So, as others have pointed out the only thing that matters is entropy. Entropy isn't just based on the number of characters, and that is true both of one-word and multi-word passwords. I'd probably say that "to be or not" is much lower entropy than "x8Jk$4B" - however, "bicycle tripod tissue diploma" is probably much higher entropy than "Wallets5".
The key with multi-word passwords is that the words need to be unrelated. If the words are closely associated like "apple banana cherry date" then you are opening yourself up to a number of attacks. The same issues apply to 8-char passwords containing numbers and symbols - users can still pick passwords that have far fewer bits of entropy than the character set implies. If anything the problem with single word passwords is that users STILL pick stuff that is dictionary-based, and yet you don't have the protection of having as many combinations as with multiple word passwords.
The math clearly shows that multiple word passwords are much stronger and potentially more memorable - AS LONG AS THE WORDS ARE UNRELATED.
I have to agree. I don't mind a little grind since it helps to savor your position in the game (you don't go straight from getting item X just to immediately getting item Y to replace it). However, it adds up really fast and becomes tedious. Stocking up at the town and going monster hunting until you have to restock can actually be fun. Having to then repeat that 14 times to be ready for the next dungeon is not.
Why not just raise the limits to something reasonable, with reasonable defined as whatever 51%+ of the population actually does? In general that probably means about 10mph higher than they are now.
Why should the population be subject to a law that 90% of the population disagrees with (if they didn't disagree with it, they wouldn't be breaking it)?
That is true for towns in the middle of nowhere, but not ones near major corridors, including most vacation areas. I do agree that if you spend lots of time in the hills or in areas where deer outnumber people you'd do better with the major carriers.
In Disney World I had great coverage with T-Mobile.
I wouldn't count out T-Mobile. I've found that just about everywhere they they have data is 4G (with 3G support as well).
If you're going to be going out into the woods then they're a bad choice. However, if you're going to be within a few miles of an interstate or a small city the entire trip, then you'll almost certainly have good coverage.
In the years that I've had them I can count on one hand the number of times I didn't have good coverage (though you still run into 2G a fair bit). That includes numerous trips, but we tend to go to cities and major attractions, not camping in the woods.
Yeah, but their dilemma is yours as well. In 30 years they might discover a cure for a disease that will ruin your life in 40 years. However, they will only discover that cure if they're still around and doing R&D.
I'm all for reigning in some of the abuses, but keep in mind that when you "punish" a big company by making R&D not pay off, all you really end up with is a lot of unemployed scientists. You don't think the CEO is going to take a pay cut short of the last office chair being sold off in bankruptcy, do you?
If you want to have drug R&D belong to the public, then start paying for it with taxes (the whole thing - not just the fun and exciting and cheap academic part). That is a model that is actually sustainable, and I can't see the NIH being any less competent than a lot of the MBAs running pharmaceutical companies these days...
The difficult part in many situations is not what is but how it is made, the difficult part in many cases is the actual manufacturing process.
Give any first-rate chemist a few million dollars, a bottle of pills, and a team to lead, and they'll be able to replicate just about anything. Let's set aside the fact that all you have to do is bribe somebody in the FDA to get a copy of all the details - or are you proposing that the details be kept safe from the government as well?
The difficult is not the manufacturing process - it is figuring out what to manufacture. Almost all of the costs in the commercially-funded side of drug development are in the clinical trials, and the repeated attempts to find something that works. Each attempt costs tens of millions of dollars (well, for the ones that make it past the cheap stuff like computer simulations), and it usually takes quite a few to find something that sort-of works.
If you don't allow for patents the only practical alternative is to have the government pay for end-to-end drug R&D. I'd actually like to see that happen, but there is no reason to not get that up to speed BEFORE you tear down the existing industry.
