Not that I mean to argue with you (I tend to agree with your point), but that seems like a poor example. Most of Europe was "addicted to war prior" to WW2- which is to say, they were busy making the most war during their most vibrant periods of growth, scientific and technical development, and cultural influence. Post WW2 (after which European nations have been far less enthusiastic about war-making) Europe an nations have gradually drifted away from the role of world leaders and become largely middle-rate world powers.
Correlation isn't causation and all the jazz, but it's hardly a water-tight argument against war.
I do realise that. That was sort of my point. I can take 10x £20 notes into my local bank branch, hand them over the counter and pay them into my bank account. Whatever happens after that- the bank is robbed, burns down, defrauded, bankrupted, or nuked- I know I can still get my £200 back (either whatever is left oft he bank will repay me, or the government will), regardless of what has happened to the original fist full of paper.
It's a guarantee that you don't have with BitCoins- you lose it, it is simply lost. It would not be such a problem if there were registered banks that dealt in BitCoins (as I would be able to behave in exactly the same way, with the same guarantees)- but there isn't. You would even struggle to take out an insurance policy on your BitCoin money- you're completely at the mercy of your own ability to protect a single plain text file.
So some bored kid modifies a standard off the shelf virus to go specifically after a given file on your computer, that is in effect worthless... it suddenly becomes worth something? You must be one of the morons who bought into Bitcoin. They aren't attacking so much to do something with your bitcoin, its more like mugging you and taking your wallet then throwing it away later. They are going after them just to go after them and cause trouble, NOT to use the crap that is unusable sense no one with half a clue would accept it as payment for anything of actual value.
Things are worth whatever people will pay for them. For reasons that are, frankly, a bit of a mystery to me too, people are willing to buy BitCoins for real world USD on a variety of BitCoin exchange sites. That gives them value (and is why people are stealing them). World of Warcraft "gold" has value for the same reason- you can sell it for real world money, so it's worth something.
The same essentially applies to gold (the real world element this time). It has industrial uses obviously, but the majority of its value is determined because it is rare and people want it. There's no real reason why people should want jewellery made of gold, rather than something else- but they do, and so it has a high value.
The main difference between gold and BitCoins is that gold has demonstrated a consistent (and relatively stable) high value for thousands of years. There is no guarantee that BitCoin will sustain any sort of value past the end of the month; if it still has value in a couple of decades, then you can wake me up.
Not really. With inflation, it's kind of the reverse.
Anyone who has had a pile of USD for the long term will find that they are worth less and less every year, while someone who is earning fresh dollars in any given year (say, is paid a yearly salary) will find the value of this salary remains relatively constant over time. Thus the scheme that is regular currency benefits "new entrants" (new earners of money) over "early adopters" (people who earned money in the past, and are now living off their accumulated pile of wealth).
Although really it's apples and oranges. Plenty of people have criticisms for fiat currencies like dollars, pounds and euros, but they are usually very different to the criticisms that are levelled at BitCoin.
An offline computer is secure from a hacking perspective, but could still get stolen in the old-fashioned sense (a burglary). Even if the burglar doesn't know what he's stolen, your wallet file will still be gone. A house fire or similar would have much the same effect (good luck getting your insurance company to pay up for "I had £50,000 worth of virtual BitCoins stored on that computer!").
The best way would be to keep your wallet file on an offline storage medium (burn it to some CDs) and put it in a safe deposit box at a conventional bank or similar. Although that would be a pain in the arse to actually take money out from- orders of magnitude less convenient than a regular bank account with a cash card or internet banking facilities.
In real life, the vast, vast majority of my money is stored in bank or building society accounts. If my money is stolen from those (i.e., a bank robbery) the bank is legally obliged to repay me. If the bank goes bust and can't repay me, the government has promised to pay me back (up to £85k per institution).
The amount of money that I keep in physical, stealable cash form is usually only a working amount (£10 or £20), and only very rarely and very briefly more than that.
Your BitCoin "wallet files" represent everything you need to access all a person's money (as the story of the $500,000 theft a few days ago demonstrates). There is simply no comparison with conventional money- it would be the equivalent of keeping $500,000 in a box in your bedroom with a small label on it saying "all of my money is in here".
I was exaggerating for funsies, but my point does stand- even the "middle" quality level isn't ideal for military use. For example, a family member of mine bought a new car a few years ago. It was quite a nice car too- a mid-level BMW, fresh off the production line. But before he'd but 10k miles on the clock, he suffered a breakdown (an electrical fault grounded him when on a 2-hour-or-so motorway trip). For him this was irritating but not a big deal, he just called his breakdown service and had it towed home, got it fixed a couple of days later.
