Average people do NOT actually like anything called a "computer".
To them "a computer" is something that they have to use, and which occasionally "craps out" on them for baffling reasons. In those cases they have to plead for help from eye-rolling snarky family members or pay lots of money for a semi-autistic 'tech' who may or may not fix it.
This is why the iPad is not a called a "Mac" even though it is.
"Windows" is a toxic brand to most people, somewhere between health insurance companies and the IRS.
This is also why Steve Ballmer is an idiot to name its phone operating system "Windows" anything. Now was the right time to prove that Microsoft can move beyond Windows; people would be more willing to look at it.
Fortunately for them they weren't foolish enough to call their Xbox say "Windows FunToy".
All that """"progress""""" arises from superior understanding of exotic fluid dynamics and radiative transfer, and not nuclear physics.
The high-burnup and yield of compact weapons come from fast fissioning of plain-old U-238. The trick is the implosion of the fusion/fission secondary and the high quality coupling from primary to secondary. It's much much cheaper and efficient to use fusion once you know the tricks to fission cheap depleted uranium.
Water + coolant = big ass explosion right next to big radioactive core.
The one advantage of water as a coolant is that if it leaks out --- which as we can see is not a trivial possibility --- you can always find more in an emergency. Which is what has been the case in Japan.
Suppose a plant with liquid flouride or sodium had been, say flooded with *water*?
"the two biggest advantages of the fast reactor design is that it requires no spent fuel pools and uses cooling systems that require no power to function"
Let's translate what this means. The core of the reactor will be VERY radioactive as it will have decay products from many more gigawatt hours---yes it will transmute quite a bit of these but do not underestimate just how hot it will be.
The cooling systems use molten sodium. It has the wee problem that it is explosive in contact with water. Say from a flood. Or if the building catches on fire. (and it's probably quite radioactive in itself simply from activation from the neutron flux). Or suppose there's a leak in the roof and it rains.
And it's right next to an extremely radioactive core. And if the explosion results in something cracking open......
One huge problem at Fukushima reactors was the unappreciated dangers of flooding, combined with the hydrogen explosions. These explosions damaged other important machinery and structures---you get a 'blunder chain reaction'.
Non breeder reactors, like every power reactor on the planet, also make plutonium.
For weapons you want only Pu-239 and not much Pu-240 or heavier nuclei which will cause problems in your weapons.
The only thing is that you take the fuel rods out early (uneconomically) if you want to make weapons.
In either case, the critical problem is cracking open the fuel rods and separating the plutonium from the very dangerous (if free) radioactive products. Reprocessing is the critical technology for weapons manufacturing, not 'breeder vs non breeder' reactor.
A high density of fast neutrons also makes the heavier actinides (that's how they get that way) which makes bomb making more difficult.
Quasi static deformations of spacetime have clearly observable consequences (gravitational lensing). Why do you believe that dynamic ones would be different?
Then there's the observed fact that pulsar frequencies decay slightly consistent with emission of gravitational radiation. I would not bet on it being some kind of kinematic illusion.
Can the car retailers and funeral homes borrow virtually unlimited quantities of money from the government at nearly zero interest rates?
The banking industry has a legal monopoly on the creation of money.
They can do this: Person or corporation X gets a loan. Banks increases an accumulator in a bank account, and puts a corresponding money owed in their database. Person X can withdraw money and use it for real world stuff and convince people to do things they want. Money, which is enforced by the government to be legal tender, was created.
If somebody else who is not a bank tries it, they are arrested and sent to prison.
A normal person---and all other businesses except banks---can only loan out 1x the money they own.
There are some limits set by the government, banks can only do it up to a mere 20, or 30 or 40 times their stockholder's investments.
These same banks who make really big profits use those same profits to convince the government to lower those restrictions and exempt more and more profit making activities from those regulations, even though just a few years ago their foolishness caused a major economic crisis affecting the world economy---but hardly impacting the personal wealth (just the accumulation rate, temporarily) of most of the people who caused it.
In a true "free market banking", the ``money'' that banks lend would never bee deemed to be legal tender unless it is stockholder's capital.
