Are you going to heat your New England home with nuclear electricity?
Absolutely. Geothermal heat-pumps are the most efficient way to heat and cool, and it can only get better if electricity gets cheaper.
Will you create plastics feedstock from nuclear electricity?
Well, if electric vehicles take off, and electricity gets cheaper, we may very well switch back to GLASS for packaging, rather than most uses of plastic. That doesn't eliminate plastic, but it could lead to a significant reduction.
If it's cheaper or more profitable to bring it by tanker from the Middle East than it is to pull it from the Gulf of Mexico, you can bet that is where we'll get most of it.
You're missing the point. The problem with importing oil isn't that it comes from "OVER THERE". The problem is that we are in dire straights if any ONE of our foreign suppliers ceases to supply us. Being so dependent on marginally-unfriendly foreign countries is BAD. Now, if we are using 1/3rd less oil, the problem is drastically reduced (even if we opt to import much of it), because we can just ramp-up domestic production in fairly short order, or get an increasing amount of slightly more expensive oil from another friendly country. Right now, we can't make-up the difference if a major supplier blacklists us, THAT is the problem.
* The emergency brake should be used only if you have reason to believe your normal brakes aren't working. Using them first will only give you rear brakes, and will LOCK the wheels, giving less braking power.
* Cutting the ignition will lock your steering-wheel, putting you in much worse danger if you don't know to turn the key back to "run" right away. It certainly won't damage your engine.
* Park won't help. Above 10MPH or so, it'll just make a clicking noise, and won't slow you down at all.
* Shifting into low gear won't do too much damage to your transmission, but will likely burn up your engine (which is the part that will slow you down) as it hits about 4X the maximum RPMs it's designed for. I'd love to watch the needle on the Tac break-off.
Now, I realize that most drivers in the US these days would recognize a clutch pedal or a manual gearbox if it hit them over the head - but in an automatic transmission the same principal applies - shift into neutral (and the "N" doesn't mean "Now we are almost ready to go"....)
Congratulations, you just got killed! Shifting into neutral sapped much of the power that would have been applied to your power brakes, drastically increasing your stopping distance...
Now, if your engine really has got the throttle stuck to the max, and you've got a decent stopping distance to work with, yes, shifting into neutral is the thing to do. Your advice is likely to cause accidents under normal circumstances, however. In general, if you need to stop fast at highway speeds, your best bet is shifting into the lowest possible gear while trying to apply the brakes, which should slow you to a snail's pace in short order, even if your throttle is pegged, and brakes aren't working at all. At low speeds (25MPH), shifting into neutral and applying foot brakes, as well as parking/emergency brakes would be the best idea.
No it fucking doesn't. Just because there's something you don't like doesn't mean you can pretend like it's not really there.
You know, it's idiots like you that give science a bad name. Ooh, a scientific paper! It must be true! Never mind how shaky the evidence is, or the lack of confirmation. No.
"I must go out and buy a sports car, because a scientific survey showed that people who own sports cars, stay healthier and live longer."
"And their analysis shows an excess of extinctions every 27 million years, with a confidence level of 99%.". We're talking about hard statistical analysis, there's absolutely nothing that goes in the way of your bullshit "anomaly/bias/incomplete data" explanation.
Right, nothing at all... Because of course "growing consensus" (from TFA) means "irrefutable fact".
And never mind all scientific the evidence that "The apparent periodicity is probably due to a statistical fluke or subjective bias."
Or that: "Only 25% of these fish and echinoderm extinctions are real (disappearance of a monophyletic group). The remaining 75% is noise, chiefly 'extinctions' of non-monophyletic groups, mistaken dating, and 'families' containing one species only. The signal-to-noise ratio is very similar in echinoderms (27:73) and fishes (23:77). Periodicity in our sample is a feature of the noise component, not of the signal."
If your interpretation of Occam's Razor is "if I can't see why things are the way they are then they mustn't be like this" you need to do some reading.
As opposed to your belief that, if you like what the paper says, it must be true, despite all evidence to the contrary.
both World Wars were convincingly won much quicker than the two we are currently embroiled in.
Not really. The "war" part of the Iraq/Afghanistan conflicts lasted all of a couple weeks. All standing military forces were defeated, and the capitols were occupied almost immediate.
No, the most simplest explanation is that it's all an imagined phenomenon. A statistical anomaly due to selection bias, miscalculation, or vastly incomplete data-set... A ghost. Occam's Razor says so.