Holding out for more money is ethical if it's the difference between someone's good life and luxury. It's not ethical when it's the difference between life and death. (You don't have to give someone your last dollar, but to let them die because they won't give you theirs isn't ok)
The problem with this is that it leads to the Viagra/iPod problem. You can charge whatever you want for Viagra or an iPod, since it doesn't save lives. On the other hand, you can't charge whatever you want for a live-saving medication, because then you're evil. So, as a result it is more profitable to develop the next iPod or Viagra then to develop a life-saving medication. Then everybody wonders why we don't have enough antibiotics (setting aside the fact that idiotic regulation basically wastes the ones we already have). Of course, you make more money on lawsuits or financing then either, which is why we spend even more lawyers and economic meltdowns than we do on iPod R&D.
If you want more life-saving medications then those are EXACTLY the drugs you want to make super-profitable. Either that, or you have to just government fund the whole development process so that profit motive doesn't enter into it.
What you can't do is sit back and wait for private companies to be successful, and then cut them off at the knees. If you do that you end up with what you see now in the Pharmaceutical industry - scientists being laid off left and right with more money going to advertising, lobbying, etc. I don't suggest that we should be happy with the status quo either - but if you want to fix the situation you need to deploy solutions that actually are sustainable and not just kill the goose that laid the golden egg.
You don't need intelligence services to procure samples of drugs.
Everything that really matters about a drug is a single key/value pair. The key is the structure and is about 400 bytes in size. The value is a single bit - whether it has a net benefit. I guess you could add the intended use of the drug to the key and add an extra 10-20 bytes or so.
That 420.125 bytes of info costs about $500M to obtain. Once you know those 420.125 bytes working out the rest of the manufacturing details takes maybe a million or two of development costs, but it is basically zero-risk work that is nearly guaranteed to pay off. Many of the big drug companies have been spending billions per year on R&D and have only generated maybe a drug per year for it, so the cost if anything might be higher (most of that cost is sunk on failures, but you can't avoid it).
That is the problem with drug development - nobody really wants to pay for those 420.125 bytes, and the people who have already paid for them want to make a lot of money for having done it. I'd really like to see the model change to one that more equitably spreads out the costs and avoids the overhead like administration and marketing (and the resulting inappropriate use), but I don't expect that the costs will just magically go away because we want them to.
Well, Bayer is being dumb to not charge market-appropriate rates - it really is going to make more money at the lower price point in a country like India. Most likely they're concerned about that product making it back to the first world. However, they would have had more control over that if they had played ball in the first place.
As far as development for non-profitable drugs goes - I would like to see the NIH fund drugs end-to-end and make them royalty-free (or maybe charge royalties to first-world countries that don't reciprocate to encourage others to do the same). There are actually drugs that were developed and made free to poor countries by private companies, but they are few in number. The problem is that it really does cost hundreds of millions of dollars to develop a drug (counting the cost of failures - which applies just as much to charity work), and the drugs still come with liability (how much goodwill do you get if it turns out your free treatment for hypertension causes cancer - even if you escape liability?).
We don't ask game vendors to come out with AAA titles for highly-detailed air traffic control simulators, or train simulators, or other markets that have little value. So, I don't think it is fair to ask private industry to finance charity work either. If we want to see it happen just have the government fund it. I don't think that fully government-sponsored and royalty-free drug development needs to be limited to rare diseases either.
John Galt turned out to be a lazy bastard who has decided it's easier to force other companies to give you money than it is to actually make something worthwhile yourself.
Well, unfortunately he is right. In the US R&D is one of the worst places you can spend money. You get a much higher return from advertising and marketing, legal maneuvers, and lobbying.
If you're going to do that you might as well bring a gun. It will be far more effective than your corner reflector, and will likely trigger the same response (lots of cops shooting at you and the people around you).
And no, I'm not suggesting that people start bringing guns to protests...
Well, if you were just a little older you'd be begging to keep your just simply for having been arrested. Then you'd be begging to keep your job after taking a week off of work for the trial, to say nothing of the preparation time. If you were unlucky you might still get convicted.