Of course he heard about pen names and handles, and was 100% aware of MySpace and a million other blogs and boards in 2003.
The crux of the matter is that Zuckerberg's customers Really Want To Know Your Real Name Because That Helps Them Make Lots Of Money. The Customer is always right. The neat trick was convincing 500 million FacebookFriends to use their real names, and emotional manipulation about authenticity and, initially, exclusivity, helped.
It's possible that the 'bully' may have been right. Nobody's job is the most important in the world.
A good manager would have explained the reasons why bending the rule may be necessary sometimes, and developed a plan to mitigate the problem and deal with it appropriately the next time around.
Good employees help too; you could have suggested that to the manager.
"something on the scale of a Davy Crockett [wikipedia.org] style device would be handled. It's a nuke, and it would place considerable destructive punch in the hands of quite light forces; but it is smaller than some perfectly-legal-and-above-board conventional explosives"
Which ones are those?
A B-52 has a payload capacity of 70,000 pounds, or 45 US tons. Supposing half of that is actual explosive. So a one Davy Crockett warhead is about a B-52 load. Plus the radiation, which for small nuclear weapons is substantially more dangerous than the blast.
The prompt radiation alone is pretty substantial:
"Both recoilless guns proved to have poor accuracy in testing, so the shell's greatest effect would have been its extreme radiation hazard. Even at a low yield setting, the M-388 would produce an almost instantly lethal radiation dosage (in excess of 10,000 rem) within 500 feet (150 m), and a probably fatal dose (around 600 rem) within a quarter mile (400 m).[3]
The CIOs dealing with thousands of seats requiring little more than Microsoft's suite, few easily ported business applications and a browser will appreciate that no application that their Windows users want (except Office, and the small number of official applications) will work on ARM Windows.
Lack of compatibility is a feature, not a bug.
Now they don't have to justify "why don't you let me install my XYZ" any more.
They just say "OK go ahead and try it" to their lusers, knowing that it won't work.
Those people with "mission critical legacy apps", well, they don't get new computers. Ever.
"First, in effective tax rates Warren Buffet certainly does NOT pay a smaller percentage of Federal Income taxes than his secretary. "
Ah yes, the convenient self-serving restriction to "Federal Income taxes"; favorite of deceptive propagandists.
Buffet isn't dishonest.
Add in FICA + Medicare --- both parts, the part which you see deducted from your paycheck and the part which you don't see deducted, state and local taxes, and Buffet is right.
"What I want is a macbook-quality laptop with no software, no restrictions, and no logos or any other identifiable marks. NOBODY is producing such a thing. Same thing with tablets. What is so hard about it? Just take the best touchscreen you can get, the best camera, the best mobo with a good processor and lots of ram and stick Honeycomb in that motherfucker. How hard can it be?"
To make, easy.
To sell, hard. Especially as at $1200 your no-name nerdBook looks just the same as some "Big Name" computer company's POS computer at $800.
Right. It was non-geeks who were getting PC's more frequently.
All normal people recognized how their PC's worked more slowly and with more glitches after a couple of years (mostly software malware & misconfiguration, but occasionally hardware failures).
Either they could harangue a relative or friend into semi-fixing it, or pay many hundreds in tech support, or they could buy a new shiny toy with a better processor & screen that works well out of the box. It was logical that they chose the last option frequently if they weren't poor.
They also noticed how their friends with Macs didn't do this. For a while, each new Mac OS X release was faster in typical use on the same hardware than previous versions. And they heard Vista was a dog.
"Alright kids, putting a drywall anchor in a wall and screwing in a coat hook ain't rocket science."
Other than taking a week to get back to you instead of a day, this 'kid' is actually smart.
I would go for it in my own house, but not in somebody else's office, particularly when (as in 99.9% of the time) the building isn't owned by the manager. In virtually any corporate environment the downside risk to not doing it right when it isn't your job (even if you think you know how) outweights the inefficiency of letting somebody whose job it is to do this do it (there is usually a facilities person from the company or building management) or letting somebody experienced take the blame for doing something nonstandard.
Your 'kid' has read Dilbert and has visions of HR marching him out sqawking "vandalism of premises".
