We HAVE tried this form of reactor before. It IS proven technology.
What needs to happen now is the R&D to mass produce and up-scale.
Only one of those two arguments can be correct. If it hasn't been scaled up and put in widespread production then we haven't really tried it. Please note that I'm not arguing that we shouldn't, merely that we haven't yet made commercial reactors beyond a few proof of concept models. While it might work great and I'm hopeful it would, there is a huge leap between proof of concept and full on deployment.
Maybe not routine but certainly expected. An earthquake of magnitude 8 or greater occurs on average about once a year somewhere in the world. In a location like Japan it is not merely possible, it is almost certain to occur eventually. Over 80% of the largest earthquakes occur somewhere along the Pacific Rim. Anyone who is surprised that a magnitude 9 earthquake struck near Japan is an imbecile.
The largest nuke mankind has ever set off was 50 megatons. So strap 9 of those bad boys together and that's what you're trying to engineer against. Ask an actual engineer about the logistics of building for something like that.
Well I am an actual engineer. Nobody promised it would be easy. Want to build something dangerous? Better plan for some worst case events. If you can't deal with a natural disaster that was as predictable as a big earthquake/tsunami in Japan then perhaps the activity isn't such a good idea.
So. Exactly how do we have a "radioactive disaster"?
From the problems you don't predict. From unexpected design flaws. From the black swan events. We have little operational experience with reactors of the sort you describe so there undoubtedly are problems we haven't come across yet. There could be problems with containment materials like embrittlement or corrosion. The design may have flaws we aren't aware of yet. Overlooked/neglected maintenance. Parts of the reactor not being built properly. Improper management of the core mixture. Externalities like natural disasters or wars. Management may take shortcuts in pursuit of economic gain. Etc. There are plenty of failure modes out there and not all of them can be addressed with an improved design.
All the advantages you describe sound great on paper but there are lots of designs that are great on paper but not so great in the real world. Until we've actually tried (and we should) its a little premature to declare that it is perfectly safe.
The thing is, the realities of Chernobyl and Fukushima are the realities of ancient, outdated equipment, bad design and unsound engineering.
Operational nuclear reactors have a service life of 30+ years. Any design you can come up with is likely to be obsolete and the equipment in it outdated possibly even between the time it is designed and built, much less for the full service life. State of the art doesn't remain state of the art for long.
As for bad designs and unsound engineering, those don't magically disappear just because time has marched on. Dealing with that takes a focused effort and even if the engineering is done perfectly, if it isn't built, operated and maintained properly it doesn't matter how well it was engineered. Some of the problems of a bad design only become apparent after the unit is built. Some problems are a failure of management. Other problems occur because most reactors built to date are unique designs with minimal commonality so each has its own unique failure modes and any lessons learned cannot be shared or built upon. Even if we decided to build to a common design there are problems there too because any failure modes will now be common to every installed reactor. We also have the problem that our best nuclear technology is apparently kept secret and used in military vessels rather than for civilian applications. Hard to learn when your best engineers can't talk about what they've learned.
The fact is, we can build reactors that don't blow up NOW.
Explosions have never been the problem with reactors that anyone really worries about. The problem is radioactive material leaking out of containment which can occur in a variety of ways. There is NO reactor design we currently possess that can fully eliminate the possibility of a containment failure. Some designs are clearly better than others but all of them carry very serious operational risks in some form or another.
So if Chrysler sold a car without working air-con and without a working stereo, but if you pay $3000 they will enable them, and then someone discovers that the technological measure is they don't put a fuse in the fuse box, and then you stick a fuse in there, is that a technological measure protected by the DMCA?
I think it has to be something covered by copyright law like computer code. I don't think that particular use case would apply here since it involves nothing that is affected by copyright law.
The jack of all trades in the IT world is much less more valuable than it was 20 years ago. Specialization and people who are that passionate and WELL educated (have become "gurus") about specific areas are what is valuable today.
Specialization with no understanding of topics outside of the area of specialty is Not-A-Good-Thing (tm). Specialization is important and obviously useful but there are plenty of cases where a generalist is more useful. You need people who can see how parts of a business fit together and can fill in roles that may don't justify hiring a dedicated specialist. The bigger or more specialized the company, the greater the need for specialists but he need for generalists never goes away, particularly if you want good managers. Technical specialists as a crude rule of thumb tend to run into their Peter Principle limit a lot sooner.
