I'm glad you mention "criminal negligence", because that is exactly the phrase I want to hear more of. That they got away with so much crap for so long, without severe penalties is ridiculous, but now that they will cost us all trillions - which will the be cost of the cleanup, accelerated shutdown, retirement and replacement of existing nuclear power plants.
I think some of this gets into the category of "too big to fail".
This is pretty much what the problem is. Simply building and fuelling a nuclear power station isn't overwhelmingly expensive, but the ongoing cost of maintenance and dealing with the waste is very expensive, and retiring a reactor even more so - its not like a conventional thermal power plant where you build it, fuel it, and when you are done just leave it.
There are far too many institutions that are getting so huge that they simply can't fail... at least until reality hits them hard in the face like what happened in Fukushima.
At which point the only answer is to nationalise - which, IMO, is how all large utilities should be run. For example telecommunications in many countries is an absolute mess because you have several very, very big companies, all competing and building infrastructure against each other, in many cases with incredibly wasteful overlap. But what if the infrastructure was all nationalised, and these companies only have to "buy-in" to get access? You would have a single set of infrastructure which is still paid for by the big companies, but lacking over-lap and being standardised means that people are not locked in to certain vendors, and by having control be done by a government entity that only provides wholesale access means you don't have unfair advantages.
There is no reason to think this is isolated to just Japan, so similar kinds of engineering management screw ups are likely to happen.
The only way to prevent this is to make sure these companies are prepared - they should be carrying out safety drills and exercises on a regular basis, and facilities should be inspected by independent third parties - none of this has happened in Japan.
I remember a press release in mid-late 2011 that they planned to expand capacity in Chiba and Yokohama, that in practical terms are part of Tokyo.
You said:
TEPCO is building new gas power plants INSIDE Tokyo Metropolitan area
The only part you got right is "TEPCO" - these are not new plants, but in every case is either an upgrade or an expansion (or a temporary facility which is nothing more than hundreds of diesel generators to try and pump as much power into the grid for an hour or two during peak periods).
Chiba and Kanagawa are not Tokyo, they are most definitely not Metropolitan Tokyo.
Fukushima Daiichi could have been a far less serious accident if Unit 1 didn't got a license to continue in service. Not only because that would have been a one more unit less in service at the time of the accident, but because the explosion of Unit 1 hampered the efforts to put under control Units 2 and 3.
Unit 1, 2 and 3 all suffered explosions. If TEPCO had been properly prepared and had a working power-supply on site or an alternative at their emergency management site, the entire thing could have been avoided. There was little what would have changed the situation as TEPCO was totally unprepared for an emergency of any scale as their own reports prove - they did not have the equipment, documentation, training or planning ready which would have easily made this a manageable situation.
They are not building any new plants, and definitely not in the Tokyo Metropolitan area. They will be making some changes to improve the output of the gas-fired power plant in Chiba, located here.
it's far cheaper to falsify records and pretend we've done that
Not sure if this was intentional, but TEPCO has a record of doing exactly that!
The utility "eventually admitted to two hundred occasions over more than two decades between 1977 and 2002, involving the submission of false technical data to authorities"
In 2007, however, the company announced to the public that an internal investigation had revealed a large number of unreported incidents. These included an unexpected unit criticality in 1978 and additional systematic false reporting, which had not been uncovered during the 2002 inquiry. Along with scandals at other Japanese electric companies, this failure to ensure corporate compliance resulted in strong public criticism of Japan's electric power industry and the nation's nuclear energy policy. Again, the company made no effort to identify those responsible.
My wifes hospital has a diesel generator which they were forced to use last year when the blackouts were being done - TEPCO claimed that because the hospital was part of the general grid, and they were unable to isolate them, they would have power outages - but hey, they have a generator, so its all OK, right?
That would be the case if they had diesel at the time...
They let most of their reactors run over the winter to provide the needed power
Reactors that were running at the time, and were not shut down automatically were allowed to keep running until they went into their maintenance cycle - but since the earthquake the plant operators were unable to restart any previously cooled down reactors.
This is only news now because finally they have all stopped - usually only about half to two thirds of the reactors are running at any given time.
Its funny because it is the same heavy industry that helped caused this problem. It has long been claimed that the reason the government is unwilling to put tighter restrictions on the nuclear industry is because of pressure from major industrial customers who are unable to bear even higher prices for electricity.
