Why couldn't there be a "washing bank", where coins are co-mingled and exchanged for equal amounts, minus transaction fee?
Why, I'm sure there could.
And I'm also sure that such a laundry service could easily log and trace your IP address, HTML cookies, and any other identifying information it can extract each time you send them bitcoins, and forward that information to the NSA/FBI/CIA, for another per-transaction fee.
Of course, if the laundry service valued your privacy (worth zero bitcoins to them) over snitching on you (worth X bitcoins plus freedom from prosecution), they wouldn't do that. But you couldn't prove that it was, and you couldn't prove that it wasn't. You'd just have to trust that perfect strangers operating in a criminal environment with no loyalty to you would always make the non-rational economic choice, wouldn't you?
So... then this is probably someone from Assad's regime trying to make the Syrian rebels look like as much of a random force of brute pointless chaos as Anonymous?
If this was the rebels, they need to hire a new PR agency.
So, what's up is that a group of people started protesting against Assad, calling for democracy and elections. These protesters were met with force and so they formed the Free Syrian Army and vowed not to stand down, fighting with whatever weapons they can scrounge up.
Ah, so just like the Muslim Brotherhood versus the Egyptian military then? So we're backing the regime, right?... crickets...
These countries will have to transition to democracy, the genie is out of the bottle and it cannot be put back again. The transition will be horribly messy, like in Egypt
"Messy" is one word to describe a hardline military coup that arrested a democratically elected President, killed a thousand mostly-peaceful democratic protestors, and looks set to reinstall the same regime and dictator against whom the population rebelled two years ago, yes.
I wouldn't exactly call it a "transition", though, much less to "democracy".
I can't see any solution to this conflict, and getting involved in it will fuck us over too.
That horse sailed a long time ago. The US has been not-very-covertly involved in sponsoring and smuggling arms to the 'right' rebel factions for several years - it's only the US media that seems to keep deliberately ignoring this. The escalating chaos in Syria didn't just happen - it's largely of the Obama White House's own making. Not that it's a partisan issue - judging by Romney's calls for moar biggar guns for the rebels in the pre-election debates, a Romney White House would have done exactly the same, or worse.
You guys started this Syrian civil war, you keep it running, escalating to actual airstrikes is just another step down the road to hell. Stop blaming Assad for what you're doing. You're sponsoring actual Islamic terrorists, for crying out loud, at the same time as you're also propping up a secular military regime who did a coup against a democratically elected Islamic political party in Egypt. What part of this makes any sense to you? The US mideast foreign policy right now is as incoherent as Microsoft's mobile marketing plan.
dumb question..... but why aren't they removing the radioactive rods or whatever from that particular site and storing them else where? or is it a giant melted mess?
Actually a very good question. And the answer is: yes, removing the fuel rods and making them safe in permanent storage is a very sensible thing to want, and TEPCO is planning to start doing this this November.
The bad news, as I understand it, and the reason why they haven't done this obvious thing until now, is that moving fuel rods is very dangerous since you don't want to get two rods too close to each other otherwise you get a criticality event (a small fission reaction). While radioisotopes can give you cancer or make you very sick, a criticality could kill you in days. And while the rods in the fuel pools aren't melted like the cores are, they have been badly shaken by the earthquake, tsunami and explosions, and they've been drenched in corrosive seawater for two years. I'm guessing that could mean that they're likely to be jammed in their framework, maybe shaken loose, possibly with their cladding decayed, some of them in pool 4 may already have burned, and all this will make handling them a very difficult and dangerous manual process.
They should have concentrated to bringing the plant back into a stable stead state.
That's actually what they're trying to do. The problem is that there is no stable steady state for a melted core. Keeping it below 100 degrees C requires constant active cooling with lots of water. Above 100 degrees and things get a lot worse - smoke and fire. But it's not like it's "shut down" right now. It's just sleeping.
