Posts by umacf24179 posts • joined Thursday 7th June 2007 06:27 GMT
I can't imagine why they needed to put the private key in in the first place. The private key should stay with the signer. Is every Yahoo developer given a copy?
Something that I agree with Ahmedinajad about. They'll be anonymising the English Channel next!
Transport speeds were static until the steamship and the railway. The world of ORBIS is very similar to the world of Pickwick Papers. Even the C18th turnpikes only brought land speeds back up to Roman levels.
I do sometimes wonder what the world would be like if the Romans had invented the limited liability joint stock company.
That is a truly excellent list and thay all of apply to me (though not necessarily while I'm actually driving, and the heels were a LONG time ago) and I have a licence to drive a car completely unsupervised by a computer or anything else. Really, if that doesn't terrify you, it should.
The way to look at this is to imagine how we will feel in fifty years time about the selfish fucks who endanger everyone by driving their cars in manual on the PUBLIC HIGHWAY FFS! And if you think that an automatic system can't really drive, you've obviously never completed a routine journey and found that you've got no memory at all of the last hour...
Personally I can't wait. If I'm travelling, I want to read or sleep, not jiggle knobs and levers.
Now THAT'S an on-line presentation tool!
I've been helicopter parenting around the OCR GCSE Maths.
The content of the course is excellent, though obviously different to what I remember from O level. I certainly don't miss logarithms, and the extra statistics/data is much more use. But the exams really don't go anywhere near the level of the course. If you want an 'A' you have to get pretty much everything correct, as there aren't any tougher, high-mark questions. And you have to get an 'A' as decent sixth-forms discount everything else!
We often hear that the teaching has improved. Well, I don't remember bad teaching but I do remember (1976) absolutely shocking textbooks. The "official" textbook for OCR was a revelation, and things like a matching revision guide will inevitably mean that any willing child will be much better prepared for the exam than we ever were.
So, good news on the whole, but I wish that the exam would separate out the candidates more. But don't get me started on number-free physics....
He's a bot!
I hope they send up replacement solar cells for Sprit and Opportunity. Still a long way to go though.
I call that thesaurus abuse. Wanton thesaurus abuse, in fact.
Billions of more-or-less earthy worlds. Zero artificial-like signals. Fermi's paradox: Where ARE they? Either:
a) We're really special -- one of a very small number of worlds that grow a civilisation, or
b) Civilisations don't survive.
I don't believe a) and I really dislike b).
I think this makes the point better than the original article.
Nice. Like catching the neutrons in little nets.
This is fascnating but one point with fusion reactors that never seems to be addressed is how to get the energy into electricity generation. A laser chamber seems to be even worse at this than the magnetic confinement systems we've played with since the fifties.
The reaction is inside what amounts to a huge vacuum tube so it won't convect out. You could let the radiance make the enclosure hot enough to allow decent thermodynamic efficiency but at the same time you have to keep the laser objectives or superconducting coils cool and stable.
Some sort of MHD generation might be a runner, but the fusion reactions that get discussed yield high proportions -- like 80% -- of the energy in fast neutrons, and neutrons don't play the magnetic game.
The only really practical means I can see is to line the chamber with depleted uranium and let the neutrons breed plutonium and other transuranics to fuel fission reactors. But that seems a bit of a palaver compared with running a fast breeder fission reactor directly. I'm flummoxed.
Many of the grosser and more extreme techies that read the Reg are dinosaurs.
HTML, I know. But I never heard of BBCode or the others until I read the story...
How much more efficient than a willow or miscanthus plantation does this have to be before it makes sense? Is there any hope that it will be? More efficient than PV with car-battery buffering?
Regardless of technical approach -- from biomass up -- the problem with solar energy is that it has to be physically huge (like 2 or 10% of UK's land area, truly impossible numbers) to make sense in the context of national energy demand. This lovely thing can't change the depressing physics of turning visible quanta into usable energy.
Nor is the limited automotive solar/hydrogen concept a runner. It's kept alive by corporate and personal dreamers who want to stick with combustion engines for cars while still sounding green. This research is brilliant -- just imagine a catalytic substrate built like this -- but solar hydrogen isn't.
Could you have the preview display all text after about 150 words struck through with a note: "You do realise no-one is going to read this?"
Or you could do all long comments in green, to reflect the madness...
I was alive in the sixties (SE England). We used to have cool wet summers and cold (but not frozen) wet winters. Now we have cool dry summers and freezing dry winters. It's still all fields around here, but they're brown now.
I am concerned about the risks of a man-in-the-middle attack.
Kerckhoffs' second principle.
"With respect to personal data received from the EU, please state that you comply with these principles: ...."
"Thank you. You are now enrolled in the Safe Harbor scheme."
And that's pretty much it. No audit -- no oversight at all. Nothing for customers to inspect. And even though it's that easy there are operations claiming to be on the Safe Harbor list when they are not (not hard to check, though).
I can't see a way for Safe Harbor to be a wise basis for firms to export PID from the EU, regardless of what the EC says. I think a SOC2 type II with a clear and explicit listing of GAPP controls might actually do better. In an outsourcing context where the data has already been properly consented, and there are explicit contract provisions preventing disclosure, GAPP may be good enough.
