You're living in the past. That's why both patents and copyrights were conceived in the Constitution.
I fear that has little to do with why patents and copyrights are around now - especially copyrights. I'll be curious to see how patent law is tweaked, so that patents can continue to be a barrier-to-entry, yet get rid of patent trolls.
Show me where to shoot a corporation to get a clean (maybe even messy) kill, and I'm with you.
If the Supreme Court declared corporations to be persons in the early 1900s, why has the death penalty never been handed down to one, in the time since? Are they really that much better "people" than flesh-and-blood "people", that much more moral? It's also interesting that in Asimov's original, "The Bicentennial Man" that the robot wasn't granted his "humanity" until he'd sufficiently improved his system that he was going to die.
The only 2 corporate "deaths" I can think of in recent history that were connected with crimes are Enron and the (name forgotten) auditing firm. While government disapproval lead to their deaths in the marketplace, neither was "dechartered", the truer equivalent of the death penalty.
What's wrong with buying a system appropriate to their needs? If all they care about is chat, email, and web browsing, why buy more than necessary?
I won't argue that there can be undesirable "market side effects", nor will I argue that privacy is being lost, excessively and often stupidly. But buying a quad-Core-I7 with ECC DRAM to satisfy "standard pleb" needs isn't going to solve that.
But Mexico is already invading us. How about if we invade Canada, instead. When I was growing up, our family used to invade Canada for a week or two every summer. We went to a little fishing camp on the Trent Waterway system in Ontario.
After ceding the simple stuff, we could graduate to bigger non-US territories that we dominate. After that, we could step aside as they move in on "neutral" places where once we would have objected.
My own pet conjecture is that China will yank our leash after another Republican administration takes office and prepares to invade Iran.
I know you're being funny, but this is perhaps the best place to hang this comment.
We should quit watching China and watch ourselves. If China is outstripping us in scientific progress, then rather than complain about them, we need to examine why we're falling behind, and fix it.
Since you're talking Fox News, let's talk about "Creation Science" or "Intelligent Design", if you prefer. Let's talk about a nation that has become addicted to technology, but mistrusting of science. This has progressed almost to the point of seeking out and killing basic science wherever it may be found, sometimes in the name of religion, sometimes in the name of fiscal waste.
We need to clean up our own house, far more than the attention we're paying to the Chinese home remodeling.
Side note... I sure with they were still teaching the Scientific Method to kids in school.
There would be no ceding of a state, nor would there even be the need to.
We simply would cede interest in some non-US territory that we currently dominate. Their politicians are smart enough to know just how much eggs to smear on our face, how much to not, and how to make real gains while splitting the difference.
You don't trust the current Congress, I don't trust them or the previous Congress, either. The one thing I'll hand to the current crop of Democrats is that they're generally too inept to do damage at the same rate that the Republicans have. The two groups do damage on different fronts, but it's damage, either way. With both sides, when they're giving you something with the visible hand, you have to watch out for what they're taking away with the hidden hand.
No, the Constitution isn't dead, it's a base set of absolutes, plus guidance. There is versatile text there that can be reasonably reinterpreted in new circumstances. I'll agree that you can't draw something out of nothing, but there's plenty to say about privacy in the 4th amendment already, for instance. Oh, and the BIGGEST Constitutional crime is none of the above... it's an early 20th century decision that grants personhood to corporations. THAT's drawing something from nothing.
If it folds, the corporation has just lost everything - it's "life." (It's dead, Jim - Appropriate since we're talking about space travel.) Of course the corporation is composed of people, and they've lost much less than they would if their soverign "died," but the company itself is dead.
OTOH, a foreign sovereign wouldn't fold in such a disaster. It would certainly go "Oops, sorry," but in the general scheme of things, space transportation is likely to be a minor fraction of what a sovereign does. About the worst-case scenario would be a sovereign whose only/major source of revenue was space access, and then to have such a disaster.
Then you need to read the end of the Bill of Rights and some of the founders' musings...
