AT&T did not have to use ATM for DSL, that was a bad choice made by some telecom equipment vendors back in the late 90s, as part of an attempt to create a centralized AOL-like internet for the monopolies, rather than succumb to what was already inevitable at that time and force the monopolies to be common carrier bandwidth providers.

The idiotic, long lost battle rages on. Bottom line is that ATM is dead outside the central office, it's not the only way to do this, but it's the one they've chosen to invest in. We should not be paying for it, and in a competitive market it'd have been gone 10 years ago.

If it makes you feel any better, unless you watched a completely different video than I did (something other the what has been in the news recently), you didn't see a beheading. Did you see the blood spurt/drain out as the carotid/jugular were severed? Did you see the disarticulation of the spine? Those weren't in any version of the video I saw. It moves from a guy making a sawing motion with a knife in front of a guy throat, to a picture of the disembodied head sitting atop the body.

That's not to say that the guy is any less dead, or that it was any less horrific. But there was a lot of somewhat creative editing going on in that video. Shadows seem to shift at different points relative to the background, indicating that some of the later parts may have been recorded an hour or two after the earlier parts. There is some analysis that seems to indicate the "terrorist" may have been two different people at different points in the video. There are a lot of cuts, and quite a bit you don't see.

I'm not saying the video is a complete fake. The guy obviously suffered a horrific death, and the perpetrators need the full weight of the western worlds power brought down upon them. But don't beat yourself up about watching a beheading -- what was shown was both sad and shocking, but it left out the actual beheading part (again, unless there is some special uncut version out there I haven't heard about).

Yaz

There is a youtube channel i watch called We eat the weeds. I'm like yeah right, but if you think of it, somewhere down the road all veggies started out with we eat the weeds, and learn. Even lillies, you could ingest 1 flower, and wait and see, then ingest 5 flowers, and wait and see, etc. In fact those toxins might be helpful as medicine when you're sick with an infection for instance, at the proper dose. That's how rats treat everything they eat, as they are scavangers and a lot of things are rotten and toxic from the bacteria, fungi and yeasts on them, so they take a bite, then come back later to eat it if they don't get sick. Which is why rat poison has to be tricky. Presently they have vitamin K antagonists, that create no pain, but prevent blood clotting, so if a vessel ruptures in their brain or muscles, they get anyeurism, or if they get hurt and start bleeding, they bleed to death, but they eat it no problem because they don't sense feeling bad from taking a bite. And unless they do bleed in someway, like an external scrape or internal blood vessel rupture, they survive it OK. Sometimes when they try to make me work hard physically I think of rat poison and blood vessel rupture, and try to moderate the level of exertion. I also refuse to get a flat stomach and muscles there, because that's a great way to get a hernia. When it's all soft and muscle-less, there is nothing that really puts a great force on your intestines to exit your abdominal cavity. And hernia operations are expensive, and I refuse to buy health insurance on matters of conscience and principle.

Also, can I run my chemical factory controls on the cloud? What if my Internet connection goes down, or there is a power outage. Locally I could have battery backups, or redundant equipment, but now you're telling me I need redundant network wires going to the cloud? That's a lot of fucking copper or fiber, and they have to go through the same fucking street and light poles, and gets smashed down by the same idiot truck driver who got lost with his oversize cargo, because his GPS device was acting up. Oh how many times my Magellan GPS has told me to go in a loop, then back to the same place where I am, and continue. I swear its got a remote in it, where they can take me through a neighborhood and show me some pretty houses, like, wouldn't you wanna live here? And pay $200,000 for a house? Yeah right.

The ext2 filesystem is only designed to a max of 32 Tera Bytes. And I'll be stuck using that for a long time, unless the unix and windows camp cleans up their act, but all I see is smart phones with ridiculously small screens all over the place, and cloud cloud cloud IBM wants your data on the cloud cloud cloud. Can I format my harddrive to fat32 on the cloud please. Nope, but you gotta pay monthly rent, on the cloud. Rent? Dude!....

Yeah, because it's like jazz, the thoughts just keep on surfacing and rolling nonstop. It all starts with a quantum fluctuation deep inside my brain that gets filtered and shaped by past memories, plus the parasites that possess me and interface with my nerve synapses pitch in too, and it all gets spilled over here like mental vomit.. I could clean it up but then it would lose the element of spontaneity to it, which is the key thing in jazz.. In fact Gauss and Euler used to present their findings in inhuman ways, that were rigorous, but obviously not the way their mind discovered it, and through that they withheld from others how they thinked.

And that's the kind of people I don't want to read my posts.

I hope Dice holdings censors and blocks access to such discussion topics from certain areas of the world. Even if they don't, it's OK though. I mean it's hard to block it from Australia, or even in America there are many foreign nationals and sympathizers. Especially India with rolling blackouts through their electric grid, exploding population levels, and sitting on top of all that Thorium, got to be interested in nuclear technology. But if they hold the cow sacred, and tell you why should I kill the cow, I love the cow, it gives me milk, cheese, I don't want to hurt it, maybe they won't use nuclear weapons on you. But don't bet on it. As they disrespect international treaties and do blasts like smiling Buddha, and some people, who are not very Hindu, and cow loving, like it used to be in the South, but live in the North of Muslim invasion land, they eat rats and mice no problem and are not vegetarian at all. In fact Pakistan and Bangladesh are India, per se, except they were excised from the rest because of the dominating muslim population, and out of those Pakistan also has nukes, but they haven't used it on each other yeat, in disputes like Kashmir, but there have been verbal threats alluding to no weapon is excluded from retaliation if this continues, kinda way, coming from Pakistan. In Bangladesh you have 155 million people stuck in an area of 57 thousand sq miles, while the great state of Texas is 269 thousand square miles, and has 26 million people only, and the whole US is 314 million, and the area is 3,794 thousand square miles. And the people in Bangladesh are not gonna stop fucking, or in the rest of India, and they need lots and lots of electric.

