Slashdot Mirror

iOS maintains a significant lead over Android, and always has, although on Slashdot ignorance is bliss, so I fully expect some replies from people ignorantly claiming this isn't true

If this is true, why do we constantly see news stories like this one that suggests that Android has a 10-15% market share lead over iOS? Where are the figures that back your assertion up?

Amazon is a personification of the spirit of the Internet, which is one of true democracy, access to the means of distribution, and rapid evolution

Spirit of the internet? Some on seeing Amazons' passing judgement on Wikileaks might think it more aligned with a certain corporate spirit than a spirit of the internet. If they're really support democracy, which can't function properly with a poorly informed public, maybe they shouldn't be the ones to decide whether or not someone is a journalist.

Hardware doesn't make spirit. What people are doing, and the thoughts that drive the choices made probably do.

They are still contented to profit from the sale of books about WikiLeaks.

http://www.amazon.com/Inside-WikiLeaks-Assange-Dangerous-Website/dp/030795191X

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/dec/11/wikileaks-amazon-denial-democracy-lieberman

Frankly, the idea of companies being "friends" is a bit weird

It's very weird indeed

Speaking of utter lack of links, because this was completely devoid in the description and the articles themselves, here are some I found relevant from comments below other articles and searching for a couple of minutes:

http://www.sfx.co.uk/2011/04/16/85-authors-protest-at-the-bbc%E2%80%99s-treatment-of-genre-fiction/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/apr/18/genre-authors-protest-bbc
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-13128769 --- (this is the BBC defense / response)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/search/news/?q=World%20Book%20Night

And the answer to your question:
The Books Featured

(Hell someone had to get a few more links in here eventually)

cheers

So Greenpeace doesn't like Apple (expect to hear a lot more about that one soon,) they don't like video games and they _especially_ don't like Nitnendo, and now they hate the Internet?

Are they intentionally trying to make everyone hate them? I'm not saying that popular things should be immune to criticism, but there's a right way to do so, and Greenpeace seems to be trying to find the exact opposite way of doing it.

If you want to make a difference you need to find actual problems so that even if the initial claim sounds outrageous anyone but the most rabid fanboy will look at the evidence and say "you know, they're actually kinda right." Instead with Greenpeace's strategy everyone initially says "that doesn't sound right", checks the "evidence" and concludes "no, it totally isn't right."

You can get away with boosting your publicity by making outrageous and mostly unfounded accusations against a minority, because most of the majority won't feel any need to defend that minority against the attack. The gains you make for getting the attention of the majority will make up for pissing off the minority. However Greenpeace seems to be trying to piss off not one but multiple large groups of people. I'm sure everyone who doesn't play video games, doesn't own an iPhone and doesn't use the internet loves them right now. Exactly how large and influential is that particular combination?

It currently looks like the litigious solicitors bringing the claims on behalf of the content owners will be funding it, or at least carry the can on behalf of the plaintiffs.

The infamous 'ACS Law' who sent tens of thousands of letters demanding 'settlement' payments of about £500 from people it accused of illegal downloading were accused of breaching the solicitors code of conduct.

The Judge said that ACS Law was "amateurish and slipshod" and said it had "brought the legal profession into disrepute".

The XBox has been making a profit since before the start of 2008. They even had $165 million in profit for Q3 of last year.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/148982/xbox_delivers_a_profit.html

http://www.pcworld.com/article/148982/xbox_delivers_a_profit.html

And lets not forget that while Microsofts profits are falling that the XBox and Kinect profits are growing.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jan/28/microsoft-profits-xbox-kinect

You were saying?

The regime can import food.

Yeah really, they can just order in 50,000 tons of egg rolls and Kung Bao chicken..

"In a visit to Ethiopia in 2009, I talked to more than one citizen there who said that the arability of the land wasn't so much the problem as not having the machines to farm the land productively. "

This is completely ignorant. Read here:

"In the late 1970s Ethiopia's communist regime nationalised all land, and private ownership remains outlawed. The millions of small-scale farmers work under licence from the state, and most plots are one hectare or less, which has hampered efforts to improve food security."

Now the Ethiopian government is leasing out large scale plots of land to foreign farm companies, which will certainly produce some work for Ethiopians, but your typical Ethiopian still has no ownership of the land and thus no ability to use that capital to get loans for farm equipment, fertilizer, and seed.

