At my last job our team had 6 developers, 4 of us used Linux on a daily basis. The company decided it was going all Windows, we were able to hold out a while but the Linux portions of the environment were getting more and more marginalized.
We all had the option of moving over to the MS side, but frankly if we wanted to work with MS there were better options, and within a year all 4 of us were gone.
A job should be something you enjoy, and if you have the ability to find enjoyment in the tools you use that counts for a lot.
As for those complaining about him looking for a new job while everyone else is struggling with unemployment... Well I hear there's about to be an opening for someone willing to work with Windows.
Except he didn't really find a hole in their systems. He found he could email some employees malware, trick them into opening it, and now he has a backdoor into the system. Now they could stand to strengthen up their IT policies/employee training a bit, but this isn't like he found a backdoor in their web server, and it's possible the docs he accessed weren't even particularly confidential.
Probably the reason he couldn't arrange an IT job interview with Marriott, and claim good security skills is he didn't have good security skills. Frankly I've come to suspect that 90% of the hacking incidents we hear about are basically script kiddies trying a bit of social engineering. I'm sure there's a few real genuine black hat hackers who are writing the rootkits and malware, but I have a feeling we'd be unimpressed by the quality of most "hackers".
And besides, what kind of work environment does he expect when he "demanded a job with Marriott in order to prevent the public release of the Marriott documents".
I won't bother to post all the links here, but there is very little reason to believe that Byron Sonne is a terrorist. That he got arrested is no surprise as I believe that was partially his intent (to see if he could set off enough red flags to get arrested), but from every source I've seen he should have been released a day or two after he was arrested, when they realized he was just a geek, not held without bail for almost a year.
He made the tweet on Jan 21, and he was picked up three days later. That is an incredibly fast turnaround for law enforcement, even for the US or Canada.
We're talking about suspicion that there's about to be an attack, particularly one involving the T-word, frankly 3 days is a little slow (but who knows when the trade show was).
They were throwing the T-word around like it was a known fact, all while terrorizing his wife and co-workers.
1. How long have the authorities been monitoring this man? 2. WHY have they been monitoring him? 3. WHY did they go after his co-workers?
The answers are bound to be exceptionally interesting and frightening.
1. He's Arab and presumably Muslim, he and a ton of people like him have probably been monitored to some degree for a while. 2. see 1), particularly if he's part of a mosque you probably don't have to follow that many links to find someone with terrorist ties (you can do the same thing with Christian Churches involving pedophiles and pro-life extremists). 3) Some analyst saw the message, assumed he was a terrorist, saw a couple other things that while innocent, still fit the bill, then freaked out. Once it became clear that he was completely innocent they had to drop charges, but they'd already investigated him and they knew if he ever DID get involved with terrorism in the future, they'd risk having huge egg on the faces, thus they're leaving the marker on his record as a CYA (Cover Your Ass).
A similar question could have been asked of perpetual motion machines, and in that case there would have been a payout, which I think is partially his point
The impetus for this prize was a post on Dick Lipton’s blog, entitled “Perpetual Motion of the 21st Century?” (See also this followup post.) [...] Anyway, in the comments section of the post, I pointed out that a refutation of scalable QC would require, not merely poking this or that hole in the Fault-Tolerance Theorem, but the construction of a dramatically-new, classically-efficiently-simulable picture of physical reality: something I don’t expect but would welcome as the scientific thrill of my life.
I think he's saying that while a general quantum computer might be a very long way off, the underlying theory that allows such a thing to exist is on very solid ground (which is why he's putting up the money). Of course this prize might still cost him since if the news of the prize goes viral he's going to spend the next decade getting spammed by kooks.
Speaking as an MD, and posting anonymously through more proxy jumps than you can count, I can tell you that the ABR is a disgrace.
They have elected to ELIMINATE the oral exams.
Did they give a justification for this? I can think of two reasons.
The first is cost, which you seem to blame, where the written exams are cheaper to administrate.
The second is CYA (Cover Your Ass), that for something like licensing, if someone complains about your decision (you fail someone, or you pass someone who later gets involved in a malpractice suit), it's a lot easier to defer blame to a written test. (of course they probably wouldn't admit this reason)
Clearly letting someone die when there's a drug that can save them is inhumane. But even with a public system there comes a point where a certain treatment is just too expensive.