I'm not an IT guy per-se but I often am asked to fill that role. I'm have the skill set of a generalist. You can find better IT guys than me but you aren't likely to find IT guys that are also certified accountants or non-IT engineers of which I am both. In my company our IT needs are relatively modest so hiring a dedicated IT guy doesn't make sense right now. As we grow that will (hopefully) change. On a weekly basis I handle work in IT, HR, engineering, accounting and purchasing. Someone who only is an IT guy would undoubtedly do a great job with the IT stuff but might struggle with stuff outside his/her specialty. The important thing for a generalist to understand is where his limits are and to not exceed them. I know a lot about IT but the most important thing for me to know is to know what I don't know.
As a fellow Slashdotter once said, "the best union is the one you're threatening to form".
Not unless it is a credible threat. There is no one actually seriously threatening to form a union and the management of the relevant companies knows this. An actual threat to form a union requires actually talking to (or becoming) union organizers. I'm confident enough I'd put actual money on it that no IT worker reading this has ever seriously taken any of the substantial actions required to form a union of IT workers. It's just a bunch of bitching on a website the management of their company will never read.
My 1960 Dodge Dart (2dr/Phoenix) got over 20 mpg on the freeway, not too shabby. That was with a 240 hp 5.2 liter V8. If you added a high-flow cat to it, it probably would run relatively clean as well, in spite of being carbureted.
I think it is unlikely it would be particularly clean. A car that old would lack an evaporative emission control system which accounts for a fairly high percentage of emissions. It lacks sensors to detect and correct for emissions. It also is carbureted which is demonstrably less clean than fuel injection. Even with a modern catalytic converter, while it might run pretty well, I would find it very surprising if it was terribly clean on the emissions.
It's about time for one for Tech / IT as a union will put a stop to a lot of this BS and the 1HB abuse.
So what is stopping you from organizing a union? If you think it is so important then why are you not doing it instead of just complaining here on slashdot where it doesn't matter at all? Or are you just all talk and no action? Every time this topic comes up there is a bunch of complaining about how IT workers "need a union" but nobody ever seems to think it important enough to actually bother organizing.
Do you seriously believe that the "new" journalism isn't ad sponsored.
Some is and some isn't. I'm not for a moment claiming ad revenue is going away (far from it) but the revenue sources are and I think will continue to become much more diverse. The companies getting the big ad revenues are companies like Google which are not media focused rather than the New York Times. The company that controls the platform is separating from the company (or people) that generate the content. Furthermore you have things like Twitter and Facebook that are essentially a form of citizen reporting that was not remotely possible previously. The platforms are often (though not always) ad sponsored but the actual journalism often isn't. This disintermediation is going to be very interesting to watch. You'll see some newspapers but less of them. You'll see broadcast TV subsumed into the internet. You'll see alternative funding methods actually gain traction as we move from a broadcast model to a social network model. Some things won't change but a lot will.
What, other than ads, do they have as a source of funding?
Subscriptions, direct fundraising (ala NPR), philanthropic grants, crowd sourcing, paywalls, and cooperatives all come to mind. Ad revenue is relatively easy but it's hardly the only way to fund journalism. The alternatives might not be as profitable but that's a very separate problem.
At least the "old" journalism could get some revenues directly from their readers.
Circulation fees charged were tiny compare to the revenue brought in by ads. They sold the paper cheaply to bring the eyeballs to the ads. They transmitted the broadcast TV for free to get eyeballs to advertisers. Radio was 100% ad supported prior to satellite/internet "radio". Anyone who tried charging a subscription fee for any of those was basically undercutting themselves because people would rather put up with ads than actually pay out of pocket for information/entertainment. Subscriptions only worked for fairly specialized sources of information like topical magazines.
The thing is, the culture at MS is toxic. The inmates are ruling the asylum.
Then it sounds like a good old fashioned purge may be just the medicine the doctor ordered. Cull the biggest troublemakers and adjust the incentive structure to something sane. It's a virtual certainty that 10% of the people are 90% of the problems.
If they don't, where is the money (viz income) going to come from in the Operating System space?
Windows is going to be a cash cow for some time to come. I really don't see that changing even with the debacle that is Windows 8.
Satya is IMHO between a rock and a hard place. Balmer has left him up shit creek without a paddle.
Not really because he has one HUGE card he can play. Microsoft has approximately $100 billion in cash and cash equivalents. They can simply buy other companies if their core business starts to erode faster than they can build up new businesses. They have almost enough cash to buy both General Motors and Ford at their current market caps. They could buy Hewlett Packard in cash and have enough left over to buy Best Buy, Blackberry, and the wildly overpriced Tesla Motors.