The Bill of Rights, and the Constitution, for that matter, were explicitly never meant to be enumerations of our Rights. We are supposed to have ALL rights, except that which the Constitution takes for the federal government and the States take for themselves. There were founders who disapproved of the Bill of Rights because they feared that it would be taken as an enumeration and limitation of peoples' rights.
Plus I have to go back to your statements, "The constitution doesn't give you, or a business formed by you and a friend, any rights. The constitution is there to limit the government's ability to take those rights away."
The Constitution and the Bill or Rights are a snapshot in time, reflecting their interests, experiences, and priorities. I have a feeling that if they were writing such in today's world, privacy would be right up there, and they'd distrust corporations as much as they distrust government. Both are assemblies of people that can be so large as to have only marginal accountability.
Don't forget that these same "conservatives", whose critics you have criticized, also are telling us that "Nowhere in the Constitution is there an enumerated right to privacy." I also wish that some "Strict Constructionists" (Exactly what's written, no more, no less) would take a walk over to the Jefferson Memorial and read some of his thoughts chiseled onto the walls there.
Years back I found a bug in the network login script, too. A friend scheduled us for departing flights prior to 7:00am, and then failed to show. I figured I'd give him a little favor for getting us on the early flight, then skipping out on us. The normal login policy was, "5 failed logins and you get locked out."
So I attempted to login to his account 5 times with random passwords. On the 5th try I got in. I couldn't believe I'd guessed it, so I tried 5 times again, with a single bogus password. On the 5th try I got in.
I went straight to the security guy and showed him. After turning a few shades, he thanked me and told me not to tell anyone. A few days later I was told that the problem had been put in just the weekend before, and that it was fixed now. Some time later, the friend who had skipped out on the flight told me he'd gotten a call from security about odd activity on his account.
At least in those (pre-internet, pre-PC) days, things weren't so paranoid that there would be talk about firing people.
Elsewhere in this thread there are comments like, "Just because it can be audited doesn't mean that it is," etc. Those comments are to a true, to a certain extent. Certainly long-hiding bugs have been found in the Linux kernel and software.
But there is one other factor at work, here. I've spent a few decades in the corporate world, and I can guarantee that the first response will be political/legal. Technical issues will come later. Let's say that Joe Coder-in-the-trenches finds a lurking bug in the source code that can be exploited. He reports it, and it starts moving up the management chain, probably gaining urgency as it goes. But at some point, some level of management is going to say, "What would an emergency patch for this look like to our customers?", "What does this do to our statistics?", "What are the potential liabilities?", etc. At that point, the patch will go in, and it will get fixed, but it will be put into "the process" and run through as quietly/non-disruptively as possible. The longer a bug has existed without being exploited, the more delay in "the process" will be tolerated.
I've also seen situations where patching a bug is interpreted by management as "admission of guilt," and then they start worrying about liability/recall type issues. In particular there was once a situation where they stonewalled a problem so hard that it when it finally broke, of course they got dynamic, let us fix it the way we'd been pushing to do, took credit, and gave themselves nice pat$ on the backs. In that case, it was at least decent that they didn't punish us other than during the stonewalling phase. We even got some pat$ on the back, too.
I have more confidence that such decisions in Linux will be technically, not politically based. I also know that there are personality issues, so it's not 100%, but it will generally be better.
Way back when, there was a company called Borland that brought out a compiler called, "Turbo Pascal." (Obviously I'm not telling the gray-haired Slashdotters anything they don't know already.) Software publishers were as interested in licensing and usage restriction as they are today, except back then they were generally using even klutzier methods of DRM, then called "copy protection." Into this realm of expensive software, expensive compilers, copy protection, and general mess Borland brought "Turbo Pascal" for a remarkably low price and a most bizarre software license.
The Borland Turbo Pascal license said basically, "Treat this software like a book." Use it yourself, loan it to a friend or two. Just don't do both at the same time. You can loan a book to a friend, but while he has it, you can't read it. Treat this software just the same way.
Well, it looks like dream of the Borland dream is finally coming to pass - software and books are getting equal treatment. But rather than software being treated like a book, books are being treated like software.
