But do MIT students represent the best candidate for scholarships? My understanding is that the undergraduate population there is already pretty well taken care of in terms of need. By the time you have the credentials to get into MIT, you're either impressive enough to get a scholarship (from someone) or you're going to take loans --- knowing that in the final analysis, an engineering career driven by an MIT degree makes them a good risk.
What worries me is all the talented kids who don't make it to such a lucky position, either because they go to terrible high schools, have no access to critical resources in early childhood, or live in developing countries with no access to resources like MIT.
Whether you think those people are more deserving is really a subjective issue. But objectively, you can't argue that a dollar spent in those areas will go a hell of a lot farther than a dollar spent at a wealthy, expensive, high profile engineering school.
This kind of donation is great, but it's also about vanity and legacy, not doing the most good with your buck.
MIT has done wonderful things for the world. As have many academic institutions. But this is as good a time as any to note that making large donations to an elite academic institution is a pretty ineffective way to use your money.
MIT is already well funded, and while this money may go to fund additional research, it may also just lead to a lot of pretty buildings going up. If you have the opportunity to donate, why not donate to a school that will use the money to dramatically increase the number of students it educates, or to a charity that sees the money directed into existing research initiatives that need it.
I'm sure the new Bose facilities will be very nice and the Bose family will have no problem getting into MIT for the next few generations. Nonetheless, it seems like a bit of a waste.
My guess is they ultimately want to start raising their overage fees.
I actually think they don't want to raise the overage fees. With streaming as popular as it is, this would mean dramatic overages for a huge swath of their customer base, which would ultimately be exactly same as simply raising their base rate and offering an 'email/web only' plan for grandma.
In other words, it's easier for them to just raise their base prices and have done with it.
I suspect that the real goal is to force players like Netflix to pony up money in order to get behind the headend an thus (magically) be exempted from the cap. Then they can charge people twice for their bandwidth --- without consumers actually realizing this.
And the sad thing is that this comes from the company that patented the "genius" 1-click buying.
Which Apple subsequently licensed for some 'undisclosed sum'*, making the whole thing look legitimate and thus helping Amazon when they went to assert their patent against other defendants.
Most tea partiers just want less government spending. Considering that 1997's entire US federal budget equals 2011's deficit, I'd say they have good reasons.
In fairness, what they actually seem to want is more government services (Medicare, defense) but less government spending, and simultaneously, lower taxes.
So if we have the government pay for MORE people's healthcare, it will cost the government LESS money? That's not what the CBO says.
I suspect you began this argument with a conclusion and thus my arguments aren't actually going to have any impact. Nonetheless, the GP poster said "per-capita" and he's correct. The US actually does pay dramatically more per capita for healthcare than just about every industrialized nation with single-payer health insurance. (And we have worse health outcomes.)
As to what the Affordable Care Act has to do with this... While, it costs more because it insures more people. But it has nothing to do with Medicare, except insofar as it tries to brings per-person healthcare costs down by giving the gov't some of the market power enjoyed by other state-run healthcare systems.
No, it has a filing cabinet with 2.6 trillion dollars of IOUs that can't be sold on the open market. It's also cash-flow negative as of last year.
Social Security is a simple program. It takes in taxes from the working population and pays them out to the retired and disabled.
This is a problem going forward because the working/retired population ratio will be smaller than today. But it doesn't mean Social Security goes 'bankrupt' or any nonsense like that. It just means that/in the worst case/ --- even if the trust fund is fiction --- recipients get less than 100% of benefits. I think the number is 70% or something like that. Not good but not catastrophic.
Don't even get me started on the trust fund, which was funded by a dedicated tax on the middle class and poor, then used to finance tax cuts for the rich that we couldn't afford, and now all of a sudden we can't possibly afford to pay it back. Yeesh.
Probably the greatest organized robbery in the history of mankind. The beauty of it is that after looting the working class, the same politicians are now trying to use the absence of the money/they stole/ as the justification for not paying the victims anything.
The 800lb gorilla of spending in the room is entitlements: social security, medicare and medicaid. If these programs aren't fixed and soon it will be too late.
Entitlements aren't the problem in 2011. Social Security is even in/surplus/ which means it's taking in more money from its dedicated taxes than it's paying out.
