> If there was any justice in the world, they'd be getting ass-raped with splintered broomhandles for the next fifteen years.
They get an email address, which is in the From: header of a posting to USENET in alt.sex.aluminum.baseball.bat of the spammer receiving his daily punishment.
The warden mails each spammer daily. All the spammer has to do to stop the day's splintered-broomhandle-assraping is to reply to the message.
Hey, the spammer can "just hit delete" on all the spam, right? If the spammer misses the warden's email in the piles of spam, that's just too damn bad.
> But was there any inidication? Were they going down hill? And of course the most important question: What on earth do they have that's gonna be better? Fear Factor with Hentai Anime?
Sigh, I'll miss Futurama - one of the few things I can be bothered to watch.
But look on the bright side - if anyone ever does decide to cross Fear Factor with hentai, FOX will air it;-)
> The FTC doesn't represent individual complainants in the way you would expect them to. There needs to be a FEDERAL case and as such this usually only happens with a substantial number of
complaints across numerous states.
This pigfucker (my apologies for the insult to those of you who fuck pigs) has been going non-stop since 1997.
Typical modus operandi used to be dozens of dialups on sprint, uu.net, and dialinx (Genuity) in the Michigan area, and recent modus operandi has been to spam from dozens of dialups on att.net, uu.net, and Broadwing, in Dallas-Ft. Worth. (He may continue to reside in Michigan, dialing long-distance, or he may have moved to DFW. I dunno.)
But with a track record of spam several light years long, what appear to be prior convictions for
bank fraud, involvement in (if not actual profit from) an operation to spam for beastiality pr0n, and continued spam for health products of questionable efficacy (e.g. his BerryTrim operation), what the fuck is the FTC waiting for?
More to the point, why the fuck is the FTC going after these two-bit chickenshit make-money-fast-fools, when they could be going after the big guns.
FTC: You reading this? You really wanna put a dent in spam? Take this bastard down. HARD.. NOW.
> If you don't want a man politically unhappy, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war. If the government is inefficient, top-heavy and tax mad, better it be all those things than people worry over it. Peace, Montag.
Thanks for posting that - brought back a lot of fond memories. A couple of other favorite literary passages:
"Did you really think that we want those laws to be observed?" said
Dr. Ferris. "We want them broken. You'd better get it straight that
it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against - then you'll know
that this is not the age for beautiful gestures. We're after power
and we mean it. You fellows were pikers, but we know the real trick,
and you'd better get wise to it. There's no way to rule innocent men.
The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals.
Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares
so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live
without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens'
What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that
can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted - and
you create a nation of law-breakers - and then you cash in on guilt.
Now that's the system, Mr. Rearden, that's the game, and once you
understand it, you'll be much easier to deal with."
- Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that
Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up
by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which
the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was
of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given
moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on
any individual wire was guesswork. It was conceivable that they watched
everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire
whenever they wanted to. You had to live--did live, from habit that
became instinct--in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard,
and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized."
- Some English Bloke, Functional specifications for something, ca. 1948.
Suggestion for class exercise: Delete the names that identify the pieces ("Winston", "Rearden", "Thought Police", "Montag"). Dig around for some press releases and political speeches - say, Germany in the 1930s, or the USSR at just about any time, or other nascent police states - and "anonymize" them in a similar fashion.
Hand out samples of the writing with a checkmark for "historical" and "fictional",
After the test, read two lists of names:
a) People who scored more than 75% correct.
b) People who got less than 25% correct.
Announce that you're escorting those in group "a)" to the principal's office. Give a 50% bonus to the people in group "b)". Give a 25% bonus to the rest of the class. "As you can see, our class average remains around 75%, so nobody's really failed."
Once the "people who know too much" are outside of the classroom, let them in on the "joke". 15-20 minutes later, have them re-enter the class with instructions to say nothing about what happened at the principal's office. Allow one or two of them slip a rumor like "they suspended us, they wouldn't say why". (Ideally, you'd give 'em all the rest of the day off -- to the rest of the class, they'd just "disappear"...)
