Your typing that message on a lot of closed hardware in that regard. You're CPU (if its AMD/Intel/IBM) is under the same circumstances, same with your video card, and memory. In fact there's no open specs for any of that stuff...
And what the hell, if you're addicted to cigarettes already, why not get addicted to heroin.
I go with light text on a black background, every time. I often use a bright green, but there are a lot of options that work: pale purple, white, light gray, light blue...
The current era of white-on-black appears to be a cute imitation of the dead trees world (in spite of the fact that dead trees don't glow, not even around Cherynobl). I once managed to find information about one study that supported using light backgrounds, but it sounded ancient: in an industrial setting you could lower the error rate by reducing the effects of reflections on the screen by giving the user the third degree.
Anyway, my current.emacs includes:
; Provides a (base?) color scheme for additional frames:
(add-to-list 'default-frame-alist '(foreground-color . "Thistle"))
(add-to-list 'default-frame-alist '(background-color . "Black"))
(add-to-list 'default-frame-alist
'(cursor-color . "Orchid"))
(add-to-list 'default-frame-alist '(mouse-color . "GreenYellow"))
(add-to-list 'default-frame-alist '(border-color . "DarkOliveGreen"))
(add-to-list 'default-frame-alist '(border-color . "Thistle")) ;Highlighting the region
(transient-mark-mode t)
(set-face-foreground 'region "Black")
(set-face-background 'region "DarkOliveGreen")
; (Redundant now, but I'm leaving them
; enabled because they
; set the background color to black faster
; before the above default-frame-alist
; colors kick in.)
(set-foreground-color "Thistle")
(set-background-color "Black")
(set-cursor-color "Orchid")
(set-mouse-color "GreenYellow")
(set-face-foreground 'modeline "Black")
(set-face-background 'modeline "DarkSlateBlue")
; This sets the text color for highlighted text ;(e.g. when running ispell)
(set-face-foreground 'highlight "PaleGreen")
(set-face-background 'highlight "BlueViolet")
(show-paren-mode)
(set-face-foreground 'show-paren-match-face "PaleGreen")
(set-face-background 'show-paren-match-face "BlueViolet")
(set-face-foreground 'show-paren-mismatch-face "yellow")
(set-face-background 'show-paren-mismatch-face "firebrick")
As a web designer myself, I'm curious to see where the hostility to Flash really comes from.
Flash is one of a number of things that tends to annoy everyone (and I mean everyone, not just techie geeks) except for the web designer, who thinks this kind of crap is the bees knees, and is always full of excuses for why you don't need to worry about driving away X% of the users.
You think it's great because you can use it to do whizzy, automated things that behave in interesting and unique ways, but everyone hates it for exactly the same reasons.
There's a subtle problem here: the standard is open in the sense that it's published, but it's still under the control of one company. If they liked, they could pull a Microsoft, and change the "standard" so that the next version would break everyone else's code.
We might say that it is "open" but not "free", eh?
(There's also a less-subtle problem, that Flash is designed to turn your computer into a television set. But some people will never get enough television.)
Uh, there are serious problems with this study, most notable that it relies upon self-reporting of sexual activity by at most a few dozen or so college-aged males (the total sample size is 200 men and women) who rank high in narcissistic, psychopathic, and manipulative behavior. Anyone else think there may be a problem with that
You get points for being skeptical and actually looking at the article, but you need to read down a little further. The article is actually about two studies, and I agree that the first one is weak, but this other one might be serious:
This observation seems to hold across cultures. David Schmitt of Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois, presented preliminary results at the same meeting from a survey of more than 35,000 people in 57 countries. He found a similar link between the dark triad and reproductive success in men. "It is universal across cultures for high dark triad scorers to be more active in short-term mating," Schmitt says. "They are more likely to try and poach other people's partners for a brief affair."
