Posts by Captain Thyratron

Well...

Conceivably, you could just paste the URL there.

No.

That would be utterly terrifying. I mean, moreso than the things that are usually in the vicinity of an active galactic nucleus.

Toward the center of the accretion disk, material falling in gets going really fast and heats up to an extremely energetic plasma through friction; gravitational potential energy is more or less becoming heat here. Whenever a collection of charges moves--and a toroidal death cloud whirling around a black hole certainly counts--it sets up magnetic fields. But when a charged particle cuts across magnetic field lines, it gets deflected; when a relativistic charged particle cuts across the magnetic field lines produced by the biggest, scariest kind of dynamo possible, it'll /really/ get deflected, and will probably shoot off along one of the poles.

Nobody's entirely sure of the exact mechanism, but this is mostly because magnetohydrodynamics--that scary place that exists somewhere between fluid mechanics and electrodynamics--is a very thorny subject. However, the fundamental cause--very fast-moving charged particles, drawn in and sped up by gravity, simultaneously generating and interacting with magnetic fields of terrifying stature--seems to be a pretty uncontroversial idea, if the NRAO's lectures are any indication. That is the meaning of "not fully understood" in this case: The math's not all filled in yet and there are probably a lot of weird things still hidden in that horrid mess of electromagnetic fields, but we seem to have the basic idea down.

re: on pilchards

You've just given me the mental image of a bunch of seals rising out of a swamp and brandishing trench knives.

What?

You have a curious definition of what constitutes a ruined life.

So don't eat it.

Does any of this matter, as long as you've burned the stuff and you aren't standing in a sealed garage running the engine for twelve hours (granted, the CO will get you long before trace unburned aromatics or aromatic partial combustion products)? I fail to see the evil, unless somebody is sneaking spoonfuls of polycyclic aromatics into boxes of breakfast cereal.

Just FYI...

H[2]O isn't radioactive. It doesn't matter how much water evaporates, because the evaporating water isn't the problem--it's the stuff that's floating around in that water, which is not especially inclined just to bugger off into the air whenever it likes. The vapor pressure of heavy ions in water is not very impressive.

The Chernobyl fire, I wish to add, was no ordinary graphite fire. The RBMK-1000 is a very large reactor, and contains hundreds of tons of graphite. When graphite burns, it burns extremely hot, and when hundreds of tons of it are on fire, all full of molten reactor parts, it's not a pretty picture. Evaporating water vapor is no good at carrying relatively dense radioactive materials into the air, but a plume of graphite-powered hellfire that burns for nine or ten days is quite adept at sending particles of soot and dust, contaminated with radioactive substances because that soot came directly from the same flaming heap that contains the remains of the fuel rods, high into the atmosphere. You will never find a fan that's as good at moving air as that fire was, nor a better way of dispersing dust laden with little bits of radioactive materials than a big, hot column of fire.

The end result is that a nontrivial fraction of the mass of the fuel went straight into the atmosphere--It actually produced about four hundred times more fallout than the Hiroshima bombing! For Fukushima Daiichi to reproduce this effect would require the construction of quite an impressive bonfire.

Your closing line, by the way, is kind of ironic since the only deaths recorded at either of the Fukushima sites have been from blunt force trauma of one sort or another.

Actually, yeah.

In fact, there are numerous reports from several sources (start with Al Jazeera, I guess, if you want a starting place; there are plenty to choose from, though) that large numbers of soldiers in Gaddafi's army have been tortured and/or executed for refusing to fight, and numerous other reports from several sources of people from places like Chad being offered work in Libya and subsequently being hustled into combat zones, basically at gunpoint (again, Al Jazeera has more on this, though they're hardly the only source--just search for "Gaddafi mercenaries"). A lot of this is coming from soldiers that the rebels have captured--soldiers who are thankful to be in a brig in Benghazi instead of living in perpetual fear of being executed by their own army for suspected disloyalty.

There's also a nice video floating around out there in which recruits for the Khamis Brigade are forced to eat the raw flesh of a dead dog--and then kiss it. I mean, just in case you were still convinced that Gaddafi's soldiers would be living wonderful lives if only NATO hadn't started bombing their armor units. No, a lot of those guys are quietly hoping Gaddafi will lose soon because, for them, victory means the continuation of a living hell, while defeat means a better life. Why do you think Gaddafi has to hire(/abduct) so many mercenaries?

By all means, though, go on whining about how cell phone service was restored to the eastern half of Libya after the guy whose government orchestrated the Abu Salim massacre cut it off. Seriously, the last thing Gaddafi wants is for people to be able to get information on their own. It rather undermines the efficacy of state TV broadcasts in which the bodies of executed protesters are mutilated (not always beyond recognition--oops!) and presented as victims of NATO airstrikes, or state TV broadcasts in which a bunch of people have been paid and/or coerced by threats (sometimes they spill the beans to reporters--oops!) to participate in staged pro-Gaddafi rallies. The free exchange of information is a grave threat to every dictator. It's (part of) why Arab autocrats can no longer just blame Israel or the United States to hoodwink their citizens anymore, and of why they can't blame every act of dissent on foreign plots (sorry, Bashar al-Assad) while claiming that their people either love them or are al-Qaida agents on drugs (Gaddafi's current explanation for the rebellion), nor exploit sectarian or tribal divisions to divide and weaken opposition as effectively as they once could. Damned awful cell-phone pirates!

