More importantly, as a consumer, I now know there's no refunds if you buy an app through the appstore - even if the developer is willing to give you one!
That's pretty useful to me to know, as a consumer (since the Help Pages at the Amazon Appstore website don't even talk about whether you can get a refund or not).
"The developer used http to deliver game levels to the customer. No personal data, no need for security."
Actually, according to the fine article, Amazon's complaint was about the session cookie, not the levels, as near as I can tell. That might not strike you as important, but it might be that from Amazon's standpoint, that session cookie might be re-used for something else more important, or might be necessary to keep people from making unpaid copies, etc.
It might not, it's just hard to tell - there's not enough information from the article to tell how important that session cookie is (or is not), from a security standpoint.
I tend to agree with the Grandparent - the very first point was the weakest of all the developer's complaints (and if it weren't for the other issues, I suspect that developer himself would still be using Amazon Appstore).
His first item was actually really 3 or 4 items that he lumped together, and I think I disagree with him on just about everything.
Subclaims:
A) It takes a long time for them to review your code:
The whole premise of the Amazon Appstore, that they use as a differentiating feature from the Market, is that Amazon promises to review submissions. Of course that will take time. 2 weeks doesn't sound like an unreasonable time span for such a review, at least to me.
B) The complaint about SSL which we've already discussed above.
C) Amazon told him the App was live, but he couldn't find it - OK, that sounds like a legitimate complaint, but I suspect it might just take a day or two to show up in the system. Not sure how that works, but I agree that once the dev is notified the app has been accepted, it seems like it should quickly show up in the listings.
D) Updates also have to be reviewed - well DUH! I mean, wth good is it to review the original app submission, but not updates? That's just an invitation for someone who wants to peddle malware to submit a "clean" version 1.0, then after acceptance, submit a "dirty" version 1.1 update a few days later.
If you are going to do security reviews, you've got to review everything. I'm sorry, that's just common sense.
My basic problem with the ultra-deregulationist, privatize everything crowd is the Bell Curve.
"It is a legitimate concern, but competitive mechanisms tend to weed this out."
On average, yes, but there will always be poorly managed companies, which will quickly die, but not before causing harm.
That is to say, that the "Free Market" is generally good at, eventually, ensuring that most of the companies do a good job most of the time. But there will always be companies which are screw-ups.
So, privatizing everything, with no regulation, it seems to me, usually gives you about a 95% solution. That is it's good 95% of the time and bad about 5%.
Arguably, that *might* be better than the government. Personally, I like well-regulated markets, not completely free markets, and not government doing everything. The government should be the law-giver, not the business.
The main trouble is making sure the regulator is well-run by the government (e.g. the Minerals Management Service fiasco). That's what our elected officials are *supposed to be doing* - providing oversight of the government to make sure the bureaucracies are staffed with competent people doing a good job, not corrupt incompetents.
Here's a question. "Marriage" is an act of the State. You receive a "license", and then others are forced by the State to provide certain privileges based upon that license.
Is that strictly a personal choice which does not affect others? Or is that the State using its powers, to interfere?
Here's another question:
I know this is a hotly contetested issue, but you brought it up not I. You claim that you believe in freedom that does not affect others. I believe you'd find that most Conservatives believe that a fetus is another person, separate from the mother, and that abortion infringes upon the most basic of that person's human rights - the right to live. Does not the weakest in our society deserve the full strength of law to protect their right to live?
You may disagree that a fetus is a person, but you must acknowledge that if someone DOES believe a fetus is a person, then they are fully consistent, as a Conservative, in expecting law to protect that person's life from being taken by another, when they are innocent of breaking any law.
If you look deeper than your own prejudice, you can see the consistency in the logic of many Conservatives, but you choose to see only that which you wish to see.
Any company offering a VoIP service is, I would think, legally *required* to provide law enforcement with a means to do a wiretap.
If the Law gets a Warrant, that's quite appropriate according to the Constitution.
