This review is well-timed, as I just finished "Snow Crash" last night. It was an act of will to do so and had I not ponied up six-ninety-nine and tax for the book, I would likely not have read past the halfway point or so.
Stephenson's Metaverse is a pretty keen idea, but I've never been a big fan of VR-world writing. If (for example) the computing power required to render Mr. Ng's smoke rings is so immense that it bears mentioning, then the odds that Hiro can code up SnowSearch and graveyard daemons and an invisible avatar in an afternoon (and get them written bug-free, no less) are awful damn slim. Further, the Big Chase Scene at the end: given that Hiro can go through stuff by poking it with his katana (as per his entry into Rife's cube), then why the hell doesn't he just mount the damn thing on the front of his bike and run Raven down? Why the "Oh, I might run into something and stop and then I'll lose him and oh, the humanity!"?
This isn't a counter-review by any means; I just found myself reading accolade after accolade and had to ask "Didn't anyone else see that the emperor has no clothes?"
'And I fear the time when I have to "test" the fsck times...'
I betcha that at least one of the journaling file systems for Linux will be available by the time this drive is on shelves -- my understanding is that ext3 is almost ready for beta testing and that XFS will be done soon.
It won't eliminate fscking but it should alleviate a lot of it.
Re:Why Mozilla 5.0 will die. (At least on the Mac)
on
Whither Netscape 5.0?
·
· Score: 1
While Mac OS X does indeed have a UNIX underbelly, the GUI that sits atop it will be the same GUI that Apple have been providing since the beginning. Need to quit an application? Clover-Q or File->Quit will still be the ways to do it.
However, cracks are beginning to appear in the rigid consistency that Apple has enforced, and sadly, the cracks appear to be driven by high-level Apple bosses (including iCEO Jobs). The QT4 debacle is the first of what I suspect will be many applications that break the Apple desktop metaphor because they are trying to force another metaphor. In the case of QT4, they are trying to force the metaphor of the handheld remote control.
I'm not a Mac person but I appreciate the machines and the company mindset -- and I think OS X is going to represent a sea change for the company. The union of the incomparable Mac OS GUI and the near-failsafe UNIX OS promises to be nothing short of astounding -- if and only if the company understands that the hours spent in usability studies and user feedback can't be thrown away just because Steve wants his Movie player to look like a TV remote.
Most people have no clue how the net runs. Most people couldn't distinguish an IP address from an IBC root beer -- and that's probably not a bad thing. Thanks to DNS, though, people think that as long as the alphabet holds out we'll be OK. After all, if we can point a browser at www.meatiebeatiebigandbouncythealbum.com and pull up a web page, everything must be OK, right? Right?
The Japanese government is reporting that the solution in question is uranyl nitrate enriched to 18.8 weight percent U-235 in a concentration of about 370gU/l. There are about 50L of solution (16kg of uranium) in a stainless steel tank with about a 50cm diameter and 3mm wall thickness, to a depth of about 26cm. Outside the wall is a 2.5cm-thick water bath.
k-effective for this is about 1.04. Removing the water bath lowers k-effective to about 1.0, so it's a good first step. If you don't understand any of the above, you may safely return to your state of antinuclear hysterical panic.
I was wondering when someone would bring up the word "fair." I'd like to point out that there's really no such thing as fairness in tax policy. There can't be.
What is the purpose of taxation? It's to derive money to fund government services. That's it. It's very simple, really. With that in mind, any discussion of taxation has to consider two things: what contribution should I make to the pool of money used to provide services, and what allocation of those services should I receive?
Any taxation system which could lay claim to being "fair" is a taxation system in which the two quantities above are equal -- a citizen who consumes X% of governmentally-provided services should provide X% of the government's revenue. This is patently absurd, though, because those who most need government services are those who can least afford to contribute.
So we find ourselves at an impasse: those who can kick in the most for government services are those who least need them; those who most need them are those who can least contribute to them. There goes fairness.