Nuclear fission has no real "off" button. Fuel rods are like slow-burning candles that you can burn fast or let smoulder, but you can't extinguish completely. Once you've lit one up, it takes years for the residual heat to go away. And once you've experienced an, um, unplanned geometry-altering event in the core, you're not really sure what the core is doing, since the level of radiation inside the containment buildings is more like "you will die in minutes" (multiple tens of Sieverts) rather than "you will die in days" (less than 1 Sieverts) which is the case for the runoff water.
They're doing their best. Unfortunately, no-one's best is good enough in this case. The water is probably going to be released into the ocean eventually, but that's not going to do the local fish a whole lot of good. We're talking isotopes with half-lives in the years, not months, absorbed into marine life tissue, with the potential for bioaccumulation (medium-low for caesium as I understand it, but extremely high for strontium).
A lot of sick fish might be the best case scenario here. Good thing the Japanese economy isn't big on fisheries, right?
Building treatment plants with 400000 liter/day capacity doesn't seem like that much of a stretch.
Just for reference, if all this water is radiating as strongly as the stuff that recently leaked, you will die for sure if you work within a foot of any of it for a week. And if you work within a foot of it for a day, you'll get very sick. If you work within a foot of it for an hour, you'll get as much radiation as an airline worker gets in 20 years or a Fukushima nuclear worker is allowed in five years. Looking at the map, the tanks are stacked maybe a couple meters apart. You won't want to be walking between the rows of tanks much.
Oh, and did I mention all this water is highly corrosive seawater? It's seawater. The last kind of water you want anywhere near your very expensive high-tech reverse-osmosis filtration plant which needs careful calibration for exotic metal salts.
So you'll need to be doing a lot of remote handling for everything, not repairing anything unless absolutely necessary, making sure to pump and drain tanks before you check seals (which are corroding rapidly). This in an outdoor, debris-strewn environment where robots haven't performed very well. You'll also be burning your workers' radiation badges out rapidly (if you're taking care of them to the legal standard) or falsifying dosimeter readings (if you aren't, and which appears to be what's happening).
Occasionally there will be radioactive dust and steam releases which will stop work because there's still three melted cores down in the groundwater occasionally going fizz.
This is an interesting technical challenge, to put it mildly.
The East Bay Municipality has waste treatment plant that can hit 375 million gallons per day.
If San Francisco sewage is radiating at 100 mSv/hr (ie, enough to give all the wastewater workers acute radiation sickness after spending a day next to it), then you've either got robots doing all the handling, or kaiju in the sewers. Or both.
Can someone give an estimate of how much more or less radiation is being introduced by the Fukushima plant than say... the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs?
This is a very good question and as a nuclear layman, it's difficult for me to get a handle on an exact answer. IANA health physicist, just a guy with Wikipedia and Google. But given that, I'll try to give some baselines from what I can see on the net.
First, in terms of "radiation", it seems like we're mostly talking about release of radioactive isotopes, rather than the initial prompt radiation of a nuclear explosion itself. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs ( as, eg, this blog describes) were airbursts, so relatively radiologically "clean" - they did a lot of initial damage from blast, heat and gamma radiation, but didn't leave nearly as many "dirty" isotopes in the way of fallout. This is compared with, eg, a surface shot like Castle Bravo which was a huge dirty contamination event.
So when we're talking about "comparing" Fukushima with Hiroshima, we're talking purely about the isotopes, not the explosive power. Which is not really a straight comparison. But given that, Fukushima (or any other nuclear power station) is and/or has the potential to be much dirtier than a bomb (at least an airburst), because there's more nuclear material stored onsite. You'd want a nuclear engineer to give the precise bequerel ratings of all the isotope mixes in the fuel composition, but for a back-of-the-envelope estimate: Little Boy had 64kg of uranium fuel - Fukushima had 1,760,000 kg of fuel on the entire site.
So all else being equal, which of course it's not because we're not talking weapons-grade uranium and I'm sure power rods have lots of other alloys in them, Daichi has 27,500 times as much raw radioactive fuel as the Hiroshima bomb. Impressive, no?