Now, myself I remain somewhat skeptical about this explanation in terms of "genetics" (I think it's a quirk of modern culture that we love these genetic explanations out of proportion to the evidence for them), but the problem here clearly isn't small sample size. I wonder how one even conducts a survey that ranges across 57 countries (consider the translation difficulties). So, what we have here is a pop science writer that wimped out on discussing the interesting details in favor of doing a fluff piece about a minor study conducted by a young dork out in New Mexico.
By the way, switching subjects to Western culture mating strategies: you might study the fellow's photo there if you're a geek worrying about the bad-boy paradox. I submit that while in practice many women may have an obsession with "bad boys" on some level, they're also mostly (1) sensible enough to know there are problems with this and (2) shallow enough to satisfy their "bad boy" urges with someone who just looks a little like a "bad boy" without actually being one.
Just because Crews and others haven't tracked down a dozen kooky Germans living over a century ago using Freuds totally incomplete records in his correspondence doesn't mean they didn't exist.
Yes, I get it. The burden of proof rests squarely on the other side, always and forever.
And the reason is that if someone knew an unconventional truth they could make money off it.
But isn't it even easier to make money with a conventional falsehood?
Are you aware of the current state of scientific opinion about Freud? He is at best "controversial", myself I would say he's been throughly debunked.
He was a charlatan. In 1896 he published three papers on the ideology of hysteria claiming that he had cured X number of patients. First it was thirteen and then it was eighteen. And he had cured them all by presenting them, or rather by obliging them to remember, that they had been sexually abused as children. In 1897 he lost faith in this theory, but he'd told his colleagues that this was the way to cure hysteria. So he had a scientific obligation to tell people about his change of mind. But he didn't. He didn't even hint at it until 1905, and even then he wasn't clear. Meanwhile, where were the thirteen patients? Where were the eighteen patients? You read the Freud - Fleiss letters and you find that Freud's patients were leaving at the time. By 1897 he didn't have any patients worth mentioning, and he hadn't cured any of them, and he knew it perfectly well. Well, if a scientist did that today, of course he would be stripped of his job. He would be stripped of his research funds. He would be disgraced for life.
The interesting thing here (to me) is that there was apparently a lot of back-and-forth about possible problems with bias and methodology, but there doesn't seem to have been a follow-on study.
Just at a guess, I'm not too far off here:
it could be that everyone else is just unmotivated to stand up to conventional wisdom on this
That there's some form of "cherry-picking" here is likely -- I purposely went looking for this particular study I remembered seeing mentioned in a newspaper article a long time back. Like I said, there's many a neo-freudian out there taking an opposite tack. I don't claim to have studied the issue in any detail, and myself, I don't have any dog to grind here.
It could be you're right that these guys are too sleazy to listen to, though on the other hand, it could be that everyone else is just unmotivated to stand up to conventional wisdom on this.
What I'd need to defy the obvious common sense that sex with children by adults is bad for the children. Just to state what should be obvious: I've never said that it isn't. I haven't questioned whether it's bad, I've questioned whether it's established that it's infinitely bad.
Well, digging around a bit, I found a reference to a study
I remembered hearing about some time back:
A major 1998 study in the highly respected Psychological
Bulletin of the American Psychological Association found that
adults who had been molested as children did not display
significant emotional differences when compared to other adults
who had not been abused. Bruce Rind et al., A Meta-Analytic
Examination of Assumed Properties of Child Sexual Abuse Using
College Samples, 124 Psychol. Bull. 22, 46 (1998).
The study reviewed and analyzed the data from fifty-nine
previous studies of college students who had reported
experiencing childhood sexual abuse. The study found that
students who were sexually abused were on average only slightly
less well-adjusted than other comparable students and that
those differences could be explained by other environmental
factors.
But it did indeed take some digging to find that. There's no
shortage of people taking a neo-freudian line out there.
Myself, I tend to think the "hatred and fear" are hold-overs from
puritanical ideas about perfect innocence and eternal doom, but in any
case, giving in to these things is very dangerous: there are people
out there who are happy to push your buttons when they want you to jump.
