I believe that if Shakespeare were alive today, he'd be working in Hollywood, pumping out those rare summer blockbusters with enough intelligence to entertain the intellectual snobs (like me) while simultaneously having enough guns, explosions, and sex to make it interesting.
Today, plays are a rather rarefied thing; it's a specialist, almost elitist, art. But when Shakespeare was alive, the theater was what your local MPAA-approved cinema is today: mostly trashy entertainment for the unwashed masses. I think he would have seen it as only natural to make his plays into movies once movies were invented.
Don't forget that OS/X still needs to be updated when installed fresh. It's just not anywhere near as painful as windows' update-reboot-update-reboot dance, but it's not something you should ignore.
Er, why not? As far as I know, no client version of OS X has ever had remote vulnerabilities* in its default install. The only vulnerabilities are either local problems (buffer overflows in suid utilities or libraries used by same) or exploits in servers that aren't running by default and won't be turned on for a typical user computer. Updating is nice, but there's no reason you couldn't install 10.3.0, or 10.2.0, or even 10.1.0 on a newbie's computer and leave it unupgraded. Compare with Windows, where you have stories of people getting smacked by the latest worm just because they were on the net while trying to download the updates that would protect them.
(*) I'm ignoring the pseudo-remote DHCP vulnerability, because in a home situation it's basically impossible to exploit, and it's not exactly a remote vulnerability anyway.
Can anyone give some specifics about what sites are blocked? Are only very politicized sites against the Chinese government blocked? I ask because I never came across a blocked site while surfing the net in China, while I was half expecting to not have access to things like the BCC and CNN's sites.
But it's an awful precedent to set to put the financial burden on the people who build an operating system to protect against every known virus.
That's exactly the point. It's an awful precedent, and it would be a terrible idea. It is likewise a terrible idea to make companies responsible for copyright infringement by people who use their products.
Let's assume their system starts out hosed, so we either have to clean it up or reinstall, first.
Then we have to go through and manually disable all of these services.
Then we have to set up separate accounts and hope that they're not going to run anything that requires using the admin account. We either have to not give them the admin password, or give it to them and pray that they don't just use it for everything.
Then we have to download a third-party browser and somehow keep them from using IE.
And finally, we have to buy and install ghost and set up separate partitions and make sure ghost works with them.
How is this "simple", again? You can install Mac OS X, and have it be in a fully secure yet completely ready to use state in twenty minutes, most of which is just watching the pretty animated progress bar move from left to right.
People who don't understand how their car works beyond turning the ignition and pushing the gas are the type of people who drive their car for ten thousand miles without an oil change, and then scratch their heads when their car just up and dies. You must have at least a basic understanding of what's going on inside your car in order to be able to use it effectively. Yet many people are completely unwilling to invest an equivalent amount of time to gain an equivalent amount of understanding of their computer, and still expect to be able to use it with no problem.
I will happily call it useless, because it is. You could also pass the test with flying colors if you had two monolingual people, one on each end, who corrected the text's errors and made it more natural before giving it back to the computer. It's not true all of the time, but a good amount of the results from machine translation are fairly comprehensible to a human being. It's rare to do a double translation test and find anything very comprehensible. If the goal is to discover how good a machine translator is at going from one language to another, and the test is having it translate the test from one language into a second and back into the first, then that is a useless test.
Damn, I had no idea, I just figured he was a normal person who just happened to write really disturbing books. I don't have to tell you how easy it is for me to believe the story, though....
That's classic. Prof uses the internet to copy questions, and then the students use the internet to copy the answers. That reminds me of the story about the prof who decides that lecturing is too much work, so he records all of his lectures to tape and just lets the machine play in the classroom. Pretty soon the students get the same idea, and not long after the room is filled with tape recorders, no student or professor in sight.
