You're mixing two different things which happen to share the same number. The 4,000 thyroid cancer cases are only a part of the victims, which, as you say, according to the report amount to up to 4,000 in total.
Additionally, the report says that 4000 thyroid cancers cases (most of them children) were probably caused by low radiation exposure.
If you use a vague adverb such as "probably", you make it look like the connection between the accident and the thyroid cancer in children is something weak.
Instead, the report says:
Given the rarity of thyroid cancer in young people, the large population with high doses to the
thyroid and the magnitude of the radiation-related risk estimates derived from epidemiological
studies, it is most likely that a large fraction of thyroid cancers observed to date
among those exposed in childhood are attributable to radiation exposure from the accident.
It is expected that the increase in thyroid cancer incidence from Chernobyl will continue
for many more years, although the long term magnitude of the risk is difficult to quantify.
That is, since thyroid cancer doesn't normally affect kids, they were forced to admit that these 4,000 were definitely victims of the disaster. That's why they're counted apart from the others.
Out of these 4000, 15 died.
First of all, I don't think that the remaining 3,985 victims are enjoying the cancer in their thyroid (supposing that they still have a thyroid).
That said, you're quoting only a part of the report; you're skipping others such as:
...the international expert group predicts that among the 600 000 persons receiving more
significant exposures (liquidators working in 1986-1987, evacuees, and residents of the most 'contaminated' areas), the possible
increase in cancer mortality due to this radiation exposure might be up to a few per cent. This might eventually represent
up to four thousand fatal cancers...
So you correct me, it's not "about 4,000" as I said, it's "up to 4,000", with no lower bound specified. I think there is little difference.
Saying "Chernobyl only made 50 victims" instead of "Chernobyl made up to 4,000 victims" is still a misrepresentation. And it's also a ugly one to me, because it disregards the value of the life of up to 3,950 people.
"fewer than 50 deaths had been directly attributed to radiation from the disaster".
I don't feel that there is a difference between dying of acute radiation poisoning and dying of cancer. Do you?
I don't think so, and that is the sad thing for me. Now people are even starting to deny what happened at Chernobyl. Radioactive forest notwithstanding.
The IAEA, i.e. the group lobbying worldwide for the construction of new nuclear power plants and the minimization of nuclear fear among the population, estimates 4,000 deaths at Chernobyl because of the disaster (source). Yet with your faith in nuclear power you managed to be more catholic than the pope and lowered the death toll by 80 times. Enough said.
Open-source phones already exist, but you don't see people touting them, do you?
The N900 is the phone that went closer to that. Manufactured by a giant proprietary company, mostly open source, unlocked boot loader, "rooted" by default, Debian-like userspace.
Unfortunately we won't see any more phones like that because the company that manufactured it was assimilated by MS, so indeed the best thing we can cling to in the future are "rooted" Android phones - with the hope that their firmwares will keep having enough bugs to let us owners "root" them against their manufacturers' wish.
You could already download the UnRAR source code from the RAR web site itself; if all you want to do is to extract RAR files, its license doesn’t look too evil (I'm quoting the most "problematic" part):
The UnRAR sources may be used in any software to handle RAR
archives without limitations free of charge, but cannot be used
to re-create the RAR compression algorithm, which is proprietary.
Distribution of modified UnRAR sources in separate form or as a
part of other software is permitted, provided that it is clearly
stated in the documentation and source comments that the code may
not be used to develop a RAR (WinRAR) compatible archiver.
OK, it's no GPL, but still I'd say that it puts "open source" RAR support in a better position than other high priority GNU projects such as Flash support, where your only chance to have a good experience is to use binary-only code.
I believe that developing a "next-generation" standard costs time and money. They probably want to avoid investing millions to develop a technology that people won't buy quickly (perhaps due to the high price that the products would have at the beginning).
- Use standard protocols, cables and connectors (usb, bluetooth);
- Support many connectivity methods (wifi, ethernet);
- Work with off-the-shelf hardware (sata drives, usb drives, UVC webcams, bluetooth keyboards, bluetooth headsets);
- Allow free storage and loading of media files to / from the console with no DRM getting in the way and no crazy partitioning schemes required on storage media;
- Support more stuff beyond gaming (browsing the web, organizing photos,...)
While of course Sony's behaviour towards existing OtherOS users is deprecable, odious and probably unlawful, I still have to find a gaming console which is more open than the PS3 even without OtherOS. I'm open to suggestions.
