OK, so you figure (anybody have the actual number?) that those reactors were in operation for, say, 50 years.
50 years is pretty much the longest that any of them will have been in operation for. The first commercial-scale nuclear power plant in the world was apparently Calder Hall and it first started up in 1956. (Neither it or any of the other similar Magnox designs reached 50 years; their average appears to be closer to 35.) The average number of years in operation is probably going to be way less than that, though unfortunately I don't think anyone's calculated it.
It's an open question whether U.S. has free elections or not, but I'm pretty confident that one thing that you don't have in your election is things like ballot boxes pre-stuffed with ballots with the "right" vote marked already.
From what I've heard lot of the US doesn't even have ballot boxes any more. It's all done on electronic voting systems created by friends of one of the two parties, with massive security holes and some well-hidden backdoors suited to vote rigging.
The OWS movement may actually have helped provided some half-decent shelter and human contact to homeless individuals
They did, in some cases as a result of deliberate police actions aimed at driving homeless individuals out of their previous locations and into the OWS camps, probably with the hope of giving them an excuse to wipe out OWS.
I don't think you read the Wikipedia page on Chinon Nuclear Power Plant carefully enough. The Magnox/UNGG reactors there were shut down a couple of decades ago; its current power production comes from PWRs. (There's a couple of newer Magnox reactors in the UK that aren't due to shut down until next year, but I don't think they were ever used to produce weapons-grade plutonium.)
IIRC, the British MAGNOX plants did originally use a fuel cycle that was relatively ill-suited to commercial power generation just so that they could produce plutonium for nuclear bombs. The military basically ended up subsidizing them because they weren't commercially viable on their own. (They're also a nightmare to decommission; I don't think I'm going to see it happen within my lifetime.)
You've failed to include all of the reactors that were once in operation but have been shut down
Interestingly the IAEA website reckons there are only 138 of those in the entire world, which seems surprisingly small at first but is probably correct: http://www.iaea.org/cgi-bin/db.page.pl/pris.reasdct.htm. Widespread nuclear power is a relatively recent thing.
First of all, you can get a pretty damn good estimate of the likelihood of a major nuclear incident by dividing the world-wide number of operating hours of all nuclear plants by the number of major incidents.
No you can't. Firstly, we're talking about a completely new design of plant that hasn't been built before. Secondly, that can't estimate the likelihood of low-probability events that haven't ever happened yet, some of which could be probable enough to still be a danger - especially if we expand nuclear power - and could cause large numbers of deaths. There's just no way to tell by looking at past performance.
Does the passive cooling system have any valves that can be closed which disable it and require power to re-open? Is there any way that the reactor could end up in a state where the passive cooling is disabled and cannot be re-enabled due to a combination of operator error and power failure? This is apparently one of the factors that did Fukushima in - the plant operators disabled the non-electrical cooling system due to the risk of dangerous overcooling and then couldn't re-enable it after the power failed.
Of course, when China's lack of an "irrational" fear of nuclear power causes them to screw it up just like they have with other large infrastructure projects, I expect we'll see +5 Insightful comments in the thread about that nuclear accident pointing out that it could never happen in the US because they have proper regulations.
Don't those billion dollars come with a nasty caveat, namely that the countries benefitting from the money have to agree to obey foreign patent laws and not buy much cheaper generic antiretroviral drugs made in places like India, making them dependent on his money from then on? Something like that anyway. It's not exactly charity.
The problem is that a lot of the time no-one's actually been proofreading the official eBook editions properly and they're full of mistakes that no self-respecting book pirate would ever have allowed.
It uses elliptic curve rather than some pluggable system to negotiate an encryption method. EC *hasn't* had anywhere near the deployment hours that conventional PKE has had. It's still, to me, a "unknown" in terms of how breakable it is compared to anything else.
It's not just EC, it's also using an elliptic curve that's not one of the widely-used ones and an implementation that probably hasn't received much scrutiny.
