Well, he does have a point. I personally have largely switched to console gaming, despite the inferior graphics to my gaming PC, the imprecise controller and the noise, simply for less hassle.
I can play single player games offline as much as I like. Even the DLC, bundled or not, works offline. I can even resell my game after I'm finished with it, instead of it being permanently associated with my email address! Imagine that. Legitimate PC gaming is absolutely riddled with DRM. Even steam games come with extra DRM on top, in addition to steam's stopping me sharing games with my wife while I also want to play.
It takes real business genius to make the paid product worth LESS than the free version you can grab from the pirate bay.
it is more aimed at people who do not identify themselves as pirates but who just loan their discs to their mates. want to sell their property after they're done with it.
Modern DRM isn't about preventing piracy. It fails spectacularly at that. Not is it about preventing casual no-skill copying (a simple cd-check does that). Those one-use install codes that create an online account? And the constant online checking you're logged in with that account? The 3x install limit via online activation?
These are about blocking resale. You buy a book, a DVD film, a 360 game. You can sell it on after you're done with it. PC games? Stuck with it. Well, until the authorisation server goes down, and then you've got a worthless bit of plastic.
Online download services? Well, steam doesn't even let you give the password to your brother or your wife, and you can't login twice at the same time. So say I have a copy of TF2, and a copy of COD whatever. If they're retail disks, at least I can play one even with the DRM, and the other can play the other online too. Buy the same games on steam? Now you can't. One game at a time. Plus you get whatever studio DRM, such as always online (no offline mode!) or install limits on top too these days.
GOG may be selling DRM-free old games, but I already have those - been gaming a looong time. But despite having a good gaming PC, I mostly suck it up and play on the 360 for new games, inferior graphics and clumsy controller and all because I'm simply sick and tired of the goddamn hassle of PC gaming and the ever tightening restrictions.
- Make copyright law more absurd, thus making it easier for large corporations to completely bankrupt anyone that tries to exercise their rights AND implement technical measures (DRM etc) such that customers who are unable or unwilling to breach copyright via the internet get less and less rights and utility out of the works and hardware they purchase copies of.
See: Loss of right of resale, i.e. first sale doctrine, via one-use registration codes or outright tying of purchase to a non-transferable account (steam, pretty much all retail pc games) See: blocking using MP3s as ringtones on mobile handsets, forcing repeat purchase of already owned music See: plays-for-sure See: Recording industry suing amazon cloud service for not buying additional licences to store music that users have already paid for - including MP3s from amazon itself See: do-not-record bit on broadcast media See: HDCP etc making it harder for people with otherwise compatible equipment watching, recording, or legitimately backing up their HD media. See: Apple lobbying (though thankfully failing) to make rooting the iphone illegal under the DMCA. See: Sony suing the bejesus out of geohot et al to try and put the jailbreak genie of the PS3 back in the bottle.
etc, etc, etc.
This is a war. And they are winning the battles while losing the war. While copyright as currently implemented is absurd, and getting more so, there's a lot of damage being caused to legitimate uses - and users - while the big content middle-men flail around trying to stay relevant and stop losing the money they think they're due.
The problem is the word 'unreasonable' there. Us and the courts are interpreting that word very differently.
Court: It's perfectly reasonable for customs to impound and search at their leisure anything that might have terrorist or drug related material on it that crosses the border, or is suspected of crossing the border, so we'll just say they can impound any kit they like within 50 miles of the border. You know, for the safety of this great nation. And probably the children.
"help students understand, analyze, critique, and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories covered in the course being taught," namely, "biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming, and human cloning."
partner preference, abortion, unsafe health conditions, or stem cells?
Nope, they're not 'protected' subjects in this bill. Only if you want to teach creationism or anti-global warming propaganda can the school not fire you for teaching it.
Going FTA, the point is they don't need a warrant at all for email older than 6 months that's not stored locally. Law enforcement just tell your webmail/IMAP provider to cough it up, and it's theirs. Stuff newer than 6 months is protected by probable cause - i.e. they need an existing reason to think there's evidence of a specific crime in your newer than 6 month email to get a warrant; but older than that? 'Abandoned'. Even if it's part of a current email account that you use daily online, anything older than 6 months is fair game for fishing expeditions.
James A. Baker, associate deputy attorney general: "Congress should recognize the collateral consequences to criminal law enforcement and the national security of the United States if ECPA were to provide only one means — a probable cause warrant — for compelling disclosure of all stored content. For example, in order to obtain a search warrant for a particular e-mail account, law enforcement has to establish probable cause to believe that evidence will be found in that particular account. In some cases, this link can be hard to establish. In one recent case, for example, law enforcement officers knew that a child exploitation subject had used one account to send and receive child pornography, and officers discovered that he had another email account, but they lacked evidence about his use of the second account."
