I agree with that statement - however, it is often the truth that those with a MS in CompSci can make for a better programmer. But it's more of a probability, not a certainty.
There's a possibility that an untrained blogger can report the news better than a trained journalist There's a possibility that a self-trained mathematician can produce better proofs than a PhD.
It's just a question of how big the possibility is - there are genius, untrained programmers out there. However, they might be 1 in 1000 instead of 1 in 10 for folks with a MS (making up numbers).
I don't claim to read Ruby, but are you saying that it's just running uppercase on each element of the array?
A = ['a', 'b', 'c']
B = [entry.upper() for entry in A]
Ta-Da!
We just bought a house about 8 months ago. I can confirm: Buying a house is by no means a "good choice" economically. If you have a large downpayment to start out with, you might possibly break even, if you ignore all the extra costs incurred due to the house.
My recommendation is that if you really, really want to live in a house (like we did), then go for it - it's great! If having a house adds needed charm to your life (and you can afford it, of course), buy one! Otherwise, it makes little sense.
Yeah, I assumed there were a couple of directories I was overlooking.
Point is that you ought to be able to easily separate "these are the directories users can touch" from the "these are the directories which users can't touch". In fact, RedHat did some work on this (look up Stateless Linux). I suspect you can come up with a list of N directories (where N 10 or so) which must be encrypted, and let the OS portions be un-encrypted.
Set up a rat's nest of soft-links to an encrypted partition, make sure the images deploy properly and your backups don't suck, and you're done! Experience level required: medium. Cost required: $0.
Of course, I shudder at the thought of trying to deploy Linux in an enterprise!
Like many things in life, it's a tradeoff. This is why I like *not* working with personal data - speculations about security can be done from the armchair. While we do need to secure our systems, the possible loss is minimal - just the time of the stupid admin (me) who made things insecure in the first place and has to start from scratch.
Ah, universities. Possibly the best jobs ever, unless you like money.
In the Unix world, you could just encrypt the $HOME directory of all the users and simply not give them the rights to write outside of that directory. Make sure you don't deploy applications which both keep sensitive data and run as root... and success!
Unless Ohio is doing something top-secret with the OS their users are running, I guess I only see the need for encrypting the entire drive when there aren't sufficient security policies in the first place.
Then again, I can do plenty of development on Linux without root permissions. Being that most Windows software can't be installed without root permission... well, let's just say I believe I'm lucky to work in a Linux / Mac shop.
It may be possible to turn Linux into that mode these days, but it certainly isn't true.
Not all writes will cause a sync on Linux (and they won't on Solaris, either). However, closing a file will cause a sync... as will touching a file (metadata update).
MySQL 3.x might not have sync'd to disk when you do an update / insert, but that hasn't been a problem for 5-7 years (unless you use MyISAM, which basically declares "I don't care about data integrity"). The rows get written to the transaction log, if nothing else.
Basically, all the enterprise "stuff" you expected from Solaris ~3 years ago is now in Linux.
You're missing the point. Apple isn't trying to create a market for movie downloads. They make beans off movie/music downloads. They are trying to enlarge the market for the iPod. Look at it this way - at some point, the MP3 player market is going to plateau. How do they grow the iPod? By making it easier to get DVDs on your iPod Video! Let's face it -Joe user doesn't know how to rip DVDs.
The iPod was successful in part because iTunes gave folks a way to easily fill it with content. iPod videos will take off once folks can easily put all their kid's Disney movies on it. Hell, I was excited to get me a Touch - but I've barely used the thing for movies because I simply don't have the time to sit down and rip DVDs.
Except that Quirin was overturned when the US signed the Third Geneva convention (due to the Supremecy Clause in the Constitution). You can't selectively pick partly from previous case law (which was overturned by an international treaty) and said treaty. Or, at least, that was the Supreme Court's decision.
According to the Third Geneva Convention, you must have status determined by a military tribunal; until then, the prisoners are POWs. In the case that they are unlawful enemy combatants, then they must be handed over to the domestic courts.