We don't have a tax system which is fair. No one does, or can, because it's a logical absurdity. With that as a factual given, we have tried to implement a policy which abandons maximal fairness in favor of minimal bitching.
As a percentage of income, the wealthiest Americans pay less than the famous middle class. In terms of raw dollars, though, they pay much more. Believe me, if the canonical example of Bill Gates is able to get his 1040 tax bill down to 1% he still forks over more bucks than I do sitting in the 30+% bracket.
Your statements about wealth lead me to believe that your position is not one derived from a reasoned examination of facts but rather stems from jealousy, a belief that the economy is a zero-sum game, and a profound ignorance of the underlying principles of the American mindset.
"Wealth is the privilege of holding a large share of the NATION'S money. It is not their money. It's ours." You could not be more wrong. Whether you like or loathe the idea of the Getty heirs living a life of luxury while yachting up and down the Pacific Coast, the money is _theirs_.
People take great risks because the rewards can be so great. If you assert a moral right to those rewards whether you have taken the risk, you are no more than a thief stealing from those who have dared and won. The fact that you want to provide free stuff to those who have not dared but seem to have lost anyway does not change that.
You shouldn't apologize -- but consider this: the autoinstall, like all Microsoft software, has the ability to blow away anything and everything. If you're lucky, it'll just be a DLL or two that you have sitting around on another disk somewhere; if you aren't it'll be a dodgy entry in the Registry that forces a reinstall.
People should know and never forget that EVERY SINGLE TIME security and/or stability collide with simplicity and slickness Microsoft opts for the latter. Yes, that means they get "cool stuff" like Autorun. They also get DLL hell and corrupted Registry information.
If you want to compare Linux's ease of use with Microsoft Windows' ease of use, you would have to have a Linux setup in which every user was UID 0, because that's the fair comparison: the guy in front of the terminal can do _anything_. Many of us find that an unacceptable practice.
'While things may be in a state now where linux+gnome/kde+icewm/enlightenemnt/* may be "mom friendly". It's certainly not friendly to someone who's going to be installing hundreds of programs cluelessly every day -- like your average computer using teenager.'
I submit that your average computer using teenage is increasingly using Linux or a BSD -- which is part of why Microsoft is beginning to sweat. Useta be they could count on people finishing high school, going to college, using Word and Excel in the machine labs, and then heading out into the workplace ready to buy and use the software they knew. Now they're entering college, taking a look at Word and Excel, announcing "This sucks!" and getting the professor to let 'em use LaTeX or gnumeric.
If you're going to quote T.S. Eliot in your sig, you should at least spell the man's name correctly. One 'l'.
Re:Drug Dealers, Terrorists, and Children
on
CALEA update
·
· Score: 1
You're not the only one to see these as red flags. For some time now I've been referring in print to the Holy Trinity of Boogeymen: Terrorists, drug dealers, and pedophiles.
Re:To tap, or not to tap
on
CALEA update
·
· Score: 1
"Like most people in the United States, I commit several crimes every month. The latest involves my plan to illegally sell my toilet to a friend. See it's got one of those big tanks and that makes it illegal to sell."
It's dangerous people like you that make me thank God I live in a country with the death penalty. Keep your filthy big-tank-toilet-selling ass out of my town, Bub!
Re:To tap, or not to tap
on
CALEA update
·
· Score: 1
"And isn't there some law about not being able to use information against you that was discovered while looking for something else?"
Not a law, but a tradition laid down by the SCOTUS -- and a tradition which the government every year tries to have removed. Every freakin' year there's some scumbag fed lawyer standing in front of a Federal judge asking for the wall to be weakened, for evidence acquired wrongly to be admitted. "Sure, we didn't have a warrant, but we followed him into his house because he looked like he might be sick and needing police assistance! And then we thought he might have cough medicine under the mattress, so we checked. No cough medicine, but we did find this gun. Can we keep it?"
