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Comment Re:So Germany is not a state? (Score 1) 265

"Chernobyl: a crazy design with a strongly positive void coefficient. No one else has ever made such designs, even before Chernobyl because it was always known to be dangerous."

Hmm.. which unit? not widely known, two meltdowns occurred at Chernobyl. NPP, Unit 1, September 9, 1982 and then the Unit 4 explosion April 26, 1986, which was hidden from world until the fallout trigger a Swedish radiation monitor.

Eight days days later, (May 4, 1986), a pebble fuel pellet got stuck in the piping in a German 750MWth, AVR PBM reactor. Efforts to dislodge the pellet caused a release of both core and coolant into the atmosphere. Local plant management tried to blame on the Chernobyl disaster. But a professor at a local university in Frelburg, analyzed the fallout which contained radioactive Pa-233 and determined that a second nuclear incident had occurred nearby.

So their is a list of three(3) incidents, each time management/government tried to cover up and there is much more.

Don't fooled, TMI unit II was only 4 months old when a valve got stuck and melted down.. Fukushima is the worst yet, three(3) fully mature reactor cores have melted down and now reside somewhere below the reactors, releasing deadly fission by products into an underground river flowing underneath it.

Millions of humans have succumbed to early death, and Ten's of millions more are suffering the consequences, and that is just the tip of iceberg. Their is nothing clean about Nuclear Power plants, each refueling cycle discharges a large amount of radioactive gas into the environment, and the effect is detectable in the surrounding population.

Comment Re:Good luck... (Score 1) 64

#4: There's massive amounts of stuff to do backups for UNIX.

That's odd.. I use Linux Mint/ddrescue to backup/restore images of Win OS partitions/disks all the time. WIndose doesn't have anything even close. I can even mount those NTFS file images as partitions and modify the contents as needed. Have you tried to mount a Ext-3/4 FS on windows lately?

M$ has a nasty habit stripping out long established features, obfuscates, cripples/breaks, and/or removes them, then monetizes it as a paid feature. I.E. Network users(>10,>20), Backups, SQL, Exchange, etc.. Meanwhile Linux/Open source rarely removes features and incorporates new features all the time.

Submission + - Material Made From Crustaceans Could Combat Military Mortalities (acs.org)

MTorrice writes: A foam composed of a polymer derived from crustacean shells may prevent more soldiers from falling victim to the most prolific killer on the battlefield: blood loss.

Pressure is one of the best tools that medics have to fight bleeding, but they can’t use it on severe wounds near organs. Here, compression could do more harm than good. First responders have no way to effectively dam blood flows from these noncompressible injuries, which account for the majority of hemorrhagic deaths. The new foam could help stop bleeding in these types of injuries.

It relies on chitosan, a biopolymer that comes from processed crustacean shells. By modifying the chitosan, the developers gave the material the ability to anchor blood cells into gel-like networks, essentially forming blood clots. The researchers dispersed the modified chitosan in water to create a fluid they could spray directly onto noncompressible wounds.

Submission + - Who Most Accurately Predicted the Explosion of Clean Energy Markets? Greenpeace.

merbs writes: The US Department of Energy says we're in the midst of an “energy revolution,” and a report from Meier Consulting shows that just about no one saw it coming. The world’s biggest energy agencies, financial institutions, and fossil fuel companies, seriously underestimated just how fast the clean power sector could and would grow.

Meier identifies one group that got the market scenario closest to right, however, and it wasn’t the International Energy Agency or Goldman Sachs or the DOE. It was Greenpeace.

Submission + - US Government Doesn't Want You to Know How to Make a Hydrogen Bomb 3

HughPickens.com writes: The atom bomb — leveler of Hiroshima and instant killer of some 80,000 people — is just a pale cousin compared to the hydrogen bomb, another product of American ingenuity, that easily packs the punch of a thousand Hiroshimas. That is why Washington has for decades done everything in its power to keep the details of its design out of the public domain. Now William J. Broad reports in the NYT that Kenneth W. Ford has defied a federal order to cut material from his new book that the government says teems with thermonuclear secrets. Ford says he included the disputed material because it had already been disclosed elsewhere and helped him paint a fuller picture of an important chapter of American history. But after he volunteered the manuscript for a security review, federal officials told him to remove about 10 percent of the text, or roughly 5,000 words. “They wanted to eviscerate the book,” says Ford. “My first thought was, ‘This is so ridiculous I won’t even respond.’ ” For instance, the federal agency wanted him to strike a reference to the size of the first hydrogen test device — its base was seven feet wide and 20 feet high. Dr. Ford responded that public photographs of the device, with men, jeeps and a forklift nearby, gave a scale of comparison that clearly revealed its overall dimensions.

Though difficult to make, hydrogen bombs are attractive to nations and militaries because their fuel is relatively cheap. Inside a thick metal casing, the weapon relies on a small atom bomb that works like a match to ignite the hydrogen fuel. Today, Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States are the only declared members of the thermonuclear club, each possessing hundreds or thousands of hydrogen bombs. Military experts suspect that Israel has dozens of hydrogen bombs. India, Pakistan and North Korea are seen as interested in acquiring the potent weapon. The big secret the book discusses is thermal equilibrium, the discovery that the temperature of the hydrogen fuel and the radiation could match each other during the explosion (PDF). World Scientific, a publisher in Singapore, recently made Dr. Ford’s book public in electronic form, with print versions to follow. Ford remains convinced the book “contains nothing whatsoever whose dissemination could, by any stretch of the imagination, damage the United States or help a country that is trying to build a hydrogen bomb.” “Were I to follow all — or even most — of your suggestions,” says Ford, “it would destroy the book.”