If we're talking about "humane", perhaps we should look at overall outcomes. What makes more sense...$300K/yr to keep one person alive, or put the money into education and prevention and possibly save multiple lives?
Well I did just cover that point with the second sentence. But besides, the fact that treatment is unfeasible still doesn't make non-treatment humane, it's possible that the necessary choice is cruel and heartless.
Honestly I have no idea what a good system would be.
Clearly letting someone die when there's a drug that can save them is inhumane.
But even with a public system there comes a point where a certain treatment is just too expensive. And there's still the question of how to price these things. It's entirely possible that it would not have been economical for them to develop the drug without charging $300,000 for a prescription, but when a drug is literally a lifesaver it's hard to come up with an appropriate number.
I don't think he's a sociopath, but he could certainly be a psychopath.
I don't believe all politicians are psychopaths (Obama seems like a genuinely good person) but I think Republicans got themselves into a bind with the Tea Party where the only way to be a viable candidate was to be some grade of nutjob (Bachmann, Santorum, Cain, etc), or an otherwise sane person who tells them what they want to hear such as Gingrich or Romney.
I think Gingrich can pull it off since he's enough of a narcissist that he believes he is being genuine, but for Romney I really feel like his entire persona and everything he says is built around gaining power.
Gingrich would certainly be a disaster as a president because advisors would have trouble keeping the dumb ideas in check, and a lot of policy would be directed by appeasing Gingrich's ego. But for Romney I'm actually having some trouble justifying the belief that being a psychopath is necessarily a bad thing for a president. He really just follows the power, and that probably keeps him in pretty moderate waters.
I don't know if it will be in time, but the cost might be as big an issue as you expect
"Wysenski said Vertex would provide the medicine for free to people with no insurance and household income of $150,000 or less. The company will also cover 30 percent of copay costs for select patients who have insurance."
Looking at the google map it's not exactly an unpopulated area. There's a ballpark, a dam with a bridge not far downstream, and it's within a block of a sizable suburban development.
How was this not common knowledge? One would expect there to be kids swarming all over that creek (hopefully not swimming). I'd expect this was somewhat common knowledge in the community and nobody thought it was a problem, or thought to report it.
In theory a lobbyist presents their case to politicians to advance their clients' views. When the lobbyist finds sympathetic politicians they try to advance their client's views by advancing the politician's power by helping them fundraise and campaign.
In theory the politician determines their views by who presents the best case, not because they expect help with their campaign, and the lobbyist helps the politician so their sympathetic voice stays in power, not because they expect any support in return.
In reality you get Chris Dodd (that being said I don't know if what he did breaks any laws).
So I don't think that there's many people sitting there thinking, "with this semicolon I strike another blow for freedom!", but I do think there's people who've chosen to contribute to open source, as opposed to some other movement/group, since they are motivated by that idea of being a sort of freedom fighter.
For instance when I contribute something my thoughts are often some combination of "this X really helped me, I hope it will make things easier for you" and "X was really bugging me so I fixed it, here's the code so I can stop worrying about it". But the reason why I expend those efforts towards open source, as opposed to something else, is that I like the idea that I'm building this ecosystem of free software. And even if I don't contribute as much as a lot of others, nor necessarily agree with their beliefs, I can understand and sympathize with them on an emotional level.
That's what I'm wondering about, do you feel like you really "get" the open source community, and RMS and all the fights about GNU vs GNU/Linux? Do you think you'd feel more a part of it if the GNU manifesto had less emphasis on purity and freedom, and more on sharing and having fun?
I want to make clear at the start that I'm not arguing nature vs nurture as it doesn't affect my point, and I'm making broad generalizations because that's the entire point (and people love to start side arguments about those things).
It's a feedback loop, but I don't think it's a self-sustaining feedback loop. ie I think there are other issues keeping the women away, and if those were gone more women would start trickling in and the male dominated culture would evaporate fairly quickly.
Consider an analogous problem, you're a company that makes dolls, and you're trying to increase your market by getting boys to play with dolls. One thought is marketing that shows boys playing with dolls, this will make it more socially acceptable and hopefully increase the number of boys playing with dolls. And that probably will help a bit, but not much.
The real solution is to give the dolls guns and call them action figures.
