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Knowledge workers are more productive with each additional monitor up to four monitors. After that additional gains in productivity trail off.

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/news/features/vibe.aspx
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/15/technology/personaltech/15basics.html
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2004/06/multiple-monitors-and-productivity.html

Interestingly, Drudge himself reported Sunday that the New York Times is opining as to why he is 2nd only to Google in referrals to news sites.

Sorry, I linked to the wrong nytimes article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/08/world/asia/08japan.html?_r=1&ref=world

> Right, primary containment is intact, which means that the core is still protected. Leaks from water lines are not loss of primary containment, and water leaks are not as hazardous as you have been led to believe.

Dude, try looking at the defination of the verb "contain". It means "not let out". That's not what's happening here. The basement of unit 1 is full of radioactive water that leaked from the containment. Unit 2 is even worse. This water is leaking into the ground water and now several sewage treatment plants have radioactive sludge.

> No, the WHO did in fact state that. You should visit their website, its a fact.
They may have stated that, but they are wrong. 630,000 terabecquerels is not an "insignificant release of radiation"

In some spots the soil contamination exceeds Chernobyl evacuation levels: http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/20110511p2a00m0na018000c.html

> Nonsense, neither WHO nor IAEA support your claim here. As the party making the affirmative assertion has the burden of proof, if you have a reliable source for all these claims I would be happy to retract my statement. I can find no evidence to support your assertions.

New York times: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/09/world/asia/09japan.html?_r=1
Most people consider it a reliable source of information.

Uranium found in air samples:
http://enenews.com/uranium-234-detected-hawaii-southern-california-seattle

The essentials of the story didn't change:

Navy SEALs flew to Pakistan in helicopters to Bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad where they shot him dead, and one of his wives in the leg after she came between the SEALs and Bin Laden. The SEALs took Bin Laden's body and the US buried it at sea in accordance with Muslim custom. The rest is relatively minor detail.

Then they don't even keep the body around long enough for anyone else to verify it. They just go dump it in the sea? Seriously?

They didn't just dump his body in the sea, they buried it at sea in accordance with Muslim tradtion (though there are disputes among Muslim scholars about when and how it is permitted). Muslim custom requires quick burial. Besides, DNA tests provide all the certainty needed. (How many other 6'4" Muslims that look exactly like Bin Laden are there in Pakistan living in million dollar compounds with vast quantities of communications with Al Qadea and Bin Laden's wives present? That many?)

Why is it so important for a Muslim to buried their dead in a day?

Muslims strive to bury the deceased as soon as possible after death, avoiding the need for embalming or otherwise disturbing the body of the deceased.

Islamic Scholars Split Over Sea Burial for Bin Laden

... Mr. Brennan said that appealing to other countries would have exceeded the time frame that Islamic custom requires, of burial within 24 hours of death.

I don't think there is any serious reason to doubt a quick burial at sea, especially since the US is trying to account for Muslim sensitivities.

They are all pathological liars in my book.

President Obama announced Bin Laden was killed by American forces:
Obama Announces Death of Osama bin Laden

Al Qaeda has announced he is dead:
Text: Al Qaeda statement confirming bin Laden's death

Iran says he is dead:
Iran's intelligence chief says bin Laden died long before the 'alleged raid'

Family members denounce his death:
My father's death was criminal and I may sue the U.S.

Locals protest his death:
Pakistani tribesmen protest

So tell me, are all of these people with multiple and conflicting interests lying about Bin Laden being dead? Is it just to fool you? If so, why?

Who'd heard of Zediva before this.

People that read the NY Times, for example.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/17/technology/personaltech/17pogue.html

It might not be permanent debilitation:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/22/magazine/22SAVANT.html?pagewanted=1

http://wireheading.com/brainstim/savant.html

Some bullet points of the Google Prediction API:

• -Customer sentiment analysis
• -Upsell opportunity analysis
• -Suspicious activity identification...

