Posts by Bilby 78 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Feb 2009
I hope the ISS astronauts are big fans of cheese; if not, SpaceX really ought to consider sending some other foodstuffs as well in their supply runs.
At the very least, they should send up some crackers on the next Progress or ATV delivery, to tide them over until the Dragon capsule can be qualified as 'biscuit rated'.
The Brits were successfully invaded by the Dutch in 1688.
You may not have heard about this, as it is classified above TOP SECRET; in fact it is part of a large body of information so sensitive that HM Government has given it a TAUGHT IN SCHOOLS classification. TOP SECRET is only for those with a 'need to know', but with TAUGHT IN SCHOOLS material, most people don't even have a 'want to know'.
If the very low levels of radiation exposure above background currently seen in Tokyo were as dangerous as some media outlets and pressure groups are suggesting, then Belarus, Ukraine, Finland, Sweden and the north and west of the British Isles would be a derelict wasteland piled with corpses. This is not the case (apart from Liverpool), so observational evidence in the 30 odd years since Chernobyl tells us that the effects of low level exposure to radio-caesium or radio-iodine are just not that big a deal.
Wow - They found Plutonium 238 in Japan!
This would be the stuff with the half-life of around 88 years, that is a by-product of Plutonium 239 production from Uranium 238, right? It must be coming from the leaking reactors, because no-one would have let a big lump of Plutonium, (presumably still mixed with fairly large quantities of various impurities) explode in an air-burst above a Japanese city at any time in the past 88 years, spreading bits of itself far and wide would they?
Oh, hang on, what is the name of that place that begins with a 'N'?
FFS.
The following program is rated 'I', for an immature audience. It may contain celebrity chefs, apparently ordinary people placed in unusual situations, or C grade talent degrading themselves for your titillation. This content is not recommended for viewing by persons over the age of 15, unless accompanied by a child.
The following program is rated 'EA', for excessive advertising. It may contain long commercial breaks, short program segments, or mindless advertorials masquerading as real content. This program is not recommended for viewers who have retained the capacity for rational thought.
"...may I suggest that plants which are built near natural bodies of water have reactor cores and cooling ponds located below the water level so that in an emergency, water can be dumped in by gravity."
If these ponds were below sea level, the tsunami would have scattered their contents over a wide area, which would render subsequent re-filling of the pools with water irrelevant.
Putting the pools on top of the solidly built containment structure does at least protect them from tsunamis.
Please can we put an end to this pointless slur. Sellafield is the BNFL site housing the Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant; the Calder Hall Magnox Power Plant, and the Windscale Plutonium Plant.
It was always called Sellafield; no one changed the name.
Windscale was (and still is) a part of the Sellafield site. It gets mentioned very little in the news these days, as it has not been operational since the fire. It was a reactor for making Plutonium for the UK Nuclear Weapons program, it has never been in any way related to nuclear power generation.
Next door to Windscale on the same site is the Calder Hall power station, which was the worlds first commercial nuclear power station. It ran for several decades with no newsworthy incidents, and is now being decommissioned as it has reached the end of its life.
Still on the same site is THORP, which is the currently active part of the Sellafield family. Here, spent fuel from around the world is cooled, stripped, and reprocessed into new fuel. Again, little attention has been paid to this site by the front pages, as rather tediously, they keep not having serious accidents.
Sellafield is the place, Calder Hall and Windscale are the names of two farms that were purchased by BNFL to build their facilities on.
Windscale is the bit of the facility that had a big accident, that has given the greenies something to frighten their kids with for over 50 years; it was a very early reactor with a number of design flaws, built to make atom bombs at the height of the cold war. But as it is no longer doing anything, no-one refers to it much. Sellafield however is still an active BNFL facility, and it is 100% wrong to call Sellafield 'Windscale', or to say that anyone changed the name.
"Uranium ore has to be mined too, and that predominantly occurs in astoundingly corrupt dictatorships that don't give a flying fuck about the safety of their workforce."
