When Nokia made their deal with Microsoft, they basically told the world "Don't buy any of our current phones because we're orphaning them."
More importantly perhaps, they told developers considering one of their many mobile platforms not to bother with any of them, and to focus on offerings from other companies instead. For their smartphones and plans for an ovi store that will be the kiss of death.
Nokia will coast for another few years as they have a huge install base and dominate the low-end, but when higher end phones start moving down, they will have a real problem, and being in hock to Microsoft is going to be part of that problem.
As for Qt, I think Microsoft will be hostile to it from the start, and encourage Nokia to burn their boats (and they have a place man at the head of Nokia to implement this). So the outlook for Qt is not good - it will probably be starved of cash and developers and left slowly to die. Best case would be if Nokia spins it off again right now, before they are taken over by MS or go into a death spiral.
What technology? The idea of putting an 'upgrade' button inside an app? Buttons like that have been inside apps and web pages since they existed, and were predated by stickers on physical goods unselling to a 'pro' version.
The idea of having a button selling another product inside an app is not a technology, it's not an invention, it's not difficult or technical, it's not even a unique or notable idea. The thought that someone would ask money because they wrote the idea down would be laughable if it weren't for the USPS actually granting patents on crap like this, US courts enforcing them, and idiot corporations like Apple licensing them and thus lending the concept credence.
Not at all unreasonable.
No, that's right, I think completely insane would be a better description of the Lodsys position.
Apple should have been refusing to license patents like this and questioning the entire system, instead of licensing and thus encouraging despicable patent trolls like this company. At least Apple wrote Lodsys a letter though, explaining why they are idiots.
Long-term disposal makes no sense at present because:
We don't *have* long-term disposal plans for nuclear waste at present, and until we do, the cost of nuclear power for host nations is huge. That's not even taking into account the risk of accidents, which leaves countries with a bill like the 15 billion dollar losses Tepco recently announced (for less than a year of expenses in dealing with the aftermath of the earthquake), and also leaves surrounding countries with a huge bill for cleanup and monitoring.
Fission power is not currently a cheap option, when you consider the true costs of containing the waste and containing accidents.
MeeGo was a joint venture between Intel and Nokia. Even if Nokia abandons it's development, Intel will step up.
Intel makes and sells chips, they do not sell operating systems, or devices which directly need operating systems. This was a gambit by them to promote the use of Atom and try to get some leverage in the mobile OS market. Without Nokia they have no horse in this race and no reason to continue supporting Meego, and even if they did try to, they have no OS expertise, no direct channel to market, and no real business reason to continue funding it. So it will die.
Development choices are often political (like it or not), and as with QT, this project sadly will have no future because the former backers have no financial interest in continuing to promote development, and no interest in seeing that it becomes a healthy standalone OS project either.
Two months later I have been completely converted to the Kindle. I now don't even bother looking at books that I can't buy on the Kindle. It kind of sucks, as a lot of publishers charge a premium on Kindle books (how the hell do they justify that???), and other books simply are not available. But the convenience of reading on a Kindle trumps the disadvantages for me.
Q: How the hell do they justify that??? A: But the convenience of reading on a Kindle trumps the disadvantages for me
If the convenience was worth less to you than the price difference, you'd buy the paper version.
Please tell me that it adds rather than replaces. Also, where is the downloadable copy? All I want is a copy of the laserdisc etc.
A more pertinent question would be - where can I get a working copy of the hardware to play the laserdisc?
This update is long overdue, and so long as all the data is there, the web is a far better place for this project, as someone else (you for example) can take all the data and repackage it with a better UI and redistribute, which couldn't be done with the original analogue files without a huge amount of extra hassle and a working version of the original hardware/software, which in 100 years will be forgotten and obsolete.
Interesting that the rosetta stone of our age may be impermanent bits which are replicated, copied and modified ad infinitum on the web, rather than more permanent marks on stone. That's until the lights go out of course. Unfortunately the original laserdiscs are neither permanently readable (stone), nor conveniently accessible (web), so they are the worst of both worlds.
so you are saying I shouldn't be drinking the water from the plant right now, and maybe wait until it's diluted with more ocean water, and then drink it? I don't actually like drinking ocean water that much though...
Radionuclides can be concentrated in the food chain. Fish in a vast region around Japan may therefore have to be monitored and banned from sale if the radiation levels are not acceptable - potentially fish much further afield will migrate to near the plant and then be caught elsewhere, increasing cancer risks around the pacific. Milk, livestock and vegetation from areas near the plant will also be affected over a long time period. There are still restrictions on lamb in the UK from the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 for example - this incident will not be quickly forgotten.
There may not be a high cost in lives, as it's very difficult to quantify the increased deaths from cancer and tie them to a particular incident, but there will be a huge economic cost (though probably not as much as the tsunami). This is something we should worry about, and it should inform our decisions on future nuclear power plants as the up-front cost is not the only one that we incur when building them. Our best bet is certainly not fission, coal or any other massively polluting energy source, it is moderating the power we do use, and finding new ways to generate it (fusion, solar, tidal etc).
If the reminders count down to zero and they start trying to block you reading content, simply remove the dynamic bit of the URL and reload the page, or visit the site from something like google news; the paywall is trivially easy to circumvent at the moment (presumably by design), I'll be interested to see how far they go with this and what happens when they try to lock it down and stop offering huge discounts and deals on subscriptions. The NYT is one of the best papers in the english speaking world (quality of writing/editorial staff, and to a lesser extent in reporting), and if they can't make payments work, no-one can.
My initial feeling was sadness that they have left the internet, but they do have to make a living or why bother running a news site at all, and advertising brings its own compromises. Along with sites like Facebook there is now a trend for a balkanised internet which is sadly reminiscent of all the walled gardens like eworld that we saw in the 90s.
