It seems like the better solution would be to educate people and train them not to be so susceptible to hysteria. The consequence of worst-case nuclear plant failures are of the same type and on the same scale as worst-case chemical plant failures, but there is no public movement to shut down Dow Chemical or Proctor & Gamble.
Imagine a low-lying cloud of lethal chlorine gas spreading through New York City or your home town, stretching 15 miles past your childhood playground, your place of worship, or your friends’ homes. Imagine that you witness the same horror seen by American troops when Hitler used chlorine gas as a weapon: people gasping for air and grasping their throats as fumes melted their lungs and slowly suffocate them. Imagine that your Senator could have done something to prevent this.
That's right, the vile bleach manufacturers are genocidal Nazis come to separate you from God and murder your children. So that's their usual fare then. But nobody pays them any mind because they're a bunch of hysterical crackpots. It doesn't get any real media coverage, but if the problem is actually legitimate then responsible people in government and industry quietly work together to reduce the risks. (Which they did.)
And when actual disaster strikes, it's the same thing: Have you ever seen the list of Superfund sites in the United States? It's literally a thousand pages long. When somebody discovers a bunch of barrels of toxic waste leaking into the drinking water, the local newspaper writes a couple of stories about it, the EPA comes in, the site gets cleaned up, the offenders are bankrupted or significantly punished by the fines and cleanup costs, we learn from our mistakes and do better next time. There is no call for hysteria. Scientific analysis to reduce the risks of future failures requires no fear mongering whatsoever, and in most cases we do a pretty damn good job of sticking to the facts. It is, in fact, still safe to drink the water in New York City and San Francisco, notwithstanding two hundred years of industrial progress.
The problem is that the population has been convinced that nuclear power is extra scary for no rational reason, which creates a vicious cycle: People are afraid of it because they don't understand it, the media (who could, if they wanted to, educate people with actual facts) respond by fear mongering and emphasizing extremely low probability worst case scenarios because it gets ratings, which in turn makes people even more afraid and even less well informed.
The solution has to be to break the cycle. Down with irrational hysteria. Hysteria kills, people. You don't want thousands to die as a result of irresponsible fear mongering, do you? Then fight hysteria. It's the only way.
My initial thought was to agree with you, but I'm not so sure. The problem with the analogy is that the Soviets used 43 engines, not 43 rockets. They had one single rocket which was 43 times as complicated: It proves the point the other way. If they built smaller rockets with fewer engines, there would be a lower probability that each of them would explode.
Of course, then they would need more of them, but you'll get more payloads to the moon if you build rockets with one engine and one payload that have a 95% success rate than you will with larger rockets with 40 engines and a.95^40=12.85% success rate: To get 40 payloads to the moon with the former, you need ~42 launches using 42 engines and you'll lose ~2 rockets with ~2 payloads. To get 40 payloads to the moon with the latter, you'll need (rounding down) ~7 launches using 280 engines and you'll lose ~6 rockets with ~240 payloads.
Of course, that's assuming the larger rockets are more complicated and therefore less reliable than the smaller ones. But if you assume they're both the same reliability then you end up having no advantage or disadvantage either way: If you can build big rockets with the same reliability as the little ones then 20 rockets carrying 40 payloads will get (on average) the same number of payloads to the moon as 20*40=800 rockets with one payload each. Or in the nuclear context, the total harm from all failures will be the same because each failure would cause proportionally less damage (since there is proportionally less material to escape from the reactor in the event of a failure), but it will be exactly offset by the increase in the absolute number of failures.
The real question, then, is whether the probability of a failure is lower for a smaller reactor or a larger one. If it's the same then it makes no difference.
Stability on these systems will probably be most affected by the 3rd party drivers produced by the hardware vendors.
Which is really the whole problem with trying to compare their stability in the first place: The stability is going to depend on the model, and whether the hardware manufacturer provided stable drivers for the OS, not the OS itself. For every model with stability problems there is another model from a different manufacturer running the same OS without any issues.
Nokia needs to be a major challenger for its business model to work, and Microsoft is investing a lot of money in mobile and needs more than just one or two partners with niche products to generate a return.
