The best part of your post is that you seem to think economic theory and reality are somehow related.
Economic theory is more or less bullshit in almost every case as it fails to take into account human nature at almost every turn, even when trying to take human nature into account.
Neither Aqua nor Compiz were started before MS added those features to the OS... no one used them because performance sucked as the OS didn't make a decent video card a requirement, and at the time, those cards were rather expensive.
Sorry, but Compiz is nothing but copies of other peoples stuff for the 'oh shiny' factor, much like all of MS's recent stuff (WinPhone 7 and Win8) are copies of Apple's stuff, without understanding WHY they did it. Both are examples of doing it wrong, regardless of what they were trying to accomplish.
There was something sweet, simple, endearing and DAMN FAST about the 3.1 shell that I haven't found anywhere since. It flew even on 200MHz machines.
Considering when it was written, it flew on 16 mhz machines, I would hope it could do well on a 200 mhz machine.
I haven't looked in Windows7, but I'm pretty sure you could still use fileman.exe as your shell in XP if you really wanted to go back to the dark ages you could, but its unlikely you'd actually stay that way for any length of time.
Perhaps someone should buy him a Mac and show him AppleScript.
Are there any native Mac OSX apps that aren't scriptable? I don't even know how you could make them unscriptable, its kind of built into... well, everything in OSX.
You don't have to do anything to make your app scriptable, though you can make it easier to script for by making helpers and such, but out of the box your apps are scriptable because the core runtime libraries are scriptable.
Maybe he should take a look in his own company at VBA, which requires the app know about and support it, but they certainly do make their apps scriptable... sort of, in a bad halfassed way.
Really? I find editing raster images and viewing them from a command line to be rather shitty, but maybe you use a different editor than I?
Perhaps you have matrix like skills so just reading hex allows you to visualize the image, I do not however, so I tend to stick with using pretty GUI editors.
I'll be happy to bet a years pay that I can come up with at least 50 tasks that you simply can not under any circumstances do better at a command prompt than I can do at a GUI.
Like wise, I could do the same for the command prompt versus the GUI.
They both have their place. Only an idiot would use a screwdriver to hammer in a nail when he has a perfectly good working hammer right there to use, which is pretty much what you've said you do.
A one-size-fits-all UI is like trying to find a nubile cutie fresh out of college who can calculate quaternion rotations in her head, thinks emacs sucks, wants to marry a typical slashdotter and have his babies, but at the same time loves hunting, fishing, and, oh BTW - she's a billionaire.
Turns out, you just described my wife almost to the letter, those she isn't a billionaire and we didn't find out until after we were married that she liked hunting and fishing. Had a deal her father was working on not fell through, its quite probably should would have been a billionaire too! So its not impossible, but it certainly is highly improbable.
I thought one of the battle cries of RMS was that OSS fixes all those problems... No ones personal agenda matters cause everyone can make it like THEY want it!
As long as greedy people are designing, building and deploying it, yes, it'll be the way it is.
We've seen in the past some alternatives done by people without greed on their mind (at least in the beginning) which then promptly get offered massive sums of money that only an idiot would turn down in exchange for selling out to some big company... which then turns it into exactly what you say.
One of the major problems however is the basic fundamental idea of a 'decent peer-to-peer collaborative system' can exist. It simply can't, for the exact same reasons why one can't be built. Anarchy doesn't work in efficiently enough to be useful beyond a small size, I challenge you to show me an example of it working. Wikipedia is more or less a failure, its not useless, but no intelligent person goes to wikipedia to get facts since its basically in constant anarchy at this point. You might go to get an idea of what something is, but thats where it ends.
The idea that we'll all just work together for the good of the world is fundamentally flawed. Competition and diversification in our own species is what keeps us from going extinct. If you have any clue about the history of the world, you can understand why P2P will never be as efficient as alternatives even when those alternatives are raping you for someone elses gain because anarchy is raping you for EVERYONE elses gain, and in the end, NO ONE gains anything.
