Actually, the I, Robot film was pretty good if you didn't expect it to be based on the novel, but instead to be exploring the concepts (and failings) of the Three Laws, which is of course what the novel was all about. I don't want to spoil it for anybody who hasn't seen it yet, but it was an interesting take on the risks of sentient AI programmed with a need to aid humanity. Consider the police; their job is to keep us safe, but often that involves arresting or even occasionally killing some of "us."
I wouldn't say it's worth going out to buy a Blu-Ray special edition director's cut with limited figurine or anything, but it's worth renting and watching just for a competently done examination of what was really the central idea of the book. The SFX is also pretty good, even if the product placement is a little too obvious.
No. I'm sorry, but you're wrong. There were some risks that should not have been taken, like the manner in which the fuel was stored (outside of containment), but "unacceptable" applied to the situation as a whole is bullshit.
This was the fifth strongest earthquake we've recorded. Not in Japan, but globally. The amount of kinetic energy unleashed was greater than just about anything human beings can directly cause; flying planes into skyscrapers is barely a blip on the same scale, and even fusion weapons aren't nearly as strong. A meteor impact is the only thing that readily comes to mind which would be greater.
"Safe" isn't a binary state, like you and so many other *ahem* individuals *ahem* seem to be trying to claim. The WTC towers to designed to resist the impact of smaller planes. Cars are designed to keep their passengers alive in collisions up to a certain speed. Fission power plants are designed with a certain degree of safety built in. The catch, in all cases, is that there's always going to be something worse.
Take the safest systems we have right now, like molten slat reactors where the failsafe is passive; the reactor literally cannot produce enough heat to melt down because the hotter it gets, the less energy it releases, until it arrives in equilibrium. Nor can the coolant boil off; the vaporization temperature of the salt is above that equilibrium point. Now, hit such a reactor with a meteor. You'll still end up with radioactive fuel being launched into the atmosphere and spread widely. Is it the planner's fault for not anticipating this? Is it an "unacceptable risk" to use a design with such a deadly known danger? Of course not! It's absurd to even suggest so.
Mind you, I don't disagree that we should modernize our fission reactors. Their are lessons to be learned here, not about the risks of immense, possibly once-a-lifetime earthquakes, but about why certain failure points are too vulnerable. The coolant cycle is a good example; by relying on external power to the pumps, it put the safety of the reactor partially in the hands of external factors. Newer reactors don't have that risk at all, but older ones could be modified to mitigate it.
Excel supports OLE, and has since the 90s. Note that it's not actually putting the reader or any other directly executable code in the spreadsheet, but it can contain a reference saying "I have a SWF object that I'd like to render here" and the OS will load whatever it has that renders those.
It's also actually a hell of a lot less secure than Adobe, oddly enough. Run a fuzzer with it and it falls over very easily. Apple's PDF reader has the same problem - even worse, in fact (15x as many exploitable vulnerabilities as Adobe Reader, according to a larger-scale experiment than I cared to run, see Charlie Miller's presentation at CanSecWest last year). I haven't tried fuzzing any of the other "fully featured" readers yet, but I'd be surprised if any of them did much better.
The reason so many vulnerabilities are publicized and exploited in Adobe software is the same reason this happens on Windows: Malware is a business, income is a linear function of exploited systems, and (at least for worms), infection rate is a linear function of exploited systems. Integrate cash flow over time to get total income, and you'll see it's quadratic in terms of whatever vulnerable install base (at least until you hit every possible systemthat can be infected, at which point total income is just linear with time). Go for a target with 5% the install base of the market leader, and you've cut the earning potential by a factor of 400 (practically speaking, no malware ever really reaches saturation before it gets stopped). Even at 33% as much as the leader, you're still losing $8 of every $9 you would have made.
Well, or you could upgrade because the OS you're currently using is just flat-out obsolete.
