There is no reason for this poorly equipped scum to be any sort of threat to civilian shipping. Just blow the pirates out of the water. Use normal warships. Use air surveillance, Use Q-ships. Put armed marines on civilian ships. In short, use all the standard naval strategies for commerce protection. Make it a death sentence to attack civilian traffic, and the problem will end.
The only reason there is any sort of problem is the weird desire to treat the pirates gently.
You may be looking for non-illegal content, but worried that you may come across something illegal in the course of the search.
It may be that you simply want to ensure that your private activities cannot be easily combined with your public activities.
Some people view proxy services as an additional defense against malware sites
There are people with a real need for anonymity, because they are engaging in political speech frowned upon in their country, This is not just China. Example: in most of Europe, it is illegal to express any doubt at all as to the historical truth of the Holocaust. I don't mean denial, but even questioning the number of victims, or how they were selected can get you sent to jail. Before the Americans start touting their "freedom of speech", how about the guy who was arrested for having printed a text-file describing an underage sexual encounter, or the chemistry teacher arrested for discussing (purely theoretically) the processes used to produce meth?
Finally, many of us use anonymouse services to provide a larger group of anonymouse data - thus allowing people with a real need for anonymity to better hide their activities.
Those are just quick ideas - I am sure that other posters will have other ideas as well...
Finally, outsourcing. HAHAHAHAHA. Having seen it in action, I think it's hilarious that people feel threatened by it. Sorry folks, American and European universities still churn out the best qualified engineers in the world. The people willing to work for $5/hr aren't nearly as competent, and you have the global economy to thank for that.
While there are exceptions to every rule, this is generally true. The difference seems to be cultural. Visit a college course in much of Asia, and watch as the students slavishly follow every word of the instructor, copy every step of a demo - no independence of thought, no independent problem solving. Visit many workplaces in Asia, and micromanagement takes on a whole new meaning.
However, exchange students visiting the USA and Europe take back Western ideas and ways of working. They may still be the exceptions, but there are some really good technical shops out there. Things are changing.
It's easy for me and it's easy for you - it's even easy to use once it's set up (assuming they are vigilant). But if I told my (very non-geek) girlfriend to encrypt her e-mails, she would have no clue on where to start. I could certainly help her but the problem is that not everyone has someone to ask or would even care enough to do so (obvious, since most people don't encrypt their email).
I definitely agree that everything should be encrypted, it has a great deal of benefits (aside from my opinion that cryptography is just fascinating). It's problematic though, since most people don't think that way - now we're back at square one, how am I supposed to send an encrypted e-mail to someone without a public key? Even if they had one, we still run into some problems with people not paying attention to what they are doing (did they verify that the fingerprint I gave them matched before they trusted my public key? Not likely).
I think computer security in general is far removed from many people's minds outside of paying their 40$/yr to Symantec. E-Mail encryption? They simply don't care.
I have a submission pending on just this topic. I find it shocking that email encryption has not become simple to set up and standard to use. The reason our friends and family don't use it, is because solutions are platform dependent, or require technical knowledge to set up, or are a total pain to use, or all of the above.
There is really no excuse for this situation. Email encryption (and digital signing) should be automatic and transparent. Granted, only tech-nerds will take proper care of their keys, but a standardized solution would still be much better than nothing.
Java needs to be replaced. I have taught Java for years, because many colleges think it is a good first language to learn. Only recently have I actually attempted to develop commercial quality applications in it. Frankly, Java sucks big green ones. Generic types (with type-erasure) are a total hack, denying the running code valuable information. Abstract classes are only half-implemented, since you cannot have abstract static methods (e.g., factory methods). Meta-programming in Java is extremely limited - Reflection covers a few aspects, but even these are very awkward to use. Exception handling is awkward, there is no multiple inheritance, not all types are objects - hacked with boxing and unboxing. And so on, and so forth, and so on...
The chances of this language going anywhere are small. Anyone who has enjoyed studying compilers has written (or at least imagined) their own language. Creating new languages is fun, lots of people do it, and mostly - even if they are good - the languages disappear down a deep, dark hole. Success for a language requires a lot of support from many different parts of the IT community: lots of libraries, job prospects, more libraries, books, courses, real world applications, and did I mention code libraries? There are zillions of languages out there, many of them better than Java. Unfortunately, none of them to date have gotten the necessary support. What are the chances that this language will be different?
