What I'd like to see addressed is the fundamental structural problem of stabilizing a space elevator. In getting a payload to geostationary orbit, only about half the energy required is needed for lifting. A similar amount of energy is required to accelerate the payload laterally by roughly 9000 km/h, giving it enough angular momentum to achieve a stable orbit.
While this comes from the realm of science fiction (where did I read about this? anybody recognise it?), it's still an interesting idea:
Imagine two elevators, at opposite points on the surface of the planet. Have a ring that goes around the planet, connecting these two elevators. Let the ring be a hollow tube, inside which is a second ring which is rotating at high speed against the direction of the orbital path.
You can then arrange things so that hoisting a mass draws its lateral energy from this inner ring - so anything you hoist makes the ring slow down a little. A series of linear accelerators around the ring will adjust its speed as needed, by pumping more energy into it - but, you can also speed up the ring by grabbing some asteroids, mining them for valuable metals, and dragging the metals back down the elevator.
Such a construct is way beyond our ability to build at this time, but so is a space elevator.
Guess which PC company we are going with for our next set of stores?
The one who sold you the hardware that didn't need to be replaced. Scratch Dell (because their hardware falls apart all the time, which is why their people are very quick at replacing it) and HP (who are having difficulty figuring out what hardware is and if they sell it, so you're lucky if you get shipped a computer and not a walnut or something). Go to another vendor. Have you considered Lenovo?
Forbes may not be credible to techies and geeks, however it is VERY reliavant to the business world and those who control the money that funds these projects. Thats a fact.
And because of this fact, the business world and those who control the money have been controlling Forbes for about as long as it has been around. Very few articles are written there which somebody did not pay for. Microsoft has paid for articles there before. Somebody paid for this article. That's another fact.
Forbes is yet another way for slightly-more-intelligent people with money to influence slightly-less-intelligent people with money. Nothing more nor less.
Blaming third-parties, whether those contracted to, or those completely uninvolved (Microsoft), is just unprofessional.
What profession do you come from? In my observation, professionals are the ones who always rush to blame somebody else, and cover their own butt. When your revenue stream is affected by who gets the blame, you have a strong reason to ensure that somebody else gets it.
Taking the blame for something you did wrong is the completely unprofessional thing to do here.
Play-Asia, for example lets you get certain region-unlocked X-Box 360 games for less than half the price of buying in the the UK. And there are some games that are severely delayed as well.
The real concern for me is things like Xenosaga or the first Katamari Damacy, which never were and never will be released in Europe, because the maker just cannot be bothered to sell them here. Xenosaga is the one which finally forced me to modify my PS2 to play import games. Or games like Disgaea, which was released in Europe but in a crippled form - the Japanese audio track was left out, so you're forced to listen to the sub-par American dub (while in the US release, both audio tracks are present and you can choose to listen to the original anime-grade audio track).
The fact is, this is all about control. Companies are scared of not having 100% control over where customers get their products from.
It's more like: companies sell "distribution rights" to publishers and/or retail companies for cash - a store can pay money to ensure that they get the game and their competitors don't get it. However, there's legally no such thing as a distribution right (in fact it's completely illegal - attempting to enforce one is typically a violation of antitrust or price-fixing laws, or both). So, the companies try to abuse related laws, like "safety" laws, to try and create an artificial distribution right which they can then sell.
Every time Microsoft introduces another new platform, whether OS, Office, HW, game console, or new executive, they promise voice recognition. Of course they never deliver.
Voice recognition is the sort of thing that stupid people love to hear about. The trouble is that we've got voice recognition already, and it just bites. It's a lousy way to control a computer. Computers cannot respond to unstructured input, and very few users, even those who are normally considered technically adept, are capable of speaking in a well-structured manner. The limitations of the mouse-and-keyboard interface are also their strength - by constraining the user to a limited set of actions, they greatly increase the stupid user's ability to figure out what to do. If you let somebody sit there and say anything, they'll sit there all day without saying anything that the computer can understand. Prompting them doesn't work because most of these people never read anything that is displayed on the screen.
Or, more briefly:
Most computer users can grasp the concept of pointing and clicking with a mouse. Very few computer users can grasp the concept of speaking with correct grammar. While we are doing reasonably well at parsing and interpreting more-or-less correct english (as is reasonably common in written form), there is presently no ability to write software that can comprehend the gibberish that most people speak. You probably need human-level intelligence to manage it.
