We may not have seen Windows clones come out in the late nineties during the heyday of the Microsoft monopoly
In the pre-win95 era there were a number of "windows clones" (in that they had similar functionality to Windows, rather than necessarilly running the same software) which were arguably better - GeoWorks and OS/2 spring to mind (given the choice between GeoWorks and Windows 3, I think I'd choose GeoWorks every time).
if Word 97 does all you need then you can pick up a second-hand copy for next to nothing.
It is worth pointing out at this point that Microsoft (and many other software companies) make much use of non-transferrable EULAs to try and eliminate the second-hand market. Of course, whether the EULAs are valid is another question (I would argue not, since you can never prove that someone agreed to an EULA and also the existence of the doctrine of first sale... the courts may disagree)
So not only are you bragging with your confederation's legislation
Not really - I'm making people aware of a fairly sensible piece of legislation. There are two good reasons for this: 1. Some people in the EU may not be aware of this legislation, and it may be in their interests to know about it. 2. Some people not in the EU may not be aware of this legislation and may want to try and get similar legislation adopted in their locality.
something you personally most likely had no influence on, at all
And my influence on the legislation is relevant how exactly?
you're also claiming other confederation's legislations have no influence on you
No, please cite anything I said which even implies this, let alone expressly states it.
and is no different than the US-centric view Americans contantly get accused of.
People don't suddenly become evil the day they employ someone else.
However, a company with, say, 10,000 employees generally seems to have a *lot* more political power than 10,000 individual citizens. Whilst the company is being benevolent this isn't a big problem, but large organisations rarely stay that way - eventually they tend to use that political power to further their own interests at the expense of the larger population.
This isn't about "being evil", it's about the fact that most people and organisations value their own interests above those of others, so giving them a disproportionate amount of power is a really Bad Thing.
Nintendo put an incredible amount of research and effort into making the best games in the world. When do you folk feel a bit ethically obliged to let the company just make some money out of the good work they've done.
How does allowing me to run my own software on hardware I have purchased prevent Nintendo from making money? In fact, it makes me more likely to buy the console. At the moment I don't have a Wii - if it were possible to run Linux on it I would buy one and it would become my MythTV frontend. So they would make more money since they would have another customer. At the same time, because I would then have a Wii, I would buy games for it, so they would make more money. By preventing me using the hardware how I like, they have reduced the value of the Wii to the point where I cannot justify the cost of buying one. Forgive me for saying, but doing whatever you can to reduce the value of your product doesn't seem to be a bright marketing strategy.
As it stands, the home user that actually sets up a RAID 5 raid is in the top percentile for actually giving a crap about home data.
RAID is not, nor has it ever been a replacement for backups. RAID provides continuity of service in the event of certain types of hardware failure, backups provide a way of recovering your data in the event of a much wider range of hardware, software or user failures. If you don't need continuity of service then you are far better off investing the money you would've spent on RAID into a backup solution instead.
RAID will not protect you from many causes of data loss, such as some rogue program/user trashing your data, or your PSU going bang and taking out all your drives (yes, I've seen this happen - breaking it to a customer that they have lost all their data because they ignored advice about taking backups since they had a RAID is great fun...).
I question your assertion that home users need to back up 12TB of data - very few home users even *have* 12TB of data, let alone 12TB of important data. My backups fit on about 3 DVDs - I don't bother to back up stuff I don't need to back up. Things like my music collection can be re-ripped from CD, yes it'd be a pain but I have decided that I would prefer risking a re-rip rather than having to back it up. Similarly, my operating systems and applications do not need to be backed up since in the event of a failure I would reinstall the software from scratch rather than recover from a backup. The *vast* majority of data on my disks is stuff I haven't created myself and can just be downloaded again.
Comcast is a monopoly; it's the only cable TV provider in many areas.
