#1 - Nuclear reactor production is put under more government scrutiny than any other energy production method. Not that it isn't justifiable in large degree, just that it increases the costs of running the reactor.
#2 - The US has no fuel recycling program. If we DID have a responsible fuel recycling program, we wouldn't have to worry about the whiny idiots going "but it produces nuclear waste", nor would we be having to dig up ore for fuel - reprocessed, recycled fuel can be extracted from "spent waste" over and over again, which would take care of 95% or greater of our current "nuclear waste" in storage.
#3 - Energy still isn't deregulated on the east coast. The government controls the pricing, therefore it makes sense that the people sticking their money out to build the reactor would want to have some guarantee in writing that the government isn't going to try to force them to operate at a loss.
The larger problem is that the idiot fringe currently in control of the Democrat Party - as evidenced by the current administration's reaction to basically everything energy-related - are a bunch of total morons who are so kooky that even the co-founder of Greenpeace recognized them for the wack-jobs that they are.
Of course, there are a number of other things that "could" be done on the energy conservation front. The US could outlaw residential air-conditioning/heating systems that don't incorporate a closed-loop ground heat pump, and require any legacy systems to be switched over at time of replacement. They could pass a national law protecting the right of all homeowners to implement "greywater" systems, rain cisterns, and solar collectors. They could focus in on outdated, inefficient "freeway flyer" bus routes and replace them all with electric train systems.
But then again, we live in a time when municipalities claim they are working for "safety" and put up red-light cameras and then shorten the yellow timing to get more tickets, despite every study out there showing that if you want to reduce accidents, lengthening the yellow time does much, much more than putting up a fucking camera. So I doubt the people would have any trust in their government that any of the other things I suggested earlier were done with the right motives...
that the only sane people seem to be in other countries? In the US, the normal people get trodden on all over the place, the idea of a "choice" of ISP is a joke, and despite the prohibition on ex post facto laws, the Supreme Court ruled that a bought-off Congress could keep extending "copyright term" ad infinitum - even setting it to a "million bajillion" years if they felt like it.
You forgot Reid, Pelosi, Emanuel, Obama, Clinton, Clinton, Biden, Franken, Soros, Schwarzenegger, Kennedy, Saletan, Colmes, Press, Hartmann, Schultz, Miller, Rhodes, Moulitsas, Cooper, Walters, Klein, Huffington, Moulitsas, Blades/Boyd, , and of course those nutjobs from WCPT...
The preceding list is not all-inclusive, naturally, as I'm sure yours isn't either. I just found it interesting that you were modded "funny" for a bunch of partisan hackery, so please enjoy this counterbalance.
They were ordered by Clinton and then Bush to work on a program to replace the aging Space Shuttle fleet, which needed retiring.
That program is Constellation. They didn't "blow" the money, they were told to come up with a bullshit cost estimate by bean counters when they were trying to create entirely new technology that involved all sorts of problems that we hadn't had to solve previously.
It's idiots like you that have made scientific exploration in the US fall so far behind.
There are people who maintain a dozen or more Slashdot accounts in order to play the 'mod point lottery' more often and get around the prohibition on modding and commenting on the same topic.
There are people who regularly abuse the theory of downmodding, using "flamebait" or "troll" to replace "disagree." Do it fast enough, and insightful comments get buried to -1 just because someone disagreed with it or decided it was politically or philosophically something they wanted to bury.
There are people who get their hands on mod points and go into histories, applying every single mod point as a negative to any old post just to ding down their max on someone's karma.
If they got rid of "troll" and "Flamebait" and simply raised the upmod ceiling to 15 or so, the system would work better. More room for upmodding, more room for posts to rise to the surface, no worries about the "early bury and never recover" problem.
Both the Repulsicrats and the Demonicans are completely owned by the MafiAA. Why wouldn't they "cave", they never really had any intention of fighting for sanity and consumers' rights in the first place.
Gotta love how Obama had Net Neutrality on his campaign platform and has thrown it under the bus like everything else.
Seriously - Credit card reform got neutered to the point of being worthless, the main "impact" has been a bunch of shitheads in the banks doubling everyone's interest rates before the deadline hit. "Health Care Reform" is now handing out "exceptions" like candy lest big companies like McDonalds throw their employees completely to the wolves. He vetoed a package authored by sleazebags on both sides of the aisle to push for quicker foreclosures and screw the housing market even more, but at the same time hasn't done anything on his promises to reform the system to punish companies who ship jobs overseas and evade taxes.
Welcome to the broken system. Obama ran on "not being Bush" and even got a Nobel for "not being Bush", but looking at what he actually did, Obama == Bush.