Now most of that fuel probably won't be released, as not all the reactors were damaged, and the health impact of the various isotopes varies wildly based on the half-life of the isotope, its heaviness (ability to be transported far from the site), whether it can be ingested in air or water, how long it stays in the body, what the affinity is for various body parts, and what kind of radiation it releases - alpha, beta or gamma. Alpha particles are the biggest, so do the most damage, but also the easiest to block - I believe outside the body they're fairly harmless, blocked by cloth or skin. But inside the body, they can do more harm. So you really do need a health physicist to work out all the equations here.
However, the buzz on the net has always centered around three main radioactive isotope families: iodine-131, caesium-134 and -137, and strontium-90.
Iodine has a half-life measured in days to weeks so it was always going to be the initial problem. Theoretically, if all the fission occurred at the first meltdown, there shouldn't be any left. In practice it seems like some short-halflife isotopes are still being detected, which suggests spontaneous fission may still be occurring in the melted cores. Iodine goes for the thyroid and its effect is thyroid cancers, particularly in children. This is starting to show up but there's arguments over what the baseline rate is and how much is due to testing rather than fallout.
They approved a design that, in the failure of grid power, a generator fault would guarantee a meltdown.
Indeed. I remember as a kid with an interest in nuclear power in the 1980s, reading about the design of the GE Mark I Boiling Water Reactor and boggling at the lack of a PWR-style containment building because the suppression torus "should be enough". But accidents always happen, I thought. What if some disaster caused a meltdown or explosion? Well, the article said, because there was no containment, the result of a meltdown would be unthinkable and therefore hasn't been investigated. Instead there would be failsafes to make sure a meltdown absolutely could never happen.
And I felt a cold shudder run down my spine at the casual engineering arrogance of that design and that, I think, was the moment when I switched from thinking of nuclear power as "cool" to "incredibly stupid".
There was a file photo in the article of a Mark 1 under construction - it was quite probably this one at Harper's Ferry - and the sight of the naked reaction vessel with the pipes reaching through the torus like an evil alien root, a cancer nodule built in steel, gave me nightmares for weeks. I had an instinctive feeling of revulsion and horror. This is a radiological disaster waiting to happen. Why would humanity build this monstrosity? Tear it out! Burn it! Bury it! Entomb the ashes!
Actually, looking at that photo, I still feel that feeling today. But at least we've learned from this... right guys?
Somalia is hardly a libertarian society—there may not be a central government, but tribal elders are granted a similar status at a more local level, with the power to make laws and meet out punishments as they see fit.
Yes, and that's exactly what private capital holders would become in a libertarian society. With property ownership the only law, and no restrictions on private use of deadly force to protect those 'rights', there'd be no central government or social contract to prevent private individuals buying up all the local land, trade, and water rights, and then turning everyone else at literal gunpoint into lifetime-contracted debtors and renters. There would be no line at all between 'landlord' and 'feudal lord with absolute monopoly power'... after all, that's what landlord meant back in the Middle Ages.
The road to serfdom, indeed. It's just that von Hayek got it completely the wrong way round.
Who in their right mind would have thought that SkyDrive infringed on British Sky Broadcasting Group?
I dunno, the same people who might think that Apple Computer infringed on Apple Corps when they started selling music?
Of course Windows doesn't play movies and BSkyB isn't in the business of transmitting information, so there isn't likely to be any conflict between the two services.
Even Snowden did not demonstrate how this was used against anyone except who it was meant to be used against except perhaps accidentally.
Exactly! Of course this capability will only ever be used against them - you know, those people, the ones not like us, the other ones, the ones it's meant to be used against. never use it against us - not unless one of us meant to use it against us. But even if we did use it against us, we'd be perfectly in the right, because at least we wouldn't be using it against us accidentally. We'd be using it against us on purpose and that would make it okay. It's meant to be kept a secret from us. If it wasn't for traitors like Snowden (who we thought was one of us but is obviously one of them) we'd never know if we did use it against us, and we shouldn't know that, either. Because then we might stop trusting us.
Look, it's really simple. It's us and them, and you're either for us or against us!
But as cars became more popular they became standardized, safer, more secure, cheaper, etc. Today cars all have the same major controls, the same security interfaces, etc. There's no reason to think the same process wouldn't apply to "smart" appliance design.