So they were able to go on a fishing expedition, and then find evidence to get probable cause to go after his current email in his main account. And that is a reason to always allow law enforcement to go for a fishing expedition in your email. Sheesh.
Moral of this story? Archive any email older than 6 months to local disk unless you don't mind law enforcement having free rein to read it at will. Or host it all outside the US; the EU has strong data protection laws, for example.
Corium lava (molten mixture of fuel rods, cladding and control rods) is not real lava - it's liquid metal, and can be up 2400 degC. Melting through the reactor vessel itself takes away heat energy. When it first encounters concrete, sure it starts to eat into the concrete - but that takes up a lot of energy, and it rapidly cools the corium. Combine that with it spreading out into a thin layer instead of a hot ball, and water pumped into the concrete containment, and the corium lava melts into the concrete somewhat, and then is cooled sufficiently until it can no longer decompose concrete. And is Contained. That is why they call it Containment.
The problem is if it becomes self-sustaining again, and generates more heat, rather than just having the decay heat left over from the initial meltdown. Then all bets are off. But if the mass stays sub-critical, a sufficient depth of concrete plus water WILL contain corium meltdown.
Decomposition of concrete and volatilization of the alkali metal compounds consumes substantial amount of heat. The fast erosion phase of the concrete basemat lasts for about an hour and progresses into about one meter depth, then slows to several centimeters per hour, and stops completely when the melt cools below the decomposition temperature of concrete (about 1400C).
The containment should indeed allow the fuel to spread out thinner to make it easier to cool/stop it going critical again in the first place, and they can (and have) pumped water into the concrete containment in case the reactor has been breached, which is only a theory at this point. The fuel reaching criticality again is not a big risk, the containment design is specifically designed to stop it doing that.
However, it's not a *zero* risk, especially given we don't know how much damage, if any, has been done to the containment in reactor #2 (or #1, or #3) by the hydrogen explosions there earlier in the crisis.
Personally, I don't think we'll find out as they seem to have the coolant system back under control, so will continue to pump water into the reactors and fuel storage pools, which means it shouldn't get bad enough for much worse to happen. Maybe some minor runoff leaks from cracks in the containment meaning it's not a good idea to drink the local groundwater (i.e. within a few miles of the plant) for a while is the worst I'm thinking we'll see.
Yeah, reactor 4, the risk is the used fuel storage pond (as you say, the reactor was offline at the time) - which doesn't have the same level of containment as the reactor itself. Interestingly enough, one analysis I read said the reason there were problems with sufficient coolant at 1-3 (causing the hydrogen explosions) was their focus on getting coolant to the more-fuel-than-usual pool at #4 in the initial few hours, especially given it's containment is not as good as that around the reactors. The hydrogen fire at #4 shows it's fairly likely some of the rods there became exposed for a time at least which will have cause god knows what damage (not like they're sending people in for a looksee any time soon), so I doubt reactor #4 will ever be used again either.
As a serious question: Is the bottom lined concrete thick enough to stop any radiation from leaking through it? if not, then the 'planned failure mode' has a significant flaw IMO.
Yes, it's thick enough. It's also designed so molten fuel that melts through the reactor vessel into the concrete containment (which is what appears to have happened in reactor 2, at least) can be cooled by water and probably boric acid, and it also spreads the fuel out to help cool it down. So far, it's doing what it was designed to do - contain molten fuel 'lava' that has breached the reactor itself.
The problem is, the containment vessel (sort of an inverted concrete lightbulb) was also damaged when they vented hydrogen - which exploded - from the reactors when they first had trouble with the coolant flow (very hot fuel+not enough water caused the water to literally boil instantly and some of it broke down into hydrogen). Most of the damage was done to the building roof, not the main containment, as it was designed to do, but it would appear there is a leak of some sort in at least one of the containment vessels, the most problematic of which is reactor 2.
likewise, what if the core melts through that concrete?
Bad stuff. In order for that to happen, the fuel would have to mass together sufficiently, without enough cooling or control rod remnants mixed in to allow the fuel to reach criticality again - i.e. restart the nuclear reaction in an uncontrolled fashion, which may make it hot enough to melt through the concrete containment floor, and keep on going until it hits groundwater causing serious contamination, or if it hits enough ground water, a steam explosion spraying radioactive material into the air. That's not terribly likely though, especially if they can keep pumping coolant into the reactor and the concrete containment.