We constantly find new and amazing ways to kill each other more easily.
We already have exceptionally convenient ways to kill EVERYONE. Every weapon developed after thr 1960s is actually designed to make it easier to SELECTIVELY kill people. In other words, less collateral damage.
And making it HARD to kill people isn't a good thing. Go back through antiquity, and you'll find that, though it was difficult, more people were being killed then, than now. Better weapons reduce the body count, as the war is won more quickly, rather than being a bloody, multi-year war of attrition.
Too bad this much effort doesn't go in other directions which are more beneficial to mankind, and are aimed at saving lives rather than taking them.
What? Better weapons beget better battle-field medicine. A great many scientific advancements have been made in war-time, which save a huge number of lives, both during and long-after the particular wars.
Every single point in the BBC article can be completely undermined by the simple mention of "DVB". Oh look, an open pan-European digital broadcasting standard that DID take off in no time... Hmm. Additionally, I'd like to add that adoption of HD-Radio in the US has gone nowhere, despite being developed and licensed by a single company, and adopted by the FCC. It would seem that audio broadcasting is a fundamentally different problem from that of video broadcasting. Is it the lower margins, the lack of consumer interest in the quality of radio with the uptake of iPods, or just that everyone has had enough bandwidth for high quality digital audio streaming over the internet for well over a decade now? I don't have a crystal ball, so I can't say, and I haven't seen any helpful information from news organizations, either.
And for the record, you would be best served by ignoring damn near ALL comments under this story. The amount of ignorance and misinformation is overwhelming, and I'm sure not going to go around respond to every single one...
The quote really isn't off-topic, it's quite relevant. My little rant was the off-topic bit.
And your quote doesn't help your argument... The only thing listed that is shared with H.264 is "intra prediction". The other bits of ffmpeg that are shared with VP8 are from PREVIOUS VPx codecs. Yes, I certainly won't deny that VP8 is VERY similar to VP7/6/5/4/3 in many ways.
I think that they're more similar than you choose to believe...
Meanwhile, I think you're the one who is mistaken. And since I KNOW that I know quite a lot about VPx, I'm going to take my opinion supported by facts, over yours which is not.
No mistake at all. I merely didn't explain the point I was making, and now YOU try to stretch it into a straw man you can knock down as if it matters. Try as hard as you like, I'll still know far more about lossy codecs than anyone here... I have yet to have an intelligent conversation about lossy encoding in the many years I've been on/. You don't seem to be changing that run.
you're talking about two completely different things.
Nonsense. SAD is a direct alternative to DCT for macroblock comparison functions, and motion vector search. It appears most other encoders use DCT (at least by default), which has a serious negative effect on video quality.
But honestly, if the only thing you can find issue with is my small little out of context and off-topic rant at the end, that's a pretty good implicit endorsement of the meat of everything else I've said...
VP8 and H.264 and other MPEG codecs use basically the same transform so their statements of bias against VP8 ring untrue
An x264 developer may have said it, but that doesn't make it true. He contradicts himself often enough, anyhow...
Yes, the macroblock size is the same, however, that's just about it... VPx codecs use rather different quantizer matrices, never use B-frames, store motion vectors differently, and in general just have a very different and unusual encoding method. There are many ways in which it is different, and more to the point, far more different from H.264 than H.264 is from MPEG-2... Of course it can be over-stated, but it's very, very real.
And BTW, what the hell is a "transform"? If you're going to pretend to be knowledgeable about a subject, you could at least have the decency to use precise terminology, so I can more efficiently ridicule you... If you're talking about the "T" in DCT, then I've got bad news for you. While nearly all lossy codecs are indeed using DCT, that's about as relevant as saying all vehicles burn fuel.
While he's talking about Theora, all points apply directly to VPx. Highly relevant quotes below:
"Theora is rather different than most video codecs, in just about every way you can name"
"As for the idea that most DCT-based codecs are all fundamentally the same, ironically, you can't even count on that with Theora- its DCT is different than the one found in MPEG-1/2/4, H.263, and JPEG (which all use the same DCT)."
But you can ignore him if you like. He's just the guy who actually wrote the VP3 and Theora decoders for FFmpeg, and has reverse engineered numerous other codecs, so I'm sure he doesn't have a clue... You know, unlike a vocal x264 developer...