No instant search; do you still launch apps by navigating manus or is there just a crapload of icons on your screen? Really primitive built-in firewall; filtering options are limited and it's incoming-only. Very painful to run as a limited user, so I bet you're logged in with an Admin account. Read up on the Principle of Least Privilege. No ASLR means "return-oriented programming" attacks will work; the other major OSes have this too. No integrity control sandboxing; apps run at the privilege level of their user even if they really should be more restricted. Video drivers all run in the kernel, meaning anything that goes wrong (and in a piece of code as comlex as a video driver, they do) causes an OS crash. Memory management algorithms intended for a time when total RAM was measured in megabytes; it's as outdated as "1.5x as much Swap as RAM" on Linux. Minimal 64-bit capability (and you're not really running XP at that point, it's the Server 2003 kernel, which has very little mainstream driver support). No ability to restore a file or folder to an earlier state unless you've invested a lot of effort in backup software (the built-in backup stuff sucks, too). App switching just shows you icons, not thumbnails, much less *live* thumbnails. Clunky error messages that don't even tell you things like what app is holding a file open when you try to manipulate it. Relatively poor support for SMP, compared to modern OSes. I bet my dual-core system can boot Win7 faster than your quad-core boots XP. Do you still use IE to install your updates? How long can you delay rebooting after you install updates? Have you ever had a Patch Tuesday where you *didn't* need to reboot? How often do you get new or updated drivers via Windows Update, vs. needing to download them manually?
Damn, I could go on like this a lot longer too. Seriously, using XP in 2011 is like driving a car from 1980, without the "it's a classic!" appeal.
If you don't want to use the automatic blocking list, which I'll grant has some weaknesses (mostly that something needs to appear three times at least before you can block it) you can install third-party block lists. I use one from EasyList - the same folks behind AdBlock Plus for Firefox.
If your concern is that it doesn't block first-party ads, well... that's fair, I guess, but I see very, very few of those. There are ad blockers extensions ("add-ons") for IE as well, anyhow. It's not like Firefox comes with ABP built in.
The ZuneHD had the hardware to be a viable iPod Touch competitor. In a way, it even had the software; leaving aside a somewhat dated browser rendering engine, it had some nice capabilities. It was targeted much more at media than the iTouch is, with things like HD Radio and HD video decoding for HDMI output. It also has some nice games and a handful of non-game apps.
The problem, aside from being late to the party and not marketing it as well as they should have, is that MS missed the boat on making it a superior general purpose device. The interface is great if you're looking to play media (no, I don't have one, but I'm friends with some former MS interns who received them last year) but has no app-centric view like modern smarphones... or the iTouch. The XNA dev toolkit allows some neat games, and is available for free, but it's very game-focused and doesn't provide anything like the general-purpose capability you can get on iOS.
Like the Xbox line? 15 years ago, the idea of a MS console was ridiculous. 10 years ago, it was seen as a joke and widely predicted to be a waste of money and effort, at least on sites like this. 5 years ago it was seen as being so error-prone, and such a money sinkhole for the company, that people predicted it would be quitely retired. Last year, it broke sales records hard, introduced a cool new peripheral that is now in Guinness Book of World Records for its sales rate, and moved from being a hardcore-gamers-only device to a living room entertainment system for the family.
Then there's things like MS mice and keyboards - hardly a monopoly, but quite popular and generally highly recommended. SQL Server is nowhere near monopoly status, but does just fine for itself. Visual Studio and.NET are also doing very well. I don't know if Azure is profitable yet, but it's certainly gaining adherents.
There's a lot of potential for MS to experiment in other markets. It has the size and cash to support some abject failures (Kin, compared to which Zune was a huge success) in order to try and find the next big thing (Kinect worked out great over the last few months; who knows what the next one will be?)
I realize it's fashionable to know absolutely nothing about MS products on here, but I feel I should provide a small dose of reality: All Windows Phone 7 devices include Zune playback capability, including ZunePass streaming and downloads (unlimited music access for a monthly subscription, with the ability to permanently download 10 high-quality DRM-free MP3s each month). Codec support includes AAC and MP3 in addition to WMA. Still no PlaysForSure compatibility, of course, but anything purchased from the Zune store will work.
Granted, Nokia's new WP7 devices will of course include this too, so in a way you're right. You're just about 5 months behind the times.
Amusingly, it does actually work quite well on IE(9). I agree though - standards-compliant websites should be described as such, not as "Chrome compatible." It's good that the script wasn't written in any way that woul require people to be using a specific browser or even specific rendering engine, so why describe it in such a manner?