Entitlements -- specifically Medicare --/will/ be the problem in a decade or two. If you make assumptions about this (costs keep going up by 10% forever, nobody ever votes to cut spending) sooner or later we go bankrupt. I suspect that some of those assumptions are stupid, sort of like assuming that my toddler will eventually starve us out of our house by projecting his appetite increase two decades forward and assuming that we will never, ever put him on a diet.
The thing most people fail to understand is there's nothing Congress can do about Medicare in 2011 that can't be undone in 2012/18/20. Similarly, if Medicare eats the budget in 2020, then the politicians of that time will have to deal with it. In fact, this is exactly what Spain just like had to do. Ultimately when things really get dire is when politicians are willing to make unpopular decisions.
But in reality (meaning, the next ten years) we could get our budget back in balance just by getting out of the huge recession we're in, letting the Bush tax cuts expire as planned, and not passing any more 'doc fix' bills. In fact, the CBO says that if we did all of these things (basically, Congress just stops doing anything) we'd be fine for decades.
Will we do those things? Of course not. Doc fixes are popular --- but we could still pay for them with cuts to defense and higher taxes. And taxes must never go up. In fact the demagogues who are 'panicking' about entitlements (including Paul Ryan) are simultaneously asking for/more/ tax cuts aimed at the rich. That pretty much tells you how serious they are about the deficit.
All of this 'kill entitlements' nonsense is a distraction for the ignorant, designed cover up the fact that we could easily balance the budget again with a few tweaks --- but one of those tweaks is to let taxes go back to their 1990s levels. And certain politicians have signed pledges saying that they will not allow this to happen.
Now string theory I don't trust hardly at all. While it sounds like it is all nice and internally consistent, there's been no demonstration of it
And in fairness, I think most scientists are up front about this. If a scientist tells you from the beginning that something is only an interesting theory and that they don't have experimental evidence, then 'trusting' them only means that you're willing to think about their idea --- not accept it as fact.
According to the first result I found on Google it seems that Apple stores did about $10 billion in revenue in 2010. That's definitely smaller than Best Buy, which did about $50bn.
So I think it's fair to identify another computer retail chain that's more in the Apple ballpark. I don't think it's fair to go down the the level of individual stores, particularly because the results will be so inconsistent and meaningless (my local computer store is a horrible place).
Apple stores are hip. They're like that really exclusive dance club that everyone seems to want to get into. Once you're inside, it's crowded and hot, the DJ sucks, the drinks are overpriced--yet people will line up around the block just to beg the bouncer to get in.
Apple stores are clean and spacious, and all of the product is plugged in and on display for anyone to fool around with. Every machine is connected to the Internet, and the salespeople don't bother you too much.
Compare to your typical Best Buy. Seriously, go to one and see how it goes.
Apple stores are only crowded because people like the experience, and because there aren't enough of them to serve the demand in major cities.
And here's the problem with robotic drivers... They are all identical. Every one on a particular model will be byte for byte identical. Which means a fault in one is a fault in all.
You are confusing a security argument for a reliability argument. In general, if there's a reliability issue subtle enough to slip through testing and general usage, then by definition that flaw must appear in only a tiny fraction of usage situations. Since at any given moment most people will not be in those situations, the flaw will only affect a tiny minority of users --- even if it's present in every vehicle. There are exceptions, for example, Y2K-type bugs, where the trigger conditions are rare but widespread. But those aren't very prevalent.
We've mainly learned to fear monocultures for reasons having to do with security. Security is a very different situation, because in that case there's an intelligent entity/trying/ to force the system into the precise situation where the flaw occurs. In this setting, monocultures become problematic.
So I would propose that your fear is a bit misplaced here, and that yes --- a widespread bug like the Toyota acceleration issue is scary --- but the number of people injured will be vanishingly small compared to the total number of users.
The technique for Phong Shading was introduced in 1973 as an improvement to Gouraud Shading, but was too computationally intensive to be used for graphics back then. This is no longer the case.
And the saddest thing is that Phong died shortly after completing his dissertation. So he never knew the impact his techniques had on the field.
many times the desire to help out your friends by leaving your wireless wide open trumps common sense
It's amazing to me that, as a society, we've reached the point where statements like this seem reasonable.