Two-way translations are a useless test of a translator. Just like with lossy compression, doing it twice gives results that are much, much worse than only doing it once. To really test a translator, you either have to find some text in a language you don't understand and translate it to one you do and see how well you understand it, or you need to be bilingual. I just tried your phrase with the Fish's English->French translation and it was perfectly understandable. Of course, French is a lot easier to translate into than Japanese or Korean, but what you posted isn't enough to convince me that their results will be incomprehensible either.
Being held liable for how secure your software is would ruin everybody.
Well, all the developers, anyway. Users would benefit from such a regulation....
If it really does ruin all the developers, then users will not benefit. If all of the developers are ruined, who is going to write new software or fix old software?
Well, there we go, I didn't like From Dusk Till Dawn either. Not to be a snob, but for whatever reason, I have a tough time getting into schlock, no matter how pretty or bloody it is.
Fight Club, on the other hand, is so unbelievably deep. I've lost count of how many times I've watched it, and I still pick up on things I missed before. I think the 'problem' with it is that there's a rather high barrier to entry. If you watch it as a movie about a bunch of guys beating up on each other and blowing up buildings, it comes down to a bunch of uninteresting gratuitous violence. I think the people who hate it didn't manage to get past that and see what's underneath. For those of us who did, wow, what a movie!
Not to put Chuck P (I'd write his last name in full, but I don't know how to spell it) down, but I have to agree with him; the book didn't really do the movie justice. It's still a great book, and P is a great writer.
Personally, after surviving horrors like Starship Troopers, any time a movie adaptation of a favorite book comes out and doesn't totally stink, I'm really happy. Although really, LotR was great. I loved all three of them. Maybe in some perfect world they could have been better, but I think that what we got is about as good as possible in the real world. As much as I would like every movie adaptation to be like Fight Club, I know that it's impossible and it doesn't stop me from enjoying a great but imperfect adaptation.
The WTC was designed to survive the impact of a 707. It probably would have, although they missed the effect that a massive paper fire would have on the denuded steel support columns, which is what brought the building down in the real world attack. However, it's a completely different type of survivability. WTC was not designed to have the airplane splatter against the walls, it was designed to absorb it and still have enough structure remaining to hold. The people on the affected floors get an express ticket to heaven. Despite the fact that the airplanes which hit the WTC were much larger than what the WTC was designed to withstand, the towers still managed to stay standing long enough for nearly everybody to evacuate.
Nuclear reactor containment domes, on the other hand, are designed to actually shield from an airplane impact. They don't just absorb it and survive, the airplane will not penetrate. This is a totally different degree of survivability. Not to mention that this has actually been tested, and the dome is barely even scratched. A bunker buster could crack it. A nuke going off right next to it could, but a nuke a little distance away probably wouldn't do much. These things are seriously strong.
About your completely nutty tin-foil hat theory about the causes of WTC, get real. People have been flying airplanes into things to destroy them since the 40s. An Algerian terrorist group tried to fly an airplane into the Eiffel Tower in 1994, and was only unsuccessful because French security forces learned of their plans beforehand and decided to raid the airplane during negotiations on the runway. An operation involving 20 people on four different flights timed to go off within minutes of each other requires years of planning to pull off. There's no way your show could have been the inspiration for the attack.
It may be Jobs's fault, but in any case, the issue is moot. The choice is not between Aqua and the Classic look-and-feel. The choice is between Jobs and OS X or a dead-in-the-water Apple still making incremental upgrades to OS 9 and getting less relevant by the second. Regardless of Jobs's faults, he did save the company, and I prefer a modern OS with a good GUI to an ancient OS made by a dead company with a great GUI.
Although, for me, I prefer OS X in every way except for the Finder, including appearance and interface. It might help that I studiously avoid Carbon apps (except for the Finder). And of course I like UNIX, which helps. But on the rare occasion that I boot back into OS 9, I feel very constrained and limited.
There are an amazing number of posts talking about what a bad idea this device is because it could easily be used to copy credit cards and so on.