The catch is that when the core is exposed (after the coolant boils off), it's still too hot and leads to hydrogen gas formation. You either need some way to remove that heat more quickly (such as pumping in additional coolant, which takes energy and irradiates more material, or venting the core, which releases radiation), or some way to prevent the core from becoming exposed (such as coolant that doesn't boil off).
Radioisotope decay thermal energy is a pretty weak power source, by itself. The chain reaction is always the problem in situations like this. Of course, that's how a fission reactor works - staying on the hairy line of criticality, where each nucleus fissioning releases (on average) enough neutrons to fission another one - so the catch is how you stop the chain reaction from running away (going super-critical) when something breaks. Removing heat alone won't do it, but adding heat isn't inherently a problem either. The catch with this reactor is that the chain reaction didn't stop, and it was capable of producing enough heat to exceed its design constraints (the coolant boiled off, the core was exposed, chemical reactions ocurred that produced flammable gas, and it exploded).
The problem is that reactors which rely on external temperature regulation are always going to have some sort of possible failure mode when external regulation fails. You can implement failsafes, like dropping in neutron-absorbing rods in the case of a power loss, but there still has to be some external mechanism to enable that... and external mechanisms can fail. What we need is reactors which simply can't get this hot - where the hotter they get, the less heat they produce.
Oh, please. Personal insults are so ridiculously childish. The logic behind your argument is faulty, for a couple reasons. "Safe" is always going to be a relative term. I can concoct extremely ridiculous situations where a molten salt reactor is unsafe, such as a significant-size meteor striking it and scattering the radioactive fuel and coolant.
You also haven't suggested anything which even vaguely resembles a solution. Modern society demands electricity. We can't just stop running the various "unsafe" (where your bar for "unsafe" appears to be "can melt down") reactors around the world; they constitute a souble-digit percentage of our most reliable (and vital) base load generation. What are they supposed to do, other than, in your words, "choose to run and operate the reactor"?
The only viable solution is to alleviate the demand for base load generation enough to take the older reactors offline. Doing that requires new generating capacity; you're not going to get it by lowering demand. Coal can meet base load demand, but is substantially more dangerous (as measured in human deaths or in radiation released, take your pick) than even the currently operating "unsafe" reactors. Hydro can, provided the climate is fairly stable, but there are only a handful of places where it's practical and there is other damage from using it. The only other really practical option right now is fission. The anti-nuclear lobbies are preventing that from going forward.
Citation needed. Older reactors were "inherently safe" in the way that the Titanic was "inherently safe" - it had redundency and failsafe capabilities. However, the central design still failed in a dangerous manner, redundency doesn't always mean *enough* redundency, and failsafe capabilities can fail.
The physics of modern reactor designs, such as molten salt reactors, are such that a meltdown cannot occur. The reactors don't *have* failsafes, they *are* failsafe. If something goes wrong (fails), the reactor simply settles intoa different stable (safe) configuration.
Power loss, believe it or not. The coolant pumps require electricity to run, and apparently the power lines that suppy them were knocked out. There's a backup generator, I think, but for some reason it didn't work.
You'd think they could do this some other way, like tapping the mechanical force generate by the turbines to keep the pumps running, but apparently it wasn't done that way. Bear in mind that these are old reactors, from the days when many of the safeguards on modern power plants weren't required.
Simply put, this reactor design (especially without the containment dome) is less safe than Three Mile Island. We (the world at large) really need to modernize our nuclear power plants. Unfortunately, that's going to require building new reactors - we can't practically afford the loss of generating capacity to take the existing ones off the grid that long - and there is, as always, a ridiculous amount of opposition, largely from luddites who wouldn't know a molten salt reactor from a bomb shelter.
Notably, that's not earthquake damage. I don't doubt that the chain of events leading up to the explosion was caused by the earthquake, but it required the reactor to be of a type which is even capable of melting down in the first place. My first thought on seeing the article was a leak \due to actual structural damage from the earthquake, but this is something else - an inherently risky reactor design and a failsafe not operating. It looks like basically the same thing as what happened at Three Mile Island, a reactor design from 40 years ago...
The problem is the outdated reactor designs. This is essentially the exact same failure as at Three Mile Island, although the Japanese appear to have omitted the containment dome that made TMI such a tempest in a teacup (almost no radiation actually leaked at TMI, due to the dome, but it looks like the Japanese reactors are already leaking significant amounts of radiation). The TMI accident was 32 years ago. Its design was 10 years old even then.
