I'm fine with nuclear power. I'm not fine with nuclear power plants being run by greedy assholes that put the profit margin above the safety margin.
Like Chernobyl?
In the wisdom of/. is anyone aware of any current (intentionally) non-profit operating companies? Not counting military obviously? I've often thought it would be a great idea. The personal goals of the sociopaths in management would be to grow their empire, thus they'd probably price the electricity they sell to about a mil beneath coal, maybe even above if they think they can squeeze during a hot summer. Yet on the other hand they'd have a non-profit corporate charter that they have to spend all that dough on their plant's safety systems rather than profit. Sounds like a good plan to me!
Actually, from what I can tell, the reactor design was "outsourced" to companies that had been doing it for some time, like General Electric. And the operating company had cooperated with them several times before at other plants.
And the initial business decision to install GE BWRs was made shortly after losing a world war. And coincidentally one of the biggest corporations on the winning side was selling..... BWRs.
Theres also some hard core national security type stuff going on with respect to commercial plant design vs military plant design. Its such a struggle to balance experience with security. From a safety standpoint you should be better off exporting what you use in your subs, except that subs inherently are not as susceptible to loss of coolant (unless you literally beach one, I guess). On the other hand you don't want to export your top sekret designs, because, uh, just because.
I don't think PWR design would have helped too much. PWR containment is stereotypically believed to be better (but stereotype and gossip is not truth). In this situation that merely means when it split open it splits more violently, hard to say. Or it pops the top of the primary exchanger. On the other hand, BWRs are famous for making their turbines radiologically filthy under "normal" operation conditions, so they have plenty of practice at low level cleanup and monitoring, which is good in this situation. A PWR does not enjoy having no power to the pressurizer. On the other hand circulation when "not quite full" supposedly works better on a PWR, some inherent hydrodynamic thing. On one hand, a BWR certainly has fuel rod design that tolerates a bit -o- boiling (duh) on the other hand a PWR doesn't have to handle boiling loads so theres less fatigue. Completely depowering either a PWR or a BWR is going to pretty much F it up rather seriously.
>The ones you need to worry about are the ones which are decaying rapidly, i.e. the ones with short half-lives.
And the ones that bioaccumulate. I'm told Xenon is a tolerably interesting (although expensive) anesthetic. I'd inhale a snoot of mildly activated Xe without much fear since it would all be out of my system in a couple breaths. On the other hand I would not F around with activated iodine or strontium (which is a calcium mimic).
And decays to technetium-99, so almost all the initial technetium-99m from the fission reaction while the reactor was active has almost certainly become plain old technetium-99 by now.
Unless its gone momentarily critical during fuel melting, insert Japanese reports of occasional "neutron beams"
No, what is being said is that this most likely indicates holes in the reactor containers.
What I want to know is are those "holes in the reactor containers" better known as intentionally opened valves or is it something like a crack.
It seems logical that if you pump "endless quantities" of seawater into a little silo shaped drum that... its gotta be going somewhere. Its not a black hole generator in there, and despite E=MC2 the E generated simply isn't enough to, for example, pump in and make disappear a hundred times its volume in seawater.
A comparison of a line graph of reactor pressure vs containment pressure would probably tell a much more interesting story that "look, water came out of a valve when we opened it, and lo and behold, its now wet beneath the valve"
That's not a very well informed argument, although your target selection is not too bad.
The unwashed masses stop listening because they want to be scared. They want to be scared because anyone whom doesn't watch garbage like the mainstream media produces... does not watch that garbage.
You know how much of a pain in the ass it is to sit next to the guy at the magic show who spends all his time telling everyone around him how its all fake and I bet I know how it works? Or the guy at the horror movie whom feels the need to tell everyone around him how its all fake and none of it is real? What a PITA for the folks whom want to be entertained.
Same way with the TV news viewers. They literally don't want the truth, so stop trying to tell them. They want to be scared. If you somehow convince them not to be scared about this thing, they'll be pissed that you've "ruined the fun" as they wait for the next scary story.