When fibre cables become commonplace, companies like Monster will assure us that simple aluminum reflective cladding is insufficient. Only Monster's platinum reflective cladding makes sure that all of your photons make it from one end of the cable to the other with minimum attenuation and dispersion. No doubt they'll make the fibre itself from unicorn horn, from unicorns free-range raised in the Swiss Alps.
The flip side of a "false sense of security" is an "under-appreciation of importance."
In spite of the dismal state of security on the internet, most attacks are still based on human engineering. In other words, the people are still a weaker link than the horrible software security we currently have. Beef up our software, improve certificate and key generation and distribution, and the human engineering attacks would step up. This time they'd have new targets - certificates, private keys, etc. Given the current state of things, such attacks would get exactly what they're after, in too many cases. The real problem is that because "now things are secure" more trust would be placed in internet communications and more money/reputation/etc would be placed at risk. Bad things would happen until we properly recalibrated our habits - or our expectations.
> This has to be one of the most confusing and confused paragraphs I've ever seen on Slashdot - > but I'll try to make some sense of it.
Thanks... I still think I'm nowhere compared to timecube and GNAA.
> Since the Navy doesn't provide training for any domestic reactors, this can't possibly be true.
I said this wrong... What I meant was the industrial base, including the industrial skills. PWR vessels and attachments require unique skills to fabricate, as does any exotic project. If the civil nuclear power industry is based on the same technology as Naval nuclear reactors, it increases the size of the industrial base, bringing at least a little better economy of scale. To go back to your "Cray and a pocket calculator", obviously they're different. But both use silicon chips, though again I'll agree widely different technologies. But the differences are minor compared to the similarities. To try and run a silicon industry for Cray would be impractical, whereas to run that industry for things like pocket calculators (not just pocket calculators) means economy of scale. At that point, you can piggy-back the more exotic Cray stuff on top of the commodity base, much more practically.
Obviously the industrial operations base doesn't feed into the Navy, though likely as nuclear operations personnel leave the Navy they may be likely to wind up in civil nuclear operations.
As for the death of the domestic nuclear industry, I guess I missed a step or 2 in there... Count your gray hairs, because there is minimum age to really appreciate the public hysteria behind this. The US domestic nuclear industry died in 1979, with the unfortunate juxtaposition of the Three Mile Island incident with the release of "The China Syndrome". This also required the background of years of "troubled nuclear industry" with cost overruns, delays, minor incidents, etc, along with a healthy counter-culture movement of the 60s and 70s that distrusted anything big, corporate, or government.
There really are inherently safe designs that simply can't melt down. They also tend to scale differently, being smaller, which would have played better with the social/political climate of the times. There's also the way France does their nuclear business, and I'm not sure why we couldn't have copied more of it. To be honest, I don't know what their base technology is, but I've heard that instead of each plant being a unique ground-up design, they picked one basic design, standardized on it, and incrementally improved it. I've also heard that they are more heavily into fuel reprocessing, (onsite?) mitigating at least some of the waste issues.
Had we taken a different approach to nuclear power in the US, it still might have failed. But socially and politically, the approach we took was more likely to fail, given the times, than it needed to be.
This isn't an isolated incident. Vermont Yankee has been plagued by problems like this, though generally less critical. There's been a photo circulating around of an incident a few years back, where one of the cooling structures fell apart. (Really... fell apart - the photo looks pretty sick, and you wonder what neglect gets it to that point.) I seem to remember that a few years back that lost some spent fuel rods, too. I don't remember how that turned out - I think it was a bookkeeping problem, and they were in the cooling pond all along.
Entergy took the plant over a few years ago, and people here weren't too happy about control going to some out of our region (Texas) firm. Plus I'm under the impression that there was supposed to be some sort of decommissioning fund being built up during operating years, so they could properly take care of the plant at end-of-life. Now there's something about no money to take care of shutdown costs, etc. (Sounds to me like raiding a pension fund, but that's probably unfair.)
Now with a rather checkered safety and maintenance record, they're trying to get an operating license extension. In addition, they're putting in for a rather hefty rate increase at the same time. People here aren't too happy.