That certainly seemed like a logical extrapolation of trends from about 1984 until 2010. And then we got iPads, Ubuntu Unity, the Office Ribbon and Windows 8. Now established UI conventions are lying in shards on the floor and it's 1983 all over again. Good luck finding anything approaching a new standard for your smart appliances.
(Me, I liked the Home Computer Wars - Commodore 64 for ever! But I was twelve, and back then it was a miracle if you could get cursor keys *and* lower case on the same device.)
You can probably walk into any major university, find the library and do a scholar.google.com search for a very large percentage of all peer reviewed published research. Then print it off (or save to USB key), and leave, without paying anything.
never reaching the magisterial heights of Mysteries of Udolpho.
(snort) Well done! You owe me a new coffee and keyboard.
What I love about Austen is how much hasn't changed in the last 210 years:
"But, perhaps, I keep no journal."
"Perhaps you are not sitting in this room, and I am not sitting by you. These are points in which a doubt is equally possible. Not keep a journal! How are your absent cousins to understand the tenour of your life in Bath without one? How are the civilities and compliments of every day to be related as they ought to be, unless noted down every evening in a journal? How are your various dresses to be remembered, and the particular state of your complexion, and curl of your hair to be described in all their diversities, without having constant recourse to a journal?"
Ladies and gentlemen, Jane Austen and the Facebook cat macros of 1803.
To give something to someone, first you have to take it from someone else.
Or simply use their labour to extract it, then withhold the product of their labour from them, which is the good old capitalist way.
There are two ways to kill someone: point a gun at them, or build a fence around the local water hole and refuse access unless they pay. Both are equally immoral.
That's what totalitarianism looks like, is the thing. It's not "guy points a gun at you to make sure you do X", but "the government provides X, and we just have some regulations to make sure you use X appropriately".
The other wrinkle to creeping totalitarianism is that it doesn't even have to be a government. Or not just a government.
It can be any "sufficiently large organisation provides product/srvice X which you don't have the option of living without, and on its own terms such that you don't have a meaningful choice of alternatives to the product offered." The organisation could be a government but doesn't have to be; it could equally be a military, a monarchy or feudal family of inherited landlords, a large multinational corporation owning exclusive energy, water or food rights, a private security contractor, and so on.
Of course, in today's military-industrial-security complex, it's also likely to be a complex combination of both: a democratic government intertwined with secret non-democratic military-intelligence agencies outsourcing their IT, food/water/energy provision and gunslingers to separate for-profit commercial companies, for instance. But that's nothing particularly new either. In the happy pre-Marxist eighteenth and nineteenth century days of unbridled capitalism, it was very common for countries in the colonial game to have companies with exclusive proprietary shipping rights and their own private militaries - the British and Dutch East India Companies, for example. And in the early 20th century, the "company towns" and Pinkerton private strikebreakers. These kind of abuses of private power are how we got Marxism (and Fascism as a "third way" alternative to both) as a response, and why it seemed sane and humane in comparison.
tldr: Big organisations suck, and we've been making private companies bigger since the 1980s.And yet somehow, the government hasn't been getting smaller either; just the part that gives money to people instead of pointing guns and microphones at them. Because welfare is bad, apparently, but bombs aren't.
Slashdot Mirror
Or use VPN/tor when spending.
Without using the default version of Firefox that shipped with the official Tor package.
This just isn't true. Person A sends me X bitcoins to a disposable receiving wallet.
How do you create or receive that wallet?
How do you give the address of that wallet to a person you want to give you money?
How do you spend coins from that wallet?
How do you do any of the above without tying any personally identifying information (such as IP address) to that wallet address?
Why couldn't there be a "washing bank", where coins are co-mingled and exchanged for equal amounts, minus transaction fee?
Why, I'm sure there could.
And I'm also sure that such a laundry service could easily log and trace your IP address, HTML cookies, and any other identifying information it can extract each time you send them bitcoins, and forward that information to the NSA/FBI/CIA, for another per-transaction fee.