Yesterday somebody asked me for $1.000. I guess I'll have to give him the money, otherwise he'll be motivated to break in my house and take all my money anyway.
That's a downright lie right there: OtherOS NEVER allowed for playing backups or hacking games
No, that's a downright truth. *ALL* PS3 exploits started on Linux. Hotz found a way to tamper with the firmware, from Linux, as he proudly demonstrated with screenshots from his blog. He didn't manage to go beyond some unuseful demos, but he showed the way. AFTER the encryption keys were dumped, from Linux, by other people, it became possible to hack even the PS3s lacking the Linux feature.
The result is that now hackers own the platform, there's no point to play online anymore because of cheaters, and you can't do it anyway, because hackers brought the PSN down; honest users pay games for "developers" who get to play for free by downloading games from torrents, Sony removed OtherOS from the honest users who made use of it, and surely they will think 999 times before putting OtherOS on their next consoles.
I guess "developers" will then have to buy other consoles, which support the installation of Linux, have free online gaming, work with standard peripherals instead of expensive proprietary ones. Until now only Sony's consoles did that.
In the case of Android, there's also the source code itself.
The source code of the Android platform only matches a fraction of the binary code running on an average Android phone.
Not only the phone's application processor (the one running Linux) runs plenty of binary-only, manufacturer-provided private code, but above all, typical Android phones (e.g. those running on Qualcomm's msm architecture) have a lower level, more privileged "baseband" CPU which boots first, is in charge of network interaction and security features, is inaccessible by the less privileged application processor that can only interact with it through IPC entry points (even when the application processor is "rooted"), and runs an exotic, closed, secured realtime operating system different from Linux and whose operation is beyond direct control by the phone's user.
"All studies of potential health hazards associated with the release of radioactive elements from coal combustion conclude that the perturbation of natural background dose levels is almost negligible."
So:
Radiation released by coal, of course, is harmless and does not elevate cancer risks, right?
Right, it doesn't. Or at least, the linked says nothing about that. It says it "could be dangerous" if the radioactive isotopes were "locally accumulated". But then it provides no example of anyone ever doing that.
Please provide links to some scientific study calculating the damages to human health caused by the radiation released by coal plants. You would require something like that, if some greenpeacer told you that living near a nuclear power plants is dangerous for your health.
and kills miners
As uranium does. Moreover, miners know the dangers they face, are trained and equipped to avoid them, and are indemnified for it. Families living around nuclear power plant aren't.
We're running out of oil
That's true, but then uranium is a scarce resource too, and alternatives exist.
as well as being horribly dirty (there is no such thing as clean coal).
There is no such thing as clean spent nuclear fuel.
Wind isn't always blowing or in the right place, sun isn't always shining or in the right place, water isn't always available for dams or in the right place and kills huge aquatic populations, not all of the population lives where tidal generators are a possibility...
1) That's why we have power distribution grids. They're needed for nuclear power plants too, because they constantly produce power even during the night, when nobody wants it.
2) For the birthday paradox, there will always be some renewable energy source readily available for any spot on the Earth.
we're running out of options if we want electricity.
No, we aren't. Many countries run perfectly fine without nuclear power at all. The US only get 20% of their power from nuclear.
Nuclear is great for providing a base generating capability, and there's not a whole lot else right now that's feasible or economical, especially considering the amount of nuclear waste we're planning on storing under a rock in Nevada.
If nuclear power is so "economical", then why does it depend on state subsidies to be set up?
The DOE says that nuclear power is the second most expensive power source, after solar power. It ranks below biomasses and wind.
1) "Mostly surviving"? You can't "mostly don't get" cancer. Also, the events are still running - you'd better wait until it's over before drawing a final balance, otherwise you'll end up doing like the AIEA: a few hours after the accident, they stated that nothing had happened, attached a comfortably low "number" to the accident, and kept inviting people to build more nuclear power plants, which is their job. Then, day after day, they had to revise their position to accommodate their propaganda to the ever-worsening reality, thus giving sledgehammer blows to their credibility.
2) The perceived magnitude at Fukushima was lower than the one at the epicenter.
3) Nuclear apologist told us, until yesterday, that nuclear power plants were able to withstand any eartquake. It turned out (in case there was need to...) that such affirmation was false, and fruit of either arrogance or bad faith.
And that's a 40 year old design. We're talking the same year that the Intel 4004 was released. That's a hell of a testament to the design of modern nuclear power plants that are more efficient and even safer.