On the other hand, we've had about 63 deaths occurring directly from nuclear incidents since nuclear power started. Now, while others have obviously had larger cancer risks and such resulting in death, but it is nearly impossible to be 100% certain about how many of those have occurred.
As you obviously know from the caveats you include after this statistic, the deaths from Chernobyl are in the thousands, and possibly tens of thousands, which you discount because 'it's impossible to be 100% certain'. So why do you repeat this misleading figure of 63? Like the climate change debate, debate on nuclear power has been poisoned by both sides attempting to distort the statistics. You're not going to persuade anyone by producing obviously cooked statistics or attacking straw men - no one is suggesting going all coal power instead, apart from you.
Nuclear (fission) is not the safest type of power we have at the moment, for that, you'd have to look at solar or wind, fusion or perhaps hydro (though globally there have been some accidents with that). Those alternatives have not been fully explored yet, and perhaps we should spend more money on exploring other options than building new nuclear plants? Thermal solar for example could provide good baseline power on a large enough scale, with zero risk of pollution or serious accidents.
Nuclear power does provide good baseline power, it doesn't cause huge numbers of deaths, in spite of several serious accidents, but it is very expensive and it does cause some deaths and the potential for catastrophic accidents. Fukushima still has the potential for serious pollution of the surrounding land, and we should not downplay the situation there. Here is a good summary of the situation from a guy who handled recovery at TMI:
Given the lax regulatory environment in some countries which have a lot of nuclear plants (the US, China and former USSR), ageing nuclear power plants are at serious risk of problems and many have had their lifetimes extended past their intended operating lifespan (as Fukushima did). There are plants in the US for example which have had warnings of serious failures in safety for decades, and *nothing* has been done about it. Here is one example:
This is a serious concern, which could perhaps be alleviated by building more modern plants, but there are other concerns with nuclear power which I believe should be addressed first. For a start, the astronomical costs of decommissioning, fuel storage, and accident clean-up (which are currently borne by governments, not the nuclear industry), mean that fission is not really economically viable IMHO. That doesn't mean it warrants scare-mongering about fallout or banning all nuclear plants when we don't have alternatives, but we should be frank and open about the dangers and costs involved rather than trying to sweep them under the carpet. Opponents of nuclear power are not always irrational fear-mongers.
If we have no alternatives right now, we might need to keep these old fission plants running, but we should be clear about the dangers, and urgently exploring alternative sources of power (fusion, hydro etc), not trying to cheerlead for a nuclear industry which does not have our best interests at heart, has a focus on profit above safety, and depends on government largesse to deal with its problems of waste storage and decommissioning. There will be serious economic consequences from Fukushima for hundreds of years for Japan and further earthquakes there make it questionable whether you can safely site nuclear plants in the country.
Decommissioning costs for Sizewell A for example (2 reactors, which shut down normally), are so far £1.2 billion, and are ongoing, while build cost
On the other hand, we've had about 63 deaths occurring directly from nuclear incidents since nuclear power started. Now, while others have obviously had larger cancer risks and such resulting in death, but it is nearly impossible to be 100% certain about how many of those have occurred.
As you obviously know from the caveats you include after this statistic, the deaths from Chernobyl are in the thousands, and possibly tens of thousands, which you discount because 'it's impossible to be 100% certain'. So why do you repeat this misleading figure of 63? Like the climate change debate, debate on nuclear power has been poisoned by both sides attempting to distort the statistics. You're not going to persuade anyone by producing obviously cooked statistics or attacking straw men - no one is suggesting going all coal power instead, apart from you.
Nuclear power does provide good baseline power, it doesn't cause huge numbers of deaths, in spite of several serious accidents, but it is very expensive and it does cause some deaths and the potential for catastrophic accidents. Fukushima still has the potential for serious pollution of the surrounding land, and we should not downplay the situation there. Here is a good summary of the situation from a guy who handled recovery at TMI:
Given the lax regulatory environment in some countries which have a lot of nuclear plants (the US, China and former USSR), ageing nuclear power plants are at serious risk of problems and many have had their lifetimes extended past their intended operating lifespan (as Fukushima did). There are plants in the US for example which have had warnings of serious failures in safety for decades, and *nothing* has been done about it. Here is one example:
This is a serious concern, which could perhaps be alleviated by building more modern plants, but there are other concerns with nuclear power which I believe should be addressed first. For a start, the astronomical costs of decommissioning, fuel storage, and accident clean-up (which are currently borne by governments, not the nuclear industry), mean that fission is not really economically viable IMHO. That doesn't mean it warrants scare-mongering about fallout or banning all nuclear plants when we don't have alternatives, but we should be frank and open about the dangers and costs involved rather than trying to sweep them under the carpet. Opponents of nuclear power are not always irrational fear-mongers.
If we have no alternatives right now, we might need to keep these old fission plants running, but we should be clear about the dangers, and urgently exploring alternative sources of power (fusion, hydro etc), not trying to cheerlead for a nuclear industry which does not have our best interests at heart, has a focus on profit above safety, and depends on government largesse to deal with its problems of waste storage and decommissioning. There will be serious economic consequences from Fukushima for hundreds of years for Japan and further earthquakes there make it questionable whether you can safely site nuclear plants in the country.
Decommissioning costs for Sizewell A for example (2 reactors, which shut down normally), are so far £1.2 billion, and are ongoing, while build cost was £65 million and decommissioning was first estimated at £500m but has since ballooned in cost. It recently narrowly avoided meltdown in the spent fuel ponds due to an unobserved leak, which thankfully was found in time by chance (a contractor doing his laundry). That would have been very expensive to clean up and could have created something similar to Fukushima (on a smaller scale). Sellafield (another plant in the UK) has estimated cleanup costs of £31.5 billion. Those
That chart might be useful if it were actually up to date but posting it long after radiation levels have been continuously rising is disingenuous at best.
