I guess Apple doesn't see it cutting into iMac G4 sales, but I wonder if iMac G3 sales (starting at $800) will suffer.
Of course it will--Apple doesn't have big plans to push yesterday's hardware and design as The Next Big Thing. The G3 iMac is right at the end of it's lifespan and has only stuck around this long to fill Apple's entry-level slot. The eMac will probably completely replace the old G3 iMacs before too long.
College level CS degrees are not a good investment if you have aptitude.
Not true, not true. For starters, not all undergrad CS programs are equal. If you're really that good, go to a top-tier CS school; you're virtually assured the opportunity to learn a great deal more than you could on your own. While it is possible to read a challenging text like The Art Of Computer Programming on your own time, you can get so much more out of it if somebody actually teaches it to you. You'll have access to a wide range of resources to tinker with and learn on, and if, in the course of your tinkering, you accidentally hose something, the repercussions are much gentler in a college environment than in a business. (You did what to the server!?)
College also gives one a much broader education than self-directed technical training. Sure, you want to be a sysadmin now, but there's a pretty good chance that your wants in life will be quite different at age thirty than they are at age eighteen. If your entire schtick is Systems Administration, you're going to run into trouble trying to swich gears in mid-career; certainly, you can get to Senior Sysadmin just fine, but what if you ever wanted to become a Systems Architect? Or an executive? Or a lawyer? With an undergrad degree, it's much easier to move between job classes, and it's much easier to pursue graduate degrees in other fields.
I say take a more targeted approach for now and go to college when, and only when, you become bored, burnt out, disenchanted, frustrated and really sick and tired of all those god damned "college boys" who make more than you but REALLY just don't know DICK!
College also provides an excellent opportunity to learn how to interact with different individuals and groups in a gracious and tactful manner.
It's interesting that you post this because you're obviously not very paranoid AT ALL:
__Thomas Tuttle__
*snip*
...I mean, Buttle! It's been confusion from the word go! He's been overcharged for Information Retrieval Procedures and someone somewhere is trying to make us carry the can!
No, American AC in Paris claimed that the creator is omnipotent. He can declare the terms of the contract and your only option is to accept it or not.
I argue that the consumer has certain rights that cannot be taken away, regardless of the existence of a contract. This is comparable to the fact that an employer may not have you sign a contract that pays you less than the minimum wage.
...so would you argue that the end user is under no moral obligation whatsoever to respect the terms with which a developer distributes her software?
If so, then what moral obligation is there to respect even the most basic licenses, such as BSD and GPL?
If not, then you've just agreed with what I've been saying all along, that the end user is morally obligated to either accept the terms of a developer's license or not use that developer's software at all.
(Oh, and the only thing that keeps a person in the US from being able to accept a contract to work for fifty cents an hour is the law. There is no moral reason why two parties could not enter into such a contract if they both wanted to. Is there?)
No. No, no, no. I don't even address legal issues in my posts. Re-read my post--you won't find a single reference to legality or illegality. Go on, post the passages of my posts where you think I'm addressing legal concerns rather than moral concerns.
The crux of my argument is that the ethical thing to do is respect the wishes of the author of a piece of software. It is unethical to disregard the terms with which a developer distributes her software. My argument is not of laws, restrictions, and consequences; my argument is of respect for the creator of software.
Now, if you feel that shareware licences place unacceptable restrictions on you, the end user, then my argument is simply that you should not use the software, and that using said software outside of the terms laid out by the developer is immoral. Nowhere did I state that such behavior was illegal, because that's not at all the point I'm trying to make.
Here's the rule. If you give something away, it isn't yours anymore. Its like that annoying uncle who gives you a christmas present on the condition that you use it in such a way.
...so the proper resonse is to give the present back to that annoying uncle and say, "Thanks, but no thanks." Accepting his gift and then disregarding his request is just plain disresepectful.
You spend the entire body of your post pontificating on The Benefits of Open Source, then in your last paragraph you proceed to say that you'd do exactly what I'm suggesting one should do. You said yourself that you would not use a piece of software if you disagreed with that software's terms of use. That's -exactly- what I said people should do.
Your post isn't so much a response to what I said as it is a diatribe on what you feel makes an acceptable license. That said, do you agree with my assertion that the end user must either respect the terms with which a developer has released her work or not use that work at all? If you disagree, how would you feel about a person yanking GPL'd source, claiming it as their own, and re-releasing it under the BSD license?