Because the RTGs that power them are fuelled with Pu238, and they're not making it any more. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30621668/ns/technology_and_science-space/t/fuel-deep-space-exploration-running-low/
I blame our idiotic attitude to nuclear technology.
Authorised people looking at data they shouldn't is not really a security problem. Provided the access logs were in good shape I'd say the security team were pretty much in the clear. The app designers might have some questions to answer about granularity of access control.
Ideally there'd be an alert for accessing non-current patient records, but that sort of control can be frustrated by all sorts of organisational issues, poor identity management etc, and it's sadly not that common.
I don't see anyone getting sacked for this. I can imagine someone getting budget for more sophisticated log monitoring.
This reminds me of the toxoplasma story from the Economist last year explaining that the French are mad because they eat cat shit (I paraphrase, you understand.) Some of my favourite science ever.
http://www.economist.com/node/16271339 (Last para but one)
What's the point of a .co.uk site if you're going to write in US euphemisms? Sounds like he was sacked.
If the insurers want this, it'll happen in a few years, at least in the States. If they don't, it'll never happen in a million. I guess the key will be the quality -- for a court -- of the "explanation" that the system can give for its choices. That has been the great failing of blackboard expert systems like Watson in the past.
There will still be plenty of room for medical incompetence though, and Watsonesque systems will increase the percentage of incompetence that has its arse well covered: "I followed the 80% recommendation."
Control Technology was CSE. Totally my favourite subject, but looked down on because I was supposed to be doing O levels.
Everyone owns a copy of the key -- or at least everyone with HDCP equipment. The key is in the displays as well.
So one way of getting it would be to break into the tamper-proof hardware where key origination is done.
Miind you, protecting a secret with licence agreements with multiple players, multiple jurisdictions and (of course) multiple employees, is totally for the birds.
The chemistry is certainly daunting, though you didn't mention the bit which sets my teeth on edge which is fluorination to "bubble off" UF6!
Two-salt designs mean that you are not dealing with fission products in the breeder circuit. Thorium is cheap enough that simply abstracting the entire irradiated breeder salt might be simpler than attempting to do anything useful to the protoactinium.
(And apropos of nothing, fission-product Xenon can bubble straight out of a liquid core, which saves neutrons but results in a less satisfactory waste product -- swings and roundabouts. I don't know much about iodine fluorides but I imagine that they do something simlar too. Liquid core win!)
My personal view is that liquid core reactors are well worth a look, as I suspect that passive cooling is going to be an essential part of the safety story for public acceptance, and if you want a large high power core to cool passively, changing its shape is a believable approach. Thorium cycle breeding is much more of a challenge: one neutron to continue the reaction, one to breed and 0.5 or so to cover all losses seems tight to me. But the potential payoff is so colossal that I would like to see it get its best shot, and that's online reprocessing...
Crunchfund may be an investor, but this feels like the NSA will be the infrastructure provider! *Adjusts aluminium foil skullcap*
Thorium/U233 cycle is a breeder cycle, and like all breeders there's a requirement for timely chemical processing of the reactor core.
Thorium is more dependent on this than the U238/Pu breeder cycle because thorium involves an intermediate which can be poisoned by neutrons if it remains within the core. Conventional reprocessing of solid fuel can work for U238/Pu, but the Indian design of solid thorium oxide in among the fuel is, apparently, too hard.
So the approach that's being talked about now is an old reactor design where the nuclear materials are disolved as fluoride salts in molten lighter fluorides. The core is just a cauldron of the molten salts with a moderator, and the same material fills the primary coolant loop.
This approach has a number of intrinsic safety features as the core can swell out of the moderator (and thus throttle down) when it gets too hot and can flow into subritical, cooling efficient shapes to shutdown with passive cooling. And because it's not using water it's not pressurised, so it won't explode in the TMI/Fukushima style.
But breeder designs benefit from liquid core for a different reason. Liquid chemistry is easier than the engineering needed to open up fuel rods and dissolve them in nitric acid. The re-processing can be done conveniently at the plant, little and often, without shipping rods and radioactive stuff all over the country. I'm guessing that a liquid core is required to make thorium/U233 practical.
So this one approach offers:
- The huge waste reduction and fuel efficiency of breeders
- Passive walkaway safety of liquid core
- And, as a bonus, it'll run at temperatures that can run efficient air-cooled gas turbines, so they can be built on small sites inland.
You can find any amount of stuff. Google "LFTR" or "MSR Thorium" to find stuff from enthusiasts like Kirk Sorenson (who was in London last week BTW).
I'd hire her for audit on that basis alone!
these mass ejections ... it's not ... well ... braking ...
Solid core reactors can't do peak power because the core has to be quite tightly managed.
Liquid core designs running at high temperatures to drive gas turbines are much better at load following.
Don't think so. Magnox ran on natural uranium, but the later gas-cooled designs use a stainless-steel fuel can, which eats neutrons, so they require enriched fuel.