So, already, we have a problem because the status was never determined by the military tribunal, so they should have been POWs. However, if they did go through a military tribunal, the next step is to hand them over to the domestic courts. However, the Gitmo site was selected *specifically* because it was not US territory - that way, the administration argued, domestic courts could not touch them. This way, they could stuff humans between the Geneva Convention and the US courts without giving them basic human rights.
Of course, the Supreme Court ruled that any place that US has complete jurisdiction in, the courts have jurisdiction, which is how we ended up with the military tribunals which congress authorized - although there is argument as to whether these can be considered "competent" courts.
One line of speculation considers that one reason that the whole Geneva Convention stuff has been avoided a lot by the Bush administration is that if Geneva doesn't apply to the prisoners, Geneva doesn't apply to the captors. The thought is that for some of these torture incidents, US personnel could possibly be prosecuted for war crimes. Of course, this part is speculation.
The Bush administration way, way overstepped when it started denying POWs basic human rights - and most of it was based on the legal footwork of Gonzales, even before he became AG.
Yes, and that feature is called Time Machine. I guess there are some other minor features hanging around, but for me (I was using an rsync-based solution before), it's a night-and-day difference.
With rsync, my hard drive shuttered once every 2 hours as rsync went through my whole file system. On the other hand, the only way I can tell that Time Machine is running is because I hear a hard drive spinning up in the server by my desk.
The FSevents daemon on Mac (similar to earlier Linux ideas) writes out a list of all file system changes. Time Machine checks to see when the last backup was performed, looks at the list of file system changes, backups up those files, and creates hard links for the remaining files / directories.
It is a night and day difference between any other backup system I've seen. Further, whether you are restoring from a local disk or your company's server, the interface is simple and intuitive. No more "Hey Mr. IT Guy, can you please restore this file to last week's version?"
A working backup solution far beyond the usability of EMC Retrospect (cost, $150) is worth $150. An OS version bump is nice too.
SIX BILLION dollars is a pathetic amount of money for research
NSF funds programs in biology, math, CS, engineering, geosciences, physics and astronomy, education, and sociology. So, that's probably less than ONE BILLION dollars per subject. So, we spend the same amount of money for one day in Iraq than a year's worth of physics research.
It's commonly accepted that general research pushes technological boundaries back which can drive research in the economy. So, if we are an "idea based economy", we had better invest in infrastructure.
I beg to differ. If you think the VA is crap, go to a private hospital. The VA consistently ranks better than any hospital system in the US. The following article is 2 years old, but it outlines how it beats the crap out of other hospital systems:
The VA is the largest hospital system in the US and its budget is decreased most years after adjusted for inflation. Given the predicament that Congress puts them in, they've done pretty well.
However, every single mistake they make is a public headline. Private hospitals have the luxury of being sued and quietly settle for $$$. Instead, the VA has to endure lots of bad publicity.
If the VA was a corporation, costs would skyrocket and even more corners would be cut. If you want to make it better, how about you ask Congress to provide adequate funding for the avalanche of people they are getting?
Cosmic rays can provide some interesting information for physicists.
In fact, since the particle accelerator for the LHC has not yet turned on, the only real "data" to speak of is cosmic rays passing through the detectors. It's great background noise to make sure everything is working.
However, it's not as good as an accelerator for a couple of reasons: 1) Most interesting particles are the decay products of a collision, not necessarily in cosmic rays. 2) Repeatability. While protons in the LHC may collide at 100Hz or so, cosmic rays are a little less predictable. 3) Statistics. To show the existence of a new particle, you need statistics at 5-sigma. This might require tens or hundreds of thousands of recorded events of a certain signature in order to be considered reliable. You simply can't get that from cosmic rays.
(3) is why some results from the Tevatron are just now getting interesting - the device has simply been running long enough to make the discovery of the Higgs a remote possibility because of the sheer number of days running and events recorded. Because the energies of the LHC are going to be much higher and at a greater rate, the Higgs search should be much faster on that machine.