No chance of free to air satellite TV then? I've got no idea what the satellite TV is like in the US, but in the UK a good deal of satellite channels are free to air so you just need a dish and a DVB-S receiver - this works well with my MythTV system. Of course, if you want subscription channels then you're stuck having to use BSkyB's own hardware (unless you use an illegal CAM to decrypt the channels you have paid for).
In both areas, Comcast's uplink to Comedy Central and FX is analog
Sounds like crazyness to me. Here in the UK everything is compressed at source. The DVB-T transmitters just redistribute MPEG2 streams and the cable uplinks are taken from DVB-S satellite streams (MPEG2 for SD, MPEG4 for HD). The old analogue transmitters are being turned off - the area I'm in will lose analogue next year and I'm certainly not complaining about that since I've been receiving TV over DVB-S for years (to be honest, I can't see a lot of point in terrestrial for non-portable receivers anyway...)
Comcast delivers a horrible picture and distorted sound. It's because their uplink is analog.
And you pay for this crap service? Sounds like you need to switch to a sane service to me...
Actually, this video was previously posted to the JohnMcCain.com website.
In that case, there is no grounds to his comment: "there is no justification for depriving the American people of access to important and timely campaign videos during that period." - if it is on his own website then no one is being deprived of access to it. I wouldn't mind betting that it wasn't hosted by his own server at all though - it was probably just an embedded YouTube video.
Believe it or not some people are more likely to watch a video they randomly come across on YouTube rather than actually go to a campaigns website.
Shouldn't that be cause for concern? There's no way to authenticate the source of the video when it's on YouTube, so a campaign that actively endorses campaign videos on YouTube seems to be asking for trouble.
These alternatives to YouTube that will thumb their nose at the DMCA
I didn't say that they would thumb their nose at the DMCA. His complaint seems to have 2 parts to it: 1. YouTube complies with DMCA takedown notices. 2. YouTube takes a long time to comply with requests to put the content back.
Clearly no sane service provider in the US is going to ignore takedown notices since that would lose them their safe harbour status. However, (2) isn't governed by the law, so if he doesn't like it he can go find an alternative to YouTube which puts content back faster.
If he doesn't like (1) then he can damned well run his own server and ignore the notices - a service provider does *not* have to comply with DMCA takedown notices, they just lose their safe harbour status if they don't.
Also, he really shouldn't be complaining at YouTube about this problem - the DMCA requires that anyone sending take-down notices must do so in good faith after determining that the content isn't being used under fair use laws. If someone sends bogus takedown notices regarding your content then your argument is with them, not the service provider - he should be suing the people issuing the notices.
DMCA aside, videos published on the web don't *have* to be published through YouTube. If you don't like your publisher's policies, change publisher or publish it yourself. Americans are always very protective of the free market, and this is an example of why it is a good thing - there are alternatives to YouTube, use them.
The key is to drive a manual transmission and to hold in the clutch whenever you can(especially downhill) so that the car coasts(runs at idle) as much as possible.
Your recommendations will likely reduce the fuel efficiency of a modern car. When you lift your foot off the accelerator, the ECU will completely cut the fuel supply to the engine so long as the revs are higher than idling speed. So leaving your car in gear with your feet off everything when going down hill is beneficial since it will be using no fuel at all during this time. Conversely, if you slip the clutch or put it into neutral, the ECU will have to supply fuel to keep the engine idling.
And don't engine brake because that is poor form and is retarded. Use your damn brakes.
You might want to qualify that comment a bit more, since "it's retarded" isn't generally considered a good argument in discussions amongst intelligent people. Using your brakes will cost you more since it'll wear the pads and discs, whereas engine braking won't.
Which is why I watch YouTube on my TV. I installed a GreaseMonkey Script that will send the URL of a YouTube video to Xbox Media Center. After a little bit of caching, the movie plays.
So you get to watch it on your TV in crappy YouTube quality instead... great...
I'm not in favour of software patents at all, and I'm fast coming to the conclusion that the whole patent system (software or otherwise) is flawed for one very simple reason:
The patent infringer may not have gained anything at all from the original "invention" - in many cases they aren't even aware of it.