We're wandering a bit here, but...
"But there is certainly damage to children when they're put through a sexually exploitave scenario".
Yeah, okay. But how much damage? Is the child likely to get over it, or will they be traumatized for life? Do they have a shot at "normality", or is it a case of innocence corrupted that can never be regained?
I have no trouble with law enforcement going after child pornographers -- but it would be nice if we could work on a problem without going off into a tizzy of hatred and fear for once.
But that's not the point. If indeed there are no naked children's pictures, then there is no evidence, there is no basis whatsoever for legal activity. If there is, then (this is my point) those pictures are evidence, and shutting down Usenet destroys the trail that leads to the actual crime: exploiting children in a room with a camera.
Well, the people who worry about this sort of thing a lot -- I'm not one of them, particularly (I think it's a Bad Thing, but then I also think that most children are fairly resilient, and bounce back from these kind of weird situations without much lasting harm) -- would argue that by criminalizing looking at the pictures, you can make the market for them dry up, and eliminate the "exploitative" act indirectly.
(The problem with that reasoning is that these are appearing on usenet: it would appear that the pedophiles of the world have some sympathy for each other's problems and are willing to engage in cooperative behavior to support each other without any financial return.)
But the point that I was trying to make is that to some extent "child pornography" is in the eye of the beholder, and even defining the crime is a tricky business; and I'm afraid I would not expect law enforcement to do any better job than Verizon in this case.
Try this scenario on for size: the government gets annoyed at an organization such as the EFF, and begins acting on a tip (from what source, they refuse to say) that the EFF has been acting as a front for child pornographers. They begin raiding the homes of EFF members, confiscating computers, looking for evidence of child pornography. They announce proudly that in a significant percentage of cases (5%? less?) they have indeed found "child pornography" on these machines. The don't describe this "child porn" in detail. Naked baby pictures? Teenagers that might be under 18? If you are one of the people the government has decided to make an example of, I'm afraid you'll find that it makes little difference: you are in for one long, expensive legal slog, and even if you ultimately get a court to sign off on your first amendment defense (or whatever), you may find it makes little difference as far as your public reputation is concerned, and the government agency that wanted to harass the EFF is unlikely to care very much that you never did any jail time.
The point that I'm making: (1) this is an emotional hot-button issue where we should really be making an effort to step carefully and (2) just saying this is a matter for law enforcement is not in itself a panacea.
Those posts of child pornography on Usenet are traceable evidence of crimes exploiting children.
You're assuming that they actually exist. Have you ever seen any?
I've noticed that there are some nude photos of very young girls out in the alt.binaries tree,
but none of young girls engaged in sexual acts.
It's a little difficult to see how it can be illegal to take nude photos of children --
the fact that some one out there might find them sexually exciting doesn't automatically make them "exploitive". Someone out there is bound to find old Shirley Temple movies sexually exciting.
Are you going to make distinctions like this based on a "reasonable man" standard, or on a "most extreme pervert" standard?
Do you think you could document your claim that perl use has "declined or leveled off"? Perl hype has leveled off, now that O'Rielly is focussing on selling books about other things, but perl usage remains pretty high, as far as I can tell.
I do agree with you about the high quality of perl documentation. Perl has always attracted people who like to write about their code, and one advantage of having a reputation as a "write-once" language is that people bend over backwards to document (both internally and externally).
(You want to stay away from people who use phrases like "self-documenting code".)
Because/. is neither primarily political, nor a blog, while the mentioned sites are both?
You beat me to it. This site is a news aggregator with comments.
I have to wonder what kind of pedantic nerd could possibly think the definition of "blog" is an interesting thing to argue about. What could possibly be riding on the outcome of this?
It really makes me wonder what exactly Taco thinks this site is.
Fathoming the alleged mind of the Taco is yet another can of worms.
Despite Obama's rep for working with small contributors, he's not above sticking a hand out to AT&T.