I appreciate what you did, but fast-forward 20 years and add a house and a family to feed, and then ask yourself whether you'd have the same luxury of expressing your rights. That's why this horrible system needs to be fixed.
That's a bit misleading no. A prosecutor can threaten to charge you with a crime that carries a life sentence but it takes a judge and a jury to impose it.
Suppose the prosecutor threatens to charge you with a crime that carries a life sentence, but offers you a plea for six months in jail. Let's assume the life sentence works out to 30 years (maybe you'd get parole by then, or whatever, or you're already middle-aged).
That is a sixty-fold difference in penalty. Six months in prison would have a huge impact on your life, but 30 years would basically amount to giving up on any dreams you ever had other than running a prison gang. So, do you think that the chances of a conviction are less than 1/60? If there is even a 1/30 chance of a conviction then the plea is statistically a better choice. From what I've read, your chances of being convicted in a trial are likely to be much higher than that even if there really is no basis for the charges - especially if the prosecutor is willing to bend the law.
Modern plea bargains are like having the Roman army walk up to your walled city. Sure, you could probably hold them off for a year or two, but you would lose in the end, and compared to what they'll do to you when they do win out just about any offer they're offering for surrender will look good.
Yeah, take a look at speed limits sometime and tell me with a straight face that they were enacted based on the will of the people. Ditto for any other law that is broken routinely by 51% or more of the population.
What about the other 20 trials that didn't make it to a jury because the charges had a potential sentence of 50 years, and the plea bargain was for two years? Unless the accused felt that there was at least a 96% chance of acquittal they would accept the plea, and even if they thought their odds were more favorable they might still take the plea if they're the sort of person who buys fire insurance.
Frontline covered a case where a woman in prison for years with many years to go was offered a chance to re-plead guilty and get out immediately on time served. However, for religious reasons she did not feel she could lie and confess to a crime she did not commit, so she is still in prison. Please explain how that is justice...
I hear you and agree to an extent, but there is another valid side to the story. At work there are always people who tend to be more conservative. If we followed their advice we'd never release anything - we'd just test and patch and test and patch. The issue isn't whether there is any risk - just whether there is reasonable risk.
Toss in the huge stakes of a reactor and the low failure rate, and it is hard to say whether a risk is real or not. No doubt tons of engineering studies demonstrate conclusively that the space shuttle has a 1:100k theoretical total failure rate, and yet the real world rate is a few percent.
That said, you do need to be cautious with stuff like this - there is no reason to still be running designs which require active safety systems.
By that kind of argument there is no "good" place to stick a reactor.
I think the real question is whether these plants use safe designs, like passive cooling at the very least. Plants with fundamentally unsafe designs should be phased out everywhere, and plants with more modern and safe designs shouldn't be an issue as long as all the usual precautions are followed.
I think a big regulatory problem is that we keep extending the life of rather ancient designs, but we don't allow newer plants to be built. This sort of thing makes no sense from a risk-management perspective...
Agreed, and I'd even go a step further and shield any manufacturer from liability (perhaps with the government paying out some compensation) as long as the accident/fatality rates remain significantly below average.
Automated cars have the potential to save MANY lives. We should be doing everything we can to encourage their development. If that costs the government a few million dollars in accident compensation we'll all be saving a fortune.
Your argument about vaccines not saving many lives is erroneous. In NYC alone in 1916 almost 6000 people died from polio. Cars only kill 33k per year across the entire US with a MUCH larger population. For every person killed by polio far more suffered significant debilitation.
Vaccines are a victim of their own success - people look at side effects/etc and neglect the huge problem the diseases they protect against used to be. Those who forego vaccination benefit from herd immunity, which also leads to misperceptions of their efficacy.
Suppose I invent an autonomous vehicle that is so popular that everybody in the country runs out and buys one, and it is the only vehicle on the roads. Due to imperfections in the design 100 people per year are killed by the car. I am now liable for the deaths of those 100 people, including possible criminal liability that could extend to employees/etc.