I think you've identified a very real reason why this whole partnership was a terrible idea: It requires one partner or the other (if not both) to get screwed. There is basically no chance of WP7 taking over the entire market. The best it can really hope for is to split the market three ways with Android and iOS, and even that seems extremely optimistic at this point. Windows Mobile, the discontinued product, is still outselling WP7, and those are the just-released latest numbers.
What is Nokia supposed to do with only a small part of a small percentage of the market? Even the entire volume of WP7 sales is probably not enough to sustain them. And Microsoft can't even let them have that, because they'll never get their market share off the floor with only one vendor who, by necessity, will itself have to continue selling and marketing non-WP7 in the interim.
There's some sort of weird stupidity from the people buying these items for governments, so they believe all the hype about new gadgets, and don't ask what happens when the problem tries to route around it.
This is an excellent point. I mean forget about attacking the person who was pointing the weapon. Look at the big picture: Something terrible is wrong politically and a large mass of people are protesting it in a nonviolent way. You bring out your crowd control weapons. You disperse the protestors. Job done, right?
What do you think those people are going to do if you make nonviolent protesting unavailable? Thank you for your benevolence and then go home and give up? Forget all about the fact that they can't find a job and are heading for bankruptcy?
The protesters are not the problem. The protesters are the symptom. Fighting the symptom doesn't solve the problem. And not solving the problem will only give it enough time to turn into a disaster.
It seems pretty obvious that the law doesn't allow you to refuse to execute a valid take down just because company issuing it has issued a bunch of fraudulent ones. The DMCA take down process is "optional" but if you opt not to do it, you lose the safe harbor and every take down you refuse becomes a prospective lawsuit. And I don't see any scenario in which a company loses every single copyright it holds for having issued a bunch of fraudulent take downs, which means that you're still on the hook for the valid ones. Even if they're all fraudulent, the legal fees incurred for opting out of the safe harbor will make the operation unprofitable.
My right to free speech doesn't mean I can stand in the middle of the Holland tunnel and giving a speech (and thereby prevent everyone else from getting to their jobs in New York City).
Blocking traffic is not speech. But you sure as hell ought to be allowed to stand on the side of (not in) the road holding a sign so that passing motorists can read it. Or do the same outside of some corrupt politician's event in a way that your signs have some hope of making it into the media coverage, instead of being corralled into some fenced area where you can be conveniently ignored.
You do understand they only want that money so they can get more people to vote for them?
You writing a letter to your representative isn't going to change much. You and a few thousand other people doing it is going to make them realize that you represent a sufficiently large chunk of their constituency that they'll be losing more votes continuing to support the bill than they can buy back with the Hollywood money.
Sure, passion is ideal. But you're missing a couple of things. For one, people can have a passion for more than one career. You take the group of people who love computers and algorithms and you look at the prospective salaries for different careers, and IT is paying $80,000/year while writing Monte Carlo simulations for financial firms is paying $400,000/year, what do you think many of these people are going to choose?
For another thing, what do you do when you need more people than there are people with the right passion? You still have to recruit some without it. And you're going to have serious issues if those people are idiots and you put them in charge of multi-billion dollar IT systems. If you have to poach candidates from other fields, you had better do it from the ones that already attract smart people, like law and finance, and to do so you're going to have to pay competitive rates.
How do you expect that to stop those companies from then submitting a couple of non-fraudulent requests and then filing a lawsuit when they don't comply?
All first world countries have required ultra low sulfur gasoline about as long as they've required emissions controls, because sulfur will poison a catalytic converter. The trucking industry fought it for several decades, but as of 2010 even diesel fuel is required to be ultra low sulfur in the US.
I suppose you could be talking about some kind of African country where high sulfur fuel is still allowed.
The article was about contracting versus in house gurus, and every month it seems there is always an article about the lack of gurus, hence the comment.
I suspect the problem is corporate executives who know the cost of everything and the value of nothing. There is a simple way to increase the supply of something: Pay more. If companies would pay competent IT people more money, then more people who would otherwise go on to be tax lawyers or securities traders will go into IT instead.
By contrast, what you hear in the media is the executives thinking with their MBA brains: If you want to increase supply, you can pay more... or you can go to the government and create artificial incentives to increase supply. More H1B visas. Government education subsidies for tech majors, to divert labor supply from occupations that pay the same or less than IT into IT. More supply at the same price.
