Parent post wrongly assumes a standard US household socket, which is max 120 volt, 15 amp, 1800 watt.
Other replies to parent port appear to wrongly assume various European outlets. European household power is generally 220-240 volt, but max amperages are all over the map -- literally. They range from 15 amp / 3750 watt to as low as 5 amp / 1250 watt, depending on country, IIRC.
We don't appear to know the country of the grandparent post's parents' microwave. We can't even say "European" for sure; some early US models were hardwired, and so might have had a higher than usual power draw.
Power sockets exemplify the "I love standards -- there are so many to choose from!" concept.
A great deal of your complaints with the PSTN stem from business decisions, not engineering ones. And don't get me wrong -- they're my complaints, too. I'm no fan of corporate planning or the business office, believe me. I certainly don't claim we should emulate everything the telcos do. I note I didn't claim that in my post, either -- you're building a straw man and then attacking that. The point I was making still stands: One thing the telcos can do right, when they put their mind to it, is robust, scalable, long-lived engineering. In the pee sea world, we have to replace technology every five years or so, even if it's working perfectly, just because it isn't supported any longer. For all the strengths of the technology, that aspect I'm not a fan of.
"Price is another example. Simple 10 pack of 10ohm resistors were $8 at the shack, and $2.49 at another shop. Most of the time, even if you were driving 30mins you saved money."
One of the things Rat Shack sometimes did well was have a fair stock of various bits and pieces close by to many people. There's significantly higher overhead to that, so there will be higher prices. And it's lucrative to charge people for the convenience. "Convenience store service, convenience store prices". Your corner store will mark up their soda a lot more than a warehouse club, too, but it's the difference between 5 min and 30 min. When people are in a hurry, that's when they go to such places. Same deal. Mail order generally offers the cheapest prices, but sometimes you need something ASAP.
What you really need to do is find an entity who can help you with the tech mechanics. That entity could be a friend you promise to reward later, a business partner you legally go 50/50 with, an independent consultant you hire, a company (large or small) you hire. But you're asking really basic questions about stuff, so you obviously need some help. Moving to the cloud just moves the problem to some place you can't touch; it doesn't address it.
(If you're offended by the suggestion that you need help, you need to adjust your thinking significantly, or abandon the idea of going into business for yourself. No one person can do everything, and any successful business person will need to realize that early on.)
In fairness to TFA, there is a difference between allowing for the idea that some students will need more/different education, and the idea that we should make it easier to pass a CS course.
Some people are smarter than others, some learn faster, some grasp CS concepts easier, some will learn differently. Just as not everyone is a genius, not everyone is a clod. Perhaps someone could still be a perfectly good -- not outstanding, but perfectly good -- programmer or sysadmin if they studied longer or had more intensive coursework. At the same time, I breezed through my CS classes, so it isn't fair to me to make me sit through hours of classes I could just as easily skip.
We both should have to pass the same exams, though. We should have to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of the subject, even if we took different routes to get there.
As others have suggested, this discussion may really indicate that lower schools are not doing a good job. Or rather, that some (significant number of) high schools are doing a poor job. Maybe my high school did a better job prep'ing me for CS than that other guy.
It seems every time there's a problem with a nuclear power plant, some people trot out the excuse "Oh, it was an old design", like that's supposed to make things better.
The fact remains, we keep nuclear power plants running for decades. Just like all power plants of that generating capacity, nuclear plants are hugely expensive to build, so you need to keep them running for decades to make them cost effective. If we're going to declare nuclear power designs obsolete and unsafe so soon after they are built, then there is no way they will ever be cost justified.
You can't handwave the problem away by saying "they're old".
"I'm more interested in how you backed up the server to USB when all of the computers were made before USB ports existed."
He would have had to use a network client, since a NetWare server generally didn't do any I/O to removable drives. You couldn't even do file management from the server console without loading some optional modules. (NetWare could use the floppy drive, but it depended on DOS to handle the I/O, so it had to switch back and forth between real mode and i386 mode, so it was the slowest thing imaginable.)