Then you have to ask yourself, why is a 40 year old power plant still operating? That's exactly because nuclear power is so expensive that once you managed (with the government's money) to build a power plant, you still have to milk every single watt of power out of it if you want to profit.
Also, every single time a nuclar accident happens, we're told that it was because that particular nuclear power plant was outdated, belonged to the previous generation, its maintaine
Please don't, I'm not a native English speaker and I probably got the tones wrong both when reading and writing. Sorry.
Rather, my main point was that those 3 will be living much longer than the 20,000 tsunami victims who are either dead or missing now, and I wish that the media would be able to remember that rather the radiation issue.
I don't feel that the media aren't transmitting compassion toward the victims of the tsunami, at least where I live. There's plenty of news shown on TV about the devastations brought about by the fury of the elements, and the admirable determination of the japanese people in rebuilding their country.
News about the nuclear disaster are effectively getting prominent as the days go by: not for hysteria, but because right now many states in Europe were slowly forgetting the (metaphoric) fallout from the Chernobyl days, and were going to invest in nuclear power again, often by extending the life of existing, decades-old power plants instead of building next-generation ones. And the news of this new disaster coming from Japan do provide useful information for the public debate.
I don't think so. Censorship is when somebody tells someone else, "you can't say that". In this case, somebody thought that a cartoon, whose only intent is to make people laugh, was possibly going to make some people sad instead, and decided not to air it now, by his own free will.
Whether or not I agree with the decision, I can't say it's censorship.
If we use some words too easily, then we risk that when it's really time to use them, they'll have lost their value.
OK, first off...living will give you cancer. Live enough, and you will get cancer.
There are a lot of things you can do while living that will increase your chances of getting cancer. Getting massive doses of radiation is one of them. I can assure you that getting cancer when you're 70 and getting it at 25 doesn't feel the same. Even though you'd be probably pissed off in both cases.
Radiation in the quantities being released from the Japanese reactors WILL NOT GIVE YOU CANCER. Scientific fact, get over it.
They were exposed to radiation levels of 170-180 millisieverts, he said, which is lower than the maximum level permitted for workers on the site of 250 millisieverts.
Most people are exposed to 2 millisieverts over the average year, while 100 millisieverts is considered the lowest level at which any increase in cancer is clearly evident.
People die on the roads in massive, horrific numbers and yet this causes no comment and people are not afraid to cross the road. How come all the hysteria about radiation?
In fact, parliaments emit all kinds of legislation to reduce the risks of road accidents, including for example freedom-limiting laws that enforce the use of safety belts by private citizens, because people are worried about road safety.
People have NOT died or suffered in any meaningful numbers from any application of nuclear power technology, at all, ever.
I learn that the people who suffered in Chernobyl, and who still suffer today, are not a "meaningful number".
And you can say that because you inspected the DNA of every single cell of their body and you can't exclude that they will develop some form of cancer in the following years, of course.
Otherwise you'd be offensive. Even as a long-term resident of Japan.
However, we can all imagine our gruesome death at the hand of deadly radiation.
Talking as a European, there's no need to imagine that, we still have vivid memories of the gruesome effects of radiation on people who worked to fix blown nuclear reactors. But, the last tsunami that hit my country was one hundred years ago. That's why people here are more sensitive to the dangers of nuclear power than they are to the fear of tsunamis. Moreover, there's nothing you can do to prevent tsunamis from happening, while nuclear accidents can always be attributed to human misbehavior, which puts doubts in people's minds such as "could it happen here?", "could it be prevented?".
No censorship is going on. No copies of the episodes were destroyed. It's not a crime to watch them.
It's just that the people who were to air them decided, autonomously, to omit some jokes that might hurt the sensitivity of some people in the present time.
I stand corrected, I had the time frame of the lawsuits completely wrong. But my definition of "problem" is more "hire a team of well-paid engineers to develop, debug and maintain an operating system and its associated userspace" rather than "put the sources of Linux and busybox on your ftp site".
From what I read, Supermicro, Extreme Networks, and Verizon settled out of court in 2008 and now provide the missing source code.
Samsung and Cisco settled out of court in 2009 and now provide the missing source code.
All of them have been shipping Linux in most TV sets and home routers, and in all Android phones, that they've been happily selling since 2006 or so.
So I think that the "problem" of making the sources of busybox available on some ftp site is well worth the advantage of getting for free the high-valued software that powers their devices.
