Back when they built Fukushima they didn't even KNOW how to stop the reaction without arbitrarily cooling it to the point where it no longer has enough energy to continue.
You're quite correct that modern designs are much safer, but I fear you may have misunderstood the reason why.
It isn't the nuclear reaction that is difficult to stop. You simply insert the control rods and the reaction: the rate of fission will decline to a negligible value within seconds. This is called a SCRAM, and it happened automatically as a result of the earthquake at Fukushima.
The problem is the amount of heat generated by the radioactive fission products that were created during the previous days and weeks that the reactor was operating. There is nothing practicable you can do to stop this other than cooling the reactor and waiting for the radioactivity to subside. Typically it would amount to about 7% of full power immediately after the SCRAM, falling to 2% after 10 minutes and 0.5% after a day - but when full power is hundreds or thousands of gigawatts, even 0.5% is a large value.
One of the major advantages of modern reactor designs is that they do not rely (or rely less heavily) on active cooling during a shutdown. The loss of electrical power, as happened at Fukushima, is then a significantly less serious problem.
I get your point and that's somewhat what I tried to say. However it's also about the same as "Trust us, it won't fail because we've got the latest safety measures in place." Which is *exactly* what they said about the original nuclear plant. Another unforeseen disaster will trump those safety features too.
Nothing else has these types of issues. Nothing.
That's not entirely true. Consider, for example, the failure of the Banqiao Dam which killed 171,000 people. It wasn't the first and it wasn't the last (although there has been nothing on such a large scale before or since).
Does this mean we should be very careful about how we build and operate hydroelectric (and nuclear) power stations? Most certainly it does. Does it mean we should stop building hydroelectric (and nuclear) power stations? No, because that would almost certainly result in more use of coal and gas (with a far more serious worst-case scenario).
from wind power ? about a dozen (let's avoid high towers when an earthquake hits)
from solar power ? 4 (again, don't be on rooftops maintaining or installing solar panels during earthquakes)
from nuclear power ? 0 (*one* got mild burns and *may* get sick in 20-30 years)
In the interests of strict accuracy that would be no deaths caused by radiation (so far at least). There was one as a direct result of the earthquake and two from the tsunami. (Even so, compared with other places on the coast that would make it a relatively safe place to be.)
But I'm not so optimistic that I would expect these to produce a significant acceleration in alternative browser share.
If you want some cause for optimism look at the StatCounter figures for IE in the Ukraine (4th place, 15.4%), Moldova (3rd place, 14.4%), Macedonia (3rd place, 11.2%) and Georgia (4th place, 13.1%). Not representative of the world by any means, but they show that Internet Explorer usage can sink to very low levels of usage even with the unfair advantages that it enjoys.
(Not that it really matters whether they end up with 20%, 10% or 0%. The important point is that their monopoly has gone so they can't dictate web standards any more.)
Provided that they intend to keep exposure within reasonable limits (which appears to be the case) then smoking, working in a coal mine, or just having an unhealthy diet would all qualify.
Do you really think that either of those things in some way compares with exposure to nuclear radiation?
It is true that a radiation dose of (say) 100 to 250mSv is considerably less dangerous than taking up smoking, however since they can both cause cancer I think it is a useful comparison to make.
I'm thinking this must be one of those cases where you've been banging a drum for a while and just accidentally went too far.
I wonder if there is a population here in the States that would be willing to take a compelling risk like this.
Provided that they intend to keep exposure within reasonable limits (which appears to be the case) then smoking, working in a coal mine, or just having an unhealthy diet would all qualify.
I think smoking and unhealthy diet are generally seen as a reasonable trade-off between immediate pleasure and long-term effects. Most of the time unconsciously, moreover. So they're not really relevant here, unless you consider cleaning up Fukushima an immediate pleasure.
As for coal miners, more often than not they don't do it by choice.
I agree that there's a big difference, and I certainly wouldn't want to belittle their altruistic intent - but I was answering the question as stated, which was about risk. The examples I gave are highly relevant in that respect.
I wonder if there is a population here in the States that would be willing to take a compelling risk like this.
Provided that they intend to keep exposure within reasonable limits (which appears to be the case) then smoking, working in a coal mine, or just having an unhealthy diet would all qualify.
Denmark has achieved 20% from wind power, but only with help from Sweden to balance the load on their grid (and Denmark is much smaller than Germany).
Except for Island and GB all of europe, russia and north east asia is on a super large interconnected grid.