If you want untappable VoIP, you'll need to use a direct, encrypted connection, and better hope the NSA hasn't figured out how to crack the cipher you pick.
Going through any third-party service (Skype, Google Talk, etc), is just asking to be tapped.
Yes, that's true. I don't think I would personally have a problem with a tax on coal which was only used to pay for the hidden costs of burning coal - helping to offset health care costs (e.g. help pay part of the costs for people with Asthma, etc), property damage due to things like acid rain from coal emissions, etc.
That seems only fair, really. It would also make other power sources more cost competitive, but I bet the republicans wouldn't allow it. If it did get through, the money would probably be spent on other things, anyhow.
You totally missed the point since you stopped reading. The GP isn't saying the government is requiring something of the parents, but simply that because the government is NOT requiring retailers to police what games children buy/play, by default, the parents are required (not by law, but by the LACK of law, and by their own set of standards) to take responsibility for what they do and don't want their children playing.
That is to say, the parents are required by their own conscience to BE good parents, or not.
This case isn't about the rights of children. It's about the rights of the stores, the publishers, and the developers.
Honestly, however, most stores will probably *voluntarily* continue to not sell Rated-M videogames to minors, because they will not want to P.O. the parents and the large (but perhaps minority) portion of the population that thinks it's not right to sell such material to minors. This ruling doesn't mean stores are forced to sell them to minors, just that they have the *freedom* to choose to sell them, or not.
In particular, it's sometimes hard to determine whether or not you *are* selling to a minor - consider an online retailer: it would be pretty easy for a minor to order something with their parent's credit card, name, address, so they wouldn't know they were selling to a minor.
A technology either is, or isn't, cost effective. Using government subsidies might lower the cost to the end-user, but doesn't actually reduce the cost per kWh. It just makes the rest of us pay for someone else's over-priced power.
The only argument I can see possibly being in favor of energy subsidies for solar or wind is the argument that it's essentially government spending on R&D to help get the technology and economies of scale advanced to the point where it can pay for itself.
If the solar windows cost a buck more than regular windows (not saying they do have that little cost difference, just rhetorically speaking), then even if they didn't provide much power, it might make sense to buy them instead of 'regular' glass, no?
It all comes down to costs, not efficiency. Better efficiency would be great, but even marginally efficient PVs could be useful so long as they are cheap enough.
No one says there's no such thing as climate change. What they say is "the climate is constantly changing, and has been constantly changing FOREVER; so what?".
Maybe they're talking about really really old systems that should be replaced anyhow?
AFAIK, virtually all modern electronics run off DC - pretty much everything takes the AC from the wall plug and converts it to DC in a power supply, then generates it's own internal clock frequency using something like a crystal or some other electronic component internally?
As long as the AC/DC converter in the power supply doesn't get damaged by the frequency variation, it shouldn't really matter, should it?
So, what you're saying is that, no matter what it says, you won't read any article which mdsolar links to, and anything which doesn't fit your view of the world must be FUD?
The first is the fallacy of Ad Hominem, while the second is the error of Confirmation Bias.
I'm basically pro-nuclear, but as a nuclear supporters, I think it's important for nuclear supporters to be the nuclear industry's biggest critics. Nuclear power can only be a good thing for mankind and the rest of the environment if we have a healthy respect for the dangers it holds for us, and if we always hold the nuclear industry to the highest levels of accountability.
If we're not going to do that, then I don't want nuclear power, because we're not yet evolved enough as a species to do it safely over the long term (hundreds, even thousands of years).
Only when we can be brutally honest, calling a spade a spade, and have a high level of transparency in the regulation of the nuclear plants, can we hope to have a safe nuclear industry.
I do not know whether the current high of 1014 feet is high enough or not. I readily admit I do not have the expertise. What I do see from that article is that the experts at the NRC who *should* have the expertise, had to force the power co to improve their flood defenses, and it appears it's a dam good thing they did (hey, did you see what I did there?), and that they did it just in the nick of time.