If he'd been relying on that equipment in a life-or-death situation, he'd have been in serious trouble. For civilian use the odd breakdown is no problem- think of all the computers or gadgets you've owned that have unexpectedly broken on you and life still went on- but it's different for emergency equipment or military gear. They need it to work every time, no problems, and be easy to fix when it does go wrong.
Because of the risks involved, they pay to have everything tested to within an inch of its life, and that costs a lot of money. You just don't do that for normal civilian gear.
It's fundamentally not the elephant in the room. An "elephant in the room" is an obvious issue that no-one talks about. The difficulty is in having a single god damn conversation about anything that happens in a country containing 1.3 billion people without it turning into the exact same discussion. Yes China can be a very nasty place in terms of censorship, and yes every single reader of Slashdot knows that. Do we need to hammer it home again?
Can't we talk about astronomy, and how cool it is that a new record-breaking observatory is getting built?
This version probably breaks one in three times you try to use it, randomly discharges it's weapon whenever there's a small gust of wind, and occasionally blows up.
There's nothing wrong with a bit of solid DIY hacking when you're in a tight fix, but it's apples-and-oranges with large scale engineering projects.
But one of the biggest reforms Thatcher has done is to allow organization to actually fire workers if reasons justify it. Isn't that what happened, that when BA strikes due to the removal of discounted ticket prices for employees, that BA wants to use that option? BA unions doesn't get to have the discounted ticket prices right?
I'm not sure I really understand the question- but the BA workers have had their discount ticket prices restored, after the strike action. BA tried to take something away, the unions protested and striked, and the decision was reversed.
It's probably as much for the Something Awful ties as the Sony ones. Anonymous aren't exactly known for having a high threshold of reasoning required for DOSing something.
I am in the UK. I know perfectly well the reforms Thatcher had put through- but I can assure you that unions still have plenty of muscle. They still negotiate pay deals (for the workforce en masse), they can still strike, they can still do pretty much anything that they could do before. The changes mostly brought in were involved in raising barriers and stripping out the corruption (for example- pre-Thatcher unions could strike on a show-of-hands ballot- now there are strict rules around notice periods for strike ballots, length of time polls have to be open, anonymous voting, etc.).
If you're under any impression that the UK is "non-unionised", I'd also like to point out that the unions are the biggest funding contributors to the Labour Party (the party who were in power for 13 years until last year), and have a full third of the vote in selecting the Labour Party leader (as in, the last two Prime Ministers, and the current Leader of the Opposition (who won solely due to the union vote)). The majority of school teachers have just balloted to strike at the end of this month, and British Airways has been crippled by strikes for the last couple of years. So let me assure you, the unions are still a big part of the British industrial landscape.
Strikes are, on the whole, rare wherever there are unions. Unions only strike when they need to- and the unions in Japan, Germany and the UK do not see the need to strike often due to the excellent workers rights in these countries. The reason Wal-Mart workers in the US feel the need to start a union- and the reason that the Wal-Mart managers ban it- is because of the raw shitty deal these workers get.
Japanese motor companies are largely unionised (I'm told), and they're the ones out-competing US manufacturers. Germany has a strong union culture, and their manufacturing base is considered second to none. My home UK is the 4th biggest motor manufacturer in Europe, and the UK has a high rate of union membership. China is unionised too (although I'm not sure of the efficiency of unionism in a totalitarian state).
And before you say it- no, foreign trade unions are not more or less "greedy" than US ones- they all demand much the same thing, in much the same way.
Whatever GM's problem, it isn't unions. The same thing happened to the BMC/Leyland/Rover MG in the UK; its failure was often blamed on unions, despite the fact that foreign manufacturers were lining up to open factories in the UK in the exact same conditions. Their failure was entirely down to bad management and mishandling their workforce- the unions made matters worse for them, but were by no means the cause of their problems.
If you want to employ people, you have to play by the employee's rules just as much as vice versa. If you don't want to play by your employee's rules, don't hire any employees. When an employer has complete power over their employees, with no scope for dialogue, that's little better than slavery.
As with all other supply-demand issues- if your business doesn't exist, someone else's can take its place quickly enough. Don't flatter yourself into thinking that the world needs your business so badly that it's willing to tolerate a total abandonment of workers rights. You have to be Wal-mart sized before that comes into effect.