Microsoft may have serious problems in their Windows and Office business but they are by no means stuck for options if they care to exercise them.
the problem of the destruction of journalism is an extremely serious one and we should worry about it far more than we worry about protecting the freedom to destroy it.
Journalism is not being destroyed. Journalism as we once knew it is being destroyed but that is a very different thing. It's being replaced by something different because the business model that it used to depend on is under attack. Newspapers and TV stations depended on local monopolies based on the expense of distributing information and they were absurdly profitable for a long time. The internet and other forms of media have knocked much of that pricing power away and now for the first time in a long time they are having to compete. Journalism may never again be as profitable as it once was but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Ad sponsored journalism always had a built in conflict of interest even when they were scrupulous about keeping the business and content separate.
Free software is....well...free. The people who wrote it don't get paid.
Frequently that is not at all true. Most free software is developed by professional developers in conjunction with their day job. It is released as free but for many important software projects the developer probably actually did get paid for their time. Sure there are a non-trivial number of developers who really are doing it for non-financial reasons in their spare time but the number is far smaller than most people think.
Bad documentation is not unique to FOSS. Commercial software is often just as bad.
How about crowdfunding some documentation efforts by real technical writers?
A band-aid that doesn't solve the real problem. Even if you did this and produced some great documentation, it would fairly rapidly become obsolete unless the software is never updated. You would have to basically create an endowment to fund ongoing documentation development. The real problem is that A) the interfaces are bad enough that documentation is even necessary in the first place and B) documentation is boring, unrewarding and time consuming to do well so nobody wants to bother.
I bet most projects would be happy to accept patches to their man pages, and files they store in/usr/doc/ if they improve quality or accuracy.
What you say is quite true however it doesn't really get at the root of the problem. If I ever have to consult a man page and I'm not doing something really arcane then the application interface is badly designed. No amount of documentation will ever fix a bad interface.
After it gets to Atlanta, it'll be 4 thousand miles closer than it was before.
Ebola was already at the CDC in Atlanta decades ago. Do you seriously think they hadn't already examined this virus in Atlanta? The CDC examines pretty much every known pathogen. The budget of the CDC is larger than the GDP of any of the countries involved in the recent outbreak. You want the CDC looking at this with whatever resources they can muster so that it doesn't become a problem.
The chance of any of the patients being transported to Atlanta resulting in an outbreak of ebola in North America is so small that it borders on science fiction. People worrying about that have watched too many zombie apocalypse movies.
Where do you go for your FOSS documentation and self-help?
Documenting code is different than documenting an interface. As an end user I honestly I don't bother with FOSS documentation for the most part because it's generally so bad. (Sadly non-FOSS software is too seldom much better even when it should be) While there are times when I have to dig into whatever is available, I generally don't bother with any application (FOSS or not) that I need to consult the documentation to figure out unless I absolutely have no alternative. It's sort of a quick and dirty way of sorting out what I want to use since 99% of what I do does not require deep magic. If I have to get out the manual then chances are that the application is poorly designed and will most likely cost me more time than some alternative. There are exceptions of course but it's not a bad first pass filter.
As a random example it's why I can't be bothered with EMACS despite the fact that it's an absurdly capable piece of software. (I don't like vi either so spare everyone the holy war) If I have to consult a manual to do even the most basic things in the application then it isn't worth my time. (Ctrl-x Ctrl-c to quit? Seriously?!? No thanks) I don't want to memorize a random list of key shortcuts especially for an application I'm just starting to use. Installation routines should take care of all but the most arcane issues. Applications should never require magic keystroke combinations or buried options for common tasks. Minimalism is fine but not when it hides so much that I can't immediately discern how to do a task (I'm looking at you Apple). If I need a tooltip to figure out what something does then it is badly designed. If I have to pull up a help screen (press F1 etc) then it is really badly designed. If I have to look at a man page or consult a third party reference then it is probably completely broken.
I think good documentation is important but it should never be a substitute for a well designed interface. Furthermore documentation for users (code is different) should primarily serve two purposes. 1) To get people up to speed on basic tasks with an unfamiliar application and 2) To document weird corner cases and how to deal with them. 99% of what any application does should not require special documentation. If it does then it needs to fixed until it is in a state where it no longer needs the documentation.
Many of the victims of SARS were doctors and especially nurses, who were following the established protocols.
Medical personnel are always among the most at risk for contracting pathogens, particularly before the transmission mechanism is known. SARS to my knowledge was an unknown pathogen prior to around 2002. The biggest problem with SARS was that the Chinese government intentionally failed to notify the WHO in a timely manner. Once the existence of a problem was known it was dealt with rather quickly but the damage was worse than it might have been had the proper protocols been followed. I was actually in China during the SARS outbreak by coincidence.