I'm not so much afraid of nuclear power, as afraid of an industry that fights every safety requirement right up till the moment they're proven wrong.
If the plant designs are such that they can't be made both safe *and* affordable at the same time, then those designs are fundamentally flawed, and need to be resigned to the dustbin of history, replaced by newer designs which can be both safe and affordable.
Hulu's been around what, 3 or 4 years now? The first 2 years I used it, it was pretty great. There were some commercials, I didn't mind too much. There was a huge selection of movies and good TV shows.
Last year, I stopped watching Hulu. They put almost anything worth watching behind the Hulu Plus service, what was left to the free users was often delayed by a MONTH (seriously, there were 3 or 4 shows I was trying to watch which would put the first 2 episodes of the season on after a week delay - ok, I can live with that; then they would take a MONTH delay and start showing episodes which had been on the TV a full month before that).
I got the message that the content producers don't want people watching shows on Hulu, so I stopped watching. I thought about subbing to the Plus Service, but they were still going to show commercials, after charging me $10/mo. Netflix costs about the same, no commercials. Guess who I give my money to?
Netflix doesn't have everything Hulu does, and doesn't have things as recent, but I decided that there's so much on Netflix, I'll just watch stuff there. If I'm gonna wait a month to watch it on Hulu, might as well wait 6 months and watch on Netflix.
Back when I signed up for their forum, like, I dunno, 6 or 8 years ago, I thought about this issue. At the end of the day, I decided that as long as they don't try some nonsense like invalidating my keys because *they* let them get stolen, I didn't care.
It's their forum, and their game keys. The keys don't protect me, they protect Bioware. They don't expose ANYTHING else of mine to any risk.
If they try to invalidate my keys for, e.g. online multiplayer, because of their stupidity in making people put the keys on their chat forum server, I'll go contact a class-action lawsuit lawyer. I bet they'd take the case on contingency.
The thing I've always liked about a monthly/quarterly/yearly subscription model, is that at least the costs are known, and fixed, up front. I always figure "Free To Play" is an attempt to try to nickle-and-dime me for far more money than I'd pay in the subs model. With "micro-transactions", they can try to milk you for more money. Of course you don't *have* to pay it; hopefully most people have good impulse control, and additionally have some sense of whether they're being scammed.
I think Penny Arcade recently ran a pretty good strip exploring this issue:
"If a person were to hold up their iPhone, the device would trigger the attention of infra-red sensors installed at the venue. These sensors would then instruct the theater employees to disable your arms."
"If a person were to hold up their iPhone, the device would trigger the attention of infra-red sensors installed at the venue. These sensors would then instruct the theater employees to come take your phone, escort you out of the theater, and beat you till you pass out."
Non-violence isn't a solution that always works in every situation. I'm pretty sure the Jews in Germany in 1939 were pretty non-violent.
Non-violence can work well in the framework of a democracy, where you challenge the majority to re-examine their morals and ethics. That worked out for Gandhi (the British Government was a democracy), and for MLK in the U.S.
Non-violence isn't always as effective against a government controlled by a ruthless, powerful elite. It did work out in Tunisia and Egypt, and that's great. In Egypt, the Army basically refused to comply with the orders of the "President" to crack down on the people.
In Libya, what remains of the military (after the NATO bombing) is still in thrall to Qaddafi, and doesn't hesitate to use violence against non-violent protesters.
Oh, I agree there have definitely been abuses of eminent domain.
I was just pointing out that your very argument that, "Why do we have private property laws if the majority can just decide to take your property", when in fact, the majority CAN decide to take your property.
"When something [nuclear in this case] can poison or damage large portions of the Earth and make it uninhabitable then that something is not worth the risk."
This statement is a bit of hyperbole. Yes, some radioactive material, in an extreme case like Chernobyl, can get spread very far. Guess what? The only area made 'uninhabitable' was an area immediately around Cherynobyl.