The problem is that the latter doesn't create "gurus" -- it creates paper MCSEs. It makes the problem companies have in hiring competent staff that much harder, because you create a population of applicants who have degrees and certifications and even experience, yet have no earthly idea what they're doing. It attracts exactly those people who are too stupid to understand that a $1000 scholarship is a completely asinine way to make a career choice, instead of those who are smart enough to do just about anything and who make decisions based on forward thinking criteria like which career will allow them to afford a house in a neighborhood with better schools and a comfortable retirement.
It's the same disease that allows them to make the IT department a cost center: They count all of the salaries and equipment and ignore the productivity improvements that accrue to other departments as a result of their existence. Which makes it look like cutting staff or replacing them with less qualified but lower paid employees will save them money: The cost savings goes straight onto the spreadsheet, without accounting for the lost profits that will occur when a major system falls over and there is no longer anyone competent working there who can get it running before you lose a big client.
"You're the product, not the customer" is a slogan created by astroturf marketing trolls to allow the old guard (like Microsoft) to attack companies (like Google) that offer products in competition with theirs, but for free.
Which isn't to say that Google is perfect. But let's take the specific example in question: The law makes it so that there is a large legal incentive to take down videos upon request, and basically no legal incentive to question the take downs. Now, in theory, Google could hire an army of lawyers to review each of the thousands of take down requests they get every day, and try to contact the poster of the video to get their side of the story, etc. But let's face it, that's prohibitively expensive. And even that creates a much higher risk that they make a mistake, refuse to take down a video that it turns out was actually infringing and then end up having to explain it in court after getting sued by some Hollywood asshats like Viacom. The situation is messed up, but it's caused primarily by stupid laws, not stupid Google. You can blame them for not doing more, but it's not like they're going out of their way to screw you over. They just don't have any good options.
And that's the problem for Microsoft and their ilk. People like Google. They're not perfect, but they're less imperfect than most of the alternatives. And public opinion matters, so "the alternative" needs some talking points that paint competing companies with "free" products in a bad light. Hence: "You're the product, not the customer."
Is that why you're posting anonymously? Because you're part of the conspiracy that is going to kill anyone who tries to fix the democratic process, and you don't want to tip your hand?
All that is necessary for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
In the long run we are all dead. -- John Maynard Keynes
Only replacing the entire system will have any effect.
Your conclusion doesn't follow your premises. You don't have to replace the entire system, you only have to repair the structural flaws that create the incentives that currently exist. The flaw isn't in the idea of democracy, it's in the way we finance elections. The answer is public financing.
Naturally, that will never pass at the federal level because it doesn't serve the interests of the people who are already there. So do it at the state level. Get a bill in every state legislature that funds candidates for that state's federal offices with state money. Then you can get a bunch of new legislators with the backing of state money who aren't Washington insiders but can beat the incumbents (or at least get them to clean up their act). That serves as the thin end of the wedge: You get enough new blood in Congress that isn't beholden to special interests and you can make the further structural changes necessary to fix things properly.
I mean what's the alternative, violent revolution? Be serious.
a wealthy corporation can spend millions on campaigns to get the people they want into office.
Why is it that people are so incapable of thinking strategically?
Step 1: Get your name on the ballot for the state legislature. This doesn't require a lot of money. Step 2: Run a serious campaign. Make your opponent fear losing his seat. Then go to him and let him know that you'll drop out of the race if he gets a bill through the state legislature for public financing of statewide elections, including your state's federal congressional seats. Step 3: Repeat Step 2 until either the public finance law is passed by your opponent, or until you beat him and can make sure it gets passed from your new seat in the state legislature. Step 4: Run for federal office using the state's public finance program and tell the corporations to die in a fire.
Honestly, you're full of crap. It's true, one vote doesn't matter. Especially when your only choice is between a politician who increases spending to buy pork and one that increases borrowing to buy pork.
But going to party meetings or working for a campaign? That's how things change. It's how the candidates that actually end up on the ballot get determined, and it's how those candidates determine their positions. Go to one of these places, offer to "help" and then while you're there, argue with them. Make them either see it your way or prove you wrong. If you can get them to be candid and admit their position is chosen based on funding or to play on public ignorance rather than based on reason, be their conscience. Be there to show them that you, as a representative of the human race, disapprove of what they're doing, care about it, and want them to change. Sometimes they will. Not all the time, but sometimes.