"...mathematics is NOT and has never been about memorizing formulas.... Mathematics is (or should be) the class where you learn how to think logically, and use logical and critical thinking skills to solve problems."
Bingo! When we learn to read, we begin with simple phonetics with simple words ("See Spot run"), then we are taken though a series of increasingly difficult texts. None of these texts are directly useful later in life. It's the same with math - you start out with basic operations, and move on the more complex topics. It may be that none of these specific items are useful later in life - it's the general ability to deal with mathematical concepts that is important.
Of course, the problem with cheating comes when one person writes this program, and twenty others copy it.
Reading Cosmos for science is like reading the National Enquirer for news. TFA presents a false dichotomy: it takes lots of energy to move stuff between space and the surface of the earth. Therefore space travel is impractical. Whats wrong with this?
First, one you establish a real, mostly self-sufficient presence in space, there is no moving stuff back-and-forth to earth. Raw materials are abundant, and getting in and out of weaker gravity wells (like the moon) is no problem.
Second, getting back into the earth's gravity well takes essentially no energy at all - only control.
This. In fact, lets go farther: Whereas literacy in math and science may have only been necessary for the best-educated in the 19th century, in today's technological societies, basic literacy in math and science is nearly as important as basic literacy. The mathematical portions of this exam would be appropriate as a precondition of receiving a high school diploma.
One issue that parent does not address is the conflation of trade schools and universities. There used to be at least three types of education that you could pursue after finishing your obligatory education: vocational training (carpenter, electrician, etc.), professional education (civil engineer, computer scientist, etc.), and university that gave you the traditional "liberal arts" education that prepared you for further study in law, medicine, or whatever.
These three levels reflected the very real needs of different professions, and also very real differences in the capabilities of individual people. Acknowleding differences in individual capability is now "politically incorrect". As a result, the lower two levels of education have been virtually eliminated in the US and UK, and are under serious attack in most other Western countries. The results are a mess: it's difficult to find tradespeople who actually know what they are doing - because no one receives an education in the trade (and the quality of workmanship is then what you would expect). Meanwhile, since everyone is "entitled" to a "world-class university education" - but most are incapable of achieving it - the quality of the university education has been massively reduced.
Anyone can pass touchy-feely courses on "human diversity", "women's studies", "modern society", etc. - as long as they don't choke when parroting the required political positions. If you actually demanded that everyone pass a course in calculus, and another in physics, and a third in computational theory - well, you'd have to fail 90% of current students, and re-create the vocational school that would actually teach them skills they could use to earn a living.
This post is politically incorrect - don't forget to mod it as "troll"
TFA is surprisingly kind. This isn't "insecure by design" - this is a whopping giant security hole that you can drive a truck through, with no justification whatsoever. Surprising, since Dropbox's implementation seems to be otherwise pretty robust and well-implemented.
I certainly hope and trust that they will fix this idiocy in the next release!
Catching plagiarism is pretty easy. Usually the mix of styles is an immediate clue - and otherwise you just past a couple of specific phrases into Google. This kind of cheating is a lot harder to catch. Actually, if the student isn't dumb (and actually reads the paper before handing it in), it's essentially impossible to catch.
On the other hand, it doesn't help you on a final exam.
Sure your classes have methods. But good OO design says that your classes correspond to groups of real-world objects: bank accounts, people, widgets, whatever. Why? Because that is the data that needs to be processed. The methods are tied to the classes, meaning that their very definitions depend on the data modelling you have done.
Working this way is suitable when you are dealing with complex data and comparatively simple algorithms; get the data model right, and your problem is half solved. Moreover, basing the data model on the real world is natural and intuitive, and mostly yields good results. This is the OO world - and it works well for many (even most) real-world problems.
The other situation is where you have complex algorithms, but simple data. Signal processing, control software, scientific programming, etc.. Take a radar as an example: the data is just a continuous stream of numbers coming in off the radar dish; but the algorithms that extract meaning from those numbers are very sophisticated. Using an OO language for problems like this is like trying to loosen a screw using a wrench - maybe you can make it work, but it's basically a really bad fit for the problem.
OO is practical for lots of problems, because it makes modelling real-world data easy. However, it is not useful if you want to give students a solid understanding of the theoretical computer science. OO is fundamentally data-centric, which gets in the way of algorithmic analysis.
To give a pure view of programming, it would make sense to teach pure functional and pure logic programming. If CMU really wanted to concentrate on the theory, they would have eliminated imperative programming from the introductory semesters, because it is very difficult to model mathematically. Apparently that was too big of a step.