Now, if you look at it one way you could say that killing 100 people per year is unacceptable. However, if this potential liability prevents the car from being built and sold, then 33k people would die in that same year, with manufacturers bearing almost no liability for this.
The only way I can support making manufacturers liable for errors in automated vehicles is if they are also made liable for driver errors if they allow the vehicle to be driven manually. In my estimation, the real fatal design flaw in a car is that it has a steering wheel in the first place.
This system uses reservations, and probably wouldn't depend on brakes - the cars space themselves out so that by the time they're at the intersection they're just maintaining constant speed. Now, a blowout would be a different matter.
Certain types of computer crashes on a large airliner are already nearly guaranteed to kill everybody onboard. Tire blowouts on a landing can be very dangerous as well. The reason that neither happens are:
1. Rigorous maintenance. 2. Strong engineering.
If you took the money saved on insurance, medical bills, and car replacements, and put a fraction of it into engineering and maintenance, then overall you'd save money and have better safety. In fact, maintenance schedules could be built into the car, and the car might go to have its tires checked while you're at work.
In any case, the 20x20 scenario depicted in that model is pretty unlikely to ever come up in real life. The capacity of 2 and 4-lane intersections goes WAY up once you get rid of the lights - so unless you filter all the traffic on the LA highway system through a single intersection you don't need crazy scenarios like this one.
Still, high-speed traffic crossings like this would not be something you'd want to watch through the window as you approach, even with two-lane roads. Psychologically at least traffic circles might be more acceptable, although your speed is going to be very limited unless they are large. Then again, the high-speed crossings only work if nobody turns anyway - so maybe circles are the way to go.
If I wanted to start my own business the last thing I'd do is blow a ton of cash on an MBA. By all means learn the material they teach, but getting the degree requires sinking a whole lot of cash into a piece of paper, and if you're going to be your own boss then there is nobody to impress with that piece of paper.
You can learn everything that matters from an MBA program from books, the internet, documentaries, and auditing (at much less expense) the odd class.
I could see how it might help somewhat with raising funds, but most of what it takes to be successful in starting your own business isn't stuff they teach you at school.
I have mixed feelings on your proposal. I think the fundamental issue with DNS is that it doesn't scale well.
I hear the objections already. From the technical standpoint of being able to convert names into IPs and other records it scales VERY well indeed - that is its big strength. From the standpoint of being a distributed and maintainable database it also scales well.
However, what is the whole point of DNS? It was intended to make it easy to remember globally-unique host names. That hasn't scaled well. What is the DNS address of the plumber down the street? Chances are that it is something like joetheplumberofatlanta.com or something like that - maybe you could remember it, but it would be pretty easy to forget the "the" or something like that. Now, if you're Roto Rooter (TM) it isn't a problem at all, but if you aren't a national-scale corporation you can't get a DNS name that is trivially simple.
So, adding many more TLDs could help make the stuff on the left of the dot shorter, but only if you don't allow existing domain holders to get preferential access to the new domains. That requires making major trademark holders surrender some of their clout, and that isn't likely to happen. If you don't allow for there to be 300 different people with rights to ford.something then all you're doing is just raising the costs for ford.com to keep registering new TLDs. If you do allow for 300 different ford.somethings then suddenly consumers have to remember which TLD to use, which isn't any better than ford-the-boston-tailor.com.
DNS really isn't different than a phone system where you type names into a phone rather than numbers, and then go through a long disambiguation process. The only thing that makes DNS tolerable right now is Google, kind of like the days of old where you'd ring the operator to complete any phone call.
At some point as population grows and the number of sites grow, the DNS names will be as hard to remember as IPs, and at that point what is the value in bothering to use it? People will just use bookmarks and google as they already do, and virtual hosts will just have to stick sites in their URLs.