Or you can sit at home and bitch about everything on the internet. That's probably just as good.
The problem, naturally, is that you'll then have one candidate that got 28% of the vote, another that got 24%, and the remaining 47% stayed home. So then who do you send to Washington?
It depends on the code. If the existing code was written by competent people who didn't do a perfect job because they were too pressed for time, and it mostly works, even if it's full of ugly kludges and runs too slowly, you can probably fix it. If it was written by imbeciles under the direction of a committee of PHBs and crashes arbitrarily for unfathomable reasons, throw it away.
You can't have "next gen" reactors before you have "first gen" reactors. Your point is that it's been a long time, but it hasn't. The public wasn't really clamoring about nuclear safety until Chernobyl, and that was in 1986. That was 25 years ago. Roswell was 64 years ago.
Because no demo next-gen reactor designs have been created or proven
Not in the United States. India and China have been building newer reactors. Not all of them differ substantially from traditional designs, but for example India is building some fast breeder reactors that can use thorium (although they seem to be starting with depleted uranium, which you can use in the same way, probably because they already have the uranium sitting around instead of having to mine anything).
OK, so you figure (anybody have the actual number?) that those reactors were in operation for, say, 50 years. 434*25 + 138*50 = 17850 reactor years. Two major incidents, so 8925 reactor years each. If you and your kids want to see a major incident in the nearest reactor, you'll be waiting for quite a while. As in, they'll first have to replace the reactor with a new one some hundred and seventy odd times at fifty year intervals. But when they get replaced the newer ones will be safer and the probability will go down. And by then we'll probably be out of Uranium and/or have fusion working, so I guess you won't get to see it at all.
Firstly, we're talking about a completely new design of plant that hasn't been built before.
The primary differences between older designs and newer designs is that newer designs have more and more passive safety features. They still work the same way: Fission converts mass into heat, heat is converted into electricity, and you have to make sure you don't generate more heat than you can remove or it gets too hot. Unless you can provide some reason why this design is more susceptible to a cooling system failure, or more likely to produce more heat than designed, your argument is just unfounded speculation.
Secondly, that can't estimate the likelihood of low-probability events that haven't ever happened yet, some of which could be probable enough to still be a danger - especially if we expand nuclear power - and could cause large numbers of deaths. There's just no way to tell by looking at past performance.
Nonsense. You can predict the statistical probability of an event from the fact that it hasn't happened. The longer you've gone without it happening at all, the less likely it is. What you can't necessarily predict is the amount of damage it would cause, but Chernobyl was pretty much the worst case scenario, short of some kind of unfathomably preposterous outcome like creating a black hole or igniting fusion in the atmosphere that you might as well ascribe to CERN or supersonic flight as to nuclear power.
There are really only a couple of variables in the realistic worst case scenario: How much of the contents of the reactor gets outside of the reactor, and how much fission occurred first (determining the makeup of fissile elements to fission products). Even if you just took the entire contents of the reactor and dumped it in the street in front of the plant, it wouldn't be all that much worse than Chernobyl was.
How many times do you have to hear "it was N-million-in-1 chance" before you start wondering exactly how unlucky one can be.
Straw man. Nobody says that.
And a working plant is infinitely more complex than the mechanical engineering required to build a bridge.
No it isn't. Nuclear plants have a single failure mode: They produce more heat than can be removed, and they get too hot. There are two ways this can happen: Either they produce more heat than intended and the cooling system can't remove it, or the design requires active cooling and the cooling system fails. That isn't a lot of variables. What you're complaining about is that somebody designed a bridge to withstand 250MPH winds and then it fell over when it got hit by 300MPH winds.
those are things which prior to the events actually occurring engineers kept saying were just fine given the odds.
That's the same thing the bridge architect says when there hasn't been a storm with 300MPH winds in recorded history, until there is. How is nuclear power different?
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Another advantage for Apple. There's only one iOS vendor. Makes life easy at Apple.
Certainly hasn't stopped them from having antenna and battery life problems.