If I recall correctly, voting was one of the usual examples of rational ignorance. The amount of effort required by a voter to cut through all the political spin and figure out what each politician actually supports and how it would affect them hugely outweighs any benefit they could expect to gain from doing so, because their vote alone has very little effect. Of course it's actually even worse than this since people aren't rational in the first place!
By the way, your post is a combination of cherry picking and misleading vividness. Fukushima was the direct result of an unanticipated major natural disaster. No one expected, nor was the plant designed for, a Richter 9.0 earthquake followed by 7.3 m (24 ft) tsunami.
No-one expected them when the plant was originally built. By the time the earthquake and tsunami struck, it was actually a known risk, but re-engineering all the nuclear plants to protect against it was considered too expensive.
The Chinese government is very good at screwing up the safety on large infrastructure projects, though. Remember the recent high-speed train derailments? I dread to think what would happen if they used nuclear power on a large scale...
The ridiculous part is, HP tablet PCs from 10 years ago would completely "violate" Apple's design patents. The only difference between them visually was that Apple's iPad had a black bezel and a glossy screen.
And of course, the reason for that difference is that pretty much the entire computer and consumer electronics industry moved from silver bezels and matte screens to black bezels and glossy screens over those 10 years.
Depending on the specific quirks of one particular "somewhat quirky" implementation to define the standard is a very good reason not to support it. It's not like it'd cost them anything in the immediate term - they're bundling SQLite anyway for their own purposes - but it's something that could easily bite them in the long term if SQLite ever becomes obsolete or changes its behaviour in any way.
I used to use Konqueror (the project on which KHTML was based) as my main browser back when Safari had recently forked from it. Fun fact: the most annoying example of a site locking me out using browser sniffing was an Apple site, some photo gallery service they offered as part of.Mac. Couldn't bypass the sniffing and let me view the site no matter what I tried.
Of course, a few years later they famously locked out all non-Safari browsers from displaying their HTML 5 showcase. Some demonstration of their respect for open standards that was.
Someone insists on gifting you a $5 game and it turns out they used a stolen credit card to do so? Bam! All your hundreds of dollars of legitimately purchased games gone in an instant.
More than that, Ars Technica actually has an interesting quote from the FCC report:
AT&T claims it cannot now build enough additional sites and obtain sufficient additional spectrum in a few localities to expand an existing and successful business. Yet AT&T simultaneously argues that the smaller providers would solve any competitive problem by installing entirely new networks over most of the country, a task that would require substantially more cell construction and integration than AT&T's claimed requirements absent the transaction.
Basically they're claiming that they can't expand their business because they can't get enough spectrum or build enough sites, but that smaller regional competitors with less money and less spectrum available to them than either AT&T or T-Mobile alone would somehow miraculously be able to expand enough to become a meaningful competitor.
And once the commercial vendors start supporting it then it will slowly but surely make its way into other distributions as well so that these apps can run on distros that other people want to use.
Except that the creator of The Journal has carefully made sure to make this as hard as possible by integrating it deeply into their init replacement which no-one else uses, systemd. Indeed, I don't think other distros could even move over to systemd; upgrading init is hairy even when it's designed to support the upgrade pathway, and somehow I have a feeling that systemd isn't going to support upgrading from a different init because Red Hat just get their customers to reinstall every major release anyway.
At least rsyslog is relatively common - Debian and Ubuntu use it too. It looks like The Journal will be basically Red Hat only because it's deeply integrated into systemd and there's no sensible upgrade path to there from the init systems other distros use even if they wanted to change to it.
It's the API legacy issue. Old tools can't cope with changes in the API - in this case, a text stream. New features require these changes.
Which Red Hat are planning to change by developing a new Red Hat-specific API that's deeply tied into their init replacement - meaning that other distros won't be able to use it even if they want to!
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OK, so you figure (anybody have the actual number?) that those reactors were in operation for, say, 50 years.