If you invent something and I take your invention and build upon it then maybe you deserve some compensation since you have saved me some development costs. On the other hand, if I invent something completely independently, with no knowledge of your prior invention, there is absolutely no reason you should expect to get compensated since I have received no benefit from using your prior invention.
The patent system provides no test to show whether the infringer was aware of the patented invention - if you unknowingly infringe on someone else's invention then you are screwed (and even if the patent is invalid, it is often impossibly expensive to defend yourself so you're still screwed). At the moment, it is probably impossible to write any useful software without unknowingly infringing on some patent, so the whole thing becomes a bit of a lottery of releasing your software and hoping someone doesn't sue.
The same applies to hardware - I've seen people patent some tiny part of an ASIC design that does a fairly generic task. There's no way a third party is going to benefit from that patent because the only way they would find out about the design is by trawling the patent archives or reverse engineering the device (both options prohibitively expensive - far cheaper to design your own hardware). So the only use for that patent is to use offensively against a competitor who has unknowingly invented the same thing independently.
Youtube offer better-than-TV resolution. Check out their high-quality option, which you can view full screen.
If you say so... I have yet to see a YouTube video encoded anywhere close to 768x576 (SDTV resolution), and resolution aside, they don't come close to broadcast quality from the encoding point of view either.
In an era when people are interested in HDTV (1920x1080), making a big deal about a crappy sub-SDTV streaming service seems a bit nuts.
(Note: I'm not one who believes in bothering with HDTV for most stuff - maybe nature programmes, etc, but certainly not worthwhile for anything with a story - but I do draw the line at watching significant amounts of YouTube quality TV).
Wikipedia is not a repository of things that are useful
Why not? In a paper encyclopedia, there must be some criteria to keep the size down, but Wikipedia doesn't need such restrictions. If a page is well written and accurate, who cares if it meets some notability criteria - it's probably useful to someone, even if it it isn't useful to you.
I'm afraid I've seen far too many really useful pages be blown away for being "non-notable" over the years - so much so that I don't bother to contribute to Wikipedia these days. Why should I spend the time contributing to improve the articles and make them really useful if someone who isn't interested in the subject matter is just going to declare them to be non-notable and blow them away?
My experiences of AfDs is that the only people who participate in the discussions are the deletionists, the people who wrote the article and *very occasionally* a few of the readers of the article. The views of the people who wrote the article are usually swiftly discounted because they are seen as having a vested interest in keeping it around and the readers of the article are usually called out as sock-puppets, because as readers, rather than contributors, they usually have very little edit history.
Wikipedia was a nice idea, but it is slowly being destroyed by petty politics and posturing.
You do know that you can buy two-liter bottles of carbolic acid at your local supermarket, don't you?
You can get all sorts of nasty chemicals from the supermarket that I wouldn't choose to drink, wash in or put fish in. CO2 dissolving in the water table would be a serious problem.
We shouldn't be storing that stuff in Yucca mountain anyway. We should be reprocessing it and make more fuel out of it.
I agree entirely. But at the moment it is, sadly, cheaper to bury it than reprocess it.
However, people seem to get irrational when it comes to anything involving radiation. When the situation is looked at rationally, it is quite simple: The nuclear industry is extremely well regulated. Sure, they deal with some pretty nasty materials, but large chunks of the less well regulated non-nuclear industry deal with chemicals on a daily basis that are far more dangerous. Everything has risk, but if we are willing to accept the risk of other industries, why are we not prepared to accept the (arguably smaller) risk of the nuclear industry?
So the real answer to the question of to why people fear nuclear power is. They are ignorant, scared, and they have been lied to by the people that use them as their base of political power.
Early nuclear accidents certainly haven't helped matters - Chernobyl, for example, sticks in everyone's mind and many people forget that the Russian nuclear program was very badly regulated and that reactor design would never have been allowed in the West, even in those days.
