Why should Google be forced to provide their competitors with the stuff they want to use to make money with? Why is it Google's problem to give Microsoft the tools they need to compete? Does Microsoft give people the source code for the Windows kernel so people can write competing operating systems?
If A) Google's product is determined to be a monopoly, and B) it is found that Google is using this monopoly to manipulate other markets, they Google could be forced to do many things. In the examples you cite, Google's product is Google Ads. If Google Ads is a monopoly (which I doubt), then Google forcing a site using Google Ads to also use Google search could be market manipulation. If Google Search is a monopoly (which some courts might agree with), then, for example, Google forcing a site using Google Search to only use Google Ads would definitely be market manipulation (though I don't think they require this).
In any event, once that determination is found, Google could be forced to do many things that help their competition. Microsoft was forced to open up their APIs to their competitors. Microsoft provided Windows source code to Apple (though IIRC this was part of an out-of-court settlement, not a court judgement).
If you claim that A) Google has a monopoly on search, and B) Google is using that monopoly to gain leverage in other markets, then Microsoft might have "legal ground".
If Google, for example, allowed googlebot to crawl YouTube but blocked access to all other crawlers, they could be breaking the law. Likewise, if Google suppressed search results for Internet Explorer in favor of results for Chrome, they could get in trouble as well. Obviously whether they actually broke the law or not depends on the outcome of the legal process.
At least, if someone runs again and loses, they only have a few months to enact legislation to help their new employer.
Now of course anyone who plans to leave office knows long before their constituents. That can't be helped. But term limits don't stop these people; they stop the people who don't want the gilded return to the private sector.
I'm like you. I buy music I like. I listen to Pandora for the first half of each month to find new music, but I don't pay for Pandora One because, in the second half of each month, I like to listen to music I've already paid for.
And yet.... I don't think we're like 20 year old kids any more. (My apologies if you are still 20 - but given that your UID is pretty close to mine we're probably a similar age.) We remember when there were no cell phones, when most houses didn't have a computer, when portable music was a cassette Walkman, and a two-cassette stereo was awesome because we could copy our sibling's tapes and/or create mixes. As the type of people who now visit Slashdot, we probably organized our tape or record collections and enjoyed looking at them all in a neat stack / row. There was a definite, tangible meaning to "owning" music.
A 20-year old today barely remembers life without a computer in the house, and has had portable, digital music throughout their teenage years, and is just now looking to greatly expand their music selection. Most will barely remember tapes and only remember listening to records if their parents liked them. Most think that a CD is a conduit for music from a store (or a friend) to an MP3 player, not an item to organize on a shelf, making it easily replaced with a digital download. A subscription might seem like a good investment to them to avoid a life-long "hassle" of data organization.
All of the things you suggest could happen, but they mostly happen because of the sentiments that may be attached to an internal startup by its "venture capital". A regular start-up is funded by venture capital that is willing to wait for a return, but only to a point; they know when to cut their losses and move on. You suggest that an internal venture capitalist (especially one who is investing company money, not their own money) might not be willing to do the same.
That can be avoided if Google has or hires someone who can avoid those sentiments. Maybe they could tie the person's salary directly and exclusively to the success of the startup? Eventually such a person would make it succeed or would quit and kill it to find better income.
You understand their model and yet still have it completely backwards. Apple is a hardware company that uses software as a differentiator to get people to choose their hardware over the competition.
You are correct in that, were their software to run on third-party hardware, they would lose some amount of their hardware sales. At the same time, they would (possibly? probably?) grow their software sales. The fact that they don't do this helps to show how they place their hardware revenue over that of their software.
I work for a similar company. Our most famous product is software - if you've heard of my company you have likely only heard of this software. And yet we are unequivocally a hardware company, with revenue driven by hardware sales at a margin higher than the industry average due to our hardware's seamless integration with our software.
What is newsworthy is that the containment units withstood a 9.0 quake which is many orders of magnitude greater than the design specified. That is impressive and only underscores just how safe nuclear power is.
Japan TV has film of one of the reactors (four, I think) showing that the top of the containment unit is gone. I haven't seen this in the U.S. media yet.
Hire retired tax evaders, maybe. Ones who are looking for work next year in tax evasion should not be hired to write the tax code this year.
And that, yet again, is why I don't support term limits. If I'm a congressman on a tax committee, and I want to keep serving until I retire or die, you should support that decision rather than give me a two-year warning that I'm going to be laid off.
