Bring your own notebook doesn't protect you from pharming and other MITM attacks.
It does if you only use SSL-enabled web sites.
For gmail users, I believe Chrome (and ChromeOS) now come configured by default to check not just the certificate chain, but even to know which specific certificate to expect. So a compromised CA plus compromised DNS just results in a denial of service. You can also manually check the certificates for other sites you go to (get their fingerprints and write them down when you're at a trustworthy connection).
Well, I'm not trying to be snarky, but my definition of "popular" is seeing one of these beasts in the wild. It's yet to happen.
Are you sure you haven't? The Acer doesn't look much different from a typical netbook, and the new Samsung looks a lot like a MacBook Air. There are a lot of both (Airs and Chromebooks) around my office (I work for Google) and it takes more than a quick glance to distinguish them if you can't see the Apple logo.
I agree... Chromebooks are great for parents:) They just work and tech support is nil.
The one downside is that they're small, which makes them difficult for older people. I'd buy one for my father-in-law in a heartbeat if they were larger; I'm actually considering installing ChromiumOS on the 15" Acer that I gave him last year. Right now it's running Ubuntu in a fairly locked-down configuration, but he still manages to mess it up from time to time (most recently he made the Chrome window larger than the screen and moved it so all the controls were off the screen). If there were a cheap 15" Chromebook with a low-to-moderate resolution screen, I'd order one for him right now.
You get false positives on your Gmail spam filter? Weird. I don't think I've gotten one in years. Of course I don't check my spam box very often, but neither do I get people telling me they sent me stuff that I didn't get.
While I agree that the person you responded too exaggerated, holly $%^& you should really borrow a dictionary before you post. Your second paragraph is completely contrary to fact.
Don't be disingenuous. You know perfectly well that there's a huge difference between the kind of small-scale, local collusion which actually happened, and the large-scale global collusion that financial conspiracy theorists believe, even though both of them fit the dictionary (and legal) definition of "conspiracy".
I think there's a distinct difference between the sort of global conspiracy many envision and the sort that actually occurred, which is many instances of people within organizations agreeing not to reveal something they have a legal duty to reveal in order to gain some advantage.
Who benefited from the wholesale destruction of financial regulations, and paid the lobbyists who had a direct hand in getting that accomplished?
"Wholesale destruction of financial regulations" is a bit of an overstatement. Yes, the banks who benefitted from the removal of some regulatory barriers probably lobbied for those barriers' removal, because it would allow them to make more money. No collusion required.
Who created a financial instrument to leverage invented assets and make billions of dollars in the process?
Banks, who thought it was a good idea, as well as a way to make lots of money. Actually, securitization of mortgages is a good idea because it increases liquidity and hence availability of funds, and also because it allows risk to be spread. What caused problems was widespread misestimation of the risk. Basically, people foolishly assumed that the risk was close to zero (as is the case with high-quality mortgages), even though the packages included many low-quality mortgages -- and in fact lower-quality mortgages than even existed before the securitization facilitated the availability of a lot more funds. And the reason everyone assumed risk was so low was because the sellers of the securities claimed it was, and everyone assumed regulators wouldn't let them say it if it weren't true.
Who forced a deal with the US Government leveraging their former employees to secure 250 billion dollars worth of cash and eventually 7.7 trillion dollars in guarantees to protect themselves from the fallout of their idiotic financial schemes?
Forced, nothing. That was the government's own foolishness.
When literally every major banking house in the world is caught conspiring in one way or another to commit fraud, why would you take the position that conspiracy wasn't a central component of the financial crisis?
Because it would have happened anyway, because the core elements of the crisis weren't dependent on those instances of internal, small-scale collusion. The collusion probably made realization of the problems a little slower, and therefore made them a little worse, but I don't think it ultimately caused the outcome. The ultimate cause was over-reliance on regulation (or under-regulation, as I said, take your pick).
A handful of individuals colluding is not what you implied, nor is it what caused the world economy to "fall apart". It contributed, certainly, in some areas (e.g. to Credit Suisse's $2.7B writedown), but the real cause of the sub-prime mortgage fiasco was either (take your pick) inadequate regulation or excessive confidence in regulation. It was a lot of people acting on their own interests, separately, and believing that the securitized mortgage bundles couldn't really be much worse than presented, because regulation would prevent that.