This time, HP is smacking Dell around like a little bitch with organic growth.
I think it's more likely that customers are deserting Dell (because their hardware is no unreliable that it causes small children to have nightmares and sysadmins to have psychotic, nightmare-inducing rampages) and HP just happened to be the next one down the list, so any reduction in Dell's sales will cause HP to become #1.
A while ago -- and maybe it was in the Slashdot discussion about ATI, I'm not sure -- somebody described a cycle in computer design, where various components are built-in monolithically, then broken out as separate components, and then swallowed back up into monolithic designs again.
Graphics chips seem to have done this cycle at least once; perhaps now we're just looking at the next stage in the cycle?
Frankly, I hope this is the last stage in the cycle - at least until we have some radical changes in how processors are fabricated. The problem is that we've more or less reached the physical limits of possible miniaturisation in semiconductor technology (there's some more space for improvement, but we won't get another factor of ten out of it). Unless we invent something smarter, in five years our options are going to be:
Systems split out into many components
A processor unit that is the size of a house brick, before the heatsink is attached
I'm not going to be foolish enough to claim that things won't continue to get faster - but sort of some revolutionary new method for building these things, they're going to be getting bigger from here on out. I don't even want to think about what the sockets will look like.
As of DirectXv10. A card either IS, or IS NOT compliant. None of this "We are 67.3% compliant".
While this is a deliberate feature of DirectX, it's nowhere near as useful as you suggest. What is specified and complied with is the set of instructions which the card will accept. What is not specified is what it will do with those instructions - a card is considered to be DirectX compliant even if it has many rendering errors in the output. GPU makers can and do take a great many liberties with this, and that's just the deliberate part - this is before we start considering the generally abysmal quality of drivers from nVidia and ATI.
Video cards are not "compatible" with DirectX. Games are deliberately made to be compatible with video cards. Every (and I do mean 'every') big-money game out there has many workarounds written into its code to handle ATI and nVidia cards, and probably the two or three minor GPU makers as well. This works because the number of variations of video cards on the market being considered at any one time is quite small, due to the absence of any attempt at compatibility with older hardware. This is not 'standardisation', it's just lip-service.
If we did not have DirectX and each manufacturer had their own proprietary interface, there would be no visible difference to gamers. Games would be made in exactly the same way they are today and they would work about as well as they currently do.
But it also helps the webmaster of the sites you visit to create sites you want to see.
I fail to see why I should care. The ones who manage to create sites I want to see get my custom; the rest can go out of business as far as I care. Nothing here gives me reason to help people move from the second group to the first. If they can't create sites I want to see without this, somebody else will.
Or, more briefly: Are they going to pay me for this? No? Then I'm not doing it.
It's funny how nerds love technology, but are such naysayers when something new and revolutionary comes along.
If you assume that every new high-tech invention is going to be a dismal failure in the market, you'll be right over 99% of the time. Nobody yet has found any way to predict which ones will fall into the tiny fraction that make a profit.
I haven't bothered to watch the video... but is that the argument where some idiot points out that this banana would not have developed naturally in the wild, while forgetting that it was deliberately engineered by human gardeners? (Natural bananas are edible, but have seeds - the Cavendish cultivar that you buy in supermarkets was created through selective breeding to have no seeds, and only reproduces through human intervention, by taking cuttings, so it could not exist without our continual attention).
How is this different from the "social engineering" that Kevin Mitnick did?
It isn't - but people do this all the time. Mitnick's only crime was being poor in a courtroom - he couldn't afford the legal staff needed to disprove the government's largely specious claims of damages (they arbitrarily slapped an figure of some tens of millions on a handful of standard instrusion cleanups - we all know that intrusion cleanup is a pain, but even for a large company or government organisation it's measured in the thousands, not millions).
The government lost most of the rest of their case against him. His sentencing was primarily based on the damages claim. Mitnick may not have been the best guy around, but he didn't really deserve anything more than a community service sentence.
Vista does support this - ReadyBoost - but USB2 isn't nearly as fast as SATA 300.
Nearly flash memory nor hard drives are anywhere near as fast as USB2 or SATA 300. It's not going to make much difference to performance, unless you're using a whole lot of them (in which case SATA 300 has the advantage because it's several busses, while USB 2 is typically just the one shared bus).
Since the terrorists will be using encrypted messages or coded messages which don't appear to be anything special (you know those -1 Slashdot comments are for something), this will help retrace the terrorist's online activities after people have died in a terrorist attack.