They work well, but how reliably? 99%? 99.9%?
How well the protocols work depends on a lot of factors including transmission vector, communicability of the disease, location of outbreak, location of resources to respond to the outbreak, rapidity of notification of relevant health organizations like the WHO or the CDC and some other factors. Once an outbreak becomes known for a disease like ebola, the protocols are quite reliable. As of July 31 the WHO reports that there are 1440 known cases. The local population in the affected countries is around 34 million so a crude estimate by your metric is that the measures for this particular disease are 99.9957% effective (1-1440/34mil). (other diseases will have a different result and this metric is not really useful for a variety of reasons) The chances of the patient being brought to the US causing any sort of wide spread infection is a pretty good approximation of zero. People worrying about that are worrying a hypothetical event that is just so absurdly unlikely that it borders on science fiction.
Ebola is as easily transmitted as HIV; arguably more easily, (no one ever got HIV from hugging someone) but it kills you insanely fast and there is no treatment.
Deliberately transporting people infected with it to this continent, seems arrogant at best and monumentally and criminally stupid at worst.
It is neither arrogant nor stupid. What is arrogant and stupid is not bringing the best medical research available to bear on a disease because it is Over There. Furthermore not utilizing resources like the CDC is how a disease that is Over There gets Over Here. This is exactly how you learn how to treat a disease that you intend to learn how to cure. Ebola is scary to someone uneducated regarding pathogens but there are plenty of pathogens around us that are WAY scarier to infectious disease doctors. Anti-biotic resistant strains of Staph (MRSA, VISA), mutated strains of influenza, etc should scare you much more than the incredibly remote possibility of ebola escaping from a patient under containment being treated by the world's premier pathogen research lab. I think you've been watching too many zombie apocalypse movies. I'm not even the tiniest bit worried about what they are doing. What worries me is idiots who think diseases will never make there way to their part of the world if they just keep sticking their head in the sand.
I wonder how hard it would be to outfit a C-5 (or C-130s) with a M*A*S*H type setup??
They already have done that. It's a big part of the reason why deaths from battlefield wounds have dropped quite a lot in the last 60 years. Soldiers wounded on a battlefield in Iraq might find themselves on a medical evacuation plane to Germany within 24 hours. If fact much of the practice of emergency medicine comes straight from lessons learned from battlefield medicine including medical transport.
They also have medical isolation planes for dealing with bioterrorism, pathogen warfare, chemical warfare and disease outbreaks.
Why would anyone SELL bitcoin mining rigs instead of simply building them and getting rich themselves?
Same reason that people sell get rich quick schemes to the gullible rather than getting rich off the scheme themselves. They know there is no profit to be had in the actual mining of bitcoins but there is money to be had selling virtual shovels to those dumb enough to not figure this fact out.
If you really could make millions mining bitcoins why would you tell anyone?
Sierra Leone's only expert on Ebola died from Ebola a couple of days ago, despite being an expert and therefore following all the safety procedures to the best of his ability.
I'm not going to bother confirming what you said but let's assume it is true. Do you have any idea what sort of conditions this person was working under? If it is anything like much of West Africa then you've probably been in highway rest stops that are cleaner than some of the hospitals. Per capita GDP in Sierra Leone is under $1000/year so I'm pretty sure any doctors working there are working without adequate supplies which equals unsafe working conditions. The CDC on the other hand has access to literally every medical technology known to man and the money to utilize them.
So what exactly is your point? That a doctor, heroically working to save people, died due to a lack of adequate medical supplies to do his job properly? Yeah, happens all the time in places like that. It's a tragedy but nothing new or shocking.
The various strains of the flu which become pandemics don't start off as particularly communicable either.
This isn't influenza nor does it behave like it.
They become a pandemic when they mutate into a form which can be transmitted via the air. Not saying this will happen with Ebola. Just saying that just because it's not particularly communicable now doesn't mean it'll stay that way.
Depending on the physiology of the virus it might very well mean that it will stay that way. Very very very few viruses that can infect humans get airborne. It's just ridiculously rare because the pathogen has to evolve in just the right way. Ebola apparently evolves rather slowly and while I'm no expert on viruses, my understanding from some people who are (I'm married to a doctor) is that most viruses will never ever become airborne because it is such a hostile environment.
So is there a chance? Probably. But you really shouldn't spend your time worrying about it.
Slashdot Mirror
We HAVE tried this form of reactor before. It IS proven technology.