When you're in the US, it's either the one monopolistic dickwad company on your area (cocks, comcrap, time waster, etc), or some combination of one of them with some equally crappy DSL company (verysucky, American Titty&Twister, etc) that equals a duopoly, or some really crappy dialup or satellite service with absolutely suck-tastic lag and lousy bandwidth.
We don't have competition, so therefore, we don't have any choice. And the Republicrats and Demicans, may they both rot in fucking hell, don't do what's necessary to fix it because they're both in the pockets of the aforementioned monopolies.
While your response was flip, I can see a number of ISPs - who already have policies of "sorry all we support is Windows" if you call in because of trouble on the line, and who have script-following Indian monkeys who will demand to know your OS before talking about anything else to replace ACTUAL customer service - using this at Microsoft's behest.
"Ohh, sorry. You're running OSX or Linux? We can't scan those for their patches so we're just going to block you off. Come back when you have a nice Win7 box. Oh, you signed a contract for a year of service? If you read the 4-point fonted small type on page 37 you'll see it clearly states in paragraph 18 line 3 that only systems with fully updated Windows 7 and an active virus scan package from an approved vendor such as Symantec or McAfee will be allowed access to the internet in order to keep the service trouble-free..."
Maybe Apple would be able to cry foul and get their systems allowed too, but home Linux users would pretty much be out of luck. And so much for anyone who responsibly has a home system with a hardware NAT and their ports properly firewalled too...
Especially when we have two political parties, one of which has as its base an entrenched, uneducated set of idiots in urban ghettos, the other a base of entrenched, uneducated rural rednecks and each party happy to keep the system set up so that a real, solid, well-rounded education that includes critical thinking processes and actual techniques of learning (as opposed to memorizing stock answers to just barely pass standardized multiple-guess tests) is the last thing they will ever have the opportunity to experience?
Even worse when each of these parties campaigns on the idea that the other side's basically a collection of morons, and that they can have no valid points in any discussion at all?
It would seem the use of a brain has already gone out the window. Instead, we have to have instructions on a box of toothpicks, and warnings about "do not iron clothes while wearing them", lest some brain-donor injure themselves and launch a frivolous lawsuit that somehow winds up with a $millions judgement because they managed to fit 12 other brain-donors into the jury and win the Lawsuit Lottery?
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why you don't want to let any religion get their hands on your government - whether it's a nutjob cult set up by an early 19th century lunatic, a 7th century pedophile, or even a rather kindly gentleman whose major accomplishment was sitting on his ass under a tree for a month and a half.
Ultimately, we want to get religion out of government as much as possible. If something is universal - say, prohibitions on murder or theft - then we can certainly all agree to implement them in a secular manner. But I shouldn't be restricted from buying some beer on my one day off each week just because a bunch of fundamentalist shitheads think I should be wasting my morning praying to their sun god.
You missed the point - he offered to pay WHATEVER IT TOOK.
Instead, these assholes let the house burn, killing the pets, and the "Mayor" defends this.
They should all be fired and then stand trial for animal cruelty. Period.
Re:We may never know? We DO know!
on
Stuxnet Worms On
·
· Score: -1, Troll
I for one feel it's safe to assume Iran is right
Oh geez. Iran is the same nation where beheadings are common (as is cousin and even double-cousin marriage), women have to be kept in beekeeper outfits for fear some Iranian neanderthal male will see an ankle and go on a rampage of rape and destruction...
Oh. I get it. Your post was tongue-in-cheek. Whew, for a second there I thought you were as insane as the Iranians!
I'm going with my original guess from the last time this was posted - most likely, Stuxnet was either the result of a pissed-off former Siemens employee, or of a competing PLC manufacturer somewhere in Asia or Russia getting the "bright idea" to hire on a mafia or yakuza group with some programmers (the same guys who code worms to set up botnets and run "pay us or we DDoS you, crash your system" extortion scams) to make the world think "OMG don't use Siemens, better use someone else instead, those Siemens things can't be trusted."
Hey, we have one here in the US! They call themselves the "New York Mint" and claim they are constantly "unearthing" rare/valuable coins from hidden treasure troves, old swiss bank vaults, etc.
On the one hand, doing things like this makes 'Anonymous' look bad, and by association, then makes what they are supporting look bad and hands ammunition to the MafiAA and bully groups whose perspective is "fuck the consumer, down with consumer rights."
On the other hand, simply protesting verbally and writing letters, even writing letters to congresscritters, seems to do only two things: jack and shit.
Actually, sometimes you need to leave "tact" aside and actually teach history.