It seems like the better solution would be to educate people and train them not to be so susceptible to hysteria. The consequence of worst-case nuclear plant failures are of the same type and on the same scale as worst-case chemical plant failures, but there is no public movement to shut down Dow Chemical or Proctor & Gamble.
Example: Here is Greenpeace doing their thing with respect to a chemical plant in New Jersey:
Imagine a low-lying cloud of lethal chlorine gas spreading through New York City or your home town, stretching 15 miles past your childhood playground, your place of worship, or your friends’ homes. Imagine that you witness the same horror seen by American troops when Hitler used chlorine gas as a weapon: people gasping for air and grasping their throats as fumes melted their lungs and slowly suffocate them. Imagine that your Senator could have done something to prevent this.
That's right, the vile bleach manufacturers are genocidal Nazis come to separate you from God and murder your children. So that's their usual fare then. But nobody pays them any mind because they're a bunch of hysterical crackpots. It doesn't get any real media coverage, but if the problem is actually legitimate then responsible people in government and industry quietly work together to reduce the risks. (Which they did.)
And when actual disaster strikes, it's the same thing: Have you ever seen the list of Superfund sites in the United States? It's literally a thousand pages long. When somebody discovers a bunch of barrels of toxic waste leaking into the drinking water, the local newspaper writes a couple of stories about it, the EPA comes in, the site gets cleaned up, the offenders are bankrupted or significantly punished by the fines and cleanup costs, we learn from our mistakes and do better next time. There is no call for hysteria. Scientific analysis to reduce the risks of future failures requires no fear mongering whatsoever, and in most cases we do a pretty damn good job of sticking to the facts. It is, in fact, still safe to drink the water in New York City and San Francisco, notwithstanding two hundred years of industrial progress.
The problem is that the population has been convinced that nuclear power is extra scary for no rational reason, which creates a vicious cycle: People are afraid of it because they don't understand it, the media (who could, if they wanted to, educate people with actual facts) respond by fear mongering and emphasizing extremely low probability worst case scenarios because it gets ratings, which in turn makes people even more afraid and even less well informed.
The solution has to be to break the cycle. Down with irrational hysteria. Hysteria kills, people. You don't want thousands to die as a result of irresponsible fear mongering, do you? Then fight hysteria. It's the only way.
My initial thought was to agree with you, but I'm not so sure. The problem with the analogy is that the Soviets used 43 engines, not 43 rockets. They had one single rocket which was 43 times as complicated: It proves the point the other way. If they built smaller rockets with fewer engines, there would be a lower probability that each of them would explode.
Of course, then they would need more of them, but you'll get more payloads to the moon if you build rockets with one engine and one payload that have a 95% success rate than you will with larger rockets with 40 engines and a .95^40=12.85% success rate: To get 40 payloads to the moon with the former, you need ~42 launches using 42 engines and you'll lose ~2 rockets with ~2 payloads. To get 40 payloads to the moon with the latter, you'll need (rounding down) ~7 launches using 280 engines and you'll lose ~6 rockets with ~240 payloads.
Of course, that's assuming the larger rockets are more complicated and therefore less reliable than the smaller ones. But if you assume they're both the same reliability then you end up having no advantage or disadvantage either way: If you can build big rockets with the same reliability as the little ones then 20 rockets carrying 40 payloads will get (on average) the same number of payloads to the moon as 20*40=800 rockets with one payload each. Or in the nuclear context, the total harm from all failures will be the same because each failure would cause proportionally less damage (since there is proportionally less material to escape from the reactor in the event of a failure), but it will be exactly offset by the increase in the absolute number of failures.
The real question, then, is whether the probability of a failure is lower for a smaller reactor or a larger one. If it's the same then it makes no difference.
Stability on these systems will probably be most affected by the 3rd party drivers produced by the hardware vendors.
Which is really the whole problem with trying to compare their stability in the first place: The stability is going to depend on the model, and whether the hardware manufacturer provided stable drivers for the OS, not the OS itself. For every model with stability problems there is another model from a different manufacturer running the same OS without any issues.
Nokia needs to be a major challenger for its business model to work, and Microsoft is investing a lot of money in mobile and needs more than just one or two partners with niche products to generate a return.