Developers deserve the same moral consideration as anyone else. If they make something and give it to the world with certain conditions, it follows that the world should honor their conditions. And I'm sure you really don't mean to say that developers can go to hell, seeing as you're not attacking them.
Your contention that "software" is synonymous with "thought" is laughably naive; by that reasoning, it would follow that "building" is "brick", "symphony" is "tone", and "Water Lillies" is "paint".
What draconian measures are shareware developers advancing that infringe upon your moral rights? Does nagware infringe upon your moral rights? Do polynomial time-sesntive registrations infringe upon your moral rights? How can something that you willingly acquire infringe upon your rights?
Describe -exactly- what it is that shareware develpers do that infringes upon your moral rights.
I fail to see how this amounts to theft. It is a violation of a modern law, but theft is almost so obvious one has to think about it to even define it. Theft is the act of depriving someone of some 'thing' that they have exclusive rights to, either by earning it, or having been given it by someone who themselves earned it.
...so you're suggesting that a software developer hasn't 'earned' the right to distribute her own creation as she sees fit?
If a developer spends 1200 hours of her life making a game, is it your right to disregard her terms?
The DEVELOPER is the OWNER of her own product. She does indeed have exclusive rights to her own creation; if she kept the only copy of the software encrypted on a CD and locked in a filing cabinet, you have absolutely no right to tell her that she must give it to you. If she gives it to you on the condition that you don't give it to anybody else, you have absolutely no right to give it to other people. She can choose to develop and distribute it however she sees fit, and she gets FINAL SAY in this matter. It doesn't matter if you don't want to cough up ten dollars; it doesn't matter if she wants to set up a registration scheme that forces you to call a 900 number every time you want to use the program. The terms are completely up to the DEVELOPER, not the consumer.
If you don't like the terms a developer has set forth, then don't use that developer's product. It's that simple. Cracking a developer's product for the express purpose of using it on your own terms is incredibly disrespectful to the developer. She worked hard to produce that software, she deserves respect, and she has the right to set out her own terms. You the end user, on the other hand, did exactly jack shit to create said software. Where do you get off telling us that it's morally okay to tell the developer to go piss up a rope?
If you disagree with a developer's terms, them do not use the software. Period.
Software development takes time. Software development takes energy. Software development takes thought. Software development is always, at some point, a royal pain in the ass. Software development is a labor of love. That you have the gall to even suggest that the end-user has the right to dictate their own terms to the developer tells me that you have never, ever developed software of any real magnitude.
There are precious few ways to keep people from pirating software, but damned if I'm going to let you claim that it's the right thing to do.
I'd imagine golf cleats, soccer shoes, or strap-on crampons would be effective. So would a few ropes.
Only if the stuff is applied to a lawn. If a riot took place in, oh, a metropolitan area, then the above apparatuses would perform markedly worse. Ever tried running on pavement wearing soccer/running/golf cleats? Ropes would let you get even more tangled once you fell down, possibly strangle a friend or two.
Aside from the sheer fright of such military weaponry being beta-tested on our citizens, I'm a little concerned about second order effects...A terrifying catastrophe waiting to happen.
Ever been in a crowd of several hundreds of thousands of people*? Even when they're behaving, it can be downright frightening; the thought of being pressed amongst countless angry, violent, rioting people is terrifying. The risks associated with an effective crowd-control weapon strike me as far less frightening and harmful than a rioting mob. Rioting mobs -are- a catastrophe -happening-.
*Paris, 1998, Bastille Day/day after the French won the World Cup, Champs Elysees. A panicked motorist ran down 80 people; the crowd was rowdy, but certainly not violent. Got quite scary at times.
You're going to be hard pressed to find a lossless codec too much more efficient than those currently available. Even if you were to design a compression algorithm tailored specifically to music or spoken word, you're still going to be dealing with enough variation between samples that you'll eventually need to rely on some mix of tried and true lossless compression schemes (barring radical advancements in compression theory, that is.)
That said, there exist lossless audio compression schemes that will give you fairly reliable results in the 25%-75% compression range. These are great for high-quality reproduction and high speed (high speed as in fast disk access, not as in cable modem/DSL) access, but you're still looking at a 160 MB download (near-best case scenario) for a single CD of music.