Let your (and your students') imaginations take it from there.
> In my experience, they do provide a noticable drop in background noise on a plane. But I didn't find it enough.
And you've brought a box full of homebrewed electronic components onto an airplane after 9/11?
What did the security drones say? (Seriously -- I've got homebuilt computer/audio gear and test equipment that I'd like to bring with me while traveling, but am worried about ever seeing it again because some jerkwad getting $5.00/hour thinks it's a bomb or weapon. Or worse, after I demonstrate it to him, said jerkwad says "Cool, I always wanted a pair of noise-cancelling Sennheisers!" and confiscates 'em anyways.)
"If a ReplayTV customer can simply type 'The X-Files' or 'James Bond' and have every episode of 'The X-Files' and every James Bond film recorded in perfect digital form and organized, compiled and stored on the hard drive of his or her ReplayTV 4000 device, it will cause substantial harm to the market for prerecorded DVD, videocassette and other copies of those episodes and films," the lawsuit states.
If the entertainment industry would just sell me copies of every X-Files or Babylon 5 episode on DVD, rather than making me wait 5 years after the end of the series...
If they'd offer me all the episodes at once, rather than 2 episodes per disc, with me having to "hope they keep producing 2-episode disks, once every month, for the next 8 years, so I can get the complete series rather than just having half the series until they stopped producing 'em"... then maybe I'd buy.
Until they offer me the product I want, I'll continue to get that product the only way I can. The fact that it's free-as-in-beer is only a bonus.
Anyone for South Park episodes? If quality doesn't matter, you can fit an entire season on a CD-R. (And if you want good quality, an entire season on a DVD-ROM.) Or you can go to the store and see a DVD with two episodes on it. 44 whole minutes of video. Whoop-de-fsck.
>: A lawsuit by the Buggy Whip Manufacturers Association against the automobile industry, because the change
from carriages to automobiles has decimated their markets. The Horse Manure Shoveler's Association is expected
to sign on as co-plaintiff.
Editorial nitpick: An analogy typically involves a comparison between two different things. For instance, "the automobile replacing the horse-drawn carriage" can be half of the analogy, with "the PVR versus Television industry" battle being the other half. The "Buggy Whip Manufacturers' Association" part of your analogy, for instance, made sense.
But then you went and included the "Horse Manure Shoveler's Association".
I don't mean to nitpick, but, if both halves of your analogy talk about the entertainment industry, it's not really an analogy, is it?;-)
> > so we get to watch our neighbors X-10 cameras. > > Hell, that might work for you if you live next to a model or movie star. I live next to a slaughterhouse and proctologist. Where does that leave me?;)
...overdue for a Slashdotting as the next goatse.cx fad?
> "Vermont's standards require an opt-in decision for the sharing of information with third parties -- typically marketing agreements that financial institutions use to round out service offerings to customers. " > >Round out services to customers eh? Guess that includes selling your personal data to whoever wanted it.
To a marketer, "round out" means "to make the customer's privacy look like the guy from goatse.cx".
> Nooooo[...]ooo! I *wanted* beasty porn in my email!!
Well, seeing as how "servicing the customer" seems to mean something like what a bull does on a farm when it services the cows...
> Lefty the Torch, a New York businessman, is suing the state of New York saying that laws against drugs, gambling,
prostitution, and extortion raise costs of doing business and hurt consumers.
Huh? Apart from the extortion part, I don't get your point.
I mean, in any major city, there's lots of people who want to consume drugs, gamble, and fuck. And when they want those things, they opt in - they go to the speakeasy, dealer, card table, play the numbers game, or whorehouse. For the most part, Lefty the Torch is providing things people want.
> > [starch packing peanuts dissolve in water] > You disolve those in water!?! Fool! Combined with Cheese Whiz those are the tastiest snacks of all time!
