temperature, making service, repair and standby operations much simpler.
Unlike salt and water, alkali coolants don't undergo radiolysis at any temperature.
The electrical conductivity in sodium is good enough that you can make electromagnetic pumps with no moving parts ( less risk of pump failure ).
The neutron spectrum with alkali coolants is quite hard, giving such a reactor excellent breeding and actinide burning potential.
So basically while the fire hazard is an issue for these reactors, there are numerous advantages with alkali metals that actually give a lot of safety advantages. Also, while a sodium fire would be bad, it's not exactly as if rupture of a pipe carrying superheated steam would be very benign either.