Conspiracy didn't really play a significant role. Had a few individuals not colluded, perhaps the problem would have been discovered a little sooner, but it's unlikely. What most likely would have happened is pretty much what did happen. There were a number of red flags that went ignored, and Serageldin's accurate numbers, had they been outed, would just have been another.
There is nothing wrong with saying those who are conspiratorial thinkers also tend to be against climate science in general.
Yes, there is, because this is an unsupported -- and I think unsupportable -- assertion. I see plenty of conspiratorial thinking on the side of those who are most aggressively concerned about climate change. Mostly about collusion between oil companies to suppress alternative energy technologies.
There doesn't need to be any collusion, merely assumptions that the oil companies will act in their own self interest.
Agreed. But one of the common conspiratorial-thinking fallacies is to assume the existence of collusion where none is required to explain the observed/perceived behavior. It's also worth pointing out that some of the oil companies are also some of the heaviest investors in solar and wind power -- self-interest doesn't necessarily mean fighting alternative energy.
There is nothing wrong with saying those who are conspiratorial thinkers also tend to be against climate science in general.
Yes, there is, because this is an unsupported -- and I think unsupportable -- assertion. I see plenty of conspiratorial thinking on the side of those who are most aggressively concerned about climate change. Mostly about collusion between oil companies to suppress alternative energy technologies.
I think it's more likely that the tendency towards conspiratorial thinking is independent of political bent, except that it seems more prevalent among people with somewhat extreme views. I don't know if that's because holding extreme views causes people to begin thinking conspiratorially (due to almost the whole world disagreeing with them), or conspiratorial tendencies encourage extreme views, or if some other characteristic causes both, but there does seem to be a correlation between conspiracy theories and extremism.
There were not...a lot of people saying "Nixon is using illegal means to keep track of his political opponents. Guaranteed!".
Is this true? I wasn't alive in the early 70's, but looking at all the crazy thing people have accused recent presidents of, it's hard for me to believe that some group of people weren't ranting that Nixon was breaking into Democrats' offices.
Not me. There are always plenty of crazies ranting, but they tend to think much bigger than burglary. Any crazy who ranted to his group about trespassing would get sneered at as naive and blind to the real scope of the evil plot.
That does happen. Anytime I point out what looks like price fixing, or market divying, there's always someone that says "stop being a conspiracy theorist".
I don't know about what you've pointed out, but it's very common that people point to something and call it price fixing when there's a clear and simple non-collusive market explanation for what's going on. Further, it's often likely that there is some more subtle dynamic that explains the apparent synchronicity of price changes or market division even when there is no clear and simple explanation. So while price fixing and market divvying do happen, there's a good chance that you often are being a conspiracy theorist, because they appear to happen more often than they really occur.
I get the feeling that advertisement is still very much a "that feels right" type of business, and that evidence based advertisement is still the exception rather than the rule.
I think what you say is true of the industry in general... but Google advertising is the evidence-based exception. Google doesn't give advertisers much control over who sees their ads, and Google itself doesn't use manual processes to target ads at particular demographics: it's all based on counting clicks. This is because Google only gets paid when the user clicks on a search ad. Manual matching of ads to search queries and user profiles is likely to introduce some sort of bias that makes it less effective than a purely evidence-based approach -- and any reduction of effectiveness reduces Google's revenues.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google, but not in advertising, so my information comes from Google's published information.)
Never mind that the chart you linked does not support your claim: the ratio was 1 to 4 in the 50's and climbed to 1 to 7. The difference is not as dramatic as the fact that overall incarcerations increased 7-fold!
Those differences aren't necessarily inconsistent, if you think about it. There's a difference between a culture in which stable families are the norm, with some exceptions, and a culture in which single-parent families are the norm. Particularly since the single-parent families that are so prevalent in modern black culture have only a mother; it's the father who is absent. If you suppose that the biggest influencer of tendency toward criminal behavior in young men (and it's young men not women, who constitute nearly all of the crime) is the presence/absence of good male role models in their formative years, it's easy to see how in a culture where the majority of adult men are family men, even young boys who grow up without a father will have plenty of nearby examples. Further, those examples will constitute the majority of adult men around the boys, which will help to make clear what the societal norm should be.