Ironically, the anti-nuclear proponents are their own worst enemies if they actually want to prevent things like this. The demand for power isn't going away, but installing newer plants, which would be of the modern and inherently safe designs, would allow the old ones to be decommissioned or at least overhauled. Instead, between a near-ban on new construction (in the US at least, I'm not sure about Japan) and an increasing energy demand that is already taxing our current grid at times (again, in the US, especially on the west coast), we simply can't afford to take the older plants offline.
Except you're completley missing what caused the damage. The damage you can see in the videos was not caused by the earthquake. It was caused by the reactor losing coolant, running too hot, producing hydrogen gas from the fuel essentially burning, and that gas exploding. As others have pointed out, this is exactly what happened at Three Mile Island, although TMI had an extra containment dome which the Japanese reactors lack, which is resulting in higher radiation leakage than TMI experienced.
Now, consider something lime a molten salt reactor. A modern reactor doesn't care if the coolant/heat exchanger cycle shuts down, as this earthquake appears to have caused. Heating up the coolant naturally slows down the reaction. Additionally, the coolant doesn't boil off, so the fuel is never exposed to oxygen or hydrogen. Combustion is impossible. At the very first step of the problem, the chain of events that leads to a loss of containment is cut. This is a monster of a quake, and yet it would have had no significant effect aside from the reactor safely reducing itself to minimal power (generating heat as quickly as it naturally dissipates) when the heat exchange cycle stopped.
I've actually played Direct3D games in FreeBSD (ok, DesktopBSD, which is/was a nice UI over FreeBSD) before. It was through Wine, but it worked just fine.
Um, no you won't. Not with a recent version of Windows. Vista and up pull all their drivers automatically from the Internet - either as part of Windows Update, or by popping up a message saying "Please click here to download your driver from the manufacturer's website." The actual install process, from "place disk in drive and boot" to "log in to a ready system," takes about 20 minutes on modern hardware, or possibly a bit longer if a really slow Internet connection is taking a while to download the absurdly large video driver. There's usually one more reboot needed after this, to install patches, but it can still finish well inside of 30 minutes with a decent connection.
I use both Windows and Linux. I install both from scratch, using the official developer media (not "restore" discs). In fact, I remove OEM copies of Windows whenever possible even from computers I don't own (i.e. somebody complains to me that their system is slow). Linux takes far longer to get to a state I consider functional (not *fully* functional - for example, I have a TV tuner card which flat out does not work in Linux - but usable for all my day-to-day needs). This is true whether setting it up for myself or for somebody else (one reason I'm less likely to suggest that friends try Linux these days is that I'll typically spend 6-8 hours over the next few days helping them make it work correctly - a process which usually takes an hour and at worst two with Windows 7).
The first is generally publicly posted along the lines of "we reserve the right to refuse service to anyone" and doesn't mean that they're allowed to take your money and then not provide the service, which is what happened here. If you get kicked out of a place they aren't going to charge you.
Do you have any references for the legality of the second? Doing it on your own time is neither criminal nor legal excuse for termination under any legal jurisdiction I'm aware of in the United States, although I hardly pretend to know them all. That said, doing things like publicly posting the pictures around the workplace and refusing to remove them (to fabricate an example) would almost certainly constitute harassment on religious ground, and that *is* grounds for termination, at least in Washington state. Clearly some more details are required.
I realize this may blow some WOW-infected minds, but the point of an RPG, much less a game in general, is not actually to level up. The point is to do something fun.
For me, in EVE, I do this by security territory, fighting off attacking fleets, throwing together fleets of my corp-mates, and going to attack their territories. Usually not with actual intent to capture anything, just for the fun of PvP. Siege warfare is actually relatively boring, if nobody comes to try and stop you.
Hell, IE8 was actually standards-compliant, it was just to an outdated standard (HTML < 5, CSS2, etc.) It won't do fancy new stuff, but at least it won't break horribly on legit code either.
IE9 is actually pushing at the bounds of the "standards" (draft standards, really) but is still in RC. Its support is quite good, though. There are some "standards" it doesn't implement yet that a few other browsers have, but the reverse is also true.
