Like many web apps first developed with MySQL, it is indeed possible to make MediaWiki work with PostgreSQL, or so I am told. However, to do so requires an intimate knowledge of the guts of MediaWiki, such that it is really difficult in practice to actually do it unless you have a lot of spare time to kill, and nothing better with which to kill it.
MySQL is like Microsoft. It's not entirely compatible with the standard, but everybody is using it, so if you want to use their software, you have to use it too. I have a copy of PostgreSQL and a copy of MySQL on my server, because Wikipedia doesn't work with PostgreSQL. I presume this is because the developers started working with MySQL back in the bad old days when it was _really_ incompatible, and their code now contains dependencies on MySQL.
I don't really know what to say about all of this - these incompatibilities are really frustrating as an end-user of this software, but I understand that it's hard to make things work with both MySQL and PostgreSQL, and resources are limited. What frustrates me is that these incompatibilities create a form of lock-in - once you've based your app on MySQL, you are stuck with it.
I suspect that if you were to start now, and to use the SQL spec rather than the MySQL documentation as a reference while doing your development, you would wind up with something that was a lot more portable, so this isn't actually an argument against using MySQL. It's more an argument towards sticking to standards when using whatever db you choose, so that when the time comes to use a different DB backend, you aren't faced with a monumental refactoring job.
Actually, the more the population grows, the more people will be in harm's way. That is, unless we (whoever "we" is) start taking into account the relative safety of various possible places to live.
Seems like a stupid business model. Why not just say "we charge you full price, but if you bring the cartridge back when you are done with it, we'll give you a $30 rebate on the next cartridge"? That would accomplish the same purpose, but would give the customer an incentive to cooperate, rather than creating a situation where Lexmark feels some weird obligation to sue the customer for not complying.
You must have some weird definition of "free market." Liable is a legal construct. In order to make someone "liable" for polluting, to make them pay, you have to have a system in place to constrain their actions. Otherwise, it's an externality. Just like in order to have "intellectual property," you have to have a system in place to enforce this completely unnatural idea.
So then the question is, is a construct of liability the best way to account for externalities? Or is it better to simply try to whittle away at the externalities through regulation. This is not a trivial question. The nice thing about regulation is that you don't have to have a lawsuit for every accounting. If you're a lawyer, I guess a liability system is great, but if you're not, regulation may be better.
And if you like a free market, then you can't have either. In a free market, there are no constraints. Which is why a free market is more of a theoretical construct than a thing that could ever actually exist in real life.
One of the things you have to get used to with a working public transit system is that tickets aren't "cheaper." Japan has awesome public transit. But it's not cheap, until you consider what they are saving by not having to own a car. *Then* it is cheap. And in Japan, it's so ubiquitous that it's possible to not own a car.
It's true that in the 'states there are vast swaths of populated land where cars are the only alternative, but there are also a lot of places in the U.S. where public transit makes good economic sense, and would really work for people if it were there. Public transit is never going to let my parents get rid of their cars in rural Massachusetts, though.
And that's fine - public transit isn't a long tail technology. Cars are a long tail technology. It's fine to use them in that context, and beneficial to use public transit where it really works. It actually makes it harder to implement public transit strategies if you insist on serving the long tail (people who are not part of the urban majority) with something other than personal cars.
Yes, if we didn't have roads everything would have to be carried on peoples' backs across the rockies, because we also don't have rail. No, wait, we do. Hm. I think your point is incorrect.
The U.S. has crappy public transit rail, but we actually have a huge rail shipping infrastructure. A lot of stuff is moved by truck, but a lot is moved by rail as well.
Your point that even people who don't drive benefit from the roads is true, but doesn't support your argument. This is because if the trucking industry paid the actual cost of the roads they use, then they would pass the cost to us directly, and we might have some economic incentive to choose cheaper shipping.
Because the roads are paid for out of taxes which are not based on usage, there is no such incentive; the result is that we pay more than we otherwise would, and we have to put up with more dangerous trucks on our roads.
Yes, in the 'states roads are hugely subsidized out of state and federal income taxes, meaning that the people who use the roads the most do not pay the most, and people who do not use the roads at all still have to pay for them. There is huge resistance to increasing fuel taxes because fuel taxes are directly and immediately visible.
BTW, I am under the impression that in Europe, fuel taxes go to pay not only for roads but also for rail infrastructure; not so?