I spent the other day visiting a well-known Ivy-league University that offers 'free' Wifi for guests --- provided the guests are willing to enter a complicated password that changes every day and click through some enormous ToS screen.
It occurred to me that this University was one of the first to stand up for the ideals of free speech, press and religion --- within a mile of where I stood, people had been imprisoned and shot defending these ideals. You would think that a place with such a storied history would understand that the massive/benefits/ of open (even anonymous) communication and that these benefits would trump whatever minimal edge-case risks there are due to copyright infringement, malware, etc.
(At least, these principles should trump the actual benefits of locking down everyone's Wifi network, a policy that seems to have a negligible effect on copyright infringement, malware, and the occurrence of bad things on the Internet.)
But that's not the society we live in, and this is certainly not the University it once was. More to the point, once you start saying things like 'unsecured Wifi access points are terrible' you need to start giving reasons. Is there really a security threat here that can't be dealt with using modern network isolation techniques. And to the same point, does locking down the residential network really stop the bad guys? Can't this mostly be worked around by someone who's willing to plug into a Cat5 jack located in a public place?
Or is all of this hyperventilating really all about protecting yourself from being wrongly accused of some not-very-important crime related to the transference of bits?
The definition (somewhere in the 'net archives) of encryption quality is how distinguishable the encrypted message is from random noise. Clearly setting bitrates, or any other parameter, based on the input, is not random.
(A common) definition of symmetric encryption is that a message should be indistinguishable from an equal-length string of random bits. In that sense, there's nothing wrong with this encryption scheme.
What is wrong here is that encryption does not hide message length, and in many cases message lengths can leak information about the message content. The research is nice because they show a very practical way to get useful information from message length.
The research is, however, three years old --- it was originally published in ACM CCS 2008. This is just a journal submission. I love to see crypto in the news, but this really shouldn't be.
This is a convenient bit of cherry-picking that ignores all of the vessles that sank, taking their reactors to the bottom of the seafloor.
And before you claim that the sinkings were not caused by reactor problems, remember that the mess in Japan wasn't either --- it was caused by an earthquake. The difference is that the Japanese reactor had to continue reacting in the middle of an inhabited area, while the naval vessels took their remains to the bottom of the ocean.
I'd like to point out the 9 nuclear powered cruisers, 11 nuclear powered aircraft carriers, and 188 nuclear powered submarines that the US Navy has operated for the last 56 years. 264 reactors (Cruisers and aircraft carries have multiple reactors, as well as the submarine USS Triton) in all. The CENTURIES worth of experience with running them I take as pretty convincing proof that nuclear power can be safe.
It can be. Of course, when it's not, the disasters almost uniformly occur at sea, far from populated areas.
but those fuckers blocked the building of 2011 era reactors, so we're stuck with 30-40 year old designs - which weren't bad as this event shows, but we could do better.
Seriously, take a look at the list of nuclear reactors operating in Japan --- and in particular their ages --- and tell me that "those fuckers" stopped the building of more recent designs. You are basically making shit up to suit your preconceived notions of how the world works.
Deploying new plants is incredibly expensive, so the operators continued to operate old, unsafe ones. End of story.
I do feel that part of the problem with nuclear power has been the culture of secrecy fed by, to be frank, the scientific and engineering ignorance, emotionalism and sometimes near-hysteria of the antis.
I would guess, instead, that most of the bad practices of the nuclear power industry were baked in by the US government, which kicked the whole thing off. I suspect that the rest of the world learned from our example.
The problem is that power generation was initially spun out of military weapons fuel generation projects. The US has never had a terrific history of dealing with radiation when national security is at stake --- for example, here for example, for a series of really terrifying US government experiments, in which they injected --- mostly unsuspecting --- patients with Plutonium to see what would happen. They did even nastier things to troops during the days of open-air nuclear tests.
In the early days of nuclear generation, civilian protections were negligible, since most people didn't realize the danger of radiation. Where they did realize, the government became very good at stonewalling. This did a lot of damage to people's perceptions of nuclear power.
