I suggest you get either an online or dead tree subscription to the NYT. Excellent general science coverage. The NYT does the heavy work of gathering together the stories and sources. If you want to know more in depth about the story, use the internet.

Kurt

If I had mod points today I would mod you up. I have been a Redhat user since the old version 4.2 and Fedora since V. 1. When the Gnome developers made spacial view the default, I truly began to question their judgement and competence as interface designers. I mean WTF? What are these people actually doing with their computers? Not much apparently or they would "get" why these interface solutions are increadibly irritating to true desktop users. And no amount of comment from disgusted users seems to make a difference.

So I will hold out on Fedora 14 and Ubuntu 10.04 untill bitrot gets to me, and then switch to XFCE unless the Fedora, and Ubuntu folks get a clue.

Kurt

This is not really true. Nuclear energy is not cheap once the plants are up and operating. If this were true the rates would go down when they switch them on. The converse is true, electric rates go up. The reason for this is that a utility can include the (very high) cost of the plant in the rate base.

One of the main reasons that power companies flocked to build nuke plants was fact that they cost so much. As public (monopoly) utilities, they were guaranteed a fixed rate of return on the cost of the plant and all the other infrastructure.

This was the reason that the $6,000,000,000 Shoreham Nuclear plant was allowed to initiate a chain reaction, even though it had been already been agreed to abandon the plant due to safety concerns - Once it was officially operating the cost of the plant could be included in the rate base. Take that, electrical consumer.

So no, nuclear power is not cheap.
The fuel is relatively cheap.

I agree that coal plants should be required to pay into a fund to reverse environmental damage.

Kurt

Sorry,

You did not address waste issue. Wham. Wham

Also, I think it is obvious from the design of the Japanese reactors, That you could certainly fly a plane into the secondary containment building where the spent fuel pools are and cause a very major release, and probably disable the primary cooling pumps to boot. Wham Wham Wham

And even with the best design you still have:
Possible design errors. Wham
or
Maintenance problem Wham

What else will pop up?

Kurt

More and more I see the attempt to design and operate Nuke plant as a very dangerous game of Whack-a-mole. Operator error, Wham, Design error, Wham, Maintenance failure, Wham. Earthquakes. Wham. Tsunamis, Wham. Terrorism, Wham,

and, what do we do with the waste for the next 20,000 years? Wham, Wham, Wham, Wham........

Miss one time, game over.

Kurt

Put your viewmaster disk on a scanner that has a backlight for scanning transparencies or film negatives. scan at 1200 dpi. Your now done as far as the scanning. You could then use a tool such as the gimp to separate out the stereo pairs and reformat them so that they could be printed and viewed using an old stereo postcard viewer.

Kurt

I have been into 3D photography since my Grandfather gave me his Realist Stereo camera sometime in the 1970's. I have added many other stereo/3D cameras to the mix since then. I also have a 3D slide projector that uses polarized light to separate the images, as well as an 1890s stereo card viewer.

3D has been really big since the 1890's.
3D was big in the 50's - both movies and photography
You could get 3D comics in the 60's
Disney has had 3D movies at least since the late 70's
Viewmaster has been around since -forever-
NASA has been taking 3D images also since -forever-
And lets not forget the hologram.

Bottom line however is that 3D is a novelty and will forever remain a novelty, because viewing a stereo image is a perceptual trick that gives our brains all the clues that we are viewing an image in 3D EXCEPT that you cannot shift your point of view as you can with a real image.

This combined with the inappropriate manipulation of the apparent interocular distance by the photographer and parallax problems and other off-axis viewing problems make viewing 3D images problematic for a lot of people. And they always will. You can't fix these problems although they can be somewhat mitigated if you know what you are doing.

I enjoy 3D movies because I have been into for a long time, know where to sit in the theater, (dead center vertically and horizontally) and know how to hold my head. (level, on axis and still)

So is it a marketing scam? Sure, yes it is. Arguably 2D is much better for most content and situations. Is it fun or informative. Yes, it can be.