Without Google knowing in advance about the URL. This feature totally allows Google to distribute their detection techniques to users rather than on their own network. When their detection code spots something via Chrome, it can then tell Googles services which can add that to the blacklist if it turns out that it really is a malicious site (after Google's services have verified it, so random people can't send a fake 'bad website!' to Google and get any site they want blacklisted.
I don't think they were implying that they'd never know about the URL, just that the browser is capable of catching some things even without it being on Google's blacklist.
The problem the GP had is they are still under the assumption that all slashdot users have a clue, while that was true many years ago, you clearly prove that it is no longer the case as you could have resolved the issue in a few seconds if you actually had a clue.
For those that like to complain about the the performance of Java I can tell you that you fury is for the most part misplaced.
I'm one of those people, 99.9% of java apps are slow as fucking balls in molasses. Having had to start doing java development in the last couple of years however I very quickly learned that the reason Java apps suck is the same reason VB apps tend to suck. They are written by people who aren't capable of being developers, but can muddle their way through the language enough to turn something out.
The language doesn't suck, but it draws in people who shouldn't be developing, which makes it appear that it sucks. I've learned that its fairly easy as a decent programmer to write Java apps that are fast enough for anything but the most hard core processing requirements (things were speed is absolutely the first priority. graphical games for instance)
I do think.NET is a java copy, but... I think its a copy with upgrades and is a better alternative if all you care about is Windows. I really wish mono wasn't such a steaming pile and that their CLR wasn't so technically inept. If.NET was truely supported on OS X, I'd be far more supportive of it, but thats never going to happen so its left as a windows only target, which means it gets cut out of most projects our company does simply because we may want the app to move to OSX as well in the future.
Actually, it is entirely syntax differences, it is so much so that you can use XML and XSLT to generate code for both VB.NET and C#, that is in fact how microsoft code examples work on their websites in almost every case.
I'd love to see an example of a type you can take in VB.NET and not C#.
Actually, porting VB6 code to VB.NET is pretty simple, especially if the person/people writing the VB6 code were decent programmers in general (which is pretty much not something you see with VB, but it is possible, as in my case where I detest VB, but got it dropped in my lap since no one else could/would do it.). The porting problems were all based around bad programmer problems.
I've successfully ported two products, with several hundred thousand lines of code between them to VB.NET, all it took was fixing stupid stuff and then finding the few quirks where things didn't work identical between versions. All in all it wasn't a whole lot different than most porting across major library changes I've done, but thats probably partially because I'd spent the previous couple of years making the original VB6 code not suck ass since it got dropped in my lap.
Right, because they had the exact same intentions... the school board of lower merion was totally trying, intentionally, to get nude pictures of the students... which is clear from the photos they found which are all semi-nude shots of kids...
Wait, common sense is kicking in... fuck, you know what, god damn common sense made me realize that these are two ENTIRELY DIFFERENT FUCKING SITUATIONS YOU MORON.
One was intentionally trying to get nude photos, the other is more or less randomized shots by an automated system... yea, its totally the same punishment cause its totally the same crime.
Depending on your environment however, a hacker may be able to determine that the lights are off or on and from that, if anyone is there to notice a physical theft.
Of course, the server is probably in a closet with the lights off most of the time anyway, but you know, just throwing it out there:)
So... you're money grabbing as well. Thats all your post says.
If he wanted to 'fix the problem' he would be going after individuals that did it, not the school board, which will just pay for the fines with tax payer money, essentially all that happens in this lawsuit is that my taxes end up paying for you to get some money and make some lawyers a fortune because you're too stupid and/or greedy to treat the problem. Instead you want 'a pile of cash to teach the school board a lesson'... the school board isn't a live, it will learn no lesson, it has no mind, and the people who you actually want to get taught a lesson will at worst, have to find a new job, which they'll probably even get a good reference for.
So again I state, all your post proves is that you too are a money grabbing douche using this as an excuse to make a quick buck, just like this student and his family.
Apple hard wired the LED to the power supply for the camera. Unless you modify the circuit board holding the camera assembly, the LED will come on when the camera is powered up no matter what you do in software. Its simply not controlled separately from the power to the camera, its on the same trace as the power supply.