You can always advertise for jobs such as "require IT skills X,Y and Z, and must have 1 year apprentice carpenter experience". Good luck with that.
If you didn't, it should not "really piss you off" any more than finding that your new hire does not actually know french.
Civilian nuclear plants are not optimized for the production of weapons grade plutonium. The most economically efficient way to produce power creates Pu-239 (the bomb stuff) and Pu-240, which will result in predetonation in an implosion nuclear weapon. (It is totally impractical to isotopically separate Pu-239 from Pu-240 because they're sufficiently radioactive)
However, if you remove the nuclear fuel in a civilian plant prematurely, such as what Iran is doing, then less of the Pu-239 being produced will be turned in to Pu-240 (just a small amount poisons the reactor). And it can be used to make weapons, though a purpose-designed plant to make weapons grade plutonium is more economically efficient (e.g. graphite instead of water moderated).
This premature removal of fuel rods (and likely reprocessing) along with Iran's other actions show a renewed committment to producing nuclear weaponry.
"How do you deal with cases like that network admin in California with a randomly selected group of people?
A randomly selected group of people aren't going to understand the nuances of some of the more specialized professions, like IT, unless you define "peers" very narrowly."
In San Francisco? You'll be able to find plenty of people who understand it in a trial. They'll definitely be weeded out. Prosecution wants the defendant to appear to be an unsympathetic obnoxious nerd.
Slashdot Mirror
Average people do NOT actually like anything called a "computer".
To them "a computer" is something that they have to use, and which occasionally "craps out" on them for baffling reasons. In those cases they have to plead for help from eye-rolling snarky family members or pay lots of money for a semi-autistic 'tech' who may or may not fix it.
This is why the iPad is not a called a "Mac" even though it is.
"Windows" is a toxic brand to most people, somewhere between health insurance companies and the IRS.
This is also why Steve Ballmer is an idiot to name its phone operating system "Windows" anything. Now was the right time to prove that Microsoft can move beyond Windows; people would be more willing to look at it.
Fortunately for them they weren't foolish enough to call their Xbox say "Windows FunToy".
All that """"progress""""" arises from superior understanding of exotic fluid dynamics and radiative transfer, and not nuclear physics.
The high-burnup and yield of compact weapons come from fast fissioning of plain-old U-238. The trick is the implosion of the fusion/fission secondary and the high quality coupling from primary to secondary. It's much much cheaper and efficient to use fusion once you know the tricks to fission cheap depleted uranium.
You could probably buy some RBMK reactors (Chernobyl style) for really really really cheap, but you'd have trouble finding insurance.
More seriously the modular factory-built reactors proposed by Babcock and Wilcox might be pretty good.
Water + coolant = big ass explosion right next to big radioactive core.
The one advantage of water as a coolant is that if it leaks out --- which as we can see is not a trivial possibility --- you can always find more in an emergency. Which is what has been the case in Japan.
Suppose a plant with liquid flouride or sodium had been, say flooded with *water*?
"the two biggest advantages of the fast reactor design is that it requires no spent fuel pools and uses cooling systems that require no power to function"
Let's translate what this means. The core of the reactor will be VERY radioactive as it will have decay products from many more gigawatt hours---yes it will transmute quite a bit of these but do not underestimate just how hot it will be.
The cooling systems use molten sodium. It has the wee problem that it is explosive in contact with water. Say from a flood. Or if the building catches on fire. (and it's probably quite radioactive in itself simply from activation from the neutron flux). Or suppose there's a leak in the roof and it rains.
And it's right next to an extremely radioactive core. And if the explosion results in something cracking open......
One huge problem at Fukushima reactors was the unappreciated dangers of flooding, combined with the hydrogen explosions. These explosions damaged other important machinery and structures---you get a 'blunder chain reaction'.
See some other comments about the TWR
http://theenergycollective.com/barrybrook/43928/terrapower%E2%80%99s-travelling-wave-reactor-%E2%80%93-why-not-use-ifr
Non breeder reactors, like every power reactor on the planet, also make plutonium.