With a memory best measured in days or weeks, I don't think the opinion of the general unwashed masses really matters for nuclear power, at all.
Now on/. its OK to tell the truth about whats going on. Some of us actually want to know. But keep the non-fiction here and the fiction out there on the TV news where it belongs.
Could it be that we went to books because of the invention of the printing press, which was not able to print continuously on a long scroll (contrary to the more modern printers, starting with the matrix printer)?
Rotary press 1843 vs offset press 1903 vs Dot matrix printer 1964
Pretty much everything printed on a modern press for about a century before the dot matrix printer was invented was printed on "scrolls". Newspapers etc are not printed on precut sheets. Other than modern desktop laser printers, pretty much everything for the last century has been printed on "scrolls" that are later chopped into pages. I am not counting artsy craftsy stuff like silk screening tee shirts here, rather the million times larger paper printing industry.
If you want some fun you can troll printers (people who run printing presses, not inanimate objects) regarding the offset press from 1903 vs the rotary press from 1843. There's not a heck of a lot of difference but some argumentative personalities love to argue how they're obviously separate different inventions vs obviously the offset is a minor modification of the rotary scarely even worth commenting on.
And it won't be obsolete in 2 years. The same software you run today will work just fine in 2 years, and will take care of any web/office task you could possibly conceive of.... But web use? Office docs? Email? A 5 year old laptop would suffice
Read the article more closely... The OP is requesting a 5 year old laptop not a new one. The wife could not survive the software transition from XP to OSX, she'll simply never survive the transition to Vista or the latest version of office. Never. The hardware doesn't really matter, whats important is installing 2004 era XP and other 2004 era software on it. And somehow maintaining it, at least to prevent the worst of virus and bot infestation.
Frankly the best option is probably select "any" underlying hardware and OS, and run XP / Office 2003 / other old stuff inside a vmware... and back up the vmware image. Then when the OS and software inside the vmware image explodes into pus filled viral infestation, simply restore the image to known good state and repeat. This won't help with identity theft, but frankly anyone doing anything "sensitive" on a windows box deserves what they get.
Its quite possible the guy doesn't need to buy any hardware at all, assuming the old macbook can run XP and other 2004 era software acceptably.
When our 2004-era Windows XP laptop.... she inherited my still serviceable 2008 MacBook. But after about six months, she hasn't gotten used to it, and wants a Windows machine....How would Slashdotters go about picking a solid, basic laptop for Web surfing and document editing that won't be obsolete in two years?
You've got bigger problems. If she can't tolerate the relatively simple and painless transition from XP to OSX, she will certainly not survive the transition to Vista or newer and will not survive the transition to the latest version of Office with its ribbon abomination.
Soooo. Your problem isn't buying a windoze laptop, your problem is purchasing and maintaining a complete 2004 era infrastructure, in its entirety, including maintenance of "unsupported" software. Possible / tolerable / no problem in opensource land, not possible in windoze land.
Note that this doesn't mean you should assume you're safe just because you're using bind variables
For example, bind variables are a great way to store the wrong value in the wrong column. Admittedly I'd rather discover that bug in the unit tests on the dev server, than discover the injection on the production server, but I can none the less hear the siren call of doing it the wrong way...
Now what would be nice would be libraries for ALL languages that look like convenient, yet vulnerable, inline SQL but translate behind the scenes into bind variables.
Also fun, if the (numerous) lint-y / perltidy-y whatever apps would highlight or comment upon security problems like this in an automated manner.
The idea that you and I will have equal votes in forty years, when my life of scrimping and saving means I have $1M in the bank, and you're penniless and living on debt scares the bejeezus out of me.
The really scary part is that 40 years of 70s style stagflation in a post peak oil environment means $1M will roughly buy a cup of coffee at starbucks...
When the US went off gold and floated our currency, there was a long (5-10 year) period of economic shock while everyone had to work out what happened.