My cousin, who is a perfectly intelligent person, and her husband, who is also perfectly intelligent, have had a wide-screen TV for several years, and a DVD player to go with it. During all that time, they've been watching their movies in the wrong aspect ratio, because they couldn't figure out how to tweak the aspect ratio. We fixed it when we visited them a while back, and now they have it working.
Not only are they smart people, but they are not spineless. The problem is that they simply thought that was how it worked, so they didn't see any reason to protest. The salesman assured them that the system was fine, and they just accepted that. It _was_ playing the content, after all. Unfortunately, chances are that this is how people will react when the HD stuff doesn't perform as intended - they will simply assume that it _is_ working as intended.
Just like people keep running Windows even when it crashes all the time - they think computers in general are just crash-prone, and that what they are experiencing is normal, so they never hunt for a solution.
It's only when the product becomes completely unusable that they start casting about for an alternative, which is, I think, why so many people I know are now switching to Mac.
The first time that someone gets and publishes a key to a legitimate device with a large installed base, and the HDCP folks revoke that key, that will be the end of HDCP key revocation - a law will be passed making it illegal to revoke HDCP keys.
Key revocation is a neat idea in theory, but in practice it can't work - the customer backlash when it's used will be too great.
They're in the form of billboards that you see occasionally as you're running along the freeway, or on the sides of buildings. At first I thought they were fake ads, and I was really impressed that they'd put something like that in, but in fact they're real ads. They are in fact unobtrusive, fit in nicely with the game, and don't bug me at all. What bugs me are the "this space for rent" ads.
But frankly the whole thing is deeply amusing to me, and I'm not sure why people are so up in arms. As one of the twelve people who play MxO, I am there because I like the visuals, and the ads actually make the visuals better. So although I am rabidly offended by ads in movie theatres before movies, I don't mind the MxO ads at all. YMMV.:')
You're right, but California isn't as big on censoring schoolbooks as Texas is, and it's always cheaper to have one edition than two, so California tends to get the same textbooks as Texas, and they tend to have been tweaked to suit Texas' standards.
Open Source Textbooks. There are people working on them. If this really burns your ass, and you have something to teach, you could do worse than to write your own textbook and open source it.
If there were a complete suite of open source textbooks, it would really cure a lot of social ills - for example, the reason that schoolbooks in K12 education are so lame is that Texas essentially has veto power over what goes into them, because they buy so many books.
Open source bypasses Texas - take out the economic disincentive to put useful information in the textbooks, and the textbooks become more useful. I would expect that even in Texas they would start using the free textbooks, simply because it's hard to beat the low cost.
The problem with this whole line of reasoning, at least for me, is that I'm not a teacher, so I don't have the skill to actually do this myself. All I can do is incite others.:'(
My recollection is that the Apple ][ ran at 1.8MHz, but I may be wrong. I think it was supposed to be a multiple of the NTSC color subcarrier frequency.
Still, cut them some slack. My experience has been that a lot of people who start with one-word statements will open up when they get comfortable. If you have any geek/shyness heritage at all, you can probably dig back into the cobwebby depths of your old person's memory and remember what this was like.:')
(Just so you know I'm just giving you a hard time about the old person thing, I'm an Ancient One myself - I remember the days when a 2mhz 6502 processor was pretty cool.)
The choice isn't between some malicious people possibly knowing, and the world definitely knowing. It's between some malicious people possibly knowing now, and some malicious people possibly knowing later.
We've seen this over and over again historically - if there is no disclosure, there is no urgency, so the problem remains unpatched until the worm hits, and then suddenly, after the fox is done raiding the henhouse, steps are taken to close the door.
I don't know if that is the case here - I really have no information at all about the vulnerability, and TFA doesn't tell us anything substantive. But that's the argument for rapid disclosure. The usual rule is to give the responsible party notice, and wait a while to see if they fix it. If they don't, disclose.
If that's what happened here, I'd say Mr. Lynn did the right thing. But again, we really don't know, at least based on TFA, whether that's what actually happened.
I don't necessarily disagree with your conclusions, but I do disagree with how you arrived at them. It's not wrong for a person to consider the good of others as well as the good of one's employer when making decisions about how to act. In fact, in many cases it's wrong not to.
When a company is acting against the public interest in a significant way, it's appropriate to blow the whistle. Placing the entire Internet at risk of a router worm is acting against the public interest.