Which is precisely why we don't need it. After the 9/11 incident, the US intelligence agencies were able to conclusively prove, from data collected before the incident, that it had happened. We do not have a data collection problem, so any new measures to collect more data are (a) wasteful, and (b) not intended for their stated purpose (since the people proposing them are quite aware that we do not have a data collection problem).
The problem we have is that the next election (and its associated budget change) is not yet in the bag. Most things in US politics are targetted at this problem. This one is probably more of the same (a combination of "we want more budget" from the intelligence agencies, and "we want you to be afraid" from the politicians).
Even a well balanced commercial disc in a very high speed DVD drive creates an unnerving amount of noise and vibration. I shudder to think of what would happen with the center of mass potentially thrown way off center from the cuts and the electronics, and the tremendous amount of air turbulence you'd end up with from the shape of that thing. You'd be lucky if it didn't destroy itself and/or the drive within seconds if the motor tried to crank it up to full speed.
Generally speaking, these oddly shaped disks (and this is far from the first one invented) are indeed noisy and impossible to read - so the drive backs off to single speed, because the laser cannot track a disk that is wobbling that badly. They do occasionally fracture during the initial spin-up, leaving some pieces of plastic stuck in your drive. Fortunately, most CD drives have a metal cage, and the fragments would rather bounce around inside it than escape and cause serious damage.
Or, as V put it, "People should not be afraid of the government. The government should be afraid of the people."
A sentiment that I have always endorsed. To this end, I attempt to be as scary as possible, and practice on anybody I can.
Re:and they plan to enforce this how?
on
School Bans 'Tag'
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· Score: 1
Key word is unsupervised.
Yeah. In this country (UK) they aren't allowed to leave the kids unsupervised, while they're at the age when they like to play these sort of games - if they did, the school would get shut down pretty quickly, and a new management staff installed. What the heck do they think they're doing over there, letting them run around without an adult watching? Anybody with half a dozen functioning brain cells could tell you that is both stupid and irresponsible.
Seriously, who the hell cares about digital records or fast counts? I don't care how fast the results come in, I want them to be RIGHT.
Which is why your system is too simple, because...
When we go to paper ballots, we guarantee that the process is easily understood, auditible, difficult to rig, and that counting is repeatable.
This is correct except for the "difficult to rig" part. While a paper system is not quite as easy to rig as a Diebold election, ballot-box stuffing is a well-established tradition in the US. It's not exactly easy, but it's not difficult either.
An ideal voting system includes a third concept: voter-verifiable counts. A public ballot is trivially voter-verifiable - everybody can see who voted for what in the final result, and can check that their vote was correctly counted. When you need a secret ballot, it's harder - cryptographic solutions exist, but that's too complex for your average US grunt to comprehend (which raises the question of whether they are qualified to make an informed decision in the first place, but that's another debate). A recent invention by Ron Rivest is ThreeBallot, a non-crytographic system that provides voter-verifiable paper trails and nearly perfect vote secrecy. The end of the paper has some ideas for how that could be improved into perfect secrecy.
There is progress to be made in this field. However, Diebold and friends aren't interested in making progress - only congress.
I simply can't believe the BBC is printing such garbage. I mean, I like sci-fi as much as the next guy, but this is pure fantasy.
A garbage theory that is being talked about by a significant number of people is news. The BBC would be remiss if they didn't print it.
They're probably quite aware that it's somewhat dubious, and have stuck carefully to their usual "facts only" reporting style. Also, this is not on the front page (at least, it isn't now, and I don't recall seeing it there earlier), except in the "Most popular" (aka slashdotted) sidebar - so it's not like they're promoting it. Something stupid happened, they reported the facts, then moved on to the next story - that is the job of a journalist. The world would be greatly improved if more so-called "news" agencies would act in this manner.
It should also be noted that they reported on the association with Bravo, an entertainment channel - to me, that says more than the rest of the article put together.
It's not that great of a personal sacrifice to resist the "new release" marketing machine, stop buying/downloading/bootlegging new CDs and DVDs, and just be content with what you've got now.
Did you read anything I wrote? It doesn't matter whether you want their media. You have to pay them anyway - they're passing laws to force you, and ensuring that new devices are locked down whether you use them to play their media or your own home videos. I don't even like any of the stuff that the DRM cartels produce - I am not into western pop slush or Hollywood action movies.