I think there's something similar going on about how we market and perceive CS, and Open Source in particular, that makes it fundamentally more attractive to men than women. For me open source really seems to be about being a rebel and fighting for freedom, however I don't really feel like those concepts strike the same chord with women. My thought is that maybe we need to think about emphasizing the sharing and collaborative aspects of open source, but I'm sadly not that good at understanding what women want.
Maybe what the Ada Initiative should be doing is starting it's own projects, a project designed by women from the get go might develop different political structures, cultures, and objectives. This could be extremely valuable, both in attracting more women and for developing original projects.
1) Take your theory and your supporting evidence 2) Find the best experts in the field you can and bring them your theory and evidence. 3) They're not convinced? Take their feedback and come up with a better theory or better evidence and repeat. 4) When you and all the experts are agreed start putting the new theory and evidence into the textbooks.
Unless you're a creationist or AGW-denialist, in that case
1) Take your theory and your supporting evidence 2) Find the best experts in the field you can and bring them your theory and evidence. 3) They're not convinced? Claim they're biased, corrupt, ignorant, etc. Ignore their objections and move on. 4) Keep presenting your case to people, those who agree can convince others. People who will disagree are biased, corrupt, ignorant, etc. 5) When you have enough people you can hijack some of the traditional mouthpieces of the experts such as journals, the media, and schools, to broadcast your theory instead.
The women I see in my masters program aren't any different in capability from the men. But they definitely don't seem to be obsessed with computers the same way as the guys are.
1. A lot of the creepy sexist behaviour in the open source community is more a result of the lack or women rather than the cause.
2. There seems to be a subset of communities, new atheism, rationality groups, loud political activism, that seem to have a mixture of exclusivity and deliberately being an outsider. For whatever reason (culture or biology) these tend to be massively male dominated. The Open Source movement feels like it belongs in this group.
3. Combining 2 with programmings pre-existing male dominance and you get a very skewed gender distribution.
I have no idea how to fix things, but that's my perspective on some of the causes of the issue.
"First lets establish the obvious in that safety isn't a binary condition, it's a continuum."
Sure, some plants are safer than others, so it's a continuum in that sense. But, there must be a regulatory threshold which creates a binary condition - a plant is either safe enough to operate, or it isn't. Speed isn't a binary condition, either, but there's a speed limit above which it's illegal to operate, and below which it isn't.
True but safety is much harder to measure and judge than speed, and in the case of Nuclear plants where each plant is different, and each plant is a massive institution, it becomes that much harder to come up with an easily applied criteria.
"I'm sorry to sound snippy but comments of the type "I'm going to misinterpret a statement so I can make a clever remark" really bug me and detract from the discussion."
Oh, and fuck you, too.
Simplifications are fine, but I'm going to comment if it looks like a point is based on a simplification.
will soon require atomic reactors to be shut down after 40 years of use to improve safety.' If, however, a nuclear plant is deemed still safe it may continue operation."
That also implies that if a plant is unsafe, it still gets 40 years. Otherwise, what does the time limit mean? At the end of 40 years, a plant is either safe or unsafe. If safe, they can keep going. If unsafe, why was it still running?
People like you are why I always feel the need to write long pedantic posts:/
First lets establish the obvious in that safety isn't a binary condition, it's a continuum.
Now older plants are less safe for two reasons. 1) they were built when the technology was less advanced, 2) they are old.
Now if a plant is unsafe enough it will obviously be shut down before the 40 year mark, the only reason to believe otherwise is if you're being deliberately obtuse.
However, we're looking at the situation where a plant is safe enough that there's no immediate reason to shut it down, but if someone started the ball rolling and did a really tough safety inspection it might end in the plant being shut down.
What this law does is start the ball rolling.
I'm sorry to sound snippy but comments of the type "I'm going to misinterpret a statement so I can make a clever remark" really bug me and detract from the discussion.
Older plants don't have as many safety features as newer plants, as well existing safety features may degrade as they age. So instead of plants simply getting older and less safe they're proactively saying "this plant will be shut down by X unless you can prove it's still safe enough to continue".
Or it could be a lone customer or disgruntled ex-employee with a grudge, or a quirk in Google's association algorithms.
I don't agree with this decision but it does bring up an interesting point. Say you're running an online store, and through no fault of your own something like this occurs, what do you do? Your business may not have done anything wrong, but depending on how you find customers it could have pretty severe financial consequences, and you may not have the Internet skills to combat whatever story or blog is causing the problem.