The biggest current risk, as we're seeing, is that radiation leaks from the hydrogen explosion damaged containment vessel; stopping them patching the breach, and sufficient radioactive material escapes containment via the leak and manages to escape the building via another route, also contaminating groundwater, but by nowhere as much as a complete failure of containment would mean.
Reactors 1-4 will never be used again. But burying them in concrete is absolutely the wrong thing to do. Right now, the cores are still hot enough to melt through the reactor vessel if not constantly cooled by constant pumping of (now) fresh water through the coolant system.
Worst case scenario (though not hugely likely) - water stops getting in, or stops cooling the fuel rods, they melt down through the reactor into the outer containment vessel, and there's not enough left of the control rods mixed in to prevent the molten fuel reaching criticality again, and it then gets hot enough to melt through the containment itself, then either contaminate groudwater, or even worse, hit enough water to cause a steam explosion, spreading radioactive elements for miles around.
It's going to take *years* to decommission these plants after the damage they've suffered from the quake and tsunami. No doubt some sort of concrete shroud will be part of the final solution, but right now, keeping control of the coolant flow in both the reactors and the used fuel ponds is the top priority, closely followed by patching any leaks from the containment vessels caused by the multiple hydrogen fires/explosions.
They're now shipping a new variant of the san francisco (silently) that has a different screen on it. Which screws up cyanogenmod as the touchscreen driver doesn't work for the new screen; and if you didn't take a back up of the original firmware, putting the published orange firmware back on it has the same problem, as it's for the old variant also.
Still a great phone for the money, especially once unlocked for free, but my mate got bitten by this last week. Fortunately, he backed up his original firmware.
Assigning/64 spaces to users is by design. IPv6 is a 128 bit address space. The first 64 bits are used for the globally routable address space, the last 64 bits are created by the hosts. The simple implementation is the ISP gives you a single routable 64-bit address, and then you stick your MAC address (on more strictly, the link-layer address) in as the last 64 bits - and bingo, you have a unique routable 128-bit IPv6 address per machine. If you want privacy, you just randomly generate the last 64-bits, which windows does by default, and linux can do with a simple option. With a 64-bit address space to play with, you're unlikely to get collisions.
It makes network routing and reconfiguration much simpler. Your IPv6 router advertises the first 64-bit address space the client can use, and the client handles the rest. Change ISP, or tunnel broker? Just change the routable prefix, and your clients will update automatically.
Yes, it means you're 'wasting' the last 64-bit of the address space by only using it for a few users; but with 5×10^28 addresses available per person on the planet, assigning 18x10^18 per ISP end connection still leaves unimaginably large amounts of the IPv6 address space free. In percentage terms, a single/64 is still far, far, far smaller than a single IPv4 address, and it drastically simplifies routing and configuration, by design.
BIg ISP's already have equipment to perform realtime deep packet inspection on their user's traffic - it's cheaper to put everything through say, sandvine DPI equipment to throttle the hell out of P2P traffic than to buy in more capacity. *Every* mainstream British ISP throttles torrent traffic at least for part of the day, and they all have quotas - again, managed as part of the same equipment.
Yes, providing akamai caches inside the ISP network in order to speed up access is one thing, but that's not what they're talking about. They're talking about using the DPI kit to put certain traffic at the top of the priority, and leave those who haven't paid the extortion fee down in the same slow lane they relegate P2P traffic to.
My galaxy S lasts 2 days in normal use, no problem. I just carry an additional battery when on long trips. Lighter and way cheaper than another phone and call plan. Why the additional call plan? Well, I like being able to use the internet and email when away from my own wifi. After all, that's *why* I bought a smartphone. I used to do the PDA and small phone combo for years. A single smart phone in your pocket is way simpler and more convenient.
I mod my phone though - the galaxy S isn't as easy to mod as say, the Nexus 1, but it's still simple enough, and there's so really nice tweaks in the custom roms. There are plenty of android phone makers who don't make life hard for people who want to use their own hardware their own way - so vote with your wallet, don't buy Motorola.
Android only grabs information your friends have already made available to you. You can go any view any of those phone numbers manually on facebook.com when you're logged in. You're correct to warn friends that they are publishing a phone number, if you know they wouldn't want it published. This isn't android's fault though, it's just collecting the information your friends have made available to you on facebook.
Google 'knows' about your facebook account because you're presumably putting some information on your public profile; it looks at facebook account names, compares them to your google account name, and takes a guess at a match. It's trying to be helpful! I find adding facebook data to my phone quite handy, as there's contacts on there (with say, email addresses) that update their information when it changes, I don't have to update it manually my end. It also syncs with the calendar for birthdays, etc.