I would be unsurprised if it was sponsored by the FBI? (cops with a budget of $4.4 billion), easy one-stop-shopping data collection with a handy web interface, no subpoena needed?

Fake drugs were the norm back in the 1900s and before. It still happens, even with the FDA in place, but at least there's a real deterrent, and the guy in that link is rotting in jail now instead of peddling overpriced water.

The overprotection of fat, spolied American pharmaceutical companies is a separate issue. We need to fix the regulation, but not drop it.

There were fuel rod pieces found two miles away from the containment structures. This fact has been completely ignored by the media.

OK, I'll blow some mod points. I kept hearing this from Fairewinds and everyone downstream of them, but it was never cited, so I dug into it a few days ago to find the source. The information is from a NRC report that was leaked to the New York Times. They haven't published the report, so all we know is from this article:

The document also suggests that fragments or particles of nuclear fuel from spent fuel pools above the reactors were blown “up to one mile from the units,” and that pieces of highly radioactive material fell between two units and had to be “bulldozed over,” presumably to protect workers at the site. The ejection of nuclear material, which may have occurred during one of the earlier hydrogen explosions, may indicate more extensive damage to the extremely radioactive pools than previously disclosed.

That's all the source we have. Unfortunately, the language is ambiguous, and so we're left to speculate over the details.

Lots of places are spinning it like they're finding chunks of fuel in people's back yards. I interpret this as: large "pieces" fell locally; the "fragments or particles" were dust particles in the plume. It was "blown" up to one mile (not two) by wind, not on a ballistic trajectory from the explosion.

As for the rest of it: I'm still undecided. The orange fire wasn't hydrogen of course. My theory is it was the oil from a pump, atomized by the explosion. The *size* of the explosion was very surprising - there was a hell of a lot of heavy material tossed up, and I can't see how hydrogen alone could have done it. A prompt criticality (causing a steam explosion) could have, and would easily explain the ejected fuel chunks whereas the hydrogen explosion would have been above them.

It is much less dangerous, but still you lose land to it.

Less dangerous unless you are a turtle... ;^)

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/27/us/27sludge.html?scp=1&sq=kingston%20coal&st=cse
Nuclear, I guess.

I found out that what I said is not true: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/11/f-c-c-commissioner-to-join-comcast/

These commissioners did sign the ethics pledge which means she cannot lobby directly to many political people in DC.

I found out that what I said is not true: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/11/f-c-c-commissioner-to-join-comcast/

These commissioners did sign the ethics pledge which means she cannot lobby directly to many political people in DC.

I found out that what I said is not true: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/11/f-c-c-commissioner-to-join-comcast/

These commissioners did sign the ethics pledge which means she cannot lobby directly to many political people in DC.

Well, we see here the award isn't given to honor the recipient, it's given to make the elites of Sydney feel good. The Dalai Lama is a rather unsavory character in many respects, although you'll never hear anything against him in the Western media as the narrative has firmly been established and anyone who says otherwise must be insane. Naming Nelson Mandela was another feelgood exercise. Daisaku Ikeda is a religious freak. Religion! What the hell? How on earth does any religion get any honor at all? I thought everyone was in agreement that religious people are total morons? Did this change overnight? Daisaku Ikeda's cult is like Scientology, members have made bomb threats against rival cults (the source is the New York Times, so you know it's true because they're fact-checked). He's a big player in Japan's New Komeito political party, sort of like how the Koch brothers influence American politics in a negative direction. And now we have Assange's award, another totally political statement.

This Sydney Peace Medal is just more bullshit, just elites scratching each other's backs. It means nothing...sort of like the Nobel Peace Prize in that respect (note the similarity of names...a total coincidence I'm sure).

Revolving door. Enough said. Honestly, I'm tired of caring about it. Action will only happen when people begin to truly feel the effects. Logic is lost on the masses.