However, the arguments which come out of anti-DRM people et al really come across as being pathetic at times. There is a pervading sense that fundamental human rights are being trampled on, when we are talking about entertainment product. Nobody needs the latest hit singles. Nobody needs box sets, DVD extras, or music libraries of 10,000 songs.
Fundamental human rights are being trampled on, but you've managed to not mention any of them. Your right to share music that you created and recorded yourself is being gradually eliminated with mandatory DRM systems. Things that have been given to you under a free license are being locked down by them. The DRM cartels are attempting to force everybody into their business model, and lock out anybody who doesn't want to commercialise their efforts. Any "free use" or "fair dealing" rights that you have (under law) are being quietly obliterated through technical measures. We still have non-DRMed media available today.... but how long will that last, with new devices appearing all the time that make no provision for other options?
It is not a matter of "pay for their stuff or don't get access to it". It is a matter of "pay for their stuff and don't get access to any other stuff".
Reprossessing extends the fuel supply considerably, but at the cost of losing enough plutonium per year to make multiple bombs.
So what? We already lose enough uranium per year to make multiple bombs.
There's a myth going around that you need plutonium and not uranium to build nuclear bombs. It's a myth encouraged by the power industry. It's still a myth, they both work quite well enough. Of all the nuclear bombs deployed in aggression so far (two), exactly half of them (one) were uranium bombs. Plutonium is a little more convinient for strategic military purposes, so if you've got it, you might as well use it, that's all.
What's the real reason why we don't reprocess fuel? Burying it in the ground and mining fresh uranium is cheaper. Plutonium scaremongering is just a convinient excuse to cover up a fairly inexcusable kind of pollution.
Slashdot Mirror
While this comes from the realm of science fiction (where did I read about this? anybody recognise it?), it's still an interesting idea:
Imagine two elevators, at opposite points on the surface of the planet. Have a ring that goes around the planet, connecting these two elevators. Let the ring be a hollow tube, inside which is a second ring which is rotating at high speed against the direction of the orbital path.
You can then arrange things so that hoisting a mass draws its lateral energy from this inner ring - so anything you hoist makes the ring slow down a little. A series of linear accelerators around the ring will adjust its speed as needed, by pumping more energy into it - but, you can also speed up the ring by grabbing some asteroids, mining them for valuable metals, and dragging the metals back down the elevator.
Such a construct is way beyond our ability to build at this time, but so is a space elevator.
The one who sold you the hardware that didn't need to be replaced. Scratch Dell (because their hardware falls apart all the time, which is why their people are very quick at replacing it) and HP (who are having difficulty figuring out what hardware is and if they sell it, so you're lucky if you get shipped a computer and not a walnut or something). Go to another vendor. Have you considered Lenovo?
And because of this fact, the business world and those who control the money have been controlling Forbes for about as long as it has been around. Very few articles are written there which somebody did not pay for. Microsoft has paid for articles there before. Somebody paid for this article. That's another fact.
Forbes is yet another way for slightly-more-intelligent people with money to influence slightly-less-intelligent people with money. Nothing more nor less.
What profession do you come from? In my observation, professionals are the ones who always rush to blame somebody else, and cover their own butt. When your revenue stream is affected by who gets the blame, you have a strong reason to ensure that somebody else gets it.
Taking the blame for something you did wrong is the completely unprofessional thing to do here.
The real concern for me is things like Xenosaga or the first Katamari Damacy, which never were and never will be released in Europe, because the maker just cannot be bothered to sell them here. Xenosaga is the one which finally forced me to modify my PS2 to play import games. Or games like Disgaea, which was released in Europe but in a crippled form - the Japanese audio track was left out, so you're forced to listen to the sub-par American dub (while in the US release, both audio tracks are present and you can choose to listen to the original anime-grade audio track).
It's more like: companies sell "distribution rights" to publishers and/or retail companies for cash - a store can pay money to ensure that they get the game and their competitors don't get it. However, there's legally no such thing as a distribution right (in fact it's completely illegal - attempting to enforce one is typically a violation of antitrust or price-fixing laws, or both). So, the companies try to abuse related laws, like "safety" laws, to try and create an artificial distribution right which they can then sell.