(I am not a particle physicist. I just work for them.)
I have a 1080p HDTV I love having high def programming I cringe when I watch DVDs on my TV because they look worse than over-the-air.
You'd think I'd be Sony's perfect customer, yet I'm thinking about a HD-DVD player. Why? Rumor is that they're going sub-$100 this Christmas.
I will spend $100 on a HD-DVD player which may be obsolete in a couple years. It's at the price point that it doesn't have to be a "sure thing" anymore. I will not spend $400 on a Blu-Ray player.
I would rather purchase CDs, and rip and resell them. I can usually do so for about $4 per CD. I know it's probably not entirely legal.
Probably not entirely legal? Try "not even in the gray area, this is completely illegal". It's people like you that the $10,000-per-song type fines are built for. At least those who are filesharing aren't (usually) making money off it.
It is an interesting to see that you consider this "much-more-illegal" type of copyright violation safer than file sharing. Shows how far off the RIAA's priorities are.
Eventually, the combined power of the Boinc architecture will be much larger than any supercomputer in terms of CPU, yet be total insufficient for any of the supercomputer's task.
Here's the experiment I've used to teach the concepts: Take a deck of cards, shuffle it, and time yourself sorting it. Now, have 1 other person help you sort it - it should be about 2 times as fast, maybe a little slower.
Repeat again with increasing number of people until you have 1 card per person. You now have a room full of bright, capable people, yet it will take you much longer to finish the task. This is because you are bogged down by the algorithm - which is not parallel - and the fact you need lots of communication between people.
The kind of tasks grids are useful for are only those that are highly parallel. Think about counting a jar full of marbles. You can give all 52 people a big handle of marbles and add the results at the end; you should be able to achieve about a 52-times speedup, given enough starting marbles.
That's the current, popular, Blue Gene/L architecture. The Blue Genes are composed of densely packed boards, each of which has a PowerPC chip and many vector processors. The PowerPC chips run a Linux-like OS and do some normal-looking I/O (filesystems, networking, etc), while the vector processors churn lots of data and have simplistic I/O.
That GP who suggests that Xen is used to distribute tasks obviously isn't familiar with the needs of big iron.
Not everything in life is facts and observations. You don't have to believe in life-after-death to have a religion (or belief system, if you will). Science and humanity can be two different things.
If you think faith is about fairy tales about an afterlife, you've been talking to the wrong people. I suppose, to me, the important part is that you are happy and centered with yourself. For me, that involves being a Christian; for you, it's apparently being a rationalist.
I suspect your problem is with people who try to shape science around a faith; that's silly. But then again, there are a lot of angry, silly people in the world.
As a scientist, I can state evidence and logic has its proper boundaries - just as much as faith and religion do. They both fill roles.
Religion does a shitty job explaining our creation and the mechanics of the world. The bible doesn't tell me much about relativity or semiconductors.
Science does a miserable job of telling me why I love my wife more than anyone else in the world or what the meaning of life is, or what I can do to make myself happy. Some people take up philosophy to fill this role, some people pick religion. I'd hate for my life to be confined to the world of "knowledge".
Having a religion is a great thing for me and many others as people. Try to not see religion and science as two mutually exclusive things which cannot be mixed.
Encrypted and/or signed email (GPG is also acceptable if you/your clients aren't in the PKI world). All mail clients support this. You'll thank me later.
What crappy IM client are you using which doesn't inform you of the people who are IMing you in the Dock?
I'll let you in on a little secret - try out Adium. With the exception of video and voice, it beats the pants off iChat. It does exactly what you want it to.
Just like Windows - sometimes it helps having a friend who knows the nice tips and tricks.:)
They're not advertising to you, sane person who knows the law.
They're advertising to people who have more money than brains, and also want to sue someone for looking at them wrong. They're trying to reach out to all the idiots who want a lawyer who will pursue a $20 million lawsuit for three years with no chance of survival and charge them $1 million while doing it.