The point is to stop giving direct aid, which then makes them dependent on more aid. If you actually want any sort of long-term success, you have got to provide support for them to become independent. Sending food, and driving local farmers out of business is simply not useful.
Moreover, "aid" is big business. Look at the number of organizations that make good money, leeching off the never ending stream of money. If one dares to question how beneficial the "aid" actually is, then one is suddently "Hitler".
It's clear enough that the situation changes above a certain standard of living. Primarily, this seems to be driven by the easy availability of birth control, plus a standard of living where having and enjoying free time is a real option. This isn't what TFA is talking about - no one is struggling to feed the populations of first- or second-world countries.
The cold, hard truth is: animal populations always live at the edge of starvation. Increase the food supply, and the population increases until they are at the edge again. This applies to humans as well: Provide more food for countries with chronic food shortages, and you get more people to feed. The food shortage continues, only now the population is utterly dependent on outside support.
People in Western countries feel oh-so-good that they have saved someone from starving - but the result is to make the long-term problem that much more intractable.
There are several problems intertwined here. Motivated U.S. students are as good as those anywhere. However, they must overcome the following problems:
Grade inflation and the whole parental culture that schools must give their little darlings top grades regardless of performance. Lots of college students come to college thinking that they deserve good grades no matter how little they study.
Progressivism. College education even for STEM majors is seriously diluted with idiotic courses in multiculturalism. The XXX-studies, sociology, and all of all the other leftist propaganda courses have displaced important core courses.
Ridiculous management salaries. Management controls the purse strings and has given itself raises beyond all reason. A top engineer ought to earn as much as a top manager, but this is not the case. In fact, in most companies, salaries from middle management up massively exceed anything an engineer can possibly earn in the same company. Anyone who can pass an engineering curriculum can snore their way through a business degree, so why not study business and have time for partying?
The combination of these factors makes STEM degrees less attractive than they ought to be...
Monogamous relationships seem to be a basic part of stable human societies. Polygamous societies have, by definition, a shortage of suitable mates for young men; young men need to "prove" themselves to have a chance at a mate, which tends to involve violence, aggression, etc. That is oversimplified, but the pattern is clear to see: societies with widespread polygamy tend to be economic disasters with frequent civil wars.
With a broad brush: most of Africa is traditionally polygamous, and most of Africa is a mess. Most of the Middle East is polygamous, and is a mess. Asia is a mixed bag: those countries that are doing well economically are mostly or entirely monogamous (China, Japan, India, etc.); those doing poorly tend to be polygamous (e.g., Bangladesh).
Someone is going to say that correlation is not causation. That may be true, however the correlation alone is enough: if you want a reasonably peaceful, successful society, choose one that is monogamous. This is a non-religious reason for governments to regulate the marriage practices of the societies they govern.
"We are going to have to solve this problem creatively ourselves. "...fearful the county won't qualify for broadband infrastructure grants...[officials] are pushing to expand homegrown services such as Conlin's."
That's what the free market is all about. Entrepreneurs will provide solutions far cheaper than the government ever could, and create jobs in the process. How about we just eliminate all of those broadband infrastructure grants, and let people like this build their businesses?
I knew I should have put a humor tag on that. Yes, folks, I know April only has 30 days. Don't you find it appropriate to celebrate an irrational number on a nonexistent day?
Here in Europe, it's on a different day
on
Happy Pi Day
·
· Score: 1
Since we write Day-Month-Year, I am personally looking forward to 31.4.15...
Congress can put anything they want into a bill, and it doesn't change one simple fact: Guantanamo Bay is a military installation, and Obama is Commander in Chief. If Obama chooses to give the order "get everyone out of Guantanamo", there is absolutely nothing that Congress can do about it.
Nothing is perfectly safe, life is just like that. The reactor will make the headlines, but it represents a tiny bit of the total damage done by the earthquake.
The greenies yammer about how much safer wind power or hydro power would be, but they have no concept that it would take literally millions of wind generators to replace these reactors, spread across zillions of square kilometers - or massive dams flooding just as much land - all of which the greenies would protest against. The result would in any case be unreliable, expensive power. And just how many of those wind generators and/or dams would survive an 8.9 earthquake?
