Actually, I don't like this new tactic of a major version number increment every 3 months or so. I think it was helpful to think of the major version number as a really big, API-breaking change that didn't happen very often, with minor version numbers representing significant but not too major evolutions of functionality.
This new scheme means we'll have Firefox 40 by about 2020. I predict that somewhere before that, they'll either stop the major version increments, or drop the emphasis on major version number altogether and just call it 'Firefox'.
If by 'streamlined' you mean 'tiny icons with all the colour sucked out of them, apparently so they could copy Chrome/Safari/IE9', then yeah.:-)
Personally I much prefer the larger 24x24 colourful icons you could have with the earlier Firefox versions. Luckily there's a theme that reverts the toolbar look and feel to that of Firefox 3. If anyone's interested; it's here: Firefox 3 theme for Firefox 4
I like quite a few things about Firefox 4. Its Javascript performance is clearly improved. The one thing I'm not a big fan of is the new minimalist GUI. The icons are too small, they have all the colour sucked out of them, and there are no 24x24 icons on Windows/OSX anymore. It does seem a lot like copying Chrome for copying's sake.
Luckily there's a theme that gets back all the Firefox 3 colourful toolbar goodness (and includes its larger icons), if anyone's interested. It's here: Firefox 3 theme for Firefox 4
Keeping spent fuel rods in open pools that need constant cooling not to boil off, though, is incredibly stupid. This being a problem was foreseeable, even in the 60s.
The sad fact is that this kind of heroism simply wouldn't have been necessary had the Japanese government/TEPCO taken safety more seriously instead of covering up problems and doing things on the cheap.
Damn the cost, Japan is one of the world's richest and most capable economies. If they can build high quality bullet trains, they can make sure their nuclear plants within range of major population centres (basically all of them) are safe given their location. Passive cooling for plants, and/or ability for backup systems to operate underwater.
After the dust (radioactive or otherwise) settles on this, the Japanese need to have a serious safety review of all their nuke plants and nuclear safety policy in general. I say this because I want nuclear power to succeed... it won't if many more of these happen.
To put this in perspective, natural background radiation is aproximately 1-3 mSv per year , while at 10.000mSv death is to be expected.
You mean 10,000 (ten thousand).
What's with this irritating Europe-style switching of the command and decimal point in English? I see it more and more. It might be what they do in Europe but in English, using the decimal there is rather misleading.
Can anyone over there in Japan give me a better picture about the likelihood of TEPCO and the Japanese government having their feet held to the fire over this nuclear power plant's still being in operation?
The hysterical Western media aside, this is an extremely bad situation for a nuclear power plant to even be able to get to in this day and age. By my limited understanding, the reason it's still in operation is basically because the Japanese government have let TEPCO get away with safety coverups and shortcuts on a regular basis, despite the IAEA warning them about this plant being dangerous. I support nuclear power, but these old plants really need to be replaced by modern, safe ones, and it looks like Japan is in desperate need of an attitude change towards its nuclear safety policy.
Is such a change likely to happen now? Are those responsable for the lack of nuclear safety (yes, I call running a 50 year old nuclear plant near-enough to Tokyo that isn't designed for an extraordinarily large earthquakes/tsunamis in a region renowned for moderate ones, unsafe) likely to be brought to justice? Or is the culture between the Japanese government/TEPCO similar to that between the US government and ExxonMobil?
If it will be possible to send messages to the past, then in the future we would have managed it. That would mean we'd be receiving messages now (or who knows, hundreds of years ago) so we'd know they will succeed. As we're not receiving messages now, they mustn't have succeeded... or they must have decided not to use it. Or they're sending the messages but we don't have the tech to decode them.:-)
Hmm, I wonder if they can send a message to Japan in 2000 to tell them to decommission Fukushima nuclear plant?
And it isn't just the media. A retarded politicial from Germany, made the EU Energy commissioner (Guenther Oettinger) said he thought the word 'apocalypse' was well-chosen to describe the situation at the plant. In Europe, some give these politicians quite a lot of respect.
The fact that the 50-year-old nuclear facility was unable to cope with the wave. Or more specifically, the fact that it was still running given that it was badly designed and many people had seen that it was an accident waiting to happen.
It's a once-in-1000-years event, which in engineering is a rather acceptable risk to take.
Um, bullshit? The typical life of a nuclear plant is 50 years. That gives a 1-in-20 chance of this occurring during the life of the plant. It's near enough to Tokyo, the most inhabited metropolitan area in the world with 35 million people.