Submission + - "I beat a patent troll and you can too"

heretic108 writes: Chris Hulls, the CEO of tech startup Life360, received $50m in new funding, only to be almost immediately set upon by a patent troll, Advanced Ground Information Systems.
But unlike other startups who simply pay the ransom (cheaper than a trial, most folks figure), this guy went medieval, attacking not only AGIS's claims, but also their entire patent portfolio. Result? Not only were the troll's patents defeated by a jury, but with the heavy publicity, Life360 sent a clear warning to patent trolls that bullies will not be tolerated, going so far as to offer free legal support to other startups who have fallen victim to this troll.

Submission + - FEMA targets climate change skeptic governors, could withhold funding (washingtontimes.com)

schwit1 writes: The Obama administration has issued new guidelines that could make it harder for governors who deny climate change to obtain federal disaster-preparedness funds.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s new rules could put some Republican governors in a bind. The rules say that states’ risk assessments must include “consideration of changing environmental or climate conditions that may affect and influence the long-term vulnerability from hazards in the state.”

The policy, which goes into effect in March 2016, doesn’t affect federal money for relief after a hurricane, flood, or other natural disaster. But states seeking disaster preparedness money from Washington will be required to assess how climate change threatens their communities, a requirement that wasn’t included in FEMA’s 2008 guidelines.

Submission + - LightEater malware attack places millions of unpatched BIOSes at risk (betanews.com)

Mark Wilson writes: Two minutes is all it takes to completely destroy a computer. In a presentation entitled "How many million BIOSes would you like to infect?" at security conference CanSecWest, security researchers Corey Kallenberg and Xeno Kovah revealed that even an unskilled person could use an implant called LightEater to infect a vulnerable system in mere moments.

The attack could be used to render a computer unusable, but it could also be used to steal passwords and intercept encrypted data. The problem affects motherboards from companies including Gigabyte, Acer, MSI, HP and Asus. It is exacerbated by manufactures reusing code across multiple UEFI BIOSes and places home users, businesses and governments at risk.

Submission + - The stolen credit for what makes up the Sun

StartsWithABang writes: Sure, it's easy today to look at the Sun and know it's a ball of (mostly) hydrogen, generating energy by combining those protons in a chain into helium through the process of nuclear fusion. But before we even knew that nuclear fusion was possible, we needed to figure out what the Sun was made out of, a more difficult task than you'd imagine. The credit was given to Henry Norris Russell (of Hertzsprung-Russell diagram fame), but he completely stole the work from a woman you never heard of, his student, Cecilia Payne, after discouraging her from publishing her work on the subject four years prior.

Submission + - No fuel in the Fukushima1 reactor #1 (yahoo.com)

An anonymous reader writes: To nobody's surprise, the Japanese press reports that a new way to look at the inside of one of the Fukushima 1 damaged reactors has shown the fuel is not in place.

Engineers have not been able to develop a machine to directly see the exact location of the molten fuel, hampered by extremely high levels of radiation in and around the reactors, but a new scan technique using muons (details on the method in the media are missing) have shown the fuel is not in its place.

While Tepco's speculation is that the fuel may be at the bottom of the reactor, it is a safe bet that at least some of it has burned through and has gone on to create an Uruguay syndrom.

Submission + - AdBlock Plus Responds To Play Store Ban (techcrunch.com)

schwit1 writes: Yesterday Google began removing ad-blocking apps from its Play Store on the grounds that they violate part of its Developer Distribution Agreement. Now one of the removed apps, AdBlock Plus, has hit back publicly at what it dubs a "unilateral move by Google", putting out a statement slamming Mountain View for threatening consumer choice.

"By unilaterally removing these apps, Google is stepping all over the checks and balances that make the Internet democratic. People should be really alarmed by this move," said Till Faida, co-founder of Adblock Plus in the statement.

"I realize that advertising revenue is important to Google, but understand that AdBlock Plus does not automatically block all ads; we simply allow users the choice whether to block ads or whitelist them.

Submission + - Uber shut down in multiple countries following raids (bbc.com)

wired_parrot writes: Worldwide raids were carried out against Uber offices in Germany, France and South Korea. In Germany, the raids followed a court ruling banning Uber from operating without a license. In Paris, raids followed an investigation into deceptive practices. And in South Korea, 30 people, including Uber's CEO, were charged with running an illegal taxi service.

Submission + - Apple dismisses screen faults as cosmetic damage

Andy Smith writes: MacBook owners who have experienced large "stains" on their laptop screens are trying to force a change of repair policy from Apple, who have dismissed the damage as cosmetic and want to charge $800 for repairs. So far 480 people have registered with the Staingate web site.

Submission + - Japan utilities set to scrap five aging nuclear reactors (reuters.com)

mdsolar writes: Three aging nuclear reactors in Japan will be decommissioned due to the high cost of upgrading them in line with tougher safety standards set after the Fukushima disaster, their operators said on Tuesday.

Another two reactors were also likely to be scrapped, local media reports said, with announcements expected later in the week.

The moves are the first concrete sign that Japan's nuclear industry is heeding a government request to shut down older reactors that are considered more vulnerable to natural disasters in the hope that it will ease public concerns about a restart of other reactors.

All 48 of Japan's nuclear reactors were taken offline after an earthquake and tsunami set off meltdowns at Tokyo Electric Power's Fukushima Daiichi plant in 2011.

As many as two-thirds of the country's reactors may never return to operation because of high costs, local opposition or seismic risks, a Reuters analysis showed last year.

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