Graphite also has low cross section, but it has to be boron free, which was the key part of how Szilard and Fermi could build the first nuclear pile in the world in Chicago back in the day, but the Germans, not aware of the boron impurity being a neutron poison, did not succeed. Had they known about it, Hiroshima may not have been the first place in the world to learn about the devastation of nuclear weapons, but it might have been something like London or Glasgow, or St, Petersburg, or Moscow.

And none of the other fast neutron coolant alternatives are better - noble gases like helium, or all gases, have issues with localized velocity distribution and meltdown, and shift in the bulk packing, and lead-bismuth eutectic alloy that the Russians are such a great fan of, melts at too high a temperature, where unfreezing stuck or plugged 10 inch lines of bulk lead solder, analogous to a plumbers solder, with an external torch, is just a pain in the ass. Sodium melts very low, (NaK melts below the freezing point of water), and has a low cross section for neutron absorption, meaning they bounce them back and stay unaffected, which is essential for a coolant. Helium, Lead, Bismuth, Sodium, Zirconium, etc, all have low cross section, Boron, Cadmium, Hafnium, etc, are neutron poisons, and get destructed into some other element, like carbon, when absorbing neutrons.

Breeder reactors, aka fast neutron reactors, are not safe from the standpoint of having to use liquid sodium that likes to leak from heat exchangers into the water side and cause a hydrogen explosion, or out into the factory floor unto the operators, who really hate bathing in that shit. Just watch youtube videos of sodium metal or potassium metal reacting with water, and you'll know what I'm talking about.

Both of you need to read the Wikipedia page about nuclear fuels, as it says something surprising: there is a window in half lives, that is the half lives are either less than ten years, or more than a couple hundred years, or something along those lines. So the decay profile of half lives is not continuous, you have some very hot and dangerous stuff, but that also blows out its punch relatively fast, and relatively mild and less dangerous stuff, but that takes a couple hundred thousand years to go away. (As in, you might almost be willing live next to it, but you don't want to ingest it for sure. There are things like cinnabar minerals in nature, that you don't want to ingest, or arsenic minerals, also toxic mushrooms, but might be willing to coexist with, and live next to them.) So these days the protocol is to hold spent nuclear fuel on site for the less than ten years part, and then when that's gone, all you got is the very low radiating but extremely long half life stuff left, which is kinda safe to ship around by rail and store. But indeed, the stuff fresh out of the reactor is deadly, and needs to be aged on site to give out its punch first. If you read up on the Fukushima disaster on Wikipedia, you'll see mention of such aging ponds.

They could look into the high carbide and boride surface coating things that might be more graphite-like, or there has got to be stuff resistant to sodium. At room temperature paraffin hydrocarbons are used to store sodium, unfortunately above 600C all hydrocarbons, including the stablest of stable ones, benzene and naphtalene and anthracene, dehydrogenate into char, which is graphitic. So organic substances and hydrocarbons are not the answer, because fast neutron reactors do like to run at high temperature, because of the benefits high temperatures bring about in heat engine Carnot cycle efficiency numbers - that is, the higher the temperature, the less heat goes through that massive nuclear cooling tower stack into the environment, and the more into the power grid as electricity. Presently the ratio of energies is probably 90% going into that cloud plume you see rising from a nuclear plant, and 10% going into the electric grid, and with fast neutron high temperature but corrosive reactors, the ratio might go to something like 70% waste vs. 30% usable electric, besides the near 100% consumption of the fuel, instead of 1% consumption and 99% waste, as "depleted uranium" makes a pretty good fuel for fast neutron reactors, and we have so much of that shit around these days, that the military uses it for high density kinetic penetrator bullets, as the density of uranium metal is near that of gold, 19 g/mL, and if depleted, it's nonradiating and nontoxic.

When they finally figure out how to run fast neutron reactors cooled with liquid sodium, and how to properly do reprocessing, we won't have any nuclear waste, because it will be precious fuel. However, presently, all major suppliers of nuclear energy only do moderated neutron reactors, that only burn the less than 1% U235 instead of the 100% U235+238, or even Thorium, because they hate liquid sodium, and they throw they hands in the aya saying we give up, we can't deal with liquid sodium, it costs too much, and when the fuel is so cheap, pressurized water reactors are easier, your real cost is security and proper operation and safety, not the fuel, and the 99% waste that comes by from only burning the less than 1% U235 is still extremely cheap to dispose of and deal with, compared to having to run a fast neutron reactor that gives you 100x power per lb of fuel, but it's a bitch to run, because of the way liquid sodium likes to corrode other metals, or glass, or anything. Maybe not graphite or diamond, but you can't make heat exchangers out of a solid block of diamond because nobody has such a piece of diamond for your sculptors to sculpt from, and graphite is really weak and brittle, it falls apart like a pencil lead, so that's not a complete answer either.