Posts by HW de Haan

Google can't spare 113 seconds of revenue to compile data on its gender pay gap

Re: (.) (.)

Yes, let's try that, let's put as many people per square mile as the Netherlands has in the USA and see what happens to the employment- and wage figures overthere. I think you're in for a rather nasty surprise.

Sysadmin 'trashed old bosses' Oracle database with ticking logic bomb'

Re: Serial Numbers

So I just swap undersides and I'm good to go (If I bring it in in a non-booting state)?

What a time to be alive: drone pooper-scoopers are a thing now

Re: useless . . . . .

Including the long grass your dog loves so much..

A krayshee sexy Dutch post-pub nosh neckfiller: Stamppot

Stamppot is not a post-pup neckfiller, the smoked sausage or Gelderse gekookte, a boiled sausage are though...

Uni of Maryland hacked: 300,000 SSNs of staff, students, alumni swiped

Re: Sophisticated computer security attack?

My bet is on a usb-stick plugged into the back because the front slots were taped over to prevent unauthorised plug-ins.

Eurocops want to build remote car-stopper, shared sensor network

I thought BMW or Audi were already working on such a system.

And when looking at the current alternatives, pit, tpac, stinger, creating trafic-jam or simply letting the fugitives go, this sounds like a reasonable alternative. Neither of the current methods of stopping the perps are any safer, well perhaps tpac but you need an awfull lot of roadspace and cars to accomplish that one, than the horror scenarios some of the previous commenters have suggested.

Maybe I have a higher regard for the average IQ of police officers then some other readers, but I don't think they're stupid enough to blindly push the button just any moment anywhere. Afterall I haven't yet seen them using a pit in the middle of mondaymorning-traffic om the M5...

btw, most of the current highspeed car-chases originate from DUI and joyriding. Neither of those will usually have/take the time to tamper with such a system before they become a subject in a car chase...

Apple files foul-up-fixing patent for fumbling slab-fondling flubbers

Seven years for a patent to be processed...Seven years for rival companies to invent exactly the same thing.. No wonder half the industry is involved in patent related lawsuits against the other half. If everyone backtracked every idea they had to see if there allready was a patent pending, the world would be a hell of a lot more expensive to live in :s

Suspected Chinese NASA spy smuggled smut not state secrets

Re: Steno-pornography?

Why would someone physically haul such a load through customs with all risks that come with it, when he could have just as easily set up a shell acount at some anomymous hosting provider and seed a few torrent files from there.

Good news: A meltdown would kill fewer than we thought

Getting your facts right might help

Well, except for the fact that chernobyl wasn't a watercooled reactor....

Who's nicked Vaz's fondleslab?

Title?

Maybe some should inform mister Vaz that he is among politicians.

Japanese gov makes Fukushima evac zone compulsory

(untitled)

It is on the other hand highly unlikely that the background radiation in those places will ever subside. This in contrary to Fukushima....

Re: The cautious approach

There is one good reason to keep people out. It's easier to clean up a hotspot when noone is around to trod through it and so spread the problem.

um yes, a title...

"The shrillest doomsayers flog theories that ingesting or inhaling the radioactive particles will somehow increase localised effect by an insane amount. To cite an example, one guy on TV pontificated that a speck lodged inside a lung would give neighbouring cells located a micron away from it an exposure1,000,000,000,000 times greater than it would if it were a metre away. This is of course patently ridiculous."

Well, to be honest they aren't, at least in theory, very much off...

A single decaying particle( The moment of decay is the dangerous bit when radiation emitted) will not be powerful enough to do much damage when it is a few feet away from the body. But when it's inside the body chances a pretty great it will kill or do damage to one or more cells. So reasoning like that the chance is ridiculously larger when that particle is inside the body. (still, 1,000,000,000,000 times just about nill is still not much)

Having said that, it's important to take note of the halflife of a particle. As I said before the risk is in the moment of decay. So when you take a glass of water with a single radioactive isotope with a halflife of only days, changes are pretty great that it will decay inside you. On the other hand if the same glass contains a particle like caesium with a halflife of twenty odd years you will probably pee it out without it doing any harm. Otoh there is some trouble regarding certain long halflife isotopes that might be stored inside the body. Luckily for the Japanese people hardly any of those have been released and most of what got out of the plant is still largely contained within the now dammed harbour of the plant.

And this brings us to the point that Lewis is making. Now that most of the I-131 has decayed (This was the really dangerous stuff with both a short halflife and being stored within the body for a prolonged period of time) the risk of anything happening to you while walking around in the exclusion-zone isn't really that great anymore.

They're melting down the cores

If you had bothered to look at facts before you started ranting, you would've seen that the temperatures of all three cores have been hovering somewhere between 100 and 200°C for the past weeks. Hardly a temperature at which your beloved meltdown would be possible.

Same goes for the 'leaky' #2 containment. The spilling has been dammed off and They're planning to close the leak in the coming weeks.

You know, it's not for nothing that the govt send recovery-crews into the evacuation zone a while ago. They would've never risk the lives of people to recover dead bodies. That's a basic fact of all rescue/recovery work.

not much choice

Since the journo is basing his story on the facts delivered by the people on the ground, you're not leaving us with much of a choice is it?

Dutch astronaut unleashes 155 mph 'Superbus'

Erm....no

The big difference between a train and this thing is that you will not see a train step out of its rails to come and pick you up. The reason why it likes a dedicated road is because regular traffic has a hard time handling a 15mtr 155mph passer-by.

Fukushima fearmongers are stealing our Jetsons future

Re: Reprocessing

"And there’s been no time in the last 30-odd years when uranium prices have been above $30/lb for even a matter of weeks."

According to this document by the IMF the price of yellowcake hasn't been below $40/lb since 2008. www.imf.org/external/np/res/commod/table3.pdf

US forces scaredypants?

"Those scaredypants of the US forces bar personnel from going within 80 km of the plant."

Funny to read this and at the same time on NHK-World see US marines delivering a barge of fresh (cooling)water to the plant.

Beer, what else on a friday?

JCB.Photorf => I am guessing you don't have children

According to your argument we should have stopped using fossil fuels long long ago. Remember Aberfan in 1966 for instance? Or San Martin Texmeluca in 2010? And what about the tsunami in Japan that shoved large parts of the Japanese petrochemical (read carcinogenic) industry over the land?

Beer, because of the lack of something stronger