Japanese shinkansen (bullet train) drivers are required to follow written procedures in the event of any kind of anomaly, failure or emergency. They have a book in the cab with all the procedures, and are not allowed to follow them from memory, they have to read each instruction from the book, speak it out loud and follow it.

So far there have been no fatalities or serious injuries due to accidents on the shinkansen system, which has been operating since 1964 and carried billions of passengers.

Unfortunately, nuclear plants might be too complex for this sort of thing to work.

It's true, environmentalists are extremely effective at blocking development. That's why we don't have any coal power plants, no fracking, open pit strip mines, Hummers were banned etc.

A lot of commercial insurance has to be mandated by law, including insurance for nuclear plants in the US. Otherwise the company wouldn't bother, they would just create subsidiaries that take on all the risk and immediately shut down if they ever become liable for a big pay out, but funnel all the profits to the parent company.

Also, insurance for nuclear plants is literally priceless - no commercial insurer will offer it, so plants only pay for limited liability insurance and the government insures the rest at its own expense.

Historically racists have called black people apes and monkeys. Therefore this accidentally and somewhat embarrassingly mimics that behaviour.

Historically white people were not, to my knowledge, insulted and discriminated against by being compared to seals and dogs. It's a bit more embarrassing to have women labeled as dogs because they are sometimes called bitches as an insult.

It's really not hard to understand. Context and history attach additional meanings and sentiments to some words.

Ask Slashdot was useful once, but in the last few years it's just become an opportunity to abuse the questioner. Okay, sometimes the questions are really dumb, but how about we try to assume good faith and not expect them to write an essay covering every possible objection first? You know, kinda like Stack Exchange or something.

In fact, screw it, Slashdot is dying. I recommend asking the same question on Stack Exchange, you will get more helpful answers.

It sounds like the questioner's wife is doing business stuff at the moment, but Java is used in a lot of places. Mobile apps are the obvious one, but also for some embedded stuff.

*facepalm*

So I'm wrong for speaking from experience, but you are right because you speak from experience. I can tell you with absolute certainty that in my entire country you can't hook anything up to the grid without it having been inspected and signed off by a qualified electrician, and they generally won't even consider DIY installations for liability reasons.

Yep, software resale is legal in the EU, so you can buy used Windows licences. Of course, you can probably just get them for free at the local rubbish dump... Maybe that's why Microsoft stopped printing the key on the stickers for OEM copies. Can't recycle them if the machine is dead and won't give the key up.

In places where resale isn't legal Windows 7 costs the same as Windows 8 and Windows XP. Microsoft keep the price the same of the lifetime of the product, it's never discounted.

I've seen a fair bit of amateur wiring, and I can assure you that most people are not capable of safely wiring up a house. In any case, without certification the electricity company won't let you connect to the grid, so you are reliant on what you can produce.

So, nice work, but not very practical.

You can create a secure base OS that runs on low cost ARM, for example, and then have a limited, sandboxed application layer. Think browser plugins - they can do a lot, have network access etc. but are executed on a virtual machine (Javascript) and with heavy sandboxing, with masses of security protections in place.

The problem with emebedded system is that you often can't remotely update the OS, or if you can manufacturer's won't bother. You can limit the damage from exploits to things like information leaks (heartbleed style bugs) or DOS, but those are bad enough.

But the assumption seems to hold up. Look at the history of Christianity. Crusades in the middle east, murdering Muslims, raking in massive wealth in the process. Was that the middle ages or the last few decades?

So actually, the goals of America seem to be pretty similar to what you (wrongly) suppose the goals of Iran are. Your mistake is assuming they think the same way you do.

Sounds a lot like the rhetoric from US politicians about bringing democracy and freedom to the whole world. Read it again. "A struggle against non-Christian values, plunder, repression and cruelty. The war waged by non-US conquerors, promoting puritanism and sub-human behaviour. They care not if whole countries are wiped out and many families left homeless. But those who study democracy and freedom will understand why the US wants to bring them to the whole world."

Bush even called Iran part of an "axis of evil", and then invaded two of the other countries on his list.

That kind of thing is pretty common with embedded systems. You have code that has been tested and otherwise works, except for this one bug. Much of it is probably ancient, with new bits tacked on as time goes by. You are terrified of breaking something by making changes, so you do a hack like this that makes minimal changes. A proper fix could cause even more problems.

The real legacy of Struxnet is to have opened the way of a cyber cold war. It's now acceptable to attack other country's infrastructure with cyber weapons. It's like sending your spies to blow up their bridges. Everyone knows who did it, but can't bring them to justice, so will just retaliate in kind.

As a real engineer let me explain how it works. Both of you are a bit off.

Even if you hire security engineers, they will be overridden by the need to add marketable features and reduce support costs. If it's too hard to set up, if it can't do what the competitor's product can do, security is irrelevant and will be at best an afterthought.

In practice, they won't hire security engineers with that $500k, some manager will spend $5k on PR making them out to be the victims if they are hacked, and the rest will be his bonus for that quarter. It works too - look at Apple. Crap security leads to many people's private photos being posted to 8chan, they claim to be the victims of "sophisticated and targeted hacking" (reality is they didn't rate limit login attempts or use captchas) and the exodus of users from iCloud doesn't happen.

To be fair, that's not something most people could do. Presumably you have the relevant certifications for installing electrical wiring and plumbing, hooking up to the networks etc. Not everywhere has a cheap supply of stone, or even allows stone buildings to be built.

I'm not suggesting what you did wasn't great, it is, but it's just not a very useful comparison for most people.