Of course, we don't have enough information to know if Cisco was placing the entire internet at risk, or whether they were protecting the Internet by being secretive, and it was Mr. Lynn who increased the risk. So we really don't have enough information to even debate whether what Mr. Lynn did was appropriate or not.
You can't build any nuclear weapon without substantial processing. Nuclear fuel and spent nuclear fuel are just a really good concentrated source of material for processing - much better than starting with uranium ore, for example.
The trouble is that major governments know how to do the reprocessing, and then produce concentrated sources of weapons-grade products, which they put into weapons, which can then be stolen and used for reasons other than what was intended.
Also, high-level nuclear waste can be used to construct a dirty bomb without any reprocessing, and while this isn't as bad as detonating a hydrogen bomb, the human costs are still truly awful.
Point being, people really do have good reason for objecting to the generation of high-level nuclear waste.
Another article under this topic mentions a means of producing energy using stimulated fission, which actually looks pretty cool. I suspect the waste generated by that would still have this problem (usable in a dirty bomb), but perhaps less so.
I live in Arizona. The idea of large areas of land being devoted to generation seems not so implausible to me. Sure, you wouldn't want to do it over fertile farm land!
WRT wind, there are feasibility studies going on for some really interesting solutions to this problem. There is *lots* of space in the sky, and lots of very dependable wind, as well. Obviously relying solely on wind generation isn't the best plan, but that's not to say that it couldn't produce a bit part of the needed energy.
WRT reactor meltdowns, I don't know why two of the responses to my post mentioned this, since in my post I mention that this is a solved problem.
This is a good point - thanks for the correction. Someone should mod it up. If what you say is true, and it seems plausible, then this becomes less of an issue in terms of radioactive waste storage, although it's still a significant environmental cost.
Look, there are five big issues with nuclear power:
1. The waste is toxic, and not biodegradable, so it remains toxic for longer than the lifespan of any historical civilization. 2. The waste can be used to build nuclear weapons. 3. Reactors can melt down. 4. Reactors can accidentally emit radioactive material into the atmosphere. 5. Reactors wear out, and when they are no longer usable, the entire reactor is itself toxic waste, and remains that way for longer than the life of any known civilization. Tearing down the reactor inevitably releases this waste into the environment - the groundwater, the soil, and the atmosphere.
It's quite possible that all of these problems can be solved. It's also true that in some cases, coal power is worse than nuclear. For example, fly ash from coal contains a certain number of parts per million of uranium, radium and thorium, depending on where it was mined.
But let's be clear. Pebble bed solves the meltdown problem. That's all it solves. It doesn't solve the waste problem.
Theory is that breeder reactors might solve the waste problem - in fact, what they allow you to do is extract about 75 times more energy from the same uranium, which is very cool indeed, and what's left is much less radioactive than what you started with (but it's still radioactive).
Unfortunately, the best example we have of a fast breeder reactor is the Superphenix reactor in France. This was shut down in 1997 because it began to fail in exciting ways, prematurely, particularly due to problems in the liquid sodium (!) cooling system. So this technology, unlike pebble bed reactors, isn't as stable as one would wish.
So we've completely addressed problem (3), and there's the possibility that problems (1) and (2) may be partially addressed by breeder reactor technology at some future time. But they aren't completely addressed even in the future, and aren't addressed at all in the present. Plus, we're still left with the other two problems, which are quite significant.
So you do the math. What's the cost/benefit analysis for coal? For solar? For nuclear? For wind? For some combination of these? If you think the answer is easy, you probably haven't actually done the math.
I think the reason for the wide disparity of opinions on this topic is that (a) people value different things differently, and (b) nobody is really even talking about the same thing.
For example, when someone talks about recycling nuclear fuel with breeder reactors, they're speaking hypothetically, even if they don't know it, because the technology isn't yet mature enough to be able to say that it's actually usable in practice. All current practical experiments have thus far yielded failure, although some have been more successful than others, and we do know that the basic idea does work.
Likewise when someone talks about getting energy from kites, it's also hypothetical, because nobody's actually doing it in production yet. Once again, there have been trials, and we do know that the basic idea does work, but we do not yet know if it can be used in practice, en masse.
Both things are interesting, but when you're discussing energy policy decisions, neither thing is presently relevant, and neither will be until they have demonstrated success in production.