I have no information about Westinghouse/JVC/Best Buy but it is difficult for me to understand why they couldn't respect the terms of the GPL as everyone else is doing.
That is quite the misrepresentation. This thread is about Google supposedly misusing the Linux kernel headers which are GPL'd, this controversy is over a copyright violation. The Google / Oracle suit is over patent violations, the BSD license is a non issue in this case.
I only added more information to the union of your post and the parent, which might be carelessly read together like "oh no, OSS makes you get sued" / "no, it's only the GPL that does".
And by the way, Oracle is also suing Google for *copyright* violations, not only patents. Moreover, had Google used Oracle's GPLed JVM, they would be protected by the patent statement contained in the GPL (and missing in BSD-like licenses).
Stripping license text from source files *is* a violation even of some BSD licenses.
Thats a straw man. The issue in the current controversy is that if Google loses then third party app developers might be forced to open their source code per GPL requirements
I'm not talking about the current controversy, I'm talking about the BSD license not being the deus-ex-machina for all licensing controversies.
If, instead of being GPL, the linux kernel headers were under the Apache license, Google would still be liable because they didn't respect article 4 point C of the license, which would require them not to strip copyright notices from the code they're redistributing.
1) Google is being "sued in to bankruptcy" for the Apache Harmony Java VM which has a BSD-like license.
2) If the "fear" that "users of BSD and comparable license" don't have, is of being unable to take code for free without giving their code back, then it's not an "open source" matter. If a company "runs away" from GPL code because they don't want to contribute back code to the community, then they wouldn't contribute back even if the original code was under the BSD license, or under Windows' license agreement.
The open source community won't lose anything for the fact that the company is not adopting the GPL code, because they wouldn't contribute anything back if the code was BSD. Hence for the community there is no "cost associated to GPL" in this case.
3) Stripping license text from source files *is* a violation even of some BSD licenses.
Same for all the various router manufacturers, set top box makers, TV makers, and so on that have run into GPL problems.
Who? Linux is used successfully on millions of commercially successful devices, released by manufacturers such as Sony, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung with no problem whatsoever.
The only "problems" I remember were when in the late 90s some router manufacturer was kindly requested to put some tarballs on their FTP site. I think that the burden of having to serve the sources is well paid by having access to a kernel which has more features and drivers, is easier to deploy, has an extremely larger user and developer base,...
Google's current "problem" is being sued by Oracle for using the Apache Harmony Java VM which was licensed under a BSD-like license.
140.000 people had to be evacuated from their homes because of the nuclear accidents. This in addition to all they have already suffered because of the earthquake and the tsunami. For this operation, and for all the future ones that will be needed, the Japanese government had to distract precious resources that could be used for other tasks now. To me, this is definitely a tragedy which needs to be reported, whatever one might think about the safety of nuclear power.
Another thing: every time a nuclear accident takes place, we are told that it was only because of that particular plant's unsafe design, and that future models will be 100% safe. Reiterating this pattern of behaviour IMHO impairs the credibility of the authorities whose job should be to tell the governments, now, which of the *currently operating* plants are safe, and which ones aren't and had better be replaced with new designs.
Slashdot Mirror
Additionally, the report says that 4000 thyroid cancers cases (most of them children) were probably caused by low radiation exposure.
If you use a vague adverb such as "probably", you make it look like the connection between the accident and the thyroid cancer in children is something weak.
Instead, the report says:
That is, since thyroid cancer doesn't normally affect kids, they were forced to admit that these 4,000 were definitely victims of the disaster. That's why they're counted apart from the others.
Out of these 4000, 15 died.
First of all, I don't think that the remaining 3,985 victims are enjoying the cancer in their thyroid (supposing that they still have a thyroid).
That said, you're quoting only a part of the report; you're skipping others such as:
So you correct me, it's not "about 4,000" as I said, it's "up to 4,000", with no lower bound specified. I think there is little difference.
Saying "Chernobyl only made 50 victims" instead of "Chernobyl made up to 4,000 victims" is still a misrepresentation. And it's also a ugly one to me, because it disregards the value of the life of up to 3,950 people.
"fewer than 50 deaths had been directly attributed to radiation from the disaster".
I don't feel that there is a difference between dying of acute radiation poisoning and dying of cancer. Do you?
Is Slashdot being astroturfed?
I don't think so, and that is the sad thing for me. Now people are even starting to deny what happened at Chernobyl. Radioactive forest notwithstanding.