This one is pretty clear - you can be in the role of attempting to escape, or see what it was like for the guards. TFA finally gets around to pointing out that players who choose to shoot and kill those who attempt escape face the consequences for their actions by having their character stand trial later for the crime. They also give the choice of killing or not killing.
Too many people want to put an entire discussion into pure binary good-and-evil, or rewrite the history books in many cases. It doesn't help. And you can certainly make a real simulation of a tough situation without "glorifying" violence.
Siemens chips were targeted BECAUSE Iran's nuclear program relies on them.
Or, Siemens chips are used all over the fucking planet, and someone with a grudge/competition motive against Siemens targeted them simply because they were Siemens.
You're starting from your bias and trying to justify your conclusion later. It doesn't work.
Or it could be a disgruntled Siemens employee or two.
Or it could be a dishonest competitor with connections to organized crime hiring their programmers for some dirty "sabotage" work - just think if every Siemens controller started going wonky, what companies that make competing PLC's stand to gain?
The reality is, conjecturing "Israel rawr" is the function of a bunch of people with previous axes to grind, not based on anything remotely substantial in terms of evidence. Someone else pointed out above that if we run calculations based on the idea of a team of 6-8 programmers, the likelihood of "May 9 1979" being just one of the programmers' birthday is pretty substantial.
admittedly a bit of a stretch as you note, there are also references to "Myrtus" within a path left in the code. Myrtus, a type of myrtle, is possibly a biblical reference to the Book of Esther (Esther was originally called Hadassah - similar to the Hebrew word for myrtle)
So now we're working off the "this word sounds like this word which is another word for this word" theory?
Lessee. "May" is a synonym with "shall"... which sounds a lot like "challa"... which is a lovely tasty breadstuff usually eaten by... JEWS! AAAUGH! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!
Of course, that's the point of all this meaningless bullshit. You're looking for obscure connections trying to "prove" your own biases. Nothing more.
Slashdot Mirror
The problems with your theory:
#1 - Nuclear reactor production is put under more government scrutiny than any other energy production method. Not that it isn't justifiable in large degree, just that it increases the costs of running the reactor.
#2 - The US has no fuel recycling program. If we DID have a responsible fuel recycling program, we wouldn't have to worry about the whiny idiots going "but it produces nuclear waste", nor would we be having to dig up ore for fuel - reprocessed, recycled fuel can be extracted from "spent waste" over and over again, which would take care of 95% or greater of our current "nuclear waste" in storage.
#3 - Energy still isn't deregulated on the east coast. The government controls the pricing, therefore it makes sense that the people sticking their money out to build the reactor would want to have some guarantee in writing that the government isn't going to try to force them to operate at a loss.
The larger problem is that the idiot fringe currently in control of the Democrat Party - as evidenced by the current administration's reaction to basically everything energy-related - are a bunch of total morons who are so kooky that even the co-founder of Greenpeace recognized them for the wack-jobs that they are.
Of course, there are a number of other things that "could" be done on the energy conservation front. The US could outlaw residential air-conditioning/heating systems that don't incorporate a closed-loop ground heat pump, and require any legacy systems to be switched over at time of replacement. They could pass a national law protecting the right of all homeowners to implement "greywater" systems, rain cisterns, and solar collectors. They could focus in on outdated, inefficient "freeway flyer" bus routes and replace them all with electric train systems.
But then again, we live in a time when municipalities claim they are working for "safety" and put up red-light cameras and then shorten the yellow timing to get more tickets, despite every study out there showing that if you want to reduce accidents, lengthening the yellow time does much, much more than putting up a fucking camera. So I doubt the people would have any trust in their government that any of the other things I suggested earlier were done with the right motives...
that the only sane people seem to be in other countries? In the US, the normal people get trodden on all over the place, the idea of a "choice" of ISP is a joke, and despite the prohibition on ex post facto laws, the Supreme Court ruled that a bought-off Congress could keep extending "copyright term" ad infinitum - even setting it to a "million bajillion" years if they felt like it.
You forgot Reid, Pelosi, Emanuel, Obama, Clinton, Clinton, Biden, Franken, Soros, Schwarzenegger, Kennedy, Saletan, Colmes, Press, Hartmann, Schultz, Miller, Rhodes, Moulitsas, Cooper, Walters, Klein, Huffington, Moulitsas, Blades/Boyd, , and of course those nutjobs from WCPT...
The preceding list is not all-inclusive, naturally, as I'm sure yours isn't either. I just found it interesting that you were modded "funny" for a bunch of partisan hackery, so please enjoy this counterbalance.
At least they're not trying to be ALL THAT... though with your acronym they easily could have :P
I don't know about progress or eventual usability, but they definitely come up pretty high on the "tortured acronym" list...