It's specifically their very large amount of hydroelectric capacity that is helpful here. Hydro is an excellent counterbalance to unreliable sources of power like wind, because you can turn it on and off instantly or even run it in reverse. Unfortunately it's not scalable because most of the best sites are already being used.
Averaging wind over a large area obviously helps, but not nearly as much as you might hope because of the degree of correlation.
Well, give the fact that already 17% of our energy comes from renewable sources I kinda doubt it. Nuclear only has about 23% in Germany and we are exporting about 40% of our energy.
It's because the contribution from wind and solar power is already quite high in Germany that adding lots more might be difficult.
Denmark has achieved 20% from wind power, but only with help from Sweden to balance the load on their grid (and Denmark is much smaller than Germany).
Besides, even if Germany was able to replace 100% of its nuclear capacity with renewables, that is energy which could have been used to replace coal - surely a much more rational and urgent environmental objective.
Can anyone provide a source for this, I'm not denying this is the case, I'm just interested to know how, seeing as about 25% of the graphite was ejected and something like 5% of the core burned in the open for 9 days.
There are a couple of factors at work here. First is the fact that the INES scale only goes up to level seven. If you did a very simplistic numerical comparison then you might rate Chernobyl at ten times Fukushima, but since you are already at the top of the scale then the increased severity is not reflected in the INES level.
Second, the effects of the release are likely to be proportionately much smaller for Fukushima than Chernobyl. This is partly due to good luck (winds blowing in the right direction) and partly better management (like having a containment building, a much safer reactor design, and promptly evacuating the immediate area).
There is an inherent risk in all power generation technologies -- just about the truly safe power generation method is solar, but that's not practical everywhere, and has only been cost-effective recently.
All other methods kill people.
Actually, solar power kills people too (especially rooftop solar). You are quite correct that it is a tradeoff though, with coal being orders of magnitude worse than nuclear.
The waste that's radioactive for tens of thousands of years gets taken offsite, shipped elsewhere and then - well, we're not sure what to do with them to be honest. No-one's figured out a good way of storing the waste.
Long-term disposal makes no sense at present because:
1. we might want to use it as fuel, and
2. that which is highly lethal now will be a lot less lethal after a few decades.
(Almost by definition, the isotopes with half lives of tens of thousands of years are not the highly radioactive ones. Not harmless by any means, but nothing like the level of danger that a fuel rod poses during the first year or so following removal from a reactor.)
The fuel may have been removed, but apparently the waste won't be safe to remove until 2065, and the buildings themselves aren't scheduled to be demolished and the site finally closed down until 2098. (Partly because it'll take that long for the widespread low-level contamination of the ground to reach safe levels, by the looks of it.)
That would be 87 years, not tens of thousands of years. It is also clearly not the case that the reactors are still running because they can't be turned off (as the post I was replying to indicated).
Oh, and I'm not sure if we've managed to come up with a better way to dispose of nuclear waste than leaving them to rot in badly-maintained storage ponds at places like Sellafield yet...
Fuel rods only need to be kept in storage ponds for a small number of years (single digits) until the rate of heat generation becomes low enough that water cooling is no longer necessary.
The reactors I have worked with are not good but there is nothing you can do to stop a Magnox reactor. The British Magnox reactors are still running after their expected lifespan because no-one knows what to do with them. Trawsfynydd still consumes considerable amounts of electricity to keep it stable. The costs do not stop after the fifty years of lifespan.
According to the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority website:
All fuel has been removed from the reactors and decommissioning is well underway.
Do you know something they don't?
The costs go on and on for tens of thousands of years
Only if you choose to treat the residue as waste as opposed to a valuable fuel source. Even then, the cost is minimal once it is cool enough to go into dry cask storage.
When someone says that they are in favour of nuclear power it would be willfully disingenuous to infer that they are in favour of building Chernobyl-type reactors.
For most of the world this was true well before 1986. You would not have been allowed to build a reactor of that type in the US or western Europe, even without the benefit of hindsight.
The isotopes of concern here are Iodine-131 (half life 8 days) and Cs-137 (half life 30 years). The caesium is about a thousand times less radioactive than the iodine, and the effective dose rate can be expected to fall rather faster than the half life would suggest due to environmental effects.
A large area may have been evacuated, but that doesn't necessarily mean it is uninhabitable in any objective sense. Large parts of the zone are there not because of current dose rates, but rather due to the risk of a further release because the reactors have yet to be fully shut down. The threshold being used is quite low (comparable to or lower than natural background radiation in some parts of the world), and some have questioned whether forcible evacuation is really justified given that it has consequences too.