There is no significant danger to places outside Japan from this plant, but a steam explosion or burning fuel rods could act as a dirty bomb and spread waste a significant area around the plant, rendering it uninhabitable for a while. Millions of people live nearby and there is a large town within 30km. The best scenario at this point is that they continue to get water sprayed on to the reactors/fuel ponds over the next few months which evaporates and/or runs off and the resulting radioactive material is so diluted in seawater that they can just put an exclusion zone round the plant and maybe gradually get it contained, though how they would do that with wrecked buildings and fractured reactors is hard to see. It is not certain that they will keep it under control though - 1 sievert per hour doses will make it very difficult to work in the reactor buildings and a lot of the cooling equipment was damaged.
'Give me your money or I'm gonna kill you' is NOT a choice.
It's good that no-one is giving you that choice then.
Having ME do the work to get where YOU want to be just doesn't fly.
There are many limits on your liberty imposed by the society you live in, in order to improve things for everyone. In this case you may not agree with this specific change, but it is in no way unusual to force compliance on people who would otherwise speed on the motorway, litter public land, steal, pollute their neighbours' land, etc etc. Those rules inconvenience many individuals who would prefer to do as they please. So your argument should really be that this particular change has no benefit for everyone or is not as good as some alternative, because frankly, arguing that it doesn't benefit you doesn't really interest the majority of society - why should it? Society is not obliged to structure itself so that you may continue living in exactly the same way forever, but you are obliged to adapt to the society you live in.
As it happens rising and volatile fuel prices will probably persuade you of the problems with your lifestyle long before your government imposes extra taxes or changes to your car. By 2050 the lifestyle you describe will not be sustainable using a car running on petrol.
What is your reasoning for the need to entomb the site some time soon? There's no evidence of ongoing meltdown, so the heat generated by the reactors is constantly dropping, so the challenges of cooling and stabilising the reactors is getting easier, not harder. And while there's tremendous damage to the surrounding buildings, there's no significant damage to the reactors - there were reports of spikes which may have been consistent with radioactive steam venting through small cracks, but given the radiation levels at the site and the fact that they still need to periodically vent gas from the reactors, it suggests they're still relatively close to air-tight.
Obviously it's hard to tell as we're working from imperfect information which has (perhaps understandably) been rationed by the Japanese gov. and Tepco, however recent news is that the government feels the situation is grave and at least one reactor has been breached:
it's not clear they have the situation under control, but let's hope they do. It does sound from recent government announcements as if they're not quite as confident as you are about the outcome though - they have recently started evacuating people from a full 30km radius. I haven't seen any reliable measures of temperature for the spent fuel ponds or reactors which indicate that they're dropping - last I heard a couple of days ago one reactor inexplicably dramatically heated up again. Of course neither of us are experts in the field, and this is all second-hand information.
My reasoning for needing to entomb the reactors is simply that if they don't have the reactors sealed they won't be able to cool them reliably, steam could escape explosively, those racks could widen, and they will continue to leak radioactive material until sealed, rendering the buildings difficult to clean up and work in. Also there is some erosion of fuel rod casings from the spent fuel ponds which isn't a good sign (zirconium found at the water outlets), so they have a lot of problems on the site, on top of periodic spikes in radiation making it difficult to work there and the wreckage of the buildings making it very difficult to assess damage (I assume that's why there are no clear indications of the state of spent fuel ponds for example). But let's hope they do get the situation under control without drastic measures.
While it's true several plant workers have been taken to hospital for monitoring after receiving acute doses higher than safety recommendations
Sorry radiation burns would have been more appropriate, sickness is a real possibility later - they are not there for 'monitoring' but for treatment. Two workers are missing too from the early days, perhaps killed in explosions. In comparison to earthquake casualties of course this is a tiny total.
Since it appears none of the reactors have actually melted down or suffered a substantial failure in containment in the immediate vicinity of the rods themselves,
There appears to be a breach in reactor 3 containment, reactors have overheated past their normal operating temperature, fuel ponds with massive stocks of spent fuel have overheated and possibly boiled dry with no containment and the entire buildings have been sprayed continually with corrosive seawater for days (which really is a last resort and is in no way normal). I think it's highly likely they'll have to give up and entomb the site at some point soon. If they are very lucky they'll be able to get it back under control, extract the fuel and entomb the remains. They have been periodically abandoning the site as radiation levels spiked, and given all the damage to 3 buildings and machinery caused by explosions restoring cooling will be *very* difficult. There is no way this will be a 'normal decommissioning process' given the huge damage to the site - for example the entire building and crane around the spent fuel pond of reactor 3 has been destroyed in the hydrogen explosion. While none of this has to lead to some dramatic explosion or disaster, it will make decommissioning the site very difficult. Hopefully they will get power back on in all buildings and temporary cooling in place but it is by no means under control yet or a normal situation.
Indeed, if they weren't already near or past their expected end-of-life, they could probably be fairly readily repaired, refuelled, and set running again within a relatively short timeframe.
I'm sorry, but having seen photos of the site, this is not close to the truth - 3 buildings have been partially destroyed and potentially radioactive debris spread around the site by the hydrogen explosions. There is no way these reactors could ever be put back into use in any meaningful sense without a complete rebuild.
I'm not denying it's a serious issue - but in the perspective of tens of thousands dead, and many times more homeless and short on food and other supplies, it really shouldn't be dominating headlines in this way.
That we can agree on - people do get irrationally scared when radiation is mentioned and the tsunami has killed more than this plant ever will. However this is a very serious accident, which still has the potential to become a serious disaster for northern Japan and downplaying the significance or potential dangers will not help deal with public hysteria about nuclear power - quite the reverse.