Follow the cases before the Supreme Court. Those of you who feel that your rights are protected because the government is on your side will find out quickly that it is not. Our legal system believes that everyone is a criminal and with enough police power they can prove it. And if they sometimes can't prove it, they can make something up.
It sure would be easier to launch a shuttle to Mars from a space station than from the surface of the Earth. That's a fine idea you've got there. Before I write my Congressman and ask him to support it, though, can you please explain how the shuttle is going to get to the space station?
Addressed to all and not just the poster I'm responding to...
I see this "Who really cares?" attitude all the time and I have to ask myself if the people who share it are really that nonchalant about appearing ignorant.
Yes, it's about communication -- but you will not be taken seriously if your communication indicates that you have only a passing acquaintance with the language you use. Clarity of language and clarity of thought are intimate companions. Sloppy writing reveals poor education, sloppy thinking, or more commonly, both. There is no idea so time-critical that its communication cannot wait for the communicator to order his thoughts and write clearly and correctly.
Even setting the above aside, as for who cares...why don't _you_ care? Given that certain grammatical forms are right and others are wrong, why on Earth are you not appalled at the possibility that millions of people are reading your message in which you have confused "lose" and "loose" and that these millions are snickering at the fact that you write like a child? Doesn't it bother you to think that the very audience that you are trying to communicate with may at this very moment be chortling to themselves thinking "I bet this guy uses those big pencils and writes the letter 'e' backwards"? Don't you blush when you read about Constitutional amendments touching on free speech and you realize that you've been writing "ammendments" and "speach" for years? In short, how can you have so little self-respect that the knowledge that your writing is riddled with errors provokes no response more severe than a shoulder-shrug and a dismissive "they'll know what I mean"?
People assume it will be added to the main kernel tarball because it is a filesystem that a lot of people want. It only bloats the kernel if you compile it in, you know.
No, I speak as someone with a PhD in nuclear engineering and a knowledge that surpasses that meager bit of pseudoscience you've picked up from "The China Syndrome", "Silkwood", and the latest panic-stricken report from Dan Rather.
Nuclear power is safe. The plants are designed with the full realization that people make mistakes, so the physical facilities better be able to compensate. It's _damned_ difficult to make a Very Bad Thing happen in a US nuclear power plant and you should be reassured by what you've read here today, not alarmed by the fact that the nukes among the/. readership aren't running as far upwind as they can get.
It's not a game -- but you are posting as though you think that nukes are somehow unaware of that fact. Believe me, we're very aware of it -- we spend our careers striving to get the odds of an accident down from one in a trillion to one in ten trillion, only to be told by people like you that our statements of confidence make you uneasy, that you worry about our cavalier attitude towards the bogeyman atom, that you want Zero Risk and won't settle for anything but.
Go back to watching "Dawson's Creek" and let the big people take care of the power, mmmkay?
"the confidence of everyone elses posts only serves to make me more uneasy."
This is because you are scientifically ignorant. If someone asked where to look for the sunrise on 1/1/2000 and the mass responded "East" in a confident manner, would you begin to sweat?
"TMI was a real wake-up call for the U.S. nuclear industry in terms of reactor design, safety systems, operator training, and computer modeling of accidents."
What many people overlook about the meltdown at TMI-2 is that in almost every instance where plant operators had a decision to make, they made what hindsight would show to be the wrong one -- and there was virtually no radiation released from the plant (some volatiles got out, which had they been concentrated in a single individual would have delivered about as much radiation dose as a single chest X-ray).
We learned a hell of a lot from TMI, and the most important thing is that the safety features _work_. The greatest loss was that of the multibillion-dollar plant. Most of the improvements made post-TMI have been along the lines of "OK, now that we know the safety features work, how can we save the plant itself in the event of an accident?"
The real bummer of the situation is that the nuclear power industry in the US effectively died with the double-whammy of TMI and Chernobyl. All that's left is to finish the operating lives and shut down the remaining plants (down to 103; there were 112 when I was in your shoes as a senior NucE student). Because people are afraid of safe reactor technology, we don't build new reactors -- which means that the even safer designs like the ABWR go unbuilt and old people roast in their apartments every summer.