Some of this damage was undone as nuclear power generation became truly unstuck from the military, but there is a certain amount of momentum and quite a few bad lessons were learned by the industry. And since the US gov't still insures the plants, they still have a sizable policy interest in minimizing the public's perception of danger. It's an unhealthy recipe.
A quake of incredible magnitude quickly followed by a massive tsunami will probably kill tens of thousands leave the entire countryside ravaged for years, but the news are all focused on a handful of nuclear power plants that are having some problems.
I realize that Slashdot is pro-nuclear, and hell, even I'm pro-nuclear. But please don't embarrass yourself or this site by referring to the ongoing disaster at Fukushima Daiichi as a plant "having some problems". I assure you the experts dealing with this problem are not minimizing the seriousness of what's going on. It's very serious, it's ongoing, and until the plant is stabilized, it's legitimate world news.
A plant "having some problems" is a drop in power production, or a small tritium leak. At this point a catastrophic meltdown and containment breach seem unlikely, mostly because the reactor operators have resorted to essentially destroying the reactor by flooding it with doped seawater. There has already been some non-trivial radiation leakage, and a 20-km radius evacuation is underway. It really is newsworthy.
The lesson that pro-nuclear folks should be learning from this disaster is that Fukushima Daiichi and similar 1960s-era reactors should not be operating in the year 2011, and most especially not in an area with high seismic activity. You know this, I know this, and I guarantee that the experts who run the plants knew it before the quake.
While this particular incident seems to be under control, as long as these plants are operating, there's a very real possibility of a catastrophic meltdown somewhere, in the next few decades. And that will do ten times more to stop the deployment of nuclear power than Greenpeace --- or the Slashdot boogeyman of the day --- could ever do.
They happily obliged after a hard drive failure and after my computer was stolen. Shame on me for not having backups, but Apple has always been very accommodating.
Better yet, tell them you lost your data during an upgrade to the latest version of OSX.
To sum it up less elegantly, the issue is the Freedom of Information Act which defines an exemption for "personal privacy". It also defines many other exemptions that apply to corporations.
The case hinged on whether artificial persons such as corporations had a right to "personal privacy". A lower court had said yes --- based more or less on an argument-by-grammar. "Personal privacy" contains the root "person", and hence all persons must have it.
The Supreme Court decision pointed out that this is not much of an argument. Flesh and blood people have "personal space" and "personal issues", but corporations probably don't. They also pointed out that the legislators had clearly written exemptions into the law that applied to corporations, and so AT&T was asking for essentially a massive extension in what the law does vs. what Congress had intended.
It gives me a small amount of confidence in this court to see them rule against a major extension of rights for corporations. Maybe it will become a trend.
You're going to dig for info on their union-busting, but you're going to be very embarrassed if you find out that the Obama administration was in bed with these scumbags on some other sleazy project(s) that come up too. They were working for the banks, but some of these firms were (or at least had been) working for the government too. Might want to check with the White House before you start digging too deep.
Have you ever considered that we might like to know about government malfeasance even if it's done by people we voted for? (hell, especially in that case).
If this radical idea had occurred to the Republican voter base back in 2001, maybe they wouldn't have to deal with a Democratic President in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
But do MIT students represent the best candidate for scholarships? My understanding is that the undergraduate population there is already pretty well taken care of in terms of need. By the time you have the credentials to get into MIT, you're either impressive enough to get a scholarship (from someone) or you're going to take loans --- knowing that in the final analysis, an engineering career driven by an MIT degree makes them a good risk.
What worries me is all the talented kids who don't make it to such a lucky position, either because they go to terrible high schools, have no access to critical resources in early childhood, or live in developing countries with no access to resources like MIT.
Whether you think those people are more deserving is really a subjective issue. But objectively, you can't argue that a dollar spent in those areas will go a hell of a lot farther than a dollar spent at a wealthy, expensive, high profile engineering school.
This kind of donation is great, but it's also about vanity and legacy, not doing the most good with your buck.
MIT has done wonderful things for the world. As have many academic institutions. But this is as good a time as any to note that making large donations to an elite academic institution is a pretty ineffective way to use your money.
MIT is already well funded, and while this money may go to fund additional research, it may also just lead to a lot of pretty buildings going up. If you have the opportunity to donate, why not donate to a school that will use the money to dramatically increase the number of students it educates, or to a charity that sees the money directed into existing research initiatives that need it.