For weapons you want only Pu-239 and not much Pu-240 or heavier nuclei which will cause problems in your weapons.
The only thing is that you take the fuel rods out early (uneconomically) if you want to make weapons.
In either case, the critical problem is cracking open the fuel rods and separating the plutonium from the very dangerous (if free) radioactive products. Reprocessing is the critical technology for weapons manufacturing, not 'breeder vs non breeder' reactor.
A high density of fast neutrons also makes the heavier actinides (that's how they get that way) which makes bomb making more difficult.
Quasi static deformations of spacetime have clearly observable consequences (gravitational lensing).
Why do you believe that dynamic ones would be different?
Then there's the observed fact that pulsar frequencies decay slightly consistent with emission of gravitational radiation. I would not bet on it being some kind of kinematic illusion.
Can the car retailers and funeral homes borrow virtually unlimited quantities of money from the government at nearly zero interest rates?
The banking industry has a legal monopoly on the creation of money.
They can do this: Person or corporation X gets a loan. Banks increases an accumulator in a bank account, and puts a corresponding money owed in their database. Person X can withdraw money and use it for real world stuff and convince people to do things they want. Money, which is enforced by the government to be legal tender, was created.
If somebody else who is not a bank tries it, they are arrested and sent to prison.
A normal person---and all other businesses except banks---can only loan out 1x the money they own.
There are some limits set by the government, banks can only do it up to a mere 20, or 30 or 40 times their stockholder's investments.
These same banks who make really big profits use those same profits to convince the government to lower those restrictions and exempt more and more profit making activities from those regulations, even though just a few years ago their foolishness caused a major economic crisis affecting the world economy---but hardly impacting the personal wealth (just the accumulation rate, temporarily) of most of the people who caused it.
In a true "free market banking", the ``money'' that banks lend would never bee deemed to be legal tender unless it is stockholder's capital.
"So wait, all that money people deposit over the counter isn't in a vault? Clearly I should have gone into banking rather than IT."
fixed that for you. -
There was a 7.0 earthquake in CA last Easter. The biggest damage was in Mexicali, MX.
Larry WANTS to destroy the brand.
There's little doubt this is irrational control-freakery from the largest shareholder.
Praise the Lord. Let us give thanks, and generous tax-deductible contributions to Supply Side Jesus
Fundamentalism, like Fascism, is indistinguishable from any parody thereof.
Of course he heard about pen names and handles, and was 100% aware of MySpace and a million other blogs and boards in 2003.
The crux of the matter is that Zuckerberg's customers Really Want To Know Your Real Name Because That Helps Them Make Lots Of Money. The Customer is always right. The neat trick was convincing 500 million FacebookFriends to use their real names, and emotional manipulation about authenticity and, initially, exclusivity, helped.
It's possible that the 'bully' may have been right. Nobody's job is the most important in the world.
A good manager would have explained the reasons why bending the rule may be necessary sometimes, and developed a plan to mitigate the problem and deal with it appropriately the next time around.
Good employees help too; you could have suggested that to the manager.
I'll take "juvenile jokesters" any day over "juvenile and tendentiously manipulative propaganda-thumping apes"
"Apes don't read philosophy!"
"Yes they do, Otto, they just don't understand it."
"something on the scale of a Davy Crockett [wikipedia.org] style device would be handled. It's a nuke, and it would place considerable destructive punch in the hands of quite light forces; but it is smaller than some perfectly-legal-and-above-board conventional explosives"
Which ones are those?
A B-52 has a payload capacity of 70,000 pounds, or 45 US tons. Supposing half of that is actual explosive. So a one Davy Crockett warhead is about a B-52 load. Plus the radiation, which for small nuclear weapons is substantially more dangerous than the blast.
The prompt radiation alone is pretty substantial:
"Both recoilless guns proved to have poor accuracy in testing, so the shell's greatest effect would have been its extreme radiation hazard. Even at a low yield setting, the M-388 would produce an almost instantly lethal radiation dosage (in excess of 10,000 rem) within 500 feet (150 m), and a probably fatal dose (around 600 rem) within a quarter mile (400 m).[3]
The CIOs dealing with thousands of seats requiring little more than Microsoft's suite, few easily ported business applications and a browser will appreciate that no application that their Windows users want (except Office, and the small number of official applications) will work on ARM Windows.