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Actually, the I, Robot film was pretty good if you didn't expect it to be based on the novel, but instead to be exploring the concepts (and failings) of the Three Laws, which is of course what the novel was all about. I don't want to spoil it for anybody who hasn't seen it yet, but it was an interesting take on the risks of sentient AI programmed with a need to aid humanity. Consider the police; their job is to keep us safe, but often that involves arresting or even occasionally killing some of "us."
I wouldn't say it's worth going out to buy a Blu-Ray special edition director's cut with limited figurine or anything, but it's worth renting and watching just for a competently done examination of what was really the central idea of the book. The SFX is also pretty good, even if the product placement is a little too obvious.
No. I'm sorry, but you're wrong. There were some risks that should not have been taken, like the manner in which the fuel was stored (outside of containment), but "unacceptable" applied to the situation as a whole is bullshit.
This was the fifth strongest earthquake we've recorded. Not in Japan, but globally. The amount of kinetic energy unleashed was greater than just about anything human beings can directly cause; flying planes into skyscrapers is barely a blip on the same scale, and even fusion weapons aren't nearly as strong. A meteor impact is the only thing that readily comes to mind which would be greater.
"Safe" isn't a binary state, like you and so many other *ahem* individuals *ahem* seem to be trying to claim. The WTC towers to designed to resist the impact of smaller planes. Cars are designed to keep their passengers alive in collisions up to a certain speed. Fission power plants are designed with a certain degree of safety built in. The catch, in all cases, is that there's always going to be something worse.
Take the safest systems we have right now, like molten slat reactors where the failsafe is passive; the reactor literally cannot produce enough heat to melt down because the hotter it gets, the less energy it releases, until it arrives in equilibrium. Nor can the coolant boil off; the vaporization temperature of the salt is above that equilibrium point. Now, hit such a reactor with a meteor. You'll still end up with radioactive fuel being launched into the atmosphere and spread widely. Is it the planner's fault for not anticipating this? Is it an "unacceptable risk" to use a design with such a deadly known danger? Of course not! It's absurd to even suggest so.
Mind you, I don't disagree that we should modernize our fission reactors. Their are lessons to be learned here, not about the risks of immense, possibly once-a-lifetime earthquakes, but about why certain failure points are too vulnerable. The coolant cycle is a good example; by relying on external power to the pumps, it put the safety of the reactor partially in the hands of external factors. Newer reactors don't have that risk at all, but older ones could be modified to mitigate it.
Excel supports OLE, and has since the 90s. Note that it's not actually putting the reader or any other directly executable code in the spreadsheet, but it can contain a reference saying "I have a SWF object that I'd like to render here" and the OS will load whatever it has that renders those.
It's also actually a hell of a lot less secure than Adobe, oddly enough. Run a fuzzer with it and it falls over very easily. Apple's PDF reader has the same problem - even worse, in fact (15x as many exploitable vulnerabilities as Adobe Reader, according to a larger-scale experiment than I cared to run, see Charlie Miller's presentation at CanSecWest last year). I haven't tried fuzzing any of the other "fully featured" readers yet, but I'd be surprised if any of them did much better.
The reason so many vulnerabilities are publicized and exploited in Adobe software is the same reason this happens on Windows: Malware is a business, income is a linear function of exploited systems, and (at least for worms), infection rate is a linear function of exploited systems. Integrate cash flow over time to get total income, and you'll see it's quadratic in terms of whatever vulnerable install base (at least until you hit every possible systemthat can be infected, at which point total income is just linear with time). Go for a target with 5% the install base of the market leader, and you've cut the earning potential by a factor of 400 (practically speaking, no malware ever really reaches saturation before it gets stopped). Even at 33% as much as the leader, you're still losing $8 of every $9 you would have made.
Well, or you could upgrade because the OS you're currently using is just flat-out obsolete.
No instant search; do you still launch apps by navigating manus or is there just a crapload of icons on your screen?
Really primitive built-in firewall; filtering options are limited and it's incoming-only.
Very painful to run as a limited user, so I bet you're logged in with an Admin account. Read up on the Principle of Least Privilege.
No ASLR means "return-oriented programming" attacks will work; the other major OSes have this too.
No integrity control sandboxing; apps run at the privilege level of their user even if they really should be more restricted.
Video drivers all run in the kernel, meaning anything that goes wrong (and in a piece of code as comlex as a video driver, they do) causes an OS crash.