So that guy prolly just connected his laptop to the LAN, attached to the NetWare server, mapped the drives (NetWare exposed all of it's drives to the network all the time; there was no separate "Share this folder" process), and copied the files.
"Active Directory was originally technology licensed from Banyan Vines."
Do you have anything to support that statement? In other words: Citation needed.
I've got a fair bit of experience with AD. I didn't work with StreetTalk much, but from what I've seen, they were radically different in their internals.
AD is basically LDAP bolted on top of the old NTLM domain system. Overall MSFT actually did a reasonably good job at that, but the old NTLM origins still poke through the covers in a few places (mainly the lower-level security stuff). The actual directory part of AD seems to have been derived from the Exchange Directory Service, which was an X.500 implementation that supported LDAP and integrated with NTLM domains (sound familiar?). When the DS moved from Exchange to Windows and became AD, Exchange lost its built-in DS and switched to using AD. AD uses the same ESE (Extensible Storage Engine, formerly known as the Exchange Storage Engine) backend that Exchange brought to life. In Windows and Exchange 2000, there were actually a number of problems because Exchange was still so tightly coupled to the directory that weird compatibility problems would occasionally crop up on Exchange servers -- especially if the server was also a Domain Controller.
This blog post I just found, purportedly from someone who actually worked at MSFT on AD back then, would appear to agree: http://blog.joeware.net/2008/08/11/1420/
"Abends come when you load a novell module on a server that is already running; they are most often caused by missing or incorrect prerequisites. They don't just come out of thin air."
ABENDs either come from NetWare internal code failing a check, or from CPU exceptions. In my experience, CPU exceptions were more common. And the leading cause of that was bad code.
In NetWare, by default, everything runs in ring 0, in the same memory space, with cooperative multitasking. One bad program can scribble over kernel memory, or get stuck in a loop, or divide by zero, and the whole machine will crash. The tools to isolate NLMs arrived too late and did too little.
So on NetWare, bad application code crashes the server. On Windows, bad application code crashes that one process.
Yes, the culprit is poorly-written software, but guess what -- there's a lot of that out there. I would say most software is poorly-written. Businesses still need/want to run it. So they pick the OS that handles it better.
Early versions of NT -- especially 4.x -- were very crash-prone, but with good hardware and good drivers, 2003 and later are quite solid. (And NetWare certainly didn't like crummy hardware either. Nothing does, really. It's hard to work around the hardware you're running on.)
It sounds like you're still clinging to a circa 1998 perception of Microsoft Windows, with your dogged focus on Windows crashing all the time. That's simply not the case anymore. And indeed, that was Novell's problem, too. They always saw Microsoft in terms of what Microsoft was in 1995. They ignored the progress Microsoft was making, and it killed them.
There are a number of things in your post that are, at best, highly dubious, if not outright wrong.
"there network stack was horrid, and they where late to tcp/ip. trying to force IPX to be the de facto standard"
NetWare's IPX stack was quite good for what it was designed for (running NetWare on LANs). It's limitations also made it faster for those simple tasks it could do.
For a time IPX *was* the de facto standard on a lot of corporate LANs, with IP being seen as the outsider. That all changed when the Internet suddenly made it big, circa 1994. Now everybody wanted to use the Internet. For a time, there was a significant market of IPX-to-IP proxy servers just for that reason.
The university world, where IP was popular earlier on, always thought IPX was this weird thing (and it was), but it was the other way around on business networks.
"They moved very expensive net cards at cost, and if pressed they would give you netware."
They certainly never gave me NetWare!:) But I'm not a representative sample, and I don't have data to argue with you on that. Maybe they did. But I can say for sure that they charged an arm and a leg for their network cards. Cards with the exact same chips and PCB but without the "Yes!" label cost considerably less.
"Novell could not handle large business and large business number of users."
That I have to disagree with. When NT first came out (1993), a lot of corporate admins laughed at it, because it struggled to handle the user load NetWare could. NetWare could easily handle 1000+ connections at once on hardware NT could maybe do 100.