Even chernobyl only killed around 50 people.
The IAEA, i.e. the group lobbying worldwide for the construction of new nuclear power plants and the minimization of nuclear fear among the population, estimates 4,000 deaths at Chernobyl because of the disaster (source). Yet with your faith in nuclear power you managed to be more catholic than the pope and lowered the death toll by 80 times. Enough said.
Open-source phones already exist, but you don't see people touting them, do you?
The N900 is the phone that went closer to that. Manufactured by a giant proprietary company, mostly open source, unlocked boot loader, "rooted" by default, Debian-like userspace.
Unfortunately we won't see any more phones like that because the company that manufactured it was assimilated by MS, so indeed the best thing we can cling to in the future are "rooted" Android phones - with the hope that their firmwares will keep having enough bugs to let us owners "root" them against their manufacturers' wish.
OK, it's no GPL, but still I'd say that it puts "open source" RAR support in a better position than other high priority GNU projects such as Flash support, where your only chance to have a good experience is to use binary-only code.
Who cares about our "needs"?
I believe that developing a "next-generation" standard costs time and money. They probably want to avoid investing millions to develop a technology that people won't buy quickly (perhaps due to the high price that the products would have at the beginning).
All those Canadians and Britons were just there for show, weren't they?
...and Soviets...
You must be new here.
- Use standard protocols, cables and connectors (usb, bluetooth); ...)
- Support many connectivity methods (wifi, ethernet);
- Work with off-the-shelf hardware (sata drives, usb drives, UVC webcams, bluetooth keyboards, bluetooth headsets);
- Allow free storage and loading of media files to / from the console with no DRM getting in the way and no crazy partitioning schemes required on storage media;
- Support more stuff beyond gaming (browsing the web, organizing photos,
While of course Sony's behaviour towards existing OtherOS users is deprecable, odious and probably unlawful, I still have to find a gaming console which is more open than the PS3 even without OtherOS. I'm open to suggestions.
Yesterday somebody asked me for $1.000. I guess I'll have to give him the money, otherwise he'll be motivated to break in my house and take all my money anyway.
That's a downright lie right there: OtherOS NEVER allowed for playing backups or hacking games
No, that's a downright truth. *ALL* PS3 exploits started on Linux. Hotz found a way to tamper with the firmware, from Linux, as he proudly demonstrated with screenshots from his blog. He didn't manage to go beyond some unuseful demos, but he showed the way. AFTER the encryption keys were dumped, from Linux, by other people, it became possible to hack even the PS3s lacking the Linux feature.
The result is that now hackers own the platform, there's no point to play online anymore because of cheaters, and you can't do it anyway, because hackers brought the PSN down; honest users pay games for "developers" who get to play for free by downloading games from torrents, Sony removed OtherOS from the honest users who made use of it, and surely they will think 999 times before putting OtherOS on their next consoles.
I guess "developers" will then have to buy other consoles, which support the installation of Linux, have free online gaming, work with standard peripherals instead of expensive proprietary ones. Until now only Sony's consoles did that.
Thank you Hotz, you're so cool.
In the case of Android, there's also the source code itself.
The source code of the Android platform only matches a fraction of the binary code running on an average Android phone. Not only the phone's application processor (the one running Linux) runs plenty of binary-only, manufacturer-provided private code, but above all, typical Android phones (e.g. those running on Qualcomm's msm architecture) have a lower level, more privileged "baseband" CPU which boots first, is in charge of network interaction and security features, is inaccessible by the less privileged application processor that can only interact with it through IPC entry points (even when the application processor is "rooted"), and runs an exotic, closed, secured realtime operating system different from Linux and whose operation is beyond direct control by the phone's user.
"All studies of potential health hazards associated with the release of radioactive elements from coal combustion conclude that the perturbation of natural background dose levels is almost negligible."
So:
Radiation released by coal, of course, is harmless and does not elevate cancer risks, right?
Right, it doesn't. Or at least, the linked says nothing about that. It says it "could be dangerous" if the radioactive isotopes were "locally accumulated". But then it provides no example of anyone ever doing that.
Coal releases tons of radiation
Please provide links to some scientific study calculating the damages to human health caused by the radiation released by coal plants. You would require something like that, if some greenpeacer told you that living near a nuclear power plants is dangerous for your health.
and kills miners
As uranium does. Moreover, miners know the dangers they face, are trained and equipped to avoid them, and are indemnified for it. Families living around nuclear power plant aren't.