Fee the effects ? Here's a choice quotefrom Ms. Baker:

“I am privileged to have had the opportunity to serve the country at a time of critical transformation in the telecommunications industry,” Ms. Baker said in a statement. “The continued deployment of our broadband infrastructures will meaningfully impact the lives of all Americans. I am happy to have played a small part in the success.”

I hope there's lube with that meaningfully impact

At the risk of being redundant - I'll repost the same thing I posted above:

TFS really isn't worth a lot, and TFA seems to be an ego-centric Apple article. But, people who keep up with the news already knew that there were going to be more people than Apple's shills testifying at that hearing. First Google hit on my set of search terms: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/10/congress-hears-from-apple-and-google-on-privacy/?partner=rss&emc=rss [nytimes.com]

You can use your own search terms - or, you can just read the news headlines from most of the major news outlets. It ain't about Apple. It's about citizen's right to privacy.

TFS really isn't worth a lot, and TFA seems to be an ego-centric Apple article. But, people who keep up with the news already knew that there were going to be more people than Apple's shills testifying at that hearing. First Google hit on my set of search terms: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/10/congress-hears-from-apple-and-google-on-privacy/?partner=rss&emc=rss

You can use your own search terms - or, you can just read the news headlines from most of the major news outlets. It ain't about Apple. It's about citizen's right to privacy.

Also pieces of nuclear fuel rods were found 2 km from the site

No credible sources have corroborated that claim. The NYT wrote a story that claims a 'confidential assessment' by the NRC 'suggests' that 'fuel fragments or particals' 'may' have been blown up to one mile from the site.

No fuel fragments have been found at two miles, two kilometers or any other large distances from the site. This is NRC speculation, as selectively interpreted by the NYT and exaggerated by various pundits, including Arnie Gundersen, who has since become the most cited source of this 'fuel rods found at 2 km' claim, and the 'prompt criticality explosion' theory, which has no support elsewhere either.

Arnie is a useful source of insight into Fukushima. Not everything Arnie says is gospel. When there is any room for doubt Arnie always adopts the worst case in his speculation. That is his job; he is a professional advocate for anti-nuclear interests.

The inevitable retort is that fuel was shot out for miles and TEPCO, the Japanese government, Bush and everyone else is covering it up. At that point you're a conspiracy theorist that has abandoned credible information.

You "pull the cord"? Please tell me that was a figure of speech...

Eh? One pulls on a cord running horizontally the length of the bus to signal the driver, "please stop at the next bus stop." Otherwise, if there are no passengers waiting to board at that stop, the bus will skip it.

This is a common method used by buses in the U.S. Perhaps a different method is used where you are; I've been on buses that had some sort of touch sensor, but this is apparently much more expensive.

Partners in Health harvests peanuts from a 30-acre farm or buys them from a cooperative of 200 smallholders. It’s planning to build a larger factory, but for now the nuts are taken to the main hospital in Cange, where women sort them in straw baskets, roast them over an outside gas burner, run them through a hand grinder and mix all the ingredients into a paste that is poured into reusable plastic canisters.

PIH has a slideshow of manufacturing Nourimamba on smugmug, here. The Times article does address some of the interesting (and sad) legal wrangling behind a simple peanut mix that has the power to save millions of lives. Also, for an interesting take on how famines can be "manufactured" by unscrupulous governments or warlords seeking to skim or redirect aid, see Linda Polman's work. Here's an excerpt from a Guardian article,

All too frequently, according to Polman, the result is not what it says in the charity brochures. She cites a damning catalogue of examples from Biafra to Darfur, and including the Ethiopian famine, in which humanitarian aid has helped prolong wars, or rewarded the perpetrators of ethnic cleansing and genocide rather than the victims. Perhaps the most striking case in the book deals with the aftermath of the genocide in Rwanda in which the Hutu killers fled en masse across the border to what was then Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo). There, in Goma, huge refugee camps were assembled and served by an enormous array of international agencies, while back in Rwanda, where Tutsi corpses filled rivers and lakes, aid was not so focused. The world was looking for refugees, the symbol of human catastrophe, and the refugees were Hutus. This meant the militias that had committed the atrocities received food, shelter and support, courtesy of international appeals, while their surviving victims were left destitute. Worse still, Polman believes the aid enabled the Hutu extremists to continue their attempt to exterminate the Tutsis from the security of the UNHCR camps in Goma. "Without humanitarian aid," she writes, "the Hutus' war would almost certainly have ground to a halt fairly quickly."