I don't know if there's a good solution to this (suing Google certainly isn't it) but I do have some sympathy for companies in this position.
So we're banning smoking in cars, manual transmissions, and the handicapped now?
I think that's the mentality that's missing from this whole argument. A risk / benefit analysis. I think LaHood said that 3000 people a year die due to distracted driving. Out of 300 million. Or around 1 in 100,000.
Not quite, 300 million people aren't distracted driving, 300 million people aren't even driving.
Lemme take some real ballpark guesstimates here. Maybe 200 million driving on a regular basis, and if 20% of those drive distracted on a regular basis (total guess) about 40 million
Now from here every year there's about 11 million accidents (~5%), ~35000 fatalities (~3.5% of accidents).
So if about 10% of accidents are from distracted driving (actually sounds pretty low). Being in that 40 million group means you have about a 1/40 chance of an accident per year, and a 1/10000 chance of a fatality.
Sure it's not horrible odds, but my cost/benefit still suggests I'd want to minimize distractions.
Remember we're talking about growth. The dirty East German industry collapsed shortly after reunification, so Germany got a big boost for doing nothing. Japan's economy has been struggling for the past two decades so it's not hard to keep emissions down when you're not actually doing more. As for France, I don't know much about how they found their success, but I'm guessing it's in large part due to going Nuclear, which is what everyone should have been doing (instead people seem to be more afraid of Nuclear than AGW).
Also Canada (and the US) are big spread out countries, so it's hard to grow while being low carbon since we don't have the densities to support things like proper transit.
There's also things like the oil sands, which is apparently about 5% of our emissions. The problem with shutting down the oil sands is it is also responsible for ~2% of Canada's GPD (I'm not sure how reliable that number is). Do you really think those other countries would give up 2% GDP in what amounts to a symbolic gesture?
I'm not happy we gave up on Kyoto, and I'm even less happy that we've done virtually nothing to cut our emissions. But I don't agree with the claims of moral superiority from countries who achieved their targets largely by facing very different circumstances.
Slashdot Mirror
Where did the poster say he was quitting his current job first?
At my last job our team had 6 developers, 4 of us used Linux on a daily basis. The company decided it was going all Windows, we were able to hold out a while but the Linux portions of the environment were getting more and more marginalized.
We all had the option of moving over to the MS side, but frankly if we wanted to work with MS there were better options, and within a year all 4 of us were gone.
A job should be something you enjoy, and if you have the ability to find enjoyment in the tools you use that counts for a lot.
As for those complaining about him looking for a new job while everyone else is struggling with unemployment... Well I hear there's about to be an opening for someone willing to work with Windows.
Except he didn't really find a hole in their systems. He found he could email some employees malware, trick them into opening it, and now he has a backdoor into the system. Now they could stand to strengthen up their IT policies/employee training a bit, but this isn't like he found a backdoor in their web server, and it's possible the docs he accessed weren't even particularly confidential.
Probably the reason he couldn't arrange an IT job interview with Marriott, and claim good security skills is he didn't have good security skills. Frankly I've come to suspect that 90% of the hacking incidents we hear about are basically script kiddies trying a bit of social engineering. I'm sure there's a few real genuine black hat hackers who are writing the rootkits and malware, but I have a feeling we'd be unimpressed by the quality of most "hackers".
And besides, what kind of work environment does he expect when he "demanded a job with Marriott in order to prevent the public release of the Marriott documents".
I won't bother to post all the links here, but there is very little reason to believe that Byron Sonne is a terrorist. That he got arrested is no surprise as I believe that was partially his intent (to see if he could set off enough red flags to get arrested), but from every source I've seen he should have been released a day or two after he was arrested, when they realized he was just a geek, not held without bail for almost a year.
We need to be asking the right questions here:
He made the tweet on Jan 21, and he was picked up three days later. That is an incredibly fast turnaround for law enforcement, even for the US or Canada.
We're talking about suspicion that there's about to be an attack, particularly one involving the T-word, frankly 3 days is a little slow (but who knows when the trade show was).
They were throwing the T-word around like it was a known fact, all while terrorizing his wife and co-workers.
Not the first time unfortunately
So, let's ask some useful questions.
1. How long have the authorities been monitoring this man?
2. WHY have they been monitoring him?
3. WHY did they go after his co-workers?
The answers are bound to be exceptionally interesting and frightening.