Now, NT had the NTLM domain system right off, while NetWare 3.x was still a "every server has its own users" model. But NetWare 4.x appeared right after NT, and it could scale to many more users than NT could, using a single organization namespace. (In NT land, it was common to create domains *just* to hold users, and other domains *just* to hold resources, and join them with trusts, because NT would fall apart under the load otherwise.)
It took Microsoft until Windows 2000 and Active Directory to catch up with that.
"By the 90s MS TCP/IP implementation was starting to blow Novell IPX out of the water..."
Microsoft didn't even *have* an IP stack until 1993 in NT and Windows for Workgroups. The NT IP stack was slow and the the WfW IP stack crashed all the time. Win9x and NT 4.x improved things considerably, but IPX was still faster because it was more limited. But because the Internet had hit, everyone wanted to run IP now. SMB could run over IP from NT on. NetWare didn't do that until 5.x, several years later. So if you went Microsoft, you could run only one network protocol, and that itself was a performance win. If you were running NetWare, you had to be dual-stack, and that cost both bandwidth and RAM.
"When this happened Novell was the big player, MS was small time."
Novell was king of LANs, but Microsoft was still a big player. I believe Microsoft wielded more influence than Novell. Sure, if you had a server, you were likely running NetWare. But all your clients would be running MS-DOS -- and maybe MS-Windows, too -- and you have more clients than servers. You might also be running other Microsoft products (e.g., FoxPro), while Novell basically just had one product -- NetWare.
What really killed NetWare was that all it was really good for was file and print (and later, directory). Initially and/or by default, programs all ran in ring zero with no memory protection, only cooperative multitasking, and no disk swapping. Software running on NetWare had to be *very* well written, or it would kill the server. Most programmers just aren't that good.
NT, for all its faults and instabilities, had memory protection and preemptive multitasking. Any idiot with a copy of Visual Basic could chu
The ancient DOS IPX/SPX client had its own logon script language. One of the commands available was "FIRE PHASERS", which made an appropriate noise using the PC speaker.
I would guess the.WAV files must have come with the Windows client? I (like many Novell other people) jumped ship around then.
Another use manual typewriters have is for filling out forms or typing documents involving classified information, without having to prepare and file a 70-page System Security Plan, get approval from everyone from the cook on up through God, and do weekly security audits.
"According to some, 90% of all email is spam. Does that make SMTP an illegitimate protocol? Often, the easiest way to find copyright infringing works is using Google. Does that make the search engine illegitimate? Porn drove early VCR development. Is VHS an illegitimate technology?"
There's a difference between a protocol specification and actually wanting to foot the bill for the infrastructure and legal battles. You want to defend file sharing? Fine, buy a hosting account and go for it. Don't expect DropBox to foot the bill, though.
"Of course it would have - they could have built a 45-foot tall seawall. Then when a 60-foot tsunami hit, we could all be having the same conversation."
One thing I'm somewhat surprised at is that their designs are susceptible to flooding at all. It's perfectly possible to put generators and switchgear inside water-proof vaults. It's pretty available technology; telcos routinely use such in some of their installations. Generators won't run without an air intake, of course, but tsunami waters recede relatively quickly.
"It eventually comes down to, "why didn't you build to withstand a Godzilla attack?". "
There's a mighty big difference between supposing a giant lizard and supposing a flood at a site next to the ocean in an earthquake-prone region.
"I bring up this morbid defense because it took a natural disaster that killed over 10,000 people immediately, in a country well-prepared for this sort of thing, to overwhelm this 40 year old design."
I must admit I am perplexed that some people keep bringing this up. The argument seems to be, a bunch of people just died in a natural disaster, so it's okay for a nuclear power plant to explode.
No. As far as I'm concerned, If we can't build a nuclear power plant that can survive a big -- but entirely reasonably foreseeable -- natural disaster we shouldn't be building them.
Note that I'm not asserting we cannot build such a plant. Perhaps we can. But it's fairly obvious we didn't. And I have a problem with that.
This was not an estimate. It was not presented as a prediction. It was given as an unequivocal declaration of fact.