Likewise, for some people, the value of generation techniques that produce no first-order pollution byproducts (i.e., combustion byproducts or fission byproducts) is more attractive than techniques that do produce these byproducts. It's important that we not let ourselves be fooled by the lack of first-order byproducts when the second-order byproducts overwhelm the first-order byproducts (e.g., the debate about the net energy cost to build a solar panel).
But assuming that we are taking these factors into account, it's still possible that even if the generation cost of, for example, solar, in dollars, were more than the generation cost of, for example, nuclear, it might still be better to build solar, because we are not counting certain externalities which, while they don't cost in dollars, do still matter.
I think you're getting a little bit carried away. If the machine is set up to prevent Linux from running, then it's not worth owning. Likewise, if it won't boot Windows, given that it's an Intel box, that would be a sign of badness. But if it boots both, then it's a usable machine. That would be my test.
It's true that he's come up with a rationalization for breaking the DRM, but the fact is that he's broken the DRM, and it's illegal to break DRM - it's a violation of the DMCA. Regardless of whether or not you have a good rationalization for it.
The problem with DRM is not that it's somehow immoral or something. It's that there is a DMCA. Get rid of the DMCA, and the market would decide whether or not DRM is a good idea. Keep the DMCA, and the market doesn't get a vote.
Point being, his rationalization is lame, and he should be ashamed of himself, whether the political position he has taken is right or wrong.
Actually, you may not have the choice of buying another copy. Frequently things go out of print, and there's no reason to assume that this will change in the new age of DRM. The way it will happen will be less likely that they stopped printing it, since "printing" digital media is basically free; rather, what will happen is that the original issuer will go out of business, leaving you in the lurch with not even an avenue of support.
And if we get really effective DRM, you won't even have the choice of breaking the DRM, because the DRM won't be breakable. The only reason this guy was able to break the DRM was because it was crappy DRM. Which, frankly, is the best kind, because really effective DRM renders the product unrecoverable if the access key is lost.
I haven't ever broken the DRM on a piece of iTMS music that I've purchased, but one of the things that makes me comfortable in buying iTMS music is that I know the DRM is breakable, so in the event that iTMS goes away, I am not shafted.
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Like many web apps first developed with MySQL, it is indeed possible to make MediaWiki work with PostgreSQL, or so I am told. However, to do so requires an intimate knowledge of the guts of MediaWiki, such that it is really difficult in practice to actually do it unless you have a lot of spare time to kill, and nothing better with which to kill it.
MySQL is like Microsoft. It's not entirely compatible with the standard, but everybody is using it, so if you want to use their software, you have to use it too. I have a copy of PostgreSQL and a copy of MySQL on my server, because Wikipedia doesn't work with PostgreSQL. I presume this is because the developers started working with MySQL back in the bad old days when it was _really_ incompatible, and their code now contains dependencies on MySQL.
I don't really know what to say about all of this - these incompatibilities are really frustrating as an end-user of this software, but I understand that it's hard to make things work with both MySQL and PostgreSQL, and resources are limited. What frustrates me is that these incompatibilities create a form of lock-in - once you've based your app on MySQL, you are stuck with it.
I suspect that if you were to start now, and to use the SQL spec rather than the MySQL documentation as a reference while doing your development, you would wind up with something that was a lot more portable, so this isn't actually an argument against using MySQL. It's more an argument towards sticking to standards when using whatever db you choose, so that when the time comes to use a different DB backend, you aren't faced with a monumental refactoring job.
Actually, the more the population grows, the more people will be in harm's way. That is, unless we (whoever "we" is) start taking into account the relative safety of various possible places to live.
Seems like a stupid business model. Why not just say "we charge you full price, but if you bring the cartridge back when you are done with it, we'll give you a $30 rebate on the next cartridge"? That would accomplish the same purpose, but would give the customer an incentive to cooperate, rather than creating a situation where Lexmark feels some weird obligation to sue the customer for not complying.
You must have some weird definition of "free market." Liable is a legal construct. In order to make someone "liable" for polluting, to make them pay, you have to have a system in place to constrain their actions. Otherwise, it's an externality. Just like in order to have "intellectual property," you have to have a system in place to enforce this completely unnatural idea.
So then the question is, is a construct of liability the best way to account for externalities? Or is it better to simply try to whittle away at the externalities through regulation. This is not a trivial question. The nice thing about regulation is that you don't have to have a lawsuit for every accounting. If you're a lawyer, I guess a liability system is great, but if you're not, regulation may be better.