As with most intelligent computers with cameras built in now days, people with half a clue realized not allowing the camera light to be overridden was the only way to avoid being sued... which sucks cause my wife notices the light being on no matter how many layers of tape I put over it... no homemade porn for me:(
No, it doesn't. You don't get in trouble for accidentally taking a nudie of a kid... unless they find out it wasn't an accident, or your knew it was happening and made sure to keep the photos around and wrote about how you jerk off to them in your diary err, I'm sorry, blog or twitter account or whatever you girls call it these days.
My webcam used to take 3600 photos... AN HOUR... you know, once a second, in 3 hours I'm well past their number, doesn't seem so odd a number to me.
If the timing of the photos was entirely automated and random, it starts to look like ignorance and isn't likely to get prosecuted as child porn as thats not what was going on. Now... if the photos were taken every 5 minutes, between the hours of 9 and 11pm, you might have a point, but without more facts you can't say it would be considered kiddie porn in a court of law as theres no indication thats what they were trying to do.
Why do people get so retarded about laws and always think they can be warped around so intent and context have no effect on the system? Are you guys really that fucking ignorant of how the American legal system works? You guys need some serious education, which surprises me for a site thats supposed to be frequented by semi-intelligent people.
No, they can't, unless they were intentionally trying to get nude shots.
Everytime someone says something retarded like this it just makes me cringe. You won't go to jail for having pictures of naked kids on your computer, there are actual reasons for them to exist. You will get in trouble for actively seeking child porn however, which is different.
Intent matters more often than not when charges are brought against someone, there are different laws and punishments depending on intent, accidents are punished completely differently (or ignored sometimes) than someone actively and intentionally doing something illegal.
If my public web cam that shoots my front yard takes a picture of your naked 3 year old sun streaking across my yard and it ends up plastered all over the Internet, no one is going to do anything for me as I didn't intend to take the picture and well, your kid shouldn't have been in my yard in the first place.
However, we don't know if someone was actually actively trying to get nudies of some highschool kids... DO WE?
but one accident can totally destroy the value of the generating plant.
Thats true at of any facility, assuming a large enough accident. However, please show me a nuclear power plant that completely closed operations after an accident?
Chernobyl didn't shut down until fairly recently, and the plants in Japan will likely ALL come back online in relatively short order, they kinda need power.
The individual reactors may not be used again, but thats a given, and why they have multiple reactors, containment to smaller amounts of damage should one go south. Lets also point out, 2 of the reactors at the Fukishima plant would be already decommissioned at this point, so they lost about a month of service out of them, and the 3rd was going to be decommissioned in the near future as well. So basically, they had to shut them down less than a year early... not all that bad considering how old these reactors are... remember, 1st gen reactors here.
Practically, its impossible at the current time, for too many reasons to go into, but the biggest obvious wall in the way is the economic one, which of course also has about a billion side effects. We're not going to destroy our economy, that'd be stupid. Let Germany do it, let them make the mistakes, and we can do it right the first try by learning from them. Of course, the reality of it is, Germany can't actually do it either and this is all just political posturing.
Long Term Practicality, the planet is likely to see its first man made fusion reactor that is self sustaining once started and actually produces additional power for output THIS YEAR (fingers crossed here), in which case we should just pretty much sit on our nuclear plants just like they are until we can take it to the next level of practical production of power with fusion reactors.
If every nuclear plant in the country pulled a Chernobyl or Fukishima... We'd STILL be better off from a radiological point of view than if they were all replaced with coal plants of the same power output. And lets continue to try to be realistic, Japans accident is a freaking joke compared to Russia's. It may not be as rosey as they originally made it sound (I've yet to see any actual direct deciption), but its not really THAT bad. We're not going to see the area evacuated for decades for any logical reasons. Are land values going to drop? Sure, people are stupid and don't actually understand nuclear physics well enough to understand why it really isn't that unsafe around the area. I don't recommend you go hang out in the wet/dry wells of the plants, but off the plant property you're unlikely to ever notice an effect, and in a couple years it'll be safe enough that you'll have bigger sources of radiation from elsewhere that are more dangerous, like the coal fallout from other plants that doesn't pollute an area around the plant, it pollutes an area larger than the country itself.