But when two-parent families become the minority, not only do boys in single-parent families not have a good role model at home, they also don't have many in the neighborhood -- and those less-common men who would model stable, responsible fatherhood for them are a minority, not the societal norm. It's a network effect; the influence becomes far more pronounced when the bulk of a boy's social graph changes one direction or another, so the result doesn't scale linearly with the change in cause.
In North America, Chromebooks are largely an education (K12) play.
I disagree. They may well be useful in that space, but the fact is that they've been flying off the shelves at Best Buy, Amazon, etc., and it's not schools that are buying them. Everyone I know that's used one really likes it. They're not (yet) a good sole computer for most people, but at the price point they are a great additional computer for a lot of people. My daughter uses one for most of her computing, and I bought one that we just keep in the kitchen for random use, even though most of us have laptops.
companies who sell electronic devices must have these types of things opt in rather than opt out
Opt-in security on mass-market devices generally equates to no security. I don't like Apple's walled garden approach, but I think secure-by-default is the right decision.
I'm not forgetting that at all... I am one of the people who have a hard time recognizing faces. I'm not face blind, but I have to be around someone quite a bit before I can reliably recognize them.
The realization that we can barely recognize people we hang out with every day if they change their haircut or buy a new shirt, and there's software out there that can recognize us everywhere we go is completely terrifying.
The whole point of my post that the existence of software that can recognize you everywhere you go is fiction. Assuming you believed me, you should have found my comments comforting.
While I don't want to dismiss all privacy concerns here, you're vastly overrating the effectiveness of current face recognition technology. If you compare a given face to a database of millions, much less hundreds of millions, you're not going to get a single match, you're going to get thousands of matches. And, frankly, this isn't just a technology problem. If you then go on to apply the very best (if not most efficient) face-matching technology we have -- people -- you'll find that you still have tens, if not hundreds of matches. Faces just aren't that unique, not on a global scale.
And all of the above assumes that all of the photos being matched are well-lit, full-face views with nothing to obscure them.
The reason it works on social services is that the face matching algorithm has an additional signal: it knows who your friends are. That means it's searching a much smaller database. Your theorized FBI matching system would not have that advantage.
Cornucopians have been proven so consistently wrong the last 10 to 15 years it's no longer funny.
The book (and the blog) contains detailed, specific answers to your question of "show me the technology". It shows dozens of technologies, all of which will likely contribute to the solutions.
...just as soon as all the non-renewable resources are gone.
Luckily, it doesn't work that way.
The truly great thing about market economics is that pricing adjustments enable markets to make incremental adjustments to changing conditions. As non-renewables get harder to obtain their prices rise, as their prices rise renewables (of various sorts) become cost-competitive for wider and wider swaths of our energy requirements.
For example, right now, pure solar installations for residential power supply are not cost-effective for most people. But for someone who builds a home in the sticks, and would have to pay for a mile of power lines to be installed in order to get electricity, pure solar, including all of the necessary storage infrastructure, is cost-effective now and has been for years. In many areas where electricity prices are higher, or where variable pricing has been implemented, grid-tie solar energy is cost-effective now as well. We're talking payback times of less than 10 years, in many cases as low as five years. As non-renewable prices rise, renewable alternatives become more and more cost-competitive, until eventually non-renewable energy will be the unusual case, reserved for extreme requirements where its high cost will be justified.
Don't sweat it. We'll get there. Slower than many would wish, but faster than many would believe.
TL/DR: Yes, we can run our society on solar power. No, it won't be cheap. No, we won't have any better alternatives.
We have better alternatives. Solar is great, but it's problematic for baseload. We really need to invest in nuclear energy research. Better, safer, cheaper, cleaner reactors that use more abundant fuels (thorium, primarily). The reactors we have now are equivalent to the second- or third- generation steam engines -- big, expensive, dangerous. There are huge improvements available, once we gain the political will -- and once the energy crunch gets serious enough, we'll find the will.
Slashdot Mirror
OpenOffice/LibreOffice is like 90+% C++. The Java bits are mostly irrelevant.
To be precise, as computed by sloccount, libreoffice-4.0.0.3.tar.xz contains:
cpp: 3990644 (87.04%)
java: 400958 (8.75%)
ansic: 91036 (1.99%)
perl: 42456 (0.93%)
python: 17392 (0.38%)
sh: 17256 (0.38%)
yacc: 8228 (0.18%)
cs: 6648 (0.15%)
asm: 3269 (0.07%)
objc: 2602 (0.06%)
lex: 2030 (0.04%)
awk: 907 (0.02%)
pascal: 800 (0.02%)
csh: 235 (0.01%)
lisp: 115 (0.00%)
php: 104 (0.00%)
sed: 7 (0.00%)
However, as Desler said, the Java bits are actually optional.