As Hernando DeSoto pointed out in "The Mystery of Capital", every developed nation in the world at one time went through the transformation from predominantly informal, extralegal land ownership to a formal, unified legal property system that allowed people to leverage property into wealth. This has not been done in countries such as Ethiopia (Egypt is another country with little rural private land ownership).

Lack of private property rights and over-regulation and government ownership of business causes poverty. Enhancing private property rights and freedom to participate in commerce cause wealth. Even the Chinese have realized this (belatedly, after starving tens of millions of people to death with collective farming during the Great Leap Forward).

Poor people around the world are not too stupid, too lazy, or too ignorant to be entrepreneurs and productive farmers. They are simply kept from becoming rich by government. They can solve their own problems if they are allowed to.

How about http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/apr/15/chinese-economic-growth-slows

"The 11.7% rise in food costs reflected growing demand, a shrinking pool of young workers â" pushing up agricultural wages â" and supply chain problems, said Arthur Kroeber of economic consultancy GaveKal-Dragonomics."

They realise they cannot live on exporting stuff to US consumers who increasingly have less money to spend, especially when the status quo results in inflation within China - and a yuan that wants to float but cannot becuase they hold such a large amount of US dollars. Getting rid of those dollars anyway they can makes a huge amount of sense.

You'd know that there *are* millions of climate refugees.

Start here or here or here ("12 out of 13 'flash' appeals in 2007 related to weather"). Here's 3/4 of a million soon to be refugees in just ONE island nation (now go add up the rest).

Pretty nice writing that snide and ignorant summary from your comfortable suburban basement, wasn't it?

This article clearly demonstrates what's wrong with America's science reporting. If the UN had released a report claiming 50 million global warming refugees by 2010, there would be dozens of news articles on it. The supposed incriminating evidence is a Google Cache page with this map that doesn't itself say anything about refugees, but does highlight areas most susceptible to sea level rise. The "50 million climate refugees by 2010" statement is not referenced anywhere in any UN report, it's a six words on one defunct graphic that was part of a larger report on world agriculture by the UN University. This 50 million by 2010 figure comes from Dr. Bogardi at the UN University in Bonn, NOT the United Nations.

The problem with this prediction being made by any scientist is that keeping track of how many refugees there are is difficult (current estimate by the UN is 1 million a year, a figure that the Red Cross lends support to with the statement that environmental disasters are displacing more people than war now) and the causes are debatable. The epic flooding in Pakistan created 10 million refugees, Hurricane Katrina added a quarter of a million refugees, and desertification in Africa is displacing millions. Can we blame these events on Global Warming? Hurricanes and floods happen without a warming world, but a warming world increases the chances of such disasters happening.

Then there are the refugees that no one realizes. In the small coastal town where I live in North Carolina, houses have been falling into the swamp one by one for decades, but the residents blame it on people building their homes in flood zones, not realizing that sea levels in their state have risen three times the rate of rise on the rest of the Atlantic coast. People didn't build their homes in the water, the water rose 1.5 meters over the 50 years since they were built, but nobody realizes this because of landscape amnesia.

You can read all about the various estimates concerning environmental refugees on Wikipedia. It took the author of this untruth less than an hour to post their nonsense and the deniers flooded the Internet with it quickly. It took me two hours to research and write this response, because I wanted to know what I was talking about, and I will only reach a very small audience in comparison. This is why I despair when considering how science could possibly stand a chance against the overwhelming confidence ignorance brings the unscientific masses.

I agree that China is probably going to go the way of Japan in the 80s - everyone thought it was the ultimate powerhouse economy that could do no wrong. Eventually everyone saw through the doddery asset inflation and its economy is still practically collapsed.

China... the country that wants to float its currency but cannot as it would bankrupt both it and the US (as it hold an eyewateringly large number of dollars), China that has such excellent infrastructure and a truly incredible property bubble (especially in Beijing)

I think the world needs to prepare for the Chinese disaster to come, I think the world's politicians already know about it and are trying to manage it already.

There is a solution of kinds.... China needs to take chunks of its manufacturing and relocate it to the USA - thus keeping the products, the currency input, and also reducing its reliance on exports to the US. The US will also benefit - it'd be just a balancing of global trade that has become dangerously unstable over the last decade or so. They would get rid of some of their dollars then - in payment for supplies and wages, would help to reduce the inflation that China is struggling with at the moment. Sound sensible?