The problem is not with this device! The problem is with your credit cards, speedpass, etc.! If they are that easy to copy, something is wrong with them. This is exactly what "security through obscurity" means. If your speedpass doesn't use encryption and can be copied just by listening in on the radio waves it sends out every time you use it, it's badly designed! If your credit card can be used to make a purchase based entirely on the easily-copied magnetic stripe, it's badly designed! Don't go after people who make card copiers, go after credit card companies who don't put smart chips in their cards and require PINs.
Thanks for your infos, but I am not fully convinced yet. It seems to me you are mostly making the old point, that an accident like Chernobyl couldn't happen in modern plants. My point was that other things can happen, that we didn't take into consideration yet.
Fair enough. But I would like to point out that doubting the safety of nuclear power in general because of a single accident, while simultaneously not understanding how nuclear power works from an engineering and physics standpoint, is foolish. Nitrate-based explosives have killed more people than nuclear power and nuclear weapons ever have, but I don't see people subsequently doubting the safety of their nitrate-based fertilizers. What I see is, people are frightened of nuclear power because they don't understand it and they can only imagine the bad, and I don't feel this is justified. Please don't take this as a personal insult, I mean this as something I see in people in general.
Well, we need to store the waste somewhere where nobody lives and nobody cares too much about habitability, right? Hmm... I just saw a web site with a bunch of pictures about a place like that. Let's store the waste at Chernobyl! It's already uninhabited and contaminated, so why not? Problem solved.
As far as I remember, there were concerns about aircrafts before 9/11, and german power plants have the concrete shield as well.
After 9/11 there were concerns about all kinds of things. There were concerns about arab-looking people having graduation parties on their lawns. Post-9/11 concerns have remarkably little to do with the real world.
But maybe they only thought of smaller aircrafts. Steel-inforced concrete maybe sounds good from the point of view of human being, consisting largely out of soft material like water. Jumbo Jets might be less impressed.
This isn't theoretical, it's been tested. Not with a jumbo jet, but with a rocket-propelled F-4 Phantom. It's smaller than a large airliner, but it has larger engines, and it's the engines that have real penetrating power. Don't make the mistake of comparing with the WTC; those buildings were mostly open space and were not designed to take any kind of impact.
And what about those new rockets the US developed to penetrate bunkers 12m below rock?
What about them? There's no way a terrorist would get ahold of one of those. I'm not saying there's no way to breach a reactor's containment. However, with most methods of doing so, whatever breaches the containment is likely to be as dangerous to the surrounding countryside as the containment breach itself.
it is possible to design nuclear reactors which have no physical way of exploding or melting down.
interesting point, although surely a power plant contains more energy than a PC, so it seems less obvious to me why the explosion couldn't be big enough to blow up my house. So how is it supposed to work? Is there some kind of feedback loop to decrease the activity the hotter it gets (or whatever, I am no nuclear scientist)? Does that loop work without extra controlers, which might have been destroyed in the case of an accident?
Yes, it's possible to make a reactor which reacts less as it gets warmer, without any systems at all. Building a reactor isn't a matter of just piling enriched uranium together until you have enough of it in one place. (You can, but it's really inefficient and nobody actually does.) Instead, you have a very complex system involving enriched uranium, moderators, neutron reflectors, etc. which all have to be in exactly the right position for anything to happen. When stuff heats up, it expands, and it's possible to make it so that this expansion makes the reactor less reactive. Even ignoring that, once the reactor heats up to a certain point, things will start to bend and break, which will knock everything completely out of position and the reaction will stop right away. The China Syndrome (a core melting and sinking to the center of the earth because it keeps itself out) is basically impossible.
Chernobyl was also like this, in fact it's hard to make a reactor that isn't. The giant mistakes in Chernobyl was that it didn't have a containment structure, and it used graphite as the moderator. Graphite is carbon, and carbon burns really nicely. What happened was that the reactor core heated up extremely and set the graphite on fire. That fire threw large pieces of the core into the atmosphere. The way to keep similar accidents from happening is simple: don't put highly-flammable substances in your reactor core! With a sane reactor design, you could even breach the containment dome and nothing really terrible would happen because all of the nasty substances will still stay in one place, absent a large quantity of explosives or flammable substances.