50 years is pretty much the longest that any of them will have been in operation for. The first commercial-scale nuclear power plant in the world was apparently Calder Hall and it first started up in 1956. (Neither it or any of the other similar Magnox designs reached 50 years; their average appears to be closer to 35.) The average number of years in operation is probably going to be way less than that, though unfortunately I don't think anyone's calculated it.
It's an open question whether U.S. has free elections or not, but I'm pretty confident that one thing that you don't have in your election is things like ballot boxes pre-stuffed with ballots with the "right" vote marked already.
From what I've heard lot of the US doesn't even have ballot boxes any more. It's all done on electronic voting systems created by friends of one of the two parties, with massive security holes and some well-hidden backdoors suited to vote rigging.
The OWS movement may actually have helped provided some half-decent shelter and human contact to homeless individuals
They did, in some cases as a result of deliberate police actions aimed at driving homeless individuals out of their previous locations and into the OWS camps, probably with the hope of giving them an excuse to wipe out OWS.
I don't think you read the Wikipedia page on Chinon Nuclear Power Plant carefully enough. The Magnox/UNGG reactors there were shut down a couple of decades ago; its current power production comes from PWRs. (There's a couple of newer Magnox reactors in the UK that aren't due to shut down until next year, but I don't think they were ever used to produce weapons-grade plutonium.)
IIRC, the British MAGNOX plants did originally use a fuel cycle that was relatively ill-suited to commercial power generation just so that they could produce plutonium for nuclear bombs. The military basically ended up subsidizing them because they weren't commercially viable on their own. (They're also a nightmare to decommission; I don't think I'm going to see it happen within my lifetime.)
You've failed to include all of the reactors that were once in operation but have been shut down
Interestingly the IAEA website reckons there are only 138 of those in the entire world, which seems surprisingly small at first but is probably correct: http://www.iaea.org/cgi-bin/db.page.pl/pris.reasdct.htm. Widespread nuclear power is a relatively recent thing.
First of all, you can get a pretty damn good estimate of the likelihood of a major nuclear incident by dividing the world-wide number of operating hours of all nuclear plants by the number of major incidents.
No you can't. Firstly, we're talking about a completely new design of plant that hasn't been built before. Secondly, that can't estimate the likelihood of low-probability events that haven't ever happened yet, some of which could be probable enough to still be a danger - especially if we expand nuclear power - and could cause large numbers of deaths. There's just no way to tell by looking at past performance.
Does the passive cooling system have any valves that can be closed which disable it and require power to re-open? Is there any way that the reactor could end up in a state where the passive cooling is disabled and cannot be re-enabled due to a combination of operator error and power failure? This is apparently one of the factors that did Fukushima in - the plant operators disabled the non-electrical cooling system due to the risk of dangerous overcooling and then couldn't re-enable it after the power failed.
Of course, when China's lack of an "irrational" fear of nuclear power causes them to screw it up just like they have with other large infrastructure projects, I expect we'll see +5 Insightful comments in the thread about that nuclear accident pointing out that it could never happen in the US because they have proper regulations.
Don't those billion dollars come with a nasty caveat, namely that the countries benefitting from the money have to agree to obey foreign patent laws and not buy much cheaper generic antiretroviral drugs made in places like India, making them dependent on his money from then on? Something like that anyway. It's not exactly charity.
The problem is that a lot of the time no-one's actually been proofreading the official eBook editions properly and they're full of mistakes that no self-respecting book pirate would ever have allowed.
It uses elliptic curve rather than some pluggable system to negotiate an encryption method. EC *hasn't* had anywhere near the deployment hours that conventional PKE has had. It's still, to me, a "unknown" in terms of how breakable it is compared to anything else.
It's not just EC, it's also using an elliptic curve that's not one of the widely-used ones and an implementation that probably hasn't received much scrutiny.