There may yet be larger releases, but -this- far we've got ~20.000 dead due to earthquake and tsunami, and ~0 dead due to radiation released from the powerplants.
Several people have radiation sickness from high exposure already, high doses have been recorded up to 40km away, and radiation kills long term (unless it's a massive dose), so that's not a very useful statistic. It is useful to know what levels of radiation have been released.
Unless fuel ponds or a reactor burns fully this disaster won't be comparable to Chernobyl, and it's unlikely to get that bad, but we should not play down its impact, which is likely to be hugely expensive over the long-term, given the highly populated surroundings. These reactors will probably need to be encased in concrete eventually and monitored for hundreds of years. After two weeks they still don't have the fires under control; this is a big problem.
Yes, she could have gone private. But then she would be flipping the entire bill for the cancer treatment as the UK doesn't allow you to be privately treated for something then go back onto the public dole for that illness except for emergency cases where government health care options are not available
Not sure where you got this idea, do you have an example of this happening?
PS The word dole is used for unemployment benefits in the UK, not healthcare.
You know, the sad part of the story is that if the girl had the option to pay for the PAP herself,
She did have the option. Private medical care is available in the UK at reasonable cost. Public healthcare is rationed, as it should be, so that it has the maximum possible benefit for society as a whole - that means some edge cases are not covered well but the vast majority of cases are covered well, and are free at the point of treatment at considerably less cost per capita than medicare costs alone in the states.
The UK currently has the solution you are suggesting in your last paragraph - like most western countries apart from the US it has a public healthcare option mixed with private healthcare available if desired.
Several plants in the US are near a major fault line, an area which could easily suffer from both earthquakes and tsunamis, here's a couple:
The Diablo Canyon plant - on the coast and near population centres San Onofre plant - on the coast, near the fault line, and near huge population centre of Los Angeles
Both plants are decades old and are designed for a 0.7 quake - that's not enough for this sort of event. Nuclear plants do special challenges during a disaster like this as they require maintenance, electricity and a lengthy safe shutdown procedure, which is difficult in a disaster zone. It is perfectly reasonable to question the safety of plants elsewhere in the light of this 'impossible' event. The eastern sea-board of the US is also due a huge earthquake sometime soon, but no-one knows when, and Japan is arguably more prepared than the US for this situation.
PS I imagine the headline was summarising the situation in Japan - a mounting death *toll* (i.e. confirmed deaths, not actual deaths), and problems at a nuclear plant. It could be misread as implying that the plant problems lead to the deaths I suppose, though I doubt that was the original intention, the semi-colon is probably meant as a separator rather than a lead in, but a full-stop would have been better.
WebOS is by all accounts great software, which was hobbled by poor hardware and half-hearted support from Palm. In concept and execution it is superb, so much so that Apple have started poaching former developers (for notifications for example).
If HP had the guts and wherewithal to fully back WebOS, drop Windows for consumers, and convert all their offerings to WebOS, they could really create an ecosystem to rival Apple or Google's, and win over a lot of consumers to a simpler method of computing (most people hate their personal computers which come to dominate spare time they'd like to spend *doing stuff*). This is exactly the right move (putting it on desktop PCs) from HP.
Apple are moving to replace their desktop OS with iOS (the two already share a lot, and a lot of the difference (UI) is now coming back to Mac OS, I'd expect them to merge them again in a few years). HP could beat them at this game with a truly web-friendly OS on their consumer computers which does everything most consumers want from a computer.
As to whether this sort of corporation has the focus, drive and determination to stick with this product for the first few difficult years, promoting it everywhere, and attract enough critical mass with developers in the face of concerted attacks on all fronts from the likes of Microsoft and Apple, I have my doubts, but good luck to them.
So nothing to do with Goldman Sachs then, who probably skimmed a few percent off all those people as they tried to buy and sell shares not by acting as a broker, but by interfering in a normal transaction by buying quickly and pocketing the spread? Money that would otherwise have gone to hire the management, engineers, construction workers, etc, etc...
There is absolutely no need for HFT, I'd support a simple tax on transactions, it would wipe a lot of these practices out at a stroke and pay for the serious deficits western countries are running up. It also would do nothing to get in the way of *real* investment activity.
There are American troops stationed in the gulf all over the place, e.g. 5th fleet in bahrain, and American military aid props up most of the dictatorships in the region from Saudi, to Eqypt (oops!) to Pakistan (Musharraf).
You should not be surprised to see widespread hatred generated as a result.
Oh good, use a bunch of people who are trading an their dictator for likely a theocratic government for an example. No thanks.
Only if you watch Fox News. Suggest you watch AJE, BBC, or some other channel which doesn't view the word through an christian american prism. The campaigners in Egypt are fighting explicitly for secular democracy - let's see how far they get.
It'll be interesting to see what emerges in Egypt, but a theocratic government is way down the list in likelihood; past military dictatorship (backed and funded by the US, so business as usual), corrupt oligarchy, and perhaps secular democracy. The MB have even been forced to concede that they will not put up a candidate for president in order not to scare off domestic support - that should tell you something about how secure their position is.
It will probably die off, either by lack of interest from Nokia for what is now a pointless money-sink, or at Microsoft's insistence - they are remarkably hostile to partners using non-MS tools. I imagine this sort of gentle undermining of cross-platform open-source toolkits is exactly the sort of thing Balmer couldn't resist. A gentle suggestion from their new partner once they are entirely dependent on Microsoft software is all it would take.
The best you can hope for is that it is sold off and then continues as a separate company.
Slashdot Mirror
When Nokia made their deal with Microsoft, they basically told the world "Don't buy any of our current phones because we're orphaning them."
More importantly perhaps, they told developers considering one of their many mobile platforms not to bother with any of them, and to focus on offerings from other companies instead. For their smartphones and plans for an ovi store that will be the kiss of death.