Slashdot Mirror
So, as others have pointed out the only thing that matters is entropy. Entropy isn't just based on the number of characters, and that is true both of one-word and multi-word passwords. I'd probably say that "to be or not" is much lower entropy than "x8Jk$4B" - however, "bicycle tripod tissue diploma" is probably much higher entropy than "Wallets5".
The key with multi-word passwords is that the words need to be unrelated. If the words are closely associated like "apple banana cherry date" then you are opening yourself up to a number of attacks. The same issues apply to 8-char passwords containing numbers and symbols - users can still pick passwords that have far fewer bits of entropy than the character set implies. If anything the problem with single word passwords is that users STILL pick stuff that is dictionary-based, and yet you don't have the protection of having as many combinations as with multiple word passwords.
The math clearly shows that multiple word passwords are much stronger and potentially more memorable - AS LONG AS THE WORDS ARE UNRELATED.
I have to agree. I don't mind a little grind since it helps to savor your position in the game (you don't go straight from getting item X just to immediately getting item Y to replace it). However, it adds up really fast and becomes tedious. Stocking up at the town and going monster hunting until you have to restock can actually be fun. Having to then repeat that 14 times to be ready for the next dungeon is not.
Unless you're 100 years old, scientists knew that model was wrong long before your teacher taught it to you...
Why not just raise the limits to something reasonable, with reasonable defined as whatever 51%+ of the population actually does? In general that probably means about 10mph higher than they are now.
Why should the population be subject to a law that 90% of the population disagrees with (if they didn't disagree with it, they wouldn't be breaking it)?
That is true for towns in the middle of nowhere, but not ones near major corridors, including most vacation areas. I do agree that if you spend lots of time in the hills or in areas where deer outnumber people you'd do better with the major carriers.
In Disney World I had great coverage with T-Mobile.
I wouldn't count out T-Mobile. I've found that just about everywhere they they have data is 4G (with 3G support as well).
If you're going to be going out into the woods then they're a bad choice. However, if you're going to be within a few miles of an interstate or a small city the entire trip, then you'll almost certainly have good coverage.
In the years that I've had them I can count on one hand the number of times I didn't have good coverage (though you still run into 2G a fair bit). That includes numerous trips, but we tend to go to cities and major attractions, not camping in the woods.
Yeah, but their dilemma is yours as well. In 30 years they might discover a cure for a disease that will ruin your life in 40 years. However, they will only discover that cure if they're still around and doing R&D.
I'm all for reigning in some of the abuses, but keep in mind that when you "punish" a big company by making R&D not pay off, all you really end up with is a lot of unemployed scientists. You don't think the CEO is going to take a pay cut short of the last office chair being sold off in bankruptcy, do you?
If you want to have drug R&D belong to the public, then start paying for it with taxes (the whole thing - not just the fun and exciting and cheap academic part). That is a model that is actually sustainable, and I can't see the NIH being any less competent than a lot of the MBAs running pharmaceutical companies these days...
The difficult part in many situations is not what is but how it is made, the difficult part in many cases is the actual manufacturing process.
Give any first-rate chemist a few million dollars, a bottle of pills, and a team to lead, and they'll be able to replicate just about anything. Let's set aside the fact that all you have to do is bribe somebody in the FDA to get a copy of all the details - or are you proposing that the details be kept safe from the government as well?
The difficult is not the manufacturing process - it is figuring out what to manufacture. Almost all of the costs in the commercially-funded side of drug development are in the clinical trials, and the repeated attempts to find something that works. Each attempt costs tens of millions of dollars (well, for the ones that make it past the cheap stuff like computer simulations), and it usually takes quite a few to find something that sort-of works.
If you don't allow for patents the only practical alternative is to have the government pay for end-to-end drug R&D. I'd actually like to see that happen, but there is no reason to not get that up to speed BEFORE you tear down the existing industry.