Not only have 80,000 residents been displaced, unable to return to their homes or collect their belongings (nor will they be able to for at least several decades), they also have to write off all the businesses, farms, schools, hospitals and other things left in the area around Fukushima.
The cost to clean-up will eventually be in the trillions, and the reactors not damaged significantly will be retired.
Many thousand businesses have been very hard hit by the fallout of Fukushima, with farmers having to destroy crops and fishermen losing catches.
Fukushima was also the straw that broke the publics trust in nuclear power. People have always been wary of it, but in Japan you have the added problem of it being a badly managed industry that is full of corruption and greed. TEPCO itself has publicly apologised on at least 3 occasions when whistleblowers have come out showing that TEPCO failed to do maintenance on key systems, covered up damaged to avoid costly down-time and repairs, and have covered-up accidents and mishaps to avoid scrutiny by regulations. Internationally the nuclear industry in Japan is well known for having poor, outdated safety standards and useless regulators who are staffed by those who are (quite literally) paid off by the nuclear industry through a system in Japan known as amakudari.
So while the actual health risk isn't going to be huge, the cost to the public in both tax payers money and trust is not an insignificant factor.
An excessively-strong reaction to the tiny bit of the event which can be addressed is a natural, if irrational, response to the larger but completely unmanageable risk of future tsunami damage.
You have no idea. TEPCO knew as early as the 1980's and with 100% certainty in 2009 that its tsunami preparations were woefully insufficient. Building and maintaining a level of defence against tsunami damage in a plant the size of Fukushima Daiichi is not a small thing, but far from impossible. With some very basic changes this disaster would have only have left the reactors as managable scrap. This disaster also highlighted the badly kept secret that Japan's nuclear industry still has no idea or plan of how to deal with its nuclear waste - a very, very expensive problem that is just being compounded over time.
My only concern is that such a massive full smash of all plants would also warrant a Manhattan Project style engineering effort to get as many of those reactors back on line ASAP... something that doesn't seem to be indicated in the article. I have to presume that Japan and its government has at least a tiny portion of intelligence in terms of putting something like that together if necessary. The disaster that they are facing right now to deal with the shortfall of energy production from this shut down is more than I can possibly understand other than I see it even here in America as a political disaster waiting to happen. This is the kind of crap that usually gets a major party shift to happen in most countries.
Right now I have no problem at all with the shutdown. An independant third-party investigation in Japan into Fukushima found that it was not the natural disaster that was to blame, but TEPCO who had repeatedly ignored research into earthquake and especially tsunami risks and failed to act on new data showing their seawall was insufficient (and their plant would be inundated), and that they completely lacked any comprehensive emergency planning or preparation, meaning their reaction to the disaster was slow, unorganised, completely adhoc and in many cases the wrong decisions were made at the wrong time. If you check my other comments in that Reddit post I talk about how they did not even have a backup power supply (eg. UPS) for their main control room, nor did they have emergency lighting (they had to use torches for everything, everywhere), they did not even have instructions on how to do an emergency manual pressure release - they had to read the original design documents and work out how to do it, a process which took almost half a day as they had to first find the documents (not even kept at the plant), then scope out the valve, then find equipment to operate it.
The official TEPCO report into their actions immediately after the earthquake and tsunami reads like a bad sci-fi novel.
My concern is mainly with the anti-nuclear nuts using this for their own political advantage and using it to shut down what new nuclear power plants are currently being built in America (there are currently a few of them) where the largest issues involved are legal costs and not engineering costs. When you need a dozen lawyers to protect each engineer, you know your project is screwed from the beginning.
This is exactly what is happening, and it pisses me off. The plants aren't being shutdown because they are inherently unsafe, or because the public fears nuclear power - its a matter of trust. We don't trust the power companies - they, along with government regulators, have been covering up accidents and skipping on maintenance for years. Repeatedly it has come to light that the power companies, contractors and the government have covered up damaged equipment or ignored warnings from experts, and eventually they'll make some sort of token effort before getting back to business as usual.
In this case the people are not stupid - these "stress tests" are nothing more than computer simulations. I'd want WANO, IAEA and everyone else and their dog to actually physically inspect every single inch of each plant, and have the government write up some decent regulations for the power companies to enforce. Up until now the government has said "the power companies know best, we don't want to impede", THIS IS RIDICULOUS, and we all know it.
You can bet these plants will stay shutdown until changes are made, and all hell will be raised if the federal government allows them to light the reactors without local community support.