EMI is for sale, as of three days ago. They're owned by Citicorp, the bank. A venture capital firm defaulted on their debt, and Citicorp ended up with EMI. Citicorp wants to unload that unwanted asset for cash.

There was talk of Warner buying EMI, but Warner has financing problems of their own. Either Google or Apple could easily pick up EMI right now.

I'm not sure about this, this would be a very hard thing to prove. How do you isolate the direct effects of piracy from normal market trends?

I've only browsed most of the studies, so I can't give a good answer. But it seems like many studies look at differences between consumers, and try to find correlations between pirating behaviour and purchasing behaviour. For example, the one by Industry Canada. Or this British one.

Generally, the people who pirate the most also spend the most money on music, if we include concert-going and merchandise.

So far, I've only found one (1) study which confirms the thesis that piracy adversely affects sales, and that's the study sponsored by the American recording industry.

Also, I'd like to point out that maximising the revenue from music/movie/software sales is not optimal for society. Quite to the contrary, if the same amount of music/movies/software can be sold to the public at a lower price, it's better for the economy. A market which can produce a music CD for $5 is more efficient than one which can produce the same CD for $10. From an economic standpoint, an industry's revenues should be as small as possible, as long as it stays profitable for it to produce its goods.

A much smaller amount of pirates, though, would have bought the content if it wasn't for a free alternative being around. These ones do result in at least a theoretical loss for creators. This group hurts smaller artists more than large publishers, since small sums of money matter much more starving musicians than those covered by the big, rich, greasy, wings of old publishers.

I think it's the other way around, since the smaller artist's music is harder to find online, they benefit more from the free advertising which piracy provides, and they tend to have a larger percentage of dedicated fans who are willing to go to concerts, buy merchandise and donate directly.

Many small bands have found that it's most efficient to just offer the music for free download, for example, the ones at jamendo.com.

Yucca Mountain's capacity limit has no scientific basis

As proposed, Yucca would have been filled more than twice by now. But let's not gloss over that it was never built, and that all the waste is languishing in temporary containment open air pools near our 104 currently operating nuclear plants, and these temporary pools are all well over designed capacity.

You are ignoring the fact that breeder reactors would provide huge amounts of energy in the process. It's common to fixate on how nuclear waste is bad but ignore how much emissions-free electricity it is responsible for.

Considering the amount of waste we have, and the amount of reprocessed fuel breeder reactors consume, we'd need a lot more new breeder reactors than the number reactors at the 104 conventional nuclear power plants just to make a dent in it. So... 400 breeder reactors later, and there's so much electricity available they can't give it away. See the problem? Where is the investment return? We would have the electricity, and a nice plan to reduce the current waste, but no economic feasibility to return the investment cost of building 400 breeder reactors, which would surely exceed hundreds of trillions of dollars... and in the end only mitigates the waste issue by compacting it into sometimes even deadlier toxic waste, it doesn't eliminate it entirely.

Nuclear power is not getting cheaper. All the research is pretty much done, and we've squeezed that R&D bone dry.

Far from true. The only well developed field is light water reactors using uranium dioxide fuel, but there's a lot more to reactor technology than that. Breeder reactor research has just scratched the surface. ... Overbearing regulations on everything related to radiation and nuclear technology are slowing down progress in this area.

And again what you are talking about is very very very expensive, heavily government subsidized research... and still it pales to the sheer magnitude of resources we've already invested. The money still comes from somewhere, and it is still not being returned (presumably, electricity is sold back to investors (i.e. taxpayers) at a profit only realizable because the government subsidies do not require any investment return). And removing regulations is a ridiculous idea. Regulations were put in place as a direct response to nuclear incidents in regard to public safety, and complaining that this slows down research is not a valid reason to put the public at risk by simply removing them.

For your several points about subsidies and R&D spending,

Not a refutation of my argument. Ignored because you have conceded that the cost is stratospheric, i.e. the only entities that have that kind of money are governments.

1. Who is "proliferators"? Some guilt-by-association neologism for nuclear power proponents?

I was simply referring to those that agree with the further proliferation of nuclear energy as the solution to the world's energy problems.