* Traditional TV watchers who structure their lives around watching specific shows at a specific time.
Given how they like to randomly shuffle around shows, I can't imagine they care at all about these viewers either. (Hello season finale of Detroit 187 randomly airing on a Sunday as the most recent example to spring to mind. Thank goodness for DVR magicks to pick it up while I'm recovering from SXSW.)
If you don't want to start with the revamp, might I suggest starting with Tom Baker? Specifically, watch The Android Invasion. It was the first episode I ever saw and it worked pretty well for me.
If, after you watch it, you wonder what that UNIT thing is all about, then go back and watch the Jon Pertwee episodes. If you are happy to never see those characters again, just keep watching from here.
If you're weaving in traffic, a cop pulls you over and writes you a ticket? He or she might give you a field sobriety test first, which, since you were sleepy not drunk, you'll probably pass as you are now fully awake. He or she can still ticket you for what he saw, with no new laws required.
No I do not. That is their problem. I suspect the free market will solve it quite quickly though.
For small businesses who don't have a legal team, and are trying to add their 2nd, 3rd, 4th employee, etc., the "free market" owner will solve it by not hiring anyone whose skin is brown or who doesn't speak perfect English.
How else do you think the free market can verify if supposedly government-issued work authorization is legitimate? The government has to get involved in that somehow unless you want to privatize work authorization too. And if that happens, hello millions of suddenly, newly authorized workers!
I bought a keyboard at Fry's that was new but had damage on the box (a big tear and crush). (It was one of the last two, and I was buying one for myself and my wife really wanted one as well.)
I insisted that I be able to open the box at the counter and verify that the keyboard wasn't damaged. Wow, that was complicated. They had to get a burly store manager over to watch me, and they told me the whole time that they don't usually allow this. As it happens the keyboard was fine and I bought it anyway, but they certainly didn't make me feel like I had the right to ensure quality in the products they sold.
If the box is open how can you tell it was never used? (Sub "internal shrink wrap" for "box" as needed.) If someone else has opened the box, it should be labeled as such. Otherwise how am I to know that they returned it with the product unmolested and all the accessories intact? If companies can't do this (and do like Fry's with a 3% "opened item" discount), then they should charge a stocking fee to cover returns. Then people can choose not to buy there if they don't like the return policy.
This is the difference between a business model based on fraud and one base on full disclosure. If they sell something as new it has to be new. If they disclose it's not new (but still has full warranty, etc.) I can choose to buy it or not. (For the record the "opened but unused" items I've bought from Fry's were crap, with missing parts, writing in the manuals, DOA. They're totally not worth my money.)
The UN projects that the world will reach replacement fertility by 2030. “The population as a whole is on a path toward nonexplosion—which is good news,”
Why would I want to eat everything I made just because I cooked it? I see no connection. Because grocery-bought food is sold in package sizes designed for the four-person family, I often find myself forced to toss unneeded portions, or make more than I should eat. When I do eat it all anyway, it just hurts my struggle with weight loss. I eat leftovers as I can but that doesn't work for many things.
I find that the costs are similar for cooking at home and eating out, provided cooking at home is real food (not just a starch) and eating out isn't a fancy restaurant.
I think it's more likely that the practical alternatives are robots to assist the elderly, followed by large retirement homes, followed by overstressed hospitals, and only then followed by lots of dead elderly.
Not likely. The population of large portions of the planet is stabilizing. The population boom primarily exists because of the 40-50 year gap between the rise of health planning and the rise of family planning in each country. This gap is getting shorter and shorter, even in developing countries. Thus, the population is expected to peak out.
In industrialized countries it took generations for fertility to fall to the replacement level or below. As that same transition takes place in the rest of the world, what has astonished demographers is how much faster it is happening there. Though its population continues to grow, China, home to a fifth of the world’s people, is already below replacement fertility and has been for nearly 20 years, thanks in part to the coercive one-child policy implemented in 1979; Chinese women, who were bearing an average of six children each as recently as 1965, are now having around 1.5. In Iran, with the support of the Islamic regime, fertility has fallen more than 70 percent since the early ’80s. In Catholic and democratic Brazil, women have reduced their fertility rate by half over the same quarter century.