Damn, what a load of self-righteous bullshit. Here you are, also sitting on your ass, posting to slashdot, pontificating, and yet you have the gall to speak for so many other people:
I hope that the generations yet to come understand that the generation currently alive are sorry for what they did to the future, with Chernobyl.
Are they sorry? I'm not sorry, since it wasn't my fault. Maybe the people who are at fault are actually sorry, but of course most of them are dead, killed by their own idiocy. The ones who are really culpable are those who came up with and executed the stupid experiment they tried that day, which screwed everything up. The designers of the plant are somewhat guilty as well, of course, for designing such an unsafe reactor, but less so. Are you really in a position to speak for them and claim that they are sorry for what they did?
I don't know what you build in Germany, but American reactors can take an airliner and not even blink. Well, the control rooms and other outlying buildings will be toast, of course, but the core is inside several feet of steel-reinforced concrete and it won't even notice than you drove several hundred tons of fully-fueled airliner into it.
There are different degrees of fail-safe. For example, I can be 100% sure that my computer will not explode with enough energy to level my house, because there simply is no physical way for that to happen. Likewise, it is possible to design nuclear reactors which have no physical way of exploding or melting down. I'm not talking about safety systems, I'm talking about physics. Even with no safety systems, such a reactor could not cause a disaster like Chernobyl.
Re:Cha ching, reloaded.
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Please, don't be dumb. Here's one possible problem off the top of my head:
The mail server generates two very large prime numbers (I figure around 80 bits should keep somebody busy for a while). This is not a particularly slow process. It then multiplies them together and hands the result to the sender.
The sender's job is to factor the large number into its constituent primes and provide the primes to the server. This is extremely time-consuming, but verification is trivial.
There are tons of problems like than. Basically any public key cryptography system contains a problem that would work perfectly for this scheme.
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Unless you have a death wish, I suggest being on the other side of the planet when triggering the detonation.
There was an interesting discussion about this on usenet a while back. One interesting quote:
>the ones inclined to worry would
>simply move somewhere a long way off.
From what the Horizon documentary said it is not clear that a sufficient value of "a long way off" is available on the Earths surface.
So it could be that the death wish is mandatory.
(The article where the quote comes from.)
I believe that if Shakespeare were alive today, he'd be working in Hollywood, pumping out those rare summer blockbusters with enough intelligence to entertain the intellectual snobs (like me) while simultaneously having enough guns, explosions, and sex to make it interesting.
Today, plays are a rather rarefied thing; it's a specialist, almost elitist, art. But when Shakespeare was alive, the theater was what your local MPAA-approved cinema is today: mostly trashy entertainment for the unwashed masses. I think he would have seen it as only natural to make his plays into movies once movies were invented.
Don't forget that OS/X still needs to be updated when installed fresh. It's just not anywhere near as painful as windows' update-reboot-update-reboot dance, but it's not something you should ignore.
Er, why not? As far as I know, no client version of OS X has ever had remote vulnerabilities* in its default install. The only vulnerabilities are either local problems (buffer overflows in suid utilities or libraries used by same) or exploits in servers that aren't running by default and won't be turned on for a typical user computer. Updating is nice, but there's no reason you couldn't install 10.3.0, or 10.2.0, or even 10.1.0 on a newbie's computer and leave it unupgraded. Compare with Windows, where you have stories of people getting smacked by the latest worm just because they were on the net while trying to download the updates that would protect them.
(*) I'm ignoring the pseudo-remote DHCP vulnerability, because in a home situation it's basically impossible to exploit, and it's not exactly a remote vulnerability anyway.
Can anyone give some specifics about what sites are blocked? Are only very politicized sites against the Chinese government blocked? I ask because I never came across a blocked site while surfing the net in China, while I was half expecting to not have access to things like the BCC and CNN's sites.
Don't you understand? The artists have the right to get money from completely unrelated sales.