There are certainly some people who lie in order to further their own political agenda, but sadly the people they lie to often believe what they are told and perpetuate the lie. Misunderstandings of more recent events end up reinforcing the misinformation - for example, Three Mile Island is often waved around as an example of why nuclear is still dangerous, but if these people actually looked into such incidents instead of taking what they are told at face value, they would realise that they are often good examples of how safe nuclear power can be, even when the shit hits the fan. And misinformation is rife (intentional or otherwise) - I was at the Centre for Alternative Technology (Wales) a few weeks back and was annoyed to see them propagating the "there is only enough uranium to last 50 years" myth.
The current situation seems to be that many people have the "nuclear bad" message so firmly ingrained in their understanding of the world that they won't even listen to people trying to dispel the misinformation. These days it seems that the anti-nuclear crowd don't even need to explain why they think nuclear is bad - they've been banging on about it for so long that everyone just accepts that it is bad without any understanding as to why.
When CO2 leaks into the water table, people's children don't start growing a third arm.
CO2 leaking into the water table would be just as serious as radioactive material leaking into the water table, unless you like drinking carbolic acid.
On the other hand, with CO2 being a soluble fluid, it seems more likely that it might leak than a solid, vitrified material.
Seems a bit odd that Microsoft have chosen to do this now. I mean, the Mac vs. PC ads were *ages* ago - MS seem to have left it a bit late to do a direct response like this.
I'm a bit confused as to why sticking a small quantity of vitrified radioactive material under ground is a huge problem for the tree-huggers, but sticking vast amounts of liquefied CO2 in the ground is ok...
I'm all for diversification of energy sources, but I really don't understand why all the environmentalists are happy with this but not fission...
Slashdot Mirror
We may not have seen Windows clones come out in the late nineties during the heyday of the Microsoft monopoly
In the pre-win95 era there were a number of "windows clones" (in that they had similar functionality to Windows, rather than necessarilly running the same software) which were arguably better - GeoWorks and OS/2 spring to mind (given the choice between GeoWorks and Windows 3, I think I'd choose GeoWorks every time).
if Word 97 does all you need then you can pick up a second-hand copy for next to nothing.
It is worth pointing out at this point that Microsoft (and many other software companies) make much use of non-transferrable EULAs to try and eliminate the second-hand market. Of course, whether the EULAs are valid is another question (I would argue not, since you can never prove that someone agreed to an EULA and also the existence of the doctrine of first sale... the courts may disagree)
So not only are you bragging with your confederation's legislation
Not really - I'm making people aware of a fairly sensible piece of legislation. There are two good reasons for this:
1. Some people in the EU may not be aware of this legislation, and it may be in their interests to know about it.
2. Some people not in the EU may not be aware of this legislation and may want to try and get similar legislation adopted in their locality.
something you personally most likely had no influence on, at all
And my influence on the legislation is relevant how exactly?
you're also claiming other confederation's legislations have no influence on you
No, please cite anything I said which even implies this, let alone expressly states it.
and is no different than the US-centric view Americans contantly get accused of.
And your point is...?
has an EULA that prohibits reverse engineering.
Not really a big deal to those of us in the EU since we have a legally guaranteed right to reverse engineer stuff for interoperability purposes.
People don't suddenly become evil the day they employ someone else.
However, a company with, say, 10,000 employees generally seems to have a *lot* more political power than 10,000 individual citizens. Whilst the company is being benevolent this isn't a big problem, but large organisations rarely stay that way - eventually they tend to use that political power to further their own interests at the expense of the larger population.
This isn't about "being evil", it's about the fact that most people and organisations value their own interests above those of others, so giving them a disproportionate amount of power is a really Bad Thing.
Right, I get that. I just meant, you know. <3, as in an ascii heart.
Looks like a pair of testicles to me...
Nintendo put an incredible amount of research and effort into making the best games in the world. When do you folk feel a bit ethically obliged to let the company just make some money out of the good work they've done.