They were ordered by Clinton and then Bush to work on a program to replace the aging Space Shuttle fleet, which needed retiring.
That program is Constellation. They didn't "blow" the money, they were told to come up with a bullshit cost estimate by bean counters when they were trying to create entirely new technology that involved all sorts of problems that we hadn't had to solve previously.
It's idiots like you that have made scientific exploration in the US fall so far behind.
Slashdot's system has plenty of room for abuse.
There are people who maintain a dozen or more Slashdot accounts in order to play the 'mod point lottery' more often and get around the prohibition on modding and commenting on the same topic.
There are people who regularly abuse the theory of downmodding, using "flamebait" or "troll" to replace "disagree." Do it fast enough, and insightful comments get buried to -1 just because someone disagreed with it or decided it was politically or philosophically something they wanted to bury.
There are people who get their hands on mod points and go into histories, applying every single mod point as a negative to any old post just to ding down their max on someone's karma.
If they got rid of "troll" and "Flamebait" and simply raised the upmod ceiling to 15 or so, the system would work better. More room for upmodding, more room for posts to rise to the surface, no worries about the "early bury and never recover" problem.
I will disagree. One of the two speaks in complete sentences. :P
Only when assisted by teleprompter... the rest of the time he's got more "err umm ahh" than Diamond Joe Quimby.
Both the Repulsicrats and the Demonicans are completely owned by the MafiAA. Why wouldn't they "cave", they never really had any intention of fighting for sanity and consumers' rights in the first place.
Gotta love how Obama had Net Neutrality on his campaign platform and has thrown it under the bus like everything else.
Seriously - Credit card reform got neutered to the point of being worthless, the main "impact" has been a bunch of shitheads in the banks doubling everyone's interest rates before the deadline hit. "Health Care Reform" is now handing out "exceptions" like candy lest big companies like McDonalds throw their employees completely to the wolves. He vetoed a package authored by sleazebags on both sides of the aisle to push for quicker foreclosures and screw the housing market even more, but at the same time hasn't done anything on his promises to reform the system to punish companies who ship jobs overseas and evade taxes.
Welcome to the broken system. Obama ran on "not being Bush" and even got a Nobel for "not being Bush", but looking at what he actually did, Obama == Bush.
Obviously not an American ISP.
When you're in the US, it's either the one monopolistic dickwad company on your area (cocks, comcrap, time waster, etc), or some combination of one of them with some equally crappy DSL company (verysucky, American Titty&Twister, etc) that equals a duopoly, or some really crappy dialup or satellite service with absolutely suck-tastic lag and lousy bandwidth.
We don't have competition, so therefore, we don't have any choice. And the Republicrats and Demicans, may they both rot in fucking hell, don't do what's necessary to fix it because they're both in the pockets of the aforementioned monopolies.
While your response was flip, I can see a number of ISPs - who already have policies of "sorry all we support is Windows" if you call in because of trouble on the line, and who have script-following Indian monkeys who will demand to know your OS before talking about anything else to replace ACTUAL customer service - using this at Microsoft's behest.
"Ohh, sorry. You're running OSX or Linux? We can't scan those for their patches so we're just going to block you off. Come back when you have a nice Win7 box. Oh, you signed a contract for a year of service? If you read the 4-point fonted small type on page 37 you'll see it clearly states in paragraph 18 line 3 that only systems with fully updated Windows 7 and an active virus scan package from an approved vendor such as Symantec or McAfee will be allowed access to the internet in order to keep the service trouble-free..."
Maybe Apple would be able to cry foul and get their systems allowed too, but home Linux users would pretty much be out of luck. And so much for anyone who responsibly has a home system with a hardware NAT and their ports properly firewalled too...
The only hardware requirements are eyes and hands, and the only software requirement is a brain, neither of which will go out of style in my lifetime.
Surely you jest - didn't you know that brains are already fast going out of style?
Especially when we have two political parties, one of which has as its base an entrenched, uneducated set of idiots in urban ghettos, the other a base of entrenched, uneducated rural rednecks and each party happy to keep the system set up so that a real, solid, well-rounded education that includes critical thinking processes and actual techniques of learning (as opposed to memorizing stock answers to just barely pass standardized multiple-guess tests) is the last thing they will ever have the opportunity to experience?
Even worse when each of these parties campaigns on the idea that the other side's basically a collection of morons, and that they can have no valid points in any discussion at all?
It would seem the use of a brain has already gone out the window. Instead, we have to have instructions on a box of toothpicks, and warnings about "do not iron clothes while wearing them", lest some brain-donor injure themselves and launch a frivolous lawsuit that somehow winds up with a $millions judgement because they managed to fit 12 other brain-donors into the jury and win the Lawsuit Lottery?