I'm sure the new Bose facilities will be very nice and the Bose family will have no problem getting into MIT for the next few generations. Nonetheless, it seems like a bit of a waste.
I actually think they don't want to raise the overage fees. With streaming as popular as it is, this would mean dramatic overages for a huge swath of their customer base, which would ultimately be exactly same as simply raising their base rate and offering an 'email/web only' plan for grandma.
In other words, it's easier for them to just raise their base prices and have done with it.
I suspect that the real goal is to force players like Netflix to pony up money in order to get behind the headend an thus (magically) be exempted from the cap. Then they can charge people twice for their bandwidth --- without consumers actually realizing this.
"If you have time to rigorously test only one component of your software platform, make sure it's the update functionality."
Words to live by.
Which Apple subsequently licensed for some 'undisclosed sum'*, making the whole thing look legitimate and thus helping Amazon when they went to assert their patent against other defendants.
Watch the same thing happen here.
* $8.50 and a jar of pimento olives.
In fairness, what they actually seem to want is more government services (Medicare, defense) but less government spending, and simultaneously, lower taxes.
That's why we're not going to get any of it.
I suspect you began this argument with a conclusion and thus my arguments aren't actually going to have any impact. Nonetheless, the GP poster said "per-capita" and he's correct. The US actually does pay dramatically more per capita for healthcare than just about every industrialized nation with single-payer health insurance. (And we have worse health outcomes.)
A chart is here. It's striking.
As to what the Affordable Care Act has to do with this... While, it costs more because it insures more people. But it has nothing to do with Medicare, except insofar as it tries to brings per-person healthcare costs down by giving the gov't some of the market power enjoyed by other state-run healthcare systems.
Social Security is a simple program. It takes in taxes from the working population and pays them out to the retired and disabled.
This is a problem going forward because the working/retired population ratio will be smaller than today. But it doesn't mean Social Security goes 'bankrupt' or any nonsense like that. It just means that /in the worst case/ --- even if the trust fund is fiction --- recipients get less than 100% of benefits. I think the number is 70% or something like that. Not good but not catastrophic.
Don't even get me started on the trust fund, which was funded by a dedicated tax on the middle class and poor, then used to finance tax cuts for the rich that we couldn't afford, and now all of a sudden we can't possibly afford to pay it back. Yeesh.
Probably the greatest organized robbery in the history of mankind. The beauty of it is that after looting the working class, the same politicians are now trying to use the absence of the money /they stole/ as the justification for not paying the victims anything.
Makes me want to fucking spit.
PS: Link to the CBO numbers I mentioned:
http://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/did-we-ask/
The 800lb gorilla of spending in the room is entitlements: social security, medicare and medicaid. If these programs aren't fixed and soon it will be too late.
Entitlements aren't the problem in 2011. Social Security is even in /surplus/ which means it's taking in more money from its dedicated taxes than it's paying out.
Entitlements -- specifically Medicare -- /will/ be the problem in a decade or two. If you make assumptions about this (costs keep going up by 10% forever, nobody ever votes to cut spending) sooner or later we go bankrupt. I suspect that some of those assumptions are stupid, sort of like assuming that my toddler will eventually starve us out of our house by projecting his appetite increase two decades forward and assuming that we will never, ever put him on a diet.
The thing most people fail to understand is there's nothing Congress can do about Medicare in 2011 that can't be undone in 2012/18/20. Similarly, if Medicare eats the budget in 2020, then the politicians of that time will have to deal with it. In fact, this is exactly what Spain just like had to do. Ultimately when things really get dire is when politicians are willing to make unpopular decisions.
But in reality (meaning, the next ten years) we could get our budget back in balance just by getting out of the huge recession we're in, letting the Bush tax cuts expire as planned, and not passing any more 'doc fix' bills. In fact, the CBO says that if we did all of these things (basically, Congress just stops doing anything) we'd be fine for decades.
Will we do those things? Of course not. Doc fixes are popular --- but we could still pay for them with cuts to defense and higher taxes. And taxes must never go up. In fact the demagogues who are 'panicking' about entitlements (including Paul Ryan) are simultaneously asking for /more/ tax cuts aimed at the rich. That pretty much tells you how serious they are about the deficit.