2. Despite the cost halving, solar is still far more expensive than other renewables and is already starting to suffer from diminishing returns.

You obviously made this up, perhaps you believe it, but it is still false. Solar continues to be more viable over time. Whereas, Nuclear power is not getting any less expensive.

To the references Guardian article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/11/china-us-human-rights-double-standards/print
To the Chinese report: http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/us/2011-04/11/content_12303177.htm

The Guardian posted an excellent rebutal to this point of view by Helen Caldicott: How Nuclear Apologists Mislead the World Over Radiation . The article you linked dismissed this article disparagingly with a three word ad hominem attack: "mad Auntie Fear" without addressing, let alone countering, any of her arguments. Instead, the Register article repeats the very mistakes Caldicott had identified.

Helen Caldicott is a medical doctor. She taught pediatrics at the Harvard Medical School for two years before turning her focus to researching and reporting the health hazards of nuclear power.

OTOH, Lewis Page (assuming it is the same Lewis Page):

... served as an officer in the Royal Navy from 1993 to 2004, and is now an author and authority on military matters.

You can also get an idea of his expertise by looking at his other articles at the Register.

It is amazing that you think the article by Lewis Page is authoritative since he has absolutely no expertise on the subject; he totally ignores criticism from a person who is an authority; and he dismisses the authority with a rude ad hominem attack. OTOH, his level of discourse would fit right in with the irrational, faith-based pro-nuclear advocacy here on Slashdot.

The Guardian posted an excellent rebutal to this point of view by Helen Caldicott: How Nuclear Apologists Mislead the World Over Radiation . The article you linked dismissed this article disparagingly with a three word ad hominem attack: "mad Auntie Fear" without addressing, let alone countering, any of her arguments. Instead, the Register article repeats the very mistakes Caldicott had identified.

Helen Caldicott is a medical doctor. She taught pediatrics at the Harvard Medical School for two years before turning her focus to researching and reporting the health hazards of nuclear power.

OTOH, Lewis Page (assuming it is the same Lewis Page):

... served as an officer in the Royal Navy from 1993 to 2004, and is now an author and authority on military matters.

You can also get an idea of his expertise by looking at his other articles at the Register.

It is amazing that you think the article by Lewis Page is authoritative since he has absolutely no expertise on the subject; he totally ignores criticism from a person who is an authority; and he dismisses the authority with a rude ad hominem attack. OTOH, his level of discourse would fit right in with the irrational, faith-based pro-nuclear advocacy here on Slashdot.

Not that the BBC's reporting is any good these days. I stopped reading it after they echoed the Israeli military's line on the boat raid last year. Hell, they were pretty much printing word for word the press release given by Knesset.

Doesn't sound like the reporting you'd get from Jeremy Bowen

I'd be very doubtful unless he has good proof he was working for the government.

Uhm.. the government ALREADY ADMITTED that they were using him as an undercover informant.

One of those things about the word "undercover" is that unless you are participating in what is going on, chances are the people you are trying to inform on will peg you real quick. "Hey, don't talk to that guy, everyone he talks to gets busted by the feds."

The Secret Service is no different than any other law enforcement agency. The dirtiest, most corrupt wing is always "Vice", simply because in order to find the guys they're trying to bust the cops have to get very, very, very dirty themselves. Sometimes they go native, sometimes they really go native, sometimes they get really freaking insane (more here. Sometimes it's even worse. Undercover cops on major mafia infiltration cases have had almost carte blanche to participate in anything that went on, so long as they testified later.

Am I completely convinced he's telling the truth? No. Is it reasonably plausible that someone in the Secret Service gave him verbal instructions to do certain things in order to keep his credibility up so as to set up future busts, but then decided he wasn't worth it and used him as a scapegoat? Absolutely.

That's correct: its demographic is neither technically literate nor particularly well-informed or erudite, and comprises a large and influential chunk of the UK electorate. It has the second-highest circulation in the UK, with a slowly rising circulation, and has been the most-visited UK newspaper website for some time. Politicians in the UK therefore take its bigoted rants very seriously, just as Fox News is taken seriously by politicians in the US.

That's correct: its demographic is neither technically literate nor particularly well-informed or erudite, and comprises a large and influential chunk of the UK electorate. It has the second-highest circulation in the UK, with a slowly rising circulation, and has been the most-visited UK newspaper website for some time.