Note - it's a one way sync. Android (and google) don't put any of your google contacts into facebook. They just pull information from your logged in account to combine with your phone contacts. It doesn't copy any of it to your google contacts or phone contacts, it keeps them separate. It does auto show facebook contacts and google/phone contacts together when they have the same name. You can turn *that* off under the contacts settings, and you'll see them as entirely separate lists.
If you want to turn off the facebook integration, just goto settings/accounts and remove the facebook sync account you have there. That's what's linking your phone to facebook.
I don't know about the HTC app, but the samsung one that came with my phone uses the underlying android facebook sync. So when you logged into the facebook app, you gave it permission to well, connect to your facebook profile. Facebook do have their own official app and widget in the android market - IIRC, it does also autosync with contacts and calendar, but you can turn that off and still use the app.
Perhaps they could have got someone left handed in the office to hold it for a bit and notice the massive signal drop off. I know, we only make up 15% of the population, but we're not *that* hard to find.
Tell that to the people that have had their car number plate cloned for a similar model car, and end up getting speeding tickets and congestion charges for driving in London, despite not doing anything of the sort. And good luck getting the police to believe that's not your car and number plate in the photos.
The problem is not the openess (or not) of people's data. It's that it's trivially abused as personal data is often used as some form of ID, not least by banks, credit agencies, police and shops.
duckduckgo is still mainly google with a dictionary bolted on top with common words, and most of the adverts stripped out. Well, that and ssl support, and no perma-cookie.
I do use it because of the latter two reasons, but the actual search part for anything other than common nouns is pure google.
Lawyers don't file suits for the hell of it. They do it because they're hired to beat someone else in court.
Who hires them? Big business. Who makes it easy for them by avoiding legislation for tort reform, and making new laws that are a lawyer's paradise? Politicians who were former lawyers, as you say.
So it's not just the legal system. It's the whole culture that thinks lawsuits are the solution to any problem, a society that completely mistrusts government to regulate properly, so end up voting in complete scumbags because they had a better funded ad campaign, a society that worships big business; allowing them to buy elections, buy laws, buy politicians outright, buy media stations and broadcast lies, and sue anyone and anything that competes with them or they don't like into oblivion in a legal, social and political environment that positively encourages that.
It's a much bigger clusterfuck than just shooting all the lawyers will fix.
Mugabe holds elections. And his thugs try to swing the result by beating up the opposition and threatening. Problem is when he loses, as he did at the last election, he rigs the results so he still wins. And shoots and beats up opposition members some more. His thugs keep him in power, keeping the people afraid of him, and he justifies everything bad that happens to the country as a result of British and American foreign interference, instead of being a result of his disastrous policies.
I don't believe western governments should get in the habit of assassinating foreign politicians, not least because of the example it sets, but it's hard to see how Mugabe will ever be removed from power without a coup of some sort, likely resulting in many deaths of the public.
The last thing zimbabwe needs on top of its other problems is a civil war.
We require training and driving licences because failure to control a ton and a half of metal and plastic at high speeds can easily kill people, including the driver.
Your mom getting a virus, thus needing you to go and clean her machine yet again does not rise to quite the same level of public safety. What's the next licence, being allowed to use a mobile phone in a public place?
It's also a negative impression for youtube itself - several times I've hit an unskippable ad before the video I was linked to started playing - and I've just hit the back button as I'm not going to sit through a 30-60 second ad, the video isn't *that* interesting. Keep that up too much, and I'd probably just stop using youtube altogether.
Being able to skip the ad after 5 seconds? I can tolerate that much.
'Anna Ardin (the official complainant) is often described by the media as a “leftist”. She has ties to the US-financed anti-Castro and anti-communist groups. She published her anti-Castro diatribes in the Swedish-language publication Revista de Asignaturas Cubanas put out by Misceláneas de Cuba. From Oslo, Professor Michael Seltzer points out that this periodical is the product of a well-financed anti-Castro organization in Sweden. He further notes that the group is connected with Union Liberal Cubana led by Carlos Alberto Montaner whose CIA ties were exposed. Note that Ardin was deported from Cuba for subversive activities. In Cuba she interacted with the feminist anti-Castro group Las damas de blanco (the Ladies in White). This group receives US government funds and the convicted anti-communist terrorist Luis Posada Carriles is a friend and supporter. Wikipedia quotes Hebe de Bonafini, president of the Argentine Madres de Plaza de Mayo as saying that “the so-called Ladies in White defend the terrorism of the United States.”'
So Anna Ardin with close ties to the CIA, and her close friend, supposedly had sex with Assange, and it was rape? While I'm not one to dismiss a claim of rape lightly at all, this accusation stinks of a CIA smear job.
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Well, he does have a point. I personally have largely switched to console gaming, despite the inferior graphics to my gaming PC, the imprecise controller and the noise, simply for less hassle.