I didn't read the fine print about how opensecrets classifies individual campaign contributions:
METHODOLOGY: The totals on these charts are calculated from PAC contributions and contributions from individuals giving more than $200, as reported to the Federal Election Commission. Individual contributions are generally categorized based on the donor's occupation/employer,
So, this is entirely consistent with Obama's reputation -- it just means that a number of AT&T employees have contributed to Obama's campaign.
So.... Why are there only two candidates? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not an American. Just would like to know why politics there is binary. On/Off, Good/Bad, Black/White.
Seems amazingly simplistic to me.
As it happens, I am an American, but what I would like to know is why you injected this rather simplistic question immediately following a rather interesting link about AT&T's campaign contributions. You appear to have done a very good job of derailing an interesting discussion about the details of the way American politics are conducted. (I would also like to know how it got rated "+5 Insightful", and why so many people took the bait and started discussing this irrelevant, off-topic issue... ).
By the way, how much is a four digit slash id worth on the open market these days?
AT&T has kicked around $300,000 to the three major candidates,
and the breakdown is:
45% McCain
28% Obama
27% Clinton
A few thing to ponder:
It appears that AT&T figured that McCain was their best value, but they must know he isn't really going to win the election (unless they know something we don't...). Do they do this just to stay on the good side of Republicans in general?
Despite Obama's rep for working with small contributors, he's not above sticking a hand out to AT&T.
(I sincerely hope Obama surprises me and doesn't disappoint me as I'm expecting).
It always amazes me how small an amount of money it takes to buy a politician. A hundred thousand or so, and you've got yourself a president? But then, this isn't the total lifetime cost of ownership.
Why exactly do we allow corporations to donate to political campaigns? Legally they're required to be money-grubbing bastards. They can't do this for any reason except some expected quid pro quo. Either the politicians are bought, and the polity is screwed, or they're not bought, and the investors are screwed.
most freakouts surrounding nuclear power are based on 1960s technology. modern reactor designs, such as pebble bed reactors [wikipedia.org], are designed to be passively safe. that is, you can just walk away from them, doing nothing, and they will not release gas, go china syndrome, or anything else unsafe. older nuke tech requires active safety management: someone must always be on the job, making sure nothing f***s up. designing safety into nuclear reactor design from the philosophical ground up is the way of the future
You're fully in sync with the current state of pro-nuclear argument, as far as I can tell (note: I am also a pro-nuclear person), but personally, I've got problems with the line you're taking. The goal seems to be to both reassure people and to subtly flatter them -- yes, you people were absolutely right about nuclear power, but
things are different now, the problems have been fixed.
I would argue that the truth is more like: you people were in complete hysterics over nothing, nuclear power has always been one of the safest ways of generating power (e.g. the worst incident in the US released nothing toxic and killed no one, and in comparison coal power spews toxic substances that kills thousands annually). The trouble is it appears to be a complete impossibility to get the American people to admit to themselves that they got something wrong (e.g. look at the current delusional state surrounding the Iraq invasion), so it's probably more politic to press the "new technology" button.
The trouble is that this leaves a fundamental problem in place, and untouched: our collective intelligence is incredibly low. We need some way of improving the way we make decisions.
software update for a nuclear power plant was actually allowed to produce an unexpected/unplanned event
Yes, software isn't just used to create cute bouncy cat icons for your web page,
it's actually used as a component in critical safety systems. And when something is screwed
with that safety system you want it to fail safely, which is what has happened here.
We might speculate that they need a better test setup (a network of machines that models the concurrency issues in the actual plant better), but I'm sure that's obvious to them too now, after the fact.
(I think some people here are confusing the internal network of the plant with the internet.)
So, I'm rather glad that this reactor took the Human element out and forced them to look at more than just the one gauge they look at, because "that's the way we've always done it".