IIRC Magnox and AGR both require powered cooling after shutdown. The merit over water cooled/moderated reactors is that the coolant won't boil dry.
This is a potential win for liquid fuel reactors with on-line reprocessing.
Depending on the fuel mix and the eagerness of the on-line reprocessing, a lot of the Pu recovered would be 238. In a solid fuel reactor, the 238 still forms, but by the time reprocessing can get at it, it's been joined by fissile Pu isotopes and chemical separation won't work.
If you want something above mildly warm, put them outdoors in the shed and use as the cool end of a heat pump.
Another advantage of Outside is that provided MS are still willing to pay the electric bill, they can run in summer without cooking the house.
(I don't like that word "denial" -- it's working too hard to smear people with a different opinion by borrowing from another sort of denial.)
... anyway, even if you don't mind about CO2 at all, you still care, presumably, that tax shouldn't reduce economic efficiency. And on that basis, carbon taxes do OK -- not as good as VAT, perhaps, but a lot better than income tax. Carbon atoms are easy to count, hard to hide and handled in bulk -- pretty much the ideal tax base (perhaps it would be better if they could put a "duty paid" sticker on each one, but you can't have everything.) You could regard CO2 reductions as a benign side effect.
!
Do they have guns?
dl.google.com -- where the installer comes from -- is categorised as "Software Download" in our webfilter services, and appsense won't let the users run it anyway.
*complacently strokes persian cat*
I had never heard of him before Savage's campaign; I suspect he's only able to run now because of that publicity boost. Even if it as "the anal sex guy".
Generation ships have serious moral problems. Anyone with a teenage child will know this: imagine "I didn't ask to be born" but in a situation where the child will spend her entire life in a metal bubble, with her social and breeding opportunities all pretty much fixed from birth. Ugly.
The reprocessing implicit in a pure thorium fuel cycle means that the waste is "just" fission products. About 2 tonnes per gW-year; maybe about 300 kg to go to 300-year storage if you were willing to reprocess. Natural uranium reactors produce transuranics like americium, curium (and plutonium, of course) in much greater quantities and that's why traditional nuclear waste is a 10,000-year worry with much greater volumes. Fission products tend to be wildly unstable, which by shortening their half lives makes them actually easier to manage than the transuranics, and that's a huge advantage for breeder/reprocessing.
Compare that 300 kg with the megatonnes of CO2 -- every year -- from an equivalent coal burner with carbon sequestration, and remember that THAT waste has to be kept out of circulation for ever.
The same thing means that this example 1gW plant is using one or two tonnes of thorium a year compared to 200 tonnes of natural uranium. It's not an uncommon metal, it's found all over the world including the UK, and security of supply is much less of an issue than uranium. It really is worth a look, but it needs the right reactor technology to make the reprocessing work.
I would take out a contract on Lewis Page.
The idea of every serious facility generating its own power on site is a nightmare. Imagine if you couldn't go into business without a plan to supply all your energy from renewable sources! Pharma firms are even more shameless liars than the nuke industry, so Pfizer need all the cosy PR they can get, but don't imagine that Freiburg is a model for business in general.
The point about business is a serious one. In fact, many businesses do generate the vast bulk of their energy on site -- by burning coal or gas. The issue with windmills is not whether they can deliver the ten GW or so that might make a difference to the national grid at current loads, but whether they'll have any relevance at all when we demand that brick kilns or cement works or blast furnaces chose carbon sequestration or low carbon electricty. (And if we have any integrity at all, we'll be making the same demand whether the bricks are made here or abroad.)
I'm with the other commentators on this story who say that if you actually do the numbers, and if you believe that the economy needs reliable energy at 10p/kWH instead of 50 then nuclear is necessary. And, I would add that a lot of that nuclear needs to be generating process heat (for the brickworks, say, or fischer tropf), which means that we need to do something now about molten salt or liquid metal cooled designs. (For my unsophisticated pick, google molten salt thorium and see what you think.)
I worry a little about nuclear waste but I worry more about the vastly greater quantities of CO2 from carbon sequestration: radioactive poisons decay and are really only a worry to people, but CO2 -- bubbling and leaking wherever we try and put it -- retains the capacity to wreck the climate for ever.
Interesting that this seems to be designed to provoke a WTO free trade complaint from the US government....
If you are the sort of tinfoil-hat loony who actually cares about this sort of thing, you should have a hardware firewall between your network and the BT-managed home hub.
Like I do.
Ready to fuel. Or not.
Finally -- being able to use a car and read a book. This might actually tempt me to emigrate!
TUPE can force an outsource choice to be offshore, simply because if the jobs go to India, TUPE doesn't apply and the price goes down further.
I've benefitted from TUPE and I'm not against it, but I can see some benefits if the new employer was able to buy out TUPE obligations (or even continuity of employment generally) under mandated terms -- maybe redundo under the old Ts&Cs (with a government floor) would cover it.
Jobs feel like property, and rational employers can motivate employees by acting as if they were, but they're not and the're a limit to the extent that the state should join in the pretence. We all need to move on from the idea that employers are our friends -- they are contract counterparties, and that's really all.