Nokia will coast for another few years as they have a huge install base and dominate the low-end, but when higher end phones start moving down, they will have a real problem, and being in hock to Microsoft is going to be part of that problem.
As for Qt, I think Microsoft will be hostile to it from the start, and encourage Nokia to burn their boats (and they have a place man at the head of Nokia to implement this). So the outlook for Qt is not good - it will probably be starved of cash and developers and left slowly to die. Best case would be if Nokia spins it off again right now, before they are taken over by MS or go into a death spiral.
These things are ridiculously expensive and virtually never pay for themselves -- ever
Just like highways and roads then?
considering you're using their technology
What technology? The idea of putting an 'upgrade' button inside an app? Buttons like that have been inside apps and web pages since they existed, and were predated by stickers on physical goods unselling to a 'pro' version.
The idea of having a button selling another product inside an app is not a technology, it's not an invention, it's not difficult or technical, it's not even a unique or notable idea. The thought that someone would ask money because they wrote the idea down would be laughable if it weren't for the USPS actually granting patents on crap like this, US courts enforcing them, and idiot corporations like Apple licensing them and thus lending the concept credence.
Not at all unreasonable.
No, that's right, I think completely insane would be a better description of the Lodsys position.
Apple should have been refusing to license patents like this and questioning the entire system, instead of licensing and thus encouraging despicable patent trolls like this company. At least Apple wrote Lodsys a letter though, explaining why they are idiots.
Long-term disposal makes no sense at present because:
We don't *have* long-term disposal plans for nuclear waste at present, and until we do, the cost of nuclear power for host nations is huge. That's not even taking into account the risk of accidents, which leaves countries with a bill like the 15 billion dollar losses Tepco recently announced (for less than a year of expenses in dealing with the aftermath of the earthquake), and also leaves surrounding countries with a huge bill for cleanup and monitoring.
Fission power is not currently a cheap option, when you consider the true costs of containing the waste and containing accidents.
MeeGo was a joint venture between Intel and Nokia. Even if Nokia abandons it's development, Intel will step up.
Intel makes and sells chips, they do not sell operating systems, or devices which directly need operating systems. This was a gambit by them to promote the use of Atom and try to get some leverage in the mobile OS market. Without Nokia they have no horse in this race and no reason to continue supporting Meego, and even if they did try to, they have no OS expertise, no direct channel to market, and no real business reason to continue funding it. So it will die.
Development choices are often political (like it or not), and as with QT, this project sadly will have no future because the former backers have no financial interest in continuing to promote development, and no interest in seeing that it becomes a healthy standalone OS project either.
Two months later I have been completely converted to the Kindle. I now don't even bother looking at books that I can't buy on the Kindle. It kind of sucks, as a lot of publishers charge a premium on Kindle books (how the hell do they justify that???), and other books simply are not available. But the convenience of reading on a Kindle trumps the disadvantages for me.
Q: How the hell do they justify that???
A: But the convenience of reading on a Kindle trumps the disadvantages for me
If the convenience was worth less to you than the price difference, you'd buy the paper version.
Please tell me that it adds rather than replaces. Also, where is the downloadable copy? All I want is a copy of the laserdisc etc.
A more pertinent question would be - where can I get a working copy of the hardware to play the laserdisc?
This update is long overdue, and so long as all the data is there, the web is a far better place for this project, as someone else (you for example) can take all the data and repackage it with a better UI and redistribute, which couldn't be done with the original analogue files without a huge amount of extra hassle and a working version of the original hardware/software, which in 100 years will be forgotten and obsolete.
Interesting that the rosetta stone of our age may be impermanent bits which are replicated, copied and modified ad infinitum on the web, rather than more permanent marks on stone. That's until the lights go out of course. Unfortunately the original laserdiscs are neither permanently readable (stone), nor conveniently accessible (web), so they are the worst of both worlds.
so you are saying I shouldn't be drinking the water from the plant right now, and maybe wait until it's diluted with more ocean water, and then drink it? I don't actually like drinking ocean water that much though...
Radionuclides can be concentrated in the food chain. Fish in a vast region around Japan may therefore have to be monitored and banned from sale if the radiation levels are not acceptable - potentially fish much further afield will migrate to near the plant and then be caught elsewhere, increasing cancer risks around the pacific. Milk, livestock and vegetation from areas near the plant will also be affected over a long time period. There are still restrictions on lamb in the UK from the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 for example - this incident will not be quickly forgotten.
There may not be a high cost in lives, as it's very difficult to quantify the increased deaths from cancer and tie them to a particular incident, but there will be a huge economic cost (though probably not as much as the tsunami). This is something we should worry about, and it should inform our decisions on future nuclear power plants as the up-front cost is not the only one that we incur when building them. Our best bet is certainly not fission, coal or any other massively polluting energy source, it is moderating the power we do use, and finding new ways to generate it (fusion, solar, tidal etc).
If the reminders count down to zero and they start trying to block you reading content, simply remove the dynamic bit of the URL and reload the page, or visit the site from something like google news; the paywall is trivially easy to circumvent at the moment (presumably by design), I'll be interested to see how far they go with this and what happens when they try to lock it down and stop offering huge discounts and deals on subscriptions. The NYT is one of the best papers in the english speaking world (quality of writing/editorial staff, and to a lesser extent in reporting), and if they can't make payments work, no-one can.
My initial feeling was sadness that they have left the internet, but they do have to make a living or why bother running a news site at all, and advertising brings its own compromises. Along with sites like Facebook there is now a trend for a balkanised internet which is sadly reminiscent of all the walled gardens like eworld that we saw in the 90s.
On the other hand, we've had about 63 deaths occurring directly from nuclear incidents since nuclear power started. Now, while others have obviously had larger cancer risks and such resulting in death, but it is nearly impossible to be 100% certain about how many of those have occurred.