But it's an awful precedent to set to put the financial burden on the people who build an operating system to protect against every known virus.
That's exactly the point. It's an awful precedent, and it would be a terrible idea. It is likewise a terrible idea to make companies responsible for copyright infringement by people who use their products.
I think you misspelled "lusers". No big deal, though, Windows has the same mistake.
Let's assume their system starts out hosed, so we either have to clean it up or reinstall, first.
Then we have to go through and manually disable all of these services.
Then we have to set up separate accounts and hope that they're not going to run anything that requires using the admin account. We either have to not give them the admin password, or give it to them and pray that they don't just use it for everything.
Then we have to download a third-party browser and somehow keep them from using IE.
And finally, we have to buy and install ghost and set up separate partitions and make sure ghost works with them.
How is this "simple", again? You can install Mac OS X, and have it be in a fully secure yet completely ready to use state in twenty minutes, most of which is just watching the pretty animated progress bar move from left to right.
Bingo!
People who don't understand how their car works beyond turning the ignition and pushing the gas are the type of people who drive their car for ten thousand miles without an oil change, and then scratch their heads when their car just up and dies. You must have at least a basic understanding of what's going on inside your car in order to be able to use it effectively. Yet many people are completely unwilling to invest an equivalent amount of time to gain an equivalent amount of understanding of their computer, and still expect to be able to use it with no problem.
I will happily call it useless, because it is. You could also pass the test with flying colors if you had two monolingual people, one on each end, who corrected the text's errors and made it more natural before giving it back to the computer. It's not true all of the time, but a good amount of the results from machine translation are fairly comprehensible to a human being. It's rare to do a double translation test and find anything very comprehensible. If the goal is to discover how good a machine translator is at going from one language to another, and the test is having it translate the test from one language into a second and back into the first, then that is a useless test.
Damn, I had no idea, I just figured he was a normal person who just happened to write really disturbing books. I don't have to tell you how easy it is for me to believe the story, though....
That's classic. Prof uses the internet to copy questions, and then the students use the internet to copy the answers. That reminds me of the story about the prof who decides that lecturing is too much work, so he records all of his lectures to tape and just lets the machine play in the classroom. Pretty soon the students get the same idea, and not long after the room is filled with tape recorders, no student or professor in sight.
Two-way translations are a useless test of a translator. Just like with lossy compression, doing it twice gives results that are much, much worse than only doing it once. To really test a translator, you either have to find some text in a language you don't understand and translate it to one you do and see how well you understand it, or you need to be bilingual. I just tried your phrase with the Fish's English->French translation and it was perfectly understandable. Of course, French is a lot easier to translate into than Japanese or Korean, but what you posted isn't enough to convince me that their results will be incomprehensible either.
Well, there we go, I didn't like From Dusk Till Dawn either. Not to be a snob, but for whatever reason, I have a tough time getting into schlock, no matter how pretty or bloody it is.
Fight Club, on the other hand, is so unbelievably deep. I've lost count of how many times I've watched it, and I still pick up on things I missed before. I think the 'problem' with it is that there's a rather high barrier to entry. If you watch it as a movie about a bunch of guys beating up on each other and blowing up buildings, it comes down to a bunch of uninteresting gratuitous violence. I think the people who hate it didn't manage to get past that and see what's underneath. For those of us who did, wow, what a movie!
Not to put Chuck P (I'd write his last name in full, but I don't know how to spell it) down, but I have to agree with him; the book didn't really do the movie justice. It's still a great book, and P is a great writer.
Personally, after surviving horrors like Starship Troopers, any time a movie adaptation of a favorite book comes out and doesn't totally stink, I'm really happy. Although really, LotR was great. I loved all three of them. Maybe in some perfect world they could have been better, but I think that what we got is about as good as possible in the real world. As much as I would like every movie adaptation to be like Fight Club, I know that it's impossible and it doesn't stop me from enjoying a great but imperfect adaptation.