"... especially compared to the totally unscientific "OMG!!1! RADIATION!" reports that were widely circulated in the media."
Two wrongs don't make a right. Put another way, adding misinformation to other misinformation only further confuses things. Put yet another way, you don't fight darkness by adding more darkness. You must add light. You must fight misinformation with accuracy and truth.
"It's not a building, it's a falsework designed to hide the building. Big difference."
Citation needed. Everything I've seen suggests the structures damaged in the explosions were the top parts of the building housing the reactors. These are not the secondary containment (the thick concrete "drywell" surrounding the reactor pressure vessel) but they very much are buildings. In particular, they cover the storage pools holding the spent fuel.
"I've never seen a pro-nuclear activist claim any of these things."
Aside from the obvious Slashdot postings... the article here: http://mitnse.com/2011/03/13/modified-version-of-original-post/ Originally stated, in unequivocal terms, that "there will *not* be any significant release of radiation" (that's pretty close to an exact quote). It was widely circulated, widely quoted, and even posted on Slashdot (a few days late, of course). It has since been edited to remove such predictions, but you can find originals on the web.
Your statement that you've never seen such cavalier dismissals does more to damage your credibility in my eyes than any anything. You're apparently not paying any attention. If that's the case, why should I believe what you have to say about nuclear power?
Slashdot Mirror
Parent post wrongly assumes a standard US household socket, which is max 120 volt, 15 amp, 1800 watt.
Other replies to parent port appear to wrongly assume various European outlets. European household power is generally 220-240 volt, but max amperages are all over the map -- literally. They range from 15 amp / 3750 watt to as low as 5 amp / 1250 watt, depending on country, IIRC.
We don't appear to know the country of the grandparent post's parents' microwave. We can't even say "European" for sure; some early US models were hardwired, and so might have had a higher than usual power draw.
Power sockets exemplify the "I love standards -- there are so many to choose from!" concept.
A great deal of your complaints with the PSTN stem from business decisions, not engineering ones. And don't get me wrong -- they're my complaints, too. I'm no fan of corporate planning or the business office, believe me. I certainly don't claim we should emulate everything the telcos do. I note I didn't claim that in my post, either -- you're building a straw man and then attacking that. The point I was making still stands: One thing the telcos can do right, when they put their mind to it, is robust, scalable, long-lived engineering. In the pee sea world, we have to replace technology every five years or so, even if it's working perfectly, just because it isn't supported any longer. For all the strengths of the technology, that aspect I'm not a fan of.
"Price is another example. Simple 10 pack of 10ohm resistors were $8 at the shack, and $2.49 at another shop. Most of the time, even if you were driving 30mins you saved money."
One of the things Rat Shack sometimes did well was have a fair stock of various bits and pieces close by to many people. There's significantly higher overhead to that, so there will be higher prices. And it's lucrative to charge people for the convenience. "Convenience store service, convenience store prices". Your corner store will mark up their soda a lot more than a warehouse club, too, but it's the difference between 5 min and 30 min. When people are in a hurry, that's when they go to such places. Same deal. Mail order generally offers the cheapest prices, but sometimes you need something ASAP.
"In terms of phone technology, where you might install a phone system and not really touch it for 10 years... 2 years is very short."
And your typical big telco equipment has a lifetime measured in decades.
And modern POTS lines are more-or-less backwards compatible with phones from 1930 or earlier.
The computer industry could learn a thing or two here.
What you really need to do is find an entity who can help you with the tech mechanics. That entity could be a friend you promise to reward later, a business partner you legally go 50/50 with, an independent consultant you hire, a company (large or small) you hire. But you're asking really basic questions about stuff, so you obviously need some help. Moving to the cloud just moves the problem to some place you can't touch; it doesn't address it.
(If you're offended by the suggestion that you need help, you need to adjust your thinking significantly, or abandon the idea of going into business for yourself. No one person can do everything, and any successful business person will need to realize that early on.)