According to the roadmap, Mozilla 1.0 will be released on or shortly after April 5.
...and the press release is scheduled to be 72 hours in advance...
for home audio...
on
Non-MP3 Codecs?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
If you're looking to compress files for home audio use, then you may as well go ahead and use one of the lossless compression formats, as adding storage space to a home audio system is trivial and you'll be able to hear comparatively more garbage from lossy compression on your home system (rather than on an earpiece headset or cheapie speakers.)
Bear in mind that the ~4x compression rate listed for lossless compression schemes is heavily reliant on the input. Don't be surprised if you get 1.5-2.5 compression a lot of the time, and remember that there's a good chance you'll get 1:1 (or worse) compression results with a 'random' enough song file.
This is the sort of situation we can expect to see the big industry types cite when they clamor for content control, copy protection, etc. In fairness, they have a point; if the norm in certain Asian markets became the norm worldwide (or even just in the U.S.,) what incentive would companies have for pouring funds into the R&D, development, QA, and management required to make commercial-grade software?
Open Source, while it's a great thing, really isn't enough of an answer. There are no OS equals to programs like Photoshop, Media 100, Oracle. (Yes, Virginia, I know about GIMP and PostgreSQL.)
Copy protection isn't the answer, either. Fair use, monopolistic control, hell, you all know the arguments.
Lassiez-faire isn't the answer, either. Given the option to purchase something or steal it without risk of repercussion, far too many people will do the latter. Adobe deserves revenue for their efforts, and they're apparently suffering enough in Asia that they're considering dropping the whole thing. Say whatever you will about the quality of their work beyond version whichever-you-love-most, but is this the norm you want to see developing with -other- companies?
(It's a link to information on RTM's worm, for those who don't feel like clicking the link.)
That's the original version; I've got an updated version (lighter bandwidth, typo fixes, etc.) available at http://www.snowplow.org/tom/worm/.
I'm going to be quite hard to get in touch with for the next two months, but if you have any questions, feel free to ask and I'll get back to them as soon as I can.
I think, if you read it, he doesn't have a double standard, he's merely complaining about Big Media's double standard. In fact, I think it's fairly obvious that's what he's doing.
There's more to his piece, though. He homes in on Big Media's two-faced behavior, but makes it very clear that he feels that Big Media's duplicity is a breed apart from Small Media's duplicity:
But when I went onto the Big Brother site, I found no age restrictions or warnings about who could buy or see the knife incident. Any kid with access to a credit card could, as is often true of sex and other "unwholesome" sites online. But it's one thing for a pornographer to do that, another a media conglomerate that purports to cover public policy issues, including technology, and that constantly spouts the most high-minded sense of moral purpose. Listen to what Big Brother's producer said of the show's ethics: "I have been lecturing my staff about using the West Point code of honor in making sure we keep to the truth."
He makes clear that it is indeed OK for a pornographer to be a pornographer, but then rips into Big Media (and Big Media alone) for being [duplicitous|multi-faceted enterprises]. The entire tone of the article is that this duplicity is a Big Media Problem, when it's honestly easily as applicable to Little Media "good guys". Hell, Slashdot has an alarming habit of posting front-page articles that flat out lie for the sake of advocacy; this goes on in spite of the "News" for nerds tagline. NPR has an ongoing scandal revolving around selling membership lists to third parties, despite their "privacy-friendly" enrollment. Major scientific journals soak research groups into paying thousands just to submit articles for publication, not to mention the prohibitive cost of such subscriptions; this in the name of furthering the general knowledge of mankind. One can even argue that Small Media is in some ways more prone to two-faced behavior, as they often tend to be niche outlets with clearly-defined target audiences and adgendas.
After reading this article, to uggest that Jon isn't exhibiting a clear anti-Big Media bias is disingenuous. Jon is most certainly drawing lines in the sand on this one.
Jon, may I say that I never, ever expected you to take the "Think Of The Children!" road. Never.
For as much bile as you harbor for Big Media, you're just asking for trouble in suggesting that they be held to standards other than that of Little Media. No matter how much good you think it could do, it is the exact same line of reasoning that you have derided on countless occasions in the past regarding things such as video game violence, censorship, and preferential treatment of big companies.