Others have suggested building *safe* plants. Personally I blame the US Navy. I once heard that basically we have landlubbing ship/submarine reactors for our domestic electric power plants for the sake of the US Navy. The type of reactors we use in the US are great for power density, not so great for safety by-design, not so great for cleanup, etc. But the Navy gets the benefit of a "nuclear industry" that practices their kind of reactors. Nuclear training in the US is essentially all for Navy reactors. Unfortunately, this contributed to the death of the nuclear industry in the US. Had we gone with one of the inherently safe, inherently cleaner designs, or had we taken the French standardization-based approach instead of a whole pile of similar one-offs, we might still have a nuclear industry, cleaner air, cheaper power, etc.
> I've never understood why people seem to freak out so much more over lab animals than they do over agricultural ones.
Quite simple... "Somebody Else's Problem" To freak out over agricultural animals might compel them to take action - maybe even change their lifestyles or something. It's much easier to freak out over lab animals where the it appears that the only ones directly affected are the researchers and the Evil Megacorporations who employ them. Never mind that their lives have very likely been made better, if not outright saved, by some of that research done on lab animals in the past. That's a sufficiently diffuse connection that most people wouldn't realize that an outright ban on lab animals would very likely hurt their grandchildren, if not their children or themselves.
I don't have a problem with the use of lab animals, though of course I'd prefer it be done wisely, humanely, and not wastefully.
I could say the same thing about food animals, though I don't do as good a job of being consistent, there. - I've no problem with hunting, as long as the meat is used. I don't like the idea of cutting off the rack and leaving the body to rot. (or get scavenged) At the very least, a hunted animal has a chance to get away, which a farm/stockyard animal doesn't. - Along that line, I don't fish anymore. The fish nearby have safe consumption limits, and I'm not into the idea of catch-and-release. - I don't eat veal - the conditions are inhumane. If I were better, I'd shop more carefully for meat and poultry in general. The "factory farm" in addition to being inhumane, externalizes a lot of cost in terms of waste - the classic farm, with the mix of crops and animals, has on-site usage for that.
When my daughter was 3-something, I took her into town, and was chatting with one of the guys at the computer store. (We did more than just go to the computer store, of course.) I let her tap away at a keyboard, figuring she wouldn't be able to hurt much. I turned around to see the "Confirm Delete" dialog. I'm not sure if she confirmed or canceled, nor what she deleted if she confirmed. Oh well...
Besides, my wife was exchanging emails with her at least daily, I call at least weekly, and my brother calls every morning. (He has an unlimited long-distance plan.) We're not grudging with our contact. Besides, look elsewhere on this thread for more of here computing experiences. We figure it's good for her to be using one as much as she is. We first set her up with one at age 69.
She wasn't so much finding bugs with Linux - she was driving icewm exactly the way it was supposed to work. It was merely a classic PEBKAC, one so unlikely you won't expect it once, let alone multiple times. I once sat down with her, and asked her to check her email while I watched. She dropped down the menu, picked "email" and then started clicking at random all around the screen. I asked her what she was doing, and she answered, "That's what makes it work!" Basically she didn't like waiting for her computer do do something, so she started to "placebo click", and came to feel that doing so was essential. The clicking was purely random, with the mouse moving the whole time. Probably most of the time it was doing no harm, though now that I think of it, maybe that's what helped her drill into the icewm theme menus. My bigger fear would be that thunderbird would pop up and she'd get in a few random clicks inside its border before she noticed it and stopped. In that case, she could be triggering some number of unknown actions - tagging a message as spam or changing sort order come to mind for two.
She's moved to assisted living, and for the smaller space is now running an Eee Box with Windows XP. Part of the thought behind using WinXP was that she could get more local help.
Because when she did it, the theme change confused here terribly, making "the screen look all wrong."
I forgot to mention that the theme changes were unintentional. That was my point, unintentionally navigating 4 layers deep into a nested menu is just a little mindboggling, yet she managed it on a repeating basis.
You're right, if she wanted to and felt comfortable doing so, I never would try to lock her out of it - I'd help her. But that wasn't the case.
Slashdot Mirror
You're living in the past. That's why both patents and copyrights were conceived in the Constitution.