Of course, if the laundry service valued your privacy (worth zero bitcoins to them) over snitching on you (worth X bitcoins plus freedom from prosecution), they wouldn't do that. But you couldn't prove that it was, and you couldn't prove that it wasn't. You'd just have to trust that perfect strangers operating in a criminal environment with no loyalty to you would always make the non-rational economic choice, wouldn't you?
It's psychological warfare, a variation of propaganda.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_warfare
So... then this is probably someone from Assad's regime trying to make the Syrian rebels look like as much of a random force of brute pointless chaos as Anonymous?
If this was the rebels, they need to hire a new PR agency.
So, to be clear, you're fine with Syria killing its own citizens with chemical weapons?
And you're fine with the rebels eating people's hearts?
And you're fine with bombing civilians as collateral damage to support those rebels?
Sometimes "not doing something awful and stupid" is a wise decision.
So, what's up is that a group of people started protesting against Assad, calling for democracy and elections. These protesters were met with force and so they formed the Free Syrian Army and vowed not to stand down, fighting with whatever weapons they can scrounge up.
Ah, so just like the Muslim Brotherhood versus the Egyptian military then? So we're backing the regime, right? ... crickets...
These countries will have to transition to democracy, the genie is out of the bottle and it cannot be put back again. The transition will be horribly messy, like in Egypt
"Messy" is one word to describe a hardline military coup that arrested a democratically elected President, killed a thousand mostly-peaceful democratic protestors, and looks set to reinstall the same regime and dictator against whom the population rebelled two years ago, yes.
I wouldn't exactly call it a "transition", though, much less to "democracy".
I can't see any solution to this conflict, and getting involved in it will fuck us over too.
That horse sailed a long time ago. The US has been not-very-covertly involved in sponsoring and smuggling arms to the 'right' rebel factions for several years - it's only the US media that seems to keep deliberately ignoring this. The escalating chaos in Syria didn't just happen - it's largely of the Obama White House's own making. Not that it's a partisan issue - judging by Romney's calls for moar biggar guns for the rebels in the pre-election debates, a Romney White House would have done exactly the same, or worse.
You guys started this Syrian civil war, you keep it running, escalating to actual airstrikes is just another step down the road to hell. Stop blaming Assad for what you're doing. You're sponsoring actual Islamic terrorists, for crying out loud, at the same time as you're also propping up a secular military regime who did a coup against a democratically elected Islamic political party in Egypt. What part of this makes any sense to you? The US mideast foreign policy right now is as incoherent as Microsoft's mobile marketing plan.
But anyone reading with any sense of humanity has to have some sort of emotional response to this?
Sure.
"That really sucks, let's never do this sort of thing ourselves" seems like a perfectly valid emotional response to witnessing a massacre, myself.
How are you getting from "ick killing people is nasty" to "therefore hooahh let's kill a whole lot more people because it will be okay if we do it"?
dumb question..... but why aren't they removing the radioactive rods or whatever from that particular site and storing them else where? or is it a giant melted mess?
Actually a very good question. And the answer is: yes, removing the fuel rods and making them safe in permanent storage is a very sensible thing to want, and TEPCO is planning to start doing this this November.
The bad news, as I understand it, and the reason why they haven't done this obvious thing until now, is that moving fuel rods is very dangerous since you don't want to get two rods too close to each other otherwise you get a criticality event (a small fission reaction). While radioisotopes can give you cancer or make you very sick, a criticality could kill you in days. And while the rods in the fuel pools aren't melted like the cores are, they have been badly shaken by the earthquake, tsunami and explosions, and they've been drenched in corrosive seawater for two years. I'm guessing that could mean that they're likely to be jammed in their framework, maybe shaken loose, possibly with their cladding decayed, some of them in pool 4 may already have burned, and all this will make handling them a very difficult and dangerous manual process.
They should have concentrated to bringing the plant back into a stable stead state.
That's actually what they're trying to do. The problem is that there is no stable steady state for a melted core. Keeping it below 100 degrees C requires constant active cooling with lots of water. Above 100 degrees and things get a lot worse - smoke and fire. But it's not like it's "shut down" right now. It's just sleeping.