In fairness to TFA, there is a difference between allowing for the idea that some students will need more/different education, and the idea that we should make it easier to pass a CS course.
Some people are smarter than others, some learn faster, some grasp CS concepts easier, some will learn differently. Just as not everyone is a genius, not everyone is a clod. Perhaps someone could still be a perfectly good -- not outstanding, but perfectly good -- programmer or sysadmin if they studied longer or had more intensive coursework. At the same time, I breezed through my CS classes, so it isn't fair to me to make me sit through hours of classes I could just as easily skip.
We both should have to pass the same exams, though. We should have to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of the subject, even if we took different routes to get there.
As others have suggested, this discussion may really indicate that lower schools are not doing a good job. Or rather, that some (significant number of) high schools are doing a poor job. Maybe my high school did a better job prep'ing me for CS than that other guy.
there's not been any actual additional harm done to users this time
You say that all that's lost is the ability to change one's password.
Didn't Sony's user database just get stolen? Wouldn't people thus want to change their password, so attackers can't vandalize their game info/account?
I honestly don't know how PSN works, so maybe I'm missing a piece of the puzzle, but that's the first thing that occurs to me.
It seems every time there's a problem with a nuclear power plant, some people trot out the excuse "Oh, it was an old design", like that's supposed to make things better.
The fact remains, we keep nuclear power plants running for decades. Just like all power plants of that generating capacity, nuclear plants are hugely expensive to build, so you need to keep them running for decades to make them cost effective. If we're going to declare nuclear power designs obsolete and unsafe so soon after they are built, then there is no way they will ever be cost justified.
You can't handwave the problem away by saying "they're old".
# rm -vf /bin/laden
removed `/bin/laden'
#
"I'm more interested in how you backed up the server to USB when all of the computers were made before USB ports existed."
He would have had to use a network client, since a NetWare server generally didn't do any I/O to removable drives. You couldn't even do file management from the server console without loading some optional modules. (NetWare could use the floppy drive, but it depended on DOS to handle the I/O, so it had to switch back and forth between real mode and i386 mode, so it was the slowest thing imaginable.)
So that guy prolly just connected his laptop to the LAN, attached to the NetWare server, mapped the drives (NetWare exposed all of it's drives to the network all the time; there was no separate "Share this folder" process), and copied the files.
"Active Directory was originally technology licensed from Banyan Vines."
Do you have anything to support that statement? In other words: Citation needed.
I've got a fair bit of experience with AD. I didn't work with StreetTalk much, but from what I've seen, they were radically different in their internals.
AD is basically LDAP bolted on top of the old NTLM domain system. Overall MSFT actually did a reasonably good job at that, but the old NTLM origins still poke through the covers in a few places (mainly the lower-level security stuff). The actual directory part of AD seems to have been derived from the Exchange Directory Service, which was an X.500 implementation that supported LDAP and integrated with NTLM domains (sound familiar?). When the DS moved from Exchange to Windows and became AD, Exchange lost its built-in DS and switched to using AD. AD uses the same ESE (Extensible Storage Engine, formerly known as the Exchange Storage Engine) backend that Exchange brought to life. In Windows and Exchange 2000, there were actually a number of problems because Exchange was still so tightly coupled to the directory that weird compatibility problems would occasionally crop up on Exchange servers -- especially if the server was also a Domain Controller.
This blog post I just found, purportedly from someone who actually worked at MSFT on AD back then, would appear to agree:
http://blog.joeware.net/2008/08/11/1420/
"Abends come when you load a novell module on a server that is already running; they are most often caused by missing or incorrect prerequisites. They don't just come out of thin air."
ABENDs either come from NetWare internal code failing a check, or from CPU exceptions. In my experience, CPU exceptions were more common. And the leading cause of that was bad code.
In NetWare, by default, everything runs in ring 0, in the same memory space, with cooperative multitasking. One bad program can scribble over kernel memory, or get stuck in a loop, or divide by zero, and the whole machine will crash. The tools to isolate NLMs arrived too late and did too little.
So on NetWare, bad application code crashes the server. On Windows, bad application code crashes that one process.