I fear that has little to do with why patents and copyrights are around now - especially copyrights. I'll be curious to see how patent law is tweaked, so that patents can continue to be a barrier-to-entry, yet get rid of patent trolls.
Show me where to shoot a corporation to get a clean (maybe even messy) kill, and I'm with you.
If the Supreme Court declared corporations to be persons in the early 1900s, why has the death penalty never been handed down to one, in the time since? Are they really that much better "people" than flesh-and-blood "people", that much more moral? It's also interesting that in Asimov's original, "The Bicentennial Man" that the robot wasn't granted his "humanity" until he'd sufficiently improved his system that he was going to die.
The only 2 corporate "deaths" I can think of in recent history that were connected with crimes are Enron and the (name forgotten) auditing firm. While government disapproval lead to their deaths in the marketplace, neither was "dechartered", the truer equivalent of the death penalty.
What's wrong with buying a system appropriate to their needs? If all they care about is chat, email, and web browsing, why buy more than necessary?
I won't argue that there can be undesirable "market side effects", nor will I argue that privacy is being lost, excessively and often stupidly. But buying a quad-Core-I7 with ECC DRAM to satisfy "standard pleb" needs isn't going to solve that.
But Mexico is already invading us. How about if we invade Canada, instead. When I was growing up, our family used to invade Canada for a week or two every summer. We went to a little fishing camp on the Trent Waterway system in Ontario.
After ceding the simple stuff, we could graduate to bigger non-US territories that we dominate. After that, we could step aside as they move in on "neutral" places where once we would have objected.
My own pet conjecture is that China will yank our leash after another Republican administration takes office and prepares to invade Iran.
Sorry, I'm just feeling too humor-impaired these days.
I know you're being funny, but this is perhaps the best place to hang this comment.
We should quit watching China and watch ourselves. If China is outstripping us in scientific progress, then rather than complain about them, we need to examine why we're falling behind, and fix it.
Since you're talking Fox News, let's talk about "Creation Science" or "Intelligent Design", if you prefer. Let's talk about a nation that has become addicted to technology, but mistrusting of science. This has progressed almost to the point of seeking out and killing basic science wherever it may be found, sometimes in the name of religion, sometimes in the name of fiscal waste.
We need to clean up our own house, far more than the attention we're paying to the Chinese home remodeling.
Side note... I sure with they were still teaching the Scientific Method to kids in school.
There would be no ceding of a state, nor would there even be the need to.
We simply would cede interest in some non-US territory that we currently dominate. Their politicians are smart enough to know just how much eggs to smear on our face, how much to not, and how to make real gains while splitting the difference.
You don't trust the current Congress, I don't trust them or the previous Congress, either. The one thing I'll hand to the current crop of Democrats is that they're generally too inept to do damage at the same rate that the Republicans have. The two groups do damage on different fronts, but it's damage, either way. With both sides, when they're giving you something with the visible hand, you have to watch out for what they're taking away with the hidden hand.
No, the Constitution isn't dead, it's a base set of absolutes, plus guidance. There is versatile text there that can be reasonably reinterpreted in new circumstances. I'll agree that you can't draw something out of nothing, but there's plenty to say about privacy in the 4th amendment already, for instance. Oh, and the BIGGEST Constitutional crime is none of the above... it's an early 20th century decision that grants personhood to corporations. THAT's drawing something from nothing.
If it folds, the corporation has just lost everything - it's "life." (It's dead, Jim - Appropriate since we're talking about space travel.) Of course the corporation is composed of people, and they've lost much less than they would if their soverign "died," but the company itself is dead.
OTOH, a foreign sovereign wouldn't fold in such a disaster. It would certainly go "Oops, sorry," but in the general scheme of things, space transportation is likely to be a minor fraction of what a sovereign does. About the worst-case scenario would be a sovereign whose only/major source of revenue was space access, and then to have such a disaster.
Then you need to read the end of the Bill of Rights and some of the founders' musings...