The UN projects that the world will reach replacement fertility by 2030. “The population as a whole is on a path toward nonexplosion—which is good news,”
Set almost entirely in the basement of a New York apartment building, the design, lighting, and mood of the locale was perfect for an apocalypse psychological survival film. (In the Q&A, the directed noted that he used the same set designer as Moon.) The cast, too, was very dedicated; the film was shot in sequence, and stars Milo Ventimiglia and Michael Eklund lose 20 lbs over the course of the filming to simulate the effects of radiation sickness. (Though note that Lauren German and Michael Biehn seem to be less effected by the radiation and barely show any effects until later in the film.)
The problems with the film are the gaps in the plot. Somewhat early on, the survivors are found by radiation-suit wearing "soldiers" with automatic rifles. They kidnap a girl, then attempt to wipe out the other survivors. A fight ensues, the survivors win, and they have a working radiation suit to explore with. What they find is puzzling and completely unexplained; after a single scene the entire sub-plot is never visited again.
Meanwhile, the characters are supposed to be shown falling to the "Lord of the Flies"-style mental effects of isolation along with the physical effects of radiation sickness. As I mentioned, they handle the physical imagery intermittently well. The mental seems to come in jumps and stutters, with some characters (Marilyn) degenerating from one scene to the next, while others (Sam) seem to bounce in and back.
Finally, I just don't get the choices made by the lead character (Eva) at the end. I think the "divide" is supposed to mean many things - the divide between those who made it into the basement (and survived) versus those just outside who died; the divide between those who suffer from radiation and those who don't; the divide between those who can keep it together under crisis and those who fall apart; and finally, the divide between those who can shed their humanity to survive and those who can't. I think Eva is supposed to be shown crossing the divide, but it really doesn't feel right for her character given her other options.
Attack the Block
While waiting in line to see this film, I spotted a young lady clearly in distress on the major party/club street near the theater. Being who I am, I ran over to help. I really don't know what had happened, but she was in tears, was stumbling, and just needed assistance. Eventually another girl agrees to walk her to a friend's place and I get back in line.
Then I get into Attack the Block, and almost right away one of the main characters (Moses) mugs another (Sam) at knife point. The whole rest of the film revolves around Sam being forced to rely on Moses for safety against the alien threat, until eventually she can learn to trust and care for him. Maybe it was just the particular circumstances of my evening, but I just couldn't get over the initial assault in the limited 70-minutes I was expected to do so. Unlike in real life, I tend to want bad guys to get their faces ripped off in film, so having him become the bad good guy was too much.
Other than that hang-up, there's not really all that much bad about the film. I think it has gotten really good reviews from most other people who have seen it, so if you can keep real life separate from the screen you might like it as well.
I can say that I appreciated the fact that Nick Frost came to the screening. He really only has a minor part in the film, and I know he was here for the Paul North American premiere the next day, but I feel more strongly for actors who bother to support their films at real fan screenings.
The powerful earthquake that unleashed a devastating tsunami Friday appears to have moved the main island of Japan by 8 feet (2.4 meters) and shifted the Earth on its axis.
Japan's recent massive earthquake, one of the largest ever recorded, appears to have moved the island by about eight feet (2.4 meters), the US Geological Survey said.
After seeing this will be you call renewable energy unsafe as well? What about this or this?
When I'm told by multiple reputable sources that every nuclear reactor is susceptible to this sort of failure, then I'll agree with you that the technology, as it exists, is unsafe and should not be used.
On the other hand, I'm relatively certain that there are nuclear reactor designs that don't require an off-site power plant to provide cooling (and is susceptible to earthquake damage), nor ones that require a backup diesel generator (susceptible to flood). In fact, I'm relatively certain that there are reactor designs that immediately drop below critical mass in the event of an emergency, due to their very design.
Are there reasons why Japan built reactors susceptible to these problems? Probably. And those reasons, political, social, financial, should be found and corrected. If necessary, all the existing plants with the "flawed" designs should be safely shut down. But then they can build better, inherently safer plants.
I pay a power company to provide 100% wind power equal to my usage, btw, though obviously the pressure that pushes electrons in and out of my house in a sinusoidal pattern might come from anywhere on the grid.
Slashdot Mirror
From today:
http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/04/04/the-fashionistas-were-right-designer-labels-might-really-improve-your-life/?hpt=T2
Why should Google be forced to provide their competitors with the stuff they want to use to make money with? Why is it Google's problem to give Microsoft the tools they need to compete? Does Microsoft give people the source code for the Windows kernel so people can write competing operating systems?