While the evacuation zone keeps expanding, at what point does Japan become uninhabitable...forever?
I don't want to sound complacent, but the situation isn't remotely as bad as you appear to be suggesting.
Sure, more radiation is released, but again, so what?
It's bad for you.
For the dose rates typically at issue here we don't know that. It might even be good for you (look up 'radiation hormesis'). Either way, the health effects are likely to be small and difficult to measure.
As for Oracle? The lesson here is, and I'm sure I'll get hate for pointing it out, but the lesson is FOSS is "free as in worthless" if you are a corp because you actually buy nothing for your money. they should have waited until Sun flatlined and picked it up for a song and ditched the FOSS and kept the IP copyrights and patents. Because as Libre Office proved it doesn't matter how much you pay for something if the FOSSies get their panties in a wad it quickly becomes not worth the effort. From what I saw oracle didn't do a damned thing different than sun before them, but because Sun was the "good guys" and Oracle was "One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison" it didn't really matter.
That's true whenever you buy a business where a large part of the value is goodwill. If you annoy your customers or employees too much then they will walk and the value is gone.
You're missing the point. Debian may not be the most popular distribution in and of itself, and it is not necessarily the best choice for many users, but it does provide the foundations for (amongst others) Ubuntu and Linux Mint. That makes it technically very important, even if the users who benefit from it don't know they are using it.
The Bing toolbar, or whatever was collecting the information, noted that person X searched for term Y, and eventually ended up at page Z. It makes perfect sense to connect Y and Z,
If I'm sitting in an exam and see that several of my neighbours have written X as the answer to the first question then it makes perfect sense for me to write X too.
regardless of the search engine used,
So Google wasn't the only victim. You're not making this sound any better.
or even if they asked a friend to point them to a page about the subject.
Not really relevant if (as seems likely) 90% of the search results in question came from Google.
That isn't nearly as blatant as you are all claiming. They aren't searching google to get their search results. They are looking at what people are actually looking for based on their searches and browsing.
In other words, collecting the inputs to Google and the corresponding outputs, then correlating the two. They may not be performing the searches but they are copying the results.
If microsoft was doing what google is attempting to do we would all be screaming bloody murder
What Google is doing is far from ideal technically, but they have given us reasonable grounds to believe that their intentions are honourable: code that we can use freely, and a patent grant with no strings attached.
The technical shortcomings can be forgiven in view of the need to challenge H.264 quickly, and the need to work around patents held by others. I wish we had a codec with the technical qualities of H.264 and the legal qualities of VP8, but we don't. H.264 is irrelevant to me if I can't use it for legal or economic reasons.
When Microsoft has done something similar (like.NET, OOXML or ActiveX) there have usually been details in the fine print that either tie the technology to other Microsoft products or make it legally dangerous to use. What they have done in the past is not comparable to what Google is doing now.
Even Microsoft were to reform their behaviour completely, they would quite rightly be scrutinised very closely because of their past misdeeds.
The Page rank algorithm determines how useful a site is based on the amount of hyperlinks TO the website. Each count is multiplied by how reputable a website is - so if its a huge website which brings in millions of users - then its more likely to be reputable than a website on a free host which gets 10 hits a year.
I think it would be more accurate to say that pagerank measures how notable (as opposed to reputable) a site is. Therein, of course, lies the problem.
What the hell kind of toaster runs Linux? There's hardly any justification for a mass-produced toaster to have any logic more complex than a relay.
Howdy doodly do. How's it going? I'm Talkie, Talkie Toaster, your chirpy breakfast companion. Talkie's the name, toasting's the game. Anyone like any toast?
To effectively prevent piracy the penalty has to be such that PenaltyAmount * ProbabilityOfGettingCaught > SavingsByPirating. Right now the chance of getting caught is quite low, so the fine has to be quite high. Perhaps the problem is actually that the *IAA isn't suing enough people. If ProbabilityOfGettingCaught was close to 1, the PenaltyAmount could be quite close to the actual value of the item pirated
I agree that (to first order) this is the penalty you would need for the law to be effective, but that doesn't necessarily mean we are morally justified imposing grossly disproportionate penalties on those unfortunate enough to be caught.
IMO this applies doubly in a civil court, where the standard of proof is set on the assumption that either verdict would be equally unjust if it were wrong. Punitive judgements belong in a criminal court, not a civil one.