1. He's Arab and presumably Muslim, he and a ton of people like him have probably been monitored to some degree for a while.
2. see 1), particularly if he's part of a mosque you probably don't have to follow that many links to find someone with terrorist ties (you can do the same thing with Christian Churches involving pedophiles and pro-life extremists).
3) Some analyst saw the message, assumed he was a terrorist, saw a couple other things that while innocent, still fit the bill, then freaked out. Once it became clear that he was completely innocent they had to drop charges, but they'd already investigated him and they knew if he ever DID get involved with terrorism in the future, they'd risk having huge egg on the faces, thus they're leaving the marker on his record as a CYA (Cover Your Ass).
A similar question could have been asked of perpetual motion machines, and in that case there would have been a payout, which I think is partially his point
The impetus for this prize was a post on Dick Lipton’s blog, entitled “Perpetual Motion of the 21st Century?” (See also this followup post.) [...] Anyway, in the comments section of the post, I pointed out that a refutation of scalable QC would require, not merely poking this or that hole in the Fault-Tolerance Theorem, but the construction of a dramatically-new, classically-efficiently-simulable picture of physical reality: something I don’t expect but would welcome as the scientific thrill of my life.
I think he's saying that while a general quantum computer might be a very long way off, the underlying theory that allows such a thing to exist is on very solid ground (which is why he's putting up the money). Of course this prize might still cost him since if the news of the prize goes viral he's going to spend the next decade getting spammed by kooks.
Speaking as an MD, and posting anonymously through more proxy jumps than you can count, I can tell you that the ABR is a disgrace.
They have elected to ELIMINATE the oral exams.
Did they give a justification for this? I can think of two reasons.
The first is cost, which you seem to blame, where the written exams are cheaper to administrate.
The second is CYA (Cover Your Ass), that for something like licensing, if someone complains about your decision (you fail someone, or you pass someone who later gets involved in a malpractice suit), it's a lot easier to defer blame to a written test. (of course they probably wouldn't admit this reason)
Clearly letting someone die when there's a drug that can save them is inhumane. But even with a public system there comes a point where a certain treatment is just too expensive.
If we're talking about "humane", perhaps we should look at overall outcomes. What makes more sense...$300K/yr to keep one person alive, or put the money into education and prevention and possibly save multiple lives?
Well I did just cover that point with the second sentence. But besides, the fact that treatment is unfeasible still doesn't make non-treatment humane, it's possible that the necessary choice is cruel and heartless.
So their offer might not be as good as I thought.
Honestly I have no idea what a good system would be.
Clearly letting someone die when there's a drug that can save them is inhumane.
But even with a public system there comes a point where a certain treatment is just too expensive. And there's still the question of how to price these things. It's entirely possible that it would not have been economical for them to develop the drug without charging $300,000 for a prescription, but when a drug is literally a lifesaver it's hard to come up with an appropriate number.
I don't think he's a sociopath, but he could certainly be a psychopath.
I don't believe all politicians are psychopaths (Obama seems like a genuinely good person) but I think Republicans got themselves into a bind with the Tea Party where the only way to be a viable candidate was to be some grade of nutjob (Bachmann, Santorum, Cain, etc), or an otherwise sane person who tells them what they want to hear such as Gingrich or Romney.
I think Gingrich can pull it off since he's enough of a narcissist that he believes he is being genuine, but for Romney I really feel like his entire persona and everything he says is built around gaining power.
Gingrich would certainly be a disaster as a president because advisors would have trouble keeping the dumb ideas in check, and a lot of policy would be directed by appeasing Gingrich's ego. But for Romney I'm actually having some trouble justifying the belief that being a psychopath is necessarily a bad thing for a president. He really just follows the power, and that probably keeps him in pretty moderate waters.
I don't know if it will be in time, but the cost might be as big an issue as you expect
"Wysenski said Vertex would provide the medicine for free to people with no insurance and household income of $150,000 or less. The company will also cover 30 percent of copay costs for select patients who have insurance."
I hope for the best.
Looking at the google map it's not exactly an unpopulated area. There's a ballpark, a dam with a bridge not far downstream, and it's within a block of a sizable suburban development.
How was this not common knowledge? One would expect there to be kids swarming all over that creek (hopefully not swimming). I'd expect this was somewhat common knowledge in the community and nobody thought it was a problem, or thought to report it.