As you obviously know from the caveats you include after this statistic, the deaths from Chernobyl are in the thousands, and possibly tens of thousands, which you discount because 'it's impossible to be 100% certain'. So why do you repeat this misleading figure of 63? Like the climate change debate, debate on nuclear power has been poisoned by both sides attempting to distort the statistics. You're not going to persuade anyone by producing obviously cooked statistics or attacking straw men - no one is suggesting going all coal power instead, apart from you.
Nuclear (fission) is not the safest type of power we have at the moment, for that, you'd have to look at solar or wind, fusion or perhaps hydro (though globally there have been some accidents with that). Those alternatives have not been fully explored yet, and perhaps we should spend more money on exploring other options than building new nuclear plants? Thermal solar for example could provide good baseline power on a large enough scale, with zero risk of pollution or serious accidents.
Nuclear power does provide good baseline power, it doesn't cause huge numbers of deaths, in spite of several serious accidents, but it is very expensive and it does cause some deaths and the potential for catastrophic accidents. Fukushima still has the potential for serious pollution of the surrounding land, and we should not downplay the situation there. Here is a good summary of the situation from a guy who handled recovery at TMI:
http://www.fairewinds.com/updates
Given the lax regulatory environment in some countries which have a lot of nuclear plants (the US, China and former USSR), ageing nuclear power plants are at serious risk of problems and many have had their lifetimes extended past their intended operating lifespan (as Fukushima did). There are plants in the US for example which have had warnings of serious failures in safety for decades, and *nothing* has been done about it. Here is one example:
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2011/03/28/us-entergy-indianpoint-idUKTRE72R60W20110328
This is a serious concern, which could perhaps be alleviated by building more modern plants, but there are other concerns with nuclear power which I believe should be addressed first. For a start, the astronomical costs of decommissioning, fuel storage, and accident clean-up (which are currently borne by governments, not the nuclear industry), mean that fission is not really economically viable IMHO. That doesn't mean it warrants scare-mongering about fallout or banning all nuclear plants when we don't have alternatives, but we should be frank and open about the dangers and costs involved rather than trying to sweep them under the carpet. Opponents of nuclear power are not always irrational fear-mongers.
If we have no alternatives right now, we might need to keep these old fission plants running, but we should be clear about the dangers, and urgently exploring alternative sources of power (fusion, hydro etc), not trying to cheerlead for a nuclear industry which does not have our best interests at heart, has a focus on profit above safety, and depends on government largesse to deal with its problems of waste storage and decommissioning. There will be serious economic consequences from Fukushima for hundreds of years for Japan and further earthquakes there make it questionable whether you can safely site nuclear plants in the country.
Decommissioning costs for Sizewell A for example (2 reactors, which shut down normally), are so far £1.2 billion, and are ongoing, while build cost
On the other hand, we've had about 63 deaths occurring directly from nuclear incidents since nuclear power started. Now, while others have obviously had larger cancer risks and such resulting in death, but it is nearly impossible to be 100% certain about how many of those have occurred.
As you obviously know from the caveats you include after this statistic, the deaths from Chernobyl are in the thousands, and possibly tens of thousands, which you discount because 'it's impossible to be 100% certain'. So why do you repeat this misleading figure of 63? Like the climate change debate, debate on nuclear power has been poisoned by both sides attempting to distort the statistics. You're not going to persuade anyone by producing obviously cooked statistics or attacking straw men - no one is suggesting going all coal power instead, apart from you.
Nuclear power does provide good baseline power, it doesn't cause huge numbers of deaths, in spite of several serious accidents, but it is very expensive and it does cause some deaths and the potential for catastrophic accidents. Fukushima still has the potential for serious pollution of the surrounding land, and we should not downplay the situation there. Here is a good summary of the situation from a guy who handled recovery at TMI:
http://www.fairewinds.com/updates
Given the lax regulatory environment in some countries which have a lot of nuclear plants (the US, China and former USSR), ageing nuclear power plants are at serious risk of problems and many have had their lifetimes extended past their intended operating lifespan (as Fukushima did). There are plants in the US for example which have had warnings of serious failures in safety for decades, and *nothing* has been done about it. Here is one example:
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2011/03/28/us-entergy-indianpoint-idUKTRE72R60W20110328
This is a serious concern, which could perhaps be alleviated by building more modern plants, but there are other concerns with nuclear power which I believe should be addressed first. For a start, the astronomical costs of decommissioning, fuel storage, and accident clean-up (which are currently borne by governments, not the nuclear industry), mean that fission is not really economically viable IMHO. That doesn't mean it warrants scare-mongering about fallout or banning all nuclear plants when we don't have alternatives, but we should be frank and open about the dangers and costs involved rather than trying to sweep them under the carpet. Opponents of nuclear power are not always irrational fear-mongers.
If we have no alternatives right now, we might need to keep these old fission plants running, but we should be clear about the dangers, and urgently exploring alternative sources of power (fusion, hydro etc), not trying to cheerlead for a nuclear industry which does not have our best interests at heart, has a focus on profit above safety, and depends on government largesse to deal with its problems of waste storage and decommissioning. There will be serious economic consequences from Fukushima for hundreds of years for Japan and further earthquakes there make it questionable whether you can safely site nuclear plants in the country.
Decommissioning costs for Sizewell A for example (2 reactors, which shut down normally), are so far £1.2 billion, and are ongoing, while build cost was £65 million and decommissioning was first estimated at £500m but has since ballooned in cost. It recently narrowly avoided meltdown in the spent fuel ponds due to an unobserved leak, which thankfully was found in time by chance (a contractor doing his laundry). That would have been very expensive to clean up and could have created something similar to Fukushima (on a smaller scale). Sellafield (another plant in the UK) has estimated cleanup costs of £31.5 billion. Those
That chart might be useful if it were actually up to date but posting it long after radiation levels have been continuously rising is disingenuous at best.
