Really inappropriate word. This shit is really hard.

Why do you expect this : have you done phage tests? Do you have information on the stability of the reduced material with respect to physical disruption?

Ahh ha! You have failed to understand that all radiation is not equal, and also mechanisms of exposure are not equal.

If someone made a bet with me that I should swallow a pellet of plutonium in a plastic case or something bad would happen to a loved one, I would swallow the plutonium and trust to my digestion and the container. If I had to breath in the plutonium in a dust instead I would still do it (for love) but I think it would be the death of me.

So - looking at the radiation released in total : has there been a massive increase in deaths due to atmospheric testing. Of course, we can't say so because there is no control and there are many confounding factors. But I offer the following for consideration.

1. Atmospheric testing was a massive propaganda tool and an excellent way of developing weapons. It is now banned and never done even by lunatics like the North Koreans. Why?

2. Cancer rates have increased substantially in the period - this is not evidence of causality, but if they had not then we could say that it would be evidence of absence of causality.

3. There is not much mention of this ever in the media.

4. There is not much to be done about it now.

http://www.ead.anl.gov/pub/doc/plutonium.pdf

It's at the bottom of page 3. The risk is life time cancer mortality.

The folks at Argonne are often thought of as competent, I note that you happily use nCi in the rest of your post.

The thing is that radiation comes in different flavours. Some radiation (the stuff that plutonium majors in) can be stopped by a barrier like a bit of paper. We call this "alpha" radiation. If one breaths in a source for this radiation (for example a particle of plutonium) you are in trouble because your lungs don't have an inner paper coating. If you receive it from a decay in the atmosphere you are not in trouble because nature and evolution have equipped you with a layer of dead cells we call skin.

The trouble with the plutonium particle is that not only does it produce one decay - it sits in your lung repeatedly producing alpha particles which go on to do all sorts of mischief.

I can't think how you got that from what I wrote, however here is where I got my figures from.

http://www.ead.anl.gov/pub/doc/plutonium.pdf

This is a document published by Argonne National Laboratory, in a form that they call "a fact sheet".

You can see that there a thing called a radiation co-efficient chart. This provides the risk of death that can be expected by exposure to 1pCi. If you don't like reading things then you can find the table at the bottom (right hand) of page 3.

If someone was exposed to 9000^12 pCi via inhalation I think that they would die in about 3 minutes - due to suffocation. Afterall - we are talking about some kilos of material.

None of this is comic.

The extrapolation lies in the likelihood of exposure to individuals, and the error I made is that in fact we are talking about 18000 * 10^12 pCi, not 9000. At the top end we are talking 200 million human deaths from cancer due to that accident. I think it would have required a very deliberate regime to do that much killing with that much plutonium, but you get the significance of the event from that (remote) possibility.

The snap-9a accident was not a small leak.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_nuclear_accidents

Indeed NASA (in the 1995 Cassini FEIS)[35] indicated that the SNAP-9a plutonium release was nearly double the 9000Ci added by all the atmospheric weapons tests to that date.[40][41]

1 pCi exposure typically will kill in 10^-8 of cases, but there were 9000^12 pCi dispersed by SNAP9. You can take any view you like about how many of them have actually been exposed to humans.

Very few people working in software today are actually programmers. Most people are software developers, some are architects. Both of those groups do some significant programming very occasionally.

Most work is maintenance - adding features and interfaces to working systems; the skill is the utilization of the components to hand. After that, configuration and customization; taking the wrappers off something and making it work in our environment and process. The next biggest activity is development - bringing a set of components together and getting them to do something new. Finally architecture - thinking at a high level about how the infrastructure will work.

Some places have a need for programmers - people who implement sophisticated algorithms over complex data structures day in and day out. Not that many though.

Because, just like in every big company in the world, in teaching it's all down to an individual heroically battling the odds to make a success.

Reward that hero, beat those who stand in the way, throw them to the dogs or the dole queue.

What is most important is that those that do what they are told, and tell you how good things are, are rewarded. And you will retire (in 18mths with $40m in the bank) sure in the knowledge that all will be well forever, or at least until the next fucking lunatic with a year of business school shows up to mess with everything.

And now they have jumped over the cage bars and into schools. Great.

And as for patents, they have a purpose of guaranteeing publication of . If you abolish them altogether get ready for more black boxes and permanent monopolies on ideas via trade secrets.

How would writers (novelists for example) make a living without copyright? Isn't society enriched by their work? My mind is enriched by their work - isn't it fair that they are compensated for the work and value that they create?

Every developer I know wants to use Linux or a Mac to produce code. I think catering for CIO's is why Windows is the most widespread OS.

Worth saying that :

1. If they don't match and give you compensation for the commute then it's a sure sign that they would get rid of you without a moments thought if they needed to.

2. If they do match then it's a good bet that they will hang on to you in hard times.

Well - you know; the industrial revolution thing; the development of aircraft thing (as in jet engines); the development of computing thing (colossus); anti-biotics and a few other bits and bobs.

I honestly just don't get the anti-java thing in the developer community.

It's fantastic. It's amazing.

Eclipse, testng, guice, java, hibernate : bloody marvelous.

If I was doing this I would use an in memory database. I would talk to that database using Java.

I developed in C++ for 5 years, I have thanked Jesus and his angels every day since Java came to save me.