I live in Japan and can tell you that the nuclear industry is just a giant accident waiting to happen. For years they have been covering up accidents and cutting corners on design, general safety and maintenance.
I had this moving over to Google Apps and pivot tables in Excel was the last feature. There is plenty of things which would be nice to use (mainly formatting tools) but since no one in my company has any idea how to use the software properly in the first place even Google Docs is feature rich enough to get work done.
My challenge has always been - "if there is a feature you must have, and it or a decent alternative does not exist we will buy you an office license"
I *love* my ALiX boards. I really should buy another dozen or so soon....
The big appeal for me with Raspi was the sheer price and simplicity - for a third of the price of an ALiX I get a computer which can be used for various things I deem "nice" but not essential - eg. simple monitoring, network tools, random junk box. Not enough that I'd need a whole PC, but maybe something unsuitable for a VM.
even something as weird as "publicly display" might be necessary to run their service. For example, what if I want to set permissions in my google drive to public, or even to something my friends can access? You know, like some real cloud storage? Bam, public display.
This is exactly it - when you set a file to public, not only is Google making it available, but if is something like a Google Doc or something else that their interface can open, they are also displaying it - a big difference to Dropbox who just make the file available for download removing the need to put that kind of specific wording into their TOS.
Dropbox doesn't have anything to promote, so there is no need for it in their TOS.
Youtube, Picasa and Plus (off the top of my head) all have ways of taking user generated content like videos, photos and posts - which, when the sharing permissions are set to "Public" - can be "promoted" by being put into various lists or displayed on pages.
Go to http://www.youtube.com/ - every video on that page is user content which has been "promoted". BUT, none of this has been done without the express permission of the content owner (via sharing settings).
Same with Google Docs templates. Same with Blogger. Same with Apps on Play.
Google saves time and effort by having a single, broad policy, which covers them for pretty much all of their services.
Bet you anything they create a Drive specific policy by the end of the week outlining the specific details for Drive which will lose many of the useless words listed in Drive.
They have one policy for all services, and then generally a more specific set of policies which outline what they mean.
For example if you post a video to Youtube and have the sharing/privacy options to let anyone view it, they will exercise the "publicly perform", "publicly display" parts of the policy. If it becomes popular and makes it to the front page, that is "promoting". By agreeing to the policy, and having the appropriate sharing settings, they are only doing as they have laid out in the policy.
To think otherwise is just stupid. Go ahead and give me even one example of Google abuse of customer content in-line with their own policy.
I've worked for a number of Fortune 100 companies in the last 3 years and iPad "adoption" is generally little more than email, and even then its only because it is everyone's favourite new toy.
It's likely that the vast majority of people still running XP are corporate customers, and if they can't manage an upgrade to Win7 over the next 2 years, they should probably hire some better IT staff.
I work for a small business and half of our computers still run XP. I've been instructed by management (who have the last call on all spending) that we will not be purchasing Windows 7 licences until the last possible moment, and we'll continue the current pattern of buying new PCs with Windows 7 as a way to slowly replace XP.
Yes, but you are paying for those parts. Cars, like computer software, usually come with a period where the manufacturer will guarantee a certain level of support. After that you pay for it.
Microsoft will still provide support after the EOL, but you'd have to pay for it. Considering that we've known for many years this day is coming, I'm surprised people are still complaining about it.
Drop it on a USB drive, plug it into old laptops. Instant fully working OS with all my options. Beats installing a new OS every time I find some old hunk of junk in the office.
Slashdot Mirror
If it is anything like Australia, that only applies to voice services.
I'm glad you mention "criminal negligence", because that is exactly the phrase I want to hear more of. That they got away with so much crap for so long, without severe penalties is ridiculous, but now that they will cost us all trillions - which will the be cost of the cleanup, accelerated shutdown, retirement and replacement of existing nuclear power plants.
I think some of this gets into the category of "too big to fail".
This is pretty much what the problem is. Simply building and fuelling a nuclear power station isn't overwhelmingly expensive, but the ongoing cost of maintenance and dealing with the waste is very expensive, and retiring a reactor even more so - its not like a conventional thermal power plant where you build it, fuel it, and when you are done just leave it.
There are far too many institutions that are getting so huge that they simply can't fail... at least until reality hits them hard in the face like what happened in Fukushima.