Like Australia.
Of course, coal is mostly mined in more enlightened places, like China.
I hear that Germany has responded to the situation in Japan by shutting down nuclear power plants pending 'safety inspections'. Given that the necessary increase in coal burning to make up the shortfall will lead to a net increase in the radiation exposure of German citizens, this seems like a remarkably stupid response.
Hopefully the safety review will go something like - "Are we near a subduction fault?" "No" "Check - Start her up again boys".
"If there were no nuclear plant story the media would be very bored with the plain 'quake and tsunami cleanup efforts, don't you think?"
I presume the cleanup hasn't finished in Christchurch, but the news media here in Australia have apparently forgotten all about their earthquake. Perhaps NZ should have invested in a couple of nuclear power stations to keep the media spotlight on their recovery effort.
We aren't. This nation, founded as a prison, has rules for EVERYTHING. If it isn't mandatory, it is forbidden. That is because the entire Govt since the first fleet has been based on the idea that they are running a jail first, and a nation second.
Fortunately the nation founded by felons (a subset of the one founded as a prison) are NOT 'wussies', and we simply ignore and/or ridicule our Govt, and get on with surfing, BBQs and footy in the sunshine.
If you study Australian Federal and State Law, you will see that we have a totalitarian system. If, on the other hand, you get off your arse, and on a plane, and come and have a look, you will find that (unlike the Poms and the Seppos) we treat the law with the disdain it deserves, and have a bloody good time instead of worrying about the wowsers in Parliament and their crazy schemes to save us from ourselves.
Beer icon, 'cos XXXX does not indicate censorship...
From the Secret Scotland site... "one very strange anomaly; both the male and female toilets have a urinal."
Given the facility was built in the '50s, it seems likely that they didn't put in a female toilet at all. There would have been two toilets; one for the officers, the other for the lesser ranks.
It is plausible that, at a later date, the two facilities may have been re-badged as male and female, but no-one bothered re-plumbing.
Lots of military facilities have two or even three male toilets (officers, NCOs, other ranks), plus one, two or three female, depending on the space available and the number of each sex expected to be stationed at the place.
"The airplane will use 20 percent less fuel for comparable missions than today's similarly sized airplane."
Sounds to me like Boeing have been hanging around USAF and NASA for too long. Commercial aircraft are used for 'Flights' or 'Services', but surely not 'Missions'.
BTW, it is an aeroplane, not an airplane; and the comparison is with a range of other systems, so the last word in the sentence should be plural, not singular (I suggest the word 'aircraft' might be appropriate). Also, as the damn thing is meant to fly today, they should have referred to 'previous' rather than 'today's'. Also... Oh stuff it, trying to teach 'Merkins to speak English is just a waste of time and effort.
I am an Australian citizen. On arrival in Dublin on a flight from Manchester, I found that of the five or six plane-loads of passengers waiting to go through customs, I was the ONLY person qualified to use the 'Non-EU Passport holders' lane in customs.
The very bored, but very friendly, Irish Customs official looked quite surprised to see me, and was expecting to have to turn me back, as he assumed I was an EU-Passport holding idiot who had gone to the wrong place; he was very happy to have something to do to relieve his boredom.
I have never passed through a busy airport at peak hour so fast; Judging by the length of the queues in the arrivals hall, my fellow passengers were still lining up to get into the country when I had driven into the city, checked in to my hotel, and was sitting in a pub drinking a pint Guinness.
"How long before the enemy/criminals have the plans?"
If the plan is to use expendable pilotless drones to deliver this weapon, not long at all.
IIRC during WWII the use of microwave radar sets in aircraft that flew over enemy occupied territory was forbidden for a long, long time, as the magnetrons were virtually indestructible, and any aircraft that failed to make it home was likely to gift the technology to the Germans, even if not much else on the plane survived.
