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Comment Transmutation in SFRs or LWRs too (Score 4, Informative) 187

The link goes to information about proposed accelerator driven subcritical reactors, but you can transmute plutonium, minor actinides, and fission products in sodium fast reactors (SFRs) or light water reactors with inert matrix fuel (LWRs). SFRs have nearly the same spectrum neutron energy spectrum as most proposed ADS blankets, and the technology readiness level is much higher. Basically anything you can do in an ADS you can do in an SFR, but you don't have the added cost of an accelerator. Moderated targets would be required for fission product transmutation.

Passive decay heat removal is necessary whether you are talking about an ADS or an SFR. Other than the worst reactivity insertion accidents (which can be mitigated by negative reactivity coefficients) I do not see serious benefits to an ADS over an SFR.

Comment Re:Where do you draw the line? (Score 1) 650

Rosetta was licensed from Transitive, which was eventually bought by IBM. Apple didn't own it, so they couldn't open-source it.

I'm willing to bet that Classic drew on an ancient codebase with bits of licensed code mixed in. Getting it in a state where it could be open-sourced was probably more trouble than it was worth.

Comment Umm... no network activity alerts? (Score 1) 232

I get that Target might've forced their IT department to take the cheap way out and forgo a nice, isolated building management system. That's out of their control.

But how could they not notice the spike in network traffic as data was being sent to the hackers?

They should know how much bandwidth their terminals are chewing up on average, how many transactions are occurring, approximately how much data should be crossing the network per transaction and have an eye out for a sudden burst of outgoing data heading to one IP address.

Is there something I'm missing here?

Comment 2011 Refurbs (Score 2) 359

Some early/late 2011 refurbs have been popping up on the Apple Refurb Store occasionally still (although there are none on there now there was some several weeks ago). My guess is these are machines Apple is replacing for folks with AppleCare and then they are replacing the logic board and battery and reselling them as refurbs.

I have a late 2011 (a work machine with applecare) and have never seen any issues.

Comment Global vs. local effects (Score 5, Interesting) 517

Global warming is exactly that- a global trend, not a local one. Locally, the effects have been most pronounced near the north pole, which is not exactly a place where many people live.

Global climate change seems to have resulted recently in a "warming" trend, but as we know from Al Gore's movie, if the North Atlantic current gets shut off we are in for a polar vortex on a much longer time scale.

I am not sure who coined the phrase "global warming"; is it a PR failure by the scientists involved or a reporting failure by the news media? To quote a well known meme: "why not both?"

Comment Meanwhile, in Syria... (Score 4, Informative) 309

The WSJ:

There also have been recent outbreaks in the Horn of Africa and Syria, although there are signs that those cases will soon be mopped up.

NPR:

The World Health Organization has declared a polio emergency in Syria.

After being free of the crippling disease for more than a decade, Syria recorded 10 confirmed cases of polio in October. Now the outbreak has grown to 17 confirmed cases, the WHO said last week. And the virus has spread to four cities, including a war-torn suburb near the capital of Damascus.

The Syrian government has pledged to immunize all Syrian children under age 5. But wartime politics is getting in the way. And the outbreak is expected to grow.

"Actually, it is spreading quickly," says Dr. Mohammed Al Saad in Gaziantep, Turkey, near the northern border of Syria. There are now more than 60 suspected cases, he says, with new ones reported each day.

Comment Re: Uh, that's a huge spread (Score 1) 226

He said 'short term' ... that means for me in hours or less.
Current reactors don't do that. If you power a reactor a bit down it gets difficult to power it up again, due to different characteristics of moderation (waste products).

The difficulty is due to xenon, which can limit the magnitude of the load follow. However, trust me there are reactors that can follow. History of load following reactors from the American Nuclear Society

Comment Re:bfd (Score 4, Interesting) 226

Although wind power does not contribute to global warming through greenhouse gas emission, it does extract kinetic energy from the atmosphere and therefore may alter global climate even at continental scales

It may be the lesser of evils compared to some other supplemental energy options but it isn't perfect- and it isn't a good candidate for base load

Comment Re:Uh, that's a huge spread (Score 2, Informative) 226

On a daily basis, December was a month of extremes for Germany, with day-ahead base prices closing on December 10 and 11 at less than €60/MWh – the highest over-the-counter levels seen all year – only to fall to its lowest level December 24 to €0.50/MWh.

I have seen a nice bumper sticker before: Solar and wind are allright, but nuke's do it all night.

I agree with this sentiment. Shame Germany is phasing out nuclear in favor of coal.

Comment Hypothesis vs. conclusion (Score 2) 247

The dark matter ring is merely a hypothesis. In my field (or science, engineering, or mathematics generally) we should follow the scientific method when reporting results at a meeting.

This guy was unfortunately presenting a hypothesis. He should have waited and tried to find more compelling evidence before presenting. New Scientist should be familiar enough with the scientific method to avoid publicizing a radical and unproven hypothesis.

Submission + - Isaac Asimov's 50-Year-Old Prediction for 2014 Is Viral and All Wrong (vice.com)

Daniel_Stuckey writes: So the internet has obviously exalted over noted non-ass Isaac Asimov's vision for 2014, which he articulated in a New York Times opinion piece in 1964. The sci-fi writer imagined visiting the 2014 World Fair, and the global culture and economy the exhibits might reflect. NPR called his many predictions, which range from cordless smart telephones, to robots running our leisure society, to machine-cooked 'automeals', "right on." Business Insider called the forecast "spot on." The Huffington Post called the projections "eerily accurate."

The only thing is, they're not.

Taken as a whole, Asimov's vision for 2014 is wildly off. It's more that 'Genius predicted the future 50 years ago' makes for a great article hook. Asimov does hit a couple pretty close to home: He got pretty close to guessing the world population (6.5 billion); he anticipated automated cars ("vehicles with 'robot brains'"); and he seems to have described the current smartphone/tablet craze ("sight-sound" telephones that "can be used not only to see the people you call but also for studying documents and photographs and reading passages from books.")

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