There is no significant danger to places outside Japan from this plant, but a steam explosion or burning fuel rods could act as a dirty bomb and spread waste a significant area around the plant, rendering it uninhabitable for a while. Millions of people live nearby and there is a large town within 30km. The best scenario at this point is that they continue to get water sprayed on to the reactors/fuel ponds over the next few months which evaporates and/or runs off and the resulting radioactive material is so diluted in seawater that they can just put an exclusion zone round the plant and maybe gradually get it contained, though how they would do that with wrecked buildings and fractured reactors is hard to see. It is not certain that they will keep it under control though - 1 sievert per hour doses will make it very difficult to work in the reactor buildings and a lot of the cooling equipment was damaged.
'Give me your money or I'm gonna kill you' is NOT a choice.
It's good that no-one is giving you that choice then.
Having ME do the work to get where YOU want to be just doesn't fly.
There are many limits on your liberty imposed by the society you live in, in order to improve things for everyone. In this case you may not agree with this specific change, but it is in no way unusual to force compliance on people who would otherwise speed on the motorway, litter public land, steal, pollute their neighbours' land, etc etc. Those rules inconvenience many individuals who would prefer to do as they please. So your argument should really be that this particular change has no benefit for everyone or is not as good as some alternative, because frankly, arguing that it doesn't benefit you doesn't really interest the majority of society - why should it? Society is not obliged to structure itself so that you may continue living in exactly the same way forever, but you are obliged to adapt to the society you live in.
As it happens rising and volatile fuel prices will probably persuade you of the problems with your lifestyle long before your government imposes extra taxes or changes to your car. By 2050 the lifestyle you describe will not be sustainable using a car running on petrol.
What is your reasoning for the need to entomb the site some time soon? There's no evidence of ongoing meltdown, so the heat generated by the reactors is constantly dropping, so the challenges of cooling and stabilising the reactors is getting easier, not harder. And while there's tremendous damage to the surrounding buildings, there's no significant damage to the reactors - there were reports of spikes which may have been consistent with radioactive steam venting through small cracks, but given the radiation levels at the site and the fact that they still need to periodically vent gas from the reactors, it suggests they're still relatively close to air-tight.
Obviously it's hard to tell as we're working from imperfect information which has (perhaps understandably) been rationed by the Japanese gov. and Tepco, however recent news is that the government feels the situation is grave and at least one reactor has been breached:
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia-pacific/2011/03/2011325112227299174.html
it's not clear they have the situation under control, but let's hope they do. It does sound from recent government announcements as if they're not quite as confident as you are about the outcome though - they have recently started evacuating people from a full 30km radius. I haven't seen any reliable measures of temperature for the spent fuel ponds or reactors which indicate that they're dropping - last I heard a couple of days ago one reactor inexplicably dramatically heated up again. Of course neither of us are experts in the field, and this is all second-hand information.
My reasoning for needing to entomb the reactors is simply that if they don't have the reactors sealed they won't be able to cool them reliably, steam could escape explosively, those racks could widen, and they will continue to leak radioactive material until sealed, rendering the buildings difficult to clean up and work in. Also there is some erosion of fuel rod casings from the spent fuel ponds which isn't a good sign (zirconium found at the water outlets), so they have a lot of problems on the site, on top of periodic spikes in radiation making it difficult to work there and the wreckage of the buildings making it very difficult to assess damage (I assume that's why there are no clear indications of the state of spent fuel ponds for example). But let's hope they do get the situation under control without drastic measures.
While it's true several plant workers have been taken to hospital for monitoring after receiving acute doses higher than safety recommendations
Sorry radiation burns would have been more appropriate, sickness is a real possibility later - they are not there for 'monitoring' but for treatment. Two workers are missing too from the early days, perhaps killed in explosions. In comparison to earthquake casualties of course this is a tiny total.
Since it appears none of the reactors have actually melted down or suffered a substantial failure in containment in the immediate vicinity of the rods themselves,
There appears to be a breach in reactor 3 containment, reactors have overheated past their normal operating temperature, fuel ponds with massive stocks of spent fuel have overheated and possibly boiled dry with no containment and the entire buildings have been sprayed continually with corrosive seawater for days (which really is a last resort and is in no way normal). I think it's highly likely they'll have to give up and entomb the site at some point soon. If they are very lucky they'll be able to get it back under control, extract the fuel and entomb the remains. They have been periodically abandoning the site as radiation levels spiked, and given all the damage to 3 buildings and machinery caused by explosions restoring cooling will be *very* difficult. There is no way this will be a 'normal decommissioning process' given the huge damage to the site - for example the entire building and crane around the spent fuel pond of reactor 3 has been destroyed in the hydrogen explosion. While none of this has to lead to some dramatic explosion or disaster, it will make decommissioning the site very difficult. Hopefully they will get power back on in all buildings and temporary cooling in place but it is by no means under control yet or a normal situation.
Indeed, if they weren't already near or past their expected end-of-life, they could probably be fairly readily repaired, refuelled, and set running again within a relatively short timeframe.
I'm sorry, but having seen photos of the site, this is not close to the truth - 3 buildings have been partially destroyed and potentially radioactive debris spread around the site by the hydrogen explosions. There is no way these reactors could ever be put back into use in any meaningful sense without a complete rebuild.
I'm not denying it's a serious issue - but in the perspective of tens of thousands dead, and many times more homeless and short on food and other supplies, it really shouldn't be dominating headlines in this way.
That we can agree on - people do get irrationally scared when radiation is mentioned and the tsunami has killed more than this plant ever will. However this is a very serious accident, which still has the potential to become a serious disaster for northern Japan and downplaying the significance or potential dangers will not help deal with public hysteria about nuclear power - quite the reverse.