Partners in Health harvests peanuts from a 30-acre farm or buys them from a cooperative of 200 smallholders. It’s planning to build a larger factory, but for now the nuts are taken to the main hospital in Cange, where women sort them in straw baskets, roast them over an outside gas burner, run them through a hand grinder and mix all the ingredients into a paste that is poured into reusable plastic canisters.

PIH has a slideshow of manufacturing Nourimamba on smugmug, here. The Times article does address some of the interesting (and sad) legal wrangling behind a simple peanut mix that has the power to save millions of lives. Also, for an interesting take on how famines can be "manufactured" by unscrupulous governments or warlords seeking to skim or redirect aid, see Linda Polman's work. Here's an excerpt from a Guardian article,

All too frequently, according to Polman, the result is not what it says in the charity brochures. She cites a damning catalogue of examples from Biafra to Darfur, and including the Ethiopian famine, in which humanitarian aid has helped prolong wars, or rewarded the perpetrators of ethnic cleansing and genocide rather than the victims. Perhaps the most striking case in the book deals with the aftermath of the genocide in Rwanda in which the Hutu killers fled en masse across the border to what was then Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo). There, in Goma, huge refugee camps were assembled and served by an enormous array of international agencies, while back in Rwanda, where Tutsi corpses filled rivers and lakes, aid was not so focused. The world was looking for refugees, the symbol of human catastrophe, and the refugees were Hutus. This meant the militias that had committed the atrocities received food, shelter and support, courtesy of international appeals, while their surviving victims were left destitute. Worse still, Polman believes the aid enabled the Hutu extremists to continue their attempt to exterminate the Tutsis from the security of the UNHCR camps in Goma. "Without humanitarian aid," she writes, "the Hutus' war would almost certainly have ground to a halt fairly quickly."

i did provide some sources, just not for that claim which i think is fairly uncontroversial given the expense and difficulties involved in extracting oil from shale and tar sands(certainly not the easiest of endeavours.) If there were still vast amounts of easily accessible oil then it wouldn't be economical to produce fromoil sands. since it is economical, i'd suggest you're wrong here.

you took exception because you disagree with the general premise and didn't even read my sources wherein the IEA (hardly a mouthpiece of the peak oil advocates) admits that peak oil has probably already occurred in 2006. here's another.

http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/is-peak-oil-behind-us/

i confronted his claims of reserves with the guardian story about the wikileaks cables. do you have a rebuttal to that? no i thought not.

who's the religious zealot again?

According the NYtimes the reason it crashed was not mechanical failure but lack of lift.

According to Aviation Week the reason it crashed was the tail rotor struck the top of the compound wall during the landing attempt,...

Actually... the parent is correct. According to the NYT article, the helo lost lift, had to make a "hard landing" and clipped the tail rotor on the way down.

Lawmakers who were briefed on the mission said the damaged helicopter had not malfunctioned, as initially described by senior administration officials. Instead, they said, it got caught in an air vortex caused by higher-than-expected temperatures and the high compound walls, which blocked the downwash of the rotor blades.

As a result, the helicopter lost its lift power while hovering over the yard and had to make a hard landing, clipping one of the walls with its tail.

http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2011/05/06/world/06helicopter.html

what this tells me is that design went into making sure it wouldn't be easy for a random individual to open the fuel cap, and tamper with fuel. it also tells me that all these fuel caps have to be replaced, because now the ratchet with the right face needed open this fuel cap can be produced by our enemies for perhaps covert sabotage

and this is just the damned fuel cap!

imagine all the other intel this downed copter produces

it's definitely a loss. but in the larger scheme of killing bin laden, an acceptable sacrifice

Many things are made by Foxconn. Also from what I've read, their suicide rate is quite a bit lower than the average suicide rates in Chinese/Taiwanese manufacturing plants. We only hear/care about this one because they make i-devices. I mean come on, the very title of this summary should be a glaring indicator why anyone cares. Foxconn is not a "chinese iPad factory," its a massive global technology company manufacturing pipeline.