It takes under two seconds to fully insert the control rods -- that's not the same as stopping the reactor. The longest-lived delayed-neutron precursors(*) have a lifetime of around 80 seconds, which means you're going to be generating fission energy for quite some time.
(*) Among the products of nuclear fission reactions are elements which are radiologically unstable; after they're produced they sit and bobble about for a bit and then decide "I'd be much happier if I had fewer neutrons", so they kick one out. The neutrons are called "delayed neutrons", the elements which produce them are called "precursors", and without them to take part in a reaction, we'd have to have humans with sub-millisecond reaction times to have nuclear power.
Almost got it. The positive temperature coefficient of the RMBK design caused a power spike, which flashed the coolant into steam. The resulting overpressure blew the "lid" off the reactor, exposing the 3000+ degree graphite moderator to an oxygen atmosphere -- it promptly burst into flames and the race to put out a 3k fire was on. (Hint: dropping or pouring water on it was a waste of time.)
The reason BigPhoneCo doesn't wait for some other big company to install fiber is because no one is telling them they have to sell to all comers at a loss. Maybe I'm just a rube in the woods but I just don't see how a competent board of directors can turn down a nice profit just because it isn't a mind-blowing profit.
As for my trying to force BigPhoneCo into selling a service, I suppose you're right. I guess I'm looking at BigPhoneCo as being akin to a company that builds and maintains toll roads: they get a big chunk of dough up front to build the roads and they get to collect a fee from users of the roads, but they don't get to ban someone running a "ferry" service with a flatbed truck loaded with people in their cars. Charge 'em extra, yes, but ban 'em, no.
Slashdot Mirror
This review is well-timed, as I just finished "Snow Crash" last night. It was an act of will to do so and had I not ponied up six-ninety-nine and tax for the book, I would likely not have read past the halfway point or so.
Stephenson's Metaverse is a pretty keen idea, but I've never been a big fan of VR-world writing. If (for example) the computing power required to render Mr. Ng's smoke rings is so immense that it bears mentioning, then the odds that Hiro can code up SnowSearch and graveyard daemons and an invisible avatar in an afternoon (and get them written bug-free, no less) are awful damn slim. Further, the Big Chase Scene at the end: given that Hiro can go through stuff by poking it with his katana (as per his entry into Rife's cube), then why the hell doesn't he just mount the damn thing on the front of his bike and run Raven down? Why the "Oh, I might run into something and stop and then I'll lose him and oh, the humanity!"?
This isn't a counter-review by any means; I just found myself reading accolade after accolade and had to ask "Didn't anyone else see that the emperor has no clothes?"
"In a multi-party election, most of the people may have voted against the victor! So he is exactly who the public did NOT want."
Like, uh, Bill Clinton in 1992, who was elected with around 43% of the votes cast?
"We need to realize that Microsoft is not the `evil empire' and dosen't want to take over the world (sorry). "
Their actions would tend to give one quite the opposite impression.
"Just remember how upset we are at companies that burn copies of Linux distro's and sell then for $5 on the corner."
(boggle)
Who's upset, other than Red Hat shareholders? Most of us think that organizations like CheapBytes are great!
'And I fear the time when I have to "test" the fsck times...'
I betcha that at least one of the journaling file systems for Linux will be available by the time this drive is on shelves -- my understanding is that ext3 is almost ready for beta testing and that XFS will be done soon.
It won't eliminate fscking but it should alleviate a lot of it.
While Mac OS X does indeed have a UNIX underbelly, the GUI that sits atop it will be the same GUI that Apple have been providing since the beginning. Need to quit an application? Clover-Q or File->Quit will still be the ways to do it.