Slashdot Mirror
I wish I could mod you up.
Thanks for the compliment.
Back when they built Fukushima they didn't even KNOW how to stop the reaction without arbitrarily cooling it to the point where it no longer has enough energy to continue.
You're quite correct that modern designs are much safer, but I fear you may have misunderstood the reason why.
It isn't the nuclear reaction that is difficult to stop. You simply insert the control rods and the reaction: the rate of fission will decline to a negligible value within seconds. This is called a SCRAM, and it happened automatically as a result of the earthquake at Fukushima.
The problem is the amount of heat generated by the radioactive fission products that were created during the previous days and weeks that the reactor was operating. There is nothing practicable you can do to stop this other than cooling the reactor and waiting for the radioactivity to subside. Typically it would amount to about 7% of full power immediately after the SCRAM, falling to 2% after 10 minutes and 0.5% after a day - but when full power is hundreds or thousands of gigawatts, even 0.5% is a large value.
One of the major advantages of modern reactor designs is that they do not rely (or rely less heavily) on active cooling during a shutdown. The loss of electrical power, as happened at Fukushima, is then a significantly less serious problem.
I get your point and that's somewhat what I tried to say. However it's also about the same as "Trust us, it won't fail because we've got the latest safety measures in place." Which is *exactly* what they said about the original nuclear plant. Another unforeseen disaster will trump those safety features too. Nothing else has these types of issues. Nothing.
That's not entirely true. Consider, for example, the failure of the Banqiao Dam which killed 171,000 people. It wasn't the first and it wasn't the last (although there has been nothing on such a large scale before or since).
Does this mean we should be very careful about how we build and operate hydroelectric (and nuclear) power stations? Most certainly it does. Does it mean we should stop building hydroelectric (and nuclear) power stations? No, because that would almost certainly result in more use of coal and gas (with a far more serious worst-case scenario).
from wind power ? about a dozen (let's avoid high towers when an earthquake hits)
from solar power ? 4 (again, don't be on rooftops maintaining or installing solar panels during earthquakes)
from nuclear power ? 0 (*one* got mild burns and *may* get sick in 20-30 years)
In the interests of strict accuracy that would be no deaths caused by radiation (so far at least). There was one as a direct result of the earthquake and two from the tsunami. (Even so, compared with other places on the coast that would make it a relatively safe place to be.)
But I'm not so optimistic that I would expect these to produce a significant acceleration in alternative browser share.
If you want some cause for optimism look at the StatCounter figures for IE in the Ukraine (4th place, 15.4%), Moldova (3rd place, 14.4%), Macedonia (3rd place, 11.2%) and Georgia (4th place, 13.1%). Not representative of the world by any means, but they show that Internet Explorer usage can sink to very low levels of usage even with the unfair advantages that it enjoys.
(Not that it really matters whether they end up with 20%, 10% or 0%. The important point is that their monopoly has gone so they can't dictate web standards any more.)
Provided that they intend to keep exposure within reasonable limits (which appears to be the case) then smoking, working in a coal mine, or just having an unhealthy diet would all qualify.
Do you really think that either of those things in some way compares with exposure to nuclear radiation?
It is true that a radiation dose of (say) 100 to 250mSv is considerably less dangerous than taking up smoking, however since they can both cause cancer I think it is a useful comparison to make.
I'm thinking this must be one of those cases where you've been banging a drum for a while and just accidentally went too far.
My only regret is that I missed out sunbathing.
I wonder if there is a population here in the States that would be willing to take a compelling risk like this.
Provided that they intend to keep exposure within reasonable limits (which appears to be the case) then smoking, working in a coal mine, or just having an unhealthy diet would all qualify.
I think smoking and unhealthy diet are generally seen as a reasonable trade-off between immediate pleasure and long-term effects. Most of the time unconsciously, moreover. So they're not really relevant here, unless you consider cleaning up Fukushima an immediate pleasure.
As for coal miners, more often than not they don't do it by choice.
I agree that there's a big difference, and I certainly wouldn't want to belittle their altruistic intent - but I was answering the question as stated, which was about risk. The examples I gave are highly relevant in that respect.
I wonder if there is a population here in the States that would be willing to take a compelling risk like this.
Provided that they intend to keep exposure within reasonable limits (which appears to be the case) then smoking, working in a coal mine, or just having an unhealthy diet would all qualify.
Except for Island and GB all of europe, russia and north east asia is on a super large interconnected grid.