How do you define Big Media, Jon? Is AOL Big Media? How about NBC? Easy, no? Well than, what about CNN? PBS? MP3.com (back in it's glory days?) OSDN? The Onion? A bit less easy, seeing as we're starting to take aim at "good guy" sites now, isn't it? And even if you can confidently draw your line in the sand to partition the "good" from the "bad", you most certainly won't be the only person drawing lines in the sand, and your word is highly unlikely to be final.
Don't advocate double standards. Don't think of the children, dammit. Don't be so quick to throw equality by the wayside.
With a fusion reactor, what would happen if you completely lost power to the magnetic fields? Would it blow up like a H-bomb or at least level the building? People aren't going to allow these kinds of plants to be built unless they are as safe or safer than fission plants.
What about the risk of an explosion or meltdown? Is this possible with Iter?
No, the fusion process in Iter can only be achieved under precise, controlled operating conditions. If conditions in the Iter machine are not ideal, the process just stops - it cannot escalate out of control. Therefore, there is no possibility of a massive energy release-or a "core melt" accident-from the Iter Tokamak.
Basically, in order to keep the plasma going, it needs to be constantly controlled by the magnetic containment field. If this field fails, there's no explosion; the plasma effectively loses state, and the whole reactor shuts down of it's own accord.
In a nutshell, fusion energy is safer than breathing.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course it will--Apple doesn't have big plans to push yesterday's hardware and design as The Next Big Thing. The G3 iMac is right at the end of it's lifespan and has only stuck around this long to fill Apple's entry-level slot. The eMac will probably completely replace the old G3 iMacs before too long.
...the really interesting thing about this is that the entire project is being funded by L. Bob Rife...
Not true, not true. For starters, not all undergrad CS programs are equal. If you're really that good, go to a top-tier CS school; you're virtually assured the opportunity to learn a great deal more than you could on your own. While it is possible to read a challenging text like The Art Of Computer Programming on your own time, you can get so much more out of it if somebody actually teaches it to you. You'll have access to a wide range of resources to tinker with and learn on, and if, in the course of your tinkering, you accidentally hose something, the repercussions are much gentler in a college environment than in a business. (You did what to the server!?)
College also gives one a much broader education than self-directed technical training. Sure, you want to be a sysadmin now, but there's a pretty good chance that your wants in life will be quite different at age thirty than they are at age eighteen. If your entire schtick is Systems Administration, you're going to run into trouble trying to swich gears in mid-career; certainly, you can get to Senior Sysadmin just fine, but what if you ever wanted to become a Systems Architect? Or an executive? Or a lawyer? With an undergrad degree, it's much easier to move between job classes, and it's much easier to pursue graduate degrees in other fields.
I say take a more targeted approach for now and go to college when, and only when, you become bored, burnt out, disenchanted, frustrated and really sick and tired of all those god damned "college boys" who make more than you but REALLY just don't know DICK!
College also provides an excellent opportunity to learn how to interact with different individuals and groups in a gracious and tactful manner.
Try:
http://optimoz.mozdev.org/gestures/
__Thomas Tuttle__
*snip*
I argue that the consumer has certain rights that cannot be taken away, regardless of the existence of a contract. This is comparable to the fact that an employer may not have you sign a contract that pays you less than the minimum wage.
If so, then what moral obligation is there to respect even the most basic licenses, such as BSD and GPL?
If not, then you've just agreed with what I've been saying all along, that the end user is morally obligated to either accept the terms of a developer's license or not use that developer's software at all.
(Oh, and the only thing that keeps a person in the US from being able to accept a contract to work for fifty cents an hour is the law. There is no moral reason why two parties could not enter into such a contract if they both wanted to. Is there?)
The crux of my argument is that the ethical thing to do is respect the wishes of the author of a piece of software. It is unethical to disregard the terms with which a developer distributes her software. My argument is not of laws, restrictions, and consequences; my argument is of respect for the creator of software.
Now, if you feel that shareware licences place unacceptable restrictions on you, the end user, then my argument is simply that you should not use the software, and that using said software outside of the terms laid out by the developer is immoral. Nowhere did I state that such behavior was illegal, because that's not at all the point I'm trying to make.
You spend the entire body of your post pontificating on The Benefits of Open Source, then in your last paragraph you proceed to say that you'd do exactly what I'm suggesting one should do. You said yourself that you would not use a piece of software if you disagreed with that software's terms of use. That's -exactly- what I said people should do.