Yes, the culprit is poorly-written software, but guess what -- there's a lot of that out there. I would say most software is poorly-written. Businesses still need/want to run it. So they pick the OS that handles it better.
Early versions of NT -- especially 4.x -- were very crash-prone, but with good hardware and good drivers, 2003 and later are quite solid. (And NetWare certainly didn't like crummy hardware either. Nothing does, really. It's hard to work around the hardware you're running on.)
It sounds like you're still clinging to a circa 1998 perception of Microsoft Windows, with your dogged focus on Windows crashing all the time. That's simply not the case anymore. And indeed, that was Novell's problem, too. They always saw Microsoft in terms of what Microsoft was in 1995. They ignored the progress Microsoft was making, and it killed them.
There are a number of things in your post that are, at best, highly dubious, if not outright wrong.
"there network stack was horrid, and they where late to tcp/ip. trying to force IPX to be the de facto standard"
NetWare's IPX stack was quite good for what it was designed for (running NetWare on LANs). It's limitations also made it faster for those simple tasks it could do.
For a time IPX *was* the de facto standard on a lot of corporate LANs, with IP being seen as the outsider. That all changed when the Internet suddenly made it big, circa 1994. Now everybody wanted to use the Internet. For a time, there was a significant market of IPX-to-IP proxy servers just for that reason.
The university world, where IP was popular earlier on, always thought IPX was this weird thing (and it was), but it was the other way around on business networks.
"They moved very expensive net cards at cost, and if pressed they would give you netware."
They certainly never gave me NetWare! :) But I'm not a representative sample, and I don't have data to argue with you on that. Maybe they did. But I can say for sure that they charged an arm and a leg for their network cards. Cards with the exact same chips and PCB but without the "Yes!" label cost considerably less.
"Novell could not handle large business and large business number of users."
That I have to disagree with. When NT first came out (1993), a lot of corporate admins laughed at it, because it struggled to handle the user load NetWare could. NetWare could easily handle 1000+ connections at once on hardware NT could maybe do 100.
Now, NT had the NTLM domain system right off, while NetWare 3.x was still a "every server has its own users" model. But NetWare 4.x appeared right after NT, and it could scale to many more users than NT could, using a single organization namespace. (In NT land, it was common to create domains *just* to hold users, and other domains *just* to hold resources, and join them with trusts, because NT would fall apart under the load otherwise.)
It took Microsoft until Windows 2000 and Active Directory to catch up with that.
"By the 90s MS TCP/IP implementation was starting to blow Novell IPX out of the water..."
Microsoft didn't even *have* an IP stack until 1993 in NT and Windows for Workgroups. The NT IP stack was slow and the the WfW IP stack crashed all the time. Win9x and NT 4.x improved things considerably, but IPX was still faster because it was more limited. But because the Internet had hit, everyone wanted to run IP now. SMB could run over IP from NT on. NetWare didn't do that until 5.x, several years later. So if you went Microsoft, you could run only one network protocol, and that itself was a performance win. If you were running NetWare, you had to be dual-stack, and that cost both bandwidth and RAM.
"When this happened Novell was the big player, MS was small time."
Novell was king of LANs, but Microsoft was still a big player. I believe Microsoft wielded more influence than Novell. Sure, if you had a server, you were likely running NetWare. But all your clients would be running MS-DOS -- and maybe MS-Windows, too -- and you have more clients than servers. You might also be running other Microsoft products (e.g., FoxPro), while Novell basically just had one product -- NetWare.
What really killed NetWare was that all it was really good for was file and print (and later, directory). Initially and/or by default, programs all ran in ring zero with no memory protection, only cooperative multitasking, and no disk swapping. Software running on NetWare had to be *very* well written, or it would kill the server. Most programmers just aren't that good.
NT, for all its faults and instabilities, had memory protection and preemptive multitasking. Any idiot with a copy of Visual Basic could chu
The ancient DOS IPX/SPX client had its own logon script language. One of the commands available was "FIRE PHASERS", which made an appropriate noise using the PC speaker.