Why would you say that? That particular bit of trivia has been mentioned in a few articles. For example,

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-13274176

(the top story on bbcnews) has the factoid in a sidebar, while
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/02/following-the-reaction-to-bin-ladens-death/

includes a poem by James Abbot himself about the town he founded:

Oh! Abbottabad we are leaving you now
To your natural beauty do I bow
Perhaps your winds will never reach my ears
My gift for you is sad tears
I bid you farewell with a heavy heart
Never from my mind will your memories thwart.

I'm more curious about what your point is; first of all, James Abbot wasn't an overlord, just an officer (judging by his bio on wiki, anyway). Even if he was, what's the point? I don't see how this is interesting beyond its status as a coincidence. It's certainly not irony.

Bah, humbug.

Actually Apple licensed the relevant GUI tech from Xerox.

http://www.nytimes.com/1989/12/15/business/company-news-xerox-sues-apple-computer-over-macintosh-copyright.html

Of course nobody minds much when Facebook is used to catch someone who's accused of armed robbery or assault. How about using Facebook to catch tax evaders [wsj.com]?

Tax evasion is a crime, so who the fuck cares if the criminal was stupid enough to get caught?

Oh, sorry, I forgot. On slashdot, not paying tax is the act of a fucking freedom fighter against teh tyrannical gubmint.

I wrote the post you quoted. I don't personally support tax evasion, but like it or not, I'd guess that lots of people don't perceive tax evasion to be as serious as assault or property crimes.

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/03/how-common-is-tax-evasion/
“Various estimates put the tax cheat rate at 80 to 95 percent of people who employ baby sitters, housekeepers and home health aides.”

Anyway, as others said, it's not about whether someone is a criminal, it's about whether stuff you post will ever be used against you, and whether that kind of information should be concentrated in the hands of the government or huge corporations.

Seriously, though, the police are bound to look at any associates of someone in a drug cartel. The only thing you can do is choose your friends carefully, whether online or in real life.

That's not really the concern. I don't have that much of an issue with the idea of law enforcement/intelligence services investigating associates of criminals. The problem is when they start investigating people who have joined an anti-war group on FB, or liked the wikileaks page. The FBI has a history of investigating people and groups with links to criminal activity that are tenuous at best.

The aspect of this (and the related stories about law enforcement having access to your cell phone meta-data directly from your carrier, for a small fee) that pushes it to the next level is that this information becomes very easy to obtain. It's one thing if an Agent has to individual interview and/or sift through mountains of paper data, it's quite another for him to be able to run a query against a database at the push of a button. I'm all for giving law enforcement the tools to do their job better, but we have to be very cognizant of the power we give them, and establish safe guards against the abuse that is sure to come from this extra power.

Uh... yes.

The Bailout started under Bush, you might recall. But regardless off whose idea it was, it hasn't been the massive waste of money that you present it as. As of June last year, 75% of the money had been repaid. And the government was actually turning a profit on what it was getting back.

Opposing the Bailout is one thing; personally, I think that it sets a bad precedent to loan out that much money with no consequences. But to present it as the sole cause of the deficit and to blame it exclusively on Democrats is simply incorrect. If you want the true cause of the deficit, the fact is that the recession is to blame. But massive tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans (which cost more than the new healthcare law) and two foreign wars, none of which were paid for certainly didn't help.

Interesting, so the US has ground troops in Pakistan, too? Shall we assume that they have both permission of the Pakistani government and the constitutional blessing of the US Congress for being at war in a FOURTH country...