I can play single player games offline as much as I like. Even the DLC, bundled or not, works offline. I can even resell my game after I'm finished with it, instead of it being permanently associated with my email address! Imagine that. Legitimate PC gaming is absolutely riddled with DRM. Even steam games come with extra DRM on top, in addition to steam's stopping me sharing games with my wife while I also want to play.
It takes real business genius to make the paid product worth LESS than the free version you can grab from the pirate bay.
it is more aimed at people who do not identify themselves as pirates but who just loan their discs to their mates. want to sell their property after they're done with it.
Modern DRM isn't about preventing piracy. It fails spectacularly at that. Not is it about preventing casual no-skill copying (a simple cd-check does that). Those one-use install codes that create an online account? And the constant online checking you're logged in with that account? The 3x install limit via online activation?
These are about blocking resale. You buy a book, a DVD film, a 360 game. You can sell it on after you're done with it. PC games? Stuck with it. Well, until the authorisation server goes down, and then you've got a worthless bit of plastic.
Online download services? Well, steam doesn't even let you give the password to your brother or your wife, and you can't login twice at the same time. So say I have a copy of TF2, and a copy of COD whatever. If they're retail disks, at least I can play one even with the DRM, and the other can play the other online too.
Buy the same games on steam? Now you can't. One game at a time. Plus you get whatever studio DRM, such as always online (no offline mode!) or install limits on top too these days.
GOG may be selling DRM-free old games, but I already have those - been gaming a looong time. But despite having a good gaming PC, I mostly suck it up and play on the 360 for new games, inferior graphics and clumsy controller and all because I'm simply sick and tired of the goddamn hassle of PC gaming and the ever tightening restrictions.
You forgot option 4:
- Make copyright law more absurd, thus making it easier for large corporations to completely bankrupt anyone that tries to exercise their rights AND implement technical measures (DRM etc) such that customers who are unable or unwilling to breach copyright via the internet get less and less rights and utility out of the works and hardware they purchase copies of.
See: Loss of right of resale, i.e. first sale doctrine, via one-use registration codes or outright tying of purchase to a non-transferable account (steam, pretty much all retail pc games)
See: blocking using MP3s as ringtones on mobile handsets, forcing repeat purchase of already owned music
See: plays-for-sure
See: Recording industry suing amazon cloud service for not buying additional licences to store music that users have already paid for - including MP3s from amazon itself
See: do-not-record bit on broadcast media
See: HDCP etc making it harder for people with otherwise compatible equipment watching, recording, or legitimately backing up their HD media.
See: Apple lobbying (though thankfully failing) to make rooting the iphone illegal under the DMCA.
See: Sony suing the bejesus out of geohot et al to try and put the jailbreak genie of the PS3 back in the bottle.
etc, etc, etc.
This is a war. And they are winning the battles while losing the war. While copyright as currently implemented is absurd, and getting more so, there's a lot of damage being caused to legitimate uses - and users - while the big content middle-men flail around trying to stay relevant and stop losing the money they think they're due.
The problem is the word 'unreasonable' there. Us and the courts are interpreting that word very differently.
Court: It's perfectly reasonable for customs to impound and search at their leisure anything that might have terrorist or drug related material on it that crosses the border, or is suspected of crossing the border, so we'll just say they can impound any kit they like within 50 miles of the border. You know, for the safety of this great nation. And probably the children.
Us: WTF?
And quoting from the Bill;
"help students understand, analyze, critique, and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories covered in the course being taught," namely, "biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming, and human cloning."
partner preference, abortion, unsafe health conditions, or stem cells?
Nope, they're not 'protected' subjects in this bill. Only if you want to teach creationism or anti-global warming propaganda can the school not fire you for teaching it.
Going FTA, the point is they don't need a warrant at all for email older than 6 months that's not stored locally. Law enforcement just tell your webmail/IMAP provider to cough it up, and it's theirs. Stuff newer than 6 months is protected by probable cause - i.e. they need an existing reason to think there's evidence of a specific crime in your newer than 6 month email to get a warrant; but older than that? 'Abandoned'. Even if it's part of a current email account that you use daily online, anything older than 6 months is fair game for fishing expeditions.
James A. Baker, associate deputy attorney general:
"Congress should recognize the collateral consequences to criminal law enforcement and the national security of the United States if ECPA were to provide only one means — a probable cause warrant — for compelling disclosure of all stored content. For example, in order to obtain a search warrant for a particular e-mail account, law enforcement has to establish probable cause to believe that evidence will be found in that particular account. In some cases, this link can be hard to establish. In one recent case, for example, law enforcement officers knew that a child exploitation subject had used one account to send and receive child pornography, and officers discovered that he had another email account, but they lacked evidence about his use of the second account."