Oh man. I've got to try that!
(Better yet, get some sprinkle-on-fake-cheese-flavor, toss it around in a bag with the peanuts, and leave it out at the office with a sign saying "free Ch33-t0ze!" And see if anyone notices;-)
> you act like they are making the DVDs out of plastic and explosives or something.
How many times do I have to say this?
If so, infringers could be killed by shards of DVD, or at least have their DVD-ROM drive trashed.
It'd also be unwise to carry such DVDs onto aircraft. So you solve the region-coding problem by making sure nobody can transport the discs between regions.
For Chrissakes, man, you think MPAA doesn't have a flunky reading this? STOP GIVING JACK VALENTI MORE IDEAS!
(More seriously, I see this as a way to cut Blockbuster and the other major video rental chains out of the market - with limited-time DVDs, the rental chains would have to replenish their inventory - leading to an ongoing revenue stream for MPAA. The Mom-and-Pop video stores, already under pressure from the major chains, would likely fold.)
> When they come to raid your company, just reboot into linux, bsd, or whatever. Then ask, "What software?" > >
Then weep as they reformat your boxes, install Windows, and run their network software finders.
"Yes, Your Honor. When we came in, all 20 FOOCORP employees were running Linux on their workstations. Our agents had to reformat their hard drives and install Windows on them to run our Windows-based network software finders. The software-finders discovered 20 copies of Windows in the office. FOOCORP admit to having no Windows licenses. Please find FOOCORP guilty of 20 counts of infringment."
> Unless you also think it would be cool to crack open your processor case and put a little window on it-- don't do your hard drive.
Dude, this is Slashdot. Of course we think it'd be cool to crack open a CPU case and put a window on it!
(That's what we need transparent aluminum for! Funky-looking heatsinks! And how come nobody's used transparent epoxy as a potting material for integrated circuits?)
> Personally, I just want a full tower, in the dimensions 1 x 4 x 9 (x 16 x 25..), painted black, that makes no sound. > >
Yeah, but what will you do when it starts eating Jupiter?
Hey, that sounds like a cheap way to make a Beowulf clust*implode*
> Ooooo.... look at it spin... it spins so fast it's like it's standing still! Aaahhhh... I could watch this all... of 5 seconds.
What about the guy who bent the platters and shone a laser pointer at the drive as it spun?
I'm thinking you could do the same thing with this mod - but instead of bending the platters and killing the drive, shine the laser pointer onto the point where the heads move back and forth, or onto the nuts that hold the platters in place.
You still get the laser light show, but you might also get to use the drive.
(No, I wouldn't recommend it for anything other than a swap partition either, but it sounds like a neat extension to what's already a pretty insane mod.)
The riskiest part of the mod looks like the stage where the plastic wrap lies on the disk. I'd have pulled the plastic wrap tight across the surface of the drive, just in case any oils on the plastic wrap find their way onto the platters.
One other thing I'd suggest for this mod is to leave a portion of the drive's housing intact, and mount that funny little air filter on it. Drives need to "breathe" through that filter. I suppose the risk of doing the mod in a non-cleanroom environment shortens the life of the drive to the point that the air filter is a moot point...
Finally, there may be additional risk from the outgassing of components in the silicone/epoxy/goop used to affix the plexi to the drive housing. God only knows what winds up being deposited on the drive platters over the next six months.
Still, a damn cool mod, and something to try some weekend when I've got nothing to do and an old 1.2G drive I don't need... and, of course, a modded case to show off the results.
> Last I heard plutonium was the most deadly poison known, but now its clean! I must get some to brush my teeth with!
Last time I looked it up, plutonium was chemically toxic, and an alpha emitter. That means that if aerosolized and inhaled, it's bad juju for your lungs, and if ingested, it's bad juju for your intestinal tract, but you can hold a lump of it in your hand and it "feels warm, like a live rabbit".