Memory management algorithms intended for a time when total RAM was measured in megabytes; it's as outdated as "1.5x as much Swap as RAM" on Linux.
Minimal 64-bit capability (and you're not really running XP at that point, it's the Server 2003 kernel, which has very little mainstream driver support).
No ability to restore a file or folder to an earlier state unless you've invested a lot of effort in backup software (the built-in backup stuff sucks, too).
App switching just shows you icons, not thumbnails, much less *live* thumbnails.
Clunky error messages that don't even tell you things like what app is holding a file open when you try to manipulate it.
Relatively poor support for SMP, compared to modern OSes. I bet my dual-core system can boot Win7 faster than your quad-core boots XP.
Do you still use IE to install your updates?
How long can you delay rebooting after you install updates?
Have you ever had a Patch Tuesday where you *didn't* need to reboot?
How often do you get new or updated drivers via Windows Update, vs. needing to download them manually?
Damn, I could go on like this a lot longer too. Seriously, using XP in 2011 is like driving a car from 1980, without the "it's a classic!" appeal.
If you don't want to use the automatic blocking list, which I'll grant has some weaknesses (mostly that something needs to appear three times at least before you can block it) you can install third-party block lists. I use one from EasyList - the same folks behind AdBlock Plus for Firefox.
If your concern is that it doesn't block first-party ads, well... that's fair, I guess, but I see very, very few of those. There are ad blockers extensions ("add-ons") for IE as well, anyhow. It's not like Firefox comes with ABP built in.
The ZuneHD had the hardware to be a viable iPod Touch competitor. In a way, it even had the software; leaving aside a somewhat dated browser rendering engine, it had some nice capabilities. It was targeted much more at media than the iTouch is, with things like HD Radio and HD video decoding for HDMI output. It also has some nice games and a handful of non-game apps.
The problem, aside from being late to the party and not marketing it as well as they should have, is that MS missed the boat on making it a superior general purpose device. The interface is great if you're looking to play media (no, I don't have one, but I'm friends with some former MS interns who received them last year) but has no app-centric view like modern smarphones... or the iTouch. The XNA dev toolkit allows some neat games, and is available for free, but it's very game-focused and doesn't provide anything like the general-purpose capability you can get on iOS.
Like the Xbox line? 15 years ago, the idea of a MS console was ridiculous. 10 years ago, it was seen as a joke and widely predicted to be a waste of money and effort, at least on sites like this. 5 years ago it was seen as being so error-prone, and such a money sinkhole for the company, that people predicted it would be quitely retired. Last year, it broke sales records hard, introduced a cool new peripheral that is now in Guinness Book of World Records for its sales rate, and moved from being a hardcore-gamers-only device to a living room entertainment system for the family.
Then there's things like MS mice and keyboards - hardly a monopoly, but quite popular and generally highly recommended. SQL Server is nowhere near monopoly status, but does just fine for itself. Visual Studio and .NET are also doing very well. I don't know if Azure is profitable yet, but it's certainly gaining adherents.
There's a lot of potential for MS to experiment in other markets. It has the size and cash to support some abject failures (Kin, compared to which Zune was a huge success) in order to try and find the next big thing (Kinect worked out great over the last few months; who knows what the next one will be?)
I realize it's fashionable to know absolutely nothing about MS products on here, but I feel I should provide a small dose of reality: All Windows Phone 7 devices include Zune playback capability, including ZunePass streaming and downloads (unlimited music access for a monthly subscription, with the ability to permanently download 10 high-quality DRM-free MP3s each month). Codec support includes AAC and MP3 in addition to WMA. Still no PlaysForSure compatibility, of course, but anything purchased from the Zune store will work.
Granted, Nokia's new WP7 devices will of course include this too, so in a way you're right. You're just about 5 months behind the times.
Amusingly, it does actually work quite well on IE(9). I agree though - standards-compliant websites should be described as such, not as "Chrome compatible." It's good that the script wasn't written in any way that woul require people to be using a specific browser or even specific rendering engine, so why describe it in such a manner?
The catch is that when the core is exposed (after the coolant boils off), it's still too hot and leads to hydrogen gas formation. You either need some way to remove that heat more quickly (such as pumping in additional coolant, which takes energy and irradiates more material, or venting the core, which releases radiation), or some way to prevent the core from becoming exposed (such as coolant that doesn't boil off).