And if you like a free market, then you can't have either. In a free market, there are no constraints. Which is why a free market is more of a theoretical construct than a thing that could ever actually exist in real life.
One of the things you have to get used to with a working public transit system is that tickets aren't "cheaper." Japan has awesome public transit. But it's not cheap, until you consider what they are saving by not having to own a car. *Then* it is cheap. And in Japan, it's so ubiquitous that it's possible to not own a car.
It's true that in the 'states there are vast swaths of populated land where cars are the only alternative, but there are also a lot of places in the U.S. where public transit makes good economic sense, and would really work for people if it were there. Public transit is never going to let my parents get rid of their cars in rural Massachusetts, though.
And that's fine - public transit isn't a long tail technology. Cars are a long tail technology. It's fine to use them in that context, and beneficial to use public transit where it really works. It actually makes it harder to implement public transit strategies if you insist on serving the long tail (people who are not part of the urban majority) with something other than personal cars.
Yes, if we didn't have roads everything would have to be carried on peoples' backs across the rockies, because we also don't have rail. No, wait, we do. Hm. I think your point is incorrect.
The U.S. has crappy public transit rail, but we actually have a huge rail shipping infrastructure. A lot of stuff is moved by truck, but a lot is moved by rail as well.
Your point that even people who don't drive benefit from the roads is true, but doesn't support your argument. This is because if the trucking industry paid the actual cost of the roads they use, then they would pass the cost to us directly, and we might have some economic incentive to choose cheaper shipping.
Because the roads are paid for out of taxes which are not based on usage, there is no such incentive; the result is that we pay more than we otherwise would, and we have to put up with more dangerous trucks on our roads.
Yes, in the 'states roads are hugely subsidized out of state and federal income taxes, meaning that the people who use the roads the most do not pay the most, and people who do not use the roads at all still have to pay for them. There is huge resistance to increasing fuel taxes because fuel taxes are directly and immediately visible.
BTW, I am under the impression that in Europe, fuel taxes go to pay not only for roads but also for rail infrastructure; not so?
My cousin, who is a perfectly intelligent person, and her husband, who is also perfectly intelligent, have had a wide-screen TV for several years, and a DVD player to go with it. During all that time, they've been watching their movies in the wrong aspect ratio, because they couldn't figure out how to tweak the aspect ratio. We fixed it when we visited them a while back, and now they have it working.
Not only are they smart people, but they are not spineless. The problem is that they simply thought that was how it worked, so they didn't see any reason to protest. The salesman assured them that the system was fine, and they just accepted that. It _was_ playing the content, after all. Unfortunately, chances are that this is how people will react when the HD stuff doesn't perform as intended - they will simply assume that it _is_ working as intended.
Just like people keep running Windows even when it crashes all the time - they think computers in general are just crash-prone, and that what they are experiencing is normal, so they never hunt for a solution.
It's only when the product becomes completely unusable that they start casting about for an alternative, which is, I think, why so many people I know are now switching to Mac.
Sigh.
The first time that someone gets and publishes a key to a legitimate device with a large installed base, and the HDCP folks revoke that key, that will be the end of HDCP key revocation - a law will be passed making it illegal to revoke HDCP keys.
Key revocation is a neat idea in theory, but in practice it can't work - the customer backlash when it's used will be too great.
They're in the form of billboards that you see occasionally as you're running along the freeway, or on the sides of buildings. At first I thought they were fake ads, and I was really impressed that they'd put something like that in, but in fact they're real ads. They are in fact unobtrusive, fit in nicely with the game, and don't bug me at all. What bugs me are the "this space for rent" ads.
:')
But frankly the whole thing is deeply amusing to me, and I'm not sure why people are so up in arms. As one of the twelve people who play MxO, I am there because I like the visuals, and the ads actually make the visuals better. So although I am rabidly offended by ads in movie theatres before movies, I don't mind the MxO ads at all. YMMV.
You're right, but California isn't as big on censoring schoolbooks as Texas is, and it's always cheaper to have one edition than two, so California tends to get the same textbooks as Texas, and they tend to have been tweaked to suit Texas' standards.
Open Source Textbooks. There are people working on them. If this really burns your ass, and you have something to teach, you could do worse than to write your own textbook and open source it.