Not quite.
In theory a lobbyist presents their case to politicians to advance their clients' views. When the lobbyist finds sympathetic politicians they try to advance their client's views by advancing the politician's power by helping them fundraise and campaign.
In theory the politician determines their views by who presents the best case, not because they expect help with their campaign, and the lobbyist helps the politician so their sympathetic voice stays in power, not because they expect any support in return.
In reality you get Chris Dodd (that being said I don't know if what he did breaks any laws).
So I don't think that there's many people sitting there thinking, "with this semicolon I strike another blow for freedom!", but I do think there's people who've chosen to contribute to open source, as opposed to some other movement/group, since they are motivated by that idea of being a sort of freedom fighter.
For instance when I contribute something my thoughts are often some combination of "this X really helped me, I hope it will make things easier for you" and "X was really bugging me so I fixed it, here's the code so I can stop worrying about it". But the reason why I expend those efforts towards open source, as opposed to something else, is that I like the idea that I'm building this ecosystem of free software. And even if I don't contribute as much as a lot of others, nor necessarily agree with their beliefs, I can understand and sympathize with them on an emotional level.
That's what I'm wondering about, do you feel like you really "get" the open source community, and RMS and all the fights about GNU vs GNU/Linux? Do you think you'd feel more a part of it if the GNU manifesto had less emphasis on purity and freedom, and more on sharing and having fun?
The difference is that among the AGW proponents are the vast majority of experts.
Hence 5), you're not hijacking the traditional mouthpieces of the experts if you're spreading the experts' message.
I want to make clear at the start that I'm not arguing nature vs nurture as it doesn't affect my point, and I'm making broad generalizations because that's the entire point (and people love to start side arguments about those things).
It's a feedback loop, but I don't think it's a self-sustaining feedback loop. ie I think there are other issues keeping the women away, and if those were gone more women would start trickling in and the male dominated culture would evaporate fairly quickly.
Consider an analogous problem, you're a company that makes dolls, and you're trying to increase your market by getting boys to play with dolls. One thought is marketing that shows boys playing with dolls, this will make it more socially acceptable and hopefully increase the number of boys playing with dolls. And that probably will help a bit, but not much.
The real solution is to give the dolls guns and call them action figures.
I think there's something similar going on about how we market and perceive CS, and Open Source in particular, that makes it fundamentally more attractive to men than women. For me open source really seems to be about being a rebel and fighting for freedom, however I don't really feel like those concepts strike the same chord with women. My thought is that maybe we need to think about emphasizing the sharing and collaborative aspects of open source, but I'm sadly not that good at understanding what women want.
Maybe what the Ada Initiative should be doing is starting it's own projects, a project designed by women from the get go might develop different political structures, cultures, and objectives. This could be extremely valuable, both in attracting more women and for developing original projects.
So you got a new theory and want to do science?
1) Take your theory and your supporting evidence
2) Find the best experts in the field you can and bring them your theory and evidence.
3) They're not convinced? Take their feedback and come up with a better theory or better evidence and repeat.
4) When you and all the experts are agreed start putting the new theory and evidence into the textbooks.
Unless you're a creationist or AGW-denialist, in that case
1) Take your theory and your supporting evidence
2) Find the best experts in the field you can and bring them your theory and evidence.
3) They're not convinced? Claim they're biased, corrupt, ignorant, etc. Ignore their objections and move on.
4) Keep presenting your case to people, those who agree can convince others. People who will disagree are biased, corrupt, ignorant, etc.
5) When you have enough people you can hijack some of the traditional mouthpieces of the experts such as journals, the media, and schools, to broadcast your theory instead.
I have to agree with this.
The women I see in my masters program aren't any different in capability from the men. But they definitely don't seem to be obsessed with computers the same way as the guys are.
1. A lot of the creepy sexist behaviour in the open source community is more a result of the lack or women rather than the cause.
2. There seems to be a subset of communities, new atheism, rationality groups, loud political activism, that seem to have a mixture of exclusivity and deliberately being an outsider. For whatever reason (culture or biology) these tend to be massively male dominated. The Open Source movement feels like it belongs in this group.
3. Combining 2 with programmings pre-existing male dominance and you get a very skewed gender distribution.
I have no idea how to fix things, but that's my perspective on some of the causes of the issue.