> Seriously guys, which would you want to live near, a coal fired plant that is mismanaged and pumps out a lot of nitrous oxide, or a nuclear power plant that is mismanaged and leaks radioactive material.
Considering what's also in coal - a bit of thorium and uranium, rubidium-87, and piles of potassium-40 - goes straight into the atmosphere... considering the radon that gets released during the mining process of coal... yeah.
If you burn 10000 tons of coal daily to generate 1000MW, you're probably generating 50-100 pounds of radioactive waste a day. If we assume 1% of it gets released into the atmosphere (with scrubbers) or 10% (without), you're throwing pounds of it straight into the air. The rest doesn't go into the air, it goes into an ash pile with the rest of the non-radioactive waste, to be recycled into whatever they do with coal ash.
Granted, none of this is significant to human health, but the point remains that a coal plant, even when properly managed, emits radioactive material -- thousands of times more than the typical nuke plant, and even if the nuke plant is improperly managed.
If you want to count gross negligence and poor design (Chernobyl) against nukes, you must also count the hundreds who die every year mining coal, and the desctruction of towns like Centralia, PA, which has been burning for 40 years.
(If you think the Centralia coal mine fire is bad, there's a coal fire in China that burns 200 million tons of coal a year and emits more CO2 per year than every automobile in the United States.)
> And 99.4% is not a very good sucess rate when you are defining "non success" as the death of everyone on board. [... ] If
six out of every 1000 commercial airline flights resulted in the complete loss of life for everyone on board, I doubt you'd
be crowing about the airline's "success rate" (lets say 10,000 flights a day with 100 people on beach flight would result in
6,000 deaths per day, or over 200,000 people per year)
Hmm, seems good enough for the automobile.
I take those odds just to drive to work.
I'll gladly take those odds if it'll get me into space.
> [When we build bases on other worlds] Do we want America, and it's values to be on that distant rock, or do we want another country with it's own set of
values to be the one that survives the next catastrophic meteor/nuclear war/ice age/etc...
America's values will be on that rock, even though those values are no longer practiced in America, or anywhere else on Terra, for that matter.
Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is a wonderful illustration of why.
> [User ruzel / Slashdot ID 216220 wrote] >PVRs are great. Watch the show when you want. But the public should refrain from rebroadcasting television shows by file sharing over the internet and let these companies come up with good solutions that will allow them to make some money so they can provide new entertainment.
Riiiiiight.
Just like the public should refrain from sharing MP3s over the 'net until the music industry comes up with a "good solution". (Hey, how hard could it be, just hire a trained monkey to encode the backcatalog at 192/44 with the Fraun encoder and sell downloads at a $1.00 per track!) That was sometime before 1997 -- it's been five years, and we're still waiting.
> If we put them out of business by
disrespecting the rights of the creators we haven't done anyone any good.
Last time I checked, there's still plenty of music being produced.
In the meantime, I'm damn glad I didn't wait five years to still not be able to get music online. After RIAA's fsckup of the online music biz, I can't imagine anyone dumb enough to wait until 2007 for MPAA's answer to online video.
And now that I've said my piece, Mr. Valenti, would you please let user ruzel / Slashdot ID 216220 have his Slashdot account back?;-)
> y stepfather tried to e-mail me a (not too large) PDF the other day, and it was bounced because it was too large. @Home (what was @Home) also had a transfer limit. I expect most ISPs do. Who on earth actually e-mails 350-meg files?
Obviously a question from someone who's never had the, uh, "pleasure" of administering a network at a company with something called a "marketing department";-)
Slashdot Mirror
>
> Attn: Mr.CEO, General Manager / To whom it may concern
>
> How are you doing Gentlepersons ?
They get an email address, which is in the From: header of a posting to USENET in alt.sex.aluminum.baseball.bat of the spammer receiving his daily punishment.
The warden mails each spammer daily. All the spammer has to do to stop the day's splintered-broomhandle-assraping is to reply to the message.