Your post isn't so much a response to what I said as it is a diatribe on what you feel makes an acceptable license. That said, do you agree with my assertion that the end user must either respect the terms with which a developer has released her work or not use that work at all? If you disagree, how would you feel about a person yanking GPL'd source, claiming it as their own, and re-releasing it under the BSD license?
Developers deserve the same moral consideration as anyone else. If they make something and give it to the world with certain conditions, it follows that the world should honor their conditions. And I'm sure you really don't mean to say that developers can go to hell, seeing as you're not attacking them.
Your contention that "software" is synonymous with "thought" is laughably naive; by that reasoning, it would follow that "building" is "brick", "symphony" is "tone", and "Water Lillies" is "paint".
What draconian measures are shareware developers advancing that infringe upon your moral rights? Does nagware infringe upon your moral rights? Do polynomial time-sesntive registrations infringe upon your moral rights? How can something that you willingly acquire infringe upon your rights?
Describe -exactly- what it is that shareware develpers do that infringes upon your moral rights.
If a developer spends 1200 hours of her life making a game, is it your right to disregard her terms?
The DEVELOPER is the OWNER of her own product. She does indeed have exclusive rights to her own creation; if she kept the only copy of the software encrypted on a CD and locked in a filing cabinet, you have absolutely no right to tell her that she must give it to you. If she gives it to you on the condition that you don't give it to anybody else, you have absolutely no right to give it to other people. She can choose to develop and distribute it however she sees fit, and she gets FINAL SAY in this matter. It doesn't matter if you don't want to cough up ten dollars; it doesn't matter if she wants to set up a registration scheme that forces you to call a 900 number every time you want to use the program. The terms are completely up to the DEVELOPER, not the consumer.
If you don't like the terms a developer has set forth, then don't use that developer's product. It's that simple. Cracking a developer's product for the express purpose of using it on your own terms is incredibly disrespectful to the developer. She worked hard to produce that software, she deserves respect, and she has the right to set out her own terms. You the end user, on the other hand, did exactly jack shit to create said software. Where do you get off telling us that it's morally okay to tell the developer to go piss up a rope?
If you disagree with a developer's terms, them do not use the software. Period.
Software development takes time. Software development takes energy. Software development takes thought. Software development is always, at some point, a royal pain in the ass. Software development is a labor of love. That you have the gall to even suggest that the end-user has the right to dictate their own terms to the developer tells me that you have never, ever developed software of any real magnitude.
There are precious few ways to keep people from pirating software, but damned if I'm going to let you claim that it's the right thing to do.
Only if the stuff is applied to a lawn. If a riot took place in, oh, a metropolitan area, then the above apparatuses would perform markedly worse. Ever tried running on pavement wearing soccer/running/golf cleats? Ropes would let you get even more tangled once you fell down, possibly strangle a friend or two.
Aside from the sheer fright of such military weaponry being beta-tested on our citizens, I'm a little concerned about second order effects...A terrifying catastrophe waiting to happen.
Ever been in a crowd of several hundreds of thousands of people*? Even when they're behaving, it can be downright frightening; the thought of being pressed amongst countless angry, violent, rioting people is terrifying. The risks associated with an effective crowd-control weapon strike me as far less frightening and harmful than a rioting mob. Rioting mobs -are- a catastrophe -happening-.
*Paris, 1998, Bastille Day/day after the French won the World Cup, Champs Elysees. A panicked motorist ran down 80 people; the crowd was rowdy, but certainly not violent. Got quite scary at times.
That said, there exist lossless audio compression schemes that will give you fairly reliable results in the 25%-75% compression range. These are great for high-quality reproduction and high speed (high speed as in fast disk access, not as in cable modem/DSL) access, but you're still looking at a 160 MB download (near-best case scenario) for a single CD of music.
don't shoot at houses with giant Jiffy-Pop tins in them!
Bear in mind that the ~4x compression rate listed for lossless compression schemes is heavily reliant on the input. Don't be surprised if you get 1.5-2.5 compression a lot of the time, and remember that there's a good chance you'll get 1:1 (or worse) compression results with a 'random' enough song file.
Open Source, while it's a great thing, really isn't enough of an answer. There are no OS equals to programs like Photoshop, Media 100, Oracle. (Yes, Virginia, I know about GIMP and PostgreSQL.)
Copy protection isn't the answer, either. Fair use, monopolistic control, hell, you all know the arguments.