And just to push further off topic, DCT isn't all that good, anyhow. The default in FFmpeg encoding isn't DCT, but SAD (Sum of Absolute Differences). SAD happens to be much faster, and more importantly, doesn't leave strangely colorful 16x16 blocks (usually green, but often red or other colors) as artifacts in low-bitrate encodings, which then have to be masked, wasting bits which could be better used elsewhere.
One of the professors who was part of doing this test even confirmed that the VP8 developers statement was untrue and misleading.
Facts aren't determined by popular opinion... And 2 people isn't much of a vote, anyhow.
Without your knowledge, your checking account is empty and your mortgage bouncing.
Nonsense. If your credit/debit card is one the same account you use to write checks, you have a problem, whether you have it direct-withdrawn from or otherwise write checks against your credit card account (many allow this), or your checking account.
Want a debit card, but don't want to risk much money, or risk checks bouncing? Open TWO checking accounts.
But really, it's crap any way you look at it. So many companies perform direct withdrawls from a checking account, so even without the debit card, you're still at equally high risk of fraud.
The first are genuinely low power and heavily integrated; but those suckers are slow. The second are pretty zippy by embedded standards; but only low-power by the standards of the desktop/laptop athlons they were derived from
The GX's are brutally slow. The NX's are ULV Socket-A Athlon-TBirds, (and the power consumption isn't bad for a DECADE-OLD CHIP that can still beat the fastest new embedded CPUs from ARM/Intel). The LX's, however, are a pretty good balance. The LX900 w/TDP of 5.1W isn't bad at all. I'd certainly like to see some benchmarks of it next to a recent ATOM, considering how low the MIPS/MHz are on those.
: in the 15 years I've been involved with Linux, OSS developers still can't seem to get a handle on building intuitive, user-friendly, clean, fluid user interfaces.
That's okay... Neither can the closed-source world.
As a counter-example, I submit MPlayer. And I don't mean the GUI that comes with it (though it doesn't affect the point). With MPlayer, if I want it to go full-screen, I hit "f". If I want to pause, I hit "p". If I want to seek forward, I hit the right-arrow key. If I want to seek backwards, left-arrow key. Mute: "m". Quit: "q". Audio-sync delay: "+" and "-". How dammed simple is that?
With Windows Media Player, Full-screen is "ALT-Enter". Forward-seek is something like right-bracket. Quit needs Alt+F4 or similar. et al.
And sadly, it's not just Microsoft's media player. Just about all use similarly obtuse keys for their functions. And don't get me started on the user-unfriendly implications of media players that support encoding and playback of several codecs and container formats, (eg. MPEG-4 audio/video) but ONLY in specific combinations of codec and container, and NOT in any others (eg. AVI). It makes no sense on either a user-interface or technical level.
Not going to happen. Laptops use 12V internally, which means the battery will be higher voltage than that (much higher in fact) and you need a supply voltage that is several volts higher than the battery to charge it, and higher still to be able to charge it while powered-on and running, too.
The standard is ~20V, which isn't bad. Connect two car batteries in series and you get 24V. Throw in a handful of diodes to clean-up the power a bit, and they'll also drop a few volts, to the point it should be safe to use.
12V sealed lead acid motorcycle battery in your pocket for when the li-ion is failing after a year.
I love car batteries for stationary uses. They're just so dirt cheap, and are so large they have tons of power to offer. For mobile uses, however, there's good reason we use NiCd, NiMH, and LiIon. A lead-acid battery would weigh a ton. But more than that, it'll still only power the device for a fraction as long as any other type of battery. They just don't have remotely the energy density of LiIon.
One day we had a sim on test with the customer and during some out-of-normal-range testing, the pilot nose-dived the plane into the primary runway only to see something like 'fuck off Joe' displayed across the entire width of the cockpit view, several feet high.
+10 points if the customer/pilot's name just happened to be Joe!
We've never had home grown terrorist who actually had a 'good' plan to kill people, and actually did kill people, and wasn't trained by some professional group to kill people in that way. (And probably no foreign terrorist either, but that's harder to track down.)
Congratulations. You're encouraging planning for previous threats, which in-turn results in getting broadsided when the new one came along. Sure, when it happens you just come up and say "Well that never happened before, how could I know?" and wash your hands of any responsibility; problem solved. How many times did we hear the Bush Administration repeat the line "Failure of Imagination" and yet you're still encouraging exactly that. That's just slightly less mind-numbingly idiotic than reintroducing the old policy of "do whatever the hijackers say".
The US is the only country that has used nuclear weapons on a civilian population. What this means is that other countries have be nuclear states, but how many would really use it. Only the US has proven it.