Basically they say, "Hey - we will pursue any stupid claim you want. Look at our website! It's full of dumb ones."
Why? There's no need to have unsigned apps - if Apple is smart and enables the end-user to sync their computer's keychain with the iPhone. This way, users who trust the DOEgrids Certificate Authority can run apps signed by the DOEgrids CA. I'm surprised there isn't a freely-available SourceForge CA that devs can use to sign their binaries. As long as the end user can control which authorities they trust (I suspect enterprise admins will want to control this, at the least), there is no need for a unsigned app!
If a developer is totally independent and has no resources, they can easily set up their own CA and ask users to add that. It's a pain-in-the-ass, but would probably greatly reduce malware (as long as the process of adding/deleting a CA isn't just "Please click OK"). Those indie developers who can't afford the $50 (or whatever cost) certificate probably are targeting hackers/modders, not normal users anyway.
If Apple plays their cards right, they will be able to get more devs to be "legit" without totally abandoning the mod crowd who isn't scared to alter their keychain. If talented devs can work on producing great apps instead of getting unsigned ones to work, it's a good thing for Apple.
This assumes, of course, that Apple is a rational being and not a controlling corporation. Big assumption.
The pebble-bed reactors are still several years out; they're considered gen IV, which are expected to arrive in 2030. The thorium reactors aren't particularly new (MSRE was what, the 60's?), but operators have been reluctant to build one, as they are radically different and nuclear power plant operators are a tad conservative... I suspect it might require a little nudging from the government.
The ABWR is a gen III+ reactor, and not a particularly advanced one at that. They, however, do have a proven success record and, like most modern designs, incredibly safe.
Lincoln, Nebraska lost connectivity to several plants in an ice storm last year. So, we've been buying electricity off the free market (Which is admittedly more expensive). Customers lost perhaps a day of power.
I think there's a good argument that you need both the electrical grid and power plants - but both have multiple layers or redundancy.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with that statement - however, it is often the truth that those with a MS in CompSci can make for a better programmer. But it's more of a probability, not a certainty.
There's a possibility that an untrained blogger can report the news better than a trained journalist
There's a possibility that a self-trained mathematician can produce better proofs than a PhD.
It's just a question of how big the possibility is - there are genius, untrained programmers out there. However, they might be 1 in 1000 instead of 1 in 10 for folks with a MS (making up numbers).
I don't claim to read Ruby, but are you saying that it's just running uppercase on each element of the array? A = ['a', 'b', 'c'] B = [entry.upper() for entry in A] Ta-Da!
We just bought a house about 8 months ago. I can confirm: Buying a house is by no means a "good choice" economically. If you have a large downpayment to start out with, you might possibly break even, if you ignore all the extra costs incurred due to the house. My recommendation is that if you really, really want to live in a house (like we did), then go for it - it's great! If having a house adds needed charm to your life (and you can afford it, of course), buy one! Otherwise, it makes little sense.
Ah, I remember living and driving in Atlanta.
That's why I moved to Nebraska. The drivers just aren't that aggressive - giving everyone 2 seconds isn't hard at all.
Yeah, I assumed there were a couple of directories I was overlooking.
Point is that you ought to be able to easily separate "these are the directories users can touch" from the "these are the directories which users can't touch". In fact, RedHat did some work on this (look up Stateless Linux). I suspect you can come up with a list of N directories (where N 10 or so) which must be encrypted, and let the OS portions be un-encrypted.
Set up a rat's nest of soft-links to an encrypted partition, make sure the images deploy properly and your backups don't suck, and you're done! Experience level required: medium. Cost required: $0.
Of course, I shudder at the thought of trying to deploy Linux in an enterprise!
Like many things in life, it's a tradeoff. This is why I like *not* working with personal data - speculations about security can be done from the armchair. While we do need to secure our systems, the possible loss is minimal - just the time of the stupid admin (me) who made things insecure in the first place and has to start from scratch.