All of this 'kill entitlements' nonsense is a distraction for the ignorant, designed cover up the fact that we could easily balance the budget again with a few tweaks --- but one of those tweaks is to let taxes go back to their 1990s levels. And certain politicians have signed pledges saying that they will not allow this to happen.
And in fairness, I think most scientists are up front about this. If a scientist tells you from the beginning that something is only an interesting theory and that they don't have experimental evidence, then 'trusting' them only means that you're willing to think about their idea --- not accept it as fact.
According to the first result I found on Google it seems that Apple stores did about $10 billion in revenue in 2010. That's definitely smaller than Best Buy, which did about $50bn.
So I think it's fair to identify another computer retail chain that's more in the Apple ballpark. I don't think it's fair to go down the the level of individual stores, particularly because the results will be so inconsistent and meaningless (my local computer store is a horrible place).
Apple stores are clean and spacious, and all of the product is plugged in and on display for anyone to fool around with. Every machine is connected to the Internet, and the salespeople don't bother you too much.
Compare to your typical Best Buy. Seriously, go to one and see how it goes.
Apple stores are only crowded because people like the experience, and because there aren't enough of them to serve the demand in major cities.
You are confusing a security argument for a reliability argument. In general, if there's a reliability issue subtle enough to slip through testing and general usage, then by definition that flaw must appear in only a tiny fraction of usage situations. Since at any given moment most people will not be in those situations, the flaw will only affect a tiny minority of users --- even if it's present in every vehicle. There are exceptions, for example, Y2K-type bugs, where the trigger conditions are rare but widespread. But those aren't very prevalent.
We've mainly learned to fear monocultures for reasons having to do with security. Security is a very different situation, because in that case there's an intelligent entity /trying/ to force the system into the precise situation where the flaw occurs. In this setting, monocultures become problematic.
So I would propose that your fear is a bit misplaced here, and that yes --- a widespread bug like the Toyota acceleration issue is scary --- but the number of people injured will be vanishingly small compared to the total number of users.
And the saddest thing is that Phong died shortly after completing his dissertation. So he never knew the impact his techniques had on the field.
It's amazing to me that, as a society, we've reached the point where statements like this seem reasonable.
I spent the other day visiting a well-known Ivy-league University that offers 'free' Wifi for guests --- provided the guests are willing to enter a complicated password that changes every day and click through some enormous ToS screen.
It occurred to me that this University was one of the first to stand up for the ideals of free speech, press and religion --- within a mile of where I stood, people had been imprisoned and shot defending these ideals. You would think that a place with such a storied history would understand that the massive /benefits/ of open (even anonymous) communication and that these benefits would trump whatever minimal edge-case risks there are due to copyright infringement, malware, etc.
(At least, these principles should trump the actual benefits of locking down everyone's Wifi network, a policy that seems to have a negligible effect on copyright infringement, malware, and the occurrence of bad things on the Internet.)
But that's not the society we live in, and this is certainly not the University it once was. More to the point, once you start saying things like 'unsecured Wifi access points are terrible' you need to start giving reasons. Is there really a security threat here that can't be dealt with using modern network isolation techniques. And to the same point, does locking down the residential network really stop the bad guys? Can't this mostly be worked around by someone who's willing to plug into a Cat5 jack located in a public place?
Or is all of this hyperventilating really all about protecting yourself from being wrongly accused of some not-very-important crime related to the transference of bits?
(A common) definition of symmetric encryption is that a message should be indistinguishable from an equal-length string of random bits. In that sense, there's nothing wrong with this encryption scheme.
What is wrong here is that encryption does not hide message length, and in many cases message lengths can leak information about the message content. The research is nice because they show a very practical way to get useful information from message length.
The research is, however, three years old --- it was originally published in ACM CCS 2008. This is just a journal submission. I love to see crypto in the news, but this really shouldn't be.
This is a convenient bit of cherry-picking that ignores all of the vessles that sank, taking their reactors to the bottom of the seafloor.
And before you claim that the sinkings were not caused by reactor problems, remember that the mess in Japan wasn't either --- it was caused by an earthquake. The difference is that the Japanese reactor had to continue reacting in the middle of an inhabited area, while the naval vessels took their remains to the bottom of the ocean.