As the centimetric radar was being put to excellent effect in the battle against the U-boats in the North Atlantic, the Royal Navy (and RAF Costal Command) were dead set against letting Bomber Command fit them in their Lancasters, as the Germans would be able to work out why their subs were suddenly vulnerable to aircraft when charging their batteries by snorkel at night (the snorkel and periscope were far too small to be picked up by conventional RADAR, and were practically impossible to see by Mark I Eyeball even in good daylight conditions).
Once the bombers were given the sets, which proved an invaluable navigation and bomb-aiming aid, they were codenamed H2S, because "it stinks that we were not allowed them sooner".
I don't know if the design is much more 'fragile' when made from Mu-metal than it was with the old copper magnetrons, but if they are not, I doubt that they are going to be totally destroyed in a crash, even if a fairly large demolition charge is provided for the purpose.
... when someone can seriously make a statement like this:
"Some of the Localsearch quality folks recently launched a shiny new algorithm for exactly this purpose. I was really psyched, because a bunch of duplicate businesses got consolidated properly after this change. However, I've been seeing some user feedback in the forum about businesses that are still being lumped together improperly, so it looks like the algorithm needs tinkering. The team is now working on a fix that aims to solve this problem for the users who are hurting, without taking a step backward in terms of our overall quality."
in a business context, without getting laughed out of town.
Is she addressing an audience of retarded three-to-five year olds?
This is the consequence of the collapse of the education system. It is too late to fix it; those kids who left school without a proper education are now the managers making the decisions.
I think she meant:
"We have fixed some flaws in the Localsearch algorithm, and it is now better, but still not perfect. We can see from the continuing complaints that several people are still unhappy, so we are trying to improve the algorithm further. However it is important that we avoid causing new problems while attempting to solve the existing ones"
This is how a grown-up would say the same thing. If I wanted to be talked to as if I was being patronized by a ditsy teenager, I would go and find one.
"Obviously the more time a talented worker spends working the greater the contributions they will make, hence higher rewards. I had hoped that would have been obvious, and I wouldn't have to spell it out. Apparently not."
This is, in fact, not only not obvious, but totally incorrect.
The best workers (Particularly on IT helpdesks) are the ones who quickly resolve a problem, and are free to move on to the next. The best people can be more effective in two hours than a typical worker is in eight, and than a poor worker is in twelve.
You correctly note that those who put in a twelve hour day are more likely to be promoted than those who put in four or five hours of actual work, spend three or four hours a day drinking coffee and surfing el Reg, and piss off home on time (or even early).
My team of five consists of four people who are good at their jobs, and who go home on time (except during genuine emergencies); plus one who, through their own incompetence, has to work back two or three hours every day, despite having less workload than the rest (because when we finish our work, we help with theirs).
Who will get the promotion? Who SHOULD get the promotion?
Your assessment of the way in which promotions are assigned is touchingly naive, and would no doubt be lovely in an ideal world. Unfortunately the world is much less than ideal, precisely because it is full of fools who actually believe this kind of bullshit - and even think that it is 'obvious'
Any password that is difficult (much less impossible) to remember is NOT immensely strong, it is inherently immensely weak.
If users cannot remember their passwords, they will write them down, somewhere totally inappropriate and insecure. Attempting to prevent this behaviour by inducements, punishments, threats, explanations, entreaties, or even physical force are doomed to fail.
If you allow users to have a easily remembered password, this will ALWAYS be more secure than a password which they WILL write down. And then lose. Or keep on a post-it in the laptop bag. You cannot stop the tide from rising. You cannot stop users from behaving in this manner.
The solution is to require a long password (or better, passphrase, or passsentence), which will be easy to remember (no requirement for upper/lower case mixtures, special characters, or numbers); but due to its length, difficult for unauthorised persons to guess. This is not very secure, but it is more secure than ANY alternative.
Security solutions which do not take account of human nature are deeply flawed, and those who are 'shocked' when they fail (cf AC 15:22 GMT above) are guilty of looking at only a subset of the overall problem, and therefore doomed to fail.
Paris, 'cos I would like to know the sentence she requires before granting access...
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