Ah, universities. Possibly the best jobs ever, unless you like money.
Interesting.
... and success!
In the Unix world, you could just encrypt the $HOME directory of all the users and simply not give them the rights to write outside of that directory. Make sure you don't deploy applications which both keep sensitive data and run as root
Unless Ohio is doing something top-secret with the OS their users are running, I guess I only see the need for encrypting the entire drive when there aren't sufficient security policies in the first place.
Then again, I can do plenty of development on Linux without root permissions. Being that most Windows software can't be installed without root permission... well, let's just say I believe I'm lucky to work in a Linux / Mac shop.
It may be possible to turn Linux into that mode these days, but it certainly isn't true.
Not all writes will cause a sync on Linux (and they won't on Solaris, either). However, closing a file will cause a sync... as will touching a file (metadata update).
MySQL 3.x might not have sync'd to disk when you do an update / insert, but that hasn't been a problem for 5-7 years (unless you use MyISAM, which basically declares "I don't care about data integrity"). The rows get written to the transaction log, if nothing else.
Basically, all the enterprise "stuff" you expected from Solaris ~3 years ago is now in Linux.
You're missing the point. Apple isn't trying to create a market for movie downloads. They make beans off movie/music downloads. They are trying to enlarge the market for the iPod. Look at it this way - at some point, the MP3 player market is going to plateau. How do they grow the iPod? By making it easier to get DVDs on your iPod Video! Let's face it -Joe user doesn't know how to rip DVDs.
The iPod was successful in part because iTunes gave folks a way to easily fill it with content. iPod videos will take off once folks can easily put all their kid's Disney movies on it. Hell, I was excited to get me a Touch - but I've barely used the thing for movies because I simply don't have the time to sit down and rip DVDs.
Except that Quirin was overturned when the US signed the Third Geneva convention (due to the Supremecy Clause in the Constitution). You can't selectively pick partly from previous case law (which was overturned by an international treaty) and said treaty. Or, at least, that was the Supreme Court's decision.
According to the Third Geneva Convention, you must have status determined by a military tribunal; until then, the prisoners are POWs. In the case that they are unlawful enemy combatants, then they must be handed over to the domestic courts.
So, already, we have a problem because the status was never determined by the military tribunal, so they should have been POWs. However, if they did go through a military tribunal, the next step is to hand them over to the domestic courts. However, the Gitmo site was selected *specifically* because it was not US territory - that way, the administration argued, domestic courts could not touch them. This way, they could stuff humans between the Geneva Convention and the US courts without giving them basic human rights.
Of course, the Supreme Court ruled that any place that US has complete jurisdiction in, the courts have jurisdiction, which is how we ended up with the military tribunals which congress authorized - although there is argument as to whether these can be considered "competent" courts.
One line of speculation considers that one reason that the whole Geneva Convention stuff has been avoided a lot by the Bush administration is that if Geneva doesn't apply to the prisoners, Geneva doesn't apply to the captors. The thought is that for some of these torture incidents, US personnel could possibly be prosecuted for war crimes. Of course, this part is speculation.
The Bush administration way, way overstepped when it started denying POWs basic human rights - and most of it was based on the legal footwork of Gonzales, even before he became AG.
With rsync, my hard drive shuttered once every 2 hours as rsync went through my whole file system. On the other hand, the only way I can tell that Time Machine is running is because I hear a hard drive spinning up in the server by my desk.
The FSevents daemon on Mac (similar to earlier Linux ideas) writes out a list of all file system changes. Time Machine checks to see when the last backup was performed, looks at the list of file system changes, backups up those files, and creates hard links for the remaining files / directories.
It is a night and day difference between any other backup system I've seen. Further, whether you are restoring from a local disk or your company's server, the interface is simple and intuitive. No more "Hey Mr. IT Guy, can you please restore this file to last week's version?"
A working backup solution far beyond the usability of EMC Retrospect (cost, $150) is worth $150. An OS version bump is nice too.