Lassiez-faire isn't the answer, either. Given the option to purchase something or steal it without risk of repercussion, far too many people will do the latter. Adobe deserves revenue for their efforts, and they're apparently suffering enough in Asia that they're considering dropping the whole thing. Say whatever you will about the quality of their work beyond version whichever-you-love-most, but is this the norm you want to see developing with -other- companies?
What do you see as the middle ground?
That's funny. I had heard that the iPod was lame. Why would we need an iPod killer?
(In any case, it's still using USB. That's gotta be painful for moving 20GB of music...)
http://www.software.com.pl/newarchive/misc/Worm
That site has been updated and now lives at http://www.snowplow.org/tom/worm/worm.html.
The co-author
(It's a link to information on RTM's worm, for those who don't feel like clicking the link.)
That's the original version; I've got an updated version (lighter bandwidth, typo fixes, etc.) available at http://www.snowplow.org/tom/worm/. I'm going to be quite hard to get in touch with for the next two months, but if you have any questions, feel free to ask and I'll get back to them as soon as I can.
Tom Darby
There's more to his piece, though. He homes in on Big Media's two-faced behavior, but makes it very clear that he feels that Big Media's duplicity is a breed apart from Small Media's duplicity:
But when I went onto the Big Brother site, I found no age restrictions or warnings about who could buy or see the knife incident. Any kid with access to a credit card could, as is often true of sex and other "unwholesome" sites online. But it's one thing for a pornographer to do that, another a media conglomerate that purports to cover public policy issues, including technology, and that constantly spouts the most high-minded sense of moral purpose. Listen to what Big Brother's producer said of the show's ethics: "I have been lecturing my staff about using the West Point code of honor in making sure we keep to the truth."
He makes clear that it is indeed OK for a pornographer to be a pornographer, but then rips into Big Media (and Big Media alone) for being [duplicitous|multi-faceted enterprises]. The entire tone of the article is that this duplicity is a Big Media Problem, when it's honestly easily as applicable to Little Media "good guys". Hell, Slashdot has an alarming habit of posting front-page articles that flat out lie for the sake of advocacy; this goes on in spite of the "News" for nerds tagline. NPR has an ongoing scandal revolving around selling membership lists to third parties, despite their "privacy-friendly" enrollment. Major scientific journals soak research groups into paying thousands just to submit articles for publication, not to mention the prohibitive cost of such subscriptions; this in the name of furthering the general knowledge of mankind. One can even argue that Small Media is in some ways more prone to two-faced behavior, as they often tend to be niche outlets with clearly-defined target audiences and adgendas.
After reading this article, to uggest that Jon isn't exhibiting a clear anti-Big Media bias is disingenuous. Jon is most certainly drawing lines in the sand on this one.
For as much bile as you harbor for Big Media, you're just asking for trouble in suggesting that they be held to standards other than that of Little Media. No matter how much good you think it could do, it is the exact same line of reasoning that you have derided on countless occasions in the past regarding things such as video game violence, censorship, and preferential treatment of big companies.
How do you define Big Media, Jon? Is AOL Big Media? How about NBC? Easy, no? Well than, what about CNN? PBS? MP3.com (back in it's glory days?) OSDN? The Onion? A bit less easy, seeing as we're starting to take aim at "good guy" sites now, isn't it? And even if you can confidently draw your line in the sand to partition the "good" from the "bad", you most certainly won't be the only person drawing lines in the sand, and your word is highly unlikely to be final.
Don't advocate double standards. Don't think of the children, dammit. Don't be so quick to throw equality by the wayside.
Gnot to gnitpick, but the gnext gnaming convention is gno gnicer...
Sources, please. I must admit that I haven't ever heard of there being such a risk with fusion reactors; where did you find this information?
From itercanada.com:
What about the risk of an explosion or meltdown? Is this possible with Iter?
No, the fusion process in Iter can only be achieved under precise, controlled operating conditions. If conditions in the Iter machine are not ideal, the process just stops - it cannot escalate out of control. Therefore, there is no possibility of a massive energy release-or a "core melt" accident-from the Iter Tokamak.
Basically, in order to keep the plasma going, it needs to be constantly controlled by the magnetic containment field. If this field fails, there's no explosion; the plasma effectively loses state, and the whole reactor shuts down of it's own accord.
In a nutshell, fusion energy is safer than breathing.