I'm not saying that's a *good* thing, but trying to get some perspective here. Your statement makes it sound like a nuclear reactor could make an area the size of Europe uninhabitable or something.
As for the toxic waste - the "Nuclear Waste Issue" is what has made me pro-nuclear. The only rational thing we can do now, with our nuclear waste, is to burn it off in something like the LFTR (Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor), or the IFR (Integral Fast Reactor).
We have a problem with waste, the only solution to the waste is to burn it off in a new generation of advanced reactors. I'm not a very big fan of the current type of reactors - thermal spectrum light and heavy water reactors.
That said, I think the risks of nuclear power are overstated (nobody has died from Fukushima yet; the best available science indicates there probably won't be a lot of deaths - maybe a few, however).
"Humans can do better"
I agree - we can build better, safer nuclear reactors than what we've built in the past.
All that said, however, I understand why Italy took the position it did. Several posters have given reasons why, and if they think the government there is too corrupt and inept, then that's a great reason to avoid nuclear for now. Maybe in the future they'll have a better government, and the world will have better nuclear reactor designs. That's completely rational and reasonable.
"When you have 80% of the population deciding it's a good idea to kill the other 20%, I suppose in your world view that's OK???"
More like, if 80% of the population decides it's a good idea to kill the other 20%, it's going to happen anyhow (at least if the other 20% do not have the means to defend themselves).
I mentioned in another comment that at the end of the day, democracy doesn't determine what is "right". It is simply a non-violent form of civil war. A way to change government or change laws with, hopefully, no bloodshed. The alternative is essentially having dictators/kings and their cronies who hold on to power until a civil war kills them and their heirs (along with large parts of the population).
Slashdot Mirror
More importantly, as a consumer, I now know there's no refunds if you buy an app through the appstore - even if the developer is willing to give you one!
That's pretty useful to me to know, as a consumer (since the Help Pages at the Amazon Appstore website don't even talk about whether you can get a refund or not).
"The developer used http to deliver game levels to the customer. No personal data, no need for security."
Actually, according to the fine article, Amazon's complaint was about the session cookie, not the levels, as near as I can tell. That might not strike you as important, but it might be that from Amazon's standpoint, that session cookie might be re-used for something else more important, or might be necessary to keep people from making unpaid copies, etc.
It might not, it's just hard to tell - there's not enough information from the article to tell how important that session cookie is (or is not), from a security standpoint.
I tend to agree with the Grandparent - the very first point was the weakest of all the developer's complaints (and if it weren't for the other issues, I suspect that developer himself would still be using Amazon Appstore).
His first item was actually really 3 or 4 items that he lumped together, and I think I disagree with him on just about everything.
Subclaims:
A) It takes a long time for them to review your code:
The whole premise of the Amazon Appstore, that they use as a differentiating feature from the Market, is that Amazon promises to review submissions. Of course that will take time. 2 weeks doesn't sound like an unreasonable time span for such a review, at least to me.
B) The complaint about SSL which we've already discussed above.
C) Amazon told him the App was live, but he couldn't find it - OK, that sounds like a legitimate complaint, but I suspect it might just take a day or two to show up in the system. Not sure how that works, but I agree that once the dev is notified the app has been accepted, it seems like it should quickly show up in the listings.
D) Updates also have to be reviewed - well DUH! I mean, wth good is it to review the original app submission, but not updates? That's just an invitation for someone who wants to peddle malware to submit a "clean" version 1.0, then after acceptance, submit a "dirty" version 1.1 update a few days later.
If you are going to do security reviews, you've got to review everything. I'm sorry, that's just common sense.
My basic problem with the ultra-deregulationist, privatize everything crowd is the Bell Curve.
"It is a legitimate concern, but competitive mechanisms tend to weed this out."
On average, yes, but there will always be poorly managed companies, which will quickly die, but not before causing harm.
That is to say, that the "Free Market" is generally good at, eventually, ensuring that most of the companies do a good job most of the time. But there will always be companies which are screw-ups.