However, cracks are beginning to appear in the rigid consistency that Apple has enforced, and sadly, the cracks appear to be driven by high-level Apple bosses (including iCEO Jobs). The QT4 debacle is the first of what I suspect will be many applications that break the Apple desktop metaphor because they are trying to force another metaphor. In the case of QT4, they are trying to force the metaphor of the handheld remote control.
I'm not a Mac person but I appreciate the machines and the company mindset -- and I think OS X is going to represent a sea change for the company. The union of the incomparable Mac OS GUI and the near-failsafe UNIX OS promises to be nothing short of astounding -- if and only if the company understands that the hours spent in usability studies and user feedback can't be thrown away just because Steve wants his Movie player to look like a TV remote.
Most people have no clue how the net runs. Most people couldn't distinguish an IP address from an IBC root beer -- and that's probably not a bad thing. Thanks to DNS, though, people think that as long as the alphabet holds out we'll be OK. After all, if we can point a browser at www.meatiebeatiebigandbouncythealbum.com and pull up a web page, everything must be OK, right? Right?
One of each. Fat Man (Nagasaki) was a plutonium implosion device and Little Boy (Hiroshima) was a uranium gun bomb.
Dropping two hydrogen bombs on Japan during World War II was no mean feat when you consider that the H-bomb wasn't developed until the early Fifties.
The Japanese government is reporting that the solution in question is uranyl nitrate enriched to 18.8 weight percent U-235 in a concentration of about 370gU/l. There are about 50L of solution (16kg of uranium) in a stainless steel tank with about a 50cm diameter and 3mm wall thickness, to a depth of about 26cm. Outside the wall is a 2.5cm-thick water bath.
k-effective for this is about 1.04. Removing the water bath lowers k-effective to about 1.0, so it's a good first step. If you don't understand any of the above, you may safely return to your state of antinuclear hysterical panic.
I was wondering when someone would bring up the word "fair." I'd like to point out that there's really no such thing as fairness in tax policy. There can't be.
What is the purpose of taxation? It's to derive money to fund government services. That's it. It's very simple, really. With that in mind, any discussion of taxation has to consider two things: what contribution should I make to the pool of money used to provide services, and what allocation of those services should I receive?
Any taxation system which could lay claim to being "fair" is a taxation system in which the two quantities above are equal -- a citizen who consumes X% of governmentally-provided services should provide X% of the government's revenue. This is patently absurd, though, because those who most need government services are those who can least afford to contribute.
So we find ourselves at an impasse: those who can kick in the most for government services are those who least need them; those who most need them are those who can least contribute to them. There goes fairness.
We don't have a tax system which is fair. No one does, or can, because it's a logical absurdity. With that as a factual given, we have tried to implement a policy which abandons maximal fairness in favor of minimal bitching.
As a percentage of income, the wealthiest Americans pay less than the famous middle class. In terms of raw dollars, though, they pay much more. Believe me, if the canonical example of Bill Gates is able to get his 1040 tax bill down to 1% he still forks over more bucks than I do sitting in the 30+% bracket.
Your statements about wealth lead me to believe that your position is not one derived from a reasoned examination of facts but rather stems from jealousy, a belief that the economy is a zero-sum game, and a profound ignorance of the underlying principles of the American mindset.
"Wealth is the privilege of holding a large share of the NATION'S money. It is not their money. It's ours." You could not be more wrong. Whether you like or loathe the idea of the Getty heirs living a life of luxury while yachting up and down the Pacific Coast, the money is _theirs_.
People take great risks because the rewards can be so great. If you assert a moral right to those rewards whether you have taken the risk, you are no more than a thief stealing from those who have dared and won. The fact that you want to provide free stuff to those who have not dared but seem to have lost anyway does not change that.
You shouldn't apologize -- but consider this: the autoinstall, like all Microsoft software, has the ability to blow away anything and everything. If you're lucky, it'll just be a DLL or two that you have sitting around on another disk somewhere; if you aren't it'll be a dodgy entry in the Registry that forces a reinstall.