I thought it was Hubberts peak of USA oil production happening just as predicted 40 or so years earlier... So in the '67 arab israeli war the arabs could shut off the spigot and... who cares since pre-peak you can always increase domestic production. But in the '73 arab israeli war we were at or post peak so the arabs figured out they can now shut off the spigot and we get gas lines and economic collapse... And everybody had to work out what happened w/ regards to that.
Also, its not so much "spot price for an ounce of gold today is hovering around $1400/oz." as it is "spot price for a dollar is a 1/1400th oz of gold" as its the value of the dollar thats collapsing over the past couple years not the value of gold soaring. In the same time frame, gold isn't a whole heck of a lot more valuable compared to... pretty much anything but other currencies that are collapsing...
There's a couple interpretations of the 70s, probably all partially correct.
Real inflation is hitting what? 8% per year. Anything I save is made worthless very quickly. It is handed over to the bankers. On the other hand, if I take out as much debt as is possible and then I get to pay it back in devalued currency.
Frosting on the cake, is using the cash to either generate income or reduce expenses.
On the other hand that assumes wages will someday increase in step with inflation instead of just 3rd worlding the countries standard of living...
One minor flaw in the ointment is the baby boomers have just spent 40 years throwing money into the market for retirement. Now they'll be pulling it out. Consider the very basic supply -n- demand implications. Huge demand to buy results in high prices results in people believing the market will always miraculously give great returns. Then huge lack of demand aka selling means prices drop.
Another problem is pre-tax is the govts money to be used at the govts beck and call, possibly even for your benefit, if the govt sees fit to give you permission. Or perhaps instead to be nationalized to pay for the boomers retirement when SS implodes.
Seems a good bet in the past, suckers bet going forward.
Various folks say we need more students in these subjects, but there aren't so many great jobs on the other end.
Various folks = businessmen whom would benefit by crushing the middle class salaries of folks with STEM educations.
Other end = If by other end you mean China or India, there are jobs there. But overall its "American Citizens need not apply". For Americans there are no jobs or rapidly will be no jobs in those fields, why not go where you're wanted, and coincidentally paid more, in other words finance?
the more troubling underlying issue is that the Internet has devalued content nearly to the point where the business reason to create it is disappearing
then why did you write your article and spam it on/.? If not for income then it must just be an ego thing, right?
Find another reason to produce content. What's the cost/benefit ratio of societal ignorance and tedium? What is more profitable? An intelligent, lively, healthy public, or an ignorant, dull, diseased one?
The problem is your assumption that the current "big content producers" somehow, miraculously I guess, produce "intelligent lively healthy public".
All they do is scare people, distribute corporate and statist propaganda, and try to control people into buying stuff they don't want. Very little to nothing redeemable. Oh, occasionally they'll try to "preach to the choir" about something ridiculously simple so folks whom already know the gospel feel morally superior, but a population that feels morally superior about itself is not really an advantage.
The sooner the big media dinosaurs die off, the sooner the average citizen's mental health and abilities will improve, not decline.
But the more troubling underlying issue is that the Internet has devalued content nearly to the point where the business reason to create it is disappearing.
Err, you mean devalued USELESS content. Note how "we" call it "content" instead of information or news, because information and news are valuable. "content" on the other hand is a placeholder to cover up some empty space.
Lets summarize the "valuable" content I see when I pull up the times front page right now:
Radiation is bad for your kids. no kidding? I never knew. Thank $diety the times is here so I can learn that. I was going to feed my kids enriched U-235 tonight, but now I'm "scared straight".
An old woman at least two generations older than me, of no cultural relevance to me whatsoever, has died. no kidding? I thought humans were immortal.
"6 things to feel good about food" Thats the headline. Seriously. You've gotta be kidding me. How much are they paying me to read that?
Warfare continues in the middle east. Since 3000 BC, pretty much uninterrupted. Wake me when they glass some cities with nukes, or the US finds some good guys to support (good luck). Till then thats a snoozer.