Bring your own notebook doesn't protect you from pharming and other MITM attacks.
It does if you only use SSL-enabled web sites.
For gmail users, I believe Chrome (and ChromeOS) now come configured by default to check not just the certificate chain, but even to know which specific certificate to expect. So a compromised CA plus compromised DNS just results in a denial of service. You can also manually check the certificates for other sites you go to (get their fingerprints and write them down when you're at a trustworthy connection).
Well, I'm not trying to be snarky, but my definition of "popular" is seeing one of these beasts in the wild. It's yet to happen.
Are you sure you haven't? The Acer doesn't look much different from a typical netbook, and the new Samsung looks a lot like a MacBook Air. There are a lot of both (Airs and Chromebooks) around my office (I work for Google) and it takes more than a quick glance to distinguish them if you can't see the Apple logo.
I agree... Chromebooks are great for parents :) They just work and tech support is nil.
The one downside is that they're small, which makes them difficult for older people. I'd buy one for my father-in-law in a heartbeat if they were larger; I'm actually considering installing ChromiumOS on the 15" Acer that I gave him last year. Right now it's running Ubuntu in a fairly locked-down configuration, but he still manages to mess it up from time to time (most recently he made the Chrome window larger than the screen and moved it so all the controls were off the screen). If there were a cheap 15" Chromebook with a low-to-moderate resolution screen, I'd order one for him right now.
You get false positives on your Gmail spam filter? Weird. I don't think I've gotten one in years. Of course I don't check my spam box very often, but neither do I get people telling me they sent me stuff that I didn't get.
While I agree that the person you responded too exaggerated, holly $%^& you should really borrow a dictionary before you post. Your second paragraph is completely contrary to fact.
Don't be disingenuous. You know perfectly well that there's a huge difference between the kind of small-scale, local collusion which actually happened, and the large-scale global collusion that financial conspiracy theorists believe, even though both of them fit the dictionary (and legal) definition of "conspiracy".
Who benefited from the wholesale destruction of financial regulations, and paid the lobbyists who had a direct hand in getting that accomplished?
"Wholesale destruction of financial regulations" is a bit of an overstatement. Yes, the banks who benefitted from the removal of some regulatory barriers probably lobbied for those barriers' removal, because it would allow them to make more money. No collusion required.
Who created a financial instrument to leverage invented assets and make billions of dollars in the process?
Banks, who thought it was a good idea, as well as a way to make lots of money. Actually, securitization of mortgages is a good idea because it increases liquidity and hence availability of funds, and also because it allows risk to be spread. What caused problems was widespread misestimation of the risk. Basically, people foolishly assumed that the risk was close to zero (as is the case with high-quality mortgages), even though the packages included many low-quality mortgages -- and in fact lower-quality mortgages than even existed before the securitization facilitated the availability of a lot more funds. And the reason everyone assumed risk was so low was because the sellers of the securities claimed it was, and everyone assumed regulators wouldn't let them say it if it weren't true.
Who forced a deal with the US Government leveraging their former employees to secure 250 billion dollars worth of cash and eventually 7.7 trillion dollars in guarantees to protect themselves from the fallout of their idiotic financial schemes?
Forced, nothing. That was the government's own foolishness.
When literally every major banking house in the world is caught conspiring in one way or another to commit fraud, why would you take the position that conspiracy wasn't a central component of the financial crisis?
Because it would have happened anyway, because the core elements of the crisis weren't dependent on those instances of internal, small-scale collusion. The collusion probably made realization of the problems a little slower, and therefore made them a little worse, but I don't think it ultimately caused the outcome. The ultimate cause was over-reliance on regulation (or under-regulation, as I said, take your pick).
Indeed. Nutcases.
A handful of individuals colluding is not what you implied, nor is it what caused the world economy to "fall apart". It contributed, certainly, in some areas (e.g. to Credit Suisse's $2.7B writedown), but the real cause of the sub-prime mortgage fiasco was either (take your pick) inadequate regulation or excessive confidence in regulation. It was a lot of people acting on their own interests, separately, and believing that the securitized mortgage bundles couldn't really be much worse than presented, because regulation would prevent that.