Hey, the spammer can "just hit delete" on all the spam, right? If the spammer misses the warden's email in the piles of spam, that's just too damn bad.
Sigh, I'll miss Futurama - one of the few things I can be bothered to watch.
But look on the bright side - if anyone ever does decide to cross Fear Factor with hentai, FOX will air it ;-)
Then why not Alan Ralsky.
This pigfucker (my apologies for the insult to those of you who fuck pigs) has been going non-stop since 1997.
Typical modus operandi used to be dozens of dialups on sprint, uu.net, and dialinx (Genuity) in the Michigan area, and recent modus operandi has been to spam from dozens of dialups on att.net, uu.net, and Broadwing, in Dallas-Ft. Worth. (He may continue to reside in Michigan, dialing long-distance, or he may have moved to DFW. I dunno.)
But with a track record of spam several light years long, what appear to be prior convictions for bank fraud, involvement in (if not actual profit from) an operation to spam for beastiality pr0n, and continued spam for health products of questionable efficacy (e.g. his BerryTrim operation), what the fuck is the FTC waiting for?
More to the point, why the fuck is the FTC going after these two-bit chickenshit make-money-fast-fools, when they could be going after the big guns.
FTC: You reading this? You really wanna put a dent in spam? Take this bastard down. HARD.. NOW.
Thanks for posting that - brought back a lot of fond memories. A couple of other favorite literary passages:
- Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged - Some English Bloke, Functional specifications for something, ca. 1948.Suggestion for class exercise: Delete the names that identify the pieces ("Winston", "Rearden", "Thought Police", "Montag"). Dig around for some press releases and political speeches - say, Germany in the 1930s, or the USSR at just about any time, or other nascent police states - and "anonymize" them in a similar fashion.
Hand out samples of the writing with a checkmark for "historical" and "fictional",
After the test, read two lists of names:
a) People who scored more than 75% correct. b) People who got less than 25% correct.
Announce that you're escorting those in group "a)" to the principal's office. Give a 50% bonus to the people in group "b)". Give a 25% bonus to the rest of the class. "As you can see, our class average remains around 75%, so nobody's really failed."
Once the "people who know too much" are outside of the classroom, let them in on the "joke". 15-20 minutes later, have them re-enter the class with instructions to say nothing about what happened at the principal's office. Allow one or two of them slip a rumor like "they suspended us, they wouldn't say why". (Ideally, you'd give 'em all the rest of the day off -- to the rest of the class, they'd just "disappear"...)
Let your (and your students') imaginations take it from there.
And you've brought a box full of homebrewed electronic components onto an airplane after 9/11?
What did the security drones say? (Seriously -- I've got homebuilt computer/audio gear and test equipment that I'd like to bring with me while traveling, but am worried about ever seeing it again because some jerkwad getting $5.00/hour thinks it's a bomb or weapon. Or worse, after I demonstrate it to him, said jerkwad says "Cool, I always wanted a pair of noise-cancelling Sennheisers!" and confiscates 'em anyways.)
If the entertainment industry would just sell me copies of every X-Files or Babylon 5 episode on DVD, rather than making me wait 5 years after the end of the series...
If they'd offer me all the episodes at once, rather than 2 episodes per disc, with me having to "hope they keep producing 2-episode disks, once every month, for the next 8 years, so I can get the complete series rather than just having half the series until they stopped producing 'em"... then maybe I'd buy.
Until they offer me the product I want, I'll continue to get that product the only way I can. The fact that it's free-as-in-beer is only a bonus.
Anyone for South Park episodes? If quality doesn't matter, you can fit an entire season on a CD-R. (And if you want good quality, an entire season on a DVD-ROM.) Or you can go to the store and see a DVD with two episodes on it. 44 whole minutes of video. Whoop-de-fsck.
I dunno, I think the Horse Manure Shoveler^W^W^Wentertainment industry has heard of value-add.