Holding out for more money is ethical if it's the difference between someone's good life and luxury. It's not ethical when it's the difference between life and death. (You don't have to give someone your last dollar, but to let them die because they won't give you theirs isn't ok)
The problem with this is that it leads to the Viagra/iPod problem. You can charge whatever you want for Viagra or an iPod, since it doesn't save lives. On the other hand, you can't charge whatever you want for a live-saving medication, because then you're evil. So, as a result it is more profitable to develop the next iPod or Viagra then to develop a life-saving medication. Then everybody wonders why we don't have enough antibiotics (setting aside the fact that idiotic regulation basically wastes the ones we already have). Of course, you make more money on lawsuits or financing then either, which is why we spend even more lawyers and economic meltdowns than we do on iPod R&D.
If you want more life-saving medications then those are EXACTLY the drugs you want to make super-profitable. Either that, or you have to just government fund the whole development process so that profit motive doesn't enter into it.
What you can't do is sit back and wait for private companies to be successful, and then cut them off at the knees. If you do that you end up with what you see now in the Pharmaceutical industry - scientists being laid off left and right with more money going to advertising, lobbying, etc. I don't suggest that we should be happy with the status quo either - but if you want to fix the situation you need to deploy solutions that actually are sustainable and not just kill the goose that laid the golden egg.
You don't need intelligence services to procure samples of drugs.
Everything that really matters about a drug is a single key/value pair. The key is the structure and is about 400 bytes in size. The value is a single bit - whether it has a net benefit. I guess you could add the intended use of the drug to the key and add an extra 10-20 bytes or so.
That 420.125 bytes of info costs about $500M to obtain. Once you know those 420.125 bytes working out the rest of the manufacturing details takes maybe a million or two of development costs, but it is basically zero-risk work that is nearly guaranteed to pay off. Many of the big drug companies have been spending billions per year on R&D and have only generated maybe a drug per year for it, so the cost if anything might be higher (most of that cost is sunk on failures, but you can't avoid it).
That is the problem with drug development - nobody really wants to pay for those 420.125 bytes, and the people who have already paid for them want to make a lot of money for having done it. I'd really like to see the model change to one that more equitably spreads out the costs and avoids the overhead like administration and marketing (and the resulting inappropriate use), but I don't expect that the costs will just magically go away because we want them to.
Well, Bayer is being dumb to not charge market-appropriate rates - it really is going to make more money at the lower price point in a country like India. Most likely they're concerned about that product making it back to the first world. However, they would have had more control over that if they had played ball in the first place.
As far as development for non-profitable drugs goes - I would like to see the NIH fund drugs end-to-end and make them royalty-free (or maybe charge royalties to first-world countries that don't reciprocate to encourage others to do the same). There are actually drugs that were developed and made free to poor countries by private companies, but they are few in number. The problem is that it really does cost hundreds of millions of dollars to develop a drug (counting the cost of failures - which applies just as much to charity work), and the drugs still come with liability (how much goodwill do you get if it turns out your free treatment for hypertension causes cancer - even if you escape liability?).
We don't ask game vendors to come out with AAA titles for highly-detailed air traffic control simulators, or train simulators, or other markets that have little value. So, I don't think it is fair to ask private industry to finance charity work either. If we want to see it happen just have the government fund it. I don't think that fully government-sponsored and royalty-free drug development needs to be limited to rare diseases either.
John Galt turned out to be a lazy bastard who has decided it's easier to force other companies to give you money than it is to actually make something worthwhile yourself.
Well, unfortunately he is right. In the US R&D is one of the worst places you can spend money. You get a much higher return from advertising and marketing, legal maneuvers, and lobbying.
If you're going to do that you might as well bring a gun. It will be far more effective than your corner reflector, and will likely trigger the same response (lots of cops shooting at you and the people around you).
And no, I'm not suggesting that people start bringing guns to protests...
Well, if you were just a little older you'd be begging to keep your just simply for having been arrested. Then you'd be begging to keep your job after taking a week off of work for the trial, to say nothing of the preparation time. If you were unlucky you might still get convicted.