So they were able to go on a fishing expedition, and then find evidence to get probable cause to go after his current email in his main account. And that is a reason to always allow law enforcement to go for a fishing expedition in your email. Sheesh.
Moral of this story? Archive any email older than 6 months to local disk unless you don't mind law enforcement having free rein to read it at will. Or host it all outside the US; the EU has strong data protection laws, for example.
Corium lava (molten mixture of fuel rods, cladding and control rods) is not real lava - it's liquid metal, and can be up 2400 degC. Melting through the reactor vessel itself takes away heat energy. When it first encounters concrete, sure it starts to eat into the concrete - but that takes up a lot of energy, and it rapidly cools the corium. Combine that with it spreading out into a thin layer instead of a hot ball, and water pumped into the concrete containment, and the corium lava melts into the concrete somewhat, and then is cooled sufficiently until it can no longer decompose concrete. And is Contained. That is why they call it Containment.
The problem is if it becomes self-sustaining again, and generates more heat, rather than just having the decay heat left over from the initial meltdown. Then all bets are off. But if the mass stays sub-critical, a sufficient depth of concrete plus water WILL contain corium meltdown.
Decomposition of concrete and volatilization of the alkali metal compounds consumes substantial amount of heat. The fast erosion phase of the concrete basemat lasts for about an hour and progresses into about one meter depth, then slows to several centimeters per hour, and stops completely when the melt cools below the decomposition temperature of concrete (about 1400C).
The containment should indeed allow the fuel to spread out thinner to make it easier to cool/stop it going critical again in the first place, and they can (and have) pumped water into the concrete containment in case the reactor has been breached, which is only a theory at this point. The fuel reaching criticality again is not a big risk, the containment design is specifically designed to stop it doing that.
However, it's not a *zero* risk, especially given we don't know how much damage, if any, has been done to the containment in reactor #2 (or #1, or #3) by the hydrogen explosions there earlier in the crisis.
Personally, I don't think we'll find out as they seem to have the coolant system back under control, so will continue to pump water into the reactors and fuel storage pools, which means it shouldn't get bad enough for much worse to happen. Maybe some minor runoff leaks from cracks in the containment meaning it's not a good idea to drink the local groundwater (i.e. within a few miles of the plant) for a while is the worst I'm thinking we'll see.
Yeah, reactor 4, the risk is the used fuel storage pond (as you say, the reactor was offline at the time) - which doesn't have the same level of containment as the reactor itself. Interestingly enough, one analysis I read said the reason there were problems with sufficient coolant at 1-3 (causing the hydrogen explosions) was their focus on getting coolant to the more-fuel-than-usual pool at #4 in the initial few hours, especially given it's containment is not as good as that around the reactors. The hydrogen fire at #4 shows it's fairly likely some of the rods there became exposed for a time at least which will have cause god knows what damage (not like they're sending people in for a looksee any time soon), so I doubt reactor #4 will ever be used again either.
As a serious question: Is the bottom lined concrete thick enough to stop any radiation from leaking through it? if not, then the 'planned failure mode' has a significant flaw IMO.
Yes, it's thick enough. It's also designed so molten fuel that melts through the reactor vessel into the concrete containment (which is what appears to have happened in reactor 2, at least) can be cooled by water and probably boric acid, and it also spreads the fuel out to help cool it down. So far, it's doing what it was designed to do - contain molten fuel 'lava' that has breached the reactor itself.
The problem is, the containment vessel (sort of an inverted concrete lightbulb) was also damaged when they vented hydrogen - which exploded - from the reactors when they first had trouble with the coolant flow (very hot fuel+not enough water caused the water to literally boil instantly and some of it broke down into hydrogen). Most of the damage was done to the building roof, not the main containment, as it was designed to do, but it would appear there is a leak of some sort in at least one of the containment vessels, the most problematic of which is reactor 2.
likewise, what if the core melts through that concrete?
Bad stuff. In order for that to happen, the fuel would have to mass together sufficiently, without enough cooling or control rod remnants mixed in to allow the fuel to reach criticality again - i.e. restart the nuclear reaction in an uncontrolled fashion, which may make it hot enough to melt through the concrete containment floor, and keep on going until it hits groundwater causing serious contamination, or if it hits enough ground water, a steam explosion spraying radioactive material into
the air. That's not terribly likely though, especially if they can keep pumping coolant into the reactor and the concrete containment.