It can be. Of course, when it's not, the disasters almost uniformly occur at sea, far from populated areas.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_nuclear_accidents
Seriously, take a look at the list of nuclear reactors operating in Japan --- and in particular their ages --- and tell me that "those fuckers" stopped the building of more recent designs. You are basically making shit up to suit your preconceived notions of how the world works.
Deploying new plants is incredibly expensive, so the operators continued to operate old, unsafe ones. End of story.
http://www.japannuclear.com/nuclearpower/program/location.html
I would guess, instead, that most of the bad practices of the nuclear power industry were baked in by the US government, which kicked the whole thing off. I suspect that the rest of the world learned from our example.
The problem is that power generation was initially spun out of military weapons fuel generation projects. The US has never had a terrific history of dealing with radiation when national security is at stake --- for example, here for example, for a series of really terrifying US government experiments, in which they injected --- mostly unsuspecting --- patients with Plutonium to see what would happen. They did even nastier things to troops during the days of open-air nuclear tests.
In the early days of nuclear generation, civilian protections were negligible, since most people didn't realize the danger of radiation. Where they did realize, the government became very good at stonewalling. This did a lot of damage to people's perceptions of nuclear power.
Some of this damage was undone as nuclear power generation became truly unstuck from the military, but there is a certain amount of momentum and quite a few bad lessons were learned by the industry. And since the US gov't still insures the plants, they still have a sizable policy interest in minimizing the public's perception of danger. It's an unhealthy recipe.
A quake of incredible magnitude quickly followed by a massive tsunami will probably kill tens of thousands leave the entire countryside ravaged for years, but the news are all focused on a handful of nuclear power plants that are having some problems.
I realize that Slashdot is pro-nuclear, and hell, even I'm pro-nuclear. But please don't embarrass yourself or this site by referring to the ongoing disaster at Fukushima Daiichi as a plant "having some problems". I assure you the experts dealing with this problem are not minimizing the seriousness of what's going on. It's very serious, it's ongoing, and until the plant is stabilized, it's legitimate world news.
A plant "having some problems" is a drop in power production, or a small tritium leak. At this point a catastrophic meltdown and containment breach seem unlikely, mostly because the reactor operators have resorted to essentially destroying the reactor by flooding it with doped seawater. There has already been some non-trivial radiation leakage, and a 20-km radius evacuation is underway. It really is newsworthy.
The lesson that pro-nuclear folks should be learning from this disaster is that Fukushima Daiichi and similar 1960s-era reactors should not be operating in the year 2011, and most especially not in an area with high seismic activity. You know this, I know this, and I guarantee that the experts who run the plants knew it before the quake.
While this particular incident seems to be under control, as long as these plants are operating, there's a very real possibility of a catastrophic meltdown somewhere, in the next few decades. And that will do ten times more to stop the deployment of nuclear power than Greenpeace --- or the Slashdot boogeyman of the day --- could ever do.
Better yet, tell them you lost your data during an upgrade to the latest version of OSX.
There's an excellent (and funny) summary of the oral arguments at Slate.
http://www.slate.com/id/2281715/
To sum it up less elegantly, the issue is the Freedom of Information Act which defines an exemption for "personal privacy". It also defines many other exemptions that apply to corporations.
The case hinged on whether artificial persons such as corporations had a right to "personal privacy". A lower court had said yes --- based more or less on an argument-by-grammar. "Personal privacy" contains the root "person", and hence all persons must have it.
The Supreme Court decision pointed out that this is not much of an argument. Flesh and blood people have "personal space" and "personal issues", but corporations probably don't. They also pointed out that the legislators had clearly written exemptions into the law that applied to corporations, and so AT&T was asking for essentially a massive extension in what the law does vs. what Congress had intended.
It gives me a small amount of confidence in this court to see them rule against a major extension of rights for corporations. Maybe it will become a trend.
Have you ever considered that we might like to know about government malfeasance even if it's done by people we voted for? (hell, especially in that case).
If this radical idea had occurred to the Republican voter base back in 2001, maybe they wouldn't have to deal with a Democratic President in the first place.