Are you seriously suggesting that people working in retail, shop-front jobs, like Apple Store staff, are going to get head hunted?
Not everyone is going to be a top-notch engineer or system specialist. Some people need to work the menial, boring, dull jobs (which make up the majority of jobs out there), otherwise there wouldn't even be jobs at the top.
It should also be pointed out that TFA is US-centric- nothing wrong with that, but it does rather inflate its newsworthyness. Apple Store workers in the UK, for example, are already more than capable of joining a union, such as the retail workers union (USDAW) or a general union like GMB. Apple will therefore already be more that familiar with dealing with "unionised" workers.
Not being able to find it in the limits of where it should be is a fairly good way of disproving it.
But if that's not good enough for you, the next step would be to try to find observational evidence for one of the competing theories, of which there are already a few:
Alternative medicine gets plenty of funding. It's just that the things that researchers find to work cease being known as "alternative medicine", and are simply called "medicine".
And seeing the prices of all those herb extracts in Holland & Barrett, I doubt even those who persist in manufacturing "alternative medicines" are ever short of cash.
The LHC is, basically, looking for particles (the Higgs boson in particular). They look for them by colliding other particles together at very specific energies and looking at the results. There are lots of different theorised Higgs bosons, each of which would appear at a different energy level- so they're busy colliding things at all the relevant energy levels to see which one (if any) yields the Higgs. One run of the experiment at a certain energy level thought it spotted the elusive Higgs boson- re-runs of the experiment have found this detection to be a false positive.
This is exactly what is "understood" to be supposed to happen. It is all going essentially as it's supposed to be going (only, unfortunately, without yet making any discoveries).
None of that has anything to do with the creation or behaviour of black holes.
Diamonds and cars both have stable, steady markets with high-demand. While completely possible that diamonds will suddenly become worthless with no demand for buyers, their value has held up more-or-less intact for thousands of years so it's a relatively fair bet that the diamond you buy today will still be worth something tomorrow.
The same can't be said of Bitcoin. As with diamonds, they only have value if people are willing to exchange them for something else (good and services, hard currency, etc.). They've only existed for a couple of years, and they could easily slip into obscurity before the decade is out. If you pay hard currency for some Bitcoins, there's a real possibility that you could suddenly find yourself owning something that can't be exchanged for anything.
We have ATMs that can accept deposits in the UK too- but we also have ones that don't. It'd be interesting if that story is true as it would imply taht all Japanese ATMs accept cash deposits (so an exception is unheard of, tripping up the teacher).
In the UK, we have some super-clever ATMs that can do almost anything (cash deposits, cheque deposits, online account management, savings book printing, etc.), but they do tend to only be on branch premises- the ones that you see scattered all over the place tend to be the bog-standard cash withdrawal ones.
They could make it available electronically, offline. That is, stick it on a CD and put a copy in the post (or tell people to come and collect it). That way the mail would still be searchable- and would be easy for any interested party to host (such as a news company's website).
To tell people that literally the only possible format you're going to provide it to them in is ink-on-wood-pulp format is obstruction pure and simple. Considering the size of the document, it's no better than offering it in audio-book format recorded on 8-track.
Yeah, it's totally different when a man takes pictures of women without them knowing and when a school takes pictures of underage children without them knowing.
And I'm sure not a single one of the IT men who administered the system even noticed when the pictures the service returned were of topless young girls.
True enough. I was debating factual accuracy vs. aesthetics with myself when I wrote that post.
While the USA is not a whole continent, it does span a whole continent (from eastern seaboard to western seaboard, from scorched southern deserts to snowy northern tundras, from giant mountain ranges to sprawling grassy plains). It's also reasonably sparsely populated. If you cant find a single spot in US territory where a nuclear reactor is safe (which is what banning them would imply), then you've clearly ruled out putting them in pretty much any location on Earth.
If France is going to produce enough power to supply itself plus most of Germany, they're going to need to build a mega-load of new power plants, and soon.
The French power companies will certainly be rubbing their collective mits together at the thought of an under-supplied German market to sell to, but that doesn't mean that they'll be able to keep Germany's lights on.
Slashdot Mirror
Not that I mean to argue with you (I tend to agree with your point), but that seems like a poor example. Most of Europe was "addicted to war prior" to WW2- which is to say, they were busy making the most war during their most vibrant periods of growth, scientific and technical development, and cultural influence. Post WW2 (after which European nations have been far less enthusiastic about war-making) Europe an nations have gradually drifted away from the role of world leaders and become largely middle-rate world powers.