Voice recognition is the sort of thing that stupid people love to hear about. The trouble is that we've got voice recognition already, and it just bites. It's a lousy way to control a computer. Computers cannot respond to unstructured input, and very few users, even those who are normally considered technically adept, are capable of speaking in a well-structured manner. The limitations of the mouse-and-keyboard interface are also their strength - by constraining the user to a limited set of actions, they greatly increase the stupid user's ability to figure out what to do. If you let somebody sit there and say anything, they'll sit there all day without saying anything that the computer can understand. Prompting them doesn't work because most of these people never read anything that is displayed on the screen.
Or, more briefly:
Most computer users can grasp the concept of pointing and clicking with a mouse. Very few computer users can grasp the concept of speaking with correct grammar. While we are doing reasonably well at parsing and interpreting more-or-less correct english (as is reasonably common in written form), there is presently no ability to write software that can comprehend the gibberish that most people speak. You probably need human-level intelligence to manage it.
Voice control is a white elephant.
I think it's more likely that customers are deserting Dell (because their hardware is no unreliable that it causes small children to have nightmares and sysadmins to have psychotic, nightmare-inducing rampages) and HP just happened to be the next one down the list, so any reduction in Dell's sales will cause HP to become #1.
Frankly, I hope this is the last stage in the cycle - at least until we have some radical changes in how processors are fabricated. The problem is that we've more or less reached the physical limits of possible miniaturisation in semiconductor technology (there's some more space for improvement, but we won't get another factor of ten out of it). Unless we invent something smarter, in five years our options are going to be:
I'm not going to be foolish enough to claim that things won't continue to get faster - but sort of some revolutionary new method for building these things, they're going to be getting bigger from here on out. I don't even want to think about what the sockets will look like.
While this is a deliberate feature of DirectX, it's nowhere near as useful as you suggest. What is specified and complied with is the set of instructions which the card will accept. What is not specified is what it will do with those instructions - a card is considered to be DirectX compliant even if it has many rendering errors in the output. GPU makers can and do take a great many liberties with this, and that's just the deliberate part - this is before we start considering the generally abysmal quality of drivers from nVidia and ATI.
Video cards are not "compatible" with DirectX. Games are deliberately made to be compatible with video cards. Every (and I do mean 'every') big-money game out there has many workarounds written into its code to handle ATI and nVidia cards, and probably the two or three minor GPU makers as well. This works because the number of variations of video cards on the market being considered at any one time is quite small, due to the absence of any attempt at compatibility with older hardware. This is not 'standardisation', it's just lip-service.
If we did not have DirectX and each manufacturer had their own proprietary interface, there would be no visible difference to gamers. Games would be made in exactly the same way they are today and they would work about as well as they currently do.
I fail to see why I should care. The ones who manage to create sites I want to see get my custom; the rest can go out of business as far as I care. Nothing here gives me reason to help people move from the second group to the first. If they can't create sites I want to see without this, somebody else will.
Or, more briefly: Are they going to pay me for this? No? Then I'm not doing it.
If you assume that every new high-tech invention is going to be a dismal failure in the market, you'll be right over 99% of the time. Nobody yet has found any way to predict which ones will fall into the tiny fraction that make a profit.
I haven't bothered to watch the video... but is that the argument where some idiot points out that this banana would not have developed naturally in the wild, while forgetting that it was deliberately engineered by human gardeners? (Natural bananas are edible, but have seeds - the Cavendish cultivar that you buy in supermarkets was created through selective breeding to have no seeds, and only reproduces through human intervention, by taking cuttings, so it could not exist without our continual attention).
It isn't - but people do this all the time. Mitnick's only crime was being poor in a courtroom - he couldn't afford the legal staff needed to disprove the government's largely specious claims of damages (they arbitrarily slapped an figure of some tens of millions on a handful of standard instrusion cleanups - we all know that intrusion cleanup is a pain, but even for a large company or government organisation it's measured in the thousands, not millions).
The government lost most of the rest of their case against him. His sentencing was primarily based on the damages claim. Mitnick may not have been the best guy around, but he didn't really deserve anything more than a community service sentence.
Nearly flash memory nor hard drives are anywhere near as fast as USB2 or SATA 300. It's not going to make much difference to performance, unless you're using a whole lot of them (in which case SATA 300 has the advantage because it's several busses, while USB 2 is typically just the one shared bus).
Which is precisely why we don't need it. After the 9/11 incident, the US intelligence agencies were able to conclusively prove, from data collected before the incident, that it had happened. We do not have a data collection problem, so any new measures to collect more data are (a) wasteful, and (b) not intended for their stated purpose (since the people proposing them are quite aware that we do not have a data collection problem).