We're running out of oil
That's true, but then uranium is a scarce resource too, and alternatives exist.
as well as being horribly dirty (there is no such thing as clean coal).
There is no such thing as clean spent nuclear fuel.
Wind isn't always blowing or in the right place, sun isn't always shining or in the right place, water isn't always available for dams or in the right place and kills huge aquatic populations, not all of the population lives where tidal generators are a possibility...
1) That's why we have power distribution grids. They're needed for nuclear power plants too, because they constantly produce power even during the night, when nobody wants it.
2) For the birthday paradox, there will always be some renewable energy source readily available for any spot on the Earth.
we're running out of options if we want electricity.
No, we aren't. Many countries run perfectly fine without nuclear power at all. The US only get 20% of their power from nuclear.
Nuclear is great for providing a base generating capability, and there's not a whole lot else right now that's feasible or economical, especially considering the amount of nuclear waste we're planning on storing under a rock in Nevada.
If nuclear power is so "economical", then why does it depend on state subsidies to be set up?
The DOE says that nuclear power is the second most expensive power source, after solar power. It ranks below biomasses and wind.
Hell, the Fukushima reactor mostly survived the 4th largest earthquake since 1900
1) "Mostly surviving"? You can't "mostly don't get" cancer. Also, the events are still running - you'd better wait until it's over before drawing a final balance, otherwise you'll end up doing like the AIEA: a few hours after the accident, they stated that nothing had happened, attached a comfortably low "number" to the accident, and kept inviting people to build more nuclear power plants, which is their job. Then, day after day, they had to revise their position to accommodate their propaganda to the ever-worsening reality, thus giving sledgehammer blows to their credibility.
2) The perceived magnitude at Fukushima was lower than the one at the epicenter.
3) Nuclear apologist told us, until yesterday, that nuclear power plants were able to withstand any eartquake. It turned out (in case there was need to...) that such affirmation was false, and fruit of either arrogance or bad faith.
And that's a 40 year old design. We're talking the same year that the Intel 4004 was released. That's a hell of a testament to the design of modern nuclear power plants that are more efficient and even safer.
Then you have to ask yourself, why is a 40 year old power plant still operating? That's exactly because nuclear power is so expensive that once you managed (with the government's money) to build a power plant, you still have to milk every single watt of power out of it if you want to profit.
Also, every single time a nuclar accident happens, we're told that it was because that particular nuclear power plant was outdated, belonged to the previous generation, its maintaine
I take offense to your being offended at me.
Please don't, I'm not a native English speaker and I probably got the tones wrong both when reading and writing. Sorry.
Rather, my main point was that those 3 will be living much longer than the 20,000 tsunami victims who are either dead or missing now, and I wish that the media would be able to remember that rather the radiation issue.
I don't feel that the media aren't transmitting compassion toward the victims of the tsunami, at least where I live. There's plenty of news shown on TV about the devastations brought about by the fury of the elements, and the admirable determination of the japanese people in rebuilding their country.
News about the nuclear disaster are effectively getting prominent as the days go by: not for hysteria, but because right now many states in Europe were slowly forgetting the (metaphoric) fallout from the Chernobyl days, and were going to invest in nuclear power again, often by extending the life of existing, decades-old power plants instead of building next-generation ones. And the news of this new disaster coming from Japan do provide useful information for the public debate.
Whether or not I agree with the decision, I can't say it's censorship.
If we use some words too easily, then we risk that when it's really time to use them, they'll have lost their value.
OK, first off...living will give you cancer. Live enough, and you will get cancer.
There are a lot of things you can do while living that will increase your chances of getting cancer. Getting massive doses of radiation is one of them. I can assure you that getting cancer when you're 70 and getting it at 25 doesn't feel the same. Even though you'd be probably pissed off in both cases.
Radiation in the quantities being released from the Japanese reactors WILL NOT GIVE YOU CANCER. Scientific fact, get over it.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12845304
They were exposed to radiation levels of 170-180 millisieverts, he said, which is lower than the maximum level permitted for workers on the site of 250 millisieverts.
Most people are exposed to 2 millisieverts over the average year, while 100 millisieverts is considered the lowest level at which any increase in cancer is clearly evident.
People die on the roads in massive, horrific numbers and yet this causes no comment and people are not afraid to cross the road. How come all the hysteria about radiation?