At which point the only answer is to nationalise - which, IMO, is how all large utilities should be run. For example telecommunications in many countries is an absolute mess because you have several very, very big companies, all competing and building infrastructure against each other, in many cases with incredibly wasteful overlap. But what if the infrastructure was all nationalised, and these companies only have to "buy-in" to get access? You would have a single set of infrastructure which is still paid for by the big companies, but lacking over-lap and being standardised means that people are not locked in to certain vendors, and by having control be done by a government entity that only provides wholesale access means you don't have unfair advantages.
There is no reason to think this is isolated to just Japan, so similar kinds of engineering management screw ups are likely to happen.
The only way to prevent this is to make sure these companies are prepared - they should be carrying out safety drills and exercises on a regular basis, and facilities should be inspected by independent third parties - none of this has happened in Japan.
I remember a press release in mid-late 2011 that they planned to expand capacity in Chiba and Yokohama, that in practical terms are part of Tokyo.
You said:
TEPCO is building new gas power plants INSIDE Tokyo Metropolitan area
The only part you got right is "TEPCO" - these are not new plants, but in every case is either an upgrade or an expansion (or a temporary facility which is nothing more than hundreds of diesel generators to try and pump as much power into the grid for an hour or two during peak periods).
Chiba and Kanagawa are not Tokyo, they are most definitely not Metropolitan Tokyo.
Fukushima Daiichi could have been a far less serious accident if Unit 1 didn't got a license to continue in service. Not only because that would have been a one more unit less in service at the time of the accident, but because the explosion of Unit 1 hampered the efforts to put under control Units 2 and 3.
Unit 1, 2 and 3 all suffered explosions. If TEPCO had been properly prepared and had a working power-supply on site or an alternative at their emergency management site, the entire thing could have been avoided. There was little what would have changed the situation as TEPCO was totally unprepared for an emergency of any scale as their own reports prove - they did not have the equipment, documentation, training or planning ready which would have easily made this a manageable situation.
Wrong.
They are not building any new plants, and definitely not in the Tokyo Metropolitan area. They will be making some changes to improve the output of the gas-fired power plant in Chiba, located here.
Press release here: http://www.tepco.co.jp/cc/press/12010603-j.html
TEPCO has stated several times they will not be building any new thermal power plants.
http://ajw.asahi.com/article/0311disaster/fukushima/AJ201203010064
it's far cheaper to falsify records and pretend we've done that
Not sure if this was intentional, but TEPCO has a record of doing exactly that!
The utility "eventually admitted to two hundred occasions over more than two decades between 1977 and 2002, involving the submission of false technical data to authorities"
In 2007, however, the company announced to the public that an internal investigation had revealed a large number of unreported incidents. These included an unexpected unit criticality in 1978 and additional systematic false reporting, which had not been uncovered during the 2002 inquiry. Along with scandals at other Japanese electric companies, this failure to ensure corporate compliance resulted in strong public criticism of Japan's electric power industry and the nation's nuclear energy policy. Again, the company made no effort to identify those responsible.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_Electric_Power_Company#Safety_inspections
Nuclear power can be achieved safely, or it can be achieved cheaply - but you cannot do both.
Guess which one the power companies choose?
My wifes hospital has a diesel generator which they were forced to use last year when the blackouts were being done - TEPCO claimed that because the hospital was part of the general grid, and they were unable to isolate them, they would have power outages - but hey, they have a generator, so its all OK, right?
That would be the case if they had diesel at the time...
They let most of their reactors run over the winter to provide the needed power
Reactors that were running at the time, and were not shut down automatically were allowed to keep running until they went into their maintenance cycle - but since the earthquake the plant operators were unable to restart any previously cooled down reactors.
This is only news now because finally they have all stopped - usually only about half to two thirds of the reactors are running at any given time.
Its funny because it is the same heavy industry that helped caused this problem. It has long been claimed that the reason the government is unwilling to put tighter restrictions on the nuclear industry is because of pressure from major industrial customers who are unable to bear even higher prices for electricity.
No, the damage done by Fukushima is massive.
Not only have 80,000 residents been displaced, unable to return to their homes or collect their belongings (nor will they be able to for at least several decades), they also have to write off all the businesses, farms, schools, hospitals and other things left in the area around Fukushima.
The cost to clean-up will eventually be in the trillions, and the reactors not damaged significantly will be retired.
Many thousand businesses have been very hard hit by the fallout of Fukushima, with farmers having to destroy crops and fishermen losing catches.
Fukushima was also the straw that broke the publics trust in nuclear power. People have always been wary of it, but in Japan you have the added problem of it being a badly managed industry that is full of corruption and greed. TEPCO itself has publicly apologised on at least 3 occasions when whistleblowers have come out showing that TEPCO failed to do maintenance on key systems, covered up damaged to avoid costly down-time and repairs, and have covered-up accidents and mishaps to avoid scrutiny by regulations. Internationally the nuclear industry in Japan is well known for having poor, outdated safety standards and useless regulators who are staffed by those who are (quite literally) paid off by the nuclear industry through a system in Japan known as amakudari.
So while the actual health risk isn't going to be huge, the cost to the public in both tax payers money and trust is not an insignificant factor.
An excessively-strong reaction to the tiny bit of the event which can be addressed is a natural, if irrational, response to the larger but completely unmanageable risk of future tsunami damage.
You have no idea. TEPCO knew as early as the 1980's and with 100% certainty in 2009 that its tsunami preparations were woefully insufficient. Building and maintaining a level of defence against tsunami damage in a plant the size of Fukushima Daiichi is not a small thing, but far from impossible. With some very basic changes this disaster would have only have left the reactors as managable scrap. This disaster also highlighted the badly kept secret that Japan's nuclear industry still has no idea or plan of how to deal with its nuclear waste - a very, very expensive problem that is just being compounded over time.
http://ajw.asahi.com/article/0311disaster/fukushima/AJ201103253443
My only concern is that such a massive full smash of all plants would also warrant a Manhattan Project style engineering effort to get as many of those reactors back on line ASAP... something that doesn't seem to be indicated in the article. I have to presume that Japan and its government has at least a tiny portion of intelligence in terms of putting something like that together if necessary. The disaster that they are facing right now to deal with the shortfall of energy production from this shut down is more than I can possibly understand other than I see it even here in America as a political disaster waiting to happen. This is the kind of crap that usually gets a major party shift to happen in most countries.
Right now I have no problem at all with the shutdown. An independant third-party investigation in Japan into Fukushima found that it was not the natural disaster that was to blame, but TEPCO who had repeatedly ignored research into earthquake and especially tsunami risks and failed to act on new data showing their seawall was insufficient (and their plant would be inundated), and that they completely lacked any comprehensive emergency planning or preparation, meaning their reaction to the disaster was slow, unorganised, completely adhoc and in many cases the wrong decisions were made at the wrong time. If you check my other comments in that Reddit post I talk about how they did not even have a backup power supply (eg. UPS) for their main control room, nor did they have emergency lighting (they had to use torches for everything, everywhere), they did not even have instructions on how to do an emergency manual pressure release - they had to read the original design documents and work out how to do it, a process which took almost half a day as they had to first find the documents (not even kept at the plant), then scope out the valve, then find equipment to operate it.
The official TEPCO report into their actions immediately after the earthquake and tsunami reads like a bad sci-fi novel.
My concern is mainly with the anti-nuclear nuts using this for their own political advantage and using it to shut down what new nuclear power plants are currently being built in America (there are currently a few of them) where the largest issues involved are legal costs and not engineering costs. When you need a dozen lawyers to protect each engineer, you know your project is screwed from the beginning.
This is exactly what is happening, and it pisses me off. The plants aren't being shutdown because they are inherently unsafe, or because the public fears nuclear power - its a matter of trust. We don't trust the power companies - they, along with government regulators, have been covering up accidents and skipping on maintenance for years. Repeatedly it has come to light that the power companies, contractors and the government have covered up damaged equipment or ignored warnings from experts, and eventually they'll make some sort of token effort before getting back to business as usual.
In this case the people are not stupid - these "stress tests" are nothing more than computer simulations. I'd want WANO, IAEA and everyone else and their dog to actually physically inspect every single inch of each plant, and have the government write up some decent regulations for the power companies to enforce. Up until now the government has said "the power companies know best, we don't want to impede", THIS IS RIDICULOUS, and we all know it.
You can bet these plants will stay shutdown until changes are made, and all hell will be raised if the federal government allows them to light the reactors without local community support.
I live in Japan and can tell you that the nuclear industry is just a giant accident waiting to happen. For years they have been covering up accidents and cutting corners on design, general safety and maintenance.
Here is my comment from Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/t6q9g/japans_last_reactor_to_shut_down_leaving_country/c4k4g2x
Its 1AM so I won't write much, but the way the foreign press is spinning this whole thing is disgusting.
I had this moving over to Google Apps and pivot tables in Excel was the last feature. There is plenty of things which would be nice to use (mainly formatting tools) but since no one in my company has any idea how to use the software properly in the first place even Google Docs is feature rich enough to get work done.
My challenge has always been - "if there is a feature you must have, and it or a decent alternative does not exist we will buy you an office license"
I *love* my ALiX boards. I really should buy another dozen or so soon....
The big appeal for me with Raspi was the sheer price and simplicity - for a third of the price of an ALiX I get a computer which can be used for various things I deem "nice" but not essential - eg. simple monitoring, network tools, random junk box. Not enough that I'd need a whole PC, but maybe something unsuitable for a VM.
even something as weird as "publicly display" might be necessary to run their service. For example, what if I want to set permissions in my google drive to public, or even to something my friends can access? You know, like some real cloud storage? Bam, public display.
This is exactly it - when you set a file to public, not only is Google making it available, but if is something like a Google Doc or something else that their interface can open, they are also displaying it - a big difference to Dropbox who just make the file available for download removing the need to put that kind of specific wording into their TOS.
Dropbox doesn't have anything to promote, so there is no need for it in their TOS.
Youtube, Picasa and Plus (off the top of my head) all have ways of taking user generated content like videos, photos and posts - which, when the sharing permissions are set to "Public" - can be "promoted" by being put into various lists or displayed on pages.
Go to http://www.youtube.com/ - every video on that page is user content which has been "promoted". BUT, none of this has been done without the express permission of the content owner (via sharing settings).
Same here: https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/featured?feat=featured_all
Same with Google Docs templates. Same with Blogger. Same with Apps on Play.
Google saves time and effort by having a single, broad policy, which covers them for pretty much all of their services.
Bet you anything they create a Drive specific policy by the end of the week outlining the specific details for Drive which will lose many of the useless words listed in Drive.
In any case "publicly perform", "publicly display" and "publish" are all essential to Drive (and Docs) - I have a large number of things in my Google Docs which are files listed in Google Docs as "Public" - mainly manuals but also a few spreadsheets with interesting information updated by a select few and viewed by thousands:
Examples:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ann1Le6EQCbEdFN2NXRoY3hKRi1ENEdPWldCU0tZVmc#gid=0
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yx5-l2JKOw18isYGhke81JMAYN7pvx6sjEk6FA3-rYk
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nRS0nOoVsYUuiOYg_OCkpx38s69hQgvetpMpWkGuElg
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Apu8Kw8hp4JadGpWMVJFakNTZG1wa3ZmeHZ2TFUzdHc#gid=0
They have one policy for all services, and then generally a more specific set of policies which outline what they mean.
For example if you post a video to Youtube and have the sharing/privacy options to let anyone view it, they will exercise the "publicly perform", "publicly display" parts of the policy. If it becomes popular and makes it to the front page, that is "promoting". By agreeing to the policy, and having the appropriate sharing settings, they are only doing as they have laid out in the policy.
To think otherwise is just stupid. Go ahead and give me even one example of Google abuse of customer content in-line with their own policy.
I've worked for a number of Fortune 100 companies in the last 3 years and iPad "adoption" is generally little more than email, and even then its only because it is everyone's favourite new toy.
My Citibank Japan card won't work in some ATMs between 9pm-8am, and not at all on Sundays or public holidays. Only in Japan...
This - I've seen the palm reader on some Tokyo ATMs for several years now. I think its Risona or MUFJ...
In Japan they would probably have a big bottle of alcohol hand cleaner - one of the practices I quite enjoy seeing.
It's likely that the vast majority of people still running XP are corporate customers, and if they can't manage an upgrade to Win7 over the next 2 years, they should probably hire some better IT staff.
I work for a small business and half of our computers still run XP. I've been instructed by management (who have the last call on all spending) that we will not be purchasing Windows 7 licences until the last possible moment, and we'll continue the current pattern of buying new PCs with Windows 7 as a way to slowly replace XP.
As you can imagine it is slowly driving me mad.
Yes, but you are paying for those parts. Cars, like computer software, usually come with a period where the manufacturer will guarantee a certain level of support. After that you pay for it.
Microsoft will still provide support after the EOL, but you'd have to pay for it. Considering that we've known for many years this day is coming, I'm surprised people are still complaining about it.
Drop it on a USB drive, plug it into old laptops. Instant fully working OS with all my options. Beats installing a new OS every time I find some old hunk of junk in the office.