If A) Google's product is determined to be a monopoly, and B) it is found that Google is using this monopoly to manipulate other markets, they Google could be forced to do many things. In the examples you cite, Google's product is Google Ads. If Google Ads is a monopoly (which I doubt), then Google forcing a site using Google Ads to also use Google search could be market manipulation. If Google Search is a monopoly (which some courts might agree with), then, for example, Google forcing a site using Google Search to only use Google Ads would definitely be market manipulation (though I don't think they require this).
In any event, once that determination is found, Google could be forced to do many things that help their competition. Microsoft was forced to open up their APIs to their competitors. Microsoft provided Windows source code to Apple (though IIRC this was part of an out-of-court settlement, not a court judgement).
If you claim that A) Google has a monopoly on search, and B) Google is using that monopoly to gain leverage in other markets, then Microsoft might have "legal ground".
If Google, for example, allowed googlebot to crawl YouTube but blocked access to all other crawlers, they could be breaking the law. Likewise, if Google suppressed search results for Internet Explorer in favor of results for Chrome, they could get in trouble as well. Obviously whether they actually broke the law or not depends on the outcome of the legal process.
At least, if someone runs again and loses, they only have a few months to enact legislation to help their new employer.
Now of course anyone who plans to leave office knows long before their constituents. That can't be helped. But term limits don't stop these people; they stop the people who don't want the gilded return to the private sector.
I'm like you. I buy music I like. I listen to Pandora for the first half of each month to find new music, but I don't pay for Pandora One because, in the second half of each month, I like to listen to music I've already paid for.
And yet.... I don't think we're like 20 year old kids any more. (My apologies if you are still 20 - but given that your UID is pretty close to mine we're probably a similar age.) We remember when there were no cell phones, when most houses didn't have a computer, when portable music was a cassette Walkman, and a two-cassette stereo was awesome because we could copy our sibling's tapes and/or create mixes. As the type of people who now visit Slashdot, we probably organized our tape or record collections and enjoyed looking at them all in a neat stack / row. There was a definite, tangible meaning to "owning" music.
A 20-year old today barely remembers life without a computer in the house, and has had portable, digital music throughout their teenage years, and is just now looking to greatly expand their music selection. Most will barely remember tapes and only remember listening to records if their parents liked them. Most think that a CD is a conduit for music from a store (or a friend) to an MP3 player, not an item to organize on a shelf, making it easily replaced with a digital download. A subscription might seem like a good investment to them to avoid a life-long "hassle" of data organization.
All of the things you suggest could happen, but they mostly happen because of the sentiments that may be attached to an internal startup by its "venture capital". A regular start-up is funded by venture capital that is willing to wait for a return, but only to a point; they know when to cut their losses and move on. You suggest that an internal venture capitalist (especially one who is investing company money, not their own money) might not be willing to do the same.
That can be avoided if Google has or hires someone who can avoid those sentiments. Maybe they could tie the person's salary directly and exclusively to the success of the startup? Eventually such a person would make it succeed or would quit and kill it to find better income.
You understand their model and yet still have it completely backwards. Apple is a hardware company that uses software as a differentiator to get people to choose their hardware over the competition.
You are correct in that, were their software to run on third-party hardware, they would lose some amount of their hardware sales. At the same time, they would (possibly? probably?) grow their software sales. The fact that they don't do this helps to show how they place their hardware revenue over that of their software.
I work for a similar company. Our most famous product is software - if you've heard of my company you have likely only heard of this software. And yet we are unequivocally a hardware company, with revenue driven by hardware sales at a margin higher than the industry average due to our hardware's seamless integration with our software.
What is newsworthy is that the containment units withstood a 9.0 quake which is many orders of magnitude greater than the design specified. That is impressive and only underscores just how safe nuclear power is.
Japan TV has film of one of the reactors (four, I think) showing that the top of the containment unit is gone. I haven't seen this in the U.S. media yet.
Hire retired tax evaders, maybe. Ones who are looking for work next year in tax evasion should not be hired to write the tax code this year.
And that, yet again, is why I don't support term limits. If I'm a congressman on a tax committee, and I want to keep serving until I retire or die, you should support that decision rather than give me a two-year warning that I'm going to be laid off.
* Traditional TV watchers who structure their lives around watching specific shows at a specific time.
