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  1. If we're discussing costs here, the thing is even the very rare nuclear accidents are incredibly expensive. Estimates of the cost of cleaning up Fukushima run between US$180 - US$600 billion.

    Estimating US$400 billion, and wikipedia's claim that about 2 PWh of nuclear energy is produced per year, we get a cost of $200/ MWh year, so substitute in how often you think it's reasonable to assume these things happen somewhere in the world (once every 30 years? Gives $6/MWh), and compare to the latest contracts being signed for dispatchable solar (solar with storage) costing less than $50/MWh. It's a significant proportion of the overall cost, not overwhelming, but should not be discounted. And solar costs are coming down fast.

    Cleanup costs:
    http://www.bbc.com/news/world-...
    https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/04/01/national/real-cost-fukushima-disaster-will-reach-¥70-trillion-triple-governments-estimate-think-tank/

    Contracts being signed around US$50/MWh:
    US$55/MWh in South Australia, including storage
    US$30/MWh in Arizona, not including storage

  2. Re:Abolish gerrymandering by using computers on Ask Slashdot: How Would You Use Computers To Make Elections Better? · · Score: 1

    The AEC was set up by the parliament, and presumably could be disbanded by the parliament, but it is run independently. The members of the commission are appointed by the Governor-General (a non-political office). It's about as independent as the judiciary.

  3. Re:What about text chat? on WhatsApp's Next Version To Include VoIP Calls and Recording · · Score: 1

    Whatsapp being phone only is what kills it for me.

    It's not a bug, it's a feature. It's what allows it to take the place of SMS. If your contact is on WhatsApp and you message them, you know they will get your message on their phone. If you send a message to someone on facebook messenger, they might not get it until they log in to facebook on their computer next week, so unless you know their habits you have to send an SMS if it needs to be timely.

  4. Re:Start your own provider? on Ask Slashdot: How Do You Fight Usage Caps? · · Score: 1

    And that's just for ONE person without any file sharing; imagine a house full of people that actually use their technology.
    <snip>
    But sometimes nice things are nice to have...

    And there is no reason why a single person using their internet fairly sporadically should pay the same as a house full of people streaming HD video 24x7. Nice things are nice to have, but why should someone else pay for them?

  5. Re:The profits have been competed away on Have We Hit Peak HFT? · · Score: 2

    Good luck with that. Traders will just move to more friendly jurisdictions. Most HFT is in deriviatives, which any exchange can list anywhere in the world. Liquidity will decrease in the taxed markets and the spreads will widen by the amount of the tax, hurting anyone who wants to invest there.

  6. Re:Privacy issue in Europe on Ask Slashdot: Are Smart Meters Safe? · · Score: 1

    Yep, see for example Nonintrusive appliance load monitoring. It's possible to identify common appliances reasonably well using the size of changes to power consumption and, depending on the smart meter hardware used, the shape of the power-usage curve (e.g. the brief initial surge when turning on compact fluorescents). It's not perfect but it's not too bad and it's getting more accurate.

  7. Re:looks like a.. on Aussie Telco Lays New Fiber For Microsecond Trading Boost · · Score: 2

    This is really for connecting the two exchanges in Sydney, the ASX and Chi-X. Plenty of stocks trade on both exchanges so the advantages to knowing sooner what is happening on the other exchange are obvious.

  8. Re:So why offer an unlimited plan in the first pla on AT&T Clarifies Data Limitations On "Unlimited" Data Plans · · Score: 1

    Exactly this happened in Australia with fixed-line broadband. ISPs offered 'unlimited' plans, in small print noting you get throttled after a certain figure. They got smacked down by the ACCC (the government consumer watchdog) and now plans are either "x GB - throttled" or "x GB - $y/GB excess fee", or genuinely unlimited.

  9. Re:Confused? on $50,000 To Solve the Most Complicated Puzzle Ever · · Score: 1

    A lot of research has been done on the second step of this algorithm in bioinformatics. When sequencing a genome, generally all you get are millions of short sequences that need to be stuck together. The algorithms work by calculating probability scores for various pieces to be adjacent and then doing some funky statistics. It's a non-trivial problem to calculate those probabilities for the document reconstruction problem, and then the reconstruction is in 2d instead of 1d, but the bioinformatics algorithms could provide some interesting approaches.

  10. Re:Obligatory XKCD on DARPA Wants To Get Rid of Password Protection · · Score: 5, Informative

    i'm not sure i completely agree with that. for one thing, he calculates entropy wrong. according to wikipedia, the set of all ascci characters has an entropy of 6.5446 bits per character. given an 11 character password, thats ~72 bits. a 26 letter character set has an entropy of 4.7004 bits per character with 24 letters, that gives the password 112 bits. that doesn't make my case for why i disagree, just showing that he calculated entropy wrong. i actually don't even know how he came up with those numbers.

    People understanding things in this way is exactly why everyone chooses bad passwords. His point is that if everyone has passwords like Tr0ub4dor&3, password guessers won't guess random printable ASCII characters, they'll guess a word and then try some substitutions on it.

    So 'Troubador' can be guessed with a dictionary attack, which is why the word only gets about 16 bits of entropy (that puts it in the top 64000 most common words in English). There is additional entropy added by the substitutions but substituting '0' for 'o' is much easier to guess than changing the 'o' to a random character.

    i'm not going to try to calculate the possible number of permutations of a 24 character english word password but its definitely significantly less than the 112 bits of entropy we calculated earlier. is it less than the 72 bits for the ascii character set? i don't know. but maybe someone smarter than me can go tell us that one.