Lack of compatibility is a feature, not a bug.
Now they don't have to justify "why don't you let me install my XYZ" any more.
They just say "OK go ahead and try it" to their lusers, knowing that it won't work.
Those people with "mission critical legacy apps", well, they don't get new computers. Ever.
"First, in effective tax rates Warren Buffet certainly does NOT pay a smaller percentage of Federal Income taxes than his secretary. "
Ah yes, the convenient self-serving restriction to "Federal Income taxes"; favorite of deceptive propagandists.
Buffet isn't dishonest.
Add in FICA + Medicare --- both parts, the part which you see deducted from your paycheck and the part which you don't see deducted, state and local taxes, and Buffet is right.
"What I want is a macbook-quality laptop with no software, no restrictions, and no logos or any other identifiable marks. NOBODY is producing such a thing. Same thing with tablets. What is so hard about it? Just take the best touchscreen you can get, the best camera, the best mobo with a good processor and lots of ram and stick Honeycomb in that motherfucker. How hard can it be?"
To make, easy.
To sell, hard. Especially as at $1200 your no-name nerdBook looks just the same as some "Big Name" computer company's POS computer at $800.
Right. It was non-geeks who were getting PC's more frequently.
All normal people recognized how their PC's worked more slowly and with more glitches after a couple of years (mostly software malware & misconfiguration, but occasionally hardware failures).
Either they could harangue a relative or friend into semi-fixing it, or pay many hundreds in tech support, or they could buy a new shiny toy with a better processor & screen that works well out of the box. It was logical that they chose the last option frequently if they weren't poor.
They also noticed how their friends with Macs didn't do this. For a while, each new Mac OS X release was faster in typical use on the same hardware than previous versions. And they heard Vista was a dog.
"Alright kids, putting a drywall anchor in a wall and screwing in a coat hook ain't rocket science."
Other than taking a week to get back to you instead of a day, this 'kid' is actually smart.
I would go for it in my own house, but not in somebody else's office, particularly when (as in 99.9% of the time) the building isn't owned by the manager.
In virtually any corporate environment the downside risk to not doing it right when it isn't your job (even if you think you know how) outweights the inefficiency of letting somebody whose job it is to do this do it (there is usually a facilities person from the company or building management) or letting somebody experienced take the blame for doing something nonstandard.
Your 'kid' has read Dilbert and has visions of HR marching him out sqawking "vandalism of premises".
You can always advertise for jobs such as "require IT skills X,Y and Z, and must have 1 year apprentice carpenter experience". Good luck with that.
If you didn't, it should not "really piss you off" any more than finding that your new hire does not actually know french.
Civilian nuclear plants are not optimized for the production of weapons grade plutonium. The most economically efficient way to produce power creates Pu-239 (the bomb stuff) and Pu-240, which will result in predetonation in an implosion nuclear weapon. (It is totally impractical to isotopically separate Pu-239 from Pu-240 because they're sufficiently radioactive)
However, if you remove the nuclear fuel in a civilian plant prematurely, such as what Iran is doing, then less of the Pu-239 being produced will be turned in to Pu-240 (just a small amount poisons the reactor). And it can be used to make weapons, though a purpose-designed plant to make weapons grade plutonium is more economically efficient (e.g. graphite instead of water moderated).
This premature removal of fuel rods (and likely reprocessing) along with Iran's other actions show a renewed committment to producing nuclear weaponry.
"If I didn't agree with the law, I would not convict. If the jury instructions conflicted with my reading of the law, I would not convict."
It's not the jury's place to decide the law actually.
"How do you deal with cases like that network admin in California with a randomly selected group of people?
A randomly selected group of people aren't going to understand the nuances of some of the more specialized professions, like IT, unless you define "peers" very narrowly."
In San Francisco? You'll be able to find plenty of people who understand it in a trial. They'll definitely be weeded out.
Prosecution wants the defendant to appear to be an unsympathetic obnoxious nerd.