Conspiracy didn't really play a significant role. Had a few individuals not colluded, perhaps the problem would have been discovered a little sooner, but it's unlikely. What most likely would have happened is pretty much what did happen. There were a number of red flags that went ignored, and Serageldin's accurate numbers, had they been outed, would just have been another.
There is nothing wrong with saying those who are conspiratorial thinkers also tend to be against climate science in general.
Yes, there is, because this is an unsupported -- and I think unsupportable -- assertion. I see plenty of conspiratorial thinking on the side of those who are most aggressively concerned about climate change. Mostly about collusion between oil companies to suppress alternative energy technologies.
There doesn't need to be any collusion, merely assumptions that the oil companies will act in their own self interest.
Agreed. But one of the common conspiratorial-thinking fallacies is to assume the existence of collusion where none is required to explain the observed/perceived behavior. It's also worth pointing out that some of the oil companies are also some of the heaviest investors in solar and wind power -- self-interest doesn't necessarily mean fighting alternative energy.
The entire world economy recently fell apart because information was kept secret through collusion and conspiracy.
I rest my case.
There is nothing wrong with saying those who are conspiratorial thinkers also tend to be against climate science in general.
Yes, there is, because this is an unsupported -- and I think unsupportable -- assertion. I see plenty of conspiratorial thinking on the side of those who are most aggressively concerned about climate change. Mostly about collusion between oil companies to suppress alternative energy technologies.
I think it's more likely that the tendency towards conspiratorial thinking is independent of political bent, except that it seems more prevalent among people with somewhat extreme views. I don't know if that's because holding extreme views causes people to begin thinking conspiratorially (due to almost the whole world disagreeing with them), or conspiratorial tendencies encourage extreme views, or if some other characteristic causes both, but there does seem to be a correlation between conspiracy theories and extremism.
There were not...a lot of people saying "Nixon is using illegal means to keep track of his political opponents. Guaranteed!".
Is this true? I wasn't alive in the early 70's, but looking at all the crazy thing people have accused recent presidents of, it's hard for me to believe that some group of people weren't ranting that Nixon was breaking into Democrats' offices.
Not me. There are always plenty of crazies ranting, but they tend to think much bigger than burglary. Any crazy who ranted to his group about trespassing would get sneered at as naive and blind to the real scope of the evil plot.
That does happen. Anytime I point out what looks like price fixing, or market divying, there's always someone that says "stop being a conspiracy theorist".
I don't know about what you've pointed out, but it's very common that people point to something and call it price fixing when there's a clear and simple non-collusive market explanation for what's going on. Further, it's often likely that there is some more subtle dynamic that explains the apparent synchronicity of price changes or market division even when there is no clear and simple explanation. So while price fixing and market divvying do happen, there's a good chance that you often are being a conspiracy theorist, because they appear to happen more often than they really occur.
I get the feeling that advertisement is still very much a "that feels right" type of business, and that evidence based advertisement is still the exception rather than the rule.
I think what you say is true of the industry in general... but Google advertising is the evidence-based exception. Google doesn't give advertisers much control over who sees their ads, and Google itself doesn't use manual processes to target ads at particular demographics: it's all based on counting clicks. This is because Google only gets paid when the user clicks on a search ad. Manual matching of ads to search queries and user profiles is likely to introduce some sort of bias that makes it less effective than a purely evidence-based approach -- and any reduction of effectiveness reduces Google's revenues.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google, but not in advertising, so my information comes from Google's published information.)
Never mind that the chart you linked does not support your claim: the ratio was 1 to 4 in the 50's and climbed to 1 to 7. The difference is not as dramatic as the fact that overall incarcerations increased 7-fold!
Those differences aren't necessarily inconsistent, if you think about it. There's a difference between a culture in which stable families are the norm, with some exceptions, and a culture in which single-parent families are the norm. Particularly since the single-parent families that are so prevalent in modern black culture have only a mother; it's the father who is absent. If you suppose that the biggest influencer of tendency toward criminal behavior in young men (and it's young men not women, who constitute nearly all of the crime) is the presence/absence of good male role models in their formative years, it's easy to see how in a culture where the majority of adult men are family men, even young boys who grow up without a father will have plenty of nearby examples. Further, those examples will constitute the majority of adult men around the boys, which will help to make clear what the societal norm should be.