The problem we have is that the next election (and its associated budget change) is not yet in the bag. Most things in US politics are targetted at this problem. This one is probably more of the same (a combination of "we want more budget" from the intelligence agencies, and "we want you to be afraid" from the politicians).
Generally speaking, these oddly shaped disks (and this is far from the first one invented) are indeed noisy and impossible to read - so the drive backs off to single speed, because the laser cannot track a disk that is wobbling that badly. They do occasionally fracture during the initial spin-up, leaving some pieces of plastic stuck in your drive. Fortunately, most CD drives have a metal cage, and the fragments would rather bounce around inside it than escape and cause serious damage.
A sentiment that I have always endorsed. To this end, I attempt to be as scary as possible, and practice on anybody I can.
Yeah. In this country (UK) they aren't allowed to leave the kids unsupervised, while they're at the age when they like to play these sort of games - if they did, the school would get shut down pretty quickly, and a new management staff installed. What the heck do they think they're doing over there, letting them run around without an adult watching? Anybody with half a dozen functioning brain cells could tell you that is both stupid and irresponsible.
Which is why your system is too simple, because...
This is correct except for the "difficult to rig" part. While a paper system is not quite as easy to rig as a Diebold election, ballot-box stuffing is a well-established tradition in the US. It's not exactly easy, but it's not difficult either.
An ideal voting system includes a third concept: voter-verifiable counts. A public ballot is trivially voter-verifiable - everybody can see who voted for what in the final result, and can check that their vote was correctly counted. When you need a secret ballot, it's harder - cryptographic solutions exist, but that's too complex for your average US grunt to comprehend (which raises the question of whether they are qualified to make an informed decision in the first place, but that's another debate). A recent invention by Ron Rivest is ThreeBallot, a non-crytographic system that provides voter-verifiable paper trails and nearly perfect vote secrecy. The end of the paper has some ideas for how that could be improved into perfect secrecy.
There is progress to be made in this field. However, Diebold and friends aren't interested in making progress - only congress.
A garbage theory that is being talked about by a significant number of people is news. The BBC would be remiss if they didn't print it.
They're probably quite aware that it's somewhat dubious, and have stuck carefully to their usual "facts only" reporting style. Also, this is not on the front page (at least, it isn't now, and I don't recall seeing it there earlier), except in the "Most popular" (aka slashdotted) sidebar - so it's not like they're promoting it. Something stupid happened, they reported the facts, then moved on to the next story - that is the job of a journalist. The world would be greatly improved if more so-called "news" agencies would act in this manner.
It should also be noted that they reported on the association with Bravo, an entertainment channel - to me, that says more than the rest of the article put together.
Did you read anything I wrote? It doesn't matter whether you want their media. You have to pay them anyway - they're passing laws to force you, and ensuring that new devices are locked down whether you use them to play their media or your own home videos. I don't even like any of the stuff that the DRM cartels produce - I am not into western pop slush or Hollywood action movies.
You can crack anything with a seven-line perl script. DRM systems are usually much weaker; they can often be cracked with a perl haiku.
Fundamental human rights are being trampled on, but you've managed to not mention any of them. Your right to share music that you created and recorded yourself is being gradually eliminated with mandatory DRM systems. Things that have been given to you under a free license are being locked down by them. The DRM cartels are attempting to force everybody into their business model, and lock out anybody who doesn't want to commercialise their efforts. Any "free use" or "fair dealing" rights that you have (under law) are being quietly obliterated through technical measures. We still have non-DRMed media available today.... but how long will that last, with new devices appearing all the time that make no provision for other options?
It is not a matter of "pay for their stuff or don't get access to it". It is a matter of "pay for their stuff and don't get access to any other stuff".
So what? We already lose enough uranium per year to make multiple bombs.
There's a myth going around that you need plutonium and not uranium to build nuclear bombs. It's a myth encouraged by the power industry. It's still a myth, they both work quite well enough. Of all the nuclear bombs deployed in aggression so far (two), exactly half of them (one) were uranium bombs. Plutonium is a little more convinient for strategic military purposes, so if you've got it, you might as well use it, that's all.
What's the real reason why we don't reprocess fuel? Burying it in the ground and mining fresh uranium is cheaper. Plutonium scaremongering is just a convinient excuse to cover up a fairly inexcusable kind of pollution.
Exactly the same way as any other piece of software. Did you think filesystem drivers were somehow different to any other kind of code?