SIX BILLION dollars is a pathetic amount of money for research
NSF funds programs in biology, math, CS, engineering, geosciences, physics and astronomy, education, and sociology. So, that's probably less than ONE BILLION dollars per subject. So, we spend the same amount of money for one day in Iraq than a year's worth of physics research.
It's commonly accepted that general research pushes technological boundaries back which can drive research in the economy. So, if we are an "idea based economy", we had better invest in infrastructure.
I beg to differ. If you think the VA is crap, go to a private hospital. The VA consistently ranks better than any hospital system in the US. The following article is 2 years old, but it outlines how it beats the crap out of other hospital systems:
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2005/0501.longman.html
If you think the VA is bad, you can always go to your favorite HMO and have a higher chance of death.
Did I mention that the VA is a leader in hospital IT infrastructure and is decades ahead of other hospitals?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veterans_Health_Information_Systems_and_Technology_Architecture
The VA is the largest hospital system in the US and its budget is decreased most years after adjusted for inflation. Given the predicament that Congress puts them in, they've done pretty well.
However, every single mistake they make is a public headline. Private hospitals have the luxury of being sued and quietly settle for $$$. Instead, the VA has to endure lots of bad publicity.
If the VA was a corporation, costs would skyrocket and even more corners would be cut. If you want to make it better, how about you ask Congress to provide adequate funding for the avalanche of people they are getting?
Cosmic rays can provide some interesting information for physicists.
In fact, since the particle accelerator for the LHC has not yet turned on, the only real "data" to speak of is cosmic rays passing through the detectors. It's great background noise to make sure everything is working.
However, it's not as good as an accelerator for a couple of reasons:
1) Most interesting particles are the decay products of a collision, not necessarily in cosmic rays.
2) Repeatability. While protons in the LHC may collide at 100Hz or so, cosmic rays are a little less predictable.
3) Statistics. To show the existence of a new particle, you need statistics at 5-sigma. This might require tens or hundreds of thousands of recorded events of a certain signature in order to be considered reliable. You simply can't get that from cosmic rays.
(3) is why some results from the Tevatron are just now getting interesting - the device has simply been running long enough to make the discovery of the Higgs a remote possibility because of the sheer number of days running and events recorded. Because the energies of the LHC are going to be much higher and at a greater rate, the Higgs search should be much faster on that machine.
(I am not a particle physicist. I just work for them.)
I have a 1080p HDTV
I love having high def programming
I cringe when I watch DVDs on my TV because they look worse than over-the-air.
You'd think I'd be Sony's perfect customer, yet I'm thinking about a HD-DVD player. Why? Rumor is that they're going sub-$100 this Christmas.
I will spend $100 on a HD-DVD player which may be obsolete in a couple years. It's at the price point that it doesn't have to be a "sure thing" anymore.
I will not spend $400 on a Blu-Ray player.
It is an interesting to see that you consider this "much-more-illegal" type of copyright violation safer than file sharing. Shows how far off the RIAA's priorities are.
Eventually, the combined power of the Boinc architecture will be much larger than any supercomputer in terms of CPU, yet be total insufficient for any of the supercomputer's task.
Here's the experiment I've used to teach the concepts: Take a deck of cards, shuffle it, and time yourself sorting it. Now, have 1 other person help you sort it - it should be about 2 times as fast, maybe a little slower.
Repeat again with increasing number of people until you have 1 card per person. You now have a room full of bright, capable people, yet it will take you much longer to finish the task. This is because you are bogged down by the algorithm - which is not parallel - and the fact you need lots of communication between people.
The kind of tasks grids are useful for are only those that are highly parallel. Think about counting a jar full of marbles. You can give all 52 people a big handle of marbles and add the results at the end; you should be able to achieve about a 52-times speedup, given enough starting marbles.
That's the current, popular, Blue Gene/L architecture. The Blue Genes are composed of densely packed boards, each of which has a PowerPC chip and many vector processors. The PowerPC chips run a Linux-like OS and do some normal-looking I/O (filesystems, networking, etc), while the vector processors churn lots of data and have simplistic I/O.