So, privatizing everything, with no regulation, it seems to me, usually gives you about a 95% solution. That is it's good 95% of the time and bad about 5%.
Arguably, that *might* be better than the government. Personally, I like well-regulated markets, not completely free markets, and not government doing everything. The government should be the law-giver, not the business.
The main trouble is making sure the regulator is well-run by the government (e.g. the Minerals Management Service fiasco). That's what our elected officials are *supposed to be doing* - providing oversight of the government to make sure the bureaucracies are staffed with competent people doing a good job, not corrupt incompetents.
Here's a question. "Marriage" is an act of the State. You receive a "license", and then others are forced by the State to provide certain privileges based upon that license.
Is that strictly a personal choice which does not affect others? Or is that the State using its powers, to interfere?
Here's another question:
I know this is a hotly contetested issue, but you brought it up not I. You claim that you believe in freedom that does not affect others. I believe you'd find that most Conservatives believe that a fetus is another person, separate from the mother, and that abortion infringes upon the most basic of that person's human rights - the right to live. Does not the weakest in our society deserve the full strength of law to protect their right to live?
You may disagree that a fetus is a person, but you must acknowledge that if someone DOES believe a fetus is a person, then they are fully consistent, as a Conservative, in expecting law to protect that person's life from being taken by another, when they are innocent of breaking any law.
If you look deeper than your own prejudice, you can see the consistency in the logic of many Conservatives, but you choose to see only that which you wish to see.
Any company offering a VoIP service is, I would think, legally *required* to provide law enforcement with a means to do a wiretap.
If the Law gets a Warrant, that's quite appropriate according to the Constitution.
If you want untappable VoIP, you'll need to use a direct, encrypted connection, and better hope the NSA hasn't figured out how to crack the cipher you pick.
Going through any third-party service (Skype, Google Talk, etc), is just asking to be tapped.
Or. . . you run the codec ON the USB dongle before encryption, which also happens on the dongle.
I'll be contacting you for my $500 consulting fee.
*grin*
Yes, that's true. I don't think I would personally have a problem with a tax on coal which was only used to pay for the hidden costs of burning coal - helping to offset health care costs (e.g. help pay part of the costs for people with Asthma, etc), property damage due to things like acid rain from coal emissions, etc.
That seems only fair, really. It would also make other power sources more cost competitive, but I bet the republicans wouldn't allow it. If it did get through, the money would probably be spent on other things, anyhow.
You totally missed the point since you stopped reading. The GP isn't saying the government is requiring something of the parents, but simply that because the government is NOT requiring retailers to police what games children buy/play, by default, the parents are required (not by law, but by the LACK of law, and by their own set of standards) to take responsibility for what they do and don't want their children playing.
That is to say, the parents are required by their own conscience to BE good parents, or not.
This case isn't about the rights of children. It's about the rights of the stores, the publishers, and the developers.
Honestly, however, most stores will probably *voluntarily* continue to not sell Rated-M videogames to minors, because they will not want to P.O. the parents and the large (but perhaps minority) portion of the population that thinks it's not right to sell such material to minors. This ruling doesn't mean stores are forced to sell them to minors, just that they have the *freedom* to choose to sell them, or not.
In particular, it's sometimes hard to determine whether or not you *are* selling to a minor - consider an online retailer: it would be pretty easy for a minor to order something with their parent's credit card, name, address, so they wouldn't know they were selling to a minor.
A technology either is, or isn't, cost effective. Using government subsidies might lower the cost to the end-user, but doesn't actually reduce the cost per kWh. It just makes the rest of us pay for someone else's over-priced power.
The only argument I can see possibly being in favor of energy subsidies for solar or wind is the argument that it's essentially government spending on R&D to help get the technology and economies of scale advanced to the point where it can pay for itself.
Unfortunately, people just see a lower price tag and dumbly say, "See! Solar power is cheaper than other sources!"