Correlation isn't causation and all the jazz, but it's hardly a water-tight argument against war.
I do realise that. That was sort of my point. I can take 10x £20 notes into my local bank branch, hand them over the counter and pay them into my bank account. Whatever happens after that- the bank is robbed, burns down, defrauded, bankrupted, or nuked- I know I can still get my £200 back (either whatever is left oft he bank will repay me, or the government will), regardless of what has happened to the original fist full of paper.
It's a guarantee that you don't have with BitCoins- you lose it, it is simply lost. It would not be such a problem if there were registered banks that dealt in BitCoins (as I would be able to behave in exactly the same way, with the same guarantees)- but there isn't. You would even struggle to take out an insurance policy on your BitCoin money- you're completely at the mercy of your own ability to protect a single plain text file.
So some bored kid modifies a standard off the shelf virus to go specifically after a given file on your computer, that is in effect worthless ... it suddenly becomes worth something? You must be one of the morons who bought into Bitcoin. They aren't attacking so much to do something with your bitcoin, its more like mugging you and taking your wallet then throwing it away later. They are going after them just to go after them and cause trouble, NOT to use the crap that is unusable sense no one with half a clue would accept it as payment for anything of actual value.
Things are worth whatever people will pay for them. For reasons that are, frankly, a bit of a mystery to me too, people are willing to buy BitCoins for real world USD on a variety of BitCoin exchange sites. That gives them value (and is why people are stealing them). World of Warcraft "gold" has value for the same reason- you can sell it for real world money, so it's worth something.
The same essentially applies to gold (the real world element this time). It has industrial uses obviously, but the majority of its value is determined because it is rare and people want it. There's no real reason why people should want jewellery made of gold, rather than something else- but they do, and so it has a high value.
The main difference between gold and BitCoins is that gold has demonstrated a consistent (and relatively stable) high value for thousands of years. There is no guarantee that BitCoin will sustain any sort of value past the end of the month; if it still has value in a couple of decades, then you can wake me up.
Not really. With inflation, it's kind of the reverse.
Anyone who has had a pile of USD for the long term will find that they are worth less and less every year, while someone who is earning fresh dollars in any given year (say, is paid a yearly salary) will find the value of this salary remains relatively constant over time. Thus the scheme that is regular currency benefits "new entrants" (new earners of money) over "early adopters" (people who earned money in the past, and are now living off their accumulated pile of wealth).
Although really it's apples and oranges. Plenty of people have criticisms for fiat currencies like dollars, pounds and euros, but they are usually very different to the criticisms that are levelled at BitCoin.
An offline computer is secure from a hacking perspective, but could still get stolen in the old-fashioned sense (a burglary). Even if the burglar doesn't know what he's stolen, your wallet file will still be gone. A house fire or similar would have much the same effect (good luck getting your insurance company to pay up for "I had £50,000 worth of virtual BitCoins stored on that computer!").
The best way would be to keep your wallet file on an offline storage medium (burn it to some CDs) and put it in a safe deposit box at a conventional bank or similar. Although that would be a pain in the arse to actually take money out from- orders of magnitude less convenient than a regular bank account with a cash card or internet banking facilities.
In real life, the vast, vast majority of my money is stored in bank or building society accounts. If my money is stolen from those (i.e., a bank robbery) the bank is legally obliged to repay me. If the bank goes bust and can't repay me, the government has promised to pay me back (up to £85k per institution).
The amount of money that I keep in physical, stealable cash form is usually only a working amount (£10 or £20), and only very rarely and very briefly more than that.
Your BitCoin "wallet files" represent everything you need to access all a person's money (as the story of the $500,000 theft a few days ago demonstrates). There is simply no comparison with conventional money- it would be the equivalent of keeping $500,000 in a box in your bedroom with a small label on it saying "all of my money is in here".
Fair point.
I was exaggerating for funsies, but my point does stand- even the "middle" quality level isn't ideal for military use. For example, a family member of mine bought a new car a few years ago. It was quite a nice car too- a mid-level BMW, fresh off the production line. But before he'd but 10k miles on the clock, he suffered a breakdown (an electrical fault grounded him when on a 2-hour-or-so motorway trip). For him this was irritating but not a big deal, he just called his breakdown service and had it towed home, got it fixed a couple of days later.