Will I buy a 3D TV? No.
Kurt

Granted that an engineering solution for passively cooling the spent fuel pools can be designed. But at what cost? What further vulnerabilities are introduced by the new design?

The trap of nuclear power plant design is that all contingencies and failure modes cannot be accommodated. What is the acceptable risk? One meltdown and release every fifty years? a hundred years? If we plan to be around as a species for the long term, I don't think anything but very close to 100% reliable is an acceptable risk.

Most folks are unable to grasps the time scale of how long we must deal with the waste products of our nuke plants. Certainly longer than present recorded history. It's a heavy burden to lay on the future for a few brief fleeting megawatts.

Kurt

No, sorry. I bet you forgot about the electrical power required to run the pumps required by the spent fuel pools.

Do you feel lucky?

Kurt

Hey, I went to MIT, I like technology and have no fundamental problem with nuclear power as a concept, but practically, as implemented, it is a disaster, and I don't see anything happening that will make it better any time soon.

The fundamental reason that utilities got into the nuke businesses was because they were/are fantastically expensive to build, and this cost went into the rate base by which profits as a regulated utility are figured. They also got a break on insurance for a risk they clearly do understand.

So problem one, the rational for building them was based on making money, lots of money, with the risk carried by the taxpayers.

Problem number two, we have never figured out what to do with the waste. Folks in the future are really really going to hate us as they pay for that one. And as a consequence, we have waste sitting all over the place that is not particularly well protected AND requires continuous cooling and attention.

Problem number three. Nuke power plants have a fundamental flaw or at least a design weakness. They REQUIRE an outside source of electricity and a connection to the grid in order to function. If you cut the connection to the grid, they will immediately shutdown. They have to, they can't function without a load and they need power to run the plant when they do shutdown. If you also disable the backup generators, you get what has happened in Japan. There are so many ways that this could happen besides an earthquake and tsunami.

Problem number four, Reactors tend to be grouped together along with spent fuel storage ponds, so it is easy to have a cascade failure when one goes seriously belly up. In other words, things are so hot you can't maintain the functioning plants either.

When all of the above are reasonably worked out, then lets look at building more nuclear power plants. These things should have been worked out 50 years ago.

As much as it has been belittled by some on here, the consequences of a meltdown and release of core material is a damn big deal. At the very least I expect it will put the power company out of business.

I'll leave it to you to decide if you would move your family into the exclusion zone around Chernobyl, or Fukushima.

Kurt

A calculator was defined at the time the exam was offered as "one who calculates", so I imagine that calculators (other than the exam taker) were banned. Just speculation.

Kurt

We initially ran an old DOS Cadd program called "Generic Cadd" using Dosemu. Then we ran a Windows cadd program called Visual Cadd using Wine. Both of these will create DWG files - just not the latest version.

There are now a number of very highly functional clones of Autocad that run natively on Linux.

These include Bricscad, ARES and a 2d free version of ARES called Draftsight. They will read DWG files from the current version all the way back to V 2.2 and will write any version back to V 12.

ARES has all the 3d stuff. It's sweet. Bricscad is about 1/2 the cost, and will read the 3d model but won't create one. They are in the process of fixing that now.

Kurt.

I run an architecture firm entirely on Linux. All our workstations have two reasonably big screens and use Gnome. I have used Gnome since its earliest inception in various flavers of Redhat, Fedora and Ubuntu.

I have to say that as much as I don't want to, we are going to have to change to Xfce or some other alternative. Gnome shell is a disaster for the way we work. I can't believe that the developers and UI designers have completely failed to take into account those of us that are actually using our workstations to do heavy duty computational, graphic and design work.

We have spent the last 20 years moving to ever larger and multiple screens because we need the real estate. Now we are supposed to work as if we were using a cell phone? What a joke.

The developers need a good whack will a clue stick. As does Redhat. The least they could do is have a fall back to the Gnome 2 series.

  We don't want to be the subject of an experimentet about how we "should be working."

This is serious business to us and has a big effect on our bottom line.

Kurt

How can you be "non partisan" if you are a Libertarian leaning political organization? Just askin'.....

Kurt