The Bill of Rights, and the Constitution, for that matter, were explicitly never meant to be enumerations of our Rights. We are supposed to have ALL rights, except that which the Constitution takes for the federal government and the States take for themselves. There were founders who disapproved of the Bill of Rights because they feared that it would be taken as an enumeration and limitation of peoples' rights.
Plus I have to go back to your statements, "The constitution doesn't give you, or a business formed by you and a friend, any rights. The constitution is there to limit the government's ability to take those rights away."
The Constitution and the Bill or Rights are a snapshot in time, reflecting their interests, experiences, and priorities. I have a feeling that if they were writing such in today's world, privacy would be right up there, and they'd distrust corporations as much as they distrust government. Both are assemblies of people that can be so large as to have only marginal accountability.
Don't forget that these same "conservatives", whose critics you have criticized, also are telling us that "Nowhere in the Constitution is there an enumerated right to privacy." I also wish that some "Strict Constructionists" (Exactly what's written, no more, no less) would take a walk over to the Jefferson Memorial and read some of his thoughts chiseled onto the walls there.
Years back I found a bug in the network login script, too. A friend scheduled us for departing flights prior to 7:00am, and then failed to show. I figured I'd give him a little favor for getting us on the early flight, then skipping out on us. The normal login policy was, "5 failed logins and you get locked out."
So I attempted to login to his account 5 times with random passwords. On the 5th try I got in.
I couldn't believe I'd guessed it, so I tried 5 times again, with a single bogus password. On the 5th try I got in.
I went straight to the security guy and showed him. After turning a few shades, he thanked me and told me not to tell anyone. A few days later I was told that the problem had been put in just the weekend before, and that it was fixed now. Some time later, the friend who had skipped out on the flight told me he'd gotten a call from security about odd activity on his account.
At least in those (pre-internet, pre-PC) days, things weren't so paranoid that there would be talk about firing people.
Elsewhere in this thread there are comments like, "Just because it can be audited doesn't mean that it is," etc. Those comments are to a true, to a certain extent. Certainly long-hiding bugs have been found in the Linux kernel and software.
But there is one other factor at work, here. I've spent a few decades in the corporate world, and I can guarantee that the first response will be political/legal. Technical issues will come later. Let's say that Joe Coder-in-the-trenches finds a lurking bug in the source code that can be exploited. He reports it, and it starts moving up the management chain, probably gaining urgency as it goes. But at some point, some level of management is going to say, "What would an emergency patch for this look like to our customers?", "What does this do to our statistics?", "What are the potential liabilities?", etc. At that point, the patch will go in, and it will get fixed, but it will be put into "the process" and run through as quietly/non-disruptively as possible. The longer a bug has existed without being exploited, the more delay in "the process" will be tolerated.
I've also seen situations where patching a bug is interpreted by management as "admission of guilt," and then they start worrying about liability/recall type issues. In particular there was once a situation where they stonewalled a problem so hard that it when it finally broke, of course they got dynamic, let us fix it the way we'd been pushing to do, took credit, and gave themselves nice pat$ on the backs. In that case, it was at least decent that they didn't punish us other than during the stonewalling phase. We even got some pat$ on the back, too.
I have more confidence that such decisions in Linux will be technically, not politically based. I also know that there are personality issues, so it's not 100%, but it will generally be better.
Way back when, there was a company called Borland that brought out a compiler called, "Turbo Pascal." (Obviously I'm not telling the gray-haired Slashdotters anything they don't know already.) Software publishers were as interested in licensing and usage restriction as they are today, except back then they were generally using even klutzier methods of DRM, then called "copy protection." Into this realm of expensive software, expensive compilers, copy protection, and general mess Borland brought "Turbo Pascal" for a remarkably low price and a most bizarre software license.
The Borland Turbo Pascal license said basically, "Treat this software like a book." Use it yourself, loan it to a friend or two. Just don't do both at the same time. You can loan a book to a friend, but while he has it, you can't read it. Treat this software just the same way.
Well, it looks like dream of the Borland dream is finally coming to pass - software and books are getting equal treatment. But rather than software being treated like a book, books are being treated like software.
Which brings us back to Monster...