The New York Times is reporting that the town Osama was found in is an affluent town near a large army base plus the country's military academy. Somehow I think we may not have given the Pakistani government much, if any, prior notice. There have been too many reports that some in the intelligence service and military are supporters or protectors of Osama. Our President could not risk another Tora Bora where locals decided to protect Osama rather than capture him.

"Abbottabad is home to a large Pakistani military base, a military academy of the Pakistani army, and a major hospital and other facilities that would could have served as support for Osama Bin Laden." http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/02/world/asia/osama-bin-laden-is-killed.html

Obama is unconcerned with energy or the economy and instead focuses on overthrowing religious fundamentalists and nation building.

Now this is just silly. Obama has been actively promoting renewable energy for years, and has done more to actually move the industry forward than any other President since Carter. And he's as aware as anyone that the health of the economy is what will make or break his re-election bid next year.

You may think his energy/economy policies are wrong-headed/harmful/evil/whatever, but to label him "unconcerned" only shows that you haven't been paying attention.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/30/business/30bose.html

recently dismantled regulations on corporate US presidential campaign donations, thus allowing corporations to nullify the votes of the electorates.

The cabal in this country is almost complete.

Yeah, university book stores are rat-fucking-bastards. There's no god-damned reason why professors couldn't hand out or straight-up-sell PDFs of their material.

That's funny, my school is getting sued by book publishers because teachers at our university did exactly that. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/16/technology/16school.html The article is old, but the lawsuit is still ongoing. My graduate director had to testify on it last Wednesday.

Hell, even Chernobyl is more than 500 million short for the next concrete sarcophagus, which should last some 100 years.

Considering Russia's attitude towards conventional pollution, does this mean we should give up all conventional industry?

There's plenty of polluted areas in the former USSR, from "business as usual" practices. Heck, the pollution around Norilsk is so bad that it is profitable to mine the soil.

The goal of religions is to spread their message as far and wide as possible - which means not putting it under copyright. Of course, they also have a little thing called the "tithe" which brings in quite a bit more money than any copyright ever has. Even the relatively small Mormon church is close to surpassing the music sales of the RIAA. (The Mormon church reportedly had revenue of $4.7 billion/year back in 1991 - http://www.nytimes.com/1991/07/02/us/income-of-mormon-church-is-put-at-4.7-billion-a-year.html)

Music has an effect too
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/26/science/26tier.html?_r=1

This is exactly what happened in the US.

The grandparents hypothetical 'cycle' had nothing to do with the presence of foreign auto manufacturers in the US.

During the late 70's and early 80's 'domestic content' laws and regulations were both enhanced and created in the US that assess tariffs on imported autos based on the percent of value add by foreign vs. domestic industry. As a result, multiple plants opened (and remain open) in southern US by the late 80's. By 1989 all imported autos were subject to these content requirements. Trucks and SUVs were eventually reclassified (yes, these demands were met) to fall under this regime as well.

The Reagan administration also negotiated hard limits on Japanese imports. Annual caps on imports were voluntarily agreed to between the US and Japan. Reagan also applied heavy tariffs on imported motorcycles; he noted in his memoirs that the only remaining US motorcycle manufacturer was on its last legs at the time. Today that company is healthy and once again has domestic competition.

The reason, the only reason, any foreign auto manufacturers pay for US labor is to avoid heavy tariffs. This paradigm was established back when the US had leaders willing to leverage the fact that importers needed the US more than the US needed the importers.

Which president most recently granted MFN status to China and signed NAFTA?

Look it up. Learn something. There is no need to resort to speculation and theory about why things are as they are; there is actual history one may study.

The explosion in #4 was minor compared to #3. In #3 the location where the dome should be is pretty much an empty space with steam rising from it. There is no sign of the lid.

If you watch videos of air fuel explosions, building implosions, and cannons and large artillary, then watch the videos of the 3 explosions at Fukushima, it doesn't take a physicist to know from basic physics that for every action there is an equal and oposite reaction. The main blast from #3 was highly directional. There was lots of heavy objects lifted very high. You can see them fall out of the top of the blast at the end of the video.