I think you've identified a very real reason why this whole partnership was a terrible idea: It requires one partner or the other (if not both) to get screwed. There is basically no chance of WP7 taking over the entire market. The best it can really hope for is to split the market three ways with Android and iOS, and even that seems extremely optimistic at this point. Windows Mobile, the discontinued product, is still outselling WP7, and those are the just-released latest numbers.
What is Nokia supposed to do with only a small part of a small percentage of the market? Even the entire volume of WP7 sales is probably not enough to sustain them. And Microsoft can't even let them have that, because they'll never get their market share off the floor with only one vendor who, by necessity, will itself have to continue selling and marketing non-WP7 in the interim.
There's some sort of weird stupidity from the people buying these items for governments, so they believe all the hype about new gadgets, and don't ask what happens when the problem tries to route around it.
This is an excellent point. I mean forget about attacking the person who was pointing the weapon. Look at the big picture: Something terrible is wrong politically and a large mass of people are protesting it in a nonviolent way. You bring out your crowd control weapons. You disperse the protestors. Job done, right?
What do you think those people are going to do if you make nonviolent protesting unavailable? Thank you for your benevolence and then go home and give up? Forget all about the fact that they can't find a job and are heading for bankruptcy?
The protesters are not the problem. The protesters are the symptom. Fighting the symptom doesn't solve the problem. And not solving the problem will only give it enough time to turn into a disaster.
It seems pretty obvious that the law doesn't allow you to refuse to execute a valid take down just because company issuing it has issued a bunch of fraudulent ones. The DMCA take down process is "optional" but if you opt not to do it, you lose the safe harbor and every take down you refuse becomes a prospective lawsuit. And I don't see any scenario in which a company loses every single copyright it holds for having issued a bunch of fraudulent take downs, which means that you're still on the hook for the valid ones. Even if they're all fraudulent, the legal fees incurred for opting out of the safe harbor will make the operation unprofitable.
My right to free speech doesn't mean I can stand in the middle of the Holland tunnel and giving a speech (and thereby prevent everyone else from getting to their jobs in New York City).
Blocking traffic is not speech. But you sure as hell ought to be allowed to stand on the side of (not in) the road holding a sign so that passing motorists can read it. Or do the same outside of some corrupt politician's event in a way that your signs have some hope of making it into the media coverage, instead of being corralled into some fenced area where you can be conveniently ignored.
You do understand they only want that money so they can get more people to vote for them?
You writing a letter to your representative isn't going to change much. You and a few thousand other people doing it is going to make them realize that you represent a sufficiently large chunk of their constituency that they'll be losing more votes continuing to support the bill than they can buy back with the Hollywood money.
Sure, passion is ideal. But you're missing a couple of things. For one, people can have a passion for more than one career. You take the group of people who love computers and algorithms and you look at the prospective salaries for different careers, and IT is paying $80,000/year while writing Monte Carlo simulations for financial firms is paying $400,000/year, what do you think many of these people are going to choose?
For another thing, what do you do when you need more people than there are people with the right passion? You still have to recruit some without it. And you're going to have serious issues if those people are idiots and you put them in charge of multi-billion dollar IT systems. If you have to poach candidates from other fields, you had better do it from the ones that already attract smart people, like law and finance, and to do so you're going to have to pay competitive rates.
How do you expect that to stop those companies from then submitting a couple of non-fraudulent requests and then filing a lawsuit when they don't comply?
All first world countries have required ultra low sulfur gasoline about as long as they've required emissions controls, because sulfur will poison a catalytic converter. The trucking industry fought it for several decades, but as of 2010 even diesel fuel is required to be ultra low sulfur in the US.
I suppose you could be talking about some kind of African country where high sulfur fuel is still allowed.
The article was about contracting versus in house gurus, and every month it seems there is always an article about the lack of gurus, hence the comment.
I suspect the problem is corporate executives who know the cost of everything and the value of nothing. There is a simple way to increase the supply of something: Pay more. If companies would pay competent IT people more money, then more people who would otherwise go on to be tax lawyers or securities traders will go into IT instead.
By contrast, what you hear in the media is the executives thinking with their MBA brains: If you want to increase supply, you can pay more... or you can go to the government and create artificial incentives to increase supply. More H1B visas. Government education subsidies for tech majors, to divert labor supply from occupations that pay the same or less than IT into IT. More supply at the same price.