What needs to happen now is the R&D to mass produce and up-scale.
Only one of those two arguments can be correct. If it hasn't been scaled up and put in widespread production then we haven't really tried it. Please note that I'm not arguing that we shouldn't, merely that we haven't yet made commercial reactors beyond a few proof of concept models. While it might work great and I'm hopeful it would, there is a huge leap between proof of concept and full on deployment.
And a 9.0 earthquake is NOT a "routine event".
Maybe not routine but certainly expected. An earthquake of magnitude 8 or greater occurs on average about once a year somewhere in the world. In a location like Japan it is not merely possible, it is almost certain to occur eventually. Over 80% of the largest earthquakes occur somewhere along the Pacific Rim. Anyone who is surprised that a magnitude 9 earthquake struck near Japan is an imbecile.
The largest nuke mankind has ever set off was 50 megatons. So strap 9 of those bad boys together and that's what you're trying to engineer against. Ask an actual engineer about the logistics of building for something like that.
Well I am an actual engineer. Nobody promised it would be easy. Want to build something dangerous? Better plan for some worst case events. If you can't deal with a natural disaster that was as predictable as a big earthquake/tsunami in Japan then perhaps the activity isn't such a good idea.
So. Exactly how do we have a "radioactive disaster"?
From the problems you don't predict. From unexpected design flaws. From the black swan events. We have little operational experience with reactors of the sort you describe so there undoubtedly are problems we haven't come across yet. There could be problems with containment materials like embrittlement or corrosion. The design may have flaws we aren't aware of yet. Overlooked/neglected maintenance. Parts of the reactor not being built properly. Improper management of the core mixture. Externalities like natural disasters or wars. Management may take shortcuts in pursuit of economic gain. Etc. There are plenty of failure modes out there and not all of them can be addressed with an improved design.
All the advantages you describe sound great on paper but there are lots of designs that are great on paper but not so great in the real world. Until we've actually tried (and we should) its a little premature to declare that it is perfectly safe.
The thing is, the realities of Chernobyl and Fukushima are the realities of ancient, outdated equipment, bad design and unsound engineering.
Operational nuclear reactors have a service life of 30+ years. Any design you can come up with is likely to be obsolete and the equipment in it outdated possibly even between the time it is designed and built, much less for the full service life. State of the art doesn't remain state of the art for long.
As for bad designs and unsound engineering, those don't magically disappear just because time has marched on. Dealing with that takes a focused effort and even if the engineering is done perfectly, if it isn't built, operated and maintained properly it doesn't matter how well it was engineered. Some of the problems of a bad design only become apparent after the unit is built. Some problems are a failure of management. Other problems occur because most reactors built to date are unique designs with minimal commonality so each has its own unique failure modes and any lessons learned cannot be shared or built upon. Even if we decided to build to a common design there are problems there too because any failure modes will now be common to every installed reactor. We also have the problem that our best nuclear technology is apparently kept secret and used in military vessels rather than for civilian applications. Hard to learn when your best engineers can't talk about what they've learned.
The fact is, we can build reactors that don't blow up NOW.
Explosions have never been the problem with reactors that anyone really worries about. The problem is radioactive material leaking out of containment which can occur in a variety of ways. There is NO reactor design we currently possess that can fully eliminate the possibility of a containment failure. Some designs are clearly better than others but all of them carry very serious operational risks in some form or another.
So if Chrysler sold a car without working air-con and without a working stereo, but if you pay $3000 they will enable them, and then someone discovers that the technological measure is they don't put a fuse in the fuse box, and then you stick a fuse in there, is that a technological measure protected by the DMCA?
I think it has to be something covered by copyright law like computer code. I don't think that particular use case would apply here since it involves nothing that is affected by copyright law.
The jack of all trades in the IT world is much less more valuable than it was 20 years ago. Specialization and people who are that passionate and WELL educated (have become "gurus") about specific areas are what is valuable today.
Specialization with no understanding of topics outside of the area of specialty is Not-A-Good-Thing (tm). Specialization is important and obviously useful but there are plenty of cases where a generalist is more useful. You need people who can see how parts of a business fit together and can fill in roles that may don't justify hiring a dedicated specialist. The bigger or more specialized the company, the greater the need for specialists but he need for generalists never goes away, particularly if you want good managers. Technical specialists as a crude rule of thumb tend to run into their Peter Principle limit a lot sooner.