Nuclear fission has no real "off" button. Fuel rods are like slow-burning candles that you can burn fast or let smoulder, but you can't extinguish completely. Once you've lit one up, it takes years for the residual heat to go away. And once you've experienced an, um, unplanned geometry-altering event in the core, you're not really sure what the core is doing, since the level of radiation inside the containment buildings is more like "you will die in minutes" (multiple tens of Sieverts) rather than "you will die in days" (less than 1 Sieverts) which is the case for the runoff water.
They're doing their best. Unfortunately, no-one's best is good enough in this case. The water is probably going to be released into the ocean eventually, but that's not going to do the local fish a whole lot of good. We're talking isotopes with half-lives in the years, not months, absorbed into marine life tissue, with the potential for bioaccumulation (medium-low for caesium as I understand it, but extremely high for strontium).
A lot of sick fish might be the best case scenario here. Good thing the Japanese economy isn't big on fisheries, right?
Building treatment plants with 400000 liter/day capacity doesn't seem like that much of a stretch.
Just for reference, if all this water is radiating as strongly as the stuff that recently leaked, you will die for sure if you work within a foot of any of it for a week. And if you work within a foot of it for a day, you'll get very sick. If you work within a foot of it for an hour, you'll get as much radiation as an airline worker gets in 20 years or a Fukushima nuclear worker is allowed in five years. Looking at the map, the tanks are stacked maybe a couple meters apart. You won't want to be walking between the rows of tanks much.
Oh, and did I mention all this water is highly corrosive seawater? It's seawater. The last kind of water you want anywhere near your very expensive high-tech reverse-osmosis filtration plant which needs careful calibration for exotic metal salts.
So you'll need to be doing a lot of remote handling for everything, not repairing anything unless absolutely necessary, making sure to pump and drain tanks before you check seals (which are corroding rapidly). This in an outdoor, debris-strewn environment where robots haven't performed very well. You'll also be burning your workers' radiation badges out rapidly (if you're taking care of them to the legal standard) or falsifying dosimeter readings (if you aren't, and which appears to be what's happening).
Occasionally there will be radioactive dust and steam releases which will stop work because there's still three melted cores down in the groundwater occasionally going fizz.
This is an interesting technical challenge, to put it mildly.
The East Bay Municipality has waste treatment plant that can hit 375 million gallons per day.
If San Francisco sewage is radiating at 100 mSv/hr (ie, enough to give all the wastewater workers acute radiation sickness after spending a day next to it), then you've either got robots doing all the handling, or kaiju in the sewers. Or both.
Can someone give an estimate of how much more or less radiation is being introduced by the Fukushima plant than say... the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs?
This is a very good question and as a nuclear layman, it's difficult for me to get a handle on an exact answer. IANA health physicist, just a guy with Wikipedia and Google. But given that, I'll try to give some baselines from what I can see on the net.
First, in terms of "radiation", it seems like we're mostly talking about release of radioactive isotopes, rather than the initial prompt radiation of a nuclear explosion itself. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs ( as, eg, this blog describes) were airbursts, so relatively radiologically "clean" - they did a lot of initial damage from blast, heat and gamma radiation, but didn't leave nearly as many "dirty" isotopes in the way of fallout. This is compared with, eg, a surface shot like Castle Bravo which was a huge dirty contamination event.
So when we're talking about "comparing" Fukushima with Hiroshima, we're talking purely about the isotopes, not the explosive power. Which is not really a straight comparison. But given that, Fukushima (or any other nuclear power station) is and/or has the potential to be much dirtier than a bomb (at least an airburst), because there's more nuclear material stored onsite. You'd want a nuclear engineer to give the precise bequerel ratings of all the isotope mixes in the fuel composition, but for a back-of-the-envelope estimate: Little Boy had 64kg of uranium fuel - Fukushima had 1,760,000 kg of fuel on the entire site.