How does allowing me to run my own software on hardware I have purchased prevent Nintendo from making money? In fact, it makes me more likely to buy the console. At the moment I don't have a Wii - if it were possible to run Linux on it I would buy one and it would become my MythTV frontend. So they would make more money since they would have another customer. At the same time, because I would then have a Wii, I would buy games for it, so they would make more money. By preventing me using the hardware how I like, they have reduced the value of the Wii to the point where I cannot justify the cost of buying one. Forgive me for saying, but doing whatever you can to reduce the value of your product doesn't seem to be a bright marketing strategy.
As it stands, the home user that actually sets up a RAID 5 raid is in the top percentile for actually giving a crap about home data.
RAID is not, nor has it ever been a replacement for backups. RAID provides continuity of service in the event of certain types of hardware failure, backups provide a way of recovering your data in the event of a much wider range of hardware, software or user failures. If you don't need continuity of service then you are far better off investing the money you would've spent on RAID into a backup solution instead.
RAID will not protect you from many causes of data loss, such as some rogue program/user trashing your data, or your PSU going bang and taking out all your drives (yes, I've seen this happen - breaking it to a customer that they have lost all their data because they ignored advice about taking backups since they had a RAID is great fun...).
I question your assertion that home users need to back up 12TB of data - very few home users even *have* 12TB of data, let alone 12TB of important data. My backups fit on about 3 DVDs - I don't bother to back up stuff I don't need to back up. Things like my music collection can be re-ripped from CD, yes it'd be a pain but I have decided that I would prefer risking a re-rip rather than having to back it up. Similarly, my operating systems and applications do not need to be backed up since in the event of a failure I would reinstall the software from scratch rather than recover from a backup. The *vast* majority of data on my disks is stuff I haven't created myself and can just be downloaded again.
Comcast is a monopoly; it's the only cable TV provider in many areas.
No chance of free to air satellite TV then? I've got no idea what the satellite TV is like in the US, but in the UK a good deal of satellite channels are free to air so you just need a dish and a DVB-S receiver - this works well with my MythTV system. Of course, if you want subscription channels then you're stuck having to use BSkyB's own hardware (unless you use an illegal CAM to decrypt the channels you have paid for).
In both areas, Comcast's uplink to Comedy Central and FX is analog
Sounds like crazyness to me. Here in the UK everything is compressed at source. The DVB-T transmitters just redistribute MPEG2 streams and the cable uplinks are taken from DVB-S satellite streams (MPEG2 for SD, MPEG4 for HD). The old analogue transmitters are being turned off - the area I'm in will lose analogue next year and I'm certainly not complaining about that since I've been receiving TV over DVB-S for years (to be honest, I can't see a lot of point in terrestrial for non-portable receivers anyway...)
Comcast delivers a horrible picture and distorted sound. It's because their uplink is analog.
And you pay for this crap service? Sounds like you need to switch to a sane service to me...
Actually, this video was previously posted to the JohnMcCain.com website.
In that case, there is no grounds to his comment: "there is no justification for depriving the American people of access to important and timely campaign videos during that period." - if it is on his own website then no one is being deprived of access to it. I wouldn't mind betting that it wasn't hosted by his own server at all though - it was probably just an embedded YouTube video.
Believe it or not some people are more likely to watch a video they randomly come across on YouTube rather than actually go to a campaigns website.
Shouldn't that be cause for concern? There's no way to authenticate the source of the video when it's on YouTube, so a campaign that actively endorses campaign videos on YouTube seems to be asking for trouble.
These alternatives to YouTube that will thumb their nose at the DMCA
I didn't say that they would thumb their nose at the DMCA. His complaint seems to have 2 parts to it:
1. YouTube complies with DMCA takedown notices.
2. YouTube takes a long time to comply with requests to put the content back.
Clearly no sane service provider in the US is going to ignore takedown notices since that would lose them their safe harbour status. However, (2) isn't governed by the law, so if he doesn't like it he can go find an alternative to YouTube which puts content back faster.