Actually, the "human element" kind of repaired itself after TMI. Those guys repeatedly over-rode the safety systems and prevented the plant from shutting itself down. After that incident, no one in the nuclear industry was willing to "oh, it's probably just a false alarm again".
Slashdot Mirror
And what the hell, if you're addicted to cigarettes already, why not get addicted to heroin.
Some people need to watch out what kool-aid they've been drinking.
I go with light text on a black background, every time. I often use a bright green, but there are a lot of options that work: pale purple, white, light gray, light blue...
The current era of white-on-black appears to be a cute imitation of the dead trees world (in spite of the fact that dead trees don't glow, not even around Cherynobl). I once managed to find information about one study that supported using light backgrounds, but it sounded ancient: in an industrial setting you could lower the error rate by reducing the effects of reflections on the screen by giving the user the third degree.
Anyway, my current .emacs includes:
;Highlighting the region
; Provides a (base?) color scheme for additional frames:
(add-to-list 'default-frame-alist
'(foreground-color . "Thistle"))
(add-to-list 'default-frame-alist
'(background-color . "Black"))
(add-to-list 'default-frame-alist
'(cursor-color . "Orchid"))
(add-to-list 'default-frame-alist '(mouse-color
. "GreenYellow"))
(add-to-list 'default-frame-alist
'(border-color . "DarkOliveGreen"))
(add-to-list 'default-frame-alist
'(border-color . "Thistle"))
(transient-mark-mode t)
(set-face-foreground 'region "Black")
(set-face-background 'region "DarkOliveGreen")
; (Redundant now, but I'm leaving them
; enabled because they
; set the background color to black faster
; before the above default-frame-alist
; colors kick in.)
(set-foreground-color "Thistle")
(set-background-color "Black")
(set-cursor-color "Orchid")
(set-mouse-color "GreenYellow")
(set-face-foreground 'modeline "Black")
(set-face-background 'modeline "DarkSlateBlue")
; This sets the text color for highlighted text
;(e.g. when running ispell)
(set-face-foreground 'highlight "PaleGreen")
(set-face-background 'highlight "BlueViolet")
(show-paren-mode)
(set-face-foreground 'show-paren-match-face "PaleGreen")
(set-face-background 'show-paren-match-face "BlueViolet")
(set-face-foreground 'show-paren-mismatch-face "yellow")
(set-face-background 'show-paren-mismatch-face "firebrick")
Flash is one of a number of things that tends to annoy everyone (and I mean everyone, not just techie geeks) except for the web designer, who thinks this kind of crap is the bees knees, and is always full of excuses for why you don't need to worry about driving away X% of the users.
You think it's great because you can use it to do whizzy, automated things that behave in interesting and unique ways, but everyone hates it for exactly the same reasons.
That's one small step for Adobe, but one giant leap for the march of videocy.
Ah well. The internet was kind of cool for a while.
Myself, I tend to blame tools that encourage people to do stupid things.
Because you see, technology is not "neutral", and different tools have different biases built into them.
There's a subtle problem here: the standard is open in the sense that it's published, but it's still under the control of one company. If they liked, they could pull a Microsoft, and change the "standard" so that the next version would break everyone else's code.
We might say that it is "open" but not "free", eh?
(There's also a less-subtle problem, that Flash is designed to turn your computer into a television set. But some people will never get enough television.)
bfwebster wrote:
You get points for being skeptical and actually looking at the article, but you need to read down a little further. The article is actually about two studies, and I agree that the first one is weak, but this other one might be serious:
Now, myself I remain somewhat skeptical about this explanation in terms of "genetics" (I think it's a quirk of modern culture that we love these genetic explanations out of proportion to the evidence for them), but the problem here clearly isn't small sample size. I wonder how one even conducts a survey that ranges across 57 countries (consider the translation difficulties). So, what we have here is a pop science writer that wimped out on discussing the interesting details in favor of doing a fluff piece about a minor study conducted by a young dork out in New Mexico.