I'm not an IT guy per-se but I often am asked to fill that role. I'm have the skill set of a generalist. You can find better IT guys than me but you aren't likely to find IT guys that are also certified accountants or non-IT engineers of which I am both. In my company our IT needs are relatively modest so hiring a dedicated IT guy doesn't make sense right now. As we grow that will (hopefully) change. On a weekly basis I handle work in IT, HR, engineering, accounting and purchasing. Someone who only is an IT guy would undoubtedly do a great job with the IT stuff but might struggle with stuff outside his/her specialty. The important thing for a generalist to understand is where his limits are and to not exceed them. I know a lot about IT but the most important thing for me to know is to know what I don't know.
As a fellow Slashdotter once said, "the best union is the one you're threatening to form".
Not unless it is a credible threat. There is no one actually seriously threatening to form a union and the management of the relevant companies knows this. An actual threat to form a union requires actually talking to (or becoming) union organizers. I'm confident enough I'd put actual money on it that no IT worker reading this has ever seriously taken any of the substantial actions required to form a union of IT workers. It's just a bunch of bitching on a website the management of their company will never read.
My 1960 Dodge Dart (2dr/Phoenix) got over 20 mpg on the freeway, not too shabby. That was with a 240 hp 5.2 liter V8. If you added a high-flow cat to it, it probably would run relatively clean as well, in spite of being carbureted.
I think it is unlikely it would be particularly clean. A car that old would lack an evaporative emission control system which accounts for a fairly high percentage of emissions. It lacks sensors to detect and correct for emissions. It also is carbureted which is demonstrably less clean than fuel injection. Even with a modern catalytic converter, while it might run pretty well, I would find it very surprising if it was terribly clean on the emissions.
It's about time for one for Tech / IT as a union will put a stop to a lot of this BS and the 1HB abuse.
So what is stopping you from organizing a union? If you think it is so important then why are you not doing it instead of just complaining here on slashdot where it doesn't matter at all? Or are you just all talk and no action? Every time this topic comes up there is a bunch of complaining about how IT workers "need a union" but nobody ever seems to think it important enough to actually bother organizing.
Do you seriously believe that the "new" journalism isn't ad sponsored.
Some is and some isn't. I'm not for a moment claiming ad revenue is going away (far from it) but the revenue sources are and I think will continue to become much more diverse. The companies getting the big ad revenues are companies like Google which are not media focused rather than the New York Times. The company that controls the platform is separating from the company (or people) that generate the content. Furthermore you have things like Twitter and Facebook that are essentially a form of citizen reporting that was not remotely possible previously. The platforms are often (though not always) ad sponsored but the actual journalism often isn't. This disintermediation is going to be very interesting to watch. You'll see some newspapers but less of them. You'll see broadcast TV subsumed into the internet. You'll see alternative funding methods actually gain traction as we move from a broadcast model to a social network model. Some things won't change but a lot will.
What, other than ads, do they have as a source of funding?
Subscriptions, direct fundraising (ala NPR), philanthropic grants, crowd sourcing, paywalls, and cooperatives all come to mind. Ad revenue is relatively easy but it's hardly the only way to fund journalism. The alternatives might not be as profitable but that's a very separate problem.
At least the "old" journalism could get some revenues directly from their readers.
Circulation fees charged were tiny compare to the revenue brought in by ads. They sold the paper cheaply to bring the eyeballs to the ads. They transmitted the broadcast TV for free to get eyeballs to advertisers. Radio was 100% ad supported prior to satellite/internet "radio". Anyone who tried charging a subscription fee for any of those was basically undercutting themselves because people would rather put up with ads than actually pay out of pocket for information/entertainment. Subscriptions only worked for fairly specialized sources of information like topical magazines.
The thing is, the culture at MS is toxic. The inmates are ruling the asylum.
Then it sounds like a good old fashioned purge may be just the medicine the doctor ordered. Cull the biggest troublemakers and adjust the incentive structure to something sane. It's a virtual certainty that 10% of the people are 90% of the problems.
If they don't, where is the money (viz income) going to come from in the Operating System space?
Windows is going to be a cash cow for some time to come. I really don't see that changing even with the debacle that is Windows 8.
Satya is IMHO between a rock and a hard place. Balmer has left him up shit creek without a paddle.
Not really because he has one HUGE card he can play. Microsoft has approximately $100 billion in cash and cash equivalents. They can simply buy other companies if their core business starts to erode faster than they can build up new businesses. They have almost enough cash to buy both General Motors and Ford at their current market caps. They could buy Hewlett Packard in cash and have enough left over to buy Best Buy, Blackberry, and the wildly overpriced Tesla Motors.