"How a building dispute can sink a sale" You've gotta be kidding me. I'll file that for next time I sell a condo in Brooklyn, yeah right soon I'm sure.
"The New Old Age: Simple Rules for Better Sleep". OMG. I gotta stop now.
I'm supposed to pay attention to this mental chewing gum? Even worse, I'm supposed to pay for it? And this was the "best" they could do, it being the front page?
I just want to make sure... firebug... well-tested and confirmed working before I make the jump.
Don't know about "well-tested" (well tested like "a two year Debian release cycle" ?) but I can certainly confirm firebug is working or at least it hasn't failed yet.
Also working:
Adblock plus flashblock ghostery noscript xmarks
Not working:
Remove it permanently (I can survive without it, but its nice) Microsoft.net framework assistant 1.2.1 (WTF is this anyway?)
Immediately upon installation: Right click on that wee little down triangle in the address bar. Uncheck "Tabs on Top" then breathe a sigh of relief as your eyes stop bleeding. Then de-turd the toolbar by right click on the same triangle and select "Customize..." and then rip out the search bar (useless), the home button (so 1993), the stop button (again, so 1993), rearrange the refresh/reload button where god intended it to be, ditto the spinner. Basically just clean it up a bit. Should have come preconfigured this way.
I don't like the weird new forward / reverse buttons. I have muscle memory from FF3 to move back to the start of history in a tab, which no longer seems to work, epic UI fail to screw the user that way. That's the only UI problem I haven't been able to work around yet.
So with about five minutes of amount of work, upgrade results in only two dead (admittedly useless) addons, and one UI fail that'll only strike me about 50 times a day no big deal. I've seen worse dot-zero releases.
I have a clunky many years old desktop and on both FF3 and FF4 everything comes up in "blink of eye" speed, I don't even know how to test if its slower or faster because everywhere I go is faster than my visual cognition (and thats fast, I'm a very fast reader). Its hardly orders of magnitude different, anyway.
Of course the user can tell the truth or lie, but how is Facebook determining they lie?
Facebook is not. Their second grade teacher is determining it, and flagging the account as "impersonation". This works pretty well if you live in a small town. When I used to have a FB account it would pop random people up from my hometown and current city and ask me to friend them... Or was that the dating site ads? Well anyway. If you put your town as "LA" or "NYC" this doesn't work, but proportionally very few people live there, or they technically live and attend school in a very small suburb, which they probably listed so as to hang out with their friends.
I should ask my school teacher relatives if they do this for fun on their own time, or maybe the school contracts to someones relative, or the admins do it in their spare time, or exactly how this works.
I looked that that, but the options are very limited (pretending to be someone else
1) The kid is pretending to be someone else; someone whom is 13 or over.
2) Tell FB that you personally know that kid, that kid is 8, and someone else is impersonating the kid online (school bully, stereotypical middle aged creepy male lunatic right out of a TV special, who knows, even though its almost certainly the parents or a relative).
At the real world age of 3 months its pretty obvious the parents are doing it for the laughs, it MIGHT even be funny (but lets face it, probably not). At the age of 7 years its not so clear who is lying. At the age of 11 years its probably the kid lying.
Theres at least 9 revisions, some pretty new, and some waiting on the drawing board.
Again, we're back to the same problem of it is externally about the same size and shape as something old, therefore it absolutely must be ancient tech.
I own a "GM car" therefore it must contain only unchanged technology from 1908 when GM was founded, correct? Its a "GM", and GM was founded in 1908 therefore the proof is self evident that my car is built entirely out of 1908 tech. Even if it was designed in the early-mid 90s and manufactured in '97.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm fine with nuclear power. I'm not fine with nuclear power plants being run by greedy assholes that put the profit margin above the safety margin.
Like Chernobyl?