So all else being equal, which of course it's not because we're not talking weapons-grade uranium and I'm sure power rods have lots of other alloys in them, Daichi has 27,500 times as much raw radioactive fuel as the Hiroshima bomb. Impressive, no?
Now most of that fuel probably won't be released, as not all the reactors were damaged, and the health impact of the various isotopes varies wildly based on the half-life of the isotope, its heaviness (ability to be transported far from the site), whether it can be ingested in air or water, how long it stays in the body, what the affinity is for various body parts, and what kind of radiation it releases - alpha, beta or gamma. Alpha particles are the biggest, so do the most damage, but also the easiest to block - I believe outside the body they're fairly harmless, blocked by cloth or skin. But inside the body, they can do more harm. So you really do need a health physicist to work out all the equations here.
However, the buzz on the net has always centered around three main radioactive isotope families: iodine-131, caesium-134 and -137, and strontium-90.
Iodine has a half-life measured in days to weeks so it was always going to be the initial problem. Theoretically, if all the fission occurred at the first meltdown, there shouldn't be any left. In practice it seems like some short-halflife isotopes are still being detected, which suggests spontaneous fission may still be occurring in the melted cores. Iodine goes for the thyroid and its effect is thyroid cancers, particularly in children. This is starting to show up but there's arguments over what the baseline rate is and how much is due to testing rather than fallout.
In terms of initial (not ongoing) iodine release, Fukushima was 2.5 times bigger than Hiroshima.
Most of the Fukushima-Hiroshima comparisions focus around the caesium isotopes, as these are long-lived (several years) and the body trea
They approved a design that, in the failure of grid power, a generator fault would guarantee a meltdown.
Indeed. I remember as a kid with an interest in nuclear power in the 1980s, reading about the design of the GE Mark I Boiling Water Reactor and boggling at the lack of a PWR-style containment building because the suppression torus "should be enough". But accidents always happen, I thought. What if some disaster caused a meltdown or explosion? Well, the article said, because there was no containment, the result of a meltdown would be unthinkable and therefore hasn't been investigated. Instead there would be failsafes to make sure a meltdown absolutely could never happen.
And I felt a cold shudder run down my spine at the casual engineering arrogance of that design and that, I think, was the moment when I switched from thinking of nuclear power as "cool" to "incredibly stupid".
There was a file photo in the article of a Mark 1 under construction - it was quite probably this one at Harper's Ferry - and the sight of the naked reaction vessel with the pipes reaching through the torus like an evil alien root, a cancer nodule built in steel, gave me nightmares for weeks. I had an instinctive feeling of revulsion and horror. This is a radiological disaster waiting to happen. Why would humanity build this monstrosity? Tear it out! Burn it! Bury it! Entomb the ashes!
Actually, looking at that photo, I still feel that feeling today. But at least we've learned from this... right guys?
Somalia is hardly a libertarian society—there may not be a central government, but tribal elders are granted a similar status at a more local level, with the power to make laws and meet out punishments as they see fit.
Yes, and that's exactly what private capital holders would become in a libertarian society. With property ownership the only law, and no restrictions on private use of deadly force to protect those 'rights', there'd be no central government or social contract to prevent private individuals buying up all the local land, trade, and water rights, and then turning everyone else at literal gunpoint into lifetime-contracted debtors and renters. There would be no line at all between 'landlord' and 'feudal lord with absolute monopoly power'... after all, that's what landlord meant back in the Middle Ages.
The road to serfdom, indeed. It's just that von Hayek got it completely the wrong way round.
Who in their right mind would have thought that SkyDrive infringed on British Sky Broadcasting Group?
I dunno, the same people who might think that Apple Computer infringed on Apple Corps when they started selling music?
Of course Windows doesn't play movies and BSkyB isn't in the business of transmitting information, so there isn't likely to be any conflict between the two services.
Ever.
Shouldn't it be:
General Failure reading drive A
Nah, it's General Alexander these days.
Even Snowden did not demonstrate how this was used against anyone except who it was meant to be used against except perhaps accidentally.