Politicians in the UK therefore take its bigoted rants very seriously, just as Fox News is taken seriously by politicians in the US.

Well, AUM also employs the Prof that censored Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain -- "The new edition's Alabama-based publisher, NewSouth books, says the development is a "bold move compassionately advocated" by the book's editor, Twain scholar Dr Alan Gribben of Auburn University, Montgomery."
            http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jan/05/huckleberry-finn-edition-censors-n-word
It's all starting to fit together...

I had never heard of Auburn University Montgomery before today; given the nature of this story, I don't expect ever to hear of it in any serious context again.

Maybe you forgot? Home of the Prof that censored Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain -- "The new edition's Alabama-based publisher, NewSouth books, says the development is a "bold move compassionately advocated" by the book's editor, Twain scholar Dr Alan Gribben of Auburn University, Montgomery."
      http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jan/05/huckleberry-finn-edition-censors-n-word

IRC the problem for any 3D screen-based system is the fact that
your eyes need to both

1) focus on the screen while simultaneously

2) converging (right and left eyes pointing) to a locus behind (or of the screen).

This is an unnatural thing to do - a bit like crossing your eyes without noticing.
If you do it for a long time it has a lasting aftereffect where you can't see real world distances properly for some hours afterwards.

If your eyes are still learning to make sense of the world (like children's) they can be fooled in learning wrong things about the world - such as it is normal to focus at one depth and converge at another - thus doing permanent damage

As first commented by me here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jan/20/nintendo-3ds-could-harm-child-eyes-claim?commentpage=1#comment-9235640

Never said it's all it takes, just that it's more important than having an intelligent candidate. If memory serves, Perot fucked up royally by dropping out, didn't he? Besides, even he may have had less funding than the D/R campaigns. Obama's new campaign is budgeted at $1bn, for instance.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/07/japan-earthquake-tsunami-warning
- Tsunami warning cancelled
- Onagawa nuclear power plant lost power line, incl. for cooling the spent fuel pool, but the backup generator kicked in OK.

That's interesting. But you'd think if were really necessary to be that big, then evolution would simply construct a better bone. The way birds have especially light, kind of honeycomb bones so they can fly more easily.

What I really want to know is how the f* do they know what colour skin dinosaurs have?! We've had the smurf-blue kosmoceratops, now this multi-coloured red thing. Is there any reasoning behind it, or just bored artists?

Like they do in France

You can already get human milk ice cream in London: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/feb/25/human-milk-ice-cream-sale

It's fun to bash Yanks and all, but are you kidding? In the US, the onus is on the plaintiff to prove a statement was defamatory, not the defendant to prove that it wasn't; also, truth is an absolute defense against a defamation claim. Not so in the UK, with England being known as "the libel capital of the world".

We never said once that the car had run out of power. The car had to be pushed into the warehouse because you are not allowed to drive cars into a building.

Ok, so in what other cases has the show used that shot? Oh wait, they haven't. They were clearly implying it was out of power. Top Gear never explicitly lied in the piece, but they made things appear to be different from what actually happened and then let the viewers make the logical assumption themselves. I don't mind that the challenges are scripted, but I expected some degree of truth from their actual reviews.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/03/us-bank-mexico-drug-gangs

If drugs were legalised and taxed, the revenue may end up being being distributed across the population. This is undesirable to our owners, the banks, who would rather that revenue were distributed to the small number of people with influence.

Fear earns nothing but violence and destruction. Fear and violence are the acts of despots determined to keep what is not theirs.

The Borgia crime family - one of the greatest mafiosa gangs in history - presided over the Enlightenment and largely caused most of it. True, there was a lot of fear, but centralized justice and peace on Earth there wasn't.

Scotland and the outlying islands achieved a murder rate average of 0.00000045 per thousand people per year over its first four millenia of occupation. It also had very very little scientific or technical development (well, ok, they invented the stone circle, the method of raising monoliths, and for some reason apartment complexes, but not a whole lot else).

And these guys don't seem too afraid of central justice. Oh, and the ATF being busted for smuggling guns into Mexico for 6-10 years? Yeah, right, those're the guys I'd trust to defend my freedom. Not.