I support nuclear power because modern plants can be safe, but the negative image for nuclear power and potential health damage this may cause make me want to weep.
When building bridges, the effects of mistakes will be quite limited. With nuclear power plants, they will make entire regions uninhabitable forever.
I don't know if you're joking, but ONE nuclear power plant made ONE region uninhabitable for a period of time, in the worst nuclear power accident ever. No other plant has ever cause remotely as much damage, and even Chernobyl radiation levels are falling now and 'uninhabitable' would be a seriously disingenuous description.
They're freaking me out with making it go away, then bringing it back only it's broken, etc.
Agreed that taking it away sucked, but what is it about the new style that is 'broken'? I'm using FF4 beta 12 now and it seems to be working as intended - popping up for loading status messages or URLs when I hover over links.
And yeah, give me a 'clunky' (read: functional) UI any day over minimalist Chrome. The first thing I do with FF4 is configure large icons mode with icons and text, and add a bunch of buttons back in. And install my FF3 theme because the default FF4 theme seems dull and horrible to me.
And of course, it's only usable when the moon is above the horizon.
I might be missing something here, but isn't the moon always visible from somewhere on Earth? You'd need maybe 2 or 3 receivers (USA, Spain, Australia?)
Slashdot Mirror
The solution to this problem has something to do with Homer Simpson's ass.
Strikes me that the time is ripe for an Eighth Amendment challenge.
How's Bradley Manning's 8th amendment challenge getting on?
Actually, I don't like this new tactic of a major version number increment every 3 months or so. I think it was helpful to think of the major version number as a really big, API-breaking change that didn't happen very often, with minor version numbers representing significant but not too major evolutions of functionality.
This new scheme means we'll have Firefox 40 by about 2020. I predict that somewhere before that, they'll either stop the major version increments, or drop the emphasis on major version number altogether and just call it 'Firefox'.
The interface is somewhat streamlined.
If by 'streamlined' you mean 'tiny icons with all the colour sucked out of them, apparently so they could copy Chrome/Safari/IE9', then yeah. :-)
Personally I much prefer the larger 24x24 colourful icons you could have with the earlier Firefox versions. Luckily there's a theme that reverts the toolbar look and feel to that of Firefox 3. If anyone's interested; it's here:
Firefox 3 theme for Firefox 4
I like quite a few things about Firefox 4. Its Javascript performance is clearly improved. The one thing I'm not a big fan of is the new minimalist GUI. The icons are too small, they have all the colour sucked out of them, and there are no 24x24 icons on Windows/OSX anymore. It does seem a lot like copying Chrome for copying's sake.
Luckily there's a theme that gets back all the Firefox 3 colourful toolbar goodness (and includes its larger icons), if anyone's interested. It's here:
Firefox 3 theme for Firefox 4
You want 50 wives?
Are you insane?
No, just a mormon.
Thank god there have always been humans with guns around to control the deer population, or there'd be infinity deers by now.
Texas: Most of your army comes from Texas.
Yep.
Keeping spent fuel rods in open pools that need constant cooling not to boil off, though, is incredibly stupid. This being a problem was foreseeable, even in the 60s.
The sad fact is that this kind of heroism simply wouldn't have been necessary had the Japanese government/TEPCO taken safety more seriously instead of covering up problems and doing things on the cheap.
Damn the cost, Japan is one of the world's richest and most capable economies. If they can build high quality bullet trains, they can make sure their nuclear plants within range of major population centres (basically all of them) are safe given their location. Passive cooling for plants, and/or ability for backup systems to operate underwater.
After the dust (radioactive or otherwise) settles on this, the Japanese need to have a serious safety review of all their nuke plants and nuclear safety policy in general. I say this because I want nuclear power to succeed... it won't if many more of these happen.
And of course by command, I clearly meant comma.
To put this in perspective, natural background radiation is aproximately 1-3 mSv per year , while at 10.000mSv death is to be expected.
You mean 10,000 (ten thousand).
What's with this irritating Europe-style switching of the command and decimal point in English? I see it more and more. It might be what they do in Europe but in English, using the decimal there is rather misleading.
As far as I know, transporting spent fuel rods is hazardous and therefore very expensive. They therefore make things cheaper by storing them on-site.