:'(
If there were a complete suite of open source textbooks, it would really cure a lot of social ills - for example, the reason that schoolbooks in K12 education are so lame is that Texas essentially has veto power over what goes into them, because they buy so many books.
Open source bypasses Texas - take out the economic disincentive to put useful information in the textbooks, and the textbooks become more useful. I would expect that even in Texas they would start using the free textbooks, simply because it's hard to beat the low cost.
The problem with this whole line of reasoning, at least for me, is that I'm not a teacher, so I don't have the skill to actually do this myself. All I can do is incite others.
My recollection is that the Apple ][ ran at 1.8MHz, but I may be wrong. I think it was supposed to be a multiple of the NTSC color subcarrier frequency.
'sup?
:')
Still, cut them some slack. My experience has been that a lot of people who start with one-word statements will open up when they get comfortable. If you have any geek/shyness heritage at all, you can probably dig back into the cobwebby depths of your old person's memory and remember what this was like.
(Just so you know I'm just giving you a hard time about the old person thing, I'm an Ancient One myself - I remember the days when a 2mhz 6502 processor was pretty cool.)
The choice isn't between some malicious people possibly knowing, and the world definitely knowing. It's between some malicious people possibly knowing now, and some malicious people possibly knowing later.
We've seen this over and over again historically - if there is no disclosure, there is no urgency, so the problem remains unpatched until the worm hits, and then suddenly, after the fox is done raiding the henhouse, steps are taken to close the door.
I don't know if that is the case here - I really have no information at all about the vulnerability, and TFA doesn't tell us anything substantive. But that's the argument for rapid disclosure. The usual rule is to give the responsible party notice, and wait a while to see if they fix it. If they don't, disclose.
If that's what happened here, I'd say Mr. Lynn did the right thing. But again, we really don't know, at least based on TFA, whether that's what actually happened.
I don't necessarily disagree with your conclusions, but I do disagree with how you arrived at them. It's not wrong for a person to consider the good of others as well as the good of one's employer when making decisions about how to act. In fact, in many cases it's wrong not to.
When a company is acting against the public interest in a significant way, it's appropriate to blow the whistle. Placing the entire Internet at risk of a router worm is acting against the public interest.
Of course, we don't have enough information to know if Cisco was placing the entire internet at risk, or whether they were protecting the Internet by being secretive, and it was Mr. Lynn who increased the risk. So we really don't have enough information to even debate whether what Mr. Lynn did was appropriate or not.
Maybe someone who was at Black Hat can comment?
You can't build any nuclear weapon without substantial processing. Nuclear fuel and spent nuclear fuel are just a really good concentrated source of material for processing - much better than starting with uranium ore, for example.
The trouble is that major governments know how to do the reprocessing, and then produce concentrated sources of weapons-grade products, which they put into weapons, which can then be stolen and used for reasons other than what was intended.
Also, high-level nuclear waste can be used to construct a dirty bomb without any reprocessing, and while this isn't as bad as detonating a hydrogen bomb, the human costs are still truly awful.
Point being, people really do have good reason for objecting to the generation of high-level nuclear waste.
Another article under this topic mentions a means of producing energy using stimulated fission, which actually looks pretty cool. I suspect the waste generated by that would still have this problem (usable in a dirty bomb), but perhaps less so.
I live in Arizona. The idea of large areas of land being devoted to generation seems not so implausible to me. Sure, you wouldn't want to do it over fertile farm land!
WRT wind, there are feasibility studies going on for some really interesting solutions to this problem. There is *lots* of space in the sky, and lots of very dependable wind, as well. Obviously relying solely on wind generation isn't the best plan, but that's not to say that it couldn't produce a bit part of the needed energy.
WRT reactor meltdowns, I don't know why two of the responses to my post mentioned this, since in my post I mention that this is a solved problem.
This is a good point - thanks for the correction. Someone should mod it up. If what you say is true, and it seems plausible, then this becomes less of an issue in terms of radioactive waste storage, although it's still a significant environmental cost.
Look, there are five big issues with nuclear power:
1. The waste is toxic, and not biodegradable, so it remains toxic for longer than the lifespan of any historical civilization.
2. The waste can be used to build nuclear weapons.
3. Reactors can melt down.
4. Reactors can accidentally emit radioactive material into the atmosphere.
5. Reactors wear out, and when they are no longer usable, the entire reactor is itself toxic waste, and remains that way for longer than the life of any known civilization. Tearing down the reactor inevitably releases this waste into the environment - the groundwater, the soil, and the atmosphere.