Doesn't mean they have to like it...
Editorial nitpick: An analogy typically involves a comparison between two different things. For instance, "the automobile replacing the horse-drawn carriage" can be half of the analogy, with "the PVR versus Television industry" battle being the other half. The "Buggy Whip Manufacturers' Association" part of your analogy, for instance, made sense.
But then you went and included the "Horse Manure Shoveler's Association".
I don't mean to nitpick, but, if both halves of your analogy talk about the entertainment industry, it's not really an analogy, is it? ;-)
>
> Hell, that might work for you if you live next to a model or movie star. I live next to a slaughterhouse and proctologist. Where does that leave me?
>
>Round out services to customers eh? Guess that includes selling your personal data to whoever wanted it.
To a marketer, "round out" means "to make the customer's privacy look like the guy from goatse.cx".
> Nooooo[...]ooo! I *wanted* beasty porn in my email!!
Well, seeing as how "servicing the customer" seems to mean something like what a bull does on a farm when it services the cows...
Huh? Apart from the extortion part, I don't get your point.
I mean, in any major city, there's lots of people who want to consume drugs, gamble, and fuck. And when they want those things, they opt in - they go to the speakeasy, dealer, card table, play the numbers game, or whorehouse. For the most part, Lefty the Torch is providing things people want.
Telemarketers and spammers, on the other hand...
> You disolve those in water!?! Fool! Combined with Cheese Whiz those are the tastiest snacks of all time!
Oh man. I've got to try that!
(Better yet, get some sprinkle-on-fake-cheese-flavor, toss it around in a bag with the peanuts, and leave it out at the office with a sign saying "free Ch33-t0ze!" And see if anyone notices ;-)
How many times do I have to say this?
If so, infringers could be killed by shards of DVD, or at least have their DVD-ROM drive trashed.
It'd also be unwise to carry such DVDs onto aircraft. So you solve the region-coding problem by making sure nobody can transport the discs between regions.
For Chrissakes, man, you think MPAA doesn't have a flunky reading this? STOP GIVING JACK VALENTI MORE IDEAS!
(More seriously, I see this as a way to cut Blockbuster and the other major video rental chains out of the market - with limited-time DVDs, the rental chains would have to replenish their inventory - leading to an ongoing revenue stream for MPAA. The Mom-and-Pop video stores, already under pressure from the major chains, would likely fold.)
>
> Then weep as they reformat your boxes, install Windows, and run their network software finders.
"Yes, Your Honor. When we came in, all 20 FOOCORP employees were running Linux on their workstations. Our agents had to reformat their hard drives and install Windows on them to run our Windows-based network software finders. The software-finders discovered 20 copies of Windows in the office. FOOCORP admit to having no Windows licenses. Please find FOOCORP guilty of 20 counts of infringment."
>
>The heart of the net is as or pertaining to a melon?
One melon, only if you've got a fetish for it. But a nice pair of melons, sure.
(Now that I've stopped laughing... ;-)
OK, what if you took a very thin sheet of aluminized mylar and stretched it over the front of your monitor?
By day, it'd look like mirrorshades. But who uses their computer during the day? By night, just turn up the brightness a notch and voila!
Dude, this is Slashdot. Of course we think it'd be cool to crack open a CPU case and put a window on it!
(That's what we need transparent aluminum for! Funky-looking heatsinks! And how come nobody's used transparent epoxy as a potting material for integrated circuits?)
>
> Yeah, but what will you do when it starts eating Jupiter?
Hey, that sounds like a cheap way to make a Beowulf clust*implode*
What about the guy who bent the platters and shone a laser pointer at the drive as it spun?
I'm thinking you could do the same thing with this mod - but instead of bending the platters and killing the drive, shine the laser pointer onto the point where the heads move back and forth, or onto the nuts that hold the platters in place.
You still get the laser light show, but you might also get to use the drive.
