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Comment Re:remote doesn't equal secure (Score 3, Insightful) 213

Also keep in mind, the size of the seismic activity needed to harm the facility in any way would have to be so large that any hazardous waste leak that resulted from it would be more of an afterthought compared to the destruction from the quake itself.

Destruction of what? The whole idea is to site a nuclear waste dump in the middle of nowhere. What would a local earthquake damage? Some mountains in the middle of a remote desert?

Possible leakage of stored waste would seem to be far more of a potential problem than toppling cactus and shifting rocks around.

Comment That was a key plot point of the 1st season... (Score 3, Informative) 118

Once Walt and Jesse moved beyond making a few ounces at a time, they couldn't get enough OTC pseudoephedrine pills through their small network of "smurfs".

They had already committed to providing 4 pounds of product to a rather psychotic distributor, so Walt decided to use a different synthetic route (P2P from phenylacetic acid via high temperature catalyst, then reductive amination with methylamine and aluminum amalgam), rather than the standard pseudoephedrine reduction using red phosphorus and iodine that they started out with.

Comment Blue color was a plot device.... (Score 5, Interesting) 118

It was necessary to have Walt's product be immediately distinguishable from everything else on the street. Otherwise, the DEA would need to run samples of every batch seized through the lab to check purity etc. to determine if a given product was cooked by "Heisenberg". While this might have been interesting to the science geeks here on /., it would have been boring to the average viewer.

I have a feeling that pinning the blue color on the P2P cook process was done by the writers before they had a scientific adviser onboard. By then, it was too late, and they were stuck with it.

The big scientific screwup on the show is exactly how Walt was managing to get nearly 100% purity from a process that in real life would result in 50% purity at best. Unlike starting from pseudoephedrine, the P2P process results in a racemic mixture of 2 different stereoisomers of methamphetamine, only one of which has any recreational value.

This bit of chemical magic could have been passed off as Walt's "secret process", but on the show both Gale and Declan's crew were also shown creating meth at significantly better than 50% purity using the P2P route, without benefit of Walt's knowledge.

Comment Get a used Panasonic or Sony Pro/Industrial deck.. (Score 1) 201

These are going cheap (like all the other analog NTSC gear) on eBay or from video supply houses now that the world has gone digital. You likely can buy a good used rackmount VHS deck for less than the shipping will cost you. I bought a Panasonic AG-6500 for $40 about a year ago.

The only caveat here is that these things generally ONLY work in the SP (2 hour) mode. If your home movies were recorded in LP or EP/SLP, you obviously need to look for a deck that can play those speeds.

The Internet

To Save the Internet We Need To Own the Means of Distribution 338

indros13 (531405) writes "Net neutrality took a hit when the FCC gave its blessing to "Internet fast lanes' last week and one commentator believes that the solution is simple: public ownership of the hardware. 'Owning the means of distribution is a traditional function of local government. We call our roads and bridges and water and sewer pipe networks public infrastructure for a reason. In the 19th century local and state governments concluded that the transportation of people and goods was so essential to a modern economy that the key distribution system must be publicly owned. In the 21st century the transportation of information is equally essential.'

Is the Internet essential infrastructure? Should local governments step in to preserve equality of access?"

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