If the solar windows cost a buck more than regular windows (not saying they do have that little cost difference, just rhetorically speaking), then even if they didn't provide much power, it might make sense to buy them instead of 'regular' glass, no?
It all comes down to costs, not efficiency. Better efficiency would be great, but even marginally efficient PVs could be useful so long as they are cheap enough.
No one says there's no such thing as climate change. What they say is "the climate is constantly changing, and has been constantly changing FOREVER; so what?".
Maybe they're talking about really really old systems that should be replaced anyhow?
AFAIK, virtually all modern electronics run off DC - pretty much everything takes the AC from the wall plug and converts it to DC in a power supply, then generates it's own internal clock frequency using something like a crystal or some other electronic component internally?
As long as the AC/DC converter in the power supply doesn't get damaged by the frequency variation, it shouldn't really matter, should it?
So, what you're saying is that, no matter what it says, you won't read any article which mdsolar links to, and anything which doesn't fit your view of the world must be FUD?
The first is the fallacy of Ad Hominem, while the second is the error of Confirmation Bias.
I'm basically pro-nuclear, but as a nuclear supporters, I think it's important for nuclear supporters to be the nuclear industry's biggest critics. Nuclear power can only be a good thing for mankind and the rest of the environment if we have a healthy respect for the dangers it holds for us, and if we always hold the nuclear industry to the highest levels of accountability.
If we're not going to do that, then I don't want nuclear power, because we're not yet evolved enough as a species to do it safely over the long term (hundreds, even thousands of years).
Only when we can be brutally honest, calling a spade a spade, and have a high level of transparency in the regulation of the nuclear plants, can we hope to have a safe nuclear industry.
I do not know whether the current high of 1014 feet is high enough or not. I readily admit I do not have the expertise. What I do see from that article is that the experts at the NRC who *should* have the expertise, had to force the power co to improve their flood defenses, and it appears it's a dam good thing they did (hey, did you see what I did there?), and that they did it just in the nick of time.
I'm not so much afraid of nuclear power, as afraid of an industry that fights every safety requirement right up till the moment they're proven wrong.
If the plant designs are such that they can't be made both safe *and* affordable at the same time, then those designs are fundamentally flawed, and need to be resigned to the dustbin of history, replaced by newer designs which can be both safe and affordable.
Hulu's been around what, 3 or 4 years now? The first 2 years I used it, it was pretty great. There were some commercials, I didn't mind too much. There was a huge selection of movies and good TV shows.
Last year, I stopped watching Hulu. They put almost anything worth watching behind the Hulu Plus service, what was left to the free users was often delayed by a MONTH (seriously, there were 3 or 4 shows I was trying to watch which would put the first 2 episodes of the season on after a week delay - ok, I can live with that; then they would take a MONTH delay and start showing episodes which had been on the TV a full month before that).
I got the message that the content producers don't want people watching shows on Hulu, so I stopped watching. I thought about subbing to the Plus Service, but they were still going to show commercials, after charging me $10/mo. Netflix costs about the same, no commercials. Guess who I give my money to?
Netflix doesn't have everything Hulu does, and doesn't have things as recent, but I decided that there's so much on Netflix, I'll just watch stuff there. If I'm gonna wait a month to watch it on Hulu, might as well wait 6 months and watch on Netflix.
Or, perhaps, they fired the people who tried to tell them the emperor has no clothes? Seems to me you are assuming an awful lot.
Back when I signed up for their forum, like, I dunno, 6 or 8 years ago, I thought about this issue. At the end of the day, I decided that as long as they don't try some nonsense like invalidating my keys because *they* let them get stolen, I didn't care.
It's their forum, and their game keys. The keys don't protect me, they protect Bioware. They don't expose ANYTHING else of mine to any risk.
If they try to invalidate my keys for, e.g. online multiplayer, because of their stupidity in making people put the keys on their chat forum server, I'll go contact a class-action lawsuit lawyer. I bet they'd take the case on contingency.