I can be called a conspiracy theory person for even suggesting the main blast in #3 was in a cannon barrel called the dry well. Due to the low radiaton from the blast, I suspect the lid is still on the reactor, but I can not confirm it.

One of the official reports did mention finding fuel rods on the ground between #3 and #4. Many of them were bulldozed under.
From the NY times.

The document also suggests that fragments or particles of nuclear fuel from spent fuel pools above the reactors were blown âoeup to one mile from the units,â and that pieces of highly radioactive material fell between two units and had to be âoebulldozed over,â presumably to protect workers at the site. The ejection of nuclear material, which may have occurred during one of the earlier hydrogen explosions, may indicate more extensive damage to the extremely radioactive pools than previously disclosed. /quote>
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/06/world/asia/06nuclear.html?_r=4&pagewanted=1&hp

Since the pools are water coupled to the dry well by a gate so rods can be moved from the flooded dry well to the storage while maintained underwater, I'm taking a guess the dry well in #3 was involved in the removal of rods stored in the bottom of the pool.

Uh huh...to quote Mel Brooks bullshit bullshit aaaaand bullshit. maybe you'd care to explain how a full 2/3rds of corps paid NO taxes this decade or how GE, who paid paid NO taxes in 2010 and in fact got a REBATE and is now using those funds to fire Americans and build overseas with the head of GE actually having the brass balls to say "We've globalized around markets, not cheap labor. The era of globalization around cheap labor is over. Today we go to China, we go to India, because that's where the customers are."

BULLSHIT and EVERY single time of growth in the history of this country TAXES AT THE TOP HAVE BEEN OVER 70% full stop. We have had unprecedented tax breaks for the top 1% for THIRTY YEARS and NOTHING has gotten better. NOTHING. So peddle the rep fantasy somewhere else, we ain't buying it no more. America WILL BE COME NATIONALIST the only question is how violent the change over will be. China is about to drop their US dollars so the game is over friend, time to pay the check.

In reality, Japanese officials already have caused a few 10'000 cancer deaths beyond what was unavoidable. The increased allowable dosage for Children (who are hugely vulnerable to radiation) is just the last batch of randomized death sentences they are implementing.

Lets start here, because this is the biggest flaw in your post. There are several websites where you can view the actual radiation reported in various areas. Except within a few kilometers of Fukushima Daiichi, the radiation levels fall to biologically insignificant levels.

At this point, the nature of the disaster is that it is hugely expensive, is leaking radioactive, hard-to-clean-up water, and is rather difficult to bring to a "probably wont catch fire or explode anymore" state. But there are no deadly radioactive clouds floating around, there is no substantial increase in the radiation in milk in the US, there is no plutonium floating around in the atmosphere, and as of now the most severely irradiated individuals (some of the workers) have received a dose that is roughly equivalent to what they would normally receive in a year, anyways-- of concern, but unlikely to cause them to keel over and die.

Further, just because we have an actual, real, substantial crisis on our hands, doesnt mean we need to lose all perspective and start comparing it to Chernobyl or (heaven forbid) Hiroshima. Its a problem, yes, and there is a lot of blame to apportion; but losing our heads and falling for all the hyperbole running around is unlikely to make matters any better.

Im not entirely sure what the dosage received by those in the immediate vicinity of the plants was; but as the area of "concern" around the plants was evacuated pretty rapidly (within about 36 hours), I have trouble believing such emphatic statements as "Japanese officials have already caused a few 10,000 cancer deaths beyond what was avoidable"; especially when the MIT Nuclear Science blog seems to indicate that in total, if you were at the plants perimeter, you basically recieved 2-3 whole body CT scans-- this less than 3km away from the plant, when the evacuation zone is 30km. That blog seems to be one of the BEST sources of information, as it plainly presents the facts without any breathless panic or fearmongering; they state that there is some danger, where it comes from, how to protect yourself, and how to get more information-- but it doesnt state "Tens of thousands of you are likely to die of cancer" or "beware floating radioactive clouds".