Radioisotope decay thermal energy is a pretty weak power source, by itself. The chain reaction is always the problem in situations like this. Of course, that's how a fission reactor works - staying on the hairy line of criticality, where each nucleus fissioning releases (on average) enough neutrons to fission another one - so the catch is how you stop the chain reaction from running away (going super-critical) when something breaks. Removing heat alone won't do it, but adding heat isn't inherently a problem either. The catch with this reactor is that the chain reaction didn't stop, and it was capable of producing enough heat to exceed its design constraints (the coolant boiled off, the core was exposed, chemical reactions ocurred that produced flammable gas, and it exploded).
The problem is that reactors which rely on external temperature regulation are always going to have some sort of possible failure mode when external regulation fails. You can implement failsafes, like dropping in neutron-absorbing rods in the case of a power loss, but there still has to be some external mechanism to enable that... and external mechanisms can fail. What we need is reactors which simply can't get this hot - where the hotter they get, the less heat they produce.
Oh, please. Personal insults are so ridiculously childish. The logic behind your argument is faulty, for a couple reasons. "Safe" is always going to be a relative term. I can concoct extremely ridiculous situations where a molten salt reactor is unsafe, such as a significant-size meteor striking it and scattering the radioactive fuel and coolant.
You also haven't suggested anything which even vaguely resembles a solution. Modern society demands electricity. We can't just stop running the various "unsafe" (where your bar for "unsafe" appears to be "can melt down") reactors around the world; they constitute a souble-digit percentage of our most reliable (and vital) base load generation. What are they supposed to do, other than, in your words, "choose to run and operate the reactor"?
The only viable solution is to alleviate the demand for base load generation enough to take the older reactors offline. Doing that requires new generating capacity; you're not going to get it by lowering demand. Coal can meet base load demand, but is substantially more dangerous (as measured in human deaths or in radiation released, take your pick) than even the currently operating "unsafe" reactors. Hydro can, provided the climate is fairly stable, but there are only a handful of places where it's practical and there is other damage from using it. The only other really practical option right now is fission. The anti-nuclear lobbies are preventing that from going forward.
Citation needed. Older reactors were "inherently safe" in the way that the Titanic was "inherently safe" - it had redundency and failsafe capabilities. However, the central design still failed in a dangerous manner, redundency doesn't always mean *enough* redundency, and failsafe capabilities can fail.
The physics of modern reactor designs, such as molten salt reactors, are such that a meltdown cannot occur. The reactors don't *have* failsafes, they *are* failsafe. If something goes wrong (fails), the reactor simply settles intoa different stable (safe) configuration.
Power loss, believe it or not. The coolant pumps require electricity to run, and apparently the power lines that suppy them were knocked out. There's a backup generator, I think, but for some reason it didn't work.
You'd think they could do this some other way, like tapping the mechanical force generate by the turbines to keep the pumps running, but apparently it wasn't done that way. Bear in mind that these are old reactors, from the days when many of the safeguards on modern power plants weren't required.
Simply put, this reactor design (especially without the containment dome) is less safe than Three Mile Island. We (the world at large) really need to modernize our nuclear power plants. Unfortunately, that's going to require building new reactors - we can't practically afford the loss of generating capacity to take the existing ones off the grid that long - and there is, as always, a ridiculous amount of opposition, largely from luddites who wouldn't know a molten salt reactor from a bomb shelter.
Notably, that's not earthquake damage. I don't doubt that the chain of events leading up to the explosion was caused by the earthquake, but it required the reactor to be of a type which is even capable of melting down in the first place. My first thought on seeing the article was a leak \due to actual structural damage from the earthquake, but this is something else - an inherently risky reactor design and a failsafe not operating. It looks like basically the same thing as what happened at Three Mile Island, a reactor design from 40 years ago...
The problem is the outdated reactor designs. This is essentially the exact same failure as at Three Mile Island, although the Japanese appear to have omitted the containment dome that made TMI such a tempest in a teacup (almost no radiation actually leaked at TMI, due to the dome, but it looks like the Japanese reactors are already leaking significant amounts of radiation). The TMI accident was 32 years ago. Its design was 10 years old even then.