Nuclear power is, in fact, incredibly safe. Look at Chernobyl - a far worse accident than what has happened in Japan. After the accident, the news was full of how tens of thousands of people were going to die of cancer. This was revised down to thousands, then to hundreds. In the final analysis, fewer than 100 deaths can be clearly attributed to the accident. It will turn out the same in Japan - fewer deaths that those cause by a typical major dam breach - which happen every couple of years.
In most part of the world, animals are welcome in public places, including restaurants. It is quite common to see a dog snoozing quietly under the table, while the owner eats lunch. What is it the USA has against animals? Why restrict animals in public places to service animals - are people afraid they will get "dog poisoning"?
Just more needless government regulation by politicians who have already solved all of the serious problems...
Slashdot Mirror
There is no reason for this poorly equipped scum to be any sort of threat to civilian shipping. Just blow the pirates out of the water. Use normal warships. Use air surveillance, Use Q-ships. Put armed marines on civilian ships. In short, use all the standard naval strategies for commerce protection. Make it a death sentence to attack civilian traffic, and the problem will end.
The only reason there is any sort of problem is the weird desire to treat the pirates gently.
Various thoughts here:
You may be looking for non-illegal content, but worried that you may come across something illegal in the course of the search.
Those are just quick ideas - I am sure that other posters will have other ideas as well...
Finally, outsourcing. HAHAHAHAHA. Having seen it in action, I think it's hilarious that people feel threatened by it. Sorry folks, American and European universities still churn out the best qualified engineers in the world. The people willing to work for $5 /hr aren't nearly as competent, and you have the global economy to thank for that.
While there are exceptions to every rule, this is generally true. The difference seems to be cultural. Visit a college course in much of Asia, and watch as the students slavishly follow every word of the instructor, copy every step of a demo - no independence of thought, no independent problem solving. Visit many workplaces in Asia, and micromanagement takes on a whole new meaning.
However, exchange students visiting the USA and Europe take back Western ideas and ways of working. They may still be the exceptions, but there are some really good technical shops out there. Things are changing.
It's easy for me and it's easy for you - it's even easy to use once it's set up (assuming they are vigilant). But if I told my (very non-geek) girlfriend to encrypt her e-mails, she would have no clue on where to start. I could certainly help her but the problem is that not everyone has someone to ask or would even care enough to do so (obvious, since most people don't encrypt their email).
I definitely agree that everything should be encrypted, it has a great deal of benefits (aside from my opinion that cryptography is just fascinating). It's problematic though, since most people don't think that way - now we're back at square one, how am I supposed to send an encrypted e-mail to someone without a public key? Even if they had one, we still run into some problems with people not paying attention to what they are doing (did they verify that the fingerprint I gave them matched before they trusted my public key? Not likely).
I think computer security in general is far removed from many people's minds outside of paying their 40$/yr to Symantec. E-Mail encryption? They simply don't care.
I have a submission pending on just this topic. I find it shocking that email encryption has not become simple to set up and standard to use. The reason our friends and family don't use it, is because solutions are platform dependent, or require technical knowledge to set up, or are a total pain to use, or all of the above.
There is really no excuse for this situation. Email encryption (and digital signing) should be automatic and transparent. Granted, only tech-nerds will take proper care of their keys, but a standardized solution would still be much better than nothing.
Java needs to be replaced. I have taught Java for years, because many colleges think it is a good first language to learn. Only recently have I actually attempted to develop commercial quality applications in it. Frankly, Java sucks big green ones. Generic types (with type-erasure) are a total hack, denying the running code valuable information. Abstract classes are only half-implemented, since you cannot have abstract static methods (e.g., factory methods). Meta-programming in Java is extremely limited - Reflection covers a few aspects, but even these are very awkward to use. Exception handling is awkward, there is no multiple inheritance, not all types are objects - hacked with boxing and unboxing. And so on, and so forth, and so on...
The chances of this language going anywhere are small. Anyone who has enjoyed studying compilers has written (or at least imagined) their own language. Creating new languages is fun, lots of people do it, and mostly - even if they are good - the languages disappear down a deep, dark hole. Success for a language requires a lot of support from many different parts of the IT community: lots of libraries, job prospects, more libraries, books, courses, real world applications, and did I mention code libraries? There are zillions of languages out there, many of them better than Java. Unfortunately, none of them to date have gotten the necessary support. What are the chances that this language will be different?
"...mathematics is NOT and has never been about memorizing formulas. ... Mathematics is (or should be) the class where you learn how to think logically, and use logical and critical thinking skills to solve problems."