If he doesn't like (1) then he can damned well run his own server and ignore the notices - a service provider does *not* have to comply with DMCA takedown notices, they just lose their safe harbour status if they don't.
Also, he really shouldn't be complaining at YouTube about this problem - the DMCA requires that anyone sending take-down notices must do so in good faith after determining that the content isn't being used under fair use laws. If someone sends bogus takedown notices regarding your content then your argument is with them, not the service provider - he should be suing the people issuing the notices.
DMCA aside, videos published on the web don't *have* to be published through YouTube. If you don't like your publisher's policies, change publisher or publish it yourself. Americans are always very protective of the free market, and this is an example of why it is a good thing - there are alternatives to YouTube, use them.
The picture and sound is better then what I get on analog cable TV
It isn't hard to beat analogue TV, but most people ditched analogue TV many years ago...
The key is to drive a manual transmission and to hold in the clutch whenever you can(especially downhill) so that the car coasts(runs at idle) as much as possible.
Your recommendations will likely reduce the fuel efficiency of a modern car. When you lift your foot off the accelerator, the ECU will completely cut the fuel supply to the engine so long as the revs are higher than idling speed. So leaving your car in gear with your feet off everything when going down hill is beneficial since it will be using no fuel at all during this time. Conversely, if you slip the clutch or put it into neutral, the ECU will have to supply fuel to keep the engine idling.
And don't engine brake because that is poor form and is retarded. Use your damn brakes.
You might want to qualify that comment a bit more, since "it's retarded" isn't generally considered a good argument in discussions amongst intelligent people. Using your brakes will cost you more since it'll wear the pads and discs, whereas engine braking won't.
Which is why I watch YouTube on my TV. I installed a GreaseMonkey Script that will send the URL of a YouTube video to Xbox Media Center. After a little bit of caching, the movie plays.
So you get to watch it on your TV in crappy YouTube quality instead... great...
I'm not in favour of software patents at all, and I'm fast coming to the conclusion that the whole patent system (software or otherwise) is flawed for one very simple reason:
The patent infringer may not have gained anything at all from the original "invention" - in many cases they aren't even aware of it.
If you invent something and I take your invention and build upon it then maybe you deserve some compensation since you have saved me some development costs. On the other hand, if I invent something completely independently, with no knowledge of your prior invention, there is absolutely no reason you should expect to get compensated since I have received no benefit from using your prior invention.
The patent system provides no test to show whether the infringer was aware of the patented invention - if you unknowingly infringe on someone else's invention then you are screwed (and even if the patent is invalid, it is often impossibly expensive to defend yourself so you're still screwed). At the moment, it is probably impossible to write any useful software without unknowingly infringing on some patent, so the whole thing becomes a bit of a lottery of releasing your software and hoping someone doesn't sue.
The same applies to hardware - I've seen people patent some tiny part of an ASIC design that does a fairly generic task. There's no way a third party is going to benefit from that patent because the only way they would find out about the design is by trawling the patent archives or reverse engineering the device (both options prohibitively expensive - far cheaper to design your own hardware). So the only use for that patent is to use offensively against a competitor who has unknowingly invented the same thing independently.
Youtube offer better-than-TV resolution. Check out their high-quality option, which you can view full screen.
If you say so... I have yet to see a YouTube video encoded anywhere close to 768x576 (SDTV resolution), and resolution aside, they don't come close to broadcast quality from the encoding point of view either.
In an era when people are interested in HDTV (1920x1080), making a big deal about a crappy sub-SDTV streaming service seems a bit nuts.
(Note: I'm not one who believes in bothering with HDTV for most stuff - maybe nature programmes, etc, but certainly not worthwhile for anything with a story - but I do draw the line at watching significant amounts of YouTube quality TV).
Does anyone seriously want to watch full length TV shows in a tiny box in their browser in crumby YouTube quality?!