(No, I wouldn't recommend it for anything other than a swap partition either, but it sounds like a neat extension to what's already a pretty insane mod.)
The riskiest part of the mod looks like the stage where the plastic wrap lies on the disk. I'd have pulled the plastic wrap tight across the surface of the drive, just in case any oils on the plastic wrap find their way onto the platters.
One other thing I'd suggest for this mod is to leave a portion of the drive's housing intact, and mount that funny little air filter on it. Drives need to "breathe" through that filter. I suppose the risk of doing the mod in a non-cleanroom environment shortens the life of the drive to the point that the air filter is a moot point...
Finally, there may be additional risk from the outgassing of components in the silicone/epoxy/goop used to affix the plexi to the drive housing. God only knows what winds up being deposited on the drive platters over the next six months.
Still, a damn cool mod, and something to try some weekend when I've got nothing to do and an old 1.2G drive I don't need... and, of course, a modded case to show off the results.
Last time I looked it up, plutonium was chemically toxic, and an alpha emitter. That means that if aerosolized and inhaled, it's bad juju for your lungs, and if ingested, it's bad juju for your intestinal tract, but you can hold a lump of it in your hand and it "feels warm, like a live rabbit".
> Seriously guys, which would you want to live near, a coal fired plant that is mismanaged and pumps out a lot of nitrous oxide, or a nuclear power plant that is mismanaged and leaks radioactive material.
Considering what's also in coal - a bit of thorium and uranium, rubidium-87, and piles of potassium-40 - goes straight into the atmosphere... considering the radon that gets released during the mining process of coal... yeah.
If you burn 10000 tons of coal daily to generate 1000MW, you're probably generating 50-100 pounds of radioactive waste a day. If we assume 1% of it gets released into the atmosphere (with scrubbers) or 10% (without), you're throwing pounds of it straight into the air. The rest doesn't go into the air, it goes into an ash pile with the rest of the non-radioactive waste, to be recycled into whatever they do with coal ash.
Granted, none of this is significant to human health, but the point remains that a coal plant, even when properly managed, emits radioactive material -- thousands of times more than the typical nuke plant, and even if the nuke plant is improperly managed.
If you want to count gross negligence and poor design (Chernobyl) against nukes, you must also count the hundreds who die every year mining coal, and the desctruction of towns like Centralia, PA, which has been burning for 40 years.
(If you think the Centralia coal mine fire is bad, there's a coal fire in China that burns 200 million tons of coal a year and emits more CO2 per year than every automobile in the United States.)
Coal cleaner than nuclear? Bullshit.
Hmm, seems good enough for the automobile.
I take those odds just to drive to work. I'll gladly take those odds if it'll get me into space.
America's values will be on that rock, even though those values are no longer practiced in America, or anywhere else on Terra, for that matter.
Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is a wonderful illustration of why.
>PVRs are great. Watch the show when you want. But the public should refrain from rebroadcasting television shows by file sharing over the internet and let these companies come up with good solutions that will allow them to make some money so they can provide new entertainment.
Riiiiiight.
Just like the public should refrain from sharing MP3s over the 'net until the music industry comes up with a "good solution". (Hey, how hard could it be, just hire a trained monkey to encode the backcatalog at 192/44 with the Fraun encoder and sell downloads at a $1.00 per track!) That was sometime before 1997 -- it's been five years, and we're still waiting.
> If we put them out of business by disrespecting the rights of the creators we haven't done anyone any good.
Last time I checked, there's still plenty of music being produced.
In the meantime, I'm damn glad I didn't wait five years to still not be able to get music online. After RIAA's fsckup of the online music biz, I can't imagine anyone dumb enough to wait until 2007 for MPAA's answer to online video.
And now that I've said my piece, Mr. Valenti, would you please let user ruzel / Slashdot ID 216220 have his Slashdot account back? ;-)
Obviously a question from someone who's never had the, uh, "pleasure" of administering a network at a company with something called a "marketing department" ;-)