Any countries which drops bombs on people would use nuclear weapons if the need arose. There's no question about it. There really isn't a fundamental difference between a high-end conventional bomb, and a low-end fission bomb. Now Fusion bombs are entirely different, just because the scale is mind-boggling... you simply can't use one unless you intend to indiscriminately wipe out entire countries.
The fact that no other countries have used any of their nuclear arsenal is not a testament to how much more moral they are than the US, but rather, a testament to the effectiveness of US' policy of discouraging the use of nuclear weapons. And the use of the first bombs on Japan may be considered part of that same strategy.
Depending on the size of the bomb, the radiation belt may take weeks or even months to return to a 'natural' state.
You've skipped over the most interesting part... The fact that it clears up in mere weeks was completely unexpected by scientists, showing just how active the mechanism is.
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Absolutely. Geothermal heat-pumps are the most efficient way to heat and cool, and it can only get better if electricity gets cheaper.
Well, if electric vehicles take off, and electricity gets cheaper, we may very well switch back to GLASS for packaging, rather than most uses of plastic. That doesn't eliminate plastic, but it could lead to a significant reduction.
You're missing the point. The problem with importing oil isn't that it comes from "OVER THERE". The problem is that we are in dire straights if any ONE of our foreign suppliers ceases to supply us. Being so dependent on marginally-unfriendly foreign countries is BAD. Now, if we are using 1/3rd less oil, the problem is drastically reduced (even if we opt to import much of it), because we can just ramp-up domestic production in fairly short order, or get an increasing amount of slightly more expensive oil from another friendly country. Right now, we can't make-up the difference if a major supplier blacklists us, THAT is the problem.
* The emergency brake should be used only if you have reason to believe your normal brakes aren't working. Using them first will only give you rear brakes, and will LOCK the wheels, giving less braking power.
* Cutting the ignition will lock your steering-wheel, putting you in much worse danger if you don't know to turn the key back to "run" right away. It certainly won't damage your engine.
* Park won't help. Above 10MPH or so, it'll just make a clicking noise, and won't slow you down at all.
* Shifting into low gear won't do too much damage to your transmission, but will likely burn up your engine (which is the part that will slow you down) as it hits about 4X the maximum RPMs it's designed for. I'd love to watch the needle on the Tac break-off.
Congratulations, you just got killed! Shifting into neutral sapped much of the power that would have been applied to your power brakes, drastically increasing your stopping distance...
Now, if your engine really has got the throttle stuck to the max, and you've got a decent stopping distance to work with, yes, shifting into neutral is the thing to do. Your advice is likely to cause accidents under normal circumstances, however. In general, if you need to stop fast at highway speeds, your best bet is shifting into the lowest possible gear while trying to apply the brakes, which should slow you to a snail's pace in short order, even if your throttle is pegged, and brakes aren't working at all. At low speeds (25MPH), shifting into neutral and applying foot brakes, as well as parking/emergency brakes would be the best idea.
You know, it's idiots like you that give science a bad name. Ooh, a scientific paper! It must be true! Never mind how shaky the evidence is, or the lack of confirmation. No.
"I must go out and buy a sports car, because a scientific survey showed that people who own sports cars, stay healthier and live longer."
Right, nothing at all... Because of course "growing consensus" (from TFA) means "irrefutable fact".
And never mind all scientific the evidence that "The apparent periodicity is probably due to a statistical fluke or subjective bias."
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0019-1035(89)90017-1
Or that: "Only 25% of these fish and echinoderm extinctions are real (disappearance of a monophyletic group). The remaining 75% is noise, chiefly 'extinctions' of non-monophyletic groups, mistaken dating, and 'families' containing one species only. The signal-to-noise ratio is very similar in echinoderms (27:73) and fishes (23:77). Periodicity in our sample is a feature of the noise component, not of the signal."
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v330/n6145/abs/330248a0.html
As opposed to your belief that, if you like what the paper says, it must be true, despite all evidence to the contrary.
We can certainly find a way to prevent that...
Not really. The "war" part of the Iraq/Afghanistan conflicts lasted all of a couple weeks. All standing military forces were defeated, and the capitols were occupied almost immediate.
No, the most simplest explanation is that it's all an imagined phenomenon. A statistical anomaly due to selection bias, miscalculation, or vastly incomplete data-set... A ghost. Occam's Razor says so.