In the wisdom of /. is anyone aware of any current (intentionally) non-profit operating companies? Not counting military obviously? I've often thought it would be a great idea. The personal goals of the sociopaths in management would be to grow their empire, thus they'd probably price the electricity they sell to about a mil beneath coal, maybe even above if they think they can squeeze during a hot summer. Yet on the other hand they'd have a non-profit corporate charter that they have to spend all that dough on their plant's safety systems rather than profit. Sounds like a good plan to me!
Actually, from what I can tell, the reactor design was "outsourced" to companies that had been doing it for some time, like General Electric. And the operating company had cooperated with them several times before at other plants.
And the initial business decision to install GE BWRs was made shortly after losing a world war. And coincidentally one of the biggest corporations on the winning side was selling ..... BWRs.
Theres also some hard core national security type stuff going on with respect to commercial plant design vs military plant design. Its such a struggle to balance experience with security. From a safety standpoint you should be better off exporting what you use in your subs, except that subs inherently are not as susceptible to loss of coolant (unless you literally beach one, I guess). On the other hand you don't want to export your top sekret designs, because, uh, just because.
I don't think PWR design would have helped too much. PWR containment is stereotypically believed to be better (but stereotype and gossip is not truth). In this situation that merely means when it split open it splits more violently, hard to say. Or it pops the top of the primary exchanger. On the other hand, BWRs are famous for making their turbines radiologically filthy under "normal" operation conditions, so they have plenty of practice at low level cleanup and monitoring, which is good in this situation. A PWR does not enjoy having no power to the pressurizer. On the other hand circulation when "not quite full" supposedly works better on a PWR, some inherent hydrodynamic thing. On one hand, a BWR certainly has fuel rod design that tolerates a bit -o- boiling (duh) on the other hand a PWR doesn't have to handle boiling loads so theres less fatigue. Completely depowering either a PWR or a BWR is going to pretty much F it up rather seriously.
>The ones you need to worry about are the ones which are decaying rapidly, i.e. the ones with short half-lives.
And the ones that bioaccumulate. I'm told Xenon is a tolerably interesting (although expensive) anesthetic. I'd inhale a snoot of mildly activated Xe without much fear since it would all be out of my system in a couple breaths. On the other hand I would not F around with activated iodine or strontium (which is a calcium mimic).
And decays to technetium-99, so almost all the initial technetium-99m from the fission reaction while the reactor was active has almost certainly become plain old technetium-99 by now.
Unless its gone momentarily critical during fuel melting, insert Japanese reports of occasional "neutron beams"
No, what is being said is that this most likely indicates holes in the reactor containers.
What I want to know is are those "holes in the reactor containers" better known as intentionally opened valves or is it something like a crack.
It seems logical that if you pump "endless quantities" of seawater into a little silo shaped drum that ... its gotta be going somewhere. Its not a black hole generator in there, and despite E=MC2 the E generated simply isn't enough to, for example, pump in and make disappear a hundred times its volume in seawater.
A comparison of a line graph of reactor pressure vs containment pressure would probably tell a much more interesting story that "look, water came out of a valve when we opened it, and lo and behold, its now wet beneath the valve"
That's not a very well informed argument, although your target selection is not too bad.
The unwashed masses stop listening because they want to be scared. They want to be scared because anyone whom doesn't watch garbage like the mainstream media produces... does not watch that garbage.
You know how much of a pain in the ass it is to sit next to the guy at the magic show who spends all his time telling everyone around him how its all fake and I bet I know how it works? Or the guy at the horror movie whom feels the need to tell everyone around him how its all fake and none of it is real? What a PITA for the folks whom want to be entertained.
Same way with the TV news viewers. They literally don't want the truth, so stop trying to tell them. They want to be scared. If you somehow convince them not to be scared about this thing, they'll be pissed that you've "ruined the fun" as they wait for the next scary story.
With a memory best measured in days or weeks, I don't think the opinion of the general unwashed masses really matters for nuclear power, at all.
Now on /. its OK to tell the truth about whats going on. Some of us actually want to know. But keep the non-fiction here and the fiction out there on the TV news where it belongs.