It's quite possible that all of these problems can be solved. It's also true that in some cases, coal power is worse than nuclear. For example, fly ash from coal contains a certain number of parts per million of uranium, radium and thorium, depending on where it was mined.
But let's be clear. Pebble bed solves the meltdown problem. That's all it solves. It doesn't solve the waste problem.
Theory is that breeder reactors might solve the waste problem - in fact, what they allow you to do is extract about 75 times more energy from the same uranium, which is very cool indeed, and what's left is much less radioactive than what you started with (but it's still radioactive).
Unfortunately, the best example we have of a fast breeder reactor is the Superphenix reactor in France. This was shut down in 1997 because it began to fail in exciting ways, prematurely, particularly due to problems in the liquid sodium (!) cooling system. So this technology, unlike pebble bed reactors, isn't as stable as one would wish.
So we've completely addressed problem (3), and there's the possibility that problems (1) and (2) may be partially addressed by breeder reactor technology at some future time. But they aren't completely addressed even in the future, and aren't addressed at all in the present. Plus, we're still left with the other two problems, which are quite significant.
So you do the math. What's the cost/benefit analysis for coal? For solar? For nuclear? For wind? For some combination of these? If you think the answer is easy, you probably haven't actually done the math.
I think the reason for the wide disparity of opinions on this topic is that (a) people value different things differently, and (b) nobody is really even talking about the same thing.
For example, when someone talks about recycling nuclear fuel with breeder reactors, they're speaking hypothetically, even if they don't know it, because the technology isn't yet mature enough to be able to say that it's actually usable in practice. All current practical experiments have thus far yielded failure, although some have been more successful than others, and we do know that the basic idea does work.
Likewise when someone talks about getting energy from kites, it's also hypothetical, because nobody's actually doing it in production yet. Once again, there have been trials, and we do know that the basic idea does work, but we do not yet know if it can be used in practice, en masse.
Both things are interesting, but when you're discussing energy policy decisions, neither thing is presently relevant, and neither will be until they have demonstrated success in production.
Likewise, for some people, the value of generation techniques that produce no first-order pollution byproducts (i.e., combustion byproducts or fission byproducts) is more attractive than techniques that do produce these byproducts. It's important that we not let ourselves be fooled by the lack of first-order byproducts when the second-order byproducts overwhelm the first-order byproducts (e.g., the debate about the net energy cost to build a solar panel).
But assuming that we are taking these factors into account, it's still possible that even if the generation cost of, for example, solar, in dollars, were more than the generation cost of, for example, nuclear, it might still be better to build solar, because we are not counting certain externalities which, while they don't cost in dollars, do still matter.
I think you're getting a little bit carried away. If the machine is set up to prevent Linux from running, then it's not worth owning. Likewise, if it won't boot Windows, given that it's an Intel box, that would be a sign of badness. But if it boots both, then it's a usable machine. That would be my test.
The market is never done choosing...
It's true that he's come up with a rationalization for breaking the DRM, but the fact is that he's broken the DRM, and it's illegal to break DRM - it's a violation of the DMCA. Regardless of whether or not you have a good rationalization for it.
The problem with DRM is not that it's somehow immoral or something. It's that there is a DMCA. Get rid of the DMCA, and the market would decide whether or not DRM is a good idea. Keep the DMCA, and the market doesn't get a vote.
Point being, his rationalization is lame, and he should be ashamed of himself, whether the political position he has taken is right or wrong.
Actually, you may not have the choice of buying another copy. Frequently things go out of print, and there's no reason to assume that this will change in the new age of DRM. The way it will happen will be less likely that they stopped printing it, since "printing" digital media is basically free; rather, what will happen is that the original issuer will go out of business, leaving you in the lurch with not even an avenue of support.
And if we get really effective DRM, you won't even have the choice of breaking the DRM, because the DRM won't be breakable. The only reason this guy was able to break the DRM was because it was crappy DRM. Which, frankly, is the best kind, because really effective DRM renders the product unrecoverable if the access key is lost.
I haven't ever broken the DRM on a piece of iTMS music that I've purchased, but one of the things that makes me comfortable in buying iTMS music is that I know the DRM is breakable, so in the event that iTMS goes away, I am not shafted.