By the way, switching subjects to Western culture mating strategies: you might study the fellow's photo there if you're a geek worrying about the bad-boy paradox. I submit that while in practice many women may have an obsession with "bad boys" on some level, they're also mostly (1) sensible enough to know there are problems with this and (2) shallow enough to satisfy their "bad boy" urges with someone who just looks a little like a "bad boy" without actually being one.
*Pause.*
Yes, I get it. The burden of proof rests squarely on the other side, always and forever. And the reason is that if someone knew an unconventional truth they could make money off it. But isn't it even easier to make money with a conventional falsehood?
Are you aware of the current state of scientific opinion about Freud? He is at best "controversial", myself I would say he's been throughly debunked.
From an interview with Frederick Crews:
There's a discussion of the controversy surrounding this study up on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rind_et_al._(1998).
The interesting thing here (to me) is that there was apparently a lot of back-and-forth about possible problems with bias and methodology, but there doesn't seem to have been a follow-on study.
Just at a guess, I'm not too far off here: it could be that everyone else is just unmotivated to stand up to conventional wisdom on this
That there's some form of "cherry-picking" here is likely -- I purposely went looking for this particular study I remembered seeing mentioned in a newspaper article a long time back. Like I said, there's many a neo-freudian out there taking an opposite tack. I don't claim to have studied the issue in any detail, and myself, I don't have any dog to grind here.
It could be you're right that these guys are too sleazy to listen to, though on the other hand, it could be that everyone else is just unmotivated to stand up to conventional wisdom on this.
What I'd need to defy the obvious common sense that sex with children by adults is bad for the children. Just to state what should be obvious: I've never said that it isn't. I haven't questioned whether it's bad, I've questioned whether it's established that it's infinitely bad.
Well, digging around a bit, I found a reference to a study I remembered hearing about some time back:
But it did indeed take some digging to find that. There's no shortage of people taking a neo-freudian line out there.
Myself, I tend to think the "hatred and fear" are hold-overs from puritanical ideas about perfect innocence and eternal doom, but in any case, giving in to these things is very dangerous: there are people out there who are happy to push your buttons when they want you to jump.
We're wandering a bit here, but... "But there is certainly damage to children when they're put through a sexually exploitave scenario".
Yeah, okay. But how much damage? Is the child likely to get over it, or will they be traumatized for life? Do they have a shot at "normality", or is it a case of innocence corrupted that can never be regained?
I have no trouble with law enforcement going after child pornographers -- but it would be nice if we could work on a problem without going off into a tizzy of hatred and fear for once.
Well, the people who worry about this sort of thing a lot -- I'm not one of them, particularly (I think it's a Bad Thing, but then I also think that most children are fairly resilient, and bounce back from these kind of weird situations without much lasting harm) -- would argue that by criminalizing looking at the pictures, you can make the market for them dry up, and eliminate the "exploitative" act indirectly.
(The problem with that reasoning is that these are appearing on usenet: it would appear that the pedophiles of the world have some sympathy for each other's problems and are willing to engage in cooperative behavior to support each other without any financial return.)
But the point that I was trying to make is that to some extent "child pornography" is in the eye of the beholder, and even defining the crime is a tricky business; and I'm afraid I would not expect law enforcement to do any better job than Verizon in this case.
Try this scenario on for size: the government gets annoyed at an organization such as the EFF, and begins acting on a tip (from what source, they refuse to say) that the EFF has been acting as a front for child pornographers. They begin raiding the homes of EFF members, confiscating computers, looking for evidence of child pornography. They announce proudly that in a significant percentage of cases (5%? less?) they have indeed found "child pornography" on these machines. The don't describe this "child porn" in detail. Naked baby pictures? Teenagers that might be under 18? If you are one of the people the government has decided to make an example of, I'm afraid you'll find that it makes little difference: you are in for one long, expensive legal slog, and even if you ultimately get a court to sign off on your first amendment defense (or whatever), you may find it makes little difference as far as your public reputation is concerned, and the government agency that wanted to harass the EFF is unlikely to care very much that you never did any jail time.