I appreciate what you did, but fast-forward 20 years and add a house and a family to feed, and then ask yourself whether you'd have the same luxury of expressing your rights. That's why this horrible system needs to be fixed.
That's a bit misleading no. A prosecutor can threaten to charge you with a crime that carries a life sentence but it takes a judge and a jury to impose it.
Suppose the prosecutor threatens to charge you with a crime that carries a life sentence, but offers you a plea for six months in jail. Let's assume the life sentence works out to 30 years (maybe you'd get parole by then, or whatever, or you're already middle-aged).
That is a sixty-fold difference in penalty. Six months in prison would have a huge impact on your life, but 30 years would basically amount to giving up on any dreams you ever had other than running a prison gang. So, do you think that the chances of a conviction are less than 1/60? If there is even a 1/30 chance of a conviction then the plea is statistically a better choice. From what I've read, your chances of being convicted in a trial are likely to be much higher than that even if there really is no basis for the charges - especially if the prosecutor is willing to bend the law.
Modern plea bargains are like having the Roman army walk up to your walled city. Sure, you could probably hold them off for a year or two, but you would lose in the end, and compared to what they'll do to you when they do win out just about any offer they're offering for surrender will look good.
Yeah, take a look at speed limits sometime and tell me with a straight face that they were enacted based on the will of the people. Ditto for any other law that is broken routinely by 51% or more of the population.
What about the other 20 trials that didn't make it to a jury because the charges had a potential sentence of 50 years, and the plea bargain was for two years? Unless the accused felt that there was at least a 96% chance of acquittal they would accept the plea, and even if they thought their odds were more favorable they might still take the plea if they're the sort of person who buys fire insurance.
Frontline covered a case where a woman in prison for years with many years to go was offered a chance to re-plead guilty and get out immediately on time served. However, for religious reasons she did not feel she could lie and confess to a crime she did not commit, so she is still in prison. Please explain how that is justice...
I hear you and agree to an extent, but there is another valid side to the story. At work there are always people who tend to be more conservative. If we followed their advice we'd never release anything - we'd just test and patch and test and patch. The issue isn't whether there is any risk - just whether there is reasonable risk.
Toss in the huge stakes of a reactor and the low failure rate, and it is hard to say whether a risk is real or not. No doubt tons of engineering studies demonstrate conclusively that the space shuttle has a 1:100k theoretical total failure rate, and yet the real world rate is a few percent.
That said, you do need to be cautious with stuff like this - there is no reason to still be running designs which require active safety systems.
By that kind of argument there is no "good" place to stick a reactor.
I think the real question is whether these plants use safe designs, like passive cooling at the very least. Plants with fundamentally unsafe designs should be phased out everywhere, and plants with more modern and safe designs shouldn't be an issue as long as all the usual precautions are followed.
I think a big regulatory problem is that we keep extending the life of rather ancient designs, but we don't allow newer plants to be built. This sort of thing makes no sense from a risk-management perspective...
Agreed, and I'd even go a step further and shield any manufacturer from liability (perhaps with the government paying out some compensation) as long as the accident/fatality rates remain significantly below average.
Automated cars have the potential to save MANY lives. We should be doing everything we can to encourage their development. If that costs the government a few million dollars in accident compensation we'll all be saving a fortune.
Your argument about vaccines not saving many lives is erroneous. In NYC alone in 1916 almost 6000 people died from polio. Cars only kill 33k per year across the entire US with a MUCH larger population. For every person killed by polio far more suffered significant debilitation.
Vaccines are a victim of their own success - people look at side effects/etc and neglect the huge problem the diseases they protect against used to be. Those who forego vaccination benefit from herd immunity, which also leads to misperceptions of their efficacy.
The problem with liability is this:
Suppose I invent an autonomous vehicle that is so popular that everybody in the country runs out and buys one, and it is the only vehicle on the roads. Due to imperfections in the design 100 people per year are killed by the car. I am now liable for the deaths of those 100 people, including possible criminal liability that could extend to employees/etc.
