Re: Clueless rubes from somewhere else...

Take a look at the California ISO website sometime during late summer and pay special attention to the solar output versus statewide load. Solar production peaks at 12 Noon, where peak load typically occurs at 6PM. This is not exactly news as I heard a PG&E engineer caution solar power enthusiasts about the time difference between peak solar product and peak power system load circa 1975.

There have been proposals for solar thermal plants using molten salts as both a heat transfer mechanism and thermal storage mechanism, permitting several hours of electric energy production after sunset. Another work-around is to redesign structures to have a higher thermal mass, run the A/C like crazy when the sun is shining and using the stored "cool" after sunset.

Re: It's called a slash

QDOS/86-DOS/PC-DOS/MS-DOS copied much of the CP/M API much the same way that Linux copied the UNIX API, but it was a rather different beast underneath. The COPY command was more like the UNIX cp command than PIP, though COPY was internal to command.com. DOS did not have or need anything like the MOVECPM command. TSR capability was part of DOS from the 86-DOS days. MS-DOS 2.X introduced subdirectories, rudimentary stdin/stdout and a form of piping to be a bit more like UNIX.

IIRC, Tustin

My recollection is that the hangars are in Tustin (where I-405 splits off I-5 in Orange County). This is about 2 miles from where I now work, so may have to take some fresh air breaks next week.

MS and researching trademarks

Anyone remember the brouhaha over MS using "Internet Explorer" for its browser without checking to see if "Internet Explorer" was already trademarked?

COPY != PIP

IIRC, PIP was a separate executable file, while COPY was internal to COMMAND.COM in at least 86-DOS if not QDOS. What M$ did to make PC-DOS 1.0 out of 86-DOS 1.14 was to change the prompt from A: to A>, added "DEL" as an alias for ERASE and not ship the SCP utilities such as the assembler, the Z80 code translator and READCPM.

86-DOS allowed AUX, CON and PRN to be treated as filenames, where CP/M required some gyrations to use device names in place of a disk filename.

Re: Get 'em in by Friday

Song title was Get 'em OUT by Friday - though I can se wanting to get the brew in by Friday...

Reminds me of when the Reg covered the giant hogweed invasion in New York state...

Don't you mean radioactive cesium?

Note that radio-isotopes can easily be detected at levels far below what would be considered harmful. As an example, Carbon 14 dating works because all food sources have some carbon-14 in them, but there has been no hysteria about removing carbon 14 from the food chain.

The global impact of radiation leakage from Fukushima is still dwarfed by the remnants of atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons. It is also even less of an issue on a global scale than naturally occurring radioactive materials such as the potassium 40 in your body.

Re: Faster

The Milwaukee speeds were from timings aboard regular runs of the Hiawatha between Milwaukee and Chicago. While the peak DBHP occurred below 100 MPH. the loco's were still putting out a significant amount of power. One limitation for the top speed of steam locomotives is dynamic augment, which is lessened with 84 inch drivers and just three coupled axles on the 3463.

As far as the Pennsy T-1's, the design spec called for 100 MPH with 1,000 trailing tons.

Also bear in mind that larger American loading gauge allows for larger boilers - with the gas flow area being critical for power production.

Re: Faster

I'd bet on the AT&SF Hudson - similarly design loco's used by the Milwaukee (Baltics on the CMStP&P) were hitting 105 - 110 MPH in regular service while pulling a much heavier train than the Mallard on its record run. The Pennsy T-1 would almost certainly be faster, there were reports of it hitting 125 MPH in service.

PWR's??? Make that BWR's

How can one take your posting seriously if you don't know the difference between a Pressurized Water Reactor and a Boiling Water Reactor? FWIW, Fukushima used BWR's.

PWR's can be set up for natural convection cooling, with the main problem in supplying make-up water to the secondary side.

Antimagnetic

4,800A/m is the the magnetomotive force ("H") that the watch will withstand before malfunctioning. In free space, that will induce a flux density ("B") of 0.06T or 600 gauss. That's well below what a typical MRI magnet will produce, but high enough that you won't have to worry about letting your watch get close to conductors carrying high currents.

Lovelaces law?

If we're going to have a storage equivalent of Godwins law, we might as well name it after the first lady of programming...

