From a Slashdot post of mine:

" There are certianly potential serious risk associated with nuclear power.

The point was that as it stands right now it is one of the safest sources of power generation with the least environmental impact per kilowatt hour produced.

Another little tidbit that tends to be forgotten regarding our largest current power source, coal, is that we are pumping enormous amounts of U-238, U-235, and other heavy metals into the air as we burn this fuel.

Nuclear is by far not the end-all-be-all of eletrical power generation, but it is the best overall choice for the immeadiate future for large scale power consumption needs."

Longer post (complete with a dumb error where my brain died and I typed Yucatan instead of Yucca) with a whole ton of informative links can be found here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=35694&cid=3855735

One of these days it would be nice to see this sort of information get on the news instead of the paranoid fears of people trying to stop a nuclear powered interplanetary probe from being launched. The closest I've seen was a rather detailed and well done "Nova" episode.

Blue mentioning that he would post about, how OotB is never about him playing said game, but have never read anything like that. I was just wondering if he would be doing this or not. If you have done this already Blue, my mistake.

#14 Good point, I personaly would rather that we look at ways we can recycle it into something, wether dirty reactors, reactors that can use old or broken down waste to make energy, or something to absorb and turn the radiation into something useful. All radiation is just some type of energy right?

why not just eject the stuff into space and/or towards the sun

It isn't as easy as that: it takes a lot of energy to orbit/hit the Sun: spacecraft usually have to slingshot around the Earth or other planets, some times several times before being able to get to the sun. Each of those encounters could mean lovely nuclear waste peppering our atmosphere if things go wrong (not counting the launch, either).

I'm all for putting the waste on the moon, along with Martin Landau and Barbara Bain, but seems to me to be a dangerous idea.

regarding the moon thing.

why put it on the moon at all? if its going on a rocket anyway why not just eject the stuff into space and/or towards the sun....

Blue, I was just wondering if you ever got a chance to actually meet Frans face to face?

Yes, Frans, loony, and I all attended E3 together a few years ago.

Blue, I was just wondering if you ever got a chance to actually meet Frans face to face?

*** As usual, I could be wrong. But really, what are the odds of that happening twice? ***

...sooner rather than later what is going on with the site.

I'll second that.


-TPFKAS2S

WTF? They're sending nuclear waste to the moon?

Sounds like the freaking backstory of Dark Reign, where they send em to the moon and one of em blows up over india, killing 30 million people.

Rockets blow up every other week. So imagine if one of them blew up at the Cape Kennedy launch pad.

Blammo! No more Florida; it'd be a freaking wasteland, full of radioactive crap.

Here we are, all afraid of Osama and his bunch and their "dirty nukes", and there you have it, a dumb scientist trying to launch nuclear waste into the earth's orbit.

If it blows up, we're all f*cked.

Anyone find that whole moon article really funny? They don't want nuclear waste tracks getting in an accident and having it spill on a road - but they're willing to put them on rockets?

This guy knows that rockets have accidents too, right? Even worse is they have accidents way up in the air, which means a much better dispertion of the radioactive waste, all over a huge area. It makes the idea of that tinker-toy waste bomb that was in the papers a few months ago look tame in comparason.

I really have to wonder if that "Environmental Engineer" is an engineer at all, and not just some crackpot standing on the side of the road with a picket sign. You'd think anyone with any sense would know enough to question, "Hey, what if the rocket had a catastrophic failure in flight?"

Frans is gone now? hmmmmm. How much did he get paid? Maybe I could be Frans Two, the sequel.

"Web pages stored on Prodigy's Web servers do not contain 'blocks of information'"

Well what the hell DO they contain then?!?! The legal system is so ridiculous. Or, the story takes this quote out of context. I'm hoping that the judge meant 'blocks of information as described by the Sargent patent'. But really, now...

My guess is that the original patent covered data retrieval from a device using a pre-defined data block size rather than the more free-form content of the world wide web (think low-level hard disk sectors or memory pages vs. the contents of an entire file). If so, then it really would mean "blocks of information as described by the Sargent patent" as you suggested.

In any case, I'm glad this particular patent claim failed. It reminds me of the litigation years ago between Apple and Microsoft regarding basic GUI operations like overlapping windows. If I remember correctly, those claims were denied because they were judged to be too fundamental to the way a computer works. To me, it was like saying the wheel is already patented so why not try to patent rolling instead...

Even the little bit of work I do at HomeLan gives me a glimpse of how time consuming this stuff can actually become.

I have a great deal of respect for both Blue and Frans for the sheer amount of content they provide.

it's not easy being gre..errr...Blue.

no worries blue, we still love ya. i for one always dug the midnight updates. ill add my ditto to above for the need of donations or subscription based content though.

i have no worries about BN. the last couple weeks have been top notch.

I'm sad to see Frans depart, as I was when Loony left...and I hope that Blue's News continues to deliver the excellent quality news we've come to know, expect and love. I saw another wonderful news site, the Emu News, fall after losing some staff members...and by god I'd rather donate some bucks than see that fate befall my beloved Blue's. Blue, you are a good solider and a deticated warrior..and if you ever need some help with anything just as us...we'll do everything in our power to help.

Edit: I didn't see Ray's post when I posted the above...funny timing.

This comment was edited on Aug 24, 04:29.

...sooner rather than later what is going on with the site. Things seem like they are going to be interesting now, at the very least. Hopefully unlikely, I am a bit worried about the future of BN...

Too tired to go into my whole donation spiel ;),
Ray


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I am thankful for all the cranky folks on Usenet, who keep us humble every single day by reminding us that we suck. -Jeff Green
This comment was edited on Aug 24, 04:15.

"Web pages stored on Prodigy's Web servers do not contain 'blocks of information'"

Well what the hell DO they contain then?!?! The legal system is so ridiculous. Or, the story takes this quote out of context. I'm hoping that the judge meant 'blocks of information as described by the Sargent patent'. But really, now...