The biggest current risk, as we're seeing, is that radiation leaks from the hydrogen explosion damaged containment vessel; stopping them patching the breach, and sufficient radioactive material escapes containment via the leak and manages to escape the building via another route, also contaminating groundwater, but by nowhere as much as a complete failure of containment would mean.
Reactors 1-4 will never be used again. But burying them in concrete is absolutely the wrong thing to do. Right now, the cores are still hot enough to melt through the reactor vessel if not constantly cooled by constant pumping of (now) fresh water through the coolant system.
Worst case scenario (though not hugely likely) - water stops getting in, or stops cooling the fuel rods, they melt down through the reactor into the outer containment vessel, and there's not enough left of the control rods mixed in to prevent the molten fuel reaching criticality again, and it then gets hot enough to melt through the containment itself, then either contaminate groudwater, or even worse, hit enough water to cause a steam explosion, spreading radioactive elements for miles around.
It's going to take *years* to decommission these plants after the damage they've suffered from the quake and tsunami. No doubt some sort of concrete shroud will be part of the final solution, but right now, keeping control of the coolant flow in both the reactors and the used fuel ponds is the top priority, closely followed by patching any leaks from the containment vessels caused by the multiple hydrogen fires/explosions.
They're now shipping a new variant of the san francisco (silently) that has a different screen on it. Which screws up cyanogenmod as the touchscreen driver doesn't work for the new screen; and if you didn't take a back up of the original firmware, putting the published orange firmware back on it has the same problem, as it's for the old variant also.
Still a great phone for the money, especially once unlocked for free, but my mate got bitten by this last week. Fortunately, he backed up his original firmware.
Assigning /64 spaces to users is by design. IPv6 is a 128 bit address space. The first 64 bits are used for the globally routable address space, the last 64 bits are created by the hosts. The simple implementation is the ISP gives you a single routable 64-bit address, and then you stick your MAC address (on more strictly, the link-layer address) in as the last 64 bits - and bingo, you have a unique routable 128-bit IPv6 address per machine. If you want privacy, you just randomly generate the last 64-bits, which windows does by default, and linux can do with a simple option. With a 64-bit address space to play with, you're unlikely to get collisions.
It makes network routing and reconfiguration much simpler. Your IPv6 router advertises the first 64-bit address space the client can use, and the client handles the rest. Change ISP, or tunnel broker? Just change the routable prefix, and your clients will update automatically.
Yes, it means you're 'wasting' the last 64-bit of the address space by only using it for a few users; but with 5×10^28 addresses available per person on the planet, assigning 18x10^18 per ISP end connection still leaves unimaginably large amounts of the IPv6 address space free. In percentage terms, a single /64 is still far, far, far smaller than a single IPv4 address, and it drastically simplifies routing and configuration, by design.
BIg ISP's already have equipment to perform realtime deep packet inspection on their user's traffic - it's cheaper to put everything through say, sandvine DPI equipment to throttle the hell out of P2P traffic than to buy in more capacity. *Every* mainstream British ISP throttles torrent traffic at least for part of the day, and they all have quotas - again, managed as part of the same equipment.
Yes, providing akamai caches inside the ISP network in order to speed up access is one thing, but that's not what they're talking about. They're talking about using the DPI kit to put certain traffic at the top of the priority, and leave those who haven't paid the extortion fee down in the same slow lane they relegate P2P traffic to.
My galaxy S lasts 2 days in normal use, no problem. I just carry an additional battery when on long trips. Lighter and way cheaper than another phone and call plan. Why the additional call plan? Well, I like being able to use the internet and email when away from my own wifi. After all, that's *why* I bought a smartphone. I used to do the PDA and small phone combo for years. A single smart phone in your pocket is way simpler and more convenient.
I mod my phone though - the galaxy S isn't as easy to mod as say, the Nexus 1, but it's still simple enough, and there's so really nice tweaks in the custom roms. There are plenty of android phone makers who don't make life hard for people who want to use their own hardware their own way - so vote with your wallet, don't buy Motorola.
Android only grabs information your friends have already made available to you. You can go any view any of those phone numbers manually on facebook.com when you're logged in. You're correct to warn friends that they are publishing a phone number, if you know they wouldn't want it published. This isn't android's fault though, it's just collecting the information your friends have made available to you on facebook.
Google 'knows' about your facebook account because you're presumably putting some information on your public profile; it looks at facebook account names, compares them to your google account name, and takes a guess at a match. It's trying to be helpful! I find adding facebook data to my phone quite handy, as there's contacts on there (with say, email addresses) that update their information when it changes, I don't have to update it manually my end. It also syncs with the calendar for birthdays, etc.