It's specifically their very large amount of hydroelectric capacity that is helpful here. Hydro is an excellent counterbalance to unreliable sources of power like wind, because you can turn it on and off instantly or even run it in reverse. Unfortunately it's not scalable because most of the best sites are already being used.
Averaging wind over a large area obviously helps, but not nearly as much as you might hope because of the degree of correlation.
Well, give the fact that already 17% of our energy comes from renewable sources I kinda doubt it. Nuclear only has about 23% in Germany and we are exporting about 40% of our energy.
It's because the contribution from wind and solar power is already quite high in Germany that adding lots more might be difficult.
Denmark has achieved 20% from wind power, but only with help from Sweden to balance the load on their grid (and Denmark is much smaller than Germany).
Besides, even if Germany was able to replace 100% of its nuclear capacity with renewables, that is energy which could have been used to replace coal - surely a much more rational and urgent environmental objective.
Can anyone provide a source for this, I'm not denying this is the case, I'm just interested to know how, seeing as about 25% of the graphite was ejected and something like 5% of the core burned in the open for 9 days.
There are a couple of factors at work here. First is the fact that the INES scale only goes up to level seven. If you did a very simplistic numerical comparison then you might rate Chernobyl at ten times Fukushima, but since you are already at the top of the scale then the increased severity is not reflected in the INES level.
Second, the effects of the release are likely to be proportionately much smaller for Fukushima than Chernobyl. This is partly due to good luck (winds blowing in the right direction) and partly better management (like having a containment building, a much safer reactor design, and promptly evacuating the immediate area).
Common sense, but wrong.
There is an inherent risk in all power generation technologies -- just about the truly safe power generation method is solar, but that's not practical everywhere, and has only been cost-effective recently.
All other methods kill people.
Actually, solar power kills people too (especially rooftop solar). You are quite correct that it is a tradeoff though, with coal being orders of magnitude worse than nuclear.
Like that time Tepco ran a geiger counter on a piece of material and found a radiation spike 10 million times above normal?
Yeah, so you double- and triple-check it.
No, at the radiation level that they thought they had measured, you run.
The waste that's radioactive for tens of thousands of years gets taken offsite, shipped elsewhere and then - well, we're not sure what to do with them to be honest. No-one's figured out a good way of storing the waste.
Long-term disposal makes no sense at present because:
1. we might want to use it as fuel, and
2. that which is highly lethal now will be a lot less lethal after a few decades.
(Almost by definition, the isotopes with half lives of tens of thousands of years are not the highly radioactive ones. Not harmless by any means, but nothing like the level of danger that a fuel rod poses during the first year or so following removal from a reactor.)
The fuel may have been removed, but apparently the waste won't be safe to remove until 2065, and the buildings themselves aren't scheduled to be demolished and the site finally closed down until 2098. (Partly because it'll take that long for the widespread low-level contamination of the ground to reach safe levels, by the looks of it.)
That would be 87 years, not tens of thousands of years. It is also clearly not the case that the reactors are still running because they can't be turned off (as the post I was replying to indicated).
Oh, and I'm not sure if we've managed to come up with a better way to dispose of nuclear waste than leaving them to rot in badly-maintained storage ponds at places like Sellafield yet...
Fuel rods only need to be kept in storage ponds for a small number of years (single digits) until the rate of heat generation becomes low enough that water cooling is no longer necessary.
The reactors I have worked with are not good but there is nothing you can do to stop a Magnox reactor. The British Magnox reactors are still running after their expected lifespan because no-one knows what to do with them. Trawsfynydd still consumes considerable amounts of electricity to keep it stable. The costs do not stop after the fifty years of lifespan.
According to the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority website:
All fuel has been removed from the reactors and decommissioning is well underway.
Do you know something they don't?
The costs go on and on for tens of thousands of years
Only if you choose to treat the residue as waste as opposed to a valuable fuel source. Even then, the cost is minimal once it is cool enough to go into dry cask storage.
It's a valid distinction:
The isotopes of concern here are Iodine-131 (half life 8 days) and Cs-137 (half life 30 years). The caesium is about a thousand times less radioactive than the iodine, and the effective dose rate can be expected to fall rather faster than the half life would suggest due to environmental effects.
A large area may have been evacuated, but that doesn't necessarily mean it is uninhabitable in any objective sense. Large parts of the zone are there not because of current dose rates, but rather due to the risk of a further release because the reactors have yet to be fully shut down. The threshold being used is quite low (comparable to or lower than natural background radiation in some parts of the world), and some have questioned whether forcible evacuation is really justified given that it has consequences too.