Level-headed. Unfortunately, what's actually going to happen in most countries is the green movement dominating the discussion and the *NO NUCLEAR, ALL RENEWABLE!!!* crowd will win out in the mainstream public opinion. Germany is already headed for a nuclear-free situation, even though that means 75% of their power coming from fossil fuels. The US is headed in that direction and has been for a long time. The UK's new nuclear plants may well be under threat thanks to this disaster. In France, "Sortir du nucléaire" campaigns for the replacement of nuclear power with something else in a country which gets 70-80% of its power from nuclear plants which have an impeccable safety record. The list goes on. I can't really see nuclear having much of a future given the public perception now. I wouldn't even be surprised in research for nuclear fusion gets dropped because it has the word 'nuclear' in it. :-(
I don't like the minimalist toolbar interface. The only browser I can still customize to get away from that is Firefox.
Can anyone over there in Japan give me a better picture about the likelihood of TEPCO and the Japanese government having their feet held to the fire over this nuclear power plant's still being in operation?
The hysterical Western media aside, this is an extremely bad situation for a nuclear power plant to even be able to get to in this day and age. By my limited understanding, the reason it's still in operation is basically because the Japanese government have let TEPCO get away with safety coverups and shortcuts on a regular basis, despite the IAEA warning them about this plant being dangerous. I support nuclear power, but these old plants really need to be replaced by modern, safe ones, and it looks like Japan is in desperate need of an attitude change towards its nuclear safety policy.
Is such a change likely to happen now? Are those responsable for the lack of nuclear safety (yes, I call running a 50 year old nuclear plant near-enough to Tokyo that isn't designed for an extraordinarily large earthquakes/tsunamis in a region renowned for moderate ones, unsafe) likely to be brought to justice? Or is the culture between the Japanese government/TEPCO similar to that between the US government and ExxonMobil?
Wait, wait, wait.
If it will be possible to send messages to the past, then in the future we would have managed it. That would mean we'd be receiving messages now (or who knows, hundreds of years ago) so we'd know they will succeed. As we're not receiving messages now, they mustn't have succeeded... or they must have decided not to use it. Or they're sending the messages but we don't have the tech to decode them. :-)
Hmm, I wonder if they can send a message to Japan in 2000 to tell them to decommission Fukushima nuclear plant?
And it isn't just the media. A retarded politicial from Germany, made the EU Energy commissioner (Guenther Oettinger) said he thought the word 'apocalypse' was well-chosen to describe the situation at the plant. In Europe, some give these politicians quite a lot of respect.
The fact that the 50-year-old nuclear facility was unable to cope with the wave. Or more specifically, the fact that it was still running given that it was badly designed and many people had seen that it was an accident waiting to happen.
It's a once-in-1000-years event, which in engineering is a rather acceptable risk to take.
Um, bullshit? The typical life of a nuclear plant is 50 years. That gives a 1-in-20 chance of this occurring during the life of the plant. It's near enough to Tokyo, the most inhabited metropolitan area in the world with 35 million people.
I support nuclear power because modern plants can be safe, but the negative image for nuclear power and potential health damage this may cause make me want to weep.
Comparing Chernobyl's hideously obsolete design (literally, "squash court" obsolete!)
Care to explain what you mean by that?
When building bridges, the effects of mistakes will be quite limited. With nuclear power plants, they will make entire regions uninhabitable forever.
I don't know if you're joking, but ONE nuclear power plant made ONE region uninhabitable for a period of time, in the worst nuclear power accident ever. No other plant has ever cause remotely as much damage, and even Chernobyl radiation levels are falling now and 'uninhabitable' would be a seriously disingenuous description.
Who actually thought up this way of doing things in the US legal system, and why didn't they realize it would decend into this?
They're freaking me out with making it go away, then bringing it back only it's broken, etc.
Agreed that taking it away sucked, but what is it about the new style that is 'broken'? I'm using FF4 beta 12 now and it seems to be working as intended - popping up for loading status messages or URLs when I hover over links.
And yeah, give me a 'clunky' (read: functional) UI any day over minimalist Chrome. The first thing I do with FF4 is configure large icons mode with icons and text, and add a bunch of buttons back in. And install my FF3 theme because the default FF4 theme seems dull and horrible to me.
And of course, it's only usable when the moon is above the horizon.
I might be missing something here, but isn't the moon always visible from somewhere on Earth? You'd need maybe 2 or 3 receivers (USA, Spain, Australia?)