Microsoft may have serious problems in their Windows and Office business but they are by no means stuck for options if they care to exercise them.
the problem of the destruction of journalism is an extremely serious one and we should worry about it far more than we worry about protecting the freedom to destroy it.
Journalism is not being destroyed. Journalism as we once knew it is being destroyed but that is a very different thing. It's being replaced by something different because the business model that it used to depend on is under attack. Newspapers and TV stations depended on local monopolies based on the expense of distributing information and they were absurdly profitable for a long time. The internet and other forms of media have knocked much of that pricing power away and now for the first time in a long time they are having to compete. Journalism may never again be as profitable as it once was but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Ad sponsored journalism always had a built in conflict of interest even when they were scrupulous about keeping the business and content separate.
Free software is....well...free. The people who wrote it don't get paid.
Frequently that is not at all true. Most free software is developed by professional developers in conjunction with their day job. It is released as free but for many important software projects the developer probably actually did get paid for their time. Sure there are a non-trivial number of developers who really are doing it for non-financial reasons in their spare time but the number is far smaller than most people think.
Bad documentation is not unique to FOSS. Commercial software is often just as bad.
How about crowdfunding some documentation efforts by real technical writers?
A band-aid that doesn't solve the real problem. Even if you did this and produced some great documentation, it would fairly rapidly become obsolete unless the software is never updated. You would have to basically create an endowment to fund ongoing documentation development. The real problem is that A) the interfaces are bad enough that documentation is even necessary in the first place and B) documentation is boring, unrewarding and time consuming to do well so nobody wants to bother.
I bet most projects would be happy to accept patches to their man pages, and files they store in /usr/doc/ if they improve quality or accuracy.
What you say is quite true however it doesn't really get at the root of the problem. If I ever have to consult a man page and I'm not doing something really arcane then the application interface is badly designed. No amount of documentation will ever fix a bad interface.
After it gets to Atlanta, it'll be 4 thousand miles closer than it was before.
Ebola was already at the CDC in Atlanta decades ago. Do you seriously think they hadn't already examined this virus in Atlanta? The CDC examines pretty much every known pathogen. The budget of the CDC is larger than the GDP of any of the countries involved in the recent outbreak. You want the CDC looking at this with whatever resources they can muster so that it doesn't become a problem.
The chance of any of the patients being transported to Atlanta resulting in an outbreak of ebola in North America is so small that it borders on science fiction. People worrying about that have watched too many zombie apocalypse movies.
Where do you go for your FOSS documentation and self-help?
Documenting code is different than documenting an interface. As an end user I honestly I don't bother with FOSS documentation for the most part because it's generally so bad. (Sadly non-FOSS software is too seldom much better even when it should be) While there are times when I have to dig into whatever is available, I generally don't bother with any application (FOSS or not) that I need to consult the documentation to figure out unless I absolutely have no alternative. It's sort of a quick and dirty way of sorting out what I want to use since 99% of what I do does not require deep magic. If I have to get out the manual then chances are that the application is poorly designed and will most likely cost me more time than some alternative. There are exceptions of course but it's not a bad first pass filter.
As a random example it's why I can't be bothered with EMACS despite the fact that it's an absurdly capable piece of software. (I don't like vi either so spare everyone the holy war) If I have to consult a manual to do even the most basic things in the application then it isn't worth my time. (Ctrl-x Ctrl-c to quit? Seriously?!? No thanks) I don't want to memorize a random list of key shortcuts especially for an application I'm just starting to use. Installation routines should take care of all but the most arcane issues. Applications should never require magic keystroke combinations or buried options for common tasks. Minimalism is fine but not when it hides so much that I can't immediately discern how to do a task (I'm looking at you Apple). If I need a tooltip to figure out what something does then it is badly designed. If I have to pull up a help screen (press F1 etc) then it is really badly designed. If I have to look at a man page or consult a third party reference then it is probably completely broken.
I think good documentation is important but it should never be a substitute for a well designed interface. Furthermore documentation for users (code is different) should primarily serve two purposes. 1) To get people up to speed on basic tasks with an unfamiliar application and 2) To document weird corner cases and how to deal with them. 99% of what any application does should not require special documentation. If it does then it needs to fixed until it is in a state where it no longer needs the documentation.
Many of the victims of SARS were doctors and especially nurses, who were following the established protocols.
Medical personnel are always among the most at risk for contracting pathogens, particularly before the transmission mechanism is known. SARS to my knowledge was an unknown pathogen prior to around 2002. The biggest problem with SARS was that the Chinese government intentionally failed to notify the WHO in a timely manner. Once the existence of a problem was known it was dealt with rather quickly but the damage was worse than it might have been had the proper protocols been followed. I was actually in China during the SARS outbreak by coincidence.