The thing I've always liked about a monthly/quarterly/yearly subscription model, is that at least the costs are known, and fixed, up front. I always figure "Free To Play" is an attempt to try to nickle-and-dime me for far more money than I'd pay in the subs model. With "micro-transactions", they can try to milk you for more money. Of course you don't *have* to pay it; hopefully most people have good impulse control, and additionally have some sense of whether they're being scammed.
I think Penny Arcade recently ran a pretty good strip exploring this issue:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2011/6/10/
Yeah, I'm pretty sure those 'ousted' execs each walked away with no less than $10 Million *each* (and some of them probably quite a lot more).
I'm with the parent, it's really hard to feel bad for those poor, rich executives.
"If a person were to hold up their iPhone, the device would trigger the attention of infra-red sensors installed at the venue. These sensors would then instruct the theater employees to disable your arms."
"If a person were to hold up their iPhone, the device would trigger the attention of infra-red sensors installed at the venue. These sensors would then instruct the theater employees to come take your phone, escort you out of the theater, and beat you till you pass out."
There, fixed it for you.
Non-violence isn't a solution that always works in every situation. I'm pretty sure the Jews in Germany in 1939 were pretty non-violent.
Non-violence can work well in the framework of a democracy, where you challenge the majority to re-examine their morals and ethics. That worked out for Gandhi (the British Government was a democracy), and for MLK in the U.S.
Non-violence isn't always as effective against a government controlled by a ruthless, powerful elite. It did work out in Tunisia and Egypt, and that's great. In Egypt, the Army basically refused to comply with the orders of the "President" to crack down on the people.
In Libya, what remains of the military (after the NATO bombing) is still in thrall to Qaddafi, and doesn't hesitate to use violence against non-violent protesters.
Oh, I agree there have definitely been abuses of eminent domain.
I was just pointing out that your very argument that, "Why do we have private property laws if the majority can just decide to take your property", when in fact, the majority CAN decide to take your property.
"When something [nuclear in this case] can poison or damage large portions of the Earth and make it uninhabitable then that something is not worth the risk."
This statement is a bit of hyperbole. Yes, some radioactive material, in an extreme case like Chernobyl, can get spread very far. Guess what? The only area made 'uninhabitable' was an area immediately around Cherynobyl.
I'm not saying that's a *good* thing, but trying to get some perspective here. Your statement makes it sound like a nuclear reactor could make an area the size of Europe uninhabitable or something.
As for the toxic waste - the "Nuclear Waste Issue" is what has made me pro-nuclear. The only rational thing we can do now, with our nuclear waste, is to burn it off in something like the LFTR (Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor), or the IFR (Integral Fast Reactor).
We have a problem with waste, the only solution to the waste is to burn it off in a new generation of advanced reactors. I'm not a very big fan of the current type of reactors - thermal spectrum light and heavy water reactors.
That said, I think the risks of nuclear power are overstated (nobody has died from Fukushima yet; the best available science indicates there probably won't be a lot of deaths - maybe a few, however).
"Humans can do better"
I agree - we can build better, safer nuclear reactors than what we've built in the past.
All that said, however, I understand why Italy took the position it did. Several posters have given reasons why, and if they think the government there is too corrupt and inept, then that's a great reason to avoid nuclear for now. Maybe in the future they'll have a better government, and the world will have better nuclear reactor designs. That's completely rational and reasonable.
"When you have 80% of the population deciding it's a good idea to kill the other 20%, I suppose in your world view that's OK???"
More like, if 80% of the population decides it's a good idea to kill the other 20%, it's going to happen anyhow (at least if the other 20% do not have the means to defend themselves).
I mentioned in another comment that at the end of the day, democracy doesn't determine what is "right". It is simply a non-violent form of civil war. A way to change government or change laws with, hopefully, no bloodshed. The alternative is essentially having dictators/kings and their cronies who hold on to power until a civil war kills them and their heirs (along with large parts of the population).
I call democracy the "War at the Ballot".