"First lets establish the obvious in that safety isn't a binary condition, it's a continuum."
Sure, some plants are safer than others, so it's a continuum in that sense. But, there must be a regulatory threshold which creates a binary condition - a plant is either safe enough to operate, or it isn't. Speed isn't a binary condition, either, but there's a speed limit above which it's illegal to operate, and below which it isn't.
True but safety is much harder to measure and judge than speed, and in the case of Nuclear plants where each plant is different, and each plant is a massive institution, it becomes that much harder to come up with an easily applied criteria.
"I'm sorry to sound snippy but comments of the type "I'm going to misinterpret a statement so I can make a clever remark" really bug me and detract from the discussion."
Oh, and fuck you, too.
Simplifications are fine, but I'm going to comment if it looks like a point is based on a simplification.
That also implies that if a plant is unsafe, it still gets 40 years. Otherwise, what does the time limit mean? At the end of 40 years, a plant is either safe or unsafe. If safe, they can keep going. If unsafe, why was it still running?
People like you are why I always feel the need to write long pedantic posts :/
First lets establish the obvious in that safety isn't a binary condition, it's a continuum.
Now older plants are less safe for two reasons. 1) they were built when the technology was less advanced, 2) they are old.
Now if a plant is unsafe enough it will obviously be shut down before the 40 year mark, the only reason to believe otherwise is if you're being deliberately obtuse.
However, we're looking at the situation where a plant is safe enough that there's no immediate reason to shut it down, but if someone started the ball rolling and did a really tough safety inspection it might end in the plant being shut down.
What this law does is start the ball rolling.
I'm sorry to sound snippy but comments of the type "I'm going to misinterpret a statement so I can make a clever remark" really bug me and detract from the discussion.
You're missing the point.
Older plants don't have as many safety features as newer plants, as well existing safety features may degrade as they age. So instead of plants simply getting older and less safe they're proactively saying "this plant will be shut down by X unless you can prove it's still safe enough to continue".
Or it could be a lone customer or disgruntled ex-employee with a grudge, or a quirk in Google's association algorithms.
I don't agree with this decision but it does bring up an interesting point. Say you're running an online store, and through no fault of your own something like this occurs, what do you do? Your business may not have done anything wrong, but depending on how you find customers it could have pretty severe financial consequences, and you may not have the Internet skills to combat whatever story or blog is causing the problem.
I don't know if there's a good solution to this (suing Google certainly isn't it) but I do have some sympathy for companies in this position.
So we're banning smoking in cars, manual transmissions, and the handicapped now?
I think that's the mentality that's missing from this whole argument. A risk / benefit analysis. I think LaHood said that 3000 people a year die due to distracted driving. Out of 300 million. Or around 1 in 100,000 .
Not quite, 300 million people aren't distracted driving, 300 million people aren't even driving.
Lemme take some real ballpark guesstimates here. Maybe 200 million driving on a regular basis, and if 20% of those drive distracted on a regular basis (total guess) about 40 million
Now from here every year there's about 11 million accidents (~5%), ~35000 fatalities (~3.5% of accidents).
So if about 10% of accidents are from distracted driving (actually sounds pretty low). Being in that 40 million group means you have about a 1/40 chance of an accident per year, and a 1/10000 chance of a fatality.
Sure it's not horrible odds, but my cost/benefit still suggests I'd want to minimize distractions.
Remember we're talking about growth. The dirty East German industry collapsed shortly after reunification, so Germany got a big boost for doing nothing. Japan's economy has been struggling for the past two decades so it's not hard to keep emissions down when you're not actually doing more. As for France, I don't know much about how they found their success, but I'm guessing it's in large part due to going Nuclear, which is what everyone should have been doing (instead people seem to be more afraid of Nuclear than AGW).
Also Canada (and the US) are big spread out countries, so it's hard to grow while being low carbon since we don't have the densities to support things like proper transit.
There's also things like the oil sands, which is apparently about 5% of our emissions. The problem with shutting down the oil sands is it is also responsible for ~2% of Canada's GPD (I'm not sure how reliable that number is). Do you really think those other countries would give up 2% GDP in what amounts to a symbolic gesture?
I'm not happy we gave up on Kyoto, and I'm even less happy that we've done virtually nothing to cut our emissions. But I don't agree with the claims of moral superiority from countries who achieved their targets largely by facing very different circumstances.