Given how they like to randomly shuffle around shows, I can't imagine they care at all about these viewers either. (Hello season finale of Detroit 187 randomly airing on a Sunday as the most recent example to spring to mind. Thank goodness for DVR magicks to pick it up while I'm recovering from SXSW.)
If you don't want to start with the revamp, might I suggest starting with Tom Baker? Specifically, watch The Android Invasion. It was the first episode I ever saw and it worked pretty well for me.
If, after you watch it, you wonder what that UNIT thing is all about, then go back and watch the Jon Pertwee episodes. If you are happy to never see those characters again, just keep watching from here.
But how do you legislate that one?
If you're weaving in traffic, a cop pulls you over and writes you a ticket? He or she might give you a field sobriety test first, which, since you were sleepy not drunk, you'll probably pass as you are now fully awake. He or she can still ticket you for what he saw, with no new laws required.
People live in Austin, yes.
No I do not. That is their problem. I suspect the free market will solve it quite quickly though.
For small businesses who don't have a legal team, and are trying to add their 2nd, 3rd, 4th employee, etc., the "free market" owner will solve it by not hiring anyone whose skin is brown or who doesn't speak perfect English.
How else do you think the free market can verify if supposedly government-issued work authorization is legitimate? The government has to get involved in that somehow unless you want to privatize work authorization too. And if that happens, hello millions of suddenly, newly authorized workers!
I bought a keyboard at Fry's that was new but had damage on the box (a big tear and crush). (It was one of the last two, and I was buying one for myself and my wife really wanted one as well.)
I insisted that I be able to open the box at the counter and verify that the keyboard wasn't damaged. Wow, that was complicated. They had to get a burly store manager over to watch me, and they told me the whole time that they don't usually allow this. As it happens the keyboard was fine and I bought it anyway, but they certainly didn't make me feel like I had the right to ensure quality in the products they sold.
If the box is open how can you tell it was never used? (Sub "internal shrink wrap" for "box" as needed.) If someone else has opened the box, it should be labeled as such. Otherwise how am I to know that they returned it with the product unmolested and all the accessories intact? If companies can't do this (and do like Fry's with a 3% "opened item" discount), then they should charge a stocking fee to cover returns. Then people can choose not to buy there if they don't like the return policy.
This is the difference between a business model based on fraud and one base on full disclosure. If they sell something as new it has to be new. If they disclose it's not new (but still has full warranty, etc.) I can choose to buy it or not. (For the record the "opened but unused" items I've bought from Fry's were crap, with missing parts, writing in the manuals, DOA. They're totally not worth my money.)
The UN projects that the world will reach replacement fertility by 2030. “The population as a whole is on a path toward nonexplosion—which is good news,”
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/01/seven-billion/kunzig-text
Why would I want to eat everything I made just because I cooked it? I see no connection. Because grocery-bought food is sold in package sizes designed for the four-person family, I often find myself forced to toss unneeded portions, or make more than I should eat. When I do eat it all anyway, it just hurts my struggle with weight loss. I eat leftovers as I can but that doesn't work for many things.
I find that the costs are similar for cooking at home and eating out, provided cooking at home is real food (not just a starch) and eating out isn't a fancy restaurant.
I think it's more likely that the practical alternatives are robots to assist the elderly, followed by large retirement homes, followed by overstressed hospitals, and only then followed by lots of dead elderly.
Not likely. The population of large portions of the planet is stabilizing. The population boom primarily exists because of the 40-50 year gap between the rise of health planning and the rise of family planning in each country. This gap is getting shorter and shorter, even in developing countries. Thus, the population is expected to peak out.
In industrialized countries it took generations for fertility to fall to the replacement level or below. As that same transition takes place in the rest of the world, what has astonished demographers is how much faster it is happening there. Though its population continues to grow, China, home to a fifth of the world’s people, is already below replacement fertility and has been for nearly 20 years, thanks in part to the coercive one-child policy implemented in 1979; Chinese women, who were bearing an average of six children each as recently as 1965, are now having around 1.5. In Iran, with the support of the Islamic regime, fertility has fallen more than 70 percent since the early ’80s. In Catholic and democratic Brazil, women have reduced their fertility rate by half over the same quarter century.
The UN projects that the world will reach replacement fertility by 2030. “The population as a whole is on a path toward nonexplosion—which is good news,”
Both quotes from
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/01/seven-billion/kunzig-text
Perhaps people in Arizona aren't as concerned about making their buildings self-sustaining. Or maybe they are and already have.
