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Comment Re:Distillation (Score 1) 189

Read a bit further because plain strontium is not the same as the isotope strontium-90

Effect on the human body

The human body absorbs strontium as if it were calcium. Due to the chemical similarity of the elements, the stable forms of strontium might not pose a significant health threat â" in fact, the levels found naturally may actually be beneficial (see below) â" but the radioactive 90Sr can lead to various bone disorders and diseases, including bone cancer. The strontium unit is used in measuring radioactivity from absorbed 90Sr.

Comment Re:Distillation (Score 2) 189

90Sr in Fallout

Strontium-90 is not quite as likely as caesium-137 to be released as a part of a nuclear reactor accident because it is much less volatile, but is probably the most dangerous component of the radioactive fallout from a nuclear weapon.[1]

Sounds pretty fucking dangerous to me, and if you're saying heavy metals are not poisonous then again you are full of it, Or are you you going to tell me that nothing lives on the sea floor and it won't get passed up the food chain.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strontium-90#Dispersal_hazards

Comment Re:Confused (Score 1) 385

It shouldn't take long before ASICs mine out most of the remaining Bitcoins and then mining will only be needed for transactions, not sure how that works but apparently a transaction fee should be paid to a miner for computational work done.

Why can't the client just do a little bit of processing each time it makes a transaction? I don't mean calculate for it's own transaction but a bit of distributed computing equal to the transaction processing needed.

It's as clear as mud how all of this scales, how much energy does it take to work out if a transaction is legit when millions of transactions start to happen daily? How much of the transaction history is actually needed (in GigaBytes) to determine if a transaction is kosher and how big will that transaction history be if there are millions of transactions per day?

Comment Re:You're not kidding (Score 1) 583

I haven't analyzed it but I bet a lot of people have.

I bet there hasn't been a lot of people analyzing it, there was already a problem with miners all having to agree to revert back to a previous version of bitcoin, so there's versioning issues for starters.

Scalability looks like a problem:
http://www.slideshare.net/dakami/bitcoin-8776098

I like bitcoin but there are a lot of unanswered questions like what happens if the bitchain split happens again and some people stick with the wrong client version?

Also how well will bitcoin work if bitcoins become worth $10,000 dollars each and everyone starts trading 0.0001 bitcoins.

And if someone trys to cash in a few million dollars worth all at once that'd probably crash the value back down to a dollar.

I don't think it's been well thought out at all, a billion dollars riding on a beta bit of software. It won't last forever.

Comment Re:You're not kidding (Score 1) 583

I'm not a crypto expert but Bitcoin does seem to have scalability issues with regards to transactions, see:
http://www.slideshare.net/dakami/bitcoin-8776098 referencing:
https://bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability

And the transaction history which the main client keeps is mushrooming approx' 1GB per month but that can apparently be pruned, but how much I don't know.

What the Bitcoin wiki says is acceptable is actually absurd, most people do not want their broadband connection saturated 24/7 or even 1% of that to keep Bitcoin going.

The Military

United States Begins Flying Stealth Bombers Over South Korea 567

skade88 writes "The New York Times is reporting that the United States has started flying B-2 stealth bomber runs over South Korea as a show of force to North Korea. The bombers flew 6,500 miles to bomb a South Korean island with mock explosives. Earlier this month the U.S. Military ran mock B-52 bombing runs over the same South Korean island. The U.S. military says it shows that it can execute precision bombing runs at will with little notice needed. The U.S. also reaffirmed their commitment to protecting its allies in the region. The North Koreans have been making threats to turn South Korea into a sea of fire. North Korea has also made threats claiming they will nuke the United States' mainland."
Mars

4-Billion-Pixel Panorama View From Curiosity Rover 101

A reader points out that there is a great new panorama made from shots from the Curiosity Rover. "Sweep your gaze around Gale Crater on Mars, where NASA's Curiosity rover is currently exploring, with this 4-billion-pixel panorama stitched together from 295 images. ...The entire image stretches 90,000 by 45,000 pixels and uses pictures taken by the rover's two MastCams. The best way to enjoy it is to go into fullscreen mode and slowly soak up the scenery — from the distant high edges of the crater to the enormous and looming Mount Sharp, the rover's eventual destination."
Firefox

Emscripten and New Javascript Engine Bring Unreal Engine To Firefox 124

MojoKid writes "There's no doubt that gaming on the Web has improved dramatically in recent years, but Mozilla believes it has developed new technology that will deliver a big leap in what browser-based gaming can become. The company developed a highly-optimized version of Javascript that's designed to 'supercharge' a game's code to deliver near-native performance. And now that innovation has enabled Mozilla to bring Epic's Unreal Engine 3 to the browser. As a sort of proof of concept, Mozilla debuted this BananaBread game demo that was built using WebGL, Emscripten, and the new JavaScript version called 'asm.js.' Mozilla says that it's working with the likes of EA, Disney, and ZeptoLab to optimize games for the mobile Web, as well." Emscripten was previously used to port Doom to the browser.

Comment Re:Only because people are dumb (Score 1) 198

About once a quarter, sometimes once a month

then I walk into the physical brick and mortar store,

with minimal time and effort spent by me

So which is it? And who, in five years I've had two issues between landline, broadband and mobile - and that was me trying to cancel the service because of broadband throttling (virgin media). And the other issue was caused by wear and tear / weather and was fixed promptly.

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