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Comment iPad Kindle app observations (Score 1) 105

I have both an iPad and Kindle. A few things with the iPad...I touch a word, the dictionary entry comes up. This is quite helpful. I am used to referring to the progress bar so sequence recall isn't a problem. Some books have x-Ray enabled, and that helps with story cohesion. Basically, after I've spent a lot of time with the iPad reader, I find it as good or better than paper. Except for the beach.

Comment Re:already done (Score 2) 133

The reactors are fine during an earthquake because they are effectively bolted to bedrock, and the move with the earth. There was a serious earthquake a few years ago at the Kashiwaszaki-Kariwa site, and the primary systems didn't move at all. There was a lot of damage to the switchyard and non-safety systems, and there was some water sloshed out of the spent fuel pool, but the reactor started up fine after all systems were requalified.

Comment Re:FUD filled.... (Score 1) 212

Actually professor you might want to take a second look at those figures. A nuclear plant relies entirely on *already produced electricity* for safe operation. With a normally functioning grid, this is not an issue. Take that out of the picture (in a scenario like a CME hit) and it will have to fall back on site generators (the local turbine generation is likely to go down with the grid) which hopefully will have been isolated from the effects of the CME and can be instantly switched in to the site system to take over and shut the plant down. However, if any of those switching components went bad during the CME hit, it could be hours before they are repaired, which starts to push the cooling safety margins to the limit (the plant is, after all, still producing heat as if it had a job to do). There are certainly good disaster plans in effect at nuclear plants for situations similar to this, but do you really want to test them all at once? There are bound to be holes. Mushroom cloud style explosions are out of the question, but we know from experience with Fukushima that all kinds of bad things can happen (including lots of little explosions of errant hydrogen) when plants go dark and can't be shut down safely.

I'll update a couple of points, when a plant loses off-site power, it immediately scrams and they have to remove decay heat (the neutrons stop reacting), which drops exponentially from 6-7% core power to less than 1% in about a day, and far less than 1% in 10 days. The generators are normally sized to handle shutdown cooling until power could be restored (but your comments are true, everything can fail, in the case of Fukushima, the entire emergency generator system was destroyed by the tsunami). I would also note that most plants are designed to react the hydrogen in a more controlled manner, the Fukushima 'explosions' were actually by design, although granted the videos don't appear that way.

Comment Re:NASA is spying on me (Score 1) 157

I saw a lecture in 1991 about the issues of living on the moon, and the underground habitat was a given. The issues that were showstoppers (among other things) were 1) water, 2) ability to manufacture concrete, 3) ability to safely do construction (power, tools, people moving things around in spacesuits). This talk was geared to a large scale habitat, something much bigger than the Mars One.

Comment It's the automation that scares me (Score 2) 150

I'm in my early 40's, and I'm just now seeing the Powers That Be (PTB) do and monitor things that I had only envisioned in my paranoid fantasies in the 80's when I first read '1984.' Throughout the whole time I was always modestly comforted by the 'safety in numbers' idea; if I'm not out shooting people or blatantly planning the overthrow of the government, then the PTB won't have the human resources to go after me and I should be left alone.

But now it's getting scary because the PTB don't have to watch me, the digital monitoring, and more importantly the digital analysis, has made it to where they can keep tabs on everything you do without spending human resources to do it. There is no longer safety in numbers because the algorithms can build the list and it can be executed efficiently.

So what's next? I'm not thrilled with some of my activities prompting which browser ads that I see, but I am bothered that companies could change their pricing strategy based on whether or not I'm motivated enough to change to another vendor when I'm not satisfied. I'm even more bothered that insurance companies know my private health records and could deny me coverage because of them, even if they were obtained with the expressed statements that conversations with your doctor are private.

Crap, I always used to roll my eyes at the Wearers of the Tin Foil Hats, but maybe technology has caught up to their paranoia. It's not going to be long before a fly lands in a printer and someone mistakes my name for someone else and my life is ruined.

Comment Re:DLC's sold as cheat? (Score 1) 178

One where I see it is 'Hay Day' on the iPad. I downloaded it to play with my nieces and nephews (the Daughter loves it too at five years of age). It's a farm resource management game, and they have inventories that can only be upgraded when you randomly receive objects. However, if you pay for diamonds and money, you get the upgrades. Only once did I pay to get my daughter something, and I realized that this would be a never-ending money pit.

It is a pretty fun game if you're into that genre though.

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