Ironically, the anti-nuclear proponents are their own worst enemies if they actually want to prevent things like this. The demand for power isn't going away, but installing newer plants, which would be of the modern and inherently safe designs, would allow the old ones to be decommissioned or at least overhauled. Instead, between a near-ban on new construction (in the US at least, I'm not sure about Japan) and an increasing energy demand that is already taxing our current grid at times (again, in the US, especially on the west coast), we simply can't afford to take the older plants offline.
Except you're completley missing what caused the damage. The damage you can see in the videos was not caused by the earthquake. It was caused by the reactor losing coolant, running too hot, producing hydrogen gas from the fuel essentially burning, and that gas exploding. As others have pointed out, this is exactly what happened at Three Mile Island, although TMI had an extra containment dome which the Japanese reactors lack, which is resulting in higher radiation leakage than TMI experienced.
Now, consider something lime a molten salt reactor. A modern reactor doesn't care if the coolant/heat exchanger cycle shuts down, as this earthquake appears to have caused. Heating up the coolant naturally slows down the reaction. Additionally, the coolant doesn't boil off, so the fuel is never exposed to oxygen or hydrogen. Combustion is impossible. At the very first step of the problem, the chain of events that leads to a loss of containment is cut. This is a monster of a quake, and yet it would have had no significant effect aside from the reactor safely reducing itself to minimal power (generating heat as quickly as it naturally dissipates) when the heat exchange cycle stopped.
I've actually played Direct3D games in FreeBSD (ok, DesktopBSD, which is/was a nice UI over FreeBSD) before. It was through Wine, but it worked just fine.
Um, no you won't. Not with a recent version of Windows. Vista and up pull all their drivers automatically from the Internet - either as part of Windows Update, or by popping up a message saying "Please click here to download your driver from the manufacturer's website." The actual install process, from "place disk in drive and boot" to "log in to a ready system," takes about 20 minutes on modern hardware, or possibly a bit longer if a really slow Internet connection is taking a while to download the absurdly large video driver. There's usually one more reboot needed after this, to install patches, but it can still finish well inside of 30 minutes with a decent connection.
I use both Windows and Linux. I install both from scratch, using the official developer media (not "restore" discs). In fact, I remove OEM copies of Windows whenever possible even from computers I don't own (i.e. somebody complains to me that their system is slow). Linux takes far longer to get to a state I consider functional (not *fully* functional - for example, I have a TV tuner card which flat out does not work in Linux - but usable for all my day-to-day needs). This is true whether setting it up for myself or for somebody else (one reason I'm less likely to suggest that friends try Linux these days is that I'll typically spend 6-8 hours over the next few days helping them make it work correctly - a process which usually takes an hour and at worst two with Windows 7).
Yes, I've done this a lot.
The first is generally publicly posted along the lines of "we reserve the right to refuse service to anyone" and doesn't mean that they're allowed to take your money and then not provide the service, which is what happened here. If you get kicked out of a place they aren't going to charge you.
Do you have any references for the legality of the second? Doing it on your own time is neither criminal nor legal excuse for termination under any legal jurisdiction I'm aware of in the United States, although I hardly pretend to know them all. That said, doing things like publicly posting the pictures around the workplace and refusing to remove them (to fabricate an example) would almost certainly constitute harassment on religious ground, and that *is* grounds for termination, at least in Washington state. Clearly some more details are required.
I realize this may blow some WOW-infected minds, but the point of an RPG, much less a game in general, is not actually to level up. The point is to do something fun.
For me, in EVE, I do this by security territory, fighting off attacking fleets, throwing together fleets of my corp-mates, and going to attack their territories. Usually not with actual intent to capture anything, just for the fun of PvP. Siege warfare is actually relatively boring, if nobody comes to try and stop you.
Hell, IE8 was actually standards-compliant, it was just to an outdated standard (HTML < 5, CSS2, etc.) It won't do fancy new stuff, but at least it won't break horribly on legit code either.
IE9 is actually pushing at the bounds of the "standards" (draft standards, really) but is still in RC. Its support is quite good, though. There are some "standards" it doesn't implement yet that a few other browsers have, but the reverse is also true.
Where exactly did the headline, summary, or article say anything whatsoever about Opera Mini?
This is the Mac App Store, not the iOS store. Opera makes a desktop browser too.
Reading comprehension is good...