And that reason is...

...that larger power plants are generally more efficient and benefit in pretty much every way from economy of scale; the logistics are also FAR simpler (and therefore more affordable).

And if that's the lesson you're taking from Fukushima, then I can tell you've not learned a thing from it.

Who'd want a Saturn V?

Why should we use the Saturn V, with its relatively inefficient engines and other half-century-old technology, when we could get the same job done with something whose newer technology is more reliable and less expensive?

The Saturn V took the engineering prowess of the richest, most powerful, most technologically advanced empire on the planet to design, test, and build, and only the same could afford one. At the time it was built, economic feasibility wasn't even a consideration. Now, however, after decades of accumulated engineering knowledge and improvements in technology, it doesn't take an empire to build /or/ to buy a rocket, and that's what's really cool about this: That you can put a payload into space without being part of anybody's federal budget.

Canned whining or what?

I don't know where you're getting this idea about friendly-fire casualties being more numerous than enemy-inflicted casualties, but my best guess is your arse.

Besides, British troops /never/ do anything dumb with their guns...

Minor incident indeed.

Nobody died from it. Repeat that to yourself a couple of times.

Meanwhile, the JSDF is plucking thousands of corpses out of the rubble, and the Touhoku region's corpse-disposal infrastructure is swamped with bodies because the tsunami killed so many people that they simply can't bury or burn them fast enough. Rikuzentakata, Minamisanriku, and a few other cities were all but wiped off the map. The airport in Sendai was closed because it was covered in what used to be people's houses. Many tons of human flesh are rotting beneath the remains of destroyed neighborhoods, and that's to say nothing of the hundreds of thousands of Japanese who don't have homes anymore.

Yes, three partial meltdowns that have yet to kill a single human being do indeed count as a minor incident.

Standard operating procedure, of course!

Well, it wouldn't be the first US lawsuit to name God as a defendant.

Nice try, hipster.

Tell your revered Opera developers to maintain their ports more carefully. I don't like a web browser that crashes just because I closed a webpage that had a Java applet in it, nor a web browser that, for years and possibly to this day, has had a well-documented history (on several platforms, including Linux on x86) of spawning broken plugin wrapper processes that pile up until the CPU gags on it.

Or are you also going to play the "it's your fault for not using Windows and x86 and the awful software is innocent" card, too?

Step outside what the Opera people think is a popular platform and you'll discover a buggy piece of inefficient software that nobody seems to have bothered testing--and if they can't be bothered to test a port, then why are they bothering to continue building and releasing it?

Fortunately,

I don't own stock in any companies involved with the Frankfurt Stock Exchange.

In that case,

say goodbye to most of your music.

Please, not ext-anything.

I know it's being worked on, but Linux doesn't have ZFS yet. Also, please don't advocate ext3 or ext4. Both are just terrible hacks bolted on top of ext2, which is itself a terrible hack. Granted, this is Linux you're talking about, so I suppose all this talk of terrible hacks is superfluous.

There are, of course, a few other things that *do* have ZFS already. Perhaps you should go advocate one of those.

No, they aren't.

Since people have been exploiting security vulnerabilities since long before the term "security researcher" entered common usage, I'd say you've got it wrong. The crooks get these ideas just fine without the help of white hats. Anybody with the time and the motivation to find some way to break into something will--especially if there's money in it.

Which would you rather have:

The bad guys figuring this out first and telling nobody but each other, as they've long done, or

some security researchers figuring this out first and publishing it so that it gets fixed soon?

Security through obscurity DOESN'T WORK. It just ensures that, when a crook discovers a good way to break into something, the only people who know how to fix the problem are the people who are exploiting it merrily. You might argue that the researchers should not publish this information openly, but often that's the only way to get this stuff fixed. If the people who distribute the afflicted software know, on the other hand, that this information is public knowledge, they have to either fix it or face the consequences--whereas, informed that only the "good guys" knew, they'd just as likely sit on their asses for three years before doing anything about it.

Another thing about it that worries me

is what prison is like in Japan. You don't hear about it much except for occasionally:

http://www.nytimes.com/1996/07/08/world/prisons-in-japan-are-safe-but-harsh.html

So you go there for a while if you're busted for possession, yet there are vending machines with beer. Makes perfect sense, doesn't it?

Meanwhile,

...while some people are running scared and others are being smug, annoying platform evangelists, there's someone, somewhere, who is actually doing something about this mess. I like FreeBSD just fine and I'm damn glad it's there, but don't belittle this guy for having the chutzpah to flip the bird to Oracle and roll his own Solaris. If there weren't guys like him, you wouldn't have FreeBSD, either. Think about that.

Speak for yourself.

Not everybody'd got the cash to go tossing a few hundred bucks at a new computer every few years. Which is more reasonable: To ask users to buy new computers every three years just to handle obnoxious websites in return for no improvement in basic functionality, or to ask website authors to make less obnoxious websites?

The "computing power is cheap" excuse is apparently the most popular rug in computing for sweeping bad engineering underneath. If computers get twice as fast every few years, then shouldn't they do twice as much as well?

Or, for that matter...

...before taking the word "theory" so lightly?