Bob Saget redeemed himself in The Aristrocrats. He's a dirty, dirty man.
I've seen The Divide and Attack the Block.
Some spoilers may follow.
The Divide
Set almost entirely in the basement of a New York apartment building, the design, lighting, and mood of the locale was perfect for an apocalypse psychological survival film. (In the Q&A, the directed noted that he used the same set designer as Moon.) The cast, too, was very dedicated; the film was shot in sequence, and stars Milo Ventimiglia and Michael Eklund lose 20 lbs over the course of the filming to simulate the effects of radiation sickness. (Though note that Lauren German and Michael Biehn seem to be less effected by the radiation and barely show any effects until later in the film.)
The problems with the film are the gaps in the plot. Somewhat early on, the survivors are found by radiation-suit wearing "soldiers" with automatic rifles. They kidnap a girl, then attempt to wipe out the other survivors. A fight ensues, the survivors win, and they have a working radiation suit to explore with. What they find is puzzling and completely unexplained; after a single scene the entire sub-plot is never visited again.
Meanwhile, the characters are supposed to be shown falling to the "Lord of the Flies"-style mental effects of isolation along with the physical effects of radiation sickness. As I mentioned, they handle the physical imagery intermittently well. The mental seems to come in jumps and stutters, with some characters (Marilyn) degenerating from one scene to the next, while others (Sam) seem to bounce in and back.
Finally, I just don't get the choices made by the lead character (Eva) at the end. I think the "divide" is supposed to mean many things - the divide between those who made it into the basement (and survived) versus those just outside who died; the divide between those who suffer from radiation and those who don't; the divide between those who can keep it together under crisis and those who fall apart; and finally, the divide between those who can shed their humanity to survive and those who can't. I think Eva is supposed to be shown crossing the divide, but it really doesn't feel right for her character given her other options.
Attack the Block
While waiting in line to see this film, I spotted a young lady clearly in distress on the major party/club street near the theater. Being who I am, I ran over to help. I really don't know what had happened, but she was in tears, was stumbling, and just needed assistance. Eventually another girl agrees to walk her to a friend's place and I get back in line.
Then I get into Attack the Block, and almost right away one of the main characters (Moses) mugs another (Sam) at knife point. The whole rest of the film revolves around Sam being forced to rely on Moses for safety against the alien threat, until eventually she can learn to trust and care for him. Maybe it was just the particular circumstances of my evening, but I just couldn't get over the initial assault in the limited 70-minutes I was expected to do so. Unlike in real life, I tend to want bad guys to get their faces ripped off in film, so having him become the bad good guy was too much.
Other than that hang-up, there's not really all that much bad about the film. I think it has gotten really good reviews from most other people who have seen it, so if you can keep real life separate from the screen you might like it as well.
I can say that I appreciated the fact that Nick Frost came to the screening. He really only has a minor part in the film, and I know he was here for the Paul North American premiere the next day, but I feel more strongly for actors who bother to support their films at real fan screenings.
The powerful earthquake that unleashed a devastating tsunami Friday appears to have moved the main island of Japan by 8 feet (2.4 meters) and shifted the Earth on its axis.
From CNN.
Japan's recent massive earthquake, one of the largest ever recorded, appears to have moved the island by about eight feet (2.4 meters), the US Geological Survey said.
From AFP.
After seeing this will be you call renewable energy unsafe as well? What about this or this?
When I'm told by multiple reputable sources that every nuclear reactor is susceptible to this sort of failure, then I'll agree with you that the technology, as it exists, is unsafe and should not be used.
On the other hand, I'm relatively certain that there are nuclear reactor designs that don't require an off-site power plant to provide cooling (and is susceptible to earthquake damage), nor ones that require a backup diesel generator (susceptible to flood). In fact, I'm relatively certain that there are reactor designs that immediately drop below critical mass in the event of an emergency, due to their very design.
Are there reasons why Japan built reactors susceptible to these problems? Probably. And those reasons, political, social, financial, should be found and corrected. If necessary, all the existing plants with the "flawed" designs should be safely shut down. But then they can build better, inherently safer plants.
I pay a power company to provide 100% wind power equal to my usage, btw, though obviously the pressure that pushes electrons in and out of my house in a sinusoidal pattern might come from anywhere on the grid.