Waste storage... REALLY? Do you have any idea how LITTLE it REALLY costs to store this stuff? I'm not saying its cheap, but the cost store compared to energy produced just makes the storage costs irrelevant.
My only reservation about nuclear can be boiled down to the statement, "We can't trust a lot of contractors to build showerheads with proper grounding to keep people using them from being electrocuted. How can we trust people who are just there for the next quarter's dollar to build something that is as intricate as a reactor, no matter how well the design?"
Part of the problem is that you think the fact that your shower head is electrified is a result of people building shower heads wrong, when the reality of it is, you've got to be actually constructing your house/building with wiring completely incorrect to the point that you're going to be sinking massive amounts of energy directly into the ground well before you get electrocuted. Your entire pipe system should be grounded in multiple places, and directly at all the faucets, which is why they have holes and screws to lock ground wires into, which would mean there is no chance any electricity is getting to your shower head, which is probably made of plastic anyway and completely unable to conduct electricity, but don't let the fake chrome exterior fool you.
Whats next, you'll blame the contractors who installed your shower heads for them being shitty cause they melted when your house burnt to the ground?
You're right, we can't really depend on people to do their jobs because there is no punishment for companies who don't do their job, ESPECIALLY construction companies. Take road construction for instance, its a given that new no road built today is going to be nice to drive on because the contractors are going to do it at the lowest bid and not actually meet the design requirements, but they'll make good money until its finished, then the state/city/whatever will sue them... but the money has been spent, so the company goes bankrupt, and the owner just starts a new one and does it all over again because his company was legally responsible, not him...
Next year, he'll be putting ashpault down on new roads, probably for the same location, in Raleigh, where I live not only did that happen... but the guy that got the contract to 'fix' the problems created by the original builder... WAS THE FUCKING ORIGINAL BUILDER.
There is no punishment for people who run scam companies in America. In this respect, we need to be more like China. In the example of the road issues, I say we take everything the man owns personally, and put him in a labor camp until he can pay back the contract obligations he failed to deliver on... which of course means he just essentially made himself into a slave as he'll never make enough to pay back the millions he shafted the state and fed governments out of.
No one is even tossed under the bus anymore, and most of the time they get to keep the fruits of their scams. Worst case, the janitor is fined $25 for littering... even though the original problem was that they failed to build a road to the standards the agreed too. Even the scapegoats don't get any real punishment, so its not like you even have to worry about being the freaking scape goat.
I like to go camping. Good luck finding a charger for an ebook reader in the woods. Batteries for a flashlight, or a nicely bright campfire, and a real book please.
Well, I just got back from camping this weekend, and every store we came across had a stand FULL of electronics chargers, plenty that would recharge off a battery pack rather than an outlet, and of course 12 volt from your car if need be.
Of course my car has a 12 volt port for charging... as does my boat, which we spent most of the time on... some of which I happened to be reading during, while the ipad was plugged in charging:/
I don't entirely disagree with your statement, but I'd much rather read from my iPad than campfire light, my eyes feel the same way. Paper books have the advantage still, but power supply isn't one of them unless you are truely stranded somewhere, at which point, you should probably be more concerned with survival itself rather than reading. Wouldn't want to read from my iPad in direct sunlight though, it sucks for that (which the Kindle of course doesn't), but I do wish I could loan/lend/sale/donate any books I bought for it. Really, I'd like to be able to buy used copies of reference manuals, or for the price of these reference manuals to become reasonable so I can buy one directly.
Slashdot Mirror
The best part of your post is that you seem to think economic theory and reality are somehow related.
Economic theory is more or less bullshit in almost every case as it fails to take into account human nature at almost every turn, even when trying to take human nature into account.
Neither Aqua nor Compiz were started before MS added those features to the OS ... no one used them because performance sucked as the OS didn't make a decent video card a requirement, and at the time, those cards were rather expensive.