Note - it's a one way sync. Android (and google) don't put any of your google contacts into facebook. They just pull information from your logged in account to combine with your phone contacts. It doesn't copy any of it to your google contacts or phone contacts, it keeps them separate. It does auto show facebook contacts and google/phone contacts together when they have the same name. You can turn *that* off under the contacts settings, and you'll see them as entirely separate lists.
If you want to turn off the facebook integration, just goto settings/accounts and remove the facebook sync account you have there. That's what's linking your phone to facebook.
I don't know about the HTC app, but the samsung one that came with my phone uses the underlying android facebook sync. So when you logged into the facebook app, you gave it permission to well, connect to your facebook profile. Facebook do have their own official app and widget in the android market - IIRC, it does also autosync with contacts and calendar, but you can turn that off and still use the app.
Perhaps they could have got someone left handed in the office to hold it for a bit and notice the massive signal drop off. I know, we only make up 15% of the population, but we're not *that* hard to find.
Tell that to the people that have had their car number plate cloned for a similar model car, and end up getting speeding tickets and congestion charges for driving in London, despite not doing anything of the sort. And good luck getting the police to believe that's not your car and number plate in the photos.
The problem is not the openess (or not) of people's data. It's that it's trivially abused as personal data is often used as some form of ID, not least by banks, credit agencies, police and shops.
duckduckgo is still mainly google with a dictionary bolted on top with common words, and most of the adverts stripped out. Well, that and ssl support, and no perma-cookie.
I do use it because of the latter two reasons, but the actual search part for anything other than common nouns is pure google.
Lawyers don't file suits for the hell of it. They do it because they're hired to beat someone else in court.
Who hires them? Big business. Who makes it easy for them by avoiding legislation for tort reform, and making new laws that are a lawyer's paradise? Politicians who were former lawyers, as you say.
So it's not just the legal system. It's the whole culture that thinks lawsuits are the solution to any problem, a society that completely mistrusts government to regulate properly, so end up voting in complete scumbags because they had a better funded ad campaign, a society that worships big business; allowing them to buy elections, buy laws, buy politicians outright, buy media stations and broadcast lies, and sue anyone and anything that competes with them or they don't like into oblivion in a legal, social and political environment that positively encourages that.
It's a much bigger clusterfuck than just shooting all the lawyers will fix.
Mugabe holds elections. And his thugs try to swing the result by beating up the opposition and threatening. Problem is when he loses, as he did at the last election, he rigs the results so he still wins. And shoots and beats up opposition members some more. His thugs keep him in power, keeping the people afraid of him, and he justifies everything bad that happens to the country as a result of British and American foreign interference, instead of being a result of his disastrous policies.
I don't believe western governments should get in the habit of assassinating foreign politicians, not least because of the example it sets, but it's hard to see how Mugabe will ever be removed from power without a coup of some sort, likely resulting in many deaths of the public.
The last thing zimbabwe needs on top of its other problems is a civil war.
Mostly traffic offences; minor speeding, running red lights, illegal parking.
We require training and driving licences because failure to control a ton and a half of metal and plastic at high speeds can easily kill people, including the driver.
Your mom getting a virus, thus needing you to go and clean her machine yet again does not rise to quite the same level of public safety. What's the next licence, being allowed to use a mobile phone in a public place?
It's also a negative impression for youtube itself - several times I've hit an unskippable ad before the video I was linked to started playing - and I've just hit the back button as I'm not going to sit through a 30-60 second ad, the video isn't *that* interesting. Keep that up too much, and I'd probably just stop using youtube altogether.
Being able to skip the ad after 5 seconds? I can tolerate that much.
Not just any ladies, either -
'Anna Ardin (the official complainant) is often described by the media as a “leftist”. She has ties to the US-financed anti-Castro and anti-communist groups. She published her anti-Castro diatribes in the Swedish-language publication Revista de Asignaturas Cubanas put out by Misceláneas de Cuba. From Oslo, Professor Michael Seltzer points out that this periodical is the product of a well-financed anti-Castro organization in Sweden. He further notes that the group is connected with Union Liberal Cubana led by Carlos Alberto Montaner whose CIA ties were exposed. Note that Ardin was deported from Cuba for subversive activities. In Cuba she interacted with the feminist anti-Castro group Las damas de blanco (the Ladies in White). This group receives US government funds and the convicted anti-communist terrorist Luis Posada Carriles is a friend and supporter. Wikipedia quotes Hebe de Bonafini, president of the Argentine Madres de Plaza de Mayo as saying that “the so-called Ladies in White defend the terrorism of the United States.”'
So Anna Ardin with close ties to the CIA, and her close friend, supposedly had sex with Assange, and it was rape? While I'm not one to dismiss a claim of rape lightly at all, this accusation stinks of a CIA smear job.