That GP who suggests that Xen is used to distribute tasks obviously isn't familiar with the needs of big iron.
Not everything in life is facts and observations. You don't have to believe in life-after-death to have a religion (or belief system, if you will). Science and humanity can be two different things.
If you think faith is about fairy tales about an afterlife, you've been talking to the wrong people. I suppose, to me, the important part is that you are happy and centered with yourself. For me, that involves being a Christian; for you, it's apparently being a rationalist.
I suspect your problem is with people who try to shape science around a faith; that's silly. But then again, there are a lot of angry, silly people in the world.
As a scientist, I can state evidence and logic has its proper boundaries - just as much as faith and religion do. They both fill roles.
Religion does a shitty job explaining our creation and the mechanics of the world. The bible doesn't tell me much about relativity or semiconductors.
Science does a miserable job of telling me why I love my wife more than anyone else in the world or what the meaning of life is, or what I can do to make myself happy. Some people take up philosophy to fill this role, some people pick religion. I'd hate for my life to be confined to the world of "knowledge".
Having a religion is a great thing for me and many others as people. Try to not see religion and science as two mutually exclusive things which cannot be mixed.
Hi,
Let me introduce you to a friend of mine called S/MIME:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S/MIME
Encrypted and/or signed email (GPG is also acceptable if you/your clients aren't in the PKI world). All mail clients support this. You'll thank me later.
What crappy IM client are you using which doesn't inform you of the people who are IMing you in the Dock?
:)
I'll let you in on a little secret - try out Adium. With the exception of video and voice, it beats the pants off iChat. It does exactly what you want it to.
Just like Windows - sometimes it helps having a friend who knows the nice tips and tricks.
They're not advertising to you, sane person who knows the law.
They're advertising to people who have more money than brains, and also want to sue someone for looking at them wrong. They're trying to reach out to all the idiots who want a lawyer who will pursue a $20 million lawsuit for three years with no chance of survival and charge them $1 million while doing it.
Basically they say, "Hey - we will pursue any stupid claim you want. Look at our website! It's full of dumb ones."
Why? There's no need to have unsigned apps - if Apple is smart and enables the end-user to sync their computer's keychain with the iPhone. This way, users who trust the DOEgrids Certificate Authority can run apps signed by the DOEgrids CA. I'm surprised there isn't a freely-available SourceForge CA that devs can use to sign their binaries. As long as the end user can control which authorities they trust (I suspect enterprise admins will want to control this, at the least), there is no need for a unsigned app!
If a developer is totally independent and has no resources, they can easily set up their own CA and ask users to add that. It's a pain-in-the-ass, but would probably greatly reduce malware (as long as the process of adding/deleting a CA isn't just "Please click OK"). Those indie developers who can't afford the $50 (or whatever cost) certificate probably are targeting hackers/modders, not normal users anyway.
If Apple plays their cards right, they will be able to get more devs to be "legit" without totally abandoning the mod crowd who isn't scared to alter their keychain. If talented devs can work on producing great apps instead of getting unsigned ones to work, it's a good thing for Apple.
This assumes, of course, that Apple is a rational being and not a controlling corporation. Big assumption.
The pebble-bed reactors are still several years out; they're considered gen IV, which are expected to arrive in 2030. The thorium reactors aren't particularly new (MSRE was what, the 60's?), but operators have been reluctant to build one, as they are radically different and nuclear power plant operators are a tad conservative... I suspect it might require a little nudging from the government. The ABWR is a gen III+ reactor, and not a particularly advanced one at that. They, however, do have a proven success record and, like most modern designs, incredibly safe.
Lincoln, Nebraska lost connectivity to several plants in an ice storm last year. So, we've been buying electricity off the free market (Which is admittedly more expensive). Customers lost perhaps a day of power. I think there's a good argument that you need both the electrical grid and power plants - but both have multiple layers or redundancy.