Sorry, but Compiz is nothing but copies of other peoples stuff for the 'oh shiny' factor, much like all of MS's recent stuff (WinPhone 7 and Win8) are copies of Apple's stuff, without understanding WHY they did it. Both are examples of doing it wrong, regardless of what they were trying to accomplish.
There was something sweet, simple, endearing and DAMN FAST about the 3.1 shell that I haven't found anywhere since. It flew even on 200MHz machines.
Considering when it was written, it flew on 16 mhz machines, I would hope it could do well on a 200 mhz machine.
I haven't looked in Windows7, but I'm pretty sure you could still use fileman.exe as your shell in XP if you really wanted to go back to the dark ages you could, but its unlikely you'd actually stay that way for any length of time.
Perhaps someone should buy him a Mac and show him AppleScript.
Are there any native Mac OSX apps that aren't scriptable? I don't even know how you could make them unscriptable, its kind of built into ... well, everything in OSX.
You don't have to do anything to make your app scriptable, though you can make it easier to script for by making helpers and such, but out of the box your apps are scriptable because the core runtime libraries are scriptable.
Maybe he should take a look in his own company at VBA, which requires the app know about and support it, but they certainly do make their apps scriptable ... sort of, in a bad halfassed way.
Really? I find editing raster images and viewing them from a command line to be rather shitty, but maybe you use a different editor than I?
Perhaps you have matrix like skills so just reading hex allows you to visualize the image, I do not however, so I tend to stick with using pretty GUI editors.
I'll be happy to bet a years pay that I can come up with at least 50 tasks that you simply can not under any circumstances do better at a command prompt than I can do at a GUI.
Like wise, I could do the same for the command prompt versus the GUI.
They both have their place. Only an idiot would use a screwdriver to hammer in a nail when he has a perfectly good working hammer right there to use, which is pretty much what you've said you do.
A one-size-fits-all UI is like trying to find a nubile cutie fresh out of college who can calculate quaternion rotations in her head, thinks emacs sucks, wants to marry a typical slashdotter and have his babies, but at the same time loves hunting, fishing, and, oh BTW - she's a billionaire.
Turns out, you just described my wife almost to the letter, those she isn't a billionaire and we didn't find out until after we were married that she liked hunting and fishing. Had a deal her father was working on not fell through, its quite probably should would have been a billionaire too! So its not impossible, but it certainly is highly improbable.
I thought one of the battle cries of RMS was that OSS fixes all those problems ... No ones personal agenda matters cause everyone can make it like THEY want it!
As long as greedy people are designing, building and deploying it, yes, it'll be the way it is.
We've seen in the past some alternatives done by people without greed on their mind (at least in the beginning) which then promptly get offered massive sums of money that only an idiot would turn down in exchange for selling out to some big company ... which then turns it into exactly what you say.
One of the major problems however is the basic fundamental idea of a 'decent peer-to-peer collaborative system' can exist. It simply can't, for the exact same reasons why one can't be built. Anarchy doesn't work in efficiently enough to be useful beyond a small size, I challenge you to show me an example of it working. Wikipedia is more or less a failure, its not useless, but no intelligent person goes to wikipedia to get facts since its basically in constant anarchy at this point. You might go to get an idea of what something is, but thats where it ends.
The idea that we'll all just work together for the good of the world is fundamentally flawed. Competition and diversification in our own species is what keeps us from going extinct. If you have any clue about the history of the world, you can understand why P2P will never be as efficient as alternatives even when those alternatives are raping you for someone elses gain because anarchy is raping you for EVERYONE elses gain, and in the end, NO ONE gains anything.
Without Google knowing in advance about the URL. This feature totally allows Google to distribute their detection techniques to users rather than on their own network. When their detection code spots something via Chrome, it can then tell Googles services which can add that to the blacklist if it turns out that it really is a malicious site (after Google's services have verified it, so random people can't send a fake 'bad website!' to Google and get any site they want blacklisted.