Now, if you look at it one way you could say that killing 100 people per year is unacceptable. However, if this potential liability prevents the car from being built and sold, then 33k people would die in that same year, with manufacturers bearing almost no liability for this.
The only way I can support making manufacturers liable for errors in automated vehicles is if they are also made liable for driver errors if they allow the vehicle to be driven manually. In my estimation, the real fatal design flaw in a car is that it has a steering wheel in the first place.
This system uses reservations, and probably wouldn't depend on brakes - the cars space themselves out so that by the time they're at the intersection they're just maintaining constant speed. Now, a blowout would be a different matter.
Certain types of computer crashes on a large airliner are already nearly guaranteed to kill everybody onboard. Tire blowouts on a landing can be very dangerous as well. The reason that neither happens are:
1. Rigorous maintenance.
2. Strong engineering.
If you took the money saved on insurance, medical bills, and car replacements, and put a fraction of it into engineering and maintenance, then overall you'd save money and have better safety. In fact, maintenance schedules could be built into the car, and the car might go to have its tires checked while you're at work.
In any case, the 20x20 scenario depicted in that model is pretty unlikely to ever come up in real life. The capacity of 2 and 4-lane intersections goes WAY up once you get rid of the lights - so unless you filter all the traffic on the LA highway system through a single intersection you don't need crazy scenarios like this one.
Still, high-speed traffic crossings like this would not be something you'd want to watch through the window as you approach, even with two-lane roads. Psychologically at least traffic circles might be more acceptable, although your speed is going to be very limited unless they are large. Then again, the high-speed crossings only work if nobody turns anyway - so maybe circles are the way to go.
If I wanted to start my own business the last thing I'd do is blow a ton of cash on an MBA. By all means learn the material they teach, but getting the degree requires sinking a whole lot of cash into a piece of paper, and if you're going to be your own boss then there is nobody to impress with that piece of paper.
You can learn everything that matters from an MBA program from books, the internet, documentaries, and auditing (at much less expense) the odd class.
I could see how it might help somewhat with raising funds, but most of what it takes to be successful in starting your own business isn't stuff they teach you at school.
I have mixed feelings on your proposal. I think the fundamental issue with DNS is that it doesn't scale well.
I hear the objections already. From the technical standpoint of being able to convert names into IPs and other records it scales VERY well indeed - that is its big strength. From the standpoint of being a distributed and maintainable database it also scales well.
However, what is the whole point of DNS? It was intended to make it easy to remember globally-unique host names. That hasn't scaled well. What is the DNS address of the plumber down the street? Chances are that it is something like joetheplumberofatlanta.com or something like that - maybe you could remember it, but it would be pretty easy to forget the "the" or something like that. Now, if you're Roto Rooter (TM) it isn't a problem at all, but if you aren't a national-scale corporation you can't get a DNS name that is trivially simple.
So, adding many more TLDs could help make the stuff on the left of the dot shorter, but only if you don't allow existing domain holders to get preferential access to the new domains. That requires making major trademark holders surrender some of their clout, and that isn't likely to happen. If you don't allow for there to be 300 different people with rights to ford.something then all you're doing is just raising the costs for ford.com to keep registering new TLDs. If you do allow for 300 different ford.somethings then suddenly consumers have to remember which TLD to use, which isn't any better than ford-the-boston-tailor.com.
DNS really isn't different than a phone system where you type names into a phone rather than numbers, and then go through a long disambiguation process. The only thing that makes DNS tolerable right now is Google, kind of like the days of old where you'd ring the operator to complete any phone call.
At some point as population grows and the number of sites grow, the DNS names will be as hard to remember as IPs, and at that point what is the value in bothering to use it? People will just use bookmarks and google as they already do, and virtual hosts will just have to stick sites in their URLs.