This is precisely why this information IS harmful, and if it shouldnt be censored because of the tyrannical tendencies of anyone given such a power, that does not mean that anyone should go spreading FUD and misinformation about a crisis while people are trying to deal with it.

6.5MW is a lot...over 10,000 fuel rods were stored there (well, maybe not right on the roof)...what can I say, I'm an arm-chair expert in the field.

Ok, I'll shut up.

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that you picked the last option in the 'humor' poll on the front page..

But it does appear the fracking technique might not be the best way

They have no concept at all to handle a major failure mode in one of their reactors, none at all.

For every disaster you plan for, there's always the chance of another one that makes the one you prepared for look like a tiny mishap.

That's right, which is why, when dealing with potential catastrophes, you not only should plan for significant events even if they have a very low probability, you also have to plan properly for what to do after failure occurs despite your best plans to prevent it.

And why do they have no plan? Well... because we can't plan for everything. We *did* have a plan for an earthquake. Then nature fucked us with a bigger one. We did know the risks of tsunamis -- but nobody thought of the possibility of a big one following a record quake.

That is incorrect. They considered the possibility of a big quake followed by a big tsunami, and settled on designing to handle the equivalent of about a 6.5 quake directly under the site and about a 6 meter tsunami. Even though they knew about quakes above 8.0 and tsunamis above 15 meters in the region, they discounted those possibilities because of their low probability. You need to consider not only the probability of something happening in a particular instance, but the consequences if that does happen, since possibilities will inevitably occur somewhere, sometime.

In France for instance, nuclear plants are designed to withstand an earthquake twice as strong as the 1000-year event calculated for each site.

After an advisory group issued nonbinding recommendations in 2002, Tokyo Electric Power Company, the plant owner and Japan’s biggest utility, raised its maximum projected tsunami at Fukushima Daiichi to between 17.7 and 18.7 feet — considerably higher than the 13-foot-high bluff [on which the plant sits]. Yet the company appeared to respond only by raising the level of an electric pump near the coast by 8 inches,

Big companies, that have decided to put crucial operations on Amazon computers are apt to pay up for the equivalent of computing insurance, analysts say. Netflix, the movie rental site, has become a large customer of the Amazon cloud. Most of its Web technology — customer movie queues, search tools and the like — runs in Amazon data centers.

Netflix said it had sailed through the last couple of days unscathed. “That’s because Netflix has taken full advantage of Amazon Web Services’ redundant cloud architecture,” which insures against technical malfunctions in any one location, said Steve Swasey, a Netflix spokesman.

Sounds like it worked for some.

First, there are so many lawsuits among mobile companies that a single extra one isn't going to have a chilling effect. All of these companies have enough cash that the cost of fighting a lawsuit alone will not hurt them (a big judgement might be a different story).

Secondly, MIcrosoft licensing costs aren't very much for Windows Phone 7. Estimates of licensing costs are between $5 and $15 on a phone that, with a data plan, ultimately costs thousands of dollars. Or, in the case of Nokia, Microsoft is paying Nokia to use it. $5 is still a cost, but it's not the reason people don't like WP7.

Then the article gets plain idiotic. It says Apple makes money on hardware, not on their OS. But this is true of every single Android phone as well.

The next factual error is a surprising one, but still serious. Look at the numbers of iOS vs Android devices. There are a lot more people using iOS than Android (note the figures include tablets). Surprising, but if you're going to write a tech journal you should be on top of this kind of thing.

Finally there is no reason to question why Apple is suing. It's about money. Just like every single other lawsuit in the mobile space. They all think they can get some extra money by suing, so they do.

Don't know about Apple, but Amazon deleted books at the kindle after people bought them, but at least they refunded the money and they also said they wouldn't do it any more.