The WTC was designed to survive the impact of a 707. It probably would have, although they missed the effect that a massive paper fire would have on the denuded steel support columns, which is what brought the building down in the real world attack. However, it's a completely different type of survivability. WTC was not designed to have the airplane splatter against the walls, it was designed to absorb it and still have enough structure remaining to hold. The people on the affected floors get an express ticket to heaven. Despite the fact that the airplanes which hit the WTC were much larger than what the WTC was designed to withstand, the towers still managed to stay standing long enough for nearly everybody to evacuate.
Nuclear reactor containment domes, on the other hand, are designed to actually shield from an airplane impact. They don't just absorb it and survive, the airplane will not penetrate. This is a totally different degree of survivability. Not to mention that this has actually been tested, and the dome is barely even scratched. A bunker buster could crack it. A nuke going off right next to it could, but a nuke a little distance away probably wouldn't do much. These things are seriously strong.
About your completely nutty tin-foil hat theory about the causes of WTC, get real. People have been flying airplanes into things to destroy them since the 40s. An Algerian terrorist group tried to fly an airplane into the Eiffel Tower in 1994, and was only unsuccessful because French security forces learned of their plans beforehand and decided to raid the airplane during negotiations on the runway. An operation involving 20 people on four different flights timed to go off within minutes of each other requires years of planning to pull off. There's no way your show could have been the inspiration for the attack.
It may be Jobs's fault, but in any case, the issue is moot. The choice is not between Aqua and the Classic look-and-feel. The choice is between Jobs and OS X or a dead-in-the-water Apple still making incremental upgrades to OS 9 and getting less relevant by the second. Regardless of Jobs's faults, he did save the company, and I prefer a modern OS with a good GUI to an ancient OS made by a dead company with a great GUI.
Although, for me, I prefer OS X in every way except for the Finder, including appearance and interface. It might help that I studiously avoid Carbon apps (except for the Finder). And of course I like UNIX, which helps. But on the rare occasion that I boot back into OS 9, I feel very constrained and limited.
There are an amazing number of posts talking about what a bad idea this device is because it could easily be used to copy credit cards and so on.
The problem is not with this device! The problem is with your credit cards, speedpass, etc.! If they are that easy to copy, something is wrong with them. This is exactly what "security through obscurity" means. If your speedpass doesn't use encryption and can be copied just by listening in on the radio waves it sends out every time you use it, it's badly designed! If your credit card can be used to make a purchase based entirely on the easily-copied magnetic stripe, it's badly designed! Don't go after people who make card copiers, go after credit card companies who don't put smart chips in their cards and require PINs.
Thanks for your infos, but I am not fully convinced yet. It seems to me you are mostly making the old point, that an accident like Chernobyl couldn't happen in modern plants. My point was that other things can happen, that we didn't take into consideration yet.
Fair enough. But I would like to point out that doubting the safety of nuclear power in general because of a single accident, while simultaneously not understanding how nuclear power works from an engineering and physics standpoint, is foolish. Nitrate-based explosives have killed more people than nuclear power and nuclear weapons ever have, but I don't see people subsequently doubting the safety of their nitrate-based fertilizers. What I see is, people are frightened of nuclear power because they don't understand it and they can only imagine the bad, and I don't feel this is justified. Please don't take this as a personal insult, I mean this as something I see in people in general.
Well, we need to store the waste somewhere where nobody lives and nobody cares too much about habitability, right? Hmm... I just saw a web site with a bunch of pictures about a place like that. Let's store the waste at Chernobyl! It's already uninhabited and contaminated, so why not? Problem solved.
After 9/11 there were concerns about all kinds of things. There were concerns about arab-looking people having graduation parties on their lawns. Post-9/11 concerns have remarkably little to do with the real world.
But maybe they only thought of smaller aircrafts. Steel-inforced concrete maybe sounds good from the point of view of human being, consisting largely out of soft material like water. Jumbo Jets might be less impressed.