People should know and never forget that EVERY SINGLE TIME security and/or stability collide with simplicity and slickness Microsoft opts for the latter. Yes, that means they get "cool stuff" like Autorun. They also get DLL hell and corrupted Registry information.
If you want to compare Linux's ease of use with Microsoft Windows' ease of use, you would have to have a Linux setup in which every user was UID 0, because that's the fair comparison: the guy in front of the terminal can do _anything_. Many of us find that an unacceptable practice.
'While things may be in a state now where linux+gnome/kde+icewm/enlightenemnt/* may be "mom friendly". It's certainly not friendly to someone who's going to be installing hundreds of programs cluelessly every day -- like your average computer using teenager.'
I submit that your average computer using teenage is increasingly using Linux or a BSD -- which is part of why Microsoft is beginning to sweat. Useta be they could count on people finishing high school, going to college, using Word and Excel in the machine labs, and then heading out into the workplace ready to buy and use the software they knew. Now they're entering college, taking a look at Word and Excel, announcing "This sucks!" and getting the professor to let 'em use LaTeX or gnumeric.
If you're going to quote T.S. Eliot in your sig,
you should at least spell the man's name correctly. One 'l'.
You're not the only one to see these as red flags. For some time now I've been referring in print to the Holy Trinity of Boogeymen: Terrorists, drug dealers, and pedophiles.
"Like most people in the United States, I commit several crimes every month. The latest involves my plan to illegally sell my toilet to a friend. See it's got one of those big tanks and that makes it illegal to sell."
It's dangerous people like you that make me thank God I live in a country with the death penalty. Keep your filthy big-tank-toilet-selling ass out of my town, Bub!
"And isn't there some law about not being able to use information against you that was discovered while looking for something else?"
Not a law, but a tradition laid down by the SCOTUS -- and a tradition which the government every year tries to have removed. Every freakin' year there's some scumbag fed lawyer standing in front of a Federal judge asking for the wall to be weakened, for evidence acquired wrongly to be admitted. "Sure, we didn't have a warrant, but we followed him into his house because he looked like he might be sick and needing police assistance! And then we thought he might have cough medicine under the mattress, so we checked. No cough medicine, but we did find this gun. Can we keep it?"
Follow the cases before the Supreme Court. Those of you who feel that your rights are protected because the government is on your side will find out quickly that it is not. Our legal system believes that everyone is a criminal and with enough police power they can prove it. And if they sometimes can't prove it, they can make something up.
It sure would be easier to launch a shuttle to Mars from a space station than from the surface of the Earth. That's a fine idea you've got there. Before I write my Congressman and ask him to support it, though, can you please explain how the shuttle is going to get to the space station?
Addressed to all and not just the poster I'm responding to...
I see this "Who really cares?" attitude all the time and I have to ask myself if the people who share it are really that nonchalant about appearing ignorant.
Yes, it's about communication -- but you will not be taken seriously if your communication indicates that you have only a passing acquaintance with the language you use. Clarity of language and clarity of thought are intimate companions. Sloppy writing reveals poor education, sloppy thinking, or more commonly, both. There is no idea so time-critical that its communication cannot wait for the communicator to order his thoughts and write clearly and correctly.
Even setting the above aside, as for who cares...why don't _you_ care? Given that certain grammatical forms are right and others are wrong, why on Earth are you not appalled at the possibility that millions of people are reading your message in which you have confused "lose" and "loose" and that these millions are snickering at the fact that you write like a child? Doesn't it bother you to think that the very audience that you are trying to communicate with may at this very moment be chortling to themselves thinking "I bet this guy uses those big pencils and writes the letter 'e' backwards"? Don't you blush when you read about Constitutional amendments touching on free speech and you realize that you've been writing "ammendments" and "speach" for years? In short, how can you have so little self-respect that the knowledge that your writing is riddled with errors provokes no response more severe than a shoulder-shrug and a dismissive "they'll know what I mean"?
People assume it will be added to the main kernel tarball because it is a filesystem that a lot of people want. It only bloats the kernel if you compile it in, you know.
