Posts by KX1B 10 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Aug 2012
Beautiful ship! May she sail with the wind at her back.
I had to do a double take. New England and Britain share many things in common especially names of places. We have a Portsmouth Naval Shipyard which is Portsmouth Harbor, New Hampshire whilst the base itself resides in Kittery, Maine. It's a submarine overhaul base now.
If it weren't for the radioactive decay of the unstable elements at the core of the Earth, life as we know it would not be possible. Thorium is one of the two radioactive elements found in abundance at the Earth's surface that can be refined into fuel to power a reactor for electric generation. Thorium is four times more abundant on Earth than Uranium.
Thorium reactors can also recycle nuclear 'waste' from conventional Uranium reactors leaving almost no waste to deal with. The reactor designs can not only recycle waste, they can breed additional fuels that can be 'burned' in the reactors themselves. These reactor designs are not reliant on high pressure steam or hot water to spin turbines that generate electricity. The level of radioactivity is much lower and the reactor designs developed by Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee have an automatic shutdown mechanism built-in if the reactor becomes too hot.
But the fact that its 'nuclear' scares people. Plutonium and U-238 are not produced as a by-product by a Thorium reactor so there is no potential for weapons grade Pu or U being produced. This is why the U.S. Government abandoned this design in the 1960's. They needed a reliable source for the production of Pu and U-238 in weapons grade refinement to power the nuclear weapons programs.
Customers are moving their applications and data to a cloud environment. Unless a customer is considering building out a private or hybrid cloud, there is limited potential for this storage solution. If Nirvanix failed to take marketshare away from S3, what is the key differentiator of DDN's WOS 3.0 that will convince customers to move their data from S3 to WOS and host it in their own cloud?
The audacity of HP to ask for another tax holiday when the last time they repatriated foreign funds due to a tax holiday it wasn't spent on adding jobs or capital investments in America. The people in Congress who promised it would add 1 million jobs to the economy should be put on TV and explain to the public why this didn't happen. Maybe the next time Congress decides to vote for a Tax Holiday, they'll have some strings attached. As something like this. 'The $$ goes into a separate fund that will be used to hire workers, build factories on American shores' If those factories stay open for 5 years, there is no tax owed. If the money is not used for those purposes, or if the factories and/or jobs disappear within 5 years, the money will be taxed on a sliding scale based on how long the investment was put to good use. Paying shareholders and executives with the $$ that was brought here under false pretenses is criminal.
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