I don't think they were implying that they'd never know about the URL, just that the browser is capable of catching some things even without it being on Google's blacklist.
http://www.lmgtfy.com/?q=Update+for+Microsoft+Silverlight+(KB2526954)+Failed
That was hard wasn't it.
The problem the GP had is they are still under the assumption that all slashdot users have a clue, while that was true many years ago, you clearly prove that it is no longer the case as you could have resolved the issue in a few seconds if you actually had a clue.
For those that like to complain about the the performance of Java I can tell you that you fury is for the most part misplaced.
I'm one of those people, 99.9% of java apps are slow as fucking balls in molasses. Having had to start doing java development in the last couple of years however I very quickly learned that the reason Java apps suck is the same reason VB apps tend to suck. They are written by people who aren't capable of being developers, but can muddle their way through the language enough to turn something out.
The language doesn't suck, but it draws in people who shouldn't be developing, which makes it appear that it sucks. I've learned that its fairly easy as a decent programmer to write Java apps that are fast enough for anything but the most hard core processing requirements (things were speed is absolutely the first priority. graphical games for instance)
I do think .NET is a java copy, but ... I think its a copy with upgrades and is a better alternative if all you care about is Windows. I really wish mono wasn't such a steaming pile and that their CLR wasn't so technically inept. If .NET was truely supported on OS X, I'd be far more supportive of it, but thats never going to happen so its left as a windows only target, which means it gets cut out of most projects our company does simply because we may want the app to move to OSX as well in the future.
Actually, it is entirely syntax differences, it is so much so that you can use XML and XSLT to generate code for both VB.NET and C#, that is in fact how microsoft code examples work on their websites in almost every case.
I'd love to see an example of a type you can take in VB.NET and not C#.
Actually, porting VB6 code to VB.NET is pretty simple, especially if the person/people writing the VB6 code were decent programmers in general (which is pretty much not something you see with VB, but it is possible, as in my case where I detest VB, but got it dropped in my lap since no one else could/would do it.). The porting problems were all based around bad programmer problems.
I've successfully ported two products, with several hundred thousand lines of code between them to VB.NET, all it took was fixing stupid stuff and then finding the few quirks where things didn't work identical between versions. All in all it wasn't a whole lot different than most porting across major library changes I've done, but thats probably partially because I'd spent the previous couple of years making the original VB6 code not suck ass since it got dropped in my lap.
Right, because they had the exact same intentions ... the school board of lower merion was totally trying, intentionally, to get nude pictures of the students ... which is clear from the photos they found which are all semi-nude shots of kids ...
Wait, common sense is kicking in ... fuck, you know what, god damn common sense made me realize that these are two ENTIRELY DIFFERENT FUCKING SITUATIONS YOU MORON.
One was intentionally trying to get nude photos, the other is more or less randomized shots by an automated system ... yea, its totally the same punishment cause its totally the same crime.
You're an idiot.
No, idiot, of course not. The web site based player on the other hand does use Silverlight since that's kind of what silverlight was made for.
Of course, the windows media center plugin is all silverlight as well, and the xbox netflix player shares some of that code as it runs on XNA.
But, don't let that stop you from looking stupid while you strain to be pedantic and fail due to your own ignorance.
Depending on your environment however, a hacker may be able to determine that the lights are off or on and from that, if anyone is there to notice a physical theft.
Of course, the server is probably in a closet with the lights off most of the time anyway, but you know, just throwing it out there :)
So ... you're money grabbing as well. Thats all your post says.
If he wanted to 'fix the problem' he would be going after individuals that did it, not the school board, which will just pay for the fines with tax payer money, essentially all that happens in this lawsuit is that my taxes end up paying for you to get some money and make some lawyers a fortune because you're too stupid and/or greedy to treat the problem. Instead you want 'a pile of cash to teach the school board a lesson' ... the school board isn't a live, it will learn no lesson, it has no mind, and the people who you actually want to get taught a lesson will at worst, have to find a new job, which they'll probably even get a good reference for.
So again I state, all your post proves is that you too are a money grabbing douche using this as an excuse to make a quick buck, just like this student and his family.