Could it be that we went to books because of the invention of the printing press, which was not able to print continuously on a long scroll (contrary to the more modern printers, starting with the matrix printer)?
Rotary press 1843 vs offset press 1903 vs Dot matrix printer 1964
Pretty much everything printed on a modern press for about a century before the dot matrix printer was invented was printed on "scrolls". Newspapers etc are not printed on precut sheets. Other than modern desktop laser printers, pretty much everything for the last century has been printed on "scrolls" that are later chopped into pages. I am not counting artsy craftsy stuff like silk screening tee shirts here, rather the million times larger paper printing industry.
If you want some fun you can troll printers (people who run printing presses, not inanimate objects) regarding the offset press from 1903 vs the rotary press from 1843. There's not a heck of a lot of difference but some argumentative personalities love to argue how they're obviously separate different inventions vs obviously the offset is a minor modification of the rotary scarely even worth commenting on.
And it won't be obsolete in 2 years. The same software you run today will work just fine in 2 years, and will take care of any web/office task you could possibly conceive of.... But web use? Office docs? Email? A 5 year old laptop would suffice
Read the article more closely... The OP is requesting a 5 year old laptop not a new one. The wife could not survive the software transition from XP to OSX, she'll simply never survive the transition to Vista or the latest version of office. Never. The hardware doesn't really matter, whats important is installing 2004 era XP and other 2004 era software on it. And somehow maintaining it, at least to prevent the worst of virus and bot infestation.
Frankly the best option is probably select "any" underlying hardware and OS, and run XP / Office 2003 / other old stuff inside a vmware... and back up the vmware image. Then when the OS and software inside the vmware image explodes into pus filled viral infestation, simply restore the image to known good state and repeat. This won't help with identity theft, but frankly anyone doing anything "sensitive" on a windows box deserves what they get.
Its quite possible the guy doesn't need to buy any hardware at all, assuming the old macbook can run XP and other 2004 era software acceptably.
When our 2004-era Windows XP laptop .... she inherited my still serviceable 2008 MacBook. But after about six months, she hasn't gotten used to it, and wants a Windows machine....How would Slashdotters go about picking a solid, basic laptop for Web surfing and document editing that won't be obsolete in two years?
You've got bigger problems. If she can't tolerate the relatively simple and painless transition from XP to OSX, she will certainly not survive the transition to Vista or newer and will not survive the transition to the latest version of Office with its ribbon abomination.
Soooo. Your problem isn't buying a windoze laptop, your problem is purchasing and maintaining a complete 2004 era infrastructure, in its entirety, including maintenance of "unsupported" software. Possible / tolerable / no problem in opensource land, not possible in windoze land.
Note that this doesn't mean you should assume you're safe just because you're using bind variables
For example, bind variables are a great way to store the wrong value in the wrong column. Admittedly I'd rather discover that bug in the unit tests on the dev server, than discover the injection on the production server, but I can none the less hear the siren call of doing it the wrong way...
Now what would be nice would be libraries for ALL languages that look like convenient, yet vulnerable, inline SQL but translate behind the scenes into bind variables.
Also fun, if the (numerous) lint-y / perltidy-y whatever apps would highlight or comment upon security problems like this in an automated manner.
The idea that you and I will have equal votes in forty years, when my life of scrimping and saving means I have $1M in the bank, and you're penniless and living on debt scares the bejeezus out of me.
The really scary part is that 40 years of 70s style stagflation in a post peak oil environment means $1M will roughly buy a cup of coffee at starbucks...
When the US went off gold and floated our currency, there was
a long (5-10 year) period of economic shock while everyone had to work
out what happened.
I thought it was Hubberts peak of USA oil production happening just as predicted 40 or so years earlier... So in the '67 arab israeli war the arabs could shut off the spigot and ... who cares since pre-peak you can always increase domestic production. But in the '73 arab israeli war we were at or post peak so the arabs figured out they can now shut off the spigot and we get gas lines and economic collapse... And everybody had to work out what happened w/ regards to that.