I would guess the .WAV files must have come with the Windows client? I (like many Novell other people) jumped ship around then.
Fair enough. I wasn't clear on that.
Another use manual typewriters have is for filling out forms or typing documents involving classified information, without having to prepare and file a 70-page System Security Plan, get approval from everyone from the cook on up through God, and do weekly security audits.
"According to some, 90% of all email is spam. Does that make SMTP an illegitimate protocol? Often, the easiest way to find copyright infringing works is using Google. Does that make the search engine illegitimate? Porn drove early VCR development. Is VHS an illegitimate technology?"
There's a difference between a protocol specification and actually wanting to foot the bill for the infrastructure and legal battles. You want to defend file sharing? Fine, buy a hosting account and go for it. Don't expect DropBox to foot the bill, though.
"Sadly, he isn't me - and will likely never live my envious lifestyle or even own a horse..."
Moo.
"It's worse than a corporation because there's no controlling external authority to hold them to a reasonable standard."
I thought that was supposed to be the voting public? ;-)
"Of course it would have - they could have built a 45-foot tall seawall. Then when a 60-foot tsunami hit, we could all be having the same conversation."
One thing I'm somewhat surprised at is that their designs are susceptible to flooding at all. It's perfectly possible to put generators and switchgear inside water-proof vaults. It's pretty available technology; telcos routinely use such in some of their installations. Generators won't run without an air intake, of course, but tsunami waters recede relatively quickly.
"It eventually comes down to, "why didn't you build to withstand a Godzilla attack?". "
There's a mighty big difference between supposing a giant lizard and supposing a flood at a site next to the ocean in an earthquake-prone region.
"I bring up this morbid defense because it took a natural disaster that killed over 10,000 people immediately, in a country well-prepared for this sort of thing, to overwhelm this 40 year old design."
I must admit I am perplexed that some people keep bringing this up. The argument seems to be, a bunch of people just died in a natural disaster, so it's okay for a nuclear power plant to explode.
No. As far as I'm concerned, If we can't build a nuclear power plant that can survive a big -- but entirely reasonably foreseeable -- natural disaster we shouldn't be building them.
Note that I'm not asserting we cannot build such a plant. Perhaps we can. But it's fairly obvious we didn't. And I have a problem with that.
"Nitrogen fixation generally requires ... fairly abusive temperature and pressure along with a catalyst"
High temperature and pressure? Hmmm, right, okay, I've got a nuclear reactor, where could I find some of that...
:-)
(Yes, I see "along with a catalyst".)
"That was a fair estimate at the time ..."
This was not an estimate. It was not presented as a prediction. It was given as an unequivocal declaration of fact.
"... especially compared to the totally unscientific "OMG!!1! RADIATION!" reports that were widely circulated in the media."
Two wrongs don't make a right. Put another way, adding misinformation to other misinformation only further confuses things. Put yet another way, you don't fight darkness by adding more darkness. You must add light. You must fight misinformation with accuracy and truth.
"It's not a building, it's a falsework designed to hide the building. Big difference."
Citation needed. Everything I've seen suggests the structures damaged in the explosions were the top parts of the building housing the reactors. These are not the secondary containment (the thick concrete "drywell" surrounding the reactor pressure vessel) but they very much are buildings. In particular, they cover the storage pools holding the spent fuel.
http://www.gereports.com/how-it-works-white-paper-on-mark-i-containment/
"I've never seen a pro-nuclear activist claim any of these things."
Aside from the obvious Slashdot postings... the article here:
http://mitnse.com/2011/03/13/modified-version-of-original-post/
Originally stated, in unequivocal terms, that "there will *not* be any significant release of radiation" (that's pretty close to an exact quote). It was widely circulated, widely quoted, and even posted on Slashdot (a few days late, of course). It has since been edited to remove such predictions, but you can find originals on the web.
Your statement that you've never seen such cavalier dismissals does more to damage your credibility in my eyes than any anything. You're apparently not paying any attention. If that's the case, why should I believe what you have to say about nuclear power?