If he'd been relying on that equipment in a life-or-death situation, he'd have been in serious trouble. For civilian use the odd breakdown is no problem- think of all the computers or gadgets you've owned that have unexpectedly broken on you and life still went on- but it's different for emergency equipment or military gear. They need it to work every time, no problems, and be easy to fix when it does go wrong.
Because of the risks involved, they pay to have everything tested to within an inch of its life, and that costs a lot of money. You just don't do that for normal civilian gear.
It's fundamentally not the elephant in the room. An "elephant in the room" is an obvious issue that no-one talks about. The difficulty is in having a single god damn conversation about anything that happens in a country containing 1.3 billion people without it turning into the exact same discussion. Yes China can be a very nasty place in terms of censorship, and yes every single reader of Slashdot knows that. Do we need to hammer it home again?
Can't we talk about astronomy, and how cool it is that a new record-breaking observatory is getting built?
This version probably breaks one in three times you try to use it, randomly discharges it's weapon whenever there's a small gust of wind, and occasionally blows up.
There's nothing wrong with a bit of solid DIY hacking when you're in a tight fix, but it's apples-and-oranges with large scale engineering projects.
But one of the biggest reforms Thatcher has done is to allow organization to actually fire workers if reasons justify it. Isn't that what happened, that when BA strikes due to the removal of discounted ticket prices for employees, that BA wants to use that option? BA unions doesn't get to have the discounted ticket prices right?
I'm not sure I really understand the question- but the BA workers have had their discount ticket prices restored, after the strike action. BA tried to take something away, the unions protested and striked, and the decision was reversed.
Isn't that the essence of union power in action?
It's probably as much for the Something Awful ties as the Sony ones. Anonymous aren't exactly known for having a high threshold of reasoning required for DOSing something.
I am in the UK. I know perfectly well the reforms Thatcher had put through- but I can assure you that unions still have plenty of muscle. They still negotiate pay deals (for the workforce en masse), they can still strike, they can still do pretty much anything that they could do before. The changes mostly brought in were involved in raising barriers and stripping out the corruption (for example- pre-Thatcher unions could strike on a show-of-hands ballot- now there are strict rules around notice periods for strike ballots, length of time polls have to be open, anonymous voting, etc.).
If you're under any impression that the UK is "non-unionised", I'd also like to point out that the unions are the biggest funding contributors to the Labour Party (the party who were in power for 13 years until last year), and have a full third of the vote in selecting the Labour Party leader (as in, the last two Prime Ministers, and the current Leader of the Opposition (who won solely due to the union vote)). The majority of school teachers have just balloted to strike at the end of this month, and British Airways has been crippled by strikes for the last couple of years. So let me assure you, the unions are still a big part of the British industrial landscape.
Strikes are, on the whole, rare wherever there are unions. Unions only strike when they need to- and the unions in Japan, Germany and the UK do not see the need to strike often due to the excellent workers rights in these countries. The reason Wal-Mart workers in the US feel the need to start a union- and the reason that the Wal-Mart managers ban it- is because of the raw shitty deal these workers get.
Japanese motor companies are largely unionised (I'm told), and they're the ones out-competing US manufacturers. Germany has a strong union culture, and their manufacturing base is considered second to none. My home UK is the 4th biggest motor manufacturer in Europe, and the UK has a high rate of union membership. China is unionised too (although I'm not sure of the efficiency of unionism in a totalitarian state).
And before you say it- no, foreign trade unions are not more or less "greedy" than US ones- they all demand much the same thing, in much the same way.
Whatever GM's problem, it isn't unions. The same thing happened to the BMC/Leyland/Rover MG in the UK; its failure was often blamed on unions, despite the fact that foreign manufacturers were lining up to open factories in the UK in the exact same conditions. Their failure was entirely down to bad management and mishandling their workforce- the unions made matters worse for them, but were by no means the cause of their problems.
If you want to employ people, you have to play by the employee's rules just as much as vice versa. If you don't want to play by your employee's rules, don't hire any employees. When an employer has complete power over their employees, with no scope for dialogue, that's little better than slavery.
As with all other supply-demand issues- if your business doesn't exist, someone else's can take its place quickly enough. Don't flatter yourself into thinking that the world needs your business so badly that it's willing to tolerate a total abandonment of workers rights. You have to be Wal-mart sized before that comes into effect.
Are you seriously suggesting that people working in retail, shop-front jobs, like Apple Store staff, are going to get head hunted?