We already have exceptionally convenient ways to kill EVERYONE. Every weapon developed after thr 1960s is actually designed to make it easier to SELECTIVELY kill people. In other words, less collateral damage.
And making it HARD to kill people isn't a good thing. Go back through antiquity, and you'll find that, though it was difficult, more people were being killed then, than now. Better weapons reduce the body count, as the war is won more quickly, rather than being a bloody, multi-year war of attrition.
What? Better weapons beget better battle-field medicine. A great many scientific advancements have been made in war-time, which save a huge number of lives, both during and long-after the particular wars.
Every single point in the BBC article can be completely undermined by the simple mention of "DVB". Oh look, an open pan-European digital broadcasting standard that DID take off in no time... Hmm.
Additionally, I'd like to add that adoption of HD-Radio in the US has gone nowhere, despite being developed and licensed by a single company, and adopted by the FCC. It would seem that audio broadcasting is a fundamentally different problem from that of video broadcasting. Is it the lower margins, the lack of consumer interest in the quality of radio with the uptake of iPods, or just that everyone has had enough bandwidth for high quality digital audio streaming over the internet for well over a decade now? I don't have a crystal ball, so I can't say, and I haven't seen any helpful information from news organizations, either.
And for the record, you would be best served by ignoring damn near ALL comments under this story. The amount of ignorance and misinformation is overwhelming, and I'm sure not going to go around respond to every single one...
For those who really want some halfway decent information, I'll just point you to my comment from the last time the topic came up here: http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1699914&cid=32710870
The quote really isn't off-topic, it's quite relevant. My little rant was the off-topic bit.
And your quote doesn't help your argument... The only thing listed that is shared with H.264 is "intra prediction". The other bits of ffmpeg that are shared with VP8 are from PREVIOUS VPx codecs. Yes, I certainly won't deny that VP8 is VERY similar to VP7/6/5/4/3 in many ways.
Meanwhile, I think you're the one who is mistaken. And since I KNOW that I know quite a lot about VPx, I'm going to take my opinion supported by facts, over yours which is not.
No mistake at all. I merely didn't explain the point I was making, and now YOU try to stretch it into a straw man you can knock down as if it matters. Try as hard as you like, I'll still know far more about lossy codecs than anyone here... I have yet to have an intelligent conversation about lossy encoding in the many years I've been on /. You don't seem to be changing that run.
Nonsense. SAD is a direct alternative to DCT for macroblock comparison functions, and motion vector search. It appears most other encoders use DCT (at least by default), which has a serious negative effect on video quality.
But honestly, if the only thing you can find issue with is my small little out of context and off-topic rant at the end, that's a pretty good implicit endorsement of the meat of everything else I've said...
An x264 developer may have said it, but that doesn't make it true. He contradicts himself often enough, anyhow...
Yes, the macroblock size is the same, however, that's just about it... VPx codecs use rather different quantizer matrices, never use B-frames, store motion vectors differently, and in general just have a very different and unusual encoding method. There are many ways in which it is different, and more to the point, far more different from H.264 than H.264 is from MPEG-2... Of course it can be over-stated, but it's very, very real.
And BTW, what the hell is a "transform"? If you're going to pretend to be knowledgeable about a subject, you could at least have the decency to use precise terminology, so I can more efficiently ridicule you... If you're talking about the "T" in DCT, then I've got bad news for you. While nearly all lossy codecs are indeed using DCT, that's about as relevant as saying all vehicles burn fuel.
I'll see your x264 developer quote, and raise you one ffmpeg/Adobe Flash developer quote: http://multimedia.cx/eggs/dct-pr/
While he's talking about Theora, all points apply directly to VPx. Highly relevant quotes below:
"Theora is rather different than most video codecs, in just about every way you can name"
"As for the idea that most DCT-based codecs are all fundamentally the same, ironically, you can't even count on that with Theora- its DCT is different than the one found in MPEG-1/2/4, H.263, and JPEG (which all use the same DCT)."
But you can ignore him if you like. He's just the guy who actually wrote the VP3 and Theora decoders for FFmpeg, and has reverse engineered numerous other codecs, so I'm sure he doesn't have a clue... You know, unlike a vocal x264 developer...
And just to push further off topic, DCT isn't all that good, anyhow. The default in FFmpeg encoding isn't DCT, but SAD (Sum of Absolute Differences). SAD happens to be much faster, and more importantly, doesn't leave strangely colorful 16x16 blocks (usually green, but often red or other colors) as artifacts in low-bitrate encodings, which then have to be masked, wasting bits which could be better used elsewhere.