This isn't theoretical, it's been tested. Not with a jumbo jet, but with a rocket-propelled F-4 Phantom. It's smaller than a large airliner, but it has larger engines, and it's the engines that have real penetrating power. Don't make the mistake of comparing with the WTC; those buildings were mostly open space and were not designed to take any kind of impact.
And what about those new rockets the US developed to penetrate bunkers 12m below rock?
What about them? There's no way a terrorist would get ahold of one of those. I'm not saying there's no way to breach a reactor's containment. However, with most methods of doing so, whatever breaches the containment is likely to be as dangerous to the surrounding countryside as the containment breach itself.
interesting point, although surely a power plant contains more energy than a PC, so it seems less obvious to me why the explosion couldn't be big enough to blow up my house. So how is it supposed to work? Is there some kind of feedback loop to decrease the activity the hotter it gets (or whatever, I am no nuclear scientist)? Does that loop work without extra controlers, which might have been destroyed in the case of an accident?
Yes, it's possible to make a reactor which reacts less as it gets warmer, without any systems at all. Building a reactor isn't a matter of just piling enriched uranium together until you have enough of it in one place. (You can, but it's really inefficient and nobody actually does.) Instead, you have a very complex system involving enriched uranium, moderators, neutron reflectors, etc. which all have to be in exactly the right position for anything to happen. When stuff heats up, it expands, and it's possible to make it so that this expansion makes the reactor less reactive. Even ignoring that, once the reactor heats up to a certain point, things will start to bend and break, which will knock everything completely out of position and the reaction will stop right away. The China Syndrome (a core melting and sinking to the center of the earth because it keeps itself out) is basically impossible.
Chernobyl was also like this, in fact it's hard to make a reactor that isn't. The giant mistakes in Chernobyl was that it didn't have a containment structure, and it used graphite as the moderator. Graphite is carbon, and carbon burns really nicely. What happened was that the reactor core heated up extremely and set the graphite on fire. That fire threw large pieces of the core into the atmosphere. The way to keep similar accidents from happening is simple: don't put highly-flammable substances in your reactor core! With a sane reactor design, you could even breach the containment dome and nothing really terrible would happen because all of the nasty substances will still stay in one place, absent a large quantity of explosives or flammable substances.
Damn, what a load of self-righteous bullshit. Here you are, also sitting on your ass, posting to slashdot, pontificating, and yet you have the gall to speak for so many other people:
I hope that the generations yet to come understand that the generation currently alive are sorry for what they did to the future, with Chernobyl.
Are they sorry? I'm not sorry, since it wasn't my fault. Maybe the people who are at fault are actually sorry, but of course most of them are dead, killed by their own idiocy. The ones who are really culpable are those who came up with and executed the stupid experiment they tried that day, which screwed everything up. The designers of the plant are somewhat guilty as well, of course, for designing such an unsafe reactor, but less so. Are you really in a position to speak for them and claim that they are sorry for what they did?
I don't know what you build in Germany, but American reactors can take an airliner and not even blink. Well, the control rooms and other outlying buildings will be toast, of course, but the core is inside several feet of steel-reinforced concrete and it won't even notice than you drove several hundred tons of fully-fueled airliner into it.
There are different degrees of fail-safe. For example, I can be 100% sure that my computer will not explode with enough energy to level my house, because there simply is no physical way for that to happen. Likewise, it is possible to design nuclear reactors which have no physical way of exploding or melting down. I'm not talking about safety systems, I'm talking about physics. Even with no safety systems, such a reactor could not cause a disaster like Chernobyl.
Please, don't be dumb. Here's one possible problem off the top of my head:
The mail server generates two very large prime numbers (I figure around 80 bits should keep somebody busy for a while). This is not a particularly slow process. It then multiplies them together and hands the result to the sender.
The sender's job is to factor the large number into its constituent primes and provide the primes to the server. This is extremely time-consuming, but verification is trivial.
There are tons of problems like than. Basically any public key cryptography system contains a problem that would work perfectly for this scheme.