Not everyone is going to be a top-notch engineer or system specialist. Some people need to work the menial, boring, dull jobs (which make up the majority of jobs out there), otherwise there wouldn't even be jobs at the top.
It should also be pointed out that TFA is US-centric- nothing wrong with that, but it does rather inflate its newsworthyness. Apple Store workers in the UK, for example, are already more than capable of joining a union, such as the retail workers union (USDAW) or a general union like GMB. Apple will therefore already be more that familiar with dealing with "unionised" workers.
Not being able to find it in the limits of where it should be is a fairly good way of disproving it.
But if that's not good enough for you, the next step would be to try to find observational evidence for one of the competing theories, of which there are already a few:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgsless_model
If you can find evidence of a model that doesn't involve the Higgs boson, then you can probably rule out the Higgs boson.
Alternative medicine gets plenty of funding. It's just that the things that researchers find to work cease being known as "alternative medicine", and are simply called "medicine".
And seeing the prices of all those herb extracts in Holland & Barrett, I doubt even those who persist in manufacturing "alternative medicines" are ever short of cash.
No. Not in any even remotely sensible way.
The LHC is, basically, looking for particles (the Higgs boson in particular). They look for them by colliding other particles together at very specific energies and looking at the results. There are lots of different theorised Higgs bosons, each of which would appear at a different energy level- so they're busy colliding things at all the relevant energy levels to see which one (if any) yields the Higgs. One run of the experiment at a certain energy level thought it spotted the elusive Higgs boson- re-runs of the experiment have found this detection to be a false positive.
This is exactly what is "understood" to be supposed to happen. It is all going essentially as it's supposed to be going (only, unfortunately, without yet making any discoveries).
None of that has anything to do with the creation or behaviour of black holes.
Diamonds and cars both have stable, steady markets with high-demand. While completely possible that diamonds will suddenly become worthless with no demand for buyers, their value has held up more-or-less intact for thousands of years so it's a relatively fair bet that the diamond you buy today will still be worth something tomorrow.
The same can't be said of Bitcoin. As with diamonds, they only have value if people are willing to exchange them for something else (good and services, hard currency, etc.). They've only existed for a couple of years, and they could easily slip into obscurity before the decade is out. If you pay hard currency for some Bitcoins, there's a real possibility that you could suddenly find yourself owning something that can't be exchanged for anything.
Or not- only time will tell.
We have ATMs that can accept deposits in the UK too- but we also have ones that don't. It'd be interesting if that story is true as it would imply taht all Japanese ATMs accept cash deposits (so an exception is unheard of, tripping up the teacher).
In the UK, we have some super-clever ATMs that can do almost anything (cash deposits, cheque deposits, online account management, savings book printing, etc.), but they do tend to only be on branch premises- the ones that you see scattered all over the place tend to be the bog-standard cash withdrawal ones.
They could make it available electronically, offline. That is, stick it on a CD and put a copy in the post (or tell people to come and collect it). That way the mail would still be searchable- and would be easy for any interested party to host (such as a news company's website).
To tell people that literally the only possible format you're going to provide it to them in is ink-on-wood-pulp format is obstruction pure and simple. Considering the size of the document, it's no better than offering it in audio-book format recorded on 8-track.
Yeah, it's totally different when a man takes pictures of women without them knowing and when a school takes pictures of underage children without them knowing.
And I'm sure not a single one of the IT men who administered the system even noticed when the pictures the service returned were of topless young girls.
True enough. I was debating factual accuracy vs. aesthetics with myself when I wrote that post.
While the USA is not a whole continent, it does span a whole continent (from eastern seaboard to western seaboard, from scorched southern deserts to snowy northern tundras, from giant mountain ranges to sprawling grassy plains). It's also reasonably sparsely populated. If you cant find a single spot in US territory where a nuclear reactor is safe (which is what banning them would imply), then you've clearly ruled out putting them in pretty much any location on Earth.
If France is going to produce enough power to supply itself plus most of Germany, they're going to need to build a mega-load of new power plants, and soon.
The French power companies will certainly be rubbing their collective mits together at the thought of an under-supplied German market to sell to, but that doesn't mean that they'll be able to keep Germany's lights on.
Anything which deals in absolutes is probably fear and/or ignorance based. The truth usually lies somewhere in the middle.
Phasing out nuclear power in some geographical areas might not be the stupidest thing in the world. Banning it from a whole continent surely is.