    And again, since an attacker would be using a dictionary attack, the correct way to calculate entropy is per word, not per character. The xkcd calculates 11 bits of entropy per common word which suggests these words are in the top 2^11=2048 most common words which seems reasonable (a quick glance at wikipedia suggests around 80% of the words in written texts are built from the most common 2000 words). So we get 44 bits of entropy. Obviously less than 72 bits but how many people are really going to create a completely random alpha-numeric-punctutation string of 11 characters (not built from a word or pattern)?

  11. Re:Noscript wins again on Two Major Ad Networks Found Serving Malware · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Most of the big banks in Sweden allow you to create a temporary (virtual) credit card with a specified limit and expiry date. You type the credit limit and expiry in, push a button and it spits out a new mastercard number. At least one bank (Swedbank, one of the largest in Scandinavia) requires this kind of card for all online transactions.

  12. Re:Home Security Theater on TSA Bans Toner and Ink Cartridges On Planes · · Score: 1

    The quickest path towards resolving this is genuinely for all non-criminal young Middle Easterners to start ejecting the radical element from within their ranks.

    Just like when the IRA was having their campaigns, I should have told them to shut the hell up so I could go about my business? I'm an Australian, although I look Irish due to my ancestors around 4 generations ago emigrating from there. Racism is not the answer.

  13. Re:Why outsource? on Europe To Import Sahara Solar Power Within 5 Years · · Score: 2, Informative

    Spain is actually a long way from, say, Germany. The middle of Spain is only about 10% closer to Berlin than Tunisia.

  14. Re:A return to baseline... on Caffeine Addicts Get No Additional Perk, Only a Return To Baseline · · Score: 1

    Usually stuff like this isn't researched on very big groups and over and over again.

    I think sporting bodies have researched this thoroughly. For example, in Australian football (the most popular sport in the country) caffeine was legalised a few years ago. The clubs spent big bucks testing their usefulness, but as far as I know none use them any more.

  15. Re:Technically.. on Lawyer Offers $1M For Proof His Client Could Have Done It; Oops · · Score: 1

    Obviously, ... women are a basic ingredient for pizza

    Evidence here: http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1693641

  16. Re:The Mysterious Reoccurrence of Mr. Freckles on Most Blogs Now Abandoned · · Score: 0, Redundant

    Obligatory: Real Life Twitter

  17. Re:You lack imagination. on First Zero-Gravity Wedding Planned · · Score: 1

    Example: I doubt anyone's been married on waterskis before. Or while submerged and in Scuba gear.

    You could at least have come up with some better examples: Wedding on waterskis, Underwater wedding

  18. Re:If a used bookstore can sell used books... on Publishers Want a Slice of Used Game Market · · Score: 1

    (Maybe I shouldn't be too loud about this but I'm sure the Post Office would love to get money from stamp collectors buying and selling their stamps. Or the Treasure Department and coins...)

    They already do. Stamp collectors buy stamps and never use them for postage - but they still pay the full price. Same with coins - they are bought from the Treasury.

  19. Re:Somebody needs to take on Google on Microsoft Bing Search Launches Early Preview · · Score: 1

    For this reason I have changed my default search engine for the moment, to at least give bing a go. Competition is good, and if Google's monopoly continues, the technology will stagnate.

  20. Re:Very true on The Case For Working With Your Hands · · Score: 1

    Mining machinery, oil platform systems, medical devices, robotics repair...any of those would offer opportunities to travel to exotic places and make a lot of money.

    At least if you work in mining, the exotic places you get sent are likely to be places you wouldn't really want to live otherwise, for example outback Australia or Siberia.

  21. Re:Chicken vs Egg on Where Are the High-Res Head-Mounted Displays? · · Score: 1

    I think what you're saying is that until PORN comes available on HMD, it isn't going to take off.

    Obviously what is required is a program to de-clothe selected women in the field of view.

  22. Re:Water is heavy on Using Lasers and Water Guns To Clean Space Debris · · Score: 1

    few realize that potable water is a dwindling resource in certain regions.

    Certainly in Australia people are well aware of this. See for example www.ourwater.vic.gov.au. The major daily newspapers have the current supply level of reservoirs every day.

  23. Re:Results not supposed causes on Study Confirms Mobile Phones Distract Drivers · · Score: 1

    It doesn't matter why someone is weaving, following too closely, drifting, not using turn signals, not checking blind spots, etc... they should be ticketed just the same.

    The problem with this is that there is no way a system that actually tickets people whenever they do these things would be accepted, and since people are distracted while on the phone they don't realise they are doing them.
    The threat of an occasional ticket is enough to stop most people from speeding and running red lights because they generally notice when they do those things, and think, "I hope I don't get caught."

  24. Sleep time on Astronaut Loses Tools While Performing an EVA · · Score: 3, Funny

    The crew is due to go to sleep tonight at 11:55 p.m. CST and will wake up at 7:55 a.m. tomorrow.

    Man, that's a pretty damn regimented sleep time. I guess there's no quickly checking /. before bed.

  25. Re:Now we know on Google's Chrome Declining In Popularity · · Score: 1

    So it turns out Slashdot has ads on it. Who knew?