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why you don't want to let any religion get their hands on your government - whether it's a nutjob cult set up by an early 19th century lunatic, a 7th century pedophile, or even a rather kindly gentleman whose major accomplishment was sitting on his ass under a tree for a month and a half.
Ultimately, we want to get religion out of government as much as possible. If something is universal - say, prohibitions on murder or theft - then we can certainly all agree to implement them in a secular manner. But I shouldn't be restricted from buying some beer on my one day off each week just because a bunch of fundamentalist shitheads think I should be wasting my morning praying to their sun god.
You missed the point - he offered to pay WHATEVER IT TOOK.
Instead, these assholes let the house burn, killing the pets, and the "Mayor" defends this.
They should all be fired and then stand trial for animal cruelty. Period.
I for one feel it's safe to assume Iran is right
Oh geez. Iran is the same nation where beheadings are common (as is cousin and even double-cousin marriage), women have to be kept in beekeeper outfits for fear some Iranian neanderthal male will see an ankle and go on a rampage of rape and destruction...
Oh. I get it. Your post was tongue-in-cheek. Whew, for a second there I thought you were as insane as the Iranians!
I'm going with my original guess from the last time this was posted - most likely, Stuxnet was either the result of a pissed-off former Siemens employee, or of a competing PLC manufacturer somewhere in Asia or Russia getting the "bright idea" to hire on a mafia or yakuza group with some programmers (the same guys who code worms to set up botnets and run "pay us or we DDoS you, crash your system" extortion scams) to make the world think "OMG don't use Siemens, better use someone else instead, those Siemens things can't be trusted."
Hey, we have one here in the US! They call themselves the "New York Mint" and claim they are constantly "unearthing" rare/valuable coins from hidden treasure troves, old swiss bank vaults, etc.
On the one hand, doing things like this makes 'Anonymous' look bad, and by association, then makes what they are supporting look bad and hands ammunition to the MafiAA and bully groups whose perspective is "fuck the consumer, down with consumer rights."
On the other hand, simply protesting verbally and writing letters, even writing letters to congresscritters, seems to do only two things: jack and shit.
And on the gripping hand...
Actually, sometimes you need to leave "tact" aside and actually teach history.
This one is pretty clear - you can be in the role of attempting to escape, or see what it was like for the guards. TFA finally gets around to pointing out that players who choose to shoot and kill those who attempt escape face the consequences for their actions by having their character stand trial later for the crime. They also give the choice of killing or not killing.
Too many people want to put an entire discussion into pure binary good-and-evil, or rewrite the history books in many cases. It doesn't help. And you can certainly make a real simulation of a tough situation without "glorifying" violence.
Siemens chips were targeted BECAUSE Iran's nuclear program relies on them.
Or, Siemens chips are used all over the fucking planet, and someone with a grudge/competition motive against Siemens targeted them simply because they were Siemens.
You're starting from your bias and trying to justify your conclusion later. It doesn't work.
Or it could be a disgruntled Siemens employee or two.
Or it could be a dishonest competitor with connections to organized crime hiring their programmers for some dirty "sabotage" work - just think if every Siemens controller started going wonky, what companies that make competing PLC's stand to gain?
The reality is, conjecturing "Israel rawr" is the function of a bunch of people with previous axes to grind, not based on anything remotely substantial in terms of evidence. Someone else pointed out above that if we run calculations based on the idea of a team of 6-8 programmers, the likelihood of "May 9 1979" being just one of the programmers' birthday is pretty substantial.
It makes a big-ass scare for a German company (Siemens) that their PLC's may not be safe to purchase.
Yakuza and Russian Mafia have their hands in certain competing manufacturing companies, certainly...
They have no intention of stopping until they've slaughtered every Arab baby in the world.
You do realize, simply by the weight of numbers, how absolutely batshit insane you sound?
You're still operating under the faulty assumption it's against Iran.
Who else does Iran sell these PLC's to?
admittedly a bit of a stretch as you note, there are also references to "Myrtus" within a path left in the code. Myrtus, a type of myrtle, is possibly a biblical reference to the Book of Esther (Esther was originally called Hadassah - similar to the Hebrew word for myrtle)
So now we're working off the "this word sounds like this word which is another word for this word" theory?
Lessee. "May" is a synonym with "shall"... which sounds a lot like "challa"... which is a lovely tasty breadstuff usually eaten by... JEWS! AAAUGH! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!
Of course, that's the point of all this meaningless bullshit. You're looking for obscure connections trying to "prove" your own biases. Nothing more.