When fibre cables become commonplace, companies like Monster will assure us that simple aluminum reflective cladding is insufficient. Only Monster's platinum reflective cladding makes sure that all of your photons make it from one end of the cable to the other with minimum attenuation and dispersion. No doubt they'll make the fibre itself from unicorn horn, from unicorns free-range raised in the Swiss Alps.
The flip side of a "false sense of security" is an "under-appreciation of importance."
In spite of the dismal state of security on the internet, most attacks are still based on human engineering. In other words, the people are still a weaker link than the horrible software security we currently have. Beef up our software, improve certificate and key generation and distribution, and the human engineering attacks would step up. This time they'd have new targets - certificates, private keys, etc. Given the current state of things, such attacks would get exactly what they're after, in too many cases. The real problem is that because "now things are secure" more trust would be placed in internet communications and more money/reputation/etc would be placed at risk. Bad things would happen until we properly recalibrated our habits - or our expectations.
> This has to be one of the most confusing and confused paragraphs I've ever seen on Slashdot -
> but I'll try to make some sense of it.
Thanks... I still think I'm nowhere compared to timecube and GNAA.
> Since the Navy doesn't provide training for any domestic reactors, this can't possibly be true.
I said this wrong... What I meant was the industrial base, including the industrial skills. PWR vessels and attachments require unique skills to fabricate, as does any exotic project. If the civil nuclear power industry is based on the same technology as Naval nuclear reactors, it increases the size of the industrial base, bringing at least a little better economy of scale. To go back to your "Cray and a pocket calculator", obviously they're different. But both use silicon chips, though again I'll agree widely different technologies. But the differences are minor compared to the similarities. To try and run a silicon industry for Cray would be impractical, whereas to run that industry for things like pocket calculators (not just pocket calculators) means economy of scale. At that point, you can piggy-back the more exotic Cray stuff on top of the commodity base, much more practically.
Obviously the industrial operations base doesn't feed into the Navy, though likely as nuclear operations personnel leave the Navy they may be likely to wind up in civil nuclear operations.
As for the death of the domestic nuclear industry, I guess I missed a step or 2 in there... Count your gray hairs, because there is minimum age to really appreciate the public hysteria behind this. The US domestic nuclear industry died in 1979, with the unfortunate juxtaposition of the Three Mile Island incident with the release of "The China Syndrome". This also required the background of years of "troubled nuclear industry" with cost overruns, delays, minor incidents, etc, along with a healthy counter-culture movement of the 60s and 70s that distrusted anything big, corporate, or government.
There really are inherently safe designs that simply can't melt down. They also tend to scale differently, being smaller, which would have played better with the social/political climate of the times. There's also the way France does their nuclear business, and I'm not sure why we couldn't have copied more of it. To be honest, I don't know what their base technology is, but I've heard that instead of each plant being a unique ground-up design, they picked one basic design, standardized on it, and incrementally improved it. I've also heard that they are more heavily into fuel reprocessing, (onsite?) mitigating at least some of the waste issues.
Had we taken a different approach to nuclear power in the US, it still might have failed. But socially and politically, the approach we took was more likely to fail, given the times, than it needed to be.
This isn't an isolated incident. Vermont Yankee has been plagued by problems like this, though generally less critical. There's been a photo circulating around of an incident a few years back, where one of the cooling structures fell apart. (Really... fell apart - the photo looks pretty sick, and you wonder what neglect gets it to that point.) I seem to remember that a few years back that lost some spent fuel rods, too. I don't remember how that turned out - I think it was a bookkeeping problem, and they were in the cooling pond all along.
Entergy took the plant over a few years ago, and people here weren't too happy about control going to some out of our region (Texas) firm. Plus I'm under the impression that there was supposed to be some sort of decommissioning fund being built up during operating years, so they could properly take care of the plant at end-of-life. Now there's something about no money to take care of shutdown costs, etc. (Sounds to me like raiding a pension fund, but that's probably unfair.)
Now with a rather checkered safety and maintenance record, they're trying to get an operating license extension. In addition, they're putting in for a rather hefty rate increase at the same time. People here aren't too happy.