The problem is that the latter doesn't create "gurus" -- it creates paper MCSEs. It makes the problem companies have in hiring competent staff that much harder, because you create a population of applicants who have degrees and certifications and even experience, yet have no earthly idea what they're doing. It attracts exactly those people who are too stupid to understand that a $1000 scholarship is a completely asinine way to make a career choice, instead of those who are smart enough to do just about anything and who make decisions based on forward thinking criteria like which career will allow them to afford a house in a neighborhood with better schools and a comfortable retirement.
It's the same disease that allows them to make the IT department a cost center: They count all of the salaries and equipment and ignore the productivity improvements that accrue to other departments as a result of their existence. Which makes it look like cutting staff or replacing them with less qualified but lower paid employees will save them money: The cost savings goes straight onto the spreadsheet, without accounting for the lost profits that will occur when a major system falls over and there is no longer anyone competent working there who can get it running before you lose a big client.
"You're the product, not the customer" is a slogan created by astroturf marketing trolls to allow the old guard (like Microsoft) to attack companies (like Google) that offer products in competition with theirs, but for free.
Which isn't to say that Google is perfect. But let's take the specific example in question: The law makes it so that there is a large legal incentive to take down videos upon request, and basically no legal incentive to question the take downs. Now, in theory, Google could hire an army of lawyers to review each of the thousands of take down requests they get every day, and try to contact the poster of the video to get their side of the story, etc. But let's face it, that's prohibitively expensive. And even that creates a much higher risk that they make a mistake, refuse to take down a video that it turns out was actually infringing and then end up having to explain it in court after getting sued by some Hollywood asshats like Viacom. The situation is messed up, but it's caused primarily by stupid laws, not stupid Google. You can blame them for not doing more, but it's not like they're going out of their way to screw you over. They just don't have any good options.
And that's the problem for Microsoft and their ilk. People like Google. They're not perfect, but they're less imperfect than most of the alternatives. And public opinion matters, so "the alternative" needs some talking points that paint competing companies with "free" products in a bad light. Hence: "You're the product, not the customer."
Is that why you're posting anonymously? Because you're part of the conspiracy that is going to kill anyone who tries to fix the democratic process, and you don't want to tip your hand?
All that is necessary for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
In the long run we are all dead. -- John Maynard Keynes
Only replacing the entire system will have any effect.
Your conclusion doesn't follow your premises. You don't have to replace the entire system, you only have to repair the structural flaws that create the incentives that currently exist. The flaw isn't in the idea of democracy, it's in the way we finance elections. The answer is public financing.
Naturally, that will never pass at the federal level because it doesn't serve the interests of the people who are already there. So do it at the state level. Get a bill in every state legislature that funds candidates for that state's federal offices with state money. Then you can get a bunch of new legislators with the backing of state money who aren't Washington insiders but can beat the incumbents (or at least get them to clean up their act). That serves as the thin end of the wedge: You get enough new blood in Congress that isn't beholden to special interests and you can make the further structural changes necessary to fix things properly.
I mean what's the alternative, violent revolution? Be serious.
a wealthy corporation can spend millions on campaigns to get the people they want into office.
Why is it that people are so incapable of thinking strategically?
Step 1: Get your name on the ballot for the state legislature. This doesn't require a lot of money.
Step 2: Run a serious campaign. Make your opponent fear losing his seat. Then go to him and let him know that you'll drop out of the race if he gets a bill through the state legislature for public financing of statewide elections, including your state's federal congressional seats.
Step 3: Repeat Step 2 until either the public finance law is passed by your opponent, or until you beat him and can make sure it gets passed from your new seat in the state legislature.
Step 4: Run for federal office using the state's public finance program and tell the corporations to die in a fire.
Honestly, you're full of crap. It's true, one vote doesn't matter. Especially when your only choice is between a politician who increases spending to buy pork and one that increases borrowing to buy pork.