Cambridge University, one of the leading institutions in the world for scientific research, is one of the most left-wing and has some of the greatest protections against retribution and indeed any kind of central justice system. It was even founded by criminals. Many top US universities for science could say the same, except for perhaps the being founded by criminals bit.

The US military recently admitted death-squads in Afghanistan went out killing civilians for fun. C'mon, the "one rotten apple" gets old after the first few hundred.

Freedom from getting stabbed by my neighbor? How about freedom from shoot-outs over where the dog chose to go? Besides, the US has a higher murder rate than almost any other country in the world.

It also has the highest infant mortality rate in the Western world, a preventable death rate double that of the next-highest Western nation, one of the poorest ratings in education and basic literacy, a low rating in overall happiness, the highest rate of incarceration outside of China, an execution rate comparable to North Korea, and a military budget in excess of the rest of the top ten combined. So I'm not seeing a whole lot of this freedom that all this money is supposedly buying.

Well, outside of Wachovia bank that is. They seem to have bought a whole lot of freedom, albeit at the cost of a Mexican civil war and a few hundred thousand lives.

The Victorians once believed as you did. Earned them a crime wave. Then they discarded retribution and threats for moderation and civility, resulting in a rebirth of British democracy.

While I agree that both sides are not stellar examples of morality, only one of them brainwashes their children. In my opinion, this is sufficient to make it clear-cut.

Are you sure about that?

The Guardian disclosed that a "Californian corporation has been awarded a contract with United States Central Command (Centcom), which oversees US armed operations in the Middle East and Central Asia, to develop what is described as an 'online persona management service' that will allow one US serviceman or woman to control up to 10 separate identities based all over the world."

A program called Operation Metalgear "involves an army of fake cyber personalities immersed in social networking websites for the purposes of manipulating the mass population via influence, crawling information from major online communities (such as Facebook), and identifying anonymous personalities via correlating stored information from multiple sources to establish connections between separate online accounts, using this information to arrest dissidents and activists who work anonymously."

Here's an opportunity along those lines : US Air Force seeking software that "will allow 10 personas per user, replete with background, history, supporting details, and cyber presences that are technically, culturally and geographacilly [sic] consistent." And "individual applications will enable an operator to exercise a number of different online persons from the same workstation and without fear of being discovered by sophisticated adversaries." Finally, "personas must be able to appear to originate in nearly any part of the world and can interact through conventional online services and social media platforms. The service includes a user friendly application environment to maximize the user's situational awareness by displaying real-time local information."

Famously, the British government sacked an advisor on drugs, because he publicly stated that taking Ecstasy was less dangerous than horse riding. And he wasn't saying Ecstasy was safe, necessarily.

But it has since emerged that the Tesla, which can be powered from an ordinary domestic plug, did not run out of electricity.

The car's California-based manufacturer said that the charge on neither of the two Teslas used in the Top Gear test fell below 20%.

The BBC today denied it had misled viewers, saying that the programme had "at no time" claimed that the car had run out of power. Programme-makers instead showed it slowing down to illustrate what would happen when the car did run out of charge.

But some viewers were left with a different impression. "I understand trying to make interesting TV, but when it materially changes the image or performance of the product, it's pretty underhanded," said one viewer on a car website.

Another said: "How pointless, in the same way if a car runs out of petrol I know what happens without a reconstruction of the event."

So to summarize: Top Gear makes it appear that the Tesla ran out of juice during testing. Tesla called them on it. The BBC claims that despite everyone thinking that is what happened, they never claimed it did. And then, inexplicably, Tesla waits 2 years to sue.

Tesla simply wants Top Gear to stop rebroadcasting the particular episode and to correct the record ...The firm expects to recover not more than £100,000 in damages

Fixed that for you!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/mar/30/tesla-sue-top-gear

Fixed that for you! The guardian doesn't say £100,000, it says "up to" In fact the claim lists exactly what the OP says it does and the "value" is not more than £100,000. But nice try.

Tesla simply wants Top Gear to stop rebroadcasting the particular episode and to correct the record ...and pay them £100,000 in damages

Fixed that for you!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/mar/30/tesla-sue-top-gear

People have NOT died or suffered in any meaningful numbers from any application of nuclear power technology, at all, ever.

I learn that the people who suffered in Chernobyl, and who still suffer today, are not a "meaningful number".