While the evacuation zone keeps expanding, at what point does Japan become uninhabitable...forever?
I don't want to sound complacent, but the situation isn't remotely as bad as you appear to be suggesting.
It's bad for you.
For the dose rates typically at issue here we don't know that. It might even be good for you (look up 'radiation hormesis'). Either way, the health effects are likely to be small and difficult to measure.
As for Oracle? The lesson here is, and I'm sure I'll get hate for pointing it out, but the lesson is FOSS is "free as in worthless" if you are a corp because you actually buy nothing for your money. they should have waited until Sun flatlined and picked it up for a song and ditched the FOSS and kept the IP copyrights and patents. Because as Libre Office proved it doesn't matter how much you pay for something if the FOSSies get their panties in a wad it quickly becomes not worth the effort. From what I saw oracle didn't do a damned thing different than sun before them, but because Sun was the "good guys" and Oracle was "One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison" it didn't really matter.
That's true whenever you buy a business where a large part of the value is goodwill. If you annoy your customers or employees too much then they will walk and the value is gone.
You're missing the point. Debian may not be the most popular distribution in and of itself, and it is not necessarily the best choice for many users, but it does provide the foundations for (amongst others) Ubuntu and Linux Mint. That makes it technically very important, even if the users who benefit from it don't know they are using it.
The Bing toolbar, or whatever was collecting the information, noted that person X searched for term Y, and eventually ended up at page Z. It makes perfect sense to connect Y and Z,
If I'm sitting in an exam and see that several of my neighbours have written X as the answer to the first question then it makes perfect sense for me to write X too.
regardless of the search engine used,
So Google wasn't the only victim. You're not making this sound any better.
or even if they asked a friend to point them to a page about the subject.
Not really relevant if (as seems likely) 90% of the search results in question came from Google.
That isn't nearly as blatant as you are all claiming. They aren't searching google to get their search results. They are looking at what people are actually looking for based on their searches and browsing.
In other words, collecting the inputs to Google and the corresponding outputs, then correlating the two. They may not be performing the searches but they are copying the results.
If microsoft was doing what google is attempting to do we would all be screaming bloody murder
What Google is doing is far from ideal technically, but they have given us reasonable grounds to believe that their intentions are honourable: code that we can use freely, and a patent grant with no strings attached.
The technical shortcomings can be forgiven in view of the need to challenge H.264 quickly, and the need to work around patents held by others. I wish we had a codec with the technical qualities of H.264 and the legal qualities of VP8, but we don't. H.264 is irrelevant to me if I can't use it for legal or economic reasons.
When Microsoft has done something similar (like .NET, OOXML or ActiveX) there have usually been details in the fine print that either tie the technology to other Microsoft products or make it legally dangerous to use. What they have done in the past is not comparable to what Google is doing now.
Even Microsoft were to reform their behaviour completely, they would quite rightly be scrutinised very closely because of their past misdeeds.
The Page rank algorithm determines how useful a site is based on the amount of hyperlinks TO the website. Each count is multiplied by how reputable a website is - so if its a huge website which brings in millions of users - then its more likely to be reputable than a website on a free host which gets 10 hits a year.
I think it would be more accurate to say that pagerank measures how notable (as opposed to reputable) a site is. Therein, of course, lies the problem.
What the hell kind of toaster runs Linux? There's hardly any justification for a mass-produced toaster to have any logic more complex than a relay.
Howdy doodly do. How's it going? I'm Talkie, Talkie Toaster, your chirpy breakfast companion. Talkie's the name, toasting's the game. Anyone like any toast?
[from Red Dwarf IV: White Hole]
To effectively prevent piracy the penalty has to be such that PenaltyAmount * ProbabilityOfGettingCaught > SavingsByPirating. Right now the chance of getting caught is quite low, so the fine has to be quite high. Perhaps the problem is actually that the *IAA isn't suing enough people. If ProbabilityOfGettingCaught was close to 1, the PenaltyAmount could be quite close to the actual value of the item pirated
I agree that (to first order) this is the penalty you would need for the law to be effective, but that doesn't necessarily mean we are morally justified imposing grossly disproportionate penalties on those unfortunate enough to be caught.
IMO this applies doubly in a civil court, where the standard of proof is set on the assumption that either verdict would be equally unjust if it were wrong. Punitive judgements belong in a criminal court, not a civil one.