Bingo! When we learn to read, we begin with simple phonetics with simple words ("See Spot run"), then we are taken though a series of increasingly difficult texts. None of these texts are directly useful later in life. It's the same with math - you start out with basic operations, and move on the more complex topics. It may be that none of these specific items are useful later in life - it's the general ability to deal with mathematical concepts that is important.
Of course, the problem with cheating comes when one person writes this program, and twenty others copy it.
Reading Cosmos for science is like reading the National Enquirer for news. TFA presents a false dichotomy: it takes lots of energy to move stuff between space and the surface of the earth. Therefore space travel is impractical. Whats wrong with this?
Space travel takes a huge initial investment to establish a real infrastructure, including mining and manufacturing. After that, it's all gravy.
This. In fact, lets go farther: Whereas literacy in math and science may have only been necessary for the best-educated in the 19th century, in today's technological societies, basic literacy in math and science is nearly as important as basic literacy. The mathematical portions of this exam would be appropriate as a precondition of receiving a high school diploma.
One issue that parent does not address is the conflation of trade schools and universities. There used to be at least three types of education that you could pursue after finishing your obligatory education: vocational training (carpenter, electrician, etc.), professional education (civil engineer, computer scientist, etc.), and university that gave you the traditional "liberal arts" education that prepared you for further study in law, medicine, or whatever.
These three levels reflected the very real needs of different professions, and also very real differences in the capabilities of individual people. Acknowleding differences in individual capability is now "politically incorrect". As a result, the lower two levels of education have been virtually eliminated in the US and UK, and are under serious attack in most other Western countries. The results are a mess: it's difficult to find tradespeople who actually know what they are doing - because no one receives an education in the trade (and the quality of workmanship is then what you would expect). Meanwhile, since everyone is "entitled" to a "world-class university education" - but most are incapable of achieving it - the quality of the university education has been massively reduced.
Anyone can pass touchy-feely courses on "human diversity", "women's studies", "modern society", etc. - as long as they don't choke when parroting the required political positions. If you actually demanded that everyone pass a course in calculus, and another in physics, and a third in computational theory - well, you'd have to fail 90% of current students, and re-create the vocational school that would actually teach them skills they could use to earn a living.
This post is politically incorrect - don't forget to mod it as "troll"
Such leadership! Even if they had agreed to slash the budget by 50%, it would only take us back to the level of spending of the Clinton administration. But no, they only managed to agree to $38 billion in spending reductions - about 1% of total outlays.
With leaders like this, we just as well jump off the cliff ourselves.
TFA is surprisingly kind. This isn't "insecure by design" - this is a whopping giant security hole that you can drive a truck through, with no justification whatsoever. Surprising, since Dropbox's implementation seems to be otherwise pretty robust and well-implemented.
I certainly hope and trust that they will fix this idiocy in the next release!
Catching plagiarism is pretty easy. Usually the mix of styles is an immediate clue - and otherwise you just past a couple of specific phrases into Google. This kind of cheating is a lot harder to catch. Actually, if the student isn't dumb (and actually reads the paper before handing it in), it's essentially impossible to catch.
On the other hand, it doesn't help you on a final exam.
Sure your classes have methods. But good OO design says that your classes correspond to groups of real-world objects: bank accounts, people, widgets, whatever. Why? Because that is the data that needs to be processed. The methods are tied to the classes, meaning that their very definitions depend on the data modelling you have done.
Working this way is suitable when you are dealing with complex data and comparatively simple algorithms; get the data model right, and your problem is half solved. Moreover, basing the data model on the real world is natural and intuitive, and mostly yields good results. This is the OO world - and it works well for many (even most) real-world problems.
The other situation is where you have complex algorithms, but simple data. Signal processing, control software, scientific programming, etc.. Take a radar as an example: the data is just a continuous stream of numbers coming in off the radar dish; but the algorithms that extract meaning from those numbers are very sophisticated. Using an OO language for problems like this is like trying to loosen a screw using a wrench - maybe you can make it work, but it's basically a really bad fit for the problem.
OO is practical for lots of problems, because it makes modelling real-world data easy. However, it is not useful if you want to give students a solid understanding of the theoretical computer science. OO is fundamentally data-centric, which gets in the way of algorithmic analysis.
To give a pure view of programming, it would make sense to teach pure functional and pure logic programming. If CMU really wanted to concentrate on the theory, they would have eliminated imperative programming from the introductory semesters, because it is very difficult to model mathematically. Apparently that was too big of a step.