Don't be obtuse. The GP meant that when compared to the number of people killed in, say, road traffic accidents or in the production of energy by burning fossil fuels, the number is insignificant. By claiming that he's cheapening the suffering of people who survived Chernobyl, you're putting words in his mouth.

The nuclear disaster at Chernobyl almost 20 years ago has so far claimed fewer than 50 lives, according to a study by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN Development Programme and the World Health Organisation.

But about 4,000 people could eventually die from exposure to radiation released when a reactor caught fire in the Ukrainian forest and showered Europe with a plume of radioactive particles.

Source:The Guardian

Compare and contrast with the numbers of people killed on roads: List of countries by traffic-related death rate. Your argument that parliaments (the same parliaments who also legislate on nuclear safety) legislate to try and prevent avoidable road traffic accidents and to prevent fatalities on the roads, is irrelevant. The GP's point was that there is no culture of hysteria surrounding cars which kill far far far far far more people than nuclear power. Nor is there a culture of hysteria surrounding falling, but an estimated 424,000 people a year die from falls. Should we avoid showing the Simpsons episode Stealing First Base because Bart falls from a roof?

The quotes you give that are meant to support the notion of rightful hysteria regarding nuclear power do no such thing. They give the figures for the radiation exposure of workers on the site of the nuclear reactor who are knowingly in harms way. There's very little threat (if any) at the moment to the population at large. They also give the figure for the lowest level at which there is *any* increased *chance* of causing cancer. It doesn't necessarily follow that just because those workers were exposed to more than that level that they definitely will suffer from cancer.

It may be that the UK has already rejected the idea; however, there is a large £300m pound fine against London for being the most polluted city in the UK. The fine, coupled with the potential congestion charge expansions, the result may still be no petrol cars in London in 39 years.

It's the old "you're just shifting emissions from tailpipe to powerplant" myth:
In the EU today:
France 85% from Nuclear
UK 25% from Nuclear/Renewables/Hydro
Germany 25% Nuclear and renewable combined
Austria 70% renewable

For the future the EU has a target of 20% renewable energy by 2020, and something like 80% or 90% by 2050. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_the_European_Union

This describes EVs running on the UK's current electricity generation mix in comparison with small, fuel efficient petrol cars:
"If we look only at the three smallest categories of conventional car, average exhaust pipe emissions from new cars in 2009 were about 130g CO2/km. Emissions from producing the fuel (extracting and refining the oil) typically adds another 10% to 18% on top, bringing the total for new small cars in 2009 to 145155g CO2/km. Based on these figures, electric cars currently emit about a third less carbon on average than small conventional cars."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/electric-vision/electricity-supply-fossil-fuels

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2005/feb/12/weekend7.weekend2

Japan might be getting used to "accumulate in the top of the food-chain" deal: Japanese schoolchildren fed toxic dolphin meat ... containing dangerous levels of mercury, Dolphin meat causing dangerous mercury levels in Japanese diners - a flawless revenge on the part of dolphins, given their circumstances? (even if only post mortem one)

On the bright side - I, for one, welcome upcoming wave of Kaiju overlords (and maybe even more posters in such style, from my part of the woods)

Japan might be getting used to "accumulate in the top of the food-chain" deal: Japanese schoolchildren fed toxic dolphin meat ... containing dangerous levels of mercury, Dolphin meat causing dangerous mercury levels in Japanese diners - a flawless revenge on the part of dolphins, given their circumstances? (even if only post mortem one)

On the bright side - I, for one, welcome upcoming wave of Kaiju overlords (and maybe even more posters in such style, from my part of the woods)

That's right, because the Danes are so much smarter than we are.

I thought it was already quite clear that Microsoft doesn't let morality get in the way of income.

There have been several significant releases of radiation in the UK, mostly from Windscale/Sellafield, but this contamination of sheep is actually due to Chernobyl. IIRC the only UK incident that released significant amounts of radioactive iodine and caesium into the atmosphere was the 1957 Windscale fire; Sellafield's more recent problems have generally involved the release of radioisotopes into the sea. Thankfully one of the designers insisted on adding filters to the Windscale chimneys and there was no hydrogen explosion, or the fire could've been a lot more dangerous. Best estimates suggest Chernobyl released an awful lot more radioisotopes over the UK than Windscale did.