Anti-neutrons do exist

The reason that the anti-proton has a negative charge is that the anti-quarks that make up the anti-proton have the opposite charge from the quarks that make up a proton. The proton contains two quarks with plus 2/3 charge and one with minus 1/3 charge. The neutron contains 1 quark with plus 2/3 charge and two with minus 1/3 charge for a net charge of zero. The anti-neutron contains two anti-quarks with plus 1/3 charge and one anti-quark with minus 2/3 charge.

ZFS takes care of reason "E" in two ways. First is a much larger checksum, making it unlikely that disk errors will pass unnoticed. Second is disk scrubbing that regulars reads all of the disk data to spot incipient disk failure, usually signaled by read retries.

Oxygen vacancies - not that odd of an idea

If the oxygen vacancy leads to formation of unpaired electron spins, then there would be an associated magnetic flux. Since there are many materials where the resistance is dependent on magnetic flux, the presence or absence of unpaired spins could have an effect on resistance.

Chua's postulated interaction of charge and flux doesn't make too much sense in classical electrodynamics, but does make more sense at the quantum level.

Interaction chrage and flus

Leon Chua's original definition was an interaction of charge and flux - more precisely a relationship between dphi/dt and dq/dt. The simplest physical mechanism I can think of is that the charge is a set of spins (i.e. charge) and their associated magnetic flux - a form of spintronics if you will. I don't particularly see it coming out of classical electrodynamics (Maxwell's equations) in the same way as a resistor, capacitor or inductor.

I was impressed with Professor Chue's teaching style in EECS 105, ended with my one and only A+ at Cal (this class was also my introduction to SPICE). He mixed in some real world examples with is discussion of the theory.

Might slightly increase the likelyhood of meltdowns

The main concern about "the grid" during a solar storm is large DC currents flowing through the windings of the transformers that terminate long distance transmission lines. To save save and money on electrical insulation, the high voltage windings are Wye "Y" connected with a grounded neutral. This allows the common mode (zero sequence) currents to flow from the ground on one transformer to the ground of another. The concern is that there is not enough resources to repair more than a handful of the transformers in a short period of time.

The simplistic way of preventing damage to the transformers is to open up the disconnect switches or circuit breakers. The problem is that these devices are designed to open currents with zero crossings (i.e. AC) and may have problems disrupting a large DC current.

A better solution is to equip the long AC lines with series capacitors, which will also improve power flow. These would prevent DC current from flowing (realizing that DC current is redundant) and likely prevent the damage from geomagnetic storms.

HVDC lines may be a different story.

Having trouble recognizing sarcasm?

This is Lewis at his finest, taking some story that has a bunch of scaremongers doing their best at scaremongering and making great fun of it.

Then again, he might be off his meds...

U233 is relatively nice for weapons

As other posters have pointed out, "U233" has a high gamma output from the U232 that comes as part of the U233 production process, much the same way that Pu240 is produced in conjunction with Pu239. The main gamma line from U232 is relatively low energy and is thus easy to shield to the point where it isn't a major threat to personnel (not so easy to shield from an isotope identification survey).

Chemistry

If there is any water around, the Cesium will react to form CsOH plus hydrogen gas. Melt-downs from slow uncovering of the fuel (e.g. TMI and Fukushima) still leave copious amounts of water in the reactor vessel to react with the cesium. The earlier estimates for 60% did not take water into account.

The experience with TMI was that six orders of magnitude less radioactive iodine was released compared to what had been expected.

IOMMU on SPARC for years

While not sure about other SPARC processors, the US-IIIi had IOMMU when first shipping ca 2003. Pity that Intel took a number of years to catch up.

Burning the place down is low order

Many explosives will burn quite nicely as long as the combustion products are not confined, so the hope was burning the house down would ignite but not detonate the explosives. Another part of the low order technique was putting up a barricade in case the low order suddenly became high order.

One thing not covered in the article was whether the owner of the house was reimbursed for the loss - Dumanis was originally threatening to collect the demolition fees from her.

FWIW, I used to drive by there daily on I-15 before moving to the coast.

Yes there has

The KAL bombing in 1986 was done with liquid explosives.

Oldest vulnerability? BSD yacc

The OpenBSD group discovered a vulnerability in the BSD version of yacc that dated back to 1975 - coincidentally the same time I was at Cal...

IIRC, the OpenBSD dev's found the problem when the Sparc64 port of yacc was dumping core. I would guess that porting software to different architectures uncovers more bugs than the "many eyeballs" approach.