The point that I'm making: (1) this is an emotional hot-button issue where we should really be making an effort to step carefully and (2) just saying this is a matter for law enforcement is not in itself a panacea.
You're assuming that they actually exist. Have you ever seen any?
I've noticed that there are some nude photos of very young girls out in the alt.binaries tree, but none of young girls engaged in sexual acts.
It's a little difficult to see how it can be illegal to take nude photos of children -- the fact that some one out there might find them sexually exciting doesn't automatically make them "exploitive". Someone out there is bound to find old Shirley Temple movies sexually exciting.
Are you going to make distinctions like this based on a "reasonable man" standard, or on a "most extreme pervert" standard?
Do you think you could document your claim that perl use has "declined or leveled off"?
Perl hype has leveled off, now that O'Rielly is focussing
on selling books about other things, but perl usage remains
pretty high, as far as I can tell.
I do agree with you about the high quality of perl
documentation. Perl has always attracted people who like
to write about their code, and one advantage of having
a reputation as a "write-once" language is that people
bend over backwards to document (both internally and externally).
(You want to stay away from people who use phrases like
"self-documenting code".)
I have to wonder what kind of pedantic nerd could possibly think the definition of "blog" is an interesting thing to argue about. What could possibly be riding on the outcome of this?
Fathoming the alleged mind of the Taco is yet another can of worms.
Because slashdot is already covered by the 'media war' unit? Some sites are better handled with stealth propaganda.
Ah, looks like I blew it here:
I didn't read the fine print about how opensecrets classifies individual campaign contributions:
So, this is entirely consistent with Obama's reputation -- it just means that a number of AT&T employees have contributed to Obama's campaign.
Why hello, "Colin Smith (2679)"...
As it happens, I am an American, but what I would like to know is why you injected this rather simplistic question immediately following a rather interesting link about AT&T's campaign contributions. You appear to have done a very good job of derailing an interesting discussion about the details of the way American politics are conducted. (I would also like to know how it got rated "+5 Insightful", and why so many people took the bait and started discussing this irrelevant, off-topic issue... ).
By the way, how much is a four digit slash id worth on the open market these days?
Thanks for the link, anonymous, this is an interesting one.
So, here we have
AT&T has kicked around $300,000 to the three major candidates, and the breakdown is:
A few thing to ponder:
You're fully in sync with the current state of pro-nuclear argument, as far as I can tell (note: I am also a pro-nuclear person), but personally, I've got problems with the line you're taking. The goal seems to be to both reassure people and to subtly flatter them -- yes, you people were absolutely right about nuclear power, but things are different now, the problems have been fixed.
I would argue that the truth is more like: you people were in complete hysterics over nothing, nuclear power has always been one of the safest ways of generating power (e.g. the worst incident in the US released nothing toxic and killed no one, and in comparison coal power spews toxic substances that kills thousands annually). The trouble is it appears to be a complete impossibility to get the American people to admit to themselves that they got something wrong (e.g. look at the current delusional state surrounding the Iraq invasion), so it's probably more politic to press the "new technology" button.
The trouble is that this leaves a fundamental problem in place, and untouched: our collective intelligence is incredibly low. We need some way of improving the way we make decisions.
Yes, software isn't just used to create cute bouncy cat icons for your web page, it's actually used as a component in critical safety systems. And when something is screwed with that safety system you want it to fail safely, which is what has happened here.
We might speculate that they need a better test setup (a network of machines that models the concurrency issues in the actual plant better), but I'm sure that's obvious to them too now, after the fact.
(I think some people here are confusing the internal network of the plant with the internet.)
Actually, the "human element" kind of repaired itself after TMI. Those guys repeatedly over-rode the safety systems and prevented the plant from shutting itself down. After that incident, no one in the nuclear industry was willing to "oh, it's probably just a false alarm again".