If I recall correctly, voting was one of the usual examples of rational ignorance. The amount of effort required by a voter to cut through all the political spin and figure out what each politician actually supports and how it would affect them hugely outweighs any benefit they could expect to gain from doing so, because their vote alone has very little effect. Of course it's actually even worse than this since people aren't rational in the first place!
By the way, your post is a combination of cherry picking and misleading vividness. Fukushima was the direct result of an unanticipated major natural disaster. No one expected, nor was the plant designed for, a Richter 9.0 earthquake followed by 7.3 m (24 ft) tsunami.
No-one expected them when the plant was originally built. By the time the earthquake and tsunami struck, it was actually a known risk, but re-engineering all the nuclear plants to protect against it was considered too expensive.
The Chinese government is very good at screwing up the safety on large infrastructure projects, though. Remember the recent high-speed train derailments? I dread to think what would happen if they used nuclear power on a large scale...
The ridiculous part is, HP tablet PCs from 10 years ago would completely "violate" Apple's design patents. The only difference between them visually was that Apple's iPad had a black bezel and a glossy screen.
And of course, the reason for that difference is that pretty much the entire computer and consumer electronics industry moved from silver bezels and matte screens to black bezels and glossy screens over those 10 years.
So it's not just my locally-compiled build of Chromium that has that annoying bug, then!
Depending on the specific quirks of one particular "somewhat quirky" implementation to define the standard is a very good reason not to support it. It's not like it'd cost them anything in the immediate term - they're bundling SQLite anyway for their own purposes - but it's something that could easily bite them in the long term if SQLite ever becomes obsolete or changes its behaviour in any way.
Well, they did use their control of internet advertising to spam users of other browsers with ads for Chrome, or at least that was my experience.
I used to use Konqueror (the project on which KHTML was based) as my main browser back when Safari had recently forked from it. Fun fact: the most annoying example of a site locking me out using browser sniffing was an Apple site, some photo gallery service they offered as part of .Mac. Couldn't bypass the sniffing and let me view the site no matter what I tried.
Of course, a few years later they famously locked out all non-Safari browsers from displaying their HTML 5 showcase. Some demonstration of their respect for open standards that was.
Someone insists on gifting you a $5 game and it turns out they used a stolen credit card to do so? Bam! All your hundreds of dollars of legitimately purchased games gone in an instant.
More than that, Ars Technica actually has an interesting quote from the FCC report:
AT&T claims it cannot now build enough additional sites and obtain sufficient additional spectrum in a few localities to expand an existing and successful business. Yet AT&T simultaneously argues that the smaller providers would solve any competitive problem by installing entirely new networks over most of the country, a task that would require substantially more cell construction and integration than AT&T's claimed requirements absent the transaction.
Basically they're claiming that they can't expand their business because they can't get enough spectrum or build enough sites, but that smaller regional competitors with less money and less spectrum available to them than either AT&T or T-Mobile alone would somehow miraculously be able to expand enough to become a meaningful competitor.
And once the commercial vendors start supporting it then it will slowly but surely make its way into other distributions as well so that these apps can run on distros that other people want to use.
Except that the creator of The Journal has carefully made sure to make this as hard as possible by integrating it deeply into their init replacement which no-one else uses, systemd. Indeed, I don't think other distros could even move over to systemd; upgrading init is hairy even when it's designed to support the upgrade pathway, and somehow I have a feeling that systemd isn't going to support upgrading from a different init because Red Hat just get their customers to reinstall every major release anyway.
At least rsyslog is relatively common - Debian and Ubuntu use it too. It looks like The Journal will be basically Red Hat only because it's deeply integrated into systemd and there's no sensible upgrade path to there from the init systems other distros use even if they wanted to change to it.
It's the API legacy issue. Old tools can't cope with changes in the API - in this case, a text stream. New features require these changes.
Which Red Hat are planning to change by developing a new Red Hat-specific API that's deeply tied into their init replacement - meaning that other distros won't be able to use it even if they want to!