The point is to stop giving direct aid, which then makes them dependent on more aid. If you actually want any sort of long-term success, you have got to provide support for them to become independent. Sending food, and driving local farmers out of business is simply not useful.
Moreover, "aid" is big business. Look at the number of organizations that make good money, leeching off the never ending stream of money. If one dares to question how beneficial the "aid" actually is, then one is suddently "Hitler".
Thank you for proving Godwin's law yet again...
It's clear enough that the situation changes above a certain standard of living. Primarily, this seems to be driven by the easy availability of birth control, plus a standard of living where having and enjoying free time is a real option. This isn't what TFA is talking about - no one is struggling to feed the populations of first- or second-world countries.
The cold, hard truth is: animal populations always live at the edge of starvation. Increase the food supply, and the population increases until they are at the edge again. This applies to humans as well: Provide more food for countries with chronic food shortages, and you get more people to feed. The food shortage continues, only now the population is utterly dependent on outside support.
People in Western countries feel oh-so-good that they have saved someone from starving - but the result is to make the long-term problem that much more intractable.
May I please remind everyone of this article concerning aid to Africa: For God's sake, please just stop!.
There are several problems intertwined here. Motivated U.S. students are as good as those anywhere. However, they must overcome the following problems:
The combination of these factors makes STEM degrees less attractive than they ought to be...
Monogamous relationships seem to be a basic part of stable human societies. Polygamous societies have, by definition, a shortage of suitable mates for young men; young men need to "prove" themselves to have a chance at a mate, which tends to involve violence, aggression, etc. That is oversimplified, but the pattern is clear to see: societies with widespread polygamy tend to be economic disasters with frequent civil wars.
With a broad brush: most of Africa is traditionally polygamous, and most of Africa is a mess. Most of the Middle East is polygamous, and is a mess. Asia is a mixed bag: those countries that are doing well economically are mostly or entirely monogamous (China, Japan, India, etc.); those doing poorly tend to be polygamous (e.g., Bangladesh).
Someone is going to say that correlation is not causation. That may be true, however the correlation alone is enough: if you want a reasonably peaceful, successful society, choose one that is monogamous. This is a non-religious reason for governments to regulate the marriage practices of the societies they govern.
"We are going to have to solve this problem creatively ourselves. "...fearful the county won't qualify for broadband infrastructure grants...[officials] are pushing to expand homegrown services such as Conlin's."
That's what the free market is all about. Entrepreneurs will provide solutions far cheaper than the government ever could, and create jobs in the process. How about we just eliminate all of those broadband infrastructure grants, and let people like this build their businesses?
Must be a very slow news day...
I knew I should have put a humor tag on that. Yes, folks, I know April only has 30 days. Don't you find it appropriate to celebrate an irrational number on a nonexistent day?
Since we write Day-Month-Year, I am personally looking forward to 31.4.15...
Congress can put anything they want into a bill, and it doesn't change one simple fact: Guantanamo Bay is a military installation, and Obama is Commander in Chief. If Obama chooses to give the order "get everyone out of Guantanamo", there is absolutely nothing that Congress can do about it.
Nothing is perfectly safe, life is just like that. The reactor will make the headlines, but it represents a tiny bit of the total damage done by the earthquake.
The greenies yammer about how much safer wind power or hydro power would be, but they have no concept that it would take literally millions of wind generators to replace these reactors, spread across zillions of square kilometers - or massive dams flooding just as much land - all of which the greenies would protest against. The result would in any case be unreliable, expensive power. And just how many of those wind generators and/or dams would survive an 8.9 earthquake?
Nuclear power is, in fact, incredibly safe. Look at Chernobyl - a far worse accident than what has happened in Japan. After the accident, the news was full of how tens of thousands of people were going to die of cancer. This was revised down to thousands, then to hundreds. In the final analysis, fewer than 100 deaths can be clearly attributed to the accident. It will turn out the same in Japan - fewer deaths that those cause by a typical major dam breach - which happen every couple of years.
In most part of the world, animals are welcome in public places, including restaurants. It is quite common to see a dog snoozing quietly under the table, while the owner eats lunch. What is it the USA has against animals? Why restrict animals in public places to service animals - are people afraid they will get "dog poisoning"?
Just more needless government regulation by politicians who have already solved all of the serious problems...