Also, its not so much "spot price for an ounce of gold today is hovering around $1400 /oz." as it is "spot price for a dollar is a 1/1400th oz of gold" as its the value of the dollar thats collapsing over the past couple years not the value of gold soaring. In the same time frame, gold isn't a whole heck of a lot more valuable compared to ... pretty much anything but other currencies that are collapsing...
There's a couple interpretations of the 70s, probably all partially correct.
Saving? Are you insane?
Real inflation is hitting what? 8% per year. Anything I save is made worthless very quickly. It is handed over to the bankers. On the other hand, if I take out as much debt as is possible and then I get to pay it back in devalued currency.
Frosting on the cake, is using the cash to either generate income or reduce expenses.
On the other hand that assumes wages will someday increase in step with inflation instead of just 3rd worlding the countries standard of living...
One minor flaw in the ointment is the baby boomers have just spent 40 years throwing money into the market for retirement. Now they'll be pulling it out.
Consider the very basic supply -n- demand implications. Huge demand to buy results in high prices results in people believing the market will always miraculously give great returns. Then huge lack of demand aka selling means prices drop.
Another problem is pre-tax is the govts money to be used at the govts beck and call, possibly even for your benefit, if the govt sees fit to give you permission. Or perhaps instead to be nationalized to pay for the boomers retirement when SS implodes.
Seems a good bet in the past, suckers bet going forward.
Various folks say we need more students in these subjects, but there aren't so many great jobs on the other end.
Various folks = businessmen whom would benefit by crushing the middle class salaries of folks with STEM educations.
Other end = If by other end you mean China or India, there are jobs there. But overall its "American Citizens need not apply". For Americans there are no jobs or rapidly will be no jobs in those fields, why not go where you're wanted, and coincidentally paid more, in other words finance?
Agreed, the 99% of them do make the 1% of you look bad.
wait wait wait.. Mr. Infoworld, but.. uh.. if:
the more troubling underlying issue is that the Internet has devalued content nearly to the point where the business reason to create it is disappearing
then why did you write your article and spam it on /.? If not for income then it must just be an ego thing, right?
Maybe it was astroturfing?
Find another reason to produce content. What's the cost/benefit ratio of societal ignorance and tedium? What is more profitable? An intelligent, lively, healthy public, or an ignorant, dull, diseased one?
The problem is your assumption that the current "big content producers" somehow, miraculously I guess, produce "intelligent lively healthy public".
All they do is scare people, distribute corporate and statist propaganda, and try to control people into buying stuff they don't want. Very little to nothing redeemable. Oh, occasionally they'll try to "preach to the choir" about something ridiculously simple so folks whom already know the gospel feel morally superior, but a population that feels morally superior about itself is not really an advantage.
The sooner the big media dinosaurs die off, the sooner the average citizen's mental health and abilities will improve, not decline.
But the more troubling underlying issue is that the Internet has devalued content nearly to the point where the business reason to create it is disappearing.
Err, you mean devalued USELESS content. Note how "we" call it "content" instead of information or news, because information and news are valuable. "content" on the other hand is a placeholder to cover up some empty space.
Lets summarize the "valuable" content I see when I pull up the times front page right now:
Radiation is bad for your kids. no kidding? I never knew. Thank $diety the times is here so I can learn that. I was going to feed my kids enriched U-235 tonight, but now I'm "scared straight".
An old woman at least two generations older than me, of no cultural relevance to me whatsoever, has died. no kidding? I thought humans were immortal.
"6 things to feel good about food" Thats the headline. Seriously. You've gotta be kidding me. How much are they paying me to read that?
Warfare continues in the middle east. Since 3000 BC, pretty much uninterrupted. Wake me when they glass some cities with nukes, or the US finds some good guys to support (good luck). Till then thats a snoozer.