Others have suggested building *safe* plants. Personally I blame the US Navy. I once heard that basically we have landlubbing ship/submarine reactors for our domestic electric power plants for the sake of the US Navy. The type of reactors we use in the US are great for power density, not so great for safety by-design, not so great for cleanup, etc. But the Navy gets the benefit of a "nuclear industry" that practices their kind of reactors. Nuclear training in the US is essentially all for Navy reactors. Unfortunately, this contributed to the death of the nuclear industry in the US. Had we gone with one of the inherently safe, inherently cleaner designs, or had we taken the French standardization-based approach instead of a whole pile of similar one-offs, we might still have a nuclear industry, cleaner air, cheaper power, etc.
> I've never understood why people seem to freak out so much more over lab animals than they do over agricultural ones.
Quite simple... "Somebody Else's Problem" To freak out over agricultural animals might compel them to take action - maybe even change their lifestyles or something. It's much easier to freak out over lab animals where the it appears that the only ones directly affected are the researchers and the Evil Megacorporations who employ them. Never mind that their lives have very likely been made better, if not outright saved, by some of that research done on lab animals in the past. That's a sufficiently diffuse connection that most people wouldn't realize that an outright ban on lab animals would very likely hurt their grandchildren, if not their children or themselves.
I don't have a problem with the use of lab animals, though of course I'd prefer it be done wisely, humanely, and not wastefully.
I could say the same thing about food animals, though I don't do as good a job of being consistent, there.
- I've no problem with hunting, as long as the meat is used. I don't like the idea of cutting off the rack and leaving the body to rot. (or get scavenged) At the very least, a hunted animal has a chance to get away, which a farm/stockyard animal doesn't.
- Along that line, I don't fish anymore. The fish nearby have safe consumption limits, and I'm not into the idea of catch-and-release.
- I don't eat veal - the conditions are inhumane. If I were better, I'd shop more carefully for meat and poultry in general. The "factory farm" in addition to being inhumane, externalizes a lot of cost in terms of waste - the classic farm, with the mix of crops and animals, has on-site usage for that.
Should have thought of that one, too late now.
When my daughter was 3-something, I took her into town, and was chatting with one of the guys at the computer store. (We did more than just go to the computer store, of course.) I let her tap away at a keyboard, figuring she wouldn't be able to hurt much. I turned around to see the "Confirm Delete" dialog. I'm not sure if she confirmed or canceled, nor what she deleted if she confirmed. Oh well...
No, she isn't really that savvy.
Besides, my wife was exchanging emails with her at least daily, I call at least weekly, and my brother calls every morning. (He has an unlimited long-distance plan.) We're not grudging with our contact. Besides, look elsewhere on this thread for more of here computing experiences. We figure it's good for her to be using one as much as she is. We first set her up with one at age 69.
She wasn't so much finding bugs with Linux - she was driving icewm exactly the way it was supposed to work. It was merely a classic PEBKAC, one so unlikely you won't expect it once, let alone multiple times. I once sat down with her, and asked her to check her email while I watched. She dropped down the menu, picked "email" and then started clicking at random all around the screen. I asked her what she was doing, and she answered, "That's what makes it work!" Basically she didn't like waiting for her computer do do something, so she started to "placebo click", and came to feel that doing so was essential. The clicking was purely random, with the mouse moving the whole time. Probably most of the time it was doing no harm, though now that I think of it, maybe that's what helped her drill into the icewm theme menus. My bigger fear would be that thunderbird would pop up and she'd get in a few random clicks inside its border before she noticed it and stopped. In that case, she could be triggering some number of unknown actions - tagging a message as spam or changing sort order come to mind for two.
She's moved to assisted living, and for the smaller space is now running an Eee Box with Windows XP. Part of the thought behind using WinXP was that she could get more local help.
Because when she did it, the theme change confused here terribly, making "the screen look all wrong."
I forgot to mention that the theme changes were unintentional. That was my point, unintentionally navigating 4 layers deep into a nested menu is just a little mindboggling, yet she managed it on a repeating basis.
You're right, if she wanted to and felt comfortable doing so, I never would try to lock her out of it - I'd help her. But that wasn't the case.