No, I speak as someone with a PhD in nuclear engineering and a knowledge that surpasses that meager bit of pseudoscience you've picked up from "The China Syndrome", "Silkwood", and the latest panic-stricken report from Dan Rather.
/. readership aren't running as far upwind as they can get.
Nuclear power is safe. The plants are designed with the full realization that people make mistakes, so the physical facilities better be able to compensate. It's _damned_ difficult to make a Very Bad Thing happen in a US nuclear power plant and you should be reassured by what you've read here today, not alarmed by the fact that the nukes among the
It's not a game -- but you are posting as though you think that nukes are somehow unaware of that fact. Believe me, we're very aware of it -- we spend our careers striving to get the odds of an accident down from one in a trillion to one in ten trillion, only to be told by people like you that our statements of confidence make you uneasy, that you worry about our cavalier attitude towards the bogeyman atom, that you want Zero Risk and won't settle for anything but.
Go back to watching "Dawson's Creek" and let the big people take care of the power, mmmkay?
"the confidence of everyone elses posts only serves to make me more uneasy."
This is because you are scientifically ignorant. If someone asked where to look for the sunrise on 1/1/2000 and the mass responded "East" in a confident manner, would you begin to sweat?
"TMI was a real wake-up call for the U.S. nuclear industry in terms of reactor design, safety systems, operator training, and computer modeling of accidents."
What many people overlook about the meltdown at TMI-2 is that in almost every instance where plant operators had a decision to make, they made what hindsight would show to be the wrong one -- and there was virtually no radiation released from the plant (some volatiles got out, which had they been concentrated in a single individual would have delivered about as much radiation dose as a single chest X-ray).
We learned a hell of a lot from TMI, and the most important thing is that the safety features _work_. The greatest loss was that of the multibillion-dollar plant. Most of the improvements made post-TMI have been along the lines of "OK, now that we know the safety features work, how can we save the plant itself in the event of an accident?"
The real bummer of the situation is that the nuclear power industry in the US effectively died with the double-whammy of TMI and Chernobyl. All that's left is to finish the operating lives and shut down the remaining plants (down to 103; there were 112 when I was in your shoes as a senior NucE student). Because people are afraid of safe reactor technology, we don't build new reactors -- which means that the even safer designs like the ABWR go unbuilt and old people roast in their apartments every summer.
It takes under two seconds to fully insert the control rods -- that's not the same as stopping the reactor. The longest-lived delayed-neutron precursors(*) have a lifetime of around 80 seconds, which means you're going to be generating fission energy for quite some time.
(*) Among the products of nuclear fission reactions are elements which are radiologically unstable; after they're produced they sit and bobble about for a bit and then decide "I'd be much happier if I had fewer neutrons", so they kick one out. The neutrons are called "delayed neutrons", the elements which produce them are called "precursors", and without them to take part in a reaction, we'd have to have humans with sub-millisecond reaction times to have nuclear power.
Almost got it. The positive temperature coefficient of the RMBK design caused a power spike, which flashed the coolant into steam. The resulting overpressure blew the "lid" off the reactor, exposing the 3000+ degree graphite moderator to an oxygen atmosphere -- it promptly burst into flames and the race to put out a 3k fire was on. (Hint: dropping or pouring water on it was a waste of time.)
The reason BigPhoneCo doesn't wait for some other big company to install fiber is because no one is telling them they have to sell to all comers at a loss. Maybe I'm just a rube in the woods but I just don't see how a competent board of directors can turn down a nice profit just because it isn't a mind-blowing profit.
As for my trying to force BigPhoneCo into selling a service, I suppose you're right. I guess I'm looking at BigPhoneCo as being akin to a company that builds and maintains toll roads: they get a big chunk of dough up front to build the roads and they get to collect a fee from users of the roads, but they don't get to ban someone running a "ferry" service with a flatbed truck loaded with people in their cars. Charge 'em extra, yes, but ban 'em, no.