Apple hard wired the LED to the power supply for the camera. Unless you modify the circuit board holding the camera assembly, the LED will come on when the camera is powered up no matter what you do in software. Its simply not controlled separately from the power to the camera, its on the same trace as the power supply.
As with most intelligent computers with cameras built in now days, people with half a clue realized not allowing the camera light to be overridden was the only way to avoid being sued ... which sucks cause my wife notices the light being on no matter how many layers of tape I put over it ... no homemade porn for me :(
No, it doesn't. You don't get in trouble for accidentally taking a nudie of a kid ... unless they find out it wasn't an accident, or your knew it was happening and made sure to keep the photos around and wrote about how you jerk off to them in your diary err, I'm sorry, blog or twitter account or whatever you girls call it these days.
My webcam used to take 3600 photos ... AN HOUR ... you know, once a second, in 3 hours I'm well past their number, doesn't seem so odd a number to me.
If the timing of the photos was entirely automated and random, it starts to look like ignorance and isn't likely to get prosecuted as child porn as thats not what was going on. Now ... if the photos were taken every 5 minutes, between the hours of 9 and 11pm, you might have a point, but without more facts you can't say it would be considered kiddie porn in a court of law as theres no indication thats what they were trying to do.
Why do people get so retarded about laws and always think they can be warped around so intent and context have no effect on the system? Are you guys really that fucking ignorant of how the American legal system works? You guys need some serious education, which surprises me for a site thats supposed to be frequented by semi-intelligent people.
No, they can't, unless they were intentionally trying to get nude shots.
Everytime someone says something retarded like this it just makes me cringe. You won't go to jail for having pictures of naked kids on your computer, there are actual reasons for them to exist. You will get in trouble for actively seeking child porn however, which is different.
Intent matters more often than not when charges are brought against someone, there are different laws and punishments depending on intent, accidents are punished completely differently (or ignored sometimes) than someone actively and intentionally doing something illegal.
If my public web cam that shoots my front yard takes a picture of your naked 3 year old sun streaking across my yard and it ends up plastered all over the Internet, no one is going to do anything for me as I didn't intend to take the picture and well, your kid shouldn't have been in my yard in the first place.
However, we don't know if someone was actually actively trying to get nudies of some highschool kids ... DO WE?
Fine, usenet then.
Or if you really want to get technical ...
Twitter is just a blog where your posts are limited to a ridiculously stupid small post length limit, both are just web pages.
but one accident can totally destroy the value of the generating plant.
Thats true at of any facility, assuming a large enough accident. However, please show me a nuclear power plant that completely closed operations after an accident?
Chernobyl didn't shut down until fairly recently, and the plants in Japan will likely ALL come back online in relatively short order, they kinda need power.
The individual reactors may not be used again, but thats a given, and why they have multiple reactors, containment to smaller amounts of damage should one go south. Lets also point out, 2 of the reactors at the Fukishima plant would be already decommissioned at this point, so they lost about a month of service out of them, and the 3rd was going to be decommissioned in the near future as well. So basically, they had to shut them down less than a year early ... not all that bad considering how old these reactors are ... remember, 1st gen reactors here.
Technically, its possible.
Practically, its impossible at the current time, for too many reasons to go into, but the biggest obvious wall in the way is the economic one, which of course also has about a billion side effects. We're not going to destroy our economy, that'd be stupid. Let Germany do it, let them make the mistakes, and we can do it right the first try by learning from them. Of course, the reality of it is, Germany can't actually do it either and this is all just political posturing.
Long Term Practicality, the planet is likely to see its first man made fusion reactor that is self sustaining once started and actually produces additional power for output THIS YEAR (fingers crossed here), in which case we should just pretty much sit on our nuclear plants just like they are until we can take it to the next level of practical production of power with fusion reactors.