But going to party meetings or working for a campaign? That's how things change. It's how the candidates that actually end up on the ballot get determined, and it's how those candidates determine their positions. Go to one of these places, offer to "help" and then while you're there, argue with them. Make them either see it your way or prove you wrong. If you can get them to be candid and admit their position is chosen based on funding or to play on public ignorance rather than based on reason, be their conscience. Be there to show them that you, as a representative of the human race, disapprove of what they're doing, care about it, and want them to change. Sometimes they will. Not all the time, but sometimes.
Or you can sit at home and bitch about everything on the internet. That's probably just as good.
The problem, naturally, is that you'll then have one candidate that got 28% of the vote, another that got 24%, and the remaining 47% stayed home. So then who do you send to Washington?
Interesting allegations. Wouldn't it be nice if we could see the original video and verify them?
It depends on the code. If the existing code was written by competent people who didn't do a perfect job because they were too pressed for time, and it mostly works, even if it's full of ugly kludges and runs too slowly, you can probably fix it. If it was written by imbeciles under the direction of a committee of PHBs and crashes arbitrarily for unfathomable reasons, throw it away.
Nuclear power generation is older than the 1950s
You can't have "next gen" reactors before you have "first gen" reactors. Your point is that it's been a long time, but it hasn't. The public wasn't really clamoring about nuclear safety until Chernobyl, and that was in 1986. That was 25 years ago. Roswell was 64 years ago.
Because no demo next-gen reactor designs have been created or proven
Not in the United States. India and China have been building newer reactors. Not all of them differ substantially from traditional designs, but for example India is building some fast breeder reactors that can use thorium (although they seem to be starting with depleted uranium, which you can use in the same way, probably because they already have the uranium sitting around instead of having to mine anything).
OK, so you figure (anybody have the actual number?) that those reactors were in operation for, say, 50 years. 434*25 + 138*50 = 17850 reactor years. Two major incidents, so 8925 reactor years each. If you and your kids want to see a major incident in the nearest reactor, you'll be waiting for quite a while. As in, they'll first have to replace the reactor with a new one some hundred and seventy odd times at fifty year intervals. But when they get replaced the newer ones will be safer and the probability will go down. And by then we'll probably be out of Uranium and/or have fusion working, so I guess you won't get to see it at all.
Firstly, we're talking about a completely new design of plant that hasn't been built before.
The primary differences between older designs and newer designs is that newer designs have more and more passive safety features. They still work the same way: Fission converts mass into heat, heat is converted into electricity, and you have to make sure you don't generate more heat than you can remove or it gets too hot. Unless you can provide some reason why this design is more susceptible to a cooling system failure, or more likely to produce more heat than designed, your argument is just unfounded speculation.
Secondly, that can't estimate the likelihood of low-probability events that haven't ever happened yet, some of which could be probable enough to still be a danger - especially if we expand nuclear power - and could cause large numbers of deaths. There's just no way to tell by looking at past performance.
Nonsense. You can predict the statistical probability of an event from the fact that it hasn't happened. The longer you've gone without it happening at all, the less likely it is. What you can't necessarily predict is the amount of damage it would cause, but Chernobyl was pretty much the worst case scenario, short of some kind of unfathomably preposterous outcome like creating a black hole or igniting fusion in the atmosphere that you might as well ascribe to CERN or supersonic flight as to nuclear power.
There are really only a couple of variables in the realistic worst case scenario: How much of the contents of the reactor gets outside of the reactor, and how much fission occurred first (determining the makeup of fissile elements to fission products). Even if you just took the entire contents of the reactor and dumped it in the street in front of the plant, it wouldn't be all that much worse than Chernobyl was.
How many times do you have to hear "it was N-million-in-1 chance" before you start wondering exactly how unlucky one can be.
Straw man. Nobody says that.
And a working plant is infinitely more complex than the mechanical engineering required to build a bridge.
No it isn't. Nuclear plants have a single failure mode: They produce more heat than can be removed, and they get too hot. There are two ways this can happen: Either they produce more heat than intended and the cooling system can't remove it, or the design requires active cooling and the cooling system fails. That isn't a lot of variables. What you're complaining about is that somebody designed a bridge to withstand 250MPH winds and then it fell over when it got hit by 300MPH winds.
those are things which prior to the events actually occurring engineers kept saying were just fine given the odds.
That's the same thing the bridge architect says when there hasn't been a storm with 300MPH winds in recorded history, until there is. How is nuclear power different?