101357742
submission
TopSpin writes:
The Sanmen 1 nuclear reactor in Zhejiang Provice, China has been synchronized to the power grid and is generating power. The reactor has been under construction for nine years and became the first AP1000 in the world to achieve criticality on June 21, 2018. The AP1000 design recieved final design certification from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2005 and has a net output of 1.117 GWe. Three other AP1000 reactors are under construction in China at the Sanmen and Haiyang sites and two reactors are under constrution in the US at the Vogtle Electric plant in Georgia.
On June 29 the Taishan 1 reactor became the first Areva EPR design to generate power. Four EPR reactors are under construction in Finland, France and China.
72842281
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TopSpin writes:
Rust 1.0 has appeared and release parties in Paris, LA and San Francisco are taking place today. From the Rust Programming Language blog; `Today we are very proud to announce the 1.0 release of Rust, a new programming language aiming to make it easier to build reliable, efficient systems. Rust combines low-level control over performance with high-level convenience and safety guarantees. Better yet, it achieves these goals without requiring a garbage collector or runtime, making it possible to use Rust libraries as a “drop-in replacement” for C.'
56715479
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TopSpin writes:
Alcatel-Lucent has authorized The University of California, Berkeley to `release all Plan 9 software previously governed by the Lucent Public License, Version 1.02 under the GNU General Public License, Version 2.' Plan 9 was developed primarily for research purposes as the successor to Unix by the Computing Sciences Research Center at Bell Labs between the mid-1980s and 2002. Plan 9 has subsequently emerged as Inferno, a commercially supported derivative, and ports to various platforms including a recent port to the Raspberry Pi. In Plan 9, all system interfaces, including those required for networking and the user interface, are represented through the file system rather than specialized interfaces. The system provides a generic protocol, 9P, to perform all communication with the system, among processes and with network resources. Applications compose resources using union file systems to form isolated namespaces.
7726424
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TopSpin writes:
NASA's Constellation Program and Ares rockets appear to have strong support in Congress. An appropriations bill passed by the House includes language that bars "any efforts by NASA to cancel or change the current Constellation program without first seeking approval of Congress." The Administration's appointed NASA leadership is being publicly hostile towards its traditional aerospace affiliations. As Charles Bolden put it to industry execs, "We are going to be fighting and fussing over the coming year," and "Some of you are not going to like me because we are not going to do the same kind of things we've always done."
7490188
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TopSpin writes:
BMW's limited roll out of the electric version of its MINI has met with complaints from early adopters including less than advertised range, cold weather charging problems, bulky batteries and connection issues. Richard Steinburg, BMW's manager of electric vehicle operations, assures everyone that the manufacturer is "learning quite a bit as we go." Drivers are paying $850/month for the privilege of helping BMW learn how to build EVs, while also helping BMW meet alternative fuel mandates so that other models can continue to be sold in select markets.
826997
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TopSpin writes:
Brendan Eich, creator of the JavaScript programming language, has announced that ECMA Technical Committee 39 has abandoned the proposed ECMAScript 4.0 language specification in favor of a more limited specification dubbed "Harmony", or ECMAScript 3.1. A split has existed among the members of this committee, including Adobe and Microsoft, regarding the future of what most of us know as JavaScript. Adobe had been promulgating their ActionScript 3 language as the next ECMAScript 4.0 proposal. As some point out, the split that has prevented this may be the result of Microsoft's interests. What does the future hold for Mozilla's Tamarin Project, based on Adobe's open source ActionScript virtual machine?
245583
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TopSpin writes:
Flight International reports that scientists at the Marshall Space Flight Center have developed designs for an Aries V launched array of asteroid interceptors wielding B83 nuclear warheads. The hypothetical mission for these designs is based on an Apophis sized Earth impactor 2-5 years out. According to NASA, "Nuclear standoff explosions are assessed to be 10-100 times more effective [at deflection] than the non-nuclear alternatives analyzed in this study (pdf)."
238209
submission
TopSpin writes:
According to this story, at Japan's recent euphemistically named Adult Treasure Expo 2007, adult filmmakers said Sony had begun offering technical support — which was later confirmed by Sony PR, which stated that Sony would offer support to any filmmaker working on the format, no matter their industry. Apparently, Blu-ray is now the preferred media for Japanese porn.