If every nuclear plant in the country pulled a Chernobyl or Fukishima ... We'd STILL be better off from a radiological point of view than if they were all replaced with coal plants of the same power output. And lets continue to try to be realistic, Japans accident is a freaking joke compared to Russia's. It may not be as rosey as they originally made it sound (I've yet to see any actual direct deciption), but its not really THAT bad. We're not going to see the area evacuated for decades for any logical reasons. Are land values going to drop? Sure, people are stupid and don't actually understand nuclear physics well enough to understand why it really isn't that unsafe around the area. I don't recommend you go hang out in the wet/dry wells of the plants, but off the plant property you're unlikely to ever notice an effect, and in a couple years it'll be safe enough that you'll have bigger sources of radiation from elsewhere that are more dangerous, like the coal fallout from other plants that doesn't pollute an area around the plant, it pollutes an area larger than the country itself.
Waste storage ... REALLY? Do you have any idea how LITTLE it REALLY costs to store this stuff? I'm not saying its cheap, but the cost store compared to energy produced just makes the storage costs irrelevant.
My only reservation about nuclear can be boiled down to the statement, "We can't trust a lot of contractors to build showerheads with proper grounding to keep people using them from being electrocuted. How can we trust people who are just there for the next quarter's dollar to build something that is as intricate as a reactor, no matter how well the design?"
Part of the problem is that you think the fact that your shower head is electrified is a result of people building shower heads wrong, when the reality of it is, you've got to be actually constructing your house/building with wiring completely incorrect to the point that you're going to be sinking massive amounts of energy directly into the ground well before you get electrocuted. Your entire pipe system should be grounded in multiple places, and directly at all the faucets, which is why they have holes and screws to lock ground wires into, which would mean there is no chance any electricity is getting to your shower head, which is probably made of plastic anyway and completely unable to conduct electricity, but don't let the fake chrome exterior fool you.
Whats next, you'll blame the contractors who installed your shower heads for them being shitty cause they melted when your house burnt to the ground?
You're right, we can't really depend on people to do their jobs because there is no punishment for companies who don't do their job, ESPECIALLY construction companies. Take road construction for instance, its a given that new no road built today is going to be nice to drive on because the contractors are going to do it at the lowest bid and not actually meet the design requirements, but they'll make good money until its finished, then the state/city/whatever will sue them ... but the money has been spent, so the company goes bankrupt, and the owner just starts a new one and does it all over again because his company was legally responsible, not him ...
Next year, he'll be putting ashpault down on new roads, probably for the same location, in Raleigh, where I live not only did that happen ... but the guy that got the contract to 'fix' the problems created by the original builder ... WAS THE FUCKING ORIGINAL BUILDER.
There is no punishment for people who run scam companies in America. In this respect, we need to be more like China. In the example of the road issues, I say we take everything the man owns personally, and put him in a labor camp until he can pay back the contract obligations he failed to deliver on ... which of course means he just essentially made himself into a slave as he'll never make enough to pay back the millions he shafted the state and fed governments out of.
No one is even tossed under the bus anymore, and most of the time they get to keep the fruits of their scams. Worst case, the janitor is fined $25 for littering ... even though the original problem was that they failed to build a road to the standards the agreed too. Even the scapegoats don't get any real punishment, so its not like you even have to worry about being the freaking scape goat.
I like to go camping. Good luck finding a charger for an ebook reader in the woods. Batteries for a flashlight, or a nicely bright campfire, and a real book please.
Well, I just got back from camping this weekend, and every store we came across had a stand FULL of electronics chargers, plenty that would recharge off a battery pack rather than an outlet, and of course 12 volt from your car if need be.
Of course my car has a 12 volt port for charging ... as does my boat, which we spent most of the time on ... some of which I happened to be reading during, while the ipad was plugged in charging :/
I don't entirely disagree with your statement, but I'd much rather read from my iPad than campfire light, my eyes feel the same way. Paper books have the advantage still, but power supply isn't one of them unless you are truely stranded somewhere, at which point, you should probably be more concerned with survival itself rather than reading. Wouldn't want to read from my iPad in direct sunlight though, it sucks for that (which the Kindle of course doesn't), but I do wish I could loan/lend/sale/donate any books I bought for it. Really, I'd like to be able to buy used copies of reference manuals, or for the price of these reference manuals to become reasonable so I can buy one directly.