There may yet be larger releases, but -this- far we've got ~20.000 dead due to earthquake and tsunami, and ~0 dead due to radiation released from the powerplants.
Several people have radiation sickness from high exposure already, high doses have been recorded up to 40km away, and radiation kills long term (unless it's a massive dose), so that's not a very useful statistic. It is useful to know what levels of radiation have been released.
Unless fuel ponds or a reactor burns fully this disaster won't be comparable to Chernobyl, and it's unlikely to get that bad, but we should not play down its impact, which is likely to be hugely expensive over the long-term, given the highly populated surroundings. These reactors will probably need to be encased in concrete eventually and monitored for hundreds of years. After two weeks they still don't have the fires under control; this is a big problem.
Yes, she could have gone private. But then she would be flipping the entire bill for the cancer treatment as the UK doesn't allow you to be privately treated for something then go back onto the public dole for that illness except for emergency cases where government health care options are not available
Not sure where you got this idea, do you have an example of this happening?
PS The word dole is used for unemployment benefits in the UK, not healthcare.
You know, the sad part of the story is that if the girl had the option to pay for the PAP herself,
She did have the option. Private medical care is available in the UK at reasonable cost. Public healthcare is rationed, as it should be, so that it has the maximum possible benefit for society as a whole - that means some edge cases are not covered well but the vast majority of cases are covered well, and are free at the point of treatment at considerably less cost per capita than medicare costs alone in the states.
The UK currently has the solution you are suggesting in your last paragraph - like most western countries apart from the US it has a public healthcare option mixed with private healthcare available if desired.
As an example, the two most vulnerable fission plants in the US are built for 7.0.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/03/14/earlyshow/main20042815.shtml
They're also near a large fault, and potentially subject to larger quakes.
Several plants in the US are near a major fault line, an area which could easily suffer from both earthquakes and tsunamis, here's a couple:
The Diablo Canyon plant - on the coast and near population centres
San Onofre plant - on the coast, near the fault line, and near huge population centre of Los Angeles
Both plants are decades old and are designed for a 0.7 quake - that's not enough for this sort of event. Nuclear plants do special challenges during a disaster like this as they require maintenance, electricity and a lengthy safe shutdown procedure, which is difficult in a disaster zone. It is perfectly reasonable to question the safety of plants elsewhere in the light of this 'impossible' event. The eastern sea-board of the US is also due a huge earthquake sometime soon, but no-one knows when, and Japan is arguably more prepared than the US for this situation.
PS I imagine the headline was summarising the situation in Japan - a mounting death *toll* (i.e. confirmed deaths, not actual deaths), and problems at a nuclear plant. It could be misread as implying that the plant problems lead to the deaths I suppose, though I doubt that was the original intention, the semi-colon is probably meant as a separator rather than a lead in, but a full-stop would have been better.
WebOS is by all accounts great software, which was hobbled by poor hardware and half-hearted support from Palm. In concept and execution it is superb, so much so that Apple have started poaching former developers (for notifications for example).
If HP had the guts and wherewithal to fully back WebOS, drop Windows for consumers, and convert all their offerings to WebOS, they could really create an ecosystem to rival Apple or Google's, and win over a lot of consumers to a simpler method of computing (most people hate their personal computers which come to dominate spare time they'd like to spend *doing stuff*). This is exactly the right move (putting it on desktop PCs) from HP.
Apple are moving to replace their desktop OS with iOS (the two already share a lot, and a lot of the difference (UI) is now coming back to Mac OS, I'd expect them to merge them again in a few years). HP could beat them at this game with a truly web-friendly OS on their consumer computers which does everything most consumers want from a computer.
As to whether this sort of corporation has the focus, drive and determination to stick with this product for the first few difficult years, promoting it everywhere, and attract enough critical mass with developers in the face of concerted attacks on all fronts from the likes of Microsoft and Apple, I have my doubts, but good luck to them.
So nothing to do with Goldman Sachs then, who probably skimmed a few percent off all those people as they tried to buy and sell shares not by acting as a broker, but by interfering in a normal transaction by buying quickly and pocketing the spread? Money that would otherwise have gone to hire the management, engineers, construction workers, etc, etc...
There is absolutely no need for HFT, I'd support a simple tax on transactions, it would wipe a lot of these practices out at a stroke and pay for the serious deficits western countries are running up. It also would do nothing to get in the way of *real* investment activity.
There are American troops stationed in the gulf all over the place, e.g. 5th fleet in bahrain, and American military aid props up most of the dictatorships in the region from Saudi, to Eqypt (oops!) to Pakistan (Musharraf).
You should not be surprised to see widespread hatred generated as a result.
Oh good, use a bunch of people who are trading an their dictator for likely a theocratic government for an example. No thanks.
Only if you watch Fox News. Suggest you watch AJE, BBC, or some other channel which doesn't view the word through an christian american prism. The campaigners in Egypt are fighting explicitly for secular democracy - let's see how far they get.
It'll be interesting to see what emerges in Egypt, but a theocratic government is way down the list in likelihood; past military dictatorship (backed and funded by the US, so business as usual), corrupt oligarchy, and perhaps secular democracy. The MB have even been forced to concede that they will not put up a candidate for president in order not to scare off domestic support - that should tell you something about how secure their position is.
It will probably die off, either by lack of interest from Nokia for what is now a pointless money-sink, or at Microsoft's insistence - they are remarkably hostile to partners using non-MS tools. I imagine this sort of gentle undermining of cross-platform open-source toolkits is exactly the sort of thing Balmer couldn't resist. A gentle suggestion from their new partner once they are entirely dependent on Microsoft software is all it would take.
The best you can hope for is that it is sold off and then continues as a separate company.