Exactly! Of course this capability will only ever be used against them - you know, those people, the ones not like us, the other ones, the ones it's meant to be used against. never use it against us - not unless one of us meant to use it against us. But even if we did use it against us, we'd be perfectly in the right, because at least we wouldn't be using it against us accidentally. We'd be using it against us on purpose and that would make it okay. It's meant to be kept a secret from us. If it wasn't for traitors like Snowden (who we thought was one of us but is obviously one of them) we'd never know if we did use it against us, and we shouldn't know that, either. Because then we might stop trusting us.
Look, it's really simple. It's us and them, and you're either for us or against us!
But as cars became more popular they became standardized, safer, more secure, cheaper, etc. Today cars all have the same major controls, the same security interfaces, etc. There's no reason to think the same process wouldn't apply to "smart" appliance design.
That certainly seemed like a logical extrapolation of trends from about 1984 until 2010. And then we got iPads, Ubuntu Unity, the Office Ribbon and Windows 8. Now established UI conventions are lying in shards on the floor and it's 1983 all over again. Good luck finding anything approaching a new standard for your smart appliances.
(Me, I liked the Home Computer Wars - Commodore 64 for ever! But I was twelve, and back then it was a miracle if you could get cursor keys *and* lower case on the same device.)
I do not want random people attacking Things.
I think it's actually going to be the other way around.
You can probably walk into any major university, find the library and do a scholar.google.com search for a very large percentage of all peer reviewed published research. Then print it off (or save to USB key), and leave, without paying anything.
You can, and that's exactly the sort of behaviour that gets you a federal prosecution.
never reaching the magisterial heights of Mysteries of Udolpho.
(snort) Well done! You owe me a new coffee and keyboard.
What I love about Austen is how much hasn't changed in the last 210 years:
"But, perhaps, I keep no journal."
"Perhaps you are not sitting in this room, and I am not sitting by you. These are points in which a doubt is equally possible. Not keep a journal! How are your absent cousins to understand the tenour of your life in Bath without one? How are the civilities and compliments of every day to be related as they ought to be, unless noted down every evening in a journal? How are your various dresses to be remembered, and the particular state of your complexion, and curl of your hair to be described in all their diversities, without having constant recourse to a journal?"
Ladies and gentlemen, Jane Austen and the Facebook cat macros of 1803.
To give something to someone, first you have to take it from someone else.
Or simply use their labour to extract it, then withhold the product of their labour from them, which is the good old capitalist way.
There are two ways to kill someone: point a gun at them, or build a fence around the local water hole and refuse access unless they pay. Both are equally immoral.
That's what totalitarianism looks like, is the thing. It's not "guy points a gun at you to make sure you do X", but "the government provides X, and we just have some regulations to make sure you use X appropriately".
The other wrinkle to creeping totalitarianism is that it doesn't even have to be a government. Or not just a government.
It can be any "sufficiently large organisation provides product/srvice X which you don't have the option of living without, and on its own terms such that you don't have a meaningful choice of alternatives to the product offered." The organisation could be a government but doesn't have to be; it could equally be a military, a monarchy or feudal family of inherited landlords, a large multinational corporation owning exclusive energy, water or food rights, a private security contractor, and so on.
Of course, in today's military-industrial-security complex, it's also likely to be a complex combination of both: a democratic government intertwined with secret non-democratic military-intelligence agencies outsourcing their IT, food/water/energy provision and gunslingers to separate for-profit commercial companies, for instance. But that's nothing particularly new either. In the happy pre-Marxist eighteenth and nineteenth century days of unbridled capitalism, it was very common for countries in the colonial game to have companies with exclusive proprietary shipping rights and their own private militaries - the British and Dutch East India Companies, for example. And in the early 20th century, the "company towns" and Pinkerton private strikebreakers. These kind of abuses of private power are how we got Marxism (and Fascism as a "third way" alternative to both) as a response, and why it seemed sane and humane in comparison.
tldr: Big organisations suck, and we've been making private companies bigger since the 1980s.And yet somehow, the government hasn't been getting smaller either; just the part that gives money to people instead of pointing guns and microphones at them. Because welfare is bad, apparently, but bombs aren't.