In fact, parliaments emit all kinds of legislation to reduce the risks of road accidents, including for example freedom-limiting laws that enforce the use of safety belts by private citizens, because people are worried about road safety.
People have NOT died or suffered in any meaningful numbers from any application of nuclear power technology, at all, ever.
I learn that the people who suffered in Chernobyl, and who still suffer today, are not a "meaningful number".
they are fine apart from some 'sunburn'
And you can say that because you inspected the DNA of every single cell of their body and you can't exclude that they will develop some form of cancer in the following years, of course.
Otherwise you'd be offensive. Even as a long-term resident of Japan.
However, we can all imagine our gruesome death at the hand of deadly radiation.
Talking as a European, there's no need to imagine that, we still have vivid memories of the gruesome effects of radiation on people who worked to fix blown nuclear reactors. But, the last tsunami that hit my country was one hundred years ago. That's why people here are more sensitive to the dangers of nuclear power than they are to the fear of tsunamis. Moreover, there's nothing you can do to prevent tsunamis from happening, while nuclear accidents can always be attributed to human misbehavior, which puts doubts in people's minds such as "could it happen here?", "could it be prevented?".
It's just that the people who were to air them decided, autonomously, to omit some jokes that might hurt the sensitivity of some people in the present time.
From what I read, Supermicro, Extreme Networks, and Verizon settled out of court in 2008 and now provide the missing source code.
Samsung and Cisco settled out of court in 2009 and now provide the missing source code.
All of them have been shipping Linux in most TV sets and home routers, and in all Android phones, that they've been happily selling since 2006 or so.
So I think that the "problem" of making the sources of busybox available on some ftp site is well worth the advantage of getting for free the high-valued software that powers their devices.
I have no information about Westinghouse/JVC/Best Buy but it is difficult for me to understand why they couldn't respect the terms of the GPL as everyone else is doing.
That is quite the misrepresentation. This thread is about Google supposedly misusing the Linux kernel headers which are GPL'd, this controversy is over a copyright violation. The Google / Oracle suit is over patent violations, the BSD license is a non issue in this case.
I only added more information to the union of your post and the parent, which might be carelessly read together like "oh no, OSS makes you get sued" / "no, it's only the GPL that does".
And by the way, Oracle is also suing Google for *copyright* violations, not only patents. Moreover, had Google used Oracle's GPLed JVM, they would be protected by the patent statement contained in the GPL (and missing in BSD-like licenses).
Stripping license text from source files *is* a violation even of some BSD licenses.
Thats a straw man. The issue in the current controversy is that if Google loses then third party app developers might be forced to open their source code per GPL requirements
I'm not talking about the current controversy, I'm talking about the BSD license not being the deus-ex-machina for all licensing controversies.
If, instead of being GPL, the linux kernel headers were under the Apache license, Google would still be liable because they didn't respect article 4 point C of the license, which would require them not to strip copyright notices from the code they're redistributing.
1) Google is being "sued in to bankruptcy" for the Apache Harmony Java VM which has a BSD-like license.
2) If the "fear" that "users of BSD and comparable license" don't have, is of being unable to take code for free without giving their code back, then it's not an "open source" matter. If a company "runs away" from GPL code because they don't want to contribute back code to the community, then they wouldn't contribute back even if the original code was under the BSD license, or under Windows' license agreement.
The open source community won't lose anything for the fact that the company is not adopting the GPL code, because they wouldn't contribute anything back if the code was BSD. Hence for the community there is no "cost associated to GPL" in this case.
3) Stripping license text from source files *is* a violation even of some BSD licenses.
Same for all the various router manufacturers, set top box makers, TV makers, and so on that have run into GPL problems.
Who? Linux is used successfully on millions of commercially successful devices, released by manufacturers such as Sony, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung with no problem whatsoever.
The only "problems" I remember were when in the late 90s some router manufacturer was kindly requested to put some tarballs on their FTP site. I think that the burden of having to serve the sources is well paid by having access to a kernel which has more features and drivers, is easier to deploy, has an extremely larger user and developer base, ...
Google's current "problem" is being sued by Oracle for using the Apache Harmony Java VM which was licensed under a BSD-like license.
Another thing: every time a nuclear accident takes place, we are told that it was only because of that particular plant's unsafe design, and that future models will be 100% safe. Reiterating this pattern of behaviour IMHO impairs the credibility of the authorities whose job should be to tell the governments, now, which of the *currently operating* plants are safe, and which ones aren't and had better be replaced with new designs.