But when two-parent families become the minority, not only do boys in single-parent families not have a good role model at home, they also don't have many in the neighborhood -- and those less-common men who would model stable, responsible fatherhood for them are a minority, not the societal norm. It's a network effect; the influence becomes far more pronounced when the bulk of a boy's social graph changes one direction or another, so the result doesn't scale linearly with the change in cause.
In North America, Chromebooks are largely an education (K12) play.
I disagree. They may well be useful in that space, but the fact is that they've been flying off the shelves at Best Buy, Amazon, etc., and it's not schools that are buying them. Everyone I know that's used one really likes it. They're not (yet) a good sole computer for most people, but at the price point they are a great additional computer for a lot of people. My daughter uses one for most of her computing, and I bought one that we just keep in the kitchen for random use, even though most of us have laptops.
For as low as $250 on some models you get a device that does 95% of what students need to do with it
The Acer C7 is $199.
companies who sell electronic devices must have these types of things opt in rather than opt out
Opt-in security on mass-market devices generally equates to no security. I don't like Apple's walled garden approach, but I think secure-by-default is the right decision.
I'm not forgetting that at all... I am one of the people who have a hard time recognizing faces. I'm not face blind, but I have to be around someone quite a bit before I can reliably recognize them.
The realization that we can barely recognize people we hang out with every day if they change their haircut or buy a new shirt, and there's software out there that can recognize us everywhere we go is completely terrifying.
The whole point of my post that the existence of software that can recognize you everywhere you go is fiction. Assuming you believed me, you should have found my comments comforting.
While I don't want to dismiss all privacy concerns here, you're vastly overrating the effectiveness of current face recognition technology. If you compare a given face to a database of millions, much less hundreds of millions, you're not going to get a single match, you're going to get thousands of matches. And, frankly, this isn't just a technology problem. If you then go on to apply the very best (if not most efficient) face-matching technology we have -- people -- you'll find that you still have tens, if not hundreds of matches. Faces just aren't that unique, not on a global scale.
And all of the above assumes that all of the photos being matched are well-lit, full-face views with nothing to obscure them.
The reason it works on social services is that the face matching algorithm has an additional signal: it knows who your friends are. That means it's searching a much smaller database. Your theorized FBI matching system would not have that advantage.
OMG.
Cornucopians have been proven so consistently wrong the last 10 to 15 years it's no longer funny.
The book (and the blog) contains detailed, specific answers to your question of "show me the technology". It shows dozens of technologies, all of which will likely contribute to the solutions.
Show me the new technology that we can deploy within the next 20 or 30 years to save our ass and I may listen to you.
http://www.amazon.com/Abundance-Future-Better-Than-Think/dp/1451614217
...just as soon as all the non-renewable resources are gone.
Luckily, it doesn't work that way.
The truly great thing about market economics is that pricing adjustments enable markets to make incremental adjustments to changing conditions. As non-renewables get harder to obtain their prices rise, as their prices rise renewables (of various sorts) become cost-competitive for wider and wider swaths of our energy requirements.
For example, right now, pure solar installations for residential power supply are not cost-effective for most people. But for someone who builds a home in the sticks, and would have to pay for a mile of power lines to be installed in order to get electricity, pure solar, including all of the necessary storage infrastructure, is cost-effective now and has been for years. In many areas where electricity prices are higher, or where variable pricing has been implemented, grid-tie solar energy is cost-effective now as well. We're talking payback times of less than 10 years, in many cases as low as five years. As non-renewable prices rise, renewable alternatives become more and more cost-competitive, until eventually non-renewable energy will be the unusual case, reserved for extreme requirements where its high cost will be justified.
Don't sweat it. We'll get there. Slower than many would wish, but faster than many would believe.
TL/DR: Yes, we can run our society on solar power. No, it won't be cheap. No, we won't have any better alternatives.
We have better alternatives. Solar is great, but it's problematic for baseload. We really need to invest in nuclear energy research. Better, safer, cheaper, cleaner reactors that use more abundant fuels (thorium, primarily). The reactors we have now are equivalent to the second- or third- generation steam engines -- big, expensive, dangerous. There are huge improvements available, once we gain the political will -- and once the energy crunch gets serious enough, we'll find the will.