Facts aren't determined by popular opinion... And 2 people isn't much of a vote, anyhow.
Of course it is... But that introduces added losses, and is considerably more expensive than a simple regulator (for lowering voltages).
Honestly, if you want to be pedantic, you should complain to the GP that he can buy a car adapter for his laptop...
I don't get it... My $30 Motorola i425 phone has a (small) screen which is perfectly readable in direct sunlight.
Nonsense. If your credit/debit card is one the same account you use to write checks, you have a problem, whether you have it direct-withdrawn from or otherwise write checks against your credit card account (many allow this), or your checking account.
Want a debit card, but don't want to risk much money, or risk checks bouncing? Open TWO checking accounts.
But really, it's crap any way you look at it. So many companies perform direct withdrawls from a checking account, so even without the debit card, you're still at equally high risk of fraud.
Actually, there are three: GX, LX and NX.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geode_(processor)#AMD_Geode
The GX's are brutally slow. The NX's are ULV Socket-A Athlon-TBirds, (and the power consumption isn't bad for a DECADE-OLD CHIP that can still beat the fastest new embedded CPUs from ARM/Intel). The LX's, however, are a pretty good balance. The LX900 w/TDP of 5.1W isn't bad at all. I'd certainly like to see some benchmarks of it next to a recent ATOM, considering how low the MIPS/MHz are on those.
Except for the fact that ATOM CPUs can now meet or exceed the power efficiency of many ARM CPUs.
That's okay... Neither can the closed-source world.
As a counter-example, I submit MPlayer. And I don't mean the GUI that comes with it (though it doesn't affect the point). With MPlayer, if I want it to go full-screen, I hit "f". If I want to pause, I hit "p". If I want to seek forward, I hit the right-arrow key. If I want to seek backwards, left-arrow key. Mute: "m". Quit: "q". Audio-sync delay: "+" and "-". How dammed simple is that?
With Windows Media Player, Full-screen is "ALT-Enter". Forward-seek is something like right-bracket. Quit needs Alt+F4 or similar. et al.
And sadly, it's not just Microsoft's media player. Just about all use similarly obtuse keys for their functions. And don't get me started on the user-unfriendly implications of media players that support encoding and playback of several codecs and container formats, (eg. MPEG-4 audio/video) but ONLY in specific combinations of codec and container, and NOT in any others (eg. AVI). It makes no sense on either a user-interface or technical level.
Not going to happen. Laptops use 12V internally, which means the battery will be higher voltage than that (much higher in fact) and you need a supply voltage that is several volts higher than the battery to charge it, and higher still to be able to charge it while powered-on and running, too.
The standard is ~20V, which isn't bad. Connect two car batteries in series and you get 24V. Throw in a handful of diodes to clean-up the power a bit, and they'll also drop a few volts, to the point it should be safe to use.
I love car batteries for stationary uses. They're just so dirt cheap, and are so large they have tons of power to offer. For mobile uses, however, there's good reason we use NiCd, NiMH, and LiIon. A lead-acid battery would weigh a ton. But more than that, it'll still only power the device for a fraction as long as any other type of battery. They just don't have remotely the energy density of LiIon.
+10 points if the customer/pilot's name just happened to be Joe!
Congratulations. You're encouraging planning for previous threats, which in-turn results in getting broadsided when the new one came along. Sure, when it happens you just come up and say "Well that never happened before, how could I know?" and wash your hands of any responsibility; problem solved. How many times did we hear the Bush Administration repeat the line "Failure of Imagination" and yet you're still encouraging exactly that. That's just slightly less mind-numbingly idiotic than reintroducing the old policy of "do whatever the hijackers say".
Any countries which drops bombs on people would use nuclear weapons if the need arose. There's no question about it. There really isn't a fundamental difference between a high-end conventional bomb, and a low-end fission bomb. Now Fusion bombs are entirely different, just because the scale is mind-boggling... you simply can't use one unless you intend to indiscriminately wipe out entire countries.
The fact that no other countries have used any of their nuclear arsenal is not a testament to how much more moral they are than the US, but rather, a testament to the effectiveness of US' policy of discouraging the use of nuclear weapons. And the use of the first bombs on Japan may be considered part of that same strategy.
You've skipped over the most interesting part... The fact that it clears up in mere weeks was completely unexpected by scientists, showing just how active the mechanism is.