"How a building dispute can sink a sale" You've gotta be kidding me. I'll file that for next time I sell a condo in Brooklyn, yeah right soon I'm sure.
"The New Old Age: Simple Rules for Better Sleep". OMG. I gotta stop now.
I'm supposed to pay attention to this mental chewing gum? Even worse, I'm supposed to pay for it? And this was the "best" they could do, it being the front page?
I just want to make sure ... firebug ... well-tested and confirmed working before I make the jump.
Don't know about "well-tested" (well tested like "a two year Debian release cycle" ?) but I can certainly confirm firebug is working or at least it hasn't failed yet.
Also working:
Adblock plus
flashblock
ghostery
noscript
xmarks
Not working:
Remove it permanently (I can survive without it, but its nice) .net framework assistant 1.2.1 (WTF is this anyway?)
Microsoft
Immediately upon installation:
Right click on that wee little down triangle in the address bar. Uncheck "Tabs on Top" then breathe a sigh of relief as your eyes stop bleeding. Then de-turd the toolbar by right click on the same triangle and select "Customize..." and then rip out the search bar (useless), the home button (so 1993), the stop button (again, so 1993), rearrange the refresh/reload button where god intended it to be, ditto the spinner. Basically just clean it up a bit. Should have come preconfigured this way.
I don't like the weird new forward / reverse buttons. I have muscle memory from FF3 to move back to the start of history in a tab, which no longer seems to work, epic UI fail to screw the user that way. That's the only UI problem I haven't been able to work around yet.
So with about five minutes of amount of work, upgrade results in only two dead (admittedly useless) addons, and one UI fail that'll only strike me about 50 times a day no big deal. I've seen worse dot-zero releases.
I have a clunky many years old desktop and on both FF3 and FF4 everything comes up in "blink of eye" speed, I don't even know how to test if its slower or faster because everywhere I go is faster than my visual cognition (and thats fast, I'm a very fast reader). Its hardly orders of magnitude different, anyway.
Remove adblock plus and try again.
Of course the user can tell the truth or lie, but how is Facebook determining they lie?
Facebook is not. Their second grade teacher is determining it, and flagging the account as "impersonation". This works pretty well if you live in a small town. When I used to have a FB account it would pop random people up from my hometown and current city and ask me to friend them... Or was that the dating site ads? Well anyway. If you put your town as "LA" or "NYC" this doesn't work, but proportionally very few people live there, or they technically live and attend school in a very small suburb, which they probably listed so as to hang out with their friends.
I should ask my school teacher relatives if they do this for fun on their own time, or maybe the school contracts to someones relative, or the admins do it in their spare time, or exactly how this works.
Was this before beer was invented? You have a 6 digit /. UID, I have a 5 digit /. UID and even we had friends with fake IDs.
I looked that that, but the options are very limited (pretending to be someone else
1) The kid is pretending to be someone else; someone whom is 13 or over.
2) Tell FB that you personally know that kid, that kid is 8, and someone else is impersonating the kid online (school bully, stereotypical middle aged creepy male lunatic right out of a TV special, who knows, even though its almost certainly the parents or a relative).
At the real world age of 3 months its pretty obvious the parents are doing it for the laughs, it MIGHT even be funny (but lets face it, probably not). At the age of 7 years its not so clear who is lying. At the age of 11 years its probably the kid lying.
Odd that you use "modern" in the context of Soyuz, when both the spacecraft and the booster are 40-year old designs.
They haven't made those old designs in 40-50 years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_(spacecraft)
Theres at least 9 revisions, some pretty new, and some waiting on the drawing board.
Again, we're back to the same problem of it is externally about the same size and shape as something old, therefore it absolutely must be ancient tech.
I own a "GM car" therefore it must contain only unchanged technology from 1908 when GM was founded, correct? Its a "GM", and GM was founded in 1908 therefore the proof is self evident that my car is built entirely out of 1908 tech. Even if it was designed in the early-mid 90s and manufactured in '97.