Wikipedia is not a repository of things that are useful
Why not? In a paper encyclopedia, there must be some criteria to keep the size down, but Wikipedia doesn't need such restrictions. If a page is well written and accurate, who cares if it meets some notability criteria - it's probably useful to someone, even if it it isn't useful to you.
I'm afraid I've seen far too many really useful pages be blown away for being "non-notable" over the years - so much so that I don't bother to contribute to Wikipedia these days. Why should I spend the time contributing to improve the articles and make them really useful if someone who isn't interested in the subject matter is just going to declare them to be non-notable and blow them away?
My experiences of AfDs is that the only people who participate in the discussions are the deletionists, the people who wrote the article and *very occasionally* a few of the readers of the article. The views of the people who wrote the article are usually swiftly discounted because they are seen as having a vested interest in keeping it around and the readers of the article are usually called out as sock-puppets, because as readers, rather than contributors, they usually have very little edit history.
Wikipedia was a nice idea, but it is slowly being destroyed by petty politics and posturing.
You do know that you can buy two-liter bottles of carbolic acid at your local supermarket, don't you?
You can get all sorts of nasty chemicals from the supermarket that I wouldn't choose to drink, wash in or put fish in. CO2 dissolving in the water table would be a serious problem.
We shouldn't be storing that stuff in Yucca mountain anyway. We should be reprocessing it and make more fuel out of it.
I agree entirely. But at the moment it is, sadly, cheaper to bury it than reprocess it.
However, people seem to get irrational when it comes to anything involving radiation. When the situation is looked at rationally, it is quite simple: The nuclear industry is extremely well regulated. Sure, they deal with some pretty nasty materials, but large chunks of the less well regulated non-nuclear industry deal with chemicals on a daily basis that are far more dangerous. Everything has risk, but if we are willing to accept the risk of other industries, why are we not prepared to accept the (arguably smaller) risk of the nuclear industry?
So the real answer to the question of to why people fear nuclear power is.
They are ignorant, scared, and they have been lied to by the people that use them as their base of political power.
Early nuclear accidents certainly haven't helped matters - Chernobyl, for example, sticks in everyone's mind and many people forget that the Russian nuclear program was very badly regulated and that reactor design would never have been allowed in the West, even in those days.
There are certainly some people who lie in order to further their own political agenda, but sadly the people they lie to often believe what they are told and perpetuate the lie. Misunderstandings of more recent events end up reinforcing the misinformation - for example, Three Mile Island is often waved around as an example of why nuclear is still dangerous, but if these people actually looked into such incidents instead of taking what they are told at face value, they would realise that they are often good examples of how safe nuclear power can be, even when the shit hits the fan. And misinformation is rife (intentional or otherwise) - I was at the Centre for Alternative Technology (Wales) a few weeks back and was annoyed to see them propagating the "there is only enough uranium to last 50 years" myth.
The current situation seems to be that many people have the "nuclear bad" message so firmly ingrained in their understanding of the world that they won't even listen to people trying to dispel the misinformation. These days it seems that the anti-nuclear crowd don't even need to explain why they think nuclear is bad - they've been banging on about it for so long that everyone just accepts that it is bad without any understanding as to why.
When CO2 leaks into the water table, people's children don't start growing a third arm.
CO2 leaking into the water table would be just as serious as radioactive material leaking into the water table, unless you like drinking carbolic acid.
On the other hand, with CO2 being a soluble fluid, it seems more likely that it might leak than a solid, vitrified material.
Seems a bit odd that Microsoft have chosen to do this now. I mean, the Mac vs. PC ads were *ages* ago - MS seem to have left it a bit late to do a direct response like this.
I'm a bit confused as to why sticking a small quantity of vitrified radioactive material under ground is a huge problem for the tree-huggers, but sticking vast amounts of liquefied CO2 in the ground is ok...
I'm all for diversification of energy sources, but I really don't understand why all the environmentalists are happy with this but not fission...