They work well, but how reliably? 99%? 99.9%?
How well the protocols work depends on a lot of factors including transmission vector, communicability of the disease, location of outbreak, location of resources to respond to the outbreak, rapidity of notification of relevant health organizations like the WHO or the CDC and some other factors. Once an outbreak becomes known for a disease like ebola, the protocols are quite reliable. As of July 31 the WHO reports that there are 1440 known cases. The local population in the affected countries is around 34 million so a crude estimate by your metric is that the measures for this particular disease are 99.9957% effective (1-1440/34mil). (other diseases will have a different result and this metric is not really useful for a variety of reasons) The chances of the patient being brought to the US causing any sort of wide spread infection is a pretty good approximation of zero. People worrying about that are worrying a hypothetical event that is just so absurdly unlikely that it borders on science fiction.
Ebola is as easily transmitted as HIV; arguably more easily, (no one ever got HIV from hugging someone) but it kills you insanely fast and there is no treatment.
Deliberately transporting people infected with it to this continent, seems arrogant at best and monumentally and criminally stupid at worst.
It is neither arrogant nor stupid. What is arrogant and stupid is not bringing the best medical research available to bear on a disease because it is Over There. Furthermore not utilizing resources like the CDC is how a disease that is Over There gets Over Here. This is exactly how you learn how to treat a disease that you intend to learn how to cure. Ebola is scary to someone uneducated regarding pathogens but there are plenty of pathogens around us that are WAY scarier to infectious disease doctors. Anti-biotic resistant strains of Staph (MRSA, VISA), mutated strains of influenza, etc should scare you much more than the incredibly remote possibility of ebola escaping from a patient under containment being treated by the world's premier pathogen research lab. I think you've been watching too many zombie apocalypse movies. I'm not even the tiniest bit worried about what they are doing. What worries me is idiots who think diseases will never make there way to their part of the world if they just keep sticking their head in the sand.
I wonder how hard it would be to outfit a C-5 (or C-130s) with a M*A*S*H type setup??
They already have done that. It's a big part of the reason why deaths from battlefield wounds have dropped quite a lot in the last 60 years. Soldiers wounded on a battlefield in Iraq might find themselves on a medical evacuation plane to Germany within 24 hours. If fact much of the practice of emergency medicine comes straight from lessons learned from battlefield medicine including medical transport.
They also have medical isolation planes for dealing with bioterrorism, pathogen warfare, chemical warfare and disease outbreaks.
Why would anyone SELL bitcoin mining rigs instead of simply building them and getting rich themselves?
Same reason that people sell get rich quick schemes to the gullible rather than getting rich off the scheme themselves. They know there is no profit to be had in the actual mining of bitcoins but there is money to be had selling virtual shovels to those dumb enough to not figure this fact out.
If you really could make millions mining bitcoins why would you tell anyone?
Sierra Leone's only expert on Ebola died from Ebola a couple of days ago, despite being an expert and therefore following all the safety procedures to the best of his ability.
I'm not going to bother confirming what you said but let's assume it is true. Do you have any idea what sort of conditions this person was working under? If it is anything like much of West Africa then you've probably been in highway rest stops that are cleaner than some of the hospitals. Per capita GDP in Sierra Leone is under $1000/year so I'm pretty sure any doctors working there are working without adequate supplies which equals unsafe working conditions. The CDC on the other hand has access to literally every medical technology known to man and the money to utilize them.
So what exactly is your point? That a doctor, heroically working to save people, died due to a lack of adequate medical supplies to do his job properly? Yeah, happens all the time in places like that. It's a tragedy but nothing new or shocking.
Also it risks your wife's grant funding.
My wife does not and never has had a grant. She is a private practice physician. By thanks for the unsolicited insult coward.
The various strains of the flu which become pandemics don't start off as particularly communicable either.
This isn't influenza nor does it behave like it.
They become a pandemic when they mutate into a form which can be transmitted via the air. Not saying this will happen with Ebola. Just saying that just because it's not particularly communicable now doesn't mean it'll stay that way.
Depending on the physiology of the virus it might very well mean that it will stay that way. Very very very few viruses that can infect humans get airborne. It's just ridiculously rare because the pathogen has to evolve in just the right way. Ebola apparently evolves rather slowly and while I'm no expert on viruses, my understanding from some people who are (I'm married to a doctor) is that most viruses